In their search they were obliged, as March complained, to the

acquisition of useless information in a degree unequalled in their

experience. They came to excel in the sad knowledge of the line at

which respectability distinguishes itself from shabbiness. Flattering

advertisements took them to numbers of huge apartment-houses chiefly

distinguishable from tenement-houses by the absence of fire-escapes on

their facades, till Mrs. March refused to stop at any door where there

were more than six bell-ratchets and speaking-tubes on either hand.

Before the middle of the afternoon she decided against ratchets

altogether, and confined herself to knobs, neatly set in the door-trim.

Her husband was still sunk in the superstition that you can live

anywhere you like in New York, and he would have paused at some

places where her quicker eye caught the fatal sign of “Modes” in the

ground-floor windows. She found that there was an east and west

line beyond which they could not go if they wished to keep their

self-respect, and that within the region to which they had restricted

themselves there was a choice of streets. At first all the New York

streets looked to them ill-paved, dirty, and repulsive; the general

infamy imparted itself in their casual impression to streets in no wise

guilty. But they began to notice that some streets were quiet and clean,

and, though never so quiet and clean as Boston streets, that they wore

an air of encouraging reform, and suggested a future of greater and

greater domesticity. Whole blocks of these downtown cross-streets seemed

to have been redeemed from decay, and even in the midst of squalor a

dwelling here and there had been seized, painted a dull red as to its

brick-work, and a glossy black as to its wood-work, and with a bright

brass bell-pull and door-knob and a large brass plate for its key-hole

escutcheon, had been endowed with an effect of purity and pride which

removed its shabby neighborhood far from it. Some of these houses were

quite small, and imaginably within their means; but, as March said, some

body seemed always to be living there himself, and the fact that none

of them was to rent kept Mrs. March true to her ideal of a fiat. Nothing

prevented its realization so much as its difference from the New York

ideal of a flat, which was inflexibly seven rooms and a bath. One or

two rooms might be at the front, the rest crooked and cornered backward

through in creasing and then decreasing darkness till they reached a

light bedroom or kitchen at the rear. It might be the one or the other,

but it was always the seventh room with the bath; or if, as sometimes

happened, it was the eighth, it was so after having counted the bath as

one; in this case the janitor said you always counted the bath as one.

If the flats were advertised as having “all light rooms,” he explained

that any room with a window giving into the open air of a court or shaft

was counted a light room.

The Marches tried to make out why it was that these flats were go much

more repulsive than the apartments which everyone lived in abroad; but

they could only do so upon the supposition that in their European

days they were too young, too happy, too full of the future, to notice

whether rooms were inside or outside, light or dark, big or little, high

or low. “Now we're imprisoned in the present,” he said, “and we have to

make the worst of it.”

In their despair he had an inspiration, which she declared worthy of

him: it was to take two small flats, of four or five rooms and a bath,

and live in both. They tried this in a great many places, but they never

could get two flats of the kind on the same floor where there was steam

heat and an elevator. At one place they almost did it. They had resigned

themselves to the humility of the neighborhood, to the prevalence of

modistes and livery-stablemen (they seem to consort much in New York),

to the garbage in the gutters and the litter of paper in the streets, to

the faltering slats in the surrounding window-shutters and the

crumbled brownstone steps and sills, when it turned out that one of the

apartments had been taken between two visits they made. Then the only

combination left open to them was of a ground-floor flat to the right

and a third-floor flat to the left.

Still they kept this inspiration in reserve for use at the first

opportunity. In the mean time there were several flats which they

thought they could almost make do: notably one where they could get

an extra servant's room in the basement four flights down, and another

where they could get it in the roof five flights up. At the first the

janitor was respectful and enthusiastic; at the second he had an effect

of ironical pessimism. When they trembled on the verge of taking his

apartment, he pointed out a spot in the kalsomining of the parlor

ceiling, and gratuitously said, Now such a thing as that he should

not agree to put in shape unless they took the apartment for a term of

years. The apartment was unfurnished, and they recurred to the fact that

they wanted a furnished apartment, and made their escape. This saved

them in several other extremities; but short of extremity they could

not keep their different requirements in mind, and were always about to

decide without regard to some one of them.

They went to several places twice without intending: once to that

old-fashioned house with the pleasant colored janitor, and wandered all

over the apartment again with a haunting sense of familiarity, and then

recognized the janitor and laughed; and to that house with the pathetic

widow and the pretty daughter who wished to take them to board. They

stayed to excuse their blunder, and easily came by the fact that the

mother had taken the house that the girl might have a home while she

was in New York studying art, and they hoped to pay their way by taking

boarders. Her daughter was at her class now, the mother concluded; and

they encouraged her to believe that it could only be a few days till the

rest of her scheme was realized.

“I dare say we could be perfectly comfortable there,” March suggested

when they had got away. “Now if we were truly humane we would modify our

desires to meet their needs and end this sickening search, wouldn't we?”

“Yes, but we're not truly humane,” his wife answered, “or at least not

in that sense. You know you hate boarding; and if we went there I should

have them on my sympathies the whole time.”

“I see. And then you would take it out of me.”

“Then I should take it out of you. And if you are going to be so weak,

Basil, and let every little thing work upon you in that way, you'd

better not come to New York. You'll see enough misery here.”

“Well, don't take that superior tone with me, as if I were a child that

had its mind set on an undesirable toy, Isabel.”

“Ah, don't you suppose it's because you are such a child in some

respects that I like you, dear?” she demanded, without relenting.

“But I don't find so much misery in New York. I don't suppose there's

any more suffering here to the population than there is in the country.

And they're so gay about it all. I think the outward aspect of the place

and the hilarity of the sky and air must get into the people's blood.

The weather is simply unapproachable; and I don't care if it is the

ugliest place in the world, as you say. I suppose it is. It shrieks and

yells with ugliness here and there but it never loses its spirits. That

widow is from the country. When she's been a year in New York she'll be

as gay--as gay as an L road.” He celebrated a satisfaction they both had

in the L roads. “They kill the streets and avenues, but at least they

partially hide them, and that is some comfort; and they do triumph over

their prostrate forms with a savage exultation that is intoxicating.

Those bends in the L that you get in the corner of Washington Square, or

just below the Cooper Institute--they're the gayest things in the world.

Perfectly atrocious, of course, but incomparably picturesque! And the

whole city is so,” said March, “or else the L would never have got built

here. New York may be splendidly gay or squalidly gay; but, prince or

pauper, it's gay always.”

“Yes, gay is the word,” she admitted, with a sigh. “But frantic. I

can't get used to it. They forget death, Basil; they forget death in New

York.”

“Well, I don't know that I've ever found much advantage in remembering

it.”

“Don't say such a thing, dearest.”

He could see that she had got to the end of her nervous strength for the

present, and he proposed that they should take the Elevated road as far

as it would carry them into the country, and shake off their nightmare

of flat-hunting for an hour or two; but her conscience would not let

her. She convicted him of levity equal to that of the New-Yorkers in

proposing such a thing; and they dragged through the day. She was too

tired to care for dinner, and in the night she had a dream from which

she woke herself with a cry that roused him, too. It was something about

the children at first, whom they had talked of wistfully before falling

asleep, and then it was of a hideous thing with two square eyes and a

series of sections growing darker and then lighter, till the tail of

the monstrous articulate was quite luminous again. She shuddered at the

vague description she was able to give; but he asked, “Did it offer to

bite you?”

“No. That was the most frightful thing about it; it had no mouth.”

March laughed. “Why, my dear, it was nothing but a harmless New York

flat--seven rooms and a bath.”

“I really believe it was,” she consented, recognizing an architectural

resemblance, and she fell asleep again, and woke renewed for the work

before them.

IX.

Their house-hunting no longer had novelty, but it still had

interest; and they varied their day by taking a coupe, by renouncing

advertisements, and by reverting to agents. Some of these induced

them to consider the idea of furnished houses; and Mrs. March learned

tolerance for Fulkerson by accepting permits to visit flats and houses

which had none of the qualifications she desired in either, and were

as far beyond her means as they were out of the region to which she had

geographically restricted herself. They looked at three-thousand and

four-thousand dollar apartments, and rejected them for one reason or

another which had nothing to do with the rent; the higher the rent

was, the more critical they were of the slippery inlaid floors and the

arrangement of the richly decorated rooms. They never knew whether they

had deceived the janitor or not; as they came in a coupe, they hoped

they had.

They drove accidentally through one street that seemed gayer in the

perspective than an L road. The fire-escapes, with their light iron

balconies and ladders of iron, decorated the lofty house fronts; the

roadway and sidewalks and door-steps swarmed with children; women's

heads seemed to show at every window. In the basements, over which

flights of high stone steps led to the tenements, were green-grocers'

shops abounding in cabbages, and provision stores running chiefly to

bacon and sausages, and cobblers' and tinners' shops, and the like, in

proportion to the small needs of a poor neighborhood. Ash barrels lined

the sidewalks, and garbage heaps filled the gutters; teams of all trades

stood idly about; a peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through the

street, and mixed his cry with the joyous screams and shouts of the

children and the scolding and gossiping voices of the women; the burly

blue bulk of a policeman defined itself at the corner; a drunkard

zigzagged down the sidewalk toward him. It was not the abode of the

extremest poverty, but of a poverty as hopeless as any in the world,

transmitting itself from generation to generation, and establishing

conditions of permanency to which human life adjusts itself as it does

to those of some incurable disease, like leprosy.

The time had been when the Marches would have taken a purely

aesthetic view of the facts as they glimpsed them in this street of

tenement-houses; when they would have contented themselves with saying

that it was as picturesque as a street in Naples or Florence, and with

wondering why nobody came to paint it; they would have thought they were

sufficiently serious about it in blaming the artists for their failure

to appreciate it, and going abroad for the picturesque when they had it

here under their noses. It was to the nose that the street made one of

its strongest appeals, and Mrs. March pulled up her window of the coupe.

“Why does he take us through such a disgusting street?” she demanded,

with an exasperation of which her husband divined the origin.

“This driver may be a philanthropist in disguise,” he answered, with

dreamy irony, “and may want us to think about the people who are not

merely carried through this street in a coupe, but have to spend their

whole lives in it, winter and summer, with no hopes of driving out of

it, except in a hearse. I must say they don't seem to mind it. I haven't

seen a jollier crowd anywhere in New York. They seem to have forgotten

death a little more completely than any of their fellow-citizens,

Isabel. And I wonder what they think of us, making this gorgeous

progress through their midst. I suppose they think we're rich, and hate

us--if they hate rich people; they don't look as if they hated anybody.

Should we be as patient as they are with their discomfort? I don't

believe there's steam heat or an elevator in the whole block. Seven

rooms and a bath would be more than the largest and genteelest family

would know what to do with. They wouldn't know what to do with the bath,

anyway.”

His monologue seemed to interest his wife apart from the satirical point

it had for themselves. “You ought to get Mr. Fulkerson to let you work

some of these New York sights up for Every Other Week, Basil; you could

do them very nicely.”

“Yes; I've thought of that. But don't let's leave the personal ground.

Doesn't it make you feel rather small and otherwise unworthy when you

see the kind of street these fellow-beings of yours live in, and then

think how particular you are about locality and the number of bellpulls?

I don't see even ratchets and speaking-tubes at these doors.” He craned

his neck out of the window for a better look, and the children of

discomfort cheered him, out of sheer good feeling and high spirits. “I

didn't know I was so popular. Perhaps it's a recognition of my humane

sentiments.”

“Oh, it's very easy to have humane sentiments, and to satirize ourselves

for wanting eight rooms and a bath in a good neighborhood, when we see

how these wretched creatures live,” said his wife. “But if we shared all

we have with them, and then settled down among them, what good would it

do?”

“Not the least in the world. It might help us for the moment, but it

wouldn't keep the wolf from their doors for a week; and then they would

go on just as before, only they wouldn't be on such good terms with the

wolf. The only way for them is to keep up an unbroken intimacy with the

wolf; then they can manage him somehow. I don't know how, and I'm afraid

I don't want to. Wouldn't you like to have this fellow drive us round

among the halls of pride somewhere for a little while? Fifth Avenue or

Madison, up-town?”

“No; we've no time to waste. I've got a place near Third Avenue, on a

nice cross street, and I want him to take us there.” It proved that she

had several addresses near together, and it seemed best to dismiss their

coupe and do the rest of their afternoon's work on foot. It came to

nothing; she was not humbled in the least by what she had seen in the

tenement-house street; she yielded no point in her ideal of a flat, and

the flats persistently refused to lend themselves to it. She lost all

patience with them.

