IX

In no way was Norman's luck superior to most men's more splendidly than

in that his inborn tendency to arrogant and extravagant desires was

matched by an inborn capacity to get the necessary money. His luxurious

tastes were certainly not moderated by his associations--enormously rich

people who, while they could be stingy enough in some respects, at the

same time could and did fling away fortunes in gratifying selfish

whims--for silly showy houses, for retinues of wasteful servants, for

gewgaws that accentuated the homeliness of their homely women and

coarsened and vulgarized their pretty women--or perhaps for a night's

gambling or entertaining, or for the forced smiles and contemptuous

caresses of some belle of the other world. Norman fortunately cared not

at all for the hugely expensive pomp of the life of the rich; if he had,

he would have hopelessly involved himself, as after all he was not a

money-grubber but a lawyer. But when there appeared anything for which

he did care, he was ready to bid for it like the richest of the rich.

Therefore the investment of a few thousand dollars seemed a small matter

to him. He had many a time tossed away far more for far less. He did not

dole out the sum he had agreed to provide. He paid it into the Jersey

City bank to the credit of the Chemical Research Company and informed

its secretary and treasurer that she could draw freely against it. "If

you will read the by-laws of the company," said he, "you will see that

you've the right to spend exactly as you see fit. When the money runs

low, let me know."

"I'll be very careful," said Dorothea Hallowell, secretary and

treasurer.

"That's precisely what we don't want," replied he. He glanced round the

tiny parlor of the cottage. "We want everything to be run in first-class

shape. That's the only way to get results. First of all, you must take a

proper house--a good-sized one, with large grounds--room for building

your father a proper laboratory."

Her dazed and dazzled expression delighted him.

"And you must live better. You must keep at least two servants."

"But we can't afford it."

"Your father has five thousand a year. You have fifteen hundred. That

makes sixty-five hundred. The rent of the house and the wages and keep

of the servants are a charge against the corporation. So, you can well

afford to make yourselves comfortable."

"I haven't got used to the idea as yet," said Dorothea. "Yes--we _are_

better off than we were."

"And you must live better. I want you to get some clothes--and things of

that sort."

She shrank within herself and sat quiet, her gaze fixed upon her hands

lying limp in her lap.

"There is no reason why your father shouldn't be made absolutely

comfortable and happy. That's the way to get the best results from a man

of his sort."

She faded on toward the self-effacing blank he had first known.

"Think it out, Dorothy," he said in his frankest, kindliest way. "You'll

see I'm right."

"No," she said.

"No? What does that mean?"

"I've an instinct against it," replied she. "I'd rather father and I

kept on as we are."

"But that's impossible. You've no right to live in this small, cramping

way. You must broaden out and give _him_ room to grow. . . . Isn't that

sensible?"

"It sounds so," she admitted. "But--" She gazed round helplessly--"I'm

afraid!"

"Afraid of what?"

"I don't know."

"Then don't bother about it."

"I'll have to be very--careful," she said thoughtfully.

"As you please," replied he. "Only, don't live and think on a

ten-dollar-a-week basis. That isn't the way to get on."

He never again brought up the matter in direct form. But most of his

conversation was indirect and more or less subtle suggestions as to ways

of branching out. She moved cautiously for a few days, then timidly

began to spend money.

There is a notion widely spread abroad that people who have little money

know more about the art of spending money and the science of economizing

than those who have much. It would be about as sensible to say that the

best swimmers are those who have never been near the water, or no nearer

than a bath tub. Anyone wishing to be convinced need only make an

excursion into the poor tenement district and observe the garbage

barrels overflowing with spoiled food--or the trashy goods exposed for

sale in the shops and the markets. Those who have had money and have

lost it are probably, as a rule, the wisest in thrift. Those who have

never had money are almost invariably prodigal--because they are

ignorant. When Dorothea Hallowell was a baby the family had had money.

But never since she could remember had they been anything but poor.

