CHAPTER I

THE WHEEL OF LIFE

by

ELLEN GLASGOW

New York

Doubleday, Page & Company

1906

By the Same Author

THE DELIVERANCE

THE BATTLE-GROUND

THE FREEMAN, AND OTHER POEMS

THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE

PHASES OF AN INFERIOR PLANET

THE DESCENDANT

CONTENTS

PART I. Impulse

CHAPTER

I. In Which the Romantic Hero is Conspicuous by His Absence

II. Treats of an Eccentric Family

III. Apologises for an Old-fashioned Atmosphere

IV. Ushers in the Modern Spirit

V. In Which a Young Man Dreams Dreams

VI. Shows That Mr. Worldly-Wise-Man May Belong to Either Sex

VII. The Irresistible Force

VIII. Proves That a Poor Lover May Make an Excellent Friend

IX. Of Masques and Mummeries

X. Shows the Hero to Be Lacking in Heroic Qualities

XI. In Which a Lie Is the Better Part of Truth

PART II. Illusion

I. Of Pleasure as the Chief End of Man

II. An Advance and a Retreat

III. The Moth and the Flame

IV. Treats of the Attraction of Opposites

V. Shows the Dangers as Well as the Pleasures of the Chase

VI. The Finer Vision

VII. In Which Failure Is Crowned By Failure

VIII. "The Small Old Path"

IX. The Triumph of the Ego

X. In Which Adams Comes Into His Inheritance

XI. On the Wings of Life

PART III. Disenchantment

I. A Disconsolate Lover and a Pair of Blue Eyes

II. The Deification of Clay

III. The Greatest of These

IV. Adams Watches in the Night and Sees the Dawn

V. Treats of the Poverty of Riches

VI. The Feet of the God

VII. In Which Kemper Is Puzzled

VIII. Shows That Love Without Wisdom Is Folly

IX. Of the Fear in Love

X. The End of the Path

PART IV. Reconciliation

I. The Secret Chambers

II. In Which Laura Enters the Valley of Humiliation

III. Proves a Great City to Be a Great Solitude

IV. Shows That True Love Is True Service

V. Between Laura and Gerty

VI. Renewal

PART I

IMPULSE

CHAPTER I

IN WHICH THE ROMANTIC HERO IS CONSPICUOUS BY HIS ABSENCE

As the light fell on her face Gerty Bridewell awoke, stifled a yawn with

her pillow, and remembered that she had been very unhappy when she went

to bed. That was only six hours ago, and yet she felt now that her

unhappiness and the object of it, which was her husband, were of less

disturbing importance to her than the fact that she must get up and

stand for three minutes under the shower bath in her dressing-room. With

a sigh she pressed the pillow more firmly under her cheek, and lay

looking a little wistfully at her maid, who, having drawn back the

curtains at the window, stood now regarding her with the discreet and

confidential smile which drew from her a protesting frown of irritation.

"Well, I can't get up until I've had my coffee," she said in a voice

which produced an effect of mournful brightness rather than of anger, "I

haven't the strength to put so much as my foot out of bed."

Her eyes followed the woman across the room and through the door, and

then, turning instinctively to the broad mirror above her dressing

table, hung critically upon the brilliant red and white reflection in

the glass. It was her comforting assurance that every woman looked her

best in bed; and as she lay now, following the lines of her charming

figure beneath the satin coverlet, she found herself wondering, not

without resentment, why the possession of a beauty so conspicuous should

afford her only a slight and temporary satisfaction. Last week a woman

whom she knew had had her nose broken in an automobile accident, and as

she remembered this it seemed to her that the mere fact of her

undisfigured features was sufficient to be the cause of joyful

gratitude. But this, she knew, was not so, for her face was perfectly

unharmed; and yet she felt that she could hardly have been more

miserable, even with a broken nose.

Here she paused for an instant in order to establish herself securely in

her argument, for, though she could by no stretch of the imagination

regard her mind as of a meditative cast, there are hours when even to

the most flippant experience wears the borrowed mantle of philosophy.

Abstract theories of conduct diverted her but little; what she wanted

was some practical explanation of the mental weariness she felt. What

she wanted, she repeated, as if to drive in the matter with a final

blow, was to be as happy in the actual condition as she had told herself

that she might be when as yet the actual was only the ideal. Why, for

instance, when she had been wretched with but one man on the box, should

the addition of a second livery fail to produce in her the contentment

of which she had often dreamed while she disconsolately regarded a

single pair of shoulders? That happiness did not masquerade in livery

she had learned since she had triumphantly married the richest man she

knew, and the admission of this brought her almost with a jump to the

bitter conclusion of her unanswerable logic--for the satisfaction which

was not to be found in a footman was absent as well from the imposing

figure of Perry Bridewell himself. Yet she told herself that she would

have married him had he possessed merely the historical penny, and the

restless infatuation of those first months was still sufficiently alive

to lend the colour of its pleasing torment to her existence.

Lying there, in her French embroidered night dress, with her brilliant

red hair pushed back from her forehead, she began idly to follow the

histories of the people whom she knew, and it seemed to her that each of

them was in some particular circumstance more fortunate than she. But

she would have changed place with none, not even with her best friend,

Laura Wilde, who was perfectly content because she lived buried away in

Gramercy Park and wrote vague beautiful verse that nobody ever read.

Laura filled as little part in what she called "the world" as Gramercy

Park occupied in modern progress, yet it was not without a faint impulse

of envy that Gerty recalled now the grave old house mantled in brown

creepers and the cheerful firelit room in which Laura lived. The peace

which she had missed in the thought of her husband came back to her with

the first recollection of her friend, and her hard bright eyes softened

a little while she dwelt on the vivid face of the woman to whom she

clung because of her very unlikeness to herself. Gradually out of the

mist of her unhappiness the figure of Laura rose in the mirror before

her, and she saw clearly her large white forehead under the dark

wing-like waves of hair, the singular intentness of her eyes, and the

rapt expectancy of look in which her features were lost as in a general

vagueness of light.

Though it was twenty years since she had first seen Laura Wilde as a

child of ten, the meeting came to her suddenly with all the bright

clearness of an incident of yesterday. She remembered herself as a weak,

bedraggled little girl, in wet slippers, who was led by a careless nurse

to a strange German school; and she felt again the agony of curiosity

with which, after the first blank wonder was over, she had stared at the

children who hung whispering together in the centre of the room. As she

looked a panic terror seized her like a wild beast, and she threw up her

hands and turned to rush away to the reassuring presence of grown up

creatures, when from the midst of the whispering group a little dark

girl, in an ugly brown frock, ran up to her and folded her in her arms.

"I shall love you best of all because you are so beautiful," said the

little dark girl, "and I will do all your sums and even eat your sausage

for you." Then she had kissed her and brought her to the stove and knelt

down on the floor to take off her wet slippers. To this day Gerty had

always thought of her friend as the little girl who had shut her eyes

and gulped down those terrible sausages for her behind her teacher's

back.

The maid brought the coffee, and while she sat up to drink it the door

of her husband's dressing-room opened and he came in and stood, large,

florid and impressive, beside her bed.

"I'm afraid I shan't get back to luncheon," he remarked, as he settled

his ample, carefully groomed body in his clothes with a comfortable

shake, "there's a chap from the country Pierce has sent to me with a

letter and I'll be obliged to feed him at the club, but--to tell the

truth--there's so little one can get really fit at this season."

To a man for whom the pleasures of the table represented the larger

share of his daily enjoyment, this was a question not without a serious

importance of its own; and while he paused to settle it he stood,

squaring his chest, with an expression of decided annoyance on his

handsome, good-humored face. Then, having made a satisfactory choice of

dishes, his features recovered their usual look of genial contentment,

and he felt carelessly in his pocket for the letter which he presently

produced and laid on Gerty's pillow. His life had corresponded so evenly

with his bodily impulses that the perfection of the adjustment had

produced in him the amiable exterior of an animal that is never crossed.

It was a case in which supreme selfishness exerted the effect of

personality.

Leaving the letter where he had placed it, Gerty sat sipping her coffee

while she looked up at him with the candid cynicism which lent a piquant

charm to the almost doll-like regularity of her features.

"You did not get three hours sleep and yet you're so fresh you smell of

soap," she observed as an indignant protest, "while I've had six and I'm

still too tired to move."

"Oh, I'm all right--I never let myself get seedy," returned Perry, with

his loud though pleasant laugh. "That's the mistake all you women

make."

Half closing her eyes Gerty leaned back and surveyed him with a curious

detachment--almost as if he were an important piece of architecture

which she had been recommended to admire and to which she was patiently

trying in vain to adjust her baffled vision. The smaller she screwed her

gaze the more remotely magnificent loomed his proportions.

"How you manage it is more than I can understand," she said.

Perry stared for a moment in an amiable vacancy at the coffee pot. Then

she watched the animation move feebly in his face, while he pulled at

his short fair moustache with a characteristic masculine gesture.

Physically, she admitted, he had never appeared to a better advantage in

her eyes.

"By the way, I had a game of billiards with Kemper and we talked pretty

late," he said, as if evolving the explanation for which she had not

asked. "He got back from Europe yesterday you know."

"He did?" Her indifferent gaiety played like harmless lightning around

his massive bulk. "Then we may presume, I suppose, on Madame Alta for

the opera season?"

He met the question with an admiring chuckle. "Do you really mean you

think he's been abroad with her all this time?"

"Well, what else did he get his divorce for?" she demanded, with the

utter disillusion of knowledge which she had found to be her most

effective pose.

Perry's chuckle swelled suddenly into a roar. "Good Lord, how women

talk!" he burst out. "Why, Arnold has been divorced ten years and he

never laid eyes on Jennie Alta till she sang over here three years ago.

There was nothing in it except that he liked to be seen with a

celebrity--most men do. But, my dear girl," he concluded in a kind of

awful reverence, "what a tongue you've got. It's a jolly good thing for

me that I'm your husband or you wouldn't leave me a blessed patch of

reputation to my back."

His humor held him convulsed for several minutes, during which interval

Gerty continued to regard him with her piquant cynicism.

"Well, if it wasn't Madame Alta it was somebody who is voiceless," she

retorted coolly. "I merely meant that there must have been a reason."

"Oh, your 'reasons'!" ejaculated Perry. Then he stooped and gave the

letter lying on Gerty's pillow a filip from his large pink forefinger.

"You haven't told me what you think of this?" he said.

Picking up the letter Gerty unfolded it and read it slowly through from

start to finish, the little ripple of sceptical amusement crossing and

recrossing her parted lips,

RAVENS NEST,

Fauquier County, Virginia,

December 26, 19--.

_My Dear Perry_: Nobody, of course, ever accused you of being

literary, nor, thank Heaven, have I fallen under that

aspersion--but since the shortest road to success seems to be by

circumvention, it has occurred to me that you might give a social

shove or two to the chap who will hand you this letter sometime

after the New Year.

His name is St. George Trent, he was born a little way up the

turnpike from me, has an enchanting mother, and shows symptoms of

being already inoculated with the literary plague. I never read

books, so I have no sense of comparative values in literature, and

consequently can't tell whether he is an inglorious Shakespeare or

a subject for the daily press. His mother assures me that he has

already written a play worthy to stand beside Hamlet--but, though

she is a charming lady, I'm hardly convinced by her opinion. The

fact remains, however, that he is going to New York to become a

playwright, and that he has two idols in the market place which, I

fancy, you may be predestined to see demolished. He is simply off

his head to meet Roger Adams, the editor of _The_--something or

other I never heard of--and--remember your budding days and be

charitable--a lady who writes poems and signs herself Laura Wilde.

I prepared him for the inevitable catastrophe by assuring him that

the harmless Mr. Adams eats with his knife, and that the lady, as

she writes books, isn't worth much at love-making--the purpose for

which woman was created by God and cultivated by man. Alas, though,

the young are a people of great faith!

Commend me to Mrs. Bridewell, whom I haven't seen since I had the

honour of assisting at the wedding.

Yours ever,

BEVERLY PIERCE.

As she finished her reading, Gerty broke into a laugh and carelessly

threw the letter aside on the blue satin quilt.

"I'm glad to hear that somebody has read Laura's poems," she observed.

"But what in thunder am I to do with the chap?" enquired Perry. "God

knows I don't go in for literature, and that's all he's good for I dare

say."

"Oh, well, he can eat, I guess," commented Gerty, with consoling irony.

"I've asked Roger Adams to luncheon," pursued Perry, too concerned to

resent her lack of sympathy, "but there are nine chances to one that he

will stay away."

"Experience has taught me," rejoined Gerty sweetly, "that your friend

Adams can be absolutely counted on to stay away. Do you know," she

resumed after a moment's thought, "that, though he's probably the

brainiest man of our acquaintance, I sometimes seriously wonder what you

see in him."

A flush of anger darkened Perry's clear skin, and this sudden change

gave him an almost brutal look. "I'd like to know if I'm a blamed fool?"

he demanded.

Her merriment struck pleasantly on his ears.

"Do you want to destroy the illusion in which I married you?" she asked.

"It was, after all, simply the belief that size is virtue."

The flush passed, and he took in a full breath which expanded his broad

chest. "Well, I'm big enough," he answered, "but it isn't Adam's fault

that he hasn't got my muscle."

With a leisurely glance in the mirror, he settled his necktie in place,

twisted the short ends of his moustache, and then stooped to kiss his

wife before going out.

"Don't you let yourself get seedy and lose your looks," he said as he

left the room.

When he had gone she made a sudden ineffectual effort to rise from bed;

then as if oppressed by a fatigue that was moral rather than physical,

she fell back again and turned her face wearily from the mirror. So the

morning slipped away, the luncheon hour came and went, and it was not

until the afternoon that she gathered energy to dress herself and begin

anew the inevitable and agonising pursuit of pleasure. The temptation of

the morning had been to let go--to relax in despair from the

fruitlessness of her endeavor--and the result of this brief withdrawal

was apparent in the order which she gave the footman before the open

door of her carriage.

"To Miss Wilde's first"--the words ended abruptly and she turned

eagerly, with outstretched hand, to a man who had hurried toward her

from the corner of Fifth Avenue.

"So you haven't forgotten me in six months, Arnold," she said, with a

sweetness in which there was an almost imperceptible tone of bitterness.

He took her hand in both of his, pressing it for an instant in a quick

muscular grasp which had in it something of the nervous vigor that lent

a peculiar vibrant quality to his voice.

"And I couldn't have done it in six years," he replied, as a singularly

charming smile illumined his forcible rather than regular features, and

brought out the genial irony in his expressive light gray eyes. "If I'd

gone to Europe to forget you it would have been time thrown away, but I

had something better on my hands than that--I've been buying French

racing automobiles--"

As he finished he gave an impatient jerk to the carriage door, a

movement which, like all his gestures, sprang from the nervous energy

that found its outlet in the magnetism of his personality. People

sometimes said that he resembled Perry Bridewell, who was, in fact, his

distant cousin, but the likeness consisted solely in a certain evident

possession of virile power--a quality which women are accustomed to

describe as masculine. He was not tall, and yet he gave an impression of

bigness; away from him one invariably thought of him as of unusual

proportions, but, standing by his side, he was found to be hardly above

the ordinary height. The development of his closely knit figure, the

splendid breadth of his chest and shoulders, the slight projection of

his heavy brows and the almost brutal strength of his jaw and chin, all

combined to emphasise that appearance of ardent vitality which has

appealed so strongly to the imagination of women. Seen in repose there

was a faint suggestion of cruelty in the lines of his mouth under his

short brown moustache, but this instead of detracting from the charm he

exercised only threw into greater relief the genial brightness of his

smile.

Now Gerty, glancing up at him, remembered a little curiously, the

whispered reason for his long absence. There was always a woman in the

wind when it blew rumours of Kemper, though he was generally considered

to regard the sex with the blithe indifference of a man to whom feminine

favour has come easily. How easily Gerty had sometimes wondered, though

she had hardly ventured so much as a dim surmise. Ten years, she would

have said, was a considerable period from which to date a passion, and

she remembered now that ten years ago Kemper had secured a divorce from

his wife in some Western court. There had been no particular scandal, no

damning charges on either side; and a club wit had remarked at the time

that the only possible ground for a separation was the fact that Mrs.

Kemper had grown jealous of her husband's after-dinner cigar. Since then

other and varied rumours had reached Gerty's ears, until finally there

had blown a veritable gale concerning a certain Madame Alta, who sang

melting soprano parts in Italian opera. Then this, too, had passed,

and, with the short memory of city livers, Gerty had forgotten alike the

gossip and the heroines of the gossip, until she noted now the lines of

deeper harassment in Kemper's face. These coming so suddenly after six

months of Europe caused her to wonder if the affair with the prima donna

had been really an entanglement of the heart.

"Well, I may not be as fast as an automobile," she presently admitted.

"But you're twice as dangerous," he retorted gaily.

For an instant the pleasant humour in his eyes held her speechless.

"Ah, well, you aren't a coward," she answered coolly enough at last.

Then her tone changed, and as she settled herself under her fur rugs she

made a cordial inviting gesture. "Come in with me and I'll take you to

Laura Wilde's," she said; "she's a genius, and you ought to know her

before the world finds her out."

With a protesting laugh Kemper held up his gloved finger.

"God forbid!" he exclaimed with a shrug which struck her as a slightly

foreign affectation. "The lady may be a female Milton, but Perry tells

me that she isn't pretty."

He touched her hand again, met her indignant defence of Laura with a nod

of smiling irony, and then, as her carriage started, he turned rapidly

down Sixty-ninth Street in the direction of the Park.

In Gerty the chance meeting had awakened a slumbering interest which she

had half forgotten, and as she drove down Fifth Avenue toward Laura's

distant home she found herself wondering idly if he would let many days

go by before he came again. The thought was still in her mind when the

carriage turned into Gramercy Park and stopped before the old brown

house hidden in creepers in which Laura lived. So changed by this time,

however, was Gerty's mood that, after leaving her carriage, she stood

hesitating from indecision upon the sidewalk. The few bared trees in the

snow, the solemn, almost ghostly, quiet of the quaint old houses and the

deserted streets, in which a flock of sparrows quarrelled under the

faint sunshine, produced in her an odd and almost mysterious sense of

unreality--as if the place, herself, the waiting carriage, and Laura

buried away in the dull brown house, were all creations of some gossamer

and dream-like quality of mind. She felt suddenly that the sorrows which

had oppressed her in the morning belonged no more to any existence in

which she herself had a part. Then, looking up, she saw her husband

crossing the street between the two men with whom he had lunched, and

even the impressive solidity of Perry Bridewell appeared to her

strangely altered and out of place.

He came up, a little breathless from his rapid walk, and it was a minute

before he could summon voice to introduce the cheerful, fresh-coloured

youth on his right hand.

"I've already told Mrs. Bridewell about you, Mr. Trent," he said at

last, "but I'm willing to confess that I haven't told her half the

truth."

Gerty met Trent's embarrassed glance with the protecting smile with

which she favoured the young who combined his sex with his attractions.

Then, when he was quite at ease again, she turned to speak to Roger

Adams, for whom, in spite, as she laughingly said, of the distinction

between a bookworm and a butterfly, she was accustomed to admit a more

than ordinary liking.

He was a gaunt, scholarly looking man of forty years, with broad,

singularly bony shoulders, an expression of kindly humour, and a plain,

strong face upon which suffering had left its indelible suggestion of

defeated physical purpose. Nothing about him was impressive, nothing

even arresting to a casual glance, and not even the shooting light from

the keen gray eyes, grown a little wistful from the emotional repression

of the man's life, could account for the cordial appeal that spoke

through so unimposing a figure. As much of his personal history as Gerty

knew seemed to her peculiarly devoid of the interest or the excitement

of adventure; and the only facts of his life which she would have found

deserving the trouble of repeating were that he had married an

impossible woman somewhere in Colorado, and that for ten years he had

lived in New York where he edited _The International Review_.

"Perry tells me that Mr. Trent has really read Laura's poems," she said

now to Adams with an almost unconscious abandonment of her cynical

manner. "Have you examined him and is it really true?"

"I didn't test him because I hoped the report was false," was Adams'

answer. "He's welcome to the literary hash, but I want to keep the

_caviar_ for myself."

"Read them!" exclaimed Trent eagerly, while his blue eyes ran entirely

to sparkles. "Why, I've learned them every one by heart."

"Then she'll let you in," responded Gerty reassuringly, "there's no

doubt whatever of your welcome."

"But there is of mine," said Perry gravely, "so I guess I'd better

quit."

He made a movement to turn away, but Gerty placing her gloved hand on

his arm, detained him by a reproachful look.

"That reminds me of the mischief you have done to-day," she said. "I met

Arnold Kemper as I left the house, and when I asked him to come with me

what do you suppose was the excuse he gave?"

"The dentist or a twinge of rheumatism?" suggested Adams gravely.

"Neither." Her voice rose indignantly, and she enforced her reprimand by

a light stroke on Perry's sleeve. "He actually said that Perry had told

him Laura wasn't pretty."

"Well, I take back my words and eat 'em, too," cried Perry.

He broke away in affected terror before Trent's angry eyes, while Gerty

gave a joyful little exclamation and waved her hand toward one of the

lower windows in the house before which they stood. The head of a woman,

framed in brown creepers, appeared there for an instant, and then,

almost before Trent had caught a glimpse of the small dark eager figure,

melted again into the warm firelight of the interior. A moment later the

outer door opened quickly, and Laura stood there with impulsive

outstretched hands and the cordial smile which was her priceless

inheritance from a Southern mother.

"I knew that you were there even before I looked out of the window," she

exclaimed to Gerty, in what Adams had once called her "Creole voice."

Then she paused, laughing happily, as she looked, with her animated

glance, from Gerty to Trent and from Trent to Adams. To the younger man,

full of his enthusiasm and his ignorance, the physical details of her

appearance seemed suddenly of no larger significance than the pale

bronze gown she wore or the old coffee-coloured lace knotted upon her

bosom in some personal caprice of dress. What she gave to him as she

stood there, looking from Adams to himself with her ardent friendly

glance, was an impression of radiant energy, of abundant life.

She turned back after the first greeting, leading the way into the

pleasant firelit room, where a white haired old gentleman with an

interesting blanched face rose to receive them.

"I have just proved to Mr. Wilberforce that I could 'feel' you coming,"

said Laura with a smile as she unfastened Gerty's furs.

"And I have argued that she could quite as well surmise it," returned

Mr. Wilberforce, as he fell back into his chair before the wood fire.

"Well, you may know in either way that my coming may be counted on,"

said Gerty, "for I have sacrificed for you the society of the most

interesting man I know."

"What! Is it possible that Perry has been forsaken?" enquired Adams in

his voice of quiet humor. In the midst of her flippant laughter, Gerty

turned on him the open cynicism of her smile.

"Now is it possible that Perry has that effect on you?" she asked with

curiosity. "For I find him decidedly depressing."

"Then if it isn't Perry I demand the name," persisted Adams gayly,

"though I'm perfectly ready to wager that it's Arnold Kemper."

"Kemper," repeated Laura curiously, as if the name arrested her almost

against her will. "Wasn't there a little novel once by an Arnold

Kemper--a slight but striking thing with very little grammar and a great

deal of audacity?"

"Oh, that was done in his early days," replied Adams, "as a kind of

outlet to the energy he now expends in racing motors. I asked Funsten,

who does our literary notices, if there was any chance for him again in

fiction, and he answered that the only favourable thing he could say of

him was to say nothing."

"But he's gone in for automobiles now," said Gerty, "they're so much

bigger, after all, he thinks, than books."

"I haven't seen him for fifteen years," remarked Adams, "but I recognise

his speech."

"One always recognises his speeches," admitted Gerty, "there's a stamp

on them, I suppose, for somehow he himself is great even if his career

isn't--and, after all," she concluded seriously, "it is--what shall I

call it--the personal quantity that he insists on."

"The personal quantity," repeated Laura laughing, and, as if the

description of Kemper had failed to interest her, she turned the

conversation upon the subject of Trent's play.

CHAPTER II

TREATS OF AN ECCENTRIC FAMILY

When the last caller had gone Laura slid back the folding doors which

opened into the library and spoke to a little old gentleman, with a very

bald head, who sat in a big armchair holding a flute in his wrinkled and

trembling hand. He had a simple, moonlike face, to which his baldness

lent a deceptive appearance of intellect, and his expression was of such

bland and smiling goodness that it was impossible to resent the tedious

garrulity of his conversation. In the midst of his shrivelled

countenance his eyes looked like little round blue buttons which had

been set there in order to keep his features from entirely slipping

away. He was the oldest member of the Wilde family, and he had lived in

the house in Gramercy Park since it was built by his father some sixty

years or more ago.

"Tired waiting, Uncle Percival?" asked Laura, raising her voice a little

that it might penetrate his deafened hearing.

As he turned upon her his smile of perfect patience the old gentleman

nodded his head quickly several times in succession. "I waited to play

until after the people went," he responded in a voice that sounded like

a cracked silver bell. "Your Aunt Angela has a headache, so she couldn't

stand the noise. I went out to get her some flowers and offered to sit

with her, but this is one of her bad days, poor girl." He fell silent

for a minute and then added, wistfully, "I'm wondering if you would like

to hear 'Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon'? It used to be your mother's

favourite air."

Though he was an inoffensively amiable and eagerly obliging old man, by

some ironic contradiction of his intentions his life had become a series

of blunders through which he endeavoured to add his share to the general

happiness. His soul was overflowing with humanity, and he spent

sleepless nights evolving innocent pleasures for those about him, but

his excess of goodness invariably resulted in producing petty annoyances

if not serious inconveniences. So his virtues had come to be regarded

with timidity, and there was an ever present anxiety in the air as to

what Uncle Percival was "doing" in his mind. The fear of inopportune

benefits was in its way as oppressive as the dread of unmerited

misfortune.

Laura shook her head impatiently as she threw herself into a chair on

the other side of the tall bronze lamp upon the writing table. On the

stem of an eccentric family tree she was felt to be the perfect flower

of artistic impulses, and her enclosed life in the sombre old house had

not succeeded in cultivating in her the slightest resemblance to an

artificial variety. She was obviously, inevitably, impulsively the

original product, and Uncle Percival never realised this more hopelessly

than in that unresponsive headshake of dismissal. Laura could be kind,

he knew, but she was kind, as she was a poet, when the mood prompted.

"Presently--not now," she said, "I want to talk to you awhile. Do you

know, Aunt Rosa was here again to-day and she still tries to persuade us

to sell the house and move uptown. It is so far for her to come from

Seventieth Street, she says, but as for me I'd positively hate the

change and Aunt Angela can't even stand the mention of it." She leaned

forward and stroked his arm with one of her earnest gestures. "What

would you do uptown, dear Uncle Percival?" she inquired gently.

The old man laid the flute on his knees, where his shrunken little hands

still caressed it. "Do? why I'd die if you dragged me away from my

roots," he answered.

Laura smiled, still smoothing him down as if he were an amiable dog.

"Well, the Park is very pleasant, you know," she returned, "and it is

full of walks, too. You wouldn't lack space for exercise."

