I began to keep a scrap-book, though I locked it up in the drawer of

my desk. In it are to be found many clippings of a similarly gratifying

tenor....

Mecklin and I were well contrasted. In this way, incidentally, I made

many valuable acquaintances among the “solid” men of the state, the

local capitalists and manufacturers, with whom my manner of dealing with

public questions was in particular favour. These were practical men;

they rather patronized the Hon. Joseph, thus estimating, to a nicety, a

mans value; or solidity, or specific gravity, it might better be said,

since our universe was one of checks and balances. The Hon. Joseph and

his like, skyrocketing through the air, were somehow necessary in the

scheme of things, but not to be taken too seriously. Me they did take

seriously, these provincial lords, inviting me to their houses and

opening their hearts. Thus, when we came to Elkington, Mr. Mecklin

reposed in the Commercial House, on the noisy main street. Fortunately

for him, the clanging of trolley cars never interfered with his

slumbers. I slept in a wide chamber in the mansion of Mr. Ezra Hutchins.

There were many Hutchinses in Elkington,--brothers and cousins and

uncles and great-uncles,--and all were connected with the woollen

mills. But there is always one supreme Hutchins, and Ezra was he: tall,

self-contained, elderly, but well preserved through frugal living,

essentially American and typical of his class, when he entered the lobby

of the Commercial House that afternoon the babel of political discussion

was suddenly hushed; politicians, traveling salesmen and the members of

the local committee made a lane for him; to him, the Hon. Joseph and I

were introduced. Mr. Hutchins knew what he wanted. He was cordial to

Mr. Mecklin, but he took me. We entered a most respectable surrey with

tassels, driven by a raw-boned coachman in a black overcoat, drawn by

two sleek horses.

“How is this thing going, Paret?” he asked.

I gave him Mr. Grunewald's estimated majority.

“What do you think?” he demanded, a shrewd, humorous look in his blue

eyes.

“Well, I think we'll carry the state. I haven't had Grunewald's

experience in estimating.”

Ezra Hutchins smiled appreciatively.

“What does Watling think?”

“He doesn't seem to be worrying much.”

“Ever been in Elkington before?”

I said I hadn't.

“Well, a drive will do you good.”

It was about four o'clock on a mild October afternoon. The little town,

of fifteen thousand inhabitants or so, had a wonderful setting in the

widening valley of the Scopanong, whose swiftly running waters furnished

the power for the mills. We drove to these through a gateway over which

the words “No Admittance” were conspicuously painted, past long brick

buildings that bordered the canals; and in the windows I caught sight

of drab figures of men and women bending over the machines. Half of the

buildings, as Mr. Hutchins pointed out, were closed,--mute witnesses

of tariff-tinkering madness. Even more eloquent of democratic folly was

that part of the town through which we presently passed, streets lined

with rows of dreary houses where the workers lived. Children were

playing on the sidewalks, but theirs seemed a listless play; listless,

too, were the men and women who sat on the steps,--listless, and

somewhat sullen, as they watched us passing. Ezra Hutchins seemed to

read my thought.

“Since the unions got in here I've had nothing but trouble,” he said.

“I've tried to do my duty by my people, God knows. But they won't see

which side their bread's buttered on. They oppose me at every step, they

vote against their own interests. Some years ago they put up a job on

us, and sent a scatter-brained radical to the legislature.”

“Krebs.”

“Do you know him?”

“Slightly. He was in my class at Harvard.... Is he still here?” I asked,

after a pause.

“Oh, yes. But he hasn't gone to the legislature this time, we've seen to

that. His father was a respectable old German who had a little shop and

made eye-glasses. The son is an example of too much education. He's a

notoriety seeker. Oh, he's clever, in a way. He's given us a good deal

of trouble, too, in the courts with damage cases.”...

We came to a brighter, more spacious, well-to-do portion of the town,

where the residences faced the river. In a little while the waters

widened into a lake, which was surrounded by a park, a gift to the

city of the Hutchins family. Facing it, on one side, was the Hutchins

Library; on the other, across a wide street, where the maples

were turning, were the Hutchinses' residences of various dates of

construction, from that of the younger George, who had lately married a

wife, and built in bright yellow brick, to the old-fashioned mansion of

Ezra himself. This, he told me, had been good enough for his father, and

was good enough for him. The picture of it comes back to me, now, with

singular attractiveness. It was of brick, and I suppose a modification

of the Georgian; the kind of house one still sees in out-of-the way

corners of London, with a sort of Dickensy flavour; high and square and

uncompromising, with small-paned windows, with a flat roof surrounded

by a low balustrade, and many substantial chimneys. The third storey was

lower than the others, separated from them by a distinct line. On one

side was a wide porch. Yellow and red leaves, the day's fall, scattered

the well-kept lawn. Standing in the doorway of the house was a girl in

white, and as we descended from the surrey she came down the walk to

meet us. She was young, about twenty. Her hair was the colour of the

russet maple leaves.

“This is Mr. Paret, Maude.” Mr. Hutchins looked at his watch as does a

man accustomed to live by it. “If you'll excuse me, Mr. Paret, I have

something important to attend to. Perhaps Mr. Paret would like to look

about the grounds?” He addressed his daughter.

I said I should be delighted, though I had no idea what grounds were

meant. As I followed Maude around the house she explained that all the

Hutchins connection had a common back yard, as she expressed it. In

reality, there were about two blocks of the property, extending behind

all the houses. There were great trees with swings, groves, orchards

where the late apples glistened between the leaves, an old-fashioned

flower garden loath to relinquish its blooming. In the distance the

shadowed western ridge hung like a curtain of deep blue velvet against

the sunset.

“What a wonderful spot!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, it is nice,” she agreed, “we were all brought up here--I mean my

cousins and myself. There are dozens of us. And dozens left,” she added,

as the shouts and laughter of children broke the stillness.

A boy came running around the corner of the path. He struck out at

Maude. With a remarkably swift movement she retaliated.

“Ouch!” he exclaimed.

“You got him that time,” I laughed, and, being detected, she suddenly

blushed. It was this act that drew my attention to her, that defined

her as an individual. Before that I had regarded her merely as a shy and

provincial girl. Now she was brimming with an unsuspected vitality. A

certain interest was aroused, although her shyness towards me was not

altered. I found it rather a flattering shyness.

“It's Hugh,” she explained, “he's always trying to be funny. Speak to

Mr. Paret, Hugh.”

“Why, that's my name, too,” I said.

“Is it?”

“She knocked my hat off a little while ago,” said Hugh. “I was only

getting square.”

“Well, you didn't get square, did you?” I asked.

“Are you going to speak in the tows hall to-night?” the boy demanded. I

admitted it. He went off, pausing once to stare back at me.... Maude and

I walked on.

“It must be exciting to speak before a large audience,” she said. “If I

were a man, I think I should like to be in politics.”

“I cannot imagine you in politics,” I answered.

She laughed.

“I said, if I were a man.”

“Are you going to the meeting?”

“Oh, yes. Father promised to take me. He has a box.”

I thought it would be pleasant to have her there.

“I'm afraid you'll find what I have to say rather dry,” I said.

“A woman can't expect to understand everything,” she answered quickly.

This remark struck me favourably. I glanced at her sideways. She was not

a beauty, but she was distinctly well-formed and strong. Her face was

oval, her features not quite regular,--giving them a certain charm; her

colour was fresh, her eyes blue, the lighter blue one sees on Chinese

ware: not a poetic comparison, but so I thought of them. She was

apparently not sophisticated, as were most of the young women at home

whom I knew intimately (as were the Watling twins, for example, with one

of whom, Frances, I had had, by the way, rather a lively flirtation the

spring before); she seemed refreshingly original, impressionable and

plastic....

We walked slowly back to the house, and in the hallway I met Mrs.

Hutchins, a bustling, housewifely lady, inclined to stoutness, whose

creased and kindly face bore witness to long acquiescence in the

discipline of matrimony, to the contentment that results from an

essentially circumscribed and comfortable life. She was, I learned

later, the second Mrs. Hutchins, and Maude their only child. The

children of the first marriage, all girls, had married and scattered.

Supper was a decorous but heterogeneous meal of the old-fashioned sort

that gives one the choice between tea and cocoa. It was something of

an occasion, I suspected. The minister was there, the Reverend Mr.

Doddridge, who would have made, in appearance at least, a perfect

Puritan divine in a steeple hat and a tippet. Only--he was no longer

the leader of the community; and even in his grace he had the air of

deferring to the man who provided the bounties of which we were about

to partake rather than to the Almighty. Young George was there, Mr.

Hutchins's nephew, who was daily becoming more and more of a factor in

the management of the mills, and had built the house of yellow brick

that stood out so incongruously among the older Hutchinses' mansions,

and marked a transition. I thought him rather a yellow-brick gentleman

himself for his assumption of cosmopolitan manners. His wife was a

pretty, discontented little woman who plainly deplored her environment,

longed for larger fields of conquest: George, she said, must remain

where he was, for the present at least,--Uncle Ezra depended on him; but

Elkington was a prosy place, and Mrs. George gave the impression that

she did not belong here. They went to the city on occasions; both

cities. And when she told me we had a common acquaintance in Mrs.

Hambleton Durrett--whom she thought so lovely!--I knew that she had

taken Nancy as an ideal: Nancy, the social leader of what was to Mrs.

George a metropolis.

Presently the talk became general among the men, the subject being the

campaign, and I the authority, bombarded with questions I strove to

answer judicially. What was the situation in this county and in that?

the national situation? George indulged in rather a vigorous arraignment

of the demagogues, national and state, who were hurting business in

order to obtain political power. The Reverend Mr. Doddridge assented,

deploring the poverty that the local people had brought on themselves

by heeding the advice of agitators; and Mrs. Hutchins, who spent much of

her time in charity work, agreed with the minister when he declared

that the trouble was largely due to a decline in Christian belief. Ezra

Hutchins, too, nodded at this.

