Chapter I.

MERCY PHILBRICK'S CHOICE.

1876

I.

_To one who found us on a starless night,

All helpless, groping in a dangerous way,

Where countless treacherous hidden pitfalls lay,

And, seeing all our peril, flashed a light

To show to our bewildered, blinded sight,

By one swift, clear, and piercing ray,

The safe, sure path,--what words could reach the height

Of our great thankfulness? And yet, at most,

The most he saved was this poor, paltry life

Of flesh, which is so little worth its cost,

Which eager sows, but may not stay to reap,

And so soon breathless with the strain and strife,

Its work half-done, exhausted, falls asleep._

II.

_But unto him who finds men's souls astray

In night that they know not is night at all,

Walking, with reckless feet, where they may fall

Each moment into deadlier deaths than slay

The flesh,--to him whose truth can rend away

From such lost souls their moral night's black pall,--

Oh, unto him what words can hearts recall

Which their deep gratitude finds fit to say?

No words but these,--and these to him are best:--

That, henceforth, like a quenchless vestal flame,

His words of truth shall burn on Truth's pure shrine;

His memory be truth worshipped and confessed;

Our gratitude and love, the priestess line,

Who serve before Truth's altar, in his name._

Mercy Philbrick's Choice.

Chapter I.

It was late in the afternoon of a November day. The sky had worn all day

that pale leaden gray color, which is depressing even to the least

sensitive of souls. Now, at sunset, a dull red tint was slowly stealing

over the west; but the gray cloud was too thick for the sun to pierce, and

the struggle of the crimson color with the unyielding sky only made the

heavens look more stern and pitiless than before.

Stephen White stood with his arms folded, leaning on the gate which shut

off, but seemed in no wise to separate, the front yard of the house in

which he lived from the public highway. There is something always pathetic

in the attempt to enforce the idea of seclusion and privacy, by building a

fence around houses only ten or twelve feet away from the public road, and

only forty or fifty feet from each other. Rows of picketed palings and

gates with latches and locks seem superfluous, when the passer-by can

look, if he likes, into the very centre of your sitting-room, and your

neighbors on the right hand and on the left can overhear every word you

say on a summer night, where windows are open.

One cannot walk through the streets of a New England village, without

being impressed by a sense of this futile semblance of barrier, this

touching effort at withdrawal and reticence. Often we see the tacit

recognition of its uselessness in an old gate shoved back to its farthest,

and left standing so till the very grass roots have embanked themselves on

each side of it, and it can never again be closed without digging away the

sods in which it is wedged. The gate on which Stephen White was leaning

had stood open in that way for years before Stephen rented the house; had

stood open, in fact, ever since old Billy Jacobs, the owner of the house,

had been carried out of it dead, in a coffin so wide that at first the

bearers had thought it could not pass through the gate; but by huddling

close, three at the head and three at the feet, they managed to tug the

heavy old man through without taking down the palings. This was so long

ago that now there was nobody left who remembered Billy Jacobs distinctly,

except his widow, who lived in a poor little house on the outskirts of the

town, her only income being that derived from the renting of the large

house, in which she had once lived in comfort with her husband and son.

The house was a double house; and for a few years Billy Jacobs's twin

brother, a sea captain, had lived in the other half of it. But Mrs. Billy

could not abide Mrs. John, and so with a big heart wrench the two

brothers, who loved each other as only twin children can love, had

separated. Captain John took his wife and went to sea again. The ship was

never heard of, and to the day of Billy Jacobs's death he never forgave

his wife. In his heart he looked upon her as his brother's murderer. Very

much like the perpetual presence of a ghost under her roof it must have

been to the woman also, the unbroken silence of those untenanted rooms,

and that never opened door on the left side of her hall, which she must

pass whenever she went in or out of her house. There were those who said

that she was never seen to look towards that door; and that whenever a

noise, as of a rat in the wall, or a blind creaking in the wind, came from

that side of the house, Mrs. Billy turned white, and shuddered. Well she

might. It is a fearful thing to have lying on one's heart in this life the

consciousness that one has been ever so innocently the occasion, if not

the cause, of a fellow-creature's turning aside into the path which was

destined to take him to his death.

The very next day after Billy Jacobs's funeral, his widow left the house.

