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Title: The Wheel of Life

Author: Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

Release Date: January 15, 2005  [eBook #14696]

Language: English

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THE WHEEL OF LIFE

by

ELLEN GLASGOW

New York
Doubleday, Page & Company

1906







By the Same Author

   THE DELIVERANCE
   THE BATTLE-GROUND
   THE FREEMAN, AND OTHER POEMS
   THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
   PHASES OF AN INFERIOR PLANET
   THE DESCENDANT




CONTENTS


PART I. Impulse

CHAPTER
   I. In Which the Romantic Hero is Conspicuous by His Absence
  II. Treats of an Eccentric Family
 III. Apologises for an Old-fashioned Atmosphere
  IV. Ushers in the Modern Spirit
   V. In Which a Young Man Dreams Dreams
  VI. Shows That Mr. Worldly-Wise-Man May Belong to Either Sex
 VII. The Irresistible Force
VIII. Proves That a Poor Lover May Make an Excellent Friend
  IX. Of Masques and Mummeries
   X. Shows the Hero to Be Lacking in Heroic Qualities
  XI. In Which a Lie Is the Better Part of Truth


PART II. Illusion

   I. Of Pleasure as the Chief End of Man
  II. An Advance and a Retreat
 III. The Moth and the Flame
  IV. Treats of the Attraction of Opposites
   V. Shows the Dangers as Well as the Pleasures of the Chase
  VI. The Finer Vision
 VII. In Which Failure Is Crowned By Failure
VIII. "The Small Old Path"
  IX. The Triumph of the Ego
   X. In Which Adams Comes Into His Inheritance
  XI. On the Wings of Life


PART III. Disenchantment

   I. A Disconsolate Lover and a Pair of Blue Eyes
  II. The Deification of Clay
 III. The Greatest of These
  IV. Adams Watches in the Night and Sees the Dawn
   V. Treats of the Poverty of Riches
  VI. The Feet of the God
 VII. In Which Kemper Is Puzzled
VIII. Shows That Love Without Wisdom Is Folly
  IX. Of the Fear in Love
   X. The End of the Path


PART IV. Reconciliation

   I. The Secret Chambers
  II. In Which Laura Enters the Valley of Humiliation
 III. Proves a Great City to Be a Great Solitude
  IV. Shows That True Love Is True Service
   V. Between Laura and Gerty
  VI. Renewal





PART I


IMPULSE




CHAPTER I

IN WHICH THE ROMANTIC HERO IS CONSPICUOUS BY HIS ABSENCE


As the light fell on her face Gerty Bridewell awoke, stifled a yawn with
her pillow, and remembered that she had been very unhappy when she went
to bed. That was only six hours ago, and yet she felt now that her
unhappiness and the object of it, which was her husband, were of less
disturbing importance to her than the fact that she must get up and
stand for three minutes under the shower bath in her dressing-room. With
a sigh she pressed the pillow more firmly under her cheek, and lay
looking a little wistfully at her maid, who, having drawn back the
curtains at the window, stood now regarding her with the discreet and
confidential smile which drew from her a protesting frown of irritation.

"Well, I can't get up until I've had my coffee," she said in a voice
which produced an effect of mournful brightness rather than of anger, "I
haven't the strength to put so much as my foot out of bed."

Her eyes followed the woman across the room and through the door, and
then, turning instinctively to the broad mirror above her dressing
table, hung critically upon the brilliant red and white reflection in
the glass. It was her comforting assurance that every woman looked her
best in bed; and as she lay now, following the lines of her charming
figure beneath the satin coverlet, she found herself wondering, not
without resentment, why the possession of a beauty so conspicuous should
afford her only a slight and temporary satisfaction. Last week a woman
whom she knew had had her nose broken in an automobile accident, and as
she remembered this it seemed to her that the mere fact of her
undisfigured features was sufficient to be the cause of joyful
gratitude. But this, she knew, was not so, for her face was perfectly
unharmed; and yet she felt that she could hardly have been more
miserable, even with a broken nose.

Here she paused for an instant in order to establish herself securely in
her argument, for, though she could by no stretch of the imagination
regard her mind as of a meditative cast, there are hours when even to
the most flippant experience wears the borrowed mantle of philosophy.
Abstract theories of conduct diverted her but little; what she wanted
was some practical explanation of the mental weariness she felt. What
she wanted, she repeated, as if to drive in the matter with a final
blow, was to be as happy in the actual condition as she had told herself
that she might be when as yet the actual was only the ideal. Why, for
instance, when she had been wretched with but one man on the box, should
the addition of a second livery fail to produce in her the contentment
of which she had often dreamed while she disconsolately regarded a
single pair of shoulders? That happiness did not masquerade in livery
she had learned since she had triumphantly married the richest man she
knew, and the admission of this brought her almost with a jump to the
bitter conclusion of her unanswerable logic--for the satisfaction which
was not to be found in a footman was absent as well from the imposing
figure of Perry Bridewell himself. Yet she told herself that she would
have married him had he possessed merely the historical penny, and the
restless infatuation of those first months was still sufficiently alive
to lend the colour of its pleasing torment to her existence.

Lying there, in her French embroidered night dress, with her brilliant
red hair pushed back from her forehead, she began idly to follow the
histories of the people whom she knew, and it seemed to her that each of
them was in some particular circumstance more fortunate than she. But
she would have changed place with none, not even with her best friend,
Laura Wilde, who was perfectly content because she lived buried away in
Gramercy Park and wrote vague beautiful verse that nobody ever read.
Laura filled as little part in what she called "the world" as Gramercy
Park occupied in modern progress, yet it was not without a faint impulse
of envy that Gerty recalled now the grave old house mantled in brown
creepers and the cheerful firelit room in which Laura lived. The peace
which she had missed in the thought of her husband came back to her with
the first recollection of her friend, and her hard bright eyes softened
a little while she dwelt on the vivid face of the woman to whom she
clung because of her very unlikeness to herself. Gradually out of the
mist of her unhappiness the figure of Laura rose in the mirror before
her, and she saw clearly her large white forehead under the dark
wing-like waves of hair, the singular intentness of her eyes, and the
rapt expectancy of look in which her features were lost as in a general
vagueness of light.

Though it was twenty years since she had first seen Laura Wilde as a
child of ten, the meeting came to her suddenly with all the bright
clearness of an incident of yesterday. She remembered herself as a weak,
bedraggled little girl, in wet slippers, who was led by a careless nurse
to a strange German school; and she felt again the agony of curiosity
with which, after the first blank wonder was over, she had stared at the
children who hung whispering together in the centre of the room. As she
looked a panic terror seized her like a wild beast, and she threw up her
hands and turned to rush away to the reassuring presence of grown up
creatures, when from the midst of the whispering group a little dark
girl, in an ugly brown frock, ran up to her and folded her in her arms.

"I shall love you best of all because you are so beautiful," said the
little dark girl, "and I will do all your sums and even eat your sausage
for you." Then she had kissed her and brought her to the stove and knelt
down on the floor to take off her wet slippers. To this day Gerty had
always thought of her friend as the little girl who had shut her eyes
and gulped down those terrible sausages for her behind her teacher's
back.

The maid brought the coffee, and while she sat up to drink it the door
of her husband's dressing-room opened and he came in and stood, large,
florid and impressive, beside her bed.

"I'm afraid I shan't get back to luncheon," he remarked, as he settled
his ample, carefully groomed body in his clothes with a comfortable
shake, "there's a chap from the country Pierce has sent to me with a
letter and I'll be obliged to feed him at the club, but--to tell the
truth--there's so little one can get really fit at this season."

To a man for whom the pleasures of the table represented the larger
share of his daily enjoyment, this was a question not without a serious
importance of its own; and while he paused to settle it he stood,
squaring his chest, with an expression of decided annoyance on his
handsome, good-humored face. Then, having made a satisfactory choice of
dishes, his features recovered their usual look of genial contentment,
and he felt carelessly in his pocket for the letter which he presently
produced and laid on Gerty's pillow. His life had corresponded so evenly
with his bodily impulses that the perfection of the adjustment had
produced in him the amiable exterior of an animal that is never crossed.
It was a case in which supreme selfishness exerted the effect of
personality.

Leaving the letter where he had placed it, Gerty sat sipping her coffee
while she looked up at him with the candid cynicism which lent a piquant
charm to the almost doll-like regularity of her features.

"You did not get three hours sleep and yet you're so fresh you smell of
soap," she observed as an indignant protest, "while I've had six and I'm
still too tired to move."

"Oh, I'm all right--I never let myself get seedy," returned Perry, with
his loud though pleasant laugh. "That's the mistake all you women
make."

Half closing her eyes Gerty leaned back and surveyed him with a curious
detachment--almost as if he were an important piece of architecture
which she had been recommended to admire and to which she was patiently
trying in vain to adjust her baffled vision. The smaller she screwed her
gaze the more remotely magnificent loomed his proportions.

"How you manage it is more than I can understand," she said.

Perry stared for a moment in an amiable vacancy at the coffee pot. Then
she watched the animation move feebly in his face, while he pulled at
his short fair moustache with a characteristic masculine gesture.
Physically, she admitted, he had never appeared to a better advantage in
her eyes.

"By the way, I had a game of billiards with Kemper and we talked pretty
late," he said, as if evolving the explanation for which she had not
asked. "He got back from Europe yesterday you know."

"He did?" Her indifferent gaiety played like harmless lightning around
his massive bulk. "Then we may presume, I suppose, on Madame Alta for
the opera season?"

He met the question with an admiring chuckle. "Do you really mean you
think he's been abroad with her all this time?"

"Well, what else did he get his divorce for?" she demanded, with the
utter disillusion of knowledge which she had found to be her most
effective pose.

Perry's chuckle swelled suddenly into a roar. "Good Lord, how women
talk!" he burst out. "Why, Arnold has been divorced ten years and he
never laid eyes on Jennie Alta till she sang over here three years ago.
There was nothing in it except that he liked to be seen with a
celebrity--most men do. But, my dear girl," he concluded in a kind of
awful reverence, "what a tongue you've got. It's a jolly good thing for
me that I'm your husband or you wouldn't leave me a blessed patch of
reputation to my back."

His humor held him convulsed for several minutes, during which interval
Gerty continued to regard him with her piquant cynicism.

"Well, if it wasn't Madame Alta it was somebody who is voiceless," she
retorted coolly. "I merely meant that there must have been a reason."

"Oh, your 'reasons'!" ejaculated Perry. Then he stooped and gave the
letter lying on Gerty's pillow a filip from his large pink forefinger.
"You haven't told me what you think of this?" he said.

Picking up the letter Gerty unfolded it and read it slowly through from
start to finish, the little ripple of sceptical amusement crossing and
recrossing her parted lips,

     RAVENS NEST,
     Fauquier County, Virginia,
     December 26, 19--.

     _My Dear Perry_: Nobody, of course, ever accused you of being
     literary, nor, thank Heaven, have I fallen under that
     aspersion--but since the shortest road to success seems to be by
     circumvention, it has occurred to me that you might give a social
     shove or two to the chap who will hand you this letter sometime
     after the New Year.

     His name is St. George Trent, he was born a little way up the
     turnpike from me, has an enchanting mother, and shows symptoms of
     being already inoculated with the literary plague. I never read
     books, so I have no sense of comparative values in literature, and
     consequently can't tell whether he is an inglorious Shakespeare or
     a subject for the daily press. His mother assures me that he has
     already written a play worthy to stand beside Hamlet--but, though
     she is a charming lady, I'm hardly convinced by her opinion. The
     fact remains, however, that he is going to New York to become a
     playwright, and that he has two idols in the market place which, I
     fancy, you may be predestined to see demolished. He is simply off
     his head to meet Roger Adams, the editor of _The_--something or
     other I never heard of--and--remember your budding days and be
     charitable--a lady who writes poems and signs herself Laura Wilde.
     I prepared him for the inevitable catastrophe by assuring him that
     the harmless Mr. Adams eats with his knife, and that the lady, as
     she writes books, isn't worth much at love-making--the purpose for
     which woman was created by God and cultivated by man. Alas, though,
     the young are a people of great faith!

     Commend me to Mrs. Bridewell, whom I haven't seen since I had the
     honour of assisting at the wedding.

     Yours ever,
            BEVERLY PIERCE.

As she finished her reading, Gerty broke into a laugh and carelessly
threw the letter aside on the blue satin quilt.

"I'm glad to hear that somebody has read Laura's poems," she observed.

"But what in thunder am I to do with the chap?" enquired Perry. "God
knows I don't go in for literature, and that's all he's good for I dare
say."

"Oh, well, he can eat, I guess," commented Gerty, with consoling irony.

"I've asked Roger Adams to luncheon," pursued Perry, too concerned to
resent her lack of sympathy, "but there are nine chances to one that he
will stay away."

"Experience has taught me," rejoined Gerty sweetly, "that your friend
Adams can be absolutely counted on to stay away. Do you know," she
resumed after a moment's thought, "that, though he's probably the
brainiest man of our acquaintance, I sometimes seriously wonder what you
see in him."

A flush of anger darkened Perry's clear skin, and this sudden change
gave him an almost brutal look. "I'd like to know if I'm a blamed fool?"
he demanded.

Her merriment struck pleasantly on his ears.

"Do you want to destroy the illusion in which I married you?" she asked.
"It was, after all, simply the belief that size is virtue."

The flush passed, and he took in a full breath which expanded his broad
chest. "Well, I'm big enough," he answered, "but it isn't Adam's fault
that he hasn't got my muscle."

With a leisurely glance in the mirror, he settled his necktie in place,
twisted the short ends of his moustache, and then stooped to kiss his
wife before going out.

"Don't you let yourself get seedy and lose your looks," he said as he
left the room.

When he had gone she made a sudden ineffectual effort to rise from bed;
then as if oppressed by a fatigue that was moral rather than physical,
she fell back again and turned her face wearily from the mirror. So the
morning slipped away, the luncheon hour came and went, and it was not
until the afternoon that she gathered energy to dress herself and begin
anew the inevitable and agonising pursuit of pleasure. The temptation of
the morning had been to let go--to relax in despair from the
fruitlessness of her endeavor--and the result of this brief withdrawal
was apparent in the order which she gave the footman before the open
door of her carriage.

"To Miss Wilde's first"--the words ended abruptly and she turned
eagerly, with outstretched hand, to a man who had hurried toward her
from the corner of Fifth Avenue.

"So you haven't forgotten me in six months, Arnold," she said, with a
sweetness in which there was an almost imperceptible tone of bitterness.

He took her hand in both of his, pressing it for an instant in a quick
muscular grasp which had in it something of the nervous vigor that lent
a peculiar vibrant quality to his voice.

"And I couldn't have done it in six years," he replied, as a singularly
charming smile illumined his forcible rather than regular features, and
brought out the genial irony in his expressive light gray eyes. "If I'd
gone to Europe to forget you it would have been time thrown away, but I
had something better on my hands than that--I've been buying French
racing automobiles--"

As he finished he gave an impatient jerk to the carriage door, a
movement which, like all his gestures, sprang from the nervous energy
that found its outlet in the magnetism of his personality. People
sometimes said that he resembled Perry Bridewell, who was, in fact, his
distant cousin, but the likeness consisted solely in a certain evident
possession of virile power--a quality which women are accustomed to
describe as masculine. He was not tall, and yet he gave an impression of
bigness; away from him one invariably thought of him as of unusual
proportions, but, standing by his side, he was found to be hardly above
the ordinary height. The development of his closely knit figure, the
splendid breadth of his chest and shoulders, the slight projection of
his heavy brows and the almost brutal strength of his jaw and chin, all
combined to emphasise that appearance of ardent vitality which has
appealed so strongly to the imagination of women. Seen in repose there
was a faint suggestion of cruelty in the lines of his mouth under his
short brown moustache, but this instead of detracting from the charm he
exercised only threw into greater relief the genial brightness of his
smile.

Now Gerty, glancing up at him, remembered a little curiously, the
whispered reason for his long absence. There was always a woman in the
wind when it blew rumours of Kemper, though he was generally considered
to regard the sex with the blithe indifference of a man to whom feminine
favour has come easily. How easily Gerty had sometimes wondered, though
she had hardly ventured so much as a dim surmise. Ten years, she would
have said, was a considerable period from which to date a passion, and
she remembered now that ten years ago Kemper had secured a divorce from
his wife in some Western court. There had been no particular scandal, no
damning charges on either side; and a club wit had remarked at the time
that the only possible ground for a separation was the fact that Mrs.
Kemper had grown jealous of her husband's after-dinner cigar. Since then
other and varied rumours had reached Gerty's ears, until finally there
had blown a veritable gale concerning a certain Madame Alta, who sang
melting soprano parts in Italian opera. Then this, too, had passed,
and, with the short memory of city livers, Gerty had forgotten alike the
gossip and the heroines of the gossip, until she noted now the lines of
deeper harassment in Kemper's face. These coming so suddenly after six
months of Europe caused her to wonder if the affair with the prima donna
had been really an entanglement of the heart.

"Well, I may not be as fast as an automobile," she presently admitted.

"But you're twice as dangerous," he retorted gaily.

For an instant the pleasant humour in his eyes held her speechless.

"Ah, well, you aren't a coward," she answered coolly enough at last.
Then her tone changed, and as she settled herself under her fur rugs she
made a cordial inviting gesture. "Come in with me and I'll take you to
Laura Wilde's," she said; "she's a genius, and you ought to know her
before the world finds her out."

With a protesting laugh Kemper held up his gloved finger.

"God forbid!" he exclaimed with a shrug which struck her as a slightly
foreign affectation. "The lady may be a female Milton, but Perry tells
me that she isn't pretty."

He touched her hand again, met her indignant defence of Laura with a nod
of smiling irony, and then, as her carriage started, he turned rapidly
down Sixty-ninth Street in the direction of the Park.

In Gerty the chance meeting had awakened a slumbering interest which she
had half forgotten, and as she drove down Fifth Avenue toward Laura's
distant home she found herself wondering idly if he would let many days
go by before he came again. The thought was still in her mind when the
carriage turned into Gramercy Park and stopped before the old brown
house hidden in creepers in which Laura lived. So changed by this time,
however, was Gerty's mood that, after leaving her carriage, she stood
hesitating from indecision upon the sidewalk. The few bared trees in the
snow, the solemn, almost ghostly, quiet of the quaint old houses and the
deserted streets, in which a flock of sparrows quarrelled under the
faint sunshine, produced in her an odd and almost mysterious sense of
unreality--as if the place, herself, the waiting carriage, and Laura
buried away in the dull brown house, were all creations of some gossamer
and dream-like quality of mind. She felt suddenly that the sorrows which
had oppressed her in the morning belonged no more to any existence in
which she herself had a part. Then, looking up, she saw her husband
crossing the street between the two men with whom he had lunched, and
even the impressive solidity of Perry Bridewell appeared to her
strangely altered and out of place.

He came up, a little breathless from his rapid walk, and it was a minute
before he could summon voice to introduce the cheerful, fresh-coloured
youth on his right hand.

"I've already told Mrs. Bridewell about you, Mr. Trent," he said at
last, "but I'm willing to confess that I haven't told her half the
truth."

Gerty met Trent's embarrassed glance with the protecting smile with
which she favoured the young who combined his sex with his attractions.
Then, when he was quite at ease again, she turned to speak to Roger
Adams, for whom, in spite, as she laughingly said, of the distinction
between a bookworm and a butterfly, she was accustomed to admit a more
than ordinary liking.

He was a gaunt, scholarly looking man of forty years, with broad,
singularly bony shoulders, an expression of kindly humour, and a plain,
strong face upon which suffering had left its indelible suggestion of
defeated physical purpose. Nothing about him was impressive, nothing
even arresting to a casual glance, and not even the shooting light from
the keen gray eyes, grown a little wistful from the emotional repression
of the man's life, could account for the cordial appeal that spoke
through so unimposing a figure. As much of his personal history as Gerty
knew seemed to her peculiarly devoid of the interest or the excitement
of adventure; and the only facts of his life which she would have found
deserving the trouble of repeating were that he had married an
impossible woman somewhere in Colorado, and that for ten years he had
lived in New York where he edited _The International Review_.

"Perry tells me that Mr. Trent has really read Laura's poems," she said
now to Adams with an almost unconscious abandonment of her cynical
manner. "Have you examined him and is it really true?"

"I didn't test him because I hoped the report was false," was Adams'
answer. "He's welcome to the literary hash, but I want to keep the
_caviar_ for myself."

"Read them!" exclaimed Trent eagerly, while his blue eyes ran entirely
to sparkles. "Why, I've learned them every one by heart."

"Then she'll let you in," responded Gerty reassuringly, "there's no
doubt whatever of your welcome."

"But there is of mine," said Perry gravely, "so I guess I'd better
quit."

He made a movement to turn away, but Gerty placing her gloved hand on
his arm, detained him by a reproachful look.

"That reminds me of the mischief you have done to-day," she said. "I met
Arnold Kemper as I left the house, and when I asked him to come with me
what do you suppose was the excuse he gave?"

"The dentist or a twinge of rheumatism?" suggested Adams gravely.

"Neither." Her voice rose indignantly, and she enforced her reprimand by
a light stroke on Perry's sleeve. "He actually said that Perry had told
him Laura wasn't pretty."

"Well, I take back my words and eat 'em, too," cried Perry.

He broke away in affected terror before Trent's angry eyes, while Gerty
gave a joyful little exclamation and waved her hand toward one of the
lower windows in the house before which they stood. The head of a woman,
framed in brown creepers, appeared there for an instant, and then,
almost before Trent had caught a glimpse of the small dark eager figure,
melted again into the warm firelight of the interior. A moment later the
outer door opened quickly, and Laura stood there with impulsive
outstretched hands and the cordial smile which was her priceless
inheritance from a Southern mother.

"I knew that you were there even before I looked out of the window," she
exclaimed to Gerty, in what Adams had once called her "Creole voice."
Then she paused, laughing happily, as she looked, with her animated
glance, from Gerty to Trent and from Trent to Adams. To the younger man,
full of his enthusiasm and his ignorance, the physical details of her
appearance seemed suddenly of no larger significance than the pale
bronze gown she wore or the old coffee-coloured lace knotted upon her
bosom in some personal caprice of dress. What she gave to him as she
stood there, looking from Adams to himself with her ardent friendly
glance, was an impression of radiant energy, of abundant life.

She turned back after the first greeting, leading the way into the
pleasant firelit room, where a white haired old gentleman with an
interesting blanched face rose to receive them.

"I have just proved to Mr. Wilberforce that I could 'feel' you coming,"
said Laura with a smile as she unfastened Gerty's furs.

"And I have argued that she could quite as well surmise it," returned
Mr. Wilberforce, as he fell back into his chair before the wood fire.

"Well, you may know in either way that my coming may be counted on,"
said Gerty, "for I have sacrificed for you the society of the most
interesting man I know."

"What! Is it possible that Perry has been forsaken?" enquired Adams in
his voice of quiet humor. In the midst of her flippant laughter, Gerty
turned on him the open cynicism of her smile.

"Now is it possible that Perry has that effect on you?" she asked with
curiosity. "For I find him decidedly depressing."

"Then if it isn't Perry I demand the name," persisted Adams gayly,
"though I'm perfectly ready to wager that it's Arnold Kemper."

"Kemper," repeated Laura curiously, as if the name arrested her almost
against her will. "Wasn't there a little novel once by an Arnold
Kemper--a slight but striking thing with very little grammar and a great
deal of audacity?"

"Oh, that was done in his early days," replied Adams, "as a kind of
outlet to the energy he now expends in racing motors. I asked Funsten,
who does our literary notices, if there was any chance for him again in
fiction, and he answered that the only favourable thing he could say of
him was to say nothing."

"But he's gone in for automobiles now," said Gerty, "they're so much
bigger, after all, he thinks, than books."

"I haven't seen him for fifteen years," remarked Adams, "but I recognise
his speech."

"One always recognises his speeches," admitted Gerty, "there's a stamp
on them, I suppose, for somehow he himself is great even if his career
isn't--and, after all," she concluded seriously, "it is--what shall I
call it--the personal quantity that he insists on."

"The personal quantity," repeated Laura laughing, and, as if the
description of Kemper had failed to interest her, she turned the
conversation upon the subject of Trent's play.




CHAPTER II

TREATS OF AN ECCENTRIC FAMILY


When the last caller had gone Laura slid back the folding doors which
opened into the library and spoke to a little old gentleman, with a very
bald head, who sat in a big armchair holding a flute in his wrinkled and
trembling hand. He had a simple, moonlike face, to which his baldness
lent a deceptive appearance of intellect, and his expression was of such
bland and smiling goodness that it was impossible to resent the tedious
garrulity of his conversation. In the midst of his shrivelled
countenance his eyes looked like little round blue buttons which had
been set there in order to keep his features from entirely slipping
away. He was the oldest member of the Wilde family, and he had lived in
the house in Gramercy Park since it was built by his father some sixty
years or more ago.

"Tired waiting, Uncle Percival?" asked Laura, raising her voice a little
that it might penetrate his deafened hearing.

As he turned upon her his smile of perfect patience the old gentleman
nodded his head quickly several times in succession. "I waited to play
until after the people went," he responded in a voice that sounded like
a cracked silver bell. "Your Aunt Angela has a headache, so she couldn't
stand the noise. I went out to get her some flowers and offered to sit
with her, but this is one of her bad days, poor girl." He fell silent
for a minute and then added, wistfully, "I'm wondering if you would like
to hear 'Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon'? It used to be your mother's
favourite air."

Though he was an inoffensively amiable and eagerly obliging old man, by
some ironic contradiction of his intentions his life had become a series
of blunders through which he endeavoured to add his share to the general
happiness. His soul was overflowing with humanity, and he spent
sleepless nights evolving innocent pleasures for those about him, but
his excess of goodness invariably resulted in producing petty annoyances
if not serious inconveniences. So his virtues had come to be regarded
with timidity, and there was an ever present anxiety in the air as to
what Uncle Percival was "doing" in his mind. The fear of inopportune
benefits was in its way as oppressive as the dread of unmerited
misfortune.

Laura shook her head impatiently as she threw herself into a chair on
the other side of the tall bronze lamp upon the writing table. On the
stem of an eccentric family tree she was felt to be the perfect flower
of artistic impulses, and her enclosed life in the sombre old house had
not succeeded in cultivating in her the slightest resemblance to an
artificial variety. She was obviously, inevitably, impulsively the
original product, and Uncle Percival never realised this more hopelessly
than in that unresponsive headshake of dismissal. Laura could be kind,
he knew, but she was kind, as she was a poet, when the mood prompted.

"Presently--not now," she said, "I want to talk to you awhile. Do you
know, Aunt Rosa was here again to-day and she still tries to persuade us
to sell the house and move uptown. It is so far for her to come from
Seventieth Street, she says, but as for me I'd positively hate the
change and Aunt Angela can't even stand the mention of it." She leaned
forward and stroked his arm with one of her earnest gestures. "What
would you do uptown, dear Uncle Percival?" she inquired gently.

The old man laid the flute on his knees, where his shrunken little hands
still caressed it. "Do? why I'd die if you dragged me away from my
roots," he answered.

Laura smiled, still smoothing him down as if he were an amiable dog.
"Well, the Park is very pleasant, you know," she returned, "and it is
full of walks, too. You wouldn't lack space for exercise."

"The Park? Pooh!" piped Uncle Percival, raising his voice; "I wouldn't
give these streets for the whole of Central Park together. Why, I've
seen these pavements laid and relaid for seventy years and I remember
all the men who walked over them. Did I ever tell you of the time I
strolled through Irving Place with Thackeray? As for Central Park, it
hasn't an ounce--not an ounce of atmosphere."

"Oh, well, that settles it," laughed Laura. "We'll keep to our own
roots. We are all of one mind, you and Aunt Angela and I."

"I'm sure Angela would never hear of it," pursued Uncle Percival, "and
in her affliction how could one expect it?"

For a moment Laura looked at him in a compassionate pause before she
made her spring. "There's nothing in the world the matter with Aunt
Angela," she said; "she's perfectly well."

Blank wonder crept into the old gentleman's little blue eyes and he
shook his head several times in solemn if voiceless protest. Forty years
ago Angela Wilde, as a girl of twenty, had in the accustomed family
phrase "brought lasting disgrace upon them," and she had dwelt, as it
were, in the shadow of the pillory ever since. Unmarried she had yielded
herself to a lover, and afterward when the full scandal had burst upon
her head, though she had not then reached the fulfilment of a singularly
charming beauty, she had condemned herself to the life of a solitary
prisoner within four walls. She had never since the day of her awakening
mentioned the name of her faithless or unfortunate lover, but her silent
magnanimity had become the expression of a reproach too deep for words,
and her bitter scorn of men had so grown upon her in her cloistral
existence that there were hours together when she could not endure even
the inoffensive Percival. Cold, white, and spectral as one of the long
slim candles on an altar, still beautiful with an indignant and wounded
loveliness, she had become in the end at once the shame and the romance
of her family.

"There is no reason under the sun why Aunt Angela shouldn't come down to
dinner with us to-night," persisted Laura. "Don't you see that by
encouraging her as you did in her foolish attitude, you have given her
past power over her for life and death. It is wrong--it is ignoble to
bow down and worship anything--man, woman, child, or event, as she bows
down and worships her trouble."

The flute shook on Uncle Percival's knees. "Ah, Laura, would you have
her face the world again?" he asked.

"The world? Nonsense! The world doesn't know there's such a person in
it. She was forgotten forty years ago, only she has grown so selfish in
her grief that she can never believe it."

The old man sighed and shook his head. "The women of this generation
have had the dew brushed off them," he lamented, "but your mother
understood. She felt for Angela."

"And yet it was an old story when my mother came here."

"Some things never grow old, my dear, and shame is one of them."

Laura dismissed the assertion with a shrug of scornful protest, and
turned the conversation at once into another channel. "Am I anything
like my mother, Uncle Percival?" she asked abruptly.

For a moment the old man pondered the question in silence, his little
red hands fingering the mouth of his flute.

"You have the Creole hair and the Creole voice," he replied; "but for
the rest you are your father's child, every inch of you."

"My mother was beautiful, I suppose?"

"Your father thought so, but as for me she was too little and
passionate. I can see her now when she would fly into one of her spasms
because somebody had crossed her or been impolite without knowing it."

"They got on badly then--I mean afterward."

"What could you expect, my dear? It was just after the War, and, though
she loved your father, she never in her heart of hearts forgave him his
blue uniform. There was no reason in her--she was all one fluttering
impulse, and to live peaceably in this world one must have at least a
grain of leaven in the lump of one's emotion." He chuckled as he ended
and fixed his mild gaze upon the lamp. Being very old, he had come to
realise that of the two masks possible to the world's stage, the comic,
even if the less spectacular, is also the less commonplace.

"So she died of an overdose of medicine," said Laura; "I have never been
told and yet I have always known that she died by her own hand.
Something in my blood has taught me."

Uncle Percival shook his head. "No--no, she only made a change," he
corrected. "She was a little white moth who drifted to another
sphere--because she had wanted so much, my child, that this earth would
have been bankrupt had it attempted to satisfy her."

"She wanted what?" demanded Laura, her eyes glowing.

The old man turned upon her a glance in which she saw the wistful
curiosity which belongs to age. "At the moment you remind me of her," he
returned, "and yet you seem so strong where she was only weak."

"What did she want? What did she want?" persisted Laura.

"Well, first of all she wanted your father--every minute of him, every
thought, every heart-beat. He couldn't give it to her, my dear. No man
could. I tell you I have lived to a great age, and I have known great
people, and I have never seen the man yet who could give a woman all the
love she wanted. Women seem to be born with a kind of divination--a
second sight where love is concerned--they aren't content with the mere
husk, and yet that is all that the most of them ever get--"

"But my father?" protested Laura; "he broke his heart for her."

A smile at the fine ironic humour of existence crossed the old man's
sunken lips. "He gave to her dead what she had never had from him
living," he returned. "When she was gone everything--even the man's life
for which he had sacrificed her--turned worthless. He always had the
seeds of consumption, I suppose, and his gnawing remorse caused them to
develop."

A short silence followed his words, while Laura stared at him with eyes
which seemed to weigh gravely the meaning of his words. Then, rising
hurriedly, she made a gesture as if throwing the subject from her and
walked rapidly to the door.

"Aunt Rosa and Aunt Sophy are coming to dine," she said, "so I must
glance at the table. I can't remember now whether I ordered the oysters
or not."

The old man glanced after her with timid disappointment. "So you haven't
time to hear me play?" he asked wistfully.

"Not now--there's Aunt Angela's dinner to be seen to. If Mr. Bleeker
comes with Aunt Sophy you can play to him. He likes it."

"But he always goes to sleep, Laura. He doesn't listen--and besides he
snores so that I can't enjoy my own music."

"That's because he'd rather snore than do anything else. I wouldn't let
that worry me an instant. He goes to sleep at the opera."

She went out, and after giving a few careful instructions to a servant
in the dining-room, ascended the staircase to the large square room in
the left wing where Angela remained a wilful prisoner. As she opened the
door she entered into a mist of dim candle light, by which her aunt was
pacing restlessly up and down the length of the apartment.

To pass from the breathless energy of modern New York into this quiet
conventual atmosphere was like crossing by a single step the division
between two opposing civilisations. Even the gas light, which Angela
could not endure, was banished from her eyes, and she lived always in a
faint, softened twilight not unlike that of some meditative Old-World
cloisters. The small iron bed, the colourless religious prints, the pale
drab walls and the floor covered only by a chill white matting, all
emphasised the singular impression of an expiation that had become as
pitiless as an obsession of insanity. On a small table by a couch, which
was drawn up before a window overlooking the park, there was a row of
little devotional books, all bound neatly in black leather, but beyond
this the room was empty of any consolation for mind or body. Only the
woman herself, with her accusing face and her carelessly arranged
snow-white hair, held and quickened the imagination in spite of her
suggestion of bitter brooding and unbalanced reason. Her eyes looking
wildly out of her pallid face were still the beautiful, fawn-like eyes
of the girl of twenty, and one felt in watching her that the old tragic
shock had paralysed in them the terrible expression of that one moment
until they wore forever the indignant and wounded look with which she
had met the blow that destroyed her youth.

"Dear," said Laura, entering softly as she might have entered a death
chamber. "You will see Aunt Rosa and Aunt Sophy, will you not?"

Angela did not stop in her nervous walk, but when she reached the end of
the long room she made a quick, feverish gesture, raising her hands to
push back her beautiful loosened hair. "I will do anything you wish,
Laura, except see their husbands."

"I've ceased to urge that, Aunt Angela, but your own sisters--"

"Oh, I will see them," returned Angela, as if the words--as if any
speech, in fact--were wrung from the cold reserve which had frozen her
from head to foot.

Laura went up to her and, with the impassioned manner which she had
inherited from her Southern mother, enclosed her in a warm and earnest
embrace. "My dear, my dear," she said, "Uncle Percival tells me that
this is one of your bad days. He says, poor man, that he went out and
got you flowers."

Angela yielded slowly, still without melting from her icy remoteness.
"They were tuberoses," she responded, in a voice which was in itself
effectual comment.

"Tuberoses!" exclaimed Laura aghast, "when you can't even stand the
scent of lilies. No wonder, poor dear, that your head aches."

"Mary put them outside on the window sill," said Angela, in a kind of
resigned despair, "but their awful perfume seemed to penetrate the
glass, so she took them down into the coal cellar."

"And a very good place for them, too," was Laura's feeling rejoinder;
"but you mustn't blame him," she charitably concluded, "for he couldn't
have chosen any other flower if he had had the whole Garden of Eden to
select from. It isn't really his fault after all--it's a part of
fatality like his flute."

"He played for me until my head almost split," remarked Angela wearily,
"and then he apologised for stopping because his breath was short."

A startled tremor shook through her as a step was heard on the
staircase. "Who is it, Laura?"

Laura went quickly to the door and, after pausing a moment outside,
returned with a short, flushed, and richly gowned little woman who was
known to the world as Mrs. Robert Bleeker.

More than twenty years ago, as the youngest of the pretty Wilde sisters,
she had, in the romantic fervour of her youth and in spite of the
opposition of her parents, made a love match with a handsome,
impecunious young dabbler in "stocks." "Sophy is a creature of
sentiment," her friends had urged in extenuation of a marriage which was
not then considered in a brilliant light, but to the surprise of
everybody, after the single venture by which she had proved the mettle
of her dreams, she had sunk back into a prosperous and comfortable
mediocrity. She had made her flight--like the queen bee she had soared
once into the farthest, bluest reaches of her heaven, and henceforth she
was quite content to relapse into the utter commonplaces of the hive.
Her yellow hair grew sparse and flat and streaked with gray, her
pink-rose face became over plump and mottled across the nose, and her
mind turned soon as flat and unelastic as her body; but she was
perfectly satisfied with the portion she had had from life, for, having
weighed all things, she had come to regard the conventions as of most
enduring worth.

Now she rustled in with an emphatic announcement of stiff brocade, and
enveloped the spectral Angela in an embrace of comfortable arms and
bosom. Her unwieldy figure reminded Laura of a broad, low wall that has
been freshly papered in a large flowered pattern. On her hands and bosom
a number of fine emeralds flashed, for events had shown in the end that
the impecunious young lover was not fated to dabble in stocks in vain.

"Oh Angela, my poor dear, how are you?" she enquired.

Angela released herself with a shrinking gesture and, turning away, sat
down at the foot of the long couch. "I am the same--always the same,"
she answered in her cold, reserved voice.

"You took your fresh air to-day, I hope?"

"I went down in the yard as usual. Laura," she looked desperately
around, "is that Rosa who has just come in?" As she paused a knock came
at the door, and Laura opened it to admit Mrs. Payne--the eldest, the
richest and the most eccentric of the sisters.

From a long and varied association with men and manners Mrs. Payne had
gathered a certain halo of experience, as of one who had ripened from
mere acquaintance into a degree of positive intimacy with the world. She
had seen it up and down from all sides, had turned it critically about
for her half-humorous, half-sentimental inspection, and the frank
cynicism which now flavoured her candid criticism of life only added the
spice of personality to her original distinction of adventure. As the
wife of an Ambassador to France in the time of the gay Eugénie, and
again as one of the diplomatic circle in Cairo and in Constantinople,
she had stored her mind with precious anecdotes much as a squirrel
stores a hollow in his tree with nuts. Life had taught her that the one
infallible method for impressing your generation is to impress it by a
difference, and, beginning as a variation from type, she had ended by
commanding attention as a preserved specimen of an extinct species.
Long, wiry, animated, and habitually perturbed, she moved in a continual
flutter of speech--a creature to be reckoned with from the little, flat,
round curls upon her temples, which looked as if each separate hair was
held in place by a particular wire, to the sweep of her black velvet
train, which surged at an exaggerated length behind her feet. Her face
was like an old and tattered comic mask which, though it has been flung
aside as no longer provocative of pleasant mirth, still carries upon its
cheeks and eyebrows the smears of the rouge pot and the pencil.

"My dear Angela," she now asked in her excited tones, "have you really
been walking about again? I lay awake all night fearing that you had
over-taxed your strength yesterday. Mrs. Francis Barnes--you never knew
her of course, but she was a distant cousin of Horace's--died quite
suddenly, without an instant's warning, after having walked rapidly
twice up and down the room. Since then I have always looked upon
movement as a very dangerous thing."

"Well, I could hardly die suddenly under any circumstances," returned
Angela, indifferently. "You've been watching by my death-bed for forty
years."

"Oh, dear sister," pleaded Mrs. Bleeker, whose heart, was as soft as her
bosom.

"It does sound as if you thought we really wanted your things,"
commented Mrs. Payne, opening and shutting her painted fan. "Of
course--if you were to die we should be too heart-broken to care what
you left--but, since we are on the subject, I've always meant to ask you
to leave me the shawl of old rose-point which belonged to mother."

"Rosa, how can you?" remonstrated Mrs. Bleeker, "I am sure I hope Angela
will outlive me many years, but if she doesn't I want everything she has
to go to Laura."

"Well, I'm sure I don't see how Laura could very well wear a rose-point
shawl," persisted Mrs. Payne. "I wouldn't have started the subject for
anything on earth, Angela, but, since you've spoken of it, I only
mention what is in my mind. And now don't say a word, Sophy, for we'll
go back to other matters. In poor Angela's mental state any little
excitement may bring on a relapse."

"A relapse of what?" bluntly enquired honest Mrs. Bleeker.

Mrs. Payne turned upon her a glance of indignant calm.

"Why a relapse of--of her trouble," she responded. "You show a strange
lack of consideration for her condition, but for my part I am perfectly
assured that it needs only some violent shock, such as may result from
a severe fall or the unexpected sight of a man, to produce a serious
crisis."

Mrs. Bleeker shook her head with the stubborn common sense which was the
reactionary result of her romantic escapade.

"A fall might hurt anybody," she rejoined, "but I'm sure I don't see why
the mere sight of a man should. I've looked at one every day for thirty
years and fattened on it, too."

"That," replied Mrs. Payne, who still delighted to prick at the old
scandal with a delicate dissecting knife, "is because you have only
encountered the sex in domestic shackles. As for me, I haven't the least
doubt in the world that the sudden shock of beholding a man after forty
years would be her death blow."

"But she has seen Percival," insisted Mrs. Bleeker; and feeling that her
illustration did not wholly prove her point added, weakly, "at least he
wears breeches."

"I would not see him if I could help myself," broke in Angela, with
sudden energy. "I never--never--never wish to see a man again in this
world or the next."

Mrs. Payne glanced sternly at Mrs. Bleeker and followed it with an
emphatic head shake, which said as plainly as words, "So there's your
argument."

"All the same, I don't believe Robert would shock her," remarked Mrs.
Bleeker.

"Never--never--never," repeated Angela in a frozen agony, and, rising,
she walked restlessly up and down again until a servant appeared to
inform the visiting sisters that dinner and Miss Wilde awaited them
below.




CHAPTER III

APOLOGISES FOR AN OLD-FASHIONED ATMOSPHERE


As soon as dinner was over Uncle Percival retired with Mr. Bleeker into
the library, from which retreat there issued immediately the shrill
piping of the flute. Mr. Bleeker, with an untouched glass of sherry at
his elbow and an unlighted cigar in his hand, sank back into the placid
after-dinner reverie which is found in the rare cases when old age has
encountered a faultless digestion. The happiest part of his life was
spent in the pleasant state between waking and sleeping, while as yet
the flavour of his favourite dishes still lingered in his mouth--just as
the most blissful moments known to Uncle Percival were those in which he
piped his cherished airs upon his antiquated instrument. The eldest
member of the Wilde family was very old indeed--had in fact successfully
rounded some years ago the critical point of his eightieth birthday, and
there was the zest of a second childhood in the animation with which he
had revived the single accomplishment of his early youth. That youth was
now more vivid to his requickened memory than the present was to his
enfeebled faculties. The past had become a veritable obsession in his
mind, and when he fingered the old flute strength came back to his
half-palsied hands and breath returned to his shrunken little body. His
own music was the one sound he heard in all its distinctness, and he
hung upon it with an enjoyment which was almost doting in its childish
delight.

So the fluting went on merrily, while Mrs. Payne and Mrs. Bleeker, after
fidgeting a moment in the drawing-room, decided that they would return
for a word or two with Angela. "It is really the only place in the house
where one can escape Percival's music," declared Mrs. Payne, who frankly
confessed that she had reached the time of life when to bore her was the
chief offence society could commit, "so, besides the comfort I afford
dear Angela, it is much the pleasantest place for me to pass the
evening. I've always been a merciful woman my child," she pursued
shaking her little flat, false gray curls above her painted wrinkles,
"for never in my life have I cast a stone at anyone who amused me; but
as for Percival and his flute! Well, I won't say a disagreeable word on
the subject, but I honestly think that a passion at his age is
absolutely indecent."

She was so grotesquely gorgeous with her winking diamonds and her old
point lace, which yawned over her lean neck, that the distinction she
had always aimed at seemed achieved at last by an ironic exaggeration.

"At least it is a perfectly harmless passion," suggested her husband, a
beautiful old man of seventy gracious years.

"Harmless!" gasped Mrs. Payne. "Why, it has wrecked the nerves of the
entire family, has given me Saint Vitus' dance, has kept Laura awake for
nights, has reduced Angela to hysterics, and you actually have the face
to tell me it is harmless! Judged by its effects, I consider it quite
as reprehensible as a taste for cards or a fancy for a chorus girl.
Those are vices at least that belong to our century and to civilisation,
but a flute is nothing less than a relic of barbarism."

"Well, it's worse on me than on anyone else," said Laura, with the
dominant spirit which caused Mr. Payne to shiver whenever she tilted
against his wife. "My room is just above, and I get the benefit of every
note."

The tune issuing from the library had changed suddenly into "The Land o'
the Leal," and by the lamp light Uncle Percival could be seen, warm and
red and breathless but still blissfully fluting to the sleeping Mr.
Bleeker, whose face, fallen back against the velvet cushions, wore a
broad, beatific smile.

"He gets his happiness from it at least," persisted Laura. "I suppose
it's a part of his life just as poetry is a part of mine, and to be
happy at eighty-two one is obliged to be happy in an antedated fashion."

Then, as the two aunts swept from the room to join Angela, Laura seated
herself at Mr. Payne's side and caught the hand which he outstretched.
Of all the family he had been her favourite since childhood, and she
sometimes told herself that he was the only one who knew her as she
really was--who had ever penetrated behind her vivid outside armour of
personality. He was a man of great unsatisfied tenderness, who indulged
a secret charity as another man might have indulged a vicious taste. All
his inclinations strained after goodness, and had he possessed the
courage to follow the natural bent of his nature toward perfection he
might have found his happiness in the peaceful paths of exalted virtue.
But the constant dropping of cynicism will extinguish an angel, and,
instead of becoming a shining light to his generation, he had dwindled
into a glow-worm beneath the billows of his wife's velvet gown.

Now, as Laura held his hand, she bent upon him one of her long,
meditative looks. "Uncle Horace, of all this queer family is Aunt Rosa
the queerest or am I?"

Mr. Payne shook his silvered head. "I don't think you're a match for
Rosa yet, my dear," he answered with his gentle humour. "Wait till
you've turned seventy--then we'll see."

"But I'm not like other women. I don't think their ways. I don't even
want the things they want."

The old man's smile shone out as he patted her hand. "That means, I
suppose, that you don't want to be married. Who is it this time? Ah, my
child, you are born to be adored or to be hated."

Without replying to his question, Laura lifted her full, dark eyes to
his face. As he met the intellectual power of her glance, he told
himself that he understood the mysterious active principle of her
personality--how the many were repelled while the few returned to
worship. One felt her, was repulsed or possessed by her, even in her
muteness.

"I don't see how any one who has ever dreamed dreams," she said at last,
"could fall in love and marry--it is so different--so different."

"So you have refused Mr. Wilberforce? Well, well, he has reached the age
when a poor lover may make an excellent friend--and besides, to become
Rosa's mouthpiece for a moment, he is very rich."

"And old enough to be my father--but it isn't that. Age has nothing to
do with it, nor has congeniality--it is nothing in real life that comes
between, for I am fond of him and I don't mind his white hairs in the
least, but I can't give up my visions--my ideal hopes."

"Ah, Laura, Laura," sighed the old man, "the trouble is that you don't
live on the earth at all, but in a little hanging garden of the
imagination."

"And yet I want life," she said.

"We all want it, my child, until we've had it. At your age I wanted it,
too, for I had my dreams, though I was not a poet. But there are
precious few of us who are willing in youth to accept the world on its
own terms--we want to add our little poem to the universal prose of
things."