“Oh, I don't say the flats are in the right of it,” said her husband,

when she denounced their stupid inadequacy to the purposes of a

Christian home. “But I'm not so sure that we are, either. I've been

thinking about that home business ever since my sensibilities were

dragged--in a coupe--through that tenement-house street. Of course,

no child born and brought up in such a place as that could have any

conception of home. But that's because those poor people can't give

character to their habitations. They have to take what they can get. But

people like us--that is, of our means--do give character to the average

flat. It's made to meet their tastes, or their supposed tastes; and so

it's made for social show, not for family life at all. Think of a baby

in a flat! It's a contradiction in terms; the flat is the negation of

motherhood. The flat means society life; that is, the pretence of social

life. It's made to give artificial people a society basis on a little

money--too much money, of course, for what they get. So the cost of the

building is put into marble halls and idiotic decoration of all kinds.

I don't object to the conveniences, but none of these flats has a

living-room. They have drawing-rooms to foster social pretence, and they

have dining-rooms and bedrooms; but they have no room where the family

can all come together and feel the sweetness of being a family. The

bedrooms are black-holes mostly, with a sinful waste of space in each.

If it were not for the marble halls, and the decorations, and the

foolishly expensive finish, the houses could be built round a court, and

the flats could be shaped something like a Pompeiian house, with small

sleeping-closets--only lit from the outside--and the rest of the floor

thrown into two or three large cheerful halls, where all the family life

could go on, and society could be transacted unpretentiously. Why,

those tenements are better and humaner than those flats! There the whole

family lives in the kitchen, and has its consciousness of being; but

the flat abolishes the family consciousness. It's confinement without

coziness; it's cluttered without being snug. You couldn't keep a

self-respecting cat in a flat; you couldn't go down cellar to get cider.

No! the Anglo-Saxon home, as we know it in the Anglo-Saxon house, is

simply impossible in the Franco-American flat, not because it's humble,

but because it's false.”

“Well, then,” said Mrs. March, “let's look at houses.”

He had been denouncing the flat in the abstract, and he had not expected

this concrete result. But he said, “We will look at houses, then.”

X.

Nothing mystifies a man more than a woman's aberrations from some point

at which he, supposes her fixed as a star. In these unfurnished houses,

without steam or elevator, March followed his wife about with patient

wonder. She rather liked the worst of them best: but she made him go

down into the cellars and look at the furnaces; she exacted from him a

rigid inquest of the plumbing. She followed him into one of the cellars

by the fitful glare of successively lighted matches, and they enjoyed a

moment in which the anomaly of their presence there on that errand,

so remote from all the facts of their long-established life in Boston,

realized itself for them.

“Think how easily we might have been murdered and nobody been any the

wiser!” she said when they were comfortably outdoors again.

“Yes, or made way with ourselves in an access of emotional insanity,

supposed to have been induced by unavailing flat-hunting,” he suggested.

She fell in with the notion. “I'm beginning to feel crazy. But I

don't want you to lose your head, Basil. And I don't want you to

sentimentalize any of the things you see in New York. I think you were

disposed to do it in that street we drove through. I don't believe

there's any real suffering--not real suffering--among those people; that

is, it would be suffering from our point of view, but they've been used

to it all their lives, and they don't feel their' discomfort so much.”

“Of course, I understand that, and I don't propose to sentimentalize

them. I think when people get used to a bad state of things they had

better stick to it; in fact, they don't usually like a better state so

well, and I shall keep that firmly in mind.”

She laughed with him, and they walked along the L bestridden avenue,

exhilarated by their escape from murder and suicide in that cellar,

toward the nearest cross town track, which they meant to take home to

their hotel. “Now to-night we will go to the theatre,” she said, “and

get this whole house business out of our minds, and be perfectly fresh

for a new start in the morning.” Suddenly she clutched his arm. “Why,

did you see that man?” and she signed with her head toward a decently

dressed person who walked beside them, next the gutter, stooping over as

if to examine it, and half halting at times.

“No. What?”

“Why, I saw him pick up a dirty bit of cracker from the pavement and

cram it into his mouth and eat it down as if he were famished. And look!

he's actually hunting for more in those garbage heaps!”

This was what the decent-looking man with the hard hands and broken

nails of a workman was doing-like a hungry dog. They kept up with him,

in the fascination of the sight, to the next corner, where he turned

down the side street still searching the gutter.

They walked on a few paces. Then March said, “I must go after him,” and

left his wife standing.

“Are you in want--hungry?” he asked the man.

The man said he could not speak English, Monsieur.

March asked his question in French.

The man shrugged a pitiful, desperate shrug, “Mais, Monsieur--”

March put a coin in his hand, and then suddenly the man's face twisted

up; he caught the hand of this alms-giver in both of his and clung to

it. “Monsieur! Monsieur!” he gasped, and the tears rained down his face.

His benefactor pulled himself away, shocked and ashamed, as one is by

such a chance, and got back to his wife, and the man lapsed back into

the mystery of misery out of which he had emerged.

March felt it laid upon him to console his wife for what had happened.

“Of course, we might live here for years and not see another case like

that; and, of course, there are twenty places where he could have gone

for help if he had known where to find them.”

“Ah, but it's the possibility of his needing the help so badly as that,”

she answered. “That's what I can't bear, and I shall not come to a

place where such things are possible, and we may as well stop our

house-hunting here at once.”

“Yes? And what part of Christendom will you live in? Such things are

possible everywhere in our conditions.”

“Then we must change the conditions--”

“Oh no; we must go to the theatre and forget them. We can stop at

Brentano's for our tickets as we pass through Union Square.”

“I am not going to the theatre, Basil. I am going home to Boston

to-night. You can stay and find a flat.”

He convinced her of the absurdity of her position, and even of its

selfishness; but she said that her mind was quite made up irrespective

of what had happened, that she had been away from the children long

enough; that she ought to be at home to finish up the work of leaving

it. The word brought a sigh. “Ah, I don't know why we should see nothing

but sad and ugly things now. When we were young--”

“Younger,” he put in. “We're still young.”

“That's what we pretend, but we know better. But I was thinking how

pretty and pleasant things used to be turning up all the time on our

travels in the old days. Why, when we were in New York here on our

wedding journey the place didn't seem half so dirty as it does now, and

none of these dismal things happened.”

“It was a good deal dirtier,” he answered; “and I fancy worse in every

way-hungrier, raggeder, more wretchedly housed. But that wasn't the

period of life for us to notice it. Don't you remember, when we

started to Niagara the last time, how everybody seemed middle-aged and

commonplace; and when we got there there were no evident brides; nothing

but elderly married people?”

“At least they weren't starving,” she rebelled.

“No, you don't starve in parlor-cars and first-class hotels; but if you

step out of them you run your chance of seeing those who do, if you're

getting on pretty well in the forties. If it's the unhappy who see

unhappiness, think what misery must be revealed to people who pass

their lives in the really squalid tenement-house streets--I don't mean

picturesque avenues like that we passed through.”

“But we are not unhappy,” she protested, bringing the talk back to the

personal base again, as women must to get any good out of talk. “We're

really no unhappier than we were when we were young.”

“We're more serious.”

“Well, I hate it; and I wish you wouldn't be so serious, if that's what

it brings us to.”

“I will be trivial from this on,” said March. “Shall we go to the Hole

in the Ground to-night?”

“I am going to Boston.”

“It's much the same thing. How do you like that for triviality? It's a

little blasphemous, I'll allow.”

“It's very silly,” she said.

At the hotel they found a letter from the agent who had sent them the

permit to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment. He wrote that she had

heard they were pleased with her apartment, and that she thought she

could make the terms to suit. She had taken her passage for Europe, and

was very anxious to let the flat before she sailed. She would call that

evening at seven.

“Mrs. Grosvenor Green!” said Mrs. March. “Which of the ten thousand

flats is it, Basil?”

“The gimcrackery,” he answered. “In the Xenophon, you know.”

“Well, she may save herself the trouble. I shall not see her. Or yes--I

must. I couldn't go away without seeing what sort of creature could have

planned that fly-away flat. She must be a perfect--”

“Parachute,” March suggested.

“No! anybody so light as that couldn't come down.”

“Well, toy balloon.”

“Toy balloon will do for the present,” Mrs. March admitted. “But I feel

that naught but herself can be her parallel for volatility.”

When Mrs. Grosvenor-Green's card came up they both descended to the

hotel parlor, which March said looked like the saloon of a Moorish

day-boat; not that he knew of any such craft, but the decorations were

so Saracenic and the architecture so Hudson Riverish. They found

there on the grand central divan a large lady whose vast smoothness,

placidity, and plumpness set at defiance all their preconceptions of

Mrs. Grosvenor Green, so that Mrs. March distinctly paused with her card

in her hand before venturing even tentatively to address her. Then she

was astonished at the low, calm voice in which Mrs. Green acknowledged

herself, and slowly proceeded to apologize for calling. It was not quite

true that she had taken her passage for Europe, but she hoped soon to do

so, and she confessed that in the mean time she was anxious to let her

flat. She was a little worn out with the care of housekeeping--Mrs.

March breathed, “Oh yes!” in the sigh with which ladies recognize one

another's martyrdom--and Mrs. Green had business abroad, and she was

going to pursue her art studies in Paris; she drew in Mr. Ilcomb's

class now, but the instruction was so much better in Paris; and as the

superintendent seemed to think the price was the only objection, she had

ventured to call.

“Then we didn't deceive him in the least,” thought Mrs. March, while she

answered, sweetly: “No; we were only afraid that it would be too small

for our family. We require a good many rooms.” She could not forego the

opportunity of saying, “My husband is coming to New York to take charge

of a literary periodical, and he will have to have a room to write in,”

which made Mrs. Green bow to March, and made March look sheepish. “But

we did think the apartment very charming”, (It was architecturally

charming, she protested to her conscience), “and we should have been so

glad if we could have got into it.” She followed this with some account

of their house-hunting, amid soft murmurs of sympathy from Mrs. Green,

who said that she had been through all that, and that if she could have

shown her apartment to them she felt sure that she could have explained

it so that they would have seen its capabilities better, Mrs. March

assented to this, and Mrs. Green added that if they found nothing

exactly suitable she would be glad to have them look at it again; and

then Mrs. March said that she was going back to Boston herself, but she

was leaving Mr. March to continue the search; and she had no doubt he

would be only too glad to see the apartment by daylight. “But if you

take it, Basil,” she warned him, when they were alone, “I shall simply

renounce you. I wouldn't live in that junk-shop if you gave it to me.

But who would have thought she was that kind of looking person? Though

of course I might have known if I had stopped to think once. It's

because the place doesn't express her at all that it's so unlike her. It

couldn't be like anybody, or anything that flies in the air, or creeps

upon the earth, or swims in the waters under the earth. I wonder where

in the world she's from; she's no New-Yorker; even we can see that; and

she's not quite a country person, either; she seems like a person from

some large town, where she's been an aesthetic authority. And she can't

find good enough art instruction in New York, and has to go to Paris for

it! Well, it's pathetic, after all, Basil. I can't help feeling sorry

for a person who mistakes herself to that extent.”

“I can't help feeling sorry for the husband of a person who mistakes

herself to that extent. What is Mr. Grosvenor Green going to do in Paris

while she's working her way into the Salon?”

“Well, you keep away from her apartment, Basil; that's all I've got to

say to you. And yet I do like some things about her.”

“I like everything about her but her apartment,” said March.

“I like her going to be out of the country,” said his wife. “We

shouldn't be overlooked. And the place was prettily shaped, you can't

deny it. And there was an elevator and steam heat. And the location is

very convenient. And there was a hall-boy to bring up cards. The halls

and stairs were kept very clean and nice. But it wouldn't do. I could

put you a folding bed in the room where you wrote, and we could even

have one in the parlor.”

“Behind a portiere? I couldn't stand any more portieres!”

“And we could squeeze the two girls into one room, or perhaps only

bring Margaret, and put out the whole of the wash. Basil!” she almost

shrieked, “it isn't to be thought of!”

He retorted, “I'm not thinking of it, my dear.”

Fulkerson came in just before they started for Mrs. March's train, to

find out what had become of them, he said, and to see whether they had

got anything to live in yet.

“Not a thing,” she said. “And I'm just going back to Boston, and

leaving Mr. March here to do anything he pleases about it. He has 'carte

blanche.'”

“But freedom brings responsibility, you know, Fulkerson, and it's the

same as if I'd no choice. I'm staying behind because I'm left, not

because I expect to do anything.”

“Is that so?” asked Fulkerson. “Well, we must see what can be done. I

supposed you would be all settled by this time, or I should have humped

myself to find you something. None of those places I gave you amounts to

anything?”

