CHAPTER XII

In spite of the preoccupations incident to the season, Miss Anthon

found an opportunity of seeing Erard. She preferred to tell him of

her new step rather than write a letter; for her curiosity about his

opinion on the subject was quite keen. They were examining an Ingres

at the Louvre and Erard was engaged in convincing her of its regular

merits. In her present mood the smooth, polished surface of the nude

figures struck her as vacant and useless. Imaginatively she began to

see that all art was of the same nature as this Ingres,--a little dead.

“I have taken your advice,” she remarked casually, “and chosen the

active life. I am to marry--Mr. Wilbur.”

“Ah!” Erard exclaimed, recovering his balance neatly. “You will be the

Chicago matron after all. And what shall I do for an assistant? I had

just taught you a few things: you were beginning to be useful!”

“That was mere play, you know well enough. I could never be more than

an intelligent clerk.” She was disappointed that his manner was so

completely impersonal. He took it altogether as too trivial a matter,

too much of course. After a few minutes he returned to the subject.

“May I paint you, Miss Anthon, as _La grande dame de Chicago, U. S. A._

I should like to make you a wedding gift, and perhaps, if Mr. Wilbur

doesn’t object, it might be in this form.”

“You may ask him,” she replied shortly, silly pique rising at his

insolent calmness. She evidently meant very little to him, personally.

He was quite right; but to please her, he ought to be wrong. Even his

interest in lecturing to her about pictures seemed to flag; making some

conventional excuse he cut short the visit to the Louvre. It was as if

he regarded time spent on her now as wasted--it would lead to nothing.

As they parted he arranged for sittings, and then remarked,--

“You will be very happy of course, after you have shaken into place and

got used to yourself. The commonplace thing is the best for most of us.”

“Yes, I shall be very happy,” she replied shortly, turning away.

With scarcely less curiosity she waited for her uncle’s comment on

the news. It came promptly, and if brief and rather conventional, was

kindly. One sentence stung her. “So you have given up exploding and

decided to be a good girl.”

She flung the note down irritably. “I believe he would have liked it

better if I had told him I was going to marry Erard.” She felt that

the old man was bored, if not disappointed, in finding that all her

rebellion had come to this decorous end.

Walter Anthon wrote their mother at great length. The substance of his

remarks was the relief which they must all feel that Adela, if she had

not done the brilliant thing, at least had ended safely and properly;

if it _were safe_, that is if Wilbur were really sound financially, and

that, he supposed his mother and uncle had taken pains to find out.

Beyond that he was sorry that her life was inevitably to be so divided

from his. “We shall be country cousins,” she explained to Wilbur, “and

he hopes that we shall not put him in the awkward position of ever

visiting London.”

Wilbur left for Chicago, after a week in Paris. The portrait came

off while the Anthons were waiting for the trousseau. The sittings

were full of ennui to the subject, for Mrs. Anthon insisted defiantly

on attending every one. She persisted in regarding this portrait as

an instalment of Erard’s debt to the Anthons, although her daughter

explained elaborately that it was an act of mere friendship. While he

painted, Erard talked merrily of the coming life in Chicago, advising

and exhorting her on matters of taste.

“Of course you will build a house--a palace I should say. Do induce Mr.

Wilbur to have a good architect, if there is one to be had over there.

Bad architecture has such a subtle influence for deterioration on the

person, and bad architecture has been the order of the day pretty

generally in your new home. Tell Mr. Wilbur that he will distinguish

himself in the best way by putting up a house that is more than

‘elegant,’ and ‘big,’ and ‘costly.’”

“We may live in a hotel for a time,” Miss Anthon answered shortly.

Erard lifted his eyebrows deprecatingly and dropped his glass. “No,

you mustn’t live in a hotel--an American hotel above all!--it is so

degenerating. I haven’t painted the portrait with that view.”

“Why? Would you have made me into a kind of barmaid, or grass-widow?”

“I should have sprinkled in diamonds a little more freely.”

Another time he continued the same vein. “Of course you will have the

furnishing and all that on your hands. Do have Lemerre design the

chairs. I will write him myself, if you want me to. He is rather dear:

you couldn’t have him do the whole place at once--that would take a

duke’s fortune. But get a little at a time, one or two chairs and a

table. You can’t think how much good you will do your neighbours, when

they come to call or to dine. And the stuffs,--there is only one place

for good colours--Maron. You ought to have some artist design the whole

for you at the same time. When you come to pictures, that will be _so_

difficult. Do, dear Miss Anthon, go slow. Don’t let Mr. Wilbur buy

old masters, because there aren’t any, or ’way beyond a millionaire’s

purse. You could start in with some good etchings and old engravings.

Then I could get you a Degas for a thousand pounds, an early Degas.

It is a great find, I assure you, and one Degas would go a great way

towards furnishing your house.”

“One of those women in a bath-tub!” Mrs. Anthon ejaculated.

“Whatever you do, my dear Miss Anthon,” Erard continued tranquilly,

“go slow. Get one good thing at a time, and make your house a shrine

for that.”

Miss Anthon felt as if she were being tutored for some missionary

service. About to go forth to the wilderness, she was receiving the

last advice of the father superior.

“Of course you will be coming over here frequently to get your ideas

straightened out, and to fortify your tastes. Six months there will

make you provincial.”

Occasionally this note of condescension stung her. “Of course we shall

travel a great deal.” Her conception of the future was large. She and

her husband were to take their life, which happened to be for the

immediate present in a western metropolis, and mould it in an original

and free pattern. The years of great things were just ahead.

She had refused to look at the picture until it should be in nearly

final shape. One afternoon, towards the end of their stay in Paris, she

took Molly Parker with her for a first view. Erard was in, when they

arrived, standing idly before the picture, which he had brought out

into the centre of the empty studio. He was smoking a cigarette, in a

mincing manner, his hands in his pockets. The two women sank into the

chairs he placed for them.

Erard had insisted upon painting her in a white satin evening dress,

half reclining upon a crimson divan as though tired by the fatigue of

receiving. It was undoubtedly a clever piece of work, painted knowingly

and for the world successfully. He had made the most of her tall form,

her ability to carry clothes. He had turned her indefinably from a

girl to a woman; her physique seemed a bit more robust and solid than

actually true; her face, a trifle full and less mobile. In expression

she wore a half-smile, looking down at the roses which drooped from

her hot hand. Yet it was not the expression of one altogether pleased

with herself, in spite of the smile, which seemed to be caused by some

pleasant flattery that still hung in her mind.

After the first long look, Miss Anthon glanced reproachfully at Erard.

“You haven’t painted _me_.”

“Wait five years,” he emitted shortly, dangling the cigarette from his

lips.

“I didn’t expect to have your prophecy.”

Erard shrugged his shoulders.

“I paint what _I_ see.”

“And shall I be like that? Dissatisfied and bored and a little heavy?”

“You will know some facts, then. Now you are fooling.”

Miss Anthon would have liked, impulsively, to seize a brush and paint

out the face, which would grow to have the power of a sneer at her

present self. But she was restrained by the presence of Molly Parker.

“A stunning piece of work,” Miss Parker remarked, eyeing the portrait

intently.

“_La grande dame de Chicago, U. S. A._,” Erard assented softly.

“But I shouldn’t hang it except in the attic,” Miss Parker continued.

“Ask Mr. Wilbur if he wants it around.”

Erard smiled as if sure on that point. What Chicago magnate would not

like to show off that superb, commanding person? “Will you let me

exhibit it?”

“Certainly,” Miss Anthon replied coolly, drawing on her gloves. “It can

make no difference to me.”

But it had made a difference to her already.

“So these are your real views of my marriage!” she exclaimed, as Miss

Parker wandered off to the old spinet.

Erard’s amused glance said, “Well, yes! if you want to know.”

Her former ambitions tantalized her; this cynical, absurd little man

tantalized her. Was she selling herself cheap? Was Erard stronger and

finer than she?

“Good-by.” She turned away with a last look at the picture. They shook

hands. She seemed to be making her farewell to a few mad dreams.

On the drive back she maintained a moody silence. The past month since

her engagement, life had seemed free and simple and full of interests.

Her equanimity had comforted her and assured her that she was making no

mistake. Now the horizon contracted again, and she wondered whether she

had broken the traces that galled her, or only shifted them for a time.

“Marriage ought not to be such a mystery!” she exclaimed at last.

“You ought to feel sure enough,” Miss Parker replied encouragingly.

“All the money you want and a good fellow whom you took of your own

free will.”

“There _is_ no reason to expect mistakes, Molly, and almost every girl

feels the same way, I suppose, when she is engaged. But the smashes

come, all the same.”

Miss Parker looked at her curiously.

“I wonder if you really love him! You always look at your marriage

from the personal point of view, as a kind of happy solution to a

difficult problem. You don’t seem to see _him_,” she continued, in a

far-away tone. “And I believe something always tells a woman when she

is justified in taking her chances. Of course she may have a hard time,

but if she is the right sort, and that something comes into her heart,

why! all the after tragedies don’t matter. For you everything seems

serene, and yet you haven’t that something, I feel. You don’t really

love him now.”

“How dare you say that!” Miss Anthon exclaimed harshly.

Molly Parker looked as if she dared say anything. To be obliged to give

her reasons was another matter.

“Oh! you take life, marriage, your career--‘broadly,’ as you say,

like a thorough course in self-development. Perhaps you will carry it

through that way. But if I hadn’t that _something_ in my heart which

would make me go barefoot with a man and have a good time, I would

run away. If I were married to a man without that something, I should

stick a hat-pin into him, or make his life a little hell, no matter how

good he was. But you may be different. ‘Love with you may be an affair

of growth.’” Her voice dwelt mockingly on this last sentence. Miss

Anthon drew herself up proudly, with the air of having been guilty of

familiarities with an inferior. They drove on some minutes in silence.