“Take that man Krebs, for example,” the minister went on, stimulated by

this encouragement, “he's an atheist, pure and simple.” A sympathetic

shudder went around the table at the word. George alone smiled. “Old

Krebs was a free-thinker; I used to get my glasses of him. He was at

least a conscientious man, a good workman, which is more than can be

said for the son. Young Krebs has talent, and if only he had devoted

himself to the honest practice of law, instead of stirring up

dissatisfaction among these people, he would be a successful man

to-day.”

Mr. Hutchins explained that I was at college with Krebs.

“These people must like him,” I said, “or they wouldn't have sent him to

the legislature.”

“Well, a good many of them do like him,” the minister admitted.

“You see, he actually lives among them. They believe his socialistic

doctrines because he's a friend of theirs.”

“He won't represent this town again, that's sure,” exclaimed George.

“You didn't see in the papers that he was nominated,--did you, Paret?”

“But if the mill people wanted him, George, how could it be prevented?”

his wife demanded.

George winked at me.

“There are more ways of skinning a cat than one,” he said cryptically.

“Well, it's time to go to the meeting, I guess,” remarked Ezra, rising.

Once more he looked at his watch.

We were packed into several family carriages and started off. In front

of the hall the inevitable red fire was burning, its quivering light

reflected on the faces of the crowd that blocked the street. They stood

silent, strangely apathetic as we pushed through them to the curb, and

the red fire went out suddenly as we descended. My temporary sense of

depression, however, deserted me as we entered the hall, which was well

lighted and filled with people, who clapped when the Hon. Joseph and

I, accompanied by Mr. Doddridge and the Hon. Henry Clay Mellish from

Pottstown, with the local chairman, walked out on the stage. A glance

over the audience sufficed to ascertain that that portion of the

population whose dinner pails we longed to fill was evidently not

present in large numbers. But the farmers had driven in from the

hills, while the merchants and storekeepers of Elkington had turned out

loyally.

The chairman, in introducing me, proclaimed me as a coming man, and

declared that I had already achieved, in the campaign, considerable

notoriety. As I spoke, I was pleasantly aware of Maude Hutchins leaning

forward a little across the rail of the right-hand stage box--for the

town hall was half opera-house; her attitude was one of semi-absorbed

admiration; and the thought that I had made an impression on her

stimulated me. I spoke with more aplomb. Somewhat to my surprise, I

found myself making occasional, unexpected witticisms that drew laughter

and applause. Suddenly, from the back of the hall, a voice called

out:--“How about House Bill 709?”

There was a silence, then a stirring and craning of necks. It was my

first experience of heckling, and for the moment I was taken aback. I

thought of Krebs. He had, indeed, been in my mind since I had risen to

my feet, and I had scanned the faces before me in search of his. But it

was not his voice.

“Well, what about Bill 709?” I demanded.

“You ought to know something about it, I guess,” the voice responded.

“Put him out!” came from various portions of the hall.

Inwardly, I was shaken. Not--in orthodox language from any “conviction

of sin.” Yet it was my first intimation that my part in the legislation

referred to was known to any save a select few. I blamed Krebs, and a

hot anger arose within me against him. After all, what could they prove?

“No, don't put him out,” I said. “Let him come up here to the platform.

I'll yield to him. And I'm entirely willing to discuss with him and

defend any measures passed in the legislature of this state by a

Republican majority. Perhaps,” I added, “the gentleman has a copy of the

law in his pocket, that I may know what he is talking about, and answer

him intelligently.”

At this there was wild applause. I had the audience with me. The

offender remained silent and presently I finished my speech. After that

Mr. Mecklin made them cheer and weep, and Mr. Mellish made them laugh.

The meeting had been highly successful.

“You polished him off, all right,” said George Hutchins, as he took my

hand.

“Who was he?”

“Oh, one of the local sore-heads. Krebs put him up to it, of course.”

“Was Krebs here?” I asked.

“Sitting in the corner of the balcony. That meeting must have made him

feel sick.” George bent forward and whispered in my ear: “I thought Bill

709 was Watling's idea.”

“Oh, I happened to be in the Potts House about that time,” I explained.

George, of whom it may be gathered that he was not wholly

unsophisticated, grinned at me appreciatively.

“Say, Paret,” he replied, putting his hand through my arm, “there's

a little legal business in prospect down here that will require some

handling, and I wish you'd come down after the campaign and talk it

over, with us. I've just about made up my mind that you're he man to

tackle it.”

“All right, I'll come,” I said.

“And stay with me,” said George....

We went to his yellow-brick house for refreshments, salad and ice-cream

and (in the face of the Hutchins traditions) champagne. Others had been

invited in, some twenty persons.... Once in a while, when I looked up,

I met Maude's eyes across the room. I walked home with her, slowly, the

length of the Hutchinses' block. Floating over the lake was a waning

October moon that cast through the thinning maples a lace-work of

shadows at our feet; I had the feeling of well-being that comes to

heroes, and the presence of Maude Hutchins was an incense, a vestal

incense far from unpleasing. Yet she had reservations which appealed to

me. Hers was not a gushing provincialism, like that of Mrs. George.

“I liked your speech so much, Mr. Paret,” she told me. “It seemed so

sensible and--controlled, compared to the others. I have never thought a

great deal about these things, of course, and I never understood before

why taking away the tariff caused so much misery. You made that quite

plain.

“If so, I'm glad,” I said.

She was silent a moment.

“The working people here have had a hard time during the last year,”

she went on. “Some of the mills had to be shut down, you know. It has

troubled me. Indeed, it has troubled all of us. And what has made it

more difficult, more painful is that many of them seem actually to

dislike us. They think it's father's fault, and that he could run all

the mills if he wanted to. I've been around a little with mother and

sometimes the women wouldn't accept any help from us; they said they'd

rather starve than take charity, that they had the right to work. But

father couldn't run the mills at a loss--could he?”

“Certainly not,” I replied.

“And then there's Mr. Krebs, of whom we were speaking at supper, and who

puts all kinds of queer notions into their heads. Father says he's an

anarchist. I heard father say at supper that he was at Harvard with you.

Did you like him?”

“Well,” I answered hesitatingly, “I didn't know him very well.”

“Of course not,” she put in. “I suppose you couldn't have.”

“He's got these notions,” I explained, “that are mischievous and

crazy--but I don't dislike him.”

“I'm glad to hear you say that!” she answered quietly. “I like him,

too--he seems so kind, so understanding.”

“Do you know him?”

“Well,--” she hesitated--“I feel as though I do. I've only met him once,

and that was by accident. It was the day the big strike began, last

spring, and I had been shopping, and started for the mills to get father

to walk home with me, as I used to do. I saw the crowds blocking the

streets around the canal. At first I paid no attention to them, but

after a while I began to be a little uneasy, there were places where I

had to squeeze through, and I couldn't help seeing that something was

wrong, and that the people were angry. Men and women were talking

in loud voices. One woman stared at me, and called my name, and said

something that frightened me terribly. I went into a doorway--and then

I saw Mr. Krebs. I didn't know who he was. He just said, 'You'd better

come with me, Miss Hutchins,' and I went with him. I thought afterwards

that it was a very courageous thing for him to do, because he was so

popular with the mill people, and they had such a feeling against us.

Yet they didn't seem to resent it, and made way for us, and Mr. Krebs

spoke to many of them as we passed. After we got to State Street, I

asked him his name, and when he told me I was speechless. He took off

his hat and went away. He had such a nice face--not at all ugly when you

look at it twice--and kind eyes, that I just couldn't believe him to be

as bad as father and George think he is. Of course he is mistaken,” she

added hastily, “but I am sure he is sincere, and honestly thinks he can

help those people by telling them what he does.”

The question shot at me during the meeting rankled still; I wanted to

believe that Krebs had inspired it, and her championship of him gave

me a twinge of jealousy,--the slightest twinge, to be sure, yet a

perceptible one. At the same time, the unaccountable liking I had

for the man stirred to life. The act she described had been so

characteristic.

“He's one of the born rebels against society,” I said glibly. “Yet I do

think he's sincere.”

Maude was grave. “I should be sorry to think he wasn't,” she replied.

After I had bidden her good night at the foot of the stairs, and gone to

my room, I reflected how absurd it was to be jealous of Krebs. What

was Maude Hutchins to me? And even if she had been something to me, she

never could be anything to Krebs. All the forces of our civilization

stood between the two; nor was she of a nature to take plunges of that

sort. The next day, as I lay back in my seat in the parlour-car and

gazed at the autumn landscape, I indulged in a luxurious contemplation

of the picture she had made as she stood on the lawn under the trees

in the early morning light, when my carriage had driven away; and I had

turned, to perceive that her eyes had followed me. I was not in love

with her, of course. I did not wish to return at once to Elkington, but

I dwelt with a pleasant anticipation upon my visit, when the campaign

should be over, with George.

XIII.

“The good old days of the Watling campaign,” as Colonel Paul Varney is

wont to call them, are gone forever. And the Colonel himself, who

stuck to his gods, has been through the burning, fiery furnace of

Investigation, and has come out unscathed and unrepentant. The flames of

investigation, as a matter of fact, passed over his head in their vain

attempt to reach the “man higher up,” whose feet they licked; but him

they did not devour, either. A veteran in retirement, the Colonel is

living under his vine and fig tree on the lake at Rossiter; the vine

bears Catawba grapes, of which he is passionately fond; the fig tree,

the Bartlett pears he gives to his friends. He has saved something

from the spoils of war, but other veterans I could mention are not so

fortunate. The old warriors have retired, and many are dead; the

good old methods are becoming obsolete. We never bothered about those

mischievous things called primaries. Our county committees, our state

committees chose the candidates for the conventions, which turned around

and chose the committees. Both the committees and the conventions--under

advice--chose the candidates. Why, pray, should the people complain,

when they had everything done for them? The benevolent parties, both

Democratic and Republican, even undertook the expense of printing the

ballots! And generous ballots they were (twenty inches long and five

wide!), distributed before election, in order that the voters might have

the opportunity of studying and preparing them: in order that Democrats

of delicate feelings might take the pains to scratch out all the

Democratic candidates, and write in the names of the Republican

candidates. Patriotism could go no farther than this....

