“Well,” Miss Parker announced finally, “the less talk about it the

better. I guess Chicago will find a way out of its troubles. And I like

the men who put their shoulders to the democratic wheel; it’s the only

one that goes to-day anyhow.”

Erard laughed indifferently. The smoke was rolling up now a purple

black, shot occasionally with cardinal red.

“I believe I will wander over there. I should like to get the effect of

that tawny colour near at hand.”

When he had left them Miss Parker broke out impatiently, tapping her

foot against the floor.

“Such an inhuman way to take things! To watch that awful fire merely to

get a sensation in reds and blacks! He would come to my funeral just to

see the effect of the black coffin, the green sward, and the minister’s

white gown. He makes me think of a mushy green caterpillar, stuffed

out with nice sensations, improperly assimilated. There he goes down

Forty-fourth street, picking his way and squinting at the houses.”

“You shouldn’t begrudge anybody a glimpse of beauty here in Chicago,

even if it takes four blocks and a million to make it,” Mrs. Wilbur

laughed in a hard, set manner. “We were talking about that--what

sacrifices to make for the mind and the sense of the beautiful--when

you came in.”

Molly Parker seized her hand impulsively.

“Adela, _don’t_,--don’t indulge yourself in sentiment of that sort.”

“What?”

“About being unhappy here in this strong new world. You have chosen

to live here, and you have shown how able you are. Do let yourself be

happy.” She glanced involuntarily at the rich room.

“I hate it,” Mrs. Wilbur said coldly, noticing her glance. “But how

stirred up you are. I am not contemplating anything desperate.”

“You will. You are just the kind to shock the whole world, to make

yourself wretched for life and your friends too, because you have

worked yourself into some exalted fancy. Why can’t you drop problems

and sensations and the ends of life--and live like a good human being

from hour to hour. Sometime you will find that in your anxiety to get

just the best, you have lost even the common good. Here is your house,

your child, your husband--”

“Yes,” the older woman agreed wearily. “Why do I make such a fuss? Why

do you and the others bother about me?”

“I suppose because we love you. You don’t deserve it, but there it is,

the mystery. Your friends are anxious that you should have all the

bothers taken away, that you should be at your best and happy.”

“My friends! They had better give up trying.”

“Your Uncle Sebastian, Mr. Jennings, and I--”

“Thornton Jennings!” Mrs. Wilbur repeated the name wistfully. “There is

a soul--I haven’t seen him for weeks.”

“Promise me that you will let me know if you ever think of doing

anything desperate.”

Mrs. Wilbur laughed and kissed her. “I’ll take you along too, to look

after me.”

While they made ready for the dinner-party of the evening, the talk

ran on in the commonplace channels of dress and dinner guests. Mrs.

Wilbur’s face cleared, and she became that object rarely seen of

men,--a woman’s woman absorbed in trivialities. From dress they got to

the kindergarten, to Molly’s latest suitors,--especially to Thornton

Jennings. Him they discussed from every point of view, Molly detailing

bits of conversation, his personal habits, gossip about him by other

women. All the odds and ends which, unknown to a man, go to make the

picture he presents to the woman of his adoration.

“I don’t know him!” the younger woman exclaimed at last. “How is this,

Adela, _bien porté_?” She shook herself into her evening dress. “When

he begins to make love I shall know,--it would be nicer if they had

made the skirt the least bit fuller.”

“I don’t think so, but if you want, Jane can let it out. John says Ikel

and Wren are awfully clever and successful.”

“One doesn’t marry a man’s brains altogether,--yes, do send Jane,--one

runs off with clever men.”

They could hear already the slight commotion of the household,

preparing itself for the function of the day. Mrs. Wilbur at last

hurried away to her own dressing-room.

There was talk that night at dinner of the fire and the severe loss it

meant to Packington; of the new tariff bill, which was dragging its

soiled body tediously through the weeks; of the tremulous condition

of the money market; and, among the women sitting lethargically

over coffee in the library, some gossip of the coming lectures, of

Calve’s latest escapade, and lastly of the difficulties of English

men-servants. Mrs. Wilbur’s mind wandered back to Erard and the

interrupted talk of the afternoon. Even the money market, with the

prospect of another hard year threatened by the scandalous ignorance of

a number of irresponsible little men at Washington, could not seem to

her as vital as the strange evening glow in a half-faded picture that

hung in a room four thousand miles away. Until that glow faded entirely

from the lovely fields, and the warm flesh tints of the naked figures

went out altogether into the darkness of unconceived things, there

would exist in the world a comforting, happy idea for all who passed

that way heedingly.

CHAPTER VII

The lectures went admirably. Mrs. Wilbur’s house was crowded every

Wednesday morning for the eight weeks of the course with “the most

prominent and fashionable leaders among Chicago women.” The new house

did something to attract; the lecturer himself more, having the skill

to hold the curiosity of his audience with his novel point of view,

while he tickled the sensibilities of the most intelligent. Then the

gossip about Erard’s old intimacy with Mrs. Wilbur added sauce to the

affair. Given that basis for elaboration in any other great city, an

acrid scandal would have fermented rapidly; Chicago was sensible and

tolerant. For the irrationality of any serious entanglement between

the clever, prosperous, and rising Mrs. Wilbur and the personally

unprepossessing and penniless young man, who in professional standing

was rather like a dancing-master, was too apparent to need statement.

As the lectures drew to a close, other matters occupied Mrs. Wilbur’s

attention. Her child gave her anxiety. Then a letter from her Uncle

Sebastian, a pathetic arrangement of his affairs on paper, had

disturbed her. A telegram from St. Louis summoned her the eve of the

last lecture. She hurried away with a forlorn feeling at the heart.

Somehow Uncle Sebastian, sparing of words as he had been, was a pillar

of sympathy. How much alone she should be without him!

She found him very feeble--placid as ever, with an increased distance

of abstraction in his face. He smiled on seeing her, and the next day

collected himself enough to say something about his affairs.

“You will have most of it--a respectable fortune.” Later he said with a

sigh, “I’ve had misgivings about Erard,--the way I treated him. Perhaps

I drove him to give up doing anything worth while.”

His niece comprehended this wistful thought, and the desire to give

Erard help even if he should make nothing of himself. As the old man

got ready to die, the eternal desirability of success, of making a

stir in this patchy world of ours, seemed less self-evident. To know

something beautiful, to make others know it,--best of all to create a

new beautiful thing, a bit of colour, a union of tones, a fine line,

that was perhaps the only solace for much pain.

Mrs. Anthon had taken her brother-in-law in hand more vigorously since

her daughter’s marriage. And at seventy Sebastian Anthon felt that

it was hardly worth while to protest against his environment. He had

compromised with himself for his life of ineffective respectability by

leaving his money largely to his niece, whom he regarded as the most

enlightened member of his family.

“You can throw it away somehow,” he explained, weakly.

“Yes,” Mrs. Wilbur answered soothingly, “I will help people to explode,

and _I_ will see that _he_--”

“No, you cannot do anything for him now.”

Later he raised himself enough to say querulously, “Why did _you_ marry

Wilbur?”

She smiled sadly.

“But it will be _your_ money, not Wilbur’s. And perhaps,” an amused and

slightly wicked smile crept over his face, “there will not always be a

Wilbur.” That seemed to be his hope in leaving her this money.

Then he had been content to lie without speaking, his hand resting in

hers. A few hours later, when he had died, she fancied that the face,

instead of looking at her emptily, spoke again frankly. “There are few

great things in this troublesome life. Don’t live to be old and miss

them.” She kissed the white cheek and left him to sleep undistracted

and appeased.

Her anxiety for her child made her leave immediately after the funeral.

A few days later she received an account of the will. The only item she

found much interest in was a legacy to Molly Parker--a thousand a year

to add to her tiny income. “Dear old uncle,” she thought, “he knew she

would like it best just this way from his hand, not mine.”

Every thought now centred on the little Sebastian; her child seemed a

refuge, the remnant of her former life. He bound her to her husband,

to the pledges she had made, and she could not contemplate a future

without that bond. All her rebellion over the child’s coming maddened

her. How futile she had been! Through him, she was responsible to a

world that had some elements of gracious affection in it. So she passed

the days in a hush, where every breath from the feeble little body

sounded separately in her ears and sent a twinge of pain and reproach

into her whole being. She could not cry over it--that was not her

way; she could see people and carry about a cold, impassive face. Her

hardness frightened Molly Parker.

“Don’t you care?” she exclaimed impulsively, bluntly.

“Care?” The word echoed back as if sounded from her whole tense being.

“It is most myself that is going.” But her husband was puzzled to find

her so “unfeeling.”

One windy afternoon in the early spring she came to the library and

led him, with a firm step, to the child’s room, where they sat without

speaking until the low breathing ceased with a flutter.

“It is over,” she explained, in a matter-of-fact voice. She took a

little shawl and laid it softly over the child as if it might be cold.

Then she rested the head gently on the pillow and stood quietly looking

at her child.

“Adela.” Wilbur had put an arm about her waist to comfort her. His eyes

were wet. She looked at him blankly, wonderingly.

“It is over,” she repeated slowly, looking back at the child. Then

disentangling herself from her husband’s arm she said “Come,” and

opened the door.

Wilbur followed, amazed and hurt, feeling that his attempts to be near

her in their trouble had been repulsed. Her mood was the same the

next day when he had kissed her and spoken hopefully of the life that

was yet before them. If bereaved now, checked in their full tide of

possession, why, the years would bring them other children. Theirs was

a common grief.

