Beacon disdained to ask an explanation, but he internally lowered his

crest, while he continued to look at Fulkerson without changing his

defiant countenance. This suited Fulkerson well enough, and he went on

with relish, “I'm going out of the syndicate business, old man, and I'm

on a new thing.” He put his leg over the back of a chair and rested his

foot on its seat, and, with one hand in his pocket, he laid the scheme

of 'Every Other Week' before Beaton with the help of the other. The

artist went about the room, meanwhile, with an effect of indifference

which by no means offended Fulkerson. He took some water into his mouth

from a tumbler, which he blew in a fine mist over the head of Judas

before swathing it in a dirty cotton cloth; he washed his brushes and

set his palette; he put up on his easel the picture he had blocked on

the day before, and stared at it with a gloomy face; then he gathered

the sheets of his unfinished letter together and slid them into a drawer

of his writing-desk. By the time he had finished and turned again to

Fulkerson, Fulkerson was saying: “I did think we could have the first

number out by New-Year's; but it will take longer than that--a month

longer; but I'm not sorry, for the holidays kill everything; and by

February, or the middle of February, people will get their breath again

and begin to look round and ask what's new. Then we'll reply in the

language of Shakespeare and Milton, 'Every Other Week; and don't you

forget it.'” He took down his leg and asked, “Got a pipe of 'baccy

anywhere?”

Beaton nodded at a clay stem sticking out of a Japanese vase of bronze

on his mantel. “There's yours,” he said; and Fulkerson said, “Thanks,”

and filled the pipe and sat down and began to smoke tranquilly.

Beaton saw that he would have to speak now. “And what do you want with

me?”

“You? Oh yes,” Fulkerson humorously dramatized a return to himself from

a pensive absence. “Want you for the art department.”

Beaton shook his head. “I'm not your man, Fulkerson,” he said,

compassionately. “You want a more practical hand, one that's in touch

with what's going. I'm getting further and further away from this

century and its claptrap. I don't believe in your enterprise; I don't

respect it, and I won't have anything to do with it. It would-choke me,

that kind of thing.”

“That's all right,” said Fulkerson. He esteemed a man who was not going

to let himself go cheap. “Or if it isn't, we can make it. You and March

will pull together first-rate. I don't care how much ideal you put into

the thing; the more the better. I can look after the other end of the

schooner myself.”

“You don't understand me,” said Beaton. “I'm not trying to get a rise

out of you. I'm in earnest. What you want is some man who can have

patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius, and with genius

turning mediocrity on his hands. I haven't any luck with men; I don't

get on with them; I'm not popular.” Beaton recognized the fact with the

satisfaction which it somehow always brings to human pride.

“So much the better!” Fulkerson was ready for him at this point. “I

don't want you to work the old-established racket the reputations.

When I want them I'll go to them with a pocketful of rocks--knock-down

argument. But my idea is to deal with the volunteer material. Look at

the way the periodicals are carried on now! Names! names! names! In a

country that's just boiling over with literary and artistic ability of

every kind the new fellows have no chance. The editors all engage

their material. I don't believe there are fifty volunteer contributions

printed in a year in all the New York magazines. It's all wrong; it's

suicidal. 'Every Other Week' is going back to the good old anonymous

system, the only fair system. It's worked well in literature, and it

will work well in art.”

“It won't work well in art,” said Beaton. “There you have a totally

different set of conditions. What you'll get by inviting volunteer

illustrations will be a lot of amateur trash. And how are you going to

submit your literature for illustration? It can't be done. At any rate,

I won't undertake to do it.”

“We'll get up a School of Illustration,” said Fulkerson, with cynical

security. “You can read the things and explain 'em, and your pupils can

make their sketches under your eye. They wouldn't be much further

out than most illustrations are if they never knew what they were

illustrating. You might select from what comes in and make up a sort of

pictorial variations to the literature without any particular reference

to it. Well, I understand you to accept?”

“No, you don't.”

“That is, to consent to help us with your advice and criticism. That's

all I want. It won't commit you to anything; and you can be as anonymous

as anybody.” At the door Fulkerson added: “By-the-way, the new man--the

fellow that's taken my old syndicate business--will want you to keep

on; but I guess he's going to try to beat you down on the price of the

letters. He's going in for retrenchment. I brought along a check for

this one; I'm to pay for that.” He offered Beaton an envelope.

“I can't take it, Fulkerson. The letter's paid for already.” Fulkerson

stepped forward and laid the envelope on the table among the tubes of

paint.

“It isn't the letter merely. I thought you wouldn't object to a little

advance on your 'Every Other Week' work till you kind of got started.”

Beaton remained inflexible. “It can't be done, Fulkerson. Don't I tell

you I can't sell myself out to a thing I don't believe in? Can't you

understand that?”

“Oh yes; I can understand that first-rate. I don't want to buy you; I

want to borrow you. It's all right. See? Come round when you can; I'd

like to introduce you to old March. That's going to be our address.” He

put a card on the table beside the envelope, and Beaton allowed him

to go without making him take the check back. He had remembered his

father's plea; that unnerved him, and he promised himself again to

return his father's poor little check and to work on that picture and

give it to Fulkerson for the check he had left and for his back debts.

He resolved to go to work on the picture at once; he had set his palette

for it; but first he looked at Fulkerson's check. It was for only fifty

dollars, and the canny Scotch blood in Beaton rebelled; he could not let

this picture go for any such money; he felt a little like a man whose

generosity has been trifled with. The conflict of emotions broke him up,

and he could not work.

IV

The day wasted away in Beaton's hands; at half-past four o'clock he went

out to tea at the house of a lady who was At Home that afternoon from

four till seven. By this time Beaton was in possession of one of those

other selves of which we each have several about us, and was again the

laconic, staccato, rather worldlified young artist whose moments of a

controlled utterance and a certain distinction of manner had commended

him to Mrs. Horn's fancy in the summer at St. Barnaby.

Mrs. Horn's rooms were large, and they never seemed very full, though

this perhaps was because people were always so quiet. The ladies, who

outnumbered the men ten to one, as they always do at a New York tea,

were dressed in sympathy with the low tone every one spoke in, and

with the subdued light which gave a crepuscular uncertainty to the few

objects, the dim pictures, the unexcited upholstery, of the rooms. One

breathed free of bric-a-brac there, and the new-comer breathed softly as

one does on going into church after service has begun. This might be a

suggestion from the voiceless behavior of the man-servant who let

you in, but it was also because Mrs. Horn's At Home was a ceremony, a

decorum, and not festival. At far greater houses there was more gayety,

at richer houses there was more freedom; the suppression at Mrs. Horn's

was a personal, not a social, effect; it was an efflux of her character,

demure, silentious, vague, but very correct.

Beaton easily found his way to her around the grouped skirts and among

the detached figures, and received a pressure of welcome from the hand

which she momentarily relaxed from the tea-pot. She sat behind a table

put crosswise of a remote corner, and offered tea to people whom a niece

of hers received provisionally or sped finally in the outer room. They

did not usually take tea, and when they did they did not usually drink

it; but Beaton was, feverishly glad of his cup; he took rum and lemon in

it, and stood talking at Mrs. Horn's side till the next arrival should

displace him: he talked in his French manner.

“I have been hoping to see you,” she said. “I wanted to ask you about

the Leightons. Did they really come?”

“I believe so. They are in town--yes. I haven't seen them.”

“Then you don't know how they're getting on--that pretty creature, with

her cleverness, and poor Mrs. Leighton? I was afraid they were venturing

on a rash experiment. Do you know where they are?”

“In West Eleventh Street somewhere. Miss Leighton is in Mr. Wetmore's

class.”

“I must look them up. Do you know their number?”

“Not at the moment. I can find out.”

“Do,” said Mrs. Horn. “What courage they must have, to plunge into New

York as they've done! I really didn't think they would. I wonder if

they've succeeded in getting anybody into their house yet?”

“I don't know,” said Beaton.

“I discouraged their coming all I could,” she sighed, “and I suppose you

did, too. But it's quite useless trying to make people in a place like

St. Barnaby understand how it is in town.”

“Yes,” said Beaton. He stirred his tea, while inwardly he tried to

believe that he had really discouraged the Leightons from coming to New

York. Perhaps the vexation of his failure made him call Mrs. Horn in his

heart a fraud.

“Yes,” she went on, “it is very, very hard. And when they won't

understand, and rush on their doom, you feel that they are going to hold

you respons--”

Mrs. Horn's eyes wandered from Beaton; her voice faltered in the faded

interest of her remark, and then rose with renewed vigor in greeting a

lady who came up and stretched her glove across the tea-cups.

Beaton got himself away and out of the house with a much briefer adieu

to the niece than he had meant to make. The patronizing compassion of

Mrs. Horn for the Leightons filled him with indignation toward her,

toward himself. There was no reason why he should not have ignored

them as he had done; but there was a feeling. It was his nature to

be careless, and he had been spoiled into recklessness; he neglected

everybody, and only remembered them when it suited his whim or his

convenience; but he fiercely resented the inattentions of others toward

himself. He had no scruple about breaking an engagement or failing

to keep an appointment; he made promises without thinking of their

fulfilment, and not because he was a faithless person, but because he

was imaginative, and expected at the time to do what he said, but was

fickle, and so did not. As most of his shortcomings were of a society

sort, no great harm was done to anybody else. He had contracted somewhat

the circle of his acquaintance by what some people called his rudeness,

but most people treated it as his oddity, and were patient with it. One

lady said she valued his coming when he said he would come because it

had the charm of the unexpected. “Only it shows that it isn't always the

unexpected that happens,” she explained.

It did not occur to him that his behavior was immoral; he did not

realize that it was creating a reputation if not a character for him.

While we are still young we do not realize that our actions have this

effect. It seems to us that people will judge us from what we think and

feel. Later we find out that this is impossible; perhaps we find it out

too late; some of us never find it out at all.

In spite of his shame about the Leightons, Beaton had no present

intention of looking them up or sending Mrs. Horn their address. As

a matter of fact, he never did send it; but he happened to meet Mr.

Wetmore and his wife at the restaurant where he dined, and he got it

of the painter for himself. He did not ask him how Miss Leighton was

getting on; but Wetmore launched out, with Alma for a tacit text, on

the futility of women generally going in for art. “Even when they have

talent they've got too much against them. Where a girl doesn't seem very

strong, like Miss Leighton, no amount of chic is going to help.”

His wife disputed him on behalf of her sex, as women always do.

“No, Dolly,” he persisted; “she'd better be home milking the cows and

leading the horse to water.”

“Do you think she'd better be up till two in the morning at balls and

going all day to receptions and luncheons?”

“Oh, guess it isn't a question of that, even if she weren't drawing. You

knew them at home,” he said to Beaton.

“Yes.”

“I remember. Her mother said you suggested me. Well, the girl has some

notion of it; there's no doubt about that. But--she's a woman. The

trouble with these talented girls is that they're all woman. If they

weren't, there wouldn't be much chance for the men, Beaton. But we've

got Providence on our own side from the start. I'm able to watch all

their inspirations with perfect composure. I know just how soon it's

going to end in nervous breakdown. Somebody ought to marry them all and

put them out of their misery.”

“And what will you do with your students who are married already?” his

wife said. She felt that she had let him go on long enough.

“Oh, they ought to get divorced.”

“You ought to be ashamed to take their money if that's what you think of

them.”

“My dear, I have a wife to support.”

Beaton intervened with a question. “Do you mean that Miss Leighton isn't

standing it very well?”

“How do I know? She isn't the kind that bends; she's the kind that

breaks.”

After a little silence Mrs. Wetmore asked, “Won't you come home with us,

Mr. Beaton?”

“Thank you; no. I have an engagement.”

“I don't see why that should prevent you,” said Wetmore. “But you always

were a punctilious cuss. Well!”

Beaton lingered over his cigar; but no one else whom he knew came in,

and he yielded to the threefold impulse of conscience, of curiosity,

of inclination, in going to call at the Leightons'. He asked for the

ladies, and the maid showed him into the parlor, where he found Mrs.