She sold all the furniture, except what was absolutely necessary for a

very meagre outfitting of the little cottage into which she moved. The

miserly habit of her husband seemed to have suddenly fallen on her like a

mantle. Her life shrank and dwindled in every possible way; she almost

starved herself and her boy, although the rent of her old homestead was

quite enough to make them comfortable. In a few years, to complete the

poor woman's misery, her son ran away and went to sea. The sea-farer's

stories which his Uncle John had told him, when he was a little child,

had never left his mind; and the drearier his mother made life for him on

land, the more longingly he dwelt on his fancies of life at sea, till at

last, when he was only fifteen, he disappeared one day, leaving a note,

not for his mother, but for his Sunday-school teacher,--the only human

being he loved. This young woman carried the note to Mrs. Jacobs. She read

it, made no comment, and handed it back. Her visitor was chilled and

terrified by her manner.

"Can I do any thing for you, Mrs. Jacobs?" she said. "I do assure you I

sympathize with you most deeply. I think the boy will soon come back. He

will find the sea life very different from what he has dreamed."

"No, you can do nothing for me," replied Mrs. Jacobs, in a voice as

unmoved as her face. "He will never come back. He will be drowned." And

from that day no one ever heard her mention her son. It was believed,

however, that she had news from him, and that she sent him money; for,

although the rents of her house were paid to her regularly, she grew if

possible more and more penurious every year, allowing herself barely

enough food to support life, and wearing such tattered and patched clothes

that she was almost an object of terror to children when they met her in

lonely fields and woods, bending down to the ground and searching for

herbs like an old witch. At one time, also, she went in great haste to a

lawyer in the village, and with his assistance raised three thousand

dollars on a mortgage on her house, mortgaging it very nearly to its full

value. In vain he represented to her that, in case the house should chance

to stand empty for a year, she would have no money to pay the interest on

her mortgage, and would lose the property. She either could not

understand, or did not care for what he said. The house always had brought

her in about so many dollars a year; she believed it always would; at any

rate, she wanted this money. And so it came to pass that the mortgage on

the old Jacobs house had come into Stephen White's hands, and he was now

living in one half of it, his own tenant and landlord at once, as he often

laughingly said.

These old rumors and sayings about the Jacobs's family history were

running in Stephen's head this evening, as he stood listlessly leaning on

the gate, and looking down at the unsightly spot of bare earth still left

where the gate had so long stood pressed back against the fence.

"I wonder how long it'll take to get that old rut smooth and green like

the rest of the yard," he thought. Stephen White absolutely hated

ugliness. It did not merely irritate and depress him, as it does everybody

of fine fastidiousness: he hated not only the sight of it, he hated it

with a sort of unreasoning vindictiveness. If it were a picture, he wanted

to burn the picture, cut it, tear it, trample it under foot, get it off

the face of the earth immediately, at any cost or risk. It had no business

to exist: if nobody else would make way with it, he must. He often saw

places that he would have liked to devastate, to blot out of existence if

he could, just because they were barren and unsightly. Once, when he was a

very little child, he suddenly seized a book of his father's,--an old,

shabby, worn dictionary,--and flung it into the fire with uncontrollable

passion; and, on being asked why he did it, had nothing to say in

justification of his act, except this extraordinary statement: "It was an

ugly book; it hurt me. Ugly books ought to go in the fire." What the child

suffered, and, still more, what the man suffered from this hatred of

ugliness, no words could portray. Ever since he could remember, he had

been unhappy from the lack of the beautiful in the surroundings of his

daily life. His father had been poor; his mother had been an invalid; and

neither father nor mother had a trace of the artistic temperament. From

what long-forgotten ancestor in his plain, hard-working family had come

Stephen's passionate love of beauty, nobody knew. It was the despair of

his father, the torment of his mother. From childhood to boyhood, from

boyhood to manhood, he had felt himself needlessly hurt and perversely

misunderstood on this one point. But it had not soured him: it had only

saddened him, and made him reticent. In his own quiet way, he went slowly

on, adding each year some new touch of simple adornment to their home.

Every dollar he could spare out of his earnings went into something for

the eye to feast on; and, in spite of the old people's perpetual grumbling

and perpetual antagonism, it came about that they grew to be, in a surly

fashion, proud of Stephen's having made their home unlike the homes of

their neighbors.

"That's Stephen's last notion. He's never satisfied without he's sticking

up suthin' new or different," they would say, as they called attention to

some new picture or shelf or improvement in the house. "It's all

tom-foolery. Things was well enough before." But in their hearts they were

secretly a little elate, as in latter years they had come to know, by

books and papers which Stephen forced them to hear or to read, that he was

really in sympathy with well-known writers in this matter of the adornment

of homes, the love of beautiful things even in every-day life.