She had looked at him vacantly, as if he had been talking of an

outsider, or some small possession that had been and now was gone to be

replaced by another. “It is over,” she repeated, “gone.” She wondered

if he could understand that some things went, never to return.

Thus he had his grief, a good, honest grief, his tears and his

sentiment over his firstborn. Then hopeful physical sanity, the round

of living, obliterated the slight scar. But the event left him with a

sore, puzzled feeling over his wife. She had been growing so stately,

so cold and forbidding. Tacked away in his mind was a memory of the

talk at Remsen’s, and something told him that his trouble dated from

that night.

He was wrong. It dated some generations back, and it mattered little

when the breach declared itself. It was there, and widening in little

ways. It was a relief to him when, a few weeks after the child’s death,

his wife brought about a business talk.

“You know Uncle Seb left me almost all his money?” Wilbur nodded.

“It’s in bricks, and for some personal reasons I don’t think I care to

disturb it. It might have been for the child, you know, and now it can

lie until I see my way to using it. But I should like to use my own

fortune, if you can convert the investments to cash.”

Wilbur waited attentively. He was preparing to leave for his office:

the brougham was standing outside on the clean white flags.

“I should like to turn over to you just what this place cost, one

hundred and fifty thousand, wasn’t it? If there is anything left of my

fortune, you can put it to my credit.”

“Buy the house?” Wilbur asked, puzzled.

“Yes,--if you have no objections.”

“I planned to give it to you clear of all mortgage in June, as a

birthday present.”

“Oh! no, you _mustn’t_ do that.”

“Why not?”

Mrs. Wilbur left her breakfast and walked nervously across the room. “I

shouldn’t feel quite right about it.”

Wilbur flashed out what was in his mind.

“Your old nonsense over the traction stocks!”

“We had better not go into that matter. After all, I suppose it is only

a question of form, but I should like to feel that as long as I live

here, my home represents my money.”

“So you put yourself off from me, and what is good enough for me isn’t

for you.”

Mrs. Wilbur looked at him coldly.

“We disagreed: you don’t understand my position.”

“I’ll be hanged if I do.”

“Will you sell the house?”

Wilbur got up to leave in a pet. Then his good-nature returned,--it was

all such a ridiculously small matter.

“Why, of course, Ada; it only amounts to a change of name in the

stocks. I’ll bring you the deeds in a few days.”

He kissed her lightly and left the room. She opened her letters one by

one, absent-mindedly, tossing the envelopes into the fire. Then she

ordered her carriage, and gathering up the mass of loose notes, went to

her library. She could not straighten out the difficulty merely by a

transfer of names on some pieces of paper.

CHAPTER VIII

When Mrs. Wilbur returned after the death of her child to the world

of clubs and visits, she learned that Erard had been invited to

Minneapolis and Omaha to deliver lectures. She heard rumours that he

was considering “taking up a permanent residence” in America as curator

for a museum of art in some western city. The idea struck her as so

ideally humorous that she felt it must have emanated from Erard. In the

early spring he appeared in Chicago, this time visiting Mrs. Stevans

and “getting acquainted” quite thoroughly. When he attended the opera

in Mrs. Stevans’s box, the vast hall of knowing neighbours remarked:

“There’s Mrs. Wilbur’s Erard.”

Public opinion over Erard was divided. He did not create such a

sensation as his advent before the Fair might have excited. Chicago

had become cloyed with real celebrities that came and stayed and dined

for long weeks. When the men met him at dinners and receptions, they

treated him well enough, but without cordiality. They thought him a

kind of adventurer who dealt in the frills of life. Therefore, he was

consigned to the women as an emasculated specimen.

Mrs. Wilbur’s mind came back to Erard frequently. She envied his air of

detachment, and she scrutinized minutely all his enigmatic talk to her

in half-phrases of tantalizing irony. He was identified with the other

life of the mind and spirit, the craving for which was getting hold of

her again. He was a repository of elusive sensations towards which she

looked and hungered.

She met him at this period, inadvertently, on an occasion that gave

emphasis to his power. She had driven to a distant point on the North

Side, and on the return her carriage was stopped as the coachman

attempted to turn into Michigan Avenue. It was well past noon, yet the

streets were thronged with people. Soon the strains of a military band

could be heard from the north. Then she remembered that her husband

had said something about a monument to be dedicated on the Lake front,

and she recalled the fact that tickets had been sent them for the

ceremonies. These she had handed over to Molly Parker, not caring

to broil for an hour in the sun for the sake of hearing the windy

eloquence of war oratory. That she should have forgotten the event,

which had been talked about for months, showed how little interest her

neighbours’ affairs had for her. It was too late to turn back now; the

street had packed in close behind with vehicles and spectators. She

settled herself to the delay with a languid curiosity. Fortunately her

carriage had been intercepted at the verge of the avenue where the

procession was to pass, and through the lowered window she could easily

survey the whole scene.

The high buildings about were black with people. At her right the large

casements of the Metropolis Club were swung open, and she caught

sight of a number of gentlemen smoking comfortably in armchairs. On

the street the people jammed up to the wheels of the carriage--a

motley crowd of business men, clerks, boys, and women. They stared

into her brougham with frank curiosity and exchanged remarks about the

equipage. Mrs. Wilbur felt as if she ought to alight and stand with the

others; somehow in this city and at this ceremony the luxury of her

horses and carriage was misplaced. But her eyes were held by the soft

blue sky, and the lake-water freshening in the gentle wind. Between

her and the lake, off a little to one side, was the scaffolding for

ticket-holders, already black with people, and in the centre the canvas

tent surrounding the new statue of the warrior.

The music came nearer; the banks of spectators on the avenue surged

back before the platoon of police. In the jam that resulted she caught

sight of Erard’s thin figure, swayed back into a doorway near her

carriage. He soon detected her, and edging his way into the press, he

succeeded in gaining the carriage, where he stood by the open window,

resting his body against the wheel. By this time the police had passed,

and the first band; next came a few irregular lines of veterans who

were cheered enthusiastically.

“I wonder how they’ll do it,” Erard shouted into the carriage. “Mrs.

Stevans gave me a ticket, but I was too late to secure my seat.”

Mrs. Wilbur nodded. The veterans had been succeeded by the barouches

in which the officials of the occasion were driven. Then came

the governors of the neighbouring states, surrounded by their

suites,--civilians who sat awkwardly on their horses. Each state

was cheered, by the boisterous crowd, as its representative passed.

Suddenly the cheers changed to derisive howls, laughter, and hoots.

“What is the matter?” Mrs. Wilbur leaned out of her carriage as far as

possible to see what had disturbed the decorum of the occasion.

“They’ve got a kind of buffoon,” Erard answered. “The gentleman hasn’t

a good seat.”

“That is the governor of Illinois,” Mrs. Wilbur exclaimed, blushing

unconsciously at the spectacle. “Oh, it’s a shame--here of all

times--before the people.”

“They don’t seem to like it--the people,” Erard remarked, as low cries

of “Shame, shame,” rose on all sides.

“Why, this is a public disgrace before the world!” Mrs. Wilbur seemed

to take the affair personally.

“He has other bad habits, I have heard.” Erard spoke jauntily. Mrs.

Wilbur looked at him with startled eyes. “What have you heard?”

“If all one hears is only a quarter true, your governor should be

accompanied by his familiar spirit, his Mephisto of the golden touch.”

“What do you mean?” Mrs. Wilbur had an irrational apprehension in her

voice.

“Why, they name the exact figure he received from Mephisto for his

soul--if he has one. The _Thunderer_ came out with it this morning in

dollars and cents, one hundred thousand odd.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Wilbur turned her face away as if personally relieved. “Mere

newspaper stories. Dick doesn’t like him.”

Erard shrugged his shoulders sceptically. “Others say it beside

‘Capitalist Dick.’ And it is a picturesque fable anyway: it all suits.”

He motioned down the avenue whither the reeling figure of the governor

had disappeared. “Drunk with wine and wealth: your democracy has

reached a wallowing era.”

“That cannot be true.” Mrs. Wilbur returned to the _Thunderer’s_

accusation. Erard looked at her ironically, as if amused at her

earnestness.

“One hears it elsewhere. It comes pretty straight. Your fat Mephisto

selected an agent, a young society man, who let it out over _his_ cups.”

Mrs. Wilbur was silent. The procession wound on, with companies of

regular troops and boyish-looking militia, then endless organizations

of labour in black suits, carrying many little banners. By this time

the press about the carriage relaxed; the street became once more

passable.

“I am on my way home,” Mrs. Wilbur remarked. “If you are going south, I

will take you.”

Erard accepted the offered seat, and the coachman began the intricate

process of retreat. “I have not seen you for a long time.” Erard looked

at his companion closely.

“No! It’s been a strange year! And now I hear news of your accepting us

permanently.”

Erard smiled. “I shall spend next winter in Rome.”

She sighed.

“And _you_?”

“Here, I suppose, unless the impossible happens.”

The carriage had gained the avenue once more beyond the procession.

They could hear the booming of the cannon from the ships in the

harbour: the speeches had begun.

“I thought,” Erard continued slowly, “you were arranging yourself for

another career.”

Mrs. Wilbur blushed unreasonably.

“I had almost begun to count on your help in my next work.” She said

nothing, thus inviting him to explain his meaning. “You mustn’t throw

yourself away. You are too fine for--this.” His gesture was expressive.

“Too feeble, rather,” she protested.

“You will never gain peace until your mind is satisfied.”