Leighton and Miss Woodburn.

The widow met him with a welcome neatly marked by resentment; she meant

him to feel that his not coming sooner had been noticed. Miss Woodburn

bubbled and gurgled on, and did what she could to mitigate his

punishment, but she did not feel authorized to stay it, till Mrs.

Leighton, by studied avoidance of her daughter's name, obliged Beaton to

ask for her. Then Miss Woodburn caught up her work, and said, “Ah'll go

and tell her, Mrs. Leighton.” At the top of the stairs she found Alma,

and Alma tried to make it seem as if she had not been standing there.

“Mah goodness, chald! there's the handsomest young man asking for you

down there you evah saw. Alh told you' mothah Ah would come up fo' you.”

“What--who is it?”

“Don't you know? But bo' could you? He's got the most beautiful eyes,

and he wea's his hai' in a bang, and he talks English like it was

something else, and his name's Mr. Beaton.”

“Did he-ask for me?” said Alma, with a dreamy tone. She put her hand on

the stairs rail, and a little shiver ran over her.

“Didn't I tell you? Of coase he did! And you ought to go raght down if

you want to save the poo' fellah's lahfe; you' mothah's just freezin'

him to death.”

V.

“She is?” cried Alma. “Tchk!” She flew downstairs, and flitted swiftly

into the room, and fluttered up to Beaton, and gave him a crushing

hand-shake.

“How very kind, of you to come and see us, Mr. Beaton! When did you come

to New York? Don't you find it warm here? We've only just lighted the

furnace, but with this mild weather it seems too early. Mamma does keep

it so hot!” She rushed about opening doors and shutting registers, and

then came back and sat facing him from the sofa with a mask of radiant

cordiality. “How have you been since we saw you?”

“Very well,” said Beaton. “I hope you're well, Miss Leighton?”

“Oh, perfectly! I think New York agrees with us both wonderfully. I

never knew such air. And to think of our not having snow yet! I should

think everybody would want to come here! Why don't you come, Mr.

Beaton?”

Beaton lifted his eyes and looked at her. “I--I live in New York,” he

faltered.

“In New York City!” she exclaimed.

“Surely, Alma,” said her mother, “you remember Mr. Beaton's telling us

he lived in New York.”

“But I thought you came from Rochester; or was it Syracuse? I always get

those places mixed up.”

“Probably I told you my father lived at Syracuse. I've been in New York

ever since I came home from Paris,” said Beaton, with the confusion of a

man who feels himself played upon by a woman.

“From Paris!” Alma echoed, leaning forward, with her smiling mask tight

on. “Wasn't it Munich where you studied?”

“I was at Munich, too. I met Wetmore there.”

“Oh, do you know Mr. Wetmore?”

“Why, Alma,” her mother interposed again, “it was Mr. Beaton who told

you of Mr. Wetmore.”

“Was it? Why, yes, to be sure. It was Mrs. Horn who suggested Mr.

Ilcomb. I remember now. I can't thank you enough for having sent me

to Mr. Wetmore, Mr. Beaton. Isn't he delightful? Oh yes, I'm a perfect

Wetmorian, I can assure you. The whole class is the same way.”

“I just met him and Mrs. Wetmore at dinner,” said Beaton, attempting the

recovery of something that he had lost through the girl's shining ease

and steely sprightliness. She seemed to him so smooth and hard, with

a repellent elasticity from which he was flung off. “I hope you're not

working too hard, Miss Leighton?”

“Oh no! I enjoy every minute of it, and grow stronger on it. Do I look

very much wasted away?” She looked him full in the face, brilliantly

smiling, and intentionally beautiful.

“No,” he said, with a slow sadness; “I never saw you looking better.”

“Poor Mr. Beaton!” she said, in recognition of his doleful tune. “It

seems to be quite a blow.”

“Oh no--”

“I remember all the good advice you used to give me about not working

too hard, and probably it's that that's saved my life--that and the

house-hunting. Has mamma told you of our adventures in getting settled?

“Some time we must. It was such fun! And didn't you think we were

fortunate to get such a pretty house? You must see both our parlors.”

She jumped up, and her mother followed her with a bewildered look as she

ran into the back parlor and flashed up the gas.

“Come in here, Mr. Beaton. I want to show you the great feature of

the house.” She opened the low windows that gave upon a glazed veranda

stretching across the end of the room. “Just think of this in New York!

You can't see it very well at night, but when the southern sun pours in

here all the afternoon--”

“Yes, I can imagine it,” he said. He glanced up at the bird-cage hanging

from the roof. “I suppose Gypsy enjoys it.”

“You remember Gypsy?” she said; and she made a cooing, kissing little

noise up at the bird, who responded drowsily. “Poor old Gypsum! Well,

he sha'n't be disturbed. Yes, it's Gyp's delight, and Colonel Woodburn

likes to write here in the morning. Think of us having a real live

author in the house! And Miss Woodburn: I'm so glad you've seen her!

They're Southern people.”

“Yes, that was obvious in her case.”

“From her accent? Isn't it fascinating? I didn't believe I could ever

endure Southerners, but we're like one family with the Woodburns. I

should think you'd want to paint Miss Woodburn. Don't you think her

coloring is delicious? And such a quaint kind of eighteenth-century type

of beauty! But she's perfectly lovely every way, and everything she says

is so funny. The Southerners seem to be such great talkers; better than

we are, don't you think?”

“I don't know,” said Beaton, in pensive discouragement. He was sensible

of being manipulated, operated, but he was helpless to escape from the

performer or to fathom her motives. His pensiveness passed into gloom,

and was degenerating into sulky resentment when he went away, after

several failures to get back to the old ground he had held in relation

to Alma. He retrieved something of it with Mrs. Leighton; but Alma

glittered upon him to the last with a keen impenetrable candor, a

child-like singleness of glance, covering unfathomable reserve.

“Well, Alma,” said her mother, when the door had closed upon him.

“Well, mother.” Then, after a moment, she said, with a rush: “Did you

think I was going to let him suppose we were piqued at his not coming?

Did you suppose I was going to let him patronize us, or think that we

were in the least dependent on his favor or friendship?”

Her mother did not attempt to answer her. She merely said, “I shouldn't

think he would come any more.”

“Well, we have got on so far without him; perhaps we can live through

the rest of the winter.”

“I couldn't help feeling sorry for him. He was quite stupefied. I could

see that he didn't know what to make of you.”

“He's not required to make anything of me,” said Alma.

“Do you think he really believed you had forgotten all those things?”

“Impossible to say, mamma.”

“Well, I don't think it was quite right, Alma.”

“I'll leave him to you the next time. Miss Woodburn said you were

freezing him to death when I came down.”

“That was quite different. But, there won't be any next time, I'm

afraid,” sighed Mrs. Leighton.

Beaton went home feeling sure there would not. He tried to read when he

got to his room; but Alma's looks, tones, gestures, whirred through and

through the woof of the story like shuttles; he could not keep them out,

and he fell asleep at last, not because he forgot them, but because he

forgave them. He was able to say to himself that he had been justly cut

off from kindness which he knew how to value in losing it. He did not

expect ever to right himself in Alma's esteem, but he hoped some day to

let her know that he had understood. It seemed to him that it would be

a good thing if she should find it out after his death. He imagined her

being touched by it under those circumstances.

VI.

In the morning it seemed to Beaton that he had done himself injustice.

When he uncovered his Judas and looked at it, he could not believe

that the man who was capable of such work deserved the punishment

Miss Leighton had inflicted upon him. He still forgave her, but in the

presence of a thing like that he could not help respecting himself; he

believed that if she could see it she would be sorry that she had cut

herself off from his acquaintance. He carried this strain of conviction

all through his syndicate letter, which he now took out of his desk and

finished, with an increasing security of his opinions and a mounting

severity in his judgments. He retaliated upon the general condition of

art among us the pangs of wounded vanity, which Alma had made him feel,

and he folded up his manuscript and put it in his pocket, almost

healed of his humiliation. He had been able to escape from its sting so

entirely while he was writing that the notion of making his life more

and more literary commended itself to him. As it was now evident

that the future was to be one of renunciation, of self-forgetting, an

oblivion tinged with bitterness, he formlessly reasoned in favor of

reconsidering his resolution against Fulkerson's offer. One must call

it reasoning, but it was rather that swift internal dramatization which

constantly goes on in persons of excitable sensibilities, and which now

seemed to sweep Beaton physically along toward the 'Every Other Week'

office, and carried his mind with lightning celerity on to a time when

he should have given that journal such quality and authority in matters

of art as had never been enjoyed by any in America before. With the

prosperity which he made attend his work he changed the character of the

enterprise, and with Fulkerson's enthusiastic support he gave the public

an art journal of as high grade as 'Les Lettres et les Arts', and very

much that sort of thing. All this involved now the unavailing regret of

Alma Leighton, and now his reconciliation with her they were married

in Grace Church, because Beaton had once seen a marriage there, and had

intended to paint a picture of it some time.

Nothing in these fervid fantasies prevented his responding with due

dryness to Fulkerson's cheery “Hello, old man!” when he found himself

in the building fitted up for the 'Every Other Week' office. Fulkerson's

room was back of the smaller one occupied by the bookkeeper; they had

been respectively the reception-room and dining-room of the little place

in its dwelling-house days, and they had been simply and tastefully

treated in their transformation into business purposes. The narrow

old trim of the doors and windows had been kept, and the quaintly

ugly marble mantels. The architect had said, Better let them stay they

expressed epoch, if not character.

“Well, have you come round to go to work? Just hang up your coat on the

floor anywhere,” Fulkerson went on.

“I've come to bring you that letter,” said Beaton, all the more

haughtily because he found that Fulkerson was not alone when he welcomed

him in these free and easy terms. There was a quiet-looking man, rather

stout, and a little above the middle height, with a full, close-cropped

iron-gray beard, seated beyond the table where Fulkerson tilted himself

back, with his knees set against it; and leaning against the mantel

there was a young man with a singularly gentle face, in which the look

of goodness qualified and transfigured a certain simplicity. His large

blue eyes were somewhat prominent; and his rather narrow face was drawn

forward in a nose a little too long perhaps, if it had not been for the

full chin deeply cut below the lip, and jutting firmly forward.

“Introduce you to Mr. March, our editor, Mr. Beaton,” Fulkerson said,

rolling his head in the direction of the elder man; and then nodding

it toward the younger, he said, “Mr. Dryfoos, Mr. Beaton.” Beaton shook

hands with March, and then with Mr. Dryfoos, and Fulkerson went on,

gayly: “We were just talking of you, Beaton--well, you know the old

saying. Mr. March, as I told you, is our editor, and Mr. Dryfoos has

charge of the publishing department--he's the counting-room incarnate,

the source of power, the fountain of corruption, the element that

prevents journalism being the high and holy thing that it would be if

there were no money in it.” Mr. Dryfoos turned his large, mild eyes upon

Beaton, and laughed with the uneasy concession which people make to a

character when they do not quite approve of the character's language.

“What Mr. March and I are trying to do is to carry on this thing so that

there won't be any money in it--or very little; and we're planning

to give the public a better article for the price than it's ever had

before. Now here's a dummy we've had made up for 'Every Other Week', and

as we've decided to adopt it, we would naturally like your opinion of

it, so's to know what opinion to have of you.” He reached forward and

pushed toward Beaton a volume a little above the size of the ordinary

duodecimo book; its ivory-white pebbled paper cover was prettily

illustrated with a water-colored design irregularly washed over the

greater part of its surface: quite across the page at top, and narrowing

from right to left as it descended. In the triangular space left blank

the title of the periodical and the publisher's imprint were tastefully

lettered so as to be partly covered by the background of color.

