IV

The Bunnies could hardly believe their eyes when, one day, Mrs. Palmer

Pence came rolling into the Burrow. She was well enough known indeed at

the "rival shop"--by which the Bunnies meant a neighbouring edifice

loftily denominated the Temple of Art, a vast structure full of theatres

and recital-halls and studios and assembly-rooms and dramatic schools;

but this was the first time she had favoured the humbler building, at

least on the formal, official Saturday afternoon. Long had they looked

for her coming, and now at last the most desirable of all the desirable

people was here.

"Ah-h-h!" breathed Little O'Grady, who made reliefs in plastina.

It was for Mrs. Palmer Pence that the samovar steamed to-day in the dimly

lighted studio of Stephen Giles, for her that the candles fluttered

within their pink shades, for her that the white peppermints lay in

orderly little rows upon the silver tray, for her that young Medora

Giles, lately back to her brother from Paris, wore her freshest gown and

drew tea with her prettiest smile. Mrs. Pence was building a new house

and there was more than an even chance that Stephen Giles might decorate

it. He held a middle ground between the "artist-architects" on the one

hand and the painters on the other, and with this advantageous footing he

was gradually drawing a strong cordon round "society" and was looking

forward to a day not very distant when he might leave the Burrow for the

Temple of Art itself.

Mrs. Pence sat liberally cushioned in her old carved pew and amiably

sipped her tea beneath a jewelled censer and admired the dark beauty of

the slender and graceful Medora. Presently she became so taken by the

girl that (despite her own superabundant bulk) she must needs cross over

and sit beside her and pat her hand at intervals. In certain extreme

cases Eudoxia was willing to waive the matter of comparison with other

women; but to find herself seated beside a man of lesser bulk than

herself seriously inconvenienced her, while to realize herself standing

beside a man of lesser stature embarrassed her most cruelly. As she was

fond of mixed society, her liberal figure was on the move most of the

time.

She was too enchanted with Medora Giles to be able to keep away from her,

but the approach of Adrian Bond--he was a great studio dawdler--presently

put her to rout. For Adrian was much too small. He was spare, he was

meagre; he was sapless, like his books; and the part in his smoothly

plastered black hair scarcely reached to her eyebrows. She felt herself

swelling, distending, filling her place to repletion, to suffocation, and

rose to flee. She was for seeking refuge in the brown beard of Stephen

Giles, which was at least on a level with her own chin, when suddenly she

perceived, in a dark corner of the place, a tower of strength more

promising still--a man even taller, broader, bulkier than herself, a

grand figure that might serve to reduce her to more desirable

proportions.

"Who is he?" she asked Giles, as she seized him by the elbow. "Take me

over there at once."

Giles laughed. "Why, that's Joyce," he said. "He's got so that he looks

in on us now and then."

"Joyce? What Joyce?"

"Why, Joyce. The one, the only,--as we believe."

"Abner Joyce? _This Weary World? The Rod of the Oppressor_?"

"Exactly. Let me bring him over and present him."

"Whichever you like; arrange it between Mohammed and the Mountain just as

you please." She looked over her shoulder; little Bond was following.

"Waive all ceremony," she begged. "I will go to him."

Giles trundled her over toward the dusky canopy under which Abner stood

chafing, conscious at once of his own powers and of his own social

inexpertness. In particular had he looked out with bitterness upon the

airy circulations of Adrian Bond--Adrian who smirked here and nodded

there and chaffed a bit now and then with the blonde Clytie and openly

philandered over the tea-urn with the brunette Medora. "That snip! That

water-fly! That whipper-snapper! That----"

Abner turned with a start. A worldly person, clad voluminously in furs,

was extending a hand that sparkled with many rings and was composing a

pair of smiling lips to say the pleasant thing. This attention was

startlingly, embarrassingly sudden, but it was welcome and it was

appropriate. Abner was little able to realize the quality of aggressive

homage that resided in Mrs. Pence's resolute and unconventional advance,

but it was natural enough that this showy woman should wish to manifest

her appreciation of a gifted and rising author. He took her hand with a

graceless gravity.

