Walter Eastman, on his way to town next morning, to his law office,
considered earnestly his young sister-in-law's admonition given him
just after breakfast, that he must that day borrow for her a sufficient
sum of money to enable her to take the course of instruction in a
school for librarians, giving as security a mortgage on her share in
Berkeley Hill. And the conclusion to which his weighty consideration
of the proposition brought him was that instead of mortgaging their
home, he would bring Daniel Leitzel, Esquire, out to Berkeley Hill to
dinner.
"Margaret's never had a chance. She's never in her life met any
marriageable men. It's about time she did. She hasn't the least idea
what a winner she'd be, given her fling! And the sooner she's
married," he grimly told himself, "the better for me, by heaven!"
Walter was too disillusioned as to the permanence and reality of love
to feel any scruples about letting Margaret in for matrimony with a man
twenty years her senior and of so little personal charm as was the
prominent Pennsylvania lawyer, Mr. Leitzel, so long as the man was
decent (as Leitzel so manifestly was) and a gentleman. It would have
taken a keener eye than Walter Eastman's to have perceived, on a short,
casual acquaintance, that the well-mannered, able, and successful
corporation lawyer was not, in Walter's sense, a gentleman. For Daniel
had, ever since the age of ten, been having many expensive "advantages."
And so it came to pass that that same evening found Mr. Leitzel, after
a dainty and beautifully appointed dinner at Berkeley Hill, alone with
his host's young sister-in-law, in the wonderfully equipped library of
the late eminent Dr. Osmond Berkeley.
His comely hostess, Mrs. Eastman, had excused herself after dinner to
go to her babies, and Eastman himself had just been called to the
telephone.
Daniel, always astutely observant, recognized their scheme to leave him
alone with this marriageable young lady of the family, while Margaret
herself never dreamed of such a thing.
Daniel was always conscious, in the presence of young women, of his
high matrimonial value. He had always regarded his future wife,
whoever she might be, as a very fortunate individual indeed. His
sisters, in whom his faith was absolute, had, for twenty-five years,
been instilling this dogma into him. Also, Daniel was mistaking the
characteristic Southern cordiality of this family for admiration of
himself. Especially this attractive girl, alone with him here in the
great, warm, bright room, packed with books and hung with engravings
and prints, manifested in her attentive and pleasant manner how
irresistible she found him. Daniel loved to be made much of. And by
such a girl as this! The blood went to his head as he contemplated
her, seated before him in a low chair in front of the big,
old-fashioned fireplace, dressed very simply all in white. How awfully
attractive she was! Odd, too, for she wasn't, just to say, a beauty.
Daniel considered himself a connoisseur as to girls, and he was sure
that Miss Berkeley's warm olive skin just escaped being sallow, that
her figure was more boyish than feminine, and her features, except,
perhaps, her beautiful dark eyes, not perfect. But it was her
arresting individuality, the subtle magnetism that seemed to hang about
her, challenging his curiosity to know more of her, to understand her,
that fascinated him in a manner unique in his experience of womankind.
Subtle, indeed, was the attraction of a woman who could, in just that
way, impress a mind like Daniel's, which, extraordinarily keen in a
practical way, was almost devoid of imagination. But everything this
evening conduced to the firing of what small romantic faculty he
possessed: the old homestead suggestive of generations of ease and
culture, the gracious, soft-voiced ladies, their marked appreciation of
himself (which was of course his due), the good dinner served on
exquisite china and silver in the spacious dining-room (Daniel, in his
own home, had never committed the extravagance of solid mahogany,
oriental rugs, and family portraits, but he had gone so far as to price
them and therefore understood what an "outlay" must have been made
here). And then the beautiful drawing-room into which he had been
shown upon his arrival, furnished in antique Hepplewhite, the walls
hung with Spanish and Dutch oils. And now this distinguished looking
library in which they sat. Almost all the books Daniel possessed,
besides his law books, were packed into a small oak bookcase in his own
bedroom. But here were books in many languages; hundreds of old
volumes in calf and cloth that showed long and hard usage, as well as
shelves and shelves of modern works in philosophy, science, history,
poetry, and fiction. What would it feel like to have been born of a
race that for generations had been educated, rich, and respectable--not
to remember a time when your family had been poor, ignorant, obscure,
and struggling for a bare existence? In New Munich the "aristocracy"
was made up of people who kept large department or jewellery or drug
stores, or were in the wholesale grocery business; even Congressman
Ocksreider had started life as an office boy and Judge Miller's father
had kept a livery stable. _This_ home seemed to stand for something so
far removed from New Munich values! And these two ladies of the
house--he was sure he had never in his life met any ladies so "elegant
and refined" in their speech, manner, movements, and appearance.