She did not know how to spend money. She did not know prices or

values--being in that respect precisely like the mass of mankind--and

womankind--who imagine they are economical because they hunt so-called

bargains and haggle with merchants who have got doubly ready for them by

laying in inferior goods and by putting up prices in advance. She knew

how much ten dollars a week was, the meaning of the twenty to thirty

dollars a week her father had made. But she had only a faint--and

exaggeratedly mistaken--notion about sixty-five hundred a year--six and

a half thousands. It seemed wealth to her, so vast that a hundred

thousand a year would have seemed no more. As soon as she drifted away

from the known course--the thirty to forty dollars a week upon which

they had been living--Dorothea Hallowell was in a trackless sea, with a

broken compass and no chart whatever. A common enough experience in

America, the land of sudden changes of fortune, of rosiest hopes about

"striking it rich," of carelessness and ignorance as to values, of eager

and untrained appetite for luxury and novelty of any and every kind.

At first any expenditure, however small, for the plainest comfort which

had been beyond their means seemed a giddy extravagance. But a bank

account--_and_ a check book--soon dissipated that nervousness. A few

charge accounts, a little practice in the simple easy gesture of drawing

a check, and she was almost at her ease. With people who have known only

squalor or with those who have earned their better fortune by privation

and slow accumulation, the spreading out process is usually slow--not so

slow as it used to be when our merchants had not learned the art of

tempting any and every kind of human nature, but still far from rapid. A

piece of money reminds them vividly and painfully of the toil put into

acquiring it; and they shy away from the pitfall of the facile check.

With those born and bred as Dorothy was and elevated into what seems to

them affluence by no effort of their own, the spreading is a tropical,

overnight affair.

Counting all she spent and arranged to spend in those first few weeks,

you had no great total. But it was great for a girl who had been making

ten dollars a week. Also there were sown in her mind broadcast and thick

the seeds of desire for more luxurious comfort, of need for it, that

could never be uprooted.

Norman came over almost every evening. He got a new and youthful and

youth-restoring kind of pleasure out of this process of expansion. He

liked to hear each trifling detail, and he was always making suggestions

that bore immediate fruit in further expenditure. When he again brought

up the subject of a larger house, she listened with only the faintest

protests. Her ideas of such a short time before seemed small, laughably

small now. "Father was worrying only this morning because he is so

cramped," she admitted.

"We must remedy that at once," said Norman.

[Illustration: "'It has killed me,' he groaned."]

And on the following Sunday he and she went house hunting. They found a

satisfactory place--peculiarly satisfactory to Norman because it was

near the Hudson tunnel, and so only a few minutes from his office. To

Dorothy it loomed a mansion, almost a palace. In fact it was a modestly

roomy old-fashioned brick house, with a brick stable at the side that,

with a little changing, would make an admirable laboratory.

"You haven't the time--or the experience--to fit this place up," said

Norman. "I'll attend to it--that is, I'll have it attended to." Seeing

her uneasy expression, he added: "I can get much better terms. They'd

certainly overcharge you. There's no sense in wasting money--is there?"

"No," she admitted, convinced.

He gave the order to a firm of decorators. It was a moderate order,

considering the amount of work that had to be done. But if the girl had

seen the estimates Norman indorsed, she would have been terrified.

However, he saw to it that she did not see them; and she, ignorant of

values, believed him when he told her the general account of the

corporation must be charged with two thousand dollars.

Her alarm took him by surprise. The sum seemed small to him--and it was

only about one fifth what the alterations and improvements had cost.

Cried she, "Why, that's more than our whole income for a year has been!"

"You are forgetting these improvements add to the value of the property.

I've bought it."

That quieted her. "You are sure you didn't pay those decorators and

furnishers too much?" said she.

"You don't like their work?" inquired he, chagrined.

"Oh, yes--yes, indeed," she assured him. "I like plain, solid-looking

things. But--two thousand dollars is a lot of money."