Mrs. Pence, upon a nearer view, found Abner all she had hoped. Confronted

by his stalwart limbs and expansive shoulders, she was no longer a

behemoth,--she felt almost like a sylph. She looked up frankly, and with

a sense of growing comfort, into his broad face where a good strong

growth of chestnut beard was bursting through his ruddy cheeks and

swirling abundantly beneath his nose. She looked up higher, to his wide

forehead, where a big shock of confident hair rolled and tumbled about

with careless affluence. And with no great shyness she appraised his

hands and his feet--those strong forceful hands that had dominated the

lurching, self-willed plough, those sturdy feet that had resolutely

tramped the miles of humpy furrow the ploughshare had turned up blackly

to sun and air. She shrank. She dwindled. Her slender girlhood--that

remote, incredible time--was on her once more.

"I shall never feel large again," she said.

How right she was! Nobody ever felt large for long when Abner Joyce

happened to be about.

V

Abner regarded Mrs. Pence and her magnificence with a sombre intensity,

far from ready to approve. He knew far more about her than she could know

about him--thanks to the activities of a shamefully discriminating (or

undiscriminating) press--and he was by no means prepared to give her his

countenance. Face to face with her opulence and splendour he set the

figure of his own mother--that sweet, patient, plaintive little presence,

now docilely habituated, at the closing in of a long pinched life, to

unremitting daily toil still unrewarded by ease and comfort or by any

hope or promise or prospect of it. There was his father too--that good

gray elder who had done so much faithful work, yet had so little to show

for it, who had fished all day and had caught next to nothing, who had

given four years out of his young life to the fight for freedom only to

see the reward so shamefully fall elsewhere.... Abner evoked here a

fanciful figure of Palmer Pence himself, whom he knew in a general way to

be high up in some monstrous Trust. He saw a prosperous, domineering man

who with a single turn of the hand had swept together a hundred little

enterprises and at the same time had swept out a thousand of the lesser

fry into the wide spaces of empty ruin, and who had insolently settled

down beside his new machine to catch the rain of coins minted for him

from the wrongs of an injured and insulted people....

Abner accepted in awkward silence Mrs. Pence's liberal and fluent praise

of _The Rod of the Oppressor_,--aside from his deep-seated indignation he

had not yet mastered any of those serviceable phrases by means of which

such a volley may be returned; but he found words when she presently set

foot in the roomy field of the betterment of local conditions. What she

had in mind, it appeared, was a training-school--it might be called the

Pence Institute if it went through--and she was ready to listen to any

one who was likely to encourage her with hints or advice.

"So much energy, so much talent going to waste, so many young people

tumbling up anyhow and presently tumbling over--all for lack of thorough

and systematic training," she said, across her own broad bosom.

"I know of but one training that is needed," said Abner massively: "the

training of the sense of social justice--such training of the public

conscience as will insist upon seeing that each and every freeman gets an

even chance."

"An even chance?" repeated Eudoxia, rather dashed. "What I think of

offering is an even start. Doesn't it come to much the same thing?"

But Abner would none of it. Possessed of the fatalistic belief in the

efficacy of mere legislation such as dominates the rural townships of the

West, he grasped his companion firmly by the arm, set his sturdy legs in

rapid motion, walked her from assembly hall to assembly hall through this

State, that and the other, and finally fetched up with her under the dome

of the national Capitol. Senators and representatives co-operated here,

there and everywhere, the chosen spokesmen of the sovereign people; Abner

seemed almost to have enrolled himself among them. Confronted with this

august company, whose work it was to set things right, Eudoxia Pence felt

smaller than ever. What were her imponderable emanations of goodwill and

good intention when compared with the robust masculinity that was

marching in firm phalanxes over solid ground toward the mastery of the

great Problem? She drooped visibly. Little O'Grady, studying her pose and

expression from afar, wrung his hands. "That fellow will drive her away.

Ten to one we shall never see her profile here again!" Yes, Eudoxia was

feeling, with a sudden faintness, that the Better Things might after all

be beyond her reach. She looked about for herself without finding

herself: she had dwindled away to nothingness.