“It's like some of those Tartarin books of Daudet's,” said Beacon,

looking at it with more interest than he suffered to be seen. “But it's

a book, not a magazine.” He opened its pages of thick, mellow white

paper, with uncut leaves, the first few pages experimentally printed in

the type intended to be used, and illustrated with some sketches drawn

into and over the text, for the sake of the effect.

“A Daniel--a Daniel come to judgment! Sit down, Dan'el, and take it

easy.” Fulkerson pushed a chair toward Beaton, who dropped into it.

“You're right, Dan'el; it's a book, to all practical intents and

purposes. And what we propose to do with the American public is to

give it twenty-four books like this a year--a complete library--for the

absurd sum of six dollars. We don't intend to sell 'em--it's no name

for the transaction--but to give 'em. And what we want to get out of

you--beg, borrow, buy, or steal from you is an opinion whether we shall

make the American public this princely present in paper covers like

this, or in some sort of flexible boards, so they can set them on the

shelf and say no more about it. Now, Dan'el, come to judgment, as our

respected friend Shylock remarked.”

Beacon had got done looking at the dummy, and he dropped it on the table

before Fulkerson, who pushed it away, apparently to free himself from

partiality. “I don't know anything about the business side, and I can't

tell about the effect of either style on the sales; but you'll spoil

the whole character of the cover if you use anything thicker than that

thickish paper.”

“All right; very good; first-rate. The ayes have it. Paper it is. I

don't mind telling you that we had decided for that paper before you

came in. Mr. March wanted it, because he felt in his bones just the

way you do about it, and Mr. Dryfoos wanted it, because he's the

counting-room incarnate, and it's cheaper; and I 'wanted it, because

I always like to go with the majority. Now what do you think of that

little design itself?”

“The sketch?” Beaton pulled the book toward him again and looked at it

again. “Rather decorative. Drawing's not remarkable. Graceful; rather

nice.” He pushed the book away again, and Fulkerson pulled it to his

aide of the table.

“Well, that's a piece of that amateur trash you despise so much. I went

to a painter I know-by-the-way, he was guilty of suggesting you for this

thing, but I told him I was ahead of him--and I got him to submit my

idea to one of his class, and that's the result. Well, now, there ain't

anything in this world that sells a book like a pretty cover, and we're

going to have a pretty cover for 'Every Other Week' every time. We've

cut loose from the old traditional quarto literary newspaper size, and

we've cut loose from the old two-column big page magazine size; we're

going to have a duodecimo page, clear black print, and paper that 'll

make your mouth water; and we're going to have a fresh illustration for

the cover of each number, and we ain't agoing to give the public any

rest at all. Sometimes we're going to have a delicate little landscape

like this, and sometimes we're going to have an indelicate little

figure, or as much so as the law will allow.”

The young man leaning against the mantelpiece blushed a sort of protest.

March smiled and said, dryly, “Those are the numbers that Mr. Fulkerson

is going to edit himself.”

“Exactly. And Mr. Beaton, here, is going to supply the floating females,

gracefully airing themselves against a sunset or something of that

kind.” Beaton frowned in embarrassment, while Fulkerson went on

philosophically; “It's astonishing how you fellows can keep it up at

this stage of the proceedings; you can paint things that your harshest

critic would be ashamed to describe accurately; you're as free as the

theatre. But that's neither here nor there. What I'm after is the fact

that we're going to have variety in our title-pages, and we are going to

have novelty in the illustrations of the body of the book. March, here,

if he had his own way, wouldn't have any illustrations at all.”

“Not because I don't like them, Mr. Beacon,” March interposed, “but

because I like them too much. I find that I look at the pictures in an

illustrated article, but I don't read the article very much, and I fancy

that's the case with most other people. You've got to doing them so

prettily that you take our eyes off the literature, if you don't take

our minds off.”

“Like the society beauties on the stage: people go in for the beauty

so much that they don't know what the play is. But the box-office gets

there all the same, and that's what Mr. Dryfoos wants.” Fulkerson looked

up gayly at Mr. Dryfoos, who smiled deprecatingly.

“It was different,” March went on, “when the illustrations used to be

bad. Then the text had some chance.”

“Old legitimate drama days, when ugliness and genius combined to storm

the galleries,” said Fulkerson.

“We can still make them bad enough,” said Beaton, ignoring Fulkerson in

his remark to March.

Fulkerson took the reply upon himself. “Well, you needn't make 'em so

bad as the old-style cuts; but you can make them unobtrusive, modestly

retiring. We've got hold of a process something like that those French

fellows gave Daudet thirty-five thousand dollars to write a novel to use

with; kind of thing that begins at one side; or one corner, and spreads

in a sort of dim religious style over the print till you can't tell

which is which. Then we've got a notion that where the pictures don't

behave quite so sociably, they can be dropped into the text, like

a little casual remark, don't you know, or a comment that has some

connection, or maybe none at all, with what's going on in the story.

Something like this.” Fulkerson took away one knee from the table long

enough to open the drawer, and pull from it a book that he shoved toward

Beacon. “That's a Spanish book I happened to see at Brentano's, and I

froze to it on account of the pictures. I guess they're pretty good.”

“Do you expect to get such drawings in this country?” asked Beaton,

after a glance at the book. “Such character--such drama? You won't.”

“Well, I'm not so sure,” said Fulkerson, “come to get our amateurs

warmed up to the work. But what I want is to get the physical effect,

so to speak-get that sized picture into our page, and set the fashion

of it. I shouldn't care if the illustration was sometimes confined to an

initial letter and a tail-piece.”

“Couldn't be done here. We haven't the touch. We're good in some things,

but this isn't in our way,” said Beaton, stubbornly. “I can't think of a

man who could do it; that is, among those that would.”

“Well, think of some woman, then,” said Fulkerson, easily. “I've got a

notion that the women could help us out on this thing, come to get 'em

interested. There ain't anything so popular as female fiction; why not

try female art?”

“The females themselves have been supposed to have been trying it for a

good while,” March suggested; and Mr. Dryfoos laughed nervously; Beaton

remained solemnly silent.

“Yes, I know,” Fulkerson assented. “But I don't mean that kind exactly.

What we want to do is to work the 'ewig Weibliche' in this concern. We

want to make a magazine that will go for the women's fancy every time.

I don't mean with recipes for cooking and fashions and personal gossip

about authors and society, but real high-tone literature that will show

women triumphing in all the stories, or else suffering tremendously.

We've got to recognize that women form three-fourths of the reading

public in this country, and go for their tastes and their sensibilities

and their sex-piety along the whole line. They do like to think that

women can do things better than men; and if we can let it leak out

and get around in the papers that the managers of 'Every Other Week'

couldn't stir a peg in the line of the illustrations they wanted till

they got a lot of God-gifted girls to help them, it 'll make the fortune

of the thing. See?”

He looked sunnily round at the other men, and March said: “You ought to

be in charge of a Siamese white elephant, Fulkerson. It's a disgrace to

be connected with you.”

“It seems to me,” said Beaton, “that you'd better get a God-gifted girl

for your art editor.”

Fulkerson leaned alertly forward, and touched him on the shoulder, with

a compassionate smile. “My dear boy, they haven't got the genius of

organization. It takes a very masculine man for that--a man who combines

the most subtle and refined sympathies with the most forceful purposes

and the most ferruginous will-power. Which his name is Angus Beaton, and

here he sets!”

The others laughed with Fulkerson at his gross burlesque of flattery,

and Beaton frowned sheepishly. “I suppose you understand this man's

style,” he growled toward March.

“He does, my son,” said Fulkerson. “He knows that I cannot tell a lie.”

He pulled out his watch, and then got suddenly upon his feet.

“It's quarter of twelve, and I've got an appointment.” Beaton rose too,

and Fulkerson put the two books in his lax hands. “Take these along,

Michelangelo Da Vinci, my friend, and put your multitudinous mind on

them for about an hour, and let us hear from you to-morrow. We hang upon

your decision.”

“There's no deciding to be done,” said Beaton. “You can't combine the

two styles. They'd kill each other.”

“A Dan'el, a Dan'el come to judgment! I knew you could help us out!

Take 'em along, and tell us which will go the furthest with the 'ewig

Weibliche.' Dryfoos, I want a word with you.” He led the way into the

front room, flirting an airy farewell to Beaton with his hand as he

went.

VII.

March and Beaton remained alone together for a moment, and March said:

“I hope you will think it worth while to take hold with us, Mr. Beaton.

Mr. Fulkerson puts it in his own way, of course; but we really want to

make a nice thing of the magazine.” He had that timidity of the elder in

the presence of the younger man which the younger, preoccupied with

his own timidity in the presence of the elder, cannot imagine. Besides,

March was aware of the gulf that divided him as a literary man from

Beaton as an artist, and he only ventured to feel his way toward

sympathy with him. “We want to make it good; we want to make it high.

Fulkerson is right about aiming to please the women, but of course he

caricatures the way of going about it.”

For answer, Beaton flung out, “I can't go in for a thing I don't

understand the plan of.”

March took it for granted that he had wounded some exposed sensibility,

of Beaton's. He continued still more deferentially: “Mr. Fulkerson's

notion--I must say the notion is his, evolved from his syndicate

experience--is that we shall do best in fiction to confine our selves

to short stories, and make each number complete in itself. He found that

the most successful things he could furnish his newspapers were short

stories; we Americans are supposed to excel in writing them; and most

people begin with them in fiction; and it's Mr. Fulkerson's idea to work

unknown talent, as he says, and so he thinks he can not only get them

easily, but can gradually form a school of short-story writers. I can't

say I follow him altogether, but I respect his experience. We shall not

despise translations of short stories, but otherwise the matter will all

be original, and, of course, it won't all be short stories. We shall use

sketches of travel, and essays, and little dramatic studies, and bits of

biography and history; but all very light, and always short enough to

be completed in a single number. Mr. Fulkerson believes in pictures, and

most of the things would be capable of illustration.”

“I see,” said Beaton.

“I don't know but this is the whole affair,” said March, beginning to

stiffen a little at the young man's reticence.

“I understand. Thank you for taking the trouble to explain.

Good-morning.” Beaton bowed himself off, without offering to shake

hands.

Fulkerson came in after a while from the outer office, and Mr. Dryfoos

followed him. “Well, what do you think of our art editor?”

“Is he our art editor?” asked March. “I wasn't quite certain when he

left.”

“Did he take the books?”

“Yes, he took the books.”

“I guess he's all right, then.” Fulkerson added, in concession to the

umbrage he detected in March.

“Beaton has his times of being the greatest ass in the solar system, but

he usually takes it out in personal conduct. When it comes to work, he's

a regular horse.”

“He appears to have compromised for the present by being a perfect

mule,” said March.

“Well, he's in a transition state,” Fulkerson allowed. “He's the man for

us. He really understands what we want. You'll see; he'll catch on. That

lurid glare of his will wear off in the course of time. He's really a

good fellow when you take him off his guard; and he's full of ideas.

He's spread out over a good deal of ground at present, and so he's

pretty thin; but come to gather him up into a lump, there's a good deal

of substance to him. Yes, there is. He's a first-rate critic, and he's a

nice fellow with the other artists. They laugh at his universality, but

they all like him. He's the best kind of a teacher when he condescends

to it; and he's just the man to deal with our volunteer work. Yes, sir,

he's a prize. Well, I must go now.”

Fulkerson went out of the street door, and then came quickly back.

“By-the-bye, March, I saw that old dynamiter of yours round at Beaton's

room yesterday.”

“What old dynamiter of mine?”

“That old one-handed Dutchman--friend of your youth--the one we saw at

Maroni's--”

“Oh-Lindau!” said March, with a vague pang of self reproach for having

thought of Lindau so little after the first flood of his tender feeling

toward him was past.

“Yes, our versatile friend was modelling him as Judas Iscariot. Lindau

makes a first-rate Judas, and Beaton has got a big thing in that head

if he works the religious people right. But what I was thinking of was

this--it struck me just as I was going out of the door: Didn't you tell

me Lindau knew forty or fifty, different languages?”

“Four or five, yes.”