A little more than a year before the time at which our story begins,

Stephen's father had died. On an investigation of his affairs, it was

found that after the settling of the estate very little would remain for

Stephen and his mother. The mortgage on the old Jacobs house was the

greater part of their property. Very reluctantly Stephen decided that

their wisest--in fact, their only--course was to move into this house to

live. Many and many a time he had walked past the old house, and thought,

as he looked at it, what a bare, staring, hopeless, joyless-looking old

house it was. It had originally been a small, square house. The addition

which Billy Jacobs had made to it was oblong, running out to the south,

and projecting on the front a few feet beyond the other part. This

obtrusive jog was certainly very ugly; and it was impossible to conceive

of any reason for it. Very possibly, it was only a carpenter's blunder;

for Billy Jacobs was, no doubt, his own architect, and left all details of

the work to the builders. Be that as it may, the little, clumsy,

meaningless jog ruined the house,--gave it an uncomfortably awry look,

like a dining-table awkwardly pieced out for an emergency by another table

a little too narrow.

The house had been for several years occupied by families of mill

operatives, and had gradually acquired that indefinable, but unmistakable

tenement-house look, which not even neatness and good repair can wholly

banish from a house. The orchard behind the house had so run down for want

of care that it looked more like a tangle of wild trees than like any

thing which had ever been an orchard. Yet the Roxbury Russets and Baldwins

of that orchard had once been Billy Jacobs's great pride, the one point of

hospitality which his miserliness never conquered. Long after it would

have broken his heart to set out a generous dinner for a neighbor, he

would feast him on choice apples, and send him away with a big basket full

in his hands. Now every passing school-boy helped himself to the wan,

withered, and scanty fruit; and nobody had thought it worth while to mend

the dilapidated fences which might have helped to shut them out.

Even Mrs. White, with all her indifference to externals, rebelled at first

at the idea of going to live in the old Jacobs house.

"I'll never go there, Stephen," she said petulantly. "I'm not going to

live in half a house with the mill people; and it's no better than a barn,

the hideous, old, faded, yellow thing!"

If it crossed Stephen's mind that there was a touch of late retribution

in his mother's having come at last to a sense of suffering because she

must live in an unsightly house, he did not betray it.

He replied very gently. He was never heard to speak other than gently to

his mother, though to every one else his manner was sometimes brusque and

dictatorial.

"But, mother, I think we must. It is the only way that we can be sure of

the rent. And, if we live ourselves in one half of it, we shall find it

much easier to get good tenants for the other part. I promise you none of

the mill people shall ever live there again. Please do not make it hard

for me, mother. We must do it."

When Stephen said "must," his mother never gainsaid him. He was only

twenty-five, but his will was stronger than hers,--as much stronger as his

temper was better. Persons judging hastily, by her violent assertions and

vehement statements of her determination, as contrasted with Stephen's

gentle, slow, almost hesitating utterance of his opinions or intentions,

might have assumed that she would always conquer; but it was not so. In

all little things, Stephen was her slave, because she was a suffering

invalid and his mother. But, in all important decisions, he was the

master; and she recognized it, and leaned upon it in a way which was

almost ludicrous in its alternation with her petulance and perpetual

dictating to him in trifles.

And so they went to live in the old Jacobs house. They took the northern

half of it, the part in which the sea captain and his wife had lived.

This half of the house was not so pleasant as the other, had less sun, and

had no door upon the street; but it was smaller and better suited to their

needs, and moreover, Stephen said to his mother,--

"We must live in the half we should find it hardest to rent to a desirable

tenant."

For the first six months after they moved in, the "wing," as Mrs. White

persisted in calling it, though it was larger by two rooms than the part

she occupied herself, stood empty. There would have been plenty of

applicants for it, but it had been noised in the town that the Whites had

given out that none but people as good as they were themselves would be

allowed to rent the house. This made a mighty stir among the mill

operatives and the trades-people, and Stephen got many a sour look and

short answer, whose real source he never suspected.

"Ahem! there he goes with his head in the clouds, damn him!" muttered

Barker the grocer, one day, as Stephen in a more than ordinarily

absent-minded fit had passed Mr. Barker's door without observing that Mr.

Barker stood in it, ready to bow and smile to the whole world. Mr.