"But it is life itself that I want," repeated Laura.

"And so I wanted Rosa, my dear, every bit as much."

"Rosa!" There was a glow of surprise in the look she turned upon him.

"You find it hard to believe, but it is true nevertheless. I had my
golden dream like everyone else, and when Rosa loved me I told myself it
had all come true. Well, perhaps, in a measure it has, only, after all,
Rosa turned out to be more suited to real life than to poetic
moonshine."

"I can't imagine even you idealizing Aunt Rosa," said Laura, "but that I
suppose is the way life equalises things."

"That way or another, and the worst it can do for us is to return us our
own dreams in grotesque and mutilated forms. That will most likely be
your portion, too, my child, for life has hurt every poet since the
world began, and it will hurt you more than most because you are so big
a creature."

Laura stirred suddenly and, after gazing a moment at the fire, turned
upon him a face which had grown brilliant with animation. "I want to
taste everything," she said. "I want to turn every page one after one."

"And yet you live the life of a hermit thrush--you have in reality as
little part in that bustling turmoil of New York out there as has poor
Angela herself."

"But my adventures will come to me--I feel that they will come."

"Then you're happy, my dear, for you have the best of your adventures as
you call them in your waiting time."

She leaned toward him, resting her cheek on his gentle old hand, and
they sat in silence until Mrs. Payne swept down upon them in her sable
wraps and demanded the attendance of her husband.

The hall door closed upon the sisters before Laura had quite come back
from her abstraction, which she did at last with a sigh of relief at
finding herself alone. Then, leaving Uncle Percival nodding in the
library, she went upstairs to the cosy little study which opened from
her bedroom on the floor above. The wood fire on the brass andirons was
unlighted, and striking a match she held it to the little pile of
splinters underneath the logs, watching, with a sensation of pleasure,
the small yellow flames lick the crumpled paper and curl upward. Rising
after a moment, she stood breathing in the soft twilight-coloured
atmosphere she loved. The place was her own and she kept it carefully
guarded from a too garish daylight, while the beloved familiar
objects--the shining rows of books, the dull greenish hangings, the
costly cushioned easy-chairs, the few rare photographs, the spacious
writing table and the single Venetian vase of flowers--were always
steeped in a softly shadowed half-tone of light.

As she looked about her the comfort of the room entered into her like
warmth, and, opening her arms in a happy gesture, she threw herself
among the pillows of the couch and lay watching the rapid yellow flames.
Even in the midst of her musing she laughed suddenly to find that she
was thinking of the phrase with which Funsten had dismissed the name of
Arnold Kemper: "The only favourable thing one can say of him is to say
nothing." Was it really so bad as that she wondered, with a dim memory
that somewhere, back in an obscure corner of her bookshelves, lay his
first thin, promising volume published now almost fifteen years ago.
Rising presently, she began a hasty search among a collection of little
novels which had been banished ignominiously from the light of day, and,
coming at last upon the story, she brought it to the lamp and commenced
a reading prompted solely by the moment's impetuous curiosity. Utterly
devoid as it was of literary finish or discerning craftsmanship, the
book gripped from the start by sheer audacity--by its dominant,
insistent, almost brutal and entirely misdirected power. It was less the
story that struck one than the personal equation between the lines, and
the impression she brought away from her breathless skimming was that
she had encountered the shock of a tremendous masculine force.

Her head fell back upon the cushions, and she lost herself in the vague
wonder the book aroused. Life was there--the life of the flesh, of vivid
sensation, of experience that ran hot and swift. The active principle,
so strong in the predestined artist, stirred suddenly in her breast, and
she felt the instant of blind terror which comes with the realisation of
the fleeting possibilities of earth. Outside--beyond her--existence in
its multitudinous forms, its diversity of colour, swept on like some
vast caravan from which she had been detached and set apart. Lying there
she heard the call of it, that tremendous music which shook through her
and loosened a caged voice within herself. Her own poetry became for her
but a little part of the tumultuous, passionate instinct for life within
her--for life not as it was in its reality but as she saw it
transfigured and enkindled by the imagination that lives in dreams.

Suddenly from the darkened silence of the house below a thin sound rose
trembling, and then, gaining strength, penetrated into the closed
chambers. Uncle Percival was at his flute again; he had arisen in the
night to resume his impassioned piping; and, rising hurriedly, Laura lit
her candle and went out into the hall, where a streak of light beneath
Angela's door ran like a white thread across the blackness. Listening a
moment, she heard inside the nervous pacing to and fro of tired yet
restless feet, and after a short hesitation she turned the knob and
entered.

"Oh, Aunt Angela, did the flute wake you?" she asked.

For answer the long white figure stopped its frantic movement and turned
upon her a blanched and stricken face out of which two beautiful haunted
eyes stared like living terrors--terrors of memory, of silence, of the
unseen which had taken visible forms.

"Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!" cried Angela breathlessly, raising her
quivering hands to her ears. "I have heard it before! I have heard
it--long before!"

She paused, gasping, and without a word Laura turned and ran down the
dark staircase, while with each step the air that Uncle Percival played
sounded louder in her ears.

The door of the library was open, and as she entered she called out in a
voice that held a sob of anger, "Uncle Percival, how could you?"

His attentive, deafened ears were for his music alone, and, letting the
flute fall from his hands, he turned to look at her with the pathetic,
innocent enquiry of a good but uncomprehending child. At the sight of
his smiling, wrinkled face, his gentle blue eyes and the wistful droop
of disappointment at the corners of his mouth, her indignation changed
suddenly to pity. It seemed to her that she saw all his eighty years
looking at her from that furrowed face out of those little wandering
round blue eyes--saw the human part of him as she had never seen it
before--with its patience of unfulfilment, its scant small pleasures,
its innocent senile passion at the end; saw, too, the divine part,
hidden in him as in all humanity--that communion of longing which bound
his passionate fluting, Angela's passionate remorse and her own
passionate purity into the universal congregation of unsatisfied souls.

The sharp words died upon her lips and, kneeling at his side, she took
his shrivelled little hands into her warm, comforting clasp. "Dear Uncle
Percival, I understand, and I love you," she said.




CHAPTER IV

USHERS IN THE MODERN SPIRIT


"So you have seen her," Adams had remarked the same afternoon, as he
walked with Trent in the direction of Broadway. "Do you walk up, by the
way? I always manage to get in a bit of exercise at this hour."

As Trent fell in with his companion's rapid step, he seemed to be moving
in a fine golden glow of enthusiasm. A light icy drizzle had turned the
snow upon the pavement into sloppy puddles of water, but to the young
man, fresh from his inexperience, the hour and the scene alike were of
exhilarating promise.

"I feel as if I had been breathing different air!" he exclaimed, without
replying directly to the question. "And yet how simple she is--how
utterly unlike the resplendent Mrs. Bridewell--"

He stopped breathlessly, overcome by his excitement, and Adams took up
the unfinished sentence almost tenderly. "So far, of course, she is
merely a beautiful promise, a flower in the bud," he said. "Her
genius--if she has genius--has not found itself, and the notes she
strikes are all mere groping attempts at a perfect self-expression. Yet,
undoubtedly, she has done a few fine things," he admitted with
professional caution.

"But if, as you say, her emotional self does not go into her poems, what
becomes of it?" enquired Trent, with a curiosity too impersonal to be
vulgar. "For she, finely tempered as she is, suggests nothing so much as
a beautiful golden flame."

Adams started, and flashed upon the other a glance as incisive as a
search-light.

"Then you, too, recognise her beauty?" he asked in a tone which had a
kindly jealousy.

"Am I a fool?" protested Trent, laughing.

'You heard Kemper?"

"I heard him proclaim himself an ass. Well, let him, let him. Would you
hand out one of your precious first editions to the crowd?"

"You're right, you're right," assented Adams, and followed his remark
with a sudden change of subject. "I am interested, Mr. Trent, in what
you yourself have come to do."

"I--Oh, I have done nothing," declared Trent.

"In your aims, then, let us say, I understand that you intend to try the
drama?"

"Well, I confess to having done a play that I think isn't bad," replied
Trent, blushing over all his fresh, smooth-shaven face. "Benson has
promised me a hearing."

"Ah, I know him--he's always eager for new blood. Perhaps you wouldn't
mind my speaking a word or two to him?

"Mind!" exclaimed the younger man, his voice shaking. "Why, I can't tell
you how happy it would make me."

They had reached Eighteenth Street, and Trent paused a moment on the
corner before turning off to the big red-brick apartment house where he
was temporarily placed. "I'd like to walk up to Thirty-fifth with you,"
he added, "but my mother is expecting me and it makes her nervous when I
stay out after dark. She's just from the country, you know, and she gets
confused by the noise." He hesitated an instant and then finished with
embarrassment. "I wish so much that she could know you.'

"It is a pleasure I hope for very shortly," responded Adams. "How does
she like New York, by the way?"

Under the electric light Trent's eyes seemed to run entirely to
sparkles. "Ah, well, it's rather lonely for her. She misses the callers
at home who used to come to spend the day."

"We must try to change that," said the other as he moved off, while
Trent noted that despite his genial sympathy of manner there had been no
mention of Mrs. Adams. Where was she? and what was she? questioned the
younger man in perplexity, as he crossed to his apartment house at the
corner of Fourth Avenue.

At Twenty-third Street Adams had turned almost unconsciously into Fifth
Avenue, for so detached was the intellectual remoteness in which he
lived that he might have been, for all his immediate perceptions of his
surroundings, strolling at dusk along a deserted Western road. He was so
used to dwelling on the cool heights of a dearly bought, a hardly wrung,
philosophy that he had become at last almost oblivious of the mere
external details of life. To live at all had been for him a matter of
fine moral courage, and his slight, delicate emaciated, yet dauntless,
figure was in itself the expression of a resolute will to endure as well
as to resist. When a man has faced death at close range for fifteen
years he is, in a measure, bound to become either indifferent satyr or
partial saint, and even in the extremity of his first revolt his
personal ideal had stood, like the angel with the flaming sword, between
Adams and the quagmire of bodily materialism. He was not, perhaps, as
yet even so much as a deficient stoic, but he had wrung from suffering a
certain high loyalty to human fellowship and a half humorous, if wholly
gallant, determination to keep fast at any cost until the very end. Why
he had made the fight he did not ask himself, nor could he have
answered. His ambition, his marriage, even the ordinary sensuous
enjoyments of life, had crumbled as the mythical Dead Sea apples upon
his lips, yet the failure of his own mere individual pursuit of
happiness had in no-wise soured the sweet and finely flavored optimism
of his nature.

The fragrance from the violets worn by a passing woman struck him
presently, and he looked outside of himself almost with a start. Around
him many women were walking briskly under raised umbrellas, and some
showed pretty faces freshened like flowers by the icy rain. He himself
had forgotten the rain, had forgotten even the cold which pierced his
chest, and, suddenly remembering the directions of his physician, he
fastened his overcoat more closely and hastened across the street,
passing rapidly in and out among the moving vehicles until he gained,
over the sloppy crossing, the safety of the opposite sidewalk. Here he
turned in the direction of Madison Avenue and finally, drawing out his
latchkey, entered one of the dingy, flat-faced, utterly conventional
brown houses which make up so large a part of the characterless
complexion of New York life.

The interior was brilliantly lighted, and he was shrinking noiselessly
into his study at the back when he heard his name called from the
drawing-room threshold and saw his wife standing there while she put on
a long white evening cloak over a filmy effect of cream-coloured lace.
She was a small, pretty woman, with a cloud of fluffy, artificially
blonde hair and large, innocent, absolutely blank blue eyes. A year ago
she had resembled, if one might imagine the existence of such a being, a
perfectly worldly wise and cynically minded baby, but twelve months of
late suppers and many plays had already blighted her rose-leaf skin and
sown three fine, nervous little wrinkles between her delicately arched
eyebrows. She was very vivacious, but, as Gerty Bridewell had observed,
it was a vivacity that was hardly justified, since possessing neither
the means nor the manner exacted by the more exclusive circles, she had
been compelled to compromise with a social body which made up in members
what it lacked as an organism. Her dash and her prettiness sufficed to
place her comfortably here, but beyond a speaking acquaintance with
Gerty, who confessed that she was too charitable to be exclusive she had
not as yet approached that small shining sphere whose inmates boast the
larger freedom no less than the finer discrimination. The larger
freedom, it seemed at times, was all of it that she was ever to attain,
for, venturing a little too boldly once or twice with a light head, she
had at last found herself skating gingerly over a veritable sleet of
scandal. She got herself rumoured about so persistently that from being
merely improbable, she had become, in Gerty's words again, "one of the
very last of the impossibilities." And of late Adams' friends had begun
to ask themselves quite seriously, "why in the deuce he didn't keep a
hand upon his wife." How much he knew or how much there was, in reality,
to know had become in a limited circle almost the question of the hour,
until Perry Bridewell had demanded in final exasperation "whether Adams
was ridiculously ignorant or outrageously indifferent?"

But if the curious had been permitted to observe the object of their
uncertainty as he stood under the full glare before his festive wife
they would have found neither ignorance nor indifference in his manner.
He regarded her with a frank, fatherly tolerance, in which there was
hardly a suggestion of a more passionate concern.

"Wrap up well," he said, as his glance shot over her, "there's a biting
wind outside."

Connie screwed up her delicate eyebrows and the fine little wrinkles
leaped instantly into view. There was a nervous irritation in her look,
which recoiled from her husband as from a blank and shining wall.

"I'm dining at Sherry's with the Donaldsons," she explained. "I knew you
wouldn't come, so I didn't even trouble you to decline."

"You're right, my dear," he rejoined gayly.

"Mr. Brady has called for me," she went on with the faintest possible
hesitation in her voice, "and as we're all going to the theatre
afterward I shall probably be late. Don't bother about sitting up for
me--I have a key."

"Well, take care of yourself," responded Adams pleasantly, adding to a
young man who appeared in the drawing-room doorway, "How are you, Mr.
Brady? Please don't let Mrs. Adams be so foolish as to stand outside in
the wind. I can't make her take care of her cold."

"Oh, I'll promise to look out for it," replied Brady, standing slightly
behind Connie, and arranging by a careless movement the white fur on her
cloak. His handsome wooden features possessed hardly more character than
was expressed by his immaculately starched shirt front, but he was not
without a certain wholly superficial attraction, half as of a sleek,
well-groomed animal and half as of a masculine conceit, naked and
unashamed.

Connie tinkled out her nervous, high-pitched, vacant little laugh, which
she used to fill in gaps in conversation much as a distinguished
virtuoso might interlude his own important efforts with selections of
light vocal strains.

"Roger is always worrying about my health," she said, "but the truth is
that it's so good I'll never begin to value it until it's gone." Her
excited, fluttering manner blew about her almost with a commotion of the
atmosphere, and reminded Adams at times of a tempestuous March breeze
shaking a fragile wind flower. It was unnatural, overdone, unbecoming,
but it seemed at last to have got quite beyond her control, and the
pretty girlish composure he remembered as one of her freshest charms,
was lost in her general violence of animation. Of late he knew that she
had fought off her natural exhaustion by the frequent use of stimulants,
and it seemed to him that he saw their immediate effects in her flushed
cheeks and too brightly shining eyes.

"Don't stay out late," he urged again; "you've been rushing like mad
these last weeks and you need rest."

"But I never rest," rejoined Connie, still laughing, "and I honestly
hope that I shan't come to a stop until I die."

She fastened her cloak under the fall of lace, and, when Brady had
slipped into his overcoat, Adams turned back to open the hall door,
which let in a biting draught.

"Ta-ta! don't sit up!" cried Connie breathlessly, as, more than ever
like a filmy wind flower in a high wind, she was blown down the steps,
across the slushy sidewalk, and into the hired carriage.

When they had gone Adams went into the dining-room and dined alone
without dressing, as he had done almost every evening for the last few
months. The Irish maid waited upon him with a solicitude in which he
read his pose of a deserted husband, and he tried with a forcible,
though silent, bravado to dispel her very evident assumption. Connie had
certainly not deserted him against his will, and when her absence had
begun to show as so incontestable a relief it seemed the basest
ingratitude to force upon her reckless shoulders the odium of an
entirely satisfying arrangement. After a day of mental and physical
exertion the further effort of a conversation with her was something
that he felt to be utterly beyond him, and the distant Colorado days
when she had played the part of a soft, inviting kitten and he had
responded happily to the appeal for constant petting, now lay very far
behind them both--buried somewhere in that cloudless country they had
left. Neither of them wanted the petting back again, and as he rose from
his simple dinner and entered his study at the end of the hall he heaved
a sigh of conscious thankfulness that it was empty.

While he lighted his pipe his eyes turned instinctively to his precious
first editions of which Trent had spoken, and then straight as an arrow
to a photograph of Laura which stood with several others upon his
writing table. The eyes of most men would have lingered, perhaps, on one
of Connie, which was taken, indeed, at her best period and in a
remarkably effective pose, but Adams' glance brushed it with an
indifference only unkind in its mute sincerity, while he sought the
troubled gaze of Laura, who wore in the picture a shy and startled look,
like that of a wild thing suddenly trapped in its reserve. He had never,
even in his own mind, analysed his feeling for the woman whom he was
content to call his friend--he hesitated to condemn himself almost
because he feared to question--but whenever he entered alone his empty
room he knew that he turned instinctively to draw strength and courage
from her pictured face. It was a face that had followed after the ideal
beauty, and in her spiritual isolation, as of one devoted to an inner
vision, he had always found the peculiar pathetic quality of her charm.
Into her verse, chastened and restrained by the sense for perfection
which dwelt in her art, she had put, he knew, this same cloistral vision
of an unrealised world--a vision which had expanded and blossomed in
the luxuriant if slightly formal garden of her intellect. The world she
looked upon was a world, as Adams had once said, "seen through the haze
of a golden temperament"--the dream of an imaginative mysticism, of a
conventual purity, a dream which is to the reality as the soul of a man
is to the body. And it was this inspired divination, this luminous
idealism, which had caused Adams to exclaim when he put down her first
small gray volume: "Is it possible that we can still see visions?"

A little later, when he came to know her, he found that the vision she
looked upon had coloured not only her own soul, but even the outward
daily happenings of her life. For him she was from the first compacted
of divine mysteries, of exquisite surprises, and he loved to fancy that
he could see her genius burning like a clear flame within her and
shining at vivid moments with a still soft radiance in her face. He
always thought of her soul as of something luminous, and there were
instants when it seemed to touch her eyes and her mouth with an edge of
light. Beyond this her complexities remained for him as on the day when
he first saw her--if she was obscure it was the obscurity of a star seen
through a fog--and the desire to understand lost itself presently in the
bewilderment of his misapprehension. At last, however, he had put her,
as it were, tentatively aside, had relinquished his attempt to reduce
her to a formula with the despairing admission that she was, take her as
you would, a subtlety that compelled one to a mental effort. The effort
which he had up to this time associated with the society of women had
been of anything but a mental character. There was the effort of
putting one's best physical foot in advance, the effort of keeping one's
person conspicuously in evidence and one's intellect as unobtrusively in
abeyance--the material effort of appearing always in one's best
trousers, the moral effort of presenting always one's worst
intelligence. It had seemed to him until he met Laura--and his opinion
was the effect of a limited experience upon a large philosophic
ignorance--that the female sex played the part in Nature which is
performed by the chorus in a Greek tragedy--that it shrilly voiced the
horrors of the actual in the face of a divine indifference--and
strenuously insisted upon the importance of the eternal detail. From
Connie he had gathered that the feminine mind tended naturally toward a
material philosophy--toward a deification of the body, a faith in the
fugitive allurement of the senses, and because of his earlier initiation
he had taken Laura's intellectual radiance as the shining of a virtually
disembodied spirit. His own senses had led him, he recognised now, to
disastrous issues; his love for Connie had been the prompting of mere
physical impulse, and he had emerged from it with a feeling of escaping
into freedom. Too much Nature he had learned during those months of
mental apathy is in its way quite as destructive as too little--there
must be a soul in desire to keep it alive, he understood at last, or the
perishing body of it will decay for lack of a vital flame in the very
hour of its fulfilment. A colder man might have come to such knowledge
along impersonal paths, a coarser one would never have gone beyond it,
but in Adams the old fighting spirit--a survival of the uncompromising
Puritan conscience--had brought him up again, soul and body, to struggle
afresh for a cleaner and a sharper air. Life had meant more to him in
the beginning than a mere series of sensations--more even than any
bodily conditions, any material attainment; and it was the final triumph
of his austere vision that it should mean most of all when it seemed to
a casual glance to contain least of actual value.




CHAPTER V

IN WHICH A YOUNG MAN DREAMS DREAMS


Since coming to New York Mrs. Trent had taken a small apartment in a big
apartment house, where she lived with her son a perfectly provincial as
well as a strictly secluded life. She was a large, florid, motherly old
lady who still wore mourning for a husband who had been killed while fox
hunting twenty-five years ago. Her face resembled a friendly and
auspicious full moon, and above it her shining hair rolled like a
parting of silvery clouds. Day or night she was always engaged in
knitting a purple shawl, which appeared never to have been finished
since her son's infancy, for his earliest recollection was of the plump,
soft balls of brilliant yarn and the long ivory knitting needles which
clicked briskly while she worked with a pleasant, familiar sound. To
this day the clicking of those needles brought to his mouth the taste of
large slices of bread and jam, and to his ears the soothing murmur of
Bible stories told in the twilight.

She was always, too, serene gossip that she was, full of a monotonous,
rippling stream of words, and if her days in New York were trying to her
body and burdened with homesickness for her heart, no one--not even St.
George himself--had ever surprised so much as a passing shadow upon her
face. The young man's untiring pursuit of managers and of players had
left her continually alone, but she busied herself cheerfully about her
housekeeping, and found diversion in yielding to an inordinate curiosity
concerning her neighbours. Once or twice she had questioned him about
his absence, and this was especially so the morning after his meeting
with Laura Wilde.

"You didn't tell me where you were yesterday, St. George," she observed
at breakfast; "did you meet any one who is likely to be of use? I
remember Beverly Pierce told me that everything had to come through
introductions in the North."

He looked at her steadily a moment before replying, taking in all the
lovely details of her appearance behind the coffee tray--the morning
sunlight on her white hair and on the massive, hand-beaten, old silver
service, the solitary rose he had purchased in the street standing
between them in a slender Bohemian vase, brought from the rare old china
in the press just at her back, the dainty hemstitching on her collar and
cuffs of fine thread cambric, and lastly the vivid spot of color made by
the knitting she had laid aside.

"I met Laura Wilde," he answered presently, "but as you never read
poetry you can't understand just what it means."

As she held the cream jug poised above his coffee cup Mrs. Trent smiled
back at him with a placid wonder.

"Who is she, my son? A lady--I mean a _real_ one?"

"Oh, yes, sterling."

"But she writes verse you say! Is it improper?"

His eyes shone with amusement. "Improper! Why, what an idea!"

"I'm sure I don't know how it is," responded his mother, carefully
measuring with her eye the correct allowance of cream, "but somehow
women always seem to get immodest when they take to verse. It's as if
they went into it for the express purpose of airing their
improprieties."

"I say!" he exclaimed, with gentle mockery, "have you been reading
'Sappho' at your age?"

She continued to regard him blandly, without so much as a flicker of
humour in her serene blue eyes. "Your grandfather used to be very fond
of quoting something from 'Sappho,'" she returned thoughtfully, "or was
it from Mr. Pope? I can't remember which or what it was except that it
was hardly the kind of thing you would recite to a lady."

Trent laughed good-humouredly as he received his coffee cup.

"Well you can't point a moral with Miss Wilde," he rejoined, "you'd be
at liberty to recite her to anybody who had the sense to understand
her."

"Is she very deep?"

"She's profound--she's wonderful--she's a genius."

Mrs. Trent shook her head a little doubtfully. "I don't see that a woman
has any business to be a genius," she remarked. "And I can't help being
prejudiced against women writers, your father always was. It's as if
they really pretended to know as much as a man. When they publish books
I suppose they expect men to read them and that in itself is a kind of
conceit."

Trent yielded the point as he helped himself to the cakes brought in by
an old negro servant.

"Well, I shan't ask Miss Wilde to call on you," he laughed, "so you
won't be apt to run across the learned of your sex."

"Oh, I shouldn't mind myself," responded the old lady, with amiability,
"but I do hate to have you thrown with women that you wouldn't meet at
home."

"I certainly shouldn't meet Miss Wilde at home if that is what you
mean."

"It's bad enough to live in a partitioned cage like this," resumed Mrs.
Trent, in her soft, expressionless voice, "and to dry your clothes on
your neighbour's roofs, but I can bear anything so long as we are not
forced to associate with common people. Of course I don't expect to find
the manners of Virginia up here," she added as a last concession, "but I
may as well confess that the people I've come across don't seem to me to
be exactly civil."

"Just as we don't seem to them to be particularly worldly-wise, I dare
say."

She nodded her head, almost without hearing him, while her even tones
rippled on over her quaint ideas, which shone to her son's mind like
little silver pebbles beneath the shallow stream.

"I'm almost reconciled to the fact that old ladies wear colours and
flowers in their bonnets," she pursued, "to say nothing of low-neck
dresses, but it does seem to me that they might show a little ordinary
politeness. I met the doctor coming out of the apartment downstairs, so
in common decency I went immediately to enquire who was sick, and
carried along a glass of chicken jelly. The woman who opened the door
was rather rude," she finished with a sigh. "I don't believe such a
thing had ever happened to her before in the whole course of her life."

Trent gave her a tender glance across the coffee service.

"Probably not," he admitted, "but I wouldn't waste my jelly if I were
you."

"I sha'n't" she determined sadly, "and that's the thing I miss most of
all--visiting the sick."

"You might devote yourself to the hospitals--there are plenty of them it
seems."

Her resignation, however, was complete, and she showed no impulse to
reach out actively again. "It wouldn't be the same, my dear--I don't
want strange paupers but real friends. Do you know," she added, with a
despair that was almost abject, "I was counting up this morning the
people I might speak to if I met them in the street, and I got them in
easily on the fingers of one hand. That included," she confessed after a
hesitation, "the doctor, the butcher's boy and the woman who comes to
scrub. It would surprise you to find what a very interesting woman she
is."

Trent rose from his chair and, coming round to where she sat, gave her a
boyish hug of sympathy. "You're a regular angel of a mother," he said
and added playfully, while he still held her, "even then I don't see how
you make it five."

She put up her large white hand and smoothed his hair across his
forehead. "That's only because I made an acquaintance in the elevator
yesterday," she replied.

"In the elevator! How?"

"The thing always makes me nervous, you know--I can't abide it, and I'd
much rather any day go up and down the seven flights--but she met me as
I started to walk and persuaded me to come inside. Then she held my hand
until I got quite to the bottom."

"Indeed," said Trent suspiciously; "who was she?"

"Her name is Christina Coles, and she came from Clarke County. I knew
her grandfather."

"Thank Heaven!" breathed Trent, and his voice betrayed his happy
reassurance.

"She's really very pretty--all the Coles were handsome--her great-aunt
was once a famous beauty. Do you remember my speaking of her--Miss Betty
Coles?" He shook his head, and she proceeded with her reminiscence.

"Well, she was said to have received fifty proposals before her
twenty-fifth birthday, but she never married. On her last visit to me,
when she was a very old lady, I asked her why--and her answer was: 'Pure
fastidiousness.'" She had picked up her purple shawl, and the long ivory
knitting needles began to click.

"But I'm more interested in the young lady of the elevator--What is she
like?"

"Not the beauty that Betty was, but still very pretty, with the same
blue eyes and brown hair, which she wears parted exactly as her aunt did
fifty years ago. I fear, though," she finished in a whisper, "I really
fear--that she writes."

"Is that so? Did she tell you?"

"Not in words, but she carried a parcel exactly like your manuscripts,
and she spoke--oh, so seriously--of her work. She spoke of it quite as
if it were a baby."

"By Jove!" he gasped, and after a moment, "I hope at any rate that she
will be a comfort."

With her knitting still in her hands, she rose and went to the window,
where she stood placidly staring at the sunlight upon the blackened
chimney-pots. "At least I can talk to her about her aunt," she returned.
Then her gaze grew more intense, and she almost flattened her nose
against the pane. "I declare I wonder what that woman is doing out there
on that fire-escape," she observed.

After he had got into his overcoat Trent came back to give her a parting
kiss. "Find out by luncheon time," he returned gaily.

When presently he entered the elevator he found it already occupied by a
young lady whom he recognised from his mother's description as Christina
Coles. She was very pretty, but, even more than by her prettiness, he
was struck by her peculiar steadfastness of look, as of one devoted to a
single absorbing purpose. He noticed, too, that the little tan coat she
wore was rather shabby, and that there was a small round hole in one of
the fingers of her glove. When she spoke, as she did when leaving the
key with the man in charge of the elevator, her voice sounded remarkably
fresh and pleasant. They left the house together, but while she walked
rapidly toward Broadway he contented himself with strolling leisurely
along Fourth Avenue, where he bent a vacant gaze on the objects
assembled in the windows of dealers in "antiques."

But his thoughts did not so much as brush the treasures at which he
stared, and neither the hurrying crowd--which had a restless, workaday
look at the morning hour--nor the noisily clanging cars broke into the
exquisitely reared castle of his dreams. Since the evening before his
imagination had been thrilling to the tune of some spirited music,
flowing presumably from these airy towers, and as he went on over the
wet sunlight on the sidewalk, he was still keeping step to the exalted
if unreal measures. Never in his life; not even in his wildest literary
ecstasies, had he felt so assured of the beauty, of the bountifulness,
of his coming years--so filled with a swelling thankfulness for the mere
physical fact of birth. He was twenty-five, he believed passionately in
his own powers, and he was, he told himself with emphasis, in love for
the first and only time. In the confused tangle of his fancy he saw
Laura like some great white flower, growing out of reach, yet not
entirely beyond endeavour, and the ladder that went up to her was made
by his own immediate successes. Then the footlights before his play swam
in his picture and he heard already the applause of crowded houses and
felt in his head the intoxication of his triumph. Act by act, scene by
scene, he rehearsed in fancy his great drama, seeing the players throng
before the footlights and seeing, too, Laura applauding softly from a
stage box at the side. He had had moments of despondency over his idea,
had grovelled in abject despair during trying periods of execution, but
now all uncertainty--all misgivings evaporated like an obscuring fog
before a burst of light. The light, indeed, had at the moment the full
radiance of a great red glow such as he had seen used for effective
purposes upon the stage--and just as every object of scenery had taken,
for the time, a portion of the transfiguring suffusion--so now the
external ugly details among which he moved were bathed in the high
coloured light of his imagination.

But if the end is sometimes long in coming, it comes at last even to the
visions of youth, and when his tired limbs finally dragged his soaring
spirit to earth, he took a passing car and came home to luncheon. The
glamour had faded suddenly from his dreams, as if a bat's wing had
fluttered overhead, and in his new mood, he felt a resurgence of his old
self-consciousness. He was provoked by the suspicion that he had shown
less as a coming dramatist than as a present fool, and he contrasted his
own awkwardness with Adams' whimsical ease of manner. Did a woman ever
forget how a man appeared when she first met him? Would any amount of
fame to-morrow obliterate from Laura's memory his embarrassment of
yesterday? He had heard that the surface impression was what counted in
the feminine mind, and this made him think enviously, for a minute, of
Perry Bridewell--of his handsome florid face and his pleasant animal
magnetism. Perry was stupid and an egoist, and yet he had heard that
Mrs. Bridewell, for all her beauty and her wit, adored him, while he
openly neglected her. Was the secret of success, after all, simply an
indifference to everyone's needs except one's own? or was it rather the
courage to impress the world that one's own were the only needs that
counted?

He was late for luncheon but his mother had waited for him, and he found
when he entered the drawing room that Christina Coles was with her. The
girl still wore her hat, but she had removed her jacket, and it lay with
a little brown package on the sofa. As she spoke to him he was struck
afresh by the singular concentration of her expression.

"Your mother tells me that you've written a play," she began, a little
shyly; "she says, too, that it is wonderful."

"'She says' is well put," he retorted gaily, "but I hear that you, also,
are among the prophets."

"I am nothing else," she answered earnestly. "It is everything to me--it
is my life."

Her frankness startled him unpleasantly, and but for her girlish
prettiness, he might have felt himself almost repelled. As it was he
merely glanced appealingly at his mother, who intervened with a gesture
of her knitting needle. "She writes stories," explained the old lady,
appearing to transfix her subject on the ivory point; "it is just as I
imagined."

The girl herself met his eyes almost fiercely, reminding him vaguely of
the look with which a lioness might defend her threatened young.

"I've done nothing yet," she declared, "but I mean to--I mean to if it
takes every single hour I have to live." Then her manner changed
suddenly, and she impressed him as melting from her hard reserve. "Oh,
she tells me that you've met Laura Wilde!" she said.

The sacred name struck him, after his impassioned dreaming, like a sharp
blow between the eyes, and he met the girl's animated gesture with a
look of blank aversion.

"I've met her--yes," he answered coldly.

But her enthusiasm was at white heat, and he saw what he had thought
mere prettiness in her warm to positive beauty. "And you adore her work
as I do?" she exclaimed.

After a moment's hesitation his ardour flashed out to meet her own. "Oh,
yes, I adore her work and her!" he said.




CHAPTER VI

SHOWS THAT MR. WORLDLY-WISE-MAN MAY BELONG TO EITHER SEX


Several afternoons later Trent was to have further light thrown on the
character of Christina Coles by a chance remark of Roger Adams, into
whose office he had dropped for a moment as he was on his way to make
his first call upon Mrs. Bridewell.

After a few friendly enquiries about the young man's own work, and the
report of a promising word from the great Benson, Adams took up a letter
lying loose among the papers on his big littered desk.

"Half the tragedy in New York is contained in a letter like this," he
observed. "Do you know, by the way, that the mass of outside literary
workers drawn in at last by the whirlpool constitutes almost a
population? Take this girl, now, she is so consumed by her ambition, for
heaven knows what, that she comes here and starves in an attic rather
than keep away in comfort. That reminds me," he added, with a sudden
recollection, "she's from your part of the country."

"Indeed!" An intuition shot like a conviction into Trent's mind. "Could
her name, I wonder, by any chance be Coles?"

"You know her then?"

"I've met her, but do you mean to say that ability is what she hasn't
got?"

"For some things I've no doubt she has an amazing amount, only she's
mistaken its probable natural bent. She strikes me as a woman who was
born for the domestic hearth, or failing that she'd do admirably, I dare
say, in a hospital."

"It's the literary instinct, then, that's missing in her?"

"Not the instinct so much as the literary stuff, and in that she's not
different from a million others. She is evidently on fire with the
impulse to create, but the power--the creative matter--isn't in her. Let
her keep up, and she'll probably go on doing 'hack' work until her
death."

"But she's so pretty," urged Trent with a chivalric qualm--and he
remembered her smooth brown hair parted over her rosy ears, her blue
eyes, fresh as flowers, and the peculiar steadfastness that possessed
her face.

"The more's the pity," said Adams, while the muscles about his mouth
twitched slightly, as they always did when he was deeply moved, "it's a
bigger waste. I wrote to her as a father might have done and begged her
to give it up," he went on, "and in return," he tapped the open sheet,
"she sends me this fierce, pathetic little letter and informs me grandly
that her life is dedicated. Dedicated, good Lord!" he exclaimed
compassionately, "dedicated to syndicated stories in the Sunday press
and an occasional verse in the cheaper magazines."

"And there's absolutely nothing to be done?" asked Trent.

Adams met the question with a frown.

"Oh, if it would make it all come right in the end, I'd go on publishing
her empty, trite little articles until Gabriel blows his trumpet."

"It wouldn't help, though, after all."

"Well, hardly--the quick way is sure to be the most merciful," he
laughed softly with the quality of kindly humour which never failed him,
"we'll starve her out as soon as possible," he declared.

As if to dismiss the subject, he refolded the letter, slipped it in its
envelope, and placed it in one of his crammed pigeon-holes. "Thank God,
your own case isn't of the hopeless kind!" he exclaimed fervently.

"Somehow success looks like selfishness," returned Trent, showing by his
tone the momentary depression which settled so easily upon his variable
moods.

At the speech Adams turned upon him the full sympathy of his smile,
while he enclosed in a warm grasp the hand which the young man held out.

"It's what we're made for," he responded cheerily, "success in one way
or another."

His words, and even more his look, remained with Trent long afterwards,
blowing, like a fresh strong wind, through the hours of despondency
which followed for him upon any temporary exaltation. The young man had
a trick of remembering faces, not as wearing their accustomed daily
look, but as he had seen them animated and transfigured by any vivid
moment of experience, and he found later that when he thought of Adams
it was to recall the instant's kindly lighting of the eyes, the flicker
of courageous humour about the mouth and the dauntless ring in the
usually quiet voice. He realised now, as he walked through the humming
streets, that success or failure is not an abstract quantity but a
relative value--that a man may be a shining success in the world's eyes
and a comparative failure in his own. To Trent, Adams had for years
represented the cultured and scholarly critic--the writer who, in his
limited individual field, had incontestably "arrived." Now, for the
first time, he saw that the editor looked upon himself as a man of small
achievements, and that, inasmuch as his idea had been vastly more than
his execution, he felt himself to belong to the unfulfilled ones of the
earth.

When, a little later, he reached Mrs. Bridewell's house in Sixty-ninth
Street the servant invited him, after a moment's wait below, into her
sitting-room upstairs, and, following the man's lead, he was finally
ushered into a charming apartment upon the second floor. A light cloud
of cigarette smoke trailed toward him as he entered, and when he paused,
confused by broken little peals of laughter, he made out a group of
ladies gathered about a tiny Oriental table upon which stood a tray of
Turkish coffee. Gerty rose from the circle as he advanced, and moved a
single step forward, while the pale green flounces of her train rippled
prettily about her feet. Her hair was loosely arranged, and she gave him
an odd impression of wearing what in his provincial mind he called a
"wrapper"--his homely name for the exquisite garment which flowed,
straight and unconfined, from her slender shoulders. His mother, he
remembered, not without a saving humour, had always insisted that a lady
should appear before the opposite sex only in the entire armour of her
"stays" and close-fitting bodice.

Gerty, as she mentioned the names of her callers, subsided with her
ebbing green waves into the chair from which she had risen, and held her
cigarette toward Trent with a pretty inviting gesture. Her delicate
grace gave the pose a piquant attraction, and he found himself watching
with delight the tiny rings of smoke which curled presently from her
parted lips. As she smoked she held her chin slightly lifted, and
regarded him from beneath lowered lids with an arch and careless humour.

"If you'd been the Pope himself," she remarked, as an indifferent
apology, "I'd hardly have done more than fling the table-cover over my
head. Even you, after you'd spent a morning trying on a velvet gown,
would require a lounge and a good smoke."

He admitted that he thought it probable, and then turned to one of the
callers who had spoken--a handsome woman with gray hair, which produced
an odd effect of being artificial.

"I wish I'd done nothing worse than try on clothes," she observed, "but
I've been to lunch with an old lover."

"Poor dear," murmured Gerty, compassionately, as she passed Trent a cup
of coffee, "was he so cruel as to tell you you'd retained your youth?"

"He did worse," sighed the handsome woman, "he assured me I hadn't."

"Well, he couldn't have done more if he'd married you," declared Gerty,
with her gleeful cynicism.

"He was too brutally frank for a husband," remarked a second caller as
she sipped her coffee. "You showed more discretion, Susie, than I gave
you credit for."

"Oh, you needn't compliment me," protested Susie; "in those days he
hadn't a penny."

"Indeed! and now?"

"Now he has a great many, but he has attached to himself a wife, and I a
husband. Well, I can't say honestly that I regret him," she laughed,
"for if he has lived down his poverty he hasn't his passion for red--he
wore a red necktie. Why is it," she lamented generally to the group,
"that the male mind leans inevitably toward violent colours?"

"Perhaps they appeal to the barbaric part of us," suggested Trent,
becoming suddenly at ease amid the battle of inanities.

"Have you a weakness for red, too, Mr. Trent?" enquired Gerty.

The sparkle in his eyes leaped out at her challenge.

"Only in the matter of hair," he retorted boldly.

She regarded him intently for a moment, while he felt again as he had
felt at Laura Wilde's, not only her fascination--her personal
radiance--but the conviction that she carried at heart a deep disgust, a
heavy disenchantment, which her ostentatious gayety could not conceal.
Even her beauty gave back to him a suggestion of insincerity, and he
wondered if the brightness of her hair and of her mouth was as
artificial as her brilliant manner. It was magnificent, but, after all,
it was not nature.

"Because I warn you now," she pursued, after the brief pause, "that if
you bind your first play in red I shall refuse to read it."

"You can't escape on that ground," rejoined Trent, "I'll make it green."

"Well, you're more civilised than Perry," declared Gerty, with one of
her relapses into defiant ridicule, which caused Trent to wonder if she
were not acting upon an intuition which taught her that a slight shock
is pleasantly stimulating to the fancy, "and I suppose it's my
association with him that convinces me if we'd leave your sex alone it
would finally revert to the savage state and to skin girdles."

"Now don't you think Perry would look rather nice in skins?" enquired
the handsome woman. "I can quite see him with his club like the man
in--which one of Wagner's?"

"It isn't the club of the savage I object to," coolly protested Gerty,
"it's the taste. Perry has been married to me five years," she
continued, reflectively, "a long enough period you would think to teach
even a Red Indian that my hair positively shrieks at anything remotely
resembling pink. Yet when I went to the Hot Springs last autumn he
actually had this room hung for me in terra-cotta."

Trent cast a blank stare about the tapestried walls.

"But where is it?" he demanded.

"It's gone," was Gerty's brief rejoinder, and she added, after a moment
devoted to her cigarette, "now that's where it pays to have the wisdom
of the serpent. I really flatter myself," she admitted complacently,
"that I've a genius, I did it so beautifully. Your young innocent would
have mangled matters to the point of butchery and have gloried like a
martyr in her domestic squabbles, but I've learned a lesson or two from
misfortune, and one of them is that a man invariably prides himself upon
possessing the quality he hasn't got. That's a perfectly safe rule," she
annotated along the margin of her story. "I used to compliment an artist
upon his art and an Apollo upon his beauty--but it never worked. They
always looked as if I had under-valued them, so now I industriously
praise the folly of the wise and the wisdom of the fool."

"And the decorative talent of Perry," laughed one of the callers.

"You needn't smile," commented Gerty, while Trent watched the little
greenish flame dance in her eyes, "it isn't funny--it's philosophy. I
made it out of life."

"But what about the terra-cotta?" enquired Susie.

"Oh, as I've said, I did nothing reckless," resumed Gerty, relaxing
among her cushions, "I neither slapped his face nor went into
hysterics--these tactics, I've found, never work unless one happens to
be a prima donna--so I complimented him upon his consideration and sat
down and waited. That night he went to a club dinner--after the
beautiful surprise he'd given me he felt that he deserved a little
freedom--and the door had no sooner closed upon him than I paid the
butler to come in and smoke the walls. He didn't want to do it at all,
so I really had to pay him very high--I gave him a suit of Perry's
evening clothes. It's the ambition of his life, you know, to look like
Perry."

"How under heaven did he manage it?" persisted Susie. "The smoke, I
mean, not the resemblance."

"There are a good many lamps about the house and we brought them all
in, every one. The butler warned me it was dangerous, but I assured him
I was desperate. That settled it--that and the evening clothes--and by
the time Perry returned the room was like an extinct volcano."

"And he never found out?" asked Susie, as the callers rose to go.

"Found out! My dear, do you really give him credit for feminine
penetration? Well, if you will go--good-bye--and--oh--don't look at my
gown to-morrow night or you'll turn blue with envy," then, as Trent
started to follow the retreating visitors, she detained him by a
gesture. "Stay awhile, unless you're bored," she urged, "but if you're
really bored I shan't say a word. I assure you I sometimes bore myself."

As he fell back into his chair Trent was conscious of a feeling of
intimacy, and strange as it was, it dispelled instantly his engrossing
shyness.

"I'm not bored," he said, "I'm merely puzzled."

"Oh, I know," Gerty nodded, "but you'll get over it. I puzzle everybody
at first, but it doesn't last because I'm really as clear as running
water. My gayety and my good spirits are but the joys of flippancy, you
see."

"I don't see," protested Trent, his eyes warming.

She laughed softly, as if rather pleased than otherwise by the frankness
of his admiration. "You haven't lost as yet the divine faith of youth,"
she said, carelessly flicking the ashes of her cigarette upon the little
table at her elbow. Then, tossing the burned end into a silver tray, she
pushed it from her with a decisive movement. "I've had six," she
observed, "and that's my limit."

"What I'm trying to understand," confessed Trent, leaning forward in his
earnestness, "is why you should care so greatly for Miss Wilde?"

Gerty flashed up suddenly from her cushions. "And pray why shouldn't I?"
she demanded.

"Because," he hesitated an instant and then advanced with the audacity
born of ignorance, "you're as much alike as a thrush and a paroquet."

She laughed again.

"So you consider me a paroquet?"

"In comparison with Laura Wilde."

"Well, I'd have said a canary," she remarked indulgently, "but we'll let
it pass. I don't see though," she serenely continued, "why a paroquet
shouldn't have a feeling for a thrush?"

He shook his head, smiling. "It seems a bit odd, that's all."

"Then, if it's any interest to you to know it," pursued Gerty, with a
burst of confidence, "I'd walk across Brooklyn Bridge, every step of the
way, on my knees for Laura. That's because I believe in her," she wound
up emphatically, "and because, too, I don't happen to believe much in
anybody else."

"So you know her well?"

"I went to school with her and I adored her then, but I adore her even
more to-day. Somehow she always seems to be knocking for the good in
one, and it has to come out at last because she stands so patiently and
waits. She makes me over every time she meets me, shapes me after some
ideal image of me she has in her brain, and then I'm filled with
desperate shame if I don't seem at least a little bit to correspond with
it."

"I understand," said Trent slowly; "one feels her as one feels a strong
wind on a high mountain. There's a wonderful bigness about her."

"It's because she's different," explained Gerty, "she's kept so apart
from life that she knows it only in its elemental freshness--she has a
kind of instinct for truth just as she has for poetry or for beauty, and
our little quibbles, our incessant inanities have never troubled her at
all."

The servant entered with a card as she finished, and after reading the
name she made a quick movement of interest.

"Ask him to come up," she said to the man, adding immediately as Trent
rose to go, "it's Arnold Kemper. Will you stay and see him?"

Trent shook his head, while he held out his hand with a laugh. "I won't
stay," he answered; "I don't like him."

She looked up puzzled, her brows bent in an enquiring frown. "Not like
him! Why, you've never met."

"What has that to do with it?" he persisted lightly. "One doesn't have
to meet a man to hate him."

"One does unless one's a person of stupid prejudices."

"Well, maybe I am," he admitted, "but I have my side."

As the portičres were drawn back, he turned hastily away, to come face
to face with Gerty's caller the next instant upon the threshold. Keen as
his curiosity was he took in, at his brief glance, only that Kemper
presented a bright and brave appearance and walked with a peculiarly
energetic step.




CHAPTER VII

THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE


Gerty was leaning forward among her cushions and as her visitor
approached she held out her hand, still faintly scented with cigarettes.
"Will you have coffee," she asked, "or shall I ring for tea?"

He sat down in the chair from which Trent had risen and replied with a
gesture of happy physical exhaustion. "Let me have some coffee," he
answered, "I've been out golfing all the morning, and if you don't prove
mentally stimulating I shall fall asleep before you. How many holes do
you think I played to-day?"