“Well, we won't quarrel about the number. The question is, Why not work

him in the field of foreign literature? You can't go over all their

reviews and magazines, and he could do the smelling for you, if you

could trust his nose. Would he know a good thing?”

“I think he would,” said March, on whom the scope of Fulkerson's

suggestion gradually opened. “He used to have good taste, and he must

know the ground. Why, it's a capital idea, Fulkerson! Lindau wrote very

fair English, and he could translate, with a little revision.”

“And he would probably work cheap. Well, hadn't you better see him about

it? I guess it 'll be quite a windfall for him.”

“Yes, it will. I'll look him up. Thank you for the suggestion,

Fulkerson.”

“Oh, don't mention it! I don't mind doing 'Every Other Week' a good turn

now and then when it comes in my way.” Fulkerson went out again, and

this time March was finally left with Mr. Dryfoos.

“Mrs. March was very sorry not to be at home when your sisters called

the other day. She wished me to ask if they had any afternoon in

particular. There was none on your mother's card.”

“No, sir,” said the young man, with a flush of embarrassment that seemed

habitual with him. “She has no day. She's at home almost every day. She

hardly ever goes out.”

“Might we come some evening?” March asked. “We should be very glad to do

that, if she would excuse the informality. Then I could come with Mrs.

March.”

“Mother isn't very formal,” said the young man. “She would be very glad

to see you.”

“Then we'll come some night this week, if you will let us. When do you

expect your father back?”

“Not much before Christmas. He's trying to settle up some things at

Moffitt.”

“And what do you think of our art editor?” asked March, with a smile,

for the change of subject.

“Oh, I don't know much about such things,” said the young man, with

another of his embarrassed flushes. “Mr. Fulkerson seems to feel sure

that he is the one for us.”

“Mr. Fulkerson seemed to think that I was the one for you, too,” said

March; and he laughed. “That's what makes me doubt his infallibility.

But he couldn't do worse with Mr. Beaton.”

Mr. Dryfoos reddened and looked down, as if unable or unwilling to

cope with the difficulty of making a polite protest against March's

self-depreciation. He said, after a moment: “It's new business to all of

us except Mr. Fulkerson. But I think it will succeed. I think we can do

some good in it.”

March asked rather absently, “Some good?” Then he added: “Oh yes;

I think we can. What do you mean by good? Improve the public taste?

Elevate the standard of literature? Give young authors and artists a

chance?”

This was the only good that had ever been in March's mind, except the

good that was to come in a material way from his success, to himself and

to his family.

“I don't know,” said the young man; and he looked down in a shamefaced

fashion. He lifted his head and looked into March's face. “I suppose

I was thinking that some time we might help along. If we were to have

those sketches of yours about life in every part of New York--”

March's authorial vanity was tickled. “Fulkerson has been talking to you

about them? He seemed to think they would be a card. He believes that

there's no subject so fascinating to the general average of people

throughout the country as life in New York City; and he liked my notion

of doing these things.” March hoped that Dryfoos would answer that

Fulkerson was perfectly enthusiastic about his notion; but he did not

need this stimulus, and, at any rate, he went on without it. “The fact

is, it's something that struck my fancy the moment I came here; I found

myself intensely interested in the place, and I began to make notes,

consciously and unconsciously, at once. Yes, I believe I can get

something quite attractive out of it. I don't in the least know what it

will be yet, except that it will be very desultory; and I couldn't

at all say when I can get at it. If we postpone the first number till

February I might get a little paper into that. Yes, I think it might be

a good thing for us,” March said, with modest self-appreciation.

“If you can make the comfortable people understand how the uncomfortable

people live, it will be a very good thing, Mr. March. Sometimes it

seems to me that the only trouble is that we don't know one another well

enough; and that the first thing is to do this.” The young fellow spoke

with the seriousness in which the beauty of his face resided. Whenever

he laughed his face looked weak, even silly. It seemed to be a sense of

this that made him hang his head or turn it away at such times.

“That's true,” said March, from the surface only. “And then, those

phases of low life are immensely picturesque. Of course, we must try to

get the contrasts of luxury for the sake of the full effect. That won't

be so easy. You can't penetrate to the dinner-party of a millionaire

under the wing of a detective as you could to a carouse in Mulberry

Street, or to his children's nursery with a philanthropist as you can

to a street-boy's lodging-house.” March laughed, and again the young man

turned his head away. “Still, something can be done in that way by tact

and patience.”

VII.

That evening March went with his wife to return the call of the Dryfoos

ladies. On their way up-town in the Elevated he told her of his talk

with young Dryfoos. “I confess I was a little ashamed before him

afterward for having looked at the matter so entirely from the aesthetic

point of view. But of course, you know, if I went to work at those

things with an ethical intention explicitly in mind, I should spoil

them.”

“Of course,” said his wife. She had always heard him say something of

this kind about such things.

He went on: “But I suppose that's just the point that such a nature as

young Dryfoos's can't get hold of, or keep hold of. We're a queer lot,

down there, Isabel--perfect menagerie. If it hadn't been that Fulkerson

got us together, and really seems to know what he did it for, I should

say he was the oddest stick among us. But when I think of myself and my

own crankiness for the literary department; and young Dryfoos, who ought

really to be in the pulpit, or a monastery, or something, for publisher;

and that young Beaton, who probably hasn't a moral fibre in his

composition, for the art man, I don't know but we could give Fulkerson

odds and still beat him in oddity.”

His wife heaved a deep sigh of apprehension, of renunciation, of

monition. “Well, I'm glad you can feel so light about it, Basil.”

“Light? I feel gay! With Fulkerson at the helm, I tell you the rocks and

the lee shore had better keep out of the way.” He laughed with pleasure

in his metaphor. “Just when you think Fulkerson has taken leave of his

senses he says or does something that shows he is on the most intimate

and inalienable terms with them all the time. You know how I've

been worrying over those foreign periodicals, and trying to get some

translations from them for the first number? Well, Fulkerson has brought

his centipedal mind to bear on the subject, and he's suggested that

old German friend of mine I was telling you of--the one I met in the

restaurant--the friend of my youth.”

“Do you think he could do it?” asked Mrs. March, sceptically.

“He's a perfect Babel of strange tongues; and he's the very man for the

work, and I was ashamed I hadn't thought of him myself, for I suspect he

needs the work.”

“Well, be careful how you get mixed up with him, then, Basil,” said

his wife, who had the natural misgiving concerning the friends of

her husband's youth that all wives have. “You know the Germans are so

unscrupulously dependent. You don't know anything about him now.”

“I'm not afraid of Lindau,” said March. “He was the best and kindest man

I ever saw, the most high-minded, the most generous. He lost a hand in

the war that helped to save us and keep us possible, and that stump of

his is character enough for me.”

“Oh, you don't think I could have meant anything against him!” said Mrs.

March, with the tender fervor that every woman who lived in the time of

the war must feel for those who suffered in it. “All that I meant was

that I hoped you would not get mixed up with him too much. You're so apt

to be carried away by your impulses.”

“They didn't carry me very far away in the direction of poor old Lindau,

I'm ashamed to think,” said March. “I meant all sorts of fine things by

him after I met him; and then I forgot him, and I had to be reminded of

him by Fulkerson.”

She did not answer him, and he fell into a remorseful reverie, in which

he rehabilitated Lindau anew, and provided handsomely for his old age.

He got him buried with military honors, and had a shaft raised over him,

with a medallion likeness by Beaton and an epitaph by himself, by

the time they reached Forty-second Street; there was no time to write

Lindau's life, however briefly, before the train stopped.

They had to walk up four blocks and then half a block across before they

came to the indistinctive brownstone house where the Dryfooses lived. It

was larger than some in the same block, but the next neighborhood of a

huge apartment-house dwarfed it again. March thought he recognized the

very flat in which he had disciplined the surly janitor, but he did

not tell his wife; he made her notice the transition character of the

street, which had been mostly built up in apartment-houses, with here

and there a single dwelling dropped far down beneath and beside them, to

that jag-toothed effect on the sky-line so often observable in such New

York streets. “I don't know exactly what the old gentleman bought here

for,” he said, as they waited on the steps after ringing, “unless he

expects to turn it into flats by-and-by. Otherwise, I don't believe

he'll get his money back.”

An Irish serving-man, with a certain surprise that delayed him, said

the ladies were at home, and let the Marches in, and then carried their

cards up-stairs. The drawing-room, where he said they could sit down

while he went on this errand, was delicately, decorated in white and

gold, and furnished with a sort of extravagant good taste; there was

nothing to object to in the satin furniture, the pale, soft, rich

carpet, the pictures, and the bronze and china bric-a-brac, except that

their costliness was too evident; everything in the room meant money too

plainly, and too much of it. The Marches recognized this in the hoarse

whispers which people cannot get their voices above when they try

to talk away the interval of waiting in such circumstances; they

conjectured from what they had heard of the Dryfooses that this tasteful

luxury in no wise expressed their civilization. “Though when you come to

that,” said March, “I don't know that Mrs. Green's gimcrackery expresses

ours.”

“Well, Basil, I didn't take the gimcrackery. That was your--”

The rustle of skirts on the stairs without arrested Mrs. March in the

well-merited punishment which she never failed to inflict upon her

husband when the question of the gimcrackery--they always called

it that--came up. She rose at the entrance of a bright-looking,

pretty-looking, mature, youngish lady, in black silk of a neutral

implication, who put out her hand to her, and said, with a very cheery,

very ladylike accent, “Mrs. March?” and then added to both of them,

while she shook hands with March, and before they could get the name

out of their months: “No, not Miss Dryfoos! Neither of them; nor Mrs.

Dryfoos. Mrs. Mandel. The ladies will be down in a moment. Won't you

throw off your sacque, Mrs. March? I'm afraid it's rather warm here,

coming from the outside.”

“I will throw it back, if you'll allow me,” said Mrs. March, with a sort

of provisionality, as if, pending some uncertainty as to Mrs. Mandel's

quality and authority, she did not feel herself justified in going

further.

But if she did not know about Mrs. Mandel, Mrs. Mandel seemed to know

about her. “Oh, well, do!” she said, with a sort of recognition of the

propriety of her caution. “I hope you are feeling a little at home in

New York. We heard so much of your trouble in getting a flat, from Mr.

Fulkerson.”

“Well, a true Bostonian doesn't give up quite so soon,” said Mrs. March.

“But I will say New York doesn't seem so far away, now we're here.”

“I'm sure you'll like it. Every one does.” Mrs. Mandel added to March,

“It's very sharp out, isn't it?”

“Rather sharp. But after our Boston winters I don't know but I ought to

repudiate the word.”

“Ah, wait till you have been here through March!” said Mrs. Mandel. She

began with him, but skillfully transferred the close of her remark, and

the little smile of menace that went with it, to his wife.

“Yes,” said Mrs. March, “or April, either: Talk about our east winds!”

“Oh, I'm sure they can't be worse than our winds,” Mrs. Mandel returned,

caressingly.

“If we escape New York pneumonia,” March laughed, “it will only be

to fall a prey to New York malaria as soon as the frost is out of the

ground.”

“Oh, but you know,” said Mrs. Mandel, “I think our malaria has really

been slandered a little. It's more a matter of drainage--of plumbing. I

don't believe it would be possible for malaria to get into this house,

we've had it gone over so thoroughly.”

Mrs. March said, while she tried to divine Mrs. Mandel's position from

this statement, “It's certainly the first duty.”

“If Mrs. March could have had her way, we should have had the drainage

of our whole ward put in order,” said her husband, “before we ventured

to take a furnished apartment for the winter.”

Mrs. Mandel looked discreetly at Mrs. March for permission to laugh

at this, but at the same moment both ladies became preoccupied with a

second rustling on the stairs.

Two tall, well-dressed young girls came in, and Mrs. Mandel introduced,

“Miss Dryfoos, Mrs. March; and Miss Mela Dryfoos, Mr. March,” she added,

and the girls shook hands in their several ways with the Marches.