I spent the week before election in the city, where I had the

opportunity of observing what may be called the charitable side of

politics. For a whole month, or more, the burden of existence had been

lifted from the shoulders of the homeless. No church or organization,

looked out for these frowsy, blear-eyed and ragged wanderers who had

failed to find a place in the scale of efficiency. For a whole month, I

say, Mr. Judd Jason and his lieutenants made them their especial care;

supported them in lodging-houses, induced the night clerks to give them

attention; took the greatest pains to ensure them the birth-right which,

as American citizens, was theirs,--that of voting. They were not only

given homes for a period, but they were registered; and in the abundance

of good feeling that reigned during this time of cheer, even the

foreigners were registered! On election day they were driven, like

visiting notables, in carryalls and carriages to the polls! Some of

them, as though in compensation for ills endured between elections,

voted not once, but many times; exercising judicial functions for which

they should be given credit. For instance, they were convinced that

the Hon. W. W. Trulease had made a good governor; and they were Watling

enthusiasts,--intent on sending men to the legislature who would vote

for him for senator; yet there were cases in which, for the minor

offices, the democrat was the better man!

It was a memorable day. In spite of Mr. Lawler's Pilot, which was as

a voice crying in the wilderness, citizens who had wives and homes and

responsibilities, business men and clerks went to the voting booths

and recorded their choice for Trulease, Watling and Prosperity: and

working-men followed suit. Victory was in the air. Even the policemen

wore happy smiles, and in some instances the election officers

themselves in absent-minded exuberance thrust bunches of ballots into

the boxes!

In response to an insistent demand from his fellow-citizens Mr. Watling,

the Saturday evening before, had made a speech in the Auditorium, decked

with bunting and filled with people. For once the Morning Era did

not exaggerate when it declared that the ovation had lasted fully ten

minutes. “A remarkable proof” it went on to say, “of the esteem and

confidence in which our fellow-citizen is held by those who know him

best, his neighbours in the city where he has given so many instances

of his public spirit, where he has achieved such distinction in the

practice of the law. He holds the sound American conviction that the

office should seek the man. His address is printed in another column,

and we believe it will appeal to the intelligence and sober judgment of

the state. It is replete with modesty and wisdom.”

Mr. Watling was introduced by Mr. Bering of the State Supreme Court (a

candidate for re-election), who spoke with deliberation, with owl-like

impressiveness. He didn't believe in judges meddling in politics, but

this was an unusual occasion. (Loud applause.) Most unusual. He had

come here as a man, as an American, to pay his tribute to another man, a

long-time friend, whom he thought to stand somewhat aside and above

mere party strife, to represent values not merely political.... So

accommodating and flexible is the human mind, so “practical” may it

become through dealing with men and affairs, that in listening to Judge

Bering I was able to ignore the little anomalies such a situation might

have suggested to the theorist, to the mere student of the institutions

of democracy. The friendly glasses of rye and water Mr. Bering had

taken in Monahan's saloon, the cases he had “arranged” for the firm of

Watling, Fowndes and Ripon were forgotten. Forgotten, too, when Theodore

Watling stood up and men began, to throw their hats in the air,--were

the cavilling charges of Mr. Lawler's Pilot that, far from the office

seeking the man, our candidate had spent over a hundred thousand dollars

of his own money, to say nothing of the contributions of Mr. Scherer,

Mr. Dickinson and the Railroad! If I had been troubled with any weak,

ethical doubts, Mr. Watling would have dispelled them; he had red blood

in his veins, a creed in which he believed, a rare power of expressing

himself in plain, everyday language that was often colloquial, but

never--as the saying goes--“cheap.” The dinner-pail predicament was

real to him. He would present a policy of our opponents charmingly, even

persuasively, and then add, after a moment's pause: “There is only one

objection to this, my friends--that it doesn't work.” It was all in the

way he said it, of course. The audience would go wild with approval,

and shouts of “that's right” could be heard here and there. Then he

proceeded to show why it didn't work. He had the faculty of bringing

his lessons home, the imagination to put himself into the daily life of

those who listened to him,--the life of the storekeeper, the clerk, of

the labourer and of the house-wife. The effect of this can scarcely

be overestimated. For the American hugs the delusion that there are no

class distinctions, even though his whole existence may be an effort

to rise out of once class into another. “Your wife,” he told them once,

“needs a dress. Let us admit that the material for the dress is a little

cheaper than it was four years ago, but when she comes to look into the

family stocking--” (Laughter.) “I needn't go on. If we could have things

cheaper, and more money to buy them with, we should all be happy, and

the Republican party could retire from business.”

He did not once refer to the United States Senatorship.

It was appropriate, perhaps, that many of us dined on the evening of

election day at the Boyne Club. There was early evidence of a Republican

land-slide. And when, at ten o'clock, it was announced that Mr. Trulease

was re-elected by a majority which exceeded Mr. Grunewald's most hopeful

estimate, that the legislature was “safe,” that Theodore Watling would

be the next United States Senator, a scene of jubilation ensued within

those hallowed walls which was unprecedented. Chairs were pushed back,

rugs taken up, Gene Hollister played the piano and a Virginia reel

started; in a burst of enthusiasm Leonard Dickinson ordered champagne

for every member present. The country was returning to its senses.

Theodore Watling had preferred, on this eventful night, to remain

quietly at home. But presently carriages were ordered, and a

“delegation” of enthusiastic friends departed to congratulate him;

Dickinson, of course, Grierson, Fowndes, Ogilvy, and Grunewald. We found

Judah B. Tallant there,--in spite of the fact that it was a busy night

for the Era; and Adolf Scherer himself, in expansive mood, was filling

the largest of the library chairs. Mr. Watling was the least excited

of them all; remarkably calm, I thought, for a man on the verge of

realizing his life's high ambition. He had some old brandy, and a box

of cigars he had been saving for an occasion. He managed to convey to

everyone his appreciation of the value of their cooperation....

It was midnight before Mr. Scherer arose to take his departure. He

seized Mr. Watling's hand, warmly, in both of his own.

“I have never,” he said, with a relapse into the German f's, “I

have never had a happier moment in my life, my friend, than when I

congratulate you on your success.” His voice shook with emotion. “Alas,

we shall not see so much of you now.”

“He'll be on guard, Scherer,” said Leonard Dickinson, putting his arm

around my chief.

“Good night, Senator,” said Tallant, and all echoed the word, which

struck me as peculiarly appropriate. Much as I had admired Mr. Watling

before, it seemed indeed as if he had undergone some subtle change in

the last few hours, gained in dignity and greatness by the action of the

people that day. When it came my turn to bid him good night, he retained

my hand in his.

“Don't go yet, Hugh,” he said.

“But you must be tired,” I objected.

“This sort of thing doesn't make a man tired,” he laughed, leading me

back to the library, where he began to poke the fire into a blaze. “Sit

down awhile. You must be tired, I think,--you've worked hard in this

campaign, a good deal harder than I have. I haven't said much about it,

but I appreciate it, my boy.” Mr. Watling had the gift of expressing his

feelings naturally, without sentimentality. I would have given much for

that gift.

“Oh, I liked it,” I replied awkwardly.

I read a gentle amusement in his eyes, and also the expression of

something else, difficult to define. He had seated himself, and was

absently thrusting at the logs with the poker.

“You've never regretted going into law?” he asked suddenly, to my

surprise.

“Why, no, sir,” I said.

“I'm glad to hear that. I feel, to a considerable extent, responsible

for your choice of a profession.”

“My father intended me to be a lawyer,” I told him. “But it's true that

you gave me my--my first enthusiasm.”

He looked up at me at the word.

“I admired your father. He seemed to me to be everything that a lawyer

should be. And years ago, when I came to this city a raw country boy

from upstate, he represented and embodied for me all the fine traditions

of the profession. But the practice of law isn't what it was in his day,

Hugh.”

“No,” I agreed, “that could scarcely be expected.”

“Yes, I believe you realize that,” he said. “I've watched you, I've

taken a personal pride in you, and I have an idea that eventually

you will succeed me here--neither Fowndes nor Ripon have the peculiar

ability you have shown. You and I are alike in a great many respects,

and I am inclined to think we are rather rare, as men go. We are able to

keep one object vividly in view, so vividly as to be able to work for

it day and night. I could mention dozens who had and have more natural

talent for the law than I, more talent for politics than I. The same

thing may be said about you. I don't regard either of us as natural

lawyers, such as your father was. He couldn't help being a lawyer.”

Here was new evidence of his perspicacity.

“But surely,” I ventured, “you don't feel any regrets concerning your

career, Mr. Watling?”

“No,” he said, “that's just the point. But no two of us are made wholly

alike. I hadn't practised law very long before I began to realize that

conditions were changing, that the new forces at work in our industrial

life made the older legal ideals impracticable. It was a case of

choosing between efficiency and inefficiency, and I chose efficiency.

Well, that was my own affair, but when it comes to influencing others--”

He paused. “I want you to see this as I do, not for the sake of

justifying myself, but because I honestly believe there is more to it

than expediency,--a good deal more. There's a weak way of looking at

it, and a strong way. And if I feel sure you understand it, I shall be

satisfied.

“Because things are going to change in this country, Hugh. They are

changing, but they are going to change more. A man has got to make up

his mind what he believes in, and be ready to fight for it. We'll have

to fight for it, sooner perhaps than we realize. We are a nation divided

against ourselves; democracy--Jacksonian democracy, at all events, is

a flat failure, and we may as well acknowledge it. We have a political

system we have outgrown, and which, therefore, we have had to nullify.