"The Park? Pooh!" piped Uncle Percival, raising his voice; "I wouldn't

give these streets for the whole of Central Park together. Why, I've

seen these pavements laid and relaid for seventy years and I remember

all the men who walked over them. Did I ever tell you of the time I

strolled through Irving Place with Thackeray? As for Central Park, it

hasn't an ounce--not an ounce of atmosphere."

"Oh, well, that settles it," laughed Laura. "We'll keep to our own

roots. We are all of one mind, you and Aunt Angela and I."

"I'm sure Angela would never hear of it," pursued Uncle Percival, "and

in her affliction how could one expect it?"

For a moment Laura looked at him in a compassionate pause before she

made her spring. "There's nothing in the world the matter with Aunt

Angela," she said; "she's perfectly well."

Blank wonder crept into the old gentleman's little blue eyes and he

shook his head several times in solemn if voiceless protest. Forty years

ago Angela Wilde, as a girl of twenty, had in the accustomed family

phrase "brought lasting disgrace upon them," and she had dwelt, as it

were, in the shadow of the pillory ever since. Unmarried she had yielded

herself to a lover, and afterward when the full scandal had burst upon

her head, though she had not then reached the fulfilment of a singularly

charming beauty, she had condemned herself to the life of a solitary

prisoner within four walls. She had never since the day of her awakening

mentioned the name of her faithless or unfortunate lover, but her silent

magnanimity had become the expression of a reproach too deep for words,

and her bitter scorn of men had so grown upon her in her cloistral

existence that there were hours together when she could not endure even

the inoffensive Percival. Cold, white, and spectral as one of the long

slim candles on an altar, still beautiful with an indignant and wounded

loveliness, she had become in the end at once the shame and the romance

of her family.

"There is no reason under the sun why Aunt Angela shouldn't come down to

dinner with us to-night," persisted Laura. "Don't you see that by

encouraging her as you did in her foolish attitude, you have given her

past power over her for life and death. It is wrong--it is ignoble to

bow down and worship anything--man, woman, child, or event, as she bows

down and worships her trouble."

The flute shook on Uncle Percival's knees. "Ah, Laura, would you have

her face the world again?" he asked.

"The world? Nonsense! The world doesn't know there's such a person in

it. She was forgotten forty years ago, only she has grown so selfish in

her grief that she can never believe it."

The old man sighed and shook his head. "The women of this generation

have had the dew brushed off them," he lamented, "but your mother

understood. She felt for Angela."

"And yet it was an old story when my mother came here."

"Some things never grow old, my dear, and shame is one of them."

Laura dismissed the assertion with a shrug of scornful protest, and

turned the conversation at once into another channel. "Am I anything

like my mother, Uncle Percival?" she asked abruptly.

For a moment the old man pondered the question in silence, his little

red hands fingering the mouth of his flute.

"You have the Creole hair and the Creole voice," he replied; "but for

the rest you are your father's child, every inch of you."

"My mother was beautiful, I suppose?"

"Your father thought so, but as for me she was too little and

passionate. I can see her now when she would fly into one of her spasms

because somebody had crossed her or been impolite without knowing it."

"They got on badly then--I mean afterward."

"What could you expect, my dear? It was just after the War, and, though

she loved your father, she never in her heart of hearts forgave him his

blue uniform. There was no reason in her--she was all one fluttering

impulse, and to live peaceably in this world one must have at least a

grain of leaven in the lump of one's emotion." He chuckled as he ended

and fixed his mild gaze upon the lamp. Being very old, he had come to

realise that of the two masks possible to the world's stage, the comic,

even if the less spectacular, is also the less commonplace.

"So she died of an overdose of medicine," said Laura; "I have never been

told and yet I have always known that she died by her own hand.

Something in my blood has taught me."

Uncle Percival shook his head. "No--no, she only made a change," he

corrected. "She was a little white moth who drifted to another

sphere--because she had wanted so much, my child, that this earth would

have been bankrupt had it attempted to satisfy her."

"She wanted what?" demanded Laura, her eyes glowing.

The old man turned upon her a glance in which she saw the wistful

curiosity which belongs to age. "At the moment you remind me of her," he

returned, "and yet you seem so strong where she was only weak."

"What did she want? What did she want?" persisted Laura.

"Well, first of all she wanted your father--every minute of him, every

thought, every heart-beat. He couldn't give it to her, my dear. No man

could. I tell you I have lived to a great age, and I have known great

people, and I have never seen the man yet who could give a woman all the

love she wanted. Women seem to be born with a kind of divination--a

second sight where love is concerned--they aren't content with the mere

husk, and yet that is all that the most of them ever get--"

"But my father?" protested Laura; "he broke his heart for her."

A smile at the fine ironic humour of existence crossed the old man's

sunken lips. "He gave to her dead what she had never had from him

living," he returned. "When she was gone everything--even the man's life

for which he had sacrificed her--turned worthless. He always had the

seeds of consumption, I suppose, and his gnawing remorse caused them to

develop."

A short silence followed his words, while Laura stared at him with eyes

which seemed to weigh gravely the meaning of his words. Then, rising

hurriedly, she made a gesture as if throwing the subject from her and

walked rapidly to the door.

"Aunt Rosa and Aunt Sophy are coming to dine," she said, "so I must

glance at the table. I can't remember now whether I ordered the oysters

or not."

The old man glanced after her with timid disappointment. "So you haven't

time to hear me play?" he asked wistfully.

"Not now--there's Aunt Angela's dinner to be seen to. If Mr. Bleeker

comes with Aunt Sophy you can play to him. He likes it."

"But he always goes to sleep, Laura. He doesn't listen--and besides he

snores so that I can't enjoy my own music."

"That's because he'd rather snore than do anything else. I wouldn't let

that worry me an instant. He goes to sleep at the opera."

She went out, and after giving a few careful instructions to a servant

in the dining-room, ascended the staircase to the large square room in

the left wing where Angela remained a wilful prisoner. As she opened the

door she entered into a mist of dim candle light, by which her aunt was

pacing restlessly up and down the length of the apartment.

To pass from the breathless energy of modern New York into this quiet

conventual atmosphere was like crossing by a single step the division

between two opposing civilisations. Even the gas light, which Angela

could not endure, was banished from her eyes, and she lived always in a

faint, softened twilight not unlike that of some meditative Old-World

cloisters. The small iron bed, the colourless religious prints, the pale

drab walls and the floor covered only by a chill white matting, all

emphasised the singular impression of an expiation that had become as

pitiless as an obsession of insanity. On a small table by a couch, which

was drawn up before a window overlooking the park, there was a row of

little devotional books, all bound neatly in black leather, but beyond

this the room was empty of any consolation for mind or body. Only the

woman herself, with her accusing face and her carelessly arranged

snow-white hair, held and quickened the imagination in spite of her

suggestion of bitter brooding and unbalanced reason. Her eyes looking

wildly out of her pallid face were still the beautiful, fawn-like eyes

of the girl of twenty, and one felt in watching her that the old tragic

shock had paralysed in them the terrible expression of that one moment

until they wore forever the indignant and wounded look with which she

had met the blow that destroyed her youth.

"Dear," said Laura, entering softly as she might have entered a death

chamber. "You will see Aunt Rosa and Aunt Sophy, will you not?"

Angela did not stop in her nervous walk, but when she reached the end of

the long room she made a quick, feverish gesture, raising her hands to

push back her beautiful loosened hair. "I will do anything you wish,

Laura, except see their husbands."

"I've ceased to urge that, Aunt Angela, but your own sisters--"

"Oh, I will see them," returned Angela, as if the words--as if any

speech, in fact--were wrung from the cold reserve which had frozen her

from head to foot.

Laura went up to her and, with the impassioned manner which she had

inherited from her Southern mother, enclosed her in a warm and earnest

embrace. "My dear, my dear," she said, "Uncle Percival tells me that

this is one of your bad days. He says, poor man, that he went out and

got you flowers."

Angela yielded slowly, still without melting from her icy remoteness.

"They were tuberoses," she responded, in a voice which was in itself

effectual comment.

"Tuberoses!" exclaimed Laura aghast, "when you can't even stand the

scent of lilies. No wonder, poor dear, that your head aches."

"Mary put them outside on the window sill," said Angela, in a kind of

resigned despair, "but their awful perfume seemed to penetrate the

glass, so she took them down into the coal cellar."

"And a very good place for them, too," was Laura's feeling rejoinder;

"but you mustn't blame him," she charitably concluded, "for he couldn't

have chosen any other flower if he had had the whole Garden of Eden to

select from. It isn't really his fault after all--it's a part of

fatality like his flute."

"He played for me until my head almost split," remarked Angela wearily,

"and then he apologised for stopping because his breath was short."

A startled tremor shook through her as a step was heard on the

staircase. "Who is it, Laura?"

Laura went quickly to the door and, after pausing a moment outside,

returned with a short, flushed, and richly gowned little woman who was

known to the world as Mrs. Robert Bleeker.

More than twenty years ago, as the youngest of the pretty Wilde sisters,

she had, in the romantic fervour of her youth and in spite of the

opposition of her parents, made a love match with a handsome,

impecunious young dabbler in "stocks." "Sophy is a creature of

sentiment," her friends had urged in extenuation of a marriage which was

not then considered in a brilliant light, but to the surprise of

everybody, after the single venture by which she had proved the mettle

of her dreams, she had sunk back into a prosperous and comfortable

mediocrity. She had made her flight--like the queen bee she had soared

once into the farthest, bluest reaches of her heaven, and henceforth she

was quite content to relapse into the utter commonplaces of the hive.

Her yellow hair grew sparse and flat and streaked with gray, her

pink-rose face became over plump and mottled across the nose, and her

mind turned soon as flat and unelastic as her body; but she was

perfectly satisfied with the portion she had had from life, for, having

weighed all things, she had come to regard the conventions as of most

enduring worth.

Now she rustled in with an emphatic announcement of stiff brocade, and

enveloped the spectral Angela in an embrace of comfortable arms and

bosom. Her unwieldy figure reminded Laura of a broad, low wall that has

been freshly papered in a large flowered pattern. On her hands and bosom

a number of fine emeralds flashed, for events had shown in the end that

the impecunious young lover was not fated to dabble in stocks in vain.

"Oh Angela, my poor dear, how are you?" she enquired.

Angela released herself with a shrinking gesture and, turning away, sat

down at the foot of the long couch. "I am the same--always the same,"

she answered in her cold, reserved voice.

"You took your fresh air to-day, I hope?"

"I went down in the yard as usual. Laura," she looked desperately

around, "is that Rosa who has just come in?" As she paused a knock came

at the door, and Laura opened it to admit Mrs. Payne--the eldest, the

richest and the most eccentric of the sisters.

From a long and varied association with men and manners Mrs. Payne had

gathered a certain halo of experience, as of one who had ripened from

mere acquaintance into a degree of positive intimacy with the world. She

had seen it up and down from all sides, had turned it critically about

for her half-humorous, half-sentimental inspection, and the frank

cynicism which now flavoured her candid criticism of life only added the

spice of personality to her original distinction of adventure. As the

wife of an Ambassador to France in the time of the gay Eugénie, and

again as one of the diplomatic circle in Cairo and in Constantinople,

she had stored her mind with precious anecdotes much as a squirrel

stores a hollow in his tree with nuts. Life had taught her that the one

infallible method for impressing your generation is to impress it by a

difference, and, beginning as a variation from type, she had ended by

commanding attention as a preserved specimen of an extinct species.

Long, wiry, animated, and habitually perturbed, she moved in a continual

flutter of speech--a creature to be reckoned with from the little, flat,

round curls upon her temples, which looked as if each separate hair was

held in place by a particular wire, to the sweep of her black velvet

train, which surged at an exaggerated length behind her feet. Her face

was like an old and tattered comic mask which, though it has been flung

aside as no longer provocative of pleasant mirth, still carries upon its

cheeks and eyebrows the smears of the rouge pot and the pencil.

"My dear Angela," she now asked in her excited tones, "have you really

been walking about again? I lay awake all night fearing that you had

over-taxed your strength yesterday. Mrs. Francis Barnes--you never knew

her of course, but she was a distant cousin of Horace's--died quite

suddenly, without an instant's warning, after having walked rapidly

twice up and down the room. Since then I have always looked upon

movement as a very dangerous thing."

"Well, I could hardly die suddenly under any circumstances," returned

Angela, indifferently. "You've been watching by my death-bed for forty

years."

"Oh, dear sister," pleaded Mrs. Bleeker, whose heart, was as soft as her

bosom.

"It does sound as if you thought we really wanted your things,"

commented Mrs. Payne, opening and shutting her painted fan. "Of

course--if you were to die we should be too heart-broken to care what

you left--but, since we are on the subject, I've always meant to ask you

to leave me the shawl of old rose-point which belonged to mother."

"Rosa, how can you?" remonstrated Mrs. Bleeker, "I am sure I hope Angela

will outlive me many years, but if she doesn't I want everything she has

to go to Laura."

"Well, I'm sure I don't see how Laura could very well wear a rose-point

shawl," persisted Mrs. Payne. "I wouldn't have started the subject for

anything on earth, Angela, but, since you've spoken of it, I only

mention what is in my mind. And now don't say a word, Sophy, for we'll

go back to other matters. In poor Angela's mental state any little

excitement may bring on a relapse."

"A relapse of what?" bluntly enquired honest Mrs. Bleeker.

Mrs. Payne turned upon her a glance of indignant calm.

"Why a relapse of--of her trouble," she responded. "You show a strange

lack of consideration for her condition, but for my part I am perfectly

assured that it needs only some violent shock, such as may result from

a severe fall or the unexpected sight of a man, to produce a serious

crisis."

Mrs. Bleeker shook her head with the stubborn common sense which was the

reactionary result of her romantic escapade.

"A fall might hurt anybody," she rejoined, "but I'm sure I don't see why

the mere sight of a man should. I've looked at one every day for thirty

years and fattened on it, too."

"That," replied Mrs. Payne, who still delighted to prick at the old

scandal with a delicate dissecting knife, "is because you have only

encountered the sex in domestic shackles. As for me, I haven't the least

doubt in the world that the sudden shock of beholding a man after forty

years would be her death blow."

"But she has seen Percival," insisted Mrs. Bleeker; and feeling that her

illustration did not wholly prove her point added, weakly, "at least he

wears breeches."

"I would not see him if I could help myself," broke in Angela, with

sudden energy. "I never--never--never wish to see a man again in this

world or the next."

Mrs. Payne glanced sternly at Mrs. Bleeker and followed it with an

emphatic head shake, which said as plainly as words, "So there's your

argument."

"All the same, I don't believe Robert would shock her," remarked Mrs.

Bleeker.

"Never--never--never," repeated Angela in a frozen agony, and, rising,

she walked restlessly up and down again until a servant appeared to

inform the visiting sisters that dinner and Miss Wilde awaited them

below.

CHAPTER III

APOLOGISES FOR AN OLD-FASHIONED ATMOSPHERE

As soon as dinner was over Uncle Percival retired with Mr. Bleeker into

the library, from which retreat there issued immediately the shrill

piping of the flute. Mr. Bleeker, with an untouched glass of sherry at

his elbow and an unlighted cigar in his hand, sank back into the placid

after-dinner reverie which is found in the rare cases when old age has

encountered a faultless digestion. The happiest part of his life was

spent in the pleasant state between waking and sleeping, while as yet

the flavour of his favourite dishes still lingered in his mouth--just as

the most blissful moments known to Uncle Percival were those in which he

piped his cherished airs upon his antiquated instrument. The eldest

member of the Wilde family was very old indeed--had in fact successfully

rounded some years ago the critical point of his eightieth birthday, and

there was the zest of a second childhood in the animation with which he

had revived the single accomplishment of his early youth. That youth was

now more vivid to his requickened memory than the present was to his

enfeebled faculties. The past had become a veritable obsession in his

mind, and when he fingered the old flute strength came back to his

half-palsied hands and breath returned to his shrunken little body. His

own music was the one sound he heard in all its distinctness, and he

hung upon it with an enjoyment which was almost doting in its childish

delight.

So the fluting went on merrily, while Mrs. Payne and Mrs. Bleeker, after

fidgeting a moment in the drawing-room, decided that they would return

for a word or two with Angela. "It is really the only place in the house

where one can escape Percival's music," declared Mrs. Payne, who frankly

confessed that she had reached the time of life when to bore her was the

chief offence society could commit, "so, besides the comfort I afford

dear Angela, it is much the pleasantest place for me to pass the

evening. I've always been a merciful woman my child," she pursued

shaking her little flat, false gray curls above her painted wrinkles,

"for never in my life have I cast a stone at anyone who amused me; but

as for Percival and his flute! Well, I won't say a disagreeable word on

the subject, but I honestly think that a passion at his age is

absolutely indecent."

She was so grotesquely gorgeous with her winking diamonds and her old

point lace, which yawned over her lean neck, that the distinction she

had always aimed at seemed achieved at last by an ironic exaggeration.

"At least it is a perfectly harmless passion," suggested her husband, a

beautiful old man of seventy gracious years.

"Harmless!" gasped Mrs. Payne. "Why, it has wrecked the nerves of the

entire family, has given me Saint Vitus' dance, has kept Laura awake for

nights, has reduced Angela to hysterics, and you actually have the face

to tell me it is harmless! Judged by its effects, I consider it quite

as reprehensible as a taste for cards or a fancy for a chorus girl.

Those are vices at least that belong to our century and to civilisation,

but a flute is nothing less than a relic of barbarism."

"Well, it's worse on me than on anyone else," said Laura, with the

dominant spirit which caused Mr. Payne to shiver whenever she tilted

against his wife. "My room is just above, and I get the benefit of every

note."

The tune issuing from the library had changed suddenly into "The Land o'

the Leal," and by the lamp light Uncle Percival could be seen, warm and

red and breathless but still blissfully fluting to the sleeping Mr.

Bleeker, whose face, fallen back against the velvet cushions, wore a

broad, beatific smile.

"He gets his happiness from it at least," persisted Laura. "I suppose

it's a part of his life just as poetry is a part of mine, and to be

happy at eighty-two one is obliged to be happy in an antedated fashion."

Then, as the two aunts swept from the room to join Angela, Laura seated

herself at Mr. Payne's side and caught the hand which he outstretched.

Of all the family he had been her favourite since childhood, and she

sometimes told herself that he was the only one who knew her as she

really was--who had ever penetrated behind her vivid outside armour of

personality. He was a man of great unsatisfied tenderness, who indulged

a secret charity as another man might have indulged a vicious taste. All

his inclinations strained after goodness, and had he possessed the

courage to follow the natural bent of his nature toward perfection he

might have found his happiness in the peaceful paths of exalted virtue.

But the constant dropping of cynicism will extinguish an angel, and,

instead of becoming a shining light to his generation, he had dwindled

into a glow-worm beneath the billows of his wife's velvet gown.

Now, as Laura held his hand, she bent upon him one of her long,

meditative looks. "Uncle Horace, of all this queer family is Aunt Rosa

the queerest or am I?"

Mr. Payne shook his silvered head. "I don't think you're a match for

Rosa yet, my dear," he answered with his gentle humour. "Wait till

you've turned seventy--then we'll see."

"But I'm not like other women. I don't think their ways. I don't even

want the things they want."

The old man's smile shone out as he patted her hand. "That means, I

suppose, that you don't want to be married. Who is it this time? Ah, my

child, you are born to be adored or to be hated."

Without replying to his question, Laura lifted her full, dark eyes to

his face. As he met the intellectual power of her glance, he told

himself that he understood the mysterious active principle of her

personality--how the many were repelled while the few returned to

worship. One felt her, was repulsed or possessed by her, even in her

muteness.

"I don't see how any one who has ever dreamed dreams," she said at last,

"could fall in love and marry--it is so different--so different."

"So you have refused Mr. Wilberforce? Well, well, he has reached the age

when a poor lover may make an excellent friend--and besides, to become

Rosa's mouthpiece for a moment, he is very rich."

"And old enough to be my father--but it isn't that. Age has nothing to

do with it, nor has congeniality--it is nothing in real life that comes

between, for I am fond of him and I don't mind his white hairs in the

least, but I can't give up my visions--my ideal hopes."

"Ah, Laura, Laura," sighed the old man, "the trouble is that you don't

live on the earth at all, but in a little hanging garden of the

imagination."

"And yet I want life," she said.

"We all want it, my child, until we've had it. At your age I wanted it,

too, for I had my dreams, though I was not a poet. But there are

precious few of us who are willing in youth to accept the world on its

own terms--we want to add our little poem to the universal prose of

things."

"But it is life itself that I want," repeated Laura.

"And so I wanted Rosa, my dear, every bit as much."

"Rosa!" There was a glow of surprise in the look she turned upon him.

"You find it hard to believe, but it is true nevertheless. I had my

golden dream like everyone else, and when Rosa loved me I told myself it

had all come true. Well, perhaps, in a measure it has, only, after all,

Rosa turned out to be more suited to real life than to poetic

moonshine."

"I can't imagine even you idealizing Aunt Rosa," said Laura, "but that I

suppose is the way life equalises things."

"That way or another, and the worst it can do for us is to return us our

own dreams in grotesque and mutilated forms. That will most likely be

your portion, too, my child, for life has hurt every poet since the

world began, and it will hurt you more than most because you are so big

a creature."

Laura stirred suddenly and, after gazing a moment at the fire, turned

upon him a face which had grown brilliant with animation. "I want to

taste everything," she said. "I want to turn every page one after one."

"And yet you live the life of a hermit thrush--you have in reality as

little part in that bustling turmoil of New York out there as has poor

Angela herself."

"But my adventures will come to me--I feel that they will come."

"Then you're happy, my dear, for you have the best of your adventures as

you call them in your waiting time."

She leaned toward him, resting her cheek on his gentle old hand, and

they sat in silence until Mrs. Payne swept down upon them in her sable

wraps and demanded the attendance of her husband.

The hall door closed upon the sisters before Laura had quite come back

from her abstraction, which she did at last with a sigh of relief at

finding herself alone. Then, leaving Uncle Percival nodding in the

library, she went upstairs to the cosy little study which opened from

her bedroom on the floor above. The wood fire on the brass andirons was

unlighted, and striking a match she held it to the little pile of

splinters underneath the logs, watching, with a sensation of pleasure,

the small yellow flames lick the crumpled paper and curl upward. Rising

after a moment, she stood breathing in the soft twilight-coloured

atmosphere she loved. The place was her own and she kept it carefully

guarded from a too garish daylight, while the beloved familiar

objects--the shining rows of books, the dull greenish hangings, the

costly cushioned easy-chairs, the few rare photographs, the spacious

writing table and the single Venetian vase of flowers--were always

steeped in a softly shadowed half-tone of light.

As she looked about her the comfort of the room entered into her like

warmth, and, opening her arms in a happy gesture, she threw herself

among the pillows of the couch and lay watching the rapid yellow flames.

Even in the midst of her musing she laughed suddenly to find that she

was thinking of the phrase with which Funsten had dismissed the name of

Arnold Kemper: "The only favourable thing one can say of him is to say

nothing." Was it really so bad as that she wondered, with a dim memory

that somewhere, back in an obscure corner of her bookshelves, lay his

first thin, promising volume published now almost fifteen years ago.

Rising presently, she began a hasty search among a collection of little

novels which had been banished ignominiously from the light of day, and,

coming at last upon the story, she brought it to the lamp and commenced

a reading prompted solely by the moment's impetuous curiosity. Utterly

devoid as it was of literary finish or discerning craftsmanship, the

book gripped from the start by sheer audacity--by its dominant,

insistent, almost brutal and entirely misdirected power. It was less the

story that struck one than the personal equation between the lines, and

the impression she brought away from her breathless skimming was that

she had encountered the shock of a tremendous masculine force.

Her head fell back upon the cushions, and she lost herself in the vague

wonder the book aroused. Life was there--the life of the flesh, of vivid

sensation, of experience that ran hot and swift. The active principle,

so strong in the predestined artist, stirred suddenly in her breast, and

she felt the instant of blind terror which comes with the realisation of

the fleeting possibilities of earth. Outside--beyond her--existence in

its multitudinous forms, its diversity of colour, swept on like some

vast caravan from which she had been detached and set apart. Lying there

she heard the call of it, that tremendous music which shook through her

and loosened a caged voice within herself. Her own poetry became for her

but a little part of the tumultuous, passionate instinct for life within

her--for life not as it was in its reality but as she saw it

transfigured and enkindled by the imagination that lives in dreams.

Suddenly from the darkened silence of the house below a thin sound rose

trembling, and then, gaining strength, penetrated into the closed

chambers. Uncle Percival was at his flute again; he had arisen in the

night to resume his impassioned piping; and, rising hurriedly, Laura lit

her candle and went out into the hall, where a streak of light beneath

Angela's door ran like a white thread across the blackness. Listening a

moment, she heard inside the nervous pacing to and fro of tired yet

restless feet, and after a short hesitation she turned the knob and

entered.

"Oh, Aunt Angela, did the flute wake you?" she asked.

For answer the long white figure stopped its frantic movement and turned

upon her a blanched and stricken face out of which two beautiful haunted

eyes stared like living terrors--terrors of memory, of silence, of the

unseen which had taken visible forms.

"Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!" cried Angela breathlessly, raising her

quivering hands to her ears. "I have heard it before! I have heard

it--long before!"

She paused, gasping, and without a word Laura turned and ran down the

dark staircase, while with each step the air that Uncle Percival played

sounded louder in her ears.

The door of the library was open, and as she entered she called out in a

voice that held a sob of anger, "Uncle Percival, how could you?"

His attentive, deafened ears were for his music alone, and, letting the

flute fall from his hands, he turned to look at her with the pathetic,

innocent enquiry of a good but uncomprehending child. At the sight of

his smiling, wrinkled face, his gentle blue eyes and the wistful droop

of disappointment at the corners of his mouth, her indignation changed

suddenly to pity. It seemed to her that she saw all his eighty years

looking at her from that furrowed face out of those little wandering

round blue eyes--saw the human part of him as she had never seen it

before--with its patience of unfulfilment, its scant small pleasures,

its innocent senile passion at the end; saw, too, the divine part,

hidden in him as in all humanity--that communion of longing which bound

his passionate fluting, Angela's passionate remorse and her own

passionate purity into the universal congregation of unsatisfied souls.

The sharp words died upon her lips and, kneeling at his side, she took

his shrivelled little hands into her warm, comforting clasp. "Dear Uncle

Percival, I understand, and I love you," she said.

CHAPTER IV

USHERS IN THE MODERN SPIRIT

"So you have seen her," Adams had remarked the same afternoon, as he

walked with Trent in the direction of Broadway. "Do you walk up, by the

way? I always manage to get in a bit of exercise at this hour."

As Trent fell in with his companion's rapid step, he seemed to be moving

in a fine golden glow of enthusiasm. A light icy drizzle had turned the

snow upon the pavement into sloppy puddles of water, but to the young

man, fresh from his inexperience, the hour and the scene alike were of

exhilarating promise.

