YOUTH AND THE BRIGHT MEDUSA

by

WILLA CATHER

1920

"We must not look at Goblin men, We must not buy their fruits;Who knows upon what soil they fedTheir hungry, thirsty roots?"

CONTENTS

COMING, APHRODITE!

THE DIAMOND MINE

A GOLD SLIPPER

SCANDAL

PAUL'S CASE

A WAGNER MATINÉE

THE SCULPTOR'S FUNERAL

"A DEATH IN THE DESERT"

The author wishes to thank _McClure's Magazine_, _The CenturyMagazine_ and _Harper's Magazine_ for their courtesy in permittingthe re-publication of three stories in this collection. 

The last four stories in the volume, _Paul's Case_, _A Wagner Matinée_, _The Sculptor's Funeral_, "_A Death in the Desert_, " are re-printed fromthe author's first book of stories, entitled "The Troll Garden, "published in 1905. 

Coming, Aphrodite!

I

Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house onthe south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him. He occupied one big room with no outside exposure except on the north, where he had built in a many-paned studio window that looked upon a courtand upon the roofs and walls of other buildings. His room was verycheerless, since he never got a ray of direct sunlight; the south cornerswere always in shadow. In one of the corners was a clothes closet, builtagainst the partition, in another a wide divan, serving as a seat by dayand a bed by night. In the front corner, the one farther from the window, was a sink, and a table with two gas burners where he sometimes cookedhis food. There, too, in the perpetual dusk, was the dog's bed, and oftena bone or two for his comfort. 

The dog was a Boston bull terrier, and Hedger explained his surlydisposition by the fact that he had been bred to the point where it toldon his nerves. His name was Caesar III, and he had taken prizes at veryexclusive dog shows. When he and his master went out to prowl aboutUniversity Place or to promenade along West Street, Caesar III wasinvariably fresh and shining. His pink skin showed through his mottledcoat, which glistened as if it had just been rubbed with olive oil, andhe wore a brass-studded collar, bought at the smartest saddler's. Hedger, as often as not, was hunched up in an old striped blanket coat, with ashapeless felt hat pulled over his bushy hair, wearing black shoes thathad become grey, or brown ones that had become black, and he never put ongloves unless the day was biting cold. 

Early in May, Hedger learned that he was to have a new neighbour in therear apartment--two rooms, one large and one small, that faced the west. His studio was shut off from the larger of these rooms by double doors, which, though they were fairly tight, left him a good deal at the mercyof the occupant. The rooms had been leased, long before he came there, bya trained nurse who considered herself knowing in old furniture. She wentto auction sales and bought up mahogany and dirty brass and stored itaway here, where she meant to live when she retired from nursing. Meanwhile, she sub-let her rooms, with their precious furniture, to youngpeople who came to New York to "write" or to "paint"--who proposed tolive by the sweat of the brow rather than of the hand, and who desiredartistic surroundings. 

When Hedger first moved in, these rooms were occupied by a young man whotried to write plays, --and who kept on trying until a week ago, when thenurse had put him out for unpaid rent. 

A few days after the playwright left, Hedger heard an ominous murmur ofvoices through the bolted double doors: the lady-like intonation of thenurse--doubtless exhibiting her treasures--and another voice, also awoman's, but very different; young, fresh, unguarded, confident. All thesame, it would be very annoying to have a woman in there. The onlybath-room on the floor was at the top of the stairs in the front hall, and he would always be running into her as he came or went from his bath. He would have to be more careful to see that Caesar didn't leave bonesabout the hall, too; and she might object when he cooked steak and onionson his gas burner. 

As soon as the talking ceased and the women left, he forgot them. He wasabsorbed in a study of paradise fish at the Aquarium, staring out atpeople through the glass and green water of their tank. It was a highlygratifying idea; the incommunicability of one stratum of animal life withanother, --though Hedger pretended it was only an experiment in unusuallighting. When he heard trunks knocking against the sides of the narrowhall, then he realized that she was moving in at once. Toward noon, groans and deep gasps and the creaking of ropes, made him aware that apiano was arriving. After the tramp of the movers died away down thestairs, somebody touched off a few scales and chords on the instrument, and then there was peace. Presently he heard her lock her door and godown the hall humming something; going out to lunch, probably. He stuckhis brushes in a can of turpentine and put on his hat, not stopping towash his hands. Caesar was smelling along the crack under the bolteddoors; his bony tail stuck out hard as a hickory withe, and the hair wasstanding up about his elegant collar. 

Hedger encouraged him. "Come along, Caesar. You'll soon get used to a newsmell. "

In the hall stood an enormous trunk, behind the ladder that led to theroof, just opposite Hedger's door. The dog flew at it with a growl ofhurt amazement. They went down three flights of stairs and out into thebrilliant May afternoon. 

Behind the Square, Hedger and his dog descended into a basement oysterhouse where there were no tablecloths on the tables and no handles on thecoffee cups, and the floor was covered with sawdust, and Caesar wasalways welcome, --not that he needed any such precautionary flooring. Allthe carpets of Persia would have been safe for him. Hedger ordered steakand onions absentmindedly, not realizing why he had an apprehension thatthis dish might be less readily at hand hereafter. While he ate, Caesarsat beside his chair, gravely disturbing the sawdust with his tail. 

After lunch Hedger strolled about the Square for the dog's health andwatched the stages pull out;--that was almost the very last summer of theold horse stages on Fifth Avenue. The fountain had but lately begunoperations for the season and was throwing up a mist of rainbow waterwhich now and then blew south and sprayed a bunch of Italian babies thatwere being supported on the outer rim by older, very little older, brothers and sisters. Plump robins were hopping about on the soil; thegrass was newly cut and blindingly green. Looking up the Avenue throughthe Arch, one could see the young poplars with their bright, stickyleaves, and the Brevoort glistening in its spring coat of paint, andshining horses and carriages, --occasionally an automobile, misshapen andsullen, like an ugly threat in a stream of things that were bright andbeautiful and alive. 

While Caesar and his master were standing by the fountain, a girlapproached them, crossing the Square. Hedger noticed her because she worea lavender cloth suit and carried in her arms a big bunch of freshlilacs. He saw that she was young and handsome, --beautiful, in fact, witha splendid figure and good action. She, too, paused by the fountain andlooked back through the Arch up the Avenue. She smiled ratherpatronizingly as she looked, and at the same time seemed delighted. Herslowly curving upper lip and half-closed eyes seemed to say: "You're gay, you're exciting, you are quite the right sort of thing; but you're nonetoo fine for me!"

In the moment she tarried, Caesar stealthily approached her and sniffedat the hem of her lavender skirt, then, when she went south like anarrow, he ran back to his master and lifted a face full of emotion andalarm, his lower lip twitching under his sharp white teeth and his hazeleyes pointed with a very definite discovery. He stood thus, motionless, while Hedger watched the lavender girl go up the steps and through thedoor of the house in which he lived. 

"You're right, my boy, it's she! She might be worse looking, you know. "

When they mounted to the studio, the new lodger's door, at the back ofthe hall, was a little ajar, and Hedger caught the warm perfume of lilacsjust brought in out of the sun. He was used to the musty smell of the oldhall carpet. (The nurse-lessee had once knocked at his studio door andcomplained that Caesar must be somewhat responsible for the particularflavour of that mustiness, and Hedger had never spoken to her since. ) Hewas used to the old smell, and he preferred it to that of the lilacs, andso did his companion, whose nose was so much more discriminating. Hedgershut his door vehemently, and fell to work. 

Most young men who dwell in obscure studios in New York have had abeginning, come out of something, have somewhere a home town, a family, apaternal roof. But Don Hedger had no such background. He was a foundling, and had grown up in a school for homeless boys, where book-learning was anegligible part of the curriculum. When he was sixteen, a Catholic priesttook him to Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to keep house for him. The priestdid something to fill in the large gaps in the boy's education, --taughthim to like "Don Quixote" and "The Golden Legend, " and encouraged him tomess with paints and crayons in his room up under the slope of themansard. When Don wanted to go to New York to study at the Art League, the priest got him a night job as packer in one of the big departmentstores. Since then, Hedger had taken care of himself; that was his onlyresponsibility. He was singularly unencumbered; had no family duties, nosocial ties, no obligations toward any one but his landlord. Since hetravelled light, he had travelled rather far. He had got over a good dealof the earth's surface, in spite of the fact that he never in his lifehad more than three hundred dollars ahead at any one time, and he hadalready outlived a succession of convictions and revelations about hisart. 

Though he was now but twenty-six years old, he had twice been on theverge of becoming a marketable product; once through some studies of NewYork streets he did for a magazine, and once through a collection ofpastels he brought home from New Mexico, which Remington, then at theheight of his popularity, happened to see, and generously tried to push. But on both occasions Hedger decided that this was something he didn'twish to carry further, --simply the old thing over again and gotnowhere, --so he took enquiring dealers experiments in a "later manner, "that made them put him out of the shop. When he ran short of money, hecould always get any amount of commercial work; he was an expertdraughtsman and worked with lightning speed. The rest of his time hespent in groping his way from one kind of painting into another, ortravelling about without luggage, like a tramp, and he was chieflyoccupied with getting rid of ideas he had once thought very fine. 

Hedger's circumstances, since he had moved to Washington Square, wereaffluent compared to anything he had ever known before. He was now ableto pay advance rent and turn the key on his studio when he went away forfour months at a stretch. It didn't occur to him to wish to be richerthan this. To be sure, he did without a great many things other peoplethink necessary, but he didn't miss them, because he had never had them. He belonged to no clubs, visited no houses, had no studio friends, and heate his dinner alone in some decent little restaurant, even on Christmasand New Year's. For days together he talked to nobody but his dog and thejanitress and the lame oysterman. 

After he shut the door and settled down to his paradise fish on thatfirst Tuesday in May, Hedger forgot all about his new neighbour. When thelight failed, he took Caesar out for a walk. On the way home he did hismarketing on West Houston Street, with a one-eyed Italian woman whoalways cheated him. After he had cooked his beans and scallopini, anddrunk half a bottle of Chianti, he put his dishes in the sink and went upon the roof to smoke. He was the only person in the house who ever wentto the roof, and he had a secret understanding with the janitress aboutit. He was to have "the privilege of the roof, " as she said, if he openedthe heavy trapdoor on sunny days to air out the upper hall, and waswatchful to close it when rain threatened. Mrs. Foley was fat and dirtyand hated to climb stairs, --besides, the roof was reached by aperpendicular iron ladder, definitely inaccessible to a woman of herbulk, and the iron door at the top of it was too heavy for any butHedger's strong arm to lift. Hedger was not above medium height, but hepractised with weights and dumb-bells, and in the shoulders he was asstrong as a gorilla. 

So Hedger had the roof to himself. He and Caesar often slept up there onhot nights, rolled in blankets he had brought home from Arizona. Hemounted with Caesar under his left arm. The dog had never learned toclimb a perpendicular ladder, and never did he feel so much his master'sgreatness and his own dependence upon him, as when he crept under his armfor this perilous ascent. Up there was even gravel to scratch in, and adog could do whatever he liked, so long as he did not bark. It was a kindof Heaven, which no one was strong enough to reach but his great, paint-smelling master. 

On this blue May night there was a slender, girlish looking young moon inthe west, playing with a whole company of silver stars. Now and then oneof them darted away from the group and shot off into the gauzy blue witha soft little trail of light, like laughter. Hedger and his dog weredelighted when a star did this. They were quite lost in watching theglittering game, when they were suddenly diverted by a sound, --notfrom the stars, though it was music. It was not the Prologue toPagliacci, which rose ever and anon on hot evenings from an Italiantenement on Thompson Street, with the gasps of the corpulent baritone whogot behind it; nor was it the hurdy-gurdy man, who often played at thecorner in the balmy twilight. No, this was a woman's voice, singing thetempestuous, over-lapping phrases of Signor Puccini, then comparativelynew in the world, but already so popular that even Hedger recognized hisunmistakable gusts of breath. He looked about over the roofs; all wasblue and still, with the well-built chimneys that were never used nowstanding up dark and mournful. He moved softly toward the yellowquadrangle where the gas from the hall shone up through the half-liftedtrapdoor. Oh yes! It came up through the hole like a strong draught, abig, beautiful voice, and it sounded rather like a professional's. Apiano had arrived in the morning, Hedger remembered. This might be a verygreat nuisance. It would be pleasant enough to listen to, if you couldturn it on and off as you wished; but you couldn't. Caesar, with the gaslight shining on his collar and his ugly but sensitive face, panted andlooked up for information. Hedger put down a reassuring hand. 

"I don't know. We can't tell yet. It may not be so bad. "

He stayed on the roof until all was still below, and finally descended, with quite a new feeling about his neighbour. Her voice, like her figure, inspired respect, --if one did not choose to call it admiration. Her doorwas shut, the transom was dark; nothing remained of her but the obtrusivetrunk, unrightfully taking up room in the narrow hall. 

II

For two days Hedger didn't see her. He was painting eight hours a dayjust then, and only went out to hunt for food. He noticed that shepractised scales and exercises for about an hour in the morning; then shelocked her door, went humming down the hall, and left him in peace. Heheard her getting her coffee ready at about the same time he got his. Earlier still, she passed his room on her way to her bath. In the eveningshe sometimes sang, but on the whole she didn't bother him. When he wasworking well he did not notice anything much. The morning paper laybefore his door until he reached out for his milk bottle, then he kickedthe sheet inside and it lay on the floor until evening. Sometimeshe read it and sometimes he did not. He forgot there was anything ofimportance going on in the world outside of his third floor studio. Nobody had ever taught him that he ought to be interested in otherpeople; in the Pittsburgh steel strike, in the Fresh Air Fund, in thescandal about the Babies' Hospital. A grey wolf, living in a Wyomingcanyon, would hardly have been less concerned about these things than wasDon Hedger. 

One morning he was coming out of the bathroom at the front end of thehall, having just given Caesar his bath and rubbed him into a glow with aheavy towel. Before the door, lying in wait for him, as it were, stood atall figure in a flowing blue silk dressing gown that fell away from hermarble arms. In her hands she carried various accessories of the bath. 

"I wish, " she said distinctly, standing in his way, "I wish you wouldn'twash your dog in the tub. I never heard of such a thing! I've found hishair in the tub, and I've smelled a doggy smell, and now I've caught youat it. It's an outrage!"

Hedger was badly frightened. She was so tall and positive, and was fairlyblazing with beauty and anger. He stood blinking, holding on to hissponge and dog-soap, feeling that he ought to bow very low to her. Butwhat he actually said was:

"Nobody has ever objected before. I always wash the tub, --and, anyhow, he's cleaner than most people. "

"Cleaner than me?" her eyebrows went up, her white arms and neck and herfragrant person seemed to scream at him like a band of outraged nymphs. Something flashed through his mind about a man who was turned into a dog, or was pursued by dogs, because he unwittingly intruded upon the bath ofbeauty. 

"No, I didn't mean that, " he muttered, turning scarlet under the bluishstubble of his muscular jaws. "But I know he's cleaner than I am. "

"That I don't doubt!" Her voice sounded like a soft shivering of crystal, and with a smile of pity she drew the folds of her voluminous blue robeclose about her and allowed the wretched man to pass. Even Caesar wasfrightened; he darted like a streak down the hall, through the door andto his own bed in the corner among the bones. 

Hedger stood still in the doorway, listening to indignant sniffs andcoughs and a great swishing of water about the sides of the tub. He hadwashed it; but as he had washed it with Caesar's sponge, it was quitepossible that a few bristles remained; the dog was shedding now. Theplaywright had never objected, nor had the jovial illustrator whooccupied the front apartment, --but he, as he admitted, "was usuallypye-eyed, when he wasn't in Buffalo. " He went home to Buffalo sometimesto rest his nerves. 

It had never occurred to Hedger that any one would mind using the tubafter Caesar;--but then, he had never seen a beautiful girl caparisonedfor the bath before. As soon as he beheld her standing there, he realizedthe unfitness of it. For that matter, she ought not to step into a tubthat any other mortal had bathed in; the illustrator was sloppy and leftcigarette ends on the moulding. 

All morning as he worked he was gnawed by a spiteful desire to get backat her. It rankled that he had been so vanquished by her disdain. When heheard her locking her door to go out for lunch, he stepped quickly intothe hall in his messy painting coat, and addressed her. 

"I don't wish to be exigent, Miss, "--he had certain grand words that heused upon occasion--"but if this is your trunk, it's rather in the wayhere. "

"Oh, very well!" she exclaimed carelessly, dropping her keys into herhandbag. "I'll have it moved when I can get a man to do it, " and she wentdown the hall with her free, roving stride. 

Her name, Hedger discovered from her letters, which the postman left onthe table in the lower hall, was Eden Bower. 

III

In the closet that was built against the partition separating his roomfrom Miss Bower's, Hedger kept all his wearing apparel, some of it onhooks and hangers, some of it on the floor. When he opened his closetdoor now-a-days, little dust-coloured insects flew out on downy wing, andhe suspected that a brood of moths were hatching in his winter overcoat. Mrs. Foley, the janitress, told him to bring down all his heavy clothesand she would give them a beating and hang them in the court. The closetwas in such disorder that he shunned the encounter, but one hot afternoonhe set himself to the task. First he threw out a pile of forgottenlaundry and tied it up in a sheet. The bundle stood as high as his middlewhen he had knotted the corners. Then he got his shoes and overshoestogether. When he took his overcoat from its place against the partition, a long ray of yellow light shot across the dark enclosure, --a knot hole, evidently, in the high wainscoating of the west room. He had nevernoticed it before, and without realizing what he was doing, he stoopedand squinted through it. 

Yonder, in a pool of sunlight, stood his new neighbour, wholly unclad, doing exercises of some sort before a long gilt mirror. Hedger did nothappen to think how unpardonable it was of him to watch her. Nudity wasnot improper to any one who had worked so much from the figure, and hecontinued to look, simply because he had never seen a woman's body sobeautiful as this one, --positively glorious in action. As she swung herarms and changed from one pivot of motion to another, muscular energyseemed to flow through her from her toes to her finger-tips. The softflush of exercise and the gold of afternoon sun played over her fleshtogether, enveloped her in a luminous mist which, as she turned andtwisted, made now an arm, now a shoulder, now a thigh, dissolve in purelight and instantly recover its outline with the next gesture. Hedger'sfingers curved as if he were holding a crayon; mentally he was doing thewhole figure in a single running line, and the charcoal seemed to explodein his hand at the point where the energy of each gesture was dischargedinto the whirling disc of light, from a foot or shoulder, from theup-thrust chin or the lifted breasts. 

He could not have told whether he watched her for six minutes or sixteen. When her gymnastics were over, she paused to catch up a lock of hair thathad come down, and examined with solicitude a little reddish mole thatgrew under her left arm-pit. Then, with her hand on her hip, she walkedunconcernedly across the room and disappeared through the door into herbedchamber. 

Disappeared--Don Hedger was crouching on his knees, staring at the goldenshower which poured in through the west windows, at the lake of goldsleeping on the faded Turkish carpet. The spot was enchanted; a visionout of Alexandria, out of the remote pagan past, had bathed itself therein Helianthine fire. 

When he crawled out of his closet, he stood blinking at the grey sheetstuffed with laundry, not knowing what had happened to him. He felt alittle sick as he contemplated the bundle. Everything here was different;he hated the disorder of the place, the grey prison light, his old shoesand himself and all his slovenly habits. The black calico curtains thatran on wires over his big window were white with dust. There were threegreasy frying pans in the sink, and the sink itself--He felt desperate. He couldn't stand this another minute. He took up an armful of winterclothes and ran down four flights into the basement. 

"Mrs. Foley, " he began, "I want my room cleaned this afternoon, thoroughly cleaned. Can you get a woman for me right away?"

"Is it company you're having?" the fat, dirty janitress enquired. Mrs. Foley was the widow of a useful Tammany man, and she owned real estate inFlatbush. She was huge and soft as a feather bed. Her face and arms werepermanently coated with dust, grained like wood where the sweat hadtrickled. 

"Yes, company. That's it. "

"Well, this is a queer time of the day to be asking for a cleaning woman. It's likely I can get you old Lizzie, if she's not drunk. I'll send Willyround to see. "

Willy, the son of fourteen, roused from the stupor and stain of his fifthbox of cigarettes by the gleam of a quarter, went out. In five minutes hereturned with old Lizzie, --she smelling strong of spirits and wearingseveral jackets which she had put on one over the other, and a number ofskirts, long and short, which made her resemble an animated dish-clout. She had, of course, to borrow her equipment from Mrs. Foley, and toiledup the long flights, dragging mop and pail and broom. She told Hedger tobe of good cheer, for he had got the right woman for the job, and showedhim a great leather strap she wore about her wrist to prevent dislocationof tendons. She swished about the place, scattering dust and splashingsoapsuds, while he watched her in nervous despair. He stood over Lizzieand made her scour the sink, directing her roughly, then paid her and gotrid of her. Shutting the door on his failure, he hurried off with his dogto lose himself among the stevedores and dock labourers on West Street. 

A strange chapter began for Don Hedger. Day after day, at that hour inthe afternoon, the hour before his neighbour dressed for dinner, hecrouched down in his closet to watch her go through her mysteriousexercises. It did not occur to him that his conduct was detestable; therewas nothing shy or retreating about this unclad girl, --a bold body, studying itself quite coolly and evidently well pleased with itself, doing all this for a purpose. Hedger scarcely regarded his action asconduct at all; it was something that had happened to him. More than oncehe went out and tried to stay away for the whole afternoon, but at aboutfive o'clock he was sure to find himself among his old shoes in the dark. The pull of that aperture was stronger than his will, --and he had alwaysconsidered his will the strongest thing about him. When she threw herselfupon the divan and lay resting, he still stared, holding his breath. Hisnerves were so on edge that a sudden noise made him start and brought outthe sweat on his forehead. The dog would come and tug at his sleeve, knowing that something was wrong with his master. If he attempted amournful whine, those strong hands closed about his throat. 

When Hedger came slinking out of his closet, he sat down on the edge ofthe couch, sat for hours without moving. He was not painting at all now. This thing, whatever it was, drank him up as ideas had sometimes done, and he sank into a stupor of idleness as deep and dark as the stupor ofwork. He could not understand it; he was no boy, he had worked frommodels for years, and a woman's body was no mystery to him. Yet now hedid nothing but sit and think about one. He slept very little, and withthe first light of morning he awoke as completely possessed by this womanas if he had been with her all the night before. The unconsciousoperations of life went on in him only to perpetuate this excitement. Hisbrain held but one image now--vibrated, burned with it. It was aheathenish feeling; without friendliness, almost without tenderness. 

Women had come and gone in Hedger's life. Not having had a mother tobegin with, his relations with them, whether amorous or friendly, hadbeen casual. He got on well with janitresses and wash-women, with Indiansand with the peasant women of foreign countries. He had friends among thesilk-skirt factory girls who came to eat their lunch in WashingtonSquare, and he sometimes took a model for a day in the country. He feltan unreasoning antipathy toward the well-dressed women he saw coming outof big shops, or driving in the Park. If, on his way to the Art Museum, he noticed a pretty girl standing on the steps of one of the houses onupper Fifth Avenue, he frowned at her and went by with his shouldershunched up as if he were cold. He had never known such girls, or heardthem talk, or seen the inside of the houses in which they lived; but hebelieved them all to be artificial and, in an aesthetic sense, perverted. He saw them enslaved by desire of merchandise and manufactured articles, effective only in making life complicated and insincere and inembroidering it with ugly and meaningless trivialities. They were enough, he thought, to make one almost forget woman as she existed in art, inthought, and in the universe. 

He had no desire to know the woman who had, for the time at least, sobroken up his life, --no curiosity about her every-day personality. Heshunned any revelation of it, and he listened for Miss Bower's coming andgoing, not to encounter, but to avoid her. He wished that the girl whowore shirt-waists and got letters from Chicago would keep out of his way, that she did not exist. With her he had naught to make. But in a roomfull of sun, before an old mirror, on a little enchanted rug of sleepingcolours, he had seen a woman who emerged naked through a door, anddisappeared naked. He thought of that body as never having been clad, oras having worn the stuffs and dyes of all the centuries but his own. Andfor him she had no geographical associations; unless with Crete, orAlexandria, or Veronese's Venice. She was the immortal conception, theperennial theme. 

The first break in Hedger's lethargy occurred one afternoon when twoyoung men came to take Eden Bower out to dine. They went into her musicroom, laughed and talked for a few minutes, and then took her away withthem. They were gone a long while, but he did not go out for foodhimself; he waited for them to come back. At last he heard them comingdown the hall, gayer and more talkative than when they left. One of themsat down at the piano, and they all began to sing. This Hedger foundabsolutely unendurable. He snatched up his hat and went running down thestairs. Caesar leaped beside him, hoping that old times were coming back. They had supper in the oysterman's basement and then sat down in front oftheir own doorway. The moon stood full over the Square, a thing of regalglory; but Hedger did not see the moon; he was looking, murderously, formen. Presently two, wearing straw hats and white trousers and carryingcanes, came down the steps from his house. He rose and dogged them acrossthe Square. They were laughing and seemed very much elated aboutsomething. As one stopped to light a cigarette, Hedger caught from theother:

"Don't you think she has a beautiful talent?"

His companion threw away his match. "She has a beautiful figure. " Theyboth ran to catch the stage. 

Hedger went back to his studio. The light was shining from her transom. For the first time he violated her privacy at night, and peered throughthat fatal aperture. She was sitting, fully dressed, in the window, smoking a cigarette and looking out over the housetops. He watched heruntil she rose, looked about her with a disdainful, crafty smile, andturned out the light. 

The next morning, when Miss Bower went out, Hedger followed her. Herwhite skirt gleamed ahead of him as she sauntered about the Square. Shesat down behind the Garibaldi statue and opened a music book she carried. She turned the leaves carelessly, and several times glanced in hisdirection. He was on the point of going over to her, when she rosequickly and looked up at the sky. A flock of pigeons had risen fromsomewhere in the crowded Italian quarter to the south, and were wheelingrapidly up through the morning air, soaring and dropping, scattering andcoming together, now grey, now white as silver, as they caught orintercepted the sunlight. She put up her hand to shade her eyes andfollowed them with a kind of defiant delight in her face. 

Hedger came and stood beside her. "You've surely seen them before?"

"Oh, yes, " she replied, still looking up. "I see them every day from mywindows. They always come home about five o'clock. Where do they live?"

"I don't know. Probably some Italian raises them for the market. Theywere here long before I came, and I've been here four years. "

"In that same gloomy room? Why didn't you take mine when it was vacant?"

"It isn't gloomy. That's the best light for painting. "

"Oh, is it? I don't know anything about painting. I'd like to see yourpictures sometime. You have such a lot in there. Don't they get dusty, piled up against the wall like that?"

"Not very. I'd be glad to show them to you. Is your name really EdenBower? I've seen your letters on the table. "

"Well, it's the name I'm going to sing under. My father's name is Bowers, but my friend Mr. Jones, a Chicago newspaper man who writes about music, told me to drop the 's. ' He's crazy about my voice. "

Miss Bower didn't usually tell the whole story, --about anything. Herfirst name, when she lived in Huntington, Illinois, was Edna, but Mr. Jones had persuaded her to change it to one which he felt would be worthyof her future. She was quick to take suggestions, though she told him she"didn't see what was the matter with 'Edna. '"

She explained to Hedger that she was going to Paris to study. She waswaiting in New York for Chicago friends who were to take her over, butwho had been detained. "Did you study in Paris?" she asked. 

"No, I've never been in Paris. But I was in the south of France all lastsummer, studying with C----. He's the biggest man among the moderns, --atleast I think so. "

Miss Bower sat down and made room for him on the bench. "Do tell me aboutit. I expected to be there by this time, and I can't wait to find outwhat it's like. "

Hedger began to relate how he had seen some of this Frenchman's work inan exhibition, and deciding at once that this was the man for him, he hadtaken a boat for Marseilles the next week, going over steerage. Heproceeded at once to the little town on the coast where his painterlived, and presented himself. The man never took pupils, but becauseHedger had come so far, he let him stay. Hedger lived at the master'shouse and every day they went out together to paint, sometimes on theblazing rocks down by the sea. They wrapped themselves in light woollenblankets and didn't feel the heat. Being there and working with C---- wasbeing in Paradise, Hedger concluded; he learned more in three months thanin all his life before. 

Eden Bower laughed. "You're a funny fellow. Didn't you do anything butwork? Are the women very beautiful? Did you have awfully good things toeat and drink?"

Hedger said some of the women were fine looking, especially one girl whowent about selling fish and lobsters. About the food there was nothingremarkable, --except the ripe figs, he liked those. They drank sour wine, and used goat-butter, which was strong and full of hair, as it waschurned in a goat skin. 

"But don't they have parties or banquets? Aren't there any fine hotelsdown there?"

"Yes, but they are all closed in summer, and the country people are poor. It's a beautiful country, though. "

"How, beautiful?" she persisted. 

"If you want to go in, I'll show you some sketches, and you'll see. "

Miss Bower rose. "All right. I won't go to my fencing lesson thismorning. Do you fence? Here comes your dog. You can't move but he's afteryou. He always makes a face at me when I meet him in the hall, and showshis nasty little teeth as if he wanted to bite me. "

In the studio Hedger got out his sketches, but to Miss Bower, whosefavourite pictures were Christ Before Pilate and a redhaired Magdalen ofHenner, these landscapes were not at all beautiful, and they gave her noidea of any country whatsoever. She was careful not to commit herself, however. Her vocal teacher had already convinced her that she had a greatdeal to learn about many things. 

"Why don't we go out to lunch somewhere?" Hedger asked, and began to dusthis fingers with a handkerchief--which he got out of sight as swiftly aspossible. 

"All right, the Brevoort, " she said carelessly. "I think that's a goodplace, and they have good wine. I don't care for cocktails. "

Hedger felt his chin uneasily. "I'm afraid I haven't shaved this morning. If you could wait for me in the Square? It won't take me ten minutes. "

Left alone, he found a clean collar and handkerchief, brushed his coatand blacked his shoes, and last of all dug up ten dollars from the bottomof an old copper kettle he had brought from Spain. His winter hat was ofsuch a complexion that the Brevoort hall boy winked at the porter as hetook it and placed it on the rack in a row of fresh straw ones. 

IV

That afternoon Eden Bower was lying on the couch in her music room, herface turned to the window, watching the pigeons. Reclining thus she couldsee none of the neighbouring roofs, only the sky itself and the birdsthat crossed and recrossed her field of vision, white as scraps of paperblowing in the wind. She was thinking that she was young and handsome andhad had a good lunch, that a very easy-going, light-hearted city lay inthe streets below her; and she was wondering why she found this queerpainter chap, with his lean, bluish cheeks and heavy black eyebrows, moreinteresting than the smart young men she met at her teacher's studio. 

Eden Bower was, at twenty, very much the same person that we all know herto be at forty, except that she knew a great deal less. But one thing sheknew: that she was to be Eden Bower. She was like some one standingbefore a great show window full of beautiful and costly things, decidingwhich she will order. She understands that they will not all be deliveredimmediately, but one by one they will arrive at her door. She alreadyknew some of the many things that were to happen to her; for instance, that the Chicago millionaire who was going to take her abroad with hissister as chaperone, would eventually press his claim in quite anothermanner. He was the most circumspect of bachelors, afraid of everythingobvious, even of women who were too flagrantly handsome. He was a nervouscollector of pictures and furniture, a nervous patron of music, and anervous host; very cautious about his health, and about any course ofconduct that might make him ridiculous. But she knew that he would atlast throw all his precautions to the winds. 

People like Eden Bower are inexplicable. Her father sold farmingmachinery in Huntington, Illinois, and she had grown up with noacquaintances or experiences outside of that prairie town. Yet from herearliest childhood she had not one conviction or opinion in common withthe people about her, --the only people she knew. Before she was out ofshort dresses she had made up her mind that she was going to be anactress, that she would live far away in great cities, that she would bemuch admired by men and would have everything she wanted. When she wasthirteen, and was already singing and reciting for church entertainments, she read in some illustrated magazine a long article about the late Czarof Russia, then just come to the throne or about to come to it. Afterthat, lying in the hammock on the front porch on summer evenings, orsitting through a long sermon in the family pew, she amused herself bytrying to make up her mind whether she would or would not be the Czar'smistress when she played in his Capital. Now Edna had met thisfascinating word only in the novels of Ouida, --her hard-worked littlemother kept a long row of them in the upstairs storeroom, behind thelinen chest. In Huntington, women who bore that relation to men werecalled by a very different name, and their lot was not an enviable one;of all the shabby and poor, they were the shabbiest. But then, Edna hadnever lived in Huntington, not even before she began to find books like"Sapho" and "Mademoiselle de Maupin, " secretly sold in paper coversthroughout Illinois. It was as if she had come into Huntington, into theBowers family, on one of the trains that puffed over the marshes behindtheir back fence all day long, and was waiting for another train to takeher out. 

As she grew older and handsomer, she had many beaux, but these small-townboys didn't interest her. If a lad kissed her when he brought her homefrom a dance, she was indulgent and she rather liked it. But if hepressed her further, she slipped away from him, laughing. After she beganto sing in Chicago, she was consistently discreet. She stayed as a guestin rich people's houses, and she knew that she was being watched like arabbit in a laboratory. Covered up in bed, with the lights out, shethought her own thoughts, and laughed. 

This summer in New York was her first taste of freedom. The Chicagocapitalist, after all his arrangements were made for sailing, had beencompelled to go to Mexico to look after oil interests. His sister knewan excellent singing master in New York. Why should not a discreet, well-balanced girl like Miss Bower spend the summer there, studyingquietly? The capitalist suggested that his sister might enjoy a summer onLong Island; he would rent the Griffith's place for her, with all theservants, and Eden could stay there. But his sister met this proposalwith a cold stare. So it fell out, that between selfishness and greed, Eden got a summer all her own, --which really did a great deal towardmaking her an artist and whatever else she was afterward to become. Shehad time to look about, to watch without being watched; to selectdiamonds in one window and furs in another, to select shoulders andmoustaches in the big hotels where she went to lunch. She had the easyfreedom of obscurity and the consciousness of power. She enjoyed both. She was in no hurry. 

While Eden Bower watched the pigeons, Don Hedger sat on the other side ofthe bolted doors, looking into a pool of dark turpentine, at his idlebrushes, wondering why a woman could do this to him. He, too, was sure ofhis future and knew that he was a chosen man. He could not know, ofcourse, that he was merely the first to fall under a fascination whichwas to be disastrous to a few men and pleasantly stimulating to manythousands. Each of these two young people sensed the future, but notcompletely. Don Hedger knew that nothing much would ever happen to him. Eden Bower understood that to her a great deal would happen. But she didnot guess that her neighbour would have more tempestuous adventuressitting in his dark studio than she would find in all the capitals ofEurope, or in all the latitude of conduct she was prepared to permitherself. 

V

One Sunday morning Eden was crossing the Square with a spruce young manin a white flannel suit and a panama hat. They had been breakfasting atthe Brevoort and he was coaxing her to let him come up to her rooms andsing for an hour. 

"No, I've got to write letters. You must run along now. I see a friend ofmine over there, and I want to ask him about something before I go up. "

"That fellow with the dog? Where did you pick him up?" the young manglanced toward the seat under a sycamore where Hedger was reading themorning paper. 

"Oh, he's an old friend from the West, " said Eden easily. "I won'tintroduce you, because he doesn't like people. He's a recluse. Good-bye. I can't be sure about Tuesday. I'll go with you if I have time after mylesson. " She nodded, left him, and went over to the seat littered withnewspapers. The young man went up the Avenue without looking back. 

"Well, what are you going to do today? Shampoo this animal all morning?"Eden enquired teasingly. 

Hedger made room for her on the seat. "No, at twelve o'clock I'm goingout to Coney Island. One of my models is going up in a balloon thisafternoon. I've often promised to go and see her, and now I'm going. "

Eden asked if models usually did such stunts. No, Hedger told her, butMolly Welch added to her earnings in that way. "I believe, " he added, "she likes the excitement of it. She's got a good deal of spirit. That'swhy I like to paint her. So many models have flaccid bodies. "

"And she hasn't, eh? Is she the one who comes to see you? I can't helphearing her, she talks so loud. "

"Yes, she has a rough voice, but she's a fine girl. I don't suppose you'dbe interested in going?"

"I don't know, " Eden sat tracing patterns on the asphalt with the end ofher parasol. "Is it any fun? I got up feeling I'd like to do somethingdifferent today. It's the first Sunday I've not had to sing in church. Ihad that engagement for breakfast at the Brevoort, but it wasn't veryexciting. That chap can't talk about anything but himself. "

Hedger warmed a little. "If you've never been to Coney Island, you oughtto go. It's nice to see all the people; tailors and bar-tenders andprize-fighters with their best girls, and all sorts of folks taking aholiday. "

Eden looked sidewise at him. So one ought to be interested in people ofthat kind, ought one? He was certainly a funny fellow. Yet he was never, somehow, tiresome. She had seen a good deal of him lately, but she keptwanting to know him better, to find out what made him different from menlike the one she had just left--whether he really was as different as heseemed. "I'll go with you, " she said at last, "if you'll leave that athome. " She pointed to Caesar's flickering ears with her sunshade. 