Then Miss Anthon said sombrely--

“There is this life, and I _will_ make the most of it.”

They were crossing the Place de la Concorde in the early lamp-light

of a November evening. The splendid lines of light in every direction

flashed on the slippery, damp pavements; carriages were dashing from

the Rue de Rivoli across the Place into the broad avenue leading to the

dominant arch. The individual hum of Paris, that Paris she had so much

loved and wondered at, the Paris that had aroused slumbering instincts

and had mocked at her, surged through her brain:--yes, there was much

to grasp in this life!

“And there are other things,” Miss Parker murmured, “which we cannot

manage always. We can only dream and hope, for after all life may be

too great for you and break you.”

PART II

CHAPTER I

Chicago is an instance of a successful, contemptuous disregard of

nature by man. Other great cities have been called gradually into

existence about some fine opportunity suggested by nature, at the

junction of fertile valleys, or on a loving bend of a broad river,

or in the inner recesses of a sea-harbour, where nature has pointed

out, as it were, a spot favourable for life and growth. In the case of

Chicago, man has decided to make for himself a city for his artificial

necessities in defiance of every indifference displayed by nature.

Along the level floor of sand and gravel cast up by the mighty lake,

the city has swelled and pushed, like a pool of quicksilver, which,

poured out on a flat plate, is ever undulating and altering its

borders, as it eats its way further into the desert expanse. Railroad

lines, like strands of a huge spider’s web, run across the continent in

all directions, wilfully, strenuously centring in this waste spot, the

swampy corner of a great lake. Through these manifold strands, the city

touches the world.

The soil, where it emerges from the swamp, will grow nothing but

spindling, scrubby trees and weeds. Man must make all,--must prepare

special foundations for his great buildings; must superimpose good

streets of asphalt or brick upon the treacherous bottom; must make

green things live, with the cares of a hot-house, to delight his eye,

for left to herself nature merely hides the plain with a kind of brown

scab. Upon this desolate waste first necessities have been provided for

by miles and miles of nondescript buildings, enclosures for business

and the requirements of naked existence; and then, these last years,

time has come for ornamentation and individual care,--for the private

house, the boulevard, the park. This last development, however, is

sporadic; hence as a whole the first impression Chicago gives is that

of a huge garment made of heterogeneous materials,--here a square of

faded cotton, next door a patch let in of fine silk. For the order of

life is first existence, then comfort, then luxury, and last--when the

human mind begins to suffer ennui--a little beauty for a plaything.

The complex quality of this wonderful city is best seen as the stranger

shoots across the prairie in a railroad train, penetrating layer after

layer of the folds. First in the great distance, rises a pall of dull

smoke, shifting lethargically up and down the scene, as the lake wind

or the land wind pulls and tugs at its mephitic dead body. Then the

railroad, describing irregular curves, crosses lines of streets built

up on embankments with oily ditches below, and intersected by cross

streets that disappear into the marsh. In the chinks of the broken,

ambitious plank walks grow brown weeds and grass. At regular intervals

lamp posts set high up on mounds indicate where the city will place

some day a solid level for actual, busy life. Here and there rows of

frame boxes, or cheaply ornamented cottages crop up, or a stone-front

apartment building stands stranded, above the swamp, its foundation

stones on a level with the lamp posts or the broken plank walk that

gives access to its desolate self. Sometimes these tentative buildings

lie closely together, and there are stores and saloons, and the

streets are penetrated by electric wires. This is the Chicago of the

future,--perhaps of the morrow, whenever the advancing lines of blocks

shall have bounded that way.

Then come the solid outworks of the great city, which are marked

roughly by the parks flanking the three landward sides. These parks

are a noble patronage of nature, an indulgence to the carnal appetites

of men, which are given to green things, as trees and flowering bushes

and soft sod. They are great slices of man’s territory handed over to

the landscape gardener to be made into nature by a _tour de force_.

Here begin the broad boulevards where live the men of the city who lead

the toil and fight in the furnace, and have emerged to build great

comfortable new houses surrounded by broad edgings of cool-looking

grass. If one has succeeded fairly, there beyond, under the pall of

black smoke, one comes out here to rest and enjoy and possess.

Still there is left the city, becoming hotter and fiercer mile by mile.

Life spins there; man there is handling existence as you knead bread

in a pan. The city is made of man; that is the last word to say of it.

Brazen, unequal, like all man’s works, it stands a stupendous piece of

blasphemy against nature. Once within its circle, the heart must forget

that the earth is beautiful. “Go to,” man boasts, “our fathers lived in

the fear of nature; _we_ will build a city where men and women in their

passions shall be the beginning and end. Man is enough for man.”

And out lakeward hangs the cool wind, ready now and then to rush into

the thousands of streets and avenues that intersect the city like the

pipes of a boiler, to clean out the stale air and the filth, willing

thus to assist man in his slipshod management of his home. At other

times it is busy with the lake--that marvellous lake!--spread out

beyond the sandy shores, shifting, changing, gathering light to itself,

playing out the panorama of nature close at hand for the unheeding

benefit of this creature, man.

To John Wilbur, Chicago was like a congenial Alpine air, which

stimulated his appetites. From the very first the strife for

advancement summoned all his virility, and the sense of rapid success

exhilarated him. His wife, on the other hand, remembered for many a

day the sudden depression which the fierce city had given her spirits

that first March morning of their arrival. It seemed to her imaginative

mind the first _fact_ she had ever known. But she learned to accept the

conditions passably, and to do without many sensibilities; she learned

how to make business--the mechanics of life--serve for all interests of

mind. Nearly two years passed thus in a swift leap while Mrs. Wilbur

was becoming a “worker,” before Molly Parker came to visit her. Mrs.

Ormiston Dexter having died suddenly, Molly was preparing wonderingly

to earn her bread, and for such vague purposes Chicago offered a good

field.

The first morning after her arrival the two visited the Wilburs’ new

house that was going up some miles to the south. They drove out by the

arrow-like Michigan Boulevard, then turned back and forth, skilfully

dodging bad streets where pools of slime lay in the broken wooden

pavements, crossing the whirring cable-tracks, until they reached a

broad avenue. Here the houses were separated by patches of lawn or

vacant lots, and the expansive boulevard was divided in two by little

artificial mounds of earth, with trees and shrubs, in which wound

gravelled walks.

“We decided to build ’way south,” Mrs. Wilbur explained, “because it

isn’t so dreadfully noisy and dusty out here. We can have plenty of

room, and, just think! there are two or three fair-sized trees on our

lot.”

Miss Parker was eagerly looking here and there. The morning breeze from

the lake shot little spots of bright colour over her face.

“There!” Mrs. Wilbur pointed with the whip down the misty avenue. “You

can just see it.”

“What? That enormous white building?” Molly exclaimed. Mrs. Wilbur

touched the horse with her whip nervously.

“John felt that the house should be more than merely a home to live

in: it is to be a good solid investment and a sort of advertisement of

success. It helps him as a young capitalist to have it known that he is

building a great house. Then the architect got us in for more than we

expected. You see it is built all around with stone, very solid, and

gives a more colossal appearance than its size really justifies.”

Miss Parker looked at the neighbouring houses that Mrs. Wilbur had

pointed to for comparison. Most of them were only faced with stone. She

had noticed, also, that in one case where a house was going up, the

imposing front consisted merely of a thin veneer of stone placed over

masonry.

“How do you like the architecture?” the mistress asked nervously.

“It is so imposing,” faltered Molly, “and what is the house in the

rear?”

“Oh, that’s the stable. We had to finish that first, so that it could

be used for the materials.”

“It looks like a mansion itself.”

Mrs. Wilbur led the way into the new “marble palace,” as it was locally

described. She showed her friend about, with sudden alternations of

enthusiasm and listlessness, explaining in detail the suites of rooms,

the manifold conveniences suggested by the architect. Suddenly she

exclaimed,--

“You have had enough of this! I am tired of it too. We come out here

two or three times a week and every Sunday. I will drive you out to the

parks, and we can have a good talk.”

Miss Parker remarked timidly, when they were once more in the trap,

jogging southwards on the hard boulevard, “You must be so awfully rich!”

Her friend smiled. “Yes. John has done remarkably well, and my money

helped of course. But the house is really beyond us. That is the

temptation out here, to discount the future, or at least to live up to

the present to the last cent. And for the past six months the times

have been _so_ bad.” She looked grave.

“Don’t you find it all interesting and exciting, now you are

married,--planning, and all that?”

“Oh, yes!” The married woman took the offered lead eagerly. “It has

been such a full time. You see, I know almost all John’s business, and

he has taken me with him on all his business trips, once to Alaska

even, and I have felt like a real partner. I have managed some affairs

here in the city all by myself.”

She talked rapidly, describing a few energetic and capable women in

Chicago who managed large businesses. “It is so good to feel that you

have a hand on the reins; aren’t merely driven along in a brougham,

while you read a novel.”

“You must like it.” Miss Parker warmed sympathetically on finding a

spot of enthusiasm. “Chicago and business must be so much more real

than all that stuff in Paris.”

“I _have_ liked it,” Mrs. Wilbur’s face sobered again, “while it was

venture and struggle, and I had a hand in it. But, I should _hate_

anything that came in between me and my husband, and just this active,

free life.” Some passionate chord had been stirred.

“A woman loves and marries and has a large scheme to carry out. She

plans living with her husband as an equal, and then--” She touched the

horse quickly.

“What?” the girl asked curiously.

“Then she finds that their roads _must_ divide. She must ‘make the

home,’ cultivate persons whom it is well to know; even entertain

horrid, stupid people because her husband’s interests are involved.”

“But if they are _your_ interests too?”

“A woman wouldn’t sacrifice herself to get her ends in that way. Now

we have this house, I must try to be something of a ‘leader,’ so John

thinks, and go in for reading papers, or at least for music and art,

because the others do. I must entertain, become a ‘patroness’ if I can,

and all the rest of it.”