"I feel as if I had been breathing different air!" he exclaimed, without

replying directly to the question. "And yet how simple she is--how

utterly unlike the resplendent Mrs. Bridewell--"

He stopped breathlessly, overcome by his excitement, and Adams took up

the unfinished sentence almost tenderly. "So far, of course, she is

merely a beautiful promise, a flower in the bud," he said. "Her

genius--if she has genius--has not found itself, and the notes she

strikes are all mere groping attempts at a perfect self-expression. Yet,

undoubtedly, she has done a few fine things," he admitted with

professional caution.

"But if, as you say, her emotional self does not go into her poems, what

becomes of it?" enquired Trent, with a curiosity too impersonal to be

vulgar. "For she, finely tempered as she is, suggests nothing so much as

a beautiful golden flame."

Adams started, and flashed upon the other a glance as incisive as a

search-light.

"Then you, too, recognise her beauty?" he asked in a tone which had a

kindly jealousy.

"Am I a fool?" protested Trent, laughing.

'You heard Kemper?"

"I heard him proclaim himself an ass. Well, let him, let him. Would you

hand out one of your precious first editions to the crowd?"

"You're right, you're right," assented Adams, and followed his remark

with a sudden change of subject. "I am interested, Mr. Trent, in what

you yourself have come to do."

"I--Oh, I have done nothing," declared Trent.

"In your aims, then, let us say, I understand that you intend to try the

drama?"

"Well, I confess to having done a play that I think isn't bad," replied

Trent, blushing over all his fresh, smooth-shaven face. "Benson has

promised me a hearing."

"Ah, I know him--he's always eager for new blood. Perhaps you wouldn't

mind my speaking a word or two to him?

"Mind!" exclaimed the younger man, his voice shaking. "Why, I can't tell

you how happy it would make me."

They had reached Eighteenth Street, and Trent paused a moment on the

corner before turning off to the big red-brick apartment house where he

was temporarily placed. "I'd like to walk up to Thirty-fifth with you,"

he added, "but my mother is expecting me and it makes her nervous when I

stay out after dark. She's just from the country, you know, and she gets

confused by the noise." He hesitated an instant and then finished with

embarrassment. "I wish so much that she could know you.'

"It is a pleasure I hope for very shortly," responded Adams. "How does

she like New York, by the way?"

Under the electric light Trent's eyes seemed to run entirely to

sparkles. "Ah, well, it's rather lonely for her. She misses the callers

at home who used to come to spend the day."

"We must try to change that," said the other as he moved off, while

Trent noted that despite his genial sympathy of manner there had been no

mention of Mrs. Adams. Where was she? and what was she? questioned the

younger man in perplexity, as he crossed to his apartment house at the

corner of Fourth Avenue.

At Twenty-third Street Adams had turned almost unconsciously into Fifth

Avenue, for so detached was the intellectual remoteness in which he

lived that he might have been, for all his immediate perceptions of his

surroundings, strolling at dusk along a deserted Western road. He was so

used to dwelling on the cool heights of a dearly bought, a hardly wrung,

philosophy that he had become at last almost oblivious of the mere

external details of life. To live at all had been for him a matter of

fine moral courage, and his slight, delicate emaciated, yet dauntless,

figure was in itself the expression of a resolute will to endure as well

as to resist. When a man has faced death at close range for fifteen

years he is, in a measure, bound to become either indifferent satyr or

partial saint, and even in the extremity of his first revolt his

personal ideal had stood, like the angel with the flaming sword, between

Adams and the quagmire of bodily materialism. He was not, perhaps, as

yet even so much as a deficient stoic, but he had wrung from suffering a

certain high loyalty to human fellowship and a half humorous, if wholly

gallant, determination to keep fast at any cost until the very end. Why

he had made the fight he did not ask himself, nor could he have

answered. His ambition, his marriage, even the ordinary sensuous

enjoyments of life, had crumbled as the mythical Dead Sea apples upon

his lips, yet the failure of his own mere individual pursuit of

happiness had in no-wise soured the sweet and finely flavored optimism

of his nature.

The fragrance from the violets worn by a passing woman struck him

presently, and he looked outside of himself almost with a start. Around

him many women were walking briskly under raised umbrellas, and some

showed pretty faces freshened like flowers by the icy rain. He himself

had forgotten the rain, had forgotten even the cold which pierced his

chest, and, suddenly remembering the directions of his physician, he

fastened his overcoat more closely and hastened across the street,

passing rapidly in and out among the moving vehicles until he gained,

over the sloppy crossing, the safety of the opposite sidewalk. Here he

turned in the direction of Madison Avenue and finally, drawing out his

latchkey, entered one of the dingy, flat-faced, utterly conventional

brown houses which make up so large a part of the characterless

complexion of New York life.

The interior was brilliantly lighted, and he was shrinking noiselessly

into his study at the back when he heard his name called from the

drawing-room threshold and saw his wife standing there while she put on

a long white evening cloak over a filmy effect of cream-coloured lace.

She was a small, pretty woman, with a cloud of fluffy, artificially

blonde hair and large, innocent, absolutely blank blue eyes. A year ago

she had resembled, if one might imagine the existence of such a being, a

perfectly worldly wise and cynically minded baby, but twelve months of

late suppers and many plays had already blighted her rose-leaf skin and

sown three fine, nervous little wrinkles between her delicately arched

eyebrows. She was very vivacious, but, as Gerty Bridewell had observed,

it was a vivacity that was hardly justified, since possessing neither

the means nor the manner exacted by the more exclusive circles, she had

been compelled to compromise with a social body which made up in members

what it lacked as an organism. Her dash and her prettiness sufficed to

place her comfortably here, but beyond a speaking acquaintance with

Gerty, who confessed that she was too charitable to be exclusive she had

not as yet approached that small shining sphere whose inmates boast the

larger freedom no less than the finer discrimination. The larger

freedom, it seemed at times, was all of it that she was ever to attain,

for, venturing a little too boldly once or twice with a light head, she

had at last found herself skating gingerly over a veritable sleet of

scandal. She got herself rumoured about so persistently that from being

merely improbable, she had become, in Gerty's words again, "one of the

very last of the impossibilities." And of late Adams' friends had begun

to ask themselves quite seriously, "why in the deuce he didn't keep a

hand upon his wife." How much he knew or how much there was, in reality,

to know had become in a limited circle almost the question of the hour,

until Perry Bridewell had demanded in final exasperation "whether Adams

was ridiculously ignorant or outrageously indifferent?"

But if the curious had been permitted to observe the object of their

uncertainty as he stood under the full glare before his festive wife

they would have found neither ignorance nor indifference in his manner.

He regarded her with a frank, fatherly tolerance, in which there was

hardly a suggestion of a more passionate concern.

"Wrap up well," he said, as his glance shot over her, "there's a biting

wind outside."

Connie screwed up her delicate eyebrows and the fine little wrinkles

leaped instantly into view. There was a nervous irritation in her look,

which recoiled from her husband as from a blank and shining wall.

"I'm dining at Sherry's with the Donaldsons," she explained. "I knew you

wouldn't come, so I didn't even trouble you to decline."

"You're right, my dear," he rejoined gayly.

"Mr. Brady has called for me," she went on with the faintest possible

hesitation in her voice, "and as we're all going to the theatre

afterward I shall probably be late. Don't bother about sitting up for

me--I have a key."

"Well, take care of yourself," responded Adams pleasantly, adding to a

young man who appeared in the drawing-room doorway, "How are you, Mr.

Brady? Please don't let Mrs. Adams be so foolish as to stand outside in

the wind. I can't make her take care of her cold."

"Oh, I'll promise to look out for it," replied Brady, standing slightly

behind Connie, and arranging by a careless movement the white fur on her

cloak. His handsome wooden features possessed hardly more character than

was expressed by his immaculately starched shirt front, but he was not

without a certain wholly superficial attraction, half as of a sleek,

well-groomed animal and half as of a masculine conceit, naked and

unashamed.

Connie tinkled out her nervous, high-pitched, vacant little laugh, which

she used to fill in gaps in conversation much as a distinguished

virtuoso might interlude his own important efforts with selections of

light vocal strains.

"Roger is always worrying about my health," she said, "but the truth is

that it's so good I'll never begin to value it until it's gone." Her

excited, fluttering manner blew about her almost with a commotion of the

atmosphere, and reminded Adams at times of a tempestuous March breeze

shaking a fragile wind flower. It was unnatural, overdone, unbecoming,

but it seemed at last to have got quite beyond her control, and the

pretty girlish composure he remembered as one of her freshest charms,

was lost in her general violence of animation. Of late he knew that she

had fought off her natural exhaustion by the frequent use of stimulants,

and it seemed to him that he saw their immediate effects in her flushed

cheeks and too brightly shining eyes.

"Don't stay out late," he urged again; "you've been rushing like mad

these last weeks and you need rest."

"But I never rest," rejoined Connie, still laughing, "and I honestly

hope that I shan't come to a stop until I die."

She fastened her cloak under the fall of lace, and, when Brady had

slipped into his overcoat, Adams turned back to open the hall door,

which let in a biting draught.

"Ta-ta! don't sit up!" cried Connie breathlessly, as, more than ever

like a filmy wind flower in a high wind, she was blown down the steps,

across the slushy sidewalk, and into the hired carriage.

When they had gone Adams went into the dining-room and dined alone

without dressing, as he had done almost every evening for the last few

months. The Irish maid waited upon him with a solicitude in which he

read his pose of a deserted husband, and he tried with a forcible,

though silent, bravado to dispel her very evident assumption. Connie had

certainly not deserted him against his will, and when her absence had

begun to show as so incontestable a relief it seemed the basest

ingratitude to force upon her reckless shoulders the odium of an

entirely satisfying arrangement. After a day of mental and physical

exertion the further effort of a conversation with her was something

that he felt to be utterly beyond him, and the distant Colorado days

when she had played the part of a soft, inviting kitten and he had

responded happily to the appeal for constant petting, now lay very far

behind them both--buried somewhere in that cloudless country they had

left. Neither of them wanted the petting back again, and as he rose from

his simple dinner and entered his study at the end of the hall he heaved

a sigh of conscious thankfulness that it was empty.

While he lighted his pipe his eyes turned instinctively to his precious

first editions of which Trent had spoken, and then straight as an arrow

to a photograph of Laura which stood with several others upon his

writing table. The eyes of most men would have lingered, perhaps, on one

of Connie, which was taken, indeed, at her best period and in a

remarkably effective pose, but Adams' glance brushed it with an

indifference only unkind in its mute sincerity, while he sought the

troubled gaze of Laura, who wore in the picture a shy and startled look,

like that of a wild thing suddenly trapped in its reserve. He had never,

even in his own mind, analysed his feeling for the woman whom he was

content to call his friend--he hesitated to condemn himself almost

because he feared to question--but whenever he entered alone his empty

room he knew that he turned instinctively to draw strength and courage

from her pictured face. It was a face that had followed after the ideal

beauty, and in her spiritual isolation, as of one devoted to an inner

vision, he had always found the peculiar pathetic quality of her charm.

Into her verse, chastened and restrained by the sense for perfection

which dwelt in her art, she had put, he knew, this same cloistral vision

of an unrealised world--a vision which had expanded and blossomed in

the luxuriant if slightly formal garden of her intellect. The world she

looked upon was a world, as Adams had once said, "seen through the haze

of a golden temperament"--the dream of an imaginative mysticism, of a

conventual purity, a dream which is to the reality as the soul of a man

is to the body. And it was this inspired divination, this luminous

idealism, which had caused Adams to exclaim when he put down her first

small gray volume: "Is it possible that we can still see visions?"

A little later, when he came to know her, he found that the vision she

looked upon had coloured not only her own soul, but even the outward

daily happenings of her life. For him she was from the first compacted

of divine mysteries, of exquisite surprises, and he loved to fancy that

he could see her genius burning like a clear flame within her and

shining at vivid moments with a still soft radiance in her face. He

always thought of her soul as of something luminous, and there were

instants when it seemed to touch her eyes and her mouth with an edge of

light. Beyond this her complexities remained for him as on the day when

he first saw her--if she was obscure it was the obscurity of a star seen

through a fog--and the desire to understand lost itself presently in the

bewilderment of his misapprehension. At last, however, he had put her,

as it were, tentatively aside, had relinquished his attempt to reduce

her to a formula with the despairing admission that she was, take her as

you would, a subtlety that compelled one to a mental effort. The effort

which he had up to this time associated with the society of women had

been of anything but a mental character. There was the effort of

putting one's best physical foot in advance, the effort of keeping one's

person conspicuously in evidence and one's intellect as unobtrusively in

abeyance--the material effort of appearing always in one's best

trousers, the moral effort of presenting always one's worst

intelligence. It had seemed to him until he met Laura--and his opinion

was the effect of a limited experience upon a large philosophic

ignorance--that the female sex played the part in Nature which is

performed by the chorus in a Greek tragedy--that it shrilly voiced the

horrors of the actual in the face of a divine indifference--and

strenuously insisted upon the importance of the eternal detail. From

Connie he had gathered that the feminine mind tended naturally toward a

material philosophy--toward a deification of the body, a faith in the

fugitive allurement of the senses, and because of his earlier initiation

he had taken Laura's intellectual radiance as the shining of a virtually

disembodied spirit. His own senses had led him, he recognised now, to

disastrous issues; his love for Connie had been the prompting of mere

physical impulse, and he had emerged from it with a feeling of escaping

into freedom. Too much Nature he had learned during those months of

mental apathy is in its way quite as destructive as too little--there

must be a soul in desire to keep it alive, he understood at last, or the

perishing body of it will decay for lack of a vital flame in the very

hour of its fulfilment. A colder man might have come to such knowledge

along impersonal paths, a coarser one would never have gone beyond it,

but in Adams the old fighting spirit--a survival of the uncompromising

Puritan conscience--had brought him up again, soul and body, to struggle

afresh for a cleaner and a sharper air. Life had meant more to him in

the beginning than a mere series of sensations--more even than any

bodily conditions, any material attainment; and it was the final triumph

of his austere vision that it should mean most of all when it seemed to

a casual glance to contain least of actual value.

CHAPTER V

IN WHICH A YOUNG MAN DREAMS DREAMS

Since coming to New York Mrs. Trent had taken a small apartment in a big

apartment house, where she lived with her son a perfectly provincial as

well as a strictly secluded life. She was a large, florid, motherly old

lady who still wore mourning for a husband who had been killed while fox

hunting twenty-five years ago. Her face resembled a friendly and

auspicious full moon, and above it her shining hair rolled like a

parting of silvery clouds. Day or night she was always engaged in

knitting a purple shawl, which appeared never to have been finished

since her son's infancy, for his earliest recollection was of the plump,

soft balls of brilliant yarn and the long ivory knitting needles which

clicked briskly while she worked with a pleasant, familiar sound. To

this day the clicking of those needles brought to his mouth the taste of

large slices of bread and jam, and to his ears the soothing murmur of

Bible stories told in the twilight.

She was always, too, serene gossip that she was, full of a monotonous,

rippling stream of words, and if her days in New York were trying to her

body and burdened with homesickness for her heart, no one--not even St.

George himself--had ever surprised so much as a passing shadow upon her

face. The young man's untiring pursuit of managers and of players had

left her continually alone, but she busied herself cheerfully about her

housekeeping, and found diversion in yielding to an inordinate curiosity

concerning her neighbours. Once or twice she had questioned him about

his absence, and this was especially so the morning after his meeting

with Laura Wilde.

"You didn't tell me where you were yesterday, St. George," she observed

at breakfast; "did you meet any one who is likely to be of use? I

remember Beverly Pierce told me that everything had to come through

introductions in the North."

He looked at her steadily a moment before replying, taking in all the

lovely details of her appearance behind the coffee tray--the morning

sunlight on her white hair and on the massive, hand-beaten, old silver

service, the solitary rose he had purchased in the street standing

between them in a slender Bohemian vase, brought from the rare old china

in the press just at her back, the dainty hemstitching on her collar and

cuffs of fine thread cambric, and lastly the vivid spot of color made by

the knitting she had laid aside.

"I met Laura Wilde," he answered presently, "but as you never read

poetry you can't understand just what it means."

As she held the cream jug poised above his coffee cup Mrs. Trent smiled

back at him with a placid wonder.

"Who is she, my son? A lady--I mean a _real_ one?"

"Oh, yes, sterling."

"But she writes verse you say! Is it improper?"

His eyes shone with amusement. "Improper! Why, what an idea!"

"I'm sure I don't know how it is," responded his mother, carefully

measuring with her eye the correct allowance of cream, "but somehow

women always seem to get immodest when they take to verse. It's as if

they went into it for the express purpose of airing their

improprieties."

"I say!" he exclaimed, with gentle mockery, "have you been reading

'Sappho' at your age?"

She continued to regard him blandly, without so much as a flicker of

humour in her serene blue eyes. "Your grandfather used to be very fond

of quoting something from 'Sappho,'" she returned thoughtfully, "or was

it from Mr. Pope? I can't remember which or what it was except that it

was hardly the kind of thing you would recite to a lady."

Trent laughed good-humouredly as he received his coffee cup.

"Well you can't point a moral with Miss Wilde," he rejoined, "you'd be

at liberty to recite her to anybody who had the sense to understand

her."

"Is she very deep?"

"She's profound--she's wonderful--she's a genius."

Mrs. Trent shook her head a little doubtfully. "I don't see that a woman

has any business to be a genius," she remarked. "And I can't help being

prejudiced against women writers, your father always was. It's as if

they really pretended to know as much as a man. When they publish books

I suppose they expect men to read them and that in itself is a kind of

conceit."

Trent yielded the point as he helped himself to the cakes brought in by

an old negro servant.

"Well, I shan't ask Miss Wilde to call on you," he laughed, "so you

won't be apt to run across the learned of your sex."

"Oh, I shouldn't mind myself," responded the old lady, with amiability,

"but I do hate to have you thrown with women that you wouldn't meet at

home."

"I certainly shouldn't meet Miss Wilde at home if that is what you

mean."

"It's bad enough to live in a partitioned cage like this," resumed Mrs.

Trent, in her soft, expressionless voice, "and to dry your clothes on

your neighbour's roofs, but I can bear anything so long as we are not

forced to associate with common people. Of course I don't expect to find

the manners of Virginia up here," she added as a last concession, "but I

may as well confess that the people I've come across don't seem to me to

be exactly civil."

"Just as we don't seem to them to be particularly worldly-wise, I dare

say."

She nodded her head, almost without hearing him, while her even tones

rippled on over her quaint ideas, which shone to her son's mind like

little silver pebbles beneath the shallow stream.

"I'm almost reconciled to the fact that old ladies wear colours and

flowers in their bonnets," she pursued, "to say nothing of low-neck

dresses, but it does seem to me that they might show a little ordinary

politeness. I met the doctor coming out of the apartment downstairs, so

in common decency I went immediately to enquire who was sick, and

carried along a glass of chicken jelly. The woman who opened the door

was rather rude," she finished with a sigh. "I don't believe such a

thing had ever happened to her before in the whole course of her life."

Trent gave her a tender glance across the coffee service.

"Probably not," he admitted, "but I wouldn't waste my jelly if I were

you."

"I sha'n't" she determined sadly, "and that's the thing I miss most of

all--visiting the sick."

"You might devote yourself to the hospitals--there are plenty of them it

seems."

Her resignation, however, was complete, and she showed no impulse to

reach out actively again. "It wouldn't be the same, my dear--I don't

want strange paupers but real friends. Do you know," she added, with a

despair that was almost abject, "I was counting up this morning the

people I might speak to if I met them in the street, and I got them in

easily on the fingers of one hand. That included," she confessed after a

hesitation, "the doctor, the butcher's boy and the woman who comes to

scrub. It would surprise you to find what a very interesting woman she

is."

Trent rose from his chair and, coming round to where she sat, gave her a

boyish hug of sympathy. "You're a regular angel of a mother," he said

and added playfully, while he still held her, "even then I don't see how

you make it five."

She put up her large white hand and smoothed his hair across his

forehead. "That's only because I made an acquaintance in the elevator

yesterday," she replied.

"In the elevator! How?"

"The thing always makes me nervous, you know--I can't abide it, and I'd

much rather any day go up and down the seven flights--but she met me as

I started to walk and persuaded me to come inside. Then she held my hand

until I got quite to the bottom."

"Indeed," said Trent suspiciously; "who was she?"

"Her name is Christina Coles, and she came from Clarke County. I knew

her grandfather."

"Thank Heaven!" breathed Trent, and his voice betrayed his happy

reassurance.

"She's really very pretty--all the Coles were handsome--her great-aunt

was once a famous beauty. Do you remember my speaking of her--Miss Betty

Coles?" He shook his head, and she proceeded with her reminiscence.

"Well, she was said to have received fifty proposals before her

twenty-fifth birthday, but she never married. On her last visit to me,

when she was a very old lady, I asked her why--and her answer was: 'Pure

fastidiousness.'" She had picked up her purple shawl, and the long ivory

knitting needles began to click.

"But I'm more interested in the young lady of the elevator--What is she

like?"

"Not the beauty that Betty was, but still very pretty, with the same

blue eyes and brown hair, which she wears parted exactly as her aunt did

fifty years ago. I fear, though," she finished in a whisper, "I really

fear--that she writes."

"Is that so? Did she tell you?"

"Not in words, but she carried a parcel exactly like your manuscripts,

and she spoke--oh, so seriously--of her work. She spoke of it quite as

if it were a baby."

"By Jove!" he gasped, and after a moment, "I hope at any rate that she

will be a comfort."

With her knitting still in her hands, she rose and went to the window,

where she stood placidly staring at the sunlight upon the blackened

chimney-pots. "At least I can talk to her about her aunt," she returned.

Then her gaze grew more intense, and she almost flattened her nose

against the pane. "I declare I wonder what that woman is doing out there

on that fire-escape," she observed.

After he had got into his overcoat Trent came back to give her a parting

kiss. "Find out by luncheon time," he returned gaily.

When presently he entered the elevator he found it already occupied by a

young lady whom he recognised from his mother's description as Christina

Coles. She was very pretty, but, even more than by her prettiness, he

was struck by her peculiar steadfastness of look, as of one devoted to a

single absorbing purpose. He noticed, too, that the little tan coat she

wore was rather shabby, and that there was a small round hole in one of

the fingers of her glove. When she spoke, as she did when leaving the

key with the man in charge of the elevator, her voice sounded remarkably

fresh and pleasant. They left the house together, but while she walked

rapidly toward Broadway he contented himself with strolling leisurely

along Fourth Avenue, where he bent a vacant gaze on the objects

assembled in the windows of dealers in "antiques."

But his thoughts did not so much as brush the treasures at which he

stared, and neither the hurrying crowd--which had a restless, workaday

look at the morning hour--nor the noisily clanging cars broke into the

exquisitely reared castle of his dreams. Since the evening before his

imagination had been thrilling to the tune of some spirited music,

flowing presumably from these airy towers, and as he went on over the

wet sunlight on the sidewalk, he was still keeping step to the exalted

if unreal measures. Never in his life; not even in his wildest literary

ecstasies, had he felt so assured of the beauty, of the bountifulness,

of his coming years--so filled with a swelling thankfulness for the mere

physical fact of birth. He was twenty-five, he believed passionately in

his own powers, and he was, he told himself with emphasis, in love for

the first and only time. In the confused tangle of his fancy he saw

Laura like some great white flower, growing out of reach, yet not

entirely beyond endeavour, and the ladder that went up to her was made

by his own immediate successes. Then the footlights before his play swam

in his picture and he heard already the applause of crowded houses and

felt in his head the intoxication of his triumph. Act by act, scene by

scene, he rehearsed in fancy his great drama, seeing the players throng

before the footlights and seeing, too, Laura applauding softly from a

stage box at the side. He had had moments of despondency over his idea,

had grovelled in abject despair during trying periods of execution, but

now all uncertainty--all misgivings evaporated like an obscuring fog

before a burst of light. The light, indeed, had at the moment the full

radiance of a great red glow such as he had seen used for effective

purposes upon the stage--and just as every object of scenery had taken,

for the time, a portion of the transfiguring suffusion--so now the

external ugly details among which he moved were bathed in the high

coloured light of his imagination.

But if the end is sometimes long in coming, it comes at last even to the

visions of youth, and when his tired limbs finally dragged his soaring

spirit to earth, he took a passing car and came home to luncheon. The

glamour had faded suddenly from his dreams, as if a bat's wing had

fluttered overhead, and in his new mood, he felt a resurgence of his old

self-consciousness. He was provoked by the suspicion that he had shown

less as a coming dramatist than as a present fool, and he contrasted his

own awkwardness with Adams' whimsical ease of manner. Did a woman ever

forget how a man appeared when she first met him? Would any amount of

fame to-morrow obliterate from Laura's memory his embarrassment of

yesterday? He had heard that the surface impression was what counted in

the feminine mind, and this made him think enviously, for a minute, of

Perry Bridewell--of his handsome florid face and his pleasant animal

magnetism. Perry was stupid and an egoist, and yet he had heard that

Mrs. Bridewell, for all her beauty and her wit, adored him, while he

openly neglected her. Was the secret of success, after all, simply an

indifference to everyone's needs except one's own? or was it rather the

courage to impress the world that one's own were the only needs that

counted?

He was late for luncheon but his mother had waited for him, and he found

when he entered the drawing room that Christina Coles was with her. The

girl still wore her hat, but she had removed her jacket, and it lay with

a little brown package on the sofa. As she spoke to him he was struck

afresh by the singular concentration of her expression.

"Your mother tells me that you've written a play," she began, a little

shyly; "she says, too, that it is wonderful."

"'She says' is well put," he retorted gaily, "but I hear that you, also,

are among the prophets."

"I am nothing else," she answered earnestly. "It is everything to me--it

is my life."

Her frankness startled him unpleasantly, and but for her girlish

prettiness, he might have felt himself almost repelled. As it was he

merely glanced appealingly at his mother, who intervened with a gesture

of her knitting needle. "She writes stories," explained the old lady,

appearing to transfix her subject on the ivory point; "it is just as I

imagined."

The girl herself met his eyes almost fiercely, reminding him vaguely of

the look with which a lioness might defend her threatened young.

"I've done nothing yet," she declared, "but I mean to--I mean to if it

takes every single hour I have to live." Then her manner changed

suddenly, and she impressed him as melting from her hard reserve. "Oh,

she tells me that you've met Laura Wilde!" she said.

The sacred name struck him, after his impassioned dreaming, like a sharp

blow between the eyes, and he met the girl's animated gesture with a

look of blank aversion.

"I've met her--yes," he answered coldly.

But her enthusiasm was at white heat, and he saw what he had thought

mere prettiness in her warm to positive beauty. "And you adore her work

as I do?" she exclaimed.

After a moment's hesitation his ardour flashed out to meet her own. "Oh,

yes, I adore her work and her!" he said.

CHAPTER VI

SHOWS THAT MR. WORLDLY-WISE-MAN MAY BELONG TO EITHER SEX

Several afternoons later Trent was to have further light thrown on the

character of Christina Coles by a chance remark of Roger Adams, into

whose office he had dropped for a moment as he was on his way to make

his first call upon Mrs. Bridewell.

After a few friendly enquiries about the young man's own work, and the

report of a promising word from the great Benson, Adams took up a letter

lying loose among the papers on his big littered desk.