"But he's half the fun. You'd like to hear him bark at the waves whenthey come in. "

"No, I wouldn't. He's jealous and disagreeable if he sees you talking toany one else. Look at him now. "

"Of course, if you make a face at him. He knows what that means, and hemakes a worse face. He likes Molly Welch, and she'll be disappointed if Idon't bring him. "

Eden said decidedly that he couldn't take both of them. So at twelveo'clock when she and Hedger got on the boat at Desbrosses street, Caesarwas lying on his pallet, with a bone. 

Eden enjoyed the boat-ride. It was the first time she had been on thewater, and she felt as if she were embarking for France. The light warmbreeze and the plunge of the waves made her very wide awake, and sheliked crowds of any kind. They went to the balcony of a big, noisyrestaurant and had a shore dinner, with tall steins of beer. Hedger hadgot a big advance from his advertising firm since he first lunched withMiss Bower ten days ago, and he was ready for anything. 

After dinner they went to the tent behind the bathing beach, where thetops of two balloons bulged out over the canvas. A red-faced man in alinen suit stood in front of the tent, shouting in a hoarse voice andtelling the people that if the crowd was good for five dollars more, abeautiful young woman would risk her life for their entertainment. Fourlittle boys in dirty red uniforms ran about taking contributions in theirpillbox hats. One of the balloons was bobbing up and down in its tetherand people were shoving forward to get nearer the tent. 

"Is it dangerous, as he pretends?" Eden asked. 

"Molly says it's simple enough if nothing goes wrong with the balloon. Then it would be all over, I suppose. "

"Wouldn't you like to go up with her?"

"I? Of course not. I'm not fond of taking foolish risks. "

Eden sniffed. "I shouldn't think sensible risks would be very much fun. "

Hedger did not answer, for just then every one began to shove the otherway and shout, "Look out. There she goes!" and a band of six piecescommenced playing furiously. 

As the balloon rose from its tent enclosure, they saw a girl in greentights standing in the basket, holding carelessly to one of the ropeswith one hand and with the other waving to the spectators. A long ropetrailed behind to keep the balloon from blowing out to sea. 

As it soared, the figure in green tights in the basket diminished to amere spot, and the balloon itself, in the brilliant light, looked like abig silver-grey bat, with its wings folded. When it began to sink, thegirl stepped through the hole in the basket to a trapeze that hung below, and gracefully descended through the air, holding to the rod with bothhands, keeping her body taut and her feet close together. The crowd, which had grown very large by this time, cheered vociferously. The mentook off their hats and waved, little boys shouted, and fat old women, shining with the heat and a beer lunch, murmured admiring comments uponthe balloonist's figure. "Beautiful legs, she has!"

"That's so, " Hedger whispered. "Not many girls would look well in thatposition. " Then, for some reason, he blushed a slow, dark, painfulcrimson. 

The balloon descended slowly, a little way from the tent, and thered-faced man in the linen suit caught Molly Welch before her feettouched the ground, and pulled her to one side. The band struck up "BlueBell" by way of welcome, and one of the sweaty pages ran forward andpresented the balloonist with a large bouquet of artificial flowers. Shesmiled and thanked him, and ran back across the sand to the tent. 

"Can't we go inside and see her?" Eden asked. "You can explain to thedoor man. I want to meet her. " Edging forward, she herself addressed theman in the linen suit and slipped something from her purse into his hand. 

They found Molly seated before a trunk that had a mirror in the lid and a"make-up" outfit spread upon the tray. She was wiping the cold cream andpowder from her neck with a discarded chemise. 

"Hello, Don, " she said cordially. "Brought a friend?"

Eden liked her. She had an easy, friendly manner, and there was somethingboyish and devil-may-care about her. 

"Yes, it's fun. I'm mad about it, " she said in reply to Eden's questions. "I always want to let go, when I come down on the bar. You don't feelyour weight at all, as you would on a stationary trapeze. "

The big drum boomed outside, and the publicity man began shouting tonewly arrived boatloads. Miss Welch took a last pull at her cigarette. "Now you'll have to get out, Don. I change for the next act. This time Igo up in a black evening dress, and lose the skirt in the basket before Istart down. "

"Yes, go along, " said Eden. "Wait for me outside the door. I'll stay andhelp her dress. "

Hedger waited and waited, while women of every build bumped into him andbegged his pardon, and the red pages ran about holding out their caps forcoins, and the people ate and perspired and shifted parasols against thesun. When the band began to play a two-step, all the bathers ran up outof the surf to watch the ascent. The second balloon bumped and rose, andthe crowd began shouting to the girl in a black evening dress who stoodleaning against the ropes and smiling. "It's a new girl, " they called. "It ain't the Countess this time. You're a peach, girlie!"

The balloonist acknowledged these compliments, bowing and looking downover the sea of upturned faces, --but Hedger was determined she should notsee him, and he darted behind the tent-fly. He was suddenly dripping withcold sweat, his mouth was full of the bitter taste of anger and histongue felt stiff behind his teeth. Molly Welch, in a shirt-waist and awhite tam-o'-shanter cap, slipped out from the tent under his arm andlaughed up in his face. "She's a crazy one you brought along. She'll getwhat she wants!"

"Oh, I'll settle with you, all right!" Hedger brought out withdifficulty. 

"It's not my fault, Donnie. I couldn't do anything with her. She boughtme off. What's the matter with you? Are you soft on her? She's safeenough. It's as easy as rolling off a log, if you keep cool. " Molly Welchwas rather excited herself, and she was chewing gum at a high speed asshe stood beside him, looking up at the floating silver cone. "Nowwatch, " she exclaimed suddenly. "She's coming down on the bar. I advisedher to cut that out, but you see she does it first-rate. And she got ridof the skirt, too. Those black tights show off her legs very well. Shekeeps her feet together like I told her, and makes a good line along theback. See the light on those silver slippers, --that was a good idea Ihad. Come along to meet her. Don't be a grouch; she's done it fine!"

Molly tweaked his elbow, and then left him standing like a stump, whileshe ran down the beach with the crowd. 

Though Hedger was sulking, his eye could not help seeing the low bluewelter of the sea, the arrested bathers, standing in the surf, their armsand legs stained red by the dropping sun, all shading their eyes andgazing upward at the slowly falling silver star. 

Molly Welch and the manager caught Eden under the arms and lifted heraside, a red page dashed up with a bouquet, and the band struck up "BlueBell. " Eden laughed and bowed, took Molly's arm, and ran up the sand inher black tights and silver slippers, dodging the friendly old women, andthe gallant sports who wanted to offer their homage on the spot. 

When she emerged from the tent, dressed in her own clothes, that part ofthe beach was almost deserted. She stepped to her companion's side andsaid carelessly: "Hadn't we better try to catch this boat? I hope you'renot sore at me. Really, it was lots of fun. "

Hedger looked at his watch. "Yes, we have fifteen minutes to get to theboat, " he said politely. 

As they walked toward the pier, one of the pages ran up panting. "Lady, you're carrying off the bouquet, " he said, aggrievedly. 

Eden stopped and looked at the bunch of spotty cotton roses in her hand. "Of course. I want them for a souvenir. You gave them to me yourself. "

"I give 'em to you for looks, but you can't take 'em away. They belong tothe show. "

"Oh, you always use the same bunch?"

"Sure we do. There ain't too much money in this business. "

She laughed and tossed them back to him. "Why are you angry?" she askedHedger. "I wouldn't have done it if I'd been with some fellows, but Ithought you were the sort who wouldn't mind. Molly didn't for a minutethink you would. "

"What possessed you to do such a fool thing?" he asked roughly. 

"I don't know. When I saw her coming down, I wanted to try it. It lookedexciting. Didn't I hold myself as well as she did?"

Hedger shrugged his shoulders, but in his heart he forgave her. 

The return boat was not crowded, though the boats that passed them, goingout, were packed to the rails. The sun was setting. Boys and girls sat onthe long benches with their arms about each other, singing. Eden felt astrong wish to propitiate her companion, to be alone with him. She hadbeen curiously wrought up by her balloon trip; it was a lark, but notvery satisfying unless one came back to something after the flight. Shewanted to be admired and adored. Though Eden said nothing, and sat withher arms limp on the rail in front of her, looking languidly at therising silhouette of the city and the bright path of the sun, Hedger felta strange drawing near to her. If he but brushed her white skirt with hisknee, there was an instant communication between them, such as there hadnever been before. They did not talk at all, but when they went over thegang-plank she took his arm and kept her shoulder close to his. He feltas if they were enveloped in a highly charged atmosphere, an invisiblenetwork of subtle, almost painful sensibility. They had somehow takenhold of each other. 

An hour later, they were dining in the back garden of a little Frenchhotel on Ninth Street, long since passed away. It was cool and leafythere, and the mosquitoes were not very numerous. A party of SouthAmericans at another table were drinking champagne, and Eden murmuredthat she thought she would like some, if it were not too expensive. "Perhaps it will make me think I am in the balloon again. That was a verynice feeling. You've forgiven me, haven't you?"

Hedger gave her a quick straight look from under his black eyebrows, andsomething went over her that was like a chill, except that it was warmand feathery. She drank most of the wine; her companion was indifferentto it. He was talking more to her tonight than he had ever done before. She asked him about a new picture she had seen in his room; a queer thingfull of stiff, supplicating female figures. "It's Indian, isn't it?"

"Yes. I call it Rain Spirits, or maybe, Indian Rain. In the Southwest, where I've been a good deal, the Indian traditions make women have to dowith the rain-fall. They were supposed to control it, somehow, and to beable to find springs, and make moisture come out of the earth. You seeI'm trying to learn to paint what people think and feel; to get away fromall that photographic stuff. When I look at you, I don't see what acamera would see, do I?"

"How can I tell?"

"Well, if I should paint you, I could make you understand what I see. "For the second time that day Hedger crimsoned unexpectedly, and his eyesfell and steadily contemplated a dish of little radishes. "Thatparticular picture I got from a story a Mexican priest told me; he saidhe found it in an old manuscript book in a monastery down there, writtenby some Spanish Missionary, who got his stories from the Aztecs. This onehe called 'The Forty Lovers of the Queen, ' and it was more or less aboutrain-making. "

"Aren't you going to tell it to me?" Eden asked. 

Hedger fumbled among the radishes. "I don't know if it's the proper kindof story to tell a girl. "

She smiled; "Oh, forget about that! I've been balloon riding today. Ilike to hear you talk. "

Her low voice was flattering. She had seemed like clay in his hands eversince they got on the boat to come home. He leaned back in his chair, forgot his food, and, looking at her intently, began to tell his story, the theme of which he somehow felt was dangerous tonight. 

The tale began, he said, somewhere in Ancient Mexico, and concerned thedaughter of a king. The birth of this Princess was preceded by unusualportents. Three times her mother dreamed that she was delivered ofserpents, which betokened that the child she carried would have powerwith the rain gods. The serpent was the symbol of water. The Princessgrew up dedicated to the gods, and wise men taught her the rain-makingmysteries. She was with difficulty restrained from men and was guarded atall times, for it was the law of the Thunder that she be maiden untilher marriage. In the years of her adolescence, rain was abundant with herpeople. The oldest man could not remember such fertility. When thePrincess had counted eighteen summers, her father went to drive out a warparty that harried his borders on the north and troubled his prosperity. The King destroyed the invaders and brought home many prisoners. Amongthe prisoners was a young chief, taller than any of his captors, of suchstrength and ferocity that the King's people came a day's journey to lookat him. When the Princess beheld his great stature, and saw that his armsand breast were covered with the figures of wild animals, bitten into theskin and coloured, she begged his life from her father. She desired thathe should practise his art upon her, and prick upon her skin the signs ofRain and Lightning and Thunder, and stain the wounds with herb-juices, asthey were upon his own body. For many days, upon the roof of the King'shouse, the Princess submitted herself to the bone needle, and the womenwith her marvelled at her fortitude. But the Princess was without shamebefore the Captive, and it came about that he threw from him his needlesand his stains, and fell upon the Princess to violate her honour; and herwomen ran down from the roof screaming, to call the guard which stood atthe gateway of the King's house, and none stayed to protect theirmistress. 

When the guard came, the Captive was thrown into bonds, and he wasgelded, and his tongue was torn out, and he was given for a slave to theRain Princess. 

The country of the Aztecs to the east was tormented by thirst, and theirking, hearing much of the rain-making arts of the Princess, sent anembassy to her father, with presents and an offer of marriage. So thePrincess went from her father to be the Queen of the Aztecs, and she tookwith her the Captive, who served her in everything with entire fidelityand slept upon a mat before her door. 

The King gave his bride a fortress on the outskirts of the city, whithershe retired to entreat the rain gods. This fortress was called theQueen's House, and on the night of the new moon the Queen came to it fromthe palace. But when the moon waxed and grew toward the round, becausethe god of Thunder had had his will of her, then the Queen returned tothe King. Drought abated in the country and rain fell abundantly byreason of the Queen's power with the stars. 

When the Queen went to her own house she took with her no servant but theCaptive, and he slept outside her door and brought her food after she hadfasted. The Queen had a jewel of great value, a turquoise that had fallenfrom the sun, and had the image of the sun upon it. And when she desireda young man whom she had seen in the army or among the slaves, she sentthe Captive to him with the jewel, for a sign that he should come to hersecretly at the Queen's House upon business concerning the welfare ofall. And some, after she had talked with them, she sent away withrewards; and some she took into her chamber and kept them by her for onenight or two. Afterward she called the Captive and bade him conduct theyouth by the secret way he had come, underneath the chambers of thefortress. But for the going away of the Queen's lovers the Captive tookout the bar that was beneath a stone in the floor of the passage, and putin its stead a rush-reed, and the youth stepped upon it and fell throughinto a cavern that was the bed of an underground river, and whatever wasthrown into it was not seen again. In this service nor in any other didthe Captive fail the Queen. 

But when the Queen sent for the Captain of the Archers, she detained himfour days in her chamber, calling often for food and wine, and wasgreatly content with him. On the fourth day she went to the Captiveoutside her door and said: "Tomorrow take this man up by the sure way, bywhich the King comes, and let him live. "

In the Queen's door were arrows, purple and white. When she desired theKing to come to her publicly, with his guard, she sent him a white arrow;but when she sent the purple, he came secretly, and covered himself withhis mantle to be hidden from the stone gods at the gate. On the fifthnight that the Queen was with her lover, the Captive took a purple arrowto the King, and the King came secretly and found them together. Hekilled the Captain with his own hand, but the Queen he brought to publictrial. The Captive, when he was put to the question, told on his fingersforty men that he had let through the underground passage into the river. The Captive and the Queen were put to death by fire, both on the sameday, and afterward there was scarcity of rain. 

 * * * * *

Eden Bower sat shivering a little as she listened. Hedger was not tryingto please her, she thought, but to antagonize and frighten her by hisbrutal story. She had often told herself that his lean, big-boned lowerjaw was like his bull-dog's, but tonight his face made Caesar's mostsavage and determined expression seem an affectation. Now she was lookingat the man he really was. Nobody's eyes had ever defied her like this. They were searching her and seeing everything; all she had concealed fromLivingston, and from the millionaire and his friends, and from thenewspaper men. He was testing her, trying her out, and she was more illat ease than she wished to show. 

"That's quite a thrilling story, " she said at last, rising and windingher scarf about her throat. "It must be getting late. Almost every onehas gone. "

They walked down the Avenue like people who have quarrelled, or who wishto get rid of each other. Hedger did not take her arm at the streetcrossings, and they did not linger in the Square. At her door he triednone of the old devices of the Livingston boys. He stood like a post, having forgotten to take off his hat, gave her a harsh, threateningglance, muttered "goodnight, " and shut his own door noisily. 

There was no question of sleep for Eden Bower. Her brain was working likea machine that would never stop. After she undressed, she tried to calmher nerves by smoking a cigarette, lying on the divan by the open window. But she grew wider and wider awake, combating the challenge that hadflamed all evening in Hedger's eyes. The balloon had been one kind ofexcitement, the wine another; but the thing that had roused her, as ablow rouses a proud man, was the doubt, the contempt, the sneeringhostility with which the painter had looked at her when he told hissavage story. Crowds and balloons were all very well, she reflected, butwoman's chief adventure is man. With a mind over active and a sense oflife over strong, she wanted to walk across the roofs in the starlight, to sail over the sea and face at once a world of which she had never beenafraid. 

Hedger must be asleep; his dog had stopped sniffing under the doubledoors. Eden put on her wrapper and slippers and stole softly down thehall over the old carpet; one loose board creaked just as she reached theladder. The trap-door was open, as always on hot nights. When she steppedout on the roof she drew a long breath and walked across it, looking upat the sky. Her foot touched something soft; she heard a low growl, andon the instant Caesar's sharp little teeth caught her ankle and waited. His breath was like steam on her leg. Nobody had ever intruded upon hisroof before, and he panted for the movement or the word that would lethim spring his jaw. Instead, Hedger's hand seized his throat. 

"Wait a minute. I'll settle with him, " he said grimly. He dragged the dogtoward the manhole and disappeared. When he came back, he found Edenstanding over by the dark chimney, looking away in an offended attitude. 

"I caned him unmercifully, " he panted. "Of course you didn't hearanything; he never whines when I beat him. He didn't nip you, did he?"

"I don't know whether he broke the skin or not, " she answeredaggrievedly, still looking off into the west. 

"If I were one of your friends in white pants, I'd strike a match to findwhether you were hurt, though I know you are not, and then I'd see yourankle, wouldn't I?"

"I suppose so. "

He shook his head and stood with his hands in the pockets of his oldpainting jacket. "I'm not up to such boy-tricks. If you want the placeto yourself, I'll clear out. There are plenty of places where I can spendthe night, what's left of it. But if you stay here and I stay here--" Heshrugged his shoulders. 

Eden did not stir, and she made no reply. Her head drooped slightly, asif she were considering. But the moment he put his arms about her theybegan to talk, both at once, as people do in an opera. The instant avowalbrought out a flood of trivial admissions. Hedger confessed his crime, was reproached and forgiven, and now Eden knew what it was in his lookthat she had found so disturbing of late. 

Standing against the black chimney, with the sky behind and blue shadowsbefore, they looked like one of Hedger's own paintings of that period;two figures, one white and one dark, and nothing whatever distinguishableabout them but that they were male and female. The faces were lost, thecontours blurred in shadow, but the figures were a man and a woman, andthat was their whole concern and their mysterious beauty, --it was therhythm in which they moved, at last, along the roof and down into thedark hole; he first, drawing her gently after him. She came down veryslowly. The excitement and bravado and uncertainty of that long day andnight seemed all at once to tell upon her. When his feet were on thecarpet and he reached up to lift her down, she twined her arms about hisneck as after a long separation, and turned her face to him, and herlips, with their perfume of youth and passion. 

 * * * * *

One Saturday afternoon Hedger was sitting in the window of Eden's musicroom. They had been watching the pigeons come wheeling over the roofsfrom their unknown feeding grounds. 

"Why, " said Eden suddenly, "don't we fix those big doors into your studioso they will open? Then, if I want you, I won't have to go through thehall. That illustrator is loafing about a good deal of late. "

"I'll open them, if you wish. The bolt is on your side. "

"Isn't there one on yours, too?"

"No. I believe a man lived there for years before I came in, and thenurse used to have these rooms herself. Naturally, the lock was onthe lady's side. "

Eden laughed and began to examine the bolt. "It's all stuck up withpaint. " Looking about, her eye lighted upon a bronze Buddah which wasone of the nurse's treasures. Taking him by his head, she struck the bolta blow with his squatting posteriors. The two doors creaked, sagged, andswung weakly inward a little way, as if they were too old for suchescapades. Eden tossed the heavy idol into a stuffed chair. "That'sbetter, " she exclaimed exultantly. "So the bolts are always on the lady'sside? What a lot society takes for granted!"

Hedger laughed, sprang up and caught her arms roughly. "Whoever takes youfor granted--Did anybody, ever?"

"Everybody does. That's why I'm here. You are the only one who knowsanything about me. Now I'll have to dress if we're going out for dinner. "

He lingered, keeping his hold on her. "But I won't always be the onlyone, Eden Bower. I won't be the last. "

"No, I suppose not, " she said carelessly. "But what does that matter? Youare the first. "

As a long, despairing whine broke in the warm stillness, they drew apart. Caesar, lying on his bed in the dark corner, had lifted his head at thisinvasion of sunlight, and realized that the side of his room was brokenopen, and his whole world shattered by change. There stood his master andthis woman, laughing at him! The woman was pulling the long black hair ofthis mightiest of men, who bowed his head and permitted it. 

VI

In time they quarrelled, of course, and about an abstraction, --as youngpeople often do, as mature people almost never do. Eden came in late oneafternoon. She had been with some of her musical friends to lunch atBurton Ives' studio, and she began telling Hedger about its splendours. He listened a moment and then threw down his brushes. "I know exactlywhat it's like, " he said impatiently. "A very good department-storeconception of a studio. It's one of the show places. "

"Well, it's gorgeous, and he said I could bring you to see him. The boystell me he's awfully kind about giving people a lift, and you might getsomething out of it. "

Hedger started up and pushed his canvas out of the way. "What could Ipossibly get from Burton Ives? He's almost the worst painter in theworld; the stupidest, I mean. "

Eden was annoyed. Burton Ives had been very nice to her and had beggedher to sit for him. "You must admit that he's a very successful one, "she said coldly. 

"Of course he is! Anybody can be successful who will do that sort ofthing. I wouldn't paint his pictures for all the money in New York. "

"Well, I saw a lot of them, and I think they are beautiful. "

Hedger bowed stiffly. 

"What's the use of being a great painter if nobody knows about you?" Edenwent on persuasively. "Why don't you paint the kind of pictures peoplecan understand, and then, after you're successful, do whatever you like?"

"As I look at it, " said Hedger brusquely, "I am successful. "

Eden glanced about. "Well, I don't see any evidences of it, " she said, biting her lip. "He has a Japanese servant and a wine cellar, and keeps ariding horse. "

Hedger melted a little. "My dear, I have the most expensive luxury in theworld, and I am much more extravagant than Burton Ives, for I work toplease nobody but myself. "

"You mean you could make money and don't? That you don't try to get apublic?"

"Exactly. A public only wants what has been done over and over. I'mpainting for painters, --who haven't been born. "

"What would you do if I brought Mr. Ives down here to see your things?"

"Well, for God's sake, don't! Before he left I'd probably tell him what Ithought of him. "

Eden rose. "I give you up. You know very well there's only one kind ofsuccess that's real. "

"Yes, but it's not the kind you mean. So you've been thinking me a scrubpainter, who needs a helping hand from some fashionable studio man? Whatthe devil have you had anything to do with me for, then?"

"There's no use talking to you, " said Eden walking slowly toward thedoor. "I've been trying to pull wires for you all afternoon, and this iswhat it comes to. " She had expected that the tidings of a prospectivecall from the great man would be received very differently, and had beenthinking as she came home in the stage how, as with a magic wand, shemight gild Hedger's future, float him out of his dark hole on a tide ofprosperity, see his name in the papers and his pictures in the windows onFifth Avenue. 

Hedger mechanically snapped the midsummer leash on Caesar's collar andthey ran downstairs and hurried through Sullivan Street off toward theriver. He wanted to be among rough, honest people, to get down where thebig drays bumped over stone paving blocks and the men wore corduroytrowsers and kept their shirts open at the neck. He stopped for a drinkin one of the sagging bar-rooms on the water front. He had never in hislife been so deeply wounded; he did not know he could be so hurt. He hadtold this girl all his secrets. On the roof, in these warm, heavy summernights, with her hands locked in his, he had been able to explain all hismisty ideas about an unborn art the world was waiting for; had been ableto explain them better than he had ever done to himself. And she hadlooked away to the chattels of this uptown studio and coveted them forhim! To her he was only an unsuccessful Burton Ives. 

Then why, as he had put it to her, did she take up with him? Young, beautiful, talented as she was, why had she wasted herself on a scrub?Pity? Hardly; she wasn't sentimental. There was no explaining her. But inthis passion that had seemed so fearless and so fated to be, his ownposition now looked to him ridiculous; a poor dauber without money orfame, --it was her caprice to load him with favours. Hedger ground histeeth so loud that his dog, trotting beside him, heard him and looked up. 

While they were having supper at the oyster-man's, he planned his escape. Whenever he saw her again, everything he had told her, that he shouldnever have told any one, would come back to him; ideas he had neverwhispered even to the painter whom he worshipped and had gone all the wayto France to see. To her they must seem his apology for not having horsesand a valet, or merely the puerile boastfulness of a weak man. Yet if sheslipped the bolt tonight and came through the doors and said, "Oh, weakman, I belong to you!" what could he do? That was the danger. He wouldcatch the train out to Long Beach tonight, and tomorrow he would go on tothe north end of Long Island, where an old friend of his had a summerstudio among the sand dunes. He would stay until things came right in hismind. And she could find a smart painter, or take her punishment. 

When he went home, Eden's room was dark; she was dining out somewhere. Hethrew his things into a hold-all he had carried about the world with him, strapped up some colours and canvases, and ran downstairs. 

VII

Five days later Hedger was a restless passenger on a dirty, crowdedSunday train, coming back to town. Of course he saw now how unreasonablehe had been in expecting a Huntington girl to know anything aboutpictures; here was a whole continent full of people who knew nothingabout pictures and he didn't hold it against them. What had such thingsto do with him and Eden Bower? When he lay out on the dunes, watching themoon come up out of the sea, it had seemed to him that there was nowonder in the world like the wonder of Eden Bower. He was going back toher because she was older than art, because she was the most overwhelmingthing that had ever come into his life. 

He had written her yesterday, begging her to be at home this evening, telling her that he was contrite, and wretched enough. 

Now that he was on his way to her, his stronger feeling unaccountablychanged to a mood that was playful and tender. He wanted to shareeverything with her, even the most trivial things. He wanted to tell herabout the people on the train, coming back tired from their holiday withbunches of wilted flowers and dirty daisies; to tell her that thefish-man, to whom she had often sent him for lobsters, was among thepassengers, disguised in a silk shirt and a spotted tie, and how his wifelooked exactly like a fish, even to her eyes, on which cataracts wereforming. He could tell her, too, that he hadn't as much as unstrapped hiscanvases, --that ought to convince her. 

In those days passengers from Long Island came into New York by ferry. Hedger had to be quick about getting his dog out of the express car inorder to catch the first boat. The East River, and the bridges, and thecity to the west, were burning in the conflagration of the sunset; therewas that great home-coming reach of evening in the air. 

The car changes from Thirty-fourth Street were too many and tooperplexing; for the first time in his life Hedger took a hansom cab forWashington Square. Caesar sat bolt upright on the worn leather cushionbeside him, and they jogged off, looking down on the rest of the world. 

It was twilight when they drove down lower Fifth Avenue into the Square, and through the Arch behind them were the two long rows of pale violetlights that used to bloom so beautifully against the grey stone andasphalt. Here and yonder about the Square hung globes that shed aradiance not unlike the blue mists of evening, emerging softly whendaylight died, as the stars emerged in the thin blue sky. Under them thesharp shadows of the trees fell on the cracked pavement and the sleepinggrass. The first stars and the first lights were growing silver againstthe gradual darkening, when Hedger paid his driver and went into thehouse, --which, thank God, was still there! On the hall table lay hisletter of yesterday, unopened. 

He went upstairs with every sort of fear and every sort of hope clutchingat his heart; it was as if tigers were tearing him. Why was there no gasburning in the top hall? He found matches and the gas bracket. Heknocked, but got no answer; nobody was there. Before his own door wereexactly five bottles of milk, standing in a row. The milk-boy had takenspiteful pleasure in thus reminding him that he forgot to stop his order. 

Hedger went down to the basement; it, too, was dark. The janitress wastaking her evening airing on the basement steps. She sat waving apalm-leaf fan majestically, her dirty calico dress open at the neck. Shetold him at once that there had been "changes. " Miss Bower's room was tolet again, and the piano would go tomorrow. Yes, she left yesterday, shesailed for Europe with friends from Chicago. They arrived on Friday, heralded by many telegrams. Very rich people they were said to be, though the man had refused to pay the nurse a month's rent in lieu ofnotice, --which would have been only right, as the young lady had agreedto take the rooms until October. Mrs. Foley had observed, too, that hedidn't overpay her or Willy for their trouble, and a great deal oftrouble they had been put to, certainly. Yes, the young lady was verypleasant, but the nurse said there were rings on the mahogany table whereshe had put tumblers and wine glasses. It was just as well she was gone. The Chicago man was uppish in his ways, but not much to look at. Shesupposed he had poor health, for there was nothing to him inside hisclothes. 

Hedger went slowly up the stairs--never had they seemed so long, or hislegs so heavy. The upper floor was emptiness and silence. He unlockedhis room, lit the gas, and opened the windows. When he went to put hiscoat in the closet, he found, hanging among his clothes, a pale, flesh-tinted dressing gown he had liked to see her wear, with aperfume--oh, a perfume that was still Eden Bower! He shut the door behindhim and there, in the dark, for a moment he lost his manliness. It waswhen he held this garment to him that he found a letter in the pocket. 

The note was written with a lead pencil, in haste: She was sorry that hewas angry, but she still didn't know just what she had done. She hadthought Mr. Ives would be useful to him; she guessed he was too proud. She wanted awfully to see him again, but Fate came knocking at her doorafter he had left her. She believed in Fate. She would never forget him, and she knew he would become the greatest painter in the world. Now shemust pack. She hoped he wouldn't mind her leaving the dressing gown;somehow, she could never wear it again. 

After Hedger read this, standing under the gas, he went back into thecloset and knelt down before the wall; the knot hole had been plugged upwith a ball of wet paper, --the same blue note-paper on which her letterwas written. 

He was hard hit. Tonight he had to bear the loneliness of a wholelifetime. Knowing himself so well, he could hardly believe that such athing had ever happened to him, that such a woman had lain happy andcontented in his arms. And now it was over. He turned out the light andsat down on his painter's stool before the big window. Caesar, on thefloor beside him, rested his head on his master's knee. We must leaveHedger thus, sitting in his tank with his dog, looking up at the stars. 

 * * * * *

COMING, APHRODITE! This legend, in electric lights over the LexingtonOpera House, had long announced the return of Eden Bower to New Yorkafter years of spectacular success in Paris. She came at last, under themanagement of an American Opera Company, but bringing her own _chefd'orchestre_. 

One bright December afternoon Eden Bower was going down Fifth Avenue inher car, on the way to her broker, in Williams Street. Her thoughts wereentirely upon stocks, --Cerro de Pasco, and how much she should buy ofit, --when she suddenly looked up and realized that she was skirtingWashington Square. She had not seen the place since she rolled out of itin an old-fashioned four-wheeler to seek her fortune, eighteen years ago. 

"_Arrêtez, Alphonse. Attendez moi_, " she called, and opened the doorbefore he could reach it. The children who were streaking over theasphalt on roller skates saw a lady in a long fur coat, and short, high-heeled shoes, alight from a French car and pace slowly about theSquare, holding her muff to her chin. This spot, at least, had changedvery little, she reflected; the same trees, the same fountain, the whitearch, and over yonder, Garibaldi, drawing the sword for freedom. There, just opposite her, was the old red brick house. 

"Yes, that is the place, " she was thinking. "I can smell the carpets now, and the dog, --what was his name? That grubby bathroom at the end of thehall, and that dreadful Hedger--still, there was something about him, youknow--" She glanced up and blinked against the sun. From somewhere in thecrowded quarter south of the Square a flock of pigeons rose, wheelingquickly upward into the brilliant blue sky. She threw back her head, pressed her muff closer to her chin, and watched them with a smile ofamazement and delight. So they still rose, out of all that dirt and noiseand squalor, fleet and silvery, just as they used to rise that summerwhen she was twenty and went up in a balloon on Coney Island!

Alphonse opened the door and tucked her robes about her. All the way downtown her mind wandered from Cerro de Pasco, and she kept smiling andlooking up at the sky. 

When she had finished her business with the broker, she asked him to lookin the telephone book for the address of M. Gaston Jules, the picturedealer, and slipped the paper on which he wrote it into her glove. It wasfive o'clock when she reached the French Galleries, as they were called. On entering she gave the attendant her card, asking him to take it to M. Jules. The dealer appeared very promptly and begged her to come into hisprivate office, where he pushed a great chair toward his desk for her andsignalled his secretary to leave the room. 

"How good your lighting is in here, " she observed, glancing about. "I metyou at Simon's studio, didn't I? Oh, no! I never forget anybody whointerests me. " She threw her muff on his writing table and sank into thedeep chair. "I have come to you for some information that's not in myline. Do you know anything about an American painter named Hedger?"

He took the seat opposite her. "Don Hedger? But, certainly! There aresome very interesting things of his in an exhibition at V----'s. If youwould care to--"

She held up her hand. "No, no. I've no time to go to exhibitions. Is he aman of any importance?"

"Certainly. He is one of the first men among the moderns. That is to say, among the very moderns. He is always coming up with something different. He often exhibits in Paris, you must have seen--"

"No, I tell you I don't go to exhibitions. Has he had great success? Thatis what I want to know. "

M. Jules pulled at his short grey moustache. "But, Madame, there are manykinds of success, " he began cautiously. 

Madame gave a dry laugh. "Yes, so he used to say. We once quarrelled onthat issue. And how would you define his particular kind?"

M. Jules grew thoughtful. "He is a great name with all the young men, andhe is decidedly an influence in art. But one can't definitely place a manwho is original, erratic, and who is changing all the time. "

She cut him short. "Is he much talked about at home? In Paris, I mean?Thanks. That's all I want to know. " She rose and began buttoning hercoat. "One doesn't like to have been an utter fool, even at twenty. "

"_Mais, non_!" M. Jules handed her her muff with a quick, sympatheticglance. He followed her out through the carpeted show-room, now closed tothe public and draped in cheesecloth, and put her into her car with wordsappreciative of the honour she had done him in calling. 

Leaning back in the cushions, Eden Bower closed her eyes, and her face, as the street lamps flashed their ugly orange light upon it, becamehard and settled, like a plaster cast; so a sail, that has been filled bya strong breeze, behaves when the wind suddenly dies. Tomorrow night thewind would blow again, and this mask would be the golden face ofAphrodite. But a "big" career takes its toll, even with the best of luck. 

The Diamond Mine

I

I first became aware that Cressida Garnet was on board when I saw youngmen with cameras going up to the boat deck. In that exposed spot she wasgood-naturedly posing for them--amid fluttering lavender scarfs--wearinga most unseaworthy hat, her broad, vigorous face wreathed in smiles. Shewas too much an American not to believe in publicity. All advertisingwas good. If it was good for breakfast foods, it was good for primedonna, --especially for a prima donna who would never be any younger andwho had just announced her intention of marrying a fourth time. 

Only a few days before, when I was lunching with some friends atSherry's, I had seen Jerome Brown come in with several younger men, looking so pleased and prosperous that I exclaimed upon it. 

"His affairs, " some one explained, "are looking up. He's going to marryCressida Garnet. Nobody believed it at first, but since she confirms ithe's getting all sorts of credit. That woman's a diamond mine. "

If there was ever a man who needed a diamond mine at hand, immediatelyconvenient, it was Jerome Brown. But as an old friend of Cressida Garnet, I was sorry to hear that mining operations were to be begun again. 

I had been away from New York and had not seen Cressida for a year; now Ipaused on the gangplank to note how very like herself she still was, andwith what undiminished zeal she went about even the most trifling thingsthat pertained to her profession. From that distance I could recognizeher "carrying" smile, and even what, in Columbus, we used to call "theGarnet look. "

At the foot of the stairway leading up to the boat deck stood two of thefactors in Cressida's destiny. One of them was her sister, Miss Julia; awoman of fifty with a relaxed, mournful face, an ageing skin that brownedslowly, like meerchaum, and the unmistakable "look" by which one knew aGarnet. Beside her, pointedly ignoring her, smoking a cigarette while heran over the passenger list with supercilious almond eyes, stood a youthin a pink shirt and a green plush hat, holding a French bull-dog on theleash. This was "Horace, " Cressida's only son. He, at any rate, had notthe Garnet look. He was rich and ruddy, indolent and insolent, with softoval cheeks and the blooming complexion of twenty-two. There was thebeginning of a silky shadow on his upper lip. He seemed like a ripe fruitgrown out of a rich soil; "oriental, " his mother called his peculiarlusciousness. His aunt's restless and aggrieved glance kept flecking himfrom the side, but the two were as motionless as the _bouledogue_, standing there on his bench legs and surveying his travelling basket withloathing. They were waiting, in constrained immobility, for Cressida todescend and reanimate them, --will them to do or to be something. Forward, by the rail, I saw the stooped, eager back for which I was unconsciouslylooking: Miletus Poppas, the Greek Jew, Cressida's accompanist andshadow. We were all there, I thought with a smile, except Jerome Brown. 