He seemed to read her thoughts, to have accompanied her these past

months, and now to say the fitting, final word.

“It would take a great deal--a catastrophe--to move me. Woman’s modesty

is one-half inertia.”

“The catastrophe has come, perhaps.”

Mrs. Wilbur shook her head. “I don’t know. Yet sometimes I think so.”

They were silent until the carriage reached the boulevard where the

Wilburs’ house was situated.

“You have given up painting!” Mrs. Wilbur exclaimed irrelevantly. “I am

so sorry for that. Doing, even feeble doing, seems to me so much more

real than all this criticism.”

“On the contrary,” Erard remarked, “the critic is the comprehensive,

the understanding, the sensuous soul. The desire to ‘do,’ as you call

it, is an egotistical conceit, and generally a desire for notoriety.”

“Perhaps in part,” Mrs. Wilbur admitted, thinking momentarily of her

husband.

“The one thing in life is to enjoy.” Erard watched her closely to

observe how she would take this frank hedonism.

“No, not that,” she protested. “I cannot accept your view.”

“Make all the pretty phrases about it you can,”--Erard shrugged his

shoulders,--“it comes to that. You know it.”

Mrs. Wilbur shook her head. “Then we are beasts!”

“Superior beasts, yes.”

The carriage drew up at the door of the great house. In the dazzling

atmosphere of this June day the stone seemed whiter, harder than ever.

It had taken on very little stain or age.

“I have brought you a mile beyond your destination. The man will drive

you back.”

“No!” Erard refused. “The air is really too fine.”

Mrs. Wilbur turned to mount the white steps, then lingered. She looked

at Erard, her mind passing over his shambling figure and lustreless

features on to the sweet garden of delights with which somehow she

had, strangely enough, identified him. A rush of feeling, of longing

unutterable for the beautiful, for the dream, surged through her heart.

Oh! for one moment of escape from these endless avenues, from this

flaunting city, from Wrightington and money, and, yes, her husband!

To hold once more the holy peace of beauty and with it to still her

rebellious heart.

Erard seemed to wait for something.

“You will call?” she asked at length.

He looked annoyed; he had expected a more significant result from their

talk.

“Yes, I think so, very soon. In a fortnight I shall be shaking the

dust--”

“I _must_ see you again. It is all such a tangle!”

As Erard turned down the boulevard, he met Wilbur, and raised his hat,

rather vacantly.

CHAPTER IX

Among the men who had been watching the procession from the comfortable

armchairs of the Metropolis Club was John Wilbur. He had recently

been received as a member,--an event deeply gratifying to him. In his

“hustling years,” as he called the period before the opening of the

new house, he had not thought much about clubs. But success translated

itself this way. He had become much more zealous for all possible

social distinctions than his wife, for she had always lived abreast of

the society where she had been placed.

This afternoon Wilbur had noticed his wife’s carriage caught in the jam

of the street below, and he had watched the conversation between her

and Erard, and finally their disappearance. At the club he had heard

a good deal more about Erard than at his own home. He found that he

was considered a source of reliable information about Erard by those

few men who were interested enough in the young man to remember him.

It irritated Wilbur because, apart from his indifference to Erard, it

always chafed him to feel that certain aspects of his wife were outside

his comprehension. He even suspected at times that, now they no longer

had business interests in common, he bored her. Bored his wife! Thus

this afternoon Erard made a very significant figure in the landscape.

All the crude instincts of the man from a Michigan farm were stirred.

Erard should “get”; no gossip about his home!

Wilbur proceeded in this business about as delicately as he would if

he had had a clerk to censure. His wife had been given too free a

rein: she must feel that his interests, if not propriety, were to be

considered. In this mood he followed his wife into the house, where he

found her sitting idly by the west window of her little room. A book

had fallen on the seat by her side; she seemed to be brooding over

difficult thoughts.

“Ady,” Wilbur’s voice roused her like a roll of thunder, “I saw you

talking to Erard this afternoon under the windows of the club, and then

take him away with you.”

Mrs. Wilbur opened her eyes and waited. Wilbur fumed. It was like

a thunderstorm without the rain,--oppressive, with no hope of

after-relief. “When does he get out of here?”

“How should I pretend to know! He is visiting Mrs. Stevans.”

“A man doesn’t want his wife talked about at all the clubs,” he began

again in bungling fashion. Mrs. Wilbur’s eyes grew cold.

“You mean?”

“I mean that you have been foolish about that Erard ever since you knew

him, by all accounts.”

“Stop!” Mrs. Wilbur raised her hand. “That is quite enough. I am sorry

you have been listening to gossip.”

Wilbur was a churchgoing Presbyterian Christian. What he was doing he

regarded, not only as manly, but as conscientious. He had no other

traditions of conduct in such affairs.

“It isn’t enough, unless you promise to send him away the next time he

calls here. I don’t want you receiving his visits, now there’s talk.”

“No,” his wife replied, growing colder, her words falling like little

flakes of ice. “I cannot do that; I see no reason for it. You can

instruct the footman to keep him out of the house if you like. But I

shall never refuse to see him; and,”--she turned to her writing-table

and prepared to answer a note,--“I shouldn’t take that course, if I

were you.”

She had not intended this last remark as a threat: it had been prompted

by a desire to make the situation endurable. It would precipitate a

crisis, if he should become aggressive and humiliate her before her

servants. Wilbur, however, had had the uncomfortable feeling of living

in reproof ever since the call at the Remsens; now he intended to

exercise _his_ moral sense.

When a few minutes later Mrs. Wilbur ascended the stairs, which swept

in a gentle curve around the north side of the hall, she could hear her

husband below her, giving orders to the butler. He was concluding in

loud tones, “Smith, if Mr. Erard calls after this, we shall not be at

home. Remember and tell the footman that we shall always be out to Mr.

Erard.”

“Yes, sir,” she heard Smith’s galvanic voice reply. It was the first

order of the kind ever given in that house.

Some acquaintances came in during the evening, and the conversation

grew warm over one of the innumerable strikes in the city. Wilbur was

emphatic, as usual, in behalf of the capitalists, “the right of a man

to do what he wanted with his own.” His wife remembered that this

illiberal attitude had grown steadily since his first success. He had

become more and more convinced that the poor man’s poverty was his own

crime. She leaned her white face against the soft cushion in her chair,

and closed her eyes to shut out thought.

Yet she could not help thinking of the procession, of the loathsome

figure on horseback, and the absent Mephisto--and of her husband, in

some way united to this crew. She had not triumphed; she had not held

him to the finer courses of conduct. And she had not even kept her home

unspotted: this house was really Mephisto’s; he had merely tossed it to

a hanger-on.

She looked again at that husband, regarding him for the first time

objectively, as if he were an outsider--with a dangerous perception

of the doubleness of their personalities. To perceive that, marks the

end of marriage. She had no harsh feelings, no great resentment at

his clownish reproof; he was not her mind and thought and heart. He

was simply a man whom she knew uncommonly well, and on whose points

good and bad she was an authority. She could be very fair to the good

points,--that was a fatal sign! He had not deteriorated in the years

of marriage, had developed no vices or brutality. He was the same

confident, shrewd, adaptable American she had married three years ago.

A little more eager then and impulsive; more fluid, perhaps, at the age

when nothing is impossible of accomplishment, at least in the belief

of an admiring woman. The fire of the struggle in Chicago had left

him less fluid, but more powerful. Alas! it had burned out all minor

alloys, leaving him a steel weapon, fashioned by modern society, for

use in converting the earth into the hands of plutocracy.

The wealth that had come to them early in life, and her own social

powers, had suddenly placed him in a world for which he had no

traditions ready to assist him. He was the American peasant. He did not

eat with his knife, nor break any commonplace amenity. He was educated,

too, even if merely in a varnishing way, much more than hosts of his

comrades. But he was, nevertheless, the peasant. Anywhere else there

would have been intermediate stages in the social evolution where he

would have stuck, his descendants to go on as they proved ready and had

imbibed the ideas of service and honour that befitted the possessors

of great power. But Wilbur with one powerful effort had gained the

heights, and he had no humbleness, no distrust,--nothing was too good

for a clever man who had made his money.

Why _could_ she see all this so clearly? Had she ever loved him? For,

had she loved him, her eyes would have shrunk from the sore. When did

she begin to fail in loving him? Her grave face still rested upon

her husband in this searching wonder, until she noticed that he was

uncomfortable. Once she heard the footman cross the hall to answer

a ring; after an interval he returned with a card which he left on

the hall table. Erard had called and been dismissed. She had little

personal interest in the fact: Erard, indeed, was quite an unimportant

person.

When the last visitor had left and Mrs. Anthon had talked herself into

sleepiness from the lack of any conversational opposition, Wilbur

prepared to put the lights out as usual.

“Wait a minute, John.” These were the first words she had spoken to

him since their conversation before dinner. “I have something to say

to you, and I had rather say it here where we meet--on a more formal

footing.”

Wilbur, who had seen the card on the table, squared himself in front of

the fireplace and prepared to be kind and firm and just.

“I know that you will think what I am going to propose is queer,” she

began gently, “and I am afraid that you will think it wrong. But I

must, I must do it.”

Wilbur’s face wore a frightened look, as though he feared a confession

of deadly sin.

“I want to leave you, to go away somewhere, to Europe probably.”

“What for?”

“Because I am not happy here. I cannot take the interest I had in

Chicago or in our affairs, and I am thinking constantly of other

things. I am no longer a good wife, I believe.” She had no idea how

literally Wilbur would take this admission.