Gerty shrugged her shoulders over the little coffee pot. "I don't know
and it doesn't interest me," she retorted. "After six months of Europe
do you still make a god of physical exertion?"

The genial irony of his smile flashed back at her, and his eyes, half
quizzical, half searching, but wholly kind, wandered leisurely down her
slender figure. Even as he lazily sipped his coffee, with his closely
clipped, rather large brown head lying against the chair-back, she was
made to feel, not unpleasantly, the compelling animal magnetism--the
"personal quantity," as she had called it--that lay behind the masculine
bluntness of manner he affected. "Aren't you rather tumbled?" he
enquired, with an animated glance, and, though he was fond of boasting
that he was the only man he knew who never flattered women, Gerty was
conscious of a sudden flush and the pleased conviction that she must be
looking her very best. It was a trick of his, she knew, to flatter, as
it were, by paradox, to deal with delicate inuendos and to compliment by
pleasant contradiction. She had not been a woman of the world without
reaping the reward of knowledge, and now, as she leaned back and smiled
brilliantly into his face, she knew that, despite the apparent
abruptness of his beginning, they would descend inevitably to the play
of personal suggestion. His measure had been taken long ago, she told
herself, and lay tucked away in the receptacle which contained the
varied neatly labelled patterns of her masculine world; but at the same
time she was perfectly aware that within five minutes he would pique
afresh both her interest and her liking. "You can't warm yourself by
fireworks," she had once said to him, and a moment later had paused to
wonder at the intrinsic meaning of a daring phrase which he had spoken.

Still sipping his coffee, he regarded her with the blithe humour which
lent so great a charm to his expression.

"I don't see why you object to exercise when it saves my life," he
observed as he took up a cigarette and then bent forward to hold it to
the flame of the alcohol lamp.

"I don't object except when it bores me out of mine," responded Gerty
lightly.

He was still smiling when he raised his head.

"You used to like it yourself," he persisted.

"I used to like a great many things which bore me now."

"Yes, you used to like me," he retorted gaily.

She had so confidently expected the remark, had left so frank an opening
for it, that while she watched him from beneath languid eyelids a little
cynical quiver disturbed her lips. The game was as old as the Garden of
Eden, she had played it well or ill from her cradle, and at last she had
begun to grow a trifle weary. She had found the wisdom which is hidden
at the core of all Dead Sea fruit, and the bitter taste of it was still
in her mouth. The world for her was a world of make-believe--of lies so
futile that their pretty embroidered shams barely covered the ugly
truths beneath, and, though she had pinned her faith upon falsehood and
had made her sacrifice to the little gods, there were moments still when
the undelivered soul within her awoke and stirred as a child stirs in
the womb. Even as she went back to the game anew, she was conscious that
it would be a battle of meaningless words, of shallow insincerities--yet
she went back, nevertheless, before the disgust the thought awoke had
passed entirely from among her sensations.

"I believe I did," she confessed with a charming shrug.

"But you turned against me in the end--women always do," he lamented
merrily, as he flicked away the ashes of his cigarette. Then, with a
perceptible start of recollection, he paused a moment and leaned forward
to look at her more closely. "By the way, I had a shot at your friend
to-day," he said, "the lady who looks like an old picture and does
verse. Why on earth did she take to poetry?" he demanded impatiently.
"I hate it--it's all sheer insanity."

"Well, some few madmen have thought otherwise," remarked Gerty, adding
immediately, "and so you met Laura. Oh, you two! It was the irresistible
force meeting the immovable body. What happened?"

He regarded her quite gravely while his cigarette burned like a little
red eye between his fingers.

"Nothing," he responded at last. "I didn't meet her--I merely glimpsed
her. She has a pair of eyes--you didn't tell me."

Gerty nodded.

"And I forgot to mention as well that she has a nose and a mouth and a
chin. What an oversight."

"Oh, I didn't bother about the rest," he said, and she wondered if he
could be half in earnest or if he were wholly jesting, "but, by Jove, I
went overboard in her eyes and never touched bottom."

For a moment Gerty stared at him in blank amazement, in the midst of
which she promptly told herself that henceforth she would be prepared
for any eccentricities of which the male mind might be capable. A hot
flush mantled her cheek, and she spoke in a voice which had a new and
womanly ring of decision.

"You would not like her," she said, "and she would hate you."

With an amused exclamation he replaced his coffee cup upon the table.
"Then she'd be a very foolish woman," he observed.

"She believes in all the things that you scoff at--she believes in the
soul, in people, and in love--"

He made a protest of mock dismay. "My dear girl, I've been too hard hit
by love not to believe in it. On the contrary, I believe in it so firmly
that I think the only sure cure for it is marriage."

At her swift movement of aversion his laughing glance made a jest of the
words, and she smiled back at him with the fantastic humour which had
become almost her natural manner. It was a habit of his to treat
sportively even the subjects which he reverenced, and in reality she had
sometimes felt him to be less of a sober cynic than herself. He took his
pleasures where he found them, and there was a touch of pathos in the
generous eagerness with which he was ready to provide as well for the
pleasures of others. If he lacked imagination she had learned by now
that he did not fail in its sister virtue, sympathy, and his keen gray
eyes, which expressed so perfectly a gay derision, were not slow, she
knew, to warm into a smiling tenderness.

"Laura is the most earnest creature alive," she said after a moment.

"Is that so? Then I presume she lacks a sense of humour."

"She has a sense of honour at any rate."

With a laugh he settled his figure more comfortably in his chair, and
while she watched the movement, a little fascinated by its easy freedom,
she felt a sudden impulse to reach out and touch his broad, strong
shoulders as she might have touched the shoulders of a statue. Were they
really as hard as bronze, she wondered, or was that suggestion of latent
power, of slumbering energy, as deceptive as the caressing glance he
bent upon her? The glance meant nothing she was aware--he would have
regarded her in much the same way had Perry been at her side, would have
shone quite as affectionately, perhaps, upon her mother. Yet, in spite
of her worldly knowledge, she felt herself yielding to it as to a
delicate flattery. Her eyes were still on him, and presently he caught
her gaze and held it by a look which, for all its fervour, had an edge
of biting irony. There was a meaning, a mystery in his regard, but his
words when at last they came sounded almost empty.

"Oh, that's well enough in its way," he said, "but as a safeguard
there's no virtue alive that can stand against a sense of humour. An
instinct for the ridiculous will keep any man from going to the devil."

She shot her defiant merriment into his face. "Has it kept you?"

"I?--Oh, I wasn't bound that way, you know--but why do you ask?"

For a breath she hesitated, then, remembering her mystification of an
instant ago, she felt a swift desire to punish him for something which
even to herself she could not express--for too sharp a prick of
unsatisfied curiosity, or was it for too intense a moment of
uncertainty?

"Oh, one hears, you know," she replied indifferently.

"One hears! And what is it that one hears?"

His voice was hard, almost angry, and she despised herself because the
fierce sound of it made her suddenly afraid.

"Do you know what a man said to me the other day," she went on with a
cool insolence before which he became suddenly quiet. "Whom the gods
destroy they first infatuate--with an opera singer."

She delivered the words straight from the shoulder, and as she finished
he rose from his chair and stood looking angrily down upon her.

"Did you let me come here for _this?_" he demanded.

"O Arnold, Arnold!" the gayety rang back to her voice, and she made a
charming little face of affected terror. "If you're going to be a bear
I'll run away."

She stretched out her hand, and he held it for an instant in his own,
while he fell back impatiently into his chair.

"The truth is that I was clean mad about her," he said, "about Madame
Alta--but it's over now, and I abominate everything that has ever set
foot on the stage."

"Was she really beautiful?" she enquired curiously.

He laughed sharply. "Beautiful! She was flesh--if you mean that."

An angry sigh escaped him, and Gerty lighted a fresh cigarette and gave
it to him with a soothing gesture. The nervous movements which were
characteristic of him became more frequent, and she found herself
wondering that they should increase rather than diminish the impression
of virile force. For a while he smoked in silence; then, with his eyes
still turned away from her, he asked in a changed voice.

"Tell me about your friend--she interests me."

"She interests you! Laura?"

"There's something in her that I like," he pursued, smiling at her
exclamation. "She looks human, natural, real. By Jove, she looks as if
she were capable of big emotions--as if, too, you could like her without
making love. She's something new."

Gerty's amazement was so sincere that she only stared at him, while her
red lips parted slightly in a breathless and perfectly unaffected
surprise. Something new! Her wonder faded slowly, and she told herself
that now at last she understood. So he was still what he had always
been--an impatient seeker after fresh sensations.

"I thought you were too much like Perry to care about her," she said.

His amused glance made the remark appear suddenly ridiculous. "I'm
different from Perry in one thing at least," he retorted. "You didn't
marry me."

"Well, I dare say it's a good thing you never gave me the chance," she
tossed back lightly. "I don't let Perry rave, you know, even over Laura.
Not that I'm unduly jealous, but that I'm easily bored."

"I can't imagine you jealous," he commented, keeping as usual close to
the intimate intention.

"And of Perry! I should hope not!" Her gesture was one of amused
indifference. "Jealousy is the darling virtue of the savage, and I may
not be a saint, but at least I'm civilized. Give me food and a warm fire
and clothes to my back, and I'm quite content to let the passions go."

"Even love?" he asked, still smiling.

She shrugged her shoulders--gracefully as few women can. "Love among the
rest--I don't care--why should I? Make me comfortable."

An impulse which was hardly more than a consuming interest in
humanity--in the varied phenomena of life--caused him to draw quickly
nearer.

"You say that because you've 'arrived,'" he declared. "You've 'arrived'
in love as your friend has in literature. The probationary stage after
all is the only one worth while, and you've gone too far beyond it."

"I've gone too far beyond everything," she protested, laughing. "I'm a
graduate of the world. Now Laura--"

The name recalled his thoughts and he repeated it while she paused.
"Laura--it has a jolly sound--and upon my word I haven't seen a woman in
years who has had so much to say to me before I've met her. Do you know,
I already like her--I like her smooth black hair, without any of your
fussy undulations; I like her strong earnest look and the strength in
her brow and chin; I even like the way she dresses--"

Gerty's laugh pealed out, and he broke off with a movement of
irritation. "Is it possible that Laura is an enchantress," she demanded,
"and have I followed the wrong principle all my life? Has my honest
intention to please men led me astray?"

"Oh, you may be funny at my expense if you choose," he retorted, "but
I've had enough of fluff and feathers, and I like the natural way she
wears her clothes--" Again he smoked in an abstracted silence, and then
asked abruptly: "Will you take me some day to see her?"

She shook her head.

"Take you? No, you've missed your opportunity."

"But I'll make another. Why not?"

"Because I tell you frankly she would hate you."

"My dear girl, she wouldn't have a shadow of an excuse. No woman has
ever hated me in my life."

"Then there's no use seeking the experience. You'd just as well accept
the fact at once that Laura couldn't bear you--"

A laugh followed from the door while the words were still in the air,
and turning quickly they saw Laura pausing upon the threshold.

"And pray what is it about Laura?" she asked in her cordial contralto
voice. "A person who has borne living in the house with a flute may be
said to have unlimited powers of endurance."

She moved forward and Kemper, while he sprang to his feet and stood
waiting for the introduction, became swiftly aware that with her
entrance the whole atmosphere had taken a fresher and a finer quality.
The sophistication of the world, the flippant irony of Gerty's voice
gave place immediately before her earnest dignity and before the look of
large humanity which distinguished her so vitally from the women whom he
knew. He felt her sincerity of purpose at the same instant that he felt
Gerty's shallowness and the artificial glamour of the hot-house air in
which he had hardly drawn breath. There was an appeal in Laura's face
which he had never seen before--an expression which seemed to him to
draw directly from the elemental pulse; and he felt suddenly that there
were depths of consciousness which he had never sounded, vivid
experiences which he had never even glimpsed. "She is different--but how
is she different?" he asked himself, perplexed. "Is she simply a bigger
personality, or is she really more of a woman than any woman I have ever
known? What is it in her that speaks to me and what is it in myself that
responds?" And it seemed to him both strange and wonderful that he
should be drawn by an impulse which was not the impulse of love--that a
woman should attract him through qualities which were independent of the
allurement of sex. A clean and perfectly sane satisfaction was the
immediate result; he felt that he had grown larger in his own eyes--that
the old Adam who had ruled over him so long had become suddenly dwarfed
and insignificant. "To like a woman and yet not to make love to her," he
repeated in his thoughts. "By Jove, it will be something decent,
something really worth while." Then he remembered that he had never
known intimately a woman of commanding intellect, and the novelty
inspired him with the spirit of fresh adventure.

She had bowed to him over the large muff she carried, and he spoke
lightly though his awakened interest showed in his face and voice. "I
was the unfortunate subject of Gerty's decision," he said. "Is there no
appeal from it?"

Her answering smile was one of indifferent kindliness; and he liked,
even while he resented her sincerity of manner. "Appeal! and to whom?"
she enquired.

"To you--to your mercy," he laughed.

She glanced at Gerty with a look which hardly simulated a curiosity she
apparently did not feel.

"But why should you need my mercy?" she demanded, as she sat down on a
little sofa heaped with cushions.

His gaze, after resting a moment on the smooth black hair beneath her
velvet hat, turned to the exquisite shining waves which encircled
Gerty's head.

"Ask my cousin," he advised with merriment.

Whatever Gerty's reason for not caring to bring them together may have
been, she concealed it now beneath a ready acceptance of the situation.

"Oh, he tried to make me promise to take him to see you," she explained,
"but I've told him you'd show him no quarter because he hasn't read your
poems."

Laura raised her eyes to his face, and he had again the sensation of
looking into an unutterable personality.

"I'm glad you haven't read them," she rejoined, "for now you won't be
able to talk to me about them."

"So you don't like to have one talk about them?"

She met his question with direct simplicity. "About my verse? I
shouldn't like to have you do it."

"And why not I?" he demanded, laughing.

"Oh, I don't know," she returned, her eyes lighting with the humour of
her frankness, "can one explain? But I'm perfectly sure that it's not
the kind of thing you'd like. There's no action in it."

"So Gerty has told you that I'm a strenuous creature?"

"Perhaps. I don't remember." She turned to Gerty, looking down upon her
with a tenderness that suffused her face with colour. "What was it that
you told me, dearest?"

"What did I tell you?" repeated Gerty, still clasping Laura's hand. "Oh,
it must have been that he agrees with some dreadful person who said that
poetry was the insanity of prose."

Laura laughed as she glanced back at him, and he contrasted her deep
contralto notes with Gerty's flute-like soprano.

"Well, he may not be right, but he is with the majority," she said.

Her indifference piqued him into the spirit of opposition, and he felt
an immediate impulse to compel her reluctant interest--to arouse her
admiration of the very qualities she now disdained.

"Well, I take my poetry where I find it," he rejoined, "and that's
mostly in life and not in books."

From the quick turn of her head, the instant's lifting of her emotional
reserve, he saw that the words had arrested her imagination--that for
the first time since her entrance she had really taken in the fact of
his existence as an individual.

"Then you are not with the majority, but you are right!" she exclaimed.

"Is it not possible to be both?" he asked, pleased almost more than he
would admit by the quickening of her attention.

"I think not," she answered seriously, "don't you?"

"I never think," he laughed with his eyes upon hers, "I live."

The animation, which was like the glow from an inner illumination, shone
in her face, and he thought, as Trent had thought before him, that her
soul must burn like a golden flame within her--a flame that reached
toward life, knowledge and the veiled wonders of experience.

"And so would I if I were a man," she said.

She rose, clasping the furs at her throat, then folding Gerty in her
arms she kissed her cheek.

"I stopped for a moment to look at you, nothing more," she confessed.
"It was a choice between looking at you and at the Rembrandt in the
Metropolitan, and I chose you." As she held Gerty from her for an
instant and then drew her into her embrace again, Kemper saw that her
delight in her friend's beauty was almost a rapture, that her friendship
possessed something of a religious fervour.

"Do stay with me," pleaded Gerty; "I want you--I need you."

"But you dine out."

"Oh, I forgot. Wait, I'll break it. I'll be ill."

Laura smiled her refusal and, stooping, picked up her large, fluffy
muff.

"I'll come to-morrow," she returned, "and it won't cost us a lie. Good
bye, my bonnie, what do you wear?"

Gerty waved her hands in a gesture of unconcern.

"It rests with the fates and with Annette," she replied. "Green, blue,
white; I don't care."

"But I do," persisted Laura; "let it be white." She looked at Kemper and
bowed silently as she turned toward the door; then, hesitating an
instant, she came back and held out her hand with a cordial smile. "It
has been very pleasant to meet you," she said.

"Mayn't I at least see you down?" he asked. "How do you go?"

"There's really no need to trouble you," she answered, "I shall go a
part of the way in the stage."

She went out, and as he followed her down the staircase he asked himself
again the puzzling question: "She is different from other women--but how
is she different?" And still he assured himself with confidence that
what he liked in her was her serene separateness from the appeal of
passion. "This is the thing that lasts--that really lasts for a
lifetime," he said in his thoughts.




CHAPTER VIII

PROVES THAT A POOR LOVER MAY MAKE AN EXCELLENT FRIEND


That night in her sitting-room, while she corrected the proof-sheets of
her new book of verse, Laura remembered Kemper's face as he sat across
from her on the long seat of the almost empty stage. Beyond him was the
humming city, where the lights bloomed like white flowers out of the
enveloping dusk, and when he turned his profile, as he did once, against
a jeweller's window, she saw every line of his large, strongly marked
features silhouetted with distinctness on a brilliant background. Twice
during the ride down she had been conscious, as when they left Gerty's
house together, that he was more masculine than any man she had known
closely in her life, and at first she had told herself that his nervous
activity--the ardent vitality in his appearance--was too aggressive to
be wholly pleasing. She had been used to a considerate gentleness from
men, and his manner, though frankly sympathetic, had seemed to her
almost brusque.

Even now, while she laid her work aside to think of him, she was hardly
sure that his genial egoism had not repelled her. Her instinct told her
that he could be both kind and generous, that he was capable of
unselfish impulses, and full, too, of a broad and tolerant humanity,
yet there was something within her--some finer spiritual
discernment--which rose to battle against the attraction he appeared to
possess. He was not mental, he was not even superficially bookish, and
yet because of a certain magnetic quality--a mere dominant virility--she
found herself occupied, to the exclusion of her work, with the words he
had uttered, with the tantalising humour in his eyes.

"I am glad that I did not ask him to call," she thought as she took up
her pencil. "He does not interest me and very likely I shall never see
him again. He was pleasant certainly, but one can't make acquaintances
of every stranger one happens to meet." Then it seemed to her that she
had been distant, almost rude, when he had bidden her good-night, and as
she remembered the engaging frankness of his smile, the eager yet humble
look with which he had waited at her door for the invitation she did not
give, she regretted in spite of herself that she had been so openly
inhospitable. After all there was no reason that one should turn a man
from one's door simply because his personality didn't please one's
fancy. For a moment she dragged her mind for some word, some look in
which she might have found a shadow of excuse for the dislike she felt.
"No, he said nothing foolish," she confessed at last, "he was only kind
and friendly and it is I who have offended--I who have allowed myself to
feel an unreasonable aversion." All at once an irritation against
herself pervaded her thoughts, and she determined that if she met him
again she would be more cordial--that she would force herself to show a
particular friendliness. The recollection of his love for Madame Alta
came to her, and she felt at the same time a sharp curiosity and a deep
disgust--"A man like that must love with madness," she thought, and
next, "but how do I know if it were love between them and why should I
judge?" Her clasped hands went to her eyes and she prayed silently:
"Keep me apart, O Lord, keep me pure and apart!"

For a while she sat with bowed bead, then, as her hands fell into her
lap, she broke into a little tender laugh at herself. "What a fool I am,
after all," she lamented; "here I have seen a man whom I do not
like--once, for an hour--and he has so troubled my quiet that I cannot
put my mind upon my work. What does it matter, and why should a stranger
who displeases me have power to compel my thoughts? It was but a
trifle--the distraction of an hour, nothing more--and, whether I like
him or not, by to-morrow I shall have forgotten his existence."

But she remembered his face as he sat across from her in the dimly
lighted stage, and she felt again, with a start, that he was the first
man she had ever known. "Yet he does not attract me, and I shall never
see him again," she thought after a moment. She took up a little
religious book from her desk and tried in vain to fix her wandering
attention. Life appeared all at once very full and very beautiful, and
as she thought of the thronging city around her it seemed to her that
she herself and the people in the street and the revolving stars were
held securely in the hand of God. The belief awoke in her that she was
shielded and set apart for a predestined good, an exalted purpose, and
she wondered if the purpose were already moving toward her out of the
city and if its end would be only the fulfilling of the law of her own
nature. Then she thought of Angela in her closed chamber. Had she been
shielded? Was she also set apart? But the thought did not disturb her,
for she herself seemed of a larger growth, of a braver spirit, than
Angela or than her aunts or than Uncle Percival, who had missed life
also. They had been defeated, but was it not because they had lacked in
themselves the courage to attain?

The next morning, after she had had her tea and toast in her room, she
went, as was her custom, into Angela's chamber. Early as it was, Mrs.
Payne had already apparelled herself in her paint and powder and driven
down. Seen by the morning sunlight, her smeared face with its brilliant
artificial smile revealed a pathos which was rendered more acute by its
effect of playful grotesqueness. She was like a faded and decrepit
actress who, fired by the unconquerable spirit of her art, forces her
wrinkled visage to ape the romantic ecstasies of passion. Age which is
beautiful only when it has become expressive of repose--of serene
renouncement--showed to Laura's eyes only as a ghastly and comic
travesty of youth.

Angela was having her breakfast at a little table by the window, and at
Laura's entrance she turned to her with a sigh of evident relief.

"Rosa has come down to speak to you particularly," she explained. "There
is something she has very heavily on her mind."

Mrs. Payne had wheeled herself about at the same instant; and Laura,
after regarding her uncertainly for a moment, impressed a light caress
upon her outstretched jewelled fingers.

"I didn't sleep a wink, my dear," began the old lady in her most
conciliatory tones, "not a blessed wink after Horace told me."

The questioning stare in Laura's face had the effect of jerking her up
so hurriedly that the words seemed to trip and stumble upon her lips.

"I might have had it from yourself, of course," she added with an
aggrieved contortion of her features, "but as I was just telling Angela,
I would not for worlds intrude upon your confidence."

"But what has he told you?" asked Laura, curiously, "and what, after
all, did I tell Uncle Horace?"

Mrs. Payne settled herself comfortably back in her chair, and, picking
up a bit of Angela's toast from the tray, nibbled abstractedly at the
crust.

"What under heaven would he have told me but the one thing?" she
demanded. "Mr. Wilberforce has at last proposed."

"At last!" echoed Laura, breaking into a laugh of unaffected merriment.
"Well, he _was_ long about it!"

At the words Angela leaned toward her, stretching out her frail hands in
a pleading gesture.

"Don't marry, Laura," she entreated; "don't--don't marry. There is only
misery from men--misery and regret."

"I believe he has millions," remarked Mrs. Payne, in the tone in which
she might have recited her creed in church, "and as far as a husband
goes I have never observed that there was any disadvantage to be found
in age. My experience of the world has taught me that decrepitude is the
only thing which permanently domesticates a man."

Laura sat down across from her, and then clasping her hands together
made her final determined stand.

"You needn't try to persuade me, Aunt Rosa," she answered, "for I
wouldn't marry him--no, not if he had billions."

For a brief interlude Mrs. Payne returned her gaze with silent yet
expressive dignity.

"There's really no occasion to become violent," she observed at last,
"particularly in the presence of poor Angela."

"But I like it! I like it," declared Angela, "it is her marriage that I
couldn't bear."

Mrs. Payne turned her reproachful look for a moment upon the weaker
sister.

"I am very sure, my dear, that we can bear anything the Lord chooses to
send," she remarked, "especially when we feel that our cross is for
another's good. Is there any reason," she wound up to Laura again, "for
the obstinate position you appear to take?"

Laura shook her head.

"I don't take any position," she replied, "I simply decline to be made
to marry him, that's all."

"But you like him--I've heard you say so much with my own ears."

"You never heard me say I liked him for a husband."

"It would have been highly indelicate if I had," observed Mrs Payne,
"but since he has proposed I may as well impress upon you that any kind
of liking is quite sufficient argument for a marriage which would be so
suitable in every way. And as to the romantic nonsense--well it all
comes very much to the same thing in the long run, and whether you begin
by loving a man or by hating him, after six months of marriage you can
ask nothing better than to be able to regard him with Christian
forbearance."

Laura turned away impatiently as Uncle Percival put his bland,
child-like face in at the open door.

"I hope you had a quiet night, Angela," he said in his high, piping
voice; "the morning is a fine one and I've already had my turn." Then,
holding his coat closely over a small bundle which he carried, he
greeted Mrs. Payne with a deprecating smile. "You're down early, Rosa;
it's a good habit."

Mrs. Payne surveyed him with an intolerant humour.

"I'm not undertaking to cultivate a habit at my time of life," she
responded, raising her voice until it sounded harsh and cracked; then
she became a prey to a devouring suspicion. "What is that under your
coat?" she demanded sternly.

Uncle Percival's flaccid mouth fell open with a frightened droop, and he
took instantly the demeanour of a small offending schoolboy.

"It--it's only a little present for Angela," he replied. "I thought it
might interest her, but I hardly think you would care for it, Rosa."

"What is it?" persisted Mrs. Payne in her unyielding calmness.

The object moved beneath his coat, and, pulling it out with a timid yet
triumphant gesture, he displayed before their astonished eyes a
squirming white rabbit.

"I hoped it might interest Angela," he repeated, seeking in vain for
sympathy in the three amazed faces.

The rabbit struggled in his grasp, and after holding it suspended a
moment by the nape of its neck, he cuddled it again beneath his coat. "A
woman was selling them in the street," he explained in a suppressed
voice. "She had a box filled with them. I bought only one."

"That was fortunate," returned Mrs. Payne, severely, "for you will have
to carry the creature back at once--or drown it if you prefer."

"But I thought Angela would like it," he said with a disappointed look.

Angela closed her eyes as if shutting out an irritating sight.

"What in the world would I do with a white rabbit?" she enquired.

"But I could take care of it," insisted Untie Percival. "I should like
to take care of it very much."

Laura drew the rabbit from his coat and held it a moment against her
bosom.

"It's a pretty little thing," she remarked carelessly, and added, "why
not keep it for yourself, Uncle Percival?"

As he glanced up at her the light of animation broke in his face.

"Why shouldn't I, indeed, why shouldn't I?" he demanded eagerly, and
hurried out before Mrs. Payne, with her Solomonic power of judgment,
could bring herself to the point of interference.

"I hope that will be a lesson to you with regard to men," she observed
as a parting shot while she tied her bonnet strings.

An uncontrollable distaste for her family swept over Laura, and she felt
that she could suffer no longer the authority of Mrs. Payne, the
senility of Uncle Percival or the sorrows of Angela. As she looked at
Mrs. Payne she was struck as if for the first time by her ridiculous
grotesqueness, and she experienced a sensation of disgust for the old
lady's stony eyes and carefully painted out wrinkles.

Without replying to the moral pointed by Uncle Percival and the white
rabbit, she left the room and hastily dressed herself for her morning
walk. The house had grown close and oppressive to her and she wanted the
January cold in her face and limbs. At the moment she was impatient of
anything that recalled a restraint of mind or body.

When she came in two hours later, after a brisk walk in the park, she
found Mr. Wilberforce awaiting her in the drawing-room downstairs. He
looked older she thought at the first glance in the last few days, but
there was a cheerfulness, a serenity, in his face which seemed to lend
itself like a softening light to his beautiful pallid features. He was a
man who having fought bitterly against resignation for many years comes
to it peacefully at last only to find that he has reaped from it a
portion of the "enchantment of the disenchanted." Her intuition told her
instantly that he had given up hope of love, but she recognized also,
through some strange communion of sympathy, that he had attained the
peace of soul which follows inevitably upon any sincere renouncement of
self.

"I am so glad, dear friend," she said, holding his hand for a moment as
she sat beside him.

He looked at her silently with his brilliant eyes which burned in the
midst of his blanched and withered face like two watch-fires that are
kept alive in a scorched desert.

"For a while I thought it might be," he replied after a long pause. "I
asked you to give me what I have never had--my youth. You could not do
it," he added with a smile, "and at first it seemed to me that there
remained only emptiness and disappointment for the future, but presently
I learned wisdom in the night." He hesitated an instant and then added
gravely, "I saw that if you couldn't give me youth, you could at least
make my old age very pleasant."

"I can--I will," she answered in a broken voice, and it seemed to her
that all the bitterness had turned to sweetness in his look. Was the
divine wisdom, after all, she wondered, not so much the courage which
turned the events that came to happiness as the greater power which
created light where there was nothing. Only age had learned to do this,
she knew, and she was conscious of a quick resentment against fate that
only age could put into passion the immortal spirit which youth craved
in vain.

"I asked a great deal," he said, "but I shall be content with a very
little."

"With my whole faith--with all my friendship," she replied; and as she
spoke the words, her heart contracted with a spasm which was almost that
of terror of the unknown purpose to which she felt, with a kind of
superstitious blindness, that she was pledged. Fate had offered her
this one good thing, and she must put it from her because she waited in
absolute ignorance--for what? For love it might be, and yet her woman's
instinct taught her that the only love which endures is the love of age
that has never been young for youth so elastic that it can never grow
old. Then swift as the flash of self-revelation she saw in imagination
the eager yet humble look with which Arnold Kemper had waited before her
door, and, though she insisted still that the picture displeased her
fancy, she knew that passion to meet response in her must come to her
clothed in a virile strength like his.

"I wish from my soul that it might have been," she murmured, but even
with the words she knew that she had all her life wished for a different
thing--for a love that was wholly unlike the love he offered.

"It has been," he answered, while his grave gentleness fell like dew on
the smouldering fire in his eyes. "It has been, my dear, and it will be
always until I die."




CHAPTER IX

OF MASQUES AND MUMMERIES


In the afternoon of the next day Laura received by a special messenger
an urgent appeal from Gerty Bridewell.

"Come to me at once," said the note, which appeared to have been written
in frantic haste. "I am in desperate trouble and I need you."

The distress of the writer was quite as apparent as the exaggeration,
and while Laura rolled rapidly toward her in a cab, she prepared herself
with a kind of nervous courage to bear the brunt of the inevitable
scene. Perry was at the bottom of it she knew--she had answered such
summonses often enough before to pre-figure with unerring insight the
nature of the event. He had shown his periodical inclination to a fresh
affair, his errant fancy had wandered in a particular direction, and
Gerty's epicurean philosophy had failed as usual to account for the
concrete fact. To Laura the amazing part was not so much Perry's
fickleness, which she had brought herself to accept with tolerant
aversion, as the extraordinary value Gerty placed upon an emotion which
was kept alive by an artifice at once so evident and so ineffectual.
There was but one thing shorter lived than his repentance she knew, and
that was the sentiment of which he was charitably supposed to have
repented. By nature he was designed a lover, and it seemed, broadly
viewed, the merest accident of circumstances that he should tend toward
variety rather than toward specialisation.

A man passing in the street bowed to her as the cab turned a corner,
and, as she recognised Arnold Kemper, she wondered vaguely if he had
aught in common with his cousin. A slight resemblance to Perry Bridewell
offended her as she recalled it, and, while her resentful sympathy flew
to Gerty, she felt almost vindictive against the masculine type he
appeared physically to represent.

"O Lord, keep me apart!" she prayed fervently, as she had prayed in the
night, for it appeared to her that the shield of faith was the one
shield for the spirit against the besieging vanities of life. Gerty's
faith had fallen from her long ago, and, as she remembered this, Laura
felt a jealous impulse to snatch her friend away from the restless
worldliness and the inordinate desires. The pitiable soul of Gerty
showed to her suddenly as a stunted and famished city child struggling
for life in an atmosphere which carried the taint of death, and in her
imagination the picture was so vivid that she saw the face of the child
turned toward her with a wistful, imploring look.

The cab stopped with a jerk, and in a little while she was knocking
softly at the closed door of Gerty's chamber. Almost immediately it
opened and the French maid came out.

"Madame is ill with a headache," she explained, pointing to the closed
shutters, "she refuses to eat."

Putting her impatiently aside, Laura closed the door upon her, and then
crossing to the windows threw back the shutters to let in the late
sunshine.

"A little light won't hurt you, dearest," she said, with a smile.

Gerty, still in her nightgown with a Japanese kimono flung carelessly
about her and her hair falling in a brilliant shower upon her shoulders,
was sitting before her bureau making a pretence of sorting a pile of
bills. In spite of this pathetic subterfuge, her beautiful green eyes
held a startled and angry look, and her face was flushed with an
excitement like that of fever.

"I was sorry I sent for you the moment afterward," she said, hardly
yielding to Laura's embrace, while she nervously tore open a bill she
held and then tossed it aside without glancing over it. "It's the same
thing over again--there's no use talking about it. I shall die."

"You cannot--you cannot," protested Laura, still holding her in her
arms. "You are too beautiful. You were never in your life lovelier than
you are to-day."

"And yet it does not hold him," broke out Gerty, in sudden passion, "and
it will never be any better, I see that. If it's not one it's another,
but it's always somebody. A year ago he promised me that I should never
have cause for jealousy again--he swore that and I believed him--and now
this--this--"

Her anger choked her like a sob, and she tore with trembling fingers at
the papers in her lap. Then suddenly her brow contracted with
resolution, and she went through a long list of items as if the most
important fact in life were the amount of money she must pay to her
dressmaker.

"Of course you know what I think," murmured Laura with her lips at
Gerty's ear.

"That he isn't worth it," Gerty nodded, while her indignant and
humiliated expression grew almost violent. "Well, I think so, too. Of
course he isn't, but that doesn't make it any better--any easier."

"You mean you couldn't give him up?"

"When I'm dead I may, not before." She closed her eyes and a long
shudder ran through her body. "It has been nothing but a fight since I
married--a fight to keep him. I used to think that marriage meant rest,
contentment, but I know now that it means a battle--all the time--every
instant. I've never had one natural moment, I've never since the
beginning been without a horrible suspicion--and I see now that I never
shall be. He likes me best I know--in his heart he really puts me
first--but there are others and I won't have it. I'll be alone, I'll be
the only one or nothing. I said I wouldn't be beaten the first time, and
I won't--I won't be beaten." She paused an instant to draw breath. "And
I haven't been," she wound up in bitter triumph.

"You'll never be, darling," declared Laura; "who is there on earth to
shine against you?"

The violence faded from Gerty's face, yielding to an expression of
disgust, of spiritual loathing--the loathing of a creature that hates
the thing it loves.

"But it isn't worth it, it isn't worth it," she moaned, pushing the
papers away from her with an indignant gesture, and rising from her
chair to walk hurriedly up and down the floor. "It isn't worth it, but
I'm bound to it--I can't get away. I'm bound to the wheel. Do you think
if I could help myself--if I could be different--that I would turn into
a mere bond-slave to my body? Why, a day labourer has rest, but I
haven't. There's not a moment when I'm not doing something for my
beauty, or planning effects, or undergoing a treatment. I never sleep as
I want to, nor bathe as I want to, nor even eat what I like. It's all
somebody's system for preserving something about me. I've lived on
celery and apples to keep from growing fat and taken daily massage to
keep from getting thin--and yet I never wake up in the morning that I
don't turn sick for fear I'll discover my first wrinkle in the glass.
Now imagine," she finished with a cynical laugh, "Perry going upon a
diet for any sentimental reasons, or sacrificing terrapin in order to
retain my affection!"

"I can't," confessed Laura bluntly, "it's beyond me, but I wish you
wouldn't. I wish you'd try to hold him by something different--something
higher."

"You can't hold a person by what he hasn't got," returned Gerty with the
flippant ridicule she so desperately clung to--a ridicule which she used
as unsparingly upon herself as upon her husband. Then, after a pause,
she resumed her bitter musing in the same high-strung, reckless manner.
"A wrinkle would kill me," she pursued; "I'd rather endure any
agony--I'd be skinned alive first like some woman Perry laughed about.
Yet they must come--they're obliged to come in fifteen--ten--perhaps in
five years. Perhaps even to-morrow. Do you suppose," she questioned
abruptly, with a tragic intensity worthy of a less ignoble cause, "that
when one gets old one really ceases to mind--that one dies out all
inside--the sensations I mean, and the emotions--before the husk begins
to wither?" She paused a moment, but as Laura continued to regard her
with a soft, compassionate look she turned away again and, touching an
electric button in the wall, flooded the room with light. The change was
so startling that every object seemed to leap at once from twilight
vagueness into a conspicuous prominence. On a chair in the corner was
carelessly flung a white chiffon dinner gown, and a pair of little satin
slippers had been thrown upon the floor beside it, where they lay
slightly sideways, with turned-out toes, as they had fallen from the
wearer's feet. The pathos which seems so often to dwell in trifling
inanimate objects spoke to Laura from the little discarded shoes, and
again society appeared to her as a hideous battle in which the passions
preyed upon the ideals, the body upon the soul. She thought of Perry
Bridewell, of his healthy animalism, his complacent self-esteem, while
her heart hardened within her. Was love, when all was said, merely a
subjection to the flesh instead of an enlargement of the spirit? Did it
depend for its very existence upon the dress-maker's art and the
primitive instinct of the chase? Had it no soul within it to keep it
clean? Could it see or hear only through the eye or the ear of sense?

"O Gerty, Gerty," she said, "if I could only make you see!"

But Gerty, with one of those swift changes of humour which made her
moods at once so unexpected and so irresistible, had burst into a peal
of mocking laughter.

"I'm prepared to conquer or to die," she said merrily; and going to a
large white box on the bed, she opened it and dangled in the air a
gorgeous evening gown of silver gauze shot with green. "This cost me a
thousand dollars," she commented in the hard, business-like tones Laura
had begun to dread. "I was keeping it for the ball next week, but
there's no call like the call of an emergency. The horrid creature he
fancies will be there," she added, surveying her exquisite armful with
an admiring, unhappy glance, "and it will be war to the death between
us, if it costs him every cent he has." She fell thoughtfully silent, to
break out at the end of a minute or two with a remark which had the
value of an imparted confidence: "She--I mean the creature--wore one
something like it, only not nearly so handsome--last night--and it made
her look frightfully gone off--even Perry noticed it."

Spreading the gown carefully upon the bed, she went to the mirror and
regarded herself with passionate scrutiny.

"Will you wait and see me dress?" she asked; "Annette has my cold bath
ready. I must have a colour, but I shan't be a minute in the tub."

"Do you mean that you are really going out to-night?" asked Laura,
remembering the despairing note of a few hours ago.

Gerty nodded. "To a dinner and a dance. Do you think that I will play
the neglected wife?"

A glow had sprung to her eyes that was like the animation with which an
intrepid hunter might depart upon a desperate chase--and through all her
elaborate toilette--the massaging of her face, the arranging of her
hair, the perfuming of her beautiful neck and arms--she chatted gayly in
the same flippant yet nervous voice. When at last the maid had withdrawn
again, Gerty, pausing before Laura in a shimmer of silver gauze that
reminded one of a faintly scented moonlight, bent over and touched her
cheek with feverish lips.

"It is war to the knife," she laughed; and the peculiar radiance of
colour, which gave her beauty a character that was almost violent, made
her at the moment appear triumphant, exultant, barbaric. To Laura she
had never seemed more beautiful nor more unhappy. Then suddenly her
manner underwent a curious change, and her accustomed mask--the smiling
surface of a woman of the world--settled as if by magic upon her face.
Perry Bridewell was at the door, and she opened it for him with an
unconcern at which Laura wondered.

"Come in if you want to," she said coolly, "Laura doesn't mind."

She drew back into the middle of the room, fastening her glove with
insolent indifference, while his startled gaze hung upon her in an
amazement he lacked the mental readiness to hide.

"By Jove, are you going out?" he asked. "I thought you were downright
ill and I was about to call up the doctor. I'm jolly glad--I declare I
am," he added humbly.

From the sincere anxiety in his voice, Laura surmised at once that
Gerty's exasperation had preceded by some hours her cooler judgment. He
looked as uncomfortable as it was possible for a man of his optimistic
habit of mind to feel, and an evident humiliation was traced upon his
countenance as if by several hasty touches of a crayon pencil.

But his features were intended so manifestly to wear a look of cheerful
self-esteem that his dejection, honest as it was, produced an effect of
insincerity, and it seemed to Laura that his other and more natural
expression was still lying somewhere beneath this superficial remorse.
Considered as physical bulk he was impressive, she admitted, in a large,
ruddy, highly obvious fashion; then he appeared suddenly so stupid and
child-like in his discomfiture that she felt her heart softening in
spite of her convictions. At the instant he resembled nothing so much as
a handsome, good-humoured, but disobedient, dog patiently awaiting a
reprimand.

"On my word I'm jolly glad," he repeated, and stopped because he could
think of nothing further to say that did not sound foolish in his own
perturbed mind.

"Oh, I'm not utterly lacking in humanity," retorted Gerty, "and one has
to be not to admit a moral obligation to one's hostess. Besides," she
confessed, with smiling pleasantry, "I shall rather enjoy Ada Lawley's
face when she sees my gown. She told me last night that she would never
be caught wearing silver gauze again until she wanted to look every day
as old as she really is. It was rather hard on her, poor thing, for
Arnold says she'd rather lose her character any day than her
complexion--not that she has very much of either left by now," she
corrected with her cutting laugh.

Before the studied insolence of her attack Perry drew back quickly in
surprise, and his eyelids winked rapidly as if a lighted candle had
flashed before them. Then, with that child-like need of having his eyes
opened, of being made to _see_, his attention was fastened upon the
brilliant figure of his wife, and her beauty seemed at the moment to
burn itself into his slow-witted brain.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, and again, "By Jove!"

"I'm glad you like it," replied Gerty, with a careless shrug. "I may not
be a model woman from a domestic point of view, but at least I've
managed to keep both my colour and my reputation." She crossed to the
bureau, and opening a drawer took out a green and silver fan. "I really
needn't trouble you to come, you know," she remarked indifferently.
"Arnold will be there and I dare say he'll be willing to come back in my
carriage."

"I dare say he will," observed Perry, not without a jealous indignation,
"and I dare say you'd be pleased enough if I'd let him."

Gerty laughed as she closed the drawer with a bang. "Well, I shouldn't
exactly mind," she rejoined.

Reconciliation, such as it was, the brief reunion of suspicion and
broken faith was apparently in rapid progress, and, filled with a pity
not unmixed with disgust, Laura put on her fur coat and went slowly down
the staircase. The last sound that followed her was the flute-like music
of Gerty's laugh--a little tired, heart-sick, utterly disillusioned
laugh.

A man was going by on the sidewalk as she went out, and when the closing
of the house door caused him instinctively to look up, she saw that it
was Roger Adams. He stopped immediately and waited for her until she
descended the steps.

"Are you bound now," he asked, "for Gramercy Park?"

She nodded "But I'd like to walk a block or two. I've been shut up all
the afternoon with Gerty."

"She's not ill, I hope," he remarked, as he fell into step at her side.
"I've always had a considerable liking for Mrs. Bridewell, and for
Perry, too. He's a first-rate chap."

For a moment Laura walked on rapidly, without replying. It seemed to her
abominable that Adams should confess to an admiration for Perry
Bridewell, and the generous humanity which she had formerly respected in
him now offended her.

"He is not a favourite of mine," she commented indifferently; then moved
by a flitting impulse, she added after a pause, "By the way, do you
know, I've met his cousin."

Adams looked a little mystified as he echoed her remark.

"His cousin?" But in an instant further light broke upon him. "Oh, you
mean Arnold Kemper!"

"I met him at Gerty's," explained Laura, "but I can't say honestly that
he particularly appealed to me. There's something about him--I don't
know what--that runs up against my prejudices."

Adams laughed.

"I rather fancy the prejudices are more than half gossip," he observed.

"I'd forgotten what I'd heard about him," rejoined Laura, shaking her
head.

They had reached a crossing, and he dropped a little behind her while
she walked on with the flowing yet energetic step she had inherited from
her Southern mother. On the opposite corner he came up with her again
and resumed the conversation where they had let it fall.

"I never see Kemper now," he said, "but I still feel that we are friends
in a way, and I believe if I were to run across him to-morrow he'd be
quite as glad to see me as if we hadn't parted fifteen years ago. The
last time I saw much of him, by the way, we roughed it together one
autumn on the coast of Nova Scotia, and I remember he volunteered there
to go out in the first heavy gale to bring in some fishermen who had
been caught out in the ice. They tied a rope around his waist and he
went and brought the men in, too, though we feared for a time that his
hands would be frozen off."

"Oh, I dare say he has pluck," observed Laura, and though her voice was
constrained, she was conscious of a sudden moral exhilaration, such as
she sometimes experienced after reading a great poem or seeing a
Shakespearian tragedy upon the stage. The lights and the noises and the
people in the street became singularly vivid, while she moved on in an
excitement which she could not explain though she felt that it was
wholly pleasurable. Kemper was present to her now in a nobler, almost a
glorified, aspect, and she began, though she herself was hardly aware of
it, to idealise him with the fatal ardour of a poet and a dreamer. There
was a splendour to her in his old heroic deed--a glow that transfigured,
like some clear northern light, the storm and the danger and even the
ice bound fishermen--and she told herself that it would be impossible
ever to atone to him for her past rudeness.

"Perhaps I was unjust," she remarked presently, "but one is never proof
against intuitive impressions, and after all it does not greatly
matter."

Then she looked at Roger Adams as he walked in the electric light beside
her. She saw how haggard were the lines in his face, that he was bent in
the shoulders as if from some mental burden, and the delicacy of his
long, slender figure appeared to her almost as a physical infirmity. It
occurred to her at the instant that his bodily defects had never before
showed so plainly to her eyes, and it was with a flash of acute
self-consciousness--a flash as from a lantern that has been turned
inward--that she realised that she was comparing him with Arnold Kemper.




CHAPTER X

SHOWS THE HERO TO BE LACKING IN HEROIC QUALITIES


When he had parted from Laura Adams walked down Fifth Avenue to
Thirty-fifth Street and then turned east in the direction of his own
house. He found upon entering that Connie, as usual, was dining out, and
after he had eaten his poorly served dinner alone in the dining-room, he
went upstairs with the intention of slipping into his smoking jacket and
returning to his study for a peaceful smoke. The electric lights were
blazing in Connie's bedroom, and when he went in to extinguish them,
moved by some instinct of economy, he found that the room was in even
greater disorder than that to which he had grown, after years of
uncomplaining discomfort, outwardly if not inwardly resigned. Of a
naturally systematic habit of thought, Connie's carelessness had been
for him one of those petty annoyances of daily life to meet which he had
always felt that philosophy had been especially designed; but to-night
the chaos struck him so forcibly that he found himself vaguely
questioning if it were possible for a human creature to sleep in such a
spot? Picking up several gowns from the middle of the floor, he returned
them to the wardrobe, and set himself to clearing the bed of an array of
satin shoes. Her silver hair brushes had fallen on the hearth rug, and
in replacing them upon the bureau his eye fell on a small, half-empty
phial lying beneath a pile of lace-edged handkerchiefs. Looking at it a
little closer he found that it contained a solution of cocaine.