The first member of Cressida's party with whom I had speech was Mr. Poppas. When we were two hours out I came upon him in the act of droppingoverboard a steamer cushion made of American flags. Cressida neversailed, I think, that one of these vivid comforts of travel did not reachher at the dock. Poppas recognized me just as the striped object left hishand. He was standing with his arm still extended over the rail, hisfingers contemptuously sprung back. "Lest we forget!" he said with ashrug. "Does Madame Cressida know we are to have the pleasure of yourcompany for this voyage?" He spoke deliberate, grammatical English--hedespised the American rendering of the language--but there was anindescribably foreign quality in his voice, --a something muted; andthough he aspirated his "th's" with such conscientious thoroughness, there was always the thud of a "d" in them. Poppas stood before me in ashort, tightly buttoned grey coat and cap, exactly the colour of hisgreyish skin and hair and waxed moustache; a monocle on a very wide blackribbon dangled over his chest. As to his age, I could not offer aconjecture. In the twelve years I had known his thin lupine face behindCressida's shoulder, it had not changed. I was used to his cold, supercilious manner, to his alarming, deep-set eyes, --very closetogether, in colour a yellowish green, and always gleaming with somethinglike defeated fury, as if he were actually on the point of having it outwith you, or with the world, at last. 

I asked him if Cressida had engagements in London. 

"Quite so; the Manchester Festival, some concerts at Queen's Hall, andthe Opera at Covent Garden; a rather special production of the operasof Mozart. That she can still do quite well, --which is not at all, ofcourse, what we might have expected, and only goes to show that ourMadame Cressida is now, as always, a charming exception to rules. "Poppas' tone about his client was consistently patronizing, and he wasalways trying to draw one into a conspiracy of two, based on a mutualunderstanding of her shortcomings. 

I approached him on the one subject I could think of which was morepersonal than his usefulness to Cressida, and asked him whether he stillsuffered from facial neuralgia as much as he had done in former years, and whether he was therefore dreading London, where the climate used tobe so bad for him. 

"And is still, " he caught me up, "And is still! For me to go to London ismartyrdom, _chère Madame_. In New York it is bad enough, but in London itis the _auto da fé_, nothing less. My nervous system is exotic in anycountry washed by the Atlantic ocean, and it shivers like a littlehairless dog from Mexico. It never relaxes. I think I have told you aboutmy favourite city in the middle of Asia, _la sainte Asie_, where therainfall is absolutely nil, and you are protected on every side byhundreds of metres of warm, dry sand. I was there when I was a childonce, and it is still my intention to retire there when I have finishedwith all this. I would be there now, n-ow-ow, " his voice rosequerulously, "if Madame Cressida did not imagine that she needs me, --andher fancies, you know, " he flourished his hands, "one gives in to them. In humouring her caprices you and I have already played some together. "

We were approaching Cressida's deck chairs, ranged under the open windowsof her stateroom. She was already recumbent, swathed in lavender scarfsand wearing purple orchids--doubtless from Jerome Brown. At her left, Horace had settled down to a French novel, and Julia Garnet, at herright, was complainingly regarding the grey horizon. On seeing me, Cressida struggled under her fur-lined robes and got to her feet, --whichwas more than Horace or Miss Julia managed to do. Miss Julia, as I couldhave foretold, was not pleased. All the Garnets had an awkward mannerwith me. Whether it was that I reminded them of things they wished toforget, or whether they thought I esteemed Cressida too highly and therest of them too lightly, I do not know; but my appearance upon theirscene always put them greatly on their dignity. After Horace had offeredme his chair and Miss Julia had said doubtfully that she thought I waslooking rather better than when she last saw me, Cressida took my arm andwalked me off toward the stern. 

"Do you know, Carrie, I half wondered whether I shouldn't find you here, or in London, because you always turn up at critical moments in my life. "She pressed my arm confidentially, and I felt that she was once morewrought up to a new purpose. I told her that I had heard some rumour ofher engagement. 

"It's quite true, and it's all that it should be, " she reassured me. "I'll tell you about it later, and you'll see that it's a real solution. They are against me, of course, --all except Horace. He has been such acomfort. "

Horace's support, such as it was, could always be had in exchange for hismother's signature, I suspected. The pale May day had turned bleak andchilly, and we sat down by an open hatchway which emitted warm air fromsomewhere below. At this close range I studied Cressida's face, and feltreassured of her unabated vitality; the old force of will was stillthere, and with it her characteristic optimism, the old hope of a"solution. "

"You have been in Columbus lately?" she was saying. "No, you needn't tellme about it, " with a sigh. "Why is it, Caroline, that there is so littleof my life I would be willing to live over again? So little that I caneven think of without depression. Yet I've really not such a badconscience. It may mean that I still belong to the future more than tothe past, do you think?"

My assent was not warm enough to fix her attention, and she went onthoughtfully: "Of course, it was a bleak country and a bleak period. ButI've sometimes wondered whether the bleakness may not have been in me, too; for it has certainly followed me. There, that is no way to talk!"she drew herself up from a momentary attitude of dejection. "Sea airalways lets me down at first. That's why it's so good for me in the end. "

"I think Julia always lets you down, too, " I said bluntly. "But perhapsthat depression works out in the same way. "

Cressida laughed. "Julia is rather more depressing than Georgie, isn'tshe? But it was Julia's turn. I can't come alone, and they've grown toexpect it. They haven't, either of them, much else to expect. "

At this point the deck steward approached us with a blue envelope. "Awireless for you, Madame Garnet. "

Cressida put out her hand with impatience, thanked him graciously, andwith every indication of pleasure tore open the blue envelope. "It'sfrom Jerome Brown, " she said with some confusion, as she folded the papersmall and tucked it between the buttons of her close-fitting gown, "Something he forgot to tell me. How long shall you be in London? Good; Iwant you to meet him. We shall probably be married there as soon as myengagements are over. " She rose. "Now I must write some letters. Keep twoplaces at your table, so that I can slip away from my party and dine withyou sometimes. "

I walked with her toward her chair, in which Mr. Poppas was nowreclining. He indicated his readiness to rise, but she shook her head andentered the door of her deck suite. As she passed him, his eye went overher with assurance until it rested upon the folded bit of blue paper inher corsage. He must have seen the original rectangle in the steward'shand; having found it again, he dropped back between Horace and MissJulia, whom I think he disliked no more than he did the rest of theworld. He liked Julia quite as well as he liked me, and he liked me quiteas well as he liked any of the women to whom he would be fitfullyagreeable upon the voyage. Once or twice, during each crossing, he didhis best and made himself very charming indeed, to keep his hand in, --forthe same reason that he kept a dummy keyboard in his stateroom, somewheredown in the bowels of the boat. He practised all the small economies;paid the minimum rate, and never took a deck chair, because, as Horacewas usually in the cardroom, he could sit in Horace's. 

The three of them lay staring at the swell which was steadily growingheavier. Both men had covered themselves with rugs, after dutifullybundling up Miss Julia. As I walked back and forth on the deck, I wasstruck by their various degrees of in-expressiveness. Opaque brown eyes, almond-shaped and only half open; wolfish green eyes, close-set andalways doing something, with a crooked gleam boring in this direction orin that; watery grey eyes, like the thick edges of broken skylight glass:I would have given a great deal to know what was going on behind eachpair of them. 

These three were sitting there in a row because they were all woven intothe pattern of one large and rather splendid life. Each had a bond, andeach had a grievance. If they could have their will, what would they dowith the generous, credulous creature who nourished them, I wondered? Howdeep a humiliation would each egotism exact? They would scarcely haveharmed her in fortune or in person (though I think Miss Julia lookedforward to the day when Cressida would "break" and could be mournedover), --but the fire at which she warmed herself, the little secrethope, --the illusion, ridiculous or sublime, which kept her going, --thatthey would have stamped out on the instant, with the whole Garnet packbehind them to make extinction sure. All, except, perhaps, MiletusPoppas. He was a vulture of the vulture race, and he had the beak of one. But I always felt that if ever he had her thus at his mercy, --if ever hecame upon the softness that was hidden under so much hardness, the warmcredulity under a life so dated and scheduled and "reported" andgenerally exposed, --he would hold his hand and spare. 

The weather grew steadily rougher. Miss Julia at last plucked Poppas bythe sleeve and indicated that she wished to be released from herwrappings. When she disappeared, there seemed to be every reason to hopethat she might be off the scene for awhile. As Cressida said, if she hadnot brought Julia, she would have had to bring Georgie, or some otherGarnet. Cressida's family was like that of the unpopular Prince ofWales, of whom, when he died, some wag wrote:

_If it had been his brother, Better him than another. If it had been his sister, No one would have missed her. _

Miss Julia was dampening enough, but Miss Georgie was aggressive andintrusive. She was out to prove to the world, and more especially toOhio, that all the Garnets were as like Cressida as two peas. Bothsisters were club-women, social service workers, and directors in musicalsocieties, and they were continually travelling up and down the MiddleWest to preside at meetings or to deliver addresses. They reminded one oftwo sombre, bumping electrics, rolling about with no visible means oflocomotion, always running out of power and lying beached in someinconvenient spot until they received a check or a suggestion fromCressy. I was only too well acquainted with the strained, anxiousexpression that the sight of their handwriting brought to Cressida's facewhen she ran over her morning mail at breakfast. She usually put theirletters by to read "when she was feeling up to it" and hastened to openothers which might possibly contain something gracious or pleasant. Sometimes these family unburdenings lay about unread for several days. Any other letters would have got themselves lost, but these bulkyepistles, never properly fitted to their envelopes, seemed immune tomischance and unfailingly disgorged to Cressida long explanations as towhy her sisters had to do and to have certain things precisely upon heraccount and because she was so much a public personage. 

The truth was that all the Garnets, and particularly her two sisters, were consumed by an habitual, bilious, unenterprising envy of Cressy. They never forgot that, no matter what she did for them or how far shedragged them about the world with her, she would never take one of themto live with her in her Tenth Street house in New York. They thought thatwas the thing they most wanted. But what they wanted, in the lastanalysis, was to _be_ Cressida. For twenty years she had been plunged instruggle; fighting for her life at first, then for a beginning, forgrowth, and at last for eminence and perfection; fighting in the dark, and afterward in the light, --which, with her bad preparation, and withher uninspired youth already behind her, took even more courage. Duringthose twenty years the Garnets had been comfortable and indolent andvastly self-satisfied; and now they expected Cressida to make them equalsharers in the finer rewards of her struggle. When her brother Buchanantold me he thought Cressida ought "to make herself one of them, " hestated the converse of what he meant. They coveted the qualities whichhad made her success, as well as the benefits which came from it. Morethan her furs or her fame or her fortune, they wanted her personaleffectiveness, her brighter glow and stronger will to live. 

"Sometimes, " I have heard Cressida say, looking up from a bunch of thosesloppily written letters, "sometimes I get discouraged. "

For several days the rough weather kept Miss Julia cloistered inCressida's deck suite with the maid, Luisa, who confided to me that theSignorina Garnet was "_dificile_. " After dinner I usually found Cressidaunincumbered, as Horace was always in the cardroom and Mr. Poppas eithernursed his neuralgia or went through the exercise of making himselfinteresting to some one of the young women on board. One evening, thethird night out, when the sea was comparatively quiet and the sky wasfull of broken black clouds, silvered by the moon at their ragged edges, Cressida talked to me about Jerome Brown. 

I had known each of her former husbands. The first one, Charley Wilton, Horace's father, was my cousin. He was organist in a church in Columbus, and Cressida married him when she was nineteen. He died of tuberculosistwo years after Horace was born. Cressida nursed him through a longillness and made the living besides. Her courage during the three yearsof her first marriage was fine enough to foreshadow her future to anydiscerning eye, and it had made me feel that she deserved any number ofchances at marital happiness. There had, of course, been a particularreason for each subsequent experiment, and a sufficiently alluringpromise of success. Her motives, in the case of Jerome Brown, seemed tome more vague and less convincing than those which she had explained tome on former occasions. 

"It's nothing hasty, " she assured me. "It's been coming on for severalyears. He has never pushed me, but he was always there--some one to counton. Even when I used to meet him at the Whitings, while I was stillsinging at the Metropolitan, I always felt that he was different from theothers; that if I were in straits of any kind, I could call on him. Youcan't know what that feeling means to me, Carrie. If you look back, you'll see it's something I've never had. "

I admitted that, in so far as I knew, she had never been much addicted toleaning on people. 

"I've never had any one to lean on, " she said with a short laugh. Thenshe went on, quite seriously: "Somehow, my relations with people alwaysbecome business relations in the end. I suppose it's because, --except fora sort of professional personality, which I've had to get, just as I'vehad to get so many other things, --I've not very much that's personal togive people. I've had to give too much else. I've had to try too hard forpeople who wouldn't try at all. "

"Which, " I put in firmly, "has done them no good, and has robbed thepeople who really cared about you. "

"By making me grubby, you mean?"

"By making you anxious and distracted so much of the time; empty. "

She nodded mournfully. "Yes, I know. You used to warn me. Well, there's not one of my brothers and sisters who does not feel that Icarried off the family success, just as I might have carried off thefamily silver, --if there'd been any! They take the view that there werejust so many prizes in the bag; I reached in and took them, so there werenone left for the others. At my age, that's a dismal truth to waken upto. "

Cressida reached for my hand and held it a moment, as if she neededcourage to face the facts in her case. "When one remembers one's firstsuccess; how one hoped to go home like a Christmas tree full ofpresents--How much one learns in a life-time! That year when Horace was ababy and Charley was dying, and I was touring the West with the Williamsband, it was my feeling about my own people that made me go at all. Why Ididn't drop myself into one of those muddy rivers, or turn on the gas inone of those dirty hotel rooms, I don't know to this day. At twenty-twoyou must hope for something more than to be able to bury your husbanddecently, and what I hoped for was to make my family happy. It was thesame afterward in Germany. A young woman must live for human people. Horace wasn't enough. I might have had lovers, of course. I suppose youwill say it would have been better if I had. "

Though there seemed no need for me to say anything, I murmured that Ithought there were more likely to be limits to the rapacity of a loverthan to that of a discontented and envious family. 

"Well, " Cressida gathered herself up, "once I got out from under it all, didn't I? And perhaps, in a milder way, such a release can come again. You were the first person I told when I ran away with Charley, and for along while you were the only one who knew about Blasius Bouchalka. Thattime, at least, I shook the Garnets. I wasn't distracted or empty. Thattime I was all there!"

"Yes, " I echoed her, "that time you were all there. It's the greatestpossible satisfaction to remember it. "

"But even that, " she sighed, "was nothing but lawyers and accounts in theend--and a hurt. A hurt that has lasted. I wonder what is the matter withme?"

The matter with Cressida was, that more than any woman I have ever known, she appealed to the acquisitive instinct in men; but this was not easilysaid, even in the brutal frankness of a long friendship. 

We would probably have gone further into the Bouchalka chapter of herlife, had not Horace appeared and nervously asked us if we did not wishto take a turn before we went inside. I pleaded indolence, but Cressidarose and disappeared with him. Later I came upon them, standing at thestern above the huddled steerage deck, which was by this time bathed inmoonlight, under an almost clear sky. Down there on the silvery floor, little hillocks were scattered about under quilts and shawls; familyunits, presumably, --male, female, and young. Here and there a black shawlsat alone, nodding. They crouched submissively under the moonlight as ifit were a spell. In one of those hillocks a baby was crying, but thesound was faint and thin, a slender protest which aroused no response. Everything was so still that I could hear snatches of the low talkbetween my friends. Cressida's voice was deep and entreating. She wasremonstrating with Horace about his losses at bridge, begging him to keepaway from the cardroom. 

"But what else is there to do on a trip like this, my Lady?" heexpostulated, tossing his spark of a cigarette-end overboard. "What isthere, now, to do?"

"Oh, Horace!" she murmured, "how can you be so? If I were twenty-two, anda boy, with some one to back me--"

Horace drew his shoulders together and buttoned his top-coat. "Oh, I'venot your energy, Mother dear. We make no secret of that. I am as I am. Ididn't ask to be born into this charming world. "

To this gallant speech Cressida made no answer. She stood with her handon the rail and her head bent forward, as if she had lost herself inthought. The ends of her scarf, lifted by the breeze, fluttered upward, almost transparent in the argent light. Presently she turned away, --asif she had been alone and were leaving only the night sea behindher, --and walked slowly forward; a strong, solitary figure on the whitedeck, the smoke-like scarf twisting and climbing and falling back uponitself in the light over her head. She reached the door of her stateroomand disappeared. Yes, she was a Garnet, but she was also Cressida; andshe had done what she had done. 

II

My first recollections of Cressida Garnet have to do with the ColumbusPublic Schools; a little girl with sunny brown hair and eager brighteyes, looking anxiously at the teacher and reciting the names anddates of the Presidents: "James Buchanan, 1857-1861; Abraham Lincoln, 1861-1865"; etc. Her family came from North Carolina, and they had thatto feel superior about before they had Cressy. The Garnet "look, " indeed, though based upon a strong family resemblance, was nothing more than therestless, preoccupied expression of an inflamed sense of importance. Thefather was a Democrat, in the sense that other men were doctors orlawyers. He scratched up some sort of poor living for his family behindoffice windows inscribed with the words "Real Estate. Insurance. Investments. " But it was his political faith that, in a Republicancommunity, gave him his feeling of eminence and originality. The Garnetchildren were all in school then, scattered along from the first gradeto the ninth. In almost any room of our school building you might chanceto enter, you saw the self-conscious little face of one or another ofthem. They were restrained, uncomfortable children, not frankly boastful, but insinuating, and somehow forever demanding special consideration andholding grudges against teachers and classmates who did not show it them;all but Cressida, who was naturally as sunny and open as a May morning. 

It was no wonder that Cressy ran away with young Charley Wilton, whohadn't a shabby thing about him except his health. He was her firstmusic teacher, the choir-master of the church in which she sang. Charleywas very handsome; the "romantic" son of an old, impoverished family. Hehad refused to go into a good business with his uncles and had goneabroad to study music when that was an extravagant and picturesque thingfor an Ohio boy to do. His letters home were handed round among themembers of his own family and of other families equally conservative. Indeed, Charley and what his mother called "his music" were the romanticexpression of a considerable group of people; young cousins and old auntsand quiet-dwelling neighbours, allied by the amity of severalgenerations. Nobody was properly married in our part of Columbus unlessCharley Wilton, and no other, played the wedding march. The old ladies ofthe First Church used to say that he "hovered over the keys like aspirit. " At nineteen Cressida was beautiful enough to turn a much harderhead than the pale, ethereal one Charley Wilton bent above the organ. 

That the chapter which began so gracefully ran on into such a stretch ofgrim, hard prose, was simply Cressida's relentless bad luck. In herundertakings, in whatever she could lay hold of with her two hands, shewas successful; but whatever happened to her was almost sure to be bad. Her family, her husbands, her son, would have crushed any other woman Ihave ever known. Cressida lived, more than most of us, "for others"; andwhat she seemed to promote among her beneficiaries was indolence and envyand discord--even dishonesty and turpitude. 

Her sisters were fond of saying--at club luncheons--that Cressida hadremained "untouched by the breath of scandal, " which was not strictlytrue. There were captious people who objected to her long and closeassociation with Miletus Poppas. Her second husband, Ransome McChord, theforeign representative of the great McChord Harvester Company, whom shemarried in Germany, had so persistently objected to Poppas that she waseventually forced to choose between them. Any one who knew her well couldeasily understand why she chose Poppas. 

While her actual self was the least changed, the least modified byexperience that it would be possible to imagine, there had been, professionally, two Cressida Garnets; the big handsome girl, alreadya "popular favourite" of the concert stage, who took with her to Germanythe raw material of a great voice;--and the accomplished artist who cameback. The singer that returned was largely the work of Miletus Poppas. Cressida had at least known what she needed, hunted for it, found it, andheld fast to it. After experimenting with a score of teachers andaccompanists, she settled down to work her problem out with Poppas. Othercoaches came and went--she was always trying new ones--but Poppassurvived them all. Cressida was not musically intelligent; she neverbecame so. Who does not remember the countless rehearsals which werenecessary before she first sang _Isolde_ in Berlin; the disgust of theconductor, the sullenness of the tenor, the rages of the blonde_teufelin_, boiling with the impatience of youth and genius, who sang her_Brangaena_? Everything but her driving power Cressida had to get fromthe outside. 

Poppas was, in his way, quite as incomplete as his pupil. He possessed agreat many valuable things for which there is no market; intuitions, discrimination, imagination, a whole twilight world of intentions andshadowy beginnings which were dark to Cressida. I remember that when"Trilby" was published she fell into a fright and said such books oughtto be prohibited by law; which gave me an intimation of what theirrelationship had actually become. 

Poppas was indispensable to her. He was like a book in which she hadwritten down more about herself than she could possibly remember--andit was information that she might need at any moment. He was the oneperson who knew her absolutely and who saw into the bottom of her grief. An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry. Poppas knew all the simple things that were so desperately hard forCressida, all the difficult things in which she could count on herself;her stupidities and inconsistencies, the chiaroscuro of the voice itselfand what could be expected from the mind somewhat mismated with it. Heknew where she was sound and where she was mended. With him she couldshare the depressing knowledge of what a wretchedly faulty thing anyproductive faculty is. 

But if Poppas was necessary to her career, she was his career. By thetime Cressida left the Metropolitan Opera Company, Poppas was a richman. He had always received a retaining fee and a percentage of hersalary, --and he was a man of simple habits. Her liberality with Poppaswas one of the weapons that Horace and the Garnets used against Cressida, and it was a point in the argument by which they justified to themselvestheir rapacity. Whatever they didn't get, they told themselves, Poppaswould. What they got, therefore, they were only saving from Poppas. TheGreek ached a good deal at the general pillage, and Cressida'sconciliatory methods with her family made him sarcastic and spiteful. Buthe had to make terms, somehow, with the Garnets and Horace, and with thehusband, if there happened to be one. He sometimes reminded them, whenthey fell to wrangling, that they must not, after all, overturn the boatunder them, and that it would be better to stop just before they droveher wild than just after. As he was the only one among them whounderstood the sources of her fortune, --and they knew it, --he was able, when it came to a general set-to, to proclaim sanctuary for the goosethat laid the golden eggs. 

That Poppas had caused the break between Cressida and McChord was anotherstick her sisters held over her. They pretended to understand perfectly, and were always explaining what they termed her "separation"; but theylet Cressida know that it cast a shadow over her family and took a gooddeal of living down. 

A beautiful soundness of body, a seemingly exhaustless vitality, and acertain "squareness" of character as well as of mind, gave CressidaGarnet earning powers that were exceptional even in her lavishly rewardedprofession. Managers chose her over the heads of singers much moregifted, because she was so sane, so conscientious, and above all, becauseshe was so sure. Her efficiency was like a beacon to lightly anchoredmen, and in the intervals between her marriages she had as many suitorsas Penelope. Whatever else they saw in her at first, her competency soimpressed and delighted them that they gradually lost sight of everythingelse. Her sterling character was the subject of her story. Once, as shesaid, she very nearly escaped her destiny. With Blasius Bouchalka shebecame almost another woman, but not quite. Her "principles, " or his lackof them, drove those two apart in the end. It was of Bouchalka that wetalked upon that last voyage I ever made with Cressida Garnet, and not ofJerome Brown. She remembered the Bohemian kindly, and since it was thepassage in her life to which she most often reverted, it is the one Ishall relate here. 

III

Late one afternoon in the winter of 189-, Cressida and I were walking inCentral Park after the first heavy storm of the year. The snow had beenfalling thickly all the night before, and all day, until about fouro'clock. Then the air grew much warmer and the sky cleared. Overhead itwas a soft, rainy blue, and to the west a smoky gold. All around thehorizon everything became misty and silvery; even the big, brutalbuildings looked like pale violet water-colours on a silver ground. Underthe elm trees along the Mall the air was purple as wisterias. Thesheep-field, toward Broadway, was smooth and white, with a thin gold washover it. At five o'clock the carriage came for us, but Cressida sent thedriver home to the Tenth Street house with the message that she woulddine uptown, and that Horace and Mr. Poppas were not to wait for her. As the horses trotted away we turned up the Mall. 

"I won't go indoors this evening for any one, " Cressida declared. "Notwhile the sky is like that. Now we will go back to the laurel wood. They are so black, over the snow, that I could cry for joy. I don't knowwhen I've felt so care-free as I feel tonight. Country winter, countrystars--they always make me think of Charley Wilton. "

She was singing twice a week, sometimes oftener, at the Metropolitan thatseason, quite at the flood-tide of her powers, and so enmeshed inoperatic routine that to be walking in the park at an unaccustomed hour, unattended by one of the men of her entourage, seemed adventurous. As westrolled along the little paths among the snow banks and the bronzelaurel bushes, she kept going back to my poor young cousin, dead so long. "Things happen out of season. That's the worst of living. It was untimelyfor both of us, and yet, " she sighed softly, "since he had to die, I'mnot sorry. There was one beautifully happy year, though we were so poor, and it gave him--something! It would have been too hard if he'd had tomiss everything. " (I remember her simplicity, which never changed anymore than winter or Ohio change. ) "Yes, " she went on, "I always feel verytenderly about Charley. I believe I'd do the same thing right over again, even knowing all that had to come after. If I were nineteen tonight, I'drather go sleigh-riding with Charley Wilton than anything else I've everdone. "

We walked until the procession of carriages on the driveway, gettingpeople home to dinner, grew thin, and then we went slowly toward theSeventh Avenue gate, still talking of Charley Wilton. We decided to dineat a place not far away, where the only access from the street was anarrow door, like a hole in the wall, between a tobacconist's and aflower shop. Cressida deluded herself into believing that her incognitowas more successful in such non-descript places. She was wearing a longsable coat, and a deep fur hat, hung with red cherries, which she hadbrought from Russia. Her walk had given her a fine colour, and shelooked so much a personage that no disguise could have been whollyeffective. 

The dining-rooms, frescoed with conventional Italian scenes, were builtround a court. The orchestra was playing as we entered and selectedour table. It was not a bad orchestra, and we were no sooner seated thanthe first violin began to speak, to assert itself, as if it were suddenlydone with mediocrity. 

"We have been recognized, " Cressida said complacently. "What a good tonehe has, quite unusual. What does he look like?" She sat with her back tothe musicians. 

The violinist was standing, directing his men with his head and with thebeak of his violin. He was a tall, gaunt young man, big-boned and rugged, in skin-tight clothes. His high forehead had a kind of luminous pallour, and his hair was jet black and somewhat stringy. His manner was excitedand dramatic. At the end of the number he acknowledged the applause, andCressida looked at him graciously over her shoulder. He swept her with abrilliant glance and bowed again. Then I noticed his red lips and thickblack eyebrows. 

"He looks as if he were poor or in trouble, " Cressida said. "See howshort his sleeves are, and how he mops his face as if the least thingupset him. This is a hard winter for musicians. "

The violinist rummaged among some music piled on a chair, turning overthe sheets with flurried rapidity, as if he were searching for a lostarticle of which he was in desperate need. Presently he placed somesheets upon the piano and began vehemently to explain something to thepianist. The pianist stared at the music doubtfully--he was a plump oldman with a rosy, bald crown, and his shiny linen and neat tie made himlook as if he were on his way to a party. The violinist bent over him, suggesting rhythms with his shoulders and running his bony finger up anddown the pages. When he stepped back to his place, I noticed that theother players sat at ease, without raising their instruments. 

"He is going to try something unusual, " I commented. "It looks as if itmight be manuscript. "

It was something, at all events, that neither of us had heard before, though it was very much in the manner of the later Russian composers whowere just beginning to be heard in New York. The young man made abrilliant dash of it, despite a lagging, scrambling accompaniment by theconservative pianist. This time we both applauded him vigorously andagain, as he bowed, he swept us with his eye. 

The usual repertory of restaurant music followed, varied by a charmingbit from Massenet's "Manon, " then little known in this country. After wepaid our check, Cressida took out one of her visiting cards and wroteacross the top of it: _"We thank you for the unusual music and thepleasure your playing has given us. "_ She folded the card in the middle, and asked the waiter to give it to the director of the orchestra. Pausingat the door, while the porter dashed out to call a cab, we saw, in thewall mirror, a pair of wild black eyes following us quite despairinglyfrom behind the palms at the other end of the room. Cressida observed aswe went out that the young man was probably having a hard struggle. "Henever got those clothes here, surely. They were probably made by acountry tailor in some little town in Austria. He seemed wild enough tograb at anything, and was trying to make himself heard above the dishes, poor fellow. There are so many like him. I wish I could help them all! Ididn't quite have the courage to send him money. His smile, when he bowedto us, was not that of one who would take it, do you think?"

"No, " I admitted, "it wasn't. He seemed to be pleading for recognition. Idon't think it was money he wanted. "

A week later I came upon some curious-looking manuscript songs on thepiano in Cressida's music room. The text was in some Slavic tongue witha French translation written underneath. Both the handwriting and themusical script were done in a manner experienced, even distinguished. Iwas looking at them when Cressida came in. 

"Oh, yes!" she exclaimed. "I meant to ask you to try them over. Poppasthinks they are very interesting. They are from that young violinist, you remember, --the one we noticed in the restaurant that evening. He sentthem with such a nice letter. His name is Blasius Bouchalka (Boú-kal-ka), a Bohemian. "

I sat down at the piano and busied myself with the manuscript, whileCressida dashed off necessary notes and wrote checks in a large squarecheckbook, six to a page. I supposed her immersed in sumptuarypreoccupations when she suddenly looked over her shoulder and said, "Yes, that legend, _Sarka_, is the most interesting. Run it through a fewtimes and I'll try it over with you. "

There was another, "_Dans les ombres des fôrets tristes_", which Ithought quite as beautiful. They were fine songs; very individual, andeach had that spontaneity which makes a song seem inevitable and, oncefor all, "done. " The accompaniments were difficult, but not unnecessarilyso; they were free from fatuous ingenuity and fine writing. 

"I wish he'd indicated his tempi a little more clearly, " I remarked as Ifinished Sarka for the third time. "It matters, because he really hassomething to say. An orchestral accompaniment would be better, I shouldthink. "

"Yes, he sent the orchestral arrangement. Poppas has it. It works outbeautifully, --so much colour in the instrumentation. The English horncomes in so effectively there, " she rose and indicated the passage, "justright with the voice. I've asked him to come next Sunday, so please behere if you can. I want to know what you think of him. "

Cressida was always at home to her friends on Sunday afternoon unless shewas billed for the evening concert at the Opera House, in which case wewere sufficiently advised by the daily press. Bouchalka must have beentold to come early, for when I arrived on Sunday, at four, he andCressida had the music-room quite to themselves and were standing by thepiano in earnest conversation. In a few moments they were separated byother early comers, and I led Bouchalka across the hall to thedrawing-room. The guests, as they came in, glanced at him curiously. Hewore a dark blue suit, soft and rather baggy, with a short coat, and ahigh double-breasted vest with two rows of buttons coming up to the loopsof his black tie. This costume was even more foreign-looking than hisskin-tight dress clothes, but it was more becoming. He spoke hurried, elliptical English, and very good French. All his sympathies were Frenchrather than German--the Czecks lean to the one culture or to the other. Ifound him a fierce, a transfixing talker. His brilliant eyes, his gaunthands, his white, deeply-lined forehead, all entered into his speech. 

I asked him whether he had not recognized Madame Garnet at once when weentered the restaurant that evening more than a week ago. 

"_Mais, certainement!_ I hear her twice when she sings in the afternoon, and sometimes at night for the last act. I have a friend who buys aticket for the first part, and he comes out and gives to me his pass-backcheck, and I return for the last act. That is convenient if I am broke. "He explained the trick with amusement but without embarrassment, as if itwere a shift that we might any of us be put to. 

I told him that I admired his skill with the violin, but his songs muchmore. 

He threw out his red under-lip and frowned. "Oh, I have no instrument!The violin I play from necessity; the flute, the piano, as it happens. For three years now I write all the time, and it spoils the hand forviolin. "

When the maid brought him his tea, he took both muffins and cakes andtold me that he was very hungry. He had to lunch and dine at the placewhere he played, and he got very tired of the food. "But since, " hisblack eyebrows nearly met in an acute angle, "but since, before, I eatat a bakery, with the slender brown roach on the pie, I guess I betterlet alone well enough. " He paused to drink his tea; as he tasted one ofthe cakes his face lit with sudden animation and he gazed across the hallafter the maid with the tray--she was now holding it before the aged andossified 'cellist of the Hempfstangle Quartette. "_Des gâteaux_" hemurmured feelingly, "_ou est-ce qu'elle peut trouver de tels gâteaux iciâ_ New York?"

I explained to him that Madame Garnet had an accomplished cook who madethem, --an Austrian, I thought. 

He shook his head. "_Austrichienne? Je ne pense pas. _"

Cressida was approaching with the new Spanish soprano, Mme. Bartolas, whowas all black velvet and long black feathers, with a lace veil over herrich pallour and even a little black patch on her chin. I beckoned them. "Tell me, Cressida, isn't Ruzenka an Austrian?"

She looked surprised. "No, a Bohemian, though I got her in Vienna. "Bouchalka's expression, and the remnant of a cake in his long fingers, gave her the connection. She laughed. "You like them? Of course, they areof your own country. You shall have more of them. " She nodded and wentaway to greet a guest who had just come in. 

A few moments later, Horace, then a beautiful lad in Eton clothes, brought another cup of tea and a plate of cakes for Bouchalka. We satdown in a corner, and talked about his songs. He was neither boastful nordeprecatory. He knew exactly in what respects they were excellent. Idecided as I watched his face, that he must be under thirty. The deeplines in his forehead probably came there from his habit of frowningdensely when he struggled to express himself, and suddenly elevating hiscoal-black eyebrows when his ideas cleared. His teeth were white, veryirregular and interesting. The corrective methods of modern dentistrywould have taken away half his good looks. His mouth would have beenmuch less attractive for any re-arranging of those long, narrow, over-crowded teeth. Along with his frown and his way of thrusting out hislip, they contributed, somehow, to the engaging impetuousness of hisconversation. As we talked about his songs, his manner changed. Beforethat he had seemed responsive and easily pleased. Now he grew abstracted, as if I had taken away his pleasant afternoon and wakened him to hismiseries. He moved restlessly in his clothes. When I mentioned Puccini, he held his head in his hands. 

"Why is it they like that always and always? A little, oh yes, very nice. But so much, always the same thing! Why?" He pierced me with thedespairing glance which had followed us out of the restaurant. 

I asked him whether he had sent any of his songs to the publishers andnamed one whom I knew to be discriminating. He shrugged his shoulders. "They not want Bohemian songs. They not want my music. Even the streetcars will not stop for me here, like for other people. Every time, I waiton the corner until somebody else make a signal to the car, and then itstop, --but not for me. "

Most people cannot become utterly poor; whatever happens, they can rightthemselves a little. But one felt that Bouchalka was the sort of personwho might actually starve or blow his brains out. Something veryimportant had been left out either of his make-up or of his education;something that we are not accustomed to miss in people. 

Gradually the parlour was filled with little groups of friends, and Itook Bouchalka back to the music-room where Cressida was surrounded byher guests; feathered women, with large sleeves and hats, young men of noimportance, in frock coats, with shining hair, and the smile which isintended to say so many flattering things but which really expresseslittle more than a desire to get on. The older men were standing aboutwaiting for a word _à deux_ with the hostess. To these people Bouchalkahad nothing to say. He stood stiffly at the outer edge of the circle, watching Cressida with intent, impatient eyes, until, under the pretextof showing him a score, she drew him into the alcove at the back end ofthe long room, where she kept her musical library. The bookcases ran fromthe floor to the ceiling. There was a table and a reading-lamp, and awindow seat looking upon the little walled garden. Two persons could bequite withdrawn there, and yet be a part of the general friendly scene. Cressida took a score from the shelf, and sat down with Bouchalka uponthe window seat, the book open between them, though neither of themlooked at it again. They fell to talking with great earnestness. At lastthe Bohemian pulled out a large, yellowing silver watch, held it upbefore him, and stared at it a moment as if it were an object of horror. He sprang up, bent over Cressida's hand and murmured something, dashedinto the hall and out of the front door without waiting for the maid toopen it. He had worn no overcoat, apparently. It was then seven o'clock;he would surely be late at his post in the up-town restaurant. I hoped hewould have wit enough to take the elevated. 

After supper Cressida told me his story. His parents, both poormusicians, --the mother a singer--died while he was yet a baby, and hewas left to the care of an arbitrary uncle who resolved to make a priestof him. He was put into a monastery school and kept there. The organistand choir-director, fortunately for Blasius, was an excellent musician, aman who had begun his career brilliantly, but who had met with crushingsorrows and disappointments in the world. He devoted himself to histalented pupil, and was the only teacher the young man ever had. Attwenty-one, when he was ready for the novitiate, Blasius felt that thecall of life was too strong for him, and he ran away out into a worldof which he knew nothing. He tramped southward to Vienna, begging andplaying his fiddle from town to town. In Vienna he fell in with a gipsyband which was being recruited for a Paris restaurant and went with themto Paris. He played in cafés and in cheap theatres, did transcribing fora music publisher, tried to get pupils. For four years he was the mouse, and hunger was the cat. She kept him on the jump. When he got work hedid not understand why; when he lost a job he did not understand why. During the time when most of us acquire a practical sense, get ahalf-unconscious knowledge of hard facts and market values, he had beenshut away from the world, fed like the pigeons in the bell-tower of hismonastery. Bouchalka had now been in New York a year, and for all he knewabout it, Cressida said, he might have landed the day before yesterday. 