“As much as forty thousand others we've looked at,” said Mrs. March.

“Yes, one of them does amount to something. It comes so near being what

we want that I've given Mr. March particular instructions not to go near

it.”

She told him about Mrs. Grosvenor Green and her flats, and at the end he

said:

“Well, well, we must look out for that. I'll keep an eye on him, Mrs.

March, and see that he doesn't do anything rash, and I won't leave him

till he's found just the right thing. It exists, of course; it must in a

city of eighteen hundred thousand people, and the only question is where

to find it. You leave him to me, Mrs. March; I'll watch out for him.”

Fulkerson showed some signs of going to the station when he found they

were not driving, but she bade him a peremptory good-bye at the hotel

door.

“He's very nice, Basil, and his way with you is perfectly charming. It's

very sweet to see how really fond of you he is. But I didn't want him

stringing along with us up to Forty-second Street and spoiling our last

moments together.”

At Third Avenue they took the Elevated for which she confessed an

infatuation. She declared it the most ideal way of getting about in the

world, and was not ashamed when he reminded her of how she used to say

that nothing under the sun could induce her to travel on it. She now

said that the night transit was even more interesting than the day, and

that the fleeing intimacy you formed with people in second and third

floor interiors, while all the usual street life went on underneath,

had a domestic intensity mixed with a perfect repose that was the last

effect of good society with all its security and exclusiveness. He said

it was better than the theatre, of which it reminded him, to see those

people through their windows: a family party of work-folk at a late

tea, some of the men in their shirt-sleeves; a woman sewing by a lamp; a

mother laying her child in its cradle; a man with his head fallen on his

hands upon a table; a girl and her lover leaning over the window-sill

together. What suggestion! what drama? what infinite interest! At the

Forty-second Street station they stopped a minute on the bridge that

crosses the track to the branch road for the Central Depot, and looked

up and down the long stretch of the Elevated to north and south. The

track that found and lost itself a thousand times in the flare and

tremor of the innumerable lights; the moony sheen of the electrics

mixing with the reddish points and blots of gas far and near; the

architectural shapes of houses and churches and towers, rescued by the

obscurity from all that was ignoble in them, and the coming and going

of the trains marking the stations with vivider or fainter plumes of

flame-shot steam-formed an incomparable perspective. They often talked

afterward of the superb spectacle, which in a city full of painters

nightly works its unrecorded miracles; and they were just to the Arachne

roof spun in iron over the cross street on which they ran to the depot;

but for the present they were mostly inarticulate before it. They had

another moment of rich silence when they paused in the gallery that

leads from the Elevated station to the waiting-rooms in the Central

Depot and looked down upon the great night trains lying on the tracks

dim under the rain of gas-lights that starred without dispersing the

vast darkness of the place. What forces, what fates, slept in these

bulks which would soon be hurling themselves north and south and west

through the night! Now they waited there like fabled monsters of

Arab story ready for the magician's touch, tractable, reckless,

will-less--organized lifelessness full of a strange semblance of life.

The Marches admired the impressive sight with a thrill of patriotic

pride in the fact that the whole world perhaps could not afford just

the like. Then they hurried down to the ticket-offices, and he got her

a lower berth in the Boston sleeper, and went with her to the car. They

made the most of the fact that her berth was in the very middle of the

car; and she promised to write as soon as she reached home. She promised

also that, having seen the limitations of New York in respect to flats,

she would not be hard on him if he took something not quite ideal. Only

he must remember that it was not to be above Twentieth Street nor below

Washington Square; it must not be higher than the third floor; it must

have an elevator, steam heat, hail-boys, and a pleasant janitor. These

were essentials; if he could not get them, then they must do without.

But he must get them.

XI.

Mrs. March was one of those wives who exact a more rigid adherence to

their ideals from their husbands than from themselves. Early in their

married life she had taken charge of him in all matters which she

considered practical. She did not include the business of bread-winning

in these; that was an affair that might safely be left to his

absent-minded, dreamy inefficiency, and she did not interfere with

him there. But in such things as rehanging the pictures, deciding on

a summer boarding-place, taking a seaside cottage, repapering rooms,

choosing seats at the theatre, seeing what the children ate when she was

not at table, shutting the cat out at night, keeping run of calls and

invitations, and seeing if the furnace was dampered, he had failed her

so often that she felt she could not leave him the slightest discretion

in regard to a flat. Her total distrust of his judgment in the matters

cited and others like them consisted with the greatest admiration of his

mind and respect for his character. She often said that if he would only

bring these to bear in such exigencies he would be simply perfect; but

she had long given up his ever doing so. She subjected him, therefore,

to an iron code, but after proclaiming it she was apt to abandon him

to the native lawlessness of his temperament. She expected him in

this event to do as he pleased, and she resigned herself to it with

considerable comfort in holding him accountable. He learned to expect

this, and after suffering keenly from her disappointment with whatever

he did he waited patiently till she forgot her grievance and began to

extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable. She would almost

admit at moments that what he had done was a very good thing, but she

reserved the right to return in full force to her original condemnation

of it; and she accumulated each act of independent volition in witness

and warning against him. Their mass oppressed but never deterred him. He

expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices, and he did

it without any apparent recollection of his former misdeeds and their

consequences. There was a good deal of comedy in it all, and some

tragedy.

He now experienced a certain expansion, such as husbands of his kind

will imagine, on going back to his hotel alone. It was, perhaps, a

revulsion from the pain of parting; and he toyed with the idea of Mrs.

Grosvenor Green's apartment, which, in its preposterous unsuitability,

had a strange attraction. He felt that he could take it with less risk

than anything else they had seen, but he said he would look at all the

other places in town first. He really spent the greater part of the next

day in hunting up the owner of an apartment that had neither steam heat

nor an elevator, but was otherwise perfect, and trying to get him to

take less than the agent asked. By a curious psychical operation he was

able, in the transaction, to work himself into quite a passionate desire

for the apartment, while he held the Grosvenor Green apartment in

the background of his mind as something that he could return to as

altogether more suitable. He conducted some simultaneous negotiation

for a furnished house, which enhanced still more the desirability of the

Grosvenor Green apartment. Toward evening he went off at a tangent far

up-town, so as to be able to tell his wife how utterly preposterous

the best there would be as compared even with this ridiculous

Grosvenor Green gimcrackery. It is hard to report the processes of his

sophistication; perhaps this, again, may best be left to the marital

imagination.

He rang at the last of these up-town apartments as it was falling dusk,

and it was long before the janitor appeared. Then the man was very

surly, and said if he looked at the flat now he would say it was too

dark, like all the rest. His reluctance irritated March in proportion

to his insincerity in proposing to look at it at all. He knew he did not

mean to take it under any circumstances; that he was going to use his

inspection of it in dishonest justification of his disobedience to his

wife; but he put on an air of offended dignity. “If you don't wish to

show the apartment,” he said, “I don't care to see it.”

The man groaned, for he was heavy, and no doubt dreaded the stairs. He

scratched a match on his thigh, and led the way up. March was sorry for

him, and he put his fingers on a quarter in his waistcoat-pocket to give

him at parting. At the same time, he had to trump up an objection to the

flat. This was easy, for it was advertised as containing ten rooms, and

he found the number eked out with the bath-room and two large closets.

“It's light enough,” said March, “but I don't see how you make out ten

rooms.”

“There's ten rooms,” said the man, deigning no proof.

March took his fingers off the quarter, and went down-stairs and out

of the door without another word. It would be wrong, it would be

impossible, to give the man anything after such insolence. He reflected,

with shame, that it was also cheaper to punish than forgive him.

He returned to his hotel prepared for any desperate measure, and

convinced now that the Grosvenor Green apartment was not merely the only

thing left for him, but was, on its own merits, the best thing in New

York.

Fulkerson was waiting for him in the reading-room, and it gave March

the curious thrill with which a man closes with temptation when he said:

“Look here! Why don't you take that woman's flat in the Xenophon?

She's been at the agents again, and they've been at me. She likes your

look--or Mrs. March's--and I guess you can have it at a pretty heavy

discount from the original price. I'm authorized to say you can have it

for one seventy-five a month, and I don't believe it would be safe for

you to offer one fifty.”

March shook his head, and dropped a mask of virtuous rejection over his

corrupt acquiescence. “It's too small for us--we couldn't squeeze into

it.”

“Why, look here!” Fulkerson persisted. “How many rooms do you people

want?”

“I've got to have a place to work--”

“Of course! And you've got to have it at the Fifth Wheel office.”

“I hadn't thought of that,” March began. “I suppose I could do my work

at the office, as there's not much writing--”

“Why, of course you can't do your work at home. You just come round with

me now, and look at that again.”

“No; I can't do it.”

“Why?”

“I--I've got to dine.”

“All right,” said Fulkerson. “Dine with me. I want to take you round to

a little Italian place that I know.”

One may trace the successive steps of March's descent in this simple

matter with the same edification that would attend the study of the

self-delusions and obfuscations of a man tempted to crime. The process

is probably not at all different, and to the philosophical mind the kind

of result is unimportant; the process is everything.

Fulkerson led him down one block and half across another to the steps of

a small dwelling-house, transformed, like many others, into a restaurant

of the Latin ideal, with little or no structural change from the

pattern of the lower middle-class New York home. There were the corroded

brownstone steps, the mean little front door, and the cramped entry with

its narrow stairs by which ladies could go up to a dining-room appointed

for them on the second floor; the parlors on the first were set about

with tables, where men smoked cigarettes between the courses, and

a single waiter ran swiftly to and fro with plates and dishes, and,

exchanged unintelligible outcries with a cook beyond a slide in the

back parlor. He rushed at the new-comers, brushed the soiled table-cloth

before them with a towel on his arm, covered its worst stains with a

napkin, and brought them, in their order, the vermicelli soup, the fried

fish, the cheese-strewn spaghetti, the veal cutlets, the tepid roast

fowl and salad, and the wizened pear and coffee which form the dinner at

such places.

“Ah, this is nice!” said Fulkerson, after the laying of the charitable

napkin, and he began to recognize acquaintances, some of whom he

described to March as young literary men and artists with whom they

should probably have to do; others were simply frequenters of the

place, and were of all nationalities and religions apparently--at least,

several were Hebrews and Cubans. “You get a pretty good slice of New

York here,” he said, “all except the frosting on top. That you won't

find much at Maroni's, though you will occasionally. I don't mean

the ladies ever, of course.” The ladies present seemed harmless and

reputable-looking people enough, but certainly they were not of the

first fashion, and, except in a few instances, not Americans. “It's like

cutting straight down through a fruitcake,” Fulkerson went on, “or a

mince-pie, when you don't know who made the pie; you get a little of

everything.” He ordered a small flask of Chianti with the dinner, and

it came in its pretty wicker jacket. March smiled upon it with tender

reminiscence, and Fulkerson laughed. “Lights you up a little. I brought

old Dryfoos here one day, and he thought it was sweet-oil; that's the

kind of bottle they used to have it in at the country drug-stores.”

“Yes, I remember now; but I'd totally forgotten it,” said March. “How

far back that goes! Who's Dryfoos?”

“Dryfoos?” Fulkerson, still smiling, tore off a piece of the half-yard

of French loaf which had been supplied them, with two pale, thin disks

of butter, and fed it into himself. “Old Dryfoos? Well, of course! I

call him old, but he ain't so very. About fifty, or along there.”

“No,” said March, “that isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be.”

“Well, I suppose you've got to know about him, anyway,” said Fulkerson,

thoughtfully. “And I've been wondering just how I should tell you. Can't

always make out exactly how much of a Bostonian you really are! Ever

been out in the natural-gas country?”

“No,” said March. “I've had a good deal of curiosity about it, but

I've never been able to get away except in summer, and then we always

preferred to go over the old ground, out to Niagara and back through

Canada, the route we took on our wedding journey. The children like it

as much as we do.”

“Yes, yes,” said Fulkerson. “Well, the natural-gas country is worth

seeing. I don't mean the Pittsburg gas-fields, but out in Northern Ohio

and Indiana around Moffitt--that's the place in the heart of the gas

region that they've been booming so. Yes, you ought to see that country.

If you haven't been West for a good many years, you haven't got any idea

how old the country looks. You remember how the fields used to be all

full of stumps?”

“I should think so.”

“Well, you won't see any stumps now. All that country out around Moffitt

is just as smooth as a checker-board, and looks as old as England. You

know how we used to burn the stumps out; and then somebody invented a

stump-extractor, and we pulled them out with a yoke of oxen. Now they

just touch 'em off with a little dynamite, and they've got a cellar dug

and filled up with kindling ready for housekeeping whenever you want it.