“You don’t mean to say it’s come to that with Erard.” Wilbur’s face

assumed a sneer, as an outward reflection of his opinion of Erard. Mrs.

Wilbur rose as if suddenly whipped.

“What do you mean? No! you needn’t explain. I understand.” Her manner

changed to a contemptuous coolness. “I am sorry that my determination

to leave your house should coincide so exactly with your vulgar

outbreak over my old friend. No, I shall not leave Chicago with him!

Had I thought of doing so, I should probably not have consulted you,

though you and my mother have done what you could to goad a woman to

that.”

“But,” she continued firmly, “my feelings, my determination, have

been growing, growing,” she repeated the word hopelessly, seeing how

difficult it was to make her conduct seem rational, not mere caprice.

“And it may be for only a few months. I want to get away by myself.”

Wilbur would not abandon the Erard motive.

“I didn’t suppose you meant to run away with him, but he’s stirred you

up; got you all out of gear, with his twaddle and sentiment.”

“Perhaps he has hastened matters,” Mrs. Wilbur admitted, anxious to do

justice to any reasonable arguments. “But that is immaterial really. He

merely made me think faster--although we never referred to my married

life.”

“Do you pretend to justify your conduct?” Wilbur fumed. He was plainly

embarrassed by the suddenness of this great question.

“Not at all,” Mrs. Wilbur replied, with a touch of sarcasm, “all the

justification will be on your side. There’s no excuse for me, since

you have not threatened my life nor committed adultery. You will have

universal sympathy.”

They thought silently for a few minutes. Then she added,--“And I should

want you to have this house and all the money I had when we were

married--in any event.”

“Have you any objections to me?” Wilbur asked roughly.

And thus they continued to discuss the matter in the still room of the

still house that Mrs. Wilbur had likened to a tomb. The man’s sense

of wanton, unprovoked injury increased as each bend of the argument

revealed itself. He was so irreproachably right! a truth which his wife

did not attempt to deny.

“But why do you want to retain a despicable woman?” she asked coldly,

at last.

If he loved her, she thought, he would not try to convince her with

arguments of propriety and religious exhortations. And if he showed

that he loved her passionately she would not have the courage to leave

him. One expression of longing love would have bound her hand and foot.

He did love her, in his way, as a busy man married nearly four years,

who could not devote himself exclusively to sentiments, does love. He

admired her, was proud of her fine presence in dress, thought she was a

clever woman--indeed the most superb creature of her sex he had ever

seen. And he loved domesticity in itself. He had an honest loathing for

immorality, and a healthy respect for the home. He hoped for a family

of children “to put ahead in the world.” He was prepared to be a good

husband and father, and, now! a catastrophe from a clear sky. A man’s

pride receives a severe cuff when the handsome woman he has secured, as

he thinks, on a life-tenure, shows the world that she is sick of the

bargain.

They gave up the subject in sheer exhaustion that night, Mrs. Wilbur

agreeing to take no final step without further consideration. As she

left the room, her husband said blankly, “You couldn’t have cared much

all along!”

She turned with a gleam of irritation.

“It was to be a partnership, wasn’t it? There was too much of that

idea. Marriage isn’t a partnership. It’s--”

He waited expectantly.

“I don’t know,” she moaned. “I have done you a wrong, somehow.”

CHAPTER X

The business of the Legal Aid Society had brought Thornton Jennings to

know one Peter Erard, an operative in a piano-factory. He lived with

his father, a helpless old man, on one of the long traffic streets

which pierce the stockyards district. In the section where the Erards

lived, the narrow frame cottages were sunk below the level of the

street, which seemed to have bestirred itself recently and risen above

the squalor of the marsh. Jennings had asked Molly Parker to visit the

Erards, when Peter met with an accident at the factory, that ended

finally in a fever and a gradual decline. While he was idle Jennings

and Miss Parker did what they could for him. They discussed the

possibility of Mrs. Wilbur’s inducing Simeon to do something for the

old man, at least in the event of Peter’s death. But Miss Parker was

afraid of the subject in her friend’s present mood.

The two felt that Peter’s misfortune was more pathetic than showed on

the surface. “He yearns for what the other one got,” Jennings said.

“_He_ stuck by the old people, and yet he had the call, too.”

When Molly reflected dubiously that it did seem as if conscience didn’t

pay, Jennings puzzled her by asserting: “It doesn’t--unless you can’t

help it. Peter couldn’t, and so he is dying over there in that hole

with his sharp little eyes unsatisfied. Simeon could, and so he sails

to Europe for a poultice that will heal the abrasions we have made on

his sensorium.”

Miss Parker learned much from pondering on this case of Peter Erard.

He was such a confirmed sceptic, she found, that she hesitated to

proffer her simple religious panacea. Jennings seemed to her sceptical

also, when he insisted that Peter’s sacrifice was quite irrational. To

her insistent _why_, he answered dreamily,--“‘_Why, why_,’--you can’t

answer _whys_. Why do we hate and love, and why do we live? The Master

wills it; it is idle to talk back.”

This was a vague reason, yet wonderfully comforting to Molly, chiefly

on account of the authority the propounder had with her. If he were

content with this mystery, she must be. So she continued to visit the

Erards, and formed plans of using Adela’s purse to help the old man.

For it was but just that Mrs. Wilbur should pay some of Simeon Erard’s

bills to society. When Jennings urged that Mrs. Wilbur could probably

force Erard to make Peter’s last days happy in other ways than with

money, Miss Parker shook her head.

“Adela can be as hard as a rock.”

“Perhaps she has never been tapped the right way.”

Yet to her suggestion that _he_ should try tapping the rock, he

answered lightly, “I guess I’m not _her_ Moses.”

It disturbed the equable Molly to realize how much interest he took in

Mrs. Wilbur. For “Adela spoils everything,” she declared sententiously.

Jennings had it in mind to approach Mrs. Wilbur, at the first good

chance, in behalf of the Erards. He had seen little of her since the

fall season; intangible influences kept them apart. Late in June,

however, he spent a Sunday in one of the northern suburbs at Mrs.

Stevans’s “place,” and when he arrived from the city in the evening, he

discovered Mrs. Wilbur sitting alone on the cool, silent veranda above

the lake. The other guests had gone off for a drive along the bluffs.

She greeted him with frank surprise.

“I didn’t expect to see _you_ here.”

“They don’t seem quite my crowd,” he admitted cheerily. “But Mrs.

Stevans is a sort of cousin, and she has done her best for me. She has

found me a hard case; her good deeds have come to asking me over for

Sunday.”

“Why haven’t you hit it off in Chicago?” Mrs. Wilbur inquired curiously.

“Why haven’t you?” the young man retorted. “And I like it tremendously

well here. I should want to hang on merely for the pleasure of seeing

your crowd thrown into the lake or banged on the head, if they don’t

reform.” He tilted back and forth with suppressed merriment. “I can’t

help feeling pleased over the growls from the ‘masses.’ If some of your

rich friends keep on grabbing quite so shamelessly, there will be a

row. I should hate to shoulder a musket in defence of your palace, Mrs.

Wilbur.”

“Their selfishness is intolerable,” she said fiercely. “I feel stifled

when I see them.”

“Yet many of them are very good people to see.” Her explosiveness

rendered him impartial. “You are too ready to include _all_; there is

a splendid remnant--fine men one can honestly admire. Even the selfish

ones are merely crude and wrong-headed. You don’t do the place justice.”

“I can’t be just. There is no reason in my life here.” She leaned

toward him appealingly, longing for sympathy. He was not merely a

young man she had seen a dozen times in a fragmentary way. He was so

intensely human that she felt she had always known him.

“No, not on your basis, there isn’t any reason,” Jennings admitted.

She waited for his meaning.

“The refined selfish person can’t get satisfied here.”

She looked at him inquiringly.

“You have always desired. A tremendous ego, and admirable, admirable,”

he ended softly.

She was, indeed, beautiful and alluring as she lay in the

steamer-chair, questioning him with her anxious eyes. The personal

power of her developed, intelligent face excited him, and made him

totally forgetful of the Erards.

“You think me pretty bad,” she exclaimed, dropping her hand from her

face.

“No!” he began to tilt back and forth once more abstractedly. “Of the

two souls--the one that demands, the other that accepts--you are the

demanding, absorbing kind. Most women accept, ultimately.”

They paused, embarrassed at the distance they had gone from the

conventional.

“I am sorry,” he added softly, “for I don’t believe there is any peace

for your kind. You go flaming about the earth, until death extinguishes

you.”

“Oh! to flame, to burn, to _feel_,” she appealed for his alliance in

her revolt. He rose from his chair and paced back and forth, his face

flushed with an excitement deeper than hers.

“That is not all,” he murmured to quiet himself. “There are mighty laws

which are holy. And there is holiness itself, a state of spirit in the

face of our Lord the Master, and that is peace. It is possible, yes, as

possible as the intoxication of passion.”

“If I take my life in my own hands, and go where I can spend it

joyfully,” she spoke deliberately, “then?”

“Then,” his low voice swept by her, “you are burned to ashes.”

“But I shall do it,” she exclaimed defiantly, “I think. Yes! I shall--”

He had come to a stand by her side and looked at her sympathetically.

“Well, do it, and God help you when your heart lies cold,” he burst

out, resuming his tramp.

“I don’t think He will help me,” Mrs. Wilbur had it on her lips to say.