Barker's sister had just married an overseer in the mill; and they had

been very anxious to set up housekeeping in the Jacobs house, but had been

prevented from applying for it by hearing of Mrs. White's determination to

have no mill people under the same roof with herself.

"Mill people, indeed!" exclaimed Jane Barker, when her lover told her, in

no very guarded terms, the reason they could not have the house on which

she had set her heart.

"Mill people, indeed! I'd like to know if they're not every whit's good's

an old shark of a lawyer like Hugh White was! I'll be bound, if poor old

granny Jacobs hadn't lost what little wit she ever had, it 'ud be very

soon seen whether Madam White's got the right to say who's to come and

who's to go in that house. It's a nasty old yaller shell anyhow, not to

say nothin' o' it's bein' haunted, 's like 's not. But there ain't no

other place so handy to the mill for us, an' I guess our money's good ez

any lawyer's money, o' the hull on 'em any day. Mill people, indeed! I'll

jest give Steve White a piece o' my mind, the first time I see him on the

street."

Jane and her lover were sitting on the tops of two barrels just outside

the grocery door, when this conversation took place. Just as the last

words had left her lips, she looked up and saw Stephen approaching at a

very rapid pace. The unusual sight of two people perched on barrels on the

sidewalk roused Stephen from the deep reverie in which he habitually

walked. Lifting his hat as courteously as if he were addressing the most

distinguished of women, he bowed, and said smiling, "How do you do, Miss

Jane?" and "Good-morning, Mr. Lovejoy," and passed on; but not before Jane

Barker had had time to say in her gentlest tones, "Very well, thank you,

Mr. Stephen," while an ugly sneer spread over the face of Reuben Lovejoy.

"Woman all over!" he muttered. "Never saw one on ye yet thet wasn't

caught by a bow from a palaverin' fool."

Jane laughed nervously. She herself felt ashamed of having so soon given

the lie to her own words of bravado; but she was woman enough not to admit

her mortification.

"I know he's a palaverin' fool's well's you do; but I reckon I've got some

manners o' my own, 's well's he. When a man bids me a pleasant

good-mornin', I ain't a-goin' to take that time to fly out at him, however

much I've got agin him."

And Reuben was silenced. The under-current of ill-feeling against Stephen

and his mother went steadily on increasing. There is a wonderful force in

these slow under-currents of feeling, in small communities, for or against

individuals. After they have once become a steady tide, nothing can check

their force or turn their direction. Sometimes they can be traced back to

their spring, as a stream can: one lucky or unlucky word or deed, years

ago, made a friend or an enemy of one person, and that person's influence

has divided itself again and again, as brooks part off and divide into

countless rivulets, and water whole districts. But generally one finds it

impossible to trace the like or dislike to its beginning. A stranger,

asking the reason of it, is answered in an off-hand way,--"Oh,

everybody'll tell you the same thing. There isn't a soul in the town but

hates him;" or, "Well, he's just the most popular man in the town. You'll

never hear a word said against him,--never; not if you were to settle

right down here, and live."

It was months before Stephen realized that there was slowly forming in the

town a dislike to him. He was slow in discovering it, because he had

always lived alone; had no intimate friends, not even when he was a boy.

His love of books and his passionate love of beauty combined with his

poverty to hedge him about more effectually than miles of desert could

have done. His father and mother had lived upon fairly good terms with all

their neighbors, but had formed no very close bonds with any. In the

ordinary New England town, neighborhood never means much: there is a

dismal lack of cohesion to the relations between people. The community is

loosely held together by a few accidental points of contact or common

interest. The individuality of individuals is, by a strange sort of

paradox, at once respected and ignored. This is indifference rather than

consideration, selfishness rather than generosity; it is an unsuspected

root of much of our national failure, is responsible for much of our

national disgrace. Some day there will come a time when it will have

crystallized into a national apathy, which will perhaps cure itself, or

have to be cured, as indurations in the body are, by sharp crises or by

surgical operations. In the mean time, our people are living, on the

whole, the dullest lives that are lived in the world, by the so-called

civilized; and the climax of this dulness of life is to be found in just

such a small New England town as Penfield, the one of which we are now

speaking.

When it gradually became clear to Stephen that he and his mother were

unpopular people, his first feeling was one of resentment, his second of

calm acquiescence: acquiescence, first, because he recognized in a measure

the justice of it,--they really did not care for their neighbors; why

should their neighbors care for them? secondly, a diminished familiarity

of intercourse would have to him great compensations. There were few

people in the town, whose clothes, whose speech, whose behavior, did not

jar upon his nerves. On the whole, he would be better content alone; and

if his mother could only have a little more independence of nature, more

resource within herself, "The less we see of them, the better," said

Stephen, proudly.