There are certain needs, certain tendencies of development in nations

as well as in individuals,--needs stronger than the state, stronger

than the law or constitution. In order to make our resources effective,

combinations of capital are more and more necessary, and no more to be

denied than a chemical process, given the proper ingredients, can be

thwarted. The men who control capital must have a free hand, or the

structure will be destroyed. This compels us to do many things which we

would rather not do, which we might accomplish openly and unopposed if

conditions were frankly recognized, and met by wise statesmanship which

sought to bring about harmony by the reshaping of laws and policies. Do

you follow me?”

“Yes,” I answered. “But I have never heard the situation stated

so clearly. Do you think the day will come when statesmanship will

recognize this need?”

“Ah,” he said, “I'm afraid not--in my time, at least. But we shall have

to develop that kind of statesmen or go on the rocks. Public opinion

in the old democratic sense is a myth; it must be made by strong

individuals who recognize and represent evolutionary needs, otherwise

it's at the mercy of demagogues who play fast and loose with the

prejudice and ignorance of the mob. The people don't value the vote,

they know nothing about the real problems. So far as I can see, they

are as easily swayed to-day as the crowd that listened to Mark Antony's

oration about Caesar. You've seen how we have to handle them, in this

election and--in other matters. It isn't a pleasant practice, something

we'd indulge in out of choice, but the alternative is unthinkable. We'd

have chaos in no time. We've just got to keep hold, you understand--we

can't leave it to the irresponsible.”

“Yes,” I said. In this mood he was more impressive than I had ever known

him, and his confidence flattered and thrilled me.

“In the meantime, we're criminals,” he continued. “From now on we'll

have to stand more and more denunciation from the visionaries, the

dissatisfied, the trouble makers. We may as well make up our minds to

it. But we've got something on our side worth fighting for, and the man

who is able to make that clear will be great.”

“But you--you are going to the Senate,” I reminded him.

He shook his head.

“The time has not yet come,” he said. “Confusion and misunderstanding

must increase before they can diminish. But I have hopes of you, Hugh,

or I shouldn't have spoken. I shan't be here now--of course I'll keep in

touch with you. I wanted to be sure that you had the right view of this

thing.”

“I see it now,” I said. “I had thought of it, but never--never as

a whole--not in the large sense in which you have expressed it.” To

attempt to acknowledge or deprecate the compliment he had paid me was

impossible; I felt that he must have read my gratitude and appreciation

in my manner.

“I mustn't keep you up until morning.” He glanced at the clock, and went

with me through the hall into the open air. A meteor darted through

the November night. “We're like that,” he observed, staring after it, a

“flash across the darkness, and we're gone.”

“Only--there are many who haven't the satisfaction of a flash,” I was

moved to reply.

He laughed and put his hand on my shoulder as he bade me good night.

“Hugh, you ought to get married. I'll have to find a nice girl for you,”

he said. With an elation not unmingled with awe I made my way homeward.

Theodore Watling had given me a creed.

A week or so after the election I received a letter from George Hutchins

asking me to come to Elkington. I shall not enter into the details of

the legal matter involved. Many times that winter I was a guest at the

yellow-brick house, and I have to confess, as spring came on, that

I made several trips to Elkington which business necessity did not

absolutely demand.

I considered Maude Hutchins, and found the consideration rather a

delightful process. As became an eligible and successful young man, I

was careful not to betray too much interest; and I occupied myself at

first with a review of what I deemed her shortcomings. Not that I was

thinking of marriage--but I had imagined the future Mrs. Paret as tall;

Maude was up to my chin: again, the hair of the fortunate lady was to

be dark, and Maude's was golden red: my ideal had esprit, lightness

of touch, the faculty of seizing just the aspect of a subject that

delighted me, and a knowledge of the world; Maude was simple, direct,

and in a word provincial. Her provinciality, however, was negative

rather than positive, she had no disagreeable mannerisms, her voice was

not nasal; her plasticity appealed to me. I suppose I was lost without

knowing it when I began to think of moulding her.

All of this went on at frequent intervals during the winter, and while

I was organizing the Elkington Power and Traction Company for George I

found time to dine and sup at Maude's house, and to take walks with

her. I thought I detected an incense deliciously sweet; by no means

overpowering, like the lily's, but more like the shy fragrance of the

wood flower. I recall her kind welcomes, the faint deepening of colour

in her cheeks when she greeted me, and while I suspected that she looked

up to me she had a surprising and tantalizing self-command.

There came moments when I grew slightly alarmed, as, for instance, one

Sunday in the early spring when I was dining at the Ezra Hutchins's

house and surprised Mrs. Hutchins's glance on me, suspecting her of

seeking to divine what manner of man I was. I became self-conscious; I

dared not look at Maude, who sat across the table; thereafter I began to

feel that the Hutchins connection regarded me as a suitor. I had

grown intimate with George and his wife, who did not refrain from sly

allusions; and George himself once remarked, with characteristic tact,

that I was most conscientious in my attention to the traction affair; I

have reason to believe they were even less delicate with Maude. This was

the logical time to withdraw--but I dallied. The experience was becoming

more engrossing,--if I may so describe it,--and spring was approaching.

The stars in their courses were conspiring. I was by no means as yet

a self-acknowledged wooer, and we discussed love in its lighter phases

through the medium of literature. Heaven forgive me for calling it so!

About that period, it will be remembered, a mushroom growth of volumes

of a certain kind sprang into existence; little books with “artistic”

bindings and wide margins, sweetened essays, some of them written in

beautiful English by dilettante authors for drawing-room consumption;

and collections of short stories, no doubt chiefly bought by

philanderers like myself, who were thus enabled to skate on thin ice

over deep water. It was a most delightful relationship that these helped

to support, and I fondly believed I could reach shore again whenever I

chose.

There came a Sunday in early May, one of those days when the feminine

assumes a large importance. I had been to the Hutchinses' church; and

Maude, as she sat and prayed decorously in the pew beside me, suddenly

increased in attractiveness and desirability. Her voice was very sweet,

and I felt a delicious and languorous thrill which I identified not only

with love, but also with a reviving spirituality. How often the two seem

to go hand in hand!

She wore a dress of a filmy material, mauve, with a design in gold

thread running through it. Of late, it seemed, she had had more new

dresses: and their modes seemed more cosmopolitan; at least to the

masculine eye. How delicately her hair grew, in little, shining wisps,

around her white neck! I could have reached out my hand and touched

her. And it was this desire,--although by no means overwhelming,--that

startled me. Did I really want her? The consideration of this vital

question occupied the whole time of the sermon; made me distrait at

dinner,--a large family gathering. Later I found myself alone with heron

a bench in the Hutchinses' garden where we had walked the day of my

arrival, during the campaign.

The gardens were very different, now. The trees had burst forth again

into leaf, the spiraea bushes seemed weighted down with snow, and with a

note like that of the quivering bass string of a 'cello the bees hummed

among the fruit blossoms. And there beside me in her filmy dress

was Maude, a part of it all--the meaning of all that set my being

clamouring. She was like some ripened, delicious flower ready to be

picked.... One of those pernicious, make-believe volumes had fallen on

the bench between us, for I could not read any more; I could not think;

I touched her hand, and when she drew it gently away I glanced at her.

Reason made a valiant but hopeless effort to assert itself. Was I sure

that I wanted her--for life? No use! I wanted her now, no matter

what price that future might demand. An awkward silence fell between

us--awkward to me, at least--and I, her guide and mentor, became banal,

apologetic, confused. I made some idiotic remark about being together in

the Garden of Eden.

“I remember Mr. Doddridge saying in Bible class that it was supposed

to be on the Euphrates,” she replied. “But it's been destroyed by the

flood.”

“Let's make another--one of our own,” I suggested.

“Why, how silly you are this afternoon.”

“What's to prevent us--Maude?” I demanded, with a dry throat.

“Nonsense!” she laughed. In proportion as I lost poise she seemed to

gain it.

“It's not nonsense,” I faltered. “If we were married.”

At last the fateful words were pronounced--irrevocably. And, instead of

qualms, I felt nothing but relief, joy that I had been swept along by

the flood of feeling. She did not look at me, but gazed straight ahead

of her.

“If I love you, Maude?” I stammered, after a moment.

“But I don't love you,” she replied, steadily.

Never in my life had I been so utterly taken aback.

“Do you mean,” I managed to say, “that after all these months you don't

like me a little?”

“'Liking' isn't loving.” She looked me full in the face. “I like you

very much.”

“But--” there I stopped, paralyzed by what appeared to me the

quintessence of feminine inconsistency and caprice. Yet, as I stared at

her, she certainly did not appear capricious. It is not too much to

say that I was fairly astounded at this evidence of self-command and

decision, of the strength of mind to refuse me. Was it possible that she

had felt nothing and I all? I got to my feet.

“I hate to hurt your feelings,” I heard her say. “I'm very sorry.”...

She looked up at me. Afterwards, when reflecting on the scene, I seemed

to remember that there were tears in her eyes. I was not in a

condition to appreciate her splendid sincerity. I was overwhelmed and

inarticulate. I left her there, on the bench, and went back to George's,

announcing my intention of taking the five o'clock train....

Maude Hutchins had become, at a stroke, the most desirable of women.

I have often wondered how I should have felt on that five-hour journey

back to the city if she had fallen into my arms! I should have persuaded

myself, no doubt, that I had not done a foolish thing in yielding to an

impulse and proposing to an inexperienced and provincial young woman,

yet there would have been regrets in the background. Too deeply

chagrined to see any humour in the situation, I settled down in a

Pullman seat and went over and over again the event of that afternoon

until the train reached the city.

As the days wore on, and I attended to my cases, I thought of Maude

a great deal, and in those moments when the pressure of business was

relaxed, she obsessed me. She must love me,--only she did not realize

it. That was the secret! Her value had risen amazingly, become supreme;

the very act of refusing me had emphasized her qualifications as a wife,

and I now desired her with all the intensity of a nature which had

been permitted always to achieve its objects. The inevitable process of

idealization began. In dusty offices I recalled her freshness as she had

sat beside me in the garden,--the freshness of a flower; with Berkeleyan

subjectivism I clothed the flower with colour, bestowed it with

fragrance. I conferred on Maude all the gifts and graces that woman had

possessed since the creation. And I recalled, with mingled bitterness

and tenderness, the turn of her head, the down on her neck, the

half-revealed curve of her arm.... In spite of the growing sordidness of

Lyme Street, my mother and I still lived in the old house, for which

she very naturally had a sentiment. In vain I had urged her from time to

time to move out into a brighter and fresher neighbourhood. It would be

time enough, she said, when I was married.