“If”--but the wistful words died unspoken. Her husband’s reproach came

to her mind. “If you had cared very much!” She had not cared, that was

the truth. Jennings had stripped her subterfuges away,--her nausea over

the business methods of a few men among the multitude of honest hearts

who were building the new world; her irritation over her husband’s

conduct in the Erard matter; her discontent with Chicago. The reason

for her act did not lie ultimately in any of these causes; it lay in

her own soul. Now she knew the unlovely truth.

Could she care? A wayward instinct prompted her to tell this

acquaintance who had happened to search her heart deeply, that she

could care, if--. But she was afraid. Let him think her merely a

craving ego! His truth-telling had made her hard. She would offer no

more excuses. She would accept her poverty of soul and take her freedom.

“Well,” she said at last, “it is very chill. I am going to my room.

Good-by, Mr. Jennings.”

She gave him her hand and let him keep it for an instant while she

wondered at him, and “at the other kind that accepts.” He opened his

lips as if to speak, then squared himself stiffly and dropped her hand.

“Good-by,” he muttered, and strode down the steps to the edge of the

bluff where the moonlight was peeping through the thickets. In old days

at college, some had called him the Saint, and some the Blasphemer.

CHAPTER XI

John Wilbur unwittingly brought about the crisis he wished to avoid.

Monday morning, on his way to the city, he called at the house of his

clergyman,--Dr. Driver, a divine celebrated locally for his eloquence,

for the prosperity of his parish, and for his influence over successful

business men and their fashionable wives. It seemed to John Wilbur that

his wife’s condition was one that demanded the services of a spiritual

physician, and he explained the case briefly to his minister.

Consequently Mrs. Wilbur had scarcely reached her home after the visit

in Lake Forest before Dr. Driver’s card was brought to her. Thinking

that he had come probably for some assistance in church-work, she went

down to the drawing-room at once without laying aside her wraps or hat.

Dr. Driver was a tall, sallow-faced, black-moustached man, who wore his

thick black hair brushed away from his forehead a little affectedly.

His bony figure, protruding under the correct black coat, made many

awkward lines. Dr. Driver, after the experience of years in ministering

to fashionable parishes in Minneapolis and Chicago, could not be called

uncouth, yet Mrs. Wilbur always saw in him the earnest, raw young man

from the seminary, his white eyelids glued in the fervour of extempore

prayer, his white linen cravat creeping up over the large collar

button in his wrestling with his thought. He had been successful--that

appealed to his congregation; they liked a man to be successful in

whatever “line” of “work” he had chosen. Dr. Driver’s success had

been marked by such tangible evidences as the two “handsome edifices”

erected during his pastorates in Minneapolis and Chicago. His florid

style did not appeal to Mrs. Wilbur, but her husband’s admiration of

him and the fact that many of their friends were prominent in his

church had overcome her aversion to the minister’s rhetorical flights

and mixed metaphors. Dr. Driver was also a poet, and one or both of his

little volumes, “Little Lyrics of Grace,” or “Growing Leaves,” might

be found on the tables of his parishioners; and in the columns of the

_Thunderer_, cheek by jowl with Capitalist Dick’s American editorials,

appeared Dr. Driver’s patriotic songs.

The pastor gathered his coat-tails about his thin thighs, seated

himself on the edge of a divan, and opened a general conversation

upon the new house and Mrs. Wilbur’s gratification in her husband’s

wonderful success. Mrs. Wilbur listened, perplexed by this general

harangue, for the regular pastoral call had occurred scarcely a month

before.

“Mrs. Wilbur,” he exclaimed at last, his eyes rising above her head

restlessly, “what a privilege is yours, with the ability and the

means to further the moral and material welfare of this great city!

Chicago is the great home for intelligent woman. Here she moulds the

destinies, the civilization of millions of eager human beings. In our

vast city,” his voice rose and fell in prophetic intonations, “woman

does not creep as the humble hand-maiden of charity; she organizes

immense reforms, she institutes educational benefits, she advances

shoulder to shoulder with men in a common fight against the demons of

want and vice.”

His victim sat in mystified silence. She saw before her eyes the new

church, three blocks away on a neighbouring boulevard, its auditorium

in the form of a theatre, with the stage crowned by a high pulpit,

which Dr. Driver mounted. Behind were rows of shiny organ pipes,

and below at the wing a small door that led to the club-rooms, and

eating-rooms, and kitchens, and carpeted assembly-rooms, all in

polished oak panelling and furniture, with every modern device of the

up-to-date house of God. The doctor should be there, exhorting his

comfortable audience, not here distracting her mind during the hours

she needed most for clear thinking and clear feeling. Dr. Driver came

soon, however, to more specific matter.

“My dear Mrs. Wilbur,” he lowered his voice and eyes simultaneously.

“I have prayed over you, wondering if you have realized to the fullest

your powers and opportunities to do God’s work.”

“I trust so,” his parishioner replied impatiently, feeling that now he

was drawing to the purpose of his visit.

“Are you not planning,” Dr. Driver’s voice grew deeper, more

threatening, “in your breast to-day, this very hour, to abandon God’s

work in his appointed pasture, to turn back like Lot’s wife from the

vineyard before you, to forsake husband and home in the pursuit of

vain pleasures, of a vainglorious conceited refinement of culture? Are

you not planning, I ask you as a daughter of the church, to make a god

of your intellectual belly?”

Mrs. Wilbur’s face flushed resentfully. “My husband, has told you of my

proposal to leave his home,” she interposed in the torrent of rhetoric.

“Yes. He came to me in the travail of his soul this morning, to his

spiritual counsellor, for my poor help in his trouble.”

“He did a very foolish thing,” Mrs. Wilbur replied haughtily.

“I trust not so. You love your husband, you loved your little child,

_his_ child, and you will love others yet to be--”

At another time Mrs. Wilbur could have tolerated Dr. Driver’s

exhortation as merely an exhibition of well-meaning bad taste. To-day

she was capable of blasphemies against the bed-rock truths of her

fellowmen. If they goaded her, stung her like little flies, she would

give the lie to her heart and commit outrages.

“I prefer not to discuss this question.” She rose to close the

interview, relying upon the frigid dignity that she could throw into

her smallest action, to restrain this earnest, vulgar man.

“It is my _duty_ to warn you, to counsel you, to say that in abandoning

this mighty world of opportunity to which God has called you, the

help of these millions of souls,--” he stretched out his arms in his

favourite gesture of immensity and numbers.

Mrs. Wilbur asked with a wicked smile,--“Suppose, Dr. Driver, I have

no interest in ‘millions,’ that I believe it is a foolish labour to

advance the masses and thus help create more ‘millions’? Suppose I

believe it is morally wrong to make humanity all a common dull level,

and that we ought to strive to produce quality, beauty, single great

lives of distinction?”

This wholesale tossing aside the axiom of his life staggered the

doctor. “Not long to bring to God all these souls?” He laboured in

search of an argumentative basis.

“Mere size, mere numbers, mere collections of human beings who may be

made industrious, neat, thrifty, and happy--that picture doesn’t stir

my enthusiasm any more than mere miles of dwellings or mere millions of

bushels of wheat!”

She was becoming tangled in an argument, when Molly Parker dashed in to

take her away to a reception. Dr. Driver left at once, and to his wife

that night he confided his belief that poor Wilbur had a heavy cross

in his misguided wife. She was a proud, haughty, self-interested, and

intellectually vain creature, and if she left her home to indulge her

conceit in “European salons” she would be lost. It is needless to add

that in a few days it was reported quite openly, “Jack Wilbur’s wife

is going to leave him”; or, as some put it with an additional touch of

imagination, “going to cut off with that painter-fellow.”

Mrs. Wilbur chatted with her friend as the carriage carried them

swiftly to the Remsens’ that afternoon, strangely at peace with

herself, and determined. Her attention was preternaturally keen, as

if her mind was eager to gather last impressions, to fortify itself.

She ran across Erard in her first assault on the crowded rooms at the

Remsens’, and she lingered to talk with him alone for the benefit of a

roomful of curious people, well aware that she was adding powder to her

husband’s guns.

“I called on you the other evening,” Erard remarked with intention.

“Yes?” Mrs. Wilbur’s voice expressed no concern.

“And you were out. I shall not call again.”

“Perhaps it is just as well,” Mrs. Wilbur answered indifferently.

“Anyway, I shall be going away soon.”

“So you have made up your mind. What are you going to do with yourself?”

“How do I know? What can a woman who has dabbled in life all round do

with herself, except begin over and dabble all round again?”

“Why don’t you make a profession of freedom, now you have given up

trying the straddle?”

She did not like the phrase, “profession of freedom”: it sounded like a

fine way of saying “abandon yourself.” Just then some one touched her

elbow, and Erard was swallowed up in the surrounding hubbub. She never

saw him again in Chicago.

She found herself talking excitedly, yet with a grateful calm at her

heart. The room, and the people who were constantly addressing her,

seemed very unsubstantial. They belonged to her house on the boulevard,

to the traction stocks, the little child who had gone, to the drunken

governor who had sold himself to Mephisto, to Dr. Driver, and the rest

of it. They were not a part of her now, and she was gay in the thought.

“Molly,” she said at last, “dismiss Thornton Jennings and go fetch your

wrap. I am going to drive you home.”

Molly Parker faltered, “You are going to tell me something dreadful.”

But Mrs. Wilbur, if she had anything dreadful on her mind, appeared

serene on their drive home. She talked about Jennings a good deal, and

watched her companion slyly. “Would you like to leave Chicago _now_,

Molly?”