Only they haven't got any use for kindling in that country--all gas. I

rode along on the cars through those level black fields at corn-planting

time, and every once in a while I'd come to a place with a piece of

ragged old stove-pipe stickin' up out of the ground, and blazing away

like forty, and a fellow ploughing all round it and not minding it any

more than if it was spring violets. Horses didn't notice it, either.

Well, they've always known about the gas out there; they say there are

places in the woods where it's been burning ever since the country was

settled.

“But when you come in sight of Moffitt--my, oh, my! Well, you come in

smell of it about as soon. That gas out there ain't odorless, like

the Pittsburg gas, and so it's perfectly safe; but the smell isn't

bad--about as bad as the finest kind of benzine. Well, the first thing

that strikes you when you come to Moffitt is the notion that there has

been a good warm, growing rain, and the town's come up overnight. That's

in the suburbs, the annexes, and additions. But it ain't shabby--no

shanty-farm business; nice brick and frame houses, some of 'em Queen

Anne style, and all of 'em looking as if they had come to stay. And when

you drive up from the depot you think everybody's moving. Everything

seems to be piled into the street; old houses made over, and new ones

going up everywhere. You know the kind of street Main Street always

used to be in our section--half plank-road and turnpike, and the rest

mud-hole, and a lot of stores and doggeries strung along with false

fronts a story higher than the back, and here and there a decent

building with the gable end to the public; and a court-house and jail

and two taverns and three or four churches. Well, they're all there in

Moffitt yet, but architecture has struck it hard, and they've got a lot

of new buildings that needn't be ashamed of themselves anywhere; the new

court-house is as big as St. Peter's, and the Grand Opera-house is in

the highest style of the art. You can't buy a lot on that street for

much less than you can buy a lot in New York--or you couldn't when the

boom was on; I saw the place just when the boom was in its prime. I went

out there to work the newspapers in the syndicate business, and I got

one of their men to write me a real bright, snappy account of the gas;

and they just took me in their arms and showed me everything. Well,

it was wonderful, and it was beautiful, too! To see a whole community

stirred up like that was--just like a big boy, all hope and high

spirits, and no discount on the remotest future; nothing but perpetual

boom to the end of time--I tell you it warmed your blood. Why, there

were some things about it that made you think what a nice kind of world

this would be if people ever took hold together, instead of each fellow

fighting it out on his own hook, and devil take the hindmost. They made

up their minds at Moffitt that if they wanted their town to grow

they'd got to keep their gas public property. So they extended their

corporation line so as to take in pretty much the whole gas region round

there; and then the city took possession of every well that was put

down, and held it for the common good. Anybody that's a mind to come to

Moffitt and start any kind of manufacture can have all the gas he wants

free; and for fifteen dollars a year you can have all the gas you want

to heat and light your private house. The people hold on to it for

themselves, and, as I say, it's a grand sight to see a whole community

hanging together and working for the good of all, instead of splitting

up into as many different cut-throats as there are able-bodied citizens.

See that fellow?” Fulkerson broke off, and indicated with a twirl of his

head a short, dark, foreign-looking man going out of the door. “They say

that fellow's a Socialist. I think it's a shame they're allowed to come

here. If they don't like the way we manage our affairs let 'em stay at

home,” Fulkerson continued. “They do a lot of mischief, shooting off

their mouths round here. I believe in free speech and all that; but I'd

like to see these fellows shut up in jail and left to jaw one another to

death. We don't want any of their poison.”

March did not notice the vanishing Socialist. He was watching, with a

teasing sense of familiarity, a tall, shabbily dressed, elderly man, who

had just come in. He had the aquiline profile uncommon among Germans,

and yet March recognized him at once as German. His long, soft beard and

mustache had once been fair, and they kept some tone of their yellow in

the gray to which they had turned. His eyes were full, and his lips and

chin shaped the beard to the noble outline which shows in the beards the

Italian masters liked to paint for their Last Suppers. His carriage was

erect and soldierly, and March presently saw that he had lost his left

hand. He took his place at a table where the overworked waiter found

time to cut up his meat and put everything in easy reach of his right

hand.

“Well,” Fulkerson resumed, “they took me round everywhere in Moffitt,

and showed me their big wells--lit 'em up for a private view, and let me

hear them purr with the soft accents of a mass-meeting of locomotives.

Why, when they let one of these wells loose in a meadow that they'd

piped it into temporarily, it drove the flame away forty feet from the

mouth of the pipe and blew it over half an acre of ground. They say when

they let one of their big wells burn away all winter before they had

learned how to control it, that well kept up a little summer all around

it; the grass stayed green, and the flowers bloomed all through the

winter. I don't know whether it's so or not. But I can believe anything

of natural gas. My! but it was beautiful when they turned on the full

force of that well and shot a roman candle into the gas--that's the

way they light it--and a plume of fire about twenty feet wide and

seventy-five feet high, all red and yellow and violet, jumped into the

sky, and that big roar shook the ground under your feet! You felt like

saying:

“'Don't trouble yourself; I'm perfectly convinced. I believe in

Moffitt.' We-e-e-ll!” drawled Fulkerson, with a long breath, “that's

where I met old Dryfoos.”

“Oh yes!--Dryfoos,” said March. He observed that the waiter had brought

the old one-handed German a towering glass of beer.

“Yes,” Fulkerson laughed. “We've got round to Dryfoos again. I thought

I could cut a long story short, but I seem to be cutting a short story

long. If you're not in a hurry, though--”

“Not in the least. Go on as long as you like.”

“I met him there in the office of a real-estate man--speculator,

of course; everybody was, in Moffitt; but a first-rate fellow, and

public-spirited as all get-out; and when Dryfoos left he told me about

him. Dryfoos was an old Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, about three or four

miles out of Moffitt, and he'd lived there pretty much all his life;

father was one of the first settlers. Everybody knew he had the right

stuff in him, but he was slower than molasses in January, like those

Pennsylvania Dutch. He'd got together the largest and handsomest farm

anywhere around there; and he was making money on it, just like he was

in some business somewhere; he was a very intelligent man; he took the

papers and kept himself posted; but he was awfully old-fashioned in his

ideas. He hung on to the doctrines as well as the dollars of the dads;

it was a real thing with him. Well, when the boom began to come he hated

it awfully, and he fought it. He used to write communications to the

weekly newspaper in Moffitt--they've got three dailies there now--and

throw cold water on the boom. He couldn't catch on no way. It made him

sick to hear the clack that went on about the gas the whole while, and

that stirred up the neighborhood and got into his family. Whenever he'd

hear of a man that had been offered a big price for his land and was

going to sell out and move into town, he'd go and labor with him and

try to talk him out of it, and tell him how long his fifteen or twenty

thousand would last him to live on, and shake the Standard Oil Company

before him, and try to make him believe it wouldn't be five years before

the Standard owned the whole region.

“Of course, he couldn't do anything with them. When a man's offered a

big price for his farm, he don't care whether it's by a secret emissary

from the Standard Oil or not; he's going to sell and get the better of

the other fellow if he can. Dryfoos couldn't keep the boom out of has

own family even. His wife was with him. She thought whatever he said and

did was just as right as if it had been thundered down from Sinai. But

the young folks were sceptical, especially the girls that had been away

to school. The boy that had been kept at home because he couldn't be

spared from helping his father manage the farm was more like him, but

they contrived to stir the boy up--with the hot end of the boom, too. So

when a fellow came along one day and offered old Dryfoos a cool hundred

thousand for his farm, it was all up with Dryfoos. He'd 'a' liked to 'a'

kept the offer to himself and not done anything about it, but his vanity

wouldn't let him do that; and when he let it out in his family the girls

outvoted him. They just made him sell.

“He wouldn't sell all. He kept about eighty acres that was off in some

piece by itself, but the three hundred that had the old brick house

on it, and the big barn--that went, and Dryfoos bought him a place in

Moffitt and moved into town to live on the interest of his money. Just

What he had scolded and ridiculed everybody else for doing. Well, they

say that at first he seemed like he would go crazy. He hadn't anything

to do. He took a fancy to that land-agent, and he used to go and set in

his office and ask him what he should do. 'I hain't got any horses, I

hain't got any cows, I hain't got any pigs, I hain't got any chickens. I

hain't got anything to do from sun-up to sun-down.' The fellow said the

tears used to run down the old fellow's cheeks, and if he hadn't been

so busy himself he believed he should 'a' cried, too. But most o' people

thought old Dryfoos was down in the mouth because he hadn't asked more

for his farm, when he wanted to buy it back and found they held it at a

hundred and fifty thousand. People couldn't believe he was just homesick

and heartsick for the old place. Well, perhaps he was sorry he hadn't

asked more; that's human nature, too.

“After a while something happened. That land-agent used to tell Dryfoos

to get out to Europe with his money and see life a little, or go and

live in Washington, where he could be somebody; but Dryfoos wouldn't,

and he kept listening to the talk there, and all of a sudden he caught

on. He came into that fellow's one day with a plan for cutting up the

eighty acres he'd kept into town lots; and he'd got it all plotted out

so-well, and had so many practical ideas about it, that the fellow was

astonished. He went right in with him, as far as Dryfoos would let him,

and glad of the chance; and they were working the thing for all it was

worth when I struck Moffitt. Old Dryfoos wanted me to go out and see the

Dryfoos & Hendry Addition--guess he thought maybe I'd write it up; and

he drove me out there himself. Well, it was funny to see a town made:

streets driven through; two rows of shadetrees, hard and soft, planted;

cellars dug and houses put up-regular Queen Anne style, too, with

stained glass-all at once. Dryfoos apologized for the streets because

they were hand-made; said they expected their street-making machine

Tuesday, and then they intended to push things.”

Fulkerson enjoyed the effect of his picture on March for a moment, and

then went on: “He was mighty intelligent, too, and he questioned me up

about my business as sharp as I ever was questioned; seemed to kind of

strike his fancy; I guess he wanted to find out if there was any money

in it. He was making money, hand over hand, then; and he never stopped

speculating and improving till he'd scraped together three or four

hundred thousand dollars, they said a million, but they like round

numbers at Moffitt, and I guess half a million would lay over it

comfortably and leave a few thousands to spare, probably. Then he came

on to New York.”

Fulkerson struck a match against the ribbed side of the porcelain cup

that held the matches in the centre of the table, and lit a cigarette,

which he began to smoke, throwing his head back with a leisurely effect,

as if he had got to the end of at least as much of his story as he meant

to tell without prompting.

March asked him the desired question. “What in the world for?”

Fulkerson took out his cigarette and said, with a smile: “To spend his

money, and get his daughters into the old Knickerbocker society. Maybe

he thought they were all the same kind of Dutch.”

“And has he succeeded?”

“Well, they're not social leaders yet. But it's only a question of

time--generation or two--especially if time's money, and if 'Every Other

Week' is the success it's bound to be.”

“You don't mean to say, Fulkerson,” said March, with a half-doubting,

half-daunted laugh, “that he's your Angel?”

“That's what I mean to say,” returned Fulkerson. “I ran onto him in

Broadway one day last summer. If you ever saw anybody in your life;

you're sure to meet him in Broadway again, sooner or later. That's

the philosophy of the bunco business; country people from the same

neighborhood are sure to run up against each other the first time they

come to New York. I put out my hand, and I said, 'Isn't this Mr. Dryfoos

from Moffitt?' He didn't seem to have any use for my hand; he let me

keep it, and he squared those old lips of his till his imperial stuck

straight out. Ever see Bernhardt in 'L'Etrangere'? Well, the American

husband is old Dryfoos all over; no mustache; and hay-colored

chin-whiskers cut slanting froze the corners of his mouth. He cocked

his little gray eyes at me, and says he: 'Yes, young man; my name

is Dryfoos, and I'm from Moffitt. But I don't want no present of

Longfellow's Works, illustrated; and I don't want to taste no fine teas;

but I know a policeman that does; and if you're the son of my old friend

Squire Strohfeldt, you'd better get out.' 'Well, then,' said I, 'how

would you like to go into the newspaper syndicate business?' He gave

another look at me, and then he burst out laughing, and he grabbed my

hand, and he just froze to it. I never saw anybody so glad.

“Well, the long and the short of it was that I asked him round here to

Maroni's to dinner; and before we broke up for the night we had settled

the financial side of the plan that's brought you to New York.”

“I can see,” said Fulkerson, who had kept his eyes fast on March's face,

“that you don't more than half like the idea of Dryfoos. It ought to

give you more confidence in the thing than you ever had. You needn't be

afraid,” he added, with some feeling, “that I talked Dryfoos into the

thing for my own advantage.”

“Oh, my dear Fulkerson!” March protested, all the more fervently because

he was really a little guilty.