Miss Dryfoos had keen black eyes, and her hair was intensely black. Her

face, but for the slight inward curve of the nose, was regular, and the

smallness of her nose and of her mouth did not weaken her face, but gave

it a curious effect of fierceness, of challenge. She had a large black

fan in her hand, which she waved in talking, with a slow, watchful

nervousness. Her sister was blonde, and had a profile like her

brother's; but her chin was not so salient, and the weak look of the

mouth was not corrected by the spirituality or the fervor of his eyes,

though hers were of the same mottled blue. She dropped into the low seat

beside Mrs. Mandel, and intertwined her fingers with those of the hand

which Mrs. Mandel let her have. She smiled upon the Marches, while Miss

Dryfoos watched them intensely, with her eyes first on one and then on

the other, as if she did not mean to let any expression of theirs escape

her.

“My mother will be down in a minute,” she said to Mrs. March.

“I hope we're not disturbing her. It is so good of you to let us come in

the evening,” Mrs. March replied.

“Oh, not at all,” said the girl. “We receive in the evening.”

“When we do receive,” Miss Mela put in. “We don't always get the chance

to.” She began a laugh, which she checked at a smile from Mrs. Mandel,

which no one could have seen to be reproving.

Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan, and looked up defiantly at Mrs.

March. “I suppose you have hardly got settled. We were afraid we would

disturb you when we called.”

“Oh no! We were very sorry to miss your visit. We are quite settled in

our new quarters. Of course, it's all very different from Boston.”

“I hope it's more of a sociable place there,” Miss Mela broke in again.

“I never saw such an unsociable place as New York. We've been in this

house three months, and I don't believe that if we stayed three years

any of the neighbors would call.”

“I fancy proximity doesn't count for much in New York,” March suggested.

Mrs. Mandel said: “That's what I tell Miss Mela. But she is a very

social nature, and can't reconcile herself to the fact.”

“No, I can't,” the girl pouted. “I think it was twice as much fun in

Moffitt. I wish I was there now.”

“Yes,” said March, “I think there's a great deal more enjoyment in

those smaller places. There's not so much going on in the way of public

amusements, and so people make more of one another. There are not so

many concerts, theatres, operas--”

“Oh, they've got a splendid opera-house in Moffitt. It's just grand,”

said Miss Mela.

“Have you been to the opera here, this winter?” Mrs. March asked of the

elder girl.

She was glaring with a frown at her sister, and detached her eyes from

her with an effort. “What did you say?” she demanded, with an absent

bluntness. “Oh yes. Yes! We went once. Father took a box at the

Metropolitan.”

“Then you got a good dose of Wagner, I suppose?” said March.

“What?” asked the girl.

“I don't think Miss Dryfoos is very fond of Wagner's music,” Mrs. Mandel

said. “I believe you are all great Wagnerites in Boston?”

“I'm a very bad Bostonian, Mrs. Mandel. I suspect myself of preferring

Verdi,” March answered.

Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan again, and said, “I like 'Trovatore'

the best.”

“It's an opera I never get tired of,” said March, and Mrs. March and

Mrs. Mandel exchanged a smile of compassion for his simplicity. He

detected it, and added: “But I dare say I shall come down with the

Wagner fever in time. I've been exposed to some malignant cases of it.”

“That night we were there,” said Miss Mela, “they had to turn the gas

down all through one part of it, and the papers said the ladies were

awful mad because they couldn't show their diamonds. I don't wonder,

if they all had to pay as much for their boxes as we did. We had to pay

sixty dollars.” She looked at the Marches for their sensation at this

expense.

March said: “Well, I think I shall take my box by the month, then. It

must come cheaper, wholesale.”

“Oh no, it don't,” said the girl, glad to inform him. “The people that

own their boxes, and that had to give fifteen or twenty thousand dollars

apiece for them, have to pay sixty dollars a night whenever there's a

performance, whether they go or not.”

“Then I should go every night,” March said.

“Most of the ladies were low neck--”

March interposed, “Well, I shouldn't go low-neck.”

The girl broke into a fondly approving laugh at his drolling. “Oh, I

guess you love to train! Us girls wanted to go low neck, too; but father

said we shouldn't, and mother said if we did she wouldn't come to the

front of the box once. Well, she didn't, anyway. We might just as well

'a' gone low neck. She stayed back the whole time, and when they had

that dance--the ballet, you know--she just shut her eyes. Well, Conrad

didn't like that part much, either; but us girls and Mrs. Mandel, we

brazened it out right in the front of the box. We were about the only

ones there that went high neck. Conrad had to wear a swallow-tail; but

father hadn't any, and he had to patch out with a white cravat. You

couldn't see what he had on in the back o' the box, anyway.”

Mrs. March looked at Miss Dryfoos, who was waving her fan more and more

slowly up and down, and who, when she felt herself looked at, returned

Mrs. March's smile, which she meant to be ingratiating and perhaps

sympathetic, with a flash that made her start, and then ran her fierce

eyes over March's face. “Here comes mother,” she said, with a sort of

breathlessness, as if speaking her thought aloud, and through the open

door the Marches could see the old lady on the stairs.

She paused half-way down, and turning, called up: “Coonrod! Coonrod! You

bring my shawl down with you.”

Her daughter Mela called out to her, “Now, mother, Christine 'll give it

to you for not sending Mike.”

“Well, I don't know where he is, Mely, child,” the mother answered back.

“He ain't never around when he's wanted, and when he ain't, it seems

like a body couldn't git shet of him, nohow.”

“Well, you ought to ring for him!” cried Miss Mela, enjoying the joke.

Her mother came in with a slow step; her head shook slightly as she

looked about the room, perhaps from nervousness, perhaps from a touch of

palsy. In either case the fact had a pathos which Mrs. March confessed

in the affection with which she took her hard, dry, large, old hand when

she was introduced to her, and in the sincerity which she put into the

hope that she was well.

“I'm just middlin',” Mrs. Dryfoos replied. “I ain't never so well,

nowadays. I tell fawther I don't believe it agrees with me very well

here, but he says I'll git used to it. He's away now, out at Moffitt,”

she said to March, and wavered on foot a moment before she sank into a

chair. She was a tall woman, who had been a beautiful girl, and her gray

hair had a memory of blondeness in it like Lindau's, March noticed. She

wore a simple silk gown, of a Quakerly gray, and she held a handkerchief

folded square, as it had come from the laundress. Something like the

Sabbath quiet of a little wooden meeting-house in thick Western woods

expressed itself to him from her presence.

“Laws, mother!” said Miss Mela; “what you got that old thing on for? If

I'd 'a' known you'd 'a' come down in that!”

“Coonrod said it was all right, Mely,” said her mother.

Miss Mela explained to the Marches: “Mother was raised among the

Dunkards, and she thinks it's wicked to wear anything but a gray silk

even for dress-up.”

“You hain't never heared o' the Dunkards, I reckon,” the old woman said

to Mrs. March. “Some folks calls 'em the Beardy Men, because they don't

never shave; and they wash feet like they do in the Testament. My uncle

was one. He raised me.”

“I guess pretty much everybody's a Beardy Man nowadays, if he ain't a

Dunkard!”

Miss Mela looked round for applause of her sally, but March was saying

to his wife: “It's a Pennsylvania German sect, I believe--something like

the Quakers. I used to see them when I was a boy.”

“Aren't they something like the Mennists?” asked Mrs. Mandel.

“They're good people,” said the old woman, “and the world 'd be a heap

better off if there was more like 'em.”

Her son came in and laid a soft shawl over her shoulders before he shook

hands with the visitors. “I am glad you found your way here,” he said to

them.

Christine, who had been bending forward over her fan, now lifted herself

up with a sigh and leaned back in her chair.

“I'm sorry my father isn't here,” said the young man to Mrs. March.

“He's never met you yet?”

“No; and I should like to see him. We hear a great deal about your

father, you know, from Mr. Fulkerson.”

“Oh, I hope you don't believe everything Mr. Fulkerson says about

people,” Mela cried. “He's the greatest person for carrying on when

he gets going I ever saw. It makes Christine just as mad when him and

mother gets to talking about religion; she says she knows he don't care

anything more about it than the man in the moon. I reckon he don't try

it on much with father.”

“Your fawther ain't ever been a perfessor,” her mother interposed; “but

he's always been a good church-goin' man.”

“Not since we come to New York,” retorted the girl.

“He's been all broke up since he come to New York,” said the old woman,

with an aggrieved look.

Mrs. Mandel attempted a diversion. “Have you heard any of our great New

York preachers yet, Mrs. March?”

“No, I haven't,” Mrs. March admitted; and she tried to imply by her

candid tone that she intended to begin hearing them the very next

Sunday.

“There are a great many things here,” said Conrad, “to take your

thoughts off the preaching that you hear in most of the churches. I

think the city itself is preaching the best sermon all the time.”

“I don't know that I understand you,” said March.

Mela answered for him. “Oh, Conrad has got a lot of notions that nobody

can understand. You ought to see the church he goes to when he does go.

I'd about as lief go to a Catholic church myself; I don't see a bit

o' difference. He's the greatest crony with one of their preachers; he

dresses just like a priest, and he says he is a priest.” She laughed for

enjoyment of the fact, and her brother cast down his eyes.

Mrs. March, in her turn, tried to take from it the personal tone which

the talk was always assuming. “Have you been to the fall exhibition?”

she asked Christine; and the girl drew herself up out of the abstraction

she seemed sunk in.

“The exhibition?” She looked at Mrs. Mandel.

“The pictures of the Academy, you know,” Mrs. Mandel explained. “Where I

wanted you to go the day you had your dress tried on.”

“No; we haven't been yet. Is it good?” She had turned to Mrs. March

again.

“I believe the fall exhibitions are never so good as the spring ones.

But there are some good pictures.”

“I don't believe I care much about pictures,” said Christine. “I don't

understand them.”

“Ah, that's no excuse for not caring about them,” said March, lightly.

“The painters themselves don't, half the time.”

The girl looked at him with that glance at once defiant and appealing,

insolent and anxious, which he had noticed before, especially when she

stole it toward himself and his wife during her sister's babble. In the

light of Fulkerson's history of the family, its origin and its ambition,

he interpreted it to mean a sense of her sister's folly and an ignorant

will to override his opinion of anything incongruous in themselves and

their surroundings. He said to himself that she was deathly proud--too

proud to try to palliate anything, but capable of anything that would

put others under her feet. Her eyes seemed hopelessly to question his

wife's social quality, and he fancied, with not unkindly interest, the

inexperienced girl's doubt whether to treat them with much or

little respect. He lost himself in fancies about her and her ideals,

necessarily sordid, of her possibilities of suffering, of the triumphs

and disappointments before her. Her sister would accept both with a

lightness that would keep no trace of either; but in her they would sink

lastingly deep. He came out of his reverie to find Mrs. Dryfoos saying

to him, in her hoarse voice:

“I think it's a shame, some of the pictur's a body sees in the winders.

They say there's a law ag'inst them things; and if there is, I don't

understand why the police don't take up them that paints 'em. I hear 182

tell, since I been here, that there's women that goes to have pictur's

took from them that way by men painters.” The point seemed aimed at

March, as if he were personally responsible for the scandal, and it fell

with a silencing effect for the moment. Nobody seemed willing to take it

up, and Mrs. Dryfoos went on, with an old woman's severity: “I say

they ought to be all tarred and feathered and rode on a rail. They'd be

drummed out of town in Moffitt.”

Miss Mela said, with a crowing laugh: “I should think they would! And

they wouldn't anybody go low neck to the opera-house there, either--not

low neck the way they do here, anyway.”

“And that pack of worthless hussies,” her mother resumed, “that come out

on the stage, and begun to kick.”

“Laws, mother!” the girl shouted, “I thought you said you had your eyes

shut!”

All but these two simpler creatures were abashed at the indecorum of

suggesting in words the commonplaces of the theatre and of art.