"Half the tragedy in New York is contained in a letter like this," he

observed. "Do you know, by the way, that the mass of outside literary

workers drawn in at last by the whirlpool constitutes almost a

population? Take this girl, now, she is so consumed by her ambition, for

heaven knows what, that she comes here and starves in an attic rather

than keep away in comfort. That reminds me," he added, with a sudden

recollection, "she's from your part of the country."

"Indeed!" An intuition shot like a conviction into Trent's mind. "Could

her name, I wonder, by any chance be Coles?"

"You know her then?"

"I've met her, but do you mean to say that ability is what she hasn't

got?"

"For some things I've no doubt she has an amazing amount, only she's

mistaken its probable natural bent. She strikes me as a woman who was

born for the domestic hearth, or failing that she'd do admirably, I dare

say, in a hospital."

"It's the literary instinct, then, that's missing in her?"

"Not the instinct so much as the literary stuff, and in that she's not

different from a million others. She is evidently on fire with the

impulse to create, but the power--the creative matter--isn't in her. Let

her keep up, and she'll probably go on doing 'hack' work until her

death."

"But she's so pretty," urged Trent with a chivalric qualm--and he

remembered her smooth brown hair parted over her rosy ears, her blue

eyes, fresh as flowers, and the peculiar steadfastness that possessed

her face.

"The more's the pity," said Adams, while the muscles about his mouth

twitched slightly, as they always did when he was deeply moved, "it's a

bigger waste. I wrote to her as a father might have done and begged her

to give it up," he went on, "and in return," he tapped the open sheet,

"she sends me this fierce, pathetic little letter and informs me grandly

that her life is dedicated. Dedicated, good Lord!" he exclaimed

compassionately, "dedicated to syndicated stories in the Sunday press

and an occasional verse in the cheaper magazines."

"And there's absolutely nothing to be done?" asked Trent.

Adams met the question with a frown.

"Oh, if it would make it all come right in the end, I'd go on publishing

her empty, trite little articles until Gabriel blows his trumpet."

"It wouldn't help, though, after all."

"Well, hardly--the quick way is sure to be the most merciful," he

laughed softly with the quality of kindly humour which never failed him,

"we'll starve her out as soon as possible," he declared.

As if to dismiss the subject, he refolded the letter, slipped it in its

envelope, and placed it in one of his crammed pigeon-holes. "Thank God,

your own case isn't of the hopeless kind!" he exclaimed fervently.

"Somehow success looks like selfishness," returned Trent, showing by his

tone the momentary depression which settled so easily upon his variable

moods.

At the speech Adams turned upon him the full sympathy of his smile,

while he enclosed in a warm grasp the hand which the young man held out.

"It's what we're made for," he responded cheerily, "success in one way

or another."

His words, and even more his look, remained with Trent long afterwards,

blowing, like a fresh strong wind, through the hours of despondency

which followed for him upon any temporary exaltation. The young man had

a trick of remembering faces, not as wearing their accustomed daily

look, but as he had seen them animated and transfigured by any vivid

moment of experience, and he found later that when he thought of Adams

it was to recall the instant's kindly lighting of the eyes, the flicker

of courageous humour about the mouth and the dauntless ring in the

usually quiet voice. He realised now, as he walked through the humming

streets, that success or failure is not an abstract quantity but a

relative value--that a man may be a shining success in the world's eyes

and a comparative failure in his own. To Trent, Adams had for years

represented the cultured and scholarly critic--the writer who, in his

limited individual field, had incontestably "arrived." Now, for the

first time, he saw that the editor looked upon himself as a man of small

achievements, and that, inasmuch as his idea had been vastly more than

his execution, he felt himself to belong to the unfulfilled ones of the

earth.

When, a little later, he reached Mrs. Bridewell's house in Sixty-ninth

Street the servant invited him, after a moment's wait below, into her

sitting-room upstairs, and, following the man's lead, he was finally

ushered into a charming apartment upon the second floor. A light cloud

of cigarette smoke trailed toward him as he entered, and when he paused,

confused by broken little peals of laughter, he made out a group of

ladies gathered about a tiny Oriental table upon which stood a tray of

Turkish coffee. Gerty rose from the circle as he advanced, and moved a

single step forward, while the pale green flounces of her train rippled

prettily about her feet. Her hair was loosely arranged, and she gave him

an odd impression of wearing what in his provincial mind he called a

"wrapper"--his homely name for the exquisite garment which flowed,

straight and unconfined, from her slender shoulders. His mother, he

remembered, not without a saving humour, had always insisted that a lady

should appear before the opposite sex only in the entire armour of her

"stays" and close-fitting bodice.

Gerty, as she mentioned the names of her callers, subsided with her

ebbing green waves into the chair from which she had risen, and held her

cigarette toward Trent with a pretty inviting gesture. Her delicate

grace gave the pose a piquant attraction, and he found himself watching

with delight the tiny rings of smoke which curled presently from her

parted lips. As she smoked she held her chin slightly lifted, and

regarded him from beneath lowered lids with an arch and careless humour.

"If you'd been the Pope himself," she remarked, as an indifferent

apology, "I'd hardly have done more than fling the table-cover over my

head. Even you, after you'd spent a morning trying on a velvet gown,

would require a lounge and a good smoke."

He admitted that he thought it probable, and then turned to one of the

callers who had spoken--a handsome woman with gray hair, which produced

an odd effect of being artificial.

"I wish I'd done nothing worse than try on clothes," she observed, "but

I've been to lunch with an old lover."

"Poor dear," murmured Gerty, compassionately, as she passed Trent a cup

of coffee, "was he so cruel as to tell you you'd retained your youth?"

"He did worse," sighed the handsome woman, "he assured me I hadn't."

"Well, he couldn't have done more if he'd married you," declared Gerty,

with her gleeful cynicism.

"He was too brutally frank for a husband," remarked a second caller as

she sipped her coffee. "You showed more discretion, Susie, than I gave

you credit for."

"Oh, you needn't compliment me," protested Susie; "in those days he

hadn't a penny."

"Indeed! and now?"

"Now he has a great many, but he has attached to himself a wife, and I a

husband. Well, I can't say honestly that I regret him," she laughed,

"for if he has lived down his poverty he hasn't his passion for red--he

wore a red necktie. Why is it," she lamented generally to the group,

"that the male mind leans inevitably toward violent colours?"

"Perhaps they appeal to the barbaric part of us," suggested Trent,

becoming suddenly at ease amid the battle of inanities.

"Have you a weakness for red, too, Mr. Trent?" enquired Gerty.

The sparkle in his eyes leaped out at her challenge.

"Only in the matter of hair," he retorted boldly.

She regarded him intently for a moment, while he felt again as he had

felt at Laura Wilde's, not only her fascination--her personal

radiance--but the conviction that she carried at heart a deep disgust, a

heavy disenchantment, which her ostentatious gayety could not conceal.

Even her beauty gave back to him a suggestion of insincerity, and he

wondered if the brightness of her hair and of her mouth was as

artificial as her brilliant manner. It was magnificent, but, after all,

it was not nature.

"Because I warn you now," she pursued, after the brief pause, "that if

you bind your first play in red I shall refuse to read it."

"You can't escape on that ground," rejoined Trent, "I'll make it green."

"Well, you're more civilised than Perry," declared Gerty, with one of

her relapses into defiant ridicule, which caused Trent to wonder if she

were not acting upon an intuition which taught her that a slight shock

is pleasantly stimulating to the fancy, "and I suppose it's my

association with him that convinces me if we'd leave your sex alone it

would finally revert to the savage state and to skin girdles."

"Now don't you think Perry would look rather nice in skins?" enquired

the handsome woman. "I can quite see him with his club like the man

in--which one of Wagner's?"

"It isn't the club of the savage I object to," coolly protested Gerty,

"it's the taste. Perry has been married to me five years," she

continued, reflectively, "a long enough period you would think to teach

even a Red Indian that my hair positively shrieks at anything remotely

resembling pink. Yet when I went to the Hot Springs last autumn he

actually had this room hung for me in terra-cotta."

Trent cast a blank stare about the tapestried walls.

"But where is it?" he demanded.

"It's gone," was Gerty's brief rejoinder, and she added, after a moment

devoted to her cigarette, "now that's where it pays to have the wisdom

of the serpent. I really flatter myself," she admitted complacently,

"that I've a genius, I did it so beautifully. Your young innocent would

have mangled matters to the point of butchery and have gloried like a

martyr in her domestic squabbles, but I've learned a lesson or two from

misfortune, and one of them is that a man invariably prides himself upon

possessing the quality he hasn't got. That's a perfectly safe rule," she

annotated along the margin of her story. "I used to compliment an artist

upon his art and an Apollo upon his beauty--but it never worked. They

always looked as if I had under-valued them, so now I industriously

praise the folly of the wise and the wisdom of the fool."

"And the decorative talent of Perry," laughed one of the callers.

"You needn't smile," commented Gerty, while Trent watched the little

greenish flame dance in her eyes, "it isn't funny--it's philosophy. I

made it out of life."

"But what about the terra-cotta?" enquired Susie.

"Oh, as I've said, I did nothing reckless," resumed Gerty, relaxing

among her cushions, "I neither slapped his face nor went into

hysterics--these tactics, I've found, never work unless one happens to

be a prima donna--so I complimented him upon his consideration and sat

down and waited. That night he went to a club dinner--after the

beautiful surprise he'd given me he felt that he deserved a little

freedom--and the door had no sooner closed upon him than I paid the

butler to come in and smoke the walls. He didn't want to do it at all,

so I really had to pay him very high--I gave him a suit of Perry's

evening clothes. It's the ambition of his life, you know, to look like

Perry."

"How under heaven did he manage it?" persisted Susie. "The smoke, I

mean, not the resemblance."

"There are a good many lamps about the house and we brought them all

in, every one. The butler warned me it was dangerous, but I assured him

I was desperate. That settled it--that and the evening clothes--and by

the time Perry returned the room was like an extinct volcano."

"And he never found out?" asked Susie, as the callers rose to go.

"Found out! My dear, do you really give him credit for feminine

penetration? Well, if you will go--good-bye--and--oh--don't look at my

gown to-morrow night or you'll turn blue with envy," then, as Trent

started to follow the retreating visitors, she detained him by a

gesture. "Stay awhile, unless you're bored," she urged, "but if you're

really bored I shan't say a word. I assure you I sometimes bore myself."

As he fell back into his chair Trent was conscious of a feeling of

intimacy, and strange as it was, it dispelled instantly his engrossing

shyness.

"I'm not bored," he said, "I'm merely puzzled."

"Oh, I know," Gerty nodded, "but you'll get over it. I puzzle everybody

at first, but it doesn't last because I'm really as clear as running

water. My gayety and my good spirits are but the joys of flippancy, you

see."

"I don't see," protested Trent, his eyes warming.

She laughed softly, as if rather pleased than otherwise by the frankness

of his admiration. "You haven't lost as yet the divine faith of youth,"

she said, carelessly flicking the ashes of her cigarette upon the little

table at her elbow. Then, tossing the burned end into a silver tray, she

pushed it from her with a decisive movement. "I've had six," she

observed, "and that's my limit."

"What I'm trying to understand," confessed Trent, leaning forward in his

earnestness, "is why you should care so greatly for Miss Wilde?"

Gerty flashed up suddenly from her cushions. "And pray why shouldn't I?"

she demanded.

"Because," he hesitated an instant and then advanced with the audacity

born of ignorance, "you're as much alike as a thrush and a paroquet."

She laughed again.

"So you consider me a paroquet?"

"In comparison with Laura Wilde."

"Well, I'd have said a canary," she remarked indulgently, "but we'll let

it pass. I don't see though," she serenely continued, "why a paroquet

shouldn't have a feeling for a thrush?"

He shook his head, smiling. "It seems a bit odd, that's all."

"Then, if it's any interest to you to know it," pursued Gerty, with a

burst of confidence, "I'd walk across Brooklyn Bridge, every step of the

way, on my knees for Laura. That's because I believe in her," she wound

up emphatically, "and because, too, I don't happen to believe much in

anybody else."

"So you know her well?"

"I went to school with her and I adored her then, but I adore her even

more to-day. Somehow she always seems to be knocking for the good in

one, and it has to come out at last because she stands so patiently and

waits. She makes me over every time she meets me, shapes me after some

ideal image of me she has in her brain, and then I'm filled with

desperate shame if I don't seem at least a little bit to correspond with

it."

"I understand," said Trent slowly; "one feels her as one feels a strong

wind on a high mountain. There's a wonderful bigness about her."

"It's because she's different," explained Gerty, "she's kept so apart

from life that she knows it only in its elemental freshness--she has a

kind of instinct for truth just as she has for poetry or for beauty, and

our little quibbles, our incessant inanities have never troubled her at

all."

The servant entered with a card as she finished, and after reading the

name she made a quick movement of interest.

"Ask him to come up," she said to the man, adding immediately as Trent

rose to go, "it's Arnold Kemper. Will you stay and see him?"

Trent shook his head, while he held out his hand with a laugh. "I won't

stay," he answered; "I don't like him."

She looked up puzzled, her brows bent in an enquiring frown. "Not like

him! Why, you've never met."

"What has that to do with it?" he persisted lightly. "One doesn't have

to meet a man to hate him."

"One does unless one's a person of stupid prejudices."

"Well, maybe I am," he admitted, "but I have my side."

As the portières were drawn back, he turned hastily away, to come face

to face with Gerty's caller the next instant upon the threshold. Keen as

his curiosity was he took in, at his brief glance, only that Kemper

presented a bright and brave appearance and walked with a peculiarly

energetic step.

CHAPTER VII

THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE

Gerty was leaning forward among her cushions and as her visitor

approached she held out her hand, still faintly scented with cigarettes.

"Will you have coffee," she asked, "or shall I ring for tea?"

He sat down in the chair from which Trent had risen and replied with a

gesture of happy physical exhaustion. "Let me have some coffee," he

answered, "I've been out golfing all the morning, and if you don't prove

mentally stimulating I shall fall asleep before you. How many holes do

you think I played to-day?"

Gerty shrugged her shoulders over the little coffee pot. "I don't know

and it doesn't interest me," she retorted. "After six months of Europe

do you still make a god of physical exertion?"

The genial irony of his smile flashed back at her, and his eyes, half

quizzical, half searching, but wholly kind, wandered leisurely down her

slender figure. Even as he lazily sipped his coffee, with his closely

clipped, rather large brown head lying against the chair-back, she was

made to feel, not unpleasantly, the compelling animal magnetism--the

"personal quantity," as she had called it--that lay behind the masculine

bluntness of manner he affected. "Aren't you rather tumbled?" he

enquired, with an animated glance, and, though he was fond of boasting

that he was the only man he knew who never flattered women, Gerty was

conscious of a sudden flush and the pleased conviction that she must be

looking her very best. It was a trick of his, she knew, to flatter, as

it were, by paradox, to deal with delicate inuendos and to compliment by

pleasant contradiction. She had not been a woman of the world without

reaping the reward of knowledge, and now, as she leaned back and smiled

brilliantly into his face, she knew that, despite the apparent

abruptness of his beginning, they would descend inevitably to the play

of personal suggestion. His measure had been taken long ago, she told

herself, and lay tucked away in the receptacle which contained the

varied neatly labelled patterns of her masculine world; but at the same

time she was perfectly aware that within five minutes he would pique

afresh both her interest and her liking. "You can't warm yourself by

fireworks," she had once said to him, and a moment later had paused to

wonder at the intrinsic meaning of a daring phrase which he had spoken.

Still sipping his coffee, he regarded her with the blithe humour which

lent so great a charm to his expression.

"I don't see why you object to exercise when it saves my life," he

observed as he took up a cigarette and then bent forward to hold it to

the flame of the alcohol lamp.

"I don't object except when it bores me out of mine," responded Gerty

lightly.

He was still smiling when he raised his head.

"You used to like it yourself," he persisted.

"I used to like a great many things which bore me now."

"Yes, you used to like me," he retorted gaily.

She had so confidently expected the remark, had left so frank an opening

for it, that while she watched him from beneath languid eyelids a little

cynical quiver disturbed her lips. The game was as old as the Garden of

Eden, she had played it well or ill from her cradle, and at last she had

begun to grow a trifle weary. She had found the wisdom which is hidden

at the core of all Dead Sea fruit, and the bitter taste of it was still

in her mouth. The world for her was a world of make-believe--of lies so

futile that their pretty embroidered shams barely covered the ugly

truths beneath, and, though she had pinned her faith upon falsehood and

had made her sacrifice to the little gods, there were moments still when

the undelivered soul within her awoke and stirred as a child stirs in

the womb. Even as she went back to the game anew, she was conscious that

it would be a battle of meaningless words, of shallow insincerities--yet

she went back, nevertheless, before the disgust the thought awoke had

passed entirely from among her sensations.

"I believe I did," she confessed with a charming shrug.

"But you turned against me in the end--women always do," he lamented

merrily, as he flicked away the ashes of his cigarette. Then, with a

perceptible start of recollection, he paused a moment and leaned forward

to look at her more closely. "By the way, I had a shot at your friend

to-day," he said, "the lady who looks like an old picture and does

verse. Why on earth did she take to poetry?" he demanded impatiently.

"I hate it--it's all sheer insanity."

"Well, some few madmen have thought otherwise," remarked Gerty, adding

immediately, "and so you met Laura. Oh, you two! It was the irresistible

force meeting the immovable body. What happened?"

He regarded her quite gravely while his cigarette burned like a little

red eye between his fingers.

"Nothing," he responded at last. "I didn't meet her--I merely glimpsed

her. She has a pair of eyes--you didn't tell me."

Gerty nodded.

"And I forgot to mention as well that she has a nose and a mouth and a

chin. What an oversight."

"Oh, I didn't bother about the rest," he said, and she wondered if he

could be half in earnest or if he were wholly jesting, "but, by Jove, I

went overboard in her eyes and never touched bottom."

For a moment Gerty stared at him in blank amazement, in the midst of

which she promptly told herself that henceforth she would be prepared

for any eccentricities of which the male mind might be capable. A hot

flush mantled her cheek, and she spoke in a voice which had a new and

womanly ring of decision.

"You would not like her," she said, "and she would hate you."

With an amused exclamation he replaced his coffee cup upon the table.

"Then she'd be a very foolish woman," he observed.

"She believes in all the things that you scoff at--she believes in the

soul, in people, and in love--"

He made a protest of mock dismay. "My dear girl, I've been too hard hit

by love not to believe in it. On the contrary, I believe in it so firmly

that I think the only sure cure for it is marriage."

At her swift movement of aversion his laughing glance made a jest of the

words, and she smiled back at him with the fantastic humour which had

become almost her natural manner. It was a habit of his to treat

sportively even the subjects which he reverenced, and in reality she had

sometimes felt him to be less of a sober cynic than herself. He took his

pleasures where he found them, and there was a touch of pathos in the

generous eagerness with which he was ready to provide as well for the

pleasures of others. If he lacked imagination she had learned by now

that he did not fail in its sister virtue, sympathy, and his keen gray

eyes, which expressed so perfectly a gay derision, were not slow, she

knew, to warm into a smiling tenderness.

"Laura is the most earnest creature alive," she said after a moment.

"Is that so? Then I presume she lacks a sense of humour."

"She has a sense of honour at any rate."

With a laugh he settled his figure more comfortably in his chair, and

while she watched the movement, a little fascinated by its easy freedom,

she felt a sudden impulse to reach out and touch his broad, strong

shoulders as she might have touched the shoulders of a statue. Were they

really as hard as bronze, she wondered, or was that suggestion of latent

power, of slumbering energy, as deceptive as the caressing glance he

bent upon her? The glance meant nothing she was aware--he would have

regarded her in much the same way had Perry been at her side, would have

shone quite as affectionately, perhaps, upon her mother. Yet, in spite

of her worldly knowledge, she felt herself yielding to it as to a

delicate flattery. Her eyes were still on him, and presently he caught

her gaze and held it by a look which, for all its fervour, had an edge

of biting irony. There was a meaning, a mystery in his regard, but his

words when at last they came sounded almost empty.

"Oh, that's well enough in its way," he said, "but as a safeguard

there's no virtue alive that can stand against a sense of humour. An

instinct for the ridiculous will keep any man from going to the devil."

She shot her defiant merriment into his face. "Has it kept you?"

"I?--Oh, I wasn't bound that way, you know--but why do you ask?"

For a breath she hesitated, then, remembering her mystification of an

instant ago, she felt a swift desire to punish him for something which

even to herself she could not express--for too sharp a prick of

unsatisfied curiosity, or was it for too intense a moment of

uncertainty?

"Oh, one hears, you know," she replied indifferently.

"One hears! And what is it that one hears?"

His voice was hard, almost angry, and she despised herself because the

fierce sound of it made her suddenly afraid.

"Do you know what a man said to me the other day," she went on with a

cool insolence before which he became suddenly quiet. "Whom the gods

destroy they first infatuate--with an opera singer."

She delivered the words straight from the shoulder, and as she finished

he rose from his chair and stood looking angrily down upon her.

"Did you let me come here for _this?_" he demanded.

"O Arnold, Arnold!" the gayety rang back to her voice, and she made a

charming little face of affected terror. "If you're going to be a bear

I'll run away."

She stretched out her hand, and he held it for an instant in his own,

while he fell back impatiently into his chair.

"The truth is that I was clean mad about her," he said, "about Madame

Alta--but it's over now, and I abominate everything that has ever set

foot on the stage."

"Was she really beautiful?" she enquired curiously.

He laughed sharply. "Beautiful! She was flesh--if you mean that."

An angry sigh escaped him, and Gerty lighted a fresh cigarette and gave

it to him with a soothing gesture. The nervous movements which were

characteristic of him became more frequent, and she found herself

wondering that they should increase rather than diminish the impression

of virile force. For a while he smoked in silence; then, with his eyes

still turned away from her, he asked in a changed voice.

"Tell me about your friend--she interests me."

"She interests you! Laura?"

"There's something in her that I like," he pursued, smiling at her

exclamation. "She looks human, natural, real. By Jove, she looks as if

she were capable of big emotions--as if, too, you could like her without

making love. She's something new."

Gerty's amazement was so sincere that she only stared at him, while her

red lips parted slightly in a breathless and perfectly unaffected

surprise. Something new! Her wonder faded slowly, and she told herself

that now at last she understood. So he was still what he had always

been--an impatient seeker after fresh sensations.

"I thought you were too much like Perry to care about her," she said.

His amused glance made the remark appear suddenly ridiculous. "I'm

different from Perry in one thing at least," he retorted. "You didn't

marry me."

"Well, I dare say it's a good thing you never gave me the chance," she

tossed back lightly. "I don't let Perry rave, you know, even over Laura.

Not that I'm unduly jealous, but that I'm easily bored."

"I can't imagine you jealous," he commented, keeping as usual close to

the intimate intention.

"And of Perry! I should hope not!" Her gesture was one of amused

indifference. "Jealousy is the darling virtue of the savage, and I may

not be a saint, but at least I'm civilized. Give me food and a warm fire

and clothes to my back, and I'm quite content to let the passions go."

"Even love?" he asked, still smiling.

She shrugged her shoulders--gracefully as few women can. "Love among the

rest--I don't care--why should I? Make me comfortable."

An impulse which was hardly more than a consuming interest in

humanity--in the varied phenomena of life--caused him to draw quickly

nearer.

"You say that because you've 'arrived,'" he declared. "You've 'arrived'

in love as your friend has in literature. The probationary stage after

all is the only one worth while, and you've gone too far beyond it."

"I've gone too far beyond everything," she protested, laughing. "I'm a

graduate of the world. Now Laura--"

The name recalled his thoughts and he repeated it while she paused.

"Laura--it has a jolly sound--and upon my word I haven't seen a woman in

years who has had so much to say to me before I've met her. Do you know,

I already like her--I like her smooth black hair, without any of your

fussy undulations; I like her strong earnest look and the strength in

her brow and chin; I even like the way she dresses--"

Gerty's laugh pealed out, and he broke off with a movement of

irritation. "Is it possible that Laura is an enchantress," she demanded,

"and have I followed the wrong principle all my life? Has my honest

intention to please men led me astray?"

"Oh, you may be funny at my expense if you choose," he retorted, "but

I've had enough of fluff and feathers, and I like the natural way she

wears her clothes--" Again he smoked in an abstracted silence, and then

asked abruptly: "Will you take me some day to see her?"

She shook her head.

"Take you? No, you've missed your opportunity."

"But I'll make another. Why not?"

"Because I tell you frankly she would hate you."

"My dear girl, she wouldn't have a shadow of an excuse. No woman has

ever hated me in my life."

"Then there's no use seeking the experience. You'd just as well accept

the fact at once that Laura couldn't bear you--"

A laugh followed from the door while the words were still in the air,

and turning quickly they saw Laura pausing upon the threshold.

"And pray what is it about Laura?" she asked in her cordial contralto

voice. "A person who has borne living in the house with a flute may be

said to have unlimited powers of endurance."

She moved forward and Kemper, while he sprang to his feet and stood

waiting for the introduction, became swiftly aware that with her

entrance the whole atmosphere had taken a fresher and a finer quality.

The sophistication of the world, the flippant irony of Gerty's voice

gave place immediately before her earnest dignity and before the look of

large humanity which distinguished her so vitally from the women whom he

knew. He felt her sincerity of purpose at the same instant that he felt

Gerty's shallowness and the artificial glamour of the hot-house air in

which he had hardly drawn breath. There was an appeal in Laura's face

which he had never seen before--an expression which seemed to him to

draw directly from the elemental pulse; and he felt suddenly that there

were depths of consciousness which he had never sounded, vivid

experiences which he had never even glimpsed. "She is different--but how

is she different?" he asked himself, perplexed. "Is she simply a bigger

personality, or is she really more of a woman than any woman I have ever

known? What is it in her that speaks to me and what is it in myself that

responds?" And it seemed to him both strange and wonderful that he

should be drawn by an impulse which was not the impulse of love--that a

woman should attract him through qualities which were independent of the

allurement of sex. A clean and perfectly sane satisfaction was the

immediate result; he felt that he had grown larger in his own eyes--that

the old Adam who had ruled over him so long had become suddenly dwarfed

and insignificant. "To like a woman and yet not to make love to her," he

repeated in his thoughts. "By Jove, it will be something decent,

something really worth while." Then he remembered that he had never

known intimately a woman of commanding intellect, and the novelty

inspired him with the spirit of fresh adventure.

She had bowed to him over the large muff she carried, and he spoke

lightly though his awakened interest showed in his face and voice. "I

was the unfortunate subject of Gerty's decision," he said. "Is there no

appeal from it?"

Her answering smile was one of indifferent kindliness; and he liked,

even while he resented her sincerity of manner. "Appeal! and to whom?"

she enquired.

"To you--to your mercy," he laughed.

She glanced at Gerty with a look which hardly simulated a curiosity she

apparently did not feel.

"But why should you need my mercy?" she demanded, as she sat down on a

little sofa heaped with cushions.

His gaze, after resting a moment on the smooth black hair beneath her

velvet hat, turned to the exquisite shining waves which encircled

Gerty's head.