“I should think it great fun to have a swell house and loads of people

about, and put my name down for all the nice charities. I’d have a

beautiful time and fill that big temple of yours full of interesting

people.”

Mrs. Wilbur smiled indulgently. “Interesting people--I mean

people interesting for more than a few minutes to any one but

themselves--aren’t so easy to find, my dear, anywhere in this wide

world.”

Molly Parker did not answer. That had not been her experience. Every

object that she could remember from the puppy dogs and the babies

in the streets to the self-conscious New England professors at Aunt

Dexter’s, had always amused her.

“Then there are other facts a woman doesn’t reckon with before she is

married,--her children,” Mrs. Wilbur continued abruptly. “Molly, do you

think a woman is horrid because she doesn’t want children?”

“Yes,” the younger woman answered promptly. “Perhaps not at first

while she is kind of honeymooning it, but afterwards--why, of course.”

“I suppose that is the proper way to look at it,” Mrs. Wilbur assented

regretfully. “If a woman doesn’t love her husband, children are

interests, and if she does love him, she wants his children. But it

isn’t true necessarily. Like so many other proper conceptions, it may

be a commonplace lie.”

Miss Parker opened her eyes in consternation, wider and wider. “Well,

your husband wants children; every man who is good and nice does.”

“I don’t,” Mrs. Wilbur answered passionately.

“Don’t say that, dear.” Molly Parker gave a little shiver of

superstitious horror.

“It is what two women out of every three say or think, if they have any

spirit in them,” Mrs. Wilbur exclaimed excitedly.

“John has been in the Dakotas two weeks to-day, and I haven’t been

with him because--in a few months I shall be a mother. Next week he

will be here again for a little while and then off for another week in

Boston and New York. And it would make no difference, if he were here

all the time, like most business men, I should be put aside,--_hors

de combat_. It will be a whole year, perhaps two, before I can be his

companion again, before I can have any life of my own. I am tied to a

circumstance that may be misery, that means two years gone, out of the

twenty good ones of life. Not to speak of the _others_ that may come!”

“Why did you marry, then?”

“What has that to do with it?” she said impatiently, “a woman

doesn’t marry for children; a young woman doesn’t think much about

it beforehand. When she does think, she supposes what the world says

is true; it all arranges itself, and is a blessing, and a great

happiness. The world has been dealing in sentimental lies so long that

its axioms are apt to be foolish. No! there is no freedom for women:

they are marked incapable from their birth and are supported by men

for some obvious and necessary services. Between times they have a few

indifferent joys dealt out to them.”

They had driven slowly around the great oval of sward in the green

park, and crossing eastward towards the lake were passing the grey

walls of the new university, which rose boldly against the steel-blue

sky.

“You must sympathize with _them_.” Miss Parker pointed dubiously to a

group of women students who were crossing the campus.

Mrs. Wilbur made no reply and they drove on silently towards the lake.

“Oh! how good it is, that great lake,” Molly exclaimed as if eager

to escape from some shocking ideas. “How I love it, the colour is so

pure, and the little clouds out on the horizon are like little hopes of

happiness.”

She jumped out of the carriage and stood looking into the lake, as if

she would grasp it in her arms, her black dress swaying in the air, and

her cheeks flushing with excitement. Mrs. Wilbur watched her a little

enviously.

“Now let us talk about your plans,” Mrs. Wilbur began when they had

turned back towards the city. “You are not marrying, with all your

proper views.”

“No! Twenty-four last March. Five proposals in full form, three half

proposals,--kind of suggestions,--four other things that might have

come to something, but didn’t. There is hope still. I am looking hard

for him, and when the right young man comes along, I won’t hesitate.

Have you any likely young men in view?”

Mrs. Wilbur shook her head. “That is one thing Chicago hasn’t

produced,--ideal young men with good fortunes suitable for ideal young

women without fortunes. There’s Thornton Jennings, but he hasn’t any

money. He is quite the nicest young man I know.”

“Then I must do something right off quick,” Molly Parker sighed,

disliking doing anything definite as much as a discreet cat.

“What _will_ you do?” Mrs. Wilbur asked thoughtfully.

“Teach kindergarten, I guess. I get on best with the kids. But tell me

something about Chicago and the people. How did you come to know them?”

That was a long theme which occupied the two friends for the rest of

the drive. Mrs. Wilbur explained how much her uncle Sebastian Anthon

had helped them to get a start socially through some old friends,

who were warmly devoted to him. And in Chicago one got to know

enough people very soon. There was a certain social openness, and a

willingness to take people for their personal value. Then John had

proved unusually _sympatico_, had made friends easily.

She described the three sections of the city with their three distinct

_milieus_. When the city was young, people settled away from the lake

out of a superstition that the water was unhealthy,--“some miles in the

interior where it is very hot, and where it is awful every way. Some

day I will take you over there and show you the miles of shabby homes,

that bear all over them the marks of not being in it.” Then she related

“the pilgrimage of the successful.” These good people of the West

Side, prospered in business, and desiring something more than narrow,

high-stooped brick houses with black-walnut decorations, moved down to

the lake; most, the very rich, to the south where land was to be had in

plenty. Occasionally a family who had acute social aspirations moved

again to the north into the little segment of lake shore. This northern

settlement held itself as conservative and distinctly fashionable. “But

the money is where we are, on the South Side--for the most part.”

Mrs. Wilbur recounted ironically, yet with genuine interest, their own

experiences in Chicago. They aspired to “the society of progressive

people of weight and wealth, who patronize art and music and

education.” They were members of the Art Association, of the Society

for the Support of Classical Music, and a dozen minor enterprises

of a public-spirited nature. Then Mrs. Wilbur described the Woman’s

Amalgamated Institute and the Monday Club, to which she had been

recently elected.

“You see,” she concluded with a laugh, “the women foster the arts and

sciences. We are making it all: we order a stock of ideas as you

would get flowers from a florist. Next Monday I am to read my first

paper,--on Modern French Art. You must come and hear me get off what

Erard told us over there.”

“And Erard?” Molly Parker put in curiously.

“He is bringing out a book, I believe. He sent me the proof, but John

had no interest in it, and I was too tired after the day’s hurly-burly

to do more than glance over it. The picture, they say, was a great

success in the Champ de Mars and at Berlin. It’s on its way over now.”

“I think,” Miss Parker remarked irrelevantly, “that when we are landed

in one place, the rest of the world should sink out of sight,--so there

need be no pillars of salt along the road.”

“Chicago is just the place for you then,” Mrs. Wilbur answered

wistfully, looking down the miles of Michigan Avenue. “When you are

in it, you are cut off by a vacuum, as it were, from the surrounding

world. You can’t see outside, and you hear the voices of the others

only faintly.”

“That sounds too much like a prison to be true.”

Mrs. Wilbur’s face looked as if she were convinced that it was a

prison, in certain aspects at least.

CHAPTER II

Miss Parker decided soon that if Chicago were a prison, it was a very

nice kind of prison to visit. Mrs. Wilbur’s friends did all manner of

pleasant things to entertain her. Each one seemed to feel responsible

for the good name of Chicago hospitality, and if the people were a

little eager to hear nice things about their home, Miss Parker was

amply able to satisfy them.

On the appointed Monday afternoon the two friends sallied forth for

the meeting of the Monday Club. Molly Parker watched with amusement

the flutter of excitement with which Mrs. Wilbur clutched her little

package of manuscript, when, on entering the room, they met the

subdued hum of feminine voices on earnest purposes bent. The first

paper was on Flaubert, by an important “social light” (as Mrs. Wilbur

whispered to her companion), and a great worker for the cause of woman

as distinguished from women. Molly Parker knew nothing about Flaubert

beyond the fact that he had written at least one naughty book. The

paper was not written to inform, but to entertain and impress. There

were mysterious sentences about psychology and social movements.

Suddenly it was all over. Much talking among the rows of women ensued;

the president--a little delicate-faced lady--called for criticism and

remarks from the floor. A few ladies berated poor Flaubert roundly

and took exception to some of the opinions in the paper, as “being

dangerously subversive of the home.” There seemed to be a general

delicacy about speaking improprieties even about an improper book. So

the president called for Mrs. Wilbur’s paper--On Some Tendencies among

the Impressionists.

Mrs. Wilbur’s paper was earnest, enthusiastic, a trifle schoolgirly

in its sounding periods. It caused much more discussion than poor

Flaubert. Many of the women had seen the impressionists in Europe, and

some owned Pissarros and Monets, and had “views.” Molly Parker found

herself in a stirring atmosphere of art criticism. Then tea followed;

women came up to congratulate Mrs. Wilbur and to meet her friend. Molly

was charmed by their cordiality, their unpretentious good sense and

power.

“Why, it’s great!” she exclaimed later, as they drove back, “to find

all these fashionable women in such stunning clothes taking up these

serious interests.”

“They have a lot more,--music, charities, civic advancement; and they

are really better in practical affairs. It’s not much good discussing

Flaubert or the impressionists without a background, as Mr. Erard

would say, and though these bright women read whatever they are told

the world is taking seriously, and have seen pictures and often buy

them, it is really _funny_ to hear the talk. That’s not their proper

atmosphere: you can’t supply background, cultivation, and insight, by

any ready-made process of education, evening lectures, and so on.”

Molly Parker was eager to combat this ever present note of

depreciation and dissatisfaction. “You expect wonders. They know a deal

more than I with all the ministers and lawyers in my family. The proper

values--the expression--will come fast enough to the next generation.”

“It’s always that,” Mrs. Wilbur replied scornfully. “That blessed next

generation! May I live to see it! But it requires a pretty lively

imagination to be always living in the next generation!”

“I like this one.” Molly settled herself comfortably in the carriage.