“Well, I did, Mely, as soon as I could believe my eyes. I don't know

what they're doin' in all their churches, to let such things go on,”

said the old woman. “It's a sin and a shame, I think. Don't you,

Coonrod?”

A ring at the door cut short whatever answer he was about to deliver.

“If it's going to be company, Coonrod,” said his mother, making an

effort to rise, “I reckon I better go up-stairs.”

“It's Mr. Fulkerson, I guess,” said Conrad. “He thought he might come”;

and at the mention of this light spirit Mrs. Dryfoos sank contentedly

back in her chair, and a relaxation of their painful tension seemed to

pass through the whole company. Conrad went to the door himself (the

serving-man tentatively, appeared some minutes later) and let in

Fulkerson's cheerful voice before his cheerful person.

“Ah, how dye do, Conrad? Brought our friend, Mr. Beaton, with me,” those

within heard him say; and then, after a sound of putting off overcoats,

they saw him fill the doorway, with his feet set square and his arms

akimbo.

IX.

“Ah! hello! hello!” Fulkerson said, in recognition of the Marches.

“Regular gathering of the clans. How are you, Mrs. Dryfoos? How do you

do, Mrs. Mandel, Miss Christine, Mela, Aunt Hitty, and all the folks?

How you wuz?” He shook hands gayly all round, and took a chair next the

old lady, whose hand he kept in his own, and left Conrad to introduce

Beaton. But he would not let the shadow of Beaton's solemnity fall

upon the company. He began to joke with Mrs. Dryfoos, and to match

rheumatisms with her, and he included all the ladies in the range of

appropriate pleasantries. “I've brought Mr. Beaton along to-night, and

I want you to make him feel at home, like you do me, Mrs. Dryfoos. He

hasn't got any rheumatism to speak of; but his parents live in Syracuse,

and he's a kind of an orphan, and we've just adopted him down at the

office. When you going to bring the young ladies down there, Mrs.

Mandel, for a champagne lunch? I will have some hydro-Mela, and

Christine it, heigh? How's that for a little starter? We dropped in at

your place a moment, Mrs. March, and gave the young folks a few pointers

about their studies. My goodness! it does me good to see a boy like

that of yours; business, from the word go; and your girl just scoops my

youthful affections. She's a beauty, and I guess she's good, too. Well,

well, what a world it is! Miss Christine, won't you show Mr. Beaton that

seal ring of yours? He knows about such things, and I brought him here

to see it as much as anything. It's an intaglio I brought from the other

side,” he explained to Mrs. March, “and I guess you'll like to look at

it. Tried to give it to the Dryfoos family, and when I couldn't, I sold

it to 'em. Bound to see it on Miss Christine's hand somehow! Hold on!

Let him see it where it belongs, first!”

He arrested the girl in the motion she made to take off the ring, and

let her have the pleasure of showing her hand to the company with the

ring on it. Then he left her to hear the painter's words about it, which

he continued to deliver dissyllabically as he stood with her under a

gas-jet, twisting his elastic figure and bending his head over the ring.

“Well, Mely, child,” Fulkerson went on, with an open travesty of her

mother's habitual address, “and how are you getting along? Mrs. Mandel

hold you up to the proprieties pretty strictly? Well, that's right. You

know you'd be roaming all over the pasture if she didn't.”

The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning, and everybody took

him on his own ground of privileged character. He brought them all

together in their friendliness for himself, and before the evening was

over he had inspired Mrs. Mandel to have them served with coffee,

and had made both the girls feel that they had figured brilliantly in

society, and that two young men had been devoted to them.

“Oh, I think he's just as lovely as he can live!” said Mela, as she

stood a moment with her sister on the scene of her triumph, where the

others had left them after the departure of their guests.

“Who?” asked Christine, deeply. As she glanced down at her ring, her

eyes burned with a softened fire.

She had allowed Beaton to change it himself from the finger where she

had worn it to the finger on which he said she ought to wear it. She did

not know whether it was right to let him, but she was glad she had done

it.

“Who? Mr. Fulkerson, goosie-poosie! Not that old stuckup Mr. Beaton of

yours!”

“He is proud,” assented Christine, with a throb of exultation.

Beaton and Fulkerson went to the Elevated station with the Marches; but

the painter said he was going to walk home, and Fulkerson let him go

alone.

“One way is enough for me,” he explained. “When I walk up, I don't walk

down. Bye-bye, my son!” He began talking about Beaton to the Marches

as they climbed the station stairs together. “That fellow puzzles me.

I don't know anybody that I have such a desire to kick, and at the same

time that I want to flatter up so much. Affect you that way?” he asked

of March.

“Well, as far as the kicking goes, yes.”

“And how is it with you, Mrs. March?”

“Oh, I want to flatter him up.”

“No; really? Why? Hold on! I've got the change.”

Fulkerson pushed March away from the ticket-office window; and made

them his guests, with the inexorable American hospitality, for the

ride down-town. “Three!” he said to the ticket-seller; and, when he had

walked them before him out on the platform and dropped his tickets into

the urn, he persisted in his inquiry, “Why?”

“Why, because you always want to flatter conceited people, don't you?”

Mrs. March answered, with a laugh.

“Do you? Yes, I guess you do. You think Beaton is conceited?”

“Well, slightly, Mr. Fulkerson.”

“I guess you're partly right,” said Fulkerson, with a sigh, so

unaccountable in its connection that they all laughed.

“An ideal 'busted'?” March suggested.

“No, not that, exactly,” said Fulkerson. “But I had a notion maybe

Beaton wasn't conceited all the time.”

“Oh!” Mrs. March exulted, “nobody could be so conceited all the time

as Mr. Beaton is most of the time. He must have moments of the direst

modesty, when he'd be quite flattery-proof.”

“Yes, that's what I mean. I guess that's what makes me want to kick him.

He's left compliments on my hands that no decent man would.”

“Oh! that's tragical,” said March.

“Mr. Fulkerson,” Mrs. March began, with change of subject in her voice,

“who is Mrs. Mandel?”

“Who? What do you think of her?” he rejoined. “I'll tell you about her

when we get in the cars. Look at that thing! Ain't it beautiful?”

They leaned over the track and looked up at the next station, where the

train, just starting, throbbed out the flame-shot steam into the white

moonlight.

“The most beautiful thing in New York--the one always and certainly

beautiful thing here,” said March; and his wife sighed, “Yes, yes.” She

clung to him, and remained rapt by the sight till the train drew near,

and then pulled him back in a panic.

“Well, there ain't really much to tell about her,” Fulkerson resumed

when they were seated in the car. “She's an invention of mine.”

“Of yours?” cried Mrs. March.

“Of course!” exclaimed her husband.

“Yes--at least in her present capacity. She sent me a story for the

syndicate, back in July some time, along about the time I first met old

Dryfoos here. It was a little too long for my purpose, and I thought

I could explain better how I wanted it cut in a call than I could in

a letter. She gave a Brooklyn address, and I went to see her. I found

her,” said Fulkerson, with a vague defiance, “a perfect lady. She was

living with an aunt over there; and she had seen better days, when she

was a girl, and worse ones afterward. I don't mean to say her husband

was a bad fellow; I guess he was pretty good; he was her music-teacher;

she met him in Germany, and they got married there, and got through her

property before they came over here. Well, she didn't strike me like a

person that could make much headway in literature. Her story was well

enough, but it hadn't much sand in it; kind of-well, academic, you know.

I told her so, and she understood, and cried a little; but she did the

best she could with the thing, and I took it and syndicated it. She kind

of stuck in my mind, and the first time I went to see the Dryfooses

they were stopping at a sort of family hotel then till they could find

a house--” Fulkerson broke off altogether, and said, “I don't know as I

know just how the Dryfooses struck you, Mrs. March?”

“Can't you imagine?” she answered, with a kindly, smile.

“Yes; but I don't believe I could guess how they would have struck you

last summer when I first saw them. My! oh my! there was the native earth

for you. Mely is a pretty wild colt now, but you ought to have seen her

before she was broken to harness.

“And Christine? Ever see that black leopard they got up there in the

Central Park? That was Christine. Well, I saw what they wanted. They

all saw it--nobody is a fool in all directions, and the Dryfooses are

in their right senses a good deal of the time. Well, to cut a long story

short, I got Mrs. Mandel to take 'em in hand--the old lady as well as

the girls. She was a born lady, and always lived like one till she saw

Mandel; and that something academic that killed her for a writer was

just the very thing for them. She knows the world well enough to know

just how much polish they can take on, and she don't try to put on a bit

more. See?”

“Yes, I can see,” said Mrs. March.

“Well, she took hold at once, as ready as a hospital-trained nurse; and

there ain't anything readier on this planet. She runs the whole concern,

socially and economically, takes all the care of housekeeping off the

old lady's hands, and goes round with the girls. By-the-bye, I'm going

to take my meals at your widow's, March, and Conrad's going to have his

lunch there. I'm sick of browsing about.”

“Mr. March's widow?” said his wife, looking at him with provisional

severity.

“I have no widow, Isabel,” he said, “and never expect to have, till I

leave you in the enjoyment of my life-insurance. I suppose Fulkerson

means the lady with the daughter who wanted to take us to board.”

“Oh yes. How are they getting on, I do wonder?” Mrs. March asked of

Fulkerson.

“Well, they've got one family to board; but it's a small one. I guess

they'll pull through. They didn't want to take any day boarders at

first, the widow said; I guess they have had to come to it.”

“Poor things!” sighed Mrs. March. “I hope they'll go back to the

country.”

“Well, I don't know. When you've once tasted New York--You wouldn't go

back to Boston, would you?”

“Instantly.”

Fulkerson laughed out a tolerant incredulity.

X

Beaton lit his pipe when he found himself in his room, and sat down

before the dull fire in his grate to think. It struck him there was

a dull fire in his heart a great deal like it; and he worked out a

fanciful analogy with the coals, still alive, and the ashes creeping

over them, and the dead clay and cinders. He felt sick of himself, sick

of his life and of all his works. He was angry with Fulkerson for having

got him into that art department of his, for having bought him up; and

he was bitter at fate because he had been obliged to use the money to

pay some pressing debts, and had not been able to return the check

his father had sent him. He pitied his poor old father; he ached with

compassion for him; and he set his teeth and snarled with contempt

through them for his own baseness. This was the kind of world it was;

but he washed his hands of it. The fault was in human nature, and he

reflected with pride that he had at least not invented human nature; he

had not sunk so low as that yet. The notion amused him; he thought he

might get a Satanic epigram out of it some way. But in the mean time

that girl, that wild animal, she kept visibly, tangibly before him; if

he put out his hand he might touch hers, he might pass his arm round

her waist. In Paris, in a set he knew there, what an effect she would be

with that look of hers, and that beauty, all out of drawing! They would

recognize the flame quality in her. He imagined a joke about her being

a fiery spirit, or nymph, naiad, whatever, from one of her native

gas-wells. He began to sketch on a bit of paper from the table at his

elbow vague lines that veiled and revealed a level, dismal landscape,

and a vast flame against an empty sky, and a shape out of the flame that

took on a likeness and floated detached from it. The sketch ran up the

left side of the sheet and stretched across it. Beaton laughed out.

Pretty good to let Fulkerson have that for the cover of his first

number! In black and red it would be effective; it would catch the eye

from the news-stands. He made a motion to throw it on the fire, but held

it back and slid it into the table-drawer, and smoked on. He saw the

dummy with the other sketch in the open drawer which he had brought away

from Fulkerson's in the morning and slipped in there, and he took it out

and looked at it. He made some criticisms in line with his pencil on it,

correcting the drawing here and there, and then he respected it a little

more, though he still smiled at the feminine quality--a young lady

quality.