For a moment surprise held him motionless; then as if to refute and
explain away any ordinary reason for her possession of the drug, he
remembered, in a comprehensive flash the recent violent changes in her
character--her uncontrollable attacks of nervousness, her spasmodic
movements and her sudden flowing, almost hysterical, volubility of
speech. His heart contracted with a sensation like that of terror, and
he was turning away again when his glance was arrested by a heap of
crumpled bills lying loosely in one corner of the open drawer.
Recollecting that she had complained the day before of the smallness of
her allowance, he drew out the papers for a casual examination--but it
needed much less, in fact, than this to assure him that her expenses had
not only gone immeasurably beyond her own limited allowance, but that
they had considerably exceeded his slightly larger income. Her debts had
evidently run up to a sum which she had lost the courage to confess even
to herself, and, while the gravity of the situation entered into him, he
smoothed out the torn and crumpled sheets and went with them to his
study. Until to-night he had looked upon Connie's extravagance merely as
an innocent childish failing, resulting from an inherent incapacity, as
she laughingly said, "to do sums," but now as he sat under the green
lamp shade, anxiously multiplying item after item, it seemed to him that
this recent recklessness involved not only her private happiness but
his own personal honour. He was a hot-tempered man by nature, and at
first the very absurdity of her expenditures, the useless, costly
trifles which made up the amount, produced in him an unreasoning passion
of anger. Had she been in the house he would have gone to her in the
first shock of his temper, but her ceaseless pursuit of pleasure had put
her beyond his reach, so he sat silently staring at the neatly arranged
heap of papers while his exasperation cooled within him.

Presently, still sitting motionless in his chair, he felt the absolute
quiet of the room take effect upon his mood, and with the peculiar
tolerance confirmed as much by balked ambition as by years of enforced
and bitter patience he began with a philosophic and impersonal leniency
to soften in his judgment of Connie's case. At the moment there was no
tenderness, he told himself, in the view he took, and he gave to her
merely the distant, habitual charity that he would have extended to the
stranger in the street. To give to her in the very least seemed to him
suddenly almost impossible when he remembered that from a forlornly
foolish caprice she had plunged him into a debt of several years. He had
worked hard, with broken health, in a profession of small financial
returns, but to his own simple tastes his income might have brought not
only perfect material ease, but the enjoyment of comparative luxury.
Still there was Connie--he had always in every situation remembered that
there was Connie--and in order to insure her present comfort as well as
to provide for her future livelihood, he had contrived to limit his
expenses to the merest necessities. One only gratification he had
allowed himself--his eyes travelled gloomily round his precious
book-lined walls and he found himself wondering if those particular
treasures would bring their full value in the open market? He regarded
them meditatively, almost religiously, with the impassioned eye of the
collector who is born not cultivated. Yet there were among them no
high-priced, particular rarities, for he had always counted the cost
with the deliberation which he felt to be the better part of impulse.
Financially they did not represent a great deal, he admitted; then, as
if flinching before a threatened sacrilege, he looked away again, while
he remembered with a quick recognition of the ludicrous, that among the
articles for which Connie had not paid was a pair of pearl ear-rings.
The item had taken a prominence oddly out of keeping with its
significance, and he found that it irritated him more than the thought
of objects of a decidedly greater cost. That any woman, that his wife in
particular, should want a pair of ear-rings appeared to him little short
of the barbaric.

But the incident was trifling, and a minute later it had faded entirely
from his reflections. As he sat there in his easy-chair in the lamp
light his thoughts turned slowly backward, travelling over the tragic
yet uneventful history of his life. He remembered his childhood on a
little Western farm, the commonplace poverty of his people, and his own
burning, agonised ambition, which had sent him through college on a
pittance, swept the highest honours from his graduation year, and
wrecked at last what had been at his starting out a fairly promising
physical constitution. He recalled, too, the sleepless enthusiasm of
his last term at Harvard, the terrible exhaustion which had made his
final triumph barren, and the long illness which had brought him in the
end, with shattered health, to the door of the great specialist in lung
diseases. At this day he could shut his eyes and summon back with
distinctness the smallest detail of the interview. He went over again
his tedious wait in the outer office--the scattered magazines upon the
table, the utterly inartistic prints upon the wall, the ticking of the
tall bronze clock on the mantel, and even the number of the page he had
been reading in a periodical, for--following a methodical habit--he had
unconsciously made a mental note of the figures when he laid the
magazine aside to face the examination behind the folding doors. With
the patient attention to minutia which was a part of his literary
instinct, his memory followed the great man across the ugly yellow
squares in the carpet and fixed itself upon a row of small green bottles
standing in a wooden rack upon the table. Through the half hour of his
visit, which brief as it was casually dismissed him to his death, those
slender green phials seemed to his fancy to hold an absurd and grotesque
prominence. "In a climate like this I'd give you three years--maybe a
little longer--yes, I think I may grant a little longer," the great man
had remarked, with what seemed to Adams a ridiculous assumption of
yielding a concession. "In a dryer air you might even be good, we may
say, until thirty-five or forty." He shrugged his shoulders with a
gesture intended to convey his sympathy but which succeeded only in
expressing his personal importance, and Adams had walked out from the
stuffy little ether-smelling office with a feeling curiously like that
he had known as a boy when during a school game of football, he found
himself suddenly thumped upon the heart. On the doorstep he had stopped
and laughed aloud, struck by the persistency with which the green
bottles dominated his impressions.

After this there had come a blank of a few weeks--a blank of which he
remembered nothing except that he had struggled like an entrapped beast
against his fate--against his fruitless labour, his sacrificed ambition,
the unavailing bitterness of his self-denial--against the world,
destiny, life, death, God! But the very intensity of his rebellion had
brought reaction, and it was in the succeeding apathy of spirit that he
had packed his few belongings and started for the Colorado country.
Behind him he was leaving all that made life endurable in his eyes, and
yet he was leaving it from some half animal instinct which caused him to
preserve the mere naked strip of existence that he no longer valued. He
hated himself for going, yet he went that he might hate himself the more
bitterly with each step of the journey.

The lamp on his desk flared up fitfully and as he turned to lower the
wick his eyes fell on Connie's picture. The uplifted babyish face came
back to him as he had first seen it under floating cherry-colored
ribbons, and his anger of the last half-hour melted and vanished utterly
away. For the sake of those few months, when the waning fire within him
had leaped despairingly toward the flame of life, he knew that he could
never quite put Connie from his heart--for the sake of his short
romance and for the sake, too, of his child that had lived three hours.
The thin, heavily veined hand on the arm of his chair quivered for an
instant, and he felt his pulses throb quickly as if from acute physical
pain. From the pitiable failure of his marriage, from his loneliness and
disillusionment there came back to him the three hours when he had
looked upon the face of his living child--the hours of his profoundest
emotion, his completest reconciliation. He had never regarded himself as
an emotionally religious man, yet ten years ago, on the night that his
boy died, he had felt that an immortal and indissoluble part of himself
had gone out into the void. For the first time he had come to the deeper
reality of life--through the flowing of the agonised longing within
himself toward that permanent universal consciousness of which all human
longings are but detached and wandering forms. From that time death had
held for him a more personal promise; and the obligation to live, to
fulfil one's present opportunities, had become charged with another
meaning than he had been used to read into what he called his mere
animal responsibility. The boy who had died was for him in a close, an
intimate relation, still vitally alive; and with one of those quaint yet
pathetic blendings of memory with imagination the little undeveloped
soul had blossomed, not invisibly, incommunicably, but into actual daily
companionship with his thoughts.

Sitting there under the green lamp, he himself showed as an
insignificant figure to possess an ear for the divine silences, an eye
for the invisible beauty. His long, gaunt body lay relaxed and inert
upon the leather cushions, and his knotted, bony hands--the hands of a
scholar and a thinker--were stretched, palms downward, on the rolled
arms of his chair. There was nothing in his appearance--nothing in his
worn, humorous face under the thin brown hair, to suggest the valiant
lover, the impressionable dreamer. Yet in the innermost truth of his own
nature he was both, and his grief, of which in his strange, almost
savage, reserve he had never spoken even to his wife, had softened
gradually into the gentlest of his dreams as well as the profoundest of
his regrets. "The little chap," as he always called the child, in his
thoughts, had grown for him into an individuality which for all its
nearness was yet clearly distinct from his own. Adams had lived day by
day with him, had sat face to face with him in his lamp-lighted room,
had carried him successfully through the first childish books that he
might have studied, had even launched him into the Latin he might have
learned. A boy to train, to educate, a mental companionship such as he
loved to fancy he would have found in a young, eager mind, had since his
marriage become the one burning desire of his heart, and even to-night
sitting, as he so often did, alone in his house, his thoughts dwelt with
a playful tenderness upon the boy who might have brought his _Cćsar_ to
his footstool. He was a man of instinctive moral cleanness, and even in
his imagination he had always kept the riotous senses severely in the
check of reason. In the domain of the affections he had wanted nothing
desperately, he told himself, except his child; and so intense had this
yearning of fatherhood become in him that there were moments of bitter
loneliness when he seemed almost to feel the touch of the boy's hand
upon his knee. He had strange hours, even when his dream became more
vivid to him than the pressing reality of events.

The clicking of the latchkey as it was put into the lock aroused him
presently, and immediately afterward he heard the closing of the outer
door, a brief "Good-night!" in Connie's high-pitched voice, and her
rapid steps as they crossed the carpet in the hall. While he waited,
hesitating to follow her upstairs, his door opened and shut quickly, and
she came in and threw herself into a chair beside the lamp. Her blonde
head fell heavily back upon the cushions and the light, streaming
directly upon her face, revealed to his startled eyes all the intenser
angularities produced by the last twelve months--angularities which
seemed, somehow, to belong less to the features themselves than to the
restless intelligence which lay behind them. Connie's features had
always appeared too small for expression; too correctly formed for any
deviating individuality, but the impression made upon Adams now was that
they had grown so thin--so transparent in their fineness--that he looked
through them to the nervous animation confined and struggling in her
fragile body. The same animation throbbed like a pulse in her emaciated
bosom, which only the extreme smallness of her bones kept still lovely
in its low-cut evening gown. She was devoured, consumed by the agony of
restlessness which shook through her, directing and controlling her
slender judgment like a perpetual and imperfectly subdued convulsion of
passion.

For an instant he looked at her in attentive silence, then, as her
fingers wrestled uncertainly with the cords of her evening wrap, he rose
from his chair and bent forward to assist her.

"It's in a hard knot," she said irritably. "I can't undo it."

While he released the fastening and drew back his glance fell upon the
little bluish hollows in her temples, over which the light curls were
skilfully arranged, and as he realised fully her wasted physical
resources, it seemed to him that an allusion to anything so sordid as a
mere financial difficulty would sound not only trivial but positively
indecorous as well. With a whimsical trick of memory he recalled
abruptly a man under sentence of death in a Western gaol who had
received the night before his execution a bill for a dozen bottles of
champagne. Connie's extravagance appeared to him suddenly but a kind of
moral champagne--the particular _hasheesh_ that she had chosen from
unhappy consciousness. To live at all one must live with a dream, he
knew, and to his present flashing vision it seemed that Connie's ecstasy
of possession and his own ecstasy of desire served a like end when they
transfigured for a little while the brutal actuality from which there
was no escape except by the way of a man's own soul.

"You're ill," he said at last in a compassionate voice, "and there's
nothing for you but to get out of New York as soon as possible."

She looked disconcerted, almost incensed, by the suggestion.

"You can't send me to Florida," she returned, "and that's where
everybody goes at this season."

A trembling like that of faintness which is fought off by an effort of
will ran over her, and he watched the pale, unsteady quiver of her
eyelids.

"I will send you there--I'll send you anywhere," he said, "if you will
promise me--"

The words were hard to come, and while he stumbled over them she looked
up with a startled exclamation. Her glance travelling to his face, swept
over the desk beside which he stood and was arrested by the pile of
unpaid bills, which he had pushed, as he spoke, further away from the
lamp light. A hot, angry flush overspread her face, and she made a
nervous movement that brought her to her feet with a spring.

"You had no right to look at them," she burst out sharply, "they are all
wrong. Half of them were not meant for me."

The lie was so foolish, so ineffectual and without excuse, that he
flinched and turned his eyes away--for the shame of it seemed to belong
less to her than to himself. At the instant he was conscious of a
stinging sensation in his veins as of a man who realises for the first
time that he has fallen into dishonour.

"I did not mean to mention that--at least not now," he said quickly.
"We'll call it off and try to keep clean out of debt in the future. I
fear your allowance does seem rather shabby to you, but it can't be
helped. It takes every cent of the balance to run the house and pay my
life insurance."

He waited an instant, hoping that his matter-of-fact statement of the
situation--his freedom from implied reproach--might call forth some
expression, however slight, of her appreciation. But her glance flashed
over him, critical, disapproving, and he became aware, through a wonder
of intuition, that even at the moment she was possessed by her passion
for externals, was weighing his personal details as he stood in the lamp
light, and deciding impartially that he made but a poor physical
showing. Her unfavourable verdict was impressed upon him so strongly
that it produced a revulsion of anger. He felt, somehow, that their
positions were reversed, that she had him now at her mercy, and failing
to reduce him by flattery, had chosen to wither him by contempt.

"There's not a woman I know who could dress decently on what I have,"
she rejoined, skilfully adjusting him into the necessity of defence.

He gathered up the papers, and placing them in a drawer of his desk,
closed it sharply. There was a sordid indecency about the discussion
which stung him like the stroke of a whip.

"I am sorry," he returned coolly, "but I have done my best. There is
nothing more to be said." His eyes lingered for a moment on her thin
bosom where the bones were beginning to be faintly visible through the
ivory flesh. Then he looked at her sharpened face and saw that the three
little wrinkles were stamped indelibly between her eyebrows. As he
watched her she lifted her head with the babyish tilt he had first seen
under cherry-coloured ribbons. "I will find the money to send you to
Florida," he said slowly, "if you will promise me--to give up drugs."

She gathered her wraps about her and made a movement as if to leave the
room. "Drugs! Why, how ridiculous!" she exclaimed with a laugh, though
he felt the cold edge of hatred in her voice.

Still laughing, she went out and up the staircase, and a few minutes
afterwards he heard her nervous step in the room above. He took out the
bills again and spent half the night in the effort to realise the exact
amount of his indebtedness.




CHAPTER XI

IN WHICH A LIE IS THE BETTER PART OF TRUTH


At breakfast Connie did not appear--she had seemed to be asleep when he
went into his dressing-room--and it was not until one o'clock that he
had a chance to speak to her again. Luncheon was already on the table
when he entered the dining-room, and Connie, in a green velvet gown and
a little green velvet hat ornamented by a twinkling aigrette, was
standing by the window looking out restlessly at the falling snow. As he
came in she went over to the table and began making tea with nervous
hands. She was apparently in the highest spirits, and while she fumbled
noisily with the cups and saucers she rambled on in her expressionless
voice with tinkling interludes of her shrill, falsetto laughter. As he
watched her in shamed silence he remembered with astonishment that it
had taken him almost ten years to find out that Connie was vulgar. Now
at last his eyes were opened--he had achieved a standard of comparison
and he felt her commonness with an awakening of his literary instinct,
quite as acutely, he told himself, as he should have felt it had she
been presented to him in the form of a printed page. The sense of
remoteness, of strangeness, grew upon him at each instant; he realised
the uselessness of his good intentions toward her--the utter
impossibility of snatching her or any human creature from the clutch of
temperament.

Her day was filled with engagements, she told him at the end of luncheon
when she rose to hurry off while he still lingered over his coffee; "and
I shan't be here to dine, either," she added, as an after thought. "Gus
Brady will come for me--there's the opera and a supper afterwards, so
you needn't trouble to sit up."

"But whom are you going with?" he enquired, filled for the first time
with a painful curiosity concerning the social body in which Connie
moved.

She shook her head with a gesture of irritation, while the aigrette in
her hat sent out little iridescent flashes of blue and green. "Oh, you
wouldn't know if I told you," she answered impatiently, and left the
room so hastily that he felt she had meant to wriggle away from the
repeated question. What did it mean? he wondered for a minute as he
slowly sipped his coffee. Even if she should go with Brady alone, where
was the harm of it? and why should she avoid so innocent an admission.
He was of a candidly unsuspicious nature, and since in his own mind he
had seen no particular reason for infringing upon the conventions of
society they had never given him so much as an unquiet thought.
Certainly to dine at a restaurant or attend so public a function as
grand opera with a person of the opposite sex, seemed to him a
singularly harmless choice of indiscretions, and had she made a careless
avowal of her intention the matter would probably have dropped at the
moment from his thoughts. But the very secretiveness of her manner--the
suggestion of a hidden motive which dwelt in her nervous movements and
even quivered in the little scintillating aigrette on her blonde
head--aroused in him if not a positive distrust, still a bewildering and
decidedly unpleasant confusion of ideas. He felt, somehow, vaguely
impelled to action, yet for the life of him, he admitted after a moment,
he could see no single direction in which action with regard to his wife
would not savor of the indiscreet, if not of the ridiculous. The
attitude of an aggrieved husband had always showed to him as something
laughable, and an explosion of jealousy had never appeared more vulgar
than it did while he sat patiently conjecturing if such a domestic
cyclone might be counted upon to shake Connie to her senses. In the end
he gave it up as a farce which he felt it would be beyond the power of
his gravity to sustain. "I'll do anything in reason, heaven knows," he
found himself confessing, after the instant's reflection, "but I'll be
hanged before I'll set out in cold blood to play the fool."

The front door, closing with a bang, brought him instantly to his feet
and, glancing through the window, he saw Connie about to step into a cab
which she had signalled from the sidewalk. Her velvet gown trailed
behind her, and she appeared perfectly unconcerned by the fact that she
had sunk above her ankles in the heavy snowdrifts. A moment later, when
she lifted her train to enter the cab, he discovered to his amazement
that she was wearing low kid shoes with the thinnest of silk stockings.
Then, before he could raise the window for a protest, the cab rolled off
in the direction of Fifth Avenue, and, wet feet and twinkling feather,
she was out of sight.

By the time he had got into his overcoat and followed her into the
street, the snow had begun to fall more rapidly in large powdery
flakes, which soon covered him in a thick, frosty coating from head to
foot. As he walked briskly toward his office, he noticed with a
quickened attention the women who like Connie, with nervous faces
showing above elaborate gowns, were borne swiftly past him in hired
cabs. Something, he hardly knew what, had opened his eyes to that
glittering life of the world of which he had always been profoundly
ignorant, and it seemed to him suddenly that the distance between
himself and his wife had broadened to an impassable space in a single
night. Connie was no longer the girl whom he remembered under
cherry-coloured ribbons. She came in reality no closer to him than did
the tired, restless women, with artificially brightened faces, who
appeared to his exhausted eyes to whirl past him perpetually in cabs. A
passionate regret seized him for the thing which Connie was not and
could never be again--for the love he had never known and for the
fatherhood that had been denied him.

He had turned, still plunged in his thoughts, into a quiet cross street
where a crowd of ragged urchins were snowballing one another in a noisy
battle; and as he paused for an instant to watch the fight he noticed
that a man, coming from the opposite direction, had stopped also and
stood now motionless with interest upon the sidewalk. The peculiar
concentration of attention was the first thing which Adams remarked in
the stranger--from his absorbed level gaze it was evident that mentally
at least he had thrown himself for the moment into the thickest of the
battle, and there was a flush of eager enjoyment in the face which was
partially obscured by the falling snow flakes. Then, quick as a flash of
light, something pleasantly familiar in the watching figure, gripped
Adams with the memory of a college battle more than fifteen years ago,
and he burst out in an exclamation of pleased surprise.

"You're Arnold Kemper and I'm Roger Adams," he said, laying his hand
upon the other's arm.

Kemper wheeled about immediately, while the smile of placid amusement in
his face broadened into a laugh of delighted recognition.

"Well, by Jove, it's great!" he responded, and the heartiness of his
handshake sent a tingling sensation through Adams' arm. "I don't know
when I've been so pleased for years. Been to luncheon?"

"I've just had it," laughed Adams, remembering that fifteen years ago,
when he last saw him, Kemper had extended a similar invitation with the
same grasp of hearty good fellowship. Was it possible that the man had
really kept his college memories alive? he wondered in a daze of
admiration, or had he himself merely awakened by his reappearance a
train of associations which had lain undisturbed since their last
parting. Let it be as it might, Adams felt that the encounter was of the
pleasantest.

"I'm driven like a slave back to office drudgery," he added, "and I'm
half inclined to envy you your freedom and your automobiles."

Kemper's eyes shot back an intimate curiosity. "So you're editor of _The
International Review_, I hear," he said. "Do you know I've had it in my
mind for years to look you up, but there's such a confounded temptation
to let things drift, you know."

"I know," rejoined Adams, smiling. "I've drifted with them."

"Well, I'm jolly glad that you've drifted my way at last. So you've been
to luncheon, have you?" Kemper enquired again, as he unfastened a button
of his overcoat and drew out his watch. "I wish you hadn't--I've
promised to meet a man at the club and it's past the hour. I say, look
here," he added hastily as he was about to hurry off, "I've some rather
decent rooms of my own now where I sometimes manage to get a quiet
morsel. Will you come to dine to-morrow at half-past seven, sharp?"

It took Adams hardly an instant to consider and accept the invitation.
Though he rarely dined out he felt a positive pleasure at the thought,
and when, a minute later, he walked on again, repeating the number of
the address which the other had pressed upon him, he found that Kemper's
greeting had left a trail of cheerfulness which lingered for at least a
half hour after the man himself had gone on his genial way. If, as Gerty
Bridewell had once declared in a fit of exasperation, "Arnold Kemper
consisted of a surface," he managed at least to present those mystifying
ripples of personality which suggest to the imagination depths of
pleasantness as yet undiscovered. Adams had lived to his present age by
the help of few illusions--and he realised even now that the thing he
liked in Kemper was an effect of manner which implied an impossible
subtlety--that the power one saw in the man was produced simply by some
trick of pose, by a frankness so big that one felt intuitively there
must be still bigger qualities behind it. Whether it was all a bluster
of affectation Adams had never as yet decided in his own mind, but
there were moments when, in listening to stories of the masculine
freedom in which Kemper lived, he felt inclined to acknowledge that the
force, whatever it was, had spent itself in wind. In a profession the
man would inevitably have become a figure, he thought now with a touch
of friendly humor--in law or medicine he would have gone in for the
invincible "grand style," and the picturesqueness of his person would
have served to swell the number of his clients. It was a shabby turn of
fortune, Adams admitted, which in supplying Kemper with a too liberal
bank account, had made of him at the same time a driver of racing motor
cars instead of the ornament of a more distinguished field. There were
compensations doubtless, and he wondered if in this instance they had
centred in the fascinations of an operatic Juliet?

Upon reaching his office he found that he was late for an interview he
had appointed with a famous Russian revolutionist, who had promised him
an article for the _Review_. It was the time of the month when they were
making up the forthcoming number, and he was kept late over a discussion
of the leading paper, which, owing to the sudden death of a literary
personage of distinction, he had been compelled to replace at the last
moment.

His office was a small, dingy room on the eighth floor of a building in
Union Square, and his privacy was guarded by the desks of his
secretaries placed directly beyond the threshold. These assistants were
young men of considerable promise, he liked to think--college graduates
and temperamental hero-worshippers, who adored him with an ardour which
he found at once disconcerting and ridiculous. He had been used,
however, to so little personal appreciation in his life that he had
grown of late to look forward, with pathetic eagerness, to the hearty
morning greeting of his fellow-workers--for one of whom, a
fresh-coloured youth named Baldwin, he had come to cherish a positive
affection. It was stimulating to feel that somewhere he counted for
something in his bodily presence--even though the scene of his
importance was confined to the little smoke-stained office among the
chimney pots.

When, at the end of the day, he came out into the street again and
crossed to Fifth Avenue for his accustomed walk, he found that the snow
had ceased to fall, though a bitter wind was scattering the heavy drifts
in a succession of miniature blizzards. After the heated office the
tempestuous gale struck agreeably upon his face, and his mind, which he
had kept closely upon his work until the hour of release, began almost
with difficulty to detach itself from the fortunes of the _Review_. In
the effort to compel rather than seek distraction, he put his
imagination idly on the scent of the people in the street--ran down in
fancy the history of a woman in a purple velvet gown and a bedraggled
petticoat, catalogued an athletic young Englishman who tugged at his
heels a reluctant bulldog, and wove a tragic romance around a pretty
girl in a shabby coat who stood in a staring ecstasy before a window
filled with imitation jewels. Then two men, smoking cigars, came up
suddenly behind him and he amused himself with guessing at the brand of
the tobacco, which had a remarkably fragrant aroma.

"The only thing I know against her," said one of the men with a laugh as
he went by, "is that she dines alone with Brady If you see nothing in
that beyond the simple act of dining--"

Reaching a corner they turned off abruptly down a cross street and the
rest of the sentence passed with the speaker into an obscurity of fog.
For an instant it did not occur to Adams to connect the phrase with an
allusion to his wife; then as he repeated it mechanically in his
thoughts, there sprang upon him, like some sinister outward visitation,
an indefinable horror--a presentiment which he dared not whisper even to
himself. Pshaw! there were perhaps, a dozen women who dined with Brady,
he insisted reassuringly, and for the matter of that, there were
probably a dozen Bradys. The name was common enough, and the only decent
thing to do was to get rid of the suspicion and to apologise to Connie
in his thoughts. To impute a low motive to a simple action had always
seemed to him the vulgarity of littleness, and littleness in a man he
had come to look upon as a kind of passive vice. So until the event
proved the necessity of action, he was determined that there should be
no "black bats" among his thoughts. Had he loved Connie there might have
been perhaps more passion and less conscience in his treatment of the
situation, but the humour of the philosopher had for many years replaced
in his nature the ardour of the lover. What he gave to her was the
inflexible code of honour which he observed in his association with his
own sex.

At Fortieth Street he was about to turn back again when he was arrested
by the sound of his own name called by a passing voice, and looking up
he saw Perry Bridewell spring from a cab which had hastily driven up to
the sidewalk.

"Wait a bit, will you, Adams?" said Perry, waving one heavily gloved
hand while he reached up with the other to pay the driver. "You're the
very man I'm after," he added an instant later as he turned from the
curbing, "so if you don't mind I'll walk a couple of blocks in your
direction. I'd just got into my dinner clothes," he explained, fastening
his fur-lined overcoat more snugly across his chest, "when I found that
Miss Wilde was going down alone to Gramercy Park. That's where I've come
from, and now I'm rushing back to keep an engagement Gerty has made for
dinner. I'll be hanged if I know where she's taking me--it's all one to
me, half the time I forget to ask whose house we're going to until I
bolt into the drawing-room. Beastly life, this everlasting eating in
other people's houses."

His tone was one of amiable discontentment, but there was a look of
positive annoyance upon his handsome face, and he turned presently to
regard his companion with an enquiry which might have been darkly
furtive had not the luminous publicity in which he moved rendered the
smallest of his mental processes so brilliantly overt. It was
immediately plain to Adams that the jerky sentences were shot out at
random in order that Perry's slow mind might gain a larger space in
which to grope for the word he really wanted. There was something
evidently behind it all, and until the situation should disclose itself
they walked on in an embarrassed and waiting silence. In his top hat and
his mink-lined overcoat Perry presented an ample dignity which his
companion found almost overpowering in its male magnificence. That
hesitation should manifest itself amid such a pageantry of personality
reminded Adams of the beggars in the old nursery rhyme who had come to
town sporting velvet gowns. Everything about Perry Bridewell was built
on so opulent a scale that in thinking of him one found oneself using
almost unconsciously a Romanesque and florid diction.

"There is something you'd like to say to me," suggested Adams presently.
"I'm in no hurry, of course, but isn't this as good a time as any
other?"

"By Jove, that's just what I was thinking," returned Perry, with a burst
of confidence, "but it isn't really anything, you know--that is, I mean,
it isn't anything that--that's real business."

A pretty woman passed suddenly under the electric light, and even in his
embarrassment, which was great, he followed her with the animated glance
which he instinctively devoted to vanishing feminine beauty.

"Thank God, there's no real business between us," retorted Adams, "and
that's why it's a rest to spend a half-hour with you--because you don't
know a piece of literature from a publisher's advertisement."

"We're such old friends, you know," pursued Perry, forgetting the moment
which he had wasted upon the pretty woman, "that when there's a thing on
my mind I feel--well, I feel a--a deuced queer fish not to tell you."

Adams laughed good naturedly.

"For heaven's sake don't remain long in a fishy sensation," he
rejoined. "Let's have it out and over. By the way, may I ask if it
concerns you or me?"

Perry shook his head as he tugged nervously at his fair moustache. "Look
here, old man," he said at last, "I know, of course, that Mrs. Adams is
as innocent as a baby--Gerty's just like her and there are plenty of
women made that way. It's the men who are such confounded brutes," he
commented with pensive morality.

"Oh, is that it?" responded Adams, and he turned upon the other a look
that was coolly interrogative. "Come, now, we'll take it quietly. You're
one of the best friends I have, and I want to know what they're saying
about my wife."

"It's that damned Brady!" exclaimed Perry, while he felt for his
handkerchief, and blew his nose with violence.

"All right--it's that damned Brady?" repeated Adams.

"If I didn't think more of you than of any man on earth I'd be shot
before I'd tell you," protested Perry, and added with a desperate rush
under fire.

"He had too much champagne last night--though, as for that matter, I've
seen him upset by a cocktail--and afterward at billiards he told Skinker
that--that Mrs. Adams--you understand, old chap, it's all his rot--was
going to supper alone with him to-night--in his rooms after the opera.
Of course he was drunk and I wouldn't bet a cent on his word even when
he's sober. He's the kind of fool that tells of his conquests at the
club," he wound up with scathing contempt.

For a moment Adams, looking away from him, stared silently into a shop
window before which he stood--intent apparently upon the varied display
of antique silver. Then he turned squarely to Perry Bridewell and broke
into a short, hard laugh.

"Well, Brady lied," he said. "I promised Mrs. Adams that I would bring
her home from the opera." It was no hesitation in his own voice, but the
joyful relief which shone at him from Perry's face that brought him
suddenly to a stop. "You were a first-rate fellow to come to me," he
went on more quietly. "Of course, you know, our Western conventions are
much more elastic than your New York ones. All the same--"

"I merely wanted to let her know the kind of man he is," explained
Perry. "What do women understand about the men they meet--why, we all
look pretty much alike upon the surface." Then his righteous anger got
the better of his philosophy and he broke out in a heartfelt oath. "Damn
him! I'd like to thrash him clean out of his skin!"

"I am glad you told me," was all Adams said, but there was a reserved
strength in his voice which made the explosive violence of the other
sound the merest bravado. As he spoke the light flashed in his face, and
Perry saw that it was the face of an old and a tired man. There was a
shrinking in his eyes as of one who has stumbled unexpectedly upon a
revolting sight.

Of the many and varied emotions which had entered Perry's life, the
cleanest, perhaps, was his loyal regard for Roger Adams. It had begun
with his college days, had strengthened with his manhood, and had
lasted, in spite of the amiable contempt in which he held all
literature, with a constancy which had certainly not belonged to his
affairs with representatives of the opposite sex. Now as he looked at
Adams' haggard face under the electric light, he felt the tugging of a
sympathy so strong that it seemed to hurt him somewhere in his expansive
chest.

"Look here, old chap, come and dine with me at Sherry's," he burst out,
"and I'll telephone Gerty that I've thrown over that beastly dinner."

To offer something to eat to the afflicted was the solitary form in
which consolation appeared to him invested with solidity; and so earnest
was the generous impulse by which he now felt himself to be prompted,
that before Adams could reply to the invitation he had begun already to
run over mentally the courses he was prepared to order. For a colossal,
a consolatory, an unforgettable dinner he was determined that it should
be--such a dinner as he permitted himself only upon the rare occasions
when one of his intimate friends had lost heavily in stocks or been
abandoned by his wife. "Come to Sherry's," he urged again, halting in
the ecstatic working of his mind, "and I promise you that we will make
an evening."

But the sly incarnate devil which lurked in Adams in the form of an
ironic spirit asserted itself with an explosion which shook the
plethoric gravity with which Perry contemplated an orgy of indigestion.
The universal scheme appeared planned to fulfil the law of a Titanic
humour, and his own credulity and Connie's indiscretions showed suddenly
to Adams as mere mote-like jests which circled in a general convulsion
of Nature's irony.

"Well, you are a capital fellow," he stammered, after a moment, while
the spasm of his unholy laughter rocked him from head to foot. "I--I'd
like it of all things--but I can't. The fact is it is all so funny--the
whole business of life."

Even as he uttered the words he realised that to Perry they would convey
an infamous lightness, but at the thought his hysterical humour
redoubled in its energy. It was as if he stood outside--afar off--and
watched as a god the little tangled eccentricities of earth. And they
_were_ little, even though Perry should continue to regard the situation
with such large magnificence.

By the time, however, that he had parted from Perry Bridewell and turned
in at his own door, the gravity of the occasion had grown almost
oppressive in his reflections. Connie had gone an hour before--he was
too late to have detained her upon a pretext--and while sitting
speechless before the dinner he could not eat--his heated imagination
wove visions of horror in which his wife was entangled as a fly in a
spider's web. What if Connie were really possessed by the influence of
some drug which rendered her incapable of willing rationally? What if he
missed her at the entrance to the opera? Or what if--most desperate
supposition--she should, in the event of his finding her, refuse to
accept his manufactured excuse to recall her home? She was capable, he
knew, of any recklessness, but he had never for an instant conceived her
as walking open eyed into dishonour, and he felt again the awful, if
partly comforting conviction that she was not herself--that an infernal
drug was working in her and bending her to some particular uses of the
devil. Why had she wasted her beauty and even her life? he wondered
bitterly--and did the moment's mad exhilaration compensate for the slow
deliberate eating away of her moral consciousness? He recalled again the
violent flutter of her manner, the excitement as of intoxication in her
voice, the yellow tinge which had crept gradually over the ivory of her
skin; her spasmodic movements and the ineffectual lies which deluded
neither of them for an instant. The tragedy of life rose before him as
vividly as the humour of it had done an hour ago--a tragedy which was
hideous because it was ignoble, in which there was neither the beauty of
resignation nor the sublimity of defiance. Had there been the
least--even the smallest redeeming honesty in the situation he felt that
he might have faced it, if not with positive sympathy yet with a
tolerant, a merciful comprehension. Love he might have understood--for
women needed it, he knew, and he was burdened by no delusion concerning
the place he occupied in Connie's horizon. But before the breathless
chase of excitement in which she lived, the frenzied invocation of
pleasure that filled her thoughts, he found himself groping blindly for
some meaning which would explain the thing it could not justify.

The hours dragged so heavily that by ten o'clock he put on his overcoat
and snow-shoes and went out again into the street. He was possessed at
the moment by a growing fear of missing Connie, and as he walked toward
the opera house he had sense of a premonition almost occult in power
that the terrible destiny which had her in its clutch was gathering
energy for some pitiless catastrophe With characteristic patience he
searched his own conscience, the incidents of his daily life, and held
himself rather than his wife to account. After all, he was the stronger
of the two, and yet when had he put forth his strength or his pity on
her behalf? In the closer human relations mere indifference showed
suddenly as sin, and the sluggish spirit which had controlled his
married life appeared in his memory as a form of moral apathy. Was a
human soul so small a thing that it could perish at his side and he be
none the Wiser? What was his boasted intellect worth if it could
paralyse the human part of him and exhaust the fount of his compassion?
In his widening vision he saw that in the spirit of things humanity is
one and indivisible, a single organism held together by a common pulse
of life. To live or to die apart he realised, is beyond the scope of an
individual destiny, for in the eye of God each man that lives is the
keeper not of his own but of his brother's soul.

The self reproach which moved in his heart impelled him so rapidly upon
his way that when he reached the doors he had still an hour to wait
before the opera ended. Remembering that if he were so fortunate to find
Connie he must take her home, he went to a livery stable for a carriage,
and then coming back, walked nervously up and down upon the frozen
pavement. His mind was divided between the fear that she might leave by
another entrance--that he might miss her altogether--and the more
horrible dread that in seeing her he should be unable to prevail upon
her to come away. She might, he felt, demand a reason, exact from him
the meaning of his unexpected appearance; there was even a hideous
possibility that she might fly into a temper.

The wind was bitter and he went into the lobby, where a few men were
hurrying out to secure their carriages. Then at last came the crowd in
evening dress, and it seemed to him that the acuteness of his perception
was reinforced by an almost unnatural power of vision. Out of the moving
throng the face of each woman stood forth distinctly as if relieved by a
spectral illumination; and he saw them clearly one after one, fair or
dark, plain or beautiful, until from among them there shone toward him
the elaborately arranged blonde head of Connie, under a winking diamond
which shed over her an unbecoming light. He had hoped to the last that
she would be with several others, but he perceived when she came out at
Brady's side, with her babyish chin tilted upward and her thin features
working in a forced and unhealthy animation, that they were alone and
would probably be alone for the remainder of the evening.

Standing beyond the entrance, and watching her unseen, while she paused
for an instant in the crowded lobby, Adams felt again the strange stir
of emotion he had experienced when he looked at her the evening before
under the lamplight in his study. In a single vivid instant he saw her
winking diamonds, her rouged cheeks, the nervous flutter that shook her
fragile figure, and the consuming fire which was destroying the
appealing prettiness of her face. Then he looked deeper still to the
naked terrified soul of her, caught in a web from which, because of her
weakness, there could be no escape.

There was no room in his heart now for any other feeling than one of
agonised compassion, and as she came through the doorway he touched her
arm and spoke in a voice which had the sound of a caress. "I've just had
bad news, Connie, so I came to find you."

She started violently, her hand dropped from her companion's arm, and
she stood trembling from head to foot like a blade of grass that is
shaken by a high wind. "What do you mean? What is it?" she demanded.

After lifting his hat to Brady he had not noticed him again, and now he
bent upon his wife a look of gentle, if unyielding, authority. "I'll
tell you presently--in the carriage," he said, drawing her wrap more
closely about her throat. "I have one waiting at the corner."

He saw her look at him in a frightened hesitation; saw, too, that even
in the quiver of her alarm she had taken in the unflattering details of
his appearance--- his ordinary business overcoat, the blue silk muffler
about his neck, and even the bespattered condition of his rubber shoes.
For an instant she glanced uncertainly at Brady's immaculate evening
dress showing beneath his open fur-lined overcoat, and knowing her as he
did, Adams read her appreciation of the contrast as plainly as if it had
been written in her face.

But he was not moved by the knowledge of her criticism, nor did it shake
him in the least from that penetrating vision he had attained. The
instinct for battle was alive and quick within him--if Connie was to be
saved he knew that he must fight single-handed with the powers of evil
for her soul. And fight he would--it was the end for which a man was
born--that he might overcome and so justify the spirit about the brute.

Her hand hung at her side, and taking it in his, he slipped it under his
arm with a possessive air, while she made to Brady some hurried excuses
in a trembling voice. For a moment still she hung back, but Adams drew
her gently with him, and after the first few steps, she recovered
herself and walked rapidly to the waiting carriage. Inside she shrank
back immediately into a corner from which, when they had rolled off, she
sent forth a nervous question. "What is it? Tell me what it is?" she
asked.

The tremor that shook her limbs, her utter helplessness before him,
touched his heart with a compassion beside which his old emotion for her
showed as a small and trivial thing. All that was divine in him awoke
and responded to the horror that looked from her face, and he felt
suddenly that until this instant he had never loved her. Now she was
really his because now she needed him; but for him she would stand
alone, deserted and afraid, in that future to which she had turned with
such pitiable and childlike ignorance. She and the fight were both in
his hands, and he was bracing himself to resist until the end.

"I'll tell you if you wish," he said, "but you mustn't let it give you a
sleepless night."

As they turned a corner an electric light flashed into the darkness of
the carriage lighting up her blonde hair and the sparkling diamonds
which made her blue eyes look dull and lifeless. "It is--is it anything
about money?" she asked with a movement toward him.

"It's about nothing more important than that consummate ass you were
with," he answered, laughing as he reached out and took her hand in his
with a friendly pressure. "I've just found out that he's a blackguard,
and I thought you were too precious to be left an instant longer in his
company. We must be careful, dear," he added. "God knows I'll do my best
to help you--but we must be careful"

"Oh!" she cried out sharply, in a high voice. "Oh!" and she shrank from
him as if he had hurt her by his touch. It was all she said, but the
word quivered in his ears with a suppressed emotion. Was it thankfulness
for her escape? he wondered, or was it anger at the part that he had
played?




PART II

ILLUSION




CHAPTER I

OF PLEASURE AS THE CHIEF END OF MAN


On the morning after his meeting with Adams, Arnold Kemper awoke at
three minutes of nine o'clock, and lay for exactly the three minutes
that were needed to make up the hour watching the hand as it moved on
the face of the bronze clock upon his mantel. The clock, like everything
in his rooms, was costly, a little ornate, and suggestive of an owner
whose intention aimed frankly at the original.

Lying in his large mahogany bedstead, with his body outstretched between
soft yet crisply ironed linen sheets, and his head placed exactly in the
centre of the pillows, he waited, yawning, until the expected hour
should strike. If by an effort of will he could have put back the minute
hand for another quarter of an hour he felt that it would have been
pleasant to doze off again, shutting his eyes to the sunlight which
streamed through the window on the Turkish rug, and inhaling agreeably
the aroma of boiling coffee which reached him through the open door of
his sitting-room. With the thought he closed his eyes, stretched himself
again and clasped his hands sleepily above his head; then, without
warning, the clock struck in a deep, bronze-like tone, and with a
vigorous movement, he sprang out of bed, flung his dressing-gown across
his shoulders, and passed quickly to the cold plunge in his
dressing-room. When he reappeared there was a fresh, healthy glow in his
face, and the smile with which he knotted his green figured necktie
before the mirror, stuck his black pearl scarf pin carefully in place,
and twisted the short ends of his brown moustache, was that of a man who
begins his day in a blithe and friendly humour.

In the dining-room, which opened from his sitting-room next door, his
breakfast was already awaiting him, and beside his plate he found
several letters and the morning papers. He read the letters first, but
with a single exception they proved to be bills, and after glancing at
these with a suspicious frown he tossed them aside and turned to the
little square white envelope, which contained an invitation to dine from
a woman whom he detested because she bored him with domestic complaints.
His heavy brows gathered darkly over his impatient gray eyes, and he
pushed the mail carelessly away to make room for his coffee, to which
his man was adding a precise amount of cream and sugar.

"Don't let me forget to answer that, Wilkins," he said, in an annoyed
tone; "the response must be sent this afternoon, too, without fail."

"I don't think you wrote the notes you spoke of yesterday, sir,"
observed Wilkins, with an English accent and a manner of respectful
intimacy.

"Hang it all! I don't believe I did," returned Kemper, as he drew his
chair up to the table and tapped his egg shell. "That comes of letting a
thing you hate to do go over. I say, Wilkins, if I attempt to leave this
room before I've answered those letters, you're to restrain me by
force, do you hear?"

"Yes, sir; certainly, sir," replied Wilkins, as he went out to bring in
the toast.

Kemper laid his napkin across his knees, leaned comfortably back in his
chair, and unfolded one of the morning papers beside his plate. As he
did so he expanded his lungs with a deep breath, while his glance
travelled rapidly to the column which contained the day's reports of the
stock market. He knew already that the Chericoke Valley Central in which
he had invested had jumped thirty points and was still advancing, but he
read the printed statements with the exhaustless interest with which a
lover might return to a love letter he had already learned by heart. His
faith in the Chericoke Valley Central stock was strong, and he meant to
keep a close grip on it for some time to come.

Turning a fresh page presently, his eyes wandered leisurely over the
staring headlines, and came suddenly to a halt before a trivial item
inserted among the Western news. It was a brief notice of his divorced
wife's marriage, and to his amazement the announcement caused him an
annoyance that was almost like the ghost of a retrospective jealousy. It
was quite evident to him that he did not want her for himself, yet he
suffered a positive displeasure at the thought that she should now
belong to another man. After the ten years since they had separated was
she still so "awfully splendid?" he wondered, had she kept her figure,
which was long, athletic, with a military carriage, and did she still
wear her hair in the fashion of a German omelette? "Thank heaven I'm
well out of it at any rate," he commented with feeling. "That comes of a
man's marrying before he's twenty-five. He's turned cynic before he gets
to forty"; and marriage appeared to him in his thoughts as a detestable
and utterly boring institution, which interfered continually with a
man's freedom and exacted from him a perpetual sociability. The most
blissful sensation he had ever known, he told himself, was that of his
recovered liberty; then his sincerity of nature compelled him to an
honest contradiction--he had known one emotion more blissful still and
that was the madness which had prompted him to his unfortunate marriage.

Oh, he had been very much in love without a doubt! and while he sat
peacefully drinking his two cups of coffee, eating his two eggs and his
four pieces of toast with orange marmalade, he remembered, with a
melancholy which in no wise affected his appetite, the first occasion
upon which he had kissed the woman who had been his wife. The memory of
her tall, erect figure, with its dashing military carriage, aroused in
him an agreeable and purely physical regret--the kind of regret which is
strong enough only to sweeten the knowledge of past pleasures; and he
admitted with his accustomed frankness that if he had never kissed her
again he should probably have continued to regard her with a charming,
if impractical, sentiment. But marriage had brushed off the bloom of
that early romance; and as he recognised this, he felt a keen resentment
against nature which had cheated him into believing that the illusion of
love would not vanish at the first touch of reality.

He had lived upon the surface of things and the surface had contented if
it had not satisfied him. It had never entered his thoughts to question
if he had had from life the best that it could offer, but he had
sometimes wondered, in moments of nervous exasperation against small
events, why it was that there could be no end under the sun to a man's
pursuit of the fugitive sensation. When he looked back now over the
breathless years of his life, he saw, almost with indignation, that
whatever punishment fate had held in reserve for him, the avenger had
inevitably appeared in the form his own gratified desire. He had
withheld his hand from nothing; the thing that he had wanted he had
taken without question--impulse and possession had flowed for him with a
rhythmic regularity of movement--and yet in glancing back he could place
his finger upon no past events and say of them "this brought me
happiness--and this--and this." In retrospect his pleasures showed cheap
and threadbare--woven of perishable colours, of lost illusions--and he
felt suddenly that he had been cheated into a false valuation of life,
that he had been deluded into a childish yet irretrievable error.

As he sat there over his paper, he remembered his impatient early love,
his ecstatic marriage, and then the long years during which he had
lived, as he put it to himself, in a "mortal funk" of the divorce court.
Not moral obligation, but social cowardice, he admitted, had held him in
a bondage from which his wife had at last liberated him by a single
blow. Well, it was all over! he heaved a sigh of relief, emptied his
coffee cup, and dismissed the subject, with its oppressive train of
associations, from his mind.

But his temperamental blitheness had suffered in the chill of
recollection, and he frowned down upon the staring headlines which
ornamented the open page before him. His face, which recorded unerringly
the slightest emotional change through which he passed, grew suddenly
heavy and was over clouded by a momentary fit of gloom. He had not seen,
had hardly thought of his former wife, once in the ten years since their
separation, yet he found almost to his annoyance that the mere printed
letters of her name reinvoked her image from the darkness in which his
sentimental skeletons were laid. Two brief lines in a newspaper sufficed
to produce her as an important factor in his present life.