“Well, of course not! I didn't mean you were. But I just happened to

tell him what I wanted to go into when I could see my way to it, and he

caught on of his own accord. The fact is,” said Fulkerson, “I guess I'd

better make a clean breast of it, now I'm at it, Dryfoos wanted to get

something for that boy of his to do. He's in railroads himself, and he's

in mines and other things, and he keeps busy, and he can't bear to have

his boy hanging round the house doing nothing, like as if he was a girl.

I told him that the great object of a rich man was to get his son into

just that fix, but he couldn't seem to see it, and the boy hated it

himself. He's got a good head, and he wanted to study for the ministry

when they were all living together out on the farm; but his father had

the old-fashioned ideas about that. You know they used to think that any

sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of; but they wanted

the good timber for business; and so the old man wouldn't let him.

You'll see the fellow; you'll like him; he's no fool, I can tell you;

and he's going to be our publisher, nominally at first and actually when

I've taught him the ropes a little.”

XII.

Fulkerson stopped and looked at March, whom he saw lapsing into a

serious silence. Doubtless he divined his uneasiness with the facts that

had been given him to digest. He pulled out his watch and glanced at it.

“See here, how would you like to go up to Forty-sixth street with me,

and drop in on old Dryfoos? Now's your chance. He's going West tomorrow,

and won't be back for a month or so. They'll all be glad to see you, and

you'll understand things better when you've seen him and his family. I

can't explain.”

March reflected a moment. Then he said, with a wisdom that surprised

him, for he would have liked to yield to the impulse of his curiosity:

“Perhaps we'd better wait till Mrs. March comes down, and let things

take the usual course. The Dryfoos ladies will want to call on her as

the last-comer, and if I treated myself 'en garcon' now, and paid the

first visit, it might complicate matters.”

“Well, perhaps you're right,” said Fulkerson. “I don't know much about

these things, and I don't believe Ma Dryfoos does, either.” He was on

his legs lighting another cigarette. “I suppose the girls are getting

themselves up in etiquette, though. Well, then, let's have a look at the

'Every Other Week' building, and then, if you like your quarters there,

you can go round and close for Mrs. Green's flat.”

March's dormant allegiance to his wife's wishes had been roused by his

decision in favor of good social usage. “I don't think I shall take the

flat,” he said.

“Well, don't reject it without giving it another look, anyway. Come on!”

He helped March on with his light overcoat, and the little stir they

made for their departure caught the notice of the old German; he looked

up from his beer at them. March was more than ever impressed with

something familiar in his face. In compensation for his prudence in

regard to the Dryfooses he now indulged an impulse. He stepped across to

where the old man sat, with his bald head shining like ivory under

the gas-jet, and his fine patriarchal length of bearded mask taking

picturesque lights and shadows, and put out his hand to him.

“Lindau! Isn't this Mr. Lindau?”

The old man lifted himself slowly to his feet with mechanical

politeness, and cautiously took March's hand. “Yes, my name is Lindau,”

he said, slowly, while he scanned March's face. Then he broke into

a long cry. “Ah-h-h-h-h, my dear poy! my gong friendt! my-my--Idt is

Passil Marge, not zo? Ah, ha, ha, ha! How gladt I am to zee you! Why, I

am gladt! And you rememberdt me? You remember Schiller, and Goethe, and

Uhland? And Indianapolis? You still lif in Indianapolis? It sheers my

hardt to zee you. But you are lidtle oldt, too? Tventy-five years makes

a difference. Ah, I am gladt! Dell me, idt is Passil Marge, not zo?”

He looked anxiously into March's face, with a gentle smile of mixed hope

and doubt, and March said: “As sure as it's Berthold Lindau, and I guess

it's you. And you remember the old times? You were as much of a boy as I

was, Lindau. Are you living in New York? Do you recollect how you tried

to teach me to fence? I don't know how to this day, Lindau. How good

you were, and how patient! Do you remember how we used to sit up in the

little parlor back of your printing-office, and read Die Rauber and Die

Theilung der Erde and Die Glocke? And Mrs. Lindau? Is she with--”

“Deadt--deadt long ago. Right after I got home from the war--tventy

years ago. But tell me, you are married? Children? Yes! Goodt! And how

oldt are you now?”

“It makes me seventeen to see you, Lindau, but I've got a son nearly as

old.”

“Ah, ha, ha! Goodt! And where do you lif?”

“Well, I'm just coming to live in New York,” March said, looking over

at Fulkerson, who had been watching his interview with the perfunctory

smile of sympathy that people put on at the meeting of old friends. “I

want to introduce you to my friend Mr. Fulkerson. He and I are going

into a literary enterprise here.”

“Ah! zo?” said the old man, with polite interest. He took Fulkerson's

proffered hand, and they all stood talking a few moments together.

Then Fulkerson said, with another look at his watch, “Well, March, we're

keeping Mr. Lindau from his dinner.”

“Dinner!” cried the old man. “Idt's better than breadt and meadt to see

Mr. Marge!”

“I must be going, anyway,” said March. “But I must see you again soon,

Lindau. Where do you live? I want a long talk.”

“And I. You will find me here at dinner-time.” said the old man. “It

is the best place”; and March fancied him reluctant to give another

address.

To cover his consciousness he answered, gayly: “Then, it's 'auf

wiedersehen' with us. Well!”

“Also!” The old man took his hand, and made a mechanical movement with

his mutilated arm, as if he would have taken it in a double clasp. He

laughed at himself. “I wanted to gif you the other handt, too, but I

gafe it to your gountry a goodt while ago.”

“To my country?” asked March, with a sense of pain, and yet lightly, as

if it were a joke of the old man's. “Your country, too, Lindau?”

The old man turned very grave, and said, almost coldly, “What gountry

hass a poor man got, Mr. Marge?”

“Well, you ought to have a share in the one you helped to save for us

rich men, Lindau,” March returned, still humoring the joke.

The old man smiled sadly, but made no answer as he sat down again.

“Seems to be a little soured,” said Fulkerson, as they went down the

steps. He was one of those Americans whose habitual conception of life

is unalloyed prosperity. When any experience or observation of his went

counter to it he suffered--something like physical pain. He eagerly

shrugged away the impression left upon his buoyancy by Lindau, and added

to March's continued silence, “What did I tell you about meeting every

man in New York that you ever knew before?”

“I never expected to meat Lindau in the world again,” said March, more

to himself than to Fulkerson. “I had an impression that he had been

killed in the war. I almost wish he had been.”

“Oh, hello, now!” cried Fulkerson.

March laughed, but went on soberly: “He was a man predestined to

adversity, though. When I first knew him out in Indianapolis he was

starving along with a sick wife and a sick newspaper. It was before

the Germans had come over to the Republicans generally, but Lindau was

fighting the anti-slavery battle just as naturally at Indianapolis in

1858 as he fought behind the barricades at Berlin in 1848. And yet he

was always such a gentle soul! And so generous! He taught me German for

the love of it; he wouldn't spoil his pleasure by taking a cent from me;

he seemed to get enough out of my being young and enthusiastic, and out

of prophesying great things for me. I wonder what the poor old fellow is

doing here, with that one hand of his?”

“Not amassing a very 'handsome pittance,' I guess, as Artemus Ward would

say,” said Fulkerson, getting back some of his lightness. “There are

lots of two-handed fellows in New York that are not doing much better, I

guess. Maybe he gets some writing on the German papers.”

“I hope so. He's one of the most accomplished men! He used to be a

splendid musician--pianist--and knows eight or ten languages.”

“Well, it's astonishing,” said Fulkerson, “how much lumber those Germans

can carry around in their heads all their lives, and never work it up

into anything. It's a pity they couldn't do the acquiring, and let

out the use of their learning to a few bright Americans. We could make

things hum, if we could arrange 'em that way.”

He talked on, unheeded by March, who went along half-consciously

tormented by his lightness in the pensive memories the meeting with

Lindau had called up. Was this all that sweet, unselfish nature could

come to? What a homeless old age at that meagre Italian table d'hote,

with that tall glass of beer for a half-hour's oblivion! That shabby

dress, that pathetic mutilation! He must have a pension, twelve dollars

a month, or eighteen, from a grateful country. But what else did he eke

out with?

“Well, here we are,” said Fulkerson, cheerily. He ran up the steps

before March, and opened the carpenter's temporary valve in the door

frame, and led the way into a darkness smelling sweetly of unpainted

wood-work and newly dried plaster; their feat slipped on shavings and

grated on sand. He scratched a match, and found a candle, and then

walked about up and down stairs, and lectured on the advantages of the

place. He had fitted up bachelor apartments for himself in the house,

and said that he was going to have a flat to let on the top floor. “I

didn't offer it to you because I supposed you'd be too proud to live

over your shop; and it's too small, anyway; only five rooms.”

“Yes, that's too small,” said March, shirking the other point.

“Well, then, here's the room I intend for your office,” said Fulkerson,

showing him into a large back parlor one flight up. “You'll have it

quiet from the street noises here, and you can be at home or not, as you

please. There'll be a boy on the stairs to find out. Now, you see, this

makes the Grosvenor Green flat practicable, if you want it.”

March felt the forces of fate closing about him and pushing him to a

decision. He feebly fought them off till he could have another look at

the flat. Then, baked and subdued still more by the unexpected presence

of Mrs. Grosvenor Green herself, who was occupying it so as to be able

to show it effectively, he took it. He was aware more than ever of its

absurdities; he knew that his wife would never cease to hate it; but he

had suffered one of those eclipses of the imagination to which men of

his temperament are subject, and into which he could see no future for

his desires. He felt a comfort in irretrievably committing himself, and

exchanging the burden of indecision for the burden of responsibility.

“I don't know,” said Fulkerson, as they walked back to his hotel

together, “but you might fix it up with that lone widow and her pretty

daughter to take part of their house here.” He seemed to be reminded

of it by the fact of passing the house, and March looked up at its dark

front. He could not have told exactly why he felt a pang of remorse

at the sight, and doubtless it was more regret for having taken the

Grosvenor Green flat than for not having taken the widow's rooms. Still,

he could not forget her wistfulness when his wife and he were looking

at them, and her disappointment when they decided against them. He had

toyed, in, his after-talk to Mrs. March, with a sort of hypothetical

obligation they had to modify their plans so as to meet the widow's want

of just such a family as theirs; they had both said what a blessing

it would be to her, and what a pity they could not do it; but they had

decided very distinctly that they could not. Now it seemed to him that

they might; and he asked himself whether he had not actually departed as

much from their ideal as if he had taken board with the widow. Suddenly

it seemed to him that his wife asked him this, too.

“I reckon,” said Fulkerson, “that she could have arranged to give you

your meals in your rooms, and it would have come to about the same thing

as housekeeping.”

“No sort of boarding can be the same as house-keeping,” said March. “I

want my little girl to have the run of a kitchen, and I want the whole

family to have the moral effect of housekeeping. It's demoralizing to

board, in every way; it isn't a home, if anybody else takes the care of

it off your hands.”

“Well, I suppose so,” Fulkerson assented; but March's words had a

hollow ring to himself, and in his own mind he began to retaliate his

dissatisfaction upon Fulkerson.

He parted from him on the usual terms outwardly, but he felt obscurely

abused by Fulkerson in regard to the Dryfooses, father and son. He did

not know but Fulkerson had taken an advantage of him in allowing him to

commit himself to their enterprise with out fully and frankly telling

him who and what his backer was; he perceived that with young Dryfoos as

the publisher and Fulkerson as the general director of the paper there

might be very little play for his own ideas of its conduct. Perhaps it

was the hurt to his vanity involved by the recognition of this fact that

made him forget how little choice he really had in the matter, and how,

since he had not accepted the offer to edit the insurance paper,

nothing remained for him but to close with Fulkerson. In this moment of

suspicion and resentment he accused Fulkerson of hastening his decision

in regard to the Grosvenor Green apartment; he now refused to consider

it a decision, and said to himself that if he felt disposed to do so he

would send Mrs. Green a note reversing it in the morning. But he put it

all off till morning with his clothes, when he went to bed, he put

off even thinking what his wife would say; he cast Fulkerson and his

constructive treachery out of his mind, too, and invited into it some

pensive reveries of the past, when he still stood at the parting of the

ways, and could take this path or that. In his middle life this was not

possible; he must follow the path chosen long, ago, wherever, it led. He

was not master of himself, as he once seemed, but the servant of those

he loved; if he could do what he liked, perhaps he might renounce this

whole New York enterprise, and go off somewhere out of the reach of

care; but he could not do what he liked, that was very clear. In the

pathos of this conviction he dwelt compassionately upon the thought

of poor old Lindau; he resolved to make him accept a handsome sum of

money--more than he could spare, something that he would feel the loss

of--in payment of the lessons in German and fencing given so long

ago. At the usual rate for such lessons, his debt, with interest for

twenty-odd years, would run very far into the hundreds. Too far, he

perceived, for his wife's joyous approval; he determined not to add the

interest; or he believed that Lindau would refuse the interest; he put a

fine speech in his mouth, making him do so; and after that he got Lindau

employment on 'Every Other Week,' and took care of him till he died.