She found, however, that Mrs. Wilbur in spite of her lugubrious

reflections, was a fairly contented person and ever active. The

days sped by in engagements. Mrs. Wilbur organized with the

organizers; met with committees of the Civic Association and the Art

Association,--dined and entertained and gossiped, as if no world

existed beyond the misty miles of Lake Michigan. She took Miss Parker

to luncheons, literary, social, and feminine,--and skilfully engineered

her into the interest of influential people.

Wilbur had come back from the Dakotas and was off again, first to New

York, then to Springfield, and again to New York. Miss Parker found him

better looking than in the Paris days. He was cordial to her, but the

chief impression he gave was one of great preoccupation. Mrs. Wilbur

explained this by remarking that the times were difficult.

During one of these absences, Mrs. Wilbur and her friend attended an

open meeting of a literary club. It took place in the ballroom of a

large house and was attended by a great many society people. The paper

of the evening on Walt Whitman was given by an elderly gentleman, a

retired “capitalist,” who cultivated letters. He didn’t like Walt

Whitman, and he made a number of jokes which seemed to touch responsive

chords in the audience. The occasion was less serious than the Monday

day Club, but “more brilliant,” and enlivened by the presence of men.

After the paper--which was discreetly short--the two friends found

themselves among strangers in one corner of the large room. Presently a

young man passed by, and catching sight of Mrs. Wilbur came up to them.

Mrs. Wilbur’s face lit with unusual animation as she turned to Molly

Parker.

“_This_ is Mr. Jennings. He can tell you all about the Civic

Association--he’s one of the secretaries--and about the municipal

scandals.”

Miss Parker glanced up at the young man’s face. He seemed to stand

unusually erect, with a kind of military uprightness, rarely met

with in our civilian society. His high forehead was rendered more

conspicuous by the receding line of hair. His green eyes were moist

and large and played a part in the mobility of his face. Molly Parker

smiled back in response to his smile. Something sympathetic seemed to

pass quickly between them as they stood looking at one another.

“He’s trying to make the city over,” Mrs. Wilbur continued.

“No,” the young fellow interjected, “only working my own broom as

vigorously as I can. And I wanted to see you particularly, Mrs.

Wilbur, about this franchise business. You must get Mr. Wilbur to join

us in fighting it. For a wonder the papers are dead with us, and if we

can only get the decent men interested, we can prevent this rascally

steal.”

Mrs. Wilbur’s face grew solemn, as if she were remembering something

unpleasant. Jennings went on explanatorily to Miss Parker. “You’ve

seen it in the papers? The railroad companies have made a raid on the

legislature, to get a lot of privileges for nothing. Wrightington--he’s

the scamp that owns the mayor and the city council--thinks the

legislature cheaper on the whole than the council, and that makes the

affair much more serious for all of us.” He talked on easily of the

situation which was then uppermost in public gossip. It was a gigantic

steal, a fraud on the public to be perpetuated for half a century. The

newspapers had been violent over it: unfortunately the opposition had

centred chiefly about a demagogic young city politician, who was using

the uproar against Wrightington for personal capital.

“Mr. Wilbur says the newspapers have overdone it, that the measure

isn’t really so bad for the city, and only fair to the railroad

corporations,” Mrs. Wilbur suggested. Jennings looked at her sharply

for a moment, and then answered swiftly,--

“But Wrightington’s methods? If it were a bill to found hospitals, his

means of getting it through are enough to blacken it.”

“Well, you _have_ to do that, they say, to buy your way here,” Mrs.

Wilbur added sadly, a flush mounting over her face.

“That is the devil’s argument that we are always meeting,” Jennings

replied earnestly, looking at Mrs. Wilbur intently. Then people came

up, and the conversation ended. Miss Parker found herself talking to a

handsome young man with a keen face. When he had gone Mrs. Wilbur said

lightly, “You wouldn’t catch _him_ talking as Jennings did. He used to

be a secretary in the Civic Association until he got all the notoriety

out of it he could. He is a type out here. Some years ago he was a

clerk behind the counter in Arnold’s; now you find him everywhere.

And they say he will marry the rich Miss McGregor. He is the ‘bound

to rise’ kind, and he never does anything that will hurt his chances.

Watch him!”

There were many others--middle-aged and young men, “each with a story,”

Mrs. Wilbur declared, “if you only knew it.”

“But your Thornton Jennings is the best,” Molly Parker concluded, as

they talked the people over after their return, “and I hope you will

get John to be on his side.”

Mrs. Wilbur’s face darkened. “That question is so complicated, and like

so many things here, opinion seems to come down to two views--that of

those ‘who are in it,’ and that of those who aren’t. But Jennings is a

fine fellow. I met him on the steamer coming home. He turned up here

that winter as a young lawyer. John calls him ‘my stripling.’”

“Well, I like your stripling, and I think he will be somebody.”

“Or leave us.”

CHAPTER III

The glamour of the “partnership” plan of marriage was fading away in

Adela Wilbur’s mind. She had found money-getting exciting enough, while

it was a matter of large chances in which she took part. Now that she

was forced to accept the usual interests of women, she tried to invest

her new home, her clubs and acquaintances, with importance. This form

of excitement, however, was not what she had planned. And her husband

seemed to be getting away from her rapidly. The Water-Hoister Company

was a thing of the past. Two bad seasons in Kansas and Nebraska had

crippled the concern. Wilbur had insisted on “getting out” in due

season. The first division between them had come over his plan of

selling their large holdings, with the idea of buying in later on a

low market. To her this familiar device was like a sneaky trading of

your home. Their partnership was based upon faith in the idea of the

Water-Hoister. To step out and let other people bear the burden of

its hard days was, if not dishonesty, cowardice. Wilbur’s sagacity,

however, had been proved convincingly. Hoister stock fell steadily,

until now it was kicked about for purely speculative purposes.

What Wilbur had done with the sums realized from their Hoister stock,

she knew only vaguely. He was so much in the thick of the fight that

she could not follow his rapid movements. She inferred that he was

one of a group of young capitalists, of whom the newspapers asserted

Wrightington was the master-mind.

The great Wrightington! This name hawked about ever since she had

known anything of Chicago, filled her with a kind of terror. He was

an unscrupulous adventurer, who had “gone broke” several times, yet

was always triumphant; a man received nowhere, of no respectable

affiliations, yet a power to be followed. Many of the respectable

element secretly admired his audacity, half excused his reputation,

and covertly followed his lead. He was brazen, impudent, cynical, and

inevitable. Of late the papers had been frantic over Wrightington; they

teemed with the usual charges of scandalous corruption and bribery

which his transactions periodically aroused. Wilbur had shown unusual

irritation, when his wife had approached the subject of the protest

before the legislature by the Civic Association.

“Don’t mix us up in that tomfoolery,” he had blurted out. “Your nice

people are keeping quiet to escape the mud the papers are throwing, but

you will see fast enough what side they are on six months hence.”

Mrs. Wilbur was confused by these words, and unable to ravel out this

question complicated by prejudices. She tried to put it out of her

mind, to believe that her husband was right: “it was not a matter for

amateurs.” But every morning the question stared her in the face in

the columns of the newspapers, and was dinned in her ears even in the

gossip of the women’s clubs. She could not escape a perpetual query:

“What has John to do with it?”

Little things, quickly noted and interpreted, indicated to her that

he had much to do with this “deal,” and a few days brought greater

certainty. The Sunday following her talk with her husband, they had

visited their new house, which was now nearly ready for the decorators.

On their return Wilbur proposed that they should call on the Remsens,

who were to be near neighbours. There they met Mr. and Mrs. Israel

Tracey, also neighbours in the Chicago sense. Presently Mrs. Stevans,

an important and wealthy widow, came in with a young broker (who was

also a “society man”), named Wren. The men drawing to one side of the

large library fell to talking confidentially among themselves. Mrs.

Wilbur listened apprehensively to the earnest tones. Israel Tracey,

a short, squat, powerfully built man of fifty, was speaking his mind

freely to a sympathetic audience.

“The papers are all humbug. Squires in the _Courant_ is down on it

because Wrightington froze him out once years ago. He hasn’t said a

word in his paper about the omnibus electric ordinance, which was a

sight more shady. He had a hand in _that_ pie. The papers are all

rotten; it’s straight blackmail and intimidation.” His face puffed out

redly.

“It’s a shame, the way the papers lead people by the nose,” Wren put in.

“There was a time,” Remsen, who was heavily interested in real estate,

began sententiously, “when every one howled for anything in Chicago.

You wouldn’t see a word of blame in the papers no matter what people

might think. Nothing was too good to say about the city. It was the

best place on earth to live and die in. Now if the papers keep this

racket up, people will be afraid to put a dollar in the place. They’re

just ruining it, damning everything and every one so. They’ve gone

pious all of a sudden.”

“But you wouldn’t have them approve of Wrightington.” Mrs. Wilbur

ventured into the conversation impulsively. There was a moment of

silence in the room, as if some one had awkwardly spilled a glass of

water. Wilbur looked annoyed.

“Well,” Tracey began again, defiantly, “Wrightington is a mighty clever

man. This franchise business is misrepresented. He needs it to protect

his properties and--”

“What’s more, he’ll get it, too, in one way or another.” Wren laughed

at his own cynicism. “All this howling may make the price higher, but

he’s bound to get it.”

“The bill passed the Senate yesterday,” Remsen explained. “There’s only

the governor now.”

Wren laughed. The other men smiled and tacitly abandoned the topic.

Just then, as Mrs. Wilbur turned back to the women, feeling reproved,

she caught a look of intelligence which passed between Mrs. Tracey

and Mrs. Stevans. The latter, who had taken no part in the talk, was

smiling knowingly across to Mrs. Tracey. Mrs. Wilbur saw her lips

moving in an inaudible whisper. She seemed to hear the words, “Did

you have something in it?” And she noted Mrs. Tracey’s smile and

affirmative nod. The pantomime was over in five seconds, but it gave

her a vivid shock.