“If you wait for that, mother,” I answered, “we shall spend the rest of

our lives here.”

“I shall spend the rest of my life here,” she would declare. “But

you--you have your life before you, my dear. You would be so much more

contented if--if you could find some nice girl. I think you live--too

feverishly.”

I do not know whether or not she suspected me of being in love, nor

indeed how much she read of me in other ways. I did not confide in her,

nor did it strike me that she might have yearned for confidences; though

sometimes, when I dined at home, I surprised her gentle face--framed

now with white hair--lifted wistfully toward me across the table.

Our relationship, indeed, was a pathetic projection of that which had

existed in my childhood; we had never been confidants then. The world

in which I lived and fought, of great transactions and merciless

consequences frightened her; her own world was more limited than ever.

She heard disquieting things, I am sure, from Cousin Robert Breck, who

had become more and more querulous since the time-honoured firm of Breck

and Company had been forced to close its doors and the home at Claremore

had been sold. My mother often spent the day in the scrolled suburban

cottage with the coloured glass front door where he lived with the

Kinleys and Helen....

If my mother suspected that I was anticipating marriage, and said

nothing, Nancy Durrett suspected and spoke out.

Life is such a curious succession of contradictions and surprises that

I record here without comment the fact that I was seeing much more

of Nancy since her marriage than I had in the years preceding it. A

comradeship existed between us. I often dined at her house and had

fallen into the habit of stopping there frequently on my way home in the

evening. Ham did not seem to mind. What was clear, at any rate, was that

Nancy, before marriage, had exacted some sort of an understanding by

which her “freedom” was not to be interfered with. She was the first

among us of the “modern wives.”

Ham, whose heartstrings and purse-strings were oddly intertwined, had

stipulated that they were to occupy the old Durrett mansion; but when

Nancy had made it “livable,” as she expressed it, he is said to have

remarked that he might as well have built a new house and been done with

it. Not even old Nathaniel himself would have recognized his home when

Nancy finished what she termed furnishing: out went the horsehair, the

hideous chandeliers, the stuffy books, the Recamier statuary, and an

army of upholsterers, wood-workers, etc., from Boston and New York

invaded the place. The old mahogany doors were spared, but matched now

by Chippendale and Sheraton; the new, polished floors were covered with

Oriental rugs, the dreary Durrett pictures replaced by good canvases and

tapestries. Nancy had what amounted to a genius for interior effects,

and she was the first to introduce among us the luxury that was to grow

more and more prevalent as our wealth increased by leaps and bounds.

Only Nancy's luxury, though lavish, was never vulgar, and her house

when completed had rather marvellously the fine distinction of some old

London mansion filled with the best that generations could contribute.

It left Mrs. Frederick Grierson--whose residence on the Heights had

hitherto been our “grandest”--breathless with despair.

With characteristic audacity Nancy had chosen old Nathaniel's sanctum

for her particular salon, into which Ham himself did not dare to venture

without invitation. It was hung in Pompeiian red and had a little

wrought-iron balcony projecting over the yard, now transformed by an

expert into a garden. When I had first entered this room after the

metamorphosis had taken place I inquired after the tombstone mantel.

“Oh, I've pulled it up by the roots,” she said.

“Aren't you afraid of ghosts?” I inquired.

“Do I look it?” she asked. And I confessed that she didn't. Indeed,

all ghosts were laid, nor was there about her the slightest evidence of

mourning or regret. One was forced to acknowledge her perfection in the

part she had chosen as the arbitress of social honours. The candidates

were rapidly increasing; almost every month, it seemed, someone turned

up with a fortune and the aspirations that go with it, and it was Mrs.

Durrett who decided the delicate question of fitness. With these,

and with the world at large, her manner might best be described as

difficult; and I was often amused at the way in which she contrived

to keep them at arm's length and make them uncomfortable. With her

intimates--of whom there were few--she was frank.

“I suppose you enjoy it,” I said to her once.

“Of course I enjoy it, or I shouldn't do it,” she retorted. “It isn't

the real thing, as I told you once. But none of us gets the real thing.

It's power.... Just as you enjoy what you're doing--sorting out the

unfit. It's a game, it keeps us from brooding over things we can't help.

And after all, when we have good appetites and are fairly happy, why

should we complain?”

“I'm not complaining,” I said, taking up a cigarette, “since I still

enjoy your favour.”

She regarded me curiously.

“And when you get married, Hugh?”

“Sufficient unto the day,” I replied.

“How shall I get along, I wonder, with that simple and unsophisticated

lady when she appears?”

“Well,” I said, “you wouldn't marry me.”

She shook her head at me, and smiled....

“No,” she corrected me, “you like me better as Hams' wife than you would

have as your own.”

I merely laughed at this remark.... It would indeed have been difficult

to analyze the new relationship that had sprung up between us, to say

what elements composed it. The roots of it went back to the beginning

of our lives; and there was much of sentiment in it, no doubt. She

understood me as no one else in the world understood me, and she was

fond of me in spite of it.

Hence, when I became infatuated with Maude Hutchins, after that Sunday

when she so unexpectedly had refused me, I might have known that Nancy's

suspicions would be aroused. She startled me by accusing me, out of a

clear sky, of being in love. I denied it a little too emphatically.

“Why shouldn't you tell me, Hugh, if it's so?” she asked. “I didn't

hesitate to tell you.”

It was just before her departure for the East to spend the summer. We

were on the balcony, shaded by the big maple that grew at the end of the

garden.

“But there's nothing to tell,” I insisted.

She lay back in her chair, regarding me.

“Did you think that I'd be jealous?”

“There's nothing to be jealous about.”

“I've always expected you to get married, Hugh. I've even predicted the

type.”

She had, in truth, with an accuracy almost uncanny.

“The only thing I'm afraid of is that she won't like me. She lives in

that place you've been going to so much, lately,--doesn't she?”

Of course she had put two and two together, my visits to Elkington and

my manner, which I had flattered myself had not been distrait. On the

chance that she knew more, from some source, I changed my tactics.

“I suppose you mean Maude Hutchins,” I said.

Nancy laughed.

“So that's her name!”

“It's the name of a girl in Elkington. I've been doing legal work for

the Hutchinses, and I imagine some idiot has been gossiping. She's just

a young girl--much too young for me.”

“Men are queer creatures,” she declared. “Did you think I should be

jealous?”

It was exactly what I had thought, but I denied it.

“Why should you be--even if there were anything to be jealous about?

You didn't consult me when you got married. You merely announced an

irrevocable decision.”

Nancy leaned forward and laid her hand on my arm.

“My dear,” she said, “strange as it may seem, I want you to be happy. I

don't want you to make a mistake, Hugh, too great a mistake.”

I was surprised and moved. Once more I had a momentary glimpse of the

real Nancy....

Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Ralph Hambleton....

XIV.

However, thoughts of Maude continued to possess me. She still appeared

the most desirable of beings, and a fortnight after my repulse, without

any excuse at all, I telegraphed the George Hutchinses that I was coming

to pay them a visit. Mrs. George, wearing a knowing smile, met me at the

station in a light buck-board.

“I've asked Maude to dinner,” she said....

Thus with masculine directness I returned to the charge, and Maude's

continued resistance but increased my ardour; could not see why she

continued to resist me.

“Because I don't love you,” she said.

This was incredible. I suggested that she didn't know what love was, and

she admitted it was possible: she liked me very, very much. I told her,

sagely, that this was the best foundation for matrimony. That might be,

but she had had other ideas. For one thing, she felt that she did not

know me.... In short, she was charming and maddening in her defensive

ruses, in her advances and retreats, for I pressed her hard during

the four weeks which followed, and in them made four visits. Flinging

caution to the winds, I did not even pretend to George that I was coming

to see him on business. I had the Hutchins family on my side, for they

had the sense to see that the match would be an advantageous one; I even

summoned up enough courage to talk to Ezra Hutchins on the subject.

“I'll not attempt to influence Maude, Mr. Paret--I've always said I

wouldn't interfere with her choice. But as you are a young man of sound

habits, sir, successful in your profession, I should raise no objection.

I suppose we can't keep her always.”

To conceal his emotion, he pulled out the watch he lived by. “Why, it's

church time!” he said.... I attended church regularly at Elkington....

On a Sunday night in June, following a day during which victory seemed

more distant than ever, with startling unexpectedness Maude capitulated.

She sat beside me on the bench, obscured, yet the warm night quivered

with her presence. I felt her tremble.... I remember the first exquisite

touch of her soft cheek. How strange it was that in conquest the tumult

of my being should be stilled, that my passion should be transmuted into

awe that thrilled yet disquieted! What had I done? It was as though I

had suddenly entered an unimagined sanctuary filled with holy flame....

Presently, when we began to talk, I found myself seeking more familiar

levels. I asked her why she had so long resisted me, accusing her of

having loved me all the time.

“Yes, I think I did, Hugh. Only--I didn't know it.”

“You must have felt something, that afternoon when I first proposed to

you!”

“You didn't really want me, Hugh. Not then.”

Surprised, and a little uncomfortable at this evidence of intuition, I

started to protest. It seemed to me then as though I had always wanted

her.

“No, no,” she exclaimed, “you didn't. You were carried away by your

feelings--you hadn't made up your mind. Indeed, I can't see why you want

me now.”

“You believe I do,” I said, and drew her toward me.

“Yes, I--I believe it, now. But I can't see why. There must be so many

attractive girls in the city, who know so much more than I do.”

I sought fervidly to reassure her on this point.... At length when we

went into the house she drew away from me at arm's length and gave me

one long searching look, as though seeking to read my soul.