And despite this she was nothing to him, had no proper business in his
mind. He tried to think of the other women whom he had loved and
remembered, or of the more numerous ones still whom he had loved only to
forget. Well, he had lived a man's life, and the deuce of it was that
women should have come into it at all. He had never wanted sentiment in
the abstract, he told himself half angrily; he was bored to death by the
deadly routine of what in his own mind he alluded to as "the business of
love." It had always come to him without his sanction--even against his
will, and he had never failed to combat the feeling with shallow
cynicism, to exhaust it speedily in racing motors. There was no
satisfaction in sentiment, of this he was quite convinced; and he
remembered the voice of Madame Alta, with her peculiar high note of
piercing sweetness, which entered like wine and honey into his blood.
The hold she still kept upon his senses through his memory was
strengthened by the knowledge which fretted him to the admission that
she had wearied first--that while her fascination was still potent to
work its spell upon him, she had fled in a half lyric, half devilish
pursuit of the flesh she worshipped. To live life thoroughly, to get out
of it all that it contained of pleasure or of experience, this was the
germ of his applied philosophy; and it was only by some fortunate mental
power of selection, some instinctive sense for comeliness, for a
well-ordered, healthful physical existence, which had left him at the
end of his forty years of pleasure with a perfectly sound and active
mind and body. He himself was accustomed to declare that though he had
lived gayly, he had lived decently, too, and he was even inclined at
times to flatter his vanity rather upon the things which he had left
undone than upon those more evident achievements which had stamped him
to his social world. A religious instinct, which was hardly definite
enough for a conviction, still survived in him, and it was entirely
characteristic of the man that he should find cause for shame, not
congratulation, in his old relations with Madame Alta.

The last remaining bit of toast and marmalade had vanished from his
plate, and as he never allowed himself more than his usual number of
slices, he carefully brushed the crumbs from his coat, and pushing back
his chair, rose from the table. The movement, slight as it was, served
to dispel his passing dejection, and as he gathered up his papers and
passed into the adjoining sitting-room, he smiled at Wilkins with such
genial brightness that the man was almost deluded into attributing the
changed atmosphere to his own personal attentions instead of to the
agreeable sensation following upon digestion. When he left the
dining-room Kemper was already humming a little Italian air, and it was
not until he was seated, with his cigar, in an easy chair upon his
hearthrug, that he suddenly recognised the music as a favourite aria of
Madame Alta's. He had heard her sing it a hundred times, and he recalled
now that she had a trick of throwing her head back as the notes issued
from her round, white throat, until her beautiful, though coarsened
face, was seen in an admirable foreshortening, while her eyes were
shadowed by her drooping lids, which were faintly tinted to look like
rose-leaves. With the memory his expression was again overcast. Then a
pleased smile chased the heaviness from his eyes, for he remembered
suddenly that he held a firm grip on the promising Chericoke Valley
Central stock. He lighted his cigar, tossed the match into the empty
fireplace, and pushing the papers from his knees, relapsed for twenty
minutes into an agreeable vacancy of mind.

The room in which he sat was essentially a man's room, furnished for
comfort rather than for beauty, and one saw in it an unconscious
striving after large effects, a disdain of useless bric-a-brac as of
small decorations. On the mantel the solitary ornament was an exquisite
bronze figure of a wrestler at the triumphant instant when he subdues
his opponent, a spirited and virile study of the nude male figure, and
just above it hung a portrait in oils of Madame Alta, painted in a large
black hat with a falling feather which shadowed the golden aureole of
her hair. Kemper seldom looked at the picture, and when he did so it was
with the casual glance he bestowed upon a piece of household furniture;
his emotion had been so bound up with the concrete fact of a fleshly
presence that in the continued absence of the prima donna he had found
it difficult even to realise the condition of her unchanged existence.
In his whole life the past had never engrossed him to the immediate
exclusion of the present.

When he had finished his cigar, he rose slowly to his feet, shook
himself with an energetic movement as if to settle his body more
comfortably in his clothes, and went into the hall to put on his
overcoat before going out. Here he was overtaken by a remonstrance from
Wilkins.

"You aren't going to the office, I hope, sir, until you've written those
notes?"

Kemper stared at him silently an instant, one arm still in the sleeve of
the overcoat he was putting on.

"Oh, I say, Wilkins, I'll do them at the club," he replied at last.

Wilkins shook his head with decision written in every line of his
smooth-shaven English profile. He was faithful, he was even
affectionate, but he had been in Kemper's service for fifteen years and
he knew his man.

"You'd better get them off now, sir," he urged in a persuasive voice,
"it won't take you a minute, and unless I post them myself, they are
like to lie over."

"Well, I suppose you'll have your way with me, Wilkins," remarked
Kemper, as he withdrew his arm from his overcoat, which his servant
promptly took from him. "Most people do, you know." Then he turned back
into his sitting-room and placing himself at his desk, took up his pen
and accepted three invitations out of the round dozen he had to answer.
This accomplished, the discreet Wilkins gave him his hat and coat and
permitted him to depart rapidly upon his way.

By eleven o'clock he was due at the office of the Confidential Life
Insurance Company, of which he was one of the directors, and as he
walked toward Broadway with his brisk and energetic step, he kept his
mind closely upon the business affairs which were immediately before
him. This peculiar ability to concentrate his whole being upon a single
instant, to apply himself with enthusiasm to the thing beneath his eyes,
was the quality of all others which had worked most not only for his
present worldly success, but for his personal happiness as well. When he
came out of his rooms the brief despondency of the morning had vanished
as utterly as if it had never been, and until his wife's name stared at
him anew from a printed page, it was hardly probable that she would
occur again to his thoughts. A feeling of peace, of perfect charity
pervaded his breast, and had he been asked on the spot for an expression
of his religious creed, he would, perhaps, have answered without
hesitation, "to live in pleasure and let live with pleasantness."
Naturally of a quick and humane heart there were moments when he felt an
urgent desire to give out happiness, to add his proper share to the
general sum of earthly contentment. He was a man, in fact, who might be
infallibly counted on for the "generous thing," provided always that
the "generous thing" was also the thing which he found it agreeable to
perform. In ancient Rome he would have been, without doubt, a popular
politician, in Greece a Cyrenaic philosopher, in the Middle Ages a
churchman conspicuous for his purple, and during the American Revolution
a believer in the cause that wore the most gold lace. It was not that he
was lacking in patriotism, but that his patriotism responded best to a
spectacular appeal.

At the luncheon hour, when he came out of his office to go to his club,
he remembered that he had neglected to send roses to a woman with whom
he had dined the week before she went to a hospital for a serious
operation, and though the stop delayed his luncheon for half an hour, he
left his car at the corner of Twenty-third Street to leave an order with
his florist. Then, after a simple meal, he put in a pleasant hour at the
club, during which he managed to interest a great occulist in a chap he
knew who was threatened with blindness but too poor to pay for the
operation necessary to his recovery. It was this conversation that
recalled to him a friend who was ill with pneumonia in chambers just
around the block, and he rushed off to enquire after him, before he
attended to the unpacking of a new French motor car, and hurried to keep
an engagement he had made with Gerty Bridewell to call on Laura Wilde. A
week ago, when the engagement was made, he had been urgent with Gerty
about going, but now that the hour drew near he began to feel the
necessity of the visit to be a bore. Like all of his sensations, the
impression Laura had made upon him had been vivid but easily effaced,
and he was almost surprised at the disappointment he felt when, upon
reaching the house, he found that she was not at home.

"It's too hard," commented Gerty, standing upon the front steps and
glancing wistfully up at him from under the white feathers in her hat,
"but there's no help for it unless you care to call on Uncle Percival."

"Uncle Percival?" he repeated, impatiently twirling his walking stick;
"who's he?"

"He's a curiosity."

"What kind of curiosity? A live one?"

She nodded. "The kind of curiosity that plays a flute."

He began his descent of the steps, not replying until he stood with her
upon the sidewalk before her carriage. "I might have put up with a
poet," he remarked with his foreign shrug, "but I'm compelled to draw
the line before a piper."

"Well, I thought you would," confessed Gerty, "or I shouldn't have
suggested it."

"It seems, by the way, to be a family that runs to talent," he laughed,
while she paused a moment before entering her carriage.

"I don't know that Uncle Percival is exactly a person of talent," she
observed, "he plays very badly, I believe. Can't I drop you somewhere?
Do let me."

He shook his head with a quizzical humour. "To tell the truth horses
make me nervous," he returned. "I'm afraid of them--You never know what
intentions they have in mind. No, I'll walk, thank you." His gaze was
on her and she saw his eyes flash with admiration of her beauty.

"Oh, your dreadful, soulless automobiles!" she exclaimed, with disgust.
"By the way, Laura hates them--she says they have the devil's energy
without his intellect."

He laughed indifferently. "Does she? I'll teach her better."

Gerty looked back to protest as she stepped into her carriage. "But
you'll never have a chance," she said.

"I'll make one," he persisted, gayly.

From the midst of her fur rugs she leaned out with a provoking little
laugh, while he watched her green eyes narrow in an arch and fascinating
merriment. "What would you say if I told you she was at home all the
time?" she asked. Then before he could remonstrate or reply, she rolled
off leaving him transfixed and questioning upon the sidewalk.

Was Laura Wilde really at home? The suspicion piqued him into a
curiosity he could not satisfy, and because he could not satisfy it he
found himself dwelling with a reawakened interest upon the woman who had
avoided him. If she had in truth refused to receive his visit it could
mean only that she entertained a dislike for his presence, and for a
dislike so evident there must be surely some foundation either in fact
or in intuition. No woman, so far as he could remember--and so unusual
an occurence would not easily have slipped his memory--had ever begun
his acquaintance with a distinctly expressed aversion, and the very
strangeness of the experience was not without attraction for his eager
and dominant temperament. What a queer little oddity she was, he
thought as he glanced up at the grave old house before turning rapidly
away--as light and sensitive as thistle-down, as vivid as flame. He
tried to recall her delicately distinguished figure and profound dark
eyes, but her charming smile seemed to come between him and her
features, and her face was obscured for him in a mysterious radiance.
Her features taken in themselves were plain, he supposed, certainly they
were not beautiful, yet of her whole appearance his memory held only the
fervent charm of her expression. It was a face with a soul in it, he
though--all the mystery of flame and of shadow was in her smile, so what
mattered the mere surface modelling or the tinting of the skin which was
less ivory than pale amber. An hour ago he had been absolutely
indifferent, almost forgetful of her existence, but his vanity if not
his heart was stung now into an emotion which had in it something of the
primitive barbarian ardour of pursuit. He cared nothing--less than
nothing--for Laura Wilde herself, yet it was not in his nature that he
should suffer in silence before a sudden and unreasonable affront.

Some hours later, when he sat with Adams at dinner, the subject occurred
to him again, and he broke in upon a discussion of the varied fortunes
of their fellow classmen to allude directly to the cause of his
inquietude.

"By the way, I had the pleasure of meeting a protegée of yours the other
afternoon," he said.

Adams met the remark with his whimsical laugh. "Of mine? Thank heaven I
haven't any," he retorted, "but I suppose you mean young Trent, who has
just come up from Virginia."

"I've heard something of him from Mrs. Bridewell, I believe," answered
Kemper across the centrepiece of red carnations, "but I haven't met him
as yet--I was thinking of Miss Wilde when I spoke. I wish you'd try this
sherry--it's really first rate--I brought it over myself."

When Wilkins had filled his glass, Adams lifted it against the light and
looked at the colour of the wine a moment before drinking. "First
rate--I should say so. It's exquisite," he observed as he touched it to
his lips in answer to Kemper's glance of enquiry. "Yes, she's done some
rather fine things," he resumed presently, returning to the subject of
Laura, "but she'll hardly make a popular appeal, I fancy, unless she
turns her talent to patriotic airs. The only poetry we tolerate to-day
is the poetry that serves some definite material purpose--it must either
send us into battle or set us to building churches. The simple spirit of
contemplation we've come to regard as a pauperising habit and it puts us
out of patience. Great poetry grows out of quiet and nobody is quiet any
longer--a thought no sooner creeps into our head than we begin to talk
about it at the top of our voice."

The branched candlestick at the end of the table shed a glimmering,
pearly light upon his face, and Kemper, as he watched him critically,
was struck suddenly by the fact that Adams was no longer young. He could
not be over forty, yet his features had the drawn and pallid look of a
man who has known, not only ill health, but the shock of emotional
catastrophes. Physically he appeared worn to the point of exhaustion,
but if there was pathos in the slight, elastic figure, there was also an
impression of power for which the other found it impossible to account.
By mere bodily force Kemper could have thrown Adams from the window with
one hand, he realised with a perfectly amiable self-congratulation--yet
in Adams' presence he invariably felt himself to be the weaker
man, and the attitude he unconsciously adopted showed an almost
boyish recognition of a superior intelligence. Something in Roger
Adams--a quality which was neither brute strength nor imperious
personality--exerted a power which Kemper generously admitted to be
greater even than these. Nothing in the man was conspicuous--he
exercised no dominant magnetism--but the invisible spirit which
controlled his life, controlled also, in a measure, the thoughts of
those who came directly beneath his influence. Was it true, Kemper now
wondered, as Perry Bridewell had once declared with unspeakable mirth,
that the thing he liked in Adams was, after all, merely simple goodness
in a manifest form? Goodness in a masculine personality had always
appeared to Kemper to be ridiculously out of place--a masquerading
feminised virtue--but at this instant as he drank to Adams' health
across the carnations, he felt again the power of an attraction which
possessed a sweetness that made his past "wine and honey" sicken in his
memory. "Is it possible that what I admire in this man is the quality I
have laughed at all my life?" he found himself asking suddenly; and the
power of self-restraint, the grace of denial, the strength which could
do without, though it could not take the thing it wanted, the quietness
of sacrifice, the sweetened humour that is learned only in sorrow--these
showed to him at the moment in a singularly new and vivid light. "I know
nothing of his life except that he has had courage," he thought again,
"yet because of this one thing--and because, too, of a quality which I
recognise, though I cannot name it, I would trust him sooner than any
man or woman whom I know--sooner, by Jove, than I would trust myself."
Among his many generous traits was the ability to appreciate keenly
where he could not follow, to apprehend almost instinctively the finer
attributes of the spirit, and though he himself preferred the pleasures
of the senses to the vaguer comforts of philosophy, he was not without a
profound admiration for the man who, as he believed, had deliberately
chosen to forfeit the joy of life. Roger Adams impressed him to-night as
a peculiarly happy man--not with the hectic happiness he himself had
sought--but with a secure, a reposeful, an indestructible
possession--the happiness which comes not through the illusion of
desire, but which is bound up in the peace of an eternal reconciliation.
The man beyond the carnations, he knew by an intuition surer than
knowledge, had never even for an hour dallied in the primrose path where
his own pursuit of delight had begun and ended--he could not imagine
Adams' control yielding to a fleeting impulse of passion--yet had not
the very power he recognised come to his friend in the stony places
through which he had been constrained to walk with God? Sitting there
Kemper was brought suddenly for the first time in his life face to face
with the profoundest truth that lies hidden in the deeps of
knowledge--that renunciation may become the richest experience in the
consciousness of man; that to renounce for the sake of goodness is not
merely to refrain from sin but to achieve virtue; and that he who gives
up his happiness and is still happy has gained not only the beauty of
his forfeited joys, but has added to his own a strength that is equal to
the strength of his unfulfilled desire. Kemper had always believed
himself strong because he had attained, yet he knew now that Adams was
stronger than he inasmuch as he had gone without for the sake of his own
soul.

From his reflections, which were dimly like these, Kemper came back
abruptly to his memory of Laura. "Do you know," he said, speaking to
himself rather than to his companion, "that she really interests me very
much indeed."

"Well, she is interesting," laughed Adams, "in spite of the fact that
Perry finds her rather dull. He complains that she doesn't talk like a
book, which is a trifle odd when you consider that he has never read
one."

"What I like about her is that she's different," said Kemper. "She is,
isn't she?"

"Different from other people? Yes, I dare say she is, but all the Wildes
are that, you know. She comes of an eccentric stock. Did you ever happen
to meet her aunt, Mrs. Payne?"

Kemper nodded as he leaned forward to make a division in the centre of
the intervening carnations, "The old lady who looks like a chorus girl
in her dotage? Yes, I've had the pleasure and I found her decidedly
better than she looked. Her husband, by the way, is a great old chap,
isn't he? He held the biggest share in iron last spring and I guess he
has made a pretty figure."

"He's a philosopher who got into the stock market by mistake," observed
Adams. "I believe he would have been perfectly happy if he could have
owned a single farm, a cow or two and a pair of horses to his plough,
but he's condemned to bear the uncongenial weight of millions, and I
hear that he has even to give his charities in secret. I never look at
him that I don't think of Marcus Aurelius oppressed by the burden of the
whole Roman Empire."

Kemper was peeling a pear, which he had taken from a dish upon the
table, and he laid down his knife for a moment to push aside his cup of
coffee.

"Has he any children?" he asked abruptly.

"Two--both sons and gay young birds, I'm told."

"Then Miss Wilde will hardly come in for a share of the burden?"

"Hardly. The sons will probably dissipate a good half of it before it
reaches them."

"It's a pity," said Kemper thoughtfully; and having finished his pear,
he dipped his fingers in his finger bowl, moistened his short moustache,
and turned to take a cigar from the little silver tray which Wilkins
held before him. "Do you know I can't imagine a greater happiness than
the quick accumulation of wealth," he observed in his hearty voice.

Adams laughed aloud with a merriment that was almost boyish. "Well, I
dare say you come in for your part of it," he returned, while he
flicked the ashes from his cigar.

"I?" Kemper shook his head without a smile. "Oh, I accumulate nothing
except habits. I make and I spend--I win and I lose--and on my word I'm
no richer to-day than I was ten years ago. I've made a fortune in a
day," he added regretfully, "to lose it in an hour."

A glow had sprung to his face, and as he spoke he leaned his elbow on
the table, and closing his eyes inhaled the delicious aroma of his
cigar. Finance interested him always--wealth in its material mass had a
tremendous attraction for him, and he loved not only the sound of
figures but the clink of coin. Though he was a lavish liver when it
suited his impulses, the modern regard for money as a concrete
possession--a personal distinction--was strong in his blood; but here,
as in other ways, he was redeemed from positive vulgarity by the very
candour with which he confessed his weakness. He drifted presently into
stocks, and they sat talking until eleven o'clock, when Adams, after
glancing in surprise at the hour, remarked, with a laugh, that he had
forgotten he no longer boasted the constitution of his college days. It
had been a pleasant evening to both, and as Kemper threw off his coat a
little later, he found himself reflecting, not without wonder, that the
quiet--the absolute inaction of the last few hours had refreshed rather
than bored him. On the whole he was inclined to admit that he liked
Adams better than any man he knew--liked his assured self-possession,
his indifference to small creature comforts; liked, too, the quiet
tolerance which characterised his human relations--and he impulsively
determined that he would arrange to see him often during the next few
years. It was time now, he concluded with an admirable midnight
resolution, while he struggled in exasperation to unfasten his collar,
that he himself should begin to pay a due regard to his health--to
restrict his indulgences; and he drew an agreeable picture of the
consolation that Adams' friendship might afford to an abstemious man of
middle age. "By Jove--confound this button--there, I've twisted it like
the deuce--by Jove, it is refreshing to be thrown with a chap who is
interested in something besides women and horses--who finds other
objects--or subjects if you choose--suffice for his entertainment." For
the first time in his life he found himself wishing regretfully that at
least a share of his own enjoyments had assumed a character which
belonged less exclusively to the external world. The joy in knowledge,
the delight in contemplation were unknown to him, though he was dimly
aware that for another man they might prove to be an unfailing, a
permanent solace. But his virtues were the magnificent virtues of the
animal, and amid the many warring impulses of the body there was but
little room for a more gracious development of the soul. He had lived
for the world and the world had repaid him as she repays all her lovers
with the fruit which is rarely bitter before the fortieth year.

Adams, meanwhile, had walked rapidly home, thinking with enthusiasm that
Kemper was a thoroughly good fellow. His social pleasures were few, and
he had enjoyed the fine wine and the choice cigars as a man enjoys a
taste for luxury which he seldom gratifies. He had expected to find
Connie still out, but to his surprise there was a sound on the staircase
as he entered the front door, and she came rapidly to meet him, her
blonde hair hanging upon her shoulders and the soiled white silk
dressing-gown she wore trailing on the carpeted steps behind her.

"I was all alone and I've been so frightened," she said with a sob.

He took her hand, which felt dead and cold, and grasped it warmly while
he turned to fasten the outer door.

"Why, I thought you were at the theatre," he responded. "I've been to
dine with Kemper, but heaven knows I'd have stayed at home if you'd told
me you meant to keep me company."

A shudder ran through her, and he saw when he turned to look at her,
that her face was pinched and blue as if from cold. In her white gown,
under her tangled fair hair, she had a ghastly look like one just
awakened from a fearful dream. But she was very little--so little in her
terror and her blighted prettiness that his heart contracted as it would
have done at the sight of a suffering child.

"I say, little girl, what is it all about?" he asked gently, and as she
swayed unsteadily, he put his arm around her and drew her against his
side. "Wait a minute while I turn out the light," he added cheerfully,
pressing the electric button with his free hand. Then holding her closer
in a steadying support, they ascended together the darkened staircase.

"I went to the theatre, but I was so ill I couldn't stay," she said, and
he felt the heavy breaths that laboured through the thin figure within
his arm. "Oh, I am in agony--in agony and I am so afraid."

She began crying in loud, uncontrollable sobs as a child cries when it
is hurt, protesting that she was afraid--that she was fearfully afraid.
He felt her terror struggling like a live thing within her--like an
imprisoned animal that could not find an escape into the light. Her
hysteria was almost akin to madness, and the form it took was one of a
blind presentiment of evil--as if she felt always in the air about her
the presence of an invisible, unspeakable horror. Half dragging, half
carrying her, he crossed the hall to her room, and laid her upon the
bed, which was tumbled as if she had lain tossing wildly there for
hours. Every electric jet was blazing high, and Connie's evening clothes
were lying in a huddled heap upon the floor. There was a sickening smell
of perfume in the room, and he saw that she had broken a bottle of
extract and spilled its contents upon the carpet.

"Tell me what it is--tell me, Connie," he commanded, rather than
pleaded, sitting beside the bed and laying his hand upon her shuddering
body.

"It is nothing--but it is everything," she gasped, clutching his hand
with fingers which were cold and moist. "I am not in pain--at least not
physically, but I feel--I believe--I know that I am going mad. I see
horrible things and I can't keep them away--I can't--I can't. They come
in flashes--in coloured flashes, all red and green, and there is
something dreadful about to happen to me. Oh, don't let it, don't let
it!"

She clung to him, shuddering, sobbing, imploring, moaning again that she
was afraid, beseeching him to keep off the horror--not to let it come
any nearer--not to let it look her in the eyes. The spasm ended at last
in a wild burst of tears, while she shrieked out frantically in a terror
that was pitiable and abject. Her hallucinations seemed to have got
entirely beyond the control of reason, and as she crouched, with drawn
up knees and quivering arms, among the pillows she looked like some
small helpless, distracted mortal in the grasp of the avenging furies.
At the moment she seemed to him less his wife than his child.

"Listen to me, Connie," he said presently in a voice whose quiet
authority silenced for an instant her despairing moans. "You haven't a
trouble on earth that I am not willing to share and I am sharing this--I
have made it mine this very minute. Whatever there is to face, I'll face
it for you, so get this into your head and go to sleep. Nothing can get
to you--neither man nor devil--until it has first passed by me. There,
now--don't sob so; don't, you'll hurt yourself. There's nothing to cry
about--it's all a false alarm."

"I'm so afraid," she repeated over and over again, as she clung to him.
"Promise not to leave me an instant--not to take your hands off of me.
If I am left alone again I shall die of fear."

"You shall not be alone, I swear it," he answered with cheerful
assurance. "Lie quiet and I'll sit here the whole blessed night if it's
any comfort."

"It is a comfort," she answered; and her words entered his ears with a
piercing sweetness, which was not unlike the sweetness of love. Love it
was indeed, he knew now, but a love so sexless, so dispassionate that
its joys were like the joys of religion. The tenderness that flooded his
breast was less the emotion of man for woman than of the soul for the
soul, and the wife whom he had ceased to love in the world's way was
nearer to him, more closely, more divinely his, than she had been in the
hour of his greatest ecstasy. The appeal she made to him now, lying
there helpless, distraught and unlovely, was an appeal which is woven of
the strongest fibres in the heart of man--the appeal to the immortal
soul to arise and discover its immortality. Connie cried out to him to
save her--to save her from the world, from herself, from the hovering
powers of evil, and he knew now that his joy in the hour of her
salvation would be as the joy of the angels in heaven. He would fight
for her as he had never fought for his own life, and he felt suddenly
that there was nothing upon the earth nor in the sky that was strong
enough to contend against the power of his compassion. All lesser
desires or emotions shrank before it and vanished utterly away--his
ambition, his longing for health wherewith to work, the increasing
ardour of his love for Laura--these were as naught before the bond which
united him to the terrified, small soul that trembled beneath his hands.
And immediately that goodness at which Kemper or Perry Bridewell would
have laughed--the goodness which is spirit, which both builds and
destroys, which knows no law except the divine law of its own being; in
which there is neither the whitened surface nor the loud
self-glorification of the Pharisee--the goodness which is a pure flame,
a consuming passion--this appeared to his eyes in all its alluring
beauty. The way of it was hard, he knew, a way of service, of
self-sacrifice, and yet the one way of happiness as well. This lesson he
had learned from himself--for it is the thing that no man can teach
another--and because it had come to him from himself he knew that it had
come to him from God.

"I made a plan on the way home to-night," he said, keeping his firm
touch upon her throbbing temples. "To-morrow I shall arrange for a
fortnight's absence at the office and the next day I'll take you South.
There you'll stay out of doors and get well again. The flesh will come
back to your body and the colour to your cheeks.

"I shall never be pretty again--never," she moaned, as he held her.

"Nonsense. You're a trifle pale and fagged that's all--but we'll have
you a beauty again before two weeks are up."

And so through the long night he sat with his touch, which compelled
quiet, upon her body, for when, after she had fallen at last into a
fitful slumber, he arose and lowered the lights, she started up with a
scream and called out that she was "alone--fearfully alone!" Then, as he
returned to his chair, she reached for him in the darkness and clung
desperately to his outstretched arm, drawing it presently across her
shoulders until she lay as if shielded by the soothing familiar
presence.




CHAPTER II

AN ADVANCE AND A RETREAT


It was the day after this, while Laura was still in Kemper's thoughts,
that he ran across her as she came out of a church in Twenty-ninth
Street. At the first glance she appeared a little startled, but the
disturbance was so slight that it passed swift as a shadow across her
face, and the next instant the illumining smile which he had thought of
as her one memorable beauty shone from her eyes and lips.

"At first I hardly recognised you," she explained, "you don't look quite
as I remembered you."

His amused glance lingered upon her face. "So you did remember me?" he
said and the retort was so characteristic of the man that Gerty
Bridewell would have paused waiting for it after she had spoken. If
there was the smallest loophole apparent in the conversation through
which the personal intention might be made to enter, he took to it as
instinctively as the fox takes to the covert. The mere uttered words
were what he might have responded to any woman who unconsciously gave
him the opportunity, yet as he looked down upon Laura, in her velvet hat
and black furs, at his side, he was filled with amazement at the
interest aroused in him by her slender, though delicately suggestive
figure. He felt the magnetic touch of her through the very flutter of
her skirts--felt the fervour of her soul, the warmth of her personality,
and he found himself attracted by her as by the mystery of a bright and
distant flame. The intensity of life--the radiant energy of
intellect--was in her look, in her voice, in her smile--and he knew
instinctively that she was capable of larger issues--of higher heights
and deeper depths--than any woman he had ever known. She puzzled him
into a sympathy which quickened with each fresh instant of uncertainty,
and it seemed to him, while she moved by his side, that the illusion of
mystery was the one perennial charm a woman could possess--a mystery
which lay not only in the flame and shadow of her expression, but in the
intenser irregularities of her profile, in the curved darkness of her
eyebrows, in the fulness of her mouth, in the profound eloquence of her
eyes, in the pale amber of her skin, which was like porcelain touched by
a flame, in her gestures, in her walk, in her delicate bosom and slender
swaying hips, in her voice, her hands, her words, and in the blackness
of her abundant hair braided low upon the nape of her slender neck. And
this illusion--stronger than the illusion of beauty because more subtle,
more tantalisingly inexplicable, caught and held his attention with a
vivid and irresistible appeal.

At his words she had turned toward him with an animated gesture, while
her hand in its white glove slipped from the large muff she held.

"It would be a poor memory that could not hold three days," she laughed.

"Three days?" He raised his eyebrows with a blithe interrogation which
lent a peculiar charm to his expression. "Why, I thought that I had
known you forever!"

She shook her head in a merry protest, though she felt herself flush
slowly under the gay deference in his eyes.

"Forever is a long day. There are few people that it pays to know
forever."

"And how do you know that you are not one of them--for me?" he asked.

"How do I know?" she took up the question in a voice which even in her
lightest moments was not without a quality of impassioned earnestness.
"The one infallible way of knowing anything is to know it without really
knowing how or why one knows. My intuitions, you see, are my deeper
wisdom."

"And what do your intuitions have to say in regard to me?"

"Only," she responded, smiling, "that it would be dangerous for us to
attempt an acquaintance that should last forever."

"Dangerous!" the word excited his imagination and he felt the sting of
it in his blood. "What harm do you think would come of it?"

"The harm that always comes of the association between opposites," she
answered quickly, and the laughter, he was prompt to notice, had died
from her voice, "the harm of endless disagreements, of lost illusions."

"Why should our illusions, if we were so fortunate as to have them,
inevitably be lost?" he asked, provoked into an assurance of his
interest by the serene disinclination she displayed.

"Because they invariably are if they are illusions?" she responded,
"and you and I could never be absolute realities to each other, since to
reach the reality in a person one must not only apprehend but comprehend
as well. I doubt if there can be any permanent friendship between people
who are totally unlike."

Half angrily he swung the stick he carried at his side. "Then what
becomes of the attraction of opposites?" he insisted.

"A catastrophe usually," she returned.

Her composed indifference irritated him more than he was willing to
admit even to himself. Never in his recollection had he encountered a
woman who showed so marked a disinclination for his society; and the
wonder of her avoidance challenged him into the exercise of the personal
magnetism he had always found so invincible in its attraction. Had she
met his advances with unaffected feminine eagerness, he would have
parted, probably, from her at the next corner, but her polite
indifference kept him, though indignant, still at her side. Of adulation
he was weary, but a positive aversion promised a new and exhilarating
experience of life.

"But why are you so sure that we are opposites?" he enquired presently.

"How am I sure that you prefer fair women--and adore an ample beauty?"
she retorted lightly. "My intuitions again!"

"Your intuitions are so numerous that they must be sometimes wrong," he
remarked.

"Oh, my intuitions are helped out by Gerty's observation," she laughed
in response.

"Ah, I see," he said: and it seemed to him that he understood now her
open avoidance, her barely concealed dislike, and the distant reticence
which made her appear to him as remote as a star. Gerty had whispered of
his affairs--perhaps of Madame Alta, and in Laura's unworldly vision his
delinquencies had showed strangely distorted and out of drawing. His
anger blazed up within him, yet he knew that the attraction of the woman
beside him was increased rather than diminished by his resentment.

"So my pretty cousin has given me a bad character," he observed, and his
annoyance roughened his usually genial voice.

"On the other hand she admires you very much," Laura hastened to assure
him; "she sings your praises with unflagging energy."

"Then, this, I suppose, you have counted a curse to me," he quoted a
little bitterly.

As she walked beside him she felt the contact of the nervous irritation
she had provoked, and she found suddenly that almost in spite of herself
she was rejoicing in the masculine quality of his presence--in his
muscular strength, in the vibrant tones of his voice and in the ardent
vitality with which he moved. But the force of his personality was a
force against which she felt that she would struggle until the end.

"I'm not sure about the curse," she answered, "but Gerty's heroes and
mine are rarely the same, you know."

"Then, I suppose, it's virtue that you are after," he remarked.

She looked gravely up at him before she bowed her head in assent. "I
like virtue," she responded quietly. "Don't you?"

"God knows, I do," he replied without hesitation in the grandiloquent
tone he loved to assume upon occasions. "But do you think," he added
presently, "that a man can acquire virtue unless it has been born in
him?"

"I think it is another name for wisdom," she replied, "and that is often
found late and in hard places."

He looked at her with an attention which had become absorbed, exclusive.
"Do you know, I thought virtue was what women didn't care about in men?"
he said, and his voice was tense with curiosity.

"Perhaps you mistake the conventions for virtue," she rejoined; "men
usually do." Then after a moment she added frankly, "But I know very
little of what women like or don't like. I've never really known but two
besides my aunts--and one of these is Gerty."

"And you are very fond of Gerty?" he enquired.

As she looked up at him it seemed to him that her smile was a miracle of
light. "I love her more than anyone in the whole world," she said.

Again she perplexed him, and with each fresh perplexity he was conscious
of an increasing desire to understand. "But I thought all women hated
one another," he observed.

"That's because men have ruled the world in two ways," she returned, and
her protest was not without a smothered indignation; "they have made the
laws and they have made the jokes."

Her championship of her sex amused even while it attracted him--he saw
in it a kind of abstract honour which he had always believed to be
lacking in the feminine mind--and at the same instant he remembered the
rancorous jealousy which had controlled Madame Alta's relations with
other women, the petty stings he had seen dealt at Gerty by her less
lovely acquaintances, and the thousand small insincerities he heard
around him every day. The very enthusiasm with which she spoke, the
intensity in her face, the decision in her voice, impressed him in a
manner for which he was utterly unprepared. In the world in which he
moved an enthusiasm which was not at the same time an affectation would
have appeared awkwardly out of place. Women whom he knew were
vivaciously excited over their winnings or losses at bridge whist, but
he could not recall that he had ever seen a single one of them stirred
to utterance by any impersonal question of injustice. To be sure there
were charitable ones among them, he supposed, but he had always tended
by a kind of natural selection toward the conspicuously fair, and the
conspicuously fair had proved invariably to be the secretly selfish as
well. His social life appeared to him now, as he walked by Laura's side,
to have been devoid of sincerity as of intelligence, and he recalled
with disgust the exquisite empty voice of Madame Alta, her lyric
sensuality, and the grossness of her affairs with her many lovers. Was
it the after taste of bitterness in his "wine and honey" which caused it
to turn suddenly nauseous in his remembrance?

"And so women can really like one another without jealousy?" he
questioned, laughing.

"What is there to be jealous of?" she retorted quickly. "For after all
one is one's self, you know, and not another. Gerty is beautiful and I
am not, but her loveliness is as keen a delight to me as it is to
her--keener, I think, for she is sometimes bored with it and I never am.
And she is more than this, too, for she is as devoted--as loyal as she
is lovely."

"To you--yes," he answered slowly, for he was thinking of the Gerty whom
he had known--of her audacious cynicism, her startling frankness, her
suggestive coquetry. Was it possible that this creature of red and white
flesh, of sweetness and irony, was really a multiple personality--the
possessor of divers souls? Had he seen only the surface of her because
it was to the surface alone that he had appealed? Or was it that Laura's
creative instinct had builded an image out of her own ideals which she
had called by Gerty's name? He did not know--he could not even attempt
to answer--but the very confusion of his thoughts strengthened the
emotional interest which Laura had aroused. And as each new and vivid
sensation effaces from the mind every impression that has gone before
it, so at this moment, in the ardent awakening of his temperament, there
existed no memory of the past occasions upon which other women had
allured as irresistibly his inflamed imagination. So far as his
immediate reflections were concerned Laura might have been the solitary
woman upon a solitary planet. If he had paused to remember he might have
recalled that he had fallen in love with the girl whom he afterward
married between the sunset and the moonrise of a single day--that his
passion for Madame Alta leaped, full armed, into being during her
singing of the balcony scene in "Romeo and Juliet"--but he did not pause
to remember, for with that singular forgetfulness which characterises
the man of pleasure, the present sensation, however small, was still
sufficient to lessen the influence of former loves.

They strolled slowly down to Gramercy Park, and this time, as they stood
together before her door, she asked him, flushing a little, if he would
not come inside.

"I only wish I could," he answered, taking out his watch, "but I've
promised to meet a man at the club on the stroke of five. If you'll
extend the privilege, however, I'll take advantage of it before many
days."

His words ended in a laugh, but she felt a moment afterward, as she
entered the house and he turned away, that he had looked at her as no
man had ever done in her life before. She grew hot all over as she
thought of it, yet there had been nothing to resent in his easy freedom
and she was not angry. The gay deference was still in his eyes, but
beneath it she had been conscious for an instant that the whole magnetic
current of his personality flowed to her through his look. That the
glance he had bent upon her was one of his most effective methods of
impressing his individuality she did not know. Gerty could have told her
that he resorted to it invariably at the psychological instant--and so,
perhaps, could Madame Alta had she chosen to be confidential. As a
conscious or unconscious trick of manner it had served its purpose in
many a place when words appeared a difficult or dangerous medium of
expression--but to Laura in her almost cloistral ignorance it was at
once a revelation and an enlightenment. When it passed from her she
found that the face of the whole world was changed.

Indoors Mr. Wilberforce and Gerty Bridewell were awaiting her, but it
seemed to her that her attitude toward them had grown less
intimate--that she herself, her friends, and even the ordinary
surroundings of her life were different from what they had been only
several hours before. She wanted to be alone--to retreat into herself in
search of a clearer knowledge, and even her voice sounded strangely
altered in her own ears.

"You look as if you had been frightened, Laura; what is it?" asked
Gerty, pressing her hand.

"It is nothing," returned Laura, with a glance; "it is only that my head
aches." She pressed her hands upon her temples, and the throbbing of her
pulses against her finger tips confirmed her words. When, after a few
sympathetic questions, they rose to go, she was aware all at once of a
great relief--a relief which seemed to her an affront to friendship so
devoted as theirs.

"Roger tells me that we are to have the new book on Wednesday," said Mr.
Wilberforce, as he stood looking down upon her with the peculiar insight
which belongs to the affection of age. Then it seemed to her suddenly
that he understood the cause of her disturbance and that there were both
pity and disappointment in his eyes.

"I hope so," she answered, smiling the first insincere smile of her
life, for even as she uttered the words she knew that she no longer felt
the old eager, consuming interest in her work, and that the making of
books appeared to her an employment which was tedious and without end.
Why, she wondered vaguely, had she devoted her whole life to a pursuit
in which there was so little of the pulsation of the intenser realities?
She felt at the instant as if a bandage had dropped from before her
eyes, and the fact that Kemper as an individual did not enter into her
thoughts in no wise lessened his tremendous moral effect upon her
awakening nature. Not one man, but life itself was making its appeal to
her, and for the first time she realised something of the intoxication
that might dwell in pleasure--in pleasure accepted solely as a pursuit,
as an end in and for itself alone. Then, a moment later, standing by her
desk in her room upstairs, she remembered, in an illuminating flash, the
look with which Kemper had parted from her at her door.




CHAPTER III

THE MOTH AND THE FLAME


Several weeks after this, on the day that Trent's first play was
accepted, he dropped in to Adams' office, where the editor was busily
giving directions about the coming _Review_.

"I know you aren't in a mood for interruptions," began the younger man,
in a voice which, in spite of his effort at control, still quivered with
a boyish excitement, "but I couldn't resist coming to tell you that
Benson has at last held out his hand. I'm to be put on in the autumn."

Adams laid down the manuscript upon which he was engaged, and turned
with the winning smile which Trent had grown to look for and to love.

"Well, that is jolly news," he said heartily, "you know without my
saying so that there is no one in New York who is more interested in
your success than I am. We'll make a fine first night of it."

"That's why I dropped in to tell you," responded Trent, while his
youthful enthusiasm made Adams feel suddenly as old as failure. "I came
about a week ago, by the way, but that shock-headed chap at the door
told me you were out of town."

Adams nodded as he picked up the manuscript again.

"I took Mrs. Adams south," he replied. "Her health had given way."

"So I heard, but I hope she's well again by now?"

"Oh, she's very much better, but one never knows, of course, how long
one can manage to keep one's health in this climate. I hate to make you
hurry off," he added, as the other rose from his chair.

"I want to carry my good news to Miss Wilde," rejoined Treat. "Do you
know, she was asking about you only the other day."

"Is that so? I've hardly had time for a word with her for three weeks.
Mrs. Adams has not been well and I've kept very closely at home ever
since I got back. Will you tell her this from me? It's a nuisance, isn't
it, that life is so short one never has time, somehow, for one's real
pleasures? Now, Laura Wilde is one of my real pleasures," he pursued,
with his quiet humour, "so when there's a sacrifice to be made, its
always the pleasure instead of the business that goes overboard. Oh,
it's a tremendous pity, of course, but then so many things are that, you
know, and its confoundedly difficult, after all, to edit a magazine and
still keep human."

The winning smile shone out again, and Treat noticed how it transfigured
the worn, sallow face under the thin brown hair.

"Well, you may comfort yourself with the reflection that it's easy to be
human but hard to edit a magazine," laughed the younger man, adding, as
he went toward the door and paused near the threshold, "I haven't seen
you, by the way, since Miss Wilde's last poems are out. Don't you agree
with me that her 'Prelude' is the biggest thing she's done as yet?"

"The biggest--yes, but there's no end to my belief in her, you know,"
said Adams. "She'll live to go far beyond this, and I'm glad to see that
her work is winning slowly. Every now and then one runs across a rare
admirer."

"And she is as kind as she is gifted," remarked Trent fervently. Then he
made his way through the assistant editors in the outer office, and
hastened with his prodigious news to Gramercy Park.

Laura was alone, and after sending up his name he followed the servant
to her study on the floor above, where he found her working with a
pencil, as she sat before a brightly burning wood fire, over a
manuscript which he saw to his surprise was not in verse. At his glance
of enquiry she smiled and laid the typewritten pages carelessly aside.

"No, it's not mine," she said. "They're several short stories which Mr.
Kemper did many years ago, and he's asked me to look over them. I find,
by the way, that they need a great deal of recasting."

"Is it possible," he exclaimed in amazement, "that you allow people to
bore you with stuff like that?"

The smile which flickered almost imperceptibly across her lips mystified
him completely, and he drew his chair a little nearer that he might
bring himself directly beneath her eyes.

"Oh, well, I don't mind it once in a while," she returned, "though he
hasn't in the very least the literary sense."

"But I wasn't aware that you even knew him," he persisted, puzzled.

"It doesn't take long to know some people," she retorted gayly; then as
her eyes rested upon his face, she spoke with one of her sympathetic
flashes of insight: "You've come to bring me good news about the play,"
she said. "Benson has accepted it--am I not right?"

"I'm jolly glad to say you are!" he assented with enthusiasm. "It will
be put on in the autumn and Benson has suggested Katie Hanska for the
leading rôle."

His voice died out in a joyous tremor, and he sat looking at her with
all the sparkles in his young blue eyes.

"I am glad," said Laura, and she stretched out her hand, which closed
warmly upon his. "I can't tell you--it's useless to try--how overjoyed I
am."

"I knew you'd be," he answered softly, while his grateful glance
caressed her. The triumph of the day--which seemed to him prophetic of
the triumph of the future--went suddenly to his head, and in some
strange presentiment he felt that his emotion for Laura was bound up and
made a part of his success in literature. He could not, try as he
would--disassociate her from her books, nor her books from his, and as
he sat there in ecstatic silence, with his eyes on her slender figure in
its soft black gown, he told himself that the morning's happy promise
united them in a close, an indissoluble bond of fellowship. He saw her
always under the literary glamour--he felt the full charm of the poetic
genius--the impassioned idealism which she expressed, and it became
almost impossible for him to detach the personality of the woman herself
from the personality of the writer whom he felt, after all, to be the
more intimately vivid of the two.

"I knew you'd be," he repeated, and this time he spoke with a passionate
assurance. "If you hadn't been I'd have found the whole thing
worthless."

She looked up still smiling, and he watched her large, beautiful
forehead, on which the firelight played as on a mirror. "Well, one's
friends do add zest to the pleasure," she returned.

For a moment he hesitated; then leaning forward he spoke with a
desperate resolve. "One's friends--yes--but you have been more than a
friend to me since the beginning--since the first day. You have been
everything. I could not have lived without you."

He saw her curved brows draw quickly together, and she bent upon him a
look in which he read pity, surprise and a slight tinge of amusement.
"Oh, you poor boy, is it possible that you imagine all this?" she asked.

"I imagine nothing," he answered with a wounded and despairing
indignation, "but I have loved you--I have dreamed of you--I have lived
for you since the first moment that I saw you."

"Then you have been behaving very foolishly," she commented, "for what
you are in love with is a shadow--a poem, a fancy that isn't myself at
all. The real truth is," she pursued, with a decision which cut him to
the heart, "that you are in love with a literary reputation and you
imagine that it's a woman. Why, I'm not only older than you in years,
I'm older in soul, older in a thousand lives. There is nothing foolish
about me, nothing pink and white and fleshly perfect--nothing that a
boy like you could hold to for a day--"

She broke off and sat staring into the fire with a troubled and brooding
look--a look which seemed to lose the fact of his presence in some more
absorbing vision at which she gazed. He noticed even in his misery that
she had suffered during the last few weeks an obscure, a mysterious
change--it was as if the flame-like suggestion, which had always
belonged to her personality, had of late gathered warmth, light,
effectiveness, consuming, as it strengthened, whatever had been passive
or without definite purpose in her nature. Her face seemed to him more
than ever to be without significance judged by a purely physical
standard--more than ever he felt it to be but a delicate and sympathetic
medium for the expression of some radiant quality of soul.

"I did not know--I would not have believed that you could be so cruel,"
he protested with bitterness.

"I can be anything," she answered slowly, drawing her gaze with an
effort from the fire. "Most women can."

The glory of the morning passed from him as suddenly as it had come, and
he told himself with the uncompromising desperation of youth that for
all he cared now his great play might remain forever in oblivion. Life
itself appeared as empty--as futile as his ambition--so empty, indeed,
that he began immediately in the elastic melancholy which comes easily
at twenty-five--to plan the consoling details of an early death. When he
remembered his buoyant happiness of a few hours ago it seemed to him
almost ridiculous, and he experienced a curious sensation of
detachment, of having drifted out of his proper and peculiar place in
life. "I shall never be happy again and I am no longer the same person
that I was yesterday--or even a half hour ago," he thought with a
determination to be completely miserable. Yet even while the words were
in his mind he found himself weighing almost instinctively the literary
value of his new emotion, and to his horror the situation in which he
now stood began slowly to take a dramatic form in his mental vision. The
very attitude into which he had unconsciously fallen--as he paused with
his face averted and his hand tightening with violence upon a book he
had picked up--showed to his imagination as a bit of restrained
emotional acting beyond the footlights.

"Then there's nothing I can do but go straight to the devil," he
declared with resolution, and at the same instant he found to his
supreme self-contempt that he was wondering how the speech would sound
in the mouth of an actor in his drama.

"Or write another play," suggested Laura, while he started quickly and
turned toward the door.

"I'll never write another," he said in a voice of gloom, which he tried
with all his soul to make an honest expression of his state of mind. "I
wish now I hadn't written this one. I wouldn't if I'd known."

"Then it's just as well that you didn't," she returned with a positive
motherly assurance. "My poor dear boy," she added soothingly, "you are
not the first man of twenty-five who has mistaken the literary mania for
the passion of love, and I fear that you will not be the last. There
seems, curiously enough, to be a strange resemblance between the two
emotions. If you'd only look at me plainly without any of your lovely
glamour you'll see in a minute what nonsense it all is. Why, you are all
the time in your heart of hearts in love with some little blonde thing
with pink cheeks who is still at school."

He turned away in a passion of wounded pride; then coming back again he
stood looking moodily down upon her.

"I'll prove to you if it kills me that I've spoken the truth," he
declared, and it seemed to him that the words were not really what he
meant to say--that they came from him against his will because he had
fitted them into the mouth of an imaginary character.