All these people were gambling on the chances of Wrightington’s having

successfully bought the legislature and the governor. Perhaps the

franchise was just enough, but to speculate on the chances of bribery

struck Mrs. Wilbur as peculiarly sordid. She had a revulsion of feeling

different in the case of each one. Little Wren, with his moth-eaten

baldness, his fat, pudgy nose, and bleared eyelids, seemed like a

pander. The newspapers had it, she remembered, that he had spent most

of the winter in Springfield as one of Wrightington’s agents. His

hands were really soiled with dirty money. And Mrs. Stevans, the ample

Mrs. Stevans, of capacious bosom and highly coloured reputation! The

champagne for her dinners came in this way. The Traceys were another

kind: they had risen straight from the lumber-camp. One could hardly

resent the expression of naive, peasant cunning on Mrs. Tracey’s hard

little face. Twenty years ago, when she haggled with the company’s

agent over tobacco and pork, that expression began to grow. And the

Remsens--well, she liked them and respected them, yet it was commonly

said that Remsen’s extra two millions came from a “tip” on the sugar

schedule of the Wilson bill.

Her disgust was not excessively moral. To be sure, old John Anthon had

taught her that the laws of commercial morality were none other than

those of private uprightness. Yet the disgust she felt was more than

moral; it was a loathing of the sordid, of the brutal, of the vulgar.

Had she, Adela Anthon, with her high-strung ideals of man’s life, her

wide-sweeping ambitions, come to be a party in such an affair? Had

she exchanged her love of intellectual life, her longing for beauty,

to share in a common swindle on the public, brought about by a dicker

between a knave and a gang of venal country legislators?

She rose abruptly and escaped. On the drive home, Wilbur did not speak.

He seemed disgusted with her, yet tolerant in consideration for her

condition. At last she asked bitterly, “So we belong to that crew?”

“I thought you were a bigger woman, Adela, than to talk like that. If

you mean, that I have put every dollar I could raise into traction

stocks, yes,--three months ago. But it isn’t good for you to talk over

such matters; it only disturbs you.”

Yet when she was silent, he felt forced to continue. “I believe that

the companies should get this franchise; all the noise over it is

absurd. As for the corruption charges, they’re always made. Probably

there’s been plenty of grease used in this matter. But we _have_ to do

it, here, and that’s all there is about it.”

“And suppose you lose? Suppose the governor is an honest man and vetoes

the bill?”

Wilbur laughed. “You don’t suppose I’d have three hundred thousand in

it if I didn’t know which way the governor is going to jump. He came

high, but--well, _Wrightington is nervy_. You will see that he will

play it out well; the governor’ll hold off, and have a hearing, and go

through all the forms. But he’ll _sign_.”

Mrs. Wilbur gave a quick gasp. Wilbur put his arm about her. “You are

nervous, Adela. You wouldn’t be so freaky over this business if you

were all right. And, Ady, it means the house. If this goes through, the

house is all right, but we were getting into a bad way.”

This argument hardly appeased her. So their home was to represent this

transaction. She could never cross the threshold without feeling that

Wrightington had given it to them; it was a morsel of Wrightington’s

plunder.

“And there are plenty of men in Chicago who have taken the same

chances! The Ralstons, and the Browns, and the Heckers are mighty stuck

on themselves. But what with false assessments, and contributions to

the city council, watered industrials, and tips on sugar, I guess they

needn’t boast.”

“Don’t you think there are _any_ honest men in this city?”

“A great many, from my point of view. Not so many from yours. A woman

_can’t_ understand it. Business is like life: you’ve got to play as the

others do and play _hard_ all the time, or you’ll be chucked out. You

can’t be dainty.”

She knew that this opinion was final. He was not a bad man, he was not

corrupt; he was merely heartily of his times, and her scruples were

unintelligible to him. He was the same Wilbur that had convinced her

in Paris of the desirability of action. He had developed, and she had

caught sight of his claws. That was all. So she gave up the contest,

as he lit a cigar and lowered the carriage window. The frosty air hung

in clouds about the eaves of the houses, and the hard roadbed of the

boulevard gave a chill thud to the horses’ hoofs, while they rolled

swiftly through this city of men.

Was marriage altogether like a partnership?

CHAPTER IV

The hearing before the governor at Springfield came off as Wilbur had

predicted. The papers reported that Charles Bishop Wren, together with

Israel Tracey and Wrightington, had gone on to the capital to plead

for the bill. Also Thornton Jennings, chairman of a subcommittee of

the Civic Association, appeared before his excellency, as the sole

representative of the opposition. Public opinion was exhausted, or

submissive: the matter seemed already arranged.

“You see,” Wilbur explained to his wife, “no one of any account has

taken the pains to appear before the governor against the bill.”

“Perhaps they prefer to save their fares,” she retorted. He made no

reply, and she was afraid to trust herself further. Yet she listened

eagerly to Jennings, who happened in one afternoon, while he described

his experiences at Springfield.

“The ‘hearing’ was a regular love-feast between old Wrightington and

his excellency, the governor, who was moderately full. They sat on me

every time I opened my mouth.” He laughed good-humouredly, stretching

out his long figure. “At last the governor suggested that I should hand

in a brief of my case. He had had enough of ‘chin.’ It was a delicious

farce.”

“He signed, then?” Mrs. Wilbur asked nervously.

“Not yet. But of course it is all settled. I knew that when I went on.”

She looked at him admiringly. He continued idly. “I wanted to be in

at the death. It was worth it too, as a comedy.” He laughed again

contagiously. “I met old Parsons of our firm on the train. He gave

me some fatherly advice about sticking to business, and keeping out

of ‘politics.’ He cited a model--Jack Hendricks--you know him? The

slim, white, perfectly clean young man who is trying to marry Remsen’s

youngest. Honest-policy Jack we call him at the office. He is a nice

young man.”

His mind ran on nervously, and when he spoke again he seemed to

be looking into the future. “But the good people of Chicago are

running things on a wrong basis, and some day they will wake up with

forty-thousand Polacks and other impetuous citizens tearing down their

houses.”

“I shouldn’t be altogether sorry!” Mrs. Wilbur flamed out.

“Well, if there were only Wrightingtons and Traceys and such like.

But the others--_you?_ After all there would be merely a row, some

shooting, and back again to the old game of grab.”

She reflected after he had gone that Wren had called him a socialist,

a meddler. “They think he should be a clergyman!” She was glad that he

left before her husband should come in and find her with her “eastern

puppy, the young agitator.” She did not wish to have any extra

prejudices to contend with. For her feeling was high:--she must express

herself somehow, must struggle to draw herself and her husband out of

this situation. Wilbur found her walking nervously back and forth,

crushing in her hot hands the evening paper with its “story” of the

hearing.

Mrs. Wilbur was too excited to use any finesse. She outlined her plan

rapidly:--they must sell the investments made with her money, and use

that for the new house. In this way she thought to induce her husband

to drop the traction stocks. For, she concluded, “then our home won’t

always be a sore between us.”

Wilbur looked at her disgustedly. “That’s the woman in business! I

don’t care to let go my hold in the Alaska company, nor in the other

things. As far as your conscience is concerned,--well, I have already

made eighty thousand in this deal. What would you like me to do with

that?”

He spoke coolly, almost good-naturedly, but with contempt. Mrs. Wilbur

rose quickly and walked up and down the room, speaking passionately.

“Do! Let us get rid of it all and keep just what I had from my father

and leave this place, this prison. We can go to Europe and live quietly

and decently and think of _other things_. If this goes on, we shall be

like the others, like the Traceys, all of them, ploughing the mud for

swill. This isn’t life,--this is--”

Pausing for the word, she caught herself, and grew calm again. Her

fury, which had made her speak out for once, appeared childish,

ineffective. Her desire was the old, womanish desire--to run away from

the present, to elude the tangle.

Wilbur looked at her in astonishment. Then as if recollecting that

allowances should be made for her, he spoke again calmly.

“Well, you wouldn’t like that kind of thing long. I shouldn’t, I can

tell you. That isn’t life, doing nothing but just dawdling around and

being respectable. You’re all twisted up and nervous, Ada, and the best

thing is for us not to talk business until you are better. Then you’ll

feel differently.”

She looked over at him critically. He certainly would never “feel

differently.” He stood alert, keenly alive, self-reliant, quite

assured,--one who had fitted into fate admirably. Her passion for

business, for the stir and contest of affairs, ended there, that night.

The papers were torn, the partnership dissolved.

Her excessive feeling was unreasonable, she knew, yet this episode of

the traction stocks had revealed to her all the ugliness of this game

with money, which as a girl she had fancied to be fine and exciting.

Others possibly might play it with ideal justice, but so few, so very

few! And the worst of it was that your ideas of fair play became

warped insensibly, that the best of men acquired a contempt for the

“amateurishness” and “quixotry” of their youth. They became Jesuits

with their souls. And the end of it all after you had got the success

was one or all of three things: personal indulgence, charity, or a

vague kind of comfort in the general development of mankind. Money made

Chicago expand until men became dizzy contemplating where the end

might be. But what use in all this multiplication, if it meant no gain

in quality, no finer fibre, no higher life of the mind or of the soul?

If the hard, honest Remsen were but to give place to the unctuous Wren?

Why go on sowing a vast country, planting dollars and reaping millions;

multiplying railroads and factories and mines,--when all that came of

it was an immense commissariat business for the accumulating hordes of

greedy, half-educated, wholly common people? One passionate, intolerant

moment killed this woman’s love of business energy,--the mere exercise

of getting wealth. It was a curious trade,--that was all.

Her imagination made her unfair, narrow. She could not see that in

this wholesale indictment of an eager, fresh civilization, she was

condemning the order of nature. She did not pause to consider the

sturdy men who kept to their ideals, nor realize that the seething,

hungry mass who fought for the only glory they knew were pitiable and

blind. She would have none of it.