“Hugh, you will always love me--to the very end, won't you?”

“Yes,” I whispered, “always.”

In the library, one on each side of the table, under the lamp, Ezra

Hutchins and his wife sat reading. Mrs. Hutchins looked up, and I saw

that she had divined.

“Mother, I am engaged to Hugh,” Maude said, and bent over and kissed

her. Ezra and I stood gazing at them. Then he turned to me and pressed

my hand.

“Well, I never saw the man who was good enough for her, Hugh. But God

bless you, my son. I hope you will prize her as we prize her.”

Mrs. Hutchins embraced me. And through her tears she, too, looked long

into my face. When she had released me Ezra had his watch in his hand.

“If you're going on the ten o'clock train, Hugh--”

“Father!” Maude protested, laughing, “I must say I don't call that very

polite.”...

In the train I slept but fitfully, awakening again and again to recall

the extraordinary fact that I was now engaged to be married, to go

over the incidents of the evening. Indifferent to the backings and

the bumpings of the car, the voices in the stations, the clanging of

locomotive bells and all the incomprehensible startings and stoppings,

exalted yet troubled I beheld Maude luminous with the love I had

amazingly awakened, a love somewhere beyond my comprehension. For her

indeed marriage was made in heaven. But for me? Could I rise now to the

ideal that had once been mine, thrust henceforth evil out of my life?

Love forever, live always in this sanctuary she had made for me? Would

the time come when I should feel a sense of bondage?...

The wedding was set for the end of September. I continued to go every

week to Elkington, and in August, Maude and I spent a fortnight at the

sea. There could be no doubt as to my mother's happiness, as to her

approval of Maude; they loved each other from the beginning. I can

picture them now, sitting together with their sewing on the porch of the

cottage at Mattapoisett. Out on the bay little white-caps danced in the

sunlight, sail-boats tacked hither and thither, the strong cape breeze,

laden with invigorating salt, stirred Maude's hair, and occasionally

played havoc with my papers.

“She is just the wife for you, Hugh,” my mother confided to me. “If I

had chosen her myself I could not have done better,” she added, with a

smile.

I was inclined to believe it, but Maude would have none of this

illusion.

“He just stumbled across me,” she insisted....

We went on long sails together, towards Wood's Hole and the open sea,

the sprays washing over us. Her cheeks grew tanned.... Sometimes, when

I praised her and spoke confidently of our future, she wore a troubled

expression.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked her once.

“You mustn't put me on a pedestal,” she said gently. “I want you to see

me as I am--I don't want you to wake up some day and be disappointed.

I'll have to learn a lot of things, and you'll have to teach me. I can't

get used to the fact that you, who are so practical and successful in

business, should be such a dreamer where I am concerned.”

I laughed, and told her, comfortably, that she was talking nonsense.

“What did you think of me, when you first knew me?” I inquired.

“Well,” she answered, with the courage that characterized her, “I

thought you were rather calculating, that you put too high a price on

success. Of course you attracted me. I own it.”

“You hid your opinions rather well,” I retorted, somewhat discomfited.

She flushed.

“Have you changed them?” I demanded.

“I think you have that side, and I think it a weak side, Hugh. It's hard

to tell you this, but it's better to say so now, since you ask me. I do

think you set too high a value on success.'

“Well, now that I know what success really is, perhaps I shall reform,”

I told her.

“I don't like to think that you fool yourself,” she replied, with a

perspicacity I should have found extraordinary.

Throughout my life there have been days and incidents, some trivial,

some important, that linger in my memory because they are saturated with

“atmosphere.” I recall, for instance, a gala occasion in youth when my

mother gave one of her luncheon parties; on my return from school, the

house and its surroundings wore a mysterious, exciting and unfamiliar

look, somehow changed by the simple fact that guests sat decorously

chatting in a dining-room shining with my mother's best linen and

treasured family silver and china. The atmosphere of my wedding-day is

no less vivid. The house of Ezra Hutchins was scarcely recognizable:

its doors and windows were opened wide, and all the morning people were

being escorted upstairs to an all-significant room that contained a

collection like a jeweller's exhibit,--a bewildering display. There was

a massive punch-bowl from which dangled the card of Mr. and Mrs. Adolf

Scherer, a really wonderful tea set of old English silver given by

Senator and Mrs. Watling, and Nancy Willett, with her certainty of

good taste, had sent an old English tankard of the time of the second

Charles. The secret was in that room. And it magically transformed for

me (as I stood, momentarily alone, in the doorway where I had first

beheld Maude) the accustomed scene, and charged with undivined

significance the blue shadows under the heavy foliage of the maples. The

September sunlight was heavy, tinged with gold....

So fragmentary and confused are the events of that day that a cubist

literature were necessary to convey the impressions left upon me. I had

something of the feeling of a recruit who for the first time is taking

part in a brilliant and complicated manoeuvre. Tom and Susan Peters

flit across the view, and Gene Hollister and Perry Blackwood and the

Ewanses,--all of whom had come up in a special car; Ralph Hambleton

was “best man,” looking preternaturally tall in his frock-coat: and

his manner, throughout the whole proceeding, was one of good-natured

tolerance toward a folly none but he might escape.

“If you must do it, Hughie, I suppose you must,” he had said to me.

“I'll see you through, of course. But don't blame me afterwards.”

Maude was a little afraid of him....

I dressed at George's; then, like one of those bewildering shifts of

a cinematograph, comes the scene in church, the glimpse of my mother's

wistful face in the front pew; and I found myself in front of the

austere Mr. Doddridge standing beside Maude--or rather beside a woman

I tried hard to believe was Maude--so veiled and generally encased was

she. I was thinking of this all the time I was mechanically answering

Mr. Doddridge, and even when the wedding march burst forth and I led her

out of the church. It was as though they had done their best to disguise

her, to put our union on the other-worldly plane that was deemed to

be its only justification, to neutralize her sex at the very moment it

should have been most enhanced. Well, they succeeded. If I had not been

as conventional as the rest, I should have preferred to have run away

with her in the lavender dress she wore when I first proposed to her. It

was only when we had got into the carriage and started for the house and

she turned to me her face from which the veil had been thrown back that

I realized what a sublime meaning it all had for her. Her eyes were

wet. Once more I was acutely conscious of my inability to feel deeply at

supreme moments. For months I had looked forward with anticipation and

impatience to my wedding-day.

I kissed her gently. But I felt as though she had gone to heaven, and

that the face I beheld enshrouded were merely her effigy. Commonplace

words were inappropriate, yet it was to these I resorted.

“Well--it wasn't so bad after all! Was it?”

She smiled at me.

“You don't want to take it back?”

She shook her head.

“I think it was a beautiful wedding, Hugh. I'm so glad we had a good

day.”...

She seemed shy, at once very near and very remote. I held her hand

awkwardly until the carriage stopped.

A little later we were standing in a corner of the parlour, the

atmosphere of which was heavy with the scent of flowers, submitting to

the onslaught of relatives. Then came the wedding breakfast: croquettes,

champagne, chicken salad, ice-cream, the wedding-cake, speeches and more

kisses.... I remember Tom Peters holding on to both my hands.

“Good-bye, and God bless you, old boy,” he was saying. Susan, in view of

the occasion, had allowed him a little more champagne than usual--enough

to betray his feelings, and I knew that these had not changed since our

college days. I resolved to see more of him. I had neglected him and

undervalued his loyalty.... He had followed me to my room in George's

house where I was dressing for the journey, and he gave it as his

deliberate judgment that in Maude I had “struck gold.”

“She's just the girl for you, Hughie,” he declared. “Susan thinks so,

too.”

Later in the afternoon, as we sat in the state-room of the car that

was bearing us eastward, Maude began to cry. I sat looking at her

helplessly, unable to enter into her emotion, resenting it a little. Yet

I tried awkwardly to comfort her.

“I can't bear to leave them,” she said.

“But you will see them often, when we come back,” I reassured her. It

was scarcely the moment for reminding her of what she was getting in

return. This peculiar family affection she evinced was beyond me; I

had never experienced it in any poignant degree since I had gone as a

freshman to Harvard, and yet I was struck by the fact that her emotions

were so rightly placed. It was natural to love one's family. I began to

feel, vaguely, as I watched her, that the new relationship into which

I had entered was to be much more complicated than I had imagined.

Twilight was coming on, the train was winding through the mountain

passes, crossing and re-crossing a swift little stream whose banks were

massed with alder; here and there, on the steep hillsides, blazed

the goldenrod.... Presently I turned, to surprise in her eyes a wide,

questioning look,--the look of a child. Even in this irrevocable hour

she sought to grasp what manner of being was this to whom she had

confided her life, and with whom she was faring forth into the unknown.

The experience was utterly unlike my anticipation. Yet I responded. The

kiss I gave her had no passion in it.

“I'll take good care of you, Maude,” I said.

Suddenly, in the fading light, she flung her arms around me, pressing me

tightly, desperately.

“Oh, I know you will, Hugh, dear. And you'll forgive me, won't you, for

being so horrid to-day, of all days? I do love you!”

Neither of us had ever been abroad. And although it was before the days

of swimming-pools and gymnasiums and a la carte cafes on ocean liners,

the Atlantic was imposing enough. Maude had a more lasting capacity for

pleasure than I, a keener enjoyment of new experiences, and as she lay

beside me in the steamer-chair where I had carefully tucked her she

would exclaim:

“I simply can't believe it, Hugh! It seems so unreal. I'm sure I shall

wake up and find myself back in Elkington.”

“Don't speak so loud, my dear,” I cautioned her. There were some very

formal-looking New Yorkers next us.

“No, I won't,” she whispered. “But I'm so happy I feel as though I

should like to tell everyone.”

“There's no need,” I answered smiling.

“Oh, Hugh, I don't want to disgrace you!” she exclaimed, in real alarm.

“Otherwise, so far as I am concerned, I shouldn't care who knew.”