Daniel's recognition of all this, however, did not humble or abash him.
He had too long enjoyed the prerogative that goes with wealth not to
feel self-assured in any circumstances, and his attitude toward mankind
in general was patronizing.
It never occurred to him for an instant that a family living like this
could be poor. Wealth seemed to him so essentially the foundation of
civilization that to be enjoying social distinction, ease, comfort, and
even luxury, with comparative poverty, would have savoured of anarchy.
Margaret, meantime, was regarding "Walter's odd little lawyer-man," who
had been quite carelessly left on her hands, with rather lukewarm
interest, though there were some things about him that did arrest her
curious attention: the small, sharp eyes that bored like gimlets
straight through you, and the thin, tightly closed lips that seemed to
express concentrated, invincible obstinacy.
"No wonder he's a successful lawyer," she reflected. "No detail could
escape those little eyes, and there'd be no appeal, I fancy, from his
viselike grip of a victim. He'd have made even a better detective."
The almost sinister power of penetration and strength of will that the
man's sharp features expressed seemed to her grotesquely at variance
with his insignificant physique.
"There never has been a great woman lawyer, has there?" she asked him,
"except Portia?"
"'Portia?' Portia who? I had not--you mean, perhaps, some ancient
Greek?" asked Daniel. "Ah!" he exclaimed, '"The quality of mercy is
not strained!' Yes. Just so. Portia. "Merchant of Venice," he
added, looking highly pleased with himself. "I studied drama in my
freshman year at Harvard."
"Did you?"
"Yes. My sisters had me very thoroughly educated. Very expensively,
too. But this 'Portia'--she was of course a fictitious, not a
historic, character, if I remember rightly. Women haven't really
brains enough, or of the sort, that could cope with such severe study
as that of the law." He waved the matter aside with a gesture of his
long, thin fingers.
"I'm not sure of _that_," Margaret maintained.
"But the courtroom is no place for a decent woman," said Daniel
dogmatically.
"But she could specialize. These are the days, I'm told, when to
succeed is to specialize. She wouldn't need to practise in the
criminal courts."
"I trust," said Daniel stiffly, "you are not a Suffragist. You don't
look like one."
"How do they look?"
"I never saw one, for we don't have them in New Munich, where I live.
But I'm sure they don't look so womanly as you do."
"I hope that to look womanly isn't to look stupid," said Margaret
solicitously.
"Why should it?--though to be sure a woman does just as well if she
isn't too bright."
"If to be womanly meant all that some men seem to think it means, we'd
have to have idiot asylums for womanly females," declared Margaret. "I
suppose"--she changed the subject and perfunctorily made
conversation--"a lawyer's work is full of interest and excitement?"
"Well," Mr. Leitzel smiled, "in these days, a lawyer for a corporation
has got to be Johnny-on-the-spot."
"I have always thought that a general practitioner must often find his
work a terrible strain upon his sympathies," said Margaret.
"Oh, no; business is business, you know."
"And necessarily inhuman?"
"Unhuman, rather. A man must not have 'sympathies' in the practice of
the law."
"He can't help it, can he?--unless he's a soulless monster."
Daniel looked at her narrowly. What a queer expression for a young
lady to use: "a soulless monster."
"Your brother-in-law, for instance," he inquired with his thin, tight
little smile, "does he, as a general practitioner, find his cases a
great strain on his sympathies?
"Oh, he hasn't enough cases to find them a great strain of any kind."
"So?" Daniel lifted his pale eyebrows. It was, then, inherited
wealth, he reflected, that maintained this luxurious home, and if so,
this Miss Berkeley, probably, shared that inheritance. His heart began
to thump in his narrow chest. His calculating eye scanned the girl's
figure, from her crown of dark hair to her shapely foot.
Now it is necessary to state just here that Daniel's one vulnerable
spot being his fondness for young pets of any species and especially
for children, together with his deep-seated aversion to the idea of his
money going to the offspring of his brother Hiram (for, of course, he
would never will a dollar of it away from the Leitzel family), this
shrewd little man never appraised a woman's matrimonial value without
considering her physical equipment for successful motherhood. He had
even read several books on the subject and had paid a big fee to a
specialist to learn how to judge of a woman's health and capacity for
child-bearing. The distinguished specialist had laughed with his
_amante_ afterward at the way he had "bluffed and soaked the rich
little cad."