Norman regretted that, as his whole object had been to please her, he

had not ordered the more showy cheaper stuff but had insisted upon the

simplest, plainest-looking appointments throughout. Even her bedroom

furniture, even her dressing table set, was of the kind that suggests

cost only to the experienced, carefully and well educated in values and

in taste.

"But I'm sure it isn't fair to charge _all_ these things to the company,"

she protested. "I can't allow it. Not the things for my personal use."

"You _are_ a fierce watchdog of a treasurer," said Norman, laughing at her

but noting and respecting the fine instinct of good breeding shown in

her absence of greediness, of desire to get all she could. "But I'm

letting the firm of decorators take over what you leave behind in the

old house. I'll see what they'll allow for it. Maybe that will cover the

expense you object to."

This contented her. Nor was she in the least suspicious when he

announced that the decorators had made such a liberal allowance that the

deficit was but three hundred dollars. "Those chaps," he explained,

"have a wide margin of profit. Besides, they're eager to get more and

bigger work from me."

A few weeks, and he was enjoying the sight of her ensconced with her

father in luxurious comfort--with two servants, with a well-run house,

with pleasant gardens, with all that is at the command of an income of

six thousand a year in a comparatively inexpensive city. Only

occasionally--and then not deeply--was he troubled by the reflection

that he was still far from his goal--and had made apparently absurdly

little progress toward it through all this maneuvering. The truth was,

he preferred to linger when lingering gave him so many new kinds of

pleasure. Of those in the large and motley company that sit down to the

banquet of the senses, the most are crude, if not coarse, gluttons. They

eat fast and furiously, having a raw appetite. Now and then there is one

who has some idea of the art of enjoyment--the art of prolonging and

varying both the joys of anticipation and the joys of realization.

He turned his attention to tempting her to extravagance in dress. But

his success there was not all he could have wished. She wore better

clothes--much better. She no longer looked the poor working girl,

struggling desperately to be neat and clean. She had almost immediately

taken on the air of the comfortable classes. But everything she got for

herself was inexpensive and she made dresses for herself, and trimmed

all her hats. With the hats Norman found no fault. There her good taste

produced about as satisfactory results as could have been got at the

fashionable milliners--more satisfactory than are got by the women who

go there, with no taste of their own beyond a hazy idea that they want

"something like what Mrs. So-and-So is wearing." But homemade dresses

were a different matter.

Norman longed to have her in toilettes that would bring out the full

beauty of her marvelous figure. He, after the manner of the more

intelligent and worldly-wise New York men, had some knowledge of

women's clothes. His sister knew how to dress; Josephine knew how,

though her taste was somewhat too sober to suit Norman--at least to suit

him in Dorothy. He thought out and suggested dresses to Dorothy, and

told her where to get them. Dorothy tried to carry out at home such of

his suggestions as pleased her--for, like all women, she believed she

knew how to dress herself. Her handiwork was creditable. It would have

contented a less exacting and less trained taste than Norman's. It would

have contented him had he not been infatuated with her beauty of face

and form. As it was, the improvement in her appearance only served to

intensify his agitation. He now saw in her not only all that had first

conquered him, but also those unsuspected beauties and graces--and

possibilities of beauty and grace yet more entrancing, were she but

dressed properly.

"You don't begin to appreciate how beautiful you are," said he. It had

ever been one of his rules in dealing with women to feed their physical

vanity sparingly and cautiously, lest it should blaze up into one of

those consuming flames that produce a very frenzy of conceit. But this

rule, like all the others, had gone by the board. He could not conceal

his infatuation from her, not even when he saw that it was turning her

head and making his task harder and harder. "If you would only go over

to New York to several dressmakers whose names I'll give you, I know

you'd get clothes from them that you could touch up into something

uncommon."

"I can't afford it," said she. "What I have is good enough--and costs

more than I've the right to pay." And her tone silenced him; it was the

tone of finality, and he had discovered that she had a will.