People smiled at her. Women came up and took her hands. And on the

fourth day the formidable New Yorkers unexpectedly thawed.

I had once thought of Maude as plastic. Then I had discovered she had

a mind and will of her own. Once more she seemed plastic; her love had

made her so. Was it not what I had desired? I had only to express a

wish, and it became her law. Nay, she appealed to me many times a day to

know whether she had made any mistakes, and I began to drill her in my

silly traditions,--gently, very gently.

“Well, I shouldn't be quite so familiar with people, quite so ready to

make acquaintances, Maude. You have no idea who they may be. Some of

them, of course, like the Sardells, I know by reputation.”

The Sardells were the New Yorkers who sat next us.

“I'll try, Hugh, to be more reserved, more like the wife of an important

man.” She smiled.

“It isn't that you're not reserved,” I replied, ignoring the latter half

of her remark. “Nor that I want you to change,” I said. “I only want to

teach you what little of the world I know myself.”

“And I want to learn, Hugh. You don't know how I want to learn!”

The sight of mist-ridden Liverpool is not a cheering one for the

American who first puts foot on the mother country's soil, a Liverpool

of yellow-browns and dingy blacks, of tilted funnels pouring out smoke

into an atmosphere already charged with it. The long wharves and shed

roofs glistened with moisture.

“Just think, Hugh, it's actually England!” she cried, as we stood on the

wet deck. But I felt as though I'd been there before.

“No wonder they're addicted to cold baths,” I replied. “They must feel

perfectly at home in them, especially if they put a little lampblack in

the water.”

Maude laughed.

“You grumpy old thing!” she exclaimed.

Nothing could dampen her ardour, not the sight of the rain-soaked stone

houses when we got ashore, nor even the frigid luncheon we ate in the

lugubrious hotel. For her it was all quaint and new. Finally we found

ourselves established in a compartment upholstered in light grey, with

tassels and arm-supporters, on the window of which was pasted a poster

with the word reserved in large, red letters. The guard inquired

respectfully, as the porter put our new luggage in the racks, whether we

had everything we wanted. The toy locomotive blew its toy whistle, and

we were off for the north; past dingy, yellow tenements of the smoking

factory towns, and stretches of orderly, hedge-spaced rain-swept

country. The quaint cottages we glimpsed, the sight of distant, stately

mansions on green slopes caused Maude to cry out with rapture:--“Oh,

Hugh, there's a manor-house!”

More vivid than were the experiences themselves of that journey are the

memories of them. We went to windswept, Sabbath-keeping Edinburgh, to

high Stirling and dark Holyrood, and to Abbotsford. It was through

Sir Walter's eyes we beheld Melrose bathed in autumn light, by his aid

repeopled it with forgotten monks eating their fast-day kale.

And as we sat reading and dreaming in the still, sunny corners I forgot,

that struggle for power in which I had been so furiously engaged since

leaving Cambridge. Legislatures, politicians and capitalists receded

into a dim background; and the gift I had possessed, in youth, of living

in a realm of fancy showed astonishing signs of revival.

“Why, Hugh,” Maude exclaimed, “you ought to have been a writer!”

“You've only just begun to fathom my talents,” I replied laughingly.

“Did you think you'd married just a dry old lawyer?”

“I believe you capable of anything,” she said....

I grew more and more to depend on her for little things.

She was a born housewife. It was pleasant to have her do all the

packing, while I read or sauntered in the queer streets about the inns.

And she took complete charge of my wardrobe.

She had a talent for drawing, and as we went southward through England

she made sketches of the various houses that took our fancy--suggestions

for future home-building; we spent hours in the evenings in the inn

sitting-rooms incorporating new features into our residence, continually

modifying our plans. Now it was a Tudor house that carried us away,

now a Jacobean, and again an early Georgian with enfolding wings and a

wrought-iron grill. A stage of bewilderment succeeded.

Maude, I knew, loved the cottages best. She said they were more

“homelike.” But she yielded to my liking for grandeur.

“My, I should feel lost in a palace like that!” she cried, as we gazed

at the Marquis of So-and-So's country-seat.

“Well, of course we should have to modify it,” I admitted.

“Perhaps--perhaps our family will be larger.”

She put her hand on my lips, and blushed a fiery red....

We examined, with other tourists, at a shilling apiece historic mansions

with endless drawing-rooms, halls, libraries, galleries filled with

family portraits; elaborate, formal bedrooms where famous sovereigns

had slept, all roped off and carpeted with canvas strips to protect

the floors. Through mullioned windows we caught glimpses of gardens and

geometrical parterres, lakes, fountains, statuary, fantastic topiary

and distant stretches of park. Maude sighed with admiration, but did not

covet. She had me. But I was often uncomfortable, resenting the vulgar,

gaping tourists with whom we were herded and the easy familiarity of

the guides. These did not trouble Maude, who often annoyed me by asking

naive questions herself. I would nudge her.

One afternoon when, with other compatriots, we were being hurried

through a famous castle, the guide unwittingly ushered us into a

drawing-room where the owner and several guests were seated about a

tea-table. I shall never forget the stares they gave us before we had

time precipitately to retreat, nor the feeling of disgust and rebellion

that came over me. This was heightened by the remark of a heavy,

six-foot Ohioan with an infantile face and a genial manner.

“I notice that they didn't invite us to sit down and have a bite,” he

said. “I call that kind of inhospitable.”

“It was 'is lordship himself!” exclaimed the guide, scandalized.

“You don't say!” drawled our fellow-countryman. “I guess I owe you

another shilling, my friend.”

The guide, utterly bewildered, accepted it. The transatlantic point of

view towards the nobility was beyond him.

“His lordship could make a nice little income if he set up as a side

show,” added the Ohioan.

Maude giggled, but I was furious. And no sooner were we outside the

gates than I declared I should never again enter a private residence by

the back door.

“Why, Hugh, how queer you are sometimes,” she said.

“I maybe queer, but I have a sense of fitness,” I retorted.

She asserted herself.

“I can't see what difference it makes. They didn't know us. And if they

admit people for money--”

“I can't help it. And as for the man from Ohio--”

“But he was so funny!” she interrupted. “And he was really very nice.”

I was silent. Her point of view, eminently sensible as it was,

exasperated me. We were leaning over the parapet of a little-stone

bridge. Her face was turned away from me, but presently I realized that

she was crying. Men and women, villagers, passing across the bridge,

looked at us curiously. I was miserable, and somewhat appalled;

resentful, yet striving to be gentle and conciliatory. I assured her

that she was talking nonsense, that I loved her. But I did not really

love her at that moment; nor did she relent as easily as usual. It was

not until we were together in our sitting-room, a few hours later, that

she gave in. I felt a tremendous sense of relief.

“Hugh, I'll try to be what you want. You know I am trying. But don't

kill what is natural in me.”

I was touched by the appeal, and repentant...

It is impossible to say when the little worries, annoyances and

disagreements began, when I first felt a restlessness creeping over me.

I tried to hide these moods from her, but always she divined them. And

yet I was sure that I loved Maude; in a surprisingly short period I had

become accustomed to her, dependent on her ministrations and the normal,

cosy intimacy of our companionship. I did not like to think that the

keen edge of the enjoyment of possession was wearing a little, while

at the same time I philosophized that the divine fire, when legalized,

settles down to a comfortable glow. The desire to go home that grew upon

me I attributed to the irritation aroused by the spectacle of a fixed

social order commanding such unquestioned deference from the many who

were content to remain resignedly outside of it. Before the setting

in of the Liberal movement and the “American invasion” England was a

country in which (from my point of view) one must be “somebody” in order

to be happy. I was “somebody” at home; or at least rapidly becoming

so....

London was shrouded, parliament had risen, and the great houses

were closed. Day after day we issued forth from a musty and highly

respectable hotel near Piccadilly to a gloomy Tower, a soggy Hampton

Court or a mournful British Museum. Our native longing for luxury--or

rather my native longing--impelled me to abandon Smith's Hotel for a

huge hostelry where our suite overlooked the Thames, where we ran across

a man I had known slightly at Harvard, and other Americans with whom

we made excursions and dined and went to the theatre. Maude liked these

persons; I did not find them especially congenial. My life-long habit

of unwillingness to accept what life sent in its ordinary course was

asserting itself; but Maude took her friends as she found them, and I

was secretly annoyed by her lack of discrimination. In addition to this,

the sense of having been pulled up by the roots grew upon me.

“Suppose,” Maude surprised me by suggesting one morning as we sat

at breakfast watching the river craft flit like phantoms through the

yellow-green fog--“suppose we don't go to France, after all, Hugh?”

“Not go to France!” I exclaimed. “Are you tired of the trip?”

“Oh, Hugh!” Her voice caught. “I could go on, always, if you were

content.”

“And--what makes you think that I'm not content?”

Her smile had in it just a touch of wistfulness.

“I understand you, Hugh, better than you think. You want to get back

to your work, and--and I should be happier. I'm not so silly and so

ignorant as to think that I can satisfy you always. And I'd like to get

settled at home,--I really should.”

There surged up within me a feeling of relief. I seized her hand as it

lay on the table.

“We'll come abroad another time, and go to France,” I said. “Maude,

you're splendid!”

She shook her head.

“Oh, no, I'm not.”

“You do satisfy me,” I insisted. “It isn't that at all. But I think,

perhaps, it would be wiser to go back. It's rather a crucial time

with me, now that Mr. Watling's in Washington. I've just arrived at a

position where I shall be able to make a good deal of money, and later

on--”

“It isn't the money, Hugh,” she cried, with a vehemence which struck

me as a little odd. “I sometimes think we'd be a great deal happier

without--without all you are going to make.”

I laughed.

“Well, I haven't made it yet.”

She possessed the frugality of the Hutchinses. And some times my

lavishness had frightened her, as when we had taken the suite of rooms

we now occupied.

“Are you sure you can afford them, Hugh?” she had asked when we first

surveyed them.

I began married life, and carried it on without giving her any

conception of the state of my finances. She had an allowance from the

first.