"Ask my cousin," he advised with merriment.

Whatever Gerty's reason for not caring to bring them together may have

been, she concealed it now beneath a ready acceptance of the situation.

"Oh, he tried to make me promise to take him to see you," she explained,

"but I've told him you'd show him no quarter because he hasn't read your

poems."

Laura raised her eyes to his face, and he had again the sensation of

looking into an unutterable personality.

"I'm glad you haven't read them," she rejoined, "for now you won't be

able to talk to me about them."

"So you don't like to have one talk about them?"

She met his question with direct simplicity. "About my verse? I

shouldn't like to have you do it."

"And why not I?" he demanded, laughing.

"Oh, I don't know," she returned, her eyes lighting with the humour of

her frankness, "can one explain? But I'm perfectly sure that it's not

the kind of thing you'd like. There's no action in it."

"So Gerty has told you that I'm a strenuous creature?"

"Perhaps. I don't remember." She turned to Gerty, looking down upon her

with a tenderness that suffused her face with colour. "What was it that

you told me, dearest?"

"What did I tell you?" repeated Gerty, still clasping Laura's hand. "Oh,

it must have been that he agrees with some dreadful person who said that

poetry was the insanity of prose."

Laura laughed as she glanced back at him, and he contrasted her deep

contralto notes with Gerty's flute-like soprano.

"Well, he may not be right, but he is with the majority," she said.

Her indifference piqued him into the spirit of opposition, and he felt

an immediate impulse to compel her reluctant interest--to arouse her

admiration of the very qualities she now disdained.

"Well, I take my poetry where I find it," he rejoined, "and that's

mostly in life and not in books."

From the quick turn of her head, the instant's lifting of her emotional

reserve, he saw that the words had arrested her imagination--that for

the first time since her entrance she had really taken in the fact of

his existence as an individual.

"Then you are not with the majority, but you are right!" she exclaimed.

"Is it not possible to be both?" he asked, pleased almost more than he

would admit by the quickening of her attention.

"I think not," she answered seriously, "don't you?"

"I never think," he laughed with his eyes upon hers, "I live."

The animation, which was like the glow from an inner illumination, shone

in her face, and he thought, as Trent had thought before him, that her

soul must burn like a golden flame within her--a flame that reached

toward life, knowledge and the veiled wonders of experience.

"And so would I if I were a man," she said.

She rose, clasping the furs at her throat, then folding Gerty in her

arms she kissed her cheek.

"I stopped for a moment to look at you, nothing more," she confessed.

"It was a choice between looking at you and at the Rembrandt in the

Metropolitan, and I chose you." As she held Gerty from her for an

instant and then drew her into her embrace again, Kemper saw that her

delight in her friend's beauty was almost a rapture, that her friendship

possessed something of a religious fervour.

"Do stay with me," pleaded Gerty; "I want you--I need you."

"But you dine out."

"Oh, I forgot. Wait, I'll break it. I'll be ill."

Laura smiled her refusal and, stooping, picked up her large, fluffy

muff.

"I'll come to-morrow," she returned, "and it won't cost us a lie. Good

bye, my bonnie, what do you wear?"

Gerty waved her hands in a gesture of unconcern.

"It rests with the fates and with Annette," she replied. "Green, blue,

white; I don't care."

"But I do," persisted Laura; "let it be white." She looked at Kemper and

bowed silently as she turned toward the door; then, hesitating an

instant, she came back and held out her hand with a cordial smile. "It

has been very pleasant to meet you," she said.

"Mayn't I at least see you down?" he asked. "How do you go?"

"There's really no need to trouble you," she answered, "I shall go a

part of the way in the stage."

She went out, and as he followed her down the staircase he asked himself

again the puzzling question: "She is different from other women--but how

is she different?" And still he assured himself with confidence that

what he liked in her was her serene separateness from the appeal of

passion. "This is the thing that lasts--that really lasts for a

lifetime," he said in his thoughts.

CHAPTER VIII

PROVES THAT A POOR LOVER MAY MAKE AN EXCELLENT FRIEND

That night in her sitting-room, while she corrected the proof-sheets of

her new book of verse, Laura remembered Kemper's face as he sat across

from her on the long seat of the almost empty stage. Beyond him was the

humming city, where the lights bloomed like white flowers out of the

enveloping dusk, and when he turned his profile, as he did once, against

a jeweller's window, she saw every line of his large, strongly marked

features silhouetted with distinctness on a brilliant background. Twice

during the ride down she had been conscious, as when they left Gerty's

house together, that he was more masculine than any man she had known

closely in her life, and at first she had told herself that his nervous

activity--the ardent vitality in his appearance--was too aggressive to

be wholly pleasing. She had been used to a considerate gentleness from

men, and his manner, though frankly sympathetic, had seemed to her

almost brusque.

Even now, while she laid her work aside to think of him, she was hardly

sure that his genial egoism had not repelled her. Her instinct told her

that he could be both kind and generous, that he was capable of

unselfish impulses, and full, too, of a broad and tolerant humanity,

yet there was something within her--some finer spiritual

discernment--which rose to battle against the attraction he appeared to

possess. He was not mental, he was not even superficially bookish, and

yet because of a certain magnetic quality--a mere dominant virility--she

found herself occupied, to the exclusion of her work, with the words he

had uttered, with the tantalising humour in his eyes.

"I am glad that I did not ask him to call," she thought as she took up

her pencil. "He does not interest me and very likely I shall never see

him again. He was pleasant certainly, but one can't make acquaintances

of every stranger one happens to meet." Then it seemed to her that she

had been distant, almost rude, when he had bidden her good-night, and as

she remembered the engaging frankness of his smile, the eager yet humble

look with which he had waited at her door for the invitation she did not

give, she regretted in spite of herself that she had been so openly

inhospitable. After all there was no reason that one should turn a man

from one's door simply because his personality didn't please one's

fancy. For a moment she dragged her mind for some word, some look in

which she might have found a shadow of excuse for the dislike she felt.

"No, he said nothing foolish," she confessed at last, "he was only kind

and friendly and it is I who have offended--I who have allowed myself to

feel an unreasonable aversion." All at once an irritation against

herself pervaded her thoughts, and she determined that if she met him

again she would be more cordial--that she would force herself to show a

particular friendliness. The recollection of his love for Madame Alta

came to her, and she felt at the same time a sharp curiosity and a deep

disgust--"A man like that must love with madness," she thought, and

next, "but how do I know if it were love between them and why should I

judge?" Her clasped hands went to her eyes and she prayed silently:

"Keep me apart, O Lord, keep me pure and apart!"

For a while she sat with bowed head, then, as her hands fell into her

lap, she broke into a little tender laugh at herself. "What a fool I am,

after all," she lamented; "here I have seen a man whom I do not

like--once, for an hour--and he has so troubled my quiet that I cannot

put my mind upon my work. What does it matter, and why should a stranger

who displeases me have power to compel my thoughts? It was but a

trifle--the distraction of an hour, nothing more--and, whether I like

him or not, by to-morrow I shall have forgotten his existence."

But she remembered his face as he sat across from her in the dimly

lighted stage, and she felt again, with a start, that he was the first

man she had ever known. "Yet he does not attract me, and I shall never

see him again," she thought after a moment. She took up a little

religious book from her desk and tried in vain to fix her wandering

attention. Life appeared all at once very full and very beautiful, and

as she thought of the thronging city around her it seemed to her that

she herself and the people in the street and the revolving stars were

held securely in the hand of God. The belief awoke in her that she was

shielded and set apart for a predestined good, an exalted purpose, and

she wondered if the purpose were already moving toward her out of the

city and if its end would be only the fulfilling of the law of her own

nature. Then she thought of Angela in her closed chamber. Had she been

shielded? Was she also set apart? But the thought did not disturb her,

for she herself seemed of a larger growth, of a braver spirit, than

Angela or than her aunts or than Uncle Percival, who had missed life

also. They had been defeated, but was it not because they had lacked in

themselves the courage to attain?

The next morning, after she had had her tea and toast in her room, she

went, as was her custom, into Angela's chamber. Early as it was, Mrs.

Payne had already apparelled herself in her paint and powder and driven

down. Seen by the morning sunlight, her smeared face with its brilliant

artificial smile revealed a pathos which was rendered more acute by its

effect of playful grotesqueness. She was like a faded and decrepit

actress who, fired by the unconquerable spirit of her art, forces her

wrinkled visage to ape the romantic ecstasies of passion. Age which is

beautiful only when it has become expressive of repose--of serene

renouncement--showed to Laura's eyes only as a ghastly and comic

travesty of youth.

Angela was having her breakfast at a little table by the window, and at

Laura's entrance she turned to her with a sigh of evident relief.

"Rosa has come down to speak to you particularly," she explained. "There

is something she has very heavily on her mind."

Mrs. Payne had wheeled herself about at the same instant; and Laura,

after regarding her uncertainly for a moment, impressed a light caress

upon her outstretched jewelled fingers.

"I didn't sleep a wink, my dear," began the old lady in her most

conciliatory tones, "not a blessed wink after Horace told me."

The questioning stare in Laura's face had the effect of jerking her up

so hurriedly that the words seemed to trip and stumble upon her lips.

"I might have had it from yourself, of course," she added with an

aggrieved contortion of her features, "but as I was just telling Angela,

I would not for worlds intrude upon your confidence."

"But what has he told you?" asked Laura, curiously, "and what, after

all, did I tell Uncle Horace?"

Mrs. Payne settled herself comfortably back in her chair, and, picking

up a bit of Angela's toast from the tray, nibbled abstractedly at the

crust.

"What under heaven would he have told me but the one thing?" she

demanded. "Mr. Wilberforce has at last proposed."

"At last!" echoed Laura, breaking into a laugh of unaffected merriment.

"Well, he _was_ long about it!"

At the words Angela leaned toward her, stretching out her frail hands in

a pleading gesture.

"Don't marry, Laura," she entreated; "don't--don't marry. There is only

misery from men--misery and regret."

"I believe he has millions," remarked Mrs. Payne, in the tone in which

she might have recited her creed in church, "and as far as a husband

goes I have never observed that there was any disadvantage to be found

in age. My experience of the world has taught me that decrepitude is the

only thing which permanently domesticates a man."

Laura sat down across from her, and then clasping her hands together

made her final determined stand.

"You needn't try to persuade me, Aunt Rosa," she answered, "for I

wouldn't marry him--no, not if he had billions."

For a brief interlude Mrs. Payne returned her gaze with silent yet

expressive dignity.

"There's really no occasion to become violent," she observed at last,

"particularly in the presence of poor Angela."

"But I like it! I like it," declared Angela, "it is her marriage that I

couldn't bear."

Mrs. Payne turned her reproachful look for a moment upon the weaker

sister.

"I am very sure, my dear, that we can bear anything the Lord chooses to

send," she remarked, "especially when we feel that our cross is for

another's good. Is there any reason," she wound up to Laura again, "for

the obstinate position you appear to take?"

Laura shook her head.

"I don't take any position," she replied, "I simply decline to be made

to marry him, that's all."

"But you like him--I've heard you say so much with my own ears."

"You never heard me say I liked him for a husband."

"It would have been highly indelicate if I had," observed Mrs Payne,

"but since he has proposed I may as well impress upon you that any kind

of liking is quite sufficient argument for a marriage which would be so

suitable in every way. And as to the romantic nonsense--well it all

comes very much to the same thing in the long run, and whether you begin

by loving a man or by hating him, after six months of marriage you can

ask nothing better than to be able to regard him with Christian

forbearance."

Laura turned away impatiently as Uncle Percival put his bland,

child-like face in at the open door.

"I hope you had a quiet night, Angela," he said in his high, piping

voice; "the morning is a fine one and I've already had my turn." Then,

holding his coat closely over a small bundle which he carried, he

greeted Mrs. Payne with a deprecating smile. "You're down early, Rosa;

it's a good habit."

Mrs. Payne surveyed him with an intolerant humour.

"I'm not undertaking to cultivate a habit at my time of life," she

responded, raising her voice until it sounded harsh and cracked; then

she became a prey to a devouring suspicion. "What is that under your

coat?" she demanded sternly.

Uncle Percival's flaccid mouth fell open with a frightened droop, and he

took instantly the demeanour of a small offending schoolboy.

"It--it's only a little present for Angela," he replied. "I thought it

might interest her, but I hardly think you would care for it, Rosa."

"What is it?" persisted Mrs. Payne in her unyielding calmness.

The object moved beneath his coat, and, pulling it out with a timid yet

triumphant gesture, he displayed before their astonished eyes a

squirming white rabbit.

"I hoped it might interest Angela," he repeated, seeking in vain for

sympathy in the three amazed faces.

The rabbit struggled in his grasp, and after holding it suspended a

moment by the nape of its neck, he cuddled it again beneath his coat. "A

woman was selling them in the street," he explained in a suppressed

voice. "She had a box filled with them. I bought only one."

"That was fortunate," returned Mrs. Payne, severely, "for you will have

to carry the creature back at once--or drown it if you prefer."

"But I thought Angela would like it," he said with a disappointed look.

Angela closed her eyes as if shutting out an irritating sight.

"What in the world would I do with a white rabbit?" she enquired.

"But I could take care of it," insisted Untie Percival. "I should like

to take care of it very much."

Laura drew the rabbit from his coat and held it a moment against her

bosom.

"It's a pretty little thing," she remarked carelessly, and added, "why

not keep it for yourself, Uncle Percival?"

As he glanced up at her the light of animation broke in his face.

"Why shouldn't I, indeed, why shouldn't I?" he demanded eagerly, and

hurried out before Mrs. Payne, with her Solomonic power of judgment,

could bring herself to the point of interference.

"I hope that will be a lesson to you with regard to men," she observed

as a parting shot while she tied her bonnet strings.

An uncontrollable distaste for her family swept over Laura, and she felt

that she could suffer no longer the authority of Mrs. Payne, the

senility of Uncle Percival or the sorrows of Angela. As she looked at

Mrs. Payne she was struck as if for the first time by her ridiculous

grotesqueness, and she experienced a sensation of disgust for the old

lady's stony eyes and carefully painted out wrinkles.

Without replying to the moral pointed by Uncle Percival and the white

rabbit, she left the room and hastily dressed herself for her morning

walk. The house had grown close and oppressive to her and she wanted the

January cold in her face and limbs. At the moment she was impatient of

anything that recalled a restraint of mind or body.

When she came in two hours later, after a brisk walk in the park, she

found Mr. Wilberforce awaiting her in the drawing-room downstairs. He

looked older she thought at the first glance in the last few days, but

there was a cheerfulness, a serenity, in his face which seemed to lend

itself like a softening light to his beautiful pallid features. He was a

man who having fought bitterly against resignation for many years comes

to it peacefully at last only to find that he has reaped from it a

portion of the "enchantment of the disenchanted." Her intuition told her

instantly that he had given up hope of love, but she recognized also,

through some strange communion of sympathy, that he had attained the

peace of soul which follows inevitably upon any sincere renouncement of

self.

"I am so glad, dear friend," she said, holding his hand for a moment as

she sat beside him.

He looked at her silently with his brilliant eyes which burned in the

midst of his blanched and withered face like two watch-fires that are

kept alive in a scorched desert.

"For a while I thought it might be," he replied after a long pause. "I

asked you to give me what I have never had--my youth. You could not do

it," he added with a smile, "and at first it seemed to me that there

remained only emptiness and disappointment for the future, but presently

I learned wisdom in the night." He hesitated an instant and then added

gravely, "I saw that if you couldn't give me youth, you could at least

make my old age very pleasant."

"I can--I will," she answered in a broken voice, and it seemed to her

that all the bitterness had turned to sweetness in his look. Was the

divine wisdom, after all, she wondered, not so much the courage which

turned the events that came to happiness as the greater power which

created light where there was nothing. Only age had learned to do this,

she knew, and she was conscious of a quick resentment against fate that

only age could put into passion the immortal spirit which youth craved

in vain.

"I asked a great deal," he said, "but I shall be content with a very

little."

"With my whole faith--with all my friendship," she replied; and as she

spoke the words, her heart contracted with a spasm which was almost that

of terror of the unknown purpose to which she felt, with a kind of

superstitious blindness, that she was pledged. Fate had offered her

this one good thing, and she must put it from her because she waited in

absolute ignorance--for what? For love it might be, and yet her woman's

instinct taught her that the only love which endures is the love of age

that has never been young for youth so elastic that it can never grow

old. Then swift as the flash of self-revelation she saw in imagination

the eager yet humble look with which Arnold Kemper had waited before her

door, and, though she insisted still that the picture displeased her

fancy, she knew that passion to meet response in her must come to her

clothed in a virile strength like his.

"I wish from my soul that it might have been," she murmured, but even

with the words she knew that she had all her life wished for a different

thing--for a love that was wholly unlike the love he offered.

"It has been," he answered, while his grave gentleness fell like dew on

the smouldering fire in his eyes. "It has been, my dear, and it will be

always until I die."

CHAPTER IX

OF MASQUES AND MUMMERIES

In the afternoon of the next day Laura received by a special messenger

an urgent appeal from Gerty Bridewell.

"Come to me at once," said the note, which appeared to have been written

in frantic haste. "I am in desperate trouble and I need you."

The distress of the writer was quite as apparent as the exaggeration,

and while Laura rolled rapidly toward her in a cab, she prepared herself

with a kind of nervous courage to bear the brunt of the inevitable

scene. Perry was at the bottom of it she knew--she had answered such

summonses often enough before to pre-figure with unerring insight the

nature of the event. He had shown his periodical inclination to a fresh

affair, his errant fancy had wandered in a particular direction, and

Gerty's epicurean philosophy had failed as usual to account for the

concrete fact. To Laura the amazing part was not so much Perry's

fickleness, which she had brought herself to accept with tolerant

aversion, as the extraordinary value Gerty placed upon an emotion which

was kept alive by an artifice at once so evident and so ineffectual.

There was but one thing shorter lived than his repentance she knew, and

that was the sentiment of which he was charitably supposed to have

repented. By nature he was designed a lover, and it seemed, broadly

viewed, the merest accident of circumstances that he should tend toward

variety rather than toward specialisation.

A man passing in the street bowed to her as the cab turned a corner,

and, as she recognised Arnold Kemper, she wondered vaguely if he had

aught in common with his cousin. A slight resemblance to Perry Bridewell

offended her as she recalled it, and, while her resentful sympathy flew

to Gerty, she felt almost vindictive against the masculine type he

appeared physically to represent.

"O Lord, keep me apart!" she prayed fervently, as she had prayed in the

night, for it appeared to her that the shield of faith was the one

shield for the spirit against the besieging vanities of life. Gerty's

faith had fallen from her long ago, and, as she remembered this, Laura

felt a jealous impulse to snatch her friend away from the restless

worldliness and the inordinate desires. The pitiable soul of Gerty

showed to her suddenly as a stunted and famished city child struggling

for life in an atmosphere which carried the taint of death, and in her

imagination the picture was so vivid that she saw the face of the child

turned toward her with a wistful, imploring look.

The cab stopped with a jerk, and in a little while she was knocking

softly at the closed door of Gerty's chamber. Almost immediately it

opened and the French maid came out.

"Madame is ill with a headache," she explained, pointing to the closed

shutters, "she refuses to eat."

Putting her impatiently aside, Laura closed the door upon her, and then

crossing to the windows threw back the shutters to let in the late

sunshine.

"A little light won't hurt you, dearest," she said, with a smile.

Gerty, still in her nightgown with a Japanese kimono flung carelessly

about her and her hair falling in a brilliant shower upon her shoulders,

was sitting before her bureau making a pretence of sorting a pile of

bills. In spite of this pathetic subterfuge, her beautiful green eyes

held a startled and angry look, and her face was flushed with an

excitement like that of fever.

"I was sorry I sent for you the moment afterward," she said, hardly

yielding to Laura's embrace, while she nervously tore open a bill she

held and then tossed it aside without glancing over it. "It's the same

thing over again--there's no use talking about it. I shall die."

"You cannot--you cannot," protested Laura, still holding her in her

arms. "You are too beautiful. You were never in your life lovelier than

you are to-day."

"And yet it does not hold him," broke out Gerty, in sudden passion, "and

it will never be any better, I see that. If it's not one it's another,

but it's always somebody. A year ago he promised me that I should never

have cause for jealousy again--he swore that and I believed him--and now

this--this--"

Her anger choked her like a sob, and she tore with trembling fingers at

the papers in her lap. Then suddenly her brow contracted with

resolution, and she went through a long list of items as if the most

important fact in life were the amount of money she must pay to her

dressmaker.

"Of course you know what I think," murmured Laura with her lips at

Gerty's ear.

"That he isn't worth it," Gerty nodded, while her indignant and

humiliated expression grew almost violent. "Well, I think so, too. Of

course he isn't, but that doesn't make it any better--any easier."

"You mean you couldn't give him up?"

"When I'm dead I may, not before." She closed her eyes and a long

shudder ran through her body. "It has been nothing but a fight since I

married--a fight to keep him. I used to think that marriage meant rest,

contentment, but I know now that it means a battle--all the time--every

instant. I've never had one natural moment, I've never since the

beginning been without a horrible suspicion--and I see now that I never

shall be. He likes me best I know--in his heart he really puts me

first--but there are others and I won't have it. I'll be alone, I'll be

the only one or nothing. I said I wouldn't be beaten the first time, and

I won't--I won't be beaten." She paused an instant to draw breath. "And

I haven't been," she wound up in bitter triumph.

"You'll never be, darling," declared Laura; "who is there on earth to

shine against you?"

The violence faded from Gerty's face, yielding to an expression of

disgust, of spiritual loathing--the loathing of a creature that hates

the thing it loves.

"But it isn't worth it, it isn't worth it," she moaned, pushing the

papers away from her with an indignant gesture, and rising from her

chair to walk hurriedly up and down the floor. "It isn't worth it, but

I'm bound to it--I can't get away. I'm bound to the wheel. Do you think

if I could help myself--if I could be different--that I would turn into

a mere bond-slave to my body? Why, a day labourer has rest, but I

haven't. There's not a moment when I'm not doing something for my

beauty, or planning effects, or undergoing a treatment. I never sleep as

I want to, nor bathe as I want to, nor even eat what I like. It's all

somebody's system for preserving something about me. I've lived on

celery and apples to keep from growing fat and taken daily massage to

keep from getting thin--and yet I never wake up in the morning that I

don't turn sick for fear I'll discover my first wrinkle in the glass.

Now imagine," she finished with a cynical laugh, "Perry going upon a

diet for any sentimental reasons, or sacrificing terrapin in order to

retain my affection!"

"I can't," confessed Laura bluntly, "it's beyond me, but I wish you

wouldn't. I wish you'd try to hold him by something different--something

higher."

"You can't hold a person by what he hasn't got," returned Gerty with the

flippant ridicule she so desperately clung to--a ridicule which she used

as unsparingly upon herself as upon her husband. Then, after a pause,

she resumed her bitter musing in the same high-strung, reckless manner.

"A wrinkle would kill me," she pursued; "I'd rather endure any

agony--I'd be skinned alive first like some woman Perry laughed about.

Yet they must come--they're obliged to come in fifteen--ten--perhaps in

five years. Perhaps even to-morrow. Do you suppose," she questioned

abruptly, with a tragic intensity worthy of a less ignoble cause, "that

when one gets old one really ceases to mind--that one dies out all

inside--the sensations I mean, and the emotions--before the husk begins

to wither?" She paused a moment, but as Laura continued to regard her

with a soft, compassionate look she turned away again and, touching an

electric button in the wall, flooded the room with light. The change was

so startling that every object seemed to leap at once from twilight

vagueness into a conspicuous prominence. On a chair in the corner was

carelessly flung a white chiffon dinner gown, and a pair of little satin

slippers had been thrown upon the floor beside it, where they lay

slightly sideways, with turned-out toes, as they had fallen from the

wearer's feet. The pathos which seems so often to dwell in trifling

inanimate objects spoke to Laura from the little discarded shoes, and

again society appeared to her as a hideous battle in which the passions

preyed upon the ideals, the body upon the soul. She thought of Perry

Bridewell, of his healthy animalism, his complacent self-esteem, while

her heart hardened within her. Was love, when all was said, merely a

subjection to the flesh instead of an enlargement of the spirit? Did it

depend for its very existence upon the dress-maker's art and the

primitive instinct of the chase? Had it no soul within it to keep it

clean? Could it see or hear only through the eye or the ear of sense?

"O Gerty, Gerty," she said, "if I could only make you see!"

But Gerty, with one of those swift changes of humour which made her

moods at once so unexpected and so irresistible, had burst into a peal

of mocking laughter.

"I'm prepared to conquer or to die," she said merrily; and going to a

large white box on the bed, she opened it and dangled in the air a

gorgeous evening gown of silver gauze shot with green. "This cost me a

thousand dollars," she commented in the hard, business-like tones Laura

had begun to dread. "I was keeping it for the ball next week, but

there's no call like the call of an emergency. The horrid creature he

fancies will be there," she added, surveying her exquisite armful with

an admiring, unhappy glance, "and it will be war to the death between

us, if it costs him every cent he has." She fell thoughtfully silent, to

break out at the end of a minute or two with a remark which had the

value of an imparted confidence: "She--I mean the creature--wore one

something like it, only not nearly so handsome--last night--and it made

her look frightfully gone off--even Perry noticed it."

Spreading the gown carefully upon the bed, she went to the mirror and

regarded herself with passionate scrutiny.

"Will you wait and see me dress?" she asked; "Annette has my cold bath

ready. I must have a colour, but I shan't be a minute in the tub."

"Do you mean that you are really going out to-night?" asked Laura,

remembering the despairing note of a few hours ago.

Gerty nodded. "To a dinner and a dance. Do you think that I will play

the neglected wife?"

A glow had sprung to her eyes that was like the animation with which an

intrepid hunter might depart upon a desperate chase--and through all her

elaborate toilette--the massaging of her face, the arranging of her

hair, the perfuming of her beautiful neck and arms--she chatted gayly in

the same flippant yet nervous voice. When at last the maid had withdrawn

again, Gerty, pausing before Laura in a shimmer of silver gauze that

reminded one of a faintly scented moonlight, bent over and touched her

cheek with feverish lips.

"It is war to the knife," she laughed; and the peculiar radiance of

colour, which gave her beauty a character that was almost violent, made

her at the moment appear triumphant, exultant, barbaric. To Laura she

had never seemed more beautiful nor more unhappy. Then suddenly her

manner underwent a curious change, and her accustomed mask--the smiling

surface of a woman of the world--settled as if by magic upon her face.

Perry Bridewell was at the door, and she opened it for him with an

unconcern at which Laura wondered.

"Come in if you want to," she said coolly, "Laura doesn't mind."

She drew back into the middle of the room, fastening her glove with

insolent indifference, while his startled gaze hung upon her in an

amazement he lacked the mental readiness to hide.

"By Jove, are you going out?" he asked. "I thought you were downright

ill and I was about to call up the doctor. I'm jolly glad--I declare I

am," he added humbly.