* * * * *

Never before had Frederick Norman let any important thing drift. And

when he started in with Dorothy he had no idea of changing that fixed

policy. He would have scoffed if anyone had foretold to him that he

would permit the days and the weeks to go by with nothing definite

accomplished toward any definite purpose. Yet that was what occurred.

Every time he came he had in mind a fixed resolve to make distinct

progress with the girl. Every time he left he had a furious quarrel with

himself for his weakness. "She is making a fool of me," he said to

himself. "She _must_ be laughing at me." But he returned only to repeat

his folly, to add one more to the lengthening, mocking series of lost

opportunities.

The truth lay deeper than he saw. He recognized only his own weakness of

the infatuated lover's fatuous timidity. He did not realize how potent

her charm for him was, how completely content she made him when he was

with her, just from the fact that they were together. After a time an

unsatisfied passion often thus diffuses itself, ceases to be a narrow

torrent, becomes a broad river whose resistless force is hidden beneath

an appearance of sparkling calm. Her ingenuousness amused him; her

developing taste and imagination interested him; her freshness, her

freedom from any sense of his importance in the world fascinated him,

and there was a keener pleasure than he dreamed in the novel sensation

of breathing the perfume of what he, the one time cynic, would have

staked his life on being unsullied purity. Their relations were to him a

delightful variation upon the intimacy of master and pupil. Either he

was listening to her or was answering her questions--and the time flew.

And there never was a moment when he could have introduced the subject

that most concerned him when he was not with her. To have introduced it

would have been rudely to break the charm of a happy afternoon or

evening.

Was she leading him on and on nowhere deliberately? Or was it the sweet

and innocent simplicity it seemed? He could not tell. He would have

broken the charm and put the matter to the test had he not been afraid

of the consequences. What had he to fear? Was she not in his power? Was

she not his, whenever he should stretch forth his hand and claim her?

Yes--no doubt--not the slightest doubt. But--He was afraid to break

the charm; it was such a satisfying charm.

Then--there was her father.

Men who arrive anywhere in any direction always have the habit of

ignoring the nonessential more or less strongly developed. One

reason--perhaps the chief reason--why Norman had got up to the high

places of material success at so early an age was that he had an

unerring instinct for the essential and wasted no time or energy upon

the nonessential. In his present situation Dorothy's father, the

abstracted man of science, was one of the factors that obviously fell

into the nonessential class. Norman knew little about him, and cared

less. Also, he took care to avoid knowing him. Knowing the father would

open up possibilities of discomfort--But, being a wise young man,

Norman gave this matter the least possible thought.

Still, it was necessary that the two men see something of each other.

Hallowell discovered nothing about Norman, not enough about his personal

appearance to have recognized him in the street far enough away from the

laboratory to dissociate the two ideas. Human beings--except his

daughter--did not interest Hallowell; and his feeling for her was

somewhat in the nature of an abstraction. Norman, on the other hand, was

intensely interested in human beings; indeed, he was interested in

little else. He was always thrusting through surfaces, probing into

minds and souls. He sought thoroughly to understand the living machines

he used in furthering his ambitions and desires. So it was not long

before he learned much about old Newton Hallowell--and began to admire

him--and with a man of Norman's temperament to admire is to like.

He had assumed at the outset that the scientist was more or less the

crank. He had not talked with him many times before he discovered that,

far from being in any respect a crank, he was a most able and

well-balanced mentality--a genius. The day came when, Dorothy not having

returned from a shopping tour, he lingered in the laboratory talking

with the father, or, rather, listening while the man of great ideas

unfolded to him conceptions of the world that set his imagination to

soaring.

Most of us see but dimly beyond the ends of our noses, and visualize

what lies within our range of sight most imperfectly. We know little

about ourselves, less about others. We fancy that the world and the

human race always have been about as they now are, and always will be.