Through all his melancholy and munificence he was aware of sordid

anxieties for having taken the Grosvenor Green apartment. These began

to assume visible, tangible shapes as he drowsed, and to became personal

entities, from which he woke, with little starts, to a realization of

their true nature, and then suddenly fell fast asleep.

In the accomplishment of the events which his reverie played with, there

was much that retroactively stamped it with prophecy, but much also that

was better than he forboded. He found that with regard to the Grosvenor

Green apartment he had not allowed for his wife's willingness to get any

sort of roof over her head again after the removal from their old home,

or for the alleviations that grow up through mere custom. The practical

workings of the apartment were not so bad; it had its good points, and

after the first sensation of oppression in it they began to feel the

convenience of its arrangement. They were at that time of life when

people first turn to their children's opinion with deference, and, in

the loss of keenness in their own likes and dislikes, consult the young

preferences which are still so sensitive. It went far to reconcile Mrs.

March to the apartment that her children were pleased with its novelty;

when this wore off for them, she had herself begun to find it much more

easily manageable than a house. After she had put away several barrels

of gimcracks, and folded up screens and rugs and skins, and carried

them all off to the little dark store-room which the flat developed,

she perceived at once a roominess and coziness in it unsuspected before.

Then, when people began to call, she had a pleasure, a superiority,

in saying that it was a furnished apartment, and in disclaiming all

responsibility for the upholstery and decoration. If March was by, she

always explained that it was Mr. March's fancy, and amiably laughed it

off with her callers as a mannish eccentricity. Nobody really seemed to

think it otherwise than pretty; and this again was a triumph for Mrs.

March, because it showed how inferior the New York taste was to the

Boston taste in such matters.

March submitted silently to his punishment, and laughed with her before

company at his own eccentricity. She had been so preoccupied with the

adjustment of the family to its new quarters and circumstances that the

time passed for laying his misgivings, if they were misgivings, about

Fulkerson before her, and when an occasion came for expressing them

they had themselves passed in the anxieties of getting forward the

first number of 'Every Other Week.' He kept these from her, too, and

the business that brought them to New York had apparently dropped into

abeyance before the questions of domestic economy that presented and

absented themselves. March knew his wife to be a woman of good mind and

in perfect sympathy with him, but he understood the limitations of

her perspective; and if he was not too wise, he was too experienced

to intrude upon it any affairs of his till her own were reduced to the

right order and proportion. It would have been folly to talk to her of

Fulkerson's conjecturable uncandor while she was in doubt whether her

cook would like the kitchen, or her two servants would consent to room

together; and till it was decided what school Tom should go to, and

whether Bella should have lessons at home or not, the relation which

March was to bear to the Dryfooses, as owner and publisher, was not to

be discussed with his wife. He might drag it in, but he was aware that

with her mind distracted by more immediate interests he could not get

from her that judgment, that reasoned divination, which he relied upon

so much. She would try, she would do her best, but the result would be a

view clouded and discolored by the effort she must make.

He put the whole matter by, and gave himself to the details of the work

before him. In this he found not only escape, but reassurance, for it

became more and more apparent that whatever was nominally the structure

of the business, a man of his qualifications and his instincts could not

have an insignificant place in it. He had also the consolation of liking

his work, and of getting an instant grasp of it that grew constantly

firmer and closer. The joy of knowing that he had not made a mistake was

great. In giving rein to ambitions long forborne he seemed to get back

to the youth when he had indulged them first; and after half a lifetime

passed in pursuits alien to his nature, he was feeling the serene

happiness of being mated through his work to his early love. From the

outside the spectacle might have had its pathos, and it is not easy to

justify such an experiment as he had made at his time of life, except

upon the ground where he rested from its consideration--the ground of

necessity.

His work was more in his thoughts than himself, however; and as the time

for the publication of the first number of his periodical came nearer,

his cares all centred upon it. Without fixing any date, Fulkerson had

announced it, and pushed his announcements with the shameless vigor of

a born advertiser. He worked his interest with the press to the utmost,

and paragraphs of a variety that did credit to his ingenuity were afloat

everywhere. Some of them were speciously unfavorable in tone; they

criticised and even ridiculed the principles on which the new departure

in literary journalism was based. Others defended it; others yet denied

that this rumored principle was really the principle. All contributed to

make talk. All proceeded from the same fertile invention.

March observed with a degree of mortification that the talk was very

little of it in the New York press; there the references to the novel

enterprise were slight and cold. But Fulkerson said: “Don't mind that,

old man. It's the whole country that makes or breaks a thing like this;

New York has very little to do with it. Now if it were a play, it would

be different. New York does make or break a play; but it doesn't make or

break a book; it doesn't make or break a magazine. The great mass of

the readers are outside of New York, and the rural districts are what

we have got to go for. They don't read much in New York; they write, and

talk about what they've written. Don't you worry.”

The rumor of Fulkerson's connection with the enterprise accompanied many

of the paragraphs, and he was able to stay March's thirst for employment

by turning over to him from day to day heaps of the manuscripts which

began to pour in from his old syndicate writers, as well as from

adventurous volunteers all over the country. With these in hand March

began practically to plan the first number, and to concrete a general

scheme from the material and the experience they furnished. They had

intended to issue the first number with the new year, and if it had been

an affair of literature alone, it would have been very easy; but it was

the art leg they limped on, as Fulkerson phrased it. They had not merely

to deal with the question of specific illustrations for this article

or that, but to decide the whole character of their illustrations, and

first of all to get a design for a cover which should both ensnare

the heedless and captivate the fastidious. These things did not come

properly within March's province--that had been clearly understood--and

for a while Fulkerson tried to run the art leg himself. The phrase was

again his, but it was simpler to make the phrase than to run the leg.

The difficult generation, at once stiff-backed and slippery, with which

he had to do in this endeavor, reduced even so buoyant an optimist to

despair, and after wasting some valuable weeks in trying to work the

artists himself, he determined to get an artist to work them. But what

artist? It could not be a man with fixed reputation and a following: he

would be too costly, and would have too many enemies among his brethren,

even if he would consent to undertake the job. Fulkerson had a man in

mind, an artist, too, who would have been the very thing if he had been

the thing at all. He had talent enough, and his sort of talent would

reach round the whole situation, but, as Fulkerson said, he was as many

kinds of an ass as he was kinds of an artist.

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Anticipative homesickness

Any sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of

Appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so much

As much of his story as he meant to tell without prompting

Considerable comfort in holding him accountable

Extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable

Flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another

Handsome pittance

He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices

Hypothetical difficulty

Never-blooming shrub

Poverty as hopeless as any in the world

Seeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to him

Servant of those he loved

Sigh with which ladies recognize one another's martyrdom

Sorry he hadn't asked more; that's human nature

That isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be

Tried to be homesick for them, but failed

Turn to their children's opinion with deference

Wish we didn't always recognize the facts as we do

PART SECOND

I.

The evening when March closed with Mrs. Green's reduced offer, and

decided to take her apartment, the widow whose lodgings he had rejected

sat with her daughter in an upper room at the back of her house. In the

shaded glow of the drop-light she was sewing, and the girl was drawing

at the same table. From time to time, as they talked, the girl lifted

her head and tilted it a little on one side so as to get some desired

effect of her work.

“It's a mercy the cold weather holds off,” said the mother. “We should

have to light the furnace, unless we wanted to scare everybody away with

a cold house; and I don't know who would take care of it, or what would

become of us, every way.”

“They seem to have been scared away from a house that wasn't cold,” said

the girl. “Perhaps they might like a cold one. But it's too early for

cold yet. It's only just in the beginning of November.”

“The Messenger says they've had a sprinkling of snow.”

“Oh yes, at St. Barnaby! I don't know when they don't have sprinklings

of snow there. I'm awfully glad we haven't got that winter before us.”

The widow sighed as mothers do who feel the contrast their experience

opposes to the hopeful recklessness of such talk as this. “We may have a

worse winter here,” she said, darkly.

“Then I couldn't stand it,” said the girl, “and I should go in for

lighting out to Florida double-quick.”

“And how would you get to Florida?” demanded her mother, severely.

“Oh, by the usual conveyance Pullman vestibuled train, I suppose. What

makes you so blue, mamma?” The girl was all the time sketching away,

rubbing out, lifting her head for the effect, and then bending it over

her work again without looking at her mother.

“I am not blue, Alma. But I cannot endure this--this hopefulness of

yours.”

“Why? What harm does it do?”

“Harm?” echoed the mother.

Pending the effort she must make in saying, the girl cut in: “Yes, harm.

You've kept your despair dusted off and ready for use at an instant's

notice ever since we came, and what good has it done? I'm going to keep

on hoping to the bitter end. That's what papa did.”

It was what the Rev. Archibald Leighton had done with all the

consumptive's buoyancy. The morning he died he told them that now he had

turned the point and was really going to get well. The cheerfulness was

not only in his disease, but in his temperament. Its excess was always

a little against him in his church work, and Mrs. Leighton was right

enough in feeling that if it had not been for the ballast of her

instinctive despondency he would have made shipwreck of such small

chances of prosperity as befell him in life. It was not from him that

his daughter got her talent, though he had left her his temperament

intact of his widow's legal thirds. He was one of those men of whom

the country people say when he is gone that the woman gets along better

without him. Mrs. Leighton had long eked out their income by taking a

summer boarder or two, as a great favor, into her family; and when the

greater need came, she frankly gave up her house to the summer-folks (as

they call them in the country), and managed it for their comfort from

the small quarter of it in which she shut herself up with her daughter.

The notion of shutting up is an exigency of the rounded period. The fact

is, of course, that Alma Leighton was not shut up in any sense whatever.

She was the pervading light, if not force, of the house. She was a good

cook, and she managed the kitchen with the help of an Irish girl, while

her mother looked after the rest of the housekeeping. But she was not

systematic; she had inspiration but not discipline, and her mother

mourned more over the days when Alma left the whole dinner to the Irish

girl than she rejoiced in those when one of Alma's great thoughts took

form in a chicken-pie of incomparable savor or in a matchless pudding.

The off-days came when her artistic nature was expressing itself in

charcoal, for she drew to the admiration of all among the lady boarders

who could not draw. The others had their reserves; they readily conceded

that Alma had genius, but they were sure she needed instruction. On the

other hand, they were not so radical as to agree with the old painter

who came every summer to paint the elms of the St. Barnaby meadows. He

contended that she needed to be a man in order to amount to anything;

but in this theory he was opposed by an authority, of his own sex, whom

the lady sketchers believed to speak with more impartiality in a matter

concerning them as much as Alma Leighton. He said that instruction would

do, and he was not only, younger and handsomer, but he was fresher from

the schools than old Harrington, who, even the lady sketchers could see,

painted in an obsolescent manner. His name was Beaton--Angus Beaton; but

he was not Scotch, or not more Scotch than Mary Queen of Scots was. His

father was a Scotchman, but Beaton was born in Syracuse, New York, and

it had taken only three years in Paris to obliterate many traces of

native and ancestral manner in him. He wore his black beard cut shorter

than his mustache, and a little pointed; he stood with his shoulders

well thrown back and with a lateral curve of his person when he talked

about art, which would alone have carried conviction even if he had not

had a thick, dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile gray

eyes, and had not spoken English with quick, staccato impulses, so as

to give it the effect of epigrammatic and sententious French. One of the

ladies said that you always thought of him as having spoken French after

it was over, and accused herself of wrong in not being able to feel

afraid of him. None of the ladies was afraid of him, though they could

not believe that he was really so deferential to their work as he

seemed; and they knew, when he would not criticise Mr. Harrington's

work, that he was just acting from principle.

They may or may not have known the deference with which he treated

Alma's work; but the girl herself felt that his abrupt, impersonal

comment recognized her as a real sister in art. He told her she ought

to come to New York, and draw in the League, or get into some painter's

private class; and it was the sense of duty thus appealed to which

finally resulted in the hazardous experiment she and her mother were

now making. There were no logical breaks in the chain of their reasoning

from past success with boarders in St. Barnaby to future success with

boarders in New York. Of course the outlay was much greater. The rent

of the furnished house they had taken was such that if they failed their

experiment would be little less than ruinous.