Six weeks later Mrs. Wilbur’s son came. When she had grown strong

enough for her old life, she put all business aside methodically,

turning away from the stock quotations in the newspapers in nervous

dread, and skilfully avoiding any reference to their affairs whenever

Wilbur showed himself inclined to talk business. There had been a time

when she resented her child’s interference with her plans, his division

between her and her husband. Now she welcomed it, trying to make up

to the little Sebastian her disloyalty during the months before his

birth. Even Molly Parker, who presided over a small kindergarten in the

neighbourhood, found her a sufficiently solicitous mother.

When Thornton Jennings wondered why Mrs. Wilbur had lost her

interest in the Legal Aid Society and in the committees of the Civic

Association, Miss Parker explained blithely, “She has other things to

think of.”

“I don’t believe it is that, altogether. She was not the kind to lose

all interest in this fashion.”

“Perhaps she is passing through a crisis. She is always having a crisis

on hand.”

And Wilbur--who found nothing to complain of in his handsome, composed

wife--also wondered about the crisis. He found himself left completely

to his own devices. He did not bother himself long, for the business

world was beginning to shake off the lethargy of the past two years,

and he was busy with success. At odd moments, the husband and wife

talked of the new house. It was nearly ready now for occupancy, and

there was an undiscussed plan to move late in the summer.

Mrs. Anthon, who had come from St. Louis to assist in this operation,

was anxious that the house should be properly dedicated by some

important social event. Wilbur agreed with her, and the two discussed

the matter for weeks. At last Mrs. Wilbur showed enough interest to

suggest, languidly, giving a musicale. “Then,” she added, “we might

have a series of lectures on art subjects by Mr. Erard. The Woman’s

Amalgamated Institute have asked me to get him for the club, and I

might offer the house.”

Mrs. Anthon sniffed dubiously. “I thought you had dropped that fellow

by this time. What’s he doing over here?”

“Visiting and lecturing, I believe. He will be in Chicago by the end of

October. I had thought of asking him to stay with us while he is here.

What do you say, John, to having him?”

“I kind of think as your mother does. What’s the use of bothering with

him any longer? He is either on his legs by this time or ought to be.”

He asked, as a second thought, “Have you been sending him money right

along?”

“Oh, yes,” she replied in her usual calm tones. “But I won’t have

him here if it troubles you. The lectures will be for women in the

mornings, you know.”

“Oh! if he interests you,--I thought we had been travelling different

roads these last years--”

“Yes.” Mrs. Wilbur’s tone was slightly ironical, “We have been going

different ways, but I still find him--interesting; perhaps more

than--well, most things.”

CHAPTER V

The night of the musicale Erard arrived at the Wilbur’s very late. He

had driven from his hotel, after a comfortable dinner and a cigar,

without taking the trouble to ascertain the distance. When he entered

the hall, he could hear the music from an inner room,--a bit from a

new Russian symphony, more intricate than melodious. Through the doors

opening broadly into the hall, he could see the people, the women

seated in irregular bunches fanning themselves and furtively looking

about, to inventory the guests and the rooms. As he continued to peep,

he was surprised at the brilliancy of the dress. He had vaguely fancied

the inhabitants as costumed in something between the conventional

blanket of the frontier and the plush absurdities of our grandmothers.

Yet these women, many of them so portly that they could carry

magnificence, appeared more richly dressed than anything he remembered

in London or Paris.

The men were standing about the doors in various uncomfortable

attitudes, seemingly unhabituated to this difficult part of the

full-dress parade. Erard noticed, as he glanced about, that they were

generally middle-aged, solid men, with here and there a bony, wiry

specimen. To his European eye, the faces appeared individual, yet

curiously undistinguished; “rudimentary types,” he murmured. Every one

was silent and serious, as if living up to the decorum of the occasion.

One of the footmen, who had taken his coat and hat, followed him and

motioned to a room on the right, away from the music. Erard took the

hint, thinking to find a chair where he might make himself comfortable

until the music arrived at an intermission. He found himself in a

dimly lighted room, which had evidently been planned for a library. He

perceived indifferently half-a-dozen other occupants of the room. As

his eyes began to wander about, he saw Mrs. Wilbur, who was watching

him from the other end. The first thing he noticed about her was the

dress: he had painted something like that once, with its delightful

folds of white lace and cream-coloured satin. And the face, too, he

had painted that. Mrs. Wilbur caught his eyes, and they looked for an

instant at each other, examining. Then he noticed Mrs. Anthon, planted

firmly in another corner of the room. She seemed a bit dumpier than

three years before, and more complex in dress.

The music ceased with an awakening bang. A servant turned on the

electric lights. Erard crossed the room to greet his hostess.

“Where is the original?” he asked meaningly. “I wish to compare it

with--the portrait.”

Mrs. Wilbur flushed with annoyance.

“So it is! the great red divan and the same dress and the house. I

couldn’t have arranged it more expressly for you! The portrait is in

here,” she turned to an inner room, designed for her den, and touched

an electric knob. Erard looked at his hostess critically, while she

threw herself, wilfully, into the pose.

“Not quite,” he announced, glancing at the portrait that faced them;

“not the final thing. Perhaps another year or two. The stone is harder

than I thought, and perhaps you have complicated the problem.”

Mrs. Wilbur refrained from pushing him to an explanation.

“And you have changed also: prosperity has altered _you_.”

“Yes, we take less tragedy in our portions as we go on. The pinnacle

doesn’t seem quite so distinguished, nor the abyss so awful, as it did

once. It is the middle light of life.”

“And your work? the painting?” she suggested eagerly.

“I paint less,” he replied uneasily. “Each season I mean to get at

it again, but the penalty of success in one effort is that you are

expected to repeat yourself. I am repeating myself.”

“Oh, you _mustn’t_ do that,” she replied pleadingly, understanding

that he referred to the success of his writing. She would have carried

protest further, but Mrs. Anthon intervened with a tardy guest who had

been hunting for her hostess.

“Ady, here is Mrs. Stevans. She’s been looking for you. Why are you hid

off here? You mustn’t flirt in the corners when you have friends to

look after.”

Mrs. Stevans was one of the most distinguished guests; Mrs. Wilbur

introduced Erard to her.

“_The_ Mr. Erard?” Mrs. Stevans beamed at him from the entrenchment of

her broad, uncovered shoulders and bosom. He looked positively dapper

and slim in comparison. “You are coming to tell us all about pictures.”

“Not so bad as that,” Erard protested.

“Why, it’s the Mr. Erard who painted your picture, Ady!” Mrs. Anthon

exclaimed.

“You must meet some of _them_ and talk with them,” Mrs. Wilbur said

quickly, to extricate him, and she led the group back to the large

rooms.

“I shall have you to dinner, and you must tell me all about my naughty

friend, Mrs. Warmister,” Mrs. Stevans shot at Erard as he moved away.

Then he found himself navigated about, presented to this important

person and that. The men received him with grave _empressement_. They

took it for granted that “he was a leading light in his line,” and

though they were not familiar with that line, they were propitious to

any prophet who had achieved success in it. In a remote corner Erard

bumped against Mr. Sebastian Anthon.

“So you’re back in America at last.” The old man greeted him cordially,

holding out a thin, trembling hand. “For long?”

“A few months,” Erard replied patronizingly; “to get an idea what it is

like. A vacation, you know, after my book.”

“Ah, yes,” the old man murmured thoughtfully. “It’s mostly books now,

isn’t it? instead of pictures.”

“Criticism absorbs me the more I think,” Erard admitted.

“A pity, it’s a pity, you know. Talk doesn’t amount to much--in

the end--all the talk in the world. I have a nephew over there in

London--Walter, a pretty boy. He does a lot of talking, clever boy. But

the thing, the main thing, is to feel.” He looked at Erard as if from

a distance, examining his shambling form and thin face to see whether

this fellow had it in him to feel.

Suddenly the music began once more, a fugue resurrected from some

German manuscript and given to the modern world for the first time by

the able young conductor. Erard took the opportunity to slide away from

Sebastian Anthon. He seemed to hear as an accompaniment to the grave

fugue the old man repeating, “A pity, it’s a pity!” Soon he was beyond

his tormentor, very near to the booming music. Mrs. Wilbur had arranged

the musical part of the evening, he concluded; she had shown positive

genius in knowing what would impress the public and make her “function”

remembered through the season. And the credentials of every selection

were printed out on a little programme.

Then came the food and drink, to which the guests devoted themselves

assiduously, earnestly, with what seemed to Erard an enormous reserve

force. Wilbur had looked out for the supper, and he also had calculated

well. In the billiard-room, where the men left their wraps, were

liquors and cigars, towards which from time to time the younger males

disappeared. This private-bar, in addition to the profuse champagne

served publicly, aroused Erard’s curiosity.

He tiptoed about, sniffing the new atmosphere. He came across Molly

Parker seated in a recess of the hall, enjoying equally her ice and a

sleepy, affable young man who was telling a long story. She looked very

attractive in a black gown, with long black gloves; the sombre colour

deepened the fairness of her skin and emphasized the great eyes that

were falling out in her excitement over the story and the ice. She

reached Erard her left hand, in a casual fashion.

“Don’t disturb yourself, Mr. Wren,” she said sweetly to the flabby

companion. “It’s only the new Parisian genius Mrs. Wilbur has imported,

Mr. Simeon Erard. He won’t spend more than two minutes on me, if he

does that.”

The young man rose pompously.

“Happy to meet you, Mr. _E_rard,--E_rard_, is it? And how do you find

Chicago?”

“Very good place as long as it likes him,” Miss Parker interposed

maliciously. “We will give you a lot of new sensations,” she went on,

“but they won’t always be pleasant.”

“There are some very fine things here in your line, I believe,” the old

young man continued ponderously.