History reads to us like a fairy tale, to which we give conventional

acceptance as truth. As to the future, we can conceive nothing but the

continuation of just what we see about us in the present. Norman,

practical man though he was, living in and for the present, had yet an

imagination. He thought Hallowell a kind of fool for thinking only of

the future and working only for it--but he soon came to think him a

divine fool. And through Hallowell's spectacles he was charmed for many

an hour with visions of the world that is to be when, in the slow but

steady processes of evolution, the human race will become intelligent,

will conquer the universe with the weapons of science and will make it

over.

When he first stated his projects to Norman, the young man had

difficulty in restraining his amusement. A new idea, in any line of

thought with which we are not familiar, always strikes us as ridiculous.

Norman had been educated in the ignorant conventional way still in high

repute among the vulgar and among those whose chief delight is to make

the vulgar gape in awe. He therefore had no science, that is, no

knowledge--outside his profession--but only what is called learning,

though tommyrot would be a fitter name for it. He had only the most

meager acquaintance with that great fundamental of a sound and sane

education, embryology. He knew nothing of what science had already done

to destroy all the still current notions about the mystery of life and

birth. He still laughed, as at a clever bit of legerdemain, when

Hallowell showed him how far science had progressed toward mastery of

the life of the lower forms of existence--how those "worms" could be

artificially created, could be aged, made young again, made diseased and

decrepit, restored to perfect health, could be swung back and forth or

sideways or sinuously along the span of existence--could even be killed

and brought back to vigor.

"We've been at this sort of thing only a few years," said Hallowell. "I

rather think it will not be many years now before we shall not even need

the initial germ of life to enable us to create but can do it by pure

chemical means, just as a taper is lighted by holding a match to it."

Norman ceased to think of sleight-of-hand.

"Life," continued the juggler, transformed now into practical man,

leader of men, "life has been demonstrated to be simply one of the forms

of energy, or one of the consequences of energy. The final discovery is

scientifically not far away. Then--" His eyes lighted up.

"Then what?" asked Norman.

"Then immortality--in the body. Eternal youth and health. A body that is

renewable much as any of our inanimate machines of the factory is

renewable. Why not? So far as we know, no living thing ever dies except

by violence. Disease--old age--they are quite as much violence as the

knife and the bullet. What science can now do with these 'worms,' as my

daughter calls them--that it will be able to do with the higher

organisms."

"And the world would soon be jammed to the last acre," objected Norman.

Hallowell shrugged his shoulders. "Not at all. There will be no

necessity to create new people, except to take the place of those who

may be accidentally obliterated."

"But the world is dying--the earth, itself, I mean."

"True. But science may learn how to arrest that cooling process--or to

adapt man to it. Or, it may be that when the world ceases to be

inhabitable we shall have learned how to cross the star spaces, as I

think I've suggested before. Then--we should simply find a planet in its

youth somewhere, and migrate to it, as a man now moves to a new house

when the old ceases to please him."

"That is a long flight of the fancy," said Norman.

"Long--but no stronger than the telegraph or the telephone. The trouble

with us is that we have been long stupefied by the ignorant theological

ideas of the universe--ideas that have come down to us from the

childhood of the race. We haven't got used to the new era--the

scientific era. And that is natural. Why, until less than three

generations ago there was really no such thing as science."

"I hadn't thought of that," admitted Norman. "We certainly have got on

very fast in those three generations."

"Rather fast. Not so fast, however, as we shall in the next three.

Science--chemistry--is going speedily to change all the conditions of

life because it will turn topsy-turvy all the ways of producing

things--food, clothing, shelter. Less than two generations ago men lived

much as they had for thousands of years. But it's very different to-day.

It will be inconceivably different to-morrow."