In spite of his experience the night he called upon the Leightons,

Beaton could not believe that Alma no longer cared for him. She played

at having forgotten him admirably, but he knew that a few months before

she had been very mindful of him. He knew he had neglected them since

they came to New York, where he had led them to expect interest, if not

attention; but he was used to neglecting people, and he was somewhat

less used to being punished for it--punished and forgiven. He felt

that Alma had punished him so thoroughly that she ought to have been

satisfied with her work and to have forgiven him in her heart afterward.

He bore no resentment after the first tingling moments were-past; he

rather admired her for it; and he would have been ready to go back half

an hour later and accept pardon and be on the footing of last summer

again. Even now he debated with himself whether it was too late to call;

but, decidedly, a quarter to ten seemed late. The next day he determined

never to call upon the Leightons again; but he had no reason for this;

it merely came into a transitory scheme of conduct, of retirement from

the society of women altogether; and after dinner he went round to see

them.

He asked for the ladies, and they all three received him, Alma not

without a surprise that intimated itself to him, and her mother with

no appreciable relenting; Miss Woodburn, with the needlework which she

found easier to be voluble over than a book, expressed in her welcome a

neutrality both cordial to Beaton and loyal to Alma.

“Is it snowing outdo's?” she asked, briskly, after the greetings were

transacted. “Mah goodness!” she said, in answer to his apparent surprise

at the question. “Ah mahght as well have stayed in the Soath, for all

the winter Ah have seen in New York yet.”

“We don't often have snow much before New-Year's,” said Beaton.

“Miss Woodburn is wild for a real Northern winter,” Mrs. Leighton

explained.

“The othah naght Ah woke up and looked oat of the window and saw all the

roofs covered with snow, and it turned oat to be nothing but moonlaght.

Ah was never so disappointed in mah lahfe,” said Miss Woodburn.

“If you'll come to St. Barnaby next summer, you shall have all the

winter you want,” said Alma.

“I can't let you slander St. Barnaby in that way,” said Beaton, with the

air of wishing to be understood as meaning more than he said.

“Yes?” returned Alma, coolly. “I didn't know you were so fond of the

climate.”

“I never think of it as a climate. It's a landscape. It doesn't matter

whether it's hot or cold.”

“With the thermometer twenty below, you'd find that it mattered,” Alma

persisted.

“Is that the way you feel about St. Barnaby, too, Mrs. Leighton?” Beaton

asked, with affected desolation.

“I shall be glad enough to go back in the summer,” Mrs. Leighton

conceded.

“And I should be glad to go now,” said Beaton, looking at Alma. He had

the dummy of 'Every Other Week' in his hand, and he saw Alma's eyes

wandering toward it whenever he glanced at her. “I should be glad to

go anywhere to get out of a job I've undertaken,” he continued, to

Mrs. Leighton. “They're going to start some sort of a new illustrated

magazine, and they've got me in for their art department. I'm not fit

for it; I'd like to run away. Don't you want to advise me a little, Mrs.

Leighton? You know how much I value your taste, and I'd like to have you

look at the design for the cover of the first number: they're going to

have a different one for every number. I don't know whether you'll agree

with me, but I think this is rather nice.”

He faced the dummy round, and then laid it on the table before Mrs.

Leighton, pushing some of her work aside to make room for it and

standing over her while she bent forward to look at it.

Alma kept her place, away from the table.

“Mah goodness! Ho' exciting!” said Miss Woodburn. “May anybody look?”

“Everybody,” said Beaton.

“Well, isn't it perfectly choming!” Miss Woodburn exclaimed. “Come

and look at this, Miss Leighton,” she called to Alma, who reluctantly

approached.

“What lines are these?” Mrs. Leighton asked, pointing to Beaton's pencil

scratches.

“They're suggestions of modifications,” he replied.

“I don't think they improve it much. What do you think, Alma?”

“Oh, I don't know,” said the girl, constraining her voice to an effect

of indifference and glancing carelessly down at the sketch. “The design

might be improved; but I don't think those suggestions would do it.”

“They're mine,” said Beaton, fixing his eyes upon her with a beautiful

sad dreaminess that he knew he could put into them; he spoke with a

dreamy remoteness of tone--his wind-harp stop, Wetmore called it.

“I supposed so,” said Alma, calmly.

“Oh, mah goodness!” cried Miss Woodburn. “Is that the way you awtusts

talk to each othah? Well, Ah'm glad Ah'm not an awtust--unless I could

do all the talking.”

“Artists cannot tell a fib,” Alma said, “or even act one,” and she

laughed in Beaton's upturned face.

He did not unbend his dreamy gaze. “You're quite right. The suggestions

are stupid.”

Alma turned to Miss Woodburn: “You hear? Even when we speak of our own

work.”

“Ah nevah hoad anything lahke it!”

“And the design itself?” Beaton persisted.

“Oh, I'm not an art editor,” Alma answered, with a laugh of exultant

evasion.

A tall, dark, grave-looking man of fifty, with a swarthy face and

iron-gray mustache and imperial and goatee, entered the room. Beaton

knew the type; he had been through Virginia sketching for one of the

illustrated papers, and he had seen such men in Richmond. Miss Woodburn

hardly needed to say, “May Ah introduce you to mah fathaw, Co'nel

Woodburn, Mr. Beaton?”

The men shook hands, and Colonel Woodburn said, in that soft, gentle,

slow Southern voice without our Northern contractions: “I am very glad

to meet you, sir; happy to make yo' acquaintance. Do not move, madam,”

he said to Mrs. Leighton, who made a deprecatory motion to let him pass

to the chair beyond her; “I can find my way.” He bowed a bulk that did

not lend itself readily to the devotion, and picked up the ball of yarn

she had let drop out of her lap in half rising. “Yo' worsteds, madam.”

“Yarn, yarn, Colonel Woodburn!” Alma shouted. “You're quite

incorrigible. A spade is a spade!”

“But sometimes it is a trump, my dear young lady,” said the Colonel,

with unabated gallantry; “and when yo' mothah uses yarn, it is worsteds.

But I respect worsteds even under the name of yarn: our ladies--my own

mothah and sistahs--had to knit the socks we wore--all we could get in

the woe.”

“Yes, and aftah the woe,” his daughter put in. “The knitting has

not stopped yet in some places. Have you been much in the Soath, Mr.

Beaton?”

Beaton explained just how much.

“Well, sir,” said the Colonel, “then you have seen a country making

gigantic struggles to retrieve its losses, sir. The South is advancing

with enormous strides, sir.”

“Too fast for some of us to keep up,” said Miss Woodburn, in an audible

aside. “The pace in Charlottesboag is pofectly killing, and we had to

drop oat into a slow place like New York.”

“The progress in the South is material now,” said the Colonel;

“and those of us whose interests are in another direction find

ourselves--isolated--isolated, sir. The intellectual centres are still

in the No'th, sir; the great cities draw the mental activity of the

country to them, sir. Necessarily New York is the metropolis.”

“Oh, everything comes here,” said Beaton, impatient of the elder's

ponderosity. Another sort of man would have sympathized with the

Southerner's willingness to talk of himself, and led him on to speak of

his plans and ideals. But the sort of man that Beaton was could not do

this; he put up the dummy into the wrapper he had let drop on the floor

beside him, and tied it round with string while Colonel Woodburn was

talking. He got to his feet with the words he spoke and offered Mrs.

Leighton his hand.

“Must you go?” she asked, in surprise.

“I am on my way to a reception,” he said. She had noticed that he was

in evening dress; and now she felt the vague hurt that people invited

nowhere feel in the presence of those who are going somewhere. She did

not feel it for herself, but for her daughter; and she knew Alma would

not have let her feel it if she could have prevented it. But Alma had

left the room for a moment, and she tacitly indulged this sense of

injury in her behalf.

“Please say good-night to Miss Leighton for me,” Beaton continued. He

bowed to Miss Woodburn, “Goodnight, Miss Woodburn,” and to her father,

bluntly, “Goodnight.”

“Good-night, sir,” said the Colonel, with a sort of severe suavity.

“Oh, isn't he choming!” Miss Woodburn whispered to Mrs. Leighton when

Beaton left the room.

Alma spoke to him in the hall without. “You knew that was my design, Mr.

Beaton. Why did you bring it?”

“Why?” He looked at her in gloomy hesitation.

Then he said: “You know why. I wished to talk it over with you, to serve

you, please you, get back your good opinion. But I've done neither the

one nor the other; I've made a mess of the whole thing.”

Alma interrupted him. “Has it been accepted?”

“It will be accepted, if you will let it.”

“Let it?” she laughed. “I shall be delighted.” She saw him swayed a

little toward her. “It's a matter of business, isn't it?”

“Purely. Good-night.”

When Alma returned to the room, Colonel Woodburn was saying to Mrs.

Leighton: “I do not contend that it is impossible, madam, but it is very

difficult in a thoroughly commercialized society, like yours, to have

the feelings of a gentleman. How can a business man, whose prosperity,

whose earthly salvation, necessarily lies in the adversity of some one

else, be delicate and chivalrous, or even honest? If we could have had

time to perfect our system at the South, to eliminate what was evil and

develop what was good in it, we should have had a perfect system. But

the virus of commercialism was in us, too; it forbade us to make the

best of a divine institution, and tempted us to make the worst. Now the

curse is on the whole country; the dollar is the measure of every value,

the stamp of every success. What does not sell is a failure; and what

sells succeeds.”

“The hobby is oat, mah deah,” said Miss Woodburn, in an audible aside to

Alma.

“Were you speaking of me, Colonel Woodburn?” Alma asked.

“Surely not, my dear young lady.”

“But he's been saying that awtusts are just as greedy aboat money as

anybody,” said his daughter.

“The law of commercialism is on everything in a commercial society,”

the Colonel explained, softening the tone in which his convictions were

presented. “The final reward of art is money, and not the pleasure of

creating.”

“Perhaps they would be willing to take it all oat in that if othah

people would let them pay their bills in the pleasure of creating,” his

daughter teased.

“They are helpless, like all the rest,” said her father, with the same

deference to her as to other women. “I do not blame them.”

“Oh, mah goodness! Didn't you say, sir, that Mr. Beaton had bad

manners?”

Alma relieved a confusion which he seemed to feel in reference to her.

“Bad manners? He has no manners! That is, when he's himself. He has

pretty good ones when he's somebody else.”

Miss Woodburn began, “Oh, mah-” and then stopped herself. Alma's mother

looked at her with distressed question, but the girl seemed perfectly

cool and contented; and she gave her mind provisionally to a point

suggested by Colonel Woodburn's talk.

“Still, I can't believe it was right to hold people in slavery, to

whip them and sell them. It never did seem right to me,” she added, in

apology for her extreme sentiments to the gentleness of her adversary.

“I quite agree with you, madam,” said the Colonel. “Those were the

abuses of the institution. But if we had not been vitiated on the one

hand and threatened on the other by the spirit of commercialism from the

North--and from Europe, too--those abuses could have been eliminated,

and the institution developed in the direction of the mild

patriarchalism of the divine intention.” The Colonel hitched his chair,

which figured a hobby careering upon its hind legs, a little toward Mrs.

Leighton and the girls approached their heads and began to whisper; they

fell deferentially silent when the Colonel paused in his argument, and

went on again when he went on.

At last they heard Mrs. Leighton saying, “And have you heard from the

publishers about your book yet?”

Then Miss Woodburn cut in, before her father could answer: “The coase of

commercialism is on that, too. They are trahing to fahnd oat whethah it

will pay.”

“And they are right-quite right,” said the Colonel. “There is no longer

any other criterion; and even a work that attacks the system must be

submitted to the tests of the system.”

“The system won't accept destruction on any othah tomes,” said Miss

Woodburn, demurely.

XI.