At that moment Thornton Jennings appeared. Miss Parker promptly

introduced him to Erard. The younger man towered commandingly over

Erard’s head, while they shook hands without words, as if measuring

one another, and recognizing the valour that each possessed. At last

Jennings spoke, with a comprehensive, winning smile on his face.

“I am glad to have had this chance. I read your articles in the _Beaux

Arts_, and I have your new book. I have heard of you through a lot of

people over there. And there is another link between us,” he added less

spontaneously, “your brother has told me such a lot about your plans,

and your father--”

But Erard received these cordialities with a stony impassivity. He

was not in a mood to be reminded of his antecedents. Miss Parker had

been right in saying that all his sensations in Chicago would not be

pleasant ones.

At last the crowded rooms began to thin out. Supper disposed of,

conversation did not have sufficient excitements to hold one after

midnight with a prospective drive of perhaps six or eight miles. Erard

stood in the hall, one of the last to say good-night.

“They are so nice,” he remarked to his hostess, “especially the ladies;

they seem like such good mothers, so homely and unpretentious. I want

to sit right down with them, and talk over Mary and Jack, and the new

bay-window, and the clergyman riding a bicycle.”

“You had better not assume too much,” his hostess laughed. “You will

find that they can talk over the last salon, the new book on Rembrandt,

even your own articles. Don’t think you have measured their horizon

quite so easily.”

“Well, I hope they won’t open up often by asking me which is the

‘sacred’ and which the ‘profane’ love in Titian’s picture, as one young

woman did to-night,” Erard replied sulkily. “I had rather talk babies.”

“Have a cigar or something, Erard?” Wilbur asked, weary of this

prolonged tête-à-tête, and willing to patronize the young man of talent

who had no great house, no good champagne, no successful feasts to

give. Said young man of talent could come and admire the other kind of

talent that owned houses, horses, and champagne, and now and then, if

he were discreet in his views, he might be called upon for dinner to

enliven a party of lethargic good folk.

Erard looked at Wilbur coolly, as if weighing the chances of being

bored against the comforts of a cigar and a glass of hot whiskey.

“No, thanks,” he concluded indifferently. “I think I shall walk back

some thousand blocks to the hotel. I must be off to arrive before

breakfast.”

The family party lingered in the library while Wilbur finished his

cigar. Mrs. Wilbur flung herself wearily against the wall on the long,

red divan where she had been seated when Erard entered. If he had

seen her now with her restless hands roaming over the large bunch of

drooping roses, her eyes tired, not with physical exhaustion, but with

the perpetual play of half-thoughts that sap vitality like dreams,

the languor of the face at the time of triumph, he would not have

said,--“Wait two years.”

“Well,” Wilbur broke the silence as his wife offered no remark, “I

think our racket was an A 1 success. The house looked fine. The music

was unusual, and the food was stunning.”

“Yes,” his wife assented. “They seemed to enjoy themselves.”

“Old Bailey and Fernald were here with their wives. I didn’t expect

that,” he reflected complacently. “But the judge didn’t come. Mrs.

Linton was here, and that married daughter of hers. The judge didn’t

come, though!”

“Judge Linton’s rheumatism confines him to the house,” Mrs. Wilbur

replied comfortingly.

“Did you notice Mrs. Stevans’s diamonds? She is a fine-looking,

well-set-up woman. I had a long talk with her. She may be a little

gay, but she has a first-rate head. She was asking about the Bad Lands

Company.”

Sebastian Anthon sat near the fire smoking a long cigarette, a habit

he had maintained in spite of the brick interests, and eyeing Wilbur

keenly.

“I suppose,” he spoke languidly, “this is the top of the hill. You are

pretty young to have got there already. You’ll have to spend the rest

of your life trying not to roll off.”

“It’s a big success, Ady. I am proud of you.” Mrs. Anthon crossed the

room and kissed her daughter effusively. “You have done everything just

as I would have had you do,--married well, and had a family”--here she

prophesied, except for little Sebastian, unless he could be called a

“family,”--“and have this elegant house, and--”

“Let me show you your room, uncle!” Mrs. Wilbur followed the old man,

who seemed to be fleeing from the volubility of his sister-in-law.

“It’s so large I lose myself,” he explained as his niece put her arm

under his. “What do you do when you want to be at home and not in a

hotel? Well, Adela, I didn’t think the explosion would end in this!”

She looked at him wistfully. “Nor I, Uncle Seb!”

“Not that it isn’t quite what you should do. But it doesn’t seem to

suit you. Most things don’t suit in this world, Adela. We are a lot of

misfits, a lot of misfits.”

She put her arms around his neck affectionately. “You should have

married me, Uncle Seb! We would have exploded together.”

“Yes, that would have been fun. How splendid you are!” he exclaimed

wearily as she turned on the electric lights in his suite of rooms. “Do

you think of water-hoister and brick-stock and Bad Lands and all your

other investments when you lie in those beds?” He noticed her sad eyes,

and added, “You are splendid too, little girl.”

“No. I see Wrightington on the walls.”

“Who the devil is Wrightington?”

But she had hastily left the room. When she returned to the library,

Mrs. Anthon went yawningly to her chamber, leaving husband and wife

alone. Suddenly Mrs. Wilbur asked him, “Are you content with it?”

“Why, of course. Who would have thought four years ago in Paris that we

should be sitting here!” He continued rather fatuously on the theme of

their success. He was thirty-three, and he had done better than very

well. To be sure, he had had his wife’s little capital as well as his

own push in the Hoister Company, and he always paid full recognition to

her share in their fortune. To-night he had demonstrated publicly what

he could do. As he finished his cigar and rose to put out the lights,

he observed casually,--

“Adela, I thought you toted that Erard round a good deal. Why can’t you

let him do his own pushing? If he were a first-rate gun, a Whistler or

a Sargent, or what is that fellow Mrs. Stevans had, Raf--Raffelly--it

would be worth while. But we can’t shove _him_ on our shoulders all the

time. And I think you ought to drop supporting him. It would not be a

very fine thing to have known around.”

The last remark revealed one of Wilbur’s new social anxieties which

were puzzling to his wife.

“It is a curious convention,” she observed bitterly, “that a woman may

be intimate with her husband’s friends, but must not even pretend to

know her own unless the husband has indorsed them. The four hundred

pounds I have paid to Erard’s bankers has always come from my private

fortune.”

“If you put it on that ground,” Wilbur answered airily, and then

indulgently, “you have always had your own way, and if you don’t mind

the false position--”

Mrs. Wilbur looked at him. Men like Wilbur, endowed with the best

intentions and the invaluable qualities which perpetuate a democracy,

should know when to refrain in handling women.

“This talk about Mr. Erard is--too vulgar. I shall ask him to luncheon

here to-morrow to arrange for his lectures. And I will find an

opportunity to withdraw my--my assistance in his work.”

She turned away into the hall. The house was all dark now save for

the glimmer of a gas-jet in the lower hall. The warm air, scented by

the profuse hot-house flowers, made a peculiar odour that permeated

even to the bedchambers. The place seemed tomb-like in its dark expanse

of vacant rooms. The suggestion of the tomb made the mistress smile

grimly: a tomb that had to be carried on and lived in by the ghosts of

the living. And what made the gates of this modern tomb so intangible,

so strong to enclose? Nothing, yet everything.

CHAPTER VI

Meanwhile Erard, in company with Molly Parker, whom he had offered

to escort around the corner, had gained the silent boulevard. The

arc-lights cast circular patches of bluish white on the gravel walks

and the frosty lawns before the big houses. The line of electric lamps

extended, like a citified milky way, into the indefinite distance of

the metropolis, which slept now for a few minutes. Above hung the soft

edges of the smoke-pall.

“Ugh!” shivered Erard. “It is beastly empty, this never-ending city of

yours. Down one of these straight perpetual streets one might expect to

be chased by an army of ghosts. If I saw a man in the distance--”

“You needn’t be afraid,” his companion interrupted lightly. “To be

sure, there are a good many ‘hold-ups’ on the streets. A man was almost

killed on that corner a month ago, and all he had was seventy-five

cents. But if any one comes, I will scream, and you can run to the

nearest house for assistance.”

Suddenly Miss Parker whisked around the corner of a vacant lot into a

cross street as desolate as it was lonely. The defective boarding of

the rotting plank walk necessitated gingerly progress.

“This new cosmopolis has been in such a hurry that it has neglected to

make its toilette,” Erard remarked.

“I wish that you hadn’t come to Chicago!” Miss Parker flamed out.

“Why! I am a most perfervid admirer of all I have seen except the

lonely stretches in the streets and the holes in the sidewalks.”

“You are only amusing yourself and getting material for a bundle of

epigrams. You haven’t any sympathy or understanding. I hate to see you

using your eye-glass on the people who made all this and are making it!”

“Am I so lost?” Erard replied with an amused laugh.

“You people in art and lovers of new ideas really talk a lot of

nonsense. I have heard enough of it to know. But here we are. Thank you

for your escort, and good-night.”

Erard turned back to the boulevard. Plunging his hands into his pockets

and tying the hood of his cape over his head, he prepared for a long

tramp through the silent city. On, on he sauntered, at the loitering

pace of a Parisian, past the huge isolated houses with tidy front walks

of patented concrete, each block squared artificially to resemble

stone, but carrying somewhere the tell-tale firm-mark in brass; past

the narrow wedges of high apartment houses, faced with pretentious

stone and finished in the frank homeliness of unburnt brick, with

scaffolded ends looming barrack-like in the alleys; past the rows of

low brick stores, built out like booths from the old line of retiring

wood-cottages. This section of compromise between business and home was

most disfiguring of all in its ragged expression. Erard felt relieved

when the square fronts of the business blocks began to loom up in the

fog and smoke of the lower city. Here an enormous windowless wall of

an armoury; next door the thin sides of a carriage factory; further on

the spidery lines of a hotel. Thus for two miles until the sky-scrapers

towered in the chill fog.