Norman could not get these ideas out of his brain. He began to

understand why Hallowell cared nothing about the active life of the

day--about its religion, politics, modes of labor, its habits of one

creature preying upon another. To-morrow, not religion, not politics,

but chemistry, not priests nor politicians, but chemists, would change

all that--and change it by the only methods that compel. An abstract

idea of liberty or justice can be rejected, evaded, nullified. But a

telephone, a steam engine, a mode of prolonging life--those realizations

of ideas _compel_.

When Dorothy came, Norman went into the garden with her in a frame of

mind so different from any he had ever before experienced that he

scarcely recognized himself. As the influence of the father's glowing

imagination of genius waned before the daughter's physical loveliness

and enchantment for him, he said to himself, "I'll keep away from him."

Why? He did not permit himself to go on to examine into his reasons. But

he could not conceal them from himself quickly enough to hide the

knowledge that they were moral.

"What is the matter with you to-day?" said Dorothy. "You are not a bit

interesting."

"Interested, you mean," he said with a smile of raillery, for he had

long since discovered that she was not without the feminine vanity that

commands the centering of all interest in the woman herself and resents

any wandering of thought as a slur upon her own powers of fascination.

"Well, interested then," said she. "You are thinking about something

else."

"Not now," he assured her.

But he left early. No sooner had he got away from the house than the

scientific dreaming vanished and he wished himself back with her

again--back where every glance at her gave him the most exquisite

sensations. And when he came the following day he apparently had once

more restored her father to his proper place of a nonessential. All that

definitely remained of the day before's impression was a certain

satisfaction that he was aiding with his money an enterprise of greater

value and of less questionable character than merely his own project.

But the powerful influences upon our life and conduct are rarely direct

and definite. He, quite unconsciously, had a wholly different feeling

about Dorothy because of her father, because of what his new knowledge

of and respect for her father had revealed and would continue to reveal

to him as to the girl herself--her training, her inheritance, her

character that could not but be touched with the splendor of the

father's noble genius. And long afterward, when the father as a distinct

personality had been almost forgotten, Norman was still, altogether

unconsciously, influenced by him--powerfully, perhaps decisively

influenced. Norman had no notion of it, but ever after that talk in the

laboratory, Dorothy Hallowell was to him Newton Hallowell's daughter.

When he came the following day, with his original purposes and plans

once more intact, as he thought, he found that she had made more of a

toilet than usual, had devised a new way of doing her hair that enabled

him to hang a highly prized addition in his memory gallery of widely

varied portraits of her.

The afternoon was warm. They sat under a big old tree at the end of the

garden. He saw that she was much disturbed--and that it had to do with

him. From time to time she looked at him, studying his face when she

thought herself unobserved. As he had learned that it is never wise to

open up the disagreeable, he waited. After making several futile efforts

at conversation, she abruptly said:

"I saw Mr. Tetlow this morning--in Twenty-third Street. I was coming out

of a chemical supplies store where father had sent me."

She paused. But Norman did not help her. He continued to wait.

"He--Mr. Tetlow--acted very strangely," she went on. "I spoke to him. He

stared at me as if he weren't going to speak--as if I weren't fit to

speak to."

"Oh!" said Norman.

"Then he came hurrying after me. And he said, 'Do you know that Norman

is to be married in two weeks?'"

"So!" said Norman.

"And I said, 'What of it? How does that interest me?'"

"It didn't interest you?"

"I was surprised that you hadn't spoken of it," replied she. "But I was

more interested in Mr. Tetlow's manner. What do you think he said next?"

"I can't imagine," said Norman.

"Why--that I was even more shameless than he thought. He said: 'Oh, I

know all about you. I found out by accident. I shan't tell anyone, for I

can't help loving you still. But it has killed my belief in woman to

find out that _you_ would sell yourself.'"

She was looking at Norman with eyes large and grave. "And what did you

say?" he inquired.

"I didn't say anything. I looked at him as if he weren't there and

started on. Then he said, 'When Norman abandons you, as he soon will,

you can count on me, if you need a friend.'"