Miss Parker blushed and kissed her. At the iron gate of the Wilbur

house she stepped out of the carriage, directing the coachman to drive

Miss Parker home. Then as if to communicate a last nothing, she put her

head through the window, and said hurriedly, “Molly, I’m going away

soon. I promised to let you know.”

She hurried up the steps without waiting to look at the startled face

in the carriage. It had been a hard day, but her nerves were strung to

a high pitch that evening, for she foresaw another long debate with her

husband. The sooner the final break was made now that Dr. Driver had

been taken into their confidence the better.

“John,” Mrs. Wilbur’s eyes glittered as she began, when they were alone

in the library, “that was unkind of you, and foolish, to send Dr.

Driver here to talk to me.”

“I hoped he could make you see the wicked and unchristian character of

the act you are contemplating.” He understood faintly that his scheme

had failed; indeed, had driven her further away.

“We must finish now at once,” Mrs. Wilbur continued.

“Have you anything to complain of in your house or in me?” Wilbur asked

defiantly. The other evening she might have said in answer something

about the traction stocks. But after Jennings had read her soul so

easily, she refrained. For one didn’t leave one’s husband because he

was callous in business. Was she the kind of woman to shrink from such

misfortune? He went on, “You don’t realize the blow you are dealing me

and yourself in all the talk your step will make. It will be in the

papers twenty-four hours after, that you have run away.”

Now that she had discovered what dread was uppermost, it was easy

enough to urge her suit. She had thought over this question and had

a plan ready. If he had been unconscious of the possible injury to

himself and his ambitions, her task would have been harder.

“I don’t think you need worry about that,” she replied a little

disdainfully, “for your friends’ sympathy will be entirely with you,

and nobody else need know until later. All I ask is to leave you--it

may be said for a few months, as other wives leave their husbands,

to travel. The house can go on, and doubtless mother will be glad to

remain here and--”

“A nice plan,” Wilbur interrupted hotly, “to make me a blind for your

goings-on with another man.”

Mrs. Wilbur flushed quickly, then became white and calm again. “You

persist in that insult. Very well, then, you can proceed at once to a

divorce. But I think that you will see how much more sensible my plan

is. Later you can get a divorce quietly.”

“Would you ever come back?” Wilbur asked wistfully.

“I don’t believe that you will want me to,” she replied more gently,

wondering at the man. “If I did return it would be a new beginning, a

_real_ marriage. I can’t tell about that. I must be _free_ first.”

“It doesn’t seem to me you are much of a slave!”

“No?” she was minded to refer to the money that had been used to

build their home, but refrained. Suddenly passion broke through her

calm manner. “A woman isn’t a slave--there is no question of it--when

husband and wife are bound together. It makes no difference,--the

desert, the mechanical routine of living,--_then_. She can starve well

enough. But when they begin to live and to think apart--when I saw

you and judged you and condemned you, then all the real freedom was

_yours_, and I was degraded.”

“You use big words like the women nowadays. When did we separate and

what ‘degradation’ do you bear?”

“We separated when you took ill-gotten gains--no! I mean I saw that we

had made a mistake then, we had never really married, and from that

time I began to want--some other satisfaction, and to hate Chicago and

all there is in it.”

Wilbur waited, disturbed and mystified.

“Yes,” she went on passionately, “and degraded too. It is degradation

to live another one’s life, or to live with him and bear his

children--unless they come as the natural fruit of common passion.”

“Oh! that’s it--you want your husband to be always honeymooning it?”

“Yes,” she answered exhausted. “Otherwise, like Eve, a woman discovers

that she is naked, and is ashamed. But this is useless. The fact

remains--_we_ are divorced, and _I_ must go and get my life. You may

say all the bitter things you wish. But I am not one who accepts,” she

ended, with a thought back on what Jennings had told her.

“So,” said Wilbur cynically, from his position of the partner to whom

marriage was naturally more episodic than ultimate. “You believe a

woman should experiment, should break her vows if she finds after three

years of apparent happiness that she prefers to run about Europe and

moon over pictures to sitting by her husband’s fireside. Does a vow

mean nothing to you?”

“Yes,” her voice broke, “a great deal. But I shouldn’t advise you to

hold me to it.”

“You never loved me,” Wilbur wandered back to the vital point. “You

took me because you were bored or because you couldn’t marry Erard, or

something of the sort.”

“That is a lie,” Mrs. Wilbur answered composedly. “If I had known then

that on such provocation you would make such low guesses--I should not

have married you.” She remembered the scene in the Paris salon, the

solemnity of it, and a wave of compassion for him and for herself

overcame her. “Don’t kill it all, John! Let us part with some respect

and honour for one another, not like a man and his mistress.”

“Go!” Wilbur exclaimed, excited by the impalpability of the reasons for

this absurd and unexpected wrong he was made to suffer. “Go! and don’t

think I shall follow you and beg you to come back. No, if you crawl

here along the boulevard, and pray to be forgiven, I will shut the door

on you and curse you.”

Mrs. Wilbur opened her lips, then checked herself. “Good-by, John. I am

sorry, so sorry you cannot understand.”

Wilbur laughed sneeringly. “But your sense of duty is so keen!”

“I must, must,” she broke into tears. “I am suffocating here. I may be

all wrong. I shall suffer for it!”

“I hope so.” He watched her leave the room and grasp the handrail of

the stairs to support herself. An old, savage instinct surged up in

him, the desire to kill what you could not keep in any other way. That

she should calmly decide to walk out of his life after three years of

marriage, for no provocation that any reasonable man would consider for

a moment,--that was intolerable! And society merely enfeebled the men

who had to stand, as he stood, passive. He would like to feel his arms

about her, his hand at her throat, and to have her know that for hate

as well as for love, she was _his_ for ever.

But she walked out of his life.

PART III

CHAPTER I

Late in August Mrs. Wilbur sailed for Europe. When the ship dropped

down the bay, and all the cables with the past were cut, a sense of

great joy came over her. As the last sultry breeze from the heated land

gave place to the deep-sea air, her imagination, which had been torpid

for many months, awoke and saluted the future. She was filled with the

romantic excitement that usually only the first voyage creates,--never,

alas! to be repeated. No other experience in life is comparable to

this passing from the actual and seeming vulgar into the spot where

the fancy has been wont to play. Europe has lived so long and so

passionately, and has gathered to itself such a chain of memories, that

it casts a spell over semi-barbarian hearts.

She sat long into the nights brooding, while the powerful, silent beast

beneath her feet plunged on into the new world,--brooding sensuously

like the gourmand returning from the parched deserts who dreams of

the fat in the pleasant valleys beyond. And now that the cables were

cut, and she was free like this ship to hasten to her haven, the past

troubled her little. These nights on the ocean she let her will relax.

Why strive? She would gorge and be satisfied and pay the penalty.

_There_, beyond in the soft darkness, was what would satisfy.

Instinctively she had chosen to go to Florence, at least for the

present; this spot of passionate delights called her authoritatively.

She arrived on a warm, dark night. The gloomy buildings loomed into

the black heavens; beneath their walls resounded the staccato note of

Florentine life. She slept that night with the rush of the Arno, as

it shot the Ponte Trinità, singing in her ears, a tumultuous lullaby.

At daybreak the Arno called her to the window while it sang its swift

song to the morning. The gentle hills across the river were gilded

with floods of warm light. A stately, solitary pine lined the horizon

above the Boboli gardens. Up beyond, San Miniato flashed back to her a

gleaming message. The city was yet cold and silent in the midst of the

bursting loveliness of the day. Her heart beat warmly, intoxicated with

the realization of her desires. It was the impossible human dream made

real. Towards it she stretched out her hands, hungeringly.

Later she went down into the city, threading her way between the black

palace walls to the open fields without the gates, where she could

seize the heavens, and the hills, and the glorious full body of light

descending to the earth. Yet before long she had wandered back to the

Uffizi, ravenous for another sensation. Tremulously she mounted the

long flights of the palace stairs and penetrated the outer rooms. At

last she had come to her joy,--when patience with subterfuges had

ceased, and her soul was eager to worship.

The pictures seemed so peaceful! They had been waiting there quietly

all these dreary years of her life, and now they spoke to her

calmly, with the clear utterance that comes of removal from things

temporal. She abandoned herself to one passion after another, in

greedy enjoyment, with mystical sensuousness of feeling; then making a

futile effort to remember what she had learned critically four years

before, she would try to reason with herself. But all the months of

renunciation, of arid living without beauty, took their revenge in a

passionate, uncontrollable mastery. The pieces of light and colour

before her eyes were not pictures: she was not promenading past dead

squares of canvas as she had done so often before. She seized specially

upon each shining soul that lay before her, with the delight one has

in the discovery of an illuminating thought, or in the still richer

consciousness of an expressive person. She remembered Erard’s phrase

about pictures,--“documents of old passions.” Not documents, not dead,

her soul asserted; but piercingly alive, godlike revelations.

Her eyes filled with tears, and she laughed at her own ecstasy. Two or

three pictures were all that she could contain in this abandonment.

When these had burned deep into her and the rush of emotion had

subsided a little, she left the gallery, content with the knowledge of

their presence, of their nearness. Idling along the narrow quais by the

Ponte Vecchio she let the minutes slip past savouringly, listening to

the human note of the city, and watching the colours of the walls over

the river under San Jacopo’s bell-tower.