Several weeks went by, and as Bouchalka did not reappear on Tenth Street, Cressida and I went once more to the place where he had played, only tofind another violinist leading the orchestra. We summoned the proprietor, a Swiss-Italian, polite and solicitous. He told us the gentleman was notplaying there any more, --was playing somewhere else, but he had forgottenwhere. We insisted upon talking to the old pianist, who at lastreluctantly admitted that the Bohemian had been dismissed. He had arrivedvery late one Sunday night three weeks ago, and had hot words with theproprietor. He had been late before, and had been warned. He was a verytalented fellow, but wild and not to be depended upon. The old man gaveus the address of a French boarding-house on Seventh Avenue whereBouchalka used to room. We drove there at once, but the woman who keptthe place said that he had gone away two weeks before, leaving noaddress, as he never got letters. Another Bohemian, who did engravingon glass, had a room with her, and when he came home perhaps he couldtell where Bouchalka was, for they were friends. 

It took us several days to run Bouchalka down, but when we did find himCressida promptly busied herself in his behalf. She sang his _"Sarka"_with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra at a Sunday night concert, she gothim a position with the Symphony Orchestra, and persuaded theconservative Hempfstangle Quartette to play one of his chambercompositions from manuscript. She aroused the interest of a publisher inhis work, and introduced him to people who were helpful to him. 

By the new year Bouchalka was fairly on his feet. He had proper clothesnow, and Cressida's friends found him attractive. He was usually at herhouse on Sunday afternoons; so usually, indeed, that Poppas beganpointedly to absent himself. When other guests arrived, the Bohemian andhis patroness were always found at the critical point of discussion, --atthe piano, by the fire, in the alcove at the end of the room--both ofthem interested and animated. He was invariably respectful and admiring, deferring to her in every tone and gesture, and she was perceptiblypleased and flattered, --as if all this were new to her and she weretasting the sweetness of a first success. 

One wild day in March Cressida burst tempestuously into my apartment andthrew herself down, declaring that she had just come from the most tryingrehearsal she had ever lived through. When I tried to question her aboutit, she replied absently and continued to shiver and crouch by the fire. Suddenly she rose, walked to the window, and stood looking out over theSquare, glittering with ice and rain and strewn with the wrecks ofumbrellas. When she turned again, she approached me with determination. 

"I shall have to ask you to go with me, " she said firmly. "That crazyBouchalka has gone and got a pleurisy or something. It may be pneumonia;there is an epidemic of it just now. I've sent Dr. Brooks to him, but Ican never tell anything from what a doctor says. I've got to seeBouchalka and his nurse, and what sort of place he's in. I've beenrehearsing all day and I'm singing tomorrow night; I can't have so muchon my mind. Can you come with me? It will save time in the end. "

I put on my furs, and we went down to Cressida's carriage, waiting below. She gave the driver a number on Seventh Avenue, and then began feelingher throat with the alarmed expression which meant that she was not goingto talk. We drove in silence to the address, and by this time it wasgrowing dark. The French landlady was a cordial, comfortable person whotook Cressida in at a glance and seemed much impressed. Cressida'sincognito was never successful. Her black gown was inconspicuous enough, but over it she wore a dark purple velvet carriage coat, lined with furand furred at the cuffs and collar. The Frenchwoman's eye ran over itdelightedly and scrutinized the veil which only half-concealed thewell-known face behind it. She insisted upon conducting us up to thefourth floor herself, running ahead of us and turning up the gas jets inthe dark, musty-smelling halls. I suspect that she tarried outside thedoor after we sent the nurse for her walk. 

We found the sick man in a great walnut bed, a relic of the better dayswhich this lodging house must have seen. The grimy red plush carpet, thered velvet chairs with broken springs, the double gilt-framed mirrorabove the mantel, had all been respectable, substantial contributions tocomfort in their time. The fireplace was now empty and grateless, and anill-smelling gas stove burned in its sooty recess under the crackedmarble. The huge arched windows were hung with heavy red curtains, pinnedtogether and lightly stirred by the wind which rattled the loose frames. 

I was examining these things while Cressida bent over Bouchalka. Hercarriage cloak she threw over the foot of his bed, either from aprotective impulse, or because there was no place else to put it. Aftershe had greeted him and seated herself, the sick man reached down anddrew the cloak up over him, looking at it with weak, childish pleasureand stroking the velvet with his long fingers. "_Couleur de gloire, couleur des reines!_" I heard him murmur. He thrust the sleeve under hischin and closed his eyes. His loud, rapid breathing was the only sound inthe room. If Cressida brushed back his hair or touched his hand, helooked up long enough to give her a smile of utter adoration, naive anduninquiring, as if he were smiling at a dream or a miracle. 

The nurse was gone for an hour, and we sat quietly, Cressida with hereyes fixed on Bouchalka, and I absorbed in the strange atmosphere of thehouse, which seemed to seep in under the door and through the walls. Occasionally we heard a call for "_de l'eau chaude_!" and the heavy trotof a serving woman on the stairs. On the floor below somebody wasstruggling with Schubert's Marche Militaire on a coarse-toned uprightpiano. Sometimes, when a door was opened, one could hear a parrotscreaming, "_Voilà, voilà, tonnerre!_" The house was built before 1870, as one could tell from windows and mouldings, and the walls were thick. The sounds were not disturbing and Bouchalka was probably used to them. 

When the nurse returned and we rose to go, Bouchalka still lay with hischeek on her cloak, and Cressida left it. "It seems to please him, " shemurmured as we went down the stairs. "I can go home without a wrap. It'snot far. " I had, of course, to give her my furs, as I was not singing_Donna Anna_ tomorrow evening and she was. 

After this I was not surprised by any devout attitude in which I happenedto find the Bohemian when I entered Cressida's music-room unannounced, or by any radiance on her face when she rose from the window-seat in thealcove and came down the room to greet me. 

Bouchalka was, of course, very often at the Opera now. On almost anynight when Cressida sang, one could see his narrow black head--highabove the temples and rather constrained behind the ears--peering fromsome part of the house. I used to wonder what he thought of Cressida asan artist, but probably he did not think seriously at all. A great voice, a handsome woman, a great prestige, all added together made a "greatartist, " the common synonym for success. Her success, and the materialevidences of it, quite blinded him. I could never draw from him anythingadequate about Anna Straka, Cressida's Slavic rival, and this perhapsmeant that he considered comparison disloyal. All the while that Cressidawas singing reliably, and satisfying the management, Straka was singinguncertainly and making history. Her voice was primarily defective, andher immediate vocal method was bad. Cressida was always living up to hercontract, delivering the whole order in good condition; while the Slavwas sometimes almost voiceless, sometimes inspired. She put you off witha hope, a promise, time after time. But she was quite as likely to putyou off with a revelation, --with an interpretation that was inimitable, unrepeatable. 

Bouchalka was not a reflective person. He had his own idea of what agreat prima donna should be like, and he took it for granted that Mme. Garnet corresponded to his conception. The curious thing was that hemanaged to impress his idea upon Cressida herself. She began to seeherself as he saw her, to try to be like the notion of her that hecarried somewhere in that pointed head of his. She was exalted quitebeyond herself. Things that had been chilled under the grind came to lifein her that winter, with the breath of Bouchalka's adoration. Then, ifever in her life, she heard the bird sing on the branch outside herwindow; and she wished she were younger, lovelier, freer. She wishedthere were no Poppas, no Horace, no Garnets. She longed to be only thebewitching creature Bouchalka imagined her. 

One April day when we were driving in the Park, Cressida, superb in agreen-and-primrose costume hurried over from Paris, turned to me smilingand said: "Do you know, this is the first spring I haven't dreaded. It'sthe first one I've ever really had. Perhaps people never have more thanone, whether it comes early or late. " She told me that she wasoverwhelmingly in love. 

Our visit to Bouchalka when he was ill had, of course, been reported, andthe men about the Opera House had made of it the only story they have thewit to invent. They could no more change the pattern of that story thanthe spider could change the design of its web. But being, as she said, "in love" suggested to Cressida only one plan of action; to have theTenth Street house done over, to put more money into her brothers'business, send Horace to school, raise Poppas' percentage, and then witha clear conscience be married in the Church of the Ascension. She wentthrough this program with her usual thoroughness. She was married in Juneand sailed immediately with her husband. Poppas was to join them inVienna in August, when she would begin to work again. From her letters Igathered that all was going well, even beyond her hopes. 

When they returned in October, both Cressida and Blasius seemed changedfor the better. She was perceptibly freshened and renewed. She attackedher work at once with more vigour and more ease; did not drive herself sorelentlessly. A little carelessness became her wonderfully. Bouchalka wasless gaunt, and much less flighty and perverse. His frank pleasure in thecomfort and order of his wife's establishment was ingratiating, even ifit was a little amusing. Cressida had the sewing-room at the top of thehouse made over into a study for him. When I went up there to see him, Iusually found him sitting before the fire or walking about with his handsin his coat pockets, admiring his new possessions. He explained theingenious arrangement of his study to me a dozen times. 

With Cressida's friends and guests, Bouchalka assumed nothing forhimself. His deportment amounted to a quiet, unobtrusive appreciation ofher and of his good fortune. He was proud to owe his wife so much. Cressida's Sunday afternoons were more popular than ever, since sheherself had so much more heart for them. Bouchalka's picturesque presencestimulated her graciousness and charm. One still found them conversingtogether as eagerly as in the days when they saw each other but seldom. Consequently their guests were never bored. We felt as if the TenthStreet house had a pleasant climate quite its own. In the spring, whenthe Metropolitan company went on tour, Cressida's husband accompaniedher, and afterward they again sailed for Genoa. 

During the second winter people began to say that Bouchalka was becomingtoo thoroughly domesticated, and that since he was growing heavier inbody he was less attractive. I noticed his increasing reluctance to stirabroad. Nobody could say that he was "wild" now. He seemed to dreadleaving the house, even for an evening. Why should he go out, he said, when he had everything he wanted at home? He published very little. Onewas given to understand that he was writing an opera. He lived in theTenth Street house like a tropical plant under glass. Nowhere in New Yorkcould he get such cookery as Ruzenka's. Ruzenka ("little Rose") had, like her mistress, bloomed afresh, now that she had a man and acompatriot to cook for. Her invention was tireless, and she took thingswith a high hand in the kitchen, confident of a perfect appreciation. Shewas a plump, fair, blue-eyed girl, giggly and easily flattered, withteeth like cream. She was passionately domestic, and her mind was full ofhomely stories and proverbs and superstitions which she somehow workedinto her cookery. She and Bouchalka had between them a whole literatureof traditions about sauces and fish and pastry. The cellar was full ofthe wines he liked, and Ruzenka always knew what wines to serve with thedinner. Blasius' monastery had been famous for good living. 

That winter was a very cold one, and I think the even temperature of thehouse enslaved Bouchalka. "Imagine it, " he once said to me when I droppedin during a blinding snowstorm and found him reading before the fire. "Tobe warm all the time, every day! It is like Aladdin. In Paris I have hadweeks together when I was not warm once, when I did not have a bath once, like the cats in the street. The nights were a misery. People haveterrible dreams when they are so cold. Here I waken up in the night sowarm I do not know what it means. Her door is open, and I turn on mylight. I cannot believe in myself until I see that she is there. "

I began to think that Bouchalka's wildness had been the desperation whichthe tamest animals exhibit when they are tortured or terrorized. Naturally luxurious, he had suffered more than most men under the pinchof penury. Those first beautiful compositions, full of the folk-music ofhis own country, had been wrung out of him by home-sickness andheart-ache. I wondered whether he could compose only under the spur ofhunger and loneliness, and whether his talent might not subside with hisdespair. Some such apprehension must have troubled Cressida, though hisgratitude would have been propitiatory to a more exacting task-master. She had always liked to make people happy, and he was the first one whohad accepted her bounty without sourness. When he did not accompany herupon her spring tour, Cressida said it was because travelling interferedwith composition; but I felt that she was deeply disappointed. Blasius, or Bla[vz]ej, as his wife had with difficulty learned to call him, wasnot showy or extravagant. He hated hotels, even the best of them. Cressida had always fought for the hearthstone and the fireside, and thehumour of Destiny is sometimes to give us too much of what we desire. Ibelieve she would have preferred even enthusiasm about other women to hisutter _oisiveté_. It was his old fire, not his docility, that had wonher. 

During the third season after her marriage Cressida had only twenty-fiveperformances at the Metropolitan, and she was singing out of town a greatdeal. Her husband did not bestir himself to accompany her, but heattended, very faithfully, to her correspondence and to her business athome. He had no ambitious schemes to increase her fortune, and he carriedout her directions exactly. Nevertheless, Cressida faced her concerttours somewhat grimly, and she seldom talked now about their plans forthe future. 

The crisis in this growing estrangement came about by accident, --one ofthose chance occurrences that affect our lives more than years of orderedeffort, --and it came in an inverted form of a situation old to comedy. Cressida had been on the road for several weeks; singing in Minneapolis, Cleveland, St. Paul, then up into Canada and back to Boston. From Bostonshe was to go directly to Chicago, coming down on the five o'clock trainand taking the eleven, over the Lake Shore, for the West. By her scheduleshe would have time to change cars comfortably at the Grand Centralstation. 

On the journey down from Boston she was seized with a great desire to seeBlasius. She decided, against her custom, one might say against herprinciples, to risk a performance with the Chicago orchestra withoutrehearsal, to stay the night in New York and go west by the afternoontrain the next day. She telegraphed Chicago, but she did not telegraphBlasius, because she wished--the old fallacy of affection!--to "surprise"him. She could take it for granted that, at eleven on a cold winternight, he would be in the Tenth Street house and nowhere else in NewYork. She sent Poppas--paler than usual with accusing scorn--and hertrunks on to Chicago, and with only her travelling bag and a sense ofbeing very audacious in her behaviour and still very much in love, shetook a cab for Tenth Street. 

Since it was her intention to disturb Blasius as little as possible andto delight him as much as possible, she let herself in with her latch-keyand went directly to his room. She did not find him there. Indeed, shefound him where he should not have been at all. There must have been atrying scene. 

Ruzenka was sent away in the morning, and the other two maids as well. Byeight o'clock Cressida and Bouchalka had the house to themselves. Nobodyhad any breakfast. Cressida took the afternoon train to keep herengagement with Theodore Thomas, and to think over the situation. Blasiuswas left in the Tenth Street house with only the furnace man's wife tolook after him. His explanation of his conduct was that he had beendrinking too much. His digression, he swore, was casual. It had neveroccurred before, and he could only appeal to his wife's magnanimity. Butit was, on the whole, easier for Cressida to be firm than to be yielding, and she knew herself too well to attempt a readjustment. She had nevermade shabby compromises, and it was too late for her to begin. When shereturned to New York she went to a hotel, and she never saw Bouchalkaalone again. Since he admitted her charge, the legal formalities wereconducted so quietly that the granting of her divorce was announced inthe morning papers before her friends knew that there was the leastlikelihood of one. Cressida's concert tours had interrupted thehospitalities of the house. 

While the lawyers were arranging matters, Bouchalka came to see me. Hewas remorseful and miserable enough, and I think his perplexity was quitesincere. If there had been an intrigue with a woman of her own class, aninfatuation, an affair, he said, he could understand. But anything sovenial and accidental--He shook his head slowly back and forth. Heassured me that he was not at all himself on that fateful evening, andthat when he recovered himself he would have sent Ruzenka away, makingproper provision for her, of course. It was an ugly thing, but uglythings sometimes happened in one's life, and one had to put them away andforget them. He could have overlooked any accident that might haveoccurred when his wife was on the road, with Poppas, for example. I cuthim short, and he bent his head to my reproof. 

"I know, " he said, "such things are different with her. But when have Isaid that I am noble as she is? Never. But I have appreciated and I haveadored. About me, say what you like. But if you say that in this therewas any _méprise_ to my wife, that is not true. I have lost all my placehere. I came in from the streets; but I understand her, and all the finethings in her, better than any of you here. If that accident had notbeen, she would have lived happy with me for years. As for me, I havenever believed in this happiness. I was not born under a good star. How did it come? By accident. It goes by accident. She tried to give goodfortune to an unfortunate man, _un miserable_; that was her mistake. Itcannot be done in this world. The lucky should marry the lucky. "Bouchalka stopped and lit a cigarette. He sat sunk in my chair as if henever meant to get up again. His large hands, now so much plumper thanwhen I first knew him, hung limp. When he had consumed his cigarette heturned to me again. 

"I, too, have tried. Have I so much as written one note to a lady sinceshe first put out her hand to help me? Some of the artists who sing mycompositions have been quite willing to plague my wife a little if I makethe least sign. With the Española, for instance, I have had to be verystern, _farouche_; she is so very playful. I have never given my wife theslightest annoyance of this kind. Since I married her, I have not kissedthe cheek of one lady! Then one night I am bored and drink too muchchampagne and I become a fool. What does it matter? Did my wife marry thefool of me? No, she married me, with my mind and my feelings all here, asI am today. But she is getting a divorce from the fool of me, which shewould never see _anyhow_! The stupidity which excuse me is the thing shewill not overlook. Even in her memory of me she will be harsh. "

His view of his conduct and its consequences was fatalistic: he was meantto have just so much misery every day of his life; for three years it hadbeen withheld, had been piling up somewhere, underground, overhead; nowthe accumulation burst over him. He had come to pay his respects to me, he said, to declare his undying gratitude to Madame Garnet, and to bidme farewell. He took up his hat and cane and kissed my hand. I have neverseen him since. Cressida made a settlement upon him, but even Poppas, tortured by envy and curiosity, never discovered how much it was. It wasvery little, she told me. "_Pour des gâteaux, _" she added with a smilethat was not unforgiving. She could not bear to think of his being inwant when so little could make him comfortable. 

He went back to his own village in Bohemia. He wrote her that the oldmonk, his teacher, was still alive, and that from the windows of his roomin the town he could see the pigeons flying forth from and back to themonastery bell-tower all day long. He sent her a song, with his ownwords, about those pigeons, --quite a lovely thing. He was the bell tower, and _les colombes_ were his memories of her. 

IV

Jerome Brown proved, on the whole, the worst of Cressida's husbands, and, with the possible exception of her eldest brother, Buchanan Garnet, hewas the most rapacious of the men with whom she had had to do. It was onething to gratify every wish of a cake-loving fellow like Bouchalka, butquite another to stand behind a financier. And Brown would be a financieror nothing. After her marriage with him, Cressida grew rapidly older. Forthe first time in her life she wanted to go abroad and live--to getJerome Brown away from the scene of his unsuccessful but undiscouragedactivities. But Brown was not a man who could be amused and kept out ofmischief in Continental hotels. He had to be a figure, if only a "mark, "in Wall street. Nothing else would gratify his peculiar vanity. Thedeeper he went in, the more affectionately he told Cressida that now allher cares and anxieties were over. To try to get related facts out of hisoptimism was like trying to find framework in a feather bed. All Cressidaknew was that she was perpetually "investing" to save investments. Whenshe told me she had put a mortgage on the Tenth Street house, her eyesfilled with tears. "Why is it? I have never cared about money, except tomake people happy with it, and it has been the curse of my life. It hasspoiled all my relations with people. Fortunately, " she addedirrelevantly, drying her eyes, "Jerome and Poppas get along well. " Jeromecould have got along with anybody; that is a promoter's business. Hiswarm hand, his flushed face, his bright eye, and his newest funnystory, --Poppas had no weapons that could do execution with a man likethat. 

Though Brown's ventures never came home, there was nothing openlydisastrous until the outbreak of the revolution in Mexico jeopardizedhis interests there. Then Cressida went to England--where she couldalways raise money from a faithful public--for a winter concert tour. When she sailed, her friends knew that her husband's affairs were in abad way; but we did not know how bad until after Cressida's death. 

Cressida Garnet, as all the world knows, was lost on the _Titanic_. Poppas and Horace, who had been travelling with her, were sent on a weekearlier and came as safely to port as if they had never stepped out oftheir London hotel. But Cressida had waited for the first trip of the seamonster--she still believed that all advertising was good--and she wentdown on the road between the old world and the new. She had been ill, andwhen the collision occurred she was in her stateroom, a modest onesomewhere down in the boat, for she was travelling economically. Apparently she never left her cabin. She was not seen on the decks, andnone of the survivors brought any word of her. 

On Monday, when the wireless messages were coming from the _Carpathia_with the names of the passengers who had been saved, I went, with somany hundred others, down to the White Star offices. There I sawCressida's motor, her redoubtable initials on the door, with four mensitting in the limousine. Jerome Brown, stripped of the promoter'sjoviality and looking flabby and old, sat behind with Buchanan Garnet, who had come on from Ohio. I had not seen him for years. He was now anold man, but he was still conscious of being in the public eye, and satturning a cigar about in his face with that foolish look of importancewhich Cressida's achievement had stamped upon all the Garnets. Poppas wasin front, with Horace. He was gnawing the finger of his chamois glove asit rested on the top of his cane. His head was sunk, his shoulders drawntogether; he looked as old as Jewry. I watched them, wondering whetherCressida would come back to them if she could. After the last names wereposted, the four men settled back into the powerful car--one of the bestmade--and the chauffeur backed off. I saw him dash away the tears fromhis face with the back of his driving glove. He was an Irish boy, and hadbeen devoted to Cressida. 

When the will was read, Henry Gilbert, the lawyer, an old friend of herearly youth, and I, were named executors. A nice job we had of it. Mostof her large fortune had been converted into stocks that were almostworthless. The marketable property realized only a hundred and fiftythousand dollars. To defeat the bequest of fifty thousand dollars toPoppas, Jerome Brown and her family contested the will. They broughtCressida's letters into court to prove that the will did not representher intentions, often expressed in writing through many years, to"provide well" for them. 

Such letters they were! The writing of a tired, overdriven woman;promising money, sending money herewith, asking for an acknowledgmentof the draft sent last month, etc. In the letters to Jerome Brown shebegged for information about his affairs and entreated him to go with herto some foreign city where they could live quietly and where she couldrest; if they were careful, there would "be enough for all. " NeitherBrown nor her brothers and sisters had any sense of shame about theseletters. It seemed never to occur to them that this golden stream, whether it rushed or whether it trickled, came out of the industry, outof the mortal body of a woman. They regarded her as a natural sourceof wealth; a copper vein, a diamond mine. 

Henry Gilbert is a good lawyer himself, and he employed an able man todefend the will. We determined that in this crisis we would stand byPoppas, believing it would be Cressida's wish. Out of the lot of them, hewas the only one who had helped her to make one penny of the money thathad brought her so much misery. He was at least more deserving than theothers. We saw to it that Poppas got his fifty thousand, and he actuallydeparted, at last, for his city in la sainte Asie, where it never rainsand where he will never again have to hold a hot water bottle to hisface. 

The rest of the property was fought for to a finish. Poppas out of theway, Horace and Brown and the Garnets quarrelled over her personaleffects. They went from floor to floor of the Tenth Street house. Thewill provided that Cressida's jewels and furs and gowns were to go to hersisters. Georgie and Julia wrangled over them down to the last moleskin. They were deeply disappointed that some of the muffs and stoles whichthey remembered as very large, proved, when exhumed from storage andexhibited beside furs of a modern cut, to be ridiculously scant. A yearago the sisters were still reasoning with each other about pearls andopals and emeralds. 

I wrote Poppas some account of these horrors, as during the courtproceedings we had become rather better friends than of old. His replyarrived only a few days ago; a photograph of himself upon a camel, underwhich is written:

 Traulich und Treu ist's nur in der Tiefe: falsch und feigist was dort oben sich freut!

His reply, and the memories it awakens--memories which have followedPoppas into the middle of Asia, seemingly, --prompted this informalnarration. 

A Gold Slipper

Marshall McKann followed his wife and her friend Mrs. Post down theaisle and up the steps to the stage of the Carnegie Music Hall with anill-concealed feeling of grievance. Heaven knew he never went toconcerts, and to be mounted upon the stage in this fashion, as if he werea "highbrow" from Sewickley, or some unfortunate with a musical wife, wasludicrous. A man went to concerts when he was courting, while he was ajunior partner. When he became a person of substance he stopped that sortof nonsense. His wife, too, was a sensible person, the daughter of an oldPittsburgh family as solid and well-rooted as the McKanns. She wouldnever have bothered him about this concert had not the meddlesome Mrs. Post arrived to pay her a visit. Mrs. Post was an old school friend ofMrs. McKann, and because she lived in Cincinnati she was always keepingup with the world and talking about things in which no one else wasinterested, music among them. She was an aggressive lady, with weightyopinions, and a deep voice like a jovial bassoon. She had arrived onlylast night, and at dinner she brought it out that she could on no accountmiss Kitty Ayrshire's recital; it was, she said, the sort of thing no onecould afford to miss. 

When McKann went into town in the morning he found that every seat in themusic-hall was sold. He telephoned his wife to that effect, and, thinkinghe had settled the matter, made his reservation on the 11. 25 train forNew York. He was unable to get a drawing-room because this same KittyAyrshire had taken the last one. He had not intended going to New Yorkuntil the following week, but he preferred to be absent during Mrs. Post's incumbency. 

In the middle of the morning, when he was deep in his correspondence, his wife called him up to say the enterprising Mrs. Post had telephonedsome musical friends in Sewickley and had found that two hundredfolding-chairs were to be placed on the stage of the concert-hall, behindthe piano, and that they would be on sale at noon. Would he please getseats in the front row? McKann asked if they would not excuse him, sincehe was going over to New York on the late train, would be tired, andwould not have time to dress, etc. No, not at all. It would be foolishfor two women to trail up to the stage unattended. Mrs. Post's husbandalways accompanied her to concerts, and she expected that much attentionfrom her host. He needn't dress, and he could take a taxi from theconcert-hall to the East Liberty station. 

The outcome of it all was that, though his bag was at the station, herewas McKann, in the worst possible humour, facing the large audience towhich he was well known, and sitting among a lot of music students andexcitable old maids. Only the desperately zealous or the morbidly curiouswould endure two hours in those wooden chairs, and he sat in the frontrow of this hectic body, somehow made a party to a transaction for whichhe had the utmost contempt. 

When McKann had been in Paris, Kitty Ayrshire was singing at the Comique, and he wouldn't go to hear her--even there, where one found so littlethat was better to do. She was too much talked about, too muchadvertised; always being thrust in an American's face as if she weresomething to be proud of. Perfumes and petticoats and cutlets were namedfor her. Some one had pointed Kitty out to him one afternoon when she wasdriving in the Bois with a French composer--old enough, he judged, to beher father--who was said to be infatuated, carried away by her. McKannwas told that this was one of the historic passions of old age. He hadlooked at her on that occasion, but she was so befrilled and befeatheredthat he caught nothing but a graceful outline and a small, dark headabove a white ostrich boa. He had noted with disgust, however, thestooped shoulders and white imperial of the silk-hatted man beside her, and the senescent line of his back. McKann described to his wife thisunpleasing picture only last night, while he was undressing, when he wasmaking every possible effort to avert this concert party. But Bessieonly looked superior and said she wished to hear Kitty Ayrshire sing, andthat her "private life" was something in which she had no interest. 

Well, here he was; hot and uncomfortable, in a chair much too small forhim, with a row of blinding footlights glaring in his eyes. Suddenly thedoor at his right elbow opened. Their seats were at one end of the frontrow; he had thought they would be less conspicuous there than in thecentre, and he had not foreseen that the singer would walk over him everytime she came upon the stage. Her velvet train brushed against histrousers as she passed him. The applause which greeted her was neitheroverwhelming nor prolonged. Her conservative audience did not knowexactly how to accept her toilette. They were accustomed to dignifiedconcert gowns, like those which Pittsburgh matrons (in those days!) woreat their daughters' coming-out teas. 

Kitty's gown that evening was really quite outrageous--the repartée of aconscienceless Parisian designer who took her hint that she wishedsomething that would be entirely novel in the States. Today, after wehave all of us, even in the uttermost provinces, been educated by Basktand the various Ballets Russes, we would accept such a gown withoutdistrust; but then it was a little disconcerting, even to thewell-disposed. It was constructed of a yard or two of green velvet--areviling, shrieking green which would have made a fright of any womanwho had not inextinguishable beauty--and it was made without armholes, adevice to which we were then so unaccustomed that it was nothing lessthan alarming. The velvet skirt split back from a transparent gold-lacepetticoat, gold stockings, gold slippers. The narrow train was, apparently, looped to both ankles, and it kept curling about her feetlike a serpent's tail, turning up its gold lining as if it were squirmingover on its back. It was not, we felt, a costume in which to sing Mozartand Handel and Beethoven. 

Kitty sensed the chill in the air, and it amused her. She liked to bethought a brilliant artist by other artists, but by the world at largeshe liked to be thought a daring creature. She had every reason tobelieve, from experience and from example, that to shock the great crowdwas the surest way to get its money and to make her name a householdword. Nobody ever became a household word of being an artist, surely; andyou were not a thoroughly paying proposition until your name meantsomething on the sidewalk and in the barber-shop. Kitty studied heraudience with an appraising eye. She liked the stimulus of thisdisapprobation. As she faced this hard-shelled public she felt keen andinterested; she knew that she would give such a recital as cannot oftenbe heard for money. She nodded gaily to the young man at the piano, fellinto an attitude of seriousness, and began the group of Beethoven andMozart songs. 

Though McKann would not have admitted it, there were really a great manypeople in the concert-hall who knew what the prodigal daughter of theircountry was singing, and how well she was doing it. They thawed graduallyunder the beauty of her voice and the subtlety of her interpretation. She had sung seldom in concert then, and they had supposed her verydependent upon the accessories of the opera. Clean singing, finishedartistry, were not what they expected from her. They began to feel, even, the wayward charm of her personality. 

McKann, who stared coldly up at the balconies during her first song, during the second glanced cautiously at the green apparition before him. He was vexed with her for having retained a débutante figure. Hecomfortably classed all singers--especially operatic singers--as "fatDutchwomen" or "shifty Sadies, " and Kitty would not fit into his clevergeneralization. She displayed, under his nose, the only kind of figurehe considered worth looking at--that of a very young girl, supple andsinuous and quicksilverish; thin, eager shoulders, polished whitearms that were nowhere too fat and nowhere too thin. McKann found itagreeable to look at Kitty, but when he saw that the authoritativeMrs. Post, red as a turkey-cock with opinions she was bursting to impart, was studying and appraising the singer through her lorgnette, he gazedindifferently out into the house again. He felt for his watch, but hiswife touched him warningly with her elbow--which, he noticed, was not atall like Kitty's. 

When Miss Ayrshire finished her first group of songs, her audienceexpressed its approval positively, but guardedly. She smiled bewitchinglyupon the people in front, glanced up at the balconies, and then turned tothe company huddled on the stage behind her. After her gay and carelessbows, she retreated toward the stage door. As she passed McKann, sheagain brushed lightly against him, and this time she paused long enoughto glance down at him and murmur, "Pardon!"

In the moment her bright, curious eyes rested upon him, McKann seemed tosee himself as if she were holding a mirror up before him. He beheldhimself a heavy, solid figure, unsuitably clad for the time and place, with a florid, square face, well-visored with good living and saneopinions--an inexpressive countenance. Not a rock face, exactly, but akind of pressed-brick-and-cement face, a "business" face upon which yearsand feelings had made no mark--in which cocktails might eventually blastout a few hollows. He had never seen himself so distinctly in hisshaving-glass as he did in that instant when Kitty Ayrshire's liquid eyeheld him, when her bright, inquiring glance roamed over his person. Afterher prehensile train curled over his boot and she was gone, his wifeturned to him and said in the tone of approbation one uses when an infantmanifests its groping intelligence, "Very gracious of her, I'm sure!"Mrs. Post nodded oracularly. McKann grunted. 

Kitty began her second number, a group of romantic German songs whichwere altogether more her affair than her first number. When she turnedonce to acknowledge the applause behind her, she caught McKann in the actof yawning behind his hand--he of course wore no gloves--and he thoughtshe frowned a little. This did not embarrass him; it somehow made himfeel important. When she retired after the second part of the program, she again looked him over curiously as she passed, and she took markedprecaution that her dress did not touch him. Mrs. Post and his wife againcommented upon her consideration. 

The final number was made up of modern French songs which Kitty sangenchantingly, and at last her frigid public was thoroughly aroused. While she was coming back again and again to smile and curtsy, McKannwhispered to his wife that if there were to be encores he had better makea dash for his train. 

"Not at all, " put in Mrs. Post. "Kitty is going on the same train. Shesings in _Faust_ at the opera tomorrow night, so she'll take no chances. "

McKann once more told himself how sorry he felt for Post. At last MissAyrshire returned, escorted by her accompanist, and gave the people whatshe of course knew they wanted: the most popular aria from the Frenchopera of which the title-rôle had become synonymous with her name--anopera written for her and to her and round about her, by the veteranFrench composer who adored her, --the last and not the palest flash of hiscreative fire. This brought her audience all the way. They clamoured formore of it, but she was not to be coerced. She had been unyieldingthrough storms to which this was a summer breeze. She came on once more, shrugged her shoulders, blew them a kiss, and was gone. Her last smilewas for that uncomfortable part of her audience seated behind her, andshe looked with recognition at McKann and his ladies as she nodded goodnight to the wooden chairs. 

McKann hurried his charges into the foyer by the nearest exit and putthem into his motor. Then he went over to the Schenley to have a glassof beer and a rarebit before train-time. He had not, he admitted tohimself, been so much bored as he pretended. The minx herself was wellenough, but it was absurd in his fellow-townsmen to look owlish anduplifted about her. He had no rooted dislike for pretty women; he evendidn't deny that gay girls had their place in the world, but they oughtto be kept in their place. He was born a Presbyterian, just as he wasborn a McKann. He sat in his pew in the First Church every Sunday, and henever missed a presbytery meeting when he was in town. His religion wasnot very spiritual, certainly, but it was substantial and concrete, madeup of good, hard convictions and opinions. It had something to do withcitizenship, with whom one ought to marry, with the coal business (inwhich his own name was powerful), with the Republican party, and with allmajorities and established precedents. He was hostile to fads, toenthusiasms, to individualism, to all changes except in mining machineryand in methods of transportation. 

His equanimity restored by his lunch at the Schenley, McKann lit a bigcigar, got into his taxi, and bowled off through the sleet. 

There was not a sound to be heard or a light to be seen. The iceglittered on the pavement and on the naked trees. No restless feet wereabroad. At eleven o'clock the rows of small, comfortable houses looked asempty of the troublesome bubble of life as the Allegheny cemetery itself. Suddenly the cab stopped, and McKann thrust his head out of the window. Awoman was standing in the middle of the street addressing his driver ina tone of excitement. Over against the curb a lone electric stooddespondent in the storm. The young woman, her cloak blowing about her, turned from the driver to McKann himself, speaking rapidly and somewhatincoherently. 

"Could you not be so kind as to help us? It is Mees Ayrshire, the singer. The juice is gone out and we cannot move. We must get to the station. Mademoiselle cannot miss the train; she sings tomorrow night in New York. It is very important. Could you not take us to the station at EastLiberty?"

McKann opened the door. "That's all right, but you'll have to hurry. It'seleven-ten now. You've only got fifteen minutes to make the train. Tellher to come along. "

The maid drew back and looked up at him in amazement. "But, thehand-luggage to carry, and Mademoiselle to walk! The street is likeglass!"

McKann threw away his cigar and followed her. He stood silent by the doorof the derelict, while the maid explained that she had found help. Thedriver had gone off somewhere to telephone for a car. Miss Ayrshireseemed not at all apprehensive; she had not doubted that a rescuer wouldbe forthcoming. She moved deliberately; out of a whirl of skirts shethrust one fur-topped shoe--McKann saw the flash of the gold stockingabove it--and alighted. 

"So kind of you! So fortunate for us!" she murmured. One hand she placedupon his sleeve, and in the other she carried an armful of roses that hadbeen sent up to the concert stage. The petals showered upon the sooty, sleety pavement as she picked her way along. They would be lying theretomorrow morning, and the children in those houses would wonder if therehad been a funeral. The maid followed with two leather bags. As soon ashe had lifted Kitty into his cab she exclaimed:

"My jewel-case! I have forgotten it. It is on the back seat, please. I amso careless!"

He dashed back, ran his hand along the cushions, and discovered a smallleather bag. When he returned he found the maid and the luggage bestowedon the front seat, and a place left for him on the back seat beside Kittyand her flowers. 

"Shall we be taking you far out of your way?" she asked sweetly. "Ihaven't an idea where the station is. I'm not even sure about the name. Céline thinks it is East Liberty, but I think it is West Liberty. An oddname, anyway. It is a Bohemian quarter, perhaps? A district where the lawrelaxes a trifle?"