"Oh, please don't," she begged.

"I suppose I may still see you sometimes?" he enquired.

"Oh, dear, yes; whenever you like."

Then while he stood there, hesitating and indignant, the servant brought
her a card, and as she took it from the tray, he saw a flush that was
like a pale flame overspread her face.

"It's Mr. Kemper now," she said. "Why will you not stay and be good and
forget?"

"I'd rather meet the devil himself at this minute," he cried in a boyish
rage that brought tears to his eyes. "It seems to me that I spend half
my life getting out of his way."

"But don't you like him?" she enquired curiously. "Every one likes him,
I think."

"Well, I'm not every one," he blurted out angrily, "for I think him a
consummate, thickheaded ass."

"Good heavens!" she gayly ejaculated, "what a character you give him."
Then, as he was leaving the room, she reached out, and taking his hand,
drew him against his will, back to his chair. "You shall not go like
this--I'll not have it," she said. "Do you think I am a stone that I can
bear to spoil all your beautiful triumph. Here, sit down and I promise
to make you like both him and me."

As she finished, Kemper came in with his energetic step and his genial
greeting, and she introduced the two men with a little flattering smile
in Trent's direction. "You have the honour to meet our coming
playwright," she added with a gracious gesture, skilfully turning the
conversation upon the younger man's affairs, while she talked on with a
sweetness which at once distracted and enraged him. He listened to her
at first moodily and then with an attention which, in spite of his
resolution, was fixed upon the fine points of his play as she made now
and then friendly suggestions as to the interpretations of particular
lines or scenes. The charming deference in her voice soothed his ruffled
vanity and it seemed to him presently that the flattering intoxication
of her praise sent his imagination spinning among the stars.

Kemper listened to it all with an intelligent and animated interest, and
when he spoke, as he did from time to time, it was to put a sympathetic
question which dismissed Trent's darling prejudice into the region of
departed errors. To have held out against the singular attraction of the
man, would have been, Trent thought a little later, the part of a
perverse and stiffnecked fool. It was not only that he succumbed to
Kemper's magnetism, but that he recognised his sincerity--his utter lack
of the dissimulation he had once believed him to possess. Then, as
Kemper sat in the square of sunlight which fell through the bow window,
Trent noticed each plain, yet impressive detail of his appearance. He
saw the peculiar roughness of finish which lent weight, if not beauty,
to his remarkably expressive face, and he saw, too, with an eye trained
to attentive observation, that the dark brown hair, so thick upon the
forehead and at the back of the neck, had already worn thin upon the
crown of the large, well-turned head. "In a few years he will begin to
be bald," thought the younger man, "then he will put on glasses, and yet
these things will not keep him from appealing to the imaginary ideal of
romance which every woman must possess. Even when he is old he will
still have the power to attract, if he cannot keep the fancy." But the
bitterness had gone out of his thoughts, and a little later, when he
left the house and walked slowly homeward, he discovered that a hopeless
love might lend a considerable sweetness to a literary life. After all,
he concluded, one might warm oneself at the flame, and yet neither
possess it utterly nor be destroyed.

His mother sat knitting by the window when he entered the apartment, and
he saw that the table was already laid for dinner in the adjoining room.

"I ordered dinner a little earlier for you," she explained as she laid
aside the purple shawl while the ball of yarn slipped from her short,
plump knees and rolled under the chair in which she sat. Never in his
recollection had he seen her put aside her knitting that the ball did
not roll from her lap upon the floor, and now as he stooped to follow
the loosened skein, he wondered vaguely how she had been able to fill
her life with so trivial and monotonous an employment.

"I wish you could get out," he said, as he sat down on a footstool at
her feet and leaned his head affectionately against her knees. "I don't
believe you've had a breath of air for a month."

"Why, I never went out of doors in the snow in my life," she responded,
"at least not since I was a child--and it always snows here except when
it rains. Do you know," she pursued, with one of her mild glances of
curiosity through the window, "I can't imagine how the people in that
big apartment over there ever manage to get through the day. Why, the
woman stays in bed every morning until eleven o'clock and then the maid
brings her something like chocolate on a tray. She wears such beautiful
wrappers, too, I really don't see how she can be entirely proper, and
then she seems to fly in such rages with her husband. There are some
children, I believe," she went on with increasing animation, "but they
are never allowed to set foot in her room, and this afternoon when she
dressed to go out I saw her try on at least four different hats and
every single one of them green."

"Poor creature!" observed Trent, with a laugh, "it must be worse than
living under the omnipresent eye of Providence. By the way, I told the
man to come up and have a look at the radiator. Did he do it?"

She laid her large, plump hand upon his head with a touch that was as
soft as her ball of yarn.

"The manager came himself," she replied, "but we got to talking and
after I found out how much trouble he had had in life--he lost his wife
and two little boys all in one year--I didn't like to say anything about
the heating. I was afraid it would hurt his feelings to find I had a
complaint to make--he seemed so very nice and obliging. And, after all,"
she concluded amiably, "the rooms do get quite warm, you know, just
about the time we are ready to go to bed, so all I need to do is to wear
my cloak a little while when I first get up in the morning. It will be a
very good way to make some use of it, for I never expect to go out of
doors again in this climate."

"You'll have to go once," he said gayly, "to the first rehearsal of my
play. You can't afford to miss it."

"Oh, I'll muffle up well on that occasion," she answered. "Did you see
Mr. Benson this morning? and what did he say to you?"

"A great deal--he was quite enthusiastic--for _him_, you know."

"I wonder what he is like," she murmured with her large, sweet
seriousness. "Is he married, and has he any children?"

"I didn't investigate. You see I was more interested in my own affairs.
He wants Katie Hanska to take the leading part. You may have seen her
picture--it was in one of the magazines I brought you."

"Did you enquire anything about her?" she asked earnestly, "I mean about
her character and her bringing up. I couldn't bear to have the part
played by any but a pure woman, and they tell me that so many actresses
aren't--aren't quite that. Before you consent I hope you'll find out
very particularly about the life she has led."

"Oh, I dare say she's all right," he remarked, with the affectionate
patience which was one of his more amiable characteristics. "At any rate
she has the mettle for the rôle."

"I hope she's good," said his mother softly, and she added after a
moment, "do you remember that poor Christina Coles I was telling you
about not long ago?"

"Why, yes," replied Trent; "the pretty girl with the blue eyes and the
uncompromising manner? What's become of her, I wonder?"

"I fear," began his mother, while she lowered her voice and glanced
timidly around as if she were on the point of a shameful disclosure, "I
honestly fear that she is starving."

"Starving!" exclaimed St. George, in horror, and he sprang to his feet
as if he meant to plunge at once into a work of rescue. "Why, how long
has she been about it?"

"I know she has stopped coming to see me because her clothes are so
shabby," returned Mrs. Trent, with what seemed to him a calmness that
was almost cruel, "and the charwoman tells me that she lives on next to
nothing--a loaf of baker's bread and a bit of cheese for dinner. It
takes all the little money she can rake and scrape together to pay her
room rent--for it seems that the papers have stopped publishing her
stories."

"For God's sake, let's do something--let's do it quickly," exclaimed
Trent, in an agony of sympathy.

"I was just thinking that you might run up and see if she would come
down to dine with us," said the old lady; "it really makes me miserable
to feel that she doesn't get even enough to eat."

"Why, I'll go before I dress--I'll go this very minute," declared the
young man. "Shall I tell her that we dine in half an hour or do you
think, if she's so very hungry, you might hurry it up a bit?"

"In half an hour--she'll want a little time," replied his mother, and
she added presently, "but she's so proud, poor thing, that I don't
believe she'll come."

The words were said softly, but had they been spoken in a louder tone,
Trent would not have heard them for he had already hastened from the
room.

In response to his knock, Christina opened her door almost immediately,
and when she recognised him a look of surprise appeared upon her face.

"Won't you come in?" she asked, drawing slightly aside with a politeness
which he felt to be an effort to her, "my room is not very orderly, but
perhaps you will not mind?"

She wore a simple cotton blouse, the sleeves of which were a little
rumpled as if they had been rolled up above her elbows, and her skirt of
some ugly brown stuff was shabby and partly frayed about the edges--but
when she looked at him with her sincere blue eyes, he forgot the
disorder of her dress in the touching pathos of her gallant little
figure. She was very pretty, he saw, in a fragile yet resolute way--like
a child that is possessed of a will of iron--and because of her
prettiness he found himself resenting her literary failures with an
acute personal resentment. The tenderness of his sympathy seemed to
increase rather than diminish his hopeless love for Laura, and while he
gazed at Christina's flower-like eyes and smooth brown hair, which shone
like satin, there stole over him a poetic melancholy that was altogether
pleasant It was as if he had suddenly discovered a companion in his
unhappiness, and he thought all at once that it would be charming to
pour the sorrows of his love into the pretty ears hidden so quaintly
under the smooth brown hair. Love, at the moment, appeared to him
chiefly as something to be talked about--an emotion which one might turn
effectively into the spoken phrase.

She drew back into the room and he followed her while his sympathetic
glance dwelt upon the sleeping couch under its daytime covering of
cretonne, upon the small gas stove on which a kettle boiled, upon the
cupboard, the dressing table, the desk at which she wrote, and the torn
and mended curtains before the single window. Though she neither
apologised nor showed in her manner the faintest embarrassment, he felt
instinctively that her fierce maidenly pride was putting her to torture.

"I came with a message from my mother," he hastened to explain as he
stood beside her on the little strip of carpet before the gas stove,
"she sends me to beg that you will dine with us this evening as a
particular favour to her. She is so much alone, you know, that a young
visitor is just what she needs."

Christina continued to regard him, as she had done from the first, with
her sincere, unsmiling eyes, but he saw a flush rise slowly to her face
in a wave of colour, turning the faint pink in her cheeks to crimson.

"I am very much obliged to her," she said, in her fresh attractive
voice, "but I am just in the middle of a story and I cannot break off
just now. I write," she added positively, "every evening."

As she finished she picked up some closely written sheets from the desk
and held them loosely in her hand, enforcing by a gesture the
unalterableness of her decision. "I hope you will give her my love--my
dear love," she said presently, with girlish sweetness, "and tell her
how sorry I am that it is impossible."

"You are writing stories, then--still?" he asked, lingering in the face
of her evident desire to be rid of him.

"Oh, yes, I write all the time--every day."

"But do you find a market for so many?"

She shook her head: "The beginning is always hard--have you never read
the lives of the poets? But when one gives up everything else--when one
has devoted one's whole life--"

Knowing what he did of her mistaken ambition, her fruitless sacrifices,
the thing appeared to him as a terrible and useless tragedy. He saw the
thinness of her figure, the faint lines which her tireless purpose had
written upon her face--and he felt that it was on the tip of his tongue
to beg her to give it up--to reason with her in the tone of a
philosopher and with the experience of the author of an accepted play.
But presently when he spoke, he found that his uttered words were not of
the high and ethical character he had planned.

"She will be very much disappointed, I know," he said at last; and
though he told himself that a great deal of good might be done by a
little perfectly plain speaking, still he did not know how to speak it
nor exactly what it would be.

"Thank her for me--I--I should love to see her oftener if I had the
time--if it were possible," said Christina. And then he went to the door
because he could think of no excuse sufficient to keep him standing
another minute upon the hearthrug.

"I hope you will remember," he said from the threshold, "that we are
always down stairs--at least my mother is--and ready to serve you at any
moment in any way we can."

The assurance appeared to make little impression upon her, but she
smiled politely, and then closing the door after him, sat down to eat
her dinner of cold bread and corned meat.




CHAPTER IV

TREATS OF THE ATTRACTION OF OPPOSITES


As soon as Trent had left the room Laura felt that the silence became
oppressive and constrained. For the first time in her life she found
herself overwhelmed with timidity--with a fear of the too obvious
word--and this timidity annoyed her because she was aware that she no
longer possessed the strength with which to struggle against it. That it
was imperative for her to lighten the situation by a trivial remark, she
saw clearly, yet she could think of nothing to say which did not sound
foolish and even insincere when she repeated it in her thoughts. Had she
dared to follow her usual impulse and be uncompromisingly honest, she
would have said, perhaps: "I am silent because I am afraid to speak and
yet I do not know why I am afraid, nor what it is that I fear." In her
own mind she was hardly more lucid than this, and the mystery of her
heart was as inscrutable to herself as it was to Kemper.

Then, presently, a rush of anger--of hot resentment--put courage into
her determination, and raising her head, with an impatient gesture, she
looked indifferently into his face. He was still sitting in the square
of sunlight, which had almost faded away, and as she turned toward him,
he met her gaze with his intimate and charming smile. Though his words
were casual usually and uttered in a tone of genial raillery, this
smile, whenever she met it, seemed to give the lie to every trifling
phrase that he had spoken. "What is the use of all this ridiculous
fencing when you fill my thoughts and each minute of the day I think
only of you," said his look. So vivid was the impression she received
now, that she felt instantly that he had caressed her in his
imagination. Her heart beat quickly, while she rose to her feet with an
indignant impulse.

"What is it?" he asked and she knew from his voice that he was still
smiling. "What is the matter?"

Picking up his typewritten manuscript, she returned with it to her
chair, drawing, as she sat down, a little farther away.

"I merely wanted to look over this," she returned, "Mr. Trent
interrupted me in my reading."

"Then you've something to thank him for," he remarked gayly, and added
in the same tone, "I noticed that he is in love with you--and I am
beginning to be jealous."

For an instant she looked at him in surprise; then she remembered his
affected scorn of what he called "social cowardice"--his natural or
assumed frankness--and she shook her head with a laugh of protest.

"He in love! Well, yes, he's in love with his imagination. He's too
young for anything more definite than that."

"A man is never too young to fall in love," he retorted, "I had it at
least six times before I was twenty-one."

The laughter was still on her lips. "You speak as if it were the
measles."

"It is--or worse, for when you've pulled through a bad attack of the
measles you may safely count yourself immune. With love--" he shrugged
his shoulders.

"Do you mean," she asked lightly, "that one can keep it up like
that--forever."

He shook his head.

"Oh, I think a case is rare," he replied, "after seventy-five. One
usually dies by then."

"And is there never--with a man, I mean--really one?"

"Oh, Lord, yes, there's always one--at a time."

His laughing eyes were probing her, and as she met them, questioningly,
she found it impossible to tell whether he was merely jesting or in
deadly earnest. With the doubt she felt a sharp prick of curiosity, and
with it she realised that in this uncertainty--this flashing suggestion
of all possibilities or of nothing--dwelt the singular attraction that
he had for her--and for others. Was he only superficial, after all? Or
did these tantalising contradictions serve to conceal the hidden depths
beneath? Had she for an instant taken him entirely at his word value,
she knew that her interest in him would have quickly passed--but the
force which dominated him, the lurking seriousness which seemed always
behind his laughter, the very largeness of the candour he
displayed--these things kept her forever expectant and forever
interested.

"I hate you when you are like this," she exclaimed, almost indignantly.

"A woman always hates a man when he tells her the truth," he retorted.
"She has a taste for sweets and prefers falsehood."

"It may be the truth as you have seen it," she answered, "but that after
all is a very small part of the whole."

"It's big enough at least to be unpleasant."

"Well, it's your personal idea of the truth, all the same," she
insisted, "and you can't make it universal. It isn't Gerty's for
instance."

"You think not?" he made a face of playful astonishment. "Well, how
about its hitting off our friend Perry?"

"Perry!" she replied disdainfully. "Do you know if he weren't so simple,
I'd detest him."

"But why?" His eyebrows were still elevated.

"Because he thinks of nothing under the sun but the sensations of his
great big body."

"Well, that may not be magnificent," he paraphrased gayly, "but it is
man."

"Then, thank heaven, it isn't woman!" she exclaimed.

"Do you mean to tell me," he leaned forward in his chair and she was
conscious suddenly that he was very close to her--closer, in spite of
the intervening space, than any man had ever been in her life before,
"do you honestly mean to tell me that women are different?"

The expression of his face altered as it always did before an
approaching change in his mood, and she saw in it something of the
satiety--the moral weariness--which is the Nemesis of the soul that is
led by pleasure. It was at this moment that she felt an exquisite
confidence in the man himself--in the man hidden behind the cynicism,
the affectation, the utter vanity of words.

"Oh, they can't devote themselves to their own sensations when they have
to think so much of other people's," she responded merrily; and she felt
again the strange impulse of retreat, the prompting to fly before the
earnestness that appeared in his voice. While he was flippant, her
intuitions told her that she might be serious, but when the banter
passed from his tone, she turned to it instinctively as to a defence.

"But those that I have known"--he stopped and looked at her as if he
weighed with an experienced eye the exact effect of his words.

She laughed, but it was a laugh of irritation rather than humour.
"Perhaps you did not select your examples very wisely," she remarked.

Her look arrested him as he was about to reply, and he spoke evidently
upon the impulse of the moment. "Did Gerty tell you about Madame Alta?"
he enquired.

She shook her head with an evasion of the question, "I don't remember
that it was Gerty."

"But you have heard of her?"

"I've _heard_ her," she answered. "It is a very beautiful voice."

He frowned with a nervous irritation, and she saw from his impatient
movements that he was under the influence of a disagreeable excitement.

"Well, I was once in love with her," he said bluntly.

She made an indifferent gesture.

"And now I hate her," he added with a sharp intonation.

"Is that the ordinary end of your romances?" she questioned without
interest.

"It wasn't romance," he replied bitterly; "it was hell."

Again she caught the note of satiety in his voice, and it stirred her to
a feeling of sympathy which she despised in herself.

"At least you worked out your own damnation," she returned coolly.

"One usually does," he admitted. "That's the infernal part of it. But
I'm out of it now," he pursued with an egoism which rejoiced in its own
strength. "I'm out of it now with a whole skin and I hope to keep decent
even if I don't get to heaven. You might not think it," he concluded
gravely, "but I'm at bottom as religious a chap as old John Knox."

"You may be," she observed without enthusiasm, "but it's the kind of
religion which impresses me not at all."

"Well, it might have been better," he said, "but I never had a chance.
I've known such devilish women all my life."

Humour shone in her eyes, making her whole face darkly brilliant with
expression. "Do you know that you show a decided family resemblance to
Adam," she observed.

"It does sound that way," he laughed, "but there's some hard sense in
it, after all. A woman has a tremendous effect on a man's life--I mean
the woman he really likes."

"Wouldn't it be safer to say the 'women'?" she suggested.

"Nonsense. I was only joking. There is always one who is more than the
others--any man will tell you that."

"I suppose any man will--even Perry Bridewell."

"Why not Perry?" he demanded. "You can't imagine how he used to bore the
life out of me about Gerty--but Gerty, you know," he added in a burst of
confidence which impressed her as almost childlike, "isn't exactly the
kind of woman to a--a lift a fellow."

Before his growing earnestness she resorted quickly to the defence of
flippancy. "Nor is Perry, I suppose, exactly the kind of man that is
lifted," she observed, with a laugh.

He looked at her a moment with a smile which had even then an edge of
his characteristic genial irony. "You are the sort of woman who could do
that," he said abruptly.

"Could lift Perry? Now, God forbid!" she retorted gayly.

"Oh, Perry be hanged!" he exclaimed, with the candid ill-humour which,
strangely enough, had a peculiar attraction for her. "If I had known you
fifteen years ago I might be a good deal nearer heaven than I am
to-day."

The charm of his earnestness was very great, and she felt that the
sudden sensation of faintness which came over her must be visible in her
fluttering eyelids and in her trembling hands.

"I haven't faith in a salvation that must be worked out by somebody
else," she said, in a voice she made cold by an effort to render it
merely careless.

An instant before he had told himself with emphasis that he would go no
further, but the chill remoteness from which she looked at him stirred
him to an emotion that was not unlike a jealous anger. She seemed to him
then more brightly distant, more sweetly inaccessible than she had done
at their first meeting.

"Not even when it is a salvation through love?" he asked impulsively,
and at the thought that she was possibly less indifferent than she
appeared to be, he felt his desire of her mount swiftly to his head.

Her hand went to her bosom to keep down the wild beating of her heart,
but the face with which she regarded him was like the face of a statue.
"No--because I doubt the possibility of such a thing," she said.

"The possibility of my loving you or of your saving me?"

"The possibility of both."

"How little you know of me," he exclaimed, and his voice sounded hurt as
if he were wounded by her disbelief.

She raised her eyes and looked at him, and for several seconds they sat
in silence with only the little space between them.

"It is very well," she said presently, "that I believe nothing that you
say to me--or it might be hard to divide the truth from the untruth."

"I never told you an untruth in my life," he protested angrily.

"Doesn't a man always tell them to a woman?" she enquired.

For an instant he hesitated; then he spoke daringly, spurred on by her
indifferent aspect. "He doesn't when--he loves her."

"When he loves her more than ever," she returned quietly, as if his
remark held for her merely an historic interest, "Perry Bridewell loves
Gerty, I suppose, and yet he lies to her every day he lives."

"That's because she likes it," he commented, with a return of raillery.

"She doesn't like it--no woman does. As for me I want the truth even if
it kills me."

"It wouldn't kill you," he answered, and the tenderness in his voice
made her feel suddenly that she had never known what love could be, "it
would give you life." Then his tone changed quickly and the old pleasant
humour leaped to his eyes, "and whatever comes I promise never to lie to
you," he added.

She shook her head. "I didn't ask it," she rejoined, with a sharp
breath.

"If you had," he laughed, "I wouldn't have promised. That's a part of
the general contrariness of men--they like to give what they are not
asked for."

"Well, I'll never ask anything of you," she said, smiling.

"Is that because you want to get everything?" he enquired gayly.

A pale flush rose to her forehead, and the glow heightened the singular
illumination which dwelt in her face. "Would the best that you could
give be more than a little?"

"It would be more than a woman ever got on earth."

"Well, I'm not sure that I would accept your valuation," she remarked,
with an effort to keep up the light tone of banter.

"Then make your own," he answered, as he rose from his chair, but his
eyes and the strong pressure of his hand on hers said more than this.

"When I've read through the manuscript I'll talk to you about it," she
observed, as he was leaving "If you really want them published, though,
they must be considerably altered."

"Oh, do it yourself," he returned, with an embarrassed eagerness. "Do
anything you please--put in the literary stuff and all that."

He spoke with an entire unconsciousness of the amount of work he asked
of her, and she liked him the better for the readiness with which he
took for granted that she possessed the patience as well as the will to
serve him.

"Well, we'll talk about it later," she said, and then for the first time
during the conversation she raised upon him, in all its mystery of
suggestion, that subtle fascination of look which he felt at the instant
to be her transcendent if solitary beauty. Through the afternoon he had
waited patiently for this remembered smile--had laid traps for it, had
sought in vain to capture it unawares, and had she been a worldly
coquette bent upon conquest, she could not have used her weapons with a
finer or more decisive effect. After more than two hours in which her
remoteness had both disappointed and irritated him, he went away at last
with her face at its most radiant moment stamped upon his memory.




CHAPTER V

SHOWS THE DANGERS AS WELL AS THE PLEASURES OF THE CHASE


When Kemper looked at his watch on Laura's steps, he found that he had
time only to pay a promised call on Gerty Bridewell before he must hurry
home to get into his dinner clothes. In his pocket, carelessly thrust
there as he left his rooms, was a note from Gerty begging him to drop in
upon her for a bit of twilight gossip; and though the request was made
with her accustomed lightness, he knew instinctively that she had sought
him less for diversion than for advice, and that her reckless pen had
been guided by some hidden agitation. When he thought of her it was with
a sympathy hardly justified by the outward brilliance of her
life--wealth, beauty, power, all the things which he would have called
desirable were hers, and the vague compassion she awoke in him appeared
to him the result of a simple trick of pathos which she knew how to
assume at times. To be sorry for Gerty was absurd, he had always looked
upon a hunger for married romance as a morbid and unhealthy passion, and
that a woman who possessed a generous husband should demand a faithful
one as well seemed to him the freak of an unreasonable and exacting
temper. "Men were not born monogamous"--it was a favourite cynicism of
his, for he was inclined to throw upon nature the full burden of her
responsibility.

Then, as he signalled a cab at the corner of Fifth Avenue, and after
seating himself, clasped his gloved hands over the crook of his walking
stick, his thoughts returned, impatient of distraction, to the
disturbing memory of Laura.

He had gone too far, this he admitted promptly and without
consideration--another minute of her bewildering charm and he felt, with
a shiver, that he might have blundered irretrievably into a declaration
of love. What a fool he had been, after all, and where was the result of
his painfully acquired caution--of his varied experiences with many
women? Before entering her doors he had told himself emphatically that
the thing should go no further than a pleasant friendship, and yet an
hour later he had found his thoughts fairly wallowing in sentiment. To
like a woman and not make love to her--was that dream of his purer
desires still beyond him--still in the distant region of the happier
impossibilities? Marriage had few allurements for him--the respect he
felt for it as an institution was equalled only by the disgust with
which he regarded it as a personal condition; and a shudder ran through
him now as he imagined himself tied to any woman upon earth for the
remainder of his days. Without being unduly proud in his own conceit, he
was clearly aware that he might be looked upon through worldly eyes as a
desirable match--as fair game for a number of wary marriageable maidens;
and it did not occur to him that even Laura herself might by any choice
of her own, still stand hopelessly beyond his reach. The thing that
troubled him was the knowledge of his own impetuous emotions--with the
shield of Madame Alta withdrawn was it not possible that a sudden
passion might plunge him headlong even into the abyss of marriage?

"What a consummate, what an unteachable ass I am," he thought as he
stared moodily at the passing cabs, "and the odd part of it is that the
newest attraction always brings with it a fatal belief in its own
permanence. I have been madly in love a dozen times since I left college
and yet it seems impossible to me that what I now feel has ever had a
beginning or can ever have an end. By Jove, I could almost swear that
I've never gone through this before." Then he remembered suddenly one of
Laura's most characteristic movements--the swift turn of her profile as
she averted her face--and he tried to imagine the quickened sensation
with which he might have stooped and kissed the little violet shadow on
her neck. "Pshaw!" he exclaimed with angry determination, "does a man
never get too old for such rubbish? Am I no better than one of the
dotards who hold on to passion after they have lost their teeth?" But in
spite of his contemptuous cynicism it seemed to him that he was more in
earnest than he had ever been in his life before. There had been nothing
so grave--nothing so destructive as this in the impulse which had driven
him to Madame Alta.

Gerty was awaiting him alone in her sitting-room upstairs, and as he
entered, she stretched out her hands with a gesture of reproachful
eagerness.

"You're so late that I've barely a half hour before dressing," she said.

"Why, in heaven's name, didn't you write me sooner?" he enquired, as he
threw himself into a chair beside the couch on which she lay half buried
amid cushions of pale green satin, "it was a mere accident that I had
this spare time on my hands. Where's Perry?"

She shook her head with the piquant disdain he knew so well. "Amusing
himself doubtless," she replied, adding with one of her uncontrollable
flashes of impulse, "Do you, by the way, I wonder, ever happen to see
Ada Lawley now?"

The question startled him, and he sat for a minute staring under bent
brows at her indignant loveliness; though she had shrieked out her
secret in the tongues of men and of angels, she could have added nothing
further to his knowledge. The wonderful child quality which still
survived in her beneath all her shallow worldliness dawned suddenly in
her wide-open, angry eyes, and he saw clearly at last the hidden canker
which was eating at her impatient heart. So this was what it meant, and
this was why she had reminded him at times of a pierced butterfly that
hides a mortal anguish beneath the beauty of its quivering wings?

"Oh, she isn't exactly the kind to blush unseen, you know," he responded
lightly.

"But what is her attraction? I can't fathom it," persisted Gerty, with a
burning curiosity. "Is it possible that men think her handsome?"

He laughed softly at her impatience, and then leaning back in his chair,
took up her question in a quizzical tone. "Is she handsome? Well, that
depends, I suppose, upon one's natural or acquired taste. Some people
like caviar--some don't."

Though she choked down her eagerness, he saw it still fluttering in her
beautiful white throat. "Then I may presume that she is caviar to the
respectable?" she said with a relapse into her biting sarcasm.

He made a gesture of alarmed protest: "You are to presume nothing--it is
never wise to presume against a woman."

"Then I won't if you'll tell me," she returned, "if you'll tell me quite
honestly and sincerely all that you think."

Before the mockery in his eyes she fell back with a sigh of
disappointment, but he answered the challenge presently in what she had
once described as his "paradoxical humour."

"Oh, well, my views have all been distant ones," he said, "but I should
judge her to be--since you ask me--a lady who insists upon a remarkable
natural beauty with a decidedly artificial emphasis."

He paused for a moment in order to enjoy the flavour of his epigram; but
Gerty was too much in earnest to waste her animated attention upon
words.

"Oh, of course she makes up," she retorted, "they all do that--men like
it."

His puzzling smile dwelt on her for an instant. "Well, I'd rather a
woman would be downright bad any day," he said, "it shows less."

"But is she bad?" asked Gerty, almost panting in her pursuit of
information. "That's what I want to know--of course she's artificial on
the face of it."

"On the face of _her_, you mean," he corrected, and concluded promptly,
"but I've never said anything against a woman in my life and it's too
late to begin just as I'm getting bald. Doesn't it suffice that the Lady
has kept her pipe tuned to the general melody?"

"You mean she's careful?"

"I mean nothing--do you?"

With a determined movement she sprang into a sitting position, and
drawing the cushions beneath her arm, rested her elbow, bare under the
flowing sleeve, upon the luxurious pile of down. He saw the dent made by
her figure in the green satin covers, and it gave him a sensation of
pleasure while he watched it fade out slowly.

"I--oh, I mean a great deal," she responded in her reckless voice, "I'm
as clear, I've always said, as running water, and what you mistake for
flippancy is merely my philosophy."

"A philosophy!" he laughed, "then you've gone too deep for me."

"Oh, it isn't deep--it's only this," she rejoined gayly, "he laughs best
who laughs most."

"And not who laughs last?"

She shook her head as she played nervously with the lace upon her
sleeve. "No, because the last laugh is apt to be a death rattle."

"You give me the shivers," he protested, with a mock shudder, "do you
know you are always clever when you are jealous?"

"But I am not jealous," she retorted indignantly; "there's nobody on
earth that's worth it--and besides I'm too happy. I'm as happy as the
very happiest human being you know. Who's that?"

He thought attentively for a moment: "By Jove, I believe it's Roger
Adams," he replied, amazed at his discovery.

For a while Gerty leaned back upon her pillows and considered the
question with closed eyes. "I think you're right," she admitted at last,
"but why? Why? What on earth has he ever got from life?"

"He has got a wife," he retorted, with his genial irony.

"Well, I suppose he congratulates himself that he hasn't two," was her
flippant rejoinder.

Kemper laughed shortly. "I'm not sure that she doesn't equal a good half
dozen."

"And yet he _is_ happy," said Gerty thoughtfully. "I don't know why and
I doubt if he knows either--but I truly and honestly believe he's the
happiest man I've ever met. Perhaps," she concluded with a quick return
to her shallow wit, "it's because he doesn't divide his waking hours
between dressmakers and bridge whist."

"But why do you if it bores you so," protested Kemper, "I'd be hanged
before I'd do it in your place."

The little half angry, half weary frown drew her eyebrows together, and
she sat for a minute restlessly tapping her slippered foot upon the
floor. "Oh, why do women lie and cheat and back-bite and strangle the
little souls within them--to please men. Your amusements are built on
our long boredom."

Was it merely the trick of pathos again, he wondered, or did the
weariness in her voice sound as true as sorrow? Was she, indeed, as
Laura so ardently believed, capable of larger means, of finer issues,
and was her very audacity of speech but a kind of wild mourning for the
soul that she had killed? A month ago he would not have asked himself
the question, but his feeling for Laura had brought with it, though
unconsciously, a deeper feeling for life.

"All the same I wouldn't bore myself if I were you," he returned, "and I
don't think frankly men are worth it."

She laughed with an impatient jerk of her head. "Oh, it's easy to
moralise," she remarked, "but I have enough of that, you know, from
Laura."

"From Laura? Then she is with me?"

"She thinks so, but what does she know of life--she has never lived.
Why, she isn't even in the world with us, you see." A tender little
laugh escaped her. "I've even seen her," she added gayly, "read Plotinus
at her dressmaker's. She says he helps her to stand the trying on."

The picture amused him, and he allowed his fancy to play about it for a
moment. "I can't conceive of her surrendering to the vanities," he said
at last.

"You can't?" Gerty's tone had softened, though she still spoke merrily.
"Well, I call no woman safe until she's dead."

His imagination, always eager in pursuit of the elusive possibility,
sprang suddenly in the train of her suggestion, and he felt the sting of
a dangerous pleasure in his blood.

"Do you mean that it is only her outward circumstances, her worldly
ignorance, that has kept her so wonderfully indifferent?" he asked.

"So she is indifferent?" enquired Gerty with a smile.

"To me--yes."

"Oh, I didn't know that--I suspected--" her pause was tantalising, and
she drew it out with an enjoyment that was almost wicked.

"You suspected--" he repeated the words with the nervous irritation
which always seized him in moments of excitement.

"I honestly believed," she gave it to him with barely suppressed
amusement, "that she really disliked you."

His curiosity changed suddenly to anger, and he remembered, while he
choked back an impulsive exclamation, the rage for mastery he had once
felt when he found a horse whose temper had more than matched his own.
"Did she tell you so?" he demanded hotly.

"Oh, dear, no--she wouldn't for the world."

"Then you're wrong," he said with dogged resolution; "I can make her
like me or not just as I choose."

"You can?" she looked lovely but incredulous.

"Why do you doubt it?"

"Because--oh, because you are too different. Do you know--and this is as
secret as the grave--if I thought Laura really cared for you it would
drive me to despair. But she won't--she couldn't--you aren't half--you
aren't one hundredth part good enough, you know."

In spite of his smile she saw that there was a tinge of annoyance in the
look he fixed upon her. "By Jove, I thought you rather liked me!" he
exclaimed.

"I do--I love you--I always have." She stretched out her hand until the
tips of her fingers rested upon his arm. "You are quite and entirely
good enough for me, my dear, but I'm not Laura, and strange as it may
seem I honestly care a little more for her than for myself. So if you
are really obliged to fall in love again, suppose you let it be with
me?"

"With you?" He met her charming eyes with his ironic smile. "Oh, I
couldn't--I was brought up on your kind, and perfect as you are, you
would only give me the tiresome, familiar society affair. There isn't
any mystery about you. I know your secret."

"Well, at least you didn't learn it from Madame Alta," she retorted.

"From Madame Alta! Pshaw! she was never anything but a vocal
instrument."

"Do you remember the way she sang this?" asked Gerty; and springing to
her feet she fell into an exaggerated mimicry of the prima donna's pose,
while she trilled out a languishing passage from "Faust." "I always
laughed when she got to that scene," she added, coming back to the
couch, "because when she grew sentimental she reminded me of a love-sick
sheep."

"Then why do you resurrect her ghost?" he demanded. "So far as I am
concerned she might have lived in the last century."

"And yet how mad you used to be about her."

"'Mad'--that's just the word. I was." He drew out his watch, glanced at
it, and rose to his feet with an ejaculation of dismay, "Why, you've
actually made me forget that we aren't living in eternity," he said.
"I'll be awfully late for dinner and it's every bit your fault."

"But think of me," gasped Gerty, already moving in the direction of her
bedroom, "I dine at Ninety-first Street, and I must get into a gown that
laces in the back." She darted out with a bird-like flutter; and running
quickly down the staircase, he hurried from the house and into a passing
cab. During the short drive to his rooms his thoughts were exclusively
engrossed with the necessity of making a rapid change and framing a
suitable apology for his hostess. The annoyance of the rush served more
effectually to banish Laura than any amount of determined opposition
would have done.




CHAPTER VI

THE FINER VISION


So far as Connie was concerned the trip South had been, to all outward
appearance at least, entirely successful. Adams had watched her bloom
back into something of her girlish prettiness, and day by day, in the
quiet little Florida village to which they had gone, the lines of
nervous exhaustion had faded slowly from her face. For the first two
weeks she had been content to lie motionless in the balmy air beneath
the pines, while she had yielded herself to the silence with a
resignation almost pathetic in its childish helplessness. But with her
returning vigour the old ache for excitement awoke within her, and to
stifle her craving for the drug which Adams had denied her, she had
turned at last to the immoderate use of wine. So, hopelessly but with
unfailing courage, he had brought her again to New York where he had
placed her in the charge of a specialist in obscure diseases of the
nerves.

Except for the hours which he spent in his office, he hardly left her
side for a minute day or night, and the strain of the close watching,
the sleepless responsibility, had produced in him that quivering
sensitiveness which made his self-control a bodily as well as a mental
effort. Yet through it all he had never relaxed in the fervour of his
compassion--had never paused even to question if the battle were not
useless--if Connie herself were worth the sacrifice--until, almost to
his surprise, there had come at last a result which, in the beginning,
he had neither expected nor desired. A closer reconciliation with life,
a stronger indifference to the mere outward show of possession, a deeper
consciousness of the reality that lay beyond, above and beneath the
manifold illusions--these things had become a part of his mental
attitude; and with this widening vision he had felt the flow in himself
of that vast, universal pity which has in it more than the sweetness,
and something of the anguish of mortal love. In looking at Connie he saw
not her alone, but all humanity--saw the little griefs and the little
joys of living creatures as they were reflected in the mirror of her
small bared soul. Though he had schooled himself for sacrifice he found
presently that he had entertained unawares the angel of peace--for it
was during these terrible weeks that the happiness at which Gerty
Bridewell had wondered possessed his heart.

On the afternoon of Trent's visit, Adams left his office a little
earlier than usual, for he had promised Connie that he would take her to
see a new ballet at her favourite music hall. When he reached his house
she was already dressed, and while he changed his clothes in his
dressing-room, she fluttered restlessly about the upper floor, looking
remarkably fresh and pretty in a gown of delicate blossom pink. From a
little distance the faint discolour of her skin, the withered lines
about her mouth and temples were lost in a general impression of rosy
fairness; and as he watched her hurried movements, through the door of
her bedroom, Adams found it almost impossible to associate this
sparkling beauty with the half-frenzied creature he had nursed two weeks
ago. One of her "spells of joy," as she called them was evidently upon
her; and even as he accepted thankfully the startling change in her
appearance, there shot into his mind an acute suspicion as to the
immediate cause.

"Connie," he said, standing in front of her with his hair brush in his
hand, "will you give me your word of honour that you have taken nothing
to-day except your proper medicine?"

A quick resentment showed in her eyes, but she veiled it a moment
afterward by a cunning expression of injured innocence. "Why, how could
I?" she asked, in a hurt voice, "the nurse was with me."

It was true, he knew--the nurse had been with her all day, and yet as he
looked more closely at her animated face and brilliant eyes the
suspicion hardened to absolute conviction in his mind. The change from
the fragile weakness of the morning to this palpitating eagerness could
mean only the one thing, he knew--Connie had found some secret way to
gratify her craving and the inevitable reaction would set in before many
hours.

Turning away again he finished his dressing to the accompaniment of her
high-pitched ceaseless prattle. Her conversation was empty and almost
inconsequent, filled with rambling descriptions of the newest gowns,
with broken bits of intimate personal gossip, but the very rush of words
which came from her served to create an atmosphere of merriment at
dinner. A little later at the music hall she insisted upon talking to
Adams in exaggerated whispers, until the pointless jokes she made about
the arms or the legs of the dancers, sent her into convulsions of
noiseless hysterical laughter. Through it all Adams sat patiently
wondering whether he suffered more from the boredom of the ballet or
from the neuralgia caused by a draught which blew directly on the back
of his neck. That the show amused Connie was sufficient reason for
sticking it out until the end, but there were moments during the long
evening, when he felt, as he sat with his blank gaze fixed upon the
glancing red legs on the stage, that every stifled yawn was but an
unuttered exclamation of profanity.

"Now really and truly was it worth it?" he asked, with a laugh, when
they stood again at their own door.

"But didn't you think it lovely?" enquired Connie, irritably, as she
entered the hall and paused a moment under the electric light. The
excitement had faded from her face, leaving it parched and wan as from a
burned out fire, and the sinister blue shadows had leaped out in the
hollows beneath her eyes.

"I think you were," he answered merrily, following her as she turned
away and went slowly up the staircase.

A smile at the compliment flickered for an instant upon her lips; then
as she reached her bedroom, her strength failed her utterly, and with a
little moaning cry she swayed forward and fell in a huddled pink heap
upon the floor. As he lifted her she begged piteously for
wine--brandy--for anything which would drive away the terrible
faintness.

"It is like falling into a gulf," she cried, "I am slipping away and I
can't hold myself--"

He measured a dose of cognac and gave it to her with a little water, but
when, after swallowing it eagerly, she begged for more, he shook his
head and began undressing her as he would have undressed a child. A
touch at the bell, he knew, would bring her maid, but a powerful
delicacy constrained him as he was about to ring; these were scenes
whose very hideousness made them sacred, and with Connie's distracted
raving in his ears, he became suddenly thankful for the absolute
loneliness, for the empty house around him. As she lay upon the bed
where he had placed her, looking, he thought even then, like a crushed
blossom in her gown of pale pink chiffon, he bent over her in an anguish
of pity which oppressed him like a physical weight. The very hatred in
her eyes as she looked up at him made the burden of his sympathy the
heavier to bear. Had she loved him it might have been easier for her,
but he knew now that in her sanest days she felt no stronger sentiment
for him than tolerant gratitude. And during her frantic nights the
violence of her detestation was but an added torture. There were times
even, and this was so now, when she sought by bodily force to gain
possession of the drug which she had hidden under the carpet or beneath
the pillows of the couch, and in order to control her struggles, he was
obliged to resort to his greater physical strength. After this she
looked up and cursed him with a wonderful florid, almost oriental
splendour of language, while throwing off his coat, he brushed from him
the hanging shreds of the torn pink chiffon gown.

At seven o'clock in the morning when the nurse came to relieve him, he
was still sitting, as he had sat all night, in a chair beside Connie's
bed.

"So she has had one of her bad attacks, I feared it," said the nurse,
with a sympathetic glance directed less at Connie than at her husband.

"Yes, it was bad," repeated Adams quietly; and then rising to his feet
he staggered like a drunken man into his bedroom across the hall. Still
wearing his evening clothes he flung himself heavily upon the sofa and
fell at once into the profound sleep of acute bodily exhaustion. Two
hours later when he awoke to take the coffee which the kindly nurse
brought to him, he found that his slumber, instead of refreshing him,
had left him sunk in a sluggish melancholy with a clogged and inactive
brain.

"She is very quiet now," said the woman, a tall, strong person of middle
age, "and strangely enough the spell has hardly weakened her at all--she
has had her breakfast and speaks of going out for a little shopping
after luncheon."

"Well, that's good news!" exclaimed Adams heartily, as he hastily
swallowed his black coffee. Then, holding out his cup to be refilled, he
shook his head with the winning humorous smile which was his solitary
beauty. "This coffee will have to write two pages in my magazine," he
said, "so pour abundantly, if you please."

Sitting there in his dishevelled evening clothes, with his thin, sallow
face under his rumpled hair, he made hardly an impressive figure even
when viewed in the effulgent light of romance as a devoted husband.
There was nothing of the heroic in his appearance; and yet as the nurse
looked down upon him she felt something of the curious attraction he had
for men like Arnold Kemper or Perry Bridewell--men whose innate
principles of life differed so widely from his own. It was impossible to
build a sentimental fiction about him, she thought--he had no place
among the broad shouldered, athletic gentlemen who bewitched her in the
pages of the modern novel--but she recognised, for the first time, as
she stood gravely regarding him, that there could be a love founded upon
other attributes than these. To be loved as he loved Connie seemed to
her at the instant a very beautiful and perfect thing.

"I think you have suffered more from it than your wife has," she
observed, as she replaced the cup upon the tray.

Adams broke into his whimsical laugh. "You don't judge fair," he
retorted, "wait until I'm washed and in my right clothes again. If
there's anything on earth that turns a man into a corpse, it is an
evening suit by daylight."

Then, as she went out with the tray, he endeavoured, while he changed
his clothes, to pull himself, by an effort of will, into proper shape to
meet the day's work before him.

An hour afterward, as he walked through the morning sunlight to his
office, he found that his unusual melancholy had vanished before the
first breath of fresh air. A sense of detachment--of world-loneliness
came over him as he looked at the passing crowd of strangers, but there
was no sadness in the feeling, for he felt within himself the source as
well as the renewal of his peace. He had never regarded himself as what
is called a religious man--it was more than ten years since he had
entered a church or heard a sermon--yet in this very relinquishment of
self, was there not something of the vital principle, of the quickening
germ of all great religions? Though he had never said in his thoughts "I
believe this" or "I hold by this creed or that commandment," his nature
was essentially one in which the intellect must be supreme either for
good or for evil; and in his soul, which had been for so long the
battlefield of a spiritual warfare, there had dawned at last that
cloudless sunrise of faith in which all lesser creeds are swallowed up
and lost. If he had ever attempted to put his religious belief into
words, he would probably have said with his unfailing humour that it
"sufficed to love his neighbour and to let his God alone."

Now, as he passed rapidly through the humming streets, his thoughts were
so anxiously engrossed by Connie's condition that, when his name was
uttered presently at his elbow, he started and looked up like one
awakening uneasily from a dream. The next moment the air swam before him
and he felt his blood rush in a torrent from his heart, for the voice
was Laura's, and he discovered when he turned that she was looking up
eagerly into his face.

"Nothing short of a meditation on the seven heavens can excuse such
absorption of mind," she said.

"You came like a spirit without my suspecting that you were near," he
answered, smiling.

She laughed softly, giving him her full face as she looked up with her
unfathomable eyes and tremulous red mouth. At the first glance he
noticed a change in her--an awakening he would have called it--and for a
minute he lost himself in a vague surmise as to the cause. Then all
other consciousness was swept away by pure delight in the mere physical
fact of her presence. For the instant, while they walked together
through the same sunshine over the same pavement, she was as much his
own as if they stood with each other upon a deserted star.

"It has been so long since I really saw you," she said, after a moment's
pause, "I wondered, at first, if you were ill, but had that been so I
was sure you would have written me."

Even her voice, he thought, had altered; it was fuller, deeper, more
exquisitely vibrant, as if some wonderful experience had enriched it.

"Connie was ill, not I," he answered quietly. "I took her South for a
fortnight, and since getting back I've hardly been able to go anywhere
except to the office."

She glanced at him with a sympathy in which he detected a slight
surprise--for so long as Connie had been well and happy he had rarely
mentioned her name even to his closest friends.

"I hope, at least, that she is better by now," responded Laura with
conventional courtesy.

"Oh, yes, very much better," he replied; "but tell me of yourself--I
want to hear of you. Is there other verse?"

For a minute she looked away to the rapidly moving vehicles in the
street; then turning quickly toward him, she spoke with one of the
impulsive gestures he had always found so charming and so
characteristic.

"There is no verse--there will never be any more," she said. "Shall I
tell you a secret?"

He bent his head. "A dozen if you like."

"Well, there's only one--it's this: I wasn't born to be a poet. It was
all a big mistake, and I've found it out in plenty of time to stop. I'd
rather do other things, you know; I'd rather live."

"Live," he repeated curiously; and the incidents of his own life flashed
quickly, one by one, across his mind. Marriage, birth, death, the
illusion of desire, the disenchantment of possession; to place one's
faith in the external object and to stake one's happiness on the
accident of events--did these things constitute living for such as she?

"When you say 'life' do you not mean action?" he asked slowly.

"Oh, I want to be, to know, to feel," she replied almost impatiently. "I
want to go through everything, to turn every page, to experience all
that can be experienced upon the earth."