He had yet to learn the lesson which, sooner or later, the proudest, most

scornful, most self-centred of human souls must learn, or must die of

loneliness for the want of learning, that humanity is one and indivisible;

and the man who shuts himself apart from his fellows, above all, the man

who thus shuts himself apart because he thinks of his fellows with pitying

condescension as his inferiors, is a fool and a blasphemer,--a fool,

because he robs himself of that good-fellowship which is the leaven of

life; a blasphemer, because he virtually implies that God made men unfit

for him to associate with. Stephen White had this lesson yet to learn.

The practical inconvenience of being unpopular, however, he began to feel

keenly, as month after month passed by, and nobody would rent the other

half of the house in which he and his mother lived. Small as the rent

was, it was a matter of great moment to them; for his earnings as clerk

and copyist were barely enough to give them food. He was still retained by

his father's partner in the same position which he had held during his

father's life. But old Mr. Williams was not wholly free from the general

prejudice against Stephen, as an aristocratic fellow, given to dreams and

fancies; and Stephen knew very well that he held the position only as it

were on a sort of sufferance, because Mr. Williams had loved his father.

Moreover, law business in Penfield was growing duller and duller. A

younger firm in the county town, only twelve miles away, was robbing them

of clients continually; and there were many long days during which Stephen

sat idle at his desk, looking out in a vague, dreamy way on the street

below, and wondering if the time were really coming when Mr. Williams

would need a clerk no longer; and, if it did come, what he could possibly

find to do in that town, by which he could earn money enough to support

his mother. At such times, he thought uneasily of the possibility of

foreclosing the mortgage on the old Jacobs house, selling the house, and

reinvesting the money in a more advantageous way. He always tried to put

the thought away from him as a dishonorable one; but it had a fatal

persistency. He could not banish it.

"Poor, half-witted old woman! she might a great deal better be in the

poor-house."

"There is no reason why we should lose our interest, for the sake of

keeping her along."

"The mortgage was for too large a sum. I doubt if the old house could

sell to-day for enough to clear it, anyhow." These were some of the

suggestions which the devil kept whispering into Stephen's ear, in these

long hours of perplexity and misgiving. It was a question of casuistry

which might, perhaps, have puzzled a finer moral sense than Stephen's. Why

should he treat old Mrs. Jacobs with any more consideration than he would

show to a man under the same circumstances? To be sure, she was a helpless

old woman; but so was his own mother, and surely his first duty was to

make her as comfortable as possible.

Luckily for old Mrs. Jacobs, a tenant appeared for the "south wing." A

friend of Stephen's, a young clergyman living in a seaport town on Cape

Cod, had written to him, asking about the house, which he knew Stephen was

anxious to rent. He made these inquiries on behalf of two women,

parishioners of his, who were obliged to move to some inland town on

account of the elder woman's failing health. They were mother and

daughter, but both widows. The younger woman's marriage had been a

tragically sad one, her husband having died suddenly, only a few days

after their marriage. She had returned at once to her mother's house,

widowed at eighteen; "heart-broken," the young clergyman wrote, "but the

most cheerful person in this town,--the most cheerful person I ever knew;

her smile is the sunniest and most pathetic thing I ever saw."

Stephen welcomed most gladly the prospect of such tenants as these. The

negotiations were soon concluded; and at the time of the beginning of our

story the two women were daily expected.

A strange feverishness of desire to have them arrive possessed Stephen's

mind. He longed for it, and yet he dreaded it. He liked the stillness of

the house; he felt a sense of ownership of the whole of it: both of these

satisfactions were to be interfered with now. But he had a singular

consciousness that some new element was coming into his life. He did not

define this; he hardly recognized it in its full extent; but if a

bystander could have looked into his mind, following the course of his

reverie distinctly, as an unbiassed outsider might, he would have said,

"Stephen, man, what is this? What are these two women to you, that your

imagination is taking these wild and superfluous leaps into their

history?"

There was hardly a possible speculation as to their past history, as to

their looks, as to their future life under his roof, that Stephen did not

indulge in, as he stood leaning with his folded arms on the gate, in the

gray November twilight, where we first found him. His thoughts, as was

natural, centred most around the younger woman.