As the steamer slipped westward my spirits rose, to reach a climax of

exhilaration when I saw the towers of New York rise gleaming like huge

stalagmites in the early winter sun. Maude likened them more happily--to

gigantic ivory chessmen. Well, New York was America's chessboard, and

the Great Players had already begun to make moves that astonished the

world. As we sat at breakfast in a Fifth Avenue hotel I ran my eye

eagerly over the stock-market reports and the financial news, and

rallied Maude for a lack of spirits.

“Aren't you glad to be home?” I asked her, as we sat in a hansom.

“Of course I am, Hugh!” she protested. “But--I can't look upon New York

as home, somehow. It frightens me.”

I laughed indulgently.

“You'll get used to it,” I said. “We'll be coming here a great deal, off

and on.”

She was silent. But later, when we took a hansom and entered the streams

of traffic, she responded to the stimulus of the place: the movement,

the colour, the sight of the well-appointed carriages, of the well-fed,

well-groomed people who sat in them, the enticement of the shops in

which we made our purchases had their effect, and she became cheerful

again....

In the evening we took the “Limited” for home.

We lived for a month with my mother, and then moved into our own house.

It was one which I had rented from Howard Ogilvy, and it stood on the

corner of Baker and Clinton streets, near that fashionable neighbourhood

called “the Heights.” Ogilvy, who was some ten years older than I, and

who belonged to one of our old families, had embarked on a career then

becoming common, but which at first was regarded as somewhat

meteoric: gradually abandoning the practice of law, and perceiving the

possibilities of the city of his birth, he had “gambled” in real estate

and other enterprises, such as our local water company, until he had

quadrupled his inheritance. He had built a mansion on Grant Avenue, the

wide thoroughfare bisecting the Heights. The house he had vacated was

not large, but essentially distinctive; with the oddity characteristic

of the revolt against the banal architecture of the 80's. The curves

of the tiled roof enfolded the upper windows; the walls were thick, the

note one of mystery. I remember Maude's naive delight when we inspected

it.

“You'd never guess what the inside was like, would you, Hugh?” she

cried.

From the panelled box of an entrance hall one went up a few steps to a

drawing-room which had a bowed recess like an oriel, and window-seats.

The dining-room was an odd shape, and was wainscoted in oak; it had a

tiled fireplace and (according to Maude) the “sweetest” china closet

built into the wall. There was a “den” for me, and an octagonal

reception-room on the corner. Upstairs, the bedrooms were quite as

unusual, the plumbing of the new pattern, heavy and imposing. Maude

expressed the air of seclusion when she exclaimed that she could almost

imagine herself in one of the mediaeval towns we had seen abroad.

“It's a dream, Hugh,” she sighed. “But--do you think we can afford

it?”...

“This house,” I announced, smiling, “is only a stepping-stone to the

palace I intend to build you some day.”

“I don't want a palace!” she cried. “I'd rather live here, like this,

always.”

A certain vehemence in her manner troubled me. I was charmed by this

disposition for domesticity, and yet I shrank from the contemplation of

its permanency. I felt vaguely, at the time, the possibility of a future

conflict of temperaments. Maude was docile, now. But would she remain

docile? and was it in her nature to take ultimately the position that

was desirable for my wife? Well, she must be moulded, before it were too

late. Her ultra-domestic tendencies must be halted. As yet blissfully

unaware of the inability of the masculine mind to fathom the subtleties

of feminine relationships, I was particularly desirous that Maude and

Nancy Durrett should be intimates. The very day after our arrival, and

while we were still at my mother's, Nancy called on Maude, and took her

out for a drive. Maude told me of it when I came home from the office.

“Dear old Nancy!” I said. “I know you liked her.”

“Of course, Hugh. I should like her for your sake, anyway. She's--she's

one of your oldest and best friends.”

“But I want you to like her for her own sake.”

“I think I shall,” said Maude. She was so scrupulously truthful! “I was

a little afraid of her, at first.”

“Afraid of Nancy!” I exclaimed.

“Well, you know, she's much older than I. I think she is sweet. But she

knows so much about the world--so much that she doesn't say. I can't

describe it.”

I smiled.

“It's only her manner. You'll get used to that, when you know what she

really is.”

“Oh, I hope so,” answered Maude. “I'm very anxious to like her--I do

like her. But it takes me such a lot of time to get to know people.”

Nancy asked us to dinner.

“I want to help Maude all I can,--if she'll let me,” Nancy said.

“Why shouldn't she let you?” I asked.

“She may not like me,” Nancy replied.

“Nonsense!” I exclaimed.

Nancy smiled.

“It won't be my fault, at any rate, if she doesn't,” she said. “I wanted

her to meet at first just the right people your old friends and a few

others. It is hard for a woman--especially a young woman--coming among

strangers.” She glanced down the table to where Maude sat talking to

Ham. “She has an air about her,--a great deal of self-possession.”

I, too, had noticed this, with pride and relief. For I knew Maude had

been nervous.

“You are luckier than you deserve to be,” Nancy reminded me. “But I hope

you realize that she has a mind of her own, that she will form her own

opinions of people, independently of you.”

I must have betrayed the fact that I was a little startled, for the

remark came as a confirmation of what I had dimly felt.

“Of course she has,” I agreed, somewhat lamely. “Every woman has, who is

worth her salt.”

Nancy's smile bespoke a knowledge that seemed to transcend my own.

“You do like her?” I demanded.

“I like her very much indeed,” said Nancy, a little gravely.

“She's simple, she's real, she has that which so few of us possess

nowadays--character. But--I've got to be prepared for the possibility

that she may not get along with me.”

“Why not?” I demanded.

“There you are again, with your old unwillingness to analyze a situation

and face it. For heaven's sake, now that you have married her, study

her. Don't take her for granted. Can't you see that she doesn't care for

the things that amuse me, that make my life?”

“Of course, if you insist on making yourself out a hardened,

sophisticated woman--” I protested. But she shook her head.

“Her roots are deeper,--she is in touch, though she may not realize it,

with the fundamentals. She is one of those women who are race-makers.”

Though somewhat perturbed, I was struck by the phrase. And I lost sight

of Nancy's generosity. She looked me full in the face.

“I wonder whether you can rise to her,” she said. “If I were you, I

should try. You will be happier--far happier than if you attempt to use

her for your own ends, as a contributor to your comfort and an auxiliary

to your career. I was afraid--I confess it--that you had married an

aspiring, simpering and empty-headed provincial like that Mrs. George

Hutchins' whom I met once, and who would sell her soul to be at my

table. Well, you escaped that, and you may thank God for it. You've got

a chance, think it over.

“A chance!” I repeated, though I gathered something of her meaning.

“Think it over, said Nancy again. And she smiled.

“But--do you want me to bury myself in domesticity?” I demanded, without

grasping the significance of my words.

“You'll find her reasonable, I think. You've got a chance now, Hugh.

Don't spoil it.”

She turned to Leonard Dickinson, who sat on her other side....

When we got home I tried to conceal my anxiety as to Maude's impressions

of the evening. I lit a cigarette, and remarked that the dinner had been

a success.

“Do you know what I've been wondering all evening?” Maude asked. “Why

you didn't marry Nancy instead of me.”

“Well,” I replied, “it just didn't come off. And Nancy was telling me at

dinner how fortunate I was to have married you.”

Maude passed this.

“I can't see why she accepted Hambleton Durrett. It seems horrible that

such a woman as she is could have married--just for money.

“Nancy has an odd streak in her,” I said. “But then we all have odd

streaks. She's the best friend in the world, when she is your friend.”

“I'm sure of it,” Maude agreed, with a little note of penitence.

“You enjoyed it,” I ventured cautiously.

“Oh, yes,” she agreed. “And everyone was so nice to me--for your sake of

course.”

“Don't be ridiculous!” I said. “I shan't tell you what Nancy and the

others said about you.”

Maude had the gift of silence.

“What a beautiful house!” she sighed presently. “I know you'll think me

silly, but so much luxury as that frightens me a little. In England,

in those places we saw, it seemed natural enough, but in America--! And

they all your friends--seem to take it as a matter of course.”

“There's no reason why we shouldn't have beautiful things and well

served dinners, too, if we have the money to pay for them.”

“I suppose not,” she agreed, absently.

XV.

That winter many other entertainments were given in our honour. But the

conviction grew upon me that Maude had no real liking for the social

side of life, that she acquiesced in it only on my account. Thus, at the

very outset of our married career, an irritant developed: signs of it,

indeed, were apparent from the first, when we were preparing the house

we had rented for occupancy. Hurrying away from my office at odd

times to furniture and department stores to help decide such momentous

questions as curtains, carpets, chairs and tables I would often spy the

tall, uncompromising figure of Susan Peters standing beside Maude's,

while an obliging clerk spread out, anxiously, rugs or wall-papers for

their inspection.

“Why don't you get Nancy to help you, too!” I ventured to ask her once.

“Ours is such a little house--compared to Nancy's, Hugh.”

My attitude towards Susan had hitherto remained undefined. She was Tom's

wife and Tom's affair. In spite of her marked disapproval of the modern

trend in business and social life,--a prejudice she had communicated to

Tom, as a bachelor I had not disliked her; and it was certain that these

views had not mitigated Tom's loyalty and affection for me. Susan had

been my friend, as had her brother Perry, and Lucia, Perry's wife:

they made no secret of the fact that they deplored in me what they were

pleased to call plutocratic obsessions, nor had their disapproval always

been confined to badinage. Nancy, too, they looked upon as a renegade.

I was able to bear their reproaches with the superior good nature that

springs from success, to point out why the American tradition to which

they so fatuously clung was a things of the past. The habit of taking

dinner with them at least once a week had continued, and their arguments

rather amused me. If they chose to dwell in a backwater out of touch

with the current of great affairs, this was a matter to be deplored,

but I did not feel strongly enough to resent it. So long as I remained

a bachelor the relationship had not troubled me, but now that I was

married I began to consider with some alarm its power to affect my

welfare.