A smile was in his eyes as he shook his head. "And when you have
accomplished all these interesting things," he said, "you will have
gained from them--what? The lesson, learned perhaps in great sorrow,
that the outward events in life are of no greater significance than the
falling of the rain on the growing corn. Nothing that can happen or that
cannot happen to one matters very much in the history of one's
experience, and the biggest incident that ever came since the beginning
of the world never brought happiness in itself alone. It may be," he
added, with a tenderness which he made no effort to keep from his voice,
"that you will arrive finally at the knowledge that all life is
forfeiture in one way or another, and that the biggest thing in it is
sometimes to go without."

His tone was not sad--the cheerful sound of it was what impressed her
most, and when she looked up at him she was almost surprised by the
smiling earnestness in his face.

"Do you mean that this is what you have learned?" she asked.

Her seriousness sent him off into his pleasant laugh. "Whatever I have
learned it has not been ingratitude for a meeting like this," he
responded gayly. "It is one of my unexpected joys."

"And yet it's a joy that you take small advantage of," she remarked.
"I'm almost always at home and I'm very often wishing that you would
come. As a last test, will you dine with me to-morrow night?"

While she spoke, for the briefest flicker of her eyelashes, she saw him
hesitate; then he shook his head.

"I fear I can't," he replied regretfully, "the nurse goes home, you see,
and there's no one left with Connie. When she's well again I'll come
gladly if you'll let me."

Her face flushed a little. "I'm sorry I asked you," she said; "I ought
to have thought--to have known."

He felt the wrench within him as if he had torn out a living nerve, for
it was the end between them and he had meant that it should be so. Life
would have no compromises with illusions, he knew--not even with the
last and the most beautiful of desires.

"On the other hand your wish made me very happy," he returned.

She had stopped when they reached a corner, and he realised, with a
pang, that the chance meeting was at an end. As she stood there in the
pale sunshine, his eyes hung upon her face with an intensity which
seemed to hold in it something of the tragedy of a last parting. At the
moment he told himself that so far as it lay in his power he would
henceforth separate his life from hers; and as he made the resolution he
knew that he would carry her memory like a white flame in his heart
forever.

An instant afterward he went from her with a smile; and as she turned to
look after him, moved by a sudden impulse, she felt a vague stir of pity
for the gaunt figure passing so rapidly along the crowded street. While
she watched him she remembered that there were worn places on the coat
he wore, and with one of the curious eccentricities of sentiment, this
trivial detail served to surround him with a peculiar pathos.




CHAPTER VII

IN WHICH FAILURE IS CROWNED BY FAILURE


At one o'clock, when Adams left his office to go home to luncheon--a
custom which he had not allowed himself to neglect since Connie's
illness--he found Mr. Wilberforce just about to enter the building from
the front on Union Square.

"Ah, I've caught you as I meant to," exclaimed the older man, with the
cordial enthusiasm which Adams had always found so delightful. "It's
been so long a time since I had a talk with you that I hope you'll come
out somewhere to lunch?"

"I only wish I could manage it," replied Adams, "but I must look in for
a minute on Mrs. Adams--she's been ill, you know."

He saw the surprise reflected in his companion's face as he had seen it
a little earlier in Laura's; and at the same instant he felt a sensation
of annoyance because of his inability to act upon his impulse of
hospitality. He would have liked to take Mr. Wilberforce home with him;
but remembering the probable quality of the luncheon which awaited him,
he repressed the inclination.

"Is that so? I'm sorry to hear it," remarked the other in the
conventional tone in which Adams' friends always spoke of Connie. "Well,
I'll walk a block or two with you in your direction," he added as they
turned toward Broadway. "Laura told me, by the way, that she was so
fortunate as to have a glimpse of you this morning."

Adams nodded and then looked quickly away from the other's searching
eyes. "Yes, we met rather early in the street," he responded; "she seems
to me to be looking very well, and yet she's altered, somehow--I can't
say exactly how or where."

"Then you've noticed it," returned Mr. Wilberforce, with a sigh, and he
asked almost immediately: "Does she appear to you to be happier than she
was?"

"Happier? Well, perhaps, but I hardly analysed the impression she
produced. There was a change in her, that was all I saw."

"Did she speak to you, I wonder, of her book?"

Adams laughed softly. "She spoke of it to say that she was tired of it,"
he answered, "but that is only the inevitable reaction of youth--it's a
part of the universal rhythm of thought, nothing more."

Mr. Wilberforce shook his head a little doubtfully. "I wish I could feel
so confident," he returned, while a quick impatience--almost a contempt
awoke in Adams' mind. Was it possible that this man beside him, with his
white hairs, his blanched skin, his benign old-world sentiments, was,
like Trent, a mere worshipper of the literary impulse in its outward
accomplishment? Did he love the poet in the woman rather than the woman
in the poet? As Adams turned to look at him, he thought, not without a
certain grim humour, that he beheld another victim to the vice of
sentimentality; and in his mental grouping he placed his companion among
those who, like Connie, were in bondage to the images of their
imaginations.

"And yet even if she should cease to write poems she will always live
one," he added lightly.

"Yes, she will still be herself," agreed Mr. Wilberforce, but his words
carried no conviction of comfort; and when he turned at the corner to
take his car, it was with the air of a man oppressed by the weight of
years.

When Adams reached home he found Connie, dressed in her blue velvet with
the little twinkling aigrette, on the point of starting for an afternoon
drive with her nurse in the Park. The events of the night had been
entirely effaced from her mind by the newer interests of the day; and as
he looked at her in amazement, it seemed to him that she bore a greater
resemblance to the rosy girl he had first loved than she had done for
many weary and heart-sick months. When he left her, presently, to go
back to his office, it was with a feeling of hopefulness which entered
like an infusion of new blood into his veins. The relapse might have
been, after all, less serious than he had at first believed, and
Connie's cure might become soon not only a beautiful dream, but an
accomplished good. He thought of the sacrifices he had made for it--not
begrudgingly, but with a generous thankfulness that he had been
permitted to pay the cost--thought of the sleepless nights, the
neglected work, the nervous exhaustion which had followed on the broken
laws of health. At the moment he regretted none of these things, because
the end, which he already saw foreshadowed in his mental vision, seemed
to him to be only the crowning of his last few weeks. Even the bodily
and moral redemption of Connie appeared no longer difficult in the
illumination of his mood; for his compassion, in absorbing all that was
vital in his nature, seemed possessed suddenly of the effectiveness of a
dynamic force.

"Already she is better," he thought, hopefully; "I see it in her
face--in her hands even, and when she is entirely cured the craving for
excitement will leave her and we shall be at peace again. Peace will be
very like happiness," he said to himself, and then, with the framing of
the sentence, he stopped in his walk and smiled. "Peace is happiness,"
he added after a moment, "for certainly pleasure is not." With the words
he remembered the bitter misery of Connie who had lived for joy
alone--the utter disenchantment of Arnold Kemper, who had made gratified
impulse the fulfilling of his law of life. Back and forth swung the
oscillation between fugitive desire and outward possession--between the
craving of emptiness and the satiety of fulfilment--and yet where was
the happiness of those who lived for happiness alone? Where was even the
mere animal contentment? "Is it only when one says to Fate 'take
this--and this as well--take everything and leave me nothing. I can do
without'--that one really comes into the fulness of one's inheritance of
joy? Was this what Christ meant when he said to His disciples 'Seek ye
first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things
shall be added unto you?' In renunciation was there, after all, not the
loss of one's individual self, but the gain of an abundance of life."

The afternoon passed almost before he was aware of it, and when he
finished his work and drew on his overcoat, he saw, as he glanced
through his office window, that it was already dusk. As he reached the
entrance to the elevator, he found Perry Bridewell awaiting him inside,
and he kept, with an effort, his too evident surprise from showing in
his face.

"Why, this is a treat that doesn't happen often!" he exclaimed with
heartiness.

"I was passing and found you were still here, so I dropped in to walk up
with you," explained Perry, but there was a note in his voice which
caused the other to glance at him quickly with a start.

"Are you ill, old man?" asked Adams, for Perry appeared at his first
look to have gone deadly white. "Is there anything that I can do? Would
you like to come up and talk things over?"

Perry shook his head with a smile which cast a sickly light over his
large, handsome face. "Oh, I'm perfectly well," he responded, "I need to
stretch my legs a bit, that's all."

"You do look as if you wanted exercise," commented Adams, as they left
the building; "too much terrapin has put your liver wrong, I guess."

At the corner, they passed a news-stand, and as Adams stopped for his
evening paper, he noticed again the nervous agony which afflicted Perry
during the brief delay.

"Look here, what's up, now?" he enquired, holding his paper in his hand
when they started on again, "are you in any trouble and can I help to
get you out? I'll do anything you like except play the gallant, and I
only draw the line at that because of my temperamental disability. So,
something _is_ wrong?" he added gayly, "for you haven't even observed
the pretty woman ahead there in the pea-green bonnet."

"Oh, I'm not in any mess just now," replied Perry, with a big,
affectionate shake like that of a wet Newfoundland dog.

Adams threw a keener glance at him. "No scrape about a woman, then?" he
asked, with the tolerant sympathy which had made him so beloved by his
own sex.

"Oh, Lord, no," ejaculated Perry, with a fervour too convincing to be
assumed.

"And you haven't lost in Wall Street?"

"On the other hand I made a jolly deal."

"Well, I give it up," remarked Adams cheerfully; then as he spoke, the
glare from an electric light fell full upon the headlines of the folded
paper in his hand, and he came to a halt so sudden that Perry, falling
back to keep step with him, felt himself spinning like a wound up top.

"My God!" said Adams, in a voice so low that it barely reached Perry's
ears. An instant later a quick animal passion--the passion of the
enraged male--entered into his tone and he walked quickly across the
pavement to the sheltering dusk of a cross street. "May God damn him for
this!" he cried in a hoarse whisper.

Following rapidly in his footsteps, Perry caught up behind him, and made
an impulsive, nerveless clutch at the unfolded paper. "I knew you'd see
it; so I wanted to be along with you," he said in a voice like that of a
tragic schoolboy.

Adams turned to him immediately, with a restraint which had succeeded
his first quivering exclamation. "So you knew that Brady's wife meant
to sue for a divorce?" he asked.

Perry bowed his head--in the supreme crisis of experience he had always
found the simple truth to be invested with the dignity of an elaborate
lie. "I had heard it rumoured," was what he said.

"And that my wife--"

"I'll swear I never believed it," broke in Perry, with a violent
assurance.

From the emotion in his voice one would have supposed him, rather than
Adams, to be the injured husband; and the fact was that he probably
suffered more at the instant than he had ever done in the whole course
of his comfortable life.

"Well, I suppose I ought to be very much obliged to you," replied Adams,
with an agonised irony to the injustice of which Perry was perfectly
indifferent, "but I can't see that it matters much so long as the thing
is true."

"But it's a lie," protested Perry with energy. "I mean the whole damned
business."

"What isn't?" demanded Adams bitterly, as he stuffed the crumpled paper
into the pocket of his coat. Then, stopping again as they reached a
crossing, he held out his hand and enclosed Perry's in a cordial grip.

"I'm very grateful to you," he said; "but if you don't mind, I think
I'll walk about a bit alone. I've got to think things over." He
hesitated a moment and then added quietly, "I know you'll stand by me
whatever comes?"

"Stand by you!" gasped Perry, and the sincere response of his whole
impressionable nature brought two large, round tear drops to his eyes;
"by Jove! I'd stand it for you!"

For an instant Adams looked at him in silence, while his familiar smile
flickered about his mouth. Then he reached out his hand for another
grip, before he turned away and walked rapidly into the dim light of the
cross street.

"I must walk about and think things out a bit," he found himself saying
presently in his thoughts; "there's a tangle somewhere--I can't pull it
out."

Stopping under a light he drew the newspaper from his pocket, but as he
unfolded it, one of Connie's wild letters to Brady flashed before his
eyes; and crushing the open sheet in his hand, he flung it from him out
into the gutter. The darkness afforded what seemed to him a physical
shelter for his rage, and as he turned toward it, he felt his first
blind instinct for violent action give place to a kind of emotional
chaos, in which he could barely hear the thunder of his own thoughts. He
knew neither what he believed nor what he suffered; his power to will
and his power to think were alike suspended, and he was conscious only
of a curious deadness of sensation, amid which his ironic devil,
standing apart, asked with surprise why he did not suffer more--why his
anger was not the greater, his restraint the less? His philosophy, at
the moment, had turned to quicksand beneath his feet; and it was this
utter failure of himself which forced upon him the anguish of
readjustment, the frenzied striving after a clearer mental vision. As he
hurried breathlessly along the narrow, dimly lighted street into which
he had turned, he felt instinctively that he was groping blindly for
some way back into his former illumination, for some finer knowledge of
spirit, which at present he did not appear to possess. Not to act upon
brute impulse, but to listen in agony until he heard the voice of reason
above the storm of his passion--until he heard the soul speaking beyond
the senses--this was the one urgent need he felt himself to be aware
of--the one intelligent purpose that remained with him through his
flight.

"No--I have failed and it is all over," was the first distinct thought
that he framed. "By her own act she has put the last barrier between us.
She is my wife no longer, for, through herself, she has brought disgrace
upon us both." Again he remembered the sacrifices he had made for her,
not with the generous rejoicing of the morning, but with a fierce
bitterness which was like a bodily hurt. "She is no longer my wife," he
repeated; "nor am I her husband--for by her own sin she has made me
free." Yet the word carried no conviction to his conscience, and he
knew, in spite of his assurance, that nothing had happened since
yesterday to change the relations between Connie and himself--that if he
had pitied her then there was only the double reason why he should pity
her now. Had this added wrong made her less helpless? had it put moral
fibre into her heart? "All this had happened yesterday--had happened
even six months ago, yet last night I sat by her bed--I was filled with
sympathy--and was it only because I was in ignorance then of something
which I know now? Yesterday I sacrificed for her both my rest and my
work, but was she worthier of pity at that hour than she is at this. She
has not changed since, nor has the thing which I have just discovered;
it is only I who am different because it is I alone who have come into
knowledge of the evil."

He thought of the hideousness of it all--of the punishment that awaited
her, of her convulsed face, of her violent gestures, and even of the
pale pink chiffon gown, which made her resemble a crushed blossom as she
lay upon the bed. That was only last night, and yet in the reality of
experience a thousand years had intervened in his soul since then.

The next instant he remembered again, with a throb of exhilaration that
he was free. By her own act she had given him back his freedom--she had
returned him to his life and to his work. As for her if she chose to
fall back into her old bondage, who was there in heaven or on earth that
could hold him to account? Every law that had been made by man since the
beginning of law was upon his side; and every law declared to him that
he was free. Free! The word went like the intoxication of joy to his
head; then, even while the exhilaration lasted, he shivered and came
abruptly to a halt.

From the light of the crossing a woman had come close to him and touched
him upon the arm, making her immemorial appeal with a sickening coquetry
in her terrible eyes. She was, doubtless, but the ordinary creature of
her class, yet coming as she did upon the brief rapture of his recovered
liberty, she appeared as a visible answer to the question he had asked
his soul. He shook his head and walked on a few steps; then coming back
again he gave her the money that was in his pocket.

"Is this the message?" he put to himself as he turned away. "Is this
the message, or is it only the ugly hallucination of my nerves?" With an
effort he sought to shake the image from him, but in spite of his closed
mind it still seemed to him that he saw Connie's future looking back at
him from the woman's terrible eyes. "And yet what have I to do with that
woman or she with Connie?" he demanded. "I have so far as I am aware
never injured either in my life, nor by any act of mine have I helped to
make my wife what she is to-day--one with that creature in the street
and with her kind. The law acquits me. Religion acquits me. My own
conscience acquits me more than all." But the argument was vain and
empty so long as he saw Connie's future revealed to him through the eyes
of the harlot he had left at the crossing. The helplessness of
ignorance, of the will that desired to will the good, came over him at
the moment and he could have cried aloud in his terror because his soul
had reached the boundaries between its angel and its devil. In his
decision he appeared to himself to stand absolutely solitary and
detached--put away from all help from humanity or from human creeds. The
law courts told him nothing, nor did religion--then, at the instant of
his sharpest despair of knowledge, there came back to him, as in a
vision of light, the scene two thousand years ago in Bethany at the
house of Simon the leper. The people passing about him in the street
became suddenly but shadows, even the noise of the cars no longer broke
in confusion upon his ears; and in the midst of the silence in which he
stood, he heard the Voice as Simon had heard it then: "I have somewhat
to say unto thee."

A moment afterward the vision was gone, and he looked round him dazed by
the flashing of the lights. "What does it matter about my life which is
almost over?" he asked. "I will help Connie, so far as I have strength,
to bear her sin against me--and as for the rest it is nothing to me any
more." Then, as the resolution took shape in his mind, he was conscious
of a feeling of restfulness, of a relief so profound that it pervaded
him to the smallest fibre of his being. The whole situation had changed
at the instant; his offended honour was no longer offended, nor was his
righteous anger still righteous. Though the naked truth must face him in
all its brutishness, he knew, from the feeling within him, that by an
act of thought, which was not an act, he had drawn the sting of the
poisoned arrow from his wound. Not only had the bitterness passed from
his shame, but there had come, with the relinquishment of the idea of
personal wrong, a swift rush of exaltation, like a strong wind, through
his soul. Almost unconsciously he had yielded his will into the hands of
God, and immediately, as in the prophecy "all these things had been
added" unto the rest.

Turning at once he walked rapidly in the direction of his house, while a
clock in a tower across the way pointed to the stroke of nine o'clock.
The bodily exertion had begun to wear upon him during the last few
minutes. His feet ached and there was a bruised feeling in all his
muscles. When he came at last to his own door the sensation of fatigue
had blotted out the acuteness of his perceptions.

The lights were blazing in the hall; there was evidently an unusual
commotion among the servants; and as he entered, Connie's nurse came to
meet him with a white and startled face.

"Have you seen Mrs. Adams?" she asked hastily. "She separated from me in
a shop and though I searched for her for hours, I could not find her."

For a breathless pause he stared at her in bewildered horror; then his
eyes fell upon a note lying conspicuously on the hall table, and he took
it up and tore it open before he answered. The words on the paper were
few, and after reading them, he folded the sheet again and replaced it
in the envelope. For an instant longer he still hesitated, swallowing
down the sensation of dryness in his throat.

"She will not come back to-night," he said quietly at last; "she has
gone away for a few days."

Then turning from the vacant curiosity in the assembled faces, he went
into his study and shut himself alone in the room in which the memory of
his dead child still lived.




CHAPTER VIII

"THE SMALL OLD PATH"


"Her letters of course gave her away," observed Gerty thoughtfully, as
she smoothed her long glove over her arm and looked at Laura with the
brilliant cynicism which belonged to her conspicuous loveliness, "Arnold
says it is always the woman's letters, and I'm sure he ought to know."

"Why ought he to know?" asked Laura, turning with an impatient movement
from the desk at which she sat. Her gaze hung on the soft white creases
of kid that encircled Gerty's arm, but there was an abstraction in her
look which put her friend at a chilling distance.

Gerty laughed. "Oh, I mean he's a man of the world and they always know
things."

For an instant Laura did not respond, and during the brief silence her
eyes were lifted from Gerty's arm to Gerty's face. "I sometimes think
his worldliness is only a big bluff," she said at last.

"Well, I wouldn't trust his bluff too much, that's all," retorted Gerty.

A smothered indignation showed for a moment in Laura's glance. "But how
do you know so much about him?" she demanded.

"I?--oh, I've had my fancy for him, who hasn't? He's like one of those
éclair vanille one gets at Sherry's--they look substantial enough on
the surface, but when one sticks in the fork there's nothing there but
froth. He's really quite all right, you know, so long as you don't stick
in the fork."

"But I thought you liked him!" protested Laura, pushing back her chair
and rising angrily to her feet.

"I do--I love him--but that's for myself, darling, not for you."

"Do you mean me to think," persisted Laura in a voice that was tense
with horrified amazement, "that you are jealous of _me_?"

A long pause followed her words, for Gerty, instead of replying to the
question had turned to the window and was staring out upon the bared
trees in Gramercy Park. The quiet of it for the moment was almost like
the quiet of the country, and the two women who loved each other seemed
suddenly divided by miles of silent misunderstanding. Then, with a
resolute movement, Gerty looked full into Laura's face, while the light
flashed upon a mist of tears that hung over her reproachful eyes.

"Oh, Laura, Laura!" she said softly.

With a cry of remorse Laura threw herself upon her knees beside the
window, kissing the gloved hands in Gerty's lap.

But Gerty had wiped her tears away and sat smiling her little worldly
smile of knowledge. "I am jealous of you, but not in the way you meant,"
she answered. "I am jealous for myself, for the one little bit of me
that is really alive--the part of myself that is in you. I am afraid to
go over again with you the old road that I went over with myself--the
old wanting, wanting, wanting that ends in nothing."

"But why should I go over it?" asked Laura, from her knees, and the
flush in her face coloured all her manner with a fine deception.

Gerty's mocking gayety rang back into her voice. "You might as well ask
me why I am still fool enough to be in love with Perry," she returned
with her flippant laugh, "it's a part of what Arnold calls 'the damnable
contradiction of life.' You might as well ask Connie Adams why she was
born bad?"

"Was she--and how do you know it?" demanded Laura.

"I don't know." Gerty's shrug was exquisitely indifferent. "But it's
more charitable, I fancy, to suppose so. Have you seen Roger, by the
bye?"

Laura shook her head. "I would rather not. There is nothing one could
say."

"Oh, I don't know--one might congratulate him on his liberation, and
that's something. I dare say he'll have to get a divorce now, though
Perry says he hates them."

"Then I don't believe he'll do it, he doesn't live by the ordinary
ethics of the rest of us, you know. Will she marry Brady, do you think?"

"Marry Brady? My blessed innocent, Brady wouldn't marry her. He has
about as much moral responsibility as a fig tree that puts forth
thistles--and besides who could blame him? She's half crazy already from
cocaine, and no man on earth could stand her for a month."

No man on earth! Laura leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes, for
she remembered the figure of Roger Adams as he moved away from her
through the sunlight in the crowded street. She saw his worn clothes,
his resolute walk, and the patience which belonged to the infinite
stillness in his face; and, for one breathless moment, she seemed to
feel the approach of the spirit which worked silently amid the humming
material things that made up life.

Gerty had risen and was fastening her white furs at her throat. "I must
go to Camille's," she said, "for she has just got in some new French
gowns and she has promised to give me the first look. Of course, one
can't really trust her," she added suspiciously, "and I shouldn't be in
the least surprised to find that she'd let Ada Lawley get ahead of me.
It is simply marvellous how that woman always manages to produce a
striking effect. She was at the opera last night in peacock blue when
every other woman was wearing that dead, lustreless white. Do you know I
sometimes wonder if I follow the fashion almost too closely."

"You could never look like any one else so it doesn't matter."

"And yet I spend two-thirds of my time trying to extinguish the little
individuality I possess," laughed Gerty, as she turned upon the
threshold. "I wear the same wave in my hair, the same colour in my gown,
the same length to my gloves. Oh, you fortunate dear, thank heaven you
have never kept a fashion!"

She went out with her softened merriment, while Laura, throwing herself
into the chair beside the window, looked down upon the carriage which
was waiting before the door. After a moment she saw Gerty come out and
cross the sidewalk, lifting her velvet skirt until she showed a
beautifully shod foot and a glimpse of black embroidered stocking. She
gave a few careless directions to the footman who arranged her rugs, and
then as the carriage door closed, she leaned out with her brilliant
smile and waved her hand to Laura at the window above. The winter
sunlight seemed to pass away with her when at last she turned the
corner.

With a sigh Laura's thoughts followed the carriage, envying the beauty
and the fashion of her friend for the first time in her life. A strange
fascination enveloped the world in which Gerty lived, and the old
familiar atmosphere through which she herself had moved so tranquilly
was troubled suddenly as if by an approaching storm. The things which
she had once loved now showed stale and profitless to her eyes, while
those external objects of fortune, to which she had always believed
herself to be indifferent, were endowed at the moment with an
extraordinary and unreal value. It was as if her whole nature had
undergone some powerful physical convulsion, which had altered not only
her outward sensibilities but the obscure temperamental forces which
controlled in her the laws of attraction and repulsion. What she had
liked yesterday she was frankly wearied of to-day. What she had formerly
hated she now found to be full of a mysterious charm. Books bored her,
and her mind, in spite of her effort at restraint, dwelt longingly upon
the trivial details which made up Gerty's life--upon those bodily
adornments on which her friend had staked her chance of married
happiness. The endless round of dressmakers, shops, and feverish
emulation appeared strangely full of interest; and her own quiet life
showed to her as utterly destitute of that illusory colour of romance
which she found in her vision of Gerty's and of every other existence
except her own. She beheld her friend moving in a whirl of colour,
through perpetual laughter, and the picture fascinated her, though she
knew that in the naked reality of things Gerty was far more unhappy than
she herself. Yet Gerty's unhappiness appeared to her to be distinguished
by the element of poetry in which her own was lacking.

A terrible _ennui_ possessed her, the restless desire for a change that
would obliterate not only the circumstances in which she was placed, but
even the personal fact of her own identity. She wanted an experience so
fresh that it would be like a new birth--a resurrection--and yet she
could tell neither what this experience would be nor why she wanted it.
All that she was clearly aware of was that her surroundings, her family,
her friends, the small daily events of her life and her own
dissatisfaction, had become stale and repugnant to her mood, and she
thought of the day before her as of a gray waste of utterly intolerable
hours.

"Nothing will happen in it that has not happened every twenty-four hours
since I was born," she said; "it is always the same--everything is the
same, and it is this monotony that seems to me insupportable. As I sit
here at this window I feel it to be impossible that I should ever drag
myself through the remainder of this afternoon, and through the evening
which will be like every other evening that I have spent. Aunt Rosa
will repeat her exhaustless jokes, Aunt Angela will make her old
complaints, Uncle Percival will begin to play upon his flute." And these
things when she thought of them--the stories of Mrs. Payne, the despair
of Angela, the piping of Uncle Percival's flute--appeared to her to
exact a power of moral endurance which she felt herself no longer to
possess. A disgust more terrible than grief seized upon her--a revolt
from the commonplace which she knew to be worse than tragedy.

Then in the midst of her depression she remembered that on the following
afternoon she would see Arnold Kemper, and the hours appeared instantly
to open into the light. The end of everything was there just twenty-four
hours ahead, and she felt, like a physical agony, the necessity to
stifle the consciousness of time, to kill the minutes, one by one, as
they crept slowly into sight. She thought of the meeting in this very
room, of the gown that she would wear, of the words that she would
speak, of the curious exquisite mixture of attraction and repulsion, of
the ardent tenderness she would find in his look. This tenderness, she
felt, was the solitary expression of the real man--of the man whom Gerty
had never known, whom Madame Alta had not so much as glimpsed; and the
assurance produced in her a secret rapture which was all the sweeter for
being exclusively her own. She wondered where he was at the instant--how
he would pass the hours which dragged so heavily for her--and the
interest which had vanished so strangely from her own existence attached
itself immediately to his. The people he knew, the club he went to,
even the motor cars he drove, were surrounded in her thoughts with a
fresh and vivid charm. Apart from this there was no longer any
charm--hardly any animation about the life she led. A single idea had
enlarged itself at the cost of all the others, and she had a sense of
standing amid a desert waste, in the drab miles of which a solitary
palm-tree flourished.

"And yet why should I hunger for his presence and what is there in it
when it comes that is worth this wanting?" she asked in dismay of her
own longing. "When I am away from him I think of nothing except of the
hour when I shall see him again, and yet when the meeting comes I am not
happy and he is always a little different from what I hoped that he
would be. I have no particular satisfaction when I see him, but when he
goes the longing and the dream begin again and I build up other ideals
of him which he will destroy the first time that we come together. Is it
because I have never really got to the thing that he is eternally--to
the soul of him--that he creates in me this agony of expectancy and of
disappointment? When I meet him to-morrow may it not happen that for the
first time he will fulfill all the ideals of him that I have made?"

And it seemed to her almost impossible that she should wait the
twenty-four intervening hours before making her final discovery--that
she should exist a day and a night in utter vacancy while the ultimate
moment still beckoned her from to-morrow. Would time never pass? Was
there no way of strangling it before it came to birth? She picked up her
favourite books from her desk--Spinoza, Shelley, "The Imitation of
Christ"--but the throbbing vitality in her own breast caused the printed
pages to turn chill and lifeless.

A mirror was placed over the mantel and she looked closely into it,
meeting her profound gaze and the poetic charm which hung like an
atmosphere about her delicate figure. She felt at the instant that she
would have given her life--her soul even and its infinite
possibilities--for an exterior of Gerty's brilliant beauty. The
blackness of her hair, the prominence of her brow, the faint amber
pallor of her skin, provoked her into a sensation of anger; and she
turned away with an emotion that was almost one of bitterness. A minute
later it seemed to her that the afternoon would pass more quickly if she
spent it out of doors, and as she slipped into her walking clothes she
thought with relief of the crowded streets and of the noises that would
drown the consciousness of her own thoughts. When Angela called to her
as she passed along the hall it was with a movement of irritation that
she turned the handle of the door and entered the invalid's room, where
the pale winter sunshine fell over the tall white candles and uncarpeted
floor.

Mrs. Payne, in her black velvet and old rose point, sat by the window
reading aloud in her shrill voice extracts from a society paper which
she had brought for the purpose of entertaining her sister. In the
conventual atmosphere in which Angela lived the biting scandals and
malicious gossip of the worldly old woman always produced upon Laura an
impression of mere vulgar insincerity. To have lived over seventy years
and still to find one's chief interest in the social indiscretions of
one's neighbours was a fact which would have been pathetic had it been
less ridiculous. Tottering reluctantly to her grave, in the centre of a
universe filled with a million mysteries of dead and living suns, she
was absorbed to the exclusion of all larger matters in the question as
to whether or not "Tom Marbury had compromised Mrs. Billy Pearce?"

"As if it mattered," sighed Angela from her couch. "As if it really
mattered to me in the least."

Mrs. Payne fixed upon her a painted pair of eyes set in lustreless
vacancy between two flashing diamond earrings. "That's because you live
so out of the world, my dear," she observed, "that you have ceased to
feel any longer a rational interest in life."

"But is life all somebody's impropriety?" enquired Angela, with the
meekness of a child.

"It is that--or charities," returned Mrs. Payne. "You may take your
choice between the two. It was only after I failed to interest you in
our day nursery that I turned to the social news."

"But you haven't tried the sports," suggested Laura, with a laugh, while
she felt the presence of her aunts to have become an intolerable burden.

Mrs. Payne raised her blackened eyebrows, and sat smoothing out the
crumpled paper with her claw-like jewelled fingers. It seemed to Laura
that she wore her body to-day as if it were a tattered, yet
industriously mended garment for which her indomitable spirit would soon
have no further use. Everything about her was youthful except the flesh
which wrapped her, and that was hideously, was grotesquely ancient. Yet
she had once been both a beauty and a belle, famed for her quick
affairs and her careful indiscretions; and as Laura watched her she saw
in this living decay but the inevitable end and weariness of pleasure.
Of her many lovers, which remained to her to-day? With the multiplied
sensations of her youth what had her loveless age to do? She had hardly
laid up even a sweetness of memories, or why did she feast upon
uncovered scandals as a vulture upon carrion?

"What poor dear Angela needs is an object in life--a passion," remarked
Mrs. Payne, picking up her gold-rimmed eye glasses which hung on a
little jewelled chain from her bosom. "I used to say that when I got too
old for an emotion I wanted to be chloroformed, but I found, thank
heaven, that with care one's emotions may last one pretty well to one's
eightieth year. When men fail one cards are left, and after cards, I
daresay, there would come gossip. It is for this reason," she pursued
with conviction, "that I am trying to persuade Angela to take up a
little bridge."

"A little bridge!" gasped Laura, and from sheer amazement she sat down
on the foot of Angela's couch.

"I was considering the moral support of it, of course," resumed Mrs.
Payne. "First of all I would advise some inspiring religious conviction,
but as religion does not appeal to her, I suggested bridge."

"It might as well be white rabbits, I don't see the difference,"
protested Angela, rolling over upon her side with a despairing movement
of fatigue.

"The difference, my dear, is that white rabbits are dirty little
beasts," observed the elder woman.

Angela lay back upon her sofa and regarded her sister with a smile sharp
and cold as the edge of a knife. "I wonder why you were more fortunate
than I, Rosa," she said, after a pause, "for in my heart I was always a
better woman."

Mrs. Payne laughed her hard little mirthless laugh, and stretched out
her withered hand with a melodramatic gesture. "But I was never a fool,
my dear," was her retort, "and there are few women of whom it can be
said with truth that they were never at any time, from the beginning to
the end of their career, a fool. Nobody is a fool always, but there are
very few people who escape it throughout their lives."

"Oh, I was," sighed Angela submissively, "I know it, but I was
punished."

"It is the one thing for which we can count quite certainly upon being
punished in this life," remarked Mrs. Payne, with a kind of moral
satisfaction, as of one who was ranged upon the side of worldliness if
not of righteousness. "Other sins are for eternity, I suppose, but I
have never yet seen a fool escape the deserts of his folly. It is the
one reason which has always made me believe so firmly in an overruling
Providence. Are you going out, my child?" she asked, as Laura rose.

"I am stifling for want of air," replied the girl, shrinking away from
the unnatural flash of her aunt's eyes. "I'll read to aunt Angela when I
come in, but just now I must get out." Then as Mrs. Payne still sought
to detain her, she broke away and ran rapidly down into the street.

But she was no sooner out of doors than it seemed to her that she ought
to have stayed in her room--that the minutes would have passed more
swiftly in unbroken quiet. Her senses were absorbed in the single desire
to have the day over--to begin to-morrow; and it seemed to her that when
once the night was gone, she would be able to collect her thoughts with
clearness, that the morning would bring some lucid explanation of the
disturbance that she felt to-day. Then it occurred to her that she would
follow Gerty's example and seek a distraction in the shops, and she took
a cab and drove to her milliner's, where she tried on a number of
absurdly impossible hats. She bought one at last, to realise immediately
as she left the shop that she would never persuade herself to wear it
because she felt that it gave her an air of Gerty's "smartness" which
sat like an impertinence upon her own individual charm. Glancing at her
watch she found that only two hours had gone since she left the house,
and turning up the street she walked on with a step which seemed
striving to match in energy her rapid thoughts.

"You have effaced every other impression of my life," he had said to her
yesterday; and as she repeated the words she remembered the quiver of
his mouth under his short brown moustache, the playful irony of the
smile that had met her own. Had he meant more or less than the spoken
phrase? Was the strength of his handclasp sincere? Or was the caressing
sound of his voice a lie, as Gerty believed? Was he, in truth, fighting
under all the shams of life for the liberation of his soul? or was there
only the emptiness of sense within him, after all? She felt his burning
look again, and flinched at the memory. "Every glance, every gesture,
every word speaks to me of things which he cannot utter, which are
unutterable," and yet even with the assurance she felt as if she were
living in an obscure and painful dream--as if the element of unreality
were a part of his smile, of his voice, of the feverish longing from
which she told herself that she would presently awake. It was as if she
moved an illusion among illusions, and yet felt the unreal quality of
herself and of the things outside.




CHAPTER IX

THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGO


He came punctually at three o'clock on the following afternoon, and even
as he entered the room, she was conscious of a slight disappointment
because, in some perfectly indefinable way, he was different from what
she had hoped that he would be.

"This is the first peaceful moment I have had for twenty-four hours," he
remarked, as he flung himself into a chair before the small wood fire;
"a man I knew was inconsiderate enough to die and make me the guardian
of his son, and I've had to overhaul the chap's property almost before
the funeral was over."

A frown of nervous irritation wrinkled his forehead, but as he turned to
her it faded quickly before the kindling animation in his look. "By
Jove, I've thought of you every single minute since I was here," he
pursued. "What a persistent way you have of interfering with a fellow's
peace of mind. I've known nothing like it in my life."

"I hope at least I didn't damage the property," she observed, and almost
with the words she wondered why she had longed so passionately yesterday
for his presence. Now that he had come she felt neither the delight of
realised expectation nor the final peace of renouncement.

"Well, it wasn't your fault if you didn't," he replied, leaning his head
against the chair-back and looking at her with his intimate and charming
smile. "I had to fight hard enough to keep you out even of the stocks.
Was I as much in your way, I wonder?"

She shook her head. "In my way? I wouldn't allow it. Why should I?"

"Why, indeed?" his genial irony was in his glance and he held her gaze
until she felt the warm blood mount swiftly to her forehead. "Why,
indeed unless you wanted to?" he laughed.

His eyes moved to the window, and she followed the large, slightly
coarsened features of his profile and the fullness of his jaw which lent
a suggestion of brutality to his averted face. Was it possible that she
found an attraction in mere animal vitality? She wondered; then his
caressing glance was turned upon her, and she forgot to ask herself the
useless question.

"So I must presume, then, that I haven't disturbed you?" he enquired
gayly.

Her eyes lingered upon him for a moment before she answered. "Oh, no, it
wasn't you, it was Gerty," she replied.

He drew nearer until the arm of his chair touched her own. "I thought at
least that my character was safe with Gerty," he exclaimed, not without
the annoyance of an easily aroused vanity.

"I don't know what you'd think about the danger," she returned with
seriousness, "but I simply hate the kind of things she told me."

His frown returned with gathered energy. "Is that so? What were they?"

"Oh, I don't know--nothing definite--but about women generally."

"Women! Pshaw! You're the only woman. There isn't any other on the
earth."

Her hand lay on the arm of her chair, and he reached out and grasped her
wrist, not gently, but with a violent pressure. "I'll swear there isn't
another woman in existence," he exclaimed.

An electric current started from his fingers through the length of her
arm; she felt it burning into her flesh as it travelled quickly from her
wrist to her heart. For one breathless moment she was conscious of his
presence as of a powerful physical force, and the sensation came to her
that she was being lifted from her feet and swept blindly out into
space. Then, drawing slightly away, she released herself from his grasp.

"I give you fair warning that if you repeat that for the third time, I
shall believe it," she retorted coolly.

"I'm trying to make you," he returned in a strained voice. "Why are you
such a sceptic, I wonder," he added as he fell back into his chair.
"Can't you tell the real thing when you come across it?"

"The real thing?" Her words were almost a whisper.

"Are you so used to shams that you don't recognise a man's love when you
see it?"

She leaned toward him, her black brows drawn together with the sombre
questioning look which had always fascinated him by its strangeness.
Beyond the look, what was there? he asked with an intense and eager
curiosity. What passionate surprises existed in her? What secret
suggestions of a still undiscovered charm? The wonder of her temperament
rose before him, exquisite, remote, alluring, and he felt the appeal she
made thrill like the spirit of adventure through his blood. Again he
stretched out his hand, but with a frown he drew it back before it
touched her.

"Can't you see that I love you?" he said with an angry hoarseness.

His face, his voice, the gesture of his outstretched hand startled her
into a quick feeling of terror, and she shrank back with a childlike
movement of alarm. Where was her dream, she demanded with an instinctive
repulsion, if this was the only living reality of love? Then his face
changed abruptly beneath her look, and as the strong tenderness of his
smile enveloped her, she was conscious of a sudden ecstasy of peace.

"Did I frighten you?" he asked, smiling.

She shook her head, resting her fingers for an instant upon his hand. "I
don't believe you could frighten me if you tried," she answered.

He raised his eyebrows with his characteristic blithe interrogation,
"Well, I shouldn't like to try, that's all."

"I give you leave--my courage is my shield."

"But I don't want to frighten you." His voice was softer than she had
ever heard it. "We aren't afraid of those we love, you know."

"Why should I love you?" she enquired gayly.

His pleasant irony was in his laugh. "Because you can't help
yourself--you're obliged to--it's your fate."

She frowned slightly. "I have no fate except the one I make for myself."

He bent toward her and this time his hand closed with determination upon
hers. "Well, you may make me what you please," he said.

Her hand fluttered like an imprisoned bird in his grasp, but he held it
with a pressure which sent the blood tingling sharply to the ends of her
fingers. His strength hurt her and yet she found a curious pleasure in
the very acuteness of her sensations.

"There's no use fighting," he said with a short laugh, "we can't help
ourselves. You'll have to marry me, so you may as well give in."

His tone was mocking, but she felt his tenderness as she had felt it a
moment before, resistless and enveloping. As she smiled up at him, he
bent quickly forward and kissed her brow and eyes and mouth, then
lifting her chin he kissed, also, the soft fulness of her throat. When
she put up her hands in protest, he crushed them back upon her bosom by
the strength of his lips.

She closed her eyes, yielding for one breathless instant to the passion
of his embrace. Her dream and her longing melted swiftly into
realisation, and she told herself that the agony of joy was sharper than
that of grief. This was like nothing that she had imagined, and she felt
an impulse to fly back into the uncertainty that she had left--to gain
time in which to prepare for the happiness which she told herself was
hers. Yet was it happiness? Her soul trembled as if from some almost
imperceptible shock of disillusionment, and she knew again the sense of
unreality which had come to her in the street on the day before. Again
she felt that she was in the midst of a singularly vivid dream from
which she would presently awake to life--and this dream seemed the
result of her dual nature, as if even her emotions belonged less to her
real existence than to an unconscious projection of thought.

The impulse to escape re-awoke in her, and yet she was clearly aware
that she would no sooner fly from him than her insatiable longing would
drive her back anew. His attraction appeared strangely the greater as
she withdrew the further from his actual presence, and she knew that if
he were absent from her for a day the uncertainty that he aroused would
become intolerable. "Does the soul that I see in him--the soul of which
mine is but the reflection--really exist, or have I created an image out
of mere emptiness?" she asked; and even with the thought it seemed to
her that she saw a new seriousness--a profounder meaning in his face.
Gerty had never touched the hidden springs, nor had any other woman
except herself, and the knowledge of this gave her an ecstatic
consciousness of power.

When she raised her eyes she saw that he had fallen back into his chair
and was watching her intently with a puzzled and ardent look.

"You won't keep me hanging on for an eternity," he said, with the
nervous contraction of his forehead she knew so well. "If we must go to
the scaffold, let's go at once."

"To the scaffold?" She smiled at him for the purpose of prolonging the
thrill of the uncertainty.

"Oh, I hate marriage, you know," he returned impatiently, "there's not
another woman on earth who could get me into it."

She nodded. "Well, that is to be hoped if not believed."

He made an impulsive movement toward her. "Believe it or not, so long as
you marry me," he exclaimed.

His flippancy grated upon her, and she turned from his words to the
elusive earnestness which mocked at her from his face. If she might only
arrest and hold this earnestness, then surely she might reach the depths
of his nature and be at peace.

"It never seemed possible to me that I should marry a man who has had
another wife," she said, with an emotion which was almost a regret for
the old ideal of conduct from which she had slipped away.

"A wife! Nonsense!" She saw the indignant flash of his eyes and the
nervous quiver of the hand with which he pulled at his short moustache.
Though he did not touch her she felt instinctively that his personality
had been put forth to overmaster her. "She was nothing but a schoolboy's
folly, and I've forgotten that I ever knew her. She's safely married
again now, so for heaven's sake, don't be foolish!"

"And how do you know that in ten years you will not have forgotten me?"
she asked.

For a brief pause he did not reply; then he bent toward her and she hung
for a rapturous instant upon the passionate denial in his face. The look
that she loved and dreaded was in his eyes, and she struggled blindly in
her own helplessness before it. He was so close to her that it seemed as
if the breath were leaving her body in the intensity of the atmosphere
she breathed.

"Forget you, my own sweetheart!" he exclaimed, and the trivial words
were almost an offence against the emotional dignity of the moment.

She rose to her feet, stretching out her hand until she stood as if
keeping him at a distance by the mere fragile tips of her fingers.

"If I love you, I shall love you very, very much," she said.

With a laugh he bent his lips against her hand. "You'll never love me
half so much as I love you, you bit of thistledown," he answered.

"It will be either a great happiness or a greater misery," she went on,
hesitating, retreating, as she withdrew her hands and pressed them upon
her bosom.

"There's no misery any more--it is the beginning of life," he rejoined.

She laughed softly, a little tender, yielding laugh; then at the very
instant when he would have caught her in his arms, she slipped quickly
back until her desk came between them.

"You must give me time--I must think before I let myself care too much,"
she said.

In the end she gave him her promise and he went from her with a rare and
vivid feeling of exhilaration. For the time he told himself that he
wanted her more than he remembered ever to have wanted anything in his
whole life; and his sated emotion of a man of pleasure, responded with
all the lost intensity of youth. Was it credible that he was already
middle-aged--was already growing a little bald? he demanded, with a
genuine delight in the discovery that his senses were still alive.

On his way up to his rooms, he dropped, by habit, into his club, and
after a word or two with several men whom he seldom met, he crossed over
to join Perry Bridewell, who sat in an exhausted attitude in a leather
chair beside the window. Outside a stream of carriages, containing
richly dressed women moved up Fifth Avenue, dividing as it approached
the mounted police at the corner, and Perry, as Kemper went up to him,
was following with a dulled fish-like glance the pronounced figure of a
lady who held the reins over a handsome pair of bays.

"That's a fine figure of a woman--look at her hips," he observed, with
relish, as Kemper stopped beside him.

"I saw her yesterday. Gerty says she's terrific form," commented Kemper,
gazing to where the object of their admiration vanished in a crush of
vehicles.

"Oh, they always say that of a woman with any figure to speak of,"
remarked Perry. "Unless she's as flat as an ironing board, somebody is
sure to say she's vulgar. For my part I like shape," he concluded with
emphasis.

A vision of Gerty's slender, almost boyish figure, with its daring
carriage, rose before Kemper, and he bit back the cynical laugh upon his
lips. Did one require, after all, a certain restraint in life, a
cultured abstinence before one could really appreciate the finer flavour
of the aesthetic taste? His old aversion to marriage returned to him as
he looked at Perry, sunk in his domestic satiety, and his exhilaration
of a moment ago gave place to a corresponding degree of depression. He
had done the irrevocable thing, and, as usual, it was no sooner
irrevocable than the joyous seduction of it fled from his fancy.
Marriage was utterly repugnant to him, and yet he knew not only that
there was no withdrawing from his position, but that he would not wish
to withdraw himself if he had the power. The instant that the
possibility of losing Laura occurred to him, he felt again the full,
resurgent wave of his desire. He wanted her, and if to marry her was the
one way to possess her, then--the devil take it--marry her he would!

A tinted note was brought to Perry Bridewell, who, after reading it, sat
twirling it between his fingers with a bored and discontented look on
his handsome florid face.

"Take my advice, and when you get clear of an affair, keep out," he
remarked, in a disgusted voice. "By Jove, I'm sometimes tempted to wish
that I were as cold blooded as old Adams."

"Old Adams?" Kemper repeated the name, with a quickened interest. "Well,
I'd hardly envy him his experience with the sex," he exclaimed.

"You would if you saw him--he simply never thinks about a woman so far
as I know, and at least he's well enough rid of his wife, at last. She's
on Brady's hands, thank heaven!"

Kemper shrugged his shoulders. "It serves her right, I suppose, but I
shouldn't care to be on Brady's hands, that's all."

"Oh, he'll chuck her presently, you'll see."

"And afterward--" Kemper was leaning over Perry while he critically
examined a pretty woman who was passing under the window.

"There's no afterward," laughed Perry; "you know how such women end."

As he glanced at the note again, the bored and discontented look came
back upon his face, and he tore the envelope carelessly across and flung
it with a jerk into the waste basket.