From the sincere anxiety in his voice, Laura surmised at once that

Gerty's exasperation had preceded by some hours her cooler judgment. He

looked as uncomfortable as it was possible for a man of his optimistic

habit of mind to feel, and an evident humiliation was traced upon his

countenance as if by several hasty touches of a crayon pencil.

But his features were intended so manifestly to wear a look of cheerful

self-esteem that his dejection, honest as it was, produced an effect of

insincerity, and it seemed to Laura that his other and more natural

expression was still lying somewhere beneath this superficial remorse.

Considered as physical bulk he was impressive, she admitted, in a large,

ruddy, highly obvious fashion; then he appeared suddenly so stupid and

child-like in his discomfiture that she felt her heart softening in

spite of her convictions. At the instant he resembled nothing so much as

a handsome, good-humoured, but disobedient, dog patiently awaiting a

reprimand.

"On my word I'm jolly glad," he repeated, and stopped because he could

think of nothing further to say that did not sound foolish in his own

perturbed mind.

"Oh, I'm not utterly lacking in humanity," retorted Gerty, "and one has

to be not to admit a moral obligation to one's hostess. Besides," she

confessed, with smiling pleasantry, "I shall rather enjoy Ada Lawley's

face when she sees my gown. She told me last night that she would never

be caught wearing silver gauze again until she wanted to look every day

as old as she really is. It was rather hard on her, poor thing, for

Arnold says she'd rather lose her character any day than her

complexion--not that she has very much of either left by now," she

corrected with her cutting laugh.

Before the studied insolence of her attack Perry drew back quickly in

surprise, and his eyelids winked rapidly as if a lighted candle had

flashed before them. Then, with that child-like need of having his eyes

opened, of being made to _see_, his attention was fastened upon the

brilliant figure of his wife, and her beauty seemed at the moment to

burn itself into his slow-witted brain.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, and again, "By Jove!"

"I'm glad you like it," replied Gerty, with a careless shrug. "I may not

be a model woman from a domestic point of view, but at least I've

managed to keep both my colour and my reputation." She crossed to the

bureau, and opening a drawer took out a green and silver fan. "I really

needn't trouble you to come, you know," she remarked indifferently.

"Arnold will be there and I dare say he'll be willing to come back in my

carriage."

"I dare say he will," observed Perry, not without a jealous indignation,

"and I dare say you'd be pleased enough if I'd let him."

Gerty laughed as she closed the drawer with a bang. "Well, I shouldn't

exactly mind," she rejoined.

Reconciliation, such as it was, the brief reunion of suspicion and

broken faith was apparently in rapid progress, and, filled with a pity

not unmixed with disgust, Laura put on her fur coat and went slowly down

the staircase. The last sound that followed her was the flute-like music

of Gerty's laugh--a little tired, heart-sick, utterly disillusioned

laugh.

A man was going by on the sidewalk as she went out, and when the closing

of the house door caused him instinctively to look up, she saw that it

was Roger Adams. He stopped immediately and waited for her until she

descended the steps.

"Are you bound now," he asked, "for Gramercy Park?"

She nodded "But I'd like to walk a block or two. I've been shut up all

the afternoon with Gerty."

"She's not ill, I hope," he remarked, as he fell into step at her side.

"I've always had a considerable liking for Mrs. Bridewell, and for

Perry, too. He's a first-rate chap."

For a moment Laura walked on rapidly, without replying. It seemed to her

abominable that Adams should confess to an admiration for Perry

Bridewell, and the generous humanity which she had formerly respected in

him now offended her.

"He is not a favourite of mine," she commented indifferently; then moved

by a flitting impulse, she added after a pause, "By the way, do you

know, I've met his cousin."

Adams looked a little mystified as he echoed her remark.

"His cousin?" But in an instant further light broke upon him. "Oh, you

mean Arnold Kemper!"

"I met him at Gerty's," explained Laura, "but I can't say honestly that

he particularly appealed to me. There's something about him--I don't

know what--that runs up against my prejudices."

Adams laughed.

"I rather fancy the prejudices are more than half gossip," he observed.

"I'd forgotten what I'd heard about him," rejoined Laura, shaking her

head.

They had reached a crossing, and he dropped a little behind her while

she walked on with the flowing yet energetic step she had inherited from

her Southern mother. On the opposite corner he came up with her again

and resumed the conversation where they had let it fall.

"I never see Kemper now," he said, "but I still feel that we are friends

in a way, and I believe if I were to run across him to-morrow he'd be

quite as glad to see me as if we hadn't parted fifteen years ago. The

last time I saw much of him, by the way, we roughed it together one

autumn on the coast of Nova Scotia, and I remember he volunteered there

to go out in the first heavy gale to bring in some fishermen who had

been caught out in the ice. They tied a rope around his waist and he

went and brought the men in, too, though we feared for a time that his

hands would be frozen off."

"Oh, I dare say he has pluck," observed Laura, and though her voice was

constrained, she was conscious of a sudden moral exhilaration, such as

she sometimes experienced after reading a great poem or seeing a

Shakespearian tragedy upon the stage. The lights and the noises and the

people in the street became singularly vivid, while she moved on in an

excitement which she could not explain though she felt that it was

wholly pleasurable. Kemper was present to her now in a nobler, almost a

glorified, aspect, and she began, though she herself was hardly aware of

it, to idealise him with the fatal ardour of a poet and a dreamer. There

was a splendour to her in his old heroic deed--a glow that transfigured,

like some clear northern light, the storm and the danger and even the

ice bound fishermen--and she told herself that it would be impossible

ever to atone to him for her past rudeness.

"Perhaps I was unjust," she remarked presently, "but one is never proof

against intuitive impressions, and after all it does not greatly

matter."

Then she looked at Roger Adams as he walked in the electric light beside

her. She saw how haggard were the lines in his face, that he was bent in

the shoulders as if from some mental burden, and the delicacy of his

long, slender figure appeared to her almost as a physical infirmity. It

occurred to her at the instant that his bodily defects had never before

showed so plainly to her eyes, and it was with a flash of acute

self-consciousness--a flash as from a lantern that has been turned

inward--that she realised that she was comparing him with Arnold Kemper.

CHAPTER X

SHOWS THE HERO TO BE LACKING IN HEROIC QUALITIES

When he had parted from Laura Adams walked down Fifth Avenue to

Thirty-fifth Street and then turned east in the direction of his own

house. He found upon entering that Connie, as usual, was dining out, and

after he had eaten his poorly served dinner alone in the dining-room, he

went upstairs with the intention of slipping into his smoking jacket and

returning to his study for a peaceful smoke. The electric lights were

blazing in Connie's bedroom, and when he went in to extinguish them,

moved by some instinct of economy, he found that the room was in even

greater disorder than that to which he had grown, after years of

uncomplaining discomfort, outwardly if not inwardly resigned. Of a

naturally systematic habit of thought, Connie's carelessness had been

for him one of those petty annoyances of daily life to meet which he had

always felt that philosophy had been especially designed; but to-night

the chaos struck him so forcibly that he found himself vaguely

questioning if it were possible for a human creature to sleep in such a

spot? Picking up several gowns from the middle of the floor, he returned

them to the wardrobe, and set himself to clearing the bed of an array of

satin shoes. Her silver hair brushes had fallen on the hearth rug, and

in replacing them upon the bureau his eye fell on a small, half-empty

phial lying beneath a pile of lace-edged handkerchiefs. Looking at it a

little closer he found that it contained a solution of cocaine.

For a moment surprise held him motionless; then as if to refute and

explain away any ordinary reason for her possession of the drug, he

remembered, in a comprehensive flash the recent violent changes in her

character--her uncontrollable attacks of nervousness, her spasmodic

movements and her sudden flowing, almost hysterical, volubility of

speech. His heart contracted with a sensation like that of terror, and

he was turning away again when his glance was arrested by a heap of

crumpled bills lying loosely in one corner of the open drawer.

Recollecting that she had complained the day before of the smallness of

her allowance, he drew out the papers for a casual examination--but it

needed much less, in fact, than this to assure him that her expenses had

not only gone immeasurably beyond her own limited allowance, but that

they had considerably exceeded his slightly larger income. Her debts had

evidently run up to a sum which she had lost the courage to confess even

to herself, and, while the gravity of the situation entered into him, he

smoothed out the torn and crumpled sheets and went with them to his

study. Until to-night he had looked upon Connie's extravagance merely as

an innocent childish failing, resulting from an inherent incapacity, as

she laughingly said, "to do sums," but now as he sat under the green

lamp shade, anxiously multiplying item after item, it seemed to him that

this recent recklessness involved not only her private happiness but

his own personal honour. He was a hot-tempered man by nature, and at

first the very absurdity of her expenditures, the useless, costly

trifles which made up the amount, produced in him an unreasoning passion

of anger. Had she been in the house he would have gone to her in the

first shock of his temper, but her ceaseless pursuit of pleasure had put

her beyond his reach, so he sat silently staring at the neatly arranged

heap of papers while his exasperation cooled within him.

Presently, still sitting motionless in his chair, he felt the absolute

quiet of the room take effect upon his mood, and with the peculiar

tolerance confirmed as much by balked ambition as by years of enforced

and bitter patience he began with a philosophic and impersonal leniency

to soften in his judgment of Connie's case. At the moment there was no

tenderness, he told himself, in the view he took, and he gave to her

merely the distant, habitual charity that he would have extended to the

stranger in the street. To give to her in the very least seemed to him

suddenly almost impossible when he remembered that from a forlornly

foolish caprice she had plunged him into a debt of several years. He had

worked hard, with broken health, in a profession of small financial

returns, but to his own simple tastes his income might have brought not

only perfect material ease, but the enjoyment of comparative luxury.

Still there was Connie--he had always in every situation remembered that

there was Connie--and in order to insure her present comfort as well as

to provide for her future livelihood, he had contrived to limit his

expenses to the merest necessities. One only gratification he had

allowed himself--his eyes travelled gloomily round his precious

book-lined walls and he found himself wondering if those particular

treasures would bring their full value in the open market? He regarded

them meditatively, almost religiously, with the impassioned eye of the

collector who is born not cultivated. Yet there were among them no

high-priced, particular rarities, for he had always counted the cost

with the deliberation which he felt to be the better part of impulse.

Financially they did not represent a great deal, he admitted; then, as

if flinching before a threatened sacrilege, he looked away again, while

he remembered with a quick recognition of the ludicrous, that among the

articles for which Connie had not paid was a pair of pearl ear-rings.

The item had taken a prominence oddly out of keeping with its

significance, and he found that it irritated him more than the thought

of objects of a decidedly greater cost. That any woman, that his wife in

particular, should want a pair of ear-rings appeared to him little short

of the barbaric.

But the incident was trifling, and a minute later it had faded entirely

from his reflections. As he sat there in his easy-chair in the lamp

light his thoughts turned slowly backward, travelling over the tragic

yet uneventful history of his life. He remembered his childhood on a

little Western farm, the commonplace poverty of his people, and his own

burning, agonised ambition, which had sent him through college on a

pittance, swept the highest honours from his graduation year, and

wrecked at last what had been at his starting out a fairly promising

physical constitution. He recalled, too, the sleepless enthusiasm of

his last term at Harvard, the terrible exhaustion which had made his

final triumph barren, and the long illness which had brought him in the

end, with shattered health, to the door of the great specialist in lung

diseases. At this day he could shut his eyes and summon back with

distinctness the smallest detail of the interview. He went over again

his tedious wait in the outer office--the scattered magazines upon the

table, the utterly inartistic prints upon the wall, the ticking of the

tall bronze clock on the mantel, and even the number of the page he had

been reading in a periodical, for--following a methodical habit--he had

unconsciously made a mental note of the figures when he laid the

magazine aside to face the examination behind the folding doors. With

the patient attention to minutia which was a part of his literary

instinct, his memory followed the great man across the ugly yellow

squares in the carpet and fixed itself upon a row of small green bottles

standing in a wooden rack upon the table. Through the half hour of his

visit, which brief as it was casually dismissed him to his death, those

slender green phials seemed to his fancy to hold an absurd and grotesque

prominence. "In a climate like this I'd give you three years--maybe a

little longer--yes, I think I may grant a little longer," the great man

had remarked, with what seemed to Adams a ridiculous assumption of

yielding a concession. "In a dryer air you might even be good, we may

say, until thirty-five or forty." He shrugged his shoulders with a

gesture intended to convey his sympathy but which succeeded only in

expressing his personal importance, and Adams had walked out from the

stuffy little ether-smelling office with a feeling curiously like that

he had known as a boy when during a school game of football, he found

himself suddenly thumped upon the heart. On the doorstep he had stopped

and laughed aloud, struck by the persistency with which the green

bottles dominated his impressions.

After this there had come a blank of a few weeks--a blank of which he

remembered nothing except that he had struggled like an entrapped beast

against his fate--against his fruitless labour, his sacrificed ambition,

the unavailing bitterness of his self-denial--against the world,

destiny, life, death, God! But the very intensity of his rebellion had

brought reaction, and it was in the succeeding apathy of spirit that he

had packed his few belongings and started for the Colorado country.

Behind him he was leaving all that made life endurable in his eyes, and

yet he was leaving it from some half animal instinct which caused him to

preserve the mere naked strip of existence that he no longer valued. He

hated himself for going, yet he went that he might hate himself the more

bitterly with each step of the journey.

The lamp on his desk flared up fitfully and as he turned to lower the

wick his eyes fell on Connie's picture. The uplifted babyish face came

back to him as he had first seen it under floating cherry-colored

ribbons, and his anger of the last half-hour melted and vanished utterly

away. For the sake of those few months, when the waning fire within him

had leaped despairingly toward the flame of life, he knew that he could

never quite put Connie from his heart--for the sake of his short

romance and for the sake, too, of his child that had lived three hours.

The thin, heavily veined hand on the arm of his chair quivered for an

instant, and he felt his pulses throb quickly as if from acute physical

pain. From the pitiable failure of his marriage, from his loneliness and

disillusionment there came back to him the three hours when he had

looked upon the face of his living child--the hours of his profoundest

emotion, his completest reconciliation. He had never regarded himself as

an emotionally religious man, yet ten years ago, on the night that his

boy died, he had felt that an immortal and indissoluble part of himself

had gone out into the void. For the first time he had come to the deeper

reality of life--through the flowing of the agonised longing within

himself toward that permanent universal consciousness of which all human

longings are but detached and wandering forms. From that time death had

held for him a more personal promise; and the obligation to live, to

fulfil one's present opportunities, had become charged with another

meaning than he had been used to read into what he called his mere

animal responsibility. The boy who had died was for him in a close, an

intimate relation, still vitally alive; and with one of those quaint yet

pathetic blendings of memory with imagination the little undeveloped

soul had blossomed, not invisibly, incommunicably, but into actual daily

companionship with his thoughts.

Sitting there under the green lamp, he himself showed as an

insignificant figure to possess an ear for the divine silences, an eye

for the invisible beauty. His long, gaunt body lay relaxed and inert

upon the leather cushions, and his knotted, bony hands--the hands of a

scholar and a thinker--were stretched, palms downward, on the rolled

arms of his chair. There was nothing in his appearance--nothing in his

worn, humorous face under the thin brown hair, to suggest the valiant

lover, the impressionable dreamer. Yet in the innermost truth of his own

nature he was both, and his grief, of which in his strange, almost

savage, reserve he had never spoken even to his wife, had softened

gradually into the gentlest of his dreams as well as the profoundest of

his regrets. "The little chap," as he always called the child, in his

thoughts, had grown for him into an individuality which for all its

nearness was yet clearly distinct from his own. Adams had lived day by

day with him, had sat face to face with him in his lamp-lighted room,

had carried him successfully through the first childish books that he

might have studied, had even launched him into the Latin he might have

learned. A boy to train, to educate, a mental companionship such as he

loved to fancy he would have found in a young, eager mind, had since his

marriage become the one burning desire of his heart, and even to-night

sitting, as he so often did, alone in his house, his thoughts dwelt with

a playful tenderness upon the boy who might have brought his _Cæsar_ to

his footstool. He was a man of instinctive moral cleanness, and even in

his imagination he had always kept the riotous senses severely in the

check of reason. In the domain of the affections he had wanted nothing

desperately, he told himself, except his child; and so intense had this

yearning of fatherhood become in him that there were moments of bitter

loneliness when he seemed almost to feel the touch of the boy's hand

upon his knee. He had strange hours, even when his dream became more

vivid to him than the pressing reality of events.

The clicking of the latchkey as it was put into the lock aroused him

presently, and immediately afterward he heard the closing of the outer

door, a brief "Good-night!" in Connie's high-pitched voice, and her

rapid steps as they crossed the carpet in the hall. While he waited,

hesitating to follow her upstairs, his door opened and shut quickly, and

she came in and threw herself into a chair beside the lamp. Her blonde

head fell heavily back upon the cushions and the light, streaming

directly upon her face, revealed to his startled eyes all the intenser

angularities produced by the last twelve months--angularities which

seemed, somehow, to belong less to the features themselves than to the

restless intelligence which lay behind them. Connie's features had

always appeared too small for expression; too correctly formed for any

deviating individuality, but the impression made upon Adams now was that

they had grown so thin--so transparent in their fineness--that he looked

through them to the nervous animation confined and struggling in her

fragile body. The same animation throbbed like a pulse in her emaciated

bosom, which only the extreme smallness of her bones kept still lovely

in its low-cut evening gown. She was devoured, consumed by the agony of

restlessness which shook through her, directing and controlling her

slender judgment like a perpetual and imperfectly subdued convulsion of

passion.

For an instant he looked at her in attentive silence, then, as her

fingers wrestled uncertainly with the cords of her evening wrap, he rose

from his chair and bent forward to assist her.

"It's in a hard knot," she said irritably. "I can't undo it."

While he released the fastening and drew back his glance fell upon the

little bluish hollows in her temples, over which the light curls were

skilfully arranged, and as he realised fully her wasted physical

resources, it seemed to him that an allusion to anything so sordid as a

mere financial difficulty would sound not only trivial but positively

indecorous as well. With a whimsical trick of memory he recalled

abruptly a man under sentence of death in a Western gaol who had

received the night before his execution a bill for a dozen bottles of

champagne. Connie's extravagance appeared to him suddenly but a kind of

moral champagne--the particular _hasheesh_ that she had chosen from

unhappy consciousness. To live at all one must live with a dream, he

knew, and to his present flashing vision it seemed that Connie's ecstasy

of possession and his own ecstasy of desire served a like end when they

transfigured for a little while the brutal actuality from which there

was no escape except by the way of a man's own soul.

"You're ill," he said at last in a compassionate voice, "and there's

nothing for you but to get out of New York as soon as possible."

She looked disconcerted, almost incensed, by the suggestion.

"You can't send me to Florida," she returned, "and that's where

everybody goes at this season."

A trembling like that of faintness which is fought off by an effort of

will ran over her, and he watched the pale, unsteady quiver of her

eyelids.

"I will send you there--I'll send you anywhere," he said, "if you will

promise me--"

The words were hard to come, and while he stumbled over them she looked

up with a startled exclamation. Her glance travelling to his face, swept

over the desk beside which he stood and was arrested by the pile of

unpaid bills, which he had pushed, as he spoke, further away from the

lamp light. A hot, angry flush overspread her face, and she made a

nervous movement that brought her to her feet with a spring.

"You had no right to look at them," she burst out sharply, "they are all

wrong. Half of them were not meant for me."

The lie was so foolish, so ineffectual and without excuse, that he

flinched and turned his eyes away--for the shame of it seemed to belong

less to her than to himself. At the instant he was conscious of a

stinging sensation in his veins as of a man who realises for the first

time that he has fallen into dishonour.

"I did not mean to mention that--at least not now," he said quickly.

"We'll call it off and try to keep clean out of debt in the future. I

fear your allowance does seem rather shabby to you, but it can't be

helped. It takes every cent of the balance to run the house and pay my

life insurance."

He waited an instant, hoping that his matter-of-fact statement of the

situation--his freedom from implied reproach--might call forth some

expression, however slight, of her appreciation. But her glance flashed

over him, critical, disapproving, and he became aware, through a wonder

of intuition, that even at the moment she was possessed by her passion

for externals, was weighing his personal details as he stood in the lamp

light, and deciding impartially that he made but a poor physical

showing. Her unfavourable verdict was impressed upon him so strongly

that it produced a revulsion of anger. He felt, somehow, that their

positions were reversed, that she had him now at her mercy, and failing

to reduce him by flattery, had chosen to wither him by contempt.

"There's not a woman I know who could dress decently on what I have,"

she rejoined, skilfully adjusting him into the necessity of defence.

He gathered up the papers, and placing them in a drawer of his desk,

closed it sharply. There was a sordid indecency about the discussion

which stung him like the stroke of a whip.

"I am sorry," he returned coolly, "but I have done my best. There is

nothing more to be said." His eyes lingered for a moment on her thin

bosom where the bones were beginning to be faintly visible through the

ivory flesh. Then he looked at her sharpened face and saw that the three

little wrinkles were stamped indelibly between her eyebrows. As he

watched her she lifted her head with the babyish tilt he had first seen

under cherry-coloured ribbons. "I will find the money to send you to

Florida," he said slowly, "if you will promise me--to give up drugs."

She gathered her wraps about her and made a movement as if to leave the

room. "Drugs! Why, how ridiculous!" she exclaimed with a laugh, though

he felt the cold edge of hatred in her voice.

Still laughing, she went out and up the staircase, and a few minutes

afterwards he heard her nervous step in the room above. He took out the

bills again and spent half the night in the effort to realise the exact

amount of his indebtedness.

CHAPTER XI

IN WHICH A LIE IS THE BETTER PART OF TRUTH

At breakfast Connie did not appear--she had seemed to be asleep when he

went into his dressing-room--and it was not until one o'clock that he

had a chance to speak to her again. Luncheon was already on the table

when he entered the dining-room, and Connie, in a green velvet gown and

a little green velvet hat ornamented by a twinkling aigrette, was

standing by the window looking out restlessly at the falling snow. As he

came in she went over to the table and began making tea with nervous

hands. She was apparently in the highest spirits, and while she fumbled

noisily with the cups and saucers she rambled on in her expressionless

voice with tinkling interludes of her shrill, falsetto laughter. As he

watched her in shamed silence he remembered with astonishment that it

had taken him almost ten years to find out that Connie was vulgar. Now

at last his eyes were opened--he had achieved a standard of comparison

and he felt her commonness with an awakening of his literary instinct,

quite as acutely, he told himself, as he should have felt it had she

been presented to him in the form of a printed page. The sense of

remoteness, of strangeness, grew upon him at each instant; he realised

the uselessness of his good intentions toward her--the utter

impossibility of snatching her or any human creature from the clutch of

temperament.

Her day was filled with engagements, she told him at the end of luncheon

when she rose to hurry off while he still lingered over his coffee; "and

I shan't be here to dine, either," she added, as an after thought. "Gus

Brady will come for me--there's the opera and a supper afterwards, so

you needn't trouble to sit up."

"But whom are you going with?" he enquired, filled for the first time

with a painful curiosity concerning the social body in which Connie

moved.

She shook her head with a gesture of irritation, while the aigrette in

her hat sent out little iridescent flashes of blue and green. "Oh, you

wouldn't know if I told you," she answered impatiently, and left the

room so hastily that he felt she had meant to wriggle away from the

repeated question. What did it mean? he wondered for a minute as he

slowly sipped his coffee. Even if she should go with Brady alone, where

was the harm of it? and why should she avoid so innocent an admission.

He was of a candidly unsuspicious nature, and since in his own mind he

had seen no particular reason for infringing upon the conventions of

society they had never given him so much as an unquiet thought.

Certainly to dine at a restaurant or attend so public a function as

grand opera with a person of the opposite sex, seemed to him a

singularly harmless choice of indiscretions, and had she made a careless

avowal of her intention the matter would probably have dropped at the

moment from his thoughts. But the very secretiveness of her manner--the

suggestion of a hidden motive which dwelt in her nervous movements and

even quivered in the little scintillating aigrette on her blonde

head--aroused in him if not a positive distrust, still a bewildering and

decidedly unpleasant confusion of ideas. He felt, somehow, vaguely

impelled to action, yet for the life of him, he admitted after a moment,

he could see no single direction in which action with regard to his wife

would not savor of the indiscreet, if not of the ridiculous. The

attitude of an aggrieved husband had always showed to him as something

laughable, and an explosion of jealousy had never appeared more vulgar

than it did while he sat patiently conjecturing if such a domestic

cyclone might be counted upon to shake Connie to her senses. In the end

he gave it up as a farce which he felt it would be beyond the power of

his gravity to sustain. "I'll do anything in reason, heaven knows," he

found himself confessing, after the instant's reflection, "but I'll be

hanged before I'll set out in cold blood to play the fool."

The front door, closing with a bang, brought him instantly to his feet

and, glancing through the window, he saw Connie about to step into a cab

which she had signalled from the sidewalk. Her velvet gown trailed

behind her, and she appeared perfectly unconcerned by the fact that she

had sunk above her ankles in the heavy snowdrifts. A moment later, when

she lifted her train to enter the cab, he discovered to his amazement

that she was wearing low kid shoes with the thinnest of silk stockings.

Then, before he could raise the window for a protest, the cab rolled off

in the direction of Fifth Avenue, and, wet feet and twinkling feather,

she was out of sight.

By the time he had got into his overcoat and followed her into the

street, the snow had begun to fall more rapidly in large powdery

flakes, which soon covered him in a thick, frosty coating from head to

foot. As he walked briskly toward his office, he noticed with a

quickened attention the women who like Connie, with nervous faces

showing above elaborate gowns, were borne swiftly past him in hired

cabs. Something, he hardly knew what, had opened his eyes to that

glittering life of the world of which he had always been profoundly

ignorant, and it seemed to him suddenly that the distance between

himself and his wife had broadened to an impassable space in a single

night. Connie was no longer the girl whom he remembered under

cherry-coloured ribbons. She came in reality no closer to him than did

the tired, restless women, with artificially brightened faces, who

appeared to his exhausted eyes to whirl past him perpetually in cabs. A

passionate regret seized him for the thing which Connie was not and

could never be again--for the love he had never known and for the

fatherhood that had been denied him.

He had turned, still plunged in his thoughts, into a quiet cross street

where a crowd of ragged urchins were snowballing one another in a noisy

battle; and as he paused for an instant to watch the fight he noticed

that a man, coming from the opposite direction, had stopped also and

stood now motionless with interest upon the sidewalk. The peculiar

concentration of attention was the first thing which Adams remarked in

the stranger--from his absorbed level gaze it was evident that mentally

at least he had thrown himself for the moment into the thickest of the

battle, and there was a flush of eager enjoyment in the face which was

partially obscured by the falling snow flakes. Then, quick as a flash of

light, something pleasantly familiar in the watching figure, gripped

Adams with the memory of a college battle more than fifteen years ago,

and he burst out in an exclamation of pleased surprise.

"You're Arnold Kemper and I'm Roger Adams," he said, laying his hand

upon the other's arm.

Kemper wheeled about immediately, while the smile of placid amusement in

his face broadened into a laugh of delighted recognition.

"Well, by Jove, it's great!" he responded, and the heartiness of his

handshake sent a tingling sensation through Adams' arm. "I don't know

when I've been so pleased for years. Been to luncheon?"