But they were not going to fail; that was what Alma contended, with a

hardy courage that her mother sometimes felt almost invited failure, if

it did not deserve it. She was one of those people who believe that if

you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen. She acted on this

superstition as if it were a religion.

“If it had not been for my despair, as you call it, Alma,” she answered,

“I don't know where we should have been now.”

“I suppose we should have been in St. Barnaby,” said the girl. “And if

it's worse to be in New York, you see what your despair's done, mamma.

But what's the use? You meant well, and I don't blame you. You can't

expect even despair to come out always just the way you want it.

Perhaps you've used too much of it.” The girl laughed, and Mrs. Leighton

laughed, too. Like every one else, she was not merely a prevailing mood,

as people are apt to be in books, but was an irregularly spheroidal

character, with surfaces that caught the different lights of

circumstance and reflected them. Alma got up and took a pose before the

mirror, which she then transferred to her sketch. The room was pinned

about with other sketches, which showed with fantastic indistinctness in

the shaded gaslight. Alma held up the drawing. “How do you like it?”

Mrs. Leighton bent forward over her sewing to look at it. “You've got

the man's face rather weak.”

“Yes, that's so. Either I see all the hidden weakness that's in men's

natures, and bring it to the surface in their figures, or else I put my

own weakness into them. Either way, it's a drawback to their presenting

a truly manly appearance. As long as I have one of the miserable objects

before me, I can draw him; but as soon as his back's turned I get to

putting ladies into men's clothes. I should think you'd be scandalized,

mamma, if you were a really feminine person. It must be your despair

that helps you to bear up. But what's the matter with the young lady in

young lady's clothes? Any dust on her?”

“What expressions!” said Mrs. Leighton. “Really, Alma, for a refined

girl you are the most unrefined!”

“Go on--about the girl in the picture!” said Alma, slightly knocking her

mother on the shoulder, as she stood over her.

“I don't see anything to her. What's she doing?”

“Oh, just being made love to, I suppose.”

“She's perfectly insipid!”

“You're awfully articulate, mamma! Now, if Mr. Wetmore were to criticise

that picture he'd draw a circle round it in the air, and look at it

through that, and tilt his head first on one side and then on the other,

and then look at you, as if you were a figure in it, and then collapse

awhile, and moan a little and gasp, 'Isn't your young lady a little

too-too--' and then he'd try to get the word out of you, and groan and

suffer some more; and you'd say, 'She is, rather,' and that would give

him courage, and he'd say, 'I don't mean that she's so very--' 'Of

course not.' 'You understand?' 'Perfectly. I see it myself, now.' 'Well,

then'---and he'd take your pencil and begin to draw--'I should give

her a little more--Ah?' 'Yes, I see the difference.'--'You see the

difference?' And he'd go off to some one else, and you'd know that

you'd been doing the wishy-washiest thing in the world, though he hadn't

spoken a word of criticism, and couldn't. But he wouldn't have noticed

the expression at all; he'd have shown you where your drawing was bad.

He doesn't care for what he calls the literature of a thing; he says

that will take care of itself if the drawing's good. He doesn't like my

doing these chic things; but I'm going to keep it up, for I think it's

the nearest way to illustrating.”

She took her sketch and pinned it up on the door.

“And has Mr. Beaton been about, yet?” asked her mother.

“No,” said the girl, with her back still turned; and she added, “I

believe he's in New York; Mr. Wetmore's seen him.”

“It's a little strange he doesn't call.”

“It would be if he were not an artist. But artists never do anything

like other people. He was on his good behavior while he was with us, and

he's a great deal more conventional than most of them; but even he

can't keep it up. That's what makes me really think that women can never

amount to anything in art. They keep all their appointments, and fulfil

all their duties just as if they didn't know anything about art. Well,

most of them don't. We've got that new model to-day.”

“What new model?”

“The one Mr. Wetmore was telling us about the old German; he's splendid.

He's got the most beautiful head; just like the old masters' things. He

used to be Humphrey Williams's model for his Biblical-pieces; but since

he's dead, the old man hardly gets anything to do. Mr. Wetmore says

there isn't anybody in the Bible that Williams didn't paint him as. He's

the Law and the Prophets in all his Old Testament pictures, and he's

Joseph, Peter, Judas Iscariot, and the Scribes and Pharisees in the

New.”

“It's a good thing people don't know how artists work, or some of the

most sacred pictures would have no influence,” said Mrs. Leighton.

“Why, of course not!” cried the girl. “And the influence is the last

thing a painter thinks of--or supposes he thinks of. What he knows

he's anxious about is the drawing and the color. But people will never

understand how simple artists are. When I reflect what a complex and

sophisticated being I am, I'm afraid I can never come to anything in

art. Or I should be if I hadn't genius.”

“Do you think Mr. Beaton is very simple?” asked Mrs. Leighton.

“Mr. Wetmore doesn't think he's very much of an artist. He thinks he

talks too well. They believe that if a man can express himself clearly

he can't paint.”

“And what do you believe?”

“Oh, I can express myself, too.”

The mother seemed to be satisfied with this evasion. After a while she

said, “I presume he will call when he gets settled.”

The girl made no answer to this. “One of the girls says that old model

is an educated man. He was in the war, and lost a hand. Doesn't it seem

a pity for such a man to have to sit to a class of affected geese like

us as a model? I declare it makes me sick. And we shall keep him a week,

and pay him six or seven dollars for the use of his grand old head, and

then what will he do? The last time he was regularly employed was when

Mr. Mace was working at his Damascus Massacre. Then he wanted so many

Arab sheiks and Christian elders that he kept old Mr. Lindau steadily

employed for six months. Now he has to pick up odd jobs where he can.”

“I suppose he has his pension,” said Mrs. Leighton.

“No; one of the girls”--that was the way Alma always described her

fellow-students--“says he has no pension. He didn't apply for it for

a long time, and then there was a hitch about it, and it was

somethinged--vetoed, I believe she said.”

“Who vetoed it?” asked Mrs. Leighton, with some curiosity about the

process, which she held in reserve.

“I don't know-whoever vetoes things. I wonder what Mr. Wetmore does

think of us--his class. We must seem perfectly crazy. There isn't one of

us really knows what she's doing it for, or what she expects to happen

when she's done it. I suppose every one thinks she has genius. I know

the Nebraska widow does, for she says that unless you have genius it

isn't the least use. Everybody's puzzled to know what she does with her

baby when she's at work--whether she gives it soothing syrup. I wonder

how Mr. Wetmore can keep from laughing in our faces. I know he does

behind our backs.”

Mrs. Leighton's mind wandered back to another point. “Then if he says

Mr. Beaton can't paint, I presume he doesn't respect him very much.”

“Oh, he never said he couldn't paint. But I know he thinks so. He says

he's an excellent critic.”

“Alma,” her mother said, with the effect of breaking off, “what do you

suppose is the reason he hasn't been near us?”

“Why, I don't know, mamma, except that it would have been natural for

another person to come, and he's an artist at least, artist enough for

that.”

“That doesn't account for it altogether. He was very nice at St.

Barnaby, and seemed so interested in you--your work.”

“Plenty of people were nice at St. Barnaby. That rich Mrs. Horn couldn't

contain her joy when she heard we were coming to New York, but she

hasn't poured in upon us a great deal since we got here.”

“But that's different. She's very fashionable, and she's taken up with

her own set. But Mr. Beaton's one of our kind.”

“Thank you. Papa wasn't quite a tombstone-cutter, mamma.”

“That makes it all the harder to bear. He can't be ashamed of us.

Perhaps he doesn't know where we are.”

“Do you wish to send him your card, mamma?” The girl flushed and towered

in scorn of the idea.

“Why, no, Alma,” returned her mother.

“Well, then,” said Alma.

But Mrs. Leighton was not so easily quelled. She had got her mind on

Mr. Beaton, and she could not detach it at once. Besides, she was one of

those women (they are commoner than the same sort of men) whom it does

not pain to take out their most intimate thoughts and examine them in

the light of other people's opinions. “But I don't see how he can behave

so. He must know that--”

“That what, mamma?” demanded the girl.

“That he influenced us a great deal in coming--”

“He didn't. If he dared to presume to think such a thing--”

“Now, Alma,” said her mother, with the clinging persistence of such

natures, “you know he did. And it's no use for you to pretend that we

didn't count upon him in--in every way. You may not have noticed his

attentions, and I don't say you did, but others certainly did; and I

must say that I didn't expect he would drop us so.”

“Drop us!” cried Alma, in a fury. “Oh!”

“Yes, drop us, Alma. He must know where we are. Of course, Mr. Wetmore's

spoken to him about you, and it's a shame that he hasn't been near us. I

should have thought common gratitude, common decency, would have brought

him after--after all we did for him.”

“We did nothing for him--nothing! He paid his board, and that ended it.”

“No, it didn't, Alma. You know what he used to say--about its being like

home, and all that; and I must say that after his attentions to you, and

all the things you told me he said, I expected something very dif--”

A sharp peal of the door-bell thrilled through the house, and as if the

pull of the bell-wire had twitched her to her feet, Mrs. Leighton sprang

up and grappled with her daughter in their common terror.

They both glared at the clock and made sure that it was five minutes

after nine. Then they abandoned themselves some moments to the

unrestricted play of their apprehensions.

II.

“Why, Alma,” whispered the mother, “who in the world can it be at this

time of night? You don't suppose he--”

“Well, I'm not going to the door, anyhow, mother, I don't care who

it is; and, of course, he wouldn't be such a goose as to come at this

hour.” She put on a look of miserable trepidation, and shrank back from

the door, while the hum of the bell died away, in the hall.

“What shall we do?” asked Mrs. Leighton, helplessly.

“Let him go away--whoever they are,” said Alma.

Another and more peremptory ring forbade them refuge in this simple

expedient.

“Oh, dear! what shall we do? Perhaps it's a despatch.”

The conjecture moved Alma to no more than a rigid stare. “I shall not

go,” she said. A third ring more insistent than the others followed, and

she said: “You go ahead, mamma, and I'll come behind to scream if it's

anybody. We can look through the side-lights at the door first.”

Mrs. Leighton fearfully led the way from the back chamber where they

bad been sitting, and slowly descended the stairs. Alma came behind and

turned up the hall gas-jet with a sudden flash that made them both jump

a little. The gas inside rendered it more difficult to tell who was on

the threshold, but Mrs. Leighton decided from a timorous peep through

the scrims that it was a lady and gentleman. Something in this

distribution of sex emboldened her; she took her life in her hand, and

opened the door.

The lady spoke. “Does Mrs. Leighton live heah?” she said, in a rich,

throaty voice; and she feigned a reference to the agent's permit she

held in her hand.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Leighton; she mechanically occupied the doorway, while

Alma already quivered behind her with impatience of her impoliteness.

“Oh,” said the lady, who began to appear more and more a young lady, “Ah

didn't know but Ah had mistaken the hoase. Ah suppose it's rather late

to see the apawtments, and Ah most ask you to pawdon us.” She put this

tentatively, with a delicately growing recognition of Mrs. Leighton as

the lady of the house, and a humorous intelligence of the situation in

the glance she threw Alma over her mother's shoulder. “Ah'm afraid we

most have frightened you.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Alma; and at the same time her mother said, “Will

you walk in, please?”

The gentleman promptly removed his hat and made the Leightons an

inclusive bow. “You awe very kind, madam, and I am sorry for the

trouble we awe giving you.” He was tall and severe-looking, with a gray,

trooperish mustache and iron-gray hair, and, as Alma decided, iron-gray

eyes. His daughter was short, plump, and fresh-colored, with an effect

of liveliness that did not all express itself in her broad-vowelled,

rather formal speech, with its odd valuations of some of the auxiliary

verbs, and its total elision of the canine letter.

“We awe from the Soath,” she said, “and we arrived this mawning, but we

got this cyahd from the brokah just befo' dinnah, and so we awe rathah

late.”

“Not at all; it's only nine o'clock,” said Mrs. Leighton. She looked up

from the card the young lady had given her, and explained, “We haven't

got in our servants yet, and we had to answer the bell ourselves, and--”

“You were frightened, of coase,” said the young lady, caressingly.

The gentleman said they ought not to have come so late, and he offered

some formal apologies.

“We should have been just as much scared any time after five o'clock,”

Alma said to the sympathetic intelligence in the girl's face.

She laughed out. “Of coase! Ah would have my hawt in my moath all day

long, too, if Ah was living in a big hoase alone.”

A moment of stiffness followed; Mrs. Leighton would have liked to

withdraw from the intimacy of the situation, but she did not know how.