McKann replied grimly that he didn't think the name referred to that kindof liberty. 

"So much the better, " sighed Kitty. "I am a Californian; that's the onlypart of America I know very well, and out there, when we called a placeLiberty Hill or Liberty Hollow--well, we meant it. You will excuse me ifI'm uncommunicative, won't you? I must not talk in this raw air. Mythroat is sensitive after a long program. " She lay back in her corner andclosed her eyes. 

When the cab rolled down the incline at East Liberty station, the NewYork express was whistling in. A porter opened the door. McKann sprangout, gave him a claim check and his Pullman ticket, and told him to gethis bag at the check-stand and rush it on that train. 

Miss Ayrshire, having gathered up her flowers, put out her hand to takehis arm. "Why, it's you!" she exclaimed, as she saw his face in thelight. "What a coincidence!" She made no further move to alight, but satsmiling as if she had just seated herself in a drawing-room and wereready for talk and a cup of tea. 

McKann caught her arm. "You must hurry, Miss Ayrshire, if you mean tocatch that train. It stops here only a moment. Can you run?"

"Can I run!" she laughed. "Try me!"

As they raced through the tunnel and up the inside stairway, McKannadmitted that he had never before made a dash with feet so quick and surestepping out beside him. The white-furred boots chased each other likelambs at play, the gold stockings flashed like the spokes of a bicyclewheel in the sun. They reached the door of Miss Ayrshire's state-roomjust as the train began to pull out. McKann was ashamed of the way he waspanting, for Kitty's breathing was as soft and regular as when she wasreclining on the back seat of his taxi. It had somehow run in his headthat all these stage women were a poor lot physically--unsound, overfedcreatures, like canaries that are kept in a cage and stuffed withsong-restorer. He retreated to escape her thanks. "Good night! Pleasantjourney! Pleasant dreams!" With a friendly nod in Kitty's direction heclosed the door behind him. 

He was somewhat surprised to find his own bag, his Pullman ticket in thestrap, on the seat just outside Kitty's door. But there was nothingstrange about it. He had got the last section left on the train, No. 13, next the drawing-room. Every other berth in the car was made up. He wasjust starting to look for the porter when the door of the state-roomopened and Kitty Ayrshire came out. She seated herself carelessly in thefront seat beside his bag. 

"Please talk to me a little, " she said coaxingly. "I'm always wakefulafter I sing, and I have to hunt some one to talk to. Céline and I get sotired of each other. We can speak very low, and we shall not disturb anyone. " She crossed her feet and rested her elbow on his Gladstone. Thoughshe still wore her gold slippers and stockings, she did not, he thankedHeaven, have on her concert gown, but a very demure black velvet withsome sort of pearl trimming about the neck. "Wasn't it funny, " sheproceeded, "that it happened to be you who picked me up? I wanted aword with you, anyway. "

McKann smiled in a way that meant he wasn't being taken in. "Did you? Weare not very old acquaintances. "

"No, perhaps not. But you disapproved tonight, and I thought I wassinging very well. You are very critical in such matters?"

He had been standing, but now he sat down. "My dear young lady, I am notcritical at all. I know nothing about 'such matters. '"

"And care less?" she said for him, "Well, then we know where we are, inso far as that is concerned. What did displease you? My gown, perhaps? Itmay seem a little _outré_ here, but it's the sort of thing all theimaginative designers abroad are doing. You like the English sort ofconcert gown better?"

"About gowns, " said McKann, "I know even less than about music. If Ilooked uncomfortable, it was probably because I was uncomfortable. Theseats were bad and the lights were annoying. "

Kitty looked up with solicitude. "I was sorry they sold those seats. Idon't like to make people uncomfortable in any way. Did the lights giveyou a headache? They are very trying. They burn one's eyes out in theend, I believe. " She paused and waved the porter away with a smile ashe came toward them. Half-clad Pittsburghers were tramping up and downthe aisle, casting sidelong glances at McKann and his companion. "Howmuch better they look with all their clothes on, " she murmured. Then, turning directly to McKann again: "I saw you were not well seated, but Ifelt something quite hostile and personal. You were displeased with me. Doubtless many people are, but I seldom get an opportunity to questionthem. It would be nice if you took the trouble to tell me why you weredispleased. "

She spoke frankly, pleasantly, without a shadow of challenge or hauteur. She did not seem to be angling for compliments. McKann settled himselfin his seat. He thought he would try her out. She had come for it, and hewould let her have it. He found, however, that it was harder to formulatethe grounds of his disapproval than he would have supposed. Now that hesat face to face with her, now that she was leaning against his bag, hehad no wish to hurt her. 

"I'm a hard-headed business man, " he said evasively, "and I don't muchbelieve in any of you fluffy-ruffles people. I have a sort of naturaldistrust of them all, the men more than the women. "

She looked thoughtful. "Artists, you mean?" drawing her words slowly. "What is your business?"

"Coal. "

"I don't feel any natural distrust of business men, and I know ever somany. I don't know any coal-men, but I think I could become very muchinterested in coal. Am I larger-minded than you?"

McKann laughed. "I don't think you know when you are interested or whenyou are not. I don't believe you know what it feels like to be reallyinterested. There is so much fake about your profession. It's anaffectation on both sides. I know a great many of the people who went tohear you tonight, and I know that most of them neither know nor careanything about music. They imagine they do, because it's supposed to bethe proper thing. "

Kitty sat upright and looked interested. She was certainly a lovelycreature--the only one of her tribe he had ever seen that he would crossthe street to see again. Those were remarkable eyes she had--curious, penetrating, restless, somewhat impudent, but not at all dulled byself-conceit. 

"But isn't that so in everything?" she cried. "How many of your clerksare honest because of a fine, individual sense of honour? They arehonest because it is the accepted rule of good conduct in business. Doyou know"--she looked at him squarely--"I thought you would havesomething quite definite to say to me; but this is funny-paper stuff, the sort of objection I'd expect from your office-boy. "

"Then you don't think it silly for a lot of people to get together andpretend to enjoy something they know nothing about?"

"Of course I think it silly, but that's the way God made audiences. Don't people go to church in exactly the same way? If there were aspiritual-pressure test-machine at the door, I suspect not many of youwould get to your pews. "

"How do you know I go to church?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, people with these old, ready-madeopinions usually go to church. But you can't evade me like that. " Shetapped the edge of his seat with the toe of her gold slipper. "You satthere all evening, glaring at me as if you could eat me alive. Now I giveyou a chance to state your objections, and you merely criticize myaudience. What is it? Is it merely that you happen to dislike mypersonality? In that case, of course, I won't press you. "

"No, " McKann frowned, "I perhaps dislike your professional personality. As I told you, I have a natural distrust of your variety. "

"Natural, I wonder?" Kitty murmured. "I don't see why you shouldnaturally dislike singers any more than I naturally dislike coal-men. Idon't classify people by their occupations. Doubtless I should find somecoal-men repulsive, and you may find some singers so. But I have reasonto believe that, at least, I'm one of the less repellent. "

"I don't doubt it, " McKann laughed, "and you're a shrewd woman to boot. But you are, all of you, according to my standards, light people. You'rebrilliant, some of you, but you've no depth. "

Kitty seemed to assent, with a dive of her girlish head. "Well, it's amerit in some things to be heavy, and in others to be light. Some thingsare meant to go deep, and others to go high. Do you want all the women inthe world to be profound?"

"You are all, " he went on steadily, watching her with indulgence, "fed onhectic emotions. You are pampered. You don't help to carry the burdens ofthe world. You are self-indulgent and appetent. "

"Yes, I am, " she assented, with a candour which he did not expect. "Notall artists are, but I am. Why not? If I could once get a convincingstatement as to why I should not be self-indulgent, I might change myways. As for the burdens of the world--" Kitty rested her chin on herclasped hands and looked thoughtful. "One should give pleasure to others. My dear sir, granting that the great majority of people can't enjoyanything very keenly, you'll admit that I give pleasure to many morepeople than you do. One should help others who are less fortunate; atpresent I am supporting just eight people, besides those I hire. Therewas never another family in California that had so many cripples andhard-luckers as that into which I had the honour to be born. The onlyones who could take care of themselves were ruined by the San Franciscoearthquake some time ago. One should make personal sacrifices. I do; Igive money and time and effort to talented students. Oh, I give somethingmuch more than that! something that you probably have never given to anyone. I give, to the really gifted ones, my _wish, _ my desire, my light, if I have any; and that, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, is like giving one's blood!It's the kind of thing you prudent people never give. That is what wasin the box of precious ointment. " Kitty threw off her fervour with aslight gesture, as if it were a scarf, and leaned back, tucking herslipper up on the edge of his seat. "If you saw the houses I keep up, "she sighed, "and the people I employ, and the motor-cars I run--And, after all, I've only this to do it with. " She indicated her slenderperson, which Marshall could almost have broken in two with his barehands. 

She was, he thought, very much like any other charming woman, except thatshe was more so. Her familiarity was natural and simple. She was at easebecause she was not afraid of him or of herself, or of certain half-cladacquaintances of his who had been wandering up and down the car oftenerthan was necessary. Well, he was not afraid, either. 

Kitty put her arms over her head and sighed again, feeling the smoothpart in her black hair. Her head was small--capable of great agitation, like a bird's; or of great resignation, like a nun's. "I can't see why Ishouldn't be self-indulgent, when I indulge others. I can't understandyour equivocal scheme of ethics. Now I can understand Count Tolstoy's, perfectly. I had a long talk with him once, about his book 'What is Art?'As nearly as I could get it, he believes that we are a race who can existonly by gratifying appetites; the appetites are evil, and the existencethey carry on is evil. We were always sad, he says, without knowing why;even in the Stone Age. In some miraculous way a divine ideal wasdisclosed to us, directly at variance with our appetites. It gave us anew craving, which we could only satisfy by starving all the otherhungers in us. Happiness lies in ceasing to be and to cause being, because the thing revealed to us is dearer than any existence ourappetites can ever get for us. I can understand that. It's something oneoften feels in art. It is even the subject of the greatest of all operas, which, because I can never hope to sing it, I love more than all theothers. " Kitty pulled herself up. "Perhaps you agree with Tolstoy?" sheadded languidly. 

"No; I think he's a crank, " said McKann, cheerfully. 

"What do you mean by a crank?"

"I mean an extremist. "

Kitty laughed. "Weighty word! You'll always have a world full of peoplewho keep to the golden mean. Why bother yourself about me and Tolstoy?"

"I don't, except when you bother me. "

"Poor man! It's true this isn't your fault. Still, you did provoke it byglaring at me. Why did you go to the concert?"

"I was dragged. "

"I might have known!" she chuckled, and shook her head. "No, you don'tgive me any good reasons. Your morality seems to me the compromise ofcowardice, apologetic and sneaking. When righteousness becomes alive andburning, you hate it as much as you do beauty. You want a little of eachin your life, perhaps--adulterated, sterilized, with the sting taken out. It's true enough they are both fearsome things when they get loose in theworld; they don't, often. "

McKann hated tall talk. "My views on women, " he said slowly, "aresimple. "

"Doubtless, " Kitty responded dryly, "but are they consistent? Do youapply them to your stenographers as well as to me? I take it forgranted you have unmarried stenographers. Their position, economically, is the same as mine. "

McKann studied the toe of her shoe. "With a woman, everything comes backto one thing. " His manner was judicial. 

She laughed indulgently. "So we are getting down to brass tacks, eh? Ihave beaten you in argument, and now you are leading trumps. "

She put her hands behind her head and her lips parted in a half-yawn. "Does everything come back to one thing? I wish I knew! It's more thanlikely that, under the same conditions, I should have been very like yourstenographers--if they are good ones. Whatever I was, I would have been agood one. I think people are very much alike. You are more different thanany one I have met for some time, but I know that there are a great manymore at home like you. And even you--I believe there is a real creaturedown under these custom-made prejudices that save you the trouble ofthinking. If you and I were shipwrecked on a desert island, I have nodoubt that we would come to a simple and natural understanding. I'mneither a coward nor a shirk. You would find, if you had to undertake anyenterprise of danger or difficulty with a woman, that there are severalqualifications quite as important as the one to which you doubtlessrefer. "

McKann felt nervously for his watch-chain. "Of course, " he brought out, "I am not laying down any generalizations--" His brows wrinkled. 

"Oh, aren't you?" murmured Kitty. "Then I totally misunderstood. Butremember"--holding up a finger--"it is you, not I, who are afraid topursue this subject further. Now, I'll tell you something. " She leanedforward and clasped her slim, white hands about her velvet knee. "I amas much a victim of these ineradicable prejudices as you. Yourstenographer seems to you a better sort. Well, she does to me. Justbecause her life is, presumably, greyer than mine, she seems better. Mymind tells me that dulness, and a mediocre order of ability, and poverty, are not in themselves admirable things. Yet in my heart I always feelthat the sales-women in shops and the working girls in factories are moremeritorious than I. Many of them, with my opportunities, would be moreselfish than I am. Some of them, with their own opportunities, are moreselfish. Yet I make this sentimental genuflection before the nun and thecharwoman. Tell me, haven't you any weakness? Isn't there any foolishnatural thing that unbends you a trifle and makes you feel gay?"

"I like to go fishing. "

"To see how many fish you can catch?"

"No, I like the woods and the weather. I like to play a fish and workhard for him. I like the pussy-willows and the cold; and the sky, whether it's blue or grey--night coming on, every thing about it. "

He spoke devoutly, and Kitty watched him through half-closed eyes. "Andyou like to feel that there are light-minded girls like me, who only careabout the inside of shops and theatres and hotels, eh? You amuse me, youand your fish! But I mustn't keep you any longer. Haven't I given youevery opportunity to state your case against me? I thought you would havemore to say for yourself. Do you know, I believe it's not a case you haveat all, but a grudge. I believe you are envious; that you'd like to be atenor, and a perfect lady-killer!" She rose, smiling, and paused with herhand on the door of her stateroom. "Anyhow, thank you for a pleasantevening. And, by the way, dream of me tonight, and not of either of thoseladies who sat beside you. It does not matter much whom we live with inthis world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of. " She noticedhis bricky flush. "You are very naive, after all, but, oh, so cautious!You are naturally afraid of everything new, just as I naturally want totry everything: new people, new religions--new miseries, even. If onlythere were more new things--If only you were really new! I might learnsomething. I'm like the Queen of Sheba--I'm not above learning. But you, my friend, would be afraid to try a new shaving soap. It isn'tgravitation that holds the world in place; it's the lazy, obese cowardiceof the people on it. All the same"--taking his hand and smilingencouragingly--"I'm going to haunt you a little. _Adios!_"

When Kitty entered her state-room, Céline, in her dressing-gown, wasnodding by the window. 

"Mademoiselle found the fat gentleman interesting?" she asked. "It isnearly one. "

"Negatively interesting. His kind always say the same thing. If I couldfind one really intelligent man who held his views, I should adopt them. "

"Monsieur did not look like an original, " murmured Céline, as she beganto take down her lady's hair. 

 * * * * *

McKann slept heavily, as usual, and the porter had to shake him inthe morning. He sat up in his berth, and, after composing his hair withhis fingers, began to hunt about for his clothes. As he put up thewindow-blind some bright object in the little hammock over his bed caughtthe sunlight and glittered. He stared and picked up a delicately turnedgold slipper. 

"Minx! hussy!" he ejaculated. "All that tall talk--! Probably got it fromsome man who hangs about; learned it off like a parrot. Did she poke thisin here herself last night, or did she send that sneak-faced Frenchwoman?I like her nerve!" He wondered whether he might have been breathingaudibly when the intruder thrust her head between his curtains. He wasconscious that he did not look a Prince Charming in his sleep. He dressedas fast as he could, and, when he was ready to go to the wash-room, glared at the slipper. If the porter should start to make up his berth inhis absence--He caught the slipper, wrapped it in his pajama jacket, andthrust it into his bag. He escaped from the train without seeing histormentor again. 

Later McKann threw the slipper into the waste-basket in his room at theKnickerbocker, but the chambermaid, seeing that it was new and mateless, thought there must be a mistake, and placed it in his clothes-closet. Hefound it there when he returned from the theatre that evening. Considerably mellowed by food and drink and cheerful company, he took theslipper in his hand and decided to keep it as a reminder that absurdthings could happen to people of the most clocklike deportment. When hegot back to Pittsburgh, he stuck it in a lock-box in his vault, safe fromprying clerks. 

 * * * * *

McKann has been ill for five years now, poor fellow! He still goes to theoffice, because it is the only place that interests him, but his partnersdo most of the work, and his clerks find him sadly changed--"morbid, "they call his state of mind. He has had the pine-trees in his yard cutdown because they remind him of cemeteries. On Sundays or holidays, whenthe office is empty, and he takes his will or his insurance-policiesout of his lock-box, he often puts the tarnished gold slipper on hisdesk and looks at it. Somehow it suggests life to his tired mind, as hispine-trees suggested death--life and youth. When he drops over some day, his executors will be puzzled by the slipper. 

As for Kitty Ayrshire, she has played so many jokes, practical andimpractical, since then, that she has long ago forgotten the night whenshe threw away a slipper to be a thorn in the side of a just man. 

Scandal

Kitty Ayrshire had a cold, a persistent inflammation of the vocal cordswhich defied the throat specialist. Week after week her name was postedat the Opera, and week after week it was canceled, and the name of oneof her rivals was substituted. For nearly two months she had beendeprived of everything she liked, even of the people she liked, and hadbeen shut up until she had come to hate the glass windows between her andthe world, and the wintry stretch of the Park they looked out upon. Shewas losing a great deal of money, and, what was worse, she was losinglife; days of which she wanted to make the utmost were slipping by, andnights which were to have crowned the days, nights of incalculablepossibilities, were being stolen from her by women for whom she had nogreat affection. At first she had been courageous, but the strain ofprolonged uncertainty was telling on her, and her nervous condition didnot improve her larynx. Every morning Miles Creedon looked down herthroat, only to put her off with evasions, to pronounce improvement thatapparently never got her anywhere, to say that tomorrow he might be ableto promise something definite. 

Her illness, of course, gave rise to rumours--rumours that she had losther voice, that at some time last summer she must have lost herdiscretion. Kitty herself was frightened by the way in which this coldhung on. She had had many sharp illnesses in her life, but always, before this, she had rallied quickly. Was she beginning to lose herresiliency? Was she, by any cursed chance, facing a bleak time when shewould have to cherish herself? She protested, as she wandered about hersunny, many-windowed rooms on the tenth floor, that if she was going tohave to live frugally, she wouldn't live at all. She wouldn't live on anyterms but the very generous ones she had always known. She wasn't goingto hoard her vitality. It must be there when she wanted it, be ready forany strain she chose to put upon it, let her play fast and loose with it;and then, if necessary, she would be ill for a while and pay the piper. But be systematically prudent and parsimonious she would not. 

When she attempted to deliver all this to Doctor Creedon, he merely puthis finger on her lips and said they would discuss these things when shecould talk without injuring her throat. He allowed her to see no oneexcept the Director of the Opera, who did not shine in conversation andwas not apt to set Kitty going. The Director was a glum fellow, indeed, but during this calamitous time he had tried to be soothing, and heagreed with Creedon that she must not risk a premature appearance. Kittywas tormented by a suspicion that he was secretly backing the littleSpanish woman who had sung many of her parts since she had been ill. Hefurthered the girl's interests because his wife had a very specialconsideration for her, and Madame had that consideration because--Butthat was too long and too dreary a story to follow out in one's mind. Kitty felt a tonsilitis disgust for opera-house politics, which, when shewas in health, she rather enjoyed, being no mean strategist herself. Theworst of being ill was that it made so many things and people look base. 

She was always afraid of being disillusioned. She wished to believe thateverything for sale in Vanity Fair was worth the advertised price. Whenshe ceased to believe in these delights, she told herself, her pullingpower would decline and she would go to pieces. In some way the chill ofher disillusionment would quiver through the long, black line whichreached from the box-office down to Seventh Avenue on nights when shesang. They shivered there in the rain and cold, all those people, becausethey loved to believe in her inextinguishable zest. She was no prouder ofwhat she drew in the boxes than she was of that long, oscillating tail;little fellows in thin coats, Italians, Frenchmen, South-Americans, Japanese. 

When she had been cloistered like a Trappist for six weeks, with nothingfrom the outside world but notes and flowers and disquieting morningpapers, Kitty told Miles Creedon that she could not endure completeisolation any longer. 

"I simply cannot live through the evenings. They have become horrors tome. Every night is the last night of a condemned man. I do nothing butcry, and that makes my throat worse. "

Miles Creedon, handsomest of his profession, was better looking with someinvalids than with others. His athletic figure, his red cheeks, andsplendid teeth always had a cheering effect upon this particular patient, who hated anything weak or broken. 

"What can I do, my dear? What do you wish? Shall I come and hold yourlovely hand from eight to ten? You have only to suggest it. "

"Would you do that, even? No, _caro mio_, I take far too much of yourtime as it is. For an age now you have been the only man in the worldto me, and you have been charming! But the world is big, and I am missingit. Let some one come tonight, some one interesting, but not toointeresting. Pierce Tevis, for instance. He is just back from Paris. Tellthe nurse I may see him for an hour tonight, " Kitty finished pleadingly, and put her fingers on the doctor's sleeve. He looked down at them andsmiled whimsically. 

Like other people, he was weak to Kitty Ayrshire. He would do for herthings that he would do for no one else; would break any engagement, desert a dinner-table, leaving an empty place and an offended hostess, tosit all evening in Kitty's dressing-room, spraying her throat and calmingher nerves, using every expedient to get her through a performance. Hehad studied her voice like a singing master; knew all of itsidiosyncracies and the emotional and nervous perturbations which affectedit. When it was permissible, sometimes when it was not permissible, heindulged her caprices. On this sunny morning her wan, disconsolate facemoved him. 

"Yes, you may see Tevis this evening if you will assure me that you willnot shed one tear for twenty-four hours. I may depend on your word?" Herose, and stood before the deep couch on which his patient reclined. Herarch look seemed to say, "On what could you depend more?" Creedon smiled, and shook his head. "If I find you worse tomorrow--"

He crossed to the writing-table and began to separate a bunch of tinyflame-coloured rosebuds. "May I?" Selecting one, he sat down on thechair from which he had lately risen, and leaned forward while Kittypinched the thorns from the stem and arranged the flower in hisbuttonhole. 

"Thank you. I like to wear one of yours. Now I must be off to thehospital. I've a nasty little operation to do this morning. I'm glad it'snot you. Shall I telephone Tevis about this evening?"

Kitty hesitated. Her eyes ran rapidly about, seeking a likely pretext. Creedon laughed. 

"Oh, I see. You've already asked him to come. You were so sure of me! Twohours in bed after lunch, with all the windows open, remember. Readsomething diverting, but not exciting; some homely British author;nothing _abandonné_. And don't make faces at me. Until to-morrow!"

When her charming doctor had disappeared through the doorway, Kitty fellback on her cushions and closed her eyes. Her mocking-bird, excited bythe sunlight, was singing in his big gilt cage, and a white lilac-treethat had come that morning was giving out its faint sweetness in thewarm room. But Kitty looked paler and wearier than when the doctor waswith her. Even with him she rose to her part just a little; couldn't helpit. And he took his share of her vivacity and sparkle, like every oneelse. He believed that his presence was soothing to her. But he admired;and whoever admired, blew on the flame, however lightly. 

The mocking-bird was in great form this morning. He had the bestbird-voice she had ever heard, and Kitty wished there were some way tonote down his improvisations; but his intervals were not expressible inany scale she knew. Parker White had brought him to her, from OjoCaliente, in New Mexico, where he had been trained in the pine forests byan old Mexican and an ill-tempered, lame master-bird, half thrush, thattaught young birds to sing. This morning, in his song there were flashesof silvery Southern springtime; they opened inviting roads of memory. Inhalf an hour he had sung his disconsolate mistress to sleep. 

That evening Kitty sat curled up on the deep couch before the fire, awaiting Pierce Tevis. Her costume was folds upon folds of diaphanouswhite over equally diaphanous rose, with a line of white fur about herneck. Her beautiful arms were bare. Her tiny Chinese slippers wereembroidered so richly that they resembled the painted porcelain of oldvases. She looked like a sultan's youngest, newest bride; a beautifullittle toy-woman, sitting at one end of the long room which composedabout her, --which, in the soft light, seemed happily arranged for her. There were flowers everywhere: rose-trees; camellia-bushes, red andwhite; the first forced hyacinths of the season; a feathery mimosa-tree, tall enough to stand under. 

The long front of Kitty's study was all windows. At one end was thefireplace, before which she sat. At the other end, back in a lightedalcove, hung a big, warm, sympathetic interior by Lucien Simon, --a groupof Kitty's friends having tea in the painter's salon in Paris. The roomin the picture was flooded with early lamp-light, and one could feel thegrey, chill winter twilight in the Paris streets outside. There stood thecavalier-like old composer, who had done much for Kitty, in his mostcharacteristic attitude, before the hearth. Mme. Simon sat at thetea-table. B----, the historian, and H----, the philologist, stood inanimated discussion behind the piano, while Mme. H---- was tying on thebonnet of her lovely little daughter. Marcel Durand, the physicist, satalone in a corner, his startling black-and-white profile loweredbroodingly, his cold hands locked over his sharp knee. A genial, red-bearded sculptor stood over him, about to touch him on the shoulderand waken him from his dream. 

This painting made, as it were, another room; so that Kitty's study onCentral Park West seemed to open into that charming French interior, intoone of the most highly harmonized and richly associated rooms in Paris. There her friends sat or stood about, men distinguished, women at onceplain and beautiful, with their furs and bonnets, their clothes that wereso distinctly not smart--all held together by the warm lamp-light, by anindescribable atmosphere of graceful and gracious human living. 

Pierce Tevis, after he had entered noiselessly and greeted Kitty, stoodbefore her fire and looked over her shoulder at this picture. 

"It's nice that you have them there together, now that they arescattered, God knows where, fighting to preserve just that. But your ownroom, too, is charming, " he added at last, taking his eyes from thecanvas. 

Kitty shrugged her shoulders. 

"Bah! I can help to feed the lamp, but I can't supply the dear things itshines upon. "

"Well, tonight it shines upon you and me, and we aren't so bad. " Tevisstepped forward and took her hand affectionately. "You've been over arough bit of road. I'm so sorry. It's left you looking very lovely, though. Has it been very hard to get on?"

She brushed his hand gratefully against her cheek and nodded. 

"Awfully dismal. Everything has been shut out from me but--gossip. Thatalways gets in. Often I don't mind, but this time I have. People do tellsuch lies about me. "

"Of course we do. That's part of our fun, one of the many pleasures yougive us. It only shows how hard up we are for interesting publicpersonages; for a royal family, for romantic fiction, if you will. But Inever hear any stories that wound me, and I'm very sensitive about you. "

"I'm gossiped about rather more than the others, am I not?"

"I believe! Heaven send that the day when you are not gossiped about isfar distant! Do you want to bite off your nose to spite your pretty face?You are the sort of person who makes myths. You can't turn around withoutmaking one. That's your singular good luck. A whole staff of publicitymen, working day and night, couldn't do for you what you do for yourself. There is an affinity between you and the popular imagination. "

"I suppose so, " said Kitty, and sighed. "All the same, I'm getting almostas tired of the person I'm supposed to be as of the person I really am. Iwish you would invent a new Kitty Ayrshire for me, Pierce. Can't I dosomething revolutionary? Marry, for instance?"

Tevis rose in alarm. 

"Whatever you do, don't try to change your legend. You have now the onethat gives the greatest satisfaction to the greatest number of people. Don't disappoint your public. The popular imagination, to which you makesuch a direct appeal, for some reason wished you to have a son, so it hasgiven you one. I've heard a dozen versions of the story, but it is alwaysa son, never by any chance a daughter. Your public gives you what is bestfor you. Let well enough alone. "

Kitty yawned and dropped back on her cushions. 

"He still persists, does he, in spite of never being visible?"

"Oh, but he has been seen by ever so many people. Let me think a moment. "He sank into an attitude of meditative ease. "The best description I everhad of him was from a friend of my mother, an elderly woman, thoroughlytruthful and matter-of-fact. She has seen him often. He is kept inRussia, in St. Petersburg, that was. He is about eight years old and ofmarvellous beauty. He is always that in every version. My old friend hasseen him being driven in his sledge on the Nevskii Prospekt on winterafternoons; black horses with silver bells and a giant in uniform on theseat beside the driver. He is always attended by this giant, who isresponsible to the Grand Duke Paul for the boy. This lady can produce noevidence beyond his beauty and his splendid furs and the fact that allthe Americans in Petrograd know he is your son. "

Kitty laughed mournfully. 

"If the Grand Duke Paul had a son, any old rag of a son, the province ofMoscow couldn't contain him! He may, for aught I know, actually pretendto have a son. It would be very like him. " She looked at her finger-tipsand her rings disapprovingly for a moment. "Do you know, I've beenthinking that I would rather like to lay hands on that youngster. Ibelieve he'd be interesting. I'm bored with the world. "

Tevis looked up and said quickly:

"Would you like him, really?"

"Of course I should, " she said indignantly. "But, then, I like otherthings, too; and one has to choose. When one has only two or three thingsto choose from, life is hard; when one has many, it is harder still. No, on the whole, I don't mind that story. It's rather pretty, except for theGrand Duke. But not all of them are pretty. "

"Well, none of them are very ugly; at least I never heard but one thattroubled me, and that was long ago. "

She looked interested. 

"That is what I want to know; how do the ugly ones get started? How didthat one get going and what was it about? Is it too dreadful to repeat?"

"No, it's not especially dreadful; merely rather shabby. If you reallywish to know, and won't be vexed, I can tell you exactly how it gotgoing, for I took the trouble to find out. But it's a long story, and youreally had nothing whatever to do with it. "

"Then who did have to do with it? Tell me; I should like to know exactlyhow even one of them originated. "

"Will you be comfortable and quiet and not get into a rage, and let melook at you as much as I please?"

Kitty nodded, and Tevis sat watching her indolently while he debated howmuch of his story he ought not to tell her. Kitty liked being looked atby intelligent persons. She knew exactly how good looking she was; andshe knew, too, that, pretty as she was, some of those rather sallowwomen in the Simon painting had a kind of beauty which she would neverhave. This knowledge, Tevis was thinking, this important realization, contributed more to her loveliness than any other thing about her; morethan her smooth, ivory skin or her changing grey eyes, the delicateforehead above them, or even the dazzling smile, which was graduallybecoming too bright and too intentional, --out in the world, at least. Here by her own fire she still had for her friends a smile less electricthan the one she flashed from stages. She could still be, in short, _intime_, a quality which few artists keep, which few ever had. 

Kitty broke in on her friend's meditations. 

"You may smoke. I had rather you did. I hate to deprive people of thingsthey like. "

"No, thanks. May I have those chocolates on the tea-table? They are quiteas bad for me. May you? No, I suppose not. " He settled himself by thefire, with the candy beside him, and began in the agreeable voice whichalways soothed his listener. 

"As I said, it was a long while ago, when you first came back to thiscountry and were singing at the Manhattan. I dropped in at theMetropolitan one evening to hear something new they were trying out. Itwas an off night, no pullers in the cast, and nobody in the boxes butgovernesses and poor relations. At the end of the first act two peopleentered one of the boxes in the second tier. The man was Siegmund Stein, the department-store millionaire, and the girl, so the men about me inthe omnibus box began to whisper, was Kitty Ayrshire. I didn't know youthen, but I was unwilling to believe that you were with Stein. I couldnot contradict them at that time, however, for the resemblance, if it wasmerely a resemblance, was absolute, and all the world knew that you werenot singing at the Manhattan that night. The girl's hair was dressed justas you then wore yours. Moreover, her head was small and restless likeyours, and she had your colouring, your eyes, your chin. She carriedherself with the critical indifference one might expect in an artist whohad come for a look at a new production that was clearly doomed tofailure. She applauded lightly. She made comments to Stein when commentswere natural enough. I thought, as I studied her face with the glass, that her nose was a trifle thinner than yours, a prettier nose, my dearKitty, but stupider and more inflexible. All the same, I was troubleduntil I saw her laugh, --and then I knew she was a counterfeit. I hadnever seen you laugh, but I knew that you would not laugh like that. Itwas not boisterous; indeed, it was consciously refined, --mirthless, meaningless. In short, it was not the laugh of one whom our friends inthere"--pointing to the Simon painting--"would honour with theiraffection and admiration. "

Kitty rose on her elbow and burst out indignantly:

"So you would really have been hood-winked except for that! You may besure that no woman, no intelligent woman, would have been. Why do we evertake the trouble to look like anything for any of you? I could count onmy four fingers"--she held them up and shook them at him--"the men I'veknown who had the least perception of what any woman really looked like, and they were all dressmakers. Even painters"--glancing back in thedirection of the Simon picture--"never get more than one type throughtheir thick heads; they try to make all women look like some wife ormistress. You are all the same; you never see our real faces. What you dosee, is some cheap conception of prettiness you got from a colouredsupplement when you were adolescents. It's too discouraging. I'd rathertake vows and veil my face for ever from such abominable eyes. In thekingdom of the blind any petticoat is a queen. " Kitty thumped the cushionwith her elbow. "Well, I can't do anything about it. Go on with yourstory. "

"Aren't you furious, Kitty! And I thought I was so shrewd. I've quiteforgotten where I was. Anyhow, I was not the only man fooled. After thelast curtain I met Villard, the press man of that management, in thelobby, and asked him whether Kitty Ayrshire was in the house. He said hethought so. Stein had telephoned for a box, and said he was bringing oneof the artists from the other company. Villard had been too busy aboutthe new production to go to the box, but he was quite sure the woman wasAyrshire, whom he had met in Paris. 

"Not long after that I met Dan Leland, a classmate of mine, at theHarvard Club. He's a journalist, and he used to keep such eccentric hoursthat I had not run across him for a long time. We got to talking aboutmodern French music, and discovered that we both had a very livelyinterest in Kitty Ayrshire. 

"'Could you tell me, ' Dan asked abruptly, 'why, with pretty much all theknown world to choose her friends from, this young woman should flitabout with Siegmund Stein? It prejudices people against her. He's a mostobjectionable person. '

"'Have you, ' I asked, 'seen her with him, yourself?'

"Yes, he had seen her driving with Stein, and some of the men on hispaper had seen her dining with him at rather queer places down town. Stein was always hanging about the Manhattan on nights when Kitty sang. Itold Dan that I suspected a masquerade. That interested him, andhe said he thought he would look into the matter. In short, we bothagreed to look into it. Finally, we got the story, though Dan could neveruse it, could never even hint at it, because Stein carries heavyadvertising in his paper. 

"To make you see the point, I must give you a little history of SiegmundStein. Any one who has seen him never forgets him. He is one of the mosthideous men in New York, but it's not at all the common sort of uglinessthat comes from over-eating and automobiles. He isn't one of the fathorrors. He has one of those rigid, horselike faces that never tellanything; a long nose, flattened as if it had been tied down; a scornfulchin; long, white teeth; flat cheeks, yellow as a Mongolian's; tiny, black eyes, with puffy lids and no lashes; dingy, dead-lookinghair--looks as if it were glued on. 

"Stein came here a beggar from somewhere in Austria. He began by workingon the machines in old Rosenthal's garment factory. He became a speeder, a foreman, a salesman; worked his way ahead steadily until the hour whenhe rented an old dwelling-house on Seventh Avenue and began to makemisses' and juniors' coats. I believe he was the first manufacturer tospecialize in those particular articles. Dozens of garment manufacturershave come along the same road, but Stein is like none of the rest ofthem. He is, and always was, a personality. While he was still at themachine, a hideous, underfed little whippersnapper, he was already ayouth of many-coloured ambitions, deeply concerned about his dress, hisassociates, his recreations. He haunted the old Astor Library and theMetropolitan Museum, learned something about pictures and porcelains, took singing lessons, though he had a voice like a crow's. When he satdown to his baked apple and doughnut in a basement lunch-room, he wouldprop a book up before him and address his food with as much leisure andceremony as if he were dining at his club. He held himself at a distancefrom his fellow-workmen and somehow always managed to impress them withhis superiority. He had inordinate vanity, and there are many storiesabout his foppishness. After his first promotion in Rosenthal's factory, he bought a new overcoat. A few days later, one of the men at themachines, which Stein had just quitted, appeared in a coat exactly likeit. Stein could not discharge him, but he gave his own coat to a newlyarrived Russian boy and got another. He was already magnificent. 

"After he began to make headway with misses' and juniors' cloaks, hebecame a collector--etchings, china, old musical instruments. He had adancing master, and engaged a beautiful Brazilian widow--she was said tobe a secret agent for some South American republic--to teach himSpanish. He cultivated the society of the unknown great: poets, actors, musicians. He entertained them sumptuously, and they regarded himas a deep, mysterious Jew who had the secret of gold, which they had not. His business associates thought him a man of taste and culture, a patronof the arts, a credit to the garment trade. 