"I certainly did make him pay up!" he had chuckled. "And as he'll
never find just the combination of physical and mental endowments I've
prescribed for him, I've saved some woman from the fate of becoming his
wife! Money-making is his passion--a woman will never be--and his
interest in it is matched only by his keenness and his caution. He's a
peculiar case of mental and spiritual littleness combined with an
acumen that's uncanny, that's _genius_!"
It was, in fact, Daniel's failure to discover a maiden who answered
satisfactorily to all the tests with which this specialist had
furnished him, together with his sister's helpful judgment in "sizing
up" for him any possible candidate for his hand, that had thus far kept
him unmarried; that had, he was sure, saved him from a matrimonial
mistake.
As to his view of his own fitness for fatherhood, had he not always led
a clean and wholesome life? Was he not expensively educated, clever,
industrious, honest within the law, and eminently successful? What man
could give his children a better heritage?
Yet the day came when the wife of his bosom wondered whether she
committed a crime in bearing offspring that must perpetuate the soul of
Daniel Leitzel.
"This estate," Daniel cautiously put out a feeler to Miss Berkeley,
"belonged to your grandfather?"
"To several of my grandfathers. It came to us from my uncle."
"A lawyer?"
"Dr. Osmond Berkeley, the psychologist," Margaret said, thinking this
an answer to the question, for she had never in her life met any one
who did not know of her famous uncle. "My goodness!" she exclaimed as
she saw that Mr. Leitzel looked unenlightened, "you don't know who he
_was_? He's turning in his grave, I'm sure!"
"I never heard of him," said Daniel sullenly.
Margaret smiled kindly upon him as she said confidentially: "Between
ourselves, I don't myself know just exactly what a psychologist _is_.
I've been trying for nine years to find out--though my uncle earned his
living by it--and a good living, too."
"Didn't he ever explain it to you?"
"Oh, yes. He told me a psychologist was 'one who studies the science
which treats inductively of the phenomena of human consciousness, and
of the nature and relations of the mind which is the subject of such
phenomena.'"
Daniel looked at her uncertainly. Was she laughing at him? "It's just
mental science, you know," he ventured. "I studied a little mental
science at college. It was compulsory. But I studied it so little, I
didn't really know _very_ much about it."
"If you had studied it a lot, say under William James or Josiah Royce,
I'm sure you'd know even less about it than you do now. My own
experience is that the more one studies it, the less one knows of it."
"Are you a college graduate?" Daniel asked with sharp suspicion; he
didn't care about tying up with an intellectual woman. The medical
specialist had said they were usually anæmic, passionless, and
childless.
"No," Margaret admitted sadly. "I never went to school after I was
sixteen." Daniel breathed again and beamed upon her so approvingly
that she hastened to add: "But I lived here with Uncle Osmond, so I
could not escape a little book-learning. I'm really not an ignorant
person for my years, Mr. Leitzel."
"I can see that you are not," Daniel graciously allowed. "Are you fond
of reading?" he added, conversationally, not dreaming how stupid the
question seemed to the young lady he addressed.
"Well, naturally," she said.
"Yes, I suppose so, with such a library as this in the house. It
belongs to--to you?"
"What? The books?" she vaguely repeated. "They go, of course, with
the house. Do you accomplish much reading outside of your profession,
Mr. Leitzel?"
"No."
"Not even an occasional novel?"
"I never read novels. I did read 'Ivanhoe' at Harvard in the freshman
English course. But that's the only one."
Margaret stared for an instant, then recovered herself. "I see now,"
she said, "why you have done what they call 'made good.' You have
specialized, excluding from your life every other possible interest
save that one little goal of your ambition."
"'Little goal?' Not very little, Miss Berkeley! The law business of
which I am the head earns a yearly income of----"
But he stopped short. If this girl were destined to the good fortune
of becoming Mrs. Leitzel, she must have no idea of the size of his
income. Nobody had, not even his sisters. He often smiled in secret
at his mental picture of the astonishment and delight of Jennie and
Sadie if suddenly told the exact figures; and certainly his wife was
the last person in the world who must know. It might make her
extravagant.
"The annual earnings of our law-firm," he changed the form of his
sentence, "are sufficient to enable me to invest some money every year,
after paying the twenty-five lawyers and clerks in my employ salaries
ranging from twenty-five hundred dollars a year down to five dollars a
week. So you see my 'goal' was not little."
"I suppose even your five-dollar-a-week clerks have to be especially
equipped, don't they?" Margaret asked, with what seemed to him stupid
irrelevance, since he was looking for an exclamation of wonder and
admiration at the figures stated.
"Of course, we employ only experienced stenographers," he curtly
replied.