The afternoons were too precious to spend in the city. The surrounding

hilltops from San Miniato to Bello Sguardo, from Fiesole to Cappa

Monte, called her. One solitary villa near the brow of Bello Sguardo,

with a broad terrace hanging over the valley, took her fancy, and

she resolved to rent it. From its lofty terrace under the solemn row

of cypresses she would hold Florence in her arms. And across the

black-ribboned Arno the hills of Fiesole beckoned her eyes on to the

Apennines. While she made arrangements to take possession, she came

here in the twilight to brood over the city at her feet. Thus the days

passed; she did not know that she was alone.

Bit after bit the past life adjusted itself in her mind, as if fate

were arranging inevitably the values. Words out of that past came to

mind. She remembered the saying of a shrewd friend, who had dealt much

in a service of twenty years with the conscious, striving women of the

day. “Why have you earnest, brilliant young women lost the instinct

that suppresses the ego? You are terrible egotists. You run about,

seeking frantically for entertainment for your restlessness.” Yes, she

demanded much; Jennings had said it too. But her heart was full now,

and she smiled.

Again she thought of Erard, the “Ishmaelite” as some one had called

him. One said in the sanctity of effort “those denationalized,

consciously devoted artists find at the end, after all their pains to

prepare, that there is nothing to express. Creation comes not that

way.” Perhaps not “creation,” but living and satisfaction: in the

sanctity of effort one did not understand such matters. She smiled,

again, and looked at the purple hill-slope of Setignano.

“You are very beautiful,” the wise friend had also said. “But you do

not care! I wish you women who long to be appeased cared for your good

looks. A little vanity in a woman is a safe thing.” Yet she was glad to

feel that her beauty existed, like the olive below the terrace, like

the golden wave of hair in that picture in the Pitti; for it made the

earth richer.

And Molly Parker’s last words came back to her. “I had rather you had

run off with Erard,” Molly had remarked irritably. “At least they say

a great passion is sometimes beyond control, but to slip off this way

because you are bored!” Again, later,--“It would be better if you

had some ‘vocation,’ as they call it.” She remembered that she had

protested: “I have the vocation to be myself.” To-day she laughed at

her pompous words. She needed no excuses; the earth smiled at her.

Erard, even, lay outside her soul with the others in that curious

world she had forsaken. Sometime she should see him, but not yet. The

days sped in peace. She made ready her villa where peace should be

perpetuated. A Chicago acquaintance, catching sight of her standing

radiant before the frescoes in the chill chapel of the Carmine, wrote

home: “Our Mrs. Wilbur seems very happy with herself. You wouldn’t

think she was as good as divorced. She hasn’t even a decent gloom.”

An end to this rapt mood came at last. Business necessitated a journey

to Paris. Also a letter from the irrepressible Molly gave Mrs. Wilbur

warning that she was not to be left to her own devices. “I am going

over to join you. You’ve got to have some one to bully and look after

you and pet you. I don’t approve of you and never shall, but I can’t

let you be foolish all by yourself.... What are your plans--to wander

about there with a maid from hotel to pension, or take an apartment and

smoke and drink and try to make a man of yourself?” (For Miss Parker’s

ideas about the modern woman were still crude.) “Plans!” Mrs. Wilbur

exclaimed. That was the futile gabble she had tried to escape. One

lived without plans. As she prepared to leave her city of delights she

sighed; something warned her that the ecstasy of freedom would never

flood so high again.

In the last calm, warm night she sat for hours on the terrace of her

villa, fearing to leave her dearly bought peace. When she returned to

the hotel, winding down between the walled orchards to the heated city,

the Arno was singing under the arches of the Trinità. But the song

sounded deep and solemn.

CHAPTER II

The pungent Latin odours emanating from the wine-shops along the

boulevards stirred Mrs. Wilbur’s memory caressingly. This was

Paris,--she dwelt on the word fondly. How eloquent it had been of joy!

She had left the noisome American quarter around the Opera House, where

Paris turns a pandering face to the tourist, and selected a little

hotel on the Quai, opposite the great palace. Her business with the

solemn old lawyer sent by her elder brother was quickly transacted,

and at the close she let fall a few pungent sentences to be carried

to her family. “My husband is welcome to my fortune. I am glad he is

good enough to use it. Fortunately I have enough beside. My family

must endeavour to bear the disgrace--I will help them by keeping out

of sight.” The lawyer talked divorce, but when he found her dumb,

departed. “Pretty Walter,” as Mrs. Wilbur named her brother, was not

so easily disposed of. He had come all the way from the great novelist

Maxwell’s place in Surrey to look into her situation.

Walter Anthon had had a good time, all these years of his sister’s

experimentation; he had kept his family informed of the growing circle

of celebrities whose finger-tips he was permitted to touch. He might

have made a booklet of the dainty notes he had received from Maxwell,

the sage novelist, from Sandy Short, the supercilious literary maid of

all work, and from Henderson, the celebrated author of closet dramas.

Even Gaston had condescended to invite him for a week to his lodge in

Scotland. The crowning glory of his career, however, had been when

the famous African poet had met in his rooms the great Maxwell. He

described the encounter epically to his sister. “Maxwell was moody and

sunk in gloom. The African was fierce and taciturn. I trembled. But I

plied Maxwell with champagne--he never drinks, you know, but this night

at my entreaty he consented to empty five bottles. Then at midnight,

the poet laid himself down before the fire on my bearskin, and such

talk--” The saga here stayed in mystery.

After entertaining his sister with a list of his conquests in letters,

he came to personal affairs. “Are you quite alone?” he asked, glancing

at the orderly hotel salon with the little bedroom at one side.

“Yes. I hate maids. It’s very jolly being alone.”

“You had better get one at once. You don’t want to identify yourself

with the horrid women who run about alone and put up at hotels and

drink whiskies and talk horse. There are some women of the nicest

families in England who do that kind of thing now,--are very free. But

we Americans cannot afford to go so far.”

“Couldn’t you join me this winter,” Mrs. Wilbur suggested

mischievously, “and keep house in Florence? The proprieties would be

appeased then.”

“No, no,--not possibly, _ma sœur_.” Walter Anthon twisted his moustache

rapidly.

“Well, then, you mustn’t offer advice.”

“My dear sister,” Anthon seized his vanishing chance, “you will

not be so distressingly vulgar as to put yourself in the way of

further--relations with Erard, I--”

This iteration of Erard from one end of America to Europe stirred Mrs.

Wilbur’s wrath. “I don’t know where Mr. Erard will be this winter. I am

not in communication with him. But if he should care for my society,

I should certainly see him.” After a moment she added maliciously, to

throw oil on the fire, “And the considerations you mention would not

prevent me from doing more.”

Walter Anthon rose majestically. “We should cut you, every one.”

“Remember that I am still _Mrs._ Wilbur, legally at least,” she

retorted. Then forgetting her resentment, she continued in a friendly

tone. “Walter, why shouldn’t we be frank with one another? I shall not

spoil your little game in London. Yon won’t find me a social burden.

I don’t give a penny for your prejudices, but it may comfort you to

know that I am waiting for an old friend to join me. Now let us be good

acquaintances. Don’t feel called upon to meddle with my leaving John.

You will not have to suffer for that. And I don’t believe that you have

any, even romantic grounds, for sorrowing over my morals. Your own will

probably keep you busy. Come and see me when I am settled. If you don’t

like the tone of my establishment, keep away. We really haven’t enough

in common to quarrel about. Now take some tea.” She rang the bell and

stood opposite him to laugh.

Walter Anthon took his tea amicably. “Who is the friend?”

“Molly. Perhaps you will look in on us occasionally.”

“Uncle Seb left her some money?”

“Lots,” Mrs. Wilbur exaggerated.

“I didn’t hear that,” he mused.

“But you needn’t bother about her now,” she smiled placidly at him.

“Molly has developed; she won’t play with you now.”

Anthon left the subject. His appreciation of his sister rose in true

British fashion in proportion to the snubbing she administered. He

offered to present some of his set. But Mrs. Wilbur gaily declined the

privilege.

“No, thank you! Celebrities bore me. I don’t care to dine with the

title-page of a magazine.”

She gave him her hand, and he went away, feeling as if he had been

treated like a small boy. Mrs. Wilbur laughed to herself that

afternoon, while she ran about from shop to shop, or stopped to gaze in

the windows, “like any vulgar American.”

* * * * *

Mrs. Wilbur decided to wait for Molly in Paris, where she had a

number of small matters to attend to. When the sombre days of early

November came on, she spent many hours at the Louvre. One morning she

was standing in a small deserted room, before a Holbein portrait,

marvelling at an art which seemed more irrevocably lost than most,--at

the power of the sure hand that stiffly traced a human face, with the

simplest detail, and left it there for centuries, a living criticism of

character!

“Not an iota of power lost, is there?” She was hardly surprised on

turning to find Erard in their old rendezvous.

“I saw you come in here from the Long Gallery,” he explained, “and I

made a wager with myself that you were looking for this Holbein.”

“Yes,” she blushed in spite of herself. “I have seen certain pictures

all these years, just as they hung on the walls, frames and all. But

they have rehung so many of them, that I miss some old friends.”

“Oh, yes, the directors set the fashion in pictures. They have an attic

full of canvases up stairs, and every now and then, when the fancy

takes them, they whisk an old friend off the walls and replace him with

some piece of rubbish they have discovered. Of course the big ones

stay, like this fellow, only they have to walk about from room to room.”

Then they were silent, each at a loss how to take up the conversation.

Erard had met her as if it were the most natural thing in the world to

find her here. At last he said brusquely,--“So you found your way back

again.”

“Yes,” she replied weakly, wondering what he knew of the intermediate

processes; what gossip he had heard. His next remark was made as much

to the portrait before them, into which he suddenly plunged his face,

as to herself.