"Poor thing! That was a mighty hard fate. Only nineteen years old

now,--six years younger than I am; and how much more she must know of life

than I do. I suppose she can't be a lady, exactly,--being a sea captain's

wife. I wonder if she's pretty? I think Harley might have told me more

about her. He might know I'd be very curious.

"I wonder if mother'll take to them? If she does, it will be a great

comfort to her. She 's so alone." And Stephen's face clouded, as he

reflected how very seldom the monotony of the invalid's life was broken

now by a friendly visit from a neighbor.

"If they should turn out really social, neighborly people that we liked,

we might move away the old side-board from before the hall door, and go in

and out that way, as the Jacobses used to. It would be unlucky though, I

reckon, to use that door. I guess I'll plaster it up some day." Like all

people of deep sentiment, Stephen had in his nature a vein of something

which bordered on superstition.

The twilight deepened into darkness, and a cold mist began to fall in

slow, drizzling drops. Still Stephen stood, absorbed in his reverie, and

unmindful of the chill.

The hall door opened, and an old woman peered out. She held a lamp in one

hand; the blast of cold air made the flame flicker and flare, and, as she

put up one hand to shade it, the light was thrown sharply across her

features, making them stand out like the distorted features of a hideous

mask.

"Steve! Steve!" she called, in a shrill voice. "Supper's been waitin' more

'n half an hour. Lor's sake, what's the boy thinkin' on now, I wonder?"

she muttered in an impatient lower tone, as Stephen turned his head

slowly.

"Yes, yes, Marty. Tell my mother I will be there in a moment," replied

Stephen, as he walked slowly toward the house; even then noting, with the

keen and relentless glance of a beauty-worshipper, how grotesquely ugly

the old woman's wrinkled face became, lighted up by the intense

cross-light. Old Marty's face had never looked other than lovingly into

Stephen's since he first lay in her arms, twenty-five years ago, when she

came, a smooth-cheeked, rosy country-woman of twenty-five, to nurse his

mother at the time of his birth. She had never left the home since. With a

faithfulness and devotion only to be accounted for by the existence of

rare springs of each in her own nature, surely not by any uncommon

lovableness in either Mr. or Mrs. White, or by any especial comforts in

her situation, she had stayed on a quarter of a century, in the hard

position of woman of all work in a poor family. She worshipped Stephen,

and, as I said, her face had never once looked other than lovingly into

his; but he could not remember the time when he had not thought her

hideous. She had a big brown mole on her chin, out of which grew a few

bristling hairs. It was an unsightly thing, no doubt, on a woman's chin;

and sometimes, when Marty was very angry, the hairs did actually seem to

bristle, as a cat's whiskers do. When Stephen could not speak plain, he

used to point his little dimpled finger at this mole and say, "Do doe

away,--doe away;" and to this day it was a torment to him. His eyes seemed

morbidly drawn toward it at times.. When he was ill, and poor Marty bent

over his bed, ministering to him as no one but a loving old nurse can, he

saw only the mole, and had to make an effort not to shrink from her.

To-night, as she lingered on the threshold, affectionately waiting to

light his path, he was thinking only of her ugliness. But when she

exclaimed, with the privileged irritability of an old servant,--

"Jest look at your feet, Steve! they're wet through, an' your coat too, a

standin' out in that drizzle. Anybody 'ud think you hadn't common sense,"

he replied with perfect good nature, and as heartily loving a tone as if

he had been feasting on her beauty, instead of writhing inwardly at her

ugliness,--

"All right, Marty,--all right. I'm not so wet as I look. I'll change my

coat, and come in to supper in one minute. Don't you fidget about me so,

good Marty." Never was Stephen heard to speak discourteously or even

ungently to a human being. It would have offended his taste. It was not a

matter of principle with him,--not at all: he hardly ever thought of

things in that light. A rude or harsh word, a loud, angry tone, jarred on

his every sense like a discord in music, or an inharmonious color; so he

never used them. But as he ran upstairs, three steps at a time, after his

kind, off-hand words to Marty, he said to himself, "Good heavens! I do

believe Marty gets uglier every day. What a picture Rembrandt would have

made of her old face peering out into the darkness there to-night! She

would have done for the witch of Endor, watching to see if Samuel were

coming up." And as he went down more slowly, revolving in his mind what

plausible excuse he could give to his mother for his tardiness, he

thought, "Well, I do hope she'll be at least tolerably good-looking."

Already the younger of the two women who were coming to live under his

roof was "she," in his thoughts.