"This specializing of our modern life, narrowing one's interests to
just one point; one can't help wondering what effect it's going to have
upon the race."
"Eugenics," Daniel nodded intelligently. "You are interested in
eugenics?" he politely inquired. "It's quite a fad these days, isn't
it, among the ladies, and even among some gentlemen, if one can believe
the newspapers."
"It's not my fad," said Margaret.
"You like children, I hope?" he quickly asked.
"Do I look like a woman who doesn't?" she protested, not, of course,
following his train of thought. She rose, as she spoke, and went
across the room to turn down a hissing gas-jet. Daniel's eyes followed
her graceful, leisurely walk down the length of the room, and as she
raised her arm above her head, he took in the delicate curve of her
bosom, her rather broad, boyish shoulders, the clear, rich olive hue of
her skin. The specialist he had consulted years ago had said that a
clear olive skin meant not only perfect health, but a warm temperament
that loved children.
"Anyway," thought Daniel with a hot impulse the like of which his slow
blood had never known, "she's the woman I want! I believe I'd want her
if she didn't have a dollar!"
It was upon this reckless conclusion that, when she had returned to her
seat, he suddenly decided to put a question to her that would better be
settled before he allowed his feelings to carry him too far.
"But," thought he as he looked at her, "I've got to put it cautiously
and--and _delicately_."
"Miss Berkeley?"
"Yes, Mr. Leitzel?"
"I've been thinking of buying myself an automobile."
"Have you?"
"A very handsome and expensive one, you know."
"Ah!"
"Yes. But now I'm hesitating after all."
"Are you?"
"Yes. Because there's another expense I may have to meet. I'm going
to ask you a question. Which, in a general way, do you think would
cost more to keep--an automobile or--or a--well, a wife?"
"Oh, an automobile!" laughed Margaret.
Daniel grinned broadly as he gazed at her; evidently she suspected the
delicate drift of his idea and was advising him for her own advantage.
Nothing slow about her!
"Wives are cheap compared to automobiles," she insisted.
"You really think so?" He couldn't manage to keep from his voice a
slight note of anxiety. "Living here with your married sister, you are
in a position to judge."
Margaret began to wonder whether this man were a humourist or an idiot.
But before she could reply, their tête-à-tête, so satisfactory to Mr.
Leitzel, was interrupted. Mr. and Mrs. Eastman returned to the library.
Now as the formality of chaperoning was not practised in New Munich,
Daniel, with all his "advantages," had never heard of it. When,
therefore, the Eastmans settled themselves with the evident intention
of remaining in the room, their guest found himself feeling chagrined,
not only because he preferred to be alone with Miss Berkeley, but
because the conclusion was forced upon him that he must have been
mistaken in assuming that they had designedly left him with her after
dinner.
This conclusion was confirmed when Miss Berkeley, quite deliberately
leaving the obligation of entertaining him to her elders, changed her
seat to a little distance from him, and in the conversation that
followed took very little part. She even seemed, in the course of a
half-hour, rather bored and--Daniel couldn't help seeing it--sleepy.
Could it be, he wondered with a sinking heart, that she was already
engaged to another man? How else explain this indifference?
But as the evening moved on, and the married pair, in spite of some
subtle hints on his part, still sat glued to their chairs, though he
could see that they, too, were tired and sleepy, he surmised that their
"game" was to _hinder_ Miss Berkeley's marriage!
"They'd like to keep her money in the family for _their_ children, I
guess!" he shrewdly concluded.
The easy indifference to money that was characteristic of the whole
tribe of Berkeleys would have seemed an appalling shortcoming to Daniel
Leitzel had he been capable of conceiving of such a mental state.
With a mind keen to see minute details, interpreting what he saw in the
light of his own narrow, if astute, vision, and incapable of seeing
anything from another's point of view, he came to more false
conclusions than a wholly stupid and less observant man would have made.
When after another half-hour Miss Berkeley, evidently considering him
entirely her brother-in-law's guest, rose, excused herself, said
good-night and left the room, Daniel could only reason that Mr. Eastman
had purposely withheld from her all knowledge as to who his dinner
guest was.
"I'll circumvent _that_ game!" he concluded, opposition, together with
the indifference of the young lady herself, augmenting to a fever heat
his budding passion. "_I'll_ let her know who and what I am!"
Indeed, by the time he left Berkeley Hill that night, so enamoured was
he with the idea of courting Miss Berkeley, he did not even remember
that in a matter so important he had never in his life gone ahead
without first consulting his sisters' valuable opinion. That phase of
the situation, however, was to come home to him keenly enough later on.