"I've just had it," laughed Adams, remembering that fifteen years ago,

when he last saw him, Kemper had extended a similar invitation with the

same grasp of hearty good fellowship. Was it possible that the man had

really kept his college memories alive? he wondered in a daze of

admiration, or had he himself merely awakened by his reappearance a

train of associations which had lain undisturbed since their last

parting. Let it be as it might, Adams felt that the encounter was of the

pleasantest.

"I'm driven like a slave back to office drudgery," he added, "and I'm

half inclined to envy you your freedom and your automobiles."

Kemper's eyes shot back an intimate curiosity. "So you're editor of _The

International Review_, I hear," he said. "Do you know I've had it in my

mind for years to look you up, but there's such a confounded temptation

to let things drift, you know."

"I know," rejoined Adams, smiling. "I've drifted with them."

"Well, I'm jolly glad that you've drifted my way at last. So you've been

to luncheon, have you?" Kemper enquired again, as he unfastened a button

of his overcoat and drew out his watch. "I wish you hadn't--I've

promised to meet a man at the club and it's past the hour. I say, look

here," he added hastily as he was about to hurry off, "I've some rather

decent rooms of my own now where I sometimes manage to get a quiet

morsel. Will you come to dine to-morrow at half-past seven, sharp?"

It took Adams hardly an instant to consider and accept the invitation.

Though he rarely dined out he felt a positive pleasure at the thought,

and when, a minute later, he walked on again, repeating the number of

the address which the other had pressed upon him, he found that Kemper's

greeting had left a trail of cheerfulness which lingered for at least a

half hour after the man himself had gone on his genial way. If, as Gerty

Bridewell had once declared in a fit of exasperation, "Arnold Kemper

consisted of a surface," he managed at least to present those mystifying

ripples of personality which suggest to the imagination depths of

pleasantness as yet undiscovered. Adams had lived to his present age by

the help of few illusions--and he realised even now that the thing he

liked in Kemper was an effect of manner which implied an impossible

subtlety--that the power one saw in the man was produced simply by some

trick of pose, by a frankness so big that one felt intuitively there

must be still bigger qualities behind it. Whether it was all a bluster

of affectation Adams had never as yet decided in his own mind, but

there were moments when, in listening to stories of the masculine

freedom in which Kemper lived, he felt inclined to acknowledge that the

force, whatever it was, had spent itself in wind. In a profession the

man would inevitably have become a figure, he thought now with a touch

of friendly humor--in law or medicine he would have gone in for the

invincible "grand style," and the picturesqueness of his person would

have served to swell the number of his clients. It was a shabby turn of

fortune, Adams admitted, which in supplying Kemper with a too liberal

bank account, had made of him at the same time a driver of racing motor

cars instead of the ornament of a more distinguished field. There were

compensations doubtless, and he wondered if in this instance they had

centred in the fascinations of an operatic Juliet?

Upon reaching his office he found that he was late for an interview he

had appointed with a famous Russian revolutionist, who had promised him

an article for the _Review_. It was the time of the month when they were

making up the forthcoming number, and he was kept late over a discussion

of the leading paper, which, owing to the sudden death of a literary

personage of distinction, he had been compelled to replace at the last

moment.

His office was a small, dingy room on the eighth floor of a building in

Union Square, and his privacy was guarded by the desks of his

secretaries placed directly beyond the threshold. These assistants were

young men of considerable promise, he liked to think--college graduates

and temperamental hero-worshippers, who adored him with an ardour which

he found at once disconcerting and ridiculous. He had been used,

however, to so little personal appreciation in his life that he had

grown of late to look forward, with pathetic eagerness, to the hearty

morning greeting of his fellow-workers--for one of whom, a

fresh-coloured youth named Baldwin, he had come to cherish a positive

affection. It was stimulating to feel that somewhere he counted for

something in his bodily presence--even though the scene of his

importance was confined to the little smoke-stained office among the

chimney pots.

When, at the end of the day, he came out into the street again and

crossed to Fifth Avenue for his accustomed walk, he found that the snow

had ceased to fall, though a bitter wind was scattering the heavy drifts

in a succession of miniature blizzards. After the heated office the

tempestuous gale struck agreeably upon his face, and his mind, which he

had kept closely upon his work until the hour of release, began almost

with difficulty to detach itself from the fortunes of the _Review_. In

the effort to compel rather than seek distraction, he put his

imagination idly on the scent of the people in the street--ran down in

fancy the history of a woman in a purple velvet gown and a bedraggled

petticoat, catalogued an athletic young Englishman who tugged at his

heels a reluctant bulldog, and wove a tragic romance around a pretty

girl in a shabby coat who stood in a staring ecstasy before a window

filled with imitation jewels. Then two men, smoking cigars, came up

suddenly behind him and he amused himself with guessing at the brand of

the tobacco, which had a remarkably fragrant aroma.

"The only thing I know against her," said one of the men with a laugh as

he went by, "is that she dines alone with Brady. If you see nothing in

that beyond the simple act of dining--"

Reaching a corner they turned off abruptly down a cross street and the

rest of the sentence passed with the speaker into an obscurity of fog.

For an instant it did not occur to Adams to connect the phrase with an

allusion to his wife; then as he repeated it mechanically in his

thoughts, there sprang upon him, like some sinister outward visitation,

an indefinable horror--a presentiment which he dared not whisper even to

himself. Pshaw! there were perhaps, a dozen women who dined with Brady,

he insisted reassuringly, and for the matter of that, there were

probably a dozen Bradys. The name was common enough, and the only decent

thing to do was to get rid of the suspicion and to apologise to Connie

in his thoughts. To impute a low motive to a simple action had always

seemed to him the vulgarity of littleness, and littleness in a man he

had come to look upon as a kind of passive vice. So until the event

proved the necessity of action, he was determined that there should be

no "black bats" among his thoughts. Had he loved Connie there might have

been perhaps more passion and less conscience in his treatment of the

situation, but the humour of the philosopher had for many years replaced

in his nature the ardour of the lover. What he gave to her was the

inflexible code of honour which he observed in his association with his

own sex.

At Fortieth Street he was about to turn back again when he was arrested

by the sound of his own name called by a passing voice, and looking up

he saw Perry Bridewell spring from a cab which had hastily driven up to

the sidewalk.

"Wait a bit, will you, Adams?" said Perry, waving one heavily gloved

hand while he reached up with the other to pay the driver. "You're the

very man I'm after," he added an instant later as he turned from the

curbing, "so if you don't mind I'll walk a couple of blocks in your

direction. I'd just got into my dinner clothes," he explained, fastening

his fur-lined overcoat more snugly across his chest, "when I found that

Miss Wilde was going down alone to Gramercy Park. That's where I've come

from, and now I'm rushing back to keep an engagement Gerty has made for

dinner. I'll be hanged if I know where she's taking me--it's all one to

me, half the time I forget to ask whose house we're going to until I

bolt into the drawing-room. Beastly life, this everlasting eating in

other people's houses."

His tone was one of amiable discontentment, but there was a look of

positive annoyance upon his handsome face, and he turned presently to

regard his companion with an enquiry which might have been darkly

furtive had not the luminous publicity in which he moved rendered the

smallest of his mental processes so brilliantly overt. It was

immediately plain to Adams that the jerky sentences were shot out at

random in order that Perry's slow mind might gain a larger space in

which to grope for the word he really wanted. There was something

evidently behind it all, and until the situation should disclose itself

they walked on in an embarrassed and waiting silence. In his top hat and

his mink-lined overcoat Perry presented an ample dignity which his

companion found almost overpowering in its male magnificence. That

hesitation should manifest itself amid such a pageantry of personality

reminded Adams of the beggars in the old nursery rhyme who had come to

town sporting velvet gowns. Everything about Perry Bridewell was built

on so opulent a scale that in thinking of him one found oneself using

almost unconsciously a Romanesque and florid diction.

"There is something you'd like to say to me," suggested Adams presently.

"I'm in no hurry, of course, but isn't this as good a time as any

other?"

"By Jove, that's just what I was thinking," returned Perry, with a burst

of confidence, "but it isn't really anything, you know--that is, I mean,

it isn't anything that--that's real business."

A pretty woman passed suddenly under the electric light, and even in his

embarrassment, which was great, he followed her with the animated glance

which he instinctively devoted to vanishing feminine beauty.

"Thank God, there's no real business between us," retorted Adams, "and

that's why it's a rest to spend a half-hour with you--because you don't

know a piece of literature from a publisher's advertisement."

"We're such old friends, you know," pursued Perry, forgetting the moment

which he had wasted upon the pretty woman, "that when there's a thing on

my mind I feel--well, I feel a--a deuced queer fish not to tell you."

Adams laughed good naturedly.

"For heaven's sake don't remain long in a fishy sensation," he

rejoined. "Let's have it out and over. By the way, may I ask if it

concerns you or me?"

Perry shook his head as he tugged nervously at his fair moustache. "Look

here, old man," he said at last, "I know, of course, that Mrs. Adams is

as innocent as a baby--Gerty's just like her and there are plenty of

women made that way. It's the men who are such confounded brutes," he

commented with pensive morality.

"Oh, is that it?" responded Adams, and he turned upon the other a look

that was coolly interrogative. "Come, now, we'll take it quietly. You're

one of the best friends I have, and I want to know what they're saying

about my wife."

"It's that damned Brady!" exclaimed Perry, while he felt for his

handkerchief, and blew his nose with violence.

"All right--it's that damned Brady?" repeated Adams.

"If I didn't think more of you than of any man on earth I'd be shot

before I'd tell you," protested Perry, and added with a desperate rush

under fire.

"He had too much champagne last night--though, as for that matter, I've

seen him upset by a cocktail--and afterward at billiards he told Skinker

that--that Mrs. Adams--you understand, old chap, it's all his rot--was

going to supper alone with him to-night--in his rooms after the opera.

Of course he was drunk and I wouldn't bet a cent on his word even when

he's sober. He's the kind of fool that tells of his conquests at the

club," he wound up with scathing contempt.

For a moment Adams, looking away from him, stared silently into a shop

window before which he stood--intent apparently upon the varied display

of antique silver. Then he turned squarely to Perry Bridewell and broke

into a short, hard laugh.

"Well, Brady lied," he said. "I promised Mrs. Adams that I would bring

her home from the opera." It was no hesitation in his own voice, but the

joyful relief which shone at him from Perry's face that brought him

suddenly to a stop. "You were a first-rate fellow to come to me," he

went on more quietly. "Of course, you know, our Western conventions are

much more elastic than your New York ones. All the same--"

"I merely wanted to let her know the kind of man he is," explained

Perry. "What do women understand about the men they meet--why, we all

look pretty much alike upon the surface." Then his righteous anger got

the better of his philosophy and he broke out in a heartfelt oath. "Damn

him! I'd like to thrash him clean out of his skin!"

"I am glad you told me," was all Adams said, but there was a reserved

strength in his voice which made the explosive violence of the other

sound the merest bravado. As he spoke the light flashed in his face, and

Perry saw that it was the face of an old and a tired man. There was a

shrinking in his eyes as of one who has stumbled unexpectedly upon a

revolting sight.

Of the many and varied emotions which had entered Perry's life, the

cleanest, perhaps, was his loyal regard for Roger Adams. It had begun

with his college days, had strengthened with his manhood, and had

lasted, in spite of the amiable contempt in which he held all

literature, with a constancy which had certainly not belonged to his

affairs with representatives of the opposite sex. Now as he looked at

Adams' haggard face under the electric light, he felt the tugging of a

sympathy so strong that it seemed to hurt him somewhere in his expansive

chest.

"Look here, old chap, come and dine with me at Sherry's," he burst out,

"and I'll telephone Gerty that I've thrown over that beastly dinner."

To offer something to eat to the afflicted was the solitary form in

which consolation appeared to him invested with solidity; and so earnest

was the generous impulse by which he now felt himself to be prompted,

that before Adams could reply to the invitation he had begun already to

run over mentally the courses he was prepared to order. For a colossal,

a consolatory, an unforgettable dinner he was determined that it should

be--such a dinner as he permitted himself only upon the rare occasions

when one of his intimate friends had lost heavily in stocks or been

abandoned by his wife. "Come to Sherry's," he urged again, halting in

the ecstatic working of his mind, "and I promise you that we will make

an evening."

But the sly incarnate devil which lurked in Adams in the form of an

ironic spirit asserted itself with an explosion which shook the

plethoric gravity with which Perry contemplated an orgy of indigestion.

The universal scheme appeared planned to fulfil the law of a Titanic

humour, and his own credulity and Connie's indiscretions showed suddenly

to Adams as mere mote-like jests which circled in a general convulsion

of Nature's irony.

"Well, you are a capital fellow," he stammered, after a moment, while

the spasm of his unholy laughter rocked him from head to foot. "I--I'd

like it of all things--but I can't. The fact is it is all so funny--the

whole business of life."

Even as he uttered the words he realised that to Perry they would convey

an infamous lightness, but at the thought his hysterical humour

redoubled in its energy. It was as if he stood outside--afar off--and

watched as a god the little tangled eccentricities of earth. And they

_were_ little, even though Perry should continue to regard the situation

with such large magnificence.

By the time, however, that he had parted from Perry Bridewell and turned

in at his own door, the gravity of the occasion had grown almost

oppressive in his reflections. Connie had gone an hour before--he was

too late to have detained her upon a pretext--and while sitting

speechless before the dinner he could not eat--his heated imagination

wove visions of horror in which his wife was entangled as a fly in a

spider's web. What if Connie were really possessed by the influence of

some drug which rendered her incapable of willing rationally? What if he

missed her at the entrance to the opera? Or what if--most desperate

supposition--she should, in the event of his finding her, refuse to

accept his manufactured excuse to recall her home? She was capable, he

knew, of any recklessness, but he had never for an instant conceived her

as walking open eyed into dishonour, and he felt again the awful, if

partly comforting conviction that she was not herself--that an infernal

drug was working in her and bending her to some particular uses of the

devil. Why had she wasted her beauty and even her life? he wondered

bitterly--and did the moment's mad exhilaration compensate for the slow

deliberate eating away of her moral consciousness? He recalled again the

violent flutter of her manner, the excitement as of intoxication in her

voice, the yellow tinge which had crept gradually over the ivory of her

skin; her spasmodic movements and the ineffectual lies which deluded

neither of them for an instant. The tragedy of life rose before him as

vividly as the humour of it had done an hour ago--a tragedy which was

hideous because it was ignoble, in which there was neither the beauty of

resignation nor the sublimity of defiance. Had there been the

least--even the smallest redeeming honesty in the situation he felt that

he might have faced it, if not with positive sympathy yet with a

tolerant, a merciful comprehension. Love he might have understood--for

women needed it, he knew, and he was burdened by no delusion concerning

the place he occupied in Connie's horizon. But before the breathless

chase of excitement in which she lived, the frenzied invocation of

pleasure that filled her thoughts, he found himself groping blindly for

some meaning which would explain the thing it could not justify.

The hours dragged so heavily that by ten o'clock he put on his overcoat

and snow-shoes and went out again into the street. He was possessed at

the moment by a growing fear of missing Connie, and as he walked toward

the opera house he had sense of a premonition almost occult in power

that the terrible destiny which had her in its clutch was gathering

energy for some pitiless catastrophe. With characteristic patience he

searched his own conscience, the incidents of his daily life, and held

himself rather than his wife to account. After all, he was the stronger

of the two, and yet when had he put forth his strength or his pity on

her behalf? In the closer human relations mere indifference showed

suddenly as sin, and the sluggish spirit which had controlled his

married life appeared in his memory as a form of moral apathy. Was a

human soul so small a thing that it could perish at his side and he be

none the Wiser? What was his boasted intellect worth if it could

paralyse the human part of him and exhaust the fount of his compassion?

In his widening vision he saw that in the spirit of things humanity is

one and indivisible, a single organism held together by a common pulse

of life. To live or to die apart he realised, is beyond the scope of an

individual destiny, for in the eye of God each man that lives is the

keeper not of his own but of his brother's soul.

The self reproach which moved in his heart impelled him so rapidly upon

his way that when he reached the doors he had still an hour to wait

before the opera ended. Remembering that if he were so fortunate to find

Connie he must take her home, he went to a livery stable for a carriage,

and then coming back, walked nervously up and down upon the frozen

pavement. His mind was divided between the fear that she might leave by

another entrance--that he might miss her altogether--and the more

horrible dread that in seeing her he should be unable to prevail upon

her to come away. She might, he felt, demand a reason, exact from him

the meaning of his unexpected appearance; there was even a hideous

possibility that she might fly into a temper.

The wind was bitter and he went into the lobby, where a few men were

hurrying out to secure their carriages. Then at last came the crowd in

evening dress, and it seemed to him that the acuteness of his perception

was reinforced by an almost unnatural power of vision. Out of the moving

throng the face of each woman stood forth distinctly as if relieved by a

spectral illumination; and he saw them clearly one after one, fair or

dark, plain or beautiful, until from among them there shone toward him

the elaborately arranged blonde head of Connie, under a winking diamond

which shed over her an unbecoming light. He had hoped to the last that

she would be with several others, but he perceived when she came out at

Brady's side, with her babyish chin tilted upward and her thin features

working in a forced and unhealthy animation, that they were alone and

would probably be alone for the remainder of the evening.

Standing beyond the entrance, and watching her unseen, while she paused

for an instant in the crowded lobby, Adams felt again the strange stir

of emotion he had experienced when he looked at her the evening before

under the lamplight in his study. In a single vivid instant he saw her

winking diamonds, her rouged cheeks, the nervous flutter that shook her

fragile figure, and the consuming fire which was destroying the

appealing prettiness of her face. Then he looked deeper still to the

naked terrified soul of her, caught in a web from which, because of her

weakness, there could be no escape.

There was no room in his heart now for any other feeling than one of

agonised compassion, and as she came through the doorway he touched her

arm and spoke in a voice which had the sound of a caress. "I've just had

bad news, Connie, so I came to find you."

She started violently, her hand dropped from her companion's arm, and

she stood trembling from head to foot like a blade of grass that is

shaken by a high wind. "What do you mean? What is it?" she demanded.

After lifting his hat to Brady he had not noticed him again, and now he

bent upon his wife a look of gentle, if unyielding, authority. "I'll

tell you presently--in the carriage," he said, drawing her wrap more

closely about her throat. "I have one waiting at the corner."

He saw her look at him in a frightened hesitation; saw, too, that even

in the quiver of her alarm she had taken in the unflattering details of

his appearance--his ordinary business overcoat, the blue silk muffler

about his neck, and even the bespattered condition of his rubber shoes.

For an instant she glanced uncertainly at Brady's immaculate evening

dress showing beneath his open fur-lined overcoat, and knowing her as he

did, Adams read her appreciation of the contrast as plainly as if it had

been written in her face.

But he was not moved by the knowledge of her criticism, nor did it shake

him in the least from that penetrating vision he had attained. The

instinct for battle was alive and quick within him--if Connie was to be

saved he knew that he must fight single-handed with the powers of evil

for her soul. And fight he would--it was the end for which a man was

born--that he might overcome and so justify the spirit about the brute.

Her hand hung at her side, and taking it in his, he slipped it under his

arm with a possessive air, while she made to Brady some hurried excuses

in a trembling voice. For a moment still she hung back, but Adams drew

her gently with him, and after the first few steps, she recovered

herself and walked rapidly to the waiting carriage. Inside she shrank

back immediately into a corner from which, when they had rolled off, she

sent forth a nervous question. "What is it? Tell me what it is?" she

asked.

The tremor that shook her limbs, her utter helplessness before him,

touched his heart with a compassion beside which his old emotion for her

showed as a small and trivial thing. All that was divine in him awoke

and responded to the horror that looked from her face, and he felt

suddenly that until this instant he had never loved her. Now she was

really his because now she needed him; but for him she would stand

alone, deserted and afraid, in that future to which she had turned with

such pitiable and childlike ignorance. She and the fight were both in

his hands, and he was bracing himself to resist until the end.

"I'll tell you if you wish," he said, "but you mustn't let it give you a

sleepless night."

As they turned a corner an electric light flashed into the darkness of

the carriage lighting up her blonde hair and the sparkling diamonds

which made her blue eyes look dull and lifeless. "It is--is it anything

about money?" she asked with a movement toward him.

"It's about nothing more important than that consummate ass you were

with," he answered, laughing as he reached out and took her hand in his

with a friendly pressure. "I've just found out that he's a blackguard,

and I thought you were too precious to be left an instant longer in his

company. We must be careful, dear," he added. "God knows I'll do my best

to help you--but we must be careful"

"Oh!" she cried out sharply, in a high voice. "Oh!" and she shrank from

him as if he had hurt her by his touch. It was all she said, but the

word quivered in his ears with a suppressed emotion. Was it thankfulness

for her escape? he wondered, or was it anger at the part that he had

played?

PART II

ILLUSION

CHAPTER I

OF PLEASURE AS THE CHIEF END OF MAN

On the morning after his meeting with Adams, Arnold Kemper awoke at

three minutes of nine o'clock, and lay for exactly the three minutes

that were needed to make up the hour watching the hand as it moved on

the face of the bronze clock upon his mantel. The clock, like everything

in his rooms, was costly, a little ornate, and suggestive of an owner

whose intention aimed frankly at the original.

Lying in his large mahogany bedstead, with his body outstretched between

soft yet crisply ironed linen sheets, and his head placed exactly in the

centre of the pillows, he waited, yawning, until the expected hour

should strike. If by an effort of will he could have put back the minute

hand for another quarter of an hour he felt that it would have been

pleasant to doze off again, shutting his eyes to the sunlight which

streamed through the window on the Turkish rug, and inhaling agreeably

the aroma of boiling coffee which reached him through the open door of

his sitting-room. With the thought he closed his eyes, stretched himself

again and clasped his hands sleepily above his head; then, without

warning, the clock struck in a deep, bronze-like tone, and with a

vigorous movement, he sprang out of bed, flung his dressing-gown across

his shoulders, and passed quickly to the cold plunge in his

dressing-room. When he reappeared there was a fresh, healthy glow in his

face, and the smile with which he knotted his green figured necktie

before the mirror, stuck his black pearl scarf pin carefully in place,

and twisted the short ends of his brown moustache, was that of a man who

begins his day in a blithe and friendly humour.

In the dining-room, which opened from his sitting-room next door, his

breakfast was already awaiting him, and beside his plate he found

several letters and the morning papers. He read the letters first, but

with a single exception they proved to be bills, and after glancing at

these with a suspicious frown he tossed them aside and turned to the

little square white envelope, which contained an invitation to dine from

a woman whom he detested because she bored him with domestic complaints.

His heavy brows gathered darkly over his impatient gray eyes, and he

pushed the mail carelessly away to make room for his coffee, to which

his man was adding a precise amount of cream and sugar.

"Don't let me forget to answer that, Wilkins," he said, in an annoyed

tone; "the response must be sent this afternoon, too, without fail."

"I don't think you wrote the notes you spoke of yesterday, sir,"

observed Wilkins, with an English accent and a manner of respectful

intimacy.

"Hang it all! I don't believe I did," returned Kemper, as he drew his

chair up to the table and tapped his egg shell. "That comes of letting a

thing you hate to do go over. I say, Wilkins, if I attempt to leave this

room before I've answered those letters, you're to restrain me by

force, do you hear?"

"Yes, sir; certainly, sir," replied Wilkins, as he went out to bring in

the toast.

Kemper laid his napkin across his knees, leaned comfortably back in his

chair, and unfolded one of the morning papers beside his plate. As he

did so he expanded his lungs with a deep breath, while his glance

travelled rapidly to the column which contained the day's reports of the

stock market. He knew already that the Chericoke Valley Central in which

he had invested had jumped thirty points and was still advancing, but he

read the printed statements with the exhaustless interest with which a

lover might return to a love letter he had already learned by heart. His

faith in the Chericoke Valley Central stock was strong, and he meant to

keep a close grip on it for some time to come.

Turning a fresh page presently, his eyes wandered leisurely over the

staring headlines, and came suddenly to a halt before a trivial item

inserted among the Western news. It was a brief notice of his divorced

wife's marriage, and to his amazement the announcement caused him an

annoyance that was almost like the ghost of a retrospective jealousy. It

was quite evident to him that he did not want her for himself, yet he

suffered a positive displeasure at the thought that she should now

belong to another man. After the ten years since they had separated was

she still so "awfully splendid?" he wondered, had she kept her figure,

which was long, athletic, with a military carriage, and did she still

wear her hair in the fashion of a German omelette? "Thank heaven I'm

well out of it at any rate," he commented with feeling. "That comes of a

man's marrying before he's twenty-five. He's turned cynic before he gets

to forty"; and marriage appeared to him in his thoughts as a detestable

and utterly boring institution, which interfered continually with a

man's freedom and exacted from him a perpetual sociability. The most

blissful sensation he had ever known, he told himself, was that of his

recovered liberty; then his sincerity of nature compelled him to an

honest contradiction--he had known one emotion more blissful still and

that was the madness which had prompted him to his unfortunate marriage.

Oh, he had been very much in love without a doubt! and while he sat

peacefully drinking his two cups of coffee, eating his two eggs and his

four pieces of toast with orange marmalade, he remembered, with a

melancholy which in no wise affected his appetite, the first occasion

upon which he had kissed the woman who had been his wife. The memory of

her tall, erect figure, with its dashing military carriage, aroused in

him an agreeable and purely physical regret--the kind of regret which is

strong enough only to sweeten the knowledge of past pleasures; and he

admitted with his accustomed frankness that if he had never kissed her

again he should probably have continued to regard her with a charming,

if impractical, sentiment. But marriage had brushed off the bloom of

that early romance; and as he recognised this, he felt a keen resentment

against nature which had cheated him into believing that the illusion of

love would not vanish at the first touch of reality.

He had lived upon the surface of things and the surface had contented if

it had not satisfied him. It had never entered his thoughts to question

if he had had from life the best that it could offer, but he had

sometimes wondered, in moments of nervous exasperation against small

events, why it was that there could be no end under the sun to a man's

pursuit of the fugitive sensation. When he looked back now over the

breathless years of his life, he saw, almost with indignation, that

whatever punishment fate had held in reserve for him, the avenger had

inevitably appeared in the form his own gratified desire. He had

withheld his hand from nothing; the thing that he had wanted he had

taken without question--impulse and possession had flowed for him with a

rhythmic regularity of movement--and yet in glancing back he could place

his finger upon no past events and say of them "this brought me

happiness--and this--and this." In retrospect his pleasures showed cheap

and threadbare--woven of perishable colours, of lost illusions--and he

felt suddenly that he had been cheated into a false valuation of life,

that he had been deluded into a childish yet irretrievable error.

As he sat there over his paper, he remembered his impatient early love,

his ecstatic marriage, and then the long years during which he had

lived, as he put it to himself, in a "mortal funk" of the divorce court.

Not moral obligation, but social cowardice, he admitted, had held him in

a bondage from which his wife had at last liberated him by a single

blow. Well, it was all over! he heaved a sigh of relief, emptied his

coffee cup, and dismissed the subject, with its oppressive train of

associations, from his mind.