“Superb, superb,” he murmured to himself. “I must have walked five

miles, and not a building, not a dog-hutch, where there is an idea

expressed beyond size, convenience, and either the possession of money

or the desire for it. It is a new race, a new world.”

It had roused his curiosity, this Chicago, from the first peep he had

had on the train of the roaring city. Miss Parker was quite wrong in

imagining him hostile to the place or its people. He was wondering over

them perpetually, as a man would wonder who is enabled by a powerful

lens to take into his consciousness a new planet where he finds that

his ideas of propriety have been entirely reversed. Such a novel

discovery could cause in _him_ neither pain nor pleasure. If some

one should come along the shore of this new world and bellow at him

that he was beholding the last utterance of creation, he would laugh

good-humouredly at the newcomer’s provinciality.

What a pother they made, these women especially, over duties and

enjoyments! His certainties were hard and sure, thank God! An exquisite

curve, a subtle mixture of colour in a landscape, the power expressed

in a moulded limb, or the richness of a flesh tint--that sent _his_

blood rushing a little faster, gave him a fuller sense of actual

existence. He sneered at all transcendental or religious interpretation

of these pleasures. He was willing to place his delight in the woman

of paint along with the delights that a merely sensual and gross man

might find in the same woman. His were more delicate, more lingering

sensations--that was all. In the same way he was willing to grant

the business man his sphere--let him be a gourmand of action; or the

religious man, his emotion over the fate of the world. But beyond the

sensation--whatever it might be--_nothing_. Only stupid, crude people

or hypocrites pretended there was a beyond.

And so Adela Wilbur gave him no romantic excitement. She was an

interesting combination of nerves. Possibly she would find out,

after trying life all round, that her greatest vitality came through

cultivating her æsthetic sensorium. If she did, he could be of help to

her. That such a discovery at this point might produce a smash, some

turmoil in the affections and relationships of life, did not concern

him. This was a jarring world,--one must expect to dodge boulders,--but

to consider as the boulders, even when they were so-called duties and

affections, that was stupid. It was a pity that she hadn’t found out

earlier what was best for her, that she should go blundering about

with her fine powers. Four years ago he had thought her too raw; had,

indeed, advised her to do just what she had done--and possibly found

tedious. If she should seek his opinion again, however, he should tell

her to start once more, with her eyes open.

Erard was not without the male satisfaction in bearing rule over

women. Other men, he reflected, would have exulted at the thought of

her beautiful self, at the mystery of her restless face,--but he was

tranquil over mere flesh and blood. He preferred to own her mind,

rather than her person. The delight of binding her will, of leading her

across the laws of convention, of conquering _her_, was keener to him

than any vulgar emotion of possession.

His revery was disturbed by the night-clerk in the hotel, who handed

him his key, with a confidential leer.

“You’ve made a night of it, sir.”

“Now,” Erard mused, “_her_ crowd have the same ideas as this smart

young fellow. They suspect I want to run away with Mrs. Wilbur in a

buggy. That was what the little Parker wanted to say to me.”

“There’s a young fellow been hanging around here for you most of the

night,” the clerk continued. “He was over there by the window.”

Erard turned sharply, scowling. But the young man had gone. As he

entered the elevator, he muttered.

“But it is about time to close money matters with _her_.”

* * * * *

The next day at luncheon Erard had a better opportunity to study Mrs.

Wilbur. Sebastian Anthon, who was developing the irritability of age,

had held that there was no peace in Chicago, and hearing that Erard

was expected for luncheon he had slipped away home. Mrs. Anthon had

remained at Field’s absorbed in shopping. So the two were left to

themselves.

Erard was delighted with this morning view of Mrs. Wilbur,--her serious

face alert, her rich dark dress fitting close to the white neck and

curling hair. She gave him a charming sensation of being a woman,

neither a girl nor a case in social psychology. He would like to paint

her again as she sat, her luncheon untouched, eagerly outlining her

scheme for the lectures. He also appreciated the capable manner in

which she treated the social and financial sides of the affair.

After luncheon, she took him into her private library. The portrait, he

noticed, had been removed. When the lecture-course had been settled,

Mrs. Wilbur led the talk to his work.

“Of course,” she remarked abruptly, “I understood your plans only

generally when we talked about them in Paris. But I have been thinking

a lot about your painting less. It has made me sad. Almost like losing

one of my own faculties.”

Erard hastened to extenuate his course, and ended lightly. “You have

stood by me four years almost. Now I think I can go it alone, as you

would say over here.”

Mrs. Wilbur, remembering with a start her promise to her husband, felt

relieved, yet protested until Erard explained that his writings brought

him a small income. He did not state that the amount thus received was

not large enough to keep him in cigarettes and note-paper. She was

grateful to him for having saved them both from an unpleasant topic,

which must have left sordid reflections.

“And your book,” Mrs. Wilbur continued. “It was impossible over here

to follow you closely. One grows so rusty in a few months, not seeing

things to train the eye. Then the importance of a new Liberale or Mazo

seems less vital here than one might expect.”

That led them on into a long talk, in which Mrs. Wilbur betrayed with

less and less restraint her irritation with her environment, her

disgust with “drawing-room art,” and with democratic ideals and joys.

Erard amused himself by gaily defending her old aspirations. “You

should go in for immense charities, civic organizations, education--and

the rest of the housekeeping for the ‘people.’ We over there,” he

tweaked his head in the direction of Lake Michigan, “are nearly played

out. They will either smash all the good buildings, or pull them down

piecemeal in the process of ‘restoring’; the pictures will be gone in

another hundred years--there’s almost nothing that is original paint

now left on the old masters. Sculpture will be locked up safely in

museums for archæologists. And Science--that refuge for the commonplace

mind--will reign Supreme in a mighty democracy. Science will then go

forth with its tin dinner-pail, the emblem of equality, not annoyed by

the twaddle of sentimentalists like you and me. Decidedly, you should

get in line with your times.”

“Don’t sneer at me, please. I could make every sacrifice--almost--for

something beautiful. One great valley, all green at its feet, with

a barrier of hills in the clouds and snow, or just one peaceful old

English field with a lot of trees. Or a sight of that--this is so

silly!” She felt as if tears stood in her eyes.

“No,” Erard paused, leaning over the back of a chair and searching her

face. “That is the distressing part of us Americans; we all apologize

for such emotions, as if we should be ashamed of having them.”

“I shall not have them long. I am a woman and take on the colour of my

habitation.”

“You are a woman and will die hard--unless you make a dash for the open

air, for freedom.” He spoke tranquilly, with calculation. Mrs. Wilbur

started as though he had blundered upon a secret, not confessed even to

herself.

“Freedom! I have been making disturbances all my life to be free. And

what have I done? I am not worth it.”

“Some people must get their freedom, no matter how they take it!”

“It isn’t merely the art, or the excitement of intellectual life, which

I crave so much. There are other things no one can know. I am sinking,

sinking--”

“Why struggle so futilely? Isn’t there a simpler, more direct way?”

Erard fixed his eyes on her face while he made his proposal of

mastership. Mrs. Wilbur flushed slowly without speaking. He continued

after a momentary pause, “If you crave the _other_ life.” And the

silence seemed to say, if you would consent to the adultery of minds;

if you would become once more my follower, my pupil. “This _is_

mephitic for some people, you and me for example,” Erard went on

slowly, “who have the necessity to think and feel, who care only for

thought and feeling.”

How far her pent-up soul would have pushed her it is hard to say, if

Molly Parker, looking about the house for Mrs. Wilbur, had not found

them at this juncture, with intent, serious faces, hushed with their

talk. She slipped over to her friend, and taking the earnest face

daintily between her hands, kissed it here and there.

“Getting yourself all fussed up over art and emotions,” she commented

with imperturbable freedom. “You don’t know that there’s been a great

fire over in the stockyards district; burned out four blocks. A whole

village full of people are homeless. You can still see the light in the

sky from the west windows.”

From the dining-room windows the angry glow against the dull sky

seemed only a few blocks away. Now and then a stream of full-bodied,

serpentlike fire leapt up to lick a stretch of wall still standing.

Then as a black stream of water fell on the fire, there was a momentary

darkness until the caldron light from the interior shot the ascending

smoke and steam with a lovely, controlled glow.

“It looks so near,” Molly Parker shivered. “Oh! the poor people!”

“It must be four miles away,” Mrs. Wilbur answered.

“Rebellious nature,” murmured Erard, glancing at Mrs. Wilbur. “An

uncaged element goes roaring forth, hotly devouring the idle works of

man.”

“A year ago,” Mrs. Wilbur remarked, “when the strikers set fire to the

cars on the Panhandle tracks, it was more awful. It was a hot July

night and the city had been lowering all day; no one knew what might

happen. Suddenly at dusk the whole horizon flamed up with a fierce

streak of red. Imagine the mobs of men and women hooting about the

flaming cars and the soldiers driving them back. Such terrible naked

passions came to the surface!”

“Yes,” Molly Parker assented. “I never knew before how necessary it is

for us all to behave ourselves; how little it would need to smash this

civilization we take for granted.”

“Chicago had a chance to see what democracy really is,” Erard scoffed.

“It’s like dynamite. Everything is placid until you drop it; then there

is an upheaval and the sky gets lurid. The question is how much of this

social dynamite you can carry without dropping it.”

“I can’t see what Chicago has to do with it,” Molly Parker retorted

defiantly.

“Only that there is rather more dynamite here than in most places. The

average man is your tin-god. When some day there are too many average

men, and they all think stupidly that they have the same rights to an

average kind of easy living, why, you’re going to have a portentous

row, for a democracy is at the bottom irreligious and unidealistic.

The ‘people’ will not starve patiently and pathetically while the

successful neighbour builds his palace.”