At the reception, where two men in livery stood aside to let him pass

up the outside steps of the house, and two more helped him off with his

overcoat indoors, and a fifth miscalled his name into the drawing-room,

the Syracuse stone-cutter's son met the niece of Mrs. Horn, and began

at once to tell her about his evening at the Dryfooses'. He was in very

good spirits, for so far as he could have been elated or depressed by

his parting with Alma Leighton he had been elated; she had not treated

his impudence with the contempt that he felt it deserved; she must still

be fond of him; and the warm sense of this, by operation of an obscure

but well-recognized law of the masculine being, disposed him to be

rather fond of Miss Vance. She was a slender girl, whose semi-aesthetic

dress flowed about her with an accentuation of her long forms, and

redeemed them from censure by the very frankness with which it confessed

them; nobody could have said that Margaret Vance was too tall. Her

pretty little head, which she had an effect of choosing to have little

in the same spirit of judicious defiance, had a good deal of reading

in it; she was proud to know literary and artistic fashions as well as

society fashions. She liked being singled out by an exterior distinction

so obvious as Beaton's, and she listened with sympathetic interest to

his account of those people. He gave their natural history reality by

drawing upon his own; he reconstructed their plebeian past from the

experiences of his childhood and his youth of the pre-Parisian period;

and he had a pang of suicidal joy in insulting their ignorance of the

world.

“What different kinds of people you meet!” said the girl at last, with

an envious sigh. Her reading had enlarged the bounds of her imagination,

if not her knowledge; the novels nowadays dealt so much with very common

people, and made them seem so very much more worth while than the people

one met.

She said something like this to Beaton. He answered: “You can meet the

people I'm talking of very easily, if you want to take the trouble. It's

what they came to New York for. I fancy it's the great ambition of their

lives to be met.”

“Oh yes,” said Miss Vance, fashionably, and looked down; then she looked

up and said, intellectually: “Don't you think it's a great pity? How

much better for them to have stayed where they were and what they were!”

“Then you could never have had any chance of meeting them,” said Beaton.

“I don't suppose you intend to go out to the gas country?”

“No,” said Miss Vance, amused. “Not that I shouldn't like to go.”

“What a daring spirit! You ought to be on the staff of 'Every Other

Week,'” said Beaton.

“The staff-Every Other Week? What is it?”

“The missing link; the long-felt want of a tie between the Arts and the

Dollars.” Beaton gave her a very picturesque, a very dramatic sketch of

the theory, the purpose, and the personnel of the new enterprise.

Miss Vance understood too little about business of any kind to know

how it differed from other enterprises of its sort. She thought it was

delightful; she thought Beaton must be glad to be part of it, though he

had represented himself so bored, so injured, by Fulkerson's insisting

upon having him. “And is it a secret? Is it a thing not to be spoken

of?”

“'Tutt' altro'! Fulkerson will be enraptured to have it spoken of in

society. He would pay any reasonable bill for the advertisement.”

“What a delightful creature! Tell him it shall all be spent in charity.”

“He would like that. He would get two paragraphs out of the fact, and

your name would go into the 'Literary Notes' of all the newspapers.”

“Oh, but I shouldn't want my name used!” cried the girl, half horrified

into fancying the situation real.

“Then you'd better not say anything about 'Every Other Week'. Fulkerson

is preternaturally unscrupulous.”

March began to think so too, at times. He was perpetually suggesting

changes in the make-up of the first number, with a view to its greater

vividness of effect. One day he came and said: “This thing isn't going

to have any sort of get up and howl about it, unless you have a paper

in the first number going for Bevans's novels. Better get Maxwell to do

it.”

“Why, I thought you liked Bevans's novels?”

“So I did; but where the good of 'Every Other Week' is concerned I am a

Roman father. The popular gag is to abuse Bevans, and Maxwell is the man

to do it. There hasn't been a new magazine started for the last three

years that hasn't had an article from Maxwell in its first number

cutting Bevans all to pieces. If people don't see it, they'll think

'Every Other Week' is some old thing.”

March did not know whether Fulkerson was joking or not. He suggested,

“Perhaps they'll think it's an old thing if they do see it.”

“Well, get somebody else, then; or else get Maxwell to write under an

assumed name. Or--I forgot! He'll be anonymous under our system, anyway.

Now there ain't a more popular racket for us to work in that first

number than a good, swinging attack on Bevans. People read his books

and quarrel over 'em, and the critics are all against him, and a regular

flaying, with salt and vinegar rubbed in afterward, will tell more with

people who like good old-fashioned fiction than anything else. I like

Bevans's things, but, dad burn it! when it comes to that first number,

I'd offer up anybody.”

“What an immoral little wretch you are, Fulkerson!” said March, with a

laugh.

Fulkerson appeared not to be very strenuous about the attack on the

novelist. “Say!” he called out, gayly, “what should you think of a paper

defending the late lamented system of slavery'?”

“What do you mean, Fulkerson?” asked March, with a puzzled smile.

Fulkerson braced his knees against his desk, and pushed himself back,

but kept his balance to the eye by canting his hat sharply forward.

“There's an old cock over there at the widow's that's written a book to

prove that slavery was and is the only solution of the labor problem.

He's a Southerner.”

“I should imagine,” March assented.

“He's got it on the brain that if the South could have been let alone by

the commercial spirit and the pseudophilanthropy of the North, it

would have worked out slavery into a perfectly ideal condition for the

laborer, in which he would have been insured against want, and protected

in all his personal rights by the state. He read the introduction to

me last night. I didn't catch on to all the points--his daughter's an

awfully pretty girl, and I was carrying that fact in my mind all the

time, too, you know--but that's about the gist of it.”

“Seems to regard it as a lost opportunity?” said March.

“Exactly! What a mighty catchy title, Neigh? Look well on the

title-page.”

“Well written?”

“I reckon so; I don't know. The Colonel read it mighty eloquently.”

“It mightn't be such bad business,” said March, in a muse. “Could you

get me a sight of it without committing yourself?”

“If the Colonel hasn't sent it off to another publisher this morning. He

just got it back with thanks yesterday. He likes to keep it travelling.”

“Well, try it. I've a notion it might be a curious thing.”

“Look here, March,” said Fulkerson, with the effect of taking a fresh

hold; “I wish you could let me have one of those New York things of

yours for the first number. After all, that's going to be the great

card.”

“I couldn't, Fulkerson; I couldn't, really. I want to philosophize

the material, and I'm too new to it all yet. I don't want to do merely

superficial sketches.”

“Of course! Of course! I understand that. Well, I don't want to hurry

you. Seen that old fellow of yours yet? I think we ought to have that

translation in the first number; don't you? We want to give 'em a notion

of what we're going to do in that line.”

“Yes,” said March; “and I was going out to look up Lindau this morning.

I've inquired at Maroni's, and he hasn't been there for several days.

I've some idea perhaps he's sick. But they gave me his address, and I'm

going to see.”

“Well, that's right. We want the first number to be the keynote in every

way.”

March shook his head. “You can't make it so. The first number is bound

to be a failure always, as far as the representative character goes.

It's invariably the case. Look at the first numbers of all the things

you've seen started. They're experimental, almost amateurish, and

necessarily so, not only because the men that are making them up are

comparatively inexperienced like ourselves, but because the material

sent them to deal with is more or less consciously tentative. People

send their adventurous things to a new periodical because the whole

thing is an adventure. I've noticed that quality in all the volunteer

contributions; it's in the articles that have been done to order even.

No; I've about made up my mind that if we can get one good striking

paper into the first number that will take people's minds off the

others, we shall be doing all we can possible hope for. I should like,”

March added, less seriously, “to make up three numbers ahead, and

publish the third one first.”

Fulkerson dropped forward and struck his fist on the desk. “It's a

first-rate idea. Why not do it?”

March laughed. “Fulkerson, I don't believe there's any quackish thing

you wouldn't do in this cause. From time to time I'm thoroughly ashamed

of being connected with such a charlatan.”

Fulkerson struck his hat sharply backward. “Ah, dad burn it! To give

that thing the right kind of start I'd walk up and down Broadway between

two boards, with the title-page of 'Every Other Week' facsimiled on one

and my name and address on the--”

He jumped to his feet and shouted, “March, I'll do it!”

“What?”

“I'll hire a lot of fellows to make mud-turtles of themselves, and I'll

have a lot of big facsimiles of the title-page, and I'll paint the town

red!”

March looked aghast at him. “Oh, come, now, Fulkerson!”

“I mean it. I was in London when a new man had taken hold of the old

Cornhill, and they were trying to boom it, and they had a procession of

these mudturtles that reached from Charing Cross to Temple Bar. Cornhill

Magazine. Sixpence. Not a dull page in it.' I said to myself then that

it was the livest thing I ever saw. I respected the man that did that

thing from the bottom of my heart. I wonder I ever forgot it. But it

shows what a shaky thing the human mind is at its best.”

“You infamous mountebank!”, said March, with great amusement at

Fulkerson's access; “you call that congeries of advertising instinct

of yours the human mind at its best? Come, don't be so diffident,

Fulkerson. Well, I'm off to find Lindau, and when I come back I hope

Mr. Dryfoos will have you under control. I don't suppose you'll be quite

sane again till after the first number is out. Perhaps public opinion

will sober you then.”

“Confound it, March! How do you think they will take it? I swear I'm

getting so nervous I don't know half the time which end of me is up. I

believe if we don't get that thing out by the first of February it 'll

be the death of me.”

“Couldn't wait till Washington's Birthday? I was thinking it would give

the day a kind of distinction, and strike the public imagination, if--”

“No, I'll be dogged if I could!” Fulkerson lapsed more and more into

the parlance of his early life in this season of strong excitement. “I

believe if Beaton lags any on the art leg I'll kill him.”

“Well, I shouldn't mind your killing Beaton,” said March, tranquilly, as

he went out.

He went over to Third Avenue and took the Elevated down to Chatham

Square. He found the variety of people in the car as unfailingly

entertaining as ever. He rather preferred the East Side to the West

Side lines, because they offered more nationalities, conditions, and

characters to his inspection. They draw not only from the up-town

American region, but from all the vast hive of populations swarming

between them and the East River. He had found that, according to the

hour, American husbands going to and from business, and American wives

going to and from shopping, prevailed on the Sixth Avenue road, and that

the most picturesque admixture to these familiar aspects of human nature

were the brilliant eyes and complexions of the American Hebrews,

who otherwise contributed to the effect of well-clad comfort and

citizen-self-satisfaction of the crowd. Now and then he had found

himself in a car mostly filled with Neapolitans from the constructions

far up the line, where he had read how they are worked and fed and

housed like beasts; and listening to the jargon of their unintelligible

dialect, he had occasion for pensive question within himself as to

what notion these poor animals formed of a free republic from their

experience of life under its conditions; and whether they found them

practically very different from those of the immemorial brigandage and

enforced complicity with rapine under which they had been born. But,

after all, this was an infrequent effect, however massive, of travel on

the West Side, whereas the East offered him continual entertainment in

like sort. The sort was never quite so squalid. For short distances the

lowest poverty, the hardest pressed labor, must walk; but March never

entered a car without encountering some interesting shape of shabby

adversity, which was almost always adversity of foreign birth. New York

is still popularly supposed to be in the control of the Irish, but

March noticed in these East Side travels of his what must strike every

observer returning to the city after a prolonged absence: the numerical

subordination of the dominant race. If they do not outvote them,

the people of Germanic, of Slavonic, of Pelasgic, of Mongolian stock

outnumber the prepotent Celts; and March seldom found his speculation

centred upon one of these. The small eyes, the high cheeks, the broad

noses, the puff lips, the bare, cue-filleted skulls, of Russians, Poles,

Czechs, Chinese; the furtive glitter of Italians; the blonde dulness of

Germans; the cold quiet of Scandinavians--fire under ice--were aspects

that he identified, and that gave him abundant suggestion for the

personal histories he constructed, and for the more public-spirited

reveries in which he dealt with the future economy of our heterogeneous

commonwealth. It must be owned that he did not take much trouble about

this; what these poor people were thinking, hoping, fearing, enjoying,

suffering; just where and how they lived; who and what they individually

were--these were the matters of his waking dreams as he stared hard

at them, while the train raced farther into the gay ugliness--the

shapeless, graceful, reckless picturesqueness of the Bowery.