"One of Stein's many ambitions was to be thought a success with women. Hegot considerable notoriety in the garment world by his attentions to anemotional actress who is now quite forgotten, but who had her little hourof expectation. Then there was a dancer; then, just after Gorky's visithere, a Russian anarchist woman. After that the coat-makers andshirtwaist-makers began to whisper that Stein's great success waswith Kitty Ayrshire. 

"It is the hardest thing in the world to disprove such a story, as DanLeland and I discovered. We managed to worry down the girl's addressthrough a taxi-cab driver who got next to Stein's chauffeur. She had anapartment in a decent-enough house on Waverly Place. Nobody ever came tosee her but Stein, her sisters, and a little Italian girl from whom wegot the story. 

"The counterfeit's name was Ruby Mohr. She worked in a shirtwaistfactory, and this Italian girl, Margarita, was her chum. Stein came tothe factory when he was hunting for living models for his new departmentstore. He looked the girls over, and picked Ruby out from severalhundred. He had her call at his office after business hours, tried herout in cloaks and evening gowns, and offered her a position. She never, however, appeared as a model in the Sixth Avenue store. Her likeness tothe newly arrived prima donna suggested to Stein another act in the playhe was always putting on. He gave two of her sisters positions assaleswomen, but Ruby he established in an apartment on Waverly Place. 

"To the outside world Stein became more mysterious in his behaviourthan ever. He dropped his Bohemian friends. No more suppers andtheatre-parties. Whenever Kitty sang, he was in his box at the Manhattan, usually alone, but not always. Sometimes he took two or three goodcustomers, large buyers from St. Louis or Kansas City. His coat factoryis still the biggest earner of his properties. I've seen him there withthese buyers, and they carried themselves as if they were being let in onsomething; took possession of the box with a proprietory air, smiled andapplauded and looked wise as if each and every one of them were friendsof Kitty Ayrshire. While they buzzed and trained their field-glasseson the prima donna, Stein was impassive and silent. I don't imagine heeven told many lies. He is the most insinuating cuss, anyhow. He probablydropped his voice or lifted his eyebrows when he invited them, and lettheir own eager imaginations do the rest. But what tales they took backto their provincial capitals!

"Sometimes, before they left New York, they were lucky enough to seeKitty dining with their clever garment man at some restaurant, her backto the curious crowd, her face half concealed by a veil or a fur collar. Those people are like children; nothing that is true or probableinterests them. They want the old, gaudy lies, told always in the sameway. Siegmund Stein and Kitty Ayrshire--a story like that, once launched, is repeated unchallenged for years among New York factory sports. In St. Paul, St. Jo, Sioux City, Council Bluffs, there used to be clothingstores where a photograph of Kitty Ayrshire hung in the fitting-room orover the proprietor's desk. 

"This girl impersonated you successfully to the lower manufacturing worldof New York for two seasons. I doubt if it could have been put acrossanywhere else in the world except in this city, which pays you somagnificently and believes of you what it likes. Then you went over tothe Metropolitan, stopped living in hotels, took this apartment, andbegan to know people. Stein discontinued his pantomime at the rightmoment, withdrew his patronage. Ruby, of course, did not go back toshirtwaists. A business friend of Stein's took her over, and she droppedout of sight. Last winter, one cold, snowy night, I saw her once again. She was going into a saloon hotel with a tough-looking young fellow. Shehad been drinking, she was shabby, and her blue shoes left stains in theslush. But she still looked amazingly, convincingly like a battered, hardened Kitty Ayrshire. As I saw her going up the brass-edged stairs, Isaid to myself--"

"Never mind that. " Kitty rose quickly, took an impatient step to thehearth, and thrust one shining porcelain slipper out to the fire. "Thegirl doesn't interest me. There is nothing I can do about her, and ofcourse she never looked like me at all. But what did Stein do withoutme?"

"Stein? Oh, he chose a new rôle. He married with greatmagnificence--married a Miss Mandelbaum, a California heiress. Herpeople have a line of department stores along the Pacific Coast. TheSteins now inhabit a great house on Fifth Avenue that used to belong topeople of a very different sort. To old New-Yorkers, it's an historichouse. "

Kitty laughed, and sat down on the end of her couch nearest her guest;sat upright, without cushions. 

"I imagine I know more about that house than you do. Let me tell you howI made the sequel to your story. 

"It has to do with Peppo Amoretti. You may remember that I brought Peppoto this country, and brought him in, too, the year the war broke out, when it wasn't easy to get boys who hadn't done military service out ofItaly. I had taken him to Munich to have some singing lessons. After thewar came on we had to get from Munich to Naples in order to sail at all. We were told that we could take only hand luggage on the railways, but Itook nine trunks and Peppo. I dressed Peppo in knickerbockers, made himbrush his curls down over his ears like doughnuts, and carry a littleviolin-case. It took us eleven days to reach Naples. I got my trunksthrough purely by personal persuasion. Once at Naples, I had a frightfultime getting Peppo on the boat. I declared him as hand-luggage; he was sotravel-worn and so crushed by his absurd appearance that he did not looklike much else. One inspector had a sense of humour, and passed him atthat, but the other was inflexible. I had to be very dramatic. Peppo wasfrightened, and there is no fight in him, anyhow. 

"_'Per me tutto e indifferente, Signorina, '_ he kept whimpering. 'Whyshould I go without it? I have lost it. '

"'Which?' I screamed. '_Not_ the hat-trunk?'

"'_No, no; mia voce. _ It is gone since Ravenna. '

"He thought he had lost his voice somewhere along the way. At last I toldthe inspector that I couldn't live without Peppo, and that I would throwmyself into the bay. I took him into my confidence. Of course, when Ifound I had to play on that string, I wished I hadn't made theboy such a spectacle. But ridiculous as he was, I managed to make theinspector believe that I had kidnapped him, and that he was indispensableto my happiness. I found that incorruptible official, like most people, willing to aid one so utterly depraved. I could never have got that boyout for any proper, reasonable purpose, such as giving him a job orsending him to school. Well, it's a queer world! But I must cut all thatand get to the Steins. 

"That first winter Peppo had no chance at the Opera. There was an ironring about him, and my interest in him only made it all the moredifficult. We've become a nest of intrigues down there; worse than theScala. Peppo had to scratch along just any way. One evening he came to meand said he could get an engagement to sing for the grand rich Steins, but the condition was that I should sing with him. They would pay, oh, anything! And the fact that I had sung a private engagement with himwould give him other engagements of the same sort. As you know, Inever sing private engagements; but to help the boy along, I consented. 

"On the night of the party, Peppo and I went to the house together in ataxi. My car was ailing. At the hour when the music was about to begin, the host and hostess appeared at my dressing-room, up-stairs. Isn't hewonderful? Your description was most inadequate. I never encounteredsuch restrained, frozen, sculptured vanity. My hostess struck me asextremely good natured and jolly, though somewhat intimate in her manner. Her reassuring pats and smiles puzzled me at the time, I remember, when Ididn't know that she had anything in particular to be large-minded andcharitable about. Her husband made known his willingness to conduct meto the music-room, and we ceremoniously descended a staircase bloominglike the hanging-gardens of Babylon. From there I had my first glimpseof the company. They _were_ strange people. The women glittered likeChristmas-trees. When we were half-way down the stairs, the buzz ofconversation stopped so suddenly that some foolish remark I happened tobe making rang out like oratory. Every face was lifted toward us. Myhost and I completed our descent and went the length of the drawing-roomthrough a silence which somewhat awed me. I couldn't help wishing thatone could ever get that kind of attention in a concert-hall. In themusic-room Stein insisted upon arranging things for me. I must say thathe was neither awkward nor stupid, not so wooden as most rich men whorent singers. I was properly affable. One has, under such circumstances, to be either gracious or pouty. Either you have to stand and sulk, likean old-fashioned German singer who wants the piano moved about for herlike a tea-wagon, and the lights turned up and the lights turneddown, --or you have to be a trifle forced, like a débutante trying to makegood. The fixed attention of my audience affected me. I was aware ofunusual interest, of a thoroughly enlisted public. When, however, my hostat last left me, I felt the tension relax to such an extent that Iwondered whether by any chance he, and not I, was the object of so muchcuriosity. But, at any rate, their cordiality pleased me so well thatafter Peppo and I had finished our numbers I sang an encore or two, andI stayed through Peppo's performance because I felt that they liked tolook at me. 

"I had asked not to be presented to people, but Mrs. Stein, of course, brought up a few friends. The throng began closing in upon me, glowingfaces bore down from every direction, and I realized that, among peopleof such unscrupulous cordiality, I must look out for myself. I ranthrough the drawing-room and fled up the stairway, which was throngedwith Old Testament characters. As I passed them, they all looked at mewith delighted, cherishing eyes, as if I had at last come back to mynative hamlet. At the top of the stairway a young man, who looked like acamel with its hair parted on the side, stopped me, seized my hands andsaid he must present himself, as he was such an old friend of Siegmund'sbachelor days. I said, 'Yes, how interesting!' The atmosphere was somehowso thick and personal that I felt uncomfortable. 

"When I reached my dressing-room Mrs. Stein followed me to say that Iwould, of course, come down to supper, as a special table had beenprepared for me. I replied that it was not my custom. 

"'But here it is different. With us you must feel perfect freedom. Siegmund will never forgive me if you do not stay. After supper our carwill take you home. ' She was overpowering. She had the manner of anintimate and indulgent friend of long standing. She seemed to have cometo make me a visit. I could only get rid of her by telling her that Imust see Peppo at once, if she would be good enough to send him to me. She did not come back, and I began to fear that I would actually bedragged down to supper. It was as if I had been kidnapped. I felt like_Gulliver_ among the giants. These people were all too--well, too muchwhat they were. No chill of manner could hold them off. I wasdefenseless. I must get away. I ran to the top of the staircase andlooked down. There was that fool Peppo, beleaguered by a bevy of fairwomen. They were simply looting him, and he was grinning like an idiot. Igathered up my train, ran down, and made a dash at him, yanked him out ofthat circle of rich contours, and dragged him by a limp cuff up thestairs after me. I told him that I must escape from that house at once. If he could get to the telephone, well and good; but if he couldn't getpast so many deep-breathing ladies, then he must break out of the frontdoor and hunt me a cab on foot. I felt as if I were about to be immuredwithin a harem. 

"He had scarcely dashed off when the host called my name several timesoutside the door. Then he knocked and walked in, uninvited. I told himthat I would be inflexible about supper. He must make my excuses to hischarming friends; any pretext he chose. He did not insist. He took up hisstand by the fireplace and began to talk; said rather intelligent things. I did not drive him out; it was his own house, and he made himselfagreeable. After a time a deputation of his friends came down the hall, somewhat boisterously, to say that supper could not be served until wecame down. Stein was still standing by the mantel, I remember. Hescattered them, without moving or speaking to them, by a portentouslook. There is something hideously forceful about him. He took a veryprofound leave of me, and said he would order his car at once. In amoment Peppo arrived, splashed to the ankles, and we made our escapetogether. 

"A week later Peppo came to me in a rage, with a paper called _TheAmerican Gentleman_, and showed me a page devoted to three photographs:Mr. And Mrs. Siegmund Stein, lately married in New York City, and KittyAyrshire, operatic soprano, who sang at their house-warming. Mrs. Steinand I were grinning our best, looked frantic with delight, and Siegmundfrowned inscrutably between us. Poor Peppo wasn't mentioned. Stein has apublicity sense. "

Tevis rose. 

"And you have enormous publicity value and no discretion. It was justlike you to fall for such a plot, Kitty. You'd be sure to. "

"What's the use of discretion?" She murmured behind her hand. "If theSteins want to adopt you into their family circle, they'll get you in theend. That's why I don't feel compassionate about your Ruby. She and I arein the same boat. We are both the victims of circumstance, and in NewYork so many of the circumstances are Steins. "

Paul's Case

It was Paul's afternoon to appear before the faculty of the PittsburghHigh School to account for his various misdemeanours. He had beensuspended a week ago, and his father had called at the Principal's officeand confessed his perplexity about his son. Paul entered the faculty roomsuave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle out-grown, and the tanvelvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but forall that there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opalpin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in hisbutton-hole. This latter adornment the faculty somehow felt was notproperly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy under the banof suspension. 

Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders anda narrow chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hystericalbrilliancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sortof way, peculiarly offensive in a boy. The pupils were abnormally large, as though he were addicted to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitterabout them which that drug does not produce. 

When questioned by the Principal as to why he was there, Paul stated, politely enough, that he wanted to come back to school. This was a lie, but Paul was quite accustomed to lying; found it, indeed, indispensablefor overcoming friction. His teachers were asked to state theirrespective charges against him, which they did with such a rancour andaggrievedness as evinced that this was not a usual case. Disorder andimpertinence were among the offences named, yet each of his instructorsfelt that it was scarcely possible to put into words the real cause ofthe trouble, which lay in a sort of hysterically defiant manner of theboy's; in the contempt which they all knew he felt for them, and which heseemingly made not the least effort to conceal. Once, when he had beenmaking a synopsis of a paragraph at the blackboard, his English teacherhad stepped to his side and attempted to guide his hand. Paul had startedback with a shudder and thrust his hands violently behind him. Theastonished woman could scarcely have been more hurt and embarrassed hadhe struck at her. The insult was so involuntary and definitely personalas to be unforgettable. In one way and another, he had made all histeachers, men and women alike, conscious of the same feeling of physicalaversion. In one class he habitually sat with his hand shading his eyes;in another he always looked out of the window during the recitation; inanother he made a running commentary on the lecture, with humorousintent. 

His teachers felt this afternoon that his whole attitude was symbolizedby his shrug and his flippantly red carnation flower, and they fell uponhim without mercy, his English teacher leading the pack. He stood throughit smiling, his pale lips parted over his white teeth. (His lips werecontinually twitching, and he had a habit of raising his eyebrows thatwas contemptuous and irritating to the last degree. ) Older boys thanPaul had broken down and shed tears under that ordeal, but his set smiledid not once desert him, and his only sign of discomfort was the nervoustrembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of his overcoat, andan occasional jerking of the other hand which held his hat. Paul wasalways smiling, always glancing about him, seeming to feel that peoplemight be watching him and trying to detect something. This consciousexpression, since it was as far as possible from boyish mirthfulness, wasusually attributed to insolence or "smartness. "

As the inquisition proceeded, one of his instructors repeated animpertinent remark of the boy's, and the Principal asked him whether hethought that a courteous speech to make to a woman. Paul shrugged hisshoulders slightly and his eyebrows twitched. 

"I don't know, " he replied. "I didn't mean to be polite or impolite, either. I guess it's a sort of way I have, of saying things regardless. "

The Principal asked him whether he didn't think that a way it would bewell to get rid of. Paul grinned and said he guessed so. When he was toldthat he could go, he bowed gracefully and went out. His bow was like arepetition of the scandalous red carnation. 

His teachers were in despair, and his drawing master voiced the feelingof them all when he declared there was something about the boy whichnone of them understood. He added: "I don't really believe that smile ofhis comes altogether from insolence; there's something sort of hauntedabout it. The boy is not strong, for one thing. There is something wrongabout the fellow. "

The drawing master had come to realize that, in looking at Paul, one sawonly his white teeth and the forced animation of his eyes. One warmafternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his drawing-board, and his masterhad noted with amazement what a white, blue-veined face it was; drawn andwrinkled like an old man's about the eyes, the lips twitching even in hissleep. 

His teachers left the building dissatisfied and unhappy; humiliated tohave felt so vindictive toward a mere boy, to have uttered this feelingin cutting terms, and to have set each other on, as it were, in thegrewsome game of intemperate reproach. One of them remembered having seena miserable street cat set at bay by a ring of tormentors. 

As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the Soldiers' Chorus from_Faust_, looking wildly behind him now and then to see whether some ofhis teachers were not there to witness his lightheartedness. As it wasnow late in the afternoon and Paul was on duty that evening as usher atCarnegie Hall, he decided that he would not go home to supper. 

When he reached the concert hall the doors were not yet open. It waschilly outside, and he decided to go up into the picture gallery--alwaysdeserted at this hour--where there were some of Raffelli's gay studies ofParis streets and an airy blue Venetian scene or two that alwaysexhilarated him. He was delighted to find no one in the gallery but theold guard, who sat in the corner, a newspaper on his knee, a black patchover one eye and the other closed. Paul possessed himself of the placeand walked confidently up and down, whistling under his breath. After awhile he sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself. When he bethoughthim to look at his watch, it was after seven o'clock, and he rose with astart and ran downstairs, making a face at Augustus Caesar, peering outfrom the cast-room, and an evil gesture at the Venus of Milo as he passedher on the stairway. 

When Paul reached the ushers' dressing-room half-a-dozen boys were therealready, and he began excitedly to tumble into his uniform. It was one ofthe few that at all approached fitting, and Paul thought it verybecoming--though he knew the tight, straight coat accentuated his narrowchest, about which he was exceedingly sensitive. He was always excitedwhile he dressed, twanging all over to the tuning of the strings and thepreliminary flourishes of the horns in the music-room; but tonight heseemed quite beside himself, and he teased and plagued the boys until, telling him that he was crazy, they put him down on the floor and sat onhim. 

Somewhat calmed by his suppression, Paul dashed out to the front of thehouse to seat the early comers. He was a model usher. Gracious andsmiling he ran up and down the aisles. Nothing was too much trouble forhim; he carried messages and brought programs as though it were hisgreatest pleasure in life, and all the people in his section thought hima charming boy, feeling that he remembered and admired them. As the housefilled, he grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the colour cameto his cheeks and lips. It was very much as though this were a greatreception and Paul were the host. Just as the musicians came out to taketheir places, his English teacher arrived with checks for the seats whicha prominent manufacturer had taken for the season. She betrayed someembarrassment when she handed Paul the tickets, and a _hauteur_ whichsubsequently made her feel very foolish. Paul was startled for a moment, and had the feeling of wanting to put her out; what business had she hereamong all these fine people and gay colours? He looked her over anddecided that she was not appropriately dressed and must be a fool to sitdownstairs in such togs. The tickets had probably been sent her out ofkindness, he reflected, as he put down a seat for her, and she had aboutas much right to sit there as he had. 

When the symphony began Paul sank into one of the rear seats with a longsigh of relief, and lost himself as he had done before the Rico. It wasnot that symphonies, as such, meant anything in particular to Paul, butthe first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious spiritwithin him; something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottlefound by the Arab fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of life; the lightsdanced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginablesplendour. When the soprano soloist came on, Paul forgot even thenastiness of his teacher's being there, and gave himself up to thepeculiar intoxication such personages always had for him. The soloistchanced to be a German woman, by no means in her first youth, and themother of many children; but she wore a satin gown and a tiara, and shehad that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine upon her, whichalways blinded Paul to any possible defects. 

After a concert was over, Paul was often irritable and wretched until hegot to sleep, --and tonight he was even more than usually restless. He hadthe feeling of not being able to let down; of its being impossible togive up this delicious excitement which was the only thing that couldbe called living at all. During the last number he withdrew and, afterhastily changing his clothes in the dressing-room, slipped out to theside door where the singer's carriage stood. Here he began pacing rapidlyup and down the walk, waiting to see her come out. 

Over yonder the Schenley, in its vacant stretch, loomed big and squarethrough the fine rain, the windows of its twelve stories glowing likethose of a lighted card-board house under a Christmas tree. All theactors and singers of any importance stayed there when they were in thecity, and a number of the big manufacturers of the place lived there inthe winter. Paul had often hung about the hotel, watching the people goin and out, longing to enter and leave school-masters and dull carebehind him for ever. 

At last the singer came out, accompanied by the conductor, who helpedher into her carriage and closed the door with a cordial _aufwiedersehen_, --which set Paul to wondering whether she werenot an old sweetheart of his. Paul followed the carriage over to thehotel, walking so rapidly as not to be far from the entrance when thesinger alighted and disappeared behind the swinging glass doors whichwere opened by a negro in a tall hat and a long coat. In the moment thatthe door was ajar, it seemed to Paul that he, too, entered. He seemed tofeel himself go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building, into an exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces andbasking ease. He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were broughtinto the dining-room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he had seenthem in the supper party pictures of the Sunday supplement. A quick gustof wind brought the rain down with sudden vehemence, and Paul wasstartled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the graveldriveway; that his boots were letting in the water and his scantyovercoat was clinging wet about him; that the lights in front of theconcert hall were out, and that the rain was driving in sheets betweenhim and the orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what hewanted--tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmaspantomime; as the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he weredestined always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it. 

He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The end had tocome sometime; his father in his night-clothes at the top of the stairs, explanations that did not explain, hastily improvised fictions that wereforever tripping him up, his upstairs room and its horrible yellowwallpaper, the creaking bureau with the greasy plush collar-box, and overhis painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin, and the framed motto, "Feed my Lambs, " which had been worked in redworsted by his mother, whom Paul could not remember. 

Half an hour later, Paul alighted from the Negley Avenue car and wentslowly down one of the side streets off the main thoroughfare. It was ahighly respectable street, where all the houses were exactly alike, andwhere business men of moderate means begot and reared large familiesof children, all of whom went to Sabbath-school and learned the shortercatechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were as exactlyalike as their homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which theylived. Paul never went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing. His home was next the house of the Cumberland minister. He approached ittonight with the nerveless sense of defeat, the hopeless feeling ofsinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had always hadwhen he came home. The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt thewaters close above his head. After each of these orgies of living, heexperienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; theloathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house permeated bykitchen odours; a shuddering repulsion for the flavourless, colourlessmass of every-day existence; a morbid desire for cool things and softlights and fresh flowers. 

The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely unequal Paul feltto the sight of it all; his ugly sleeping chamber; the cold bath-roomwith the grimy zinc tub, the cracked mirror, the dripping spiggots; hisfather, at the top of the stairs, his hairy legs sticking out from hisnightshirt, his feet thrust into carpet slippers. He was so much laterthan usual that there would certainly be inquiries and reproaches. Paulstopped short before the door. He felt that he could not be accosted byhis father tonight; that he could not toss again on that miserable bed. He would not go in. He would tell his father that he had no car fare, andit was raining so hard he had gone home with one of the boys and stayedall night. 

Meanwhile, he was wet and cold. He went around to the back of the houseand tried one of the basement windows, found it open, raised itcautiously, and scrambled down the cellar wall to the floor. There hestood, holding his breath, terrified by the noise he had made; but thefloor above him was silent, and there was no creak on the stairs. Hefound a soap-box, and carried it over to the soft ring of light thatstreamed from the furnace door, and sat down. He was horribly afraid ofrats, so he did not try to sleep, but sat looking distrustfully at thedark, still terrified lest he might have awakened his father. In suchreactions, after one of the experiences which made days and nights out ofthe dreary blanks of the calendar, when his senses were deadened, Paul'shead was always singularly clear. Suppose his father had heard himgetting in at the window and had come down and shot him for a burglar?Then, again, suppose his father had come down, pistol in hand, and he hadcried out in time to save himself, and his father had been horrified tothink how nearly he had killed him? Then, again, suppose a day shouldcome when his father would remember that night, and wish there had beenno warning cry to stay his hand? With this last supposition Paulentertained himself until daybreak. 

The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was broken bythe last flash of autumnal summer. In the morning Paul had to go tochurch and Sabbath-school, as always. On seasonable Sunday afternoons theburghers of Cordelia Street usually sat out on their front "stoops, " andtalked to their neighbours on the next stoop, or called to those acrossthe street in neighbourly fashion. The men sat placidly on gay cushionsplaced upon the steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, intheir Sunday "waists, " sat in rockers on the cramped porches, pretendingto be greatly at their ease. The children played in the streets; therewere so many of them that the place resembled the recreation grounds of akindergarten. The men on the steps--all in their shirt sleeves, theirvests unbuttoned--sat with their legs well apart, their stomachscomfortably protruding, and talked of the prices of things, or toldanecdotes of the sagacity of their various chiefs and overlords. Theyoccasionally looked over the multitude of squabbling children, listenedaffectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to see theirown proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and interspersed theirlegends of the iron kings with remarks about their sons' progress atschool, their grades in arithmetic, and the amounts they had saved intheir toy banks. 

On this last Sunday of November, Paul sat all the afternoon on the loweststep of his "stoop, " staring into the street, while his sisters, in theirrockers, were talking to the minister's daughters next door about howmany shirt-waists they had made in the last week, and how many wafflessome one had eaten at the last church supper. When the weather was warm, and his father was in a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls madelemonade, which was always brought out in a red-glass pitcher, ornamentedwith forget-me-nots in blue enamel. This the girls thought very fine, andthe neighbours joked about the suspicious colour of the pitcher. 

Today Paul's father, on the top step, was talking to a young man whoshifted a restless baby from knee to knee. He happened to be the youngman who was daily held up to Paul as a model, and after whom it was hisfather's dearest hope that he would pattern. This young man was of aruddy complexion, with a compressed, red mouth, and faded, near-sightedeyes, over which he wore thick spectacles, with gold bows that curvedabout his ears. He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steelcorporation, and was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a youngman with a future. There was a story that, some five years ago--he wasnow barely twenty-six--he had been a trifle 'dissipated, ' but in order tocurb his appetites and save the loss of time and strength that a sowingof wild oats might have entailed, he had taken his chief's advice, oftreiterated to his employees, and at twenty-one had married the firstwoman whom he could persuade to share his fortunes. She happened to be anangular school-mistress, much older than he, who also wore thick glasses, and who had now borne him four children, all near-sighted, like herself. 

The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in theMediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of the business, arranging his office hours on his yacht just as though he were at home, and "knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy. " His fathertold, in turn, the plan his corporation was considering, of putting in anelectric railway plant at Cairo. Paul snapped his teeth; he had an awfulapprehension that they might spoil it all before he got there. Yet herather liked to hear these legends of the iron kings, that were told andretold on Sundays and holidays; these stories of palaces in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo appealed to hisfancy, and he was interested in the triumphs of cash boys who had becomefamous, though he had no mind for the cash-boy stage. 

After supper was over, and he had helped to dry the dishes, Paulnervously asked his father whether he could go to George's to get somehelp in his geometry, and still more nervously asked for car-fare. Thislatter request he had to repeat, as his father, on principle, did notlike to hear requests for money, whether much or little. He asked Paulwhether he could not go to some boy who lived nearer, and told him thathe ought not to leave his school work until Sunday; but he gave him thedime. He was not a poor man, but he had a worthy ambition to come up inthe world. His only reason for allowing Paul to usher was that he thoughta boy ought to be earning a little. 

Paul bounded upstairs, scrubbed the greasy odour of the dish-water fromhis hands with the ill-smelling soap he hated, and then shook overhis fingers a few drops of violet water from the bottle he kept hidden inhis drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously under hisarm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtowncar, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening days, and began to liveagain. 

The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at oneof the downtown theatres was an acquaintance of Paul's, and theboy had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-night rehearsals wheneverhe could. For more than a year Paul had spent every available momentloitering about Charley Edwards's dressing-room. He had won a place amongEdwards's following not only because the young actor, who could notafford to employ a dresser, often found him useful, but because herecognized in Paul something akin to what churchmen term "vocation. "

It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; therest was but a sleep and a forgetting. This was Paul's fairy tale, andit had for him all the allurement of a secret love. The moment he inhaledthe gassy, painty, dusty odour behind the scenes, he breathed like aprisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or sayingsplendid, brilliant things. The moment the cracked orchestra beat out theoverture from _Martha_, or jerked at the serenade from _Rigoletto_, allstupid and ugly things slid from him, and his senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired. 

Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always worethe guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed tohim necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of lifeelsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies, wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the unescapable odoursof cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly-cladmen and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry appleorchards that bloomed perennially under the lime-light. 

It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly thestage entrance of that theatre was for Paul the actual portal of Romance. Certainly none of the company ever suspected it, least of all CharleyEdwards. It was very like the old stories that used to float about Londonof fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls, with palms, andfountains, and soft lamps and richly apparelled women who never saw thedisenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of that smoke-palledcity, enamoured of figures and grimy toil, Paul had his secret temple, his wishing-carpet, his bit of blue-and-white Mediterranean shore bathedin perpetual sunshine. 

Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had beenperverted by garish fiction; but the truth was, he scarcely ever read atall. The books at home were not such as would either tempt or corrupt ayouthful mind, and as for reading the novels that some of his friendsurged upon him--well, he got what he wanted much more quickly from music;any sort of music, from an orchestra to a barrel organ. He needed onlythe spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master ofhis senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own. Itwas equally true that he was not stage-struck--not, at any rate, in theusual acceptation of that expression. He had no desire to become anactor, any more than he had to become a musician. He felt no necessity todo any of these things; what he wanted was to see, to be in theatmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league afterblue league, away from everything. 

After a night behind the scenes, Paul found the school-room more thanever repulsive; the bare floors and naked walls; the prosy men who neverwore frock coats, or violets in their buttonholes; the women with theirdull gowns, shrill voices, and pitiful seriousness about prepositionsthat govern the dative. He could not bear to have the other pupils think, for a moment, that he took these people seriously; he must convey tothem that he considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of ajoke, anyway. He had autograph pictures of all the members of the stockcompany which he showed his classmates, telling them the most incrediblestories of his familiarity with these people, of his acquaintance withthe soloists who came to Carnegie Hall, his suppers with them and theflowers he sent them. When these stories lost their effect, and hisaudience grew listless, he would bid all the boys good-bye, announcingthat he was going to travel for awhile; going to Naples, to California, to Egypt. Then, next Monday, he would slip back, conscious and nervouslysmiling; his sister was ill, and he would have to defer his voyage untilspring. 

Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the itch to let hisinstructors know how heartily he despised them, and how thoroughly he wasappreciated elsewhere, he mentioned once or twice that he had no time tofool with theorems; adding--with a twitch of the eyebrows and a touch ofthat nervous bravado which so perplexed them--that he was helping thepeople down at the stock company; they were old friends of his. 

The upshot of the matter was, that the Principal went to Paul's father, and Paul was taken out of school and put to work. The manager at CarnegieHall was told to get another usher in his stead; the doorkeeper at thetheatre was warned not to admit him to the house; and Charley Edwardsremorsefully promised the boy's father not to see him again. 

The members of the stock company were vastly amused when some of Paul'sstories reached them--especially the women. They were hard-working women, most of them supporting indolent husbands or brothers, and they laughedrather bitterly at having stirred the boy to such fervid and floridinventions. They agreed with the faculty and with his father, that Paul'swas a bad case. 

The east-bound train was ploughing through a January snow-storm; the dulldawn was beginning to show grey when the engine whistled a mile out ofNewark. Paul started up from the seat where he had lain curled in uneasyslumber, rubbed the breath-misted window glass with his hand, and peeredout. The snow was whirling in curling eddies above the white bottomlands, and the drifts lay already deep in the fields and along thefences, while here and there the long dead grass and dried weed stalksprotruded black above it. Lights shone from the scattered houses, anda gang of labourers who stood beside the track waved their lanterns. 

Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable. He hadmade the all-night journey in a day coach because he was afraid if hetook a Pullman he might be seen by some Pittsburgh business man who hadnoticed him in Denny & Carson's office. When the whistle woke him, heclutched quickly at his breast pocket, glancing about him with anuncertain smile. But the little, clay-bespattered Italians were stillsleeping, the slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthedoblivion, and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled. Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he could. 

When he arrived at the Jersey City station, he hurried through hisbreakfast, manifestly ill at ease and keeping a sharp eye about him. After he reached the Twenty-third Street station, he consulted a cabman, and had himself driven to a men's furnishing establishment which was justopening for the day. He spent upward of two hours there, buying withendless reconsidering and great care. His new street suit he put on inthe fitting-room; the frock coat and dress clothes he had bundled intothe cab with his new shirts. Then he drove to a hatter's and a shoehouse. His next errand was at Tiffany's, where he selected silver mountedbrushes and a scarf-pin. He would not wait to have his silver marked, hesaid. Lastly, he stopped at a trunk shop on Broadway, and had hispurchases packed into various travelling bags. 

It was a little after one o'clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and, after settling with the cabman, went into the office. He registered fromWashington; said his mother and father had been abroad, and that he hadcome down to await the arrival of their steamer. He told his storyplausibly and had no trouble, since he offered to pay for them inadvance, in engaging his rooms; a sleeping-room, sitting-room and bath. 

Not once, but a hundred times Paul had planned this entry into New York. He had gone over every detail of it with Charley Edwards, and in hisscrap book at home there were pages of description about New York hotels, cut from the Sunday papers. 

When he was shown to his sitting-room on the eighth floor, he saw at aglance that everything was as it should be; there was but one detail inhis mental picture that the place did not realize, so he rang for thebell boy and sent him down for flowers. He moved about nervously untilthe boy returned, putting away his new linen and fingering it delightedlyas he did so. When the flowers came, he put them hastily into water, andthen tumbled into a hot bath. Presently he came out of his whitebath-room, resplendent in his new silk underwear, and playing with thetassels of his red robe. The snow was whirling so fiercely outside hiswindows that he could scarcely see across the street; but within, the airwas deliciously soft and fragrant. He put the violets and jonquils on thetabouret beside the couch, and threw himself down with a long sigh, covering himself with a Roman blanket. He was thoroughly tired; hehad been in such haste, he had stood up to such a strain, covered so muchground in the last twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it hadall come about. Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and thecool fragrance of the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection. 

It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the theatreand concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the whole thing wasvirtually determined. The rest was a mere matter of opportunity. The onlything that at all surprised him was his own courage--for he realized wellenough that he had always been tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensivedread that, of late years, as the meshes of the lies he had told closedabout him, had been pulling the muscles of his body tighter and tighter. Until now, he could not remember a time when he had not been dreadingsomething. Even when he was a little boy, it was always there--behindhim, or before, or on either side. There had always been the shadowedcorner, the dark place into which he dared not look, but from whichsomething seemed always to be watching him--and Paul had done things thatwere not pretty to watch, he knew. 

But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had at last throwndown the gauntlet to the thing in the corner. 

Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the traces; butyesterday afternoon that he had been sent to the bank with Denny &Carson's deposit, as usual--but this time he was instructed to leave thebook to be balanced. There was above two thousand dollars in checks, andnearly a thousand in the bank notes which he had taken from the book andquietly transferred to his pocket. At the bank he had made out a newdeposit slip. His nerves had been steady enough to permit of hisreturning to the office, where he had finished his work and asked for afull day's holiday tomorrow, Saturday, giving a perfectly reasonablepretext. The bank book, he knew, would not be returned before Monday orTuesday, and his father would be out of town for the next week. From thetime he slipped the bank notes into his pocket until he boarded the nighttrain for New York, he had not known a moment's hesitation. 

How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the thing done; andthis time there would be no awakening, no figure at the top of thestairs. He watched the snow flakes whirling by his window until he fellasleep. 

When he awoke, it was four o'clock in the afternoon. He bounded up with astart; one of his precious days gone already! He spent nearly an hour indressing, watching every stage of his toilet carefully in the mirror. Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he hadalways wanted to be. 

When he went downstairs, Paul took a carriage and drove up Fifth avenuetoward the Park. The snow had somewhat abated; carriages and tradesmen'swagons were hurrying soundlessly to and fro in the winter twilight; boysin woollen mufflers were shovelling off the doorsteps; the avenue stagesmade fine spots of colour against the white street. Here and there on thecorners whole flower gardens blooming behind glass windows, against whichthe snow flakes stuck and melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies ofthe valley--somehow vastly more lovely and alluring that they blossomedthus unnaturally in the snow. The Park itself was a wonderful stagewinter-piece. 

When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased, and the tune ofthe streets had changed. The snow was falling faster, lights streamedfrom the hotels that reared their many stories fearlessly up into thestorm, defying the raging Atlantic winds. A long, black stream ofcarriages poured down the avenue, intersected here and there by otherstreams, tending horizontally. There were a score of cabs about theentrance of his hotel, and his driver had to wait. Boys in livery wererunning in and out of the awning stretched across the sidewalk, up anddown the red velvet carpet laid from the door to the street. Above, about, within it all, was the rumble and roar, the hurry and toss ofthousands of human beings as hot for pleasure as himself, and on everyside of him towered the glaring affirmation of the omnipotence of wealth. 

The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a spasm ofrealization; the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances, thenervestuff of all sensations was whirling about him like the snow flakes. He burnt like a faggot in a tempest. 

When Paul came down to dinner, the music of the orchestra floated up theelevator shaft to greet him. As he stepped into the thronged corridor, hesank back into one of the chairs against the wall to get his breath. Thelights, the chatter, the perfumes, the bewildering medley of colour--hehad, for a moment, the feeling of not being able to stand it. But onlyfor a moment; these were his own people, he told himself. He went slowlyabout the corridors, through the writing-rooms, smoking-rooms, reception-rooms, as though he were exploring the chambers of an enchantedpalace, built and peopled for him alone. 