"Pshaw! it's all a confounded nuisance--the whole business of sex," he
remarked as he rose to his feet. Then while the disgust still lingered
in his expression, a servant entered and handed him a second note
written upon the same faintly tinted paper. Immediately as if by magic
his face was transfigured by the animated satisfaction of the conqueror,
and instinctively his hand wandered to the ends of his fair moustache,
to which he added an eloquent upward twirl. From the condition of a mere
sullen and dejected animal--he sprang instantly into the victorious
swagger of the complacent male.

"Sorry, but I'm in an awful hurry," he remarked in his usual hearty
voice. "Look me up later in the evening and we'll have a game of
billiards."

He went out, still twirling the fine ends of his moustache, and Kemper
followed, after a short delay, to where his newest French motor car was
waiting before the door.

A little later as he moved slowly amid the crush of vehicles in Fifth
Avenue, it occurred to him that since Perry was so agreeably engaged, he
might himself come in for a share of Gerty's society, and stopping
before her door, he sent up a request that she would come with him for a
short quick run up Riverside. Next to Laura herself he felt that he
preferred Gerty because he knew that she would enter into a lively
banter upon the subject that filled his thoughts, and his emotion was so
fresh that there was a piquant charm in her sprightly allusion to the
mere fact of its existence. When she came down at the end of a few
minutes, wearing her long tan motoring coat and a fluttering white
chiffon veil, he felt a quick impatience of the first casual phrases
with which she leaned back in the car and settled her hanging draperies
about her.

"Go as fast as you like," he said to the chauffeur, and then reaching
into his pocket, he drew out his glasses and offered her a pair.

She shook her head, with an indignant gesture of refusal. "If I perish I
perish, but I won't perish hideously!" she exclaimed.

With a laugh he slipped the elastic over his cap. "What a bore it must
be always to keep beautiful," he remarked. "You can't imagine the
positive delight there is in the freedom of ugliness."

"I dare say." She had turned her head to look at a passing carriage, and
he saw the lovely delicacy of her profile through the blown transparent
folds of her veil. "I shall know it some day," she added presently, "for
after I've safely passed my fiftieth birthday, I mean never to look into
a glass again. Then I'll break my mirrors and be really happy."

"No, you won't, my dear cousin," he rejoined, "for you'll continue to
see yourself in Perry's eyes."

He watched with a sensation of pleasure the graceful shrug of her
shoulders under her shapeless coat.

"Oh, there's no chance of that," she assured him; "he is always in them
himself?"

The vague curiosity in his thoughts took form suddenly in words.
"Where's he now, by the way, do you know?"

Her musical, empty laugh was as perfect as the indifferent glance she
gave him. "Enjoying himself, I hope," she answered. "He hung around me
until I sent him out in the sheer desperation of weariness."

Though her lashes did not quiver, he knew not only that she lied, but
that she was perfectly aware of the assurance and extent of his
knowledge. The hopeless gallantry of her deception appealed to the
fighting spirit in his blood, and he found himself wondering foolishly
if Laura could have played with so high an air the part of a neglected
wife. To a man of his peculiarly eager temperament there existed a
curious fascination in the idea of pushing to its limit of endurance an
unalterable constancy. Would Laura have uttered her futile lies with so
exquisite an insolence? or would she have acted in tears the patient
Griselda in her closet? The virtue of truthfulness was the one he had
most nearly associated with her, and it seemed to him impossible that
she should stoop to shield herself behind a falsehood. Yet he could not
dispel his curiosity as to how she would act in circumstances which he
felt to be impossible and purely imaginary.

He wanted to speak of her to Gerty, but a restraint that was almost
embarrassment kept him silent, and Gerty herself could not be induced to
abandon her flippant satirical tone. So Laura was not mentioned between
them; and he felt when at last he brought Gerty to her door again that,
on the whole, the drive had been a disappointment. He had meant to seek
her sympathy with his love for her friend, and instead he had been met
by a fine, exquisite edge of cutting humour. For once he had felt the
need to be wholly in earnest, and Gerty had taken nothing seriously,
least of all the hint which he had dropped concerning the ultimate
stability of his emotion. If she had got her heartache from his sex, he
saw clearly that she meant to have her laugh on it as well; and the only
remark from which she had let fall even momentarily her gay derision was
in answer to some phrase of his in which had occurred the name of Roger
Adams.

"Roger Adams!" she had echoed with a fleeting earnestness, "do you know
I've always had a fancy that he is meant for Laura in another life."

"In another life?" he questioned merrily.

"Oh, things went crosswise here, you see," she answered, "but somewhere
else, who knows? They may all be straightened out."

The question of Laura's possible fate in "another life" failed somehow
to disturb him seriously; but as he drove presently down the darkening
street, under the high electric lights, he found himself wondering
vaguely why Gerty had so persistently associated her friend with Roger
Adams.




CHAPTER X

IN WHICH ADAMS COMES INTO HIS INHERITANCE


Five minutes had hardly passed after Laura was alone before the servant
brought up the name of Roger Adams, and an instant later he was holding
her hand in his cordial grasp. At his appearance she had for a moment a
sense of the returning reality of things--the vigour of his hand clasp,
the strong, kindly look of his face, the winning, protective tenderness
of his smile, these gave her an impression of belonging to the permanent
instead of to the merely evanescent part of life. When he sat down in
the big leather chair from which Kemper had risen, and removing his
glasses, fixed upon her the attentive gaze of his narrow, short-sighted
eyes, she felt immediately the first sensation of peace that she had
known for many weeks. His hand, long, heavily veined, muscular, and yet
finely sensitive, lay outstretched upon the mahogany lid of her desk,
and she found herself presently contrasting it with the square, brown,
roughly shaped hand of Kemper. Her senses, her brain, her heart were
still full of her lover, yet she was able to feel through some strange
enfranchisement of her dual nature, that there was a mental directness,
an impassioned morality about the man she did not love in which the man
she loved was entirely lacking. But the knowledge of this curiously
enough, served to increase rather than to diminish the persistent
quantity of her emotion, and the few minutes during which Kemper had
been absent from her had sufficed to exaggerate his image to a statue
that was heroic in its proportions. It was as if her heart--she was
still lucid enough to think in a figure of speech--were an altar
dedicated to the perpetual flame before a deity who had already showed
himself to be both terrible and obscure.

Now as she sat looking, with her rapt gaze, at the man before her, she
was thinking how absolutely and without reservation was her surrender to
those particular qualities which Roger Adams did not represent. Here, at
this approaching crisis in her experience, it might have been supposed
that her sense of humour would have lent something of its brilliance as
a safeguard, but the weakness of her temperament lay in the very fact
that her humour entered only into those situations where it could
ornament without modifying the actual conditions of thought--that she
devoted to her passion for Kemper, as to the other merely temporary
phenomena of the senses, a large intensity of outlook which only the
eternal could support with dignity.

Her gaze dropped back from the heights, and he felt that she became less
elusive and more human.

"I've thought of you so often and so much," she remarked with her smile
of cordial sweetness.

"Not so often as I've thought of you." He laid, as he spoke, a folded
paper upon the desk, "There's an English review of the poems. It's
rather good so I thought you might care to see it."

She unfolded the paper; then pushed it from her with an indifferent
gesture. "It seems so long ago I can hardly believe I wrote them," she
returned, conscious as she uttered the mere ordinary words of a subdued
yet singularly vivid excitement, which seemed the softer mental radiance
left by an illumination which was past.

"I wonder why it should seem long to you," said Adams slowly. "I
remember you used to complain that one was obliged to fly through phases
of thought in order to test them all."

"I'm not sure that I want to test them all now," she replied. "When one
gets to a good place one would better stop and rest."

"Then you are in a good place?" he asked, looking at her intently from
his short-sighted eyes, which appeared to contract and narrow since he
had taken off his glasses.

"I don't know," she evaded the question with a smile, "but if I am, I
warn you, I shall stand still and rest."

He laughed softly. "I dare say you're right, if there's such a state as
rest on the earth," he answered.

The cheerful sound of his voice brought the tears suddenly to her eyes,
and she remembered a man whom she had once seen in a hospital, smiling
after a frightful accident through which he had passed.

"Are you yourself so tired?" she asked.

"I?" he shook his head. "Oh, I was using the glittering generalities
again."

"And yet you seldom take even the smallest of vacations," she insisted.

"One doesn't need it when one is broken in as I am. There's a joy in
getting one's work behind one that the luxury of idleness does not
know."

"All the same I wish you'd stop awhile." Then she gave him one of her
long, thoughtful looks and spoke with the beautiful, vibrant note in her
voice which he had called its "Creole quality." "We have been such old,
such close, such dear friends," she went on, "that I wonder if I may
tell you how profoundly--how sincerely--"

She faltered and he took up her unfinished sentence with the instinct to
put her embarrassment at ease. "I knew it all along, God bless you," he
said. "One feels such things, I think."

"One ought to," she responded.

"It's been hard," he pursued frankly; and she was struck by the utter
absence of picturesqueness, of the whining tone of the victim in his
treatment of the situation. There was no appeal to her sympathy in his
manner, and he impressed her suddenly as a man who had come into
possession of a power over the results of events if not over the passage
of events themselves. "It's been harder, perhaps, than I can say--poor
girl," he added quickly.

With a start she sat erect in her chair. "And you can stop to think of
her?" she demanded.

The hand lying on the arm of his chair closed and unclosed itself
slowly, without effort. "Can't you?" he asked abruptly.

"Not sincerely, not naturally," she answered. "I think of you."

She saw a spasm of pain pass suddenly into his face, a too ardent
leaping, as it were, of the blood.

"You would understand things better," he said presently, after a pause
in which she felt that she had witnessed a quick, sharp struggle, "if
you had ever watched the slow moral poisoning of cocaine--or had ever
been," he added with a harsh, grating sound in his usually quiet voice,
"at the mercy of such a damned brute as Brady."

His sudden rage shook her like a strong wind, and she liked him the
better for his relapse into an elemental passion in the cause of
righteousness.

"I'm glad you cursed him," she remarked simply. "I like it!"

He smiled a little grimly. "So do I."

"And yet how terrible it is," she said, with an effort to work herself
into a sentiment of pity for Connie which she did not feel. "It makes
the whole world look full of horror."

"Well, it's a comfort to think I never argued that it wasn't a hard
road," he returned, with the whimsical humour which seemed only to
deepen her sense of tragedy. "I've merely maintained that the only
excuse for living is to make it a little easier."

He rose as he spoke and held out his hand with a smile. "So long as
you're happy, don't bother to think of me," he said; "but if there ever
comes a time when you need a sword-arm, let me know."

Would she ever find that she had need of him? he asked himself presently
as he walked rapidly homeward through the streets. Was it in the
remotest probability of events that he should ever know the delight of
putting forth his full strength in her service? Like a beautiful dream
the thought stayed by him for many minutes, and his mind dwelt upon it
as upon some rare, cherished vision that lies always behind the actual
energies of life. He thought of her dark, eloquent eyes, of the
imaginative spirit in her look, and of that peculiar blending of
strength with sweetness which he had found in no woman except herself.
It was a part of the power she exercised that in thinking of her the
physical images appeared always to express a quality that was not in
themselves alone.

Then, because he must let her go forever, he set himself patiently to
detach her presence from his memory. To think of her had become, he
knew, the luxury of weakness, and in order to test his strength for
renouncement, he brought his mind deliberately to bear upon the
immediate necessity before him. It was useless to say to himself that he
could as soon give up his dream as his desire. The endurance of his
will, he realised, was equal to whatever sacrifice he was called upon to
make and live.

"I can do without--take this--take all and leave me nothing," he had
said in the hour of his deepest misery; and with the knowledge of his
strength to renounce all that which lay outside himself had come also
the knowledge of his power to possess whatever was within his soul. Life
was forfeiture and he had given up the world that he might gain himself.
Since the night when he had distractedly sought God through the city, he
had become gradually aware that he moved in the midst of a large
unspeakable peace, for in willing as God willed he had entered, he
found, into a happiness which was independent and almost oblivious of
the external tragedy in which he lived. Neither sickness nor poverty,
nor the shame of Connie's sin, nor the weakness of his own flesh, had
power to separate him from the wisdom which had come to him under the
eyes of the harlot at the crossing. In seeking the essential thing he
had wandered for years in a circle which had led him back at last to his
own soul. Beyond this, he saw there was little further to be lost and
nothing to be learned. "Give me more light, my God!" he had prayed in
agony of spirit; and the answer had come in a mental illumination which
had made the crooked places plain and the obscure meanings clear. At
last he was happy, for at last he had learned that the man who loses all
else and has God possesses everything.

His loneliness--surely there was never a man more alone since the
beginning of time--had failed suddenly to disquiet him; and as he looked
from his remote vision upon the people about him, there flowed through
his mind that ultimate essence of knowledge which enables a man to
recognise himself when he encounters the stranger in the street.

Several weeks later he heard from Gerty Bridewell of Laura's engagement
to Arnold Kemper. He had dropped in to see Perry one afternoon upon an
insignificant piece of business, and Gerty in her husband's absence, had
insisted upon receiving his call.

"I'll reward you with a bit of news," she said, with a nervous and
troubled gesture. "Laura will be married in the autumn."

"Married?" He looked at her a little blankly, for after having armoured
himself to meet an expected blow, he was almost surprised to find that
he was not insensible to the shook. "Married! and to whom?"

"To Arnold, of course. Didn't you suspect that it would happen?"

He shook his head. "Of all men he's the last I'd ever have thought of."
With the words a vision of Kemper rose before him, robust, virile,
sensual, with his dominant egoism and his pleasant affectations, half
hero and half libertine.

"Well, of all men he's probably the only one that could have done it,"
replied Gerty; "he's positively wild about her, there's some comfort to
be got from that--and Laura--"

"And Laura?" he repeated the name for she had broken off quickly after
having uttered it.

"Oh, Laura is very much in love, it seems. I don't believe she herself
knows exactly why--but then one never does."

"Well, let's wish them happiness with all our hearts," he said, and
added a little wistfully, "If it could only come by wishing."

"Ah, if it could!" was Gerty's plaintive echo; then her voice dropped
into a sigh of perplexity, and she leaned toward him in a flattering
confidential manner. "Do you know there are some men who are cads only
in their relations to women," she observed; "leave out that element from
their make-up and they're all round first-rate fellows."

"I dare say you're right," he answered, and thought of Perry Bridewell,
"but why do you select this instant," he added humorously, "to formulate
your philosophy of sex?"

Her earnestness fled and she leaned back in her chair laughing. "Oh, I
don't know--perhaps--because one doesn't like to lose an aphorism even
if it pops into one's head at the wrong time."

Then as he rose to go she pressed his hand with a grip that was almost
boyish. "How I wish you liked me half as much as I like you," she said.

"I do--I shall always," he responded in his whimsical manner. "There's
absolutely no limit to my liking--only I know it would be the surest way
to bore you to death."

She laughed a little wearily. "It would be so nice to be really liked,"
she pursued. "Nobody likes me. A good many have loved me in one way or
another, but I want to be just liked."

He saw the pathetic little frown gather between her brows, and in spite
of the pain in his own heart, he felt a profound and pitiful sympathy.
"Well, we'll make a compact upon it," he declared, holding her hand for
an instant in his hearty grasp. "I promise to like you until you tell me
frankly that you're bored."

The eager child quality he seldom saw was in her look and she was about
to make some impulsive answer to his words, when there was the sound of
a heavy step outside the door and they heard the next instant Perry's
hilarious voice.

"Well, I'm jolly glad you kept him, Gerty, but, by Jove, I wonder how
you hit it off. He's not your sort, you know."

The child quality vanished instantly from her face, and Adams watched
the mocking insolence creep back upon her lips.

"On the other hand we're perfectly agreed," she said. "I don't confine
my admiration to your type, you know."

"You don't, eh? Well, that's a good joke!" exclaimed Perry, with a break
into his not unpleasant, though sensual laugh. As he stood, squaring his
handsome chest, in the centre of the room, Adams felt that the mere
animal splendour of the man had never been more impressive.

"I find to my great pleasure that Mrs. Bridewell and I are very good
friends," remarked Adams, after a moment in which he had taken in
Perry's full magnificence with his humorous short-sighted gaze, "and she
has promised on the strength of it to extend to me the favour of her
protection. No, I can't stay now," he added, in answer to Perry's
protestations. "I'll see you again to-morrow--there's really not the
faintest need to hurry."

And with a feeling that he was stifling in the over-heated
flower-scented rooms, he went quickly from the house into the street.

There was no reason why the news of Laura should disquiet him--by no
possible twist of his imagination could he bring the event of her
marriage into any direct bearing on his own life, yet as he walked at
his rapid, nervous pace toward his home in Thirty-fifth Street, he felt
a burning sore like a great jagged wound in his breast. That merely
human part of him, which was mixed so vitally into the intellectual
fervour of his love, suffered from the loss almost as if it had been
some fresh physical hurt. Was it possible that his avowal of
renunciation had sought to keep back some particular treasure? some
darling frailty? Or was his suffering at the moment but the first
involuntary quiver of the nerves which would pass presently leaving him
at one with his fate again? "Was I content to give her up only so long
as she belonged to no other man?" he asked. "Could I have relinquished
her friendship so easily had I known that her love was not for me, but
for Kemper?" Again the image of Kemper appeared to him, genial,
impulsive, sensual--and he felt that if it had been another and a
different man, he could have borne the loss of Laura with a finer
courage.

Then the unworthiness of his mental attitude forced itself upon his
reflections, and he realised that with his first return to his old state
of selfish blindness, the illumination that had shone in his soul was
gradually obscured. Could it happen to him that he should again lose the
light? Again walk in darkness? His thoughts were no longer clear with
that crystalline clearness of the day before, and it seemed to him
suddenly that the key to all wisdom, which he had found so lately, had
failed at the critical moment to unlock the fortified doors. That
temporary and purely human reaction, which is the inevitable fleeting
shadow cast on the mind by any spiritual irradiation, appeared in his
present mood to contain within itself the ultimate abyss of failure. The
single instant when he lost hold on God stretched itself into an
eternity of nothingness through his soul.

He had walked rapidly and far, and looking up at his first almost
automatic stop, he found that he had not only passed by his own house,
but that he had come as far down as the corner of Twentieth Street and
Broadway. The afternoon had waned before he knew it, and the streets
were now filled with people returning from their day's work in offices
or in shops. On one side a newsboy was offering him the evening papers,
and on the other a man had thrust a bunch of half-faded violets into his
face.

As he stood now, hesitating for a moment beside the crossing, he became
dimly aware that he had passed quickly from one state of consciousness
into another, from the brief period of dream into the briefer transition
which precedes the awakening--and that there was a distinct gap between
his former and his present frame of mind. He _was_ awakening--this he
realised as he watched the crowd which surged rapidly by on either
side--and there came to him almost with the conviction a vivid
presentiment that the full return of his senses would bring at the same
time a clearer and a deeper conception of life. His short unhappiness
showed suddenly as a nightmare, and while he looked at the men and women
among whom he stood, he felt that the egoism of his love for Laura had
broadened into a generous stream of humanity which filled the world. The
personal had passed suddenly into the universal; the spirit of desire
had showed itself to be one with the spirit of pity; and the very agony
of the rebellion through which he had come appeared as he looked back
upon it to have enriched his consciousness of the tragedy in other
lives. To live close to mankind, to make a little easier the old worn
road, to stand shoulder to shoulder with the labourer at his toil, these
were the impulses which sprang like a new growth from his past selfish
longing. "Let me feel both the joy and the sorrow among which I move,"
was the prayer he now found strength to utter.

With renewed energy he turned to go onward, when, as he stepped upon the
crossing by which he stood, he saw that a woman at his side was weeping
softly, without noise, as she walked. Something of his old restraint,
his old embarrassment, checked him for a moment; then he saw that she
was poor and middle-aged and plainly clad, and he turned to speak to
her, though still with a slight hesitation.

"I wish you would do me the kindness to tell me your trouble," he said.

She stopped short in her walk and looked up with a nervous squint of her
eyes, while the undried tears were still visible on her large mottled
cheeks. As she stood there, timid and silent, before him, he saw that
the basket contained a squirming mass of gray fur, and stooping to look
at it more attentively, he found that the fur belonged to a number of
small animals, huddled asleep on the fragment of a red and white plaid
shawl. He liked the woman's face and he liked, too, the little creatures
in the basket; and more than this he felt the great need of helping as
the one means to bridge the extreme spiritual isolation in which he
stood. To give one's self! Was not this final surrender of the soul the
beginning of all faith as of all love?

"I believe that you need help," he said, in the winning voice which had
always had a strange power to open out the hearts of others, "and I know
that I need to give it."

In the midst of the crude noises of the street, surrounded by the
screaming newsboys and the clanging cars, he saw that she paused for an
instant to cast a quick, frightened glance about her.

"If you'll believe what I say," she replied, in a voice which had gained
the assurance of a heartfelt conviction, "I was just praying for help to
come, but somehow it always seems to take one's breath clean away when
there's an answer. I've been trying to sell some of the little
creatures," she went on, "but they don't go well to-day and I guess Jim
won't be able to hold out till I get the money for his funeral."

"And Jim is your husband?" he asked quietly.

"I married him more than thirty years ago," she answered, stooping to
wipe her eyes with a hard rub on the sleeve of her jacket, "and he was
always a good worker until this sickness came. I've never known him to
miss a day's work so long as he had his health," she added proudly, "and
that, too, when so many other husbands were soaking themselves in
drink."

"And he's ill now?" asked Adams, as she paused.

"He's been dying steadily for a week, sir," she answered with the simple
directness of the grief which takes account only of the concrete fact,
"and I've been working day and night to make up his burial money by the
time he needs it. If he'd only manage to last a day or two longer I
might lay up enough to keep him out of the paupers' lot," she finished
with a kind of awful cheerfulness.

It was this cheerfulness, he found, glimmering like some weird
death-fire over the actual horror, which made his realisation of the
tragedy the more poignant, and lent even a certain distinction to the
poverty which she described. Here, indeed, was the supreme vulgarity of
suffering--and before it his own personal afflictions appeared as
unsubstantial as shades. At least he had had the empty dignity of
receiving his sorrow with a full sense of its importance, but with this
woman the very presence of grief was crowded out by the brutal
obligation to meet the material demands of death. Death, indeed, had
become but an incident--a side issue of the event--and the funeral had
usurped the place and the importance of a law of nature.

"Let me go home with you--I should like it," he said when they had
started to walk on again; and then with an instinctive courtesy, he took
the basket from her and slipped it over his own arm. A little later,
when following her directions, they entered a surface car for the West
Side, he placed the basket on his knees and sat looking down at the
small gray kittens that awaking suddenly began to play beneath his eyes.
The jostling crowd about him, the substantial panting figure of the
woman beside him, and more than all the joyous animal movements of the
kittens in his lap, seemed somehow to return to him that intimate
relation to life which he had lost. He no longer felt the sensation of
detachment, of insecurity in his surroundings; for his own individual
existence had become in his eyes but a part of the enlarged universal
existence of the race.

As the car stopped the woman motioned to him with an imperative gesture,
and then as they reached the sidewalk, she pointed to a fruiterer's
stand on the outside of a tenement near the corner.

"It is just above there--on the third floor," she said, threading her
way with a large determined ease through the children playing upon the
sidewalk.

When he mounted presently the dimly lighted staircase inside, it seemed
to Adams that the whole house, close, poorly-lighted, dust laden as it
was, was filled to the echo with the ceaseless voices of
children--laughing voices, crying voices, scolding voices, voices lifted
as high in joy as in grief. So strong was his impression of the number
of the little inmates that he was almost surprised when the woman pushed
open a door on the third landing and led the way into a room which
appeared deserted except for the occupant of the clean white bed by the
window.

The whole place was scrupulously neat, he saw this at the first
glance--saw the well swept floor, the orderly arrangement of the chairs,
the spotless white cambric curtains parted above the window sill, on
which a red geranium bore a single blossom out of season. Several large
gray cats arose at the woman's entrance and came crying to the kittens
in the basket; and she motioned to Adams to put the little creatures on
the floor. Then going to the bed she stooped over the man who lay
there--outstretched and perfectly motionless as if wrapped in a profound
and quiet slumber. One iron-stained misshapened hand lay on the outside
of the coverlet and as Adams looked at it, he saw in it a symbol of the
whole tragedy upon which he gazed. The face of the sleeper was hidden
from him, but so expressive was the distorted, toil-hardened hand, with
the fingers fallen a little open as if in relief from a recently dropped
tool, that the voice of the woman sounding in his ears merely put into
words his own unspoken knowledge.

"Ah, he's gone," she said. "He promised me he'd hold out if he could,
but I guess he couldn't manage it."

Then standing there in the bare, cleanly swept room, bright with the
voices of children which floated in from the staircase, Adams was
conscious, with a consciousness more vital and penetrating than he had
ever felt before, that the place, the universe and his own soul were
filled to overflowing with the infinite presence of God.




CHAPTER XI

ON THE WINGS OF LIFE


It was on the morning after Gerty's conversation with Adams that Laura
carried the news of her engagement to Uncle Percival.

"I've something really interesting for you this morning," she began,
taking his withered little hand in hers as she sat down on the high
footstool before his chair.

His wandering blue eyes fixed her for a moment, then, turning
restlessly, travelled to his flute which lay silent on the table on his
elbow.

"Ah, but I'm ahead of you for once," he remarked with his amiable
toothless smile, "there's a new batch of rabbits in the yard and I've
already seen 'em. Don't tell Rosa, my dear," he cautioned in a whisper,
"or she'll be sure to drown 'em everyone."

Releasing his hand from her clasp, he reached for his flute, and, with a
pathetic delight in the presence of his enforced listener, raised the
mouth of the instrument to his lips. The tune he played was "The Last
Rose of Summer," and Laura sat patiently at his side until the end. With
the final note, even as he laid the flute lovingly across his knees, she
saw that the music had strengthened and controlled his enfeebled mind.

"I want to tell you that I shall be married in the autumn, dear Uncle
Percival," she said with a renewed effort to penetrate the senile
abstraction in which he lived.

"Married!" repeated the old man, with an indignant surprise for which
she was entirely unprepared. "Married! Why, what on earth makes you do a
ridiculous thing like that? It's out of the question," he continued with
an angry vehemence, "it is utterly and absurdly out of the question."

For an instant it seemed to Laura that she had absolutely no response to
offer.

"But almost everyone marries in the end, you know," she said at last.

"I have lived very comfortably to be eighty-five," retorted Uncle
Percival, "and I never married."

"Oh, but you never fell in love," persisted Laura.

"In love? Tush!" protested the old man with scorn, "and why should you?
I have never felt the need of it."

"Well, I don't think one can help it sometimes," remonstrated Laura, a
little helplessly. "One doesn't always want it, but it comes anyway."

"Then if I didn't want it I wouldn't let it bother me," said Uncle
Percival, adding immediately. "What does Rosa think of this state of
things, I wonder--Rosa is a very sensible woman."

"Oh, she's heartily pleased--everybody is pleased but you."

Uncle Percival shook his head in stubborn disapproval. "People are
always pleased at the mistakes of others," he observed, "it's human
nature, I suppose, and they can't help it, but I tell you I've seen a
great deal too much of love all my life--and it's better left alone,
it's better left alone."

Rising dejectedly, he wandered off to his rabbits, while Laura, as soon
as the curtains at the door had fallen together again behind his
shrunken little figure, forgot him with that complete forgetfulness of
trivial details which is possible only to the mind that is in the
possession of an absorbing emotion. All hesitation, all uncertainty, all
disappointment, had been swept from her consciousness as if by a
destroying and purifying flame; and for the past few weeks she had lived
with that passionate swiftness of sensation which gives one an ecstatic
sense of rushing, like a winged creature, through crawling time. Life,
indeed, was winged for her at the moment; her soul flew; and she felt
her happiness beating like a caged bird within her breast. The agony of
the imprisoned creature was there also, for she loved blindly without
understanding why she loved--and yet it was this hidden mystery of her
passion, this divine miracle which attended its conception, that filled
the world about her with the invisible, announcing hosts of angels. She
could explain nothing--life, death, birth, the ordinary incidents of
every day were but so many signs and portents of 'the unseen wonders;
and every breath she drew seemed as great a miracle to her as the
raising of Lazarus from the tomb.

Closing her eyes she thought of the afternoon before when she had gone
out with her lover in his automobile. Life at the instant had condensed
itself into a flash of experience, and his face as he looked at her had
been clear and strong as the wind which rushed by them. "Faster! faster!
let us go faster!" she had begged, "let me live this one hour flying,"
and even with the words she had wondered if the same rapture would ever
enter into her love again? Was it possible to touch the highest point of
one's being twice in a single lifetime? Was it given to any human
creature to repeat perfection? And he? Would he ever know it again? she
questioned, with an uncertainty sharp as a sword that pierced her
through. Would she ever find in his eyes a look that would be anything
but a shadow of the look she had seen on the day before? Was happiness,
after all, as fluid a quantity as the emotion which gave it birth?

Standing beside the table, she leaned her cheek for a moment upon the
roses in the Venetian vase; and it seemed to her, as the petals brushed
her face, that she felt again his eager kisses fall on her eyes and
throat. The memory sent her blood beating to her pulses; and she saw his
face in her thoughts as she had seen it on that afternoon, transfigured
and intensified by the peculiar vividness of her perceptions.

"There has been nothing like this in my life before," he had said in a
passion of sincerity, "there has been nothing in my life but you from
the beginning." The irony was gone then from his voice; she had found no
hint of even the satirical humour in his eyes; and as she remembered
this now it seemed to her that she had there for the first time--for the
one and only moment since she had known him--succeeded in holding by her
touch that deeper chord of his nature for which she had always felt
herself to be instinctively groping.

She was still brooding over the rapture of yesterday, when the door
opened quickly and Kemper came in with the eager haste in which he
appeared to live every instant of his life. At the first glance she saw
that the ardour of the last afternoon was still in his eyes, and the
next moment she found herself yielding to his impatient kisses.

"I was trying to decide whether I love you more when you are with me or
when you are away," she said with a joyful laugh.

"Well, as for me, I love you exactly a hundred times more when I see
you," he retorted gayly.

His words seemed, as she repeated them, an affront to her insatiable
desire for the perfection of love.

"Then if you never saw me again you would be able to forget me?" she
asked a little wounded.

He laughed easily with a quick return to his pleasant banter, "I hope
so. What's the use of loving when nothing comes of it?"

When nothing comes of it! A cloud dimmed the radiant clearness of her
morning; then she met the strong tenderness in his eyes, and with an
effort, she thrust her disappointment aside, as she had thrust it aside
at every meeting since the beginning of her love.

"I have always wondered if happiness were as happy as people thought,"
she said gravely, "and now I know, I know."

"And is it really?" he asked, with the confident smile which piqued her
even while it fascinated.

For answer she lifted to him "the seraphic look" which he had never seen
in any face but hers; and as he met her eyes it appeared to him that all
other women whom he had loved were but tinted shadows--that they were
one and all utterly devoid of the mystery by which passion lives. Here
in her face he saw at last the charm and the wonder of sex made
luminous; and while he watched her emotion quiver on her lips, he began
to ask himself if this were not the assurance in his own heart of a
feeling that might endure for life? Would this, too, change and perish
as his impulses had changed and perished until to-day?

"Shall I tell you what I have been thinking since last night?" she
questioned in a voice that was like a song to his ears, "it is that I
have been all my life a plant in a dark cellar, groping toward the light
and never finding it--always groping, groping."

She leaned toward him, placing her hands, the lovely, delicate hands he
loved, upon his shoulders, "I've grown to the light! I've grown to the
light!" she whispered joyously.

He raised her hand to his lips, and his teeth closed softly over each
slender finger one by one.

"So I am the light?" he enquired with tender humour.

She shook her head. "Not you, but love."

A short laugh broke from him. "But where, my dear sweetheart," he
retorted? "would love be without me?"

"I don't dare to think," she was too earnest to take his jest with
lightness, "it is strange, isn't it?--that but for you I should never
have known--this."

"Who can tell? There might have come along another fellow and you'd
probably have made love quite as prettily to a substitute."

"Never!" she shook her head with an indignant protest, "and you?" she
added softly after a moment.

"And I? What?"

"Without me could you have felt it quite like this?"

She waited breathlessly, but the ironic spirit had got the better of his
tenderness.

"My dear girl," he rejoined, "what a question?"

"But could you?-tell me," she implored in sudden passion.

"Well, I devoutly hope so," he answered lightly, "it's a thing I
should'nt like to have missed, you know."

He leaned back closing his eyes; and immediately, without warning and
against his will, there rose before him the seductive face of Madame
Alta, and he recalled her exquisite voice, with its peculiar high note
of piercing sweetness. Then he remembered his wife, and, one by one, the
other women whom he had loved and forgotten or merely forgotten without
loving. They meant so little in his existence now, and yet once, each in
her own bad time had engrossed utterly his senses. In what rare quality
of sentiment could this love differ from those lesser loves that had
gone before?

But he was not given to introspection, and so the disturbing question
left him almost as readily as it had come. When one attempted to think
things out, there was no hope of escaping the endless circle with a
clear head. No, he wasn't analytical, thank Heaven!

While he was still rejoicing in what he called his "practical turn of
mind," he remembered suddenly an appointment at his club which he had
made a week ago and then overlooked in the absorbing interest of his
engagement.

"By Jove, you'll get me into an awful scrape some day," he remarked
cheerfully as he hurried into his overcoat. "I might have lost fifty
thousand dollars by letting this thing slip."

His manner had changed completely with the awakened recollection; and
finance in all its forms--the look of figures, the clink of coin--had
assumed instantly the position of romance in his thoughts. For the
moment Laura was crowded from his mind, and she recognised this with a
pang sharp and cold as the thrust of a dagger.

"If you only knew how much you'd nearly cost me," were his last words as
he ran down the steps.

At the corner he met Gerty's carriage and in response to her inviting
gesture, he gave an order to the coachman as he sprang inside.

"Well, this is a godsend," he observed with a grateful sigh while he
wrapped the fur rug carelessly about him. "A drive with a pretty woman
leaves a surface car a good many miles behind. And you are unusually
pretty this morning," he commented with a touch of daring gallantry.

"I ought to be," returned Gerty defiantly, "for heaven knows I take
trouble enough about it. Oh, I _am_ glad to see you!" she finished
gayly, "how is Laura?"

He met her question with his genial smile. "She makes a pretty good
pretence at happiness," he answered.

"And so she's really over head and ears in love?"

"Does it surprise you that she should find me charming?" he asked,
laughing.

She nodded with unshaken candour.

"I was never so much surprised in all my life."

If his smile was ready it did not fail to betray a touch of vanity that
was almost childlike.

"And yet there was a time when you yourself rather liked me," he
retorted with his intimate and penetrating glance.

"Was there?" She avoided his look though her tone was almost insolent,
"my dear fellow, I never in my life liked you better than I like you at
this minute--but we are speaking now of Laura's liking not of mine. Oh,
Arnold, Arnold, I am in a quake of fear."

"About Laura? Then get over it and don't be silly."

"And you are honestly and truly and terribly in earnest?"

"My dear girl, I'm going to marry her--isn't that enough? Does a man
commit suicide except when he's sincere?"

Her shallow cynicism had dropped from her now, and she turned toward him
with an unaffected anxiety in her face.

"Then it will last--it must."

"Last!" An expression of irritation showed in his eyes, and he shrugged
his shoulders with an impatient movement. "Of course it won't
last--nothing does. If you want the eternal you must seek it in
eternity."

"So in the end it will be like--all the others?"

Because the question annoyed him he responded to it with a frankness
that was almost brutal. "Everything is like everything else," he
returned, "there's nothing new, least of all in the emotions."

For a minute she looked at him in silence while the steady green flame
appeared to him to grow brighter in her eyes. Was it contempt or
curiosity that he saw in her face?

"Poor Laura!" she said at last very softly. "Poor happy Laura!"

At her words his dissenting laugh broke out, but he showed by his
animated glance a moment later that it was of herself rather than of
Laura that he was thinking.

"Is it such a terrible fate, after all, to become my wife?" he enquired.

His look challenged hers, and lifting her insolent bright eyes, she
returned steadily the smiling gaze he bent upon her.

"Oh, dear me, yes," she answered merrily, "it is almost if not quite as
bad as being Perry's." The carriage had stopped at the door of his club,
and his mind was already at work over the approaching interview.

"Well, you escaped the lesser for the greater ill," he responded
pleasantly, as he gave her hand a careless parting pressure.




PART III

DISENCHANTMENT




CHAPTER I

A DISCONSOLATE LOVER AND A PAIR OF BLUE EYES


With that strange hunger of youth for the agony of experience, Trent
allowed the news of Laura's engagement to plunge him into an imaginary
despondency which was quite as vivid as any reality of suffering. For a
week he persistently refused his meals, and he was even seized with a
kind of moral indignation when his perfectly healthy appetite asserted
itself at irregular hours. To eat with a broken heart appeared to him an
act of positive brutality; and yet he was aware that, in spite of the
sting of his wounded pride, the tragic ending of his first romance
produced not the slightest effect upon his physical enjoyment. It was an
instance where a purely ideal sentiment struggled against a perfectly
normal constitution.

"You could never have cared for me, of course I always knew that," he
remarked one day to Laura, "but I can't help wishing that you hadn't
fallen in love with anybody else."

From the bright remoteness of her happiness she smiled down upon him.
"But doesn't such a wish as that strike you as rather selfish?"

"I don't care--I want you back again just as you used to be--and now,"
he added bitterly, "you've even given up your writing."

"I shall never write again," she answered, quietly, without regret. It
was a truth which she felt only intuitively at the time, for her reason
as yet had hardly taken account of a fact that was perfectly evident to
the subtler perceptions of her feeling. She would never write again--her
art had been only the exotic flowering of a luxuriant imagination and
she had lost value as a creative energy while she had gained in
experience as a human soul.

"I was too young, that was the trouble," pursued Trent, "there were five
years between us."

"My dear boy," she laughed merrily, "there was all eternity."

His bitterness, he felt, grew heavily upon him while he watched her. A
new beauty had passed into her face; the mystery of a thousand lives was
in her look, in her gestures, in her voice; and she appeared to him not
as herself alone, but as the embodied essence of all former loves of
which he had dreamed--of all the enchanting dead women of whom the poets
wrote. Then he thought of Arnold Kemper, with his exhausted emotions,
his superficial cleverness, his engrossing middle-age, and especially of
his approaching baldness. Was love, after all, he questioned, only a
re-quickened memory in particular brain cells as modern scientists
believed? Was physical heredity, in truth, the fulfilling of the law of
life? and was the soul merely a series of vibrations by which matter
lived and moved?

All the way home his angry scepticism boiled over in his thoughts, and
at the luncheon table, a little later, he met his mother's placid
enquiries with an explosion of boyish despair.

"There's no use trying to persuade me--I can't eat," he said.

"But, my dear son, I fear you'll work yourself into an illness,"
returned Mrs. Trent, with her unshaken calm.

"I don't care," replied the young man desperately, "whether I die now or
later, it is all the same."

"I suppose really it is," admitted his mother; but she added after a
pause in which she had dipped mildly into a philosophic curiosity, "The
way being in love effects one has always seemed to me the very strangest
thing in life. I remember your uncle Channing lived exclusively on
onions for a whole month after Mattie Godwin refused his offer. Why he
selected onions I could never explain," she concluded, "unless it was
that he had never been able to endure the taste of them, and he seemed
bent upon making himself as miserable as it was possible to be."

While she went on placidly eating her hashed chicken, Trent tossed off a
glass or two of claret, which he was perfectly aware, taken on his empty
stomach, would immediately produce a racking headache. Since his passion
was not sincere, it occurred to him that it might at least become
dramatic; but he saw presently, with aggrieved surprise, that the
impression made upon his mother by his violent behavior was far slighter
than he had brought himself to expect. When next she spoke her thoughts
appeared to have strayed utterly from the subject of his appetite.

"I couldn't sleep last night for thinking of that poor Christina Coles,"
she said, "the char-woman told me yesterday that the child had been
obliged to go out and pawn some of her things in order to get the money
to pay her room rent."

With a start his mind swung back from the dream life to the actual. He
had not seen Christina for more than a week, and the thought of her
pierced his heart with a keen reproach.

"Good God, has it come to that?" he exclaimed.

"What hurts me most is not being able to do anything to help her,"
resumed Mrs. Trent, "she's so proud that I don't dare even ask her to a
meal for fear she'll take offence."

"But if it's so bad as that why doesn't she go home--she must have a
home."

"Oh, she has--but to go back, she feels, would mean that she's given up,
and the char-woman declares that she'll never give up so long as she's
alive."

"Well, she's a precious little fool," observed Trent, as he drank an
extra glass of claret.

But the thought of Christina was not to be so lightly put from him, and
before the afternoon was over he went up to the eighth landing and
knocked in vain at her door. She was still out, as the little pile of
rejected manuscript lying on her threshold bore witness; and he turned
away and came down again with a disappointment of which he felt himself
to be half ashamed. An hour later he ran against her when he was going
out into the street, and as she turned with her constrained little bow
and looked at him for an instant with her sincere blue eyes, he was
almost overcome by the rush of pity which the sight of her evoked. How
pale and thin she had grown! how shabby her little tan coat looked in
the daylight; and yet what a charming curve there was to her brown
head! He realised then for the first time that brown--warm, living brown
with glints of amber--was the one colour for a woman's hair.

The next morning he rushed off indignantly to upbraid Adams.

"The girl's starving, I tell you--we can't let her starve," he exclaimed
in an agony of remorse.

"Oh, yes we can," returned Adams with a cheerful brutality which enraged
the younger man. "Starving isn't half so bad as writing trash. But you
needn't look at me like that," he added, "she doesn't come here any
longer now. She told me fiction was the field she meant to dig in."

"Well, you'll kill her among you," was Trent's threatening rejoinder;
and filled with a righteous fury against literature he went back again
to knock at the door of Christina's empty room. Once his mother came up
also, but the girl, it appeared, was always out now, while the rejected
manuscript thickened each morning upon the threshold. Several times Mrs.
Trent arranged a little tray of luncheon and sent it up stairs by the
old negro servant, but the message brought back was always that
Christina was not at home. And then gradually, as the weeks went by, the
dignity and the pathos of her struggle were surrounded in Trent's mind
by a romantic halo. Her beauty borrowed from his poetic fancy the
peculiar touch of atmosphere it lacked, and his thoughts dwelt more and
more upon her slender, girlish figure, her smooth brown hair, and the
flower-like sweetness of her face.

Then just as he had grown almost hopeless of ever seeing her again, he
found her one evening in the elevator as he went up to his mother's
rooms. The touch of her cold little hand on his sent a sudden shock to
his heart, and while he looked anxiously into her face, he saw her go
deadly pale and bite her lip sharply as if to bring back her
consciousness by the sting of pain.

"You are ill," he said eagerly; "don't deny it, for haven't I eyes? Yes,
you must, you shall come with me in to mother."

Even then she would have turned proudly away, but with his impulsive,
lover's sympathy he led her from the elevator upon the landing on which
he lived. "She is waiting for you--she wants you," he urged with
passion; "and can't you see--oh, Christina, I want you, too!"

But his fervour only left her the more cold and shrinking, and she shook
her head with a refusal that was almost angry.

"How dare you? Why did you make me come out?" she asked. "I must go
back--I am not well--oh, I must go back!"

Over the angry tones of her voice he saw her entreating eyes shining
like wet flowers, and as he looked into them it came to him in a
revelation of knowledge that the meaning of everything that had been was
made clear at last. He knew now why he had succeeded where Christina had
failed--he knew why Laura had refused his love, and why, even in his
misery, her refusal had left his heart untouched. And beyond all these
things, he realised that now his boyhood was over and that from the
experience of this one moment he had become a man.




CHAPTER II

THE DEIFICATION OF CLAY


Not until a month after the announcement of Laura's engagement did she
come face to face for the first time with the ugly skeleton which lies
hidden beneath the most beautiful of dreams. The spring had passed in a
troubled rapture; and it was on one of the bright, warm days in early
June that she found awaiting her on the hall table when she came in from
her walk a letter addressed in a strange handwriting and bearing a
strange foreign postmark. Beside this was a note from Kemper explaining
a broken engagement of the day before; and she read first her lover's
letter, which ended, as every letter of his had ended since the
beginning of their love, "Yours with my whole heart and soul, Arnold."

With an emotion which repetition could never deaden, she stooped to kiss
the last sentence he had written, before she turned carelessly to take
up the strange foreign envelope, which she had thrown, with her veil and
gloves, on the chair at her side. For a moment she pondered
indifferently the address; then, almost as she broke the seal, the first
words she read were those which lay hidden away in the love letter
within her hand, "Yours with my whole heart and soul, Arnold."

In her first shock, even while the blow still blinded her eyes, she
turned to seek wildly for some possible solution; and it was then that
she discovered that the letter, in Kemper's handwriting, was addressed
evidently to some other woman, since it bore the date of a day in June
just three years before she had first met him. Three years ago he had
declared himself to belong, heart and soul, to this other woman; and
to-day, with no remembrance in his mind, it seemed, of that former
passion, he could repeat quite as ardently the old threadbare avowal.
How many times, she asked herself, had he used that characteristic
ending to his love letters?--and the thing appeared to her suddenly to
be the veriest travesty of the perfect self-surrender of love.

She was a woman capable of keen retrospective jealousy, and as she sat
there, beaten down from her winged ecstasy by the blow that had struck
at her from the silence, she told herself passionately that her life was
wrecked utterly and her brief happiness at an end. Then, with that
relentless power of intellect, from which her emotions were never
entirely separated, she began deliberately to disentangle the true facts
from the temporary impulses of her jealous anger.

"I am wounded and yet why am I wounded and by what right?" she demanded,
with a pathetic groping after the self-condemnation which would acquit
her lover, "he has lived his life, I know--I have always known it--and
his letter has only brought forcibly before me a fact which I have
accepted though I have not faced it." And it occurred to her, with the
bitter sweetness of a consoling lie, that he could not have been false
to her three years ago, since he was not then even aware of her
existence. To dwell on this thought was like yielding to the power of
an insidious drug, and yet she found herself forcing it almost
deliriously against her saner judgment. "How could he wrong me so long
as I was a stranger to him?" she repeated over and over. "On the day
that he first loved me, his old life, with its sins and its selfish
pleasures, was blotted out." But her conscience, even while she
reasoned, told her that love could possess no power like this--that the
man who loved her to-day, was the inevitable result of the man who had
loved other women yesterday, and that there was as little permanence in
the prompting of mere impulse as there was stability in change itself.
So the voice within her spoke through the intolerable clearness of her
intellect; and in her frantic desire to drown the thing it uttered, she
repeated again and again the empty words which her heart prompted. Yet
she knew even though she urged the falsehood upon her thoughts, that it
was less her argument that pleaded for Kemper than the memory of a look
in his face at animated instants, which rose now before her and appealed
disturbingly to her emotions.

Three ways of conduct were open to her, she saw plainly enough. Wisdom
suggested that she should not only put the letter aside, but that she
should banish the recollection of its existence from her life. But,
while she admitted that this would be the most courageous treatment of
the situation, she recognised perfectly that to act upon such a decision
was utterly beyond her strength. Though she were to destroy the object,
was the memory of it not seared indelibly into her brain? and would not
this memory return to embitter long afterward her happiest moments?
"When he kisses me I shall remember that he has kissed other women and I
feel that I shall grow to hate him if he should ever write to me again
in those lying words." But she knew intuitively that he would use the
same ending in his next letter, and that she would