But his temperamental blitheness had suffered in the chill of

recollection, and he frowned down upon the staring headlines which

ornamented the open page before him. His face, which recorded unerringly

the slightest emotional change through which he passed, grew suddenly

heavy and was over clouded by a momentary fit of gloom. He had not seen,

had hardly thought of his former wife, once in the ten years since their

separation, yet he found almost to his annoyance that the mere printed

letters of her name reinvoked her image from the darkness in which his

sentimental skeletons were laid. Two brief lines in a newspaper sufficed

to produce her as an important factor in his present life.

And despite this she was nothing to him, had no proper business in his

mind. He tried to think of the other women whom he had loved and

remembered, or of the more numerous ones still whom he had loved only to

forget. Well, he had lived a man's life, and the deuce of it was that

women should have come into it at all. He had never wanted sentiment in

the abstract, he told himself half angrily; he was bored to death by the

deadly routine of what in his own mind he alluded to as "the business of

love." It had always come to him without his sanction--even against his

will, and he had never failed to combat the feeling with shallow

cynicism, to exhaust it speedily in racing motors. There was no

satisfaction in sentiment, of this he was quite convinced; and he

remembered the voice of Madame Alta, with her peculiar high note of

piercing sweetness, which entered like wine and honey into his blood.

The hold she still kept upon his senses through his memory was

strengthened by the knowledge which fretted him to the admission that

she had wearied first--that while her fascination was still potent to

work its spell upon him, she had fled in a half lyric, half devilish

pursuit of the flesh she worshipped. To live life thoroughly, to get out

of it all that it contained of pleasure or of experience, this was the

germ of his applied philosophy; and it was only by some fortunate mental

power of selection, some instinctive sense for comeliness, for a

well-ordered, healthful physical existence, which had left him at the

end of his forty years of pleasure with a perfectly sound and active

mind and body. He himself was accustomed to declare that though he had

lived gayly, he had lived decently, too, and he was even inclined at

times to flatter his vanity rather upon the things which he had left

undone than upon those more evident achievements which had stamped him

to his social world. A religious instinct, which was hardly definite

enough for a conviction, still survived in him, and it was entirely

characteristic of the man that he should find cause for shame, not

congratulation, in his old relations with Madame Alta.

The last remaining bit of toast and marmalade had vanished from his

plate, and as he never allowed himself more than his usual number of

slices, he carefully brushed the crumbs from his coat, and pushing back

his chair, rose from the table. The movement, slight as it was, served

to dispel his passing dejection, and as he gathered up his papers and

passed into the adjoining sitting-room, he smiled at Wilkins with such

genial brightness that the man was almost deluded into attributing the

changed atmosphere to his own personal attentions instead of to the

agreeable sensation following upon digestion. When he left the

dining-room Kemper was already humming a little Italian air, and it was

not until he was seated, with his cigar, in an easy chair upon his

hearthrug, that he suddenly recognised the music as a favourite aria of

Madame Alta's. He had heard her sing it a hundred times, and he recalled

now that she had a trick of throwing her head back as the notes issued

from her round, white throat, until her beautiful, though coarsened

face, was seen in an admirable foreshortening, while her eyes were

shadowed by her drooping lids, which were faintly tinted to look like

rose-leaves. With the memory his expression was again overcast. Then a

pleased smile chased the heaviness from his eyes, for he remembered

suddenly that he held a firm grip on the promising Chericoke Valley

Central stock. He lighted his cigar, tossed the match into the empty

fireplace, and pushing the papers from his knees, relapsed for twenty

minutes into an agreeable vacancy of mind.

The room in which he sat was essentially a man's room, furnished for

comfort rather than for beauty, and one saw in it an unconscious

striving after large effects, a disdain of useless bric-a-brac as of

small decorations. On the mantel the solitary ornament was an exquisite

bronze figure of a wrestler at the triumphant instant when he subdues

his opponent, a spirited and virile study of the nude male figure, and

just above it hung a portrait in oils of Madame Alta, painted in a large

black hat with a falling feather which shadowed the golden aureole of

her hair. Kemper seldom looked at the picture, and when he did so it was

with the casual glance he bestowed upon a piece of household furniture;

his emotion had been so bound up with the concrete fact of a fleshly

presence that in the continued absence of the prima donna he had found

it difficult even to realise the condition of her unchanged existence.

In his whole life the past had never engrossed him to the immediate

exclusion of the present.

When he had finished his cigar, he rose slowly to his feet, shook

himself with an energetic movement as if to settle his body more

comfortably in his clothes, and went into the hall to put on his

overcoat before going out. Here he was overtaken by a remonstrance from

Wilkins.

"You aren't going to the office, I hope, sir, until you've written those

notes?"

Kemper stared at him silently an instant, one arm still in the sleeve of

the overcoat he was putting on.

"Oh, I say, Wilkins, I'll do them at the club," he replied at last.

Wilkins shook his head with decision written in every line of his

smooth-shaven English profile. He was faithful, he was even

affectionate, but he had been in Kemper's service for fifteen years and

he knew his man.

"You'd better get them off now, sir," he urged in a persuasive voice,

"it won't take you a minute, and unless I post them myself, they are

like to lie over."

"Well, I suppose you'll have your way with me, Wilkins," remarked

Kemper, as he withdrew his arm from his overcoat, which his servant

promptly took from him. "Most people do, you know." Then he turned back

into his sitting-room and placing himself at his desk, took up his pen

and accepted three invitations out of the round dozen he had to answer.

This accomplished, the discreet Wilkins gave him his hat and coat and

permitted him to depart rapidly upon his way.

By eleven o'clock he was due at the office of the Confidential Life

Insurance Company, of which he was one of the directors, and as he

walked toward Broadway with his brisk and energetic step, he kept his

mind closely upon the business affairs which were immediately before

him. This peculiar ability to concentrate his whole being upon a single

instant, to apply himself with enthusiasm to the thing beneath his eyes,

was the quality of all others which had worked most not only for his

present worldly success, but for his personal happiness as well. When he

came out of his rooms the brief despondency of the morning had vanished

as utterly as if it had never been, and until his wife's name stared at

him anew from a printed page, it was hardly probable that she would

occur again to his thoughts. A feeling of peace, of perfect charity

pervaded his breast, and had he been asked on the spot for an expression

of his religious creed, he would, perhaps, have answered without

hesitation, "to live in pleasure and let live with pleasantness."

Naturally of a quick and humane heart there were moments when he felt an

urgent desire to give out happiness, to add his proper share to the

general sum of earthly contentment. He was a man, in fact, who might be

infallibly counted on for the "generous thing," provided always that

the "generous thing" was also the thing which he found it agreeable to

perform. In ancient Rome he would have been, without doubt, a popular

politician, in Greece a Cyrenaic philosopher, in the Middle Ages a

churchman conspicuous for his purple, and during the American Revolution

a believer in the cause that wore the most gold lace. It was not that he

was lacking in patriotism, but that his patriotism responded best to a

spectacular appeal.

At the luncheon hour, when he came out of his office to go to his club,

he remembered that he had neglected to send roses to a woman with whom

he had dined the week before she went to a hospital for a serious

operation, and though the stop delayed his luncheon for half an hour, he

left his car at the corner of Twenty-third Street to leave an order with

his florist. Then, after a simple meal, he put in a pleasant hour at the

club, during which he managed to interest a great occulist in a chap he

knew who was threatened with blindness but too poor to pay for the

operation necessary to his recovery. It was this conversation that

recalled to him a friend who was ill with pneumonia in chambers just

around the block, and he rushed off to enquire after him, before he

attended to the unpacking of a new French motor car, and hurried to keep

an engagement he had made with Gerty Bridewell to call on Laura Wilde. A

week ago, when the engagement was made, he had been urgent with Gerty

about going, but now that the hour drew near he began to feel the

necessity of the visit to be a bore. Like all of his sensations, the

impression Laura had made upon him had been vivid but easily effaced,

and he was almost surprised at the disappointment he felt when, upon

reaching the house, he found that she was not at home.

"It's too hard," commented Gerty, standing upon the front steps and

glancing wistfully up at him from under the white feathers in her hat,

"but there's no help for it unless you care to call on Uncle Percival."

"Uncle Percival?" he repeated, impatiently twirling his walking stick;

"who's he?"

"He's a curiosity."

"What kind of curiosity? A live one?"

She nodded. "The kind of curiosity that plays a flute."

He began his descent of the steps, not replying until he stood with her

upon the sidewalk before her carriage. "I might have put up with a

poet," he remarked with his foreign shrug, "but I'm compelled to draw

the line before a piper."

"Well, I thought you would," confessed Gerty, "or I shouldn't have

suggested it."

"It seems, by the way, to be a family that runs to talent," he laughed,

while she paused a moment before entering her carriage.

"I don't know that Uncle Percival is exactly a person of talent," she

observed, "he plays very badly, I believe. Can't I drop you somewhere?

Do let me."

He shook his head with a quizzical humour. "To tell the truth horses

make me nervous," he returned. "I'm afraid of them--You never know what

intentions they have in mind. No, I'll walk, thank you." His gaze was

on her and she saw his eyes flash with admiration of her beauty.

"Oh, your dreadful, soulless automobiles!" she exclaimed, with disgust.

"By the way, Laura hates them--she says they have the devil's energy

without his intellect."

He laughed indifferently. "Does she? I'll teach her better."

Gerty looked back to protest as she stepped into her carriage. "But

you'll never have a chance," she said.

"I'll make one," he persisted, gayly.

From the midst of her fur rugs she leaned out with a provoking little

laugh, while he watched her green eyes narrow in an arch and fascinating

merriment. "What would you say if I told you she was at home all the

time?" she asked. Then before he could remonstrate or reply, she rolled

off leaving him transfixed and questioning upon the sidewalk.

Was Laura Wilde really at home? The suspicion piqued him into a

curiosity he could not satisfy, and because he could not satisfy it he

found himself dwelling with a reawakened interest upon the woman who had

avoided him. If she had in truth refused to receive his visit it could

mean only that she entertained a dislike for his presence, and for a

dislike so evident there must be surely some foundation either in fact

or in intuition. No woman, so far as he could remember--and so unusual

an occurence would not easily have slipped his memory--had ever begun

his acquaintance with a distinctly expressed aversion, and the very

strangeness of the experience was not without attraction for his eager

and dominant temperament. What a queer little oddity she was, he

thought as he glanced up at the grave old house before turning rapidly

away--as light and sensitive as thistle-down, as vivid as flame. He

tried to recall her delicately distinguished figure and profound dark

eyes, but her charming smile seemed to come between him and her

features, and her face was obscured for him in a mysterious radiance.

Her features taken in themselves were plain, he supposed, certainly they

were not beautiful, yet of her whole appearance his memory held only the

fervent charm of her expression. It was a face with a soul in it, he

though--all the mystery of flame and of shadow was in her smile, so what

mattered the mere surface modelling or the tinting of the skin which was

less ivory than pale amber. An hour ago he had been absolutely

indifferent, almost forgetful of her existence, but his vanity if not

his heart was stung now into an emotion which had in it something of the

primitive barbarian ardour of pursuit. He cared nothing--less than

nothing--for Laura Wilde herself, yet it was not in his nature that he

should suffer in silence before a sudden and unreasonable affront.

Some hours later, when he sat with Adams at dinner, the subject occurred

to him again, and he broke in upon a discussion of the varied fortunes

of their fellow classmen to allude directly to the cause of his

inquietude.

"By the way, I had the pleasure of meeting a protegée of yours the other

afternoon," he said.

Adams met the remark with his whimsical laugh. "Of mine? Thank heaven I

haven't any," he retorted, "but I suppose you mean young Trent, who has

just come up from Virginia."

"I've heard something of him from Mrs. Bridewell, I believe," answered

Kemper across the centrepiece of red carnations, "but I haven't met him

as yet--I was thinking of Miss Wilde when I spoke. I wish you'd try this

sherry--it's really first rate--I brought it over myself."

When Wilkins had filled his glass, Adams lifted it against the light and

looked at the colour of the wine a moment before drinking. "First

rate--I should say so. It's exquisite," he observed as he touched it to

his lips in answer to Kemper's glance of enquiry. "Yes, she's done some

rather fine things," he resumed presently, returning to the subject of

Laura, "but she'll hardly make a popular appeal, I fancy, unless she

turns her talent to patriotic airs. The only poetry we tolerate to-day

is the poetry that serves some definite material purpose--it must either

send us into battle or set us to building churches. The simple spirit of

contemplation we've come to regard as a pauperising habit and it puts us

out of patience. Great poetry grows out of quiet and nobody is quiet any

longer--a thought no sooner creeps into our head than we begin to talk

about it at the top of our voice."

The branched candlestick at the end of the table shed a glimmering,

pearly light upon his face, and Kemper, as he watched him critically,

was struck suddenly by the fact that Adams was no longer young. He could

not be over forty, yet his features had the drawn and pallid look of a

man who has known, not only ill health, but the shock of emotional

catastrophes. Physically he appeared worn to the point of exhaustion,

but if there was pathos in the slight, elastic figure, there was also an

impression of power for which the other found it impossible to account.

By mere bodily force Kemper could have thrown Adams from the window with

one hand, he realised with a perfectly amiable self-congratulation--yet

in Adams' presence he invariably felt himself to be the weaker

man, and the attitude he unconsciously adopted showed an almost

boyish recognition of a superior intelligence. Something in Roger

Adams--a quality which was neither brute strength nor imperious

personality--exerted a power which Kemper generously admitted to be

greater even than these. Nothing in the man was conspicuous--he

exercised no dominant magnetism--but the invisible spirit which

controlled his life, controlled also, in a measure, the thoughts of

those who came directly beneath his influence. Was it true, Kemper now

wondered, as Perry Bridewell had once declared with unspeakable mirth,

that the thing he liked in Adams was, after all, merely simple goodness

in a manifest form? Goodness in a masculine personality had always

appeared to Kemper to be ridiculously out of place--a masquerading

feminised virtue--but at this instant as he drank to Adams' health

across the carnations, he felt again the power of an attraction which

possessed a sweetness that made his past "wine and honey" sicken in his

memory. "Is it possible that what I admire in this man is the quality I

have laughed at all my life?" he found himself asking suddenly; and the

power of self-restraint, the grace of denial, the strength which could

do without, though it could not take the thing it wanted, the quietness

of sacrifice, the sweetened humour that is learned only in sorrow--these

showed to him at the moment in a singularly new and vivid light. "I know

nothing of his life except that he has had courage," he thought again,

"yet because of this one thing--and because, too, of a quality which I

recognise, though I cannot name it, I would trust him sooner than any

man or woman whom I know--sooner, by Jove, than I would trust myself."

Among his many generous traits was the ability to appreciate keenly

where he could not follow, to apprehend almost instinctively the finer

attributes of the spirit, and though he himself preferred the pleasures

of the senses to the vaguer comforts of philosophy, he was not without a

profound admiration for the man who, as he believed, had deliberately

chosen to forfeit the joy of life. Roger Adams impressed him to-night as

a peculiarly happy man--not with the hectic happiness he himself had

sought--but with a secure, a reposeful, an indestructible

possession--the happiness which comes not through the illusion of

desire, but which is bound up in the peace of an eternal reconciliation.

The man beyond the carnations, he knew by an intuition surer than

knowledge, had never even for an hour dallied in the primrose path where

his own pursuit of delight had begun and ended--he could not imagine

Adams' control yielding to a fleeting impulse of passion--yet had not

the very power he recognised come to his friend in the stony places

through which he had been constrained to walk with God? Sitting there

Kemper was brought suddenly for the first time in his life face to face

with the profoundest truth that lies hidden in the deeps of

knowledge--that renunciation may become the richest experience in the

consciousness of man; that to renounce for the sake of goodness is not

merely to refrain from sin but to achieve virtue; and that he who gives

up his happiness and is still happy has gained not only the beauty of

his forfeited joys, but has added to his own a strength that is equal to

the strength of his unfulfilled desire. Kemper had always believed

himself strong because he had attained, yet he knew now that Adams was

stronger than he inasmuch as he had gone without for the sake of his own

soul.

From his reflections, which were dimly like these, Kemper came back

abruptly to his memory of Laura. "Do you know," he said, speaking to

himself rather than to his companion, "that she really interests me very

much indeed."

"Well, she is interesting," laughed Adams, "in spite of the fact that

Perry finds her rather dull. He complains that she doesn't talk like a

book, which is a trifle odd when you consider that he has never read

one."

"What I like about her is that she's different," said Kemper. "She is,

isn't she?"

"Different from other people? Yes, I dare say she is, but all the Wildes

are that, you know. She comes of an eccentric stock. Did you ever happen

to meet her aunt, Mrs. Payne?"

Kemper nodded as he leaned forward to make a division in the centre of

the intervening carnations, "The old lady who looks like a chorus girl

in her dotage? Yes, I've had the pleasure and I found her decidedly

better than she looked. Her husband, by the way, is a great old chap,

isn't he? He held the biggest share in iron last spring and I guess he

has made a pretty figure."

"He's a philosopher who got into the stock market by mistake," observed

Adams. "I believe he would have been perfectly happy if he could have

owned a single farm, a cow or two and a pair of horses to his plough,

but he's condemned to bear the uncongenial weight of millions, and I

hear that he has even to give his charities in secret. I never look at

him that I don't think of Marcus Aurelius oppressed by the burden of the

whole Roman Empire."

Kemper was peeling a pear, which he had taken from a dish upon the

table, and he laid down his knife for a moment to push aside his cup of

coffee.

"Has he any children?" he asked abruptly.

"Two--both sons and gay young birds, I'm told."

"Then Miss Wilde will hardly come in for a share of the burden?"

"Hardly. The sons will probably dissipate a good half of it before it

reaches them."

"It's a pity," said Kemper thoughtfully; and having finished his pear,

he dipped his fingers in his finger bowl, moistened his short moustache,

and turned to take a cigar from the little silver tray which Wilkins

held before him. "Do you know I can't imagine a greater happiness than

the quick accumulation of wealth," he observed in his hearty voice.

Adams laughed aloud with a merriment that was almost boyish. "Well, I

dare say you come in for your part of it," he returned, while he

flicked the ashes from his cigar.

"I?" Kemper shook his head without a smile. "Oh, I accumulate nothing

except habits. I make and I spend--I win and I lose--and on my word I'm

no richer to-day than I was ten years ago. I've made a fortune in a

day," he added regretfully, "to lose it in an hour."

A glow had sprung to his face, and as he spoke he leaned his elbow on

the table, and closing his eyes inhaled the delicious aroma of his

cigar. Finance interested him always--wealth in its material mass had a

tremendous attraction for him, and he loved not only the sound of

figures but the clink of coin. Though he was a lavish liver when it

suited his impulses, the modern regard for money as a concrete

possession--a personal distinction--was strong in his blood; but here,

as in other ways, he was redeemed from positive vulgarity by the very

candour with which he confessed his weakness. He drifted presently into

stocks, and they sat talking until eleven o'clock, when Adams, after

glancing in surprise at the hour, remarked, with a laugh, that he had

forgotten he no longer boasted the constitution of his college days. It

had been a pleasant evening to both, and as Kemper threw off his coat a

little later, he found himself reflecting, not without wonder, that the

quiet--the absolute inaction of the last few hours had refreshed rather

than bored him. On the whole he was inclined to admit that he liked

Adams better than any man he knew--liked his assured self-possession,

his indifference to small creature comforts; liked, too, the quiet

tolerance which characterised his human relations--and he impulsively

determined that he would arrange to see him often during the next few

years. It was time now, he concluded with an admirable midnight

resolution, while he struggled in exasperation to unfasten his collar,

that he himself should begin to pay a due regard to his health--to

restrict his indulgences; and he drew an agreeable picture of the

consolation that Adams' friendship might afford to an abstemious man of

middle age. "By Jove--confound this button--there, I've twisted it like

the deuce--by Jove, it is refreshing to be thrown with a chap who is

interested in something besides women and horses--who finds other

objects--or subjects if you choose--suffice for his entertainment." For

the first time in his life he found himself wishing regretfully that at

least a share of his own enjoyments had assumed a character which

belonged less exclusively to the external world. The joy in knowledge,

the delight in contemplation were unknown to him, though he was dimly

aware that for another man they might prove to be an unfailing, a

permanent solace. But his virtues were the magnificent virtues of the

animal, and amid the many warring impulses of the body there was but

little room for a more gracious development of the soul. He had lived

for the world and the world had repaid him as she repays all her lovers

with the fruit which is rarely bitter before the fortieth year.

Adams, meanwhile, had walked rapidly home, thinking with enthusiasm that

Kemper was a thoroughly good fellow. His social pleasures were few, and

he had enjoyed the fine wine and the choice cigars as a man enjoys a

taste for luxury which he seldom gratifies. He had expected to find

Connie still out, but to his surprise there was a sound on the staircase

as he entered the front door, and she came rapidly to meet him, her

blonde hair hanging upon her shoulders and the soiled white silk

dressing-gown she wore trailing on the carpeted steps behind her.

"I was all alone and I've been so frightened," she said with a sob.

He took her hand, which felt dead and cold, and grasped it warmly while

he turned to fasten the outer door.

"Why, I thought you were at the theatre," he responded. "I've been to

dine with Kemper, but heaven knows I'd have stayed at home if you'd told

me you meant to keep me company."

A shudder ran through her, and he saw when he turned to look at her,

that her face was pinched and blue as if from cold. In her white gown,

under her tangled fair hair, she had a ghastly look like one just

awakened from a fearful dream. But she was very little--so little in her

terror and her blighted prettiness that his heart contracted as it would

have done at the sight of a suffering child.

"I say, little girl, what is it all about?" he asked gently, and as she

swayed unsteadily, he put his arm around her and drew her against his

side. "Wait a minute while I turn out the light," he added cheerfully,

pressing the electric button with his free hand. Then holding her closer

in a steadying support, they ascended together the darkened staircase.

"I went to the theatre, but I was so ill I couldn't stay," she said, and

he felt the heavy breaths that laboured through the thin figure within

his arm. "Oh, I am in agony--in agony and I am so afraid."

She began crying in loud, uncontrollable sobs as a child cries when it

is hurt, protesting that she was afraid--that she was fearfully afraid.

He felt her terror struggling like a live thing within her--like an

imprisoned animal that could not find an escape into the light. Her

hysteria was almost akin to madness, and the form it took was one of a

blind presentiment of evil--as if she felt always in the air about her

the presence of an invisible, unspeakable horror. Half dragging, half

carrying her, he crossed the hall to her room, and laid her upon the

bed, which was tumbled as if she had lain tossing wildly there for

hours. Every electric jet was blazing high, and Connie's evening clothes

were lying in a huddled heap upon the floor. There was a sickening smell

of perfume in the room, and he saw that she had broken a bottle of

extract and spilled its contents upon the carpet.

"Tell me what it is--tell me, Connie," he commanded, rather than

pleaded, sitting beside the bed and laying his hand upon her shuddering

body.

"It is nothing--but it is everything," she gasped, clutching his hand

with fingers which were cold and moist. "I am not in pain--at least not

physically, but I feel--I believe--I know that I am going mad. I see

horrible things and I can't keep them away--I can't--I can't. They come

in flashes--in coloured flashes, all red and green, and there is

something dreadful about to happen to me. Oh, don't let it, don't let

it!"

She clung to him, shuddering, sobbing, imploring, moaning again that she

was afraid, beseeching him to keep off the horror--not to let it come

any nearer--not to let it look her in the eyes. The spasm ended at last

in a wild burst of tears, while she shrieked out frantically in a terror

that was pitiable and abject. Her hallucinations seemed to have got

entirely beyond the control of reason, and as she crouched, with drawn

up knees and quivering arms, among the pillows she looked like some

small helpless, distracted mortal in the grasp of the avenging furies.

At the moment she seemed to him less his wife than his child.

"Listen to me, Connie," he said presently in a voice whose quiet

authority silenced for an instant her despairing moans. "You haven't a

trouble on earth that I am not willing to share and I am sharing this--I

have made it mine this very minute. Whatever there is to face, I'll face

it for you, so get this into your head and go to sleep. Nothing can get

to you--neither man nor devil--until it has first passed by me. There,

now--don't sob so; don't, you'll hurt yourself. There's nothing to cry

about--it's all a false alarm."

"I'm so afraid," she repeated over and over again, as she clung to him.

"Promise not to leave me an instant--not to take your hands off of me.

If I am left alone again I shall die of fear."

"You shall not be alone, I swear it," he answered with cheerful

assurance. "Lie quiet and I'll sit here the whole blessed night if it's

any comfort."

"It is a comfort," she answered; and her words entered his ears with a

piercing sweetness, which was not unlike the sweetness of love. Love it

was indeed, he knew now, but a love so sexless, so dispassionate that

its joys were like the joys of religion. The tenderness that flooded his

breast was less the emotion of man for woman than of the soul for the

soul, and the wife whom he had ceased to love in the world's way was

nearer to him, more closely, more divinely his, than she had been in the

hour of his greatest ecstasy. The appeal she made to him now, lying

there helpless, distraught and unlovely, was an appeal which is woven of

the strongest fibres in the heart of man--the appeal to the immortal

soul to arise and discover its immortality. Connie cried out to him to

save her--to save her from the world, from herself, from the hovering

powers of evil, and he knew now that his joy in the hour of her

salvation would be as the joy of the angels in heaven. He would fight

for her as he had never fought for his own life, and he felt suddenly

that there was nothing upon the earth nor in the sky that was strong

enough to contend against the power of his compassion. All lesser

desires or emotions shrank before it and vanished utterly away--his

ambition, his longing for health wherewith to work, the increasing

ardour of his love for Laura--these were as naught before the bond which

united him to the terrified, small soul that trembled beneath his hands.

And immediately that goodness at which Kemper or Perry Bridewell would

have laughed--the goodness which is spirit, which both builds and

destroys, which knows no law except the divine law of its own being; in

which there is neither the whitened surface nor the loud

self-glorification of the Pharisee--the goodness which is a pure flame,

a consuming passion--this appeared to his eyes in all its alluring

beauty. The way of it was hard, he knew, a way of service, of

self-sacrifice, and yet the one way of happiness as well. This lesson he

had learned from himself--for it is the thing that no man can teach

another--and because it had come to him from himself he knew that it had

come to him from God.

"I made a plan on the way home to-night," he said, keeping his firm

touch upon her throbbing temples. "To-morrow I shall arrange for a

fortnight's absence at the office and the next day I'll take you South.

There you'll stay out of doors and get well again. The flesh will come

back to your body and the colour to your cheeks.

"I shall never be pretty again--never," she moaned, as he held her.

"Nonsense. You're a trifle pale and fagged that's all--but we'll have

you a beauty again before two weeks are up."

And so through the long night he sat with his touch, which compelled

quiet, upon her body, for when, after she had fallen at last into a

fitful slumber, he arose and lowered the lights, she started up with a

scream and called out that she was "alone--fearfully alone!" Then, as he

returned to his chair, she reached for him in the darkness and clung

desperately to his outstretched arm, drawing it presently across her

shoulders until she lay as if shielded by the soothing familiar

presence.