When he reached the dining-room he sat down at a table near a window. Theflowers, the white linen, the many-coloured wine glasses, the gaytoilettes of the women, the low popping of corks, the undulatingrepetitions of the _Blue Danube_ from the orchestra, all flooded Paul'sdream with bewildering radiance. When the roseate tinge of his champagnewas added--that cold, precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed inhis glass--Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all. This was what all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this waswhat all the struggle was about. He doubted the reality of his past. Hadhe ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a place where faggedlooking business men boarded the early car? Mere rivets in a machine theyseemed to Paul, --sickening men, with combings of children's hair alwayshanging to their coats, and the smell of cooking in their clothes. Cordelia Street--Ah, that belonged to another time and country! Hadhe not always been thus, had he not sat here night after night, from asfar back as he could remember, looking pensively over just suchshimmering textures, and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like thisone between his thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had. 

He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire tomeet or to know any of these people; all he demanded was the right tolook on and conjecture, to watch the pageant. The mere stage propertieswere all he contended for. Nor was he lonely later in the evening, inhis loge at the Opera. He was entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, ofhis forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himselfdifferent from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundingsexplained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to wear itpassively. He had only to glance down at his dress coat to reassurehimself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him. 

He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting-room to go to bed thatnight, and sat long watching the raging storm from his turret window. When he went to sleep, it was with the lights turned on in his bedroom;partly because of his old timidity, and partly so that, if he shouldwake in the night, there would be no wretched moment of doubt, nohorrible suspicion of yellow wall-paper, or of Washington and Calvinabove his bed. 

On Sunday morning the city was practically snow-bound. Paul breakfastedlate, and in the afternoon he fell in with a wild San Francisco boy, a freshman at Yale, who said he had run down for a "little flyer" overSunday. The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town, and the two boys went off together after dinner, not returning to thehotel until seven o'clock the next morning. They had started out in theconfiding warmth of a champagne friendship, but their parting in theelevator was singularly cool. The freshman pulled himself together tomake his train, and Paul went to bed. He awoke at two o'clock in theafternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for ice-water, coffee, andthe Pittsburgh papers. 

On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion. There wasthis to be said for him, that he wore his spoils with dignity and inno way made himself conspicuous. His chief greediness lay in his ears andeyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasureswere the grey winter twilights in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoymentof his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette and his senseof power. He could not remember a time when he had felt so at peace withhimself. The mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying everyday and every day, restored his self-respect. He had never lied forpleasure, even at school; but to make himself noticed and admired, toassert his difference from other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a gooddeal more manly, more honest, even, now that he had no need for boastfulpretensions, now that he could, as his actor friends used to say, "dressthe part. " It was characteristic that remorse did not occur to him. Hisgolden days went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as hecould. 

On the eighth day after his arrival in New York, he found the wholeaffair exploited in the Pittsburgh papers, exploited with a wealth ofdetail which indicated that local news of a sensational nature was at alow ebb. The firm of Denny & Carson announced that the boy's fatherhad refunded the full amount of his theft, and that they had no intentionof prosecuting. The Cumberland minister had been interviewed, andexpressed his hope of yet reclaiming the motherless lad, and Paul'sSabbath-school teacher declared that she would spare no effort to thatend. The rumour had reached Pittsburgh that the boy had been seen in aNew York hotel, and his father had gone East to find him and bringhim home. 

Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair, weak in the knees, and clasped his head in his hands. It was to be worsethan jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close overhim finally and forever. The grey monotony stretched before him inhopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath-school, Young People's Meeting, theyellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels; it all rushed back upon himwith sickening vividness. He had the old feeling that the orchestra hadsuddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over. The sweatbroke out on his face, and he sprang to his feet, looked about him withhis white, conscious smile, and winked at himself in the mirror. Withsomething of the childish belief in miracles with which he had so oftengone to class, all his lessons unlearned, Paul dressed and dashedwhistling down the corridor to the elevator. 

He had no sooner entered the dining-room and caught the measure of themusic, than his remembrance was lightened by his old elastic power ofclaiming the moment, mounting with it, and finding it all sufficient. Theglare and glitter about him, the mere scenic accessories had again, andfor the last time, their old potency. He would show himself that he wasgame, he would finish the thing splendidly. He doubted, more than ever, the existence of Cordelia Street, and for the first time he drank hiswine recklessly. Was he not, after all, one of these fortunate beings?Was he not still himself, and in his own place? He drummed a nervousaccompaniment to the music and looked about him, telling himself over andover that it had paid. 

He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the violin and the chill sweetnessof his wine, that he might have done it more wisely. He might have caughtan outbound steamer and been well out of their clutches before now. Butthe other side of the world had seemed too far away and too uncertainthen; he could not have waited for it; his need had been too sharp. If hehad to choose over again, he would do the same thing tomorrow. He lookedaffectionately about the dining-room, now gilded with a soft mist. Ah, ithad paid indeed!

Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his head andfeet. He had thrown himself across the bed without undressing, and hadslept with his shoes on. His limbs and hands were lead heavy, and histongue and throat were parched. There came upon him one of those fatefulattacks of clear-headedness that never occurred except when he wasphysically exhausted and his nerves hung loose. He lay still and closedhis eyes and let the tide of realities wash over him. 

His father was in New York; "stopping at some joint or other, " he toldhimself. The memory of successive summers on the front stoop fell uponhim like a weight of black water. He had not a hundred dollars left; andhe knew now, more than ever, that money was everything, the wall thatstood between all he loathed and all he wanted. The thing was windingitself up; he had thought of that on his first glorious day in New York, and had even provided a way to snap the thread. It lay on hisdressing-table now; he had got it out last night when he came blindly upfrom dinner, --but the shiny metal hurt his eyes, and he disliked the lookof it, anyway. 

He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and againto attacks of nausea. It was the old depression exaggerated; all theworld had become Cordelia Street. Yet somehow he was not afraid ofanything, was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had looked into thedark corner at last, and knew. It was bad enough, what he saw there; butsomehow not so bad as his long fear of it had been. He saw everythingclearly now. He had a feeling that he had made the best of it, that hehad lived the sort of life he was meant to live, and for half an hour hesat staring at the revolver. But he told himself that was not the way, sohe went downstairs and took a cab to the ferry. 

When Paul arrived at Newark, he got off the train and took another cab, directing the driver to follow the Pennsylvania tracks out of the town. The snow lay heavy on the roadways and had drifted deep in the openfields. Only here and there the dead grass or dried weed stalksprojected, singularly black, above it. Once well into the country, Pauldismissed the carriage and walked, floundering along the tracks, his minda medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an actualpicture of everything he had seen that morning. He remembered everyfeature of both his drivers, the toothless old woman from whom he hadbought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had got histicket, and all of his fellow-passengers on the ferry. His mind, unableto cope with vital matters near at hand, worked feverishly and deftlyat sorting and grouping these images. They made for him a part of theugliness of the world, of the ache in his head, and the bitter burning onhis tongue. He stooped and put a handful of snow into his mouth as hewalked, but that, too, seemed hot. When he reached a little hillside, where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty feet below him, he stoppedand sat down. 

The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed; alltheir red glory over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seenin the show windows that first night must have gone the same way, longbefore this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of theirbrave mockery at the winter outside the glass. It was a losing game inthe end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the worldis run. Paul took one of the blossoms carefully from his coat and scoopeda little hole in the snow, where he covered it up. Then he dozed awhile, from his weak condition, seeming insensible to the cold. 

The sound of an approaching train woke him, and he started to his feet, remembering only his resolution, and afraid lest he should be too late. He stood watching the approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering, hislips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glancednervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the rightmoment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred tohim with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue ofAdriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands. 

He felt something strike his chest, --his body was being thrown swiftlythrough the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbsgently relaxed. Then, because the picture making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into theimmense design of things. 

A Wagner Matinee

I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink on glassy, blue-lined note-paper, and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraskavillage. This communication, worn and rubbed, looking as if it had beencarried for some days in a coat pocket that was none too clean, was frommy uncle Howard, and informed me that his wife had been left a smalllegacy by a bachelor relative, and that it would be necessary for her togo to Boston to attend to the settling of the estate. He requested me tomeet her at the station and render her whatever services might benecessary. On examining the date indicated as that of her arrival, Ifound it to be no later than tomorrow. He had characteristically delayedwriting until, had I been away from home for a day, I must have missed myaunt altogether. 

The name of my Aunt Georgiana opened before me a gulf of recollection sowide and deep that, as the letter dropped from my hand, I felt suddenly astranger to all the present conditions of my existence, wholly ill atease and out of place amid the familiar surroundings of my study. Ibecame, in short, the gangling farmer-boy my aunt had known, scourgedwith chilblains and bashfulness, my hands cracked and sore from the cornhusking. I sat again before her parlour organ, fumbling the scales withmy stiff, red fingers, while she, beside me, made canvas mittens for thehuskers. 

The next morning, after preparing my landlady for a visitor, I set outfor the station. When the train arrived I had some difficulty in findingmy aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and it was notuntil I got her into the carriage that she seemed really to recognize me. She had come all the way in a day coach; her linen duster had becomeblack with soot and her black bonnet grey with dust during the journey. When we arrived at my boarding-house the landlady put her to bed at onceand I did not see her again until the next morning. 

Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance, sheconsiderately concealed. As for myself, I saw my aunt's battered figurewith that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers whohave left their ears and fingers north of Franz-Joseph-Land, or theirhealth somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been amusic teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the lattersixties. One summer, while visiting in the little village among the GreenMountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had kindledthe callow fancy of my uncle, Howard Carpenter, then an idle, shiftlessboy of twenty-one. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howardfollowed her, and the upshot of this infatuation was that she eloped withhim, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticism of herfriends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, ofcourse, had no money, took up a homestead in Red Willow County, fiftymiles from the railroad. There they had measured off their landthemselves, driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of whichthey had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting its revolutions. They built a dug-out in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellingswhose inmates so often reverted to primitive conditions. Their water theygot from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock ofprovisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For thirtyyears my aunt had not been farther than fifty miles from the homestead. 

I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way in myboyhood, and had a reverential affection for her. During the yearswhen I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking the threemeals--the first of which was ready at six o'clock in the morning--andputting the six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at herironing-board, with me at the kitchen table beside her, hearing me reciteLatin declensions and conjugations, gently shaking me when my drowsy headsank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at her ironingor mending, that I read my first Shakspere, and her old text-book onmythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands. She taught memy scales and exercises on the little parlour organ which her husband hadbought her after fifteen years during which she had not so much as seen amusical instrument. She would sit beside me by the hour, darning andcounting, while I struggled with the "Joyous Farmer. " She seldom talkedto me about music, and I understood why. Once when I had been doggedlybeating out some easy passages from an old score of _Euryanthe_ I hadfound among her music books, she came up to me and, putting her handsover my eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulder, sayingtremulously, "Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. "

When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival in Boston, she wasstill in a semi-somnambulant state. She seemed not to realize that shewas in the city where she had spent her youth, the place longed forhungrily half a lifetime. She had been so wretchedly train-sickthroughout the journey that she had no recollection of anything but herdiscomfort, and, to all intents and purposes, there were but a few hoursof nightmare between the farm in Red Willow County and my study onNewbury Street. I had planned a little pleasure for her that afternoon, to repay her for some of the glorious moments she had given me when weused to milk together in the straw-thatched cowshed and she, because Iwas more than usually tired, or because her husband had spoken sharply tome, would tell me of the splendid performance of the _Huguenots_ shehad seen in Paris, in her youth. 

At two o'clock the Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner program, and Iintended to take my aunt; though, as I conversed with her, I grewdoubtful about her enjoyment of it. I suggested our visiting theConservatory and the Common before lunch, but she seemed altogether tootimid to wish to venture out. She questioned me absently about variouschanges in the city, but she was chiefly concerned that she had forgottento leave instructions about feeding half-skimmed milk to a certainweakling calf, "old Maggie's calf, you know, Clark, " she explained, evidently having forgotten how long I had been away. She was furthertroubled because she had neglected to tell her daughter about thefreshly-opened kit of mackerel in the cellar, which would spoil if itwere not used directly. 

I asked her whether she had ever heard any of the Wagnerian operas, andfound that she had not, though she was perfectly familiar with theirrespective situations, and had once possessed the piano score of _TheFlying Dutchman_. I began to think it would be best to get her back toRed Willow County without waking her, and regretted having suggested theconcert. 

From the time we entered the concert hall, however, she was a trifle lesspassive and inert, and for the first time seemed to perceive hersurroundings. I had felt some trepidation lest she might become aware ofher queer, country clothes, or might experience some painfulembarrassment at stepping suddenly into the world to which she had beendead for a quarter of a century. But, again, I found how superficially Ihad judged her. She sat looking about her with eyes as impersonal, almostas stony, as those with which the granite Rameses in a museum watches thefroth and fret that ebbs and flows about his pedestal. I have seen thissame aloofness in old miners who drift into the Brown hotel at Denver, their pockets full of bullion, their linen soiled, their haggard facesunshaven; standing in the thronged corridors as solitary as though theywere still in a frozen camp on the Yukon. 

The matinée audience was made up chiefly of women. One lost the contourof faces and figures, indeed any effect of line whatever, and there wasonly the colour of bodices past counting, the shimmer of fabrics soft andfirm, silky and sheer; red, mauve, pink, blue, lilac, purple, écru, rose, yellow, cream, and white, all the colours that an impressionist finds ina sunlit landscape, with here and there the dead shadow of a frock coat. My Aunt Georgiana regarded them as though they had been so many daubs oftube-paint on a palette. 

When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave a little stirof anticipation, and looked with quickening interest down over the railat that invariable grouping, perhaps the first wholly familiar thing thathad greeted her eye since she had left old Maggie and her weaklingcalf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul, for I hadnot forgotten how they had sunk into mine when I came fresh fromploughing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as ina treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving ashadow of change. The clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of theirlinen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of theinstruments, the patches of yellow light on the smooth, varnishedbellies of the 'cellos and the bass viols in the rear, the restless, wind-tossed forest of fiddle necks and bows--I recalled how, in the firstorchestra I ever heard, those long bow-strokes seemed to draw the heartout of me, as a conjurer's stick reels out yards of paper ribbon froma hat. 

The first number was the Tannhauser overture. When the horns drew out thefirst strain of the Pilgrim's chorus, Aunt Georgiana clutched my coatsleeve. Then it was I first realized that for her this broke a silence ofthirty years. With the battle between the two motives, with the frenzy ofthe Venusberg theme and its ripping of strings, there came to me anoverwhelming sense of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat;and I saw again the tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as awooden fortress; the black pond where I had learned to swim, its marginpitted with sun-dried cattle tracks; the rain gullied clay banks aboutthe naked house, the four dwarf ash seedlings where the dish-cloths werealways hung to dry before the kitchen door. The world there was the flatworld of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched todaybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to sunset; between, theconquests of peace, dearer-bought than those of war. 

The overture closed, my aunt released my coat sleeve, but she saidnothing. She sat staring dully at the orchestra. What, I wondered, didshe get from it? She had been a good pianist in her day, I knew, and hermusical education had been broader than that of most music teachers of aquarter of a century ago. She had often told me of Mozart's operas andMeyerbeer's, and I could remember hearing her sing, years ago, certainmelodies of Verdi. When I had fallen ill with a fever in her house sheused to sit by my cot in the evening--when the cool, night wind blew inthrough the faded mosquito netting tacked over the window and I laywatching a certain bright star that burned red above the cornfield--andsing "Home to our mountains, O, let us return!" in a way fit to break theheart of a Vermont boy near dead of homesickness already. 

I watched her closely through the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, tryingvainly to conjecture what that seething turmoil of strings and windsmight mean to her, but she sat mutely staring at the violin bows thatdrove obliquely downward, like the pelting streaks of rain in a summershower. Had this music any message for her? Had she enough left to at allcomprehend this power which had kindled the world since she had left it?I was in a fever of curiosity, but Aunt Georgiana sat silent upon herpeak in Darien. She preserved this utter immobility throughoutthe number from The Flying Dutchman, though her fingers workedmechanically upon her black dress, as if, of themselves, they wererecalling the piano score they had once played. Poor hands! They had beenstretched and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and lift and kneadwith;--on one of them a thin, worn band that had once been a weddingring. As I pressed and gently quieted one of those groping hands, Iremembered with quivering eyelids their services for me in other days. 

Soon after the tenor began the "Prize Song, " I heard a quick drawn breathand turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears wereglistening on her cheeks, and I think, in a moment more, they were in myeyes as well. It never really died, then--the soul which can suffer soexcruciatingly and so interminably; it withers to the outward eye only;like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century andyet, if placed in water, grows green again. She wept so throughout thedevelopment and elaboration of the melody. 

During the intermission before the second half, I questioned my aunt andfound that the "Prize Song" was not new to her. Some years before therehad drifted to the farm in Red Willow County a young German, a trampcow-puncher, who had sung in the chorus at Bayreuth when he was a boy, along with the other peasant boys and girls. Of a Sunday morning he usedto sit on his gingham-sheeted bed in the hands' bedroom which opened offthe kitchen, cleaning the leather of his boots and saddle, singing the"Prize Song, " while my aunt went about her work in the kitchen. She hadhovered over him until she had prevailed upon him to join the countrychurch, though his sole fitness for this step, in so far as I couldgather, lay in his boyish face and his possession of this divine melody. Shortly afterward, he had gone to town on the Fourth of July, been drunkfor several days, lost his money at a faro table, ridden a saddled Texassteer on a bet, and disappeared with a fractured collar-bone. All thismy aunt told me huskily, wanderingly, as though she were talking in theweak lapses of illness. 

"Well, we have come to better things than the old Trovatore at any rate, Aunt Georgie?" I queried, with a well meant effort at jocularity. 

Her lip quivered and she hastily put her handkerchief up to her mouth. From behind it she murmured, "And you have been hearing this ever sinceyou left me, Clark?" Her question was the gentlest and saddest ofreproaches. 

The second half of the program consisted of four numbers from the _Ring, _and closed with Siegfried's funeral march. My aunt wept quietly, butalmost continuously, as a shallow vessel overflows in a rain-storm. Fromtime to time her dim eyes looked up at the lights, burning softly undertheir dull glass globes. 

The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she found in theshining current of it; I never knew how far it bore her, or past whathappy islands. From the trembling of her face I could well believe thatbefore the last number she had been carried out where the myriad gravesare, into the grey, nameless burying grounds of the sea; or into someworld of death vaster yet, where, from the beginning of the world, hopehas lain down with hope and dream with dream and, renouncing, slept. 

The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering andlaughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my kinswomanmade no effort to rise. The harpist slipped the green felt cover over hisinstrument; the flute-players shook the water from their mouthpieces;the men of the orchestra went out one by one, leaving the stage to thechairs and music stands, empty as a winter cornfield. 

I spoke to my aunt. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. "I don'twant to go, Clark, I don't want to go!"

I understood. For her, just outside the concert hall, lay the black pondwith the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, withweather-curled boards, naked as a tower; the crook-backed ash seedlingswhere the dish-cloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys pickingup refuse about the kitchen door. 

The Sculptor's Funeral

A group of the townspeople stood on the station siding of a little Kansastown, awaiting the coming of the night train, which was already twentyminutes overdue. The snow had fallen thick over everything; in the palestarlight the line of bluffs across the wide, white meadows south of thetown made soft, smoke-coloured curves against the clear sky. The menon the siding stood first on one foot and then on the other, their handsthrust deep into their trousers pockets, their overcoats open, theirshoulders screwed up with the cold; and they glanced from time to timetoward the southeast, where the railroad track wound along the rivershore. They conversed in low tones and moved about restlessly, seeming uncertain as to what was expected of them. There was but one ofthe company who looked as if he knew exactly why he was there, and hekept conspicuously apart; walking to the far end of the platform, returning to the station door, then pacing up the track again, his chinsunk in the high collar of his overcoat, his burly shoulders droopingforward, his gait heavy and dogged. Presently he was approached by atall, spare, grizzled man clad in a faded Grand Army suit, who shuffledout from the group and advanced with a certain deference, craning hisneck forward until his back made the angle of a jack-knife three-quartersopen. 

"I reckon she's a-goin' to be pretty late agin to-night, Jim, " heremarked in a squeaky falsetto. "S'pose it's the snow?"

"I don't know, " responded the other man with a shade of annoyance, speaking from out an astonishing cataract of red beard that grew fiercelyand thickly in all directions. 

The spare man shifted the quill toothpick he was chewing to the otherside of his mouth. "It ain't likely that anybody from the East will comewith the corpse, I s'pose, " he went on reflectively. 

"I don't know, " responded the other, more curtly than before. 

"It's too bad he didn't belong to some lodge or other. I like an orderfuneral myself. They seem more appropriate for people of somerepytation, " the spare man continued, with an ingratiating concession inhis shrill voice, as he carefully placed his toothpick in his vestpocket. He always carried the flag at the G. A. R. Funerals in the town. 

The heavy man turned on his heel, without replying, and walked up thesiding. The spare man rejoined the uneasy group. "Jim's ez full ez atick, ez ushel, " he commented commiseratingly. 

Just then a distant whistle sounded, and there was a shuffling of feet onthe platform. A number of lanky boys, of all ages, appeared as, suddenlyand slimily as eels wakened by the crack of thunder; some came from thewaiting-room, where they had been warming themselves by the red stove, orhalf asleep on the slat benches; others uncoiled themselves from baggagetrucks or slid out of express wagons. Two clambered down from thedriver's seat of a hearse that stood backed up against the siding. Theystraightened their stooping shoulders and lifted their heads, and a flashof momentary animation kindled their dull eyes at that cold, vibrantscream, the worldwide call for men. It stirred them like the note of atrumpet; just as it had often stirred the man who was coming hometonight, in his boyhood. 

The night express shot, red as a rocket, from out the eastward marshlands and wound along the river shore under the long lines of shiveringpoplars that sentinelled the meadows, the escaping steam hanging in greymasses against the pale sky and blotting out the Milky Way. In a momentthe red glare from the headlight streamed up the snow-covered trackbefore the siding and glittered on the wet, black rails. The burly manwith the dishevelled red beard walked swiftly up the platform toward theapproaching train, uncovering his head as he went. The group of menbehind him hesitated, glanced questioningly at one another, and awkwardlyfollowed his example. The train stopped, and the crowd shuffled up tothe express car just as the door was thrown open, the man in the G. A. R. Suit thrusting his head forward with curiosity. The express messengerappeared in the doorway, accompanied by a young man in a long ulster andtravelling cap. 

"Are Mr. Merrick's friends here?" inquired the young man. 

The group on the platform swayed uneasily. Philip Phelps, the banker, responded with dignity: "We have come to take charge of the body. Mr. Merrick's father is very feeble and can't be about. "

"Send the agent out here, " growled the express messenger, "and tell theoperator to lend a hand. "

The coffin was got out of its rough-box and down on the snowy platform. The townspeople drew back enough to make room for it and then formed aclose semicircle about it, looking curiously at the palm leaf which layacross the black cover. No one said anything. The baggage man stood byhis truck, waiting to get at the trunks. The engine panted heavily, andthe fireman dodged in and out among the wheels with his yellow torch andlong oil-can, snapping the spindle boxes. The young Bostonian, one of thedead sculptor's pupils who had come with the body, looked about himhelplessly. He turned to the banker, the only one of that black, uneasy, stoop-shouldered group who seemed enough of an individual to beaddressed. 

"None of Mr. Merrick's brothers are here?" he asked uncertainly. 

The man with the red beard for the first time stepped up and joined theothers. "No, they have not come yet; the family is scattered. The bodywill be taken directly to the house. " He stooped and took hold of one ofthe handles of the coffin. 

"Take the long hill road up, Thompson, it will be easier on the horses, "called the liveryman as the undertaker snapped the door of the hearseand prepared to mount to the driver's seat. 

Laird, the red-bearded lawyer, turned again to the stranger: "We didn'tknow whether there would be any one with him or not, " he explained. "It'sa long walk, so you'd better go up in the hack. " He pointed to a singlebattered conveyance, but the young man replied stiffly: "Thank you, but Ithink I will go up with the hearse. If you don't object, " turning to theundertaker, "I'll ride with you. "

They clambered up over the wheels and drove off in the starlight up thelong, white hill toward the town. The lamps in the still village wereshining from under the low, snow-burdened roofs; and beyond, on everyside, the plains reached out into emptiness, peaceful and wide as thesoft sky itself, and wrapped in a tangible, white silence. 

When the hearse backed up to a wooden sidewalk before a naked, weather-beaten frame house, the same composite, ill-defined group thathad stood upon the station siding was huddled about the gate. The frontyard was an icy swamp, and a couple of warped planks, extending from thesidewalk to the door, made a sort of rickety footbridge. The gate hung onone hinge, and was opened wide with difficulty. Steavens, the youngstranger, noticed that something black was tied to the knob of the frontdoor. 

The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the hearse, was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was wrenchedopen, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded into the snow andflung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: "My boy, my boy! And this ishow you've come home to me!"

As Steavens turned away and closed his eyes with a shudder of unutterablerepulsion, another woman, also tall, but flat and angular, dressedentirely in black, darted out of the house and caught Mrs. Merrick by theshoulders, crying sharply: "Come, come, mother; you mustn't go on likethis!" Her tone changed to one of obsequious solemnity as she turned tothe banker: "The parlour is ready, Mr. Phelps. "

The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards, while theundertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests. They bore it into a large, unheated room that smelled of dampness and disuse and furniture polish, and set it down under a hanging lamp ornamented with jingling glassprisms and before a "Rogers group" of John Alden and Priscilla, wreathedwith smilax. Henry Steavens stared about him with the sickeningconviction that there had been a mistake, and that he had somehow arrivedat the wrong destination. He looked at the clover-green Brussels, the fatplush upholstery, among the hand-painted china placques and panels andvases, for some mark of identification, --for something that might onceconceivably have belonged to Harvey Merrick. It was not until herecognized his friend in the crayon portrait of a little boy in kiltsand curls, hanging above the piano, that he felt willing to let any ofthese people approach the coffin. 

"Take the lid off, Mr. Thompson; let me see my boy's face, " wailed theelder woman between her sobs. This time Steavens looked fearfully, almost beseechingly into her face, red and swollen under its masses ofstrong, black, shiny hair. He flushed, dropped his eyes, and then, almostincredulously, looked again. There was a kind of power about her face--akind of brutal handsomeness, even; but it was scarred and furrowed byviolence, and so coloured and coarsened by fiercer passions that griefseemed never to have laid a gentle finger there. The long nose wasdistended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep lines on eitherside of it; her heavy, black brows almost met across her forehead, herteeth were large and square, and set far apart--teeth that could tear. She filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed about liketwigs in an angry water, and even Steavens felt himself being drawn intothe whirlpool. 

The daughter--the tall, raw-boned woman in crêpe, with a mourning comb inher hair which curiously lengthened her long face--sat stiffly upon thesofa, her hands, conspicuous for their large knuckles, folded in her lap, her mouth and eyes drawn down, solemnly awaiting the opening of thecoffin. Near the door stood a mulatto woman, evidently a servant in thehouse, with a timid bearing and an emaciated face pitifully sad andgentle. She was weeping silently, the corner of her calico apron liftedto her eyes, occasionally suppressing a long, quivering sob. Steavenswalked over and stood beside her. 

Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall and frail, odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept grey hair and a dingy beard, tobacco stained about the mouth, entered uncertainly. He went slowly upto the coffin and stood rolling a blue cotton handkerchief between hishands, seeming so pained and embarrassed by his wife's orgy of grief thathe had no consciousness of anything else. 

"There, there, Annie, dear, don't take on so, " he quavered timidly, putting out a shaking hand and awkwardly patting her elbow. She turnedand sank upon his shoulder with such violence that he tottered a little. He did not even glance toward the coffin, but continued to look at herwith a dull, frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at thewhip. His sunken cheeks slowly reddened and burned with miserable shame. When his wife rushed from the room, her daughter strode after her withset lips. The servant stole up to the coffin, bent over it for a moment, and then slipped away to the kitchen, leaving Steavens, the lawyer, andthe father to themselves. The old man stood looking down at his deadson's face. The sculptor's splendid head seemed even more noble in itsrigid stillness than in life. The dark hair had crept down upon the wideforehead; the face seemed strangely long, but in it there was not thatrepose we expect to find in the faces of the dead. The brows were sodrawn that there were two deep lines above the beaked nose, and the chinwas thrust forward defiantly. It was as though the strain of life hadbeen so sharp and bitter that death could not at once relax the tensionand smooth the countenance into perfect peace--as though he were stillguarding something precious, which might even yet be wrested from him. 

The old man's lips were working under his stained beard. He turned to thelawyer with timid deference: "Phelps and the rest are comin' back to setup with Harve, ain't they?" he asked. "Thank'ee, Jim, thank'ee. " Hebrushed the hair back gently from his son's forehead. "He was a good boy, Jim; always a good boy. He was ez gentle ez a child and the kindest of'em all--only we didn't none of us ever onderstand him. " The tearstrickled slowly down his beard and dropped upon the sculptor's coat. 

"Martin, Martin! Oh, Martin! come here, " his wife wailed from the top ofthe stairs. The old man started timorously: "Yes, Annie, I'm coming. " Heturned away, hesitated, stood for a moment in miserable indecision; thenreached back and patted the dead man's hair softly, and stumbled from theroom. 

"Poor old man, I didn't think he had any tears left. Seems as if his eyeswould have gone dry long ago. At his age nothing cuts very deep, "remarked the lawyer. 

Something in his tone made Steavens glance up. While the mother had beenin the room, the young man had scarcely seen any one else; but now, fromthe moment he first glanced into Jim Laird's florid face and blood-shoteyes, he knew that he had found what he had been heartsick at not findingbefore--the feeling, the understanding, that must exist in some one, evenhere. 

The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and blurred bydissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye. His face was strained--thatof a man who is controlling himself with difficulty--and he kept pluckingat his beard with a sort of fierce resentment. Steavens, sitting by thewindow, watched him turn down the glaring lamp, still its janglingpendants with an angry gesture, and then stand with his hands lockedbehind him, staring down into the master's face. He could not helpwondering what link there had been between the porcelain vessel and sosooty a lump of potter's clay. 

From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-room dooropened, the import of it was clear. The mother was abusing the maid forhaving forgotten to make the dressing for the chicken salad which hadbeen prepared for the watchers. Steavens had never heard anything inthe least like it; it was injured, emotional, dramatic abuse, unique andmasterly in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and unrestrained as hadbeen her grief of twenty minutes before. With a shudder of disgust thelawyer went into the dining-room and closed the door into the kitchen. 

"Poor Roxy's getting it now, " he remarked when he came back. "TheMerricks took her out of the poor-house years ago; and if her loyaltywould let her, I guess the poor old thing could tell tales that wouldcurdle your blood. She's the mulatto woman who was standing in here awhile ago, with her apron to her eyes. The old woman is a fury; therenever was anybody like her. She made Harvey's life a hell for him whenhe lived at home; he was so sick ashamed of it. I never could see how hekept himself sweet. "

"He was wonderful, " said Steavens slowly, "wonderful; but until tonight Ihave never known how wonderful. "

"That is the eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it can come even fromsuch a dung heap as this, " the lawyer cried, with a sweeping gesturewhich seemed to indicate much more than the four walls within which theystood. 

"I think I'll see whether I can get a little air. The room is so close Iam beginning to feel rather faint, " murmured Steavens, struggling withone of the windows. The sash was stuck, however, and would not yield, sohe sat down dejectedly and began pulling at his collar. The lawyer cameover, loosened the sash with one blow of his red fist and sent the windowup a few inches. Steavens thanked him, but the nausea which had beengradually climbing into his throat for the last half hour left him withbut one desire--a desperate feeling that he must get away from this placewith what was left of Harvey Merrick. Oh, he comprehended well enoughnow the quiet bitterness of the smile that he had seen so often on hismaster's lips!

Once when Merrick returned from a visit home, he brought with him asingularly feeling and suggestive bas-relief of a thin, faded old woman, sitting and sewing something pinned to her knee; while a full-lipped, full-blooded little urchin, his trousers held up by a single gallows, stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to call her attention toa butterfly he had caught. Steavens, impressed by the tender and delicatemodelling of the thin, tired face, had asked him if it were his mother. He remembered the dull flush that had burned up in the sculptor's face. 

The lawyer was sitting in a rocking-chair beside the coffin, his headthrown back and his eyes closed. Steavens looked at him earnestly, puzzled at the line of the chin, and wondering why a man should conceal afeature of such distinction under that disfiguring shock of beard. Suddenly, as though he felt the young sculptor's keen glance, Jim Lairdopened his eyes. 

"Was he always a good deal of an oyster?" he asked abruptly. "He wasterribly shy as a boy. "

"Yes, he was an oyster, since you put it so, " rejoined Stevens. "Althoughhe could be very fond of people, he always gave one the impression ofbeing detached. He disliked violent emotion; he was reflective, andrather distrustful of himself--except, of course, as regarded his work. He was sure enough there. He distrusted men pretty thoroughly and womeneven more, yet somehow without believing ill of them. He was determined, indeed, to believe the best; but he seemed afraid to investigate. "

"A burnt dog dreads the fire, " said the lawyer grimly, and closed hiseyes. 

Steavens went on and on, reconstructing that whole miserable boyhood. Allthis raw, biting ugliness had been the portion of the man whose mind wasto become an exhaustless gallery of beautiful impressions--so sensitivethat the mere shadow of a poplar leaf flickering against a sunny wallwould be etched and held there for ever. Surely, if ever a man had themagic word in his finger tips, it was Merrick. Whatever he touched, herevealed its holiest secret; liberated it from enchantment and restoredit to its pristine loveliness. Upon whatever he had come in contact with, he had left a beautiful record of the experience--a sort of etherealsignature; a scent, a sound, a colour that was his own. 

Steavens understood now the real tragedy of his master's life; neitherlove nor wine, as many had conjectured; but a blow which had fallenearlier and cut deeper than anything else could have done--a shame nothis, and yet so unescapably his, to bide in his heart from his veryboyhood. And without--the frontier warfare; the yearning of a boy, castashore upon a desert of newness and ugliness and sordidness, for all thatis chastened and old, and noble with traditions. 

At eleven o'clock the tall, flat woman in black announced that thewatchers were arriving, and asked them to "step into the dining-room. " AsSteavens rose, the lawyer said dryly: "You go on--it'll be a goodexperience for you. I'm not equal to that crowd tonight; I've had twentyyears of them. "

As Steavens closed the door after him he glanced back at the lawyer, sitting by the coffin in the dim light, with his chin resting on hishand. 

The same misty group that had stood before the door of the express carshuffled into the dining-room. In the light of the kerosene lamp theyseparated and became individuals. The minister, a pale, feeble-lookingman with white hair and blond chin-whiskers, took his seat beside a smallside table and placed his Bible upon it. The Grand Army man sat downbehind the stove and tilted his chair back comfortably against the wall, fishing his quill toothpick from his waistcoat pocket. The two bankers, Phelps and Elder, sat off in a corner behind the dinner-table, where theycould finish their discussion of the new usury law and its effect onchattel security loans. The real estate agent, an old man with a smiling, hypocritical face, soon joined them. The coal and lumber dealer and thecattle shipper sat on opposite sides of the hard coal-burner, their feeton the nickel-work. Steavens took a book from his pocket and began toread. The talk around him ranged through various topics of local interestwhile the house was quieting down. When it was clear that the members ofthe family were in bed, the Grand Army man hitched his shoulders and, untangling his long legs, caught his heels on the rounds of his chair. 

"S'pose there'll be a will, Phelps?" he queried in his weak falsetto. 

The banker laughed disagreeably, and began trimming his nails with apearl-handled pocket-knife. 

"There'll scarcely be any need for one, will there?" he queried in histurn. 

The restless Grand Army man shifted his position again, getting his kneesstill nearer his chin. "Why, the ole man says Harve's done right welllately, " he chirped. 

The other banker spoke up. "I reckon he means by that Harve ain't askedhim to mortgage any more farms lately, so as he could go on with hiseducation. "

"Seems like my mind don't reach back to a time when Harve wasn't bein'edycated, " tittered the Grand Army man. 

There was a general chuckle. The minister took out his handkerchief andblew his nose sonorously. Banker Phelps closed his knife with a snap. "It's too bad the old man's sons didn't turn out better, " he remarkedwith reflective authority. "They never hung together. He spent moneyenough on Harve to stock a dozen cattle-farms, and he might as well havepoured it into Sand Creek. If Harve had stayed at home and helped nursewhat little they had, and gone into stock on the old man's bottom farm, they might all have been well fixed. But the old man had to trusteverything to tenants and was cheated right and left. "

"Harve never could have handled stock none, " interposed the cattleman. "He hadn't it in him to be sharp. Do you remember when he bought Sander'smules for eight-year olds, when everybody in town knew that Sander'sfather-in-law give 'em to his wife for a wedding present eighteen yearsbefore, an' they was full-grown mules then?"

The company laughed discreetly, and the Grand Army man rubbed his kneeswith a spasm of childish delight. 

"Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he shore wasnever fond of work, " began the coal and lumber dealer. "I mind the lasttime he was home; the day he left, when the old man was out to the barnhelpin' his hand hitch up to take Harve to the train, and Cal Moots waspatchin' up the fence; Harve, he come out on the step and sings out, inhis lady-like voice: 'Cal Moots, Cal Moots! please come cord my trunk. '"

"That's Harve for you, " approved the Grand Army man. "I kin hear himhowlin' yet, when he was a big feller in long pants and his mother usedto whale him with a rawhide in the barn for lettin' the cows gitfoundered in the cornfield when he was drivin' 'em home from pasture. Hekilled a cow of mine that-a-way onct--a pure Jersey and the best milker Ihad, an' the ole man had to put up for her. Harve, he was watchin' thesun set acrost the marshes when the anamile got away. "

"Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy East toschool, " said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in a deliberate, judicial tone. "There was where he got his head full of nonsense. WhatHarve needed, of all people, was a course in some first-class KansasCity business college. "

The letters were swimming before Steavens's eyes. Was it possible thatthese men did not understand, that the palm on the coffin meant nothingto them? The very name of their town would have remained for ever buriedin the postal guide had it not been now and again mentioned in the worldin connection with Harvey Merrick's. He remembered what his master hadsaid to him on the day of his death, after the congestion of both lungshad shut off any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked hispupil to send his body home. "It's not a pleasant place to be lying whilethe world is moving and doing and bettering, " he had said with a feeblesmile, "but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place wecame from, in the end. The townspeople will come in for a look at me; andafter they have had their say, I shan't have much to fear from thejudgment of God!"

The cattleman took up the comment. "Forty's young for a Merrick to cashin; they usually hang on pretty well. Probably he helped it along withwhisky. "

"His mother's people were not long lived, and Harvey never had a robustconstitution, " said the minister mildly. He would have liked to say more. He had been the boy's Sunday-school teacher, and had been fond of him;but he felt that he was not in a position to speak. His own sons hadturned out badly, and it was not a year since one of them had made hislast trip home in the express car, shot in a gambling-house in theBlack Hills. 

"Nevertheless, there is no disputin' that Harve frequently looked uponthe wine when it was red, also variegated, and it shore made an oncommonfool of him, " moralized the cattleman. 

Just then the door leading into the parlour rattled loudly and every onestarted involuntarily, looking relieved when only Jim Laird came out. The Grand Army man ducked his head when he saw the spark in his blue, blood-shot eye. They were all afraid of Jim; he was a drunkard, but hecould twist the law to suit his client's needs as no other man in allwestern Kansas could do, and there were many who tried. The lawyer closedthe door behind him, leaned back against it and folded his arms, cockinghis head a little to one side. When he assumed this attitude in thecourt-room, ears were always pricked up, as it usually foretold a floodof withering sarcasm. 

"I've been with you gentlemen before, " he began in a dry, even tone, "when you've sat by the coffins of boys born and raised in this town;and, if I remember rightly, you were never any too well satisfied whenyou checked them up. What's the matter, anyhow? Why is it that reputableyoung men are as scarce as millionaires in Sand City? It might almostseem to a stranger that there was some way something the matter with yourprogressive town. Why did Ruben Sayer, the brightest young lawyer youever turned out, after he had come home from the university as straightas a die, take to drinking and forge a check and shoot himself? Why didBill Merrit's son die of the shakes in a saloon in Omaha? Why was Mr. Thomas's son, here, shot in a gambling-house? Why did young Adams burnhis mill to beat the insurance companies and go to the pen?"

The lawyer paused and unfolded his arms, laying one clenched fist quietlyon the table. "I'll tell you why. Because you drummed nothing but moneyand knavery into their ears from the time they wore knickerbockers;because you carped away at them as you've been carping here tonight, holding our friends Phelps and Elder up to them for their models, as ourgrandfathers held up George Washington and John Adams. But the boys wereyoung, and raw at the business you put them to, and how could they matchcoppers with such artists as Phelps and Elder? You wanted them to besuccessful rascals; they were only unsuccessful ones--that's all thedifference. There was only one boy ever raised in this borderland betweenruffianism and civilization who didn't come to grief, and you hatedHarvey Merrick more for winning out than you hated all the other boys whogot under the wheels. Lord, Lord, how you did hate him! Phelps, here, isfond of saying that he could buy and sell us all out any time he's a mindto; but he knew Harve wouldn't have given a tinker's damn for his bankand all his cattlefarms put together; and a lack of appreciation, thatway, goes hard with Phelps. 

"Old Nimrod thinks Harve drank too much; and this from such as Nimrod andme!

"Brother Elder says Harve was too free with the old man's money--fellshort in filial consideration, maybe. Well, we can all remember thevery tone in which brother Elder swore his own father was a liar, in thecounty court; and we all know that the old man came out of thatpartnership with his son as bare as a sheared lamb. But maybe I'm gettingpersonal, and I'd better be driving ahead at what I want to say. "

The lawyer paused a moment, squared his heavy shoulders, and went on:"Harvey Merrick and I went to school together, back East. We were dead inearnest, and we wanted you all to be proud of us some day. We meant to begreat men. Even I, and I haven't lost my sense of humour, gentlemen, Imeant to be a great man. I came back here to practise, and I found youdidn't in the least want me to be a great man. You wanted me to be ashrewd lawyer--oh, yes! Our veteran here wanted me to get him an increaseof pension, because he had dyspepsia; Phelps wanted a new county surveythat would put the widow Wilson's little bottom farm inside his southline; Elder wanted to lend money at 5 per cent, a month, and get itcollected; and Stark here wanted to wheedle old women up in Vermont intoinvesting their annuities in real-estate mortgages that are not worth thepaper they are written on. Oh, you needed me hard enough, and you'll goon needing me!

"Well, I came back here and became the damned shyster you wanted me tobe. You pretend to have some sort of respect for me; and yet you'll standup and throw mud at Harvey Merrick, whose soul you couldn't dirty andwhose hands you couldn't tie. Oh, you're a discriminating lot ofChristians! There have been times when the sight of Harvey's name in someEastern paper has made me hang my head like a whipped dog; and, again, times when I liked to think of him off there in the world, away from allthis hog-wallow, climbing the big, clean up-grade he'd set for himself. 

"And we? Now that we've fought and lied and sweated and stolen, and hatedas only the disappointed strugglers in a bitter, dead little Western townknow how to do, what have we got to show for it? Harvey Merrick wouldn'thave given one sunset over your marshes for all you've got put together, and you know it. It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom ofGod, a genius should ever have been called from this place of hatred andbitter waters; but I want this Boston man to know that the drivel he'sbeen hearing here tonight is the only tribute any truly great man couldhave from such a lot of sick, side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharksas the here-present financiers of Sand City--upon which town may God havemercy!"

The lawyer thrust out his hand to Steavens as he passed him, caught uphis overcoat in the hall, and had left the house before the Grand Armyman had had time to lift his ducked head and crane his long neck about athis fellows. 

Next day Jim Laird was drunk and unable to attend the funeral services. Steavens called twice at his office, but was compelled to start Eastwithout seeing him. He had a presentiment that he would hear from himagain, and left his address on the lawyer's table; but if Laird found it, he never acknowledged it. The thing in him that Harvey Merrick had lovedmust have gone under ground with Harvey Merrick's coffin; for it neverspoke again, and Jim got the cold he died of driving across the Coloradomountains to defend one of Phelps's sons who had got into trouble outthere by cutting government timber. 

"A Death in the Desert"

Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat across the aislewas looking at him intently. He was a large, florid man, wore aconspicuous diamond solitaire upon his third finger, and Everett judgedhim to be a travelling salesman of some sort. He had the air of anadaptable fellow who had been about the world and who could keep cool andclean under almost any circumstances. 

The "High Line Flyer, " as this train was derisively called among railroadmen, was jerking along through the hot afternoon over the monotonouscountry between Holdredge and Cheyenne. Besides the blond man and himselfthe only occupants of the car were two dusty, bedraggled-looking girlswho had been to the Exposition at Chicago, and who were earnestlydiscussing the cost of their first trip out of Colorado. The fouruncomfortable passengers were covered with a sediment of fine, yellowdust which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold powder. It blew upin clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through which they passed, until they were one colour with the sage-brush and sand-hills. The greyand yellow desert was varied only by occasional ruins of deserted towns, and the little red boxes of station-houses, where the spindling treesand sickly vines in the blue-grass yards made little green reservesfenced off in that confusing wilderness of sand. 

As the slanting rays of the sun beat in stronger and stronger through thecar-windows, the blond gentleman asked the ladies' permission to removehis coat, and sat in his lavender striped shirtsleeves, with a black silkhandkerchief tucked about his collar. He had seemed interested inEverett since they had boarded the train at Holdredge; kept glancing athim curiously and then looking reflectively out of the window, as thoughhe were trying to recall something. But wherever Everett went, some onewas almost sure to look at him with that curious interest, and it hadceased to embarrass or annoy him. Presently the stranger, seemingsatisfied with his observation, leaned back in his seat, half closed hiseyes, and began softly to whistle the Spring Song from _Proserpine_, thecantata that a dozen years before had made its young composer famous in anight. Everett had heard that air on guitars in Old Mexico, on mandolinsat college glees, on cottage organs in New England hamlets, and onlytwo weeks ago he had heard it played on sleigh-bells at a variety theatrein Denver. There was literally no way of escaping his brother'sprecocity. Adriance could live on the other side of the Atlantic, wherehis youthful indiscretions were forgotten in his mature achievements, buthis brother had never been able to outrun _Proserpine_, --and here hefound it again, in the Colorado sand-hills. Not that Everett was exactlyashamed of _Proserpine_; only a man of genius could have written it, butit was the sort of thing that a man of genius outgrows as soon as he can. 

Everett unbent a trifle, and smiled at his neighbour across the aisle. Immediately the large man rose and coming over dropped into the seatfacing Hilgarde, extending his card. 

"Dusty ride, isn't it? I don't mind it myself; I'm used to it. Born andbred in de briar patch, like Br'er Rabbit. I've been trying to place youfor a long time; I think I must have met you before. "

"Thank you, " said Everett, taking the card; "my name is Hilgarde. You'veprobably met my brother, Adriance; people often mistake me for him. "

The travelling-man brought his hand down upon his knee with suchvehemence that the solitaire blazed. 

"So I was right after all, and if you're not Adriance Hilgarde you're hisdouble. I thought I couldn't be mistaken. Seen him? Well, I guess! Inever missed one of his recitals at the Auditorium, and he played thepiano score of _Proserpine_ through to us once at the Chicago Press Club. I used to be on the _Commercial_ there before I began to travel for thepublishing department of the concern. So you're Hilgarde's brother, andhere I've run into you at the jumping-off place. Sounds like a newspaperyarn, doesn't it?"

The travelling-man laughed and offering Everett a cigar plied him withquestions on the only subject that people ever seemed to care to talkto him about. At length the salesman and the two girls alighted at aColorado way station, and Everett went on to Cheyenne alone. 

The train pulled into Cheyenne at nine o'clock, late by a matter of fourhours or so; but no one seemed particularly concerned at its tardinessexcept the station agent, who grumbled at being kept in the office overtime on a summer night. When Everett alighted from the train he walkeddown the platform and stopped at the track crossing, uncertain as to whatdirection he should take to reach a hotel. A phaeton stood near thecrossing and a woman held the reins. She was dressed in white, and herfigure was clearly silhouetted against the cushions, though it was toodark to see her face. Everett had scarcely noticed her, when theswitch-engine came puffing up from the opposite direction, and thehead-light threw a strong glare of light on his face. The woman in thephaeton uttered a low cry and dropped the reins. Everett started forwardand caught the horse's head, but the animal only lifted its ears andwhisked its tail in impatient surprise. The woman sat perfectly still, her head sunk between her shoulders and her handkerchief pressed to herface. Another woman came out of the depot and hurried toward the phaeton, crying, "Katharine, dear, what is the matter?"

Everett hesitated a moment in painful embarrassment, then lifted his hatand passed on. He was accustomed to sudden recognitions in the mostimpossible places, especially from women. 

While he was breakfasting the next morning, the head waiter leaned overhis chair to murmur that there was a gentleman waiting to see him in theparlour. Everett finished his coffee, and went in the directionindicated, where he found his visitor restlessly pacing the floor. Hiswhole manner betrayed a high degree of agitation, though his physique wasnot that of a man whose nerves lie near the surface. He was somethingbelow medium height, square-shouldered and solidly built. His thick, closely cut hair was beginning to show grey about the ears, and hisbronzed face was heavily lined. His square brown hands were locked behindhim, and he held his shoulders like a man conscious of responsibilities, yet, as he turned to greet Everett, there was an incongruous diffidencein his address. 

"Good-morning, Mr. Hilgarde, " he said, extending his hand; "I found yourname on the hotel register. My name is Gaylord. I'm afraid my sisterstartled you at the station last night, and I've come around to explain. "

"Ah! the young lady in the phaeton? I'm sure I didn't know whether I hadanything to do with her alarm or not. If I did, it is I who owe anapology. "

The man coloured a little under the dark brown of his face. 

"Oh, it's nothing you could help, sir, I fully understand that. You see, my sister used to be a pupil of your brother's, and it seems you favourhim; when the switch-engine threw a light on your face, it startled her. "

Everett wheeled about in his chair. "Oh! _Katharine_ Gaylord! Is itpossible! Why, I used to know her when I was a boy. What onearth--"

"Is she doing here?" Gaylord grimly filled out the pause. "You've got atthe heart of the matter. You know my sister had been in bad health for along time?"

"No. The last I knew of her she was singing in London. My brother and Icorrespond infrequently, and seldom get beyond family matters. I amdeeply sorry to hear this. "

The lines in Charley Gaylord's brow relaxed a little. 

"What I'm trying to say, Mr. Hilgarde, is that she wants to see you. She's set on it. We live several miles out of town, but my rig's below, and I can take you out any time you can go. "

"At once, then. I'll get my hat and be with you in a moment. "

When he came downstairs Everett found a cart at the door, and CharleyGaylord drew a long sigh of relief as he gathered up the reins andsettled back into his own element. 

"I think I'd better tell you something about my sister before you seeher, and I don't know just where to begin. She travelled in Europe withyour brother and his wife, and sang at a lot of his concerts; but I don'tknow just how much you know about her. "

"Very little, except that my brother always thought her the most giftedof his pupils. When I knew her she was very young and very beautiful, and quite turned my head for a while. "

Everett saw that Gaylord's mind was entirely taken up by his grief. "That's the whole thing, " he went on, flecking his horses with the whip. 

"She was a great woman, as you say, and she didn't come of a greatfamily. She had to fight her own way from the first. She got to Chicago, and then to New York, and then to Europe, and got a taste for it all; andnow she's dying here like a rat in a hole, out of her own world, and shecan't fall back into ours. We've grown apart, some way--miles and milesapart--and I'm afraid she's fearfully unhappy. "

"It's a tragic story you're telling me, Gaylord, " said Everett. They werewell out into the country now, spinning along over the dusty plains ofred grass, with the ragged blue outline of the mountains before them. 

"Tragic!" cried Gaylord, starting up in his seat, "my God, nobody willever know how tragic! It's a tragedy I live with and eat with and sleepwith, until I've lost my grip on everything. You see she had made a goodbit of money, but she spent it all going to health resorts. It's herlungs. I've got money enough to send her anywhere, but the doctors allsay it's no use. She hasn't the ghost of a chance. It's just gettingthrough the days now. I had no notion she was half so bad before she cameto me. She just wrote that she was run down. Now that she's here, I thinkshe'd be happier anywhere under the sun, but she won't leave. She saysit's easier to let go of life here. There was a time when Iwas a brakeman with a run out of Bird City, Iowa, and she was a littlething I could carry on my shoulder, when I could get her everything onearth she wanted, and she hadn't a wish my $80 a month didn't cover; andnow, when I've got a little property together, I can't buy her a night'ssleep!"

Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord's present status in the worldmight be, he had brought the brakeman's heart up the ladder with him. 

The reins slackened in Gaylord's hand as they drew up before a showilypainted house with many gables and a round tower. "Here we are, " he said, turning to Everett, "and I guess we understand each other. "

They were met at the door by a thin, colourless woman, whom Gaylordintroduced as "My sister, Maggie. " She asked her brother to show Mr. Hilgarde into the music-room, where Katharine would join him. 

When Everett entered the music-room he gave a little start of surprise, feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into someNew York studio that he had always known. He looked incredulously out ofthe window at the grey plain that ended in the great upheaval of theRockies. 

The haunting air of familiarity perplexed him. Suddenly his eye fell upona large photograph of his brother above the piano. Then it all becameclear enough: this was veritably his brother's room. If it were not anexact copy of one of the many studios that Adriance had fitted up invarious parts of the world, wearying of them and leaving almost beforethe renovator's varnish had dried, it was at least in the same tone. Inevery detail Adriance's taste was so manifest that the room seemed toexhale his personality. 

Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord, taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when the flash of hereye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in atumult. Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree ofembarrassment. It was the face of a woman already old in her first youth, a trifle hard, and it told of what her brother had called her fight. The_camaraderie_ of her frank, confident eyes was qualified by the deeplines about her mouth and the curve of the lips, which was both sad andcynical. Certainly she had more good-will than confidence toward theworld. The chief charm of the woman, as Everett had known her, lay inher superb figure and in her eyes, which possessed a warm, life-givingquality like the sunlight; eyes which glowed with a perpetual _salutat_to the world. 

Everett was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him andhis head inclined, when he heard the door open. A tall woman advancedtoward him, holding out her hand. As she started to speak she coughedslightly, then, laughing, said, in a low, rich voice, a trifle husky:"You see I make the traditional Camille entrance. How good of you tocome, Mr. Hilgarde. "

Everett was acutely conscious that while addressing him she was notlooking at him at all, and, as he assured her of his pleasure in coming, he was glad to have an opportunity to collect himself. He had notreckoned upon the ravages of a long illness. The long, loose folds of herwhite gown had been especially designed to conceal the sharp outlines ofher body, but the stamp of her disease was there; simple and ugly andobtrusive, a pitiless fact that could not be disguised or evaded. Thesplendid shoulders were stooped, there was a swaying unevenness in hergait, her arms seemed disproportionately long, and her hands weretransparently white, and cold to the touch. The changes in her face wereless obvious; the proud carriage of the head, the warm, clear eyes, eventhe delicate flush of colour in her cheeks, all defiantly remained, though they were all in a lower key--older, sadder, softer. 

She sat down upon the divan and began nervously to arrange the pillows. "Of course I'm ill, and I look it, but you must be quite frank andsensible about that and get used to it at once, for we've no time tolose. And if I'm a trifle irritable you won't mind?--for I'm more thanusually nervous. "

"Don't bother with me this morning, if you are tired, " urged Everett. "Ican come quite as well tomorrow. "

"Gracious, no!" she protested, with a flash of that quick, keen humourthat he remembered as a part of her. "It's solitude that I'm tired todeath of--solitude and the wrong kind of people. You see, the ministercalled on me this morning. He happened to be riding by on his bicycle andfelt it his duty to stop. The funniest feature of his conversation isthat he is always excusing my own profession to me. But how we are losingtime! Do tell me about New York; Charley says you're just on from there. How does it look and taste and smell just now? I think a whiff of theJersey ferry would be as flagons of cod-liver oil to me. Are the treesstill green in Madison Square, or have they grown brown and dusty? Doesthe chaste Diana still keep her vows through all the exasperating changesof weather? Who has your brother's old studio now, and what misguidedaspirants practise their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall?What do people go to see at the theatres, and what do they eat and drinkin the world nowadays? Oh, let me die in Harlem!" she was interrupted bya violent attack of coughing, and Everett, embarrassed by her discomfort, plunged into gossip about the professional people he had met in townduring the summer, and the musical outlook for the winter. He wasdiagramming with his pencil some new mechanical device to be used at theMetropolitan in the production of the _Rheingold_, when he becameconscious that she was looking at him intently, and that he was talkingto the four walls. 

Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him throughhalf-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture. He finished hisexplanation vaguely enough and put the pencil back in his pocket. As hedid so, she said, quietly: "How wonderfully like Adriance you are!"

He laughed, looking up at her with a touch of pride in his eyes that madethem seem quite boyish. "Yes, isn't it absurd? It's almost as awkwardas looking like Napoleon--But, after all, there are some advantages. Ithas made some of his friends like me, and I hope it will make you. "

Katharine gave him a quick, meaning glance from under her lashes. "Oh, itdid that long ago. What a haughty, reserved youth you were then, and howyou used to stare at people, and then blush and look cross. Do youremember that night you took me home from a rehearsal, and scarcely spokea word to me?"

"It was the silence of admiration, " protested Everett, "very crude andboyish, but certainly sincere. Perhaps you suspected something of thesort?"

"I believe I suspected a pose; the one that boys often affect withsingers. But it rather surprised me in you, for you must have seen a gooddeal of your brother's pupils. " Everett shook his head. "I saw mybrother's pupils come and go. Sometimes I was called on to playaccompaniments, or to fill out a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order acarriage for an infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part. But theynever spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblanceyou speak of. "

"Yes, " observed Katharine, thoughtfully, "I noticed it then, too; but ithas grown as you have grown older. That is rather strange, when you havelived such different lives. It's not merely an ordinary family likenessof features, you know, but the suggestion of the other man's personalityin your face--like an air transposed to another key. But I'm notattempting to define it; it's beyond me; something altogether unusual anda trifle--well, uncanny, " she finished, laughing. 

Everett sat looking out under the red window-blind which was raised justa little. As it swung back and forth in the wind it revealed the glaringpanorama of the desert--a blinding stretch of yellow, flat as the sea indead calm, splotched here and there with deep purple shadows; and, beyond, the ragged blue outline of the mountains and the peaks of snow, white as the white clouds. "I remember, when I was a child I used to bevery sensitive about it. I don't think it exactly displeased me, or thatI would have had it otherwise, but it seemed like a birthmark, orsomething not to be lightly spoken of. It came into even my relationswith my mother. Ad went abroad to study when he was very young, andmother was all broken up over it. She did her whole duty by each ofus, but it was generally understood among us that she'd have madeburnt-offerings of us all for him any day. I was a little fellow then, and when she sat alone on the porch on summer evenings, she usedsometimes to call me to her and turn my face up in the light thatstreamed out through the shutters and kiss me, and then I always knew shewas thinking of Adriance. "

"Poor little chap, " said Katharine, in her husky voice. "How fond peoplehave always been of Adriance! Tell me the latest news of him. I haven'theard, except through the press, for a year or more. He was in Algiersthen, in the valley of the Chelif, riding horseback, and he had quitemade up his mind to adopt the Mahometan faith and become an Arab. Howmany countries and faiths has he adopted, I wonder?"

"Oh, that's Adriance, " chuckled Everett. "He is himself barely longenough to write checks and be measured for his clothes. I didn't hearfrom him while he was an Arab; I missed that. "

"He was writing an Algerian _suite_ for the piano then; it must be in thepublisher's hands by this time. I have been too ill to answer his letter, and have lost touch with him. "

Everett drew an envelope from his pocket. "This came a month ago. Read itat your leisure. "

"Thanks. I shall keep it as a hostage. Now I want you to play for me. Whatever you like; but if there is anything new in the world, in mercylet me hear it. "

He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him, absorbed in hisremarkable physical likeness to his brother, and trying to discover injust what it consisted. He was of a larger build than Adriance, and muchheavier. His face was of the same oval mould, but it was grey, anddarkened about the mouth by continual shaving. His eyes were of the sameinconstant April colour, but they were reflective and rather dull; whileAdriance's were always points of high light, and always meaning anotherthing than the thing they meant yesterday. It was hard to see why thisearnest man should so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face, asgay as his was grave. For Adriance, though he was ten years the elder, and though his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy oftwenty, so mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them intowords. A contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal methods andof her affections, once said that the shepherd-boys who sang in the Valeof Tempe must certainly have looked like young Hilgarde. 

Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the Inter-Ocean House that night, the victim of mournful recollections. His infatuation for KatharineGaylord, visionary as it was, had been the most serious of his boyishlove-affairs. The fact that it was all so done and dead and far behindhim, and that the woman had lived her life out since then, gave him anoppressive sense of age and loss. 

He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his stay at hisbrother's studio when Katharine Gaylord was working there, and how he hadwounded Adriance on the night of his last concert in New York. He had satthere in the box--while his brother and Katherine were called back againand again, and the flowers went up over the footlights until they werestacked half as high as the piano--brooding in his sullen boy's heartupon the pride those two felt in each other's work--spurring each otherto their best and beautifully contending in song. The footlights hadseemed a hard, glittering line drawn sharply between their life and his. He walked back to his hotel alone, and sat in his window staring out onMadison Square until long after midnight, resolved to beat no more atdoors that he could never enter. 

 * * * * *

Everett's week in Cheyenne stretched to three, and he saw no prospect ofrelease except through the thing he dreaded. The bright, windy days ofthe Wyoming autumn passed swiftly. Letters and telegrams came urging himto hasten his trip to the coast, but he resolutely postponed his businessengagements. The mornings he spent on one of Charley Gaylord's ponies, orfishing in the mountains. In the afternoon he was usually at his post ofduty. Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive notions aboutthe sort of parts we are fitted to play. The scene changes and thecompensation varies, but in the end we usually find that we have playedthe same class of business from first to last. Everett had been astop-gap all his life. He remembered going through a looking-glasslabyrinth when he was a boy, and trying gallery after gallery, only atevery turn to bump his nose against his own face--which, indeed, was nothis own, but his brother's. No matter what his mission, east or west, byland or sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother'sbusiness, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the shiningcurrent of Adriance Hilgarde's. It was not the first time that his dutyhad been to comfort, as best he could, one of the broken things hisbrother's imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten. He made noattempt to analyse the situation or to state it in exact terms; but heaccepted it as a commission from his brother to help this woman to die. Day by day he felt her need for him grow more acute and positive; and dayby day he felt that in his peculiar relation to her, his ownindividuality played a smaller part. His power to minister to her comfortlay solely in his link with his brother's life. He knew that she sat byhim always watching for some trick of gesture, some familiar play ofexpression, some illusion of light and shadow, in which he should seemwholly Adriance. He knew that she lived upon this, and that in theexhaustion which followed this turmoil of her dying senses, she sleptdeep and sweet, and dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain oldFlorentine garden, and not of bitterness and death. 

A few days after his first meeting with Katharine Gaylord, he had cabledhis brother to write her. He merely said that she was mortally ill;he could depend on Adriance to say the right thing--that was a part ofhis gift. Adriance always said not only the right thing, but theopportune, graceful, exquisite thing. He caught the lyric essence of themoment, the poetic suggestion of every situation. Moreover, he usuallydid the right thing, --except, when he did very cruel things--bent uponmaking people happy when their existence touched his, just as he insistedthat his material environment should be beautiful; lavishing upon thosenear him all the warmth and radiance of his rich nature, all the homageof the poet and troubadour, and, when they were no longer near, forgetting--for that also was a part of Adriance's gift. 

Three weeks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made his daily callat the gaily painted ranch-house, he found Katharine laughing like agirl. "Have you ever thought, " she said, as he entered the music-room, "how much these séances of ours are like Heine's 'Florentine Nights, 'except that I don't give you an opportunity to monopolize theconversation?" She held his hand longer than usual as she greeted him. "You are the kindest man living, the kindest, " she added, softly. 

Everett's grey face coloured faintly as he drew his hand away, for hefelt that this time she was looking at him, and not at a whimsicalcaricature of his brother. 

She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between the leaves of abook and held it out, smiling. "You got him to write it. Don't say youdidn't, for it came direct, you see, and the last address I gave him wasa place in Florida. This deed shall be remembered of you when I am withthe just in Paradise. But one thing you did not ask him to do, for youdidn't know about it. He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata, andyou are to play it for me directly. But first for the letter; I think youwould better read it aloud to me. "

Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window-seat in which shereclined with a barricade of pillows behind her. He opened the letter, his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw to his satisfaction thatit was a long one; wonderfully tactful and tender, even for Adriance, whowas tender with his valet and his stable-boy, with his old gondolier andthe beggar-women who prayed to the saints for him. 

The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he sat by thefountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa. The air was heavy with the warmfragrance of the South and full of the sound of splashing, running water, as it had been in a certain old garden in Florence, long ago. The skywas one great turquoise, heated until it glowed. The wonderful Moorisharches threw graceful blue shadows all about him. He had sketched anoutline of them on the margin of his note-paper. The letter was full ofconfidences about his work, and delicate allusions to their old happydays of study and comradeship. 

As Everett folded it he felt that Adriance had divined the thing neededand had risen to it in his own wonderful way. The letter was consistentlyegotistical, and seemed to him even a trifle patronizing, yet it was justwhat she had wanted. A strong realization of his brother's charm andintensity and power came over him; he felt the breath of that whirlwindof flame in which Adriance passed, consuming all in his path, and himselfeven more resolutely than he consumed others. Then he looked down at thiswhite, burnt-out brand that lay before him. 

"Like him, isn't it?" she said, quietly. "I think I can scarcely answerhis letter, but when you see him next you can do that for me. I wantyou to tell him many things for me, yet they can all be summed up inthis: I want him to grow wholly into his best and greatest self, even atthe cost of what is half his charm to you and me. Do you understand me?"

"I know perfectly well what you mean, " answered Everett, thoughtfully. "And yet it's difficult to prescribe for those fellows; so little makes, so little mars. "

Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face flushed withfeverish earnestness. "Ah, but it is the waste of himself that I mean;his lashing himself out on stupid and uncomprehending people until theytake him at their own estimate. "

"Come, come, " expostulated Everett, now alarmed at her excitement. "Whereis the new sonata? Let him speak for himself. "

He sat down at the piano and began playing the first movement, which wasindeed the voice of Adriance, his proper speech. The sonata was the mostambitious work he had done up to that time, and marked the transitionfrom his early lyric vein to a deeper and nobler style. Everett playedintelligently and with that sympathetic comprehension which seemspeculiar to a certain lovable class of men who never accomplish anythingin particular. When he had finished he turned to Katharine. 

"How he has grown!" she cried. "What the three last years have done forhim! He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but this is thetragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats called hell. This is mytragedy, as I lie here, listening to the feet of the runners as they passme--ah, God! the swift feet of the runners!"

She turned her face away and covered it with her hands. Everett crossedover to her and knelt beside her. In all the days he had known her shehad never before, beyond an occasional ironical jest, given voice to thebitterness of her own defeat. Her courage had become a point of pridewith him. 

"Don't do it, " he gasped. "I can't stand it, I really can't, I feel ittoo much. "

When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old, brave, cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could not shed. "No, I won't; I will save that for the night, when I have no better company. Run over that theme at the beginning again, will you? It was running inhis head when we were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on hisglass at the dinner-table. He had just begun to work it out when the lateautumn came on, and he decided to go to Florence for the winter. He losttouch with his idea, I suppose, during his illness. Do you remember thosefrightful days? All the people who have loved him are not strong enoughto save him from himself! When I got word from Florence that he had beenill, I was singing at Monte Carlo. His wife was hurrying to him fromParis, but I reached him first. I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm. They had taken an old palace there for the winter, and I found him in thelibrary--a long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furnitureand bronzes. He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room, looking, oh, so worn and pale!--as he always does when he is ill, youknow. Ah, it is so good that you _do_ know! Even his red smoking-jacketlent no colour to his face. His first words were not to tell me how illhe had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put thelast strokes to the score of his _'Souvenirs d' Automne, '_ and he was asI most like to remember him; calm and happy, and tired with that heavenlytiredness that comes after a good work done at last. Outside, the rainpoured down in torrents, and the wind moaned and sobbed in the gardenand about the walls of that desolated old palace. How that night comesback to me! There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire. Itglowed on the black walls and floor like the reflection of purgatorialflame. Beyond us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all. Adriancesat staring at the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eyes, and of all the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up onesuch life as his. Somehow the wind with all its world-pain had got intothe room, and the cold rain was in our eyes, and the wave came up in bothof us at once--that awful vague, universal pain, that cold fear of lifeand death and God and hope--and we were like two clinging together on aspar in mid-ocean after the shipwreck of everything. Then we heard thefront door open with a great gust of wind that shook even the walls, andthe servants came running with lights, announcing that Madame hadreturned, '_and in the book we read no more that night_. '"

She gave the old line with a certain bitter humour, and with the hard, bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her weakness as in aglittering garment. That ironical smile, worn through so many years, hadgradually changed the lines of her face, and when she looked in themirror she saw not herself, but the scathing critic, the amused observerand satirist of herself. 

Everett dropped his head upon his hand. "How much you have cared!" hesaid. 

"Ah, yes, I cared, " she replied, closing her eyes. "You can't imaginewhat a comfort it is to have you know how I cared, what a relief it is tobe able to tell it to some one. "

Everett continued to look helplessly at the floor. "I was not sure howmuch you wanted me to know, " he said. 

"Oh, I intended you should know from the first time I looked into yourface, when you came that day with Charley. You are so like him, that itis almost like telling him himself. At least, I feel now that he willknow some day, and then I will be quite sacred from his compassion. "

"And has he never known at all?" asked Everett, in a thick voice. 

"Oh! never at all in the way that you mean. Of course, he is accustomedto looking into the eyes of women and finding love there; when he doesn'tfind it there he thinks he must have been guilty of some discourtesy. Hehas a genuine fondness for every woman who is not stupid or gloomy, orold or preternaturally ugly. I shared with the rest; shared the smilesand the gallantries and the droll little sermons. It was quite like aSunday-school picnic; we wore our best clothes and a smile and took ourturns. It was his kindness that was hardest. "

"Don't; you'll make me hate him, " groaned Everett. 

Katherine laughed and began to play nervously with her fan. "It wasn't inthe slightest degree his fault; that is the most grotesque part of it. Why, it had really begun before I ever met him. I fought my way to him, and I drank my doom greedily enough. "

Everett rose and stood hesitating. "I think I must go. You ought to bequiet, and I don't think I can hear any more just now. "

She put out her hand and took his playfully. 

"You've put in three weeks at this sort of thing, haven't you? Well, itought to square accounts for a much worse life than yours will ever be. "

He knelt beside her, saying, brokenly: "I stayed because I wanted to bewith you, that's all. I have never cared about other women since Iknew you in New York when I was a lad. You are a part of my destiny, andI could not leave you if I would. "

She put her hands on his shoulders and shook her head. "No, no; don'ttell me that. I have seen enough tragedy. It was only a boy's fancy, and your divine pity and my utter pitiableness have recalled it for amoment. One does not love the dying, dear friend. Now go, and you willcome again tomorrow, as long as there are tomorrows. " She took his handwith a smile that was both courage and despair, and full of infiniteloyalty and tenderness, as she said softly:

_"For ever and for ever, farewell, Cassius;If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;If not, why then, this parting was well made. "_

The courage in her eyes was like the clear light of a star to him as hewent out. 

On the night of Adriance Hilgarde's opening concert in Paris, Everett satby the bed in the ranch-house in Wyoming, watching over the last battlethat we have with the flesh before we are done with it and free of it forever. At times it seemed that the serene soul of her must have leftalready and found some refuge from the storm, and only the tenaciousanimal life were left to do battle with death. She laboured under adelusion at once pitiful and merciful, thinking that she was in thePullman on her way to New York, going back to her life and her work. Whenshe roused from her stupor, it was only to ask the porter to waken herhalf an hour out of Jersey City, or to remonstrate about the delays andthe roughness of the road. At midnight Everett and the nurse were leftalone with her. Poor Charley Gaylord had lain down on a couch outside thedoor. Everett sat looking at the sputtering night-lamp until it made hiseyes ache. His head dropped forward, and he sank into heavy, distressfulslumber. He was dreaming of Adriance's concert in Paris, and ofAdriance, the troubadour. He heard the applause and he saw the flowersgoing up over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as thepiano, and the petals fell and scattered, making crimson splotches on thefloor. Down this crimson pathway came Adriance with his youthful step, leading his singer by the hand; a dark woman this time, with Spanisheyes. 

The nurse touched him on the shoulder, he started and awoke. She screenedthe lamp with her hand. Everett saw that Katharine was awake andconscious, and struggling a little. He lifted her gently on his arm andbegan to fan her. She looked into his face with eyes that seemed never tohave wept or doubted. "Ah, dear Adriance, dear, dear!" she whispered. 

Everett went to call her brother, but when they came back the madness ofart was over for Katharine. 

Two days later Everett was pacing the station siding, waiting for thewest-bound train. Charley Gaylord walked beside him, but the two men hadnothing to say to each other. Everett's bags were piled on the truck, andhis step was hurried and his eyes were full of impatience, as he gazedagain and again up the track, watching for the train. Gaylord'simpatience was not less than his own; these two, who had grown so close, had now become painful and impossible to each other, and longed for thewrench of farewell. 

As the train pulled in, Everett wrung Gaylord's hand among the crowd ofalighting passengers. The people of a German opera company, _en route_for the coast, rushed by them in frantic haste to snatch their breakfastduring the stop. Everett heard an exclamation, and a stout woman rushedup to him, glowing with joyful surprise and caught his coat-sleeve withher tightly gloved hands. 

"_Herr Gott_, Adriance, _lieber Freund_, " she cried. 

Everett lifted his hat, blushing. "Pardon me, madame, I see that you havemistaken me for Adriance Hilgarde. I am his brother. " Turning from thecrestfallen singer he hurried into the car.