It was very well for these people to assume to be what they pretended;

but, she reflected too late, she had no proof of it except the agent's

permit. They were all standing in the hall together, and she prolonged

the awkward pause while she examined the permit. “You are Mr. Woodburn?”

she asked, in a way that Alma felt implied he might not be.

“Yes, madam; from Charlottesboag, Virginia,” he answered, with the

slight umbrage a man shows when the strange cashier turns his check over

and questions him before cashing it.

Alma writhed internally, but outwardly remained subordinate; she

examined the other girl's dress, and decided in a superficial

consciousness that she had made her own bonnet.

“I shall be glad to show you my rooms,” said Mrs. Leighton, with an

irrelevant sigh. “You must excuse their being not just as I should wish

them. We're hardly settled yet.”

“Don't speak of it, madam,” said the gentleman, “if you can overlook the

trouble we awe giving you at such an unseasonable houah.”

“Ah'm a hoasekeepah mahself,” Miss Woodburn joined in, “and Ah know ho'

to accyoant fo' everything.”

Mrs. Leighton led the way up-stairs, and the young lady decided upon the

large front room and small side room on the third story. She said she

could take the small one, and the other was so large that her father

could both sleep and work in it. She seemed not ashamed to ask if Mrs.

Leighton's price was inflexible, but gave way laughing when her father

refused to have any bargaining, with a haughty self-respect which he

softened to deference for Mrs. Leighton. His impulsiveness opened the

way for some confidence from her, and before the affair was arranged

she was enjoying in her quality of clerical widow the balm of the

Virginians' reverent sympathy. They said they were church people

themselves.

“Ah don't know what yo' mothah means by yo' hoase not being in oddah,”

the young lady said to Alma as they went down-stairs together. “Ah'm a

great hoasekeepah mahself, and Ah mean what Ah say.”

They had all turned mechanically into the room where the Leightons were

sitting when the Woodburns rang: Mr. Woodburn consented to sit down, and

he remained listening to Mrs. Leighton while his daughter bustled up to

the sketches pinned round the room and questioned Alma about them.

“Ah suppose you awe going to be a great awtust?” she said, in friendly

banter, when Alma owned to having done the things. “Ah've a great notion

to take a few lessons mahself. Who's yo' teachah?”

Alma said she was drawing in Mr. Wetmore's class, and Miss Woodburn

said: “Well, it's just beautiful, Miss Leighton; it's grand. Ah suppose

it's raght expensive, now? Mah goodness! we have to cyoant the coast so

much nowadays; it seems to me we do nothing but cyoant it. Ah'd like to

hah something once without askin' the price.”

“Well, if you didn't ask it,” said Alma, “I don't believe Mr. Wetmore

would ever know what the price of his lessons was. He has to think, when

you ask him.”

“Why, he most be chomming,” said Miss Woodburn. “Perhaps Ah maght get

the lessons for nothing from him. Well, Ah believe in my soul Ah'll

trah. Now ho' did you begin? and ho' do you expect to get anything oat

of it?” She turned on Alma eyes brimming with a shrewd mixture of

fun and earnest, and Alma made note of the fact that she had an early

nineteenth-century face, round, arch, a little coquettish, but extremely

sensible and unspoiled-looking, such as used to be painted a good deal

in miniature at that period; a tendency of her brown hair to twine and

twist at the temples helped the effect; a high comb would have completed

it, Alma felt, if she had her bonnet off. It was almost a Yankee

country-girl type; but perhaps it appeared so to Alma because it was,

like that, pure Anglo-Saxon. Alma herself, with her dull, dark skin,

slender in figure, slow in speech, with aristocratic forms in her

long hands, and the oval of her fine face pointed to a long chin,

felt herself much more Southern in style than this blooming, bubbling,

bustling Virginian.

“I don't know,” she answered, slowly.

“Going to take po'traits,” suggested Miss Woodburn, “or just paint the

ahdeal?” A demure burlesque lurked in her tone.

“I suppose I don't expect to paint at all,” said Alma. “I'm going to

illustrate books--if anybody will let me.”

“Ah should think they'd just joamp at you,” said Miss Woodburn. “Ah'll

tell you what let's do, Miss Leighton: you make some pictures, and Ah'll

wrahte a book fo' them. Ah've got to do something. Ali maght as well

wrahte a book. You know we Southerners have all had to go to woak. But

Ah don't mand it. I tell papa I shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein'

poo' if it wasn't fo' the inconvenience.”

“Yes, it's inconvenient,” said Alma; “but you forget it when you're at

work, don't you think?”

“Mah, yes! Perhaps that's one reason why poo' people have to woak so

hawd-to keep their wands off their poverty.”

The girls both tittered, and turned from talking in a low tone with

their backs toward their elders, and faced them.

“Well, Madison,” said Mr. Woodburn, “it is time we should go. I bid you

good-night, madam,” he bowed to Mrs. Leighton. “Good-night,” he bowed

again to Alma.

His daughter took leave of them in formal phrase, but with a jolly

cordiality of manner that deformalized it. “We shall be roand raght soon

in the mawning, then,” she threatened at the door.

“We shall be all ready for you,” Alma called after her down the steps.

“Well, Alma?” her mother asked, when the door closed upon them.

“She doesn't know any more about art,” said Alma, “than--nothing at all.

But she's jolly and good-hearted. She praised everything that was bad

in my sketches, and said she was going to take lessons herself. When a

person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it, you know

where they belong artistically.”

Mrs. Leighton shook her head with a sigh. “I wish I knew where they

belonged financially. We shall have to get in two girls at once. I shall

have to go out the first thing in the morning, and then our troubles

will begin.”

“Well, didn't you want them to begin? I will stay home and help you get

ready. Our prosperity couldn't begin without the troubles, if you

mean boarders, and boarders mean servants. I shall be very glad to be

afflicted with a cook for a while myself.”

“Yes; but we don't know anything about these people, or whether they

will be able to pay us. Did she talk as if they were well off?”

“She talked as if they were poor; poo' she called it.”

“Yes, how queerly she pronounced,” said Mrs. Leighton. “Well, I ought to

have told them that I required the first week in advance.”

“Mamma! If that's the way you're going to act!”

“Oh, of course, I couldn't, after he wouldn't let her bargain for the

rooms. I didn't like that.”

“I did. And you can see that they were perfect ladies; or at least one

of them.” Alma laughed at herself, but her mother did not notice.

“Their being ladies won't help if they've got no money. It 'll make it

all the worse.”

“Very well, then; we have no money, either. We're a match for them any

day there. We can show them that two can play at that game.”

III.

Arnus Beaton's studio looked at first glance like many other painters'

studios. A gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light;

casts of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints, sketches in oil

and water-color stuck here and there lower down; a rickety table,

with paint and palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed

comfortlessly on it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaeval silk

trailing from it; a lay figure simpering in incomplete nakedness, with

its head on one side, and a stocking on one leg, and a Japanese dress

dropped before it; dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished

floor; canvases faced to the mop-board; an open trunk overflowing with

costumes: these features one might notice anywhere. But, besides, there

was a bookcase with an unusual number of books in it, and there was an

open colonial writing-desk, claw-footed, brass-handled, and scutcheoned,

with foreign periodicals--French and English--littering its leaf, and

some pages of manuscript scattered among them. Above all, there was

a sculptor's revolving stand, supporting a bust which Beaton was

modelling, with an eye fixed as simultaneously as possible on the clay

and on the head of the old man who sat on the platform beside it.

Few men have been able to get through the world with several gifts to

advantage in all; and most men seem handicapped for the race if they

have more than one. But they are apparently immensely interested as well

as distracted by them. When Beaton was writing, he would have agreed,

up to a certain point, with any one who said literature was his proper

expression; but, then, when he was painting, up to a certain point,

he would have maintained against the world that he was a colorist, and

supremely a colorist. At the certain point in either art he was apt to

break away in a frenzy of disgust and wreak himself upon some other.

In these moods he sometimes designed elevations of buildings, very

striking, very original, very chic, very everything but habitable. It

was in this way that he had tried his hand on sculpture, which he had

at first approached rather slightingly as a mere decorative accessory

of architecture. But it had grown in his respect till he maintained

that the accessory business ought to be all the other way: that temples

should be raised to enshrine statues, not statues made to ornament

temples; that was putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance.

This was when he had carried a plastic study so far that the sculptors

who saw it said that Beaton might have been an architect, but would

certainly never be a sculptor. At the same time he did some hurried,

nervous things that had a popular charm, and that sold in plaster

reproductions, to the profit of another. Beaton justly despised the

popular charm in these, as well as in the paintings he sold from time to

time; he said it was flat burglary to have taken money for them, and

he would have been living almost wholly upon the bounty of the old

tombstone-cutter in Syracuse if it had not been for the syndicate

letters which he supplied to Fulkerson for ten dollars a week.

They were very well done, but he hated doing them after the first two or

three, and had to be punched up for them by Fulkerson, who did not cease

to prize them, and who never failed to punch him up. Beaton being what

he was, Fulkerson was his creditor as well as patron; and Fulkerson

being what he was, had an enthusiastic patience with the elusive,

facile, adaptable, unpractical nature of Beaton. He was very proud of

his art-letters, as he called them; but then Fulkerson was proud of

everything he secured for his syndicate. The fact that he had secured it

gave it value; he felt as if he had written it himself.

One art trod upon another's heels with Beaton. The day before he had

rushed upon canvas the conception of a picture which he said to himself

was glorious, and to others (at the table d'hote of Maroni) was not

bad. He had worked at it in a fury till the light failed him, and he

execrated the dying day. But he lit his lamp and transferred the process

of his thinking from the canvas to the opening of the syndicate letter

which he knew Fulkerson would be coming for in the morning. He remained

talking so long after dinner in the same strain as he had painted and

written in that he could not finish his letter that night. The next

morning, while he was making his tea for breakfast, the postman brought

him a letter from his father enclosing a little check, and begging him

with tender, almost deferential, urgence to come as lightly upon him as

possible, for just now his expenses were very heavy. It brought tears of

shame into Beaton's eyes--the fine, smouldering, floating eyes that many

ladies admired, under the thick bang--and he said to himself that if he

were half a man he would go home and go to work cutting gravestones in

his father's shop. But he would wait, at least, to finish his picture;

and as a sop to his conscience, to stay its immediate ravening, he

resolved to finish that syndicate letter first, and borrow enough money

from Fulkerson to be able to send his father's check back; or, if not

that, then to return the sum of it partly in Fulkerson's check. While he

still teemed with both of these good intentions the old man from whom

he was modelling his head of Judas came, and Beaton saw that he must get

through with him before he finished either the picture or the letter; he

would have to pay him for the time, anyway. He utilized the remorse with

which he was tingling to give his Judas an expression which he found

novel in the treatment of that character--a look of such touching,

appealing self-abhorrence that Beaton's artistic joy in it amounted to

rapture; between the breathless moments when he worked in dead silence

for an effect that was trying to escape him, he sang and whistled

fragments of comic opera.

In one of the hushes there came a blow on the outside of the door that

made Beaton jump, and swear with a modified profanity that merged itself

in apostrophic prayer. He knew it must be Fulkerson, and after roaring

“Come in!” he said to the model, “That 'll do this morning, Lindau.”

Fulkerson squared his feet in front of the bust and compared it by

fleeting glances with the old man as he got stiffly up and suffered

Beaton to help him on with his thin, shabby overcoat.

“Can you come to-morrow, Lindau?”

“No, not to-morrow, Mr. Peaton. I haf to zit for the young ladties.”

“Oh!” said Beaton. “Wet-more's class? Is Miss Leighton doing you?”

“I don't know their namess,” Lindau began, when Fulkerson said:

“Hope you haven't forgotten mine, Mr. Lindau? I met you with Mr. March

at Maroni's one night.” Fulkerson offered him a universally shakable

hand.

“Oh yes! I am gladt to zee you again, Mr. Vulkerson. And Mr. Marge--he

don't zeem to gome any more?”

“Up to his eyes in work. Been moving on from Boston and getting settled,

and starting in on our enterprise. Beaton here hasn't got a very

flattering likeness of you, hey? Well, good-morning,” he said, for

Lindau appeared not to have heard him and was escaping with a bow

through the door.

Beaton lit a cigarette which he pinched nervously between his lips

before he spoke. “You've come for that letter, I suppose, Fulkerson? It

isn't done.”

Fulkerson turned from staring at the bust to which he had mounted. “What

you fretting about that letter for? I don't want your letter.”

Beaton stopped biting his cigarette and looked at him. “Don't want my

letter? Oh, very good!” he bristled up. He took his cigarette from

his lips, and blew the smoke through his nostrils, and then looked at

Fulkerson.

“No; I don't want your letter; I want you.”