“You concluded that we are right,--we who care solely for sensations

and ideas.”

Mrs. Wilbur felt chill at this summary of her emotions. “Ah, well,”

he continued, using his glasses on the ruff of the Holbein man, “it

was just as well to make the experiment, even if it wasted four years.

Having satisfied yourself that the duties and privileges of normal

society don’t amuse you, you will never be bothered again. You’ve got

_that_ behind you.”

The woman in Mrs. Wilbur suddenly realized how actually she was cut

off from the “duties and privileges of normal society,” and was not

altogether so complacent in the thought as Erard assumed. “I am not

planning a future,” she replied with an attempt at lightness. Erard

turned from the picture and looked at her deliberately, as if to say,

“You are in _my_ hands now, my lady.” His manner was placid; he was

enjoying the pleasure of a successful solution to an intricate problem.

He repeated the resulting proposition again with greater emphasis for

her benefit.

“I mean that if you could content yourself with mere activity, with

bringing children into the world, and conducting charities and clubs,

it would be foolish to attempt anything else. But having tried,--”

“And failed,” Mrs. Wilbur interrupted sombrely.

“Having tried that so-called moral existence,” Erard’s voice was

domineeringly emphatic, as if drilling a refractory pupil, “and found

it incomplete, you will never have doubts about the other occupation

of cultivating and enjoying your wits.”

Thus she had enrolled herself under his banner. There need be no

further talk about the matter. They sauntered away from the Holbein

room into the Long Gallery. In the dim distance where the perspective

lines of the picture-covered walls converge, the usual conglomerate

public was passing to and fro. A party of Americans was being “put

through the Louvre in three hours.” As Erard and his companion skirted

the huddling mob of apathetic men and disturbed women, they could hear

the cicerone shouting: “Ladies and shentlemen, this is a Teetian, one

of the ten greatest pictures in the world. It is valued at one hundred

fifty tousand dollar.” Thereupon the mob swayed, from the common

impulse to look in one direction; then the voice of the conductor

shouted again: “This is by Rubens, the great Flemish painter; the third

lady at the right is a picture of his wife.” The bit of personality

seemed also to arouse the languor of the herd; but in a moment the set

look of vacant wonder settled over the faces once more.

“Thus,” commented Erard, “the run of the world take life. They hear a

collection of names and a piece of gossip; and they look and pass on.”

Mrs. Wilbur thought that something might be said on the other side,

at least for the intermediate people, but she accepted easily once

more Erard’s oracular position. He had not forced her to join the

connoisseurs of life; indeed, four years ago, he had advised her to

become one of the herd.

They looked casually at one or two more pictures, Erard, to his

disciple’s surprise, delivering new opinions quite contrary to

those she had imbibed four years ago. All his criticism tended now

towards psychology; it was a process of explaining _why_ the human

animal enjoyed, not a means of making him enjoy more completely with

sympathetic enthusiasm. She reflected that Erard had been writing and

publishing and had theories to maintain. In a general way she felt

that he was less the artist, the sympathizer and creator, and more the

pedant. He laughed at her tremulous excitement over pictures, and in a

few minutes the ecstasy she had felt more or less ever since that first

morning by the Arno evaporated. She saw that her talk was gush, and was

ashamed. He made her feel that fine-art was only a wonderful trick,

like the conjurer’s devices, to be cleverly detected and classified. He

pawed a picture, figuratively, as M. Berthelot might paw a human animal

in measuring its abnormality.

“Well,” he said at last, “it must be time for déjeuner. I have to look

over some pictures at three. I have a commission to execute for a

Chicago family. Don’t you want to see some fine Monets?”

She felt humiliated in his eyes when she said, “Yes, but I can’t ask

you to lunch with me. I am alone at my hotel.”

He shot a quick glance at her. She hadn’t sloughed off the small

prejudices yet. “We can go to a restaurant on the rue de Rivoli--that

will be on the way.”

As they left the Salon Carré he pointed out a Frenchwoman who was

passing on the arm of an elderly man. “That is the famous Claire

Desmond. She was for years Dampière’s mistress. He picked her up in

Brittany and used her as his model until she grew to be impossible.

She is a character in the _Quartier_.” He went on to relate one or two

anecdotes of the picturesque Claire.

Though Mrs. Wilbur thought herself far from prudish, her notions of

good breeding were evidently out of place in the new life her companion

was showing her. Erard was not coarse by nature, but in the _milieu_

he had cultivated, the amatory passages of his neighbours had their

passing interest. Art was intimately influenced by sex: indeed, in his

extravagant moods, Erard was inclined to attribute all art effort to

the sexual instincts. He suspected Mrs. Wilbur of having provincial

prejudices about naked speech that needed correction; for he did not

propose to change his habitual expression to suit the squeamishness of

a constant companion.

They gained the hall, and paused before the Botticelli frescoes. Then

Mrs. Wilbur turned and swept haughtily down the stone stairs, lingering

for a minute before the rushing Victory. Such art was naked as men were

naked in the childhood of the race. That state of simplicity could

never come again. The nakedness of Erard seemed to her like impotent

curiosity.

She might come to accept this attitude, also, and see no mystery in

man and woman more than the mystery of two sensual animals. But she

shuddered at the idea. That would strip the world of one necessary

covering for its sordidness. She looked up at the noble Victory,

feeling the form of the goddess through the garment of stone. Then she

glanced at Erard, who was waiting for her at the end of the staircase.

She was not willing that _that_ male, with his little unshapen body,

should discuss sex,--a part of her which she shared with the goddess

above,--in his disillusioned manner.

CHAPTER III

The déjeuner put them in accord, however. A bottle of good wine

brought out evidences of human comradeship in Erard. He talked over

his winter’s work, in which he assumed her coöperation. He made her

take her notebook and jot down titles and references, laughing at

her heedless reading. She was to make the drawings of architectural

details for the new book. Then they discussed several excursions,

one especially to a chateau near Orleans where there were said to

be some Leonardo drawings. As they walked down the avenue to the

picture-dealer’s, Mrs. Wilbur was surprised to find how far she had

gone. It had not been possible to parley with Erard; he had taken

everything for granted.

They passed the Opera House. She remembered the night when Wilbur had

carried her off her feet with his plans for making a fortune. That

emotion seemed quite dead now; she was thankful to escape so cheaply.

Dear Uncle Sebastian had made it possible for her to become a privateer

once more,--to take the step in a queenly fashion without haggling. She

blessed him for enabling her to trip lightly whither she would.

At last Erard’s talk and her musings ceased at the door of the dealer.

Once inside the portières which closed the little gallery, Mrs. Wilbur

noticed with a shock of surprise three familiar faces; there were

the Mills--father, mother, and daughter. Erard had said nothing about

meeting these Chicago patrons of art in the gallery. Perhaps he had

neglected to mention the fact through pure indifference; perhaps he had

a subtler reason for not warning her.

Mrs. Wilbur advanced timidly, angry at herself for her lack of ease. It

was the first time she had actually met any of her old acquaintances

since her rupture with her husband. Recovering her self-command

quickly, she determined to take the matter in her old aggressive,

imposing style. She bowed stiffly, and spoke. Evidently the Mills

were disconcerted on their side. The father turned away awkwardly, as

if suddenly interested in a small canvas in the corner. Mrs. Mills

bowed coldly and advanced to receive Erard with emphatic cordiality.

The daughter, putting her lorgnette affectedly to her eyes, swept the

room, including Mrs. Wilbur, in a gross stare. Then suddenly perceiving

Erard, she brushed past Mrs. Wilbur without a look, and stood beside

her mother.

Mrs. Wilbur was stung by the snub. These Mills were good, plain

people--he had been one of Remsen’s junior partners--who had only

lately had money. She had rather patronized them in Chicago, especially

the daughter, whom she had entertained several times. They had built

a house a mile above the Wilburs and in the Chicago sense they were

close neighbours. Evidently her case was judged in Chicago, and had

gone against her by default. Her character was now the property of

such people as the Mills, who could take the position of guardians of

society! She walked about the little room with as much indifference and

composure as she could assume. She would have liked to flee, but pride

held her there in her discomfiture. Erard, she thought, was watching

her curiously, all the time talking lightly with Miss Mills. Had he

set this trap for her,--the cad! and was he now amusing himself with

watching her emotions? Or did he wish to give her an object-lesson in

the term “burning your ships”?

The dealer appeared at last, and suggested that the party should enter

his private room where the pictures in question were assembled. The

Mills followed the dealer, passing directly in front of Mrs. Wilbur

without noticing her presence. Mr. Mills did the act clumsily; his wife

severely; the daughter airily.

“Won’t you come with us, Mrs. Wilbur?” Erard paused to ask.

“Thank you, no. I find enough to interest me here,” she managed to

reply.

Erard shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “You should have calculated

the cost of all this beforehand. No use to get into a temper about it

_now_.” He tiptoed after his patrons.

She thought that she had calculated all the costs, and although the

actual experience was more brutal than the imagined, she tried to think

that she cared little for the snub itself. But she had meant to be

discreet, and now she knew that in ten days Chicago gossips would have

a pointed corroboration of their surmises.

She would like to go up to this good Mr. Mills and say, “I am not this

Erard’s mistress; indeed I am not low enough for that!”

Then she smiled at herself, and stilled her tumultuous feelings,

pretending to examine a greenish-red Renoir that was propped against

the wall. One doesn’t cut a straight path to freedom, she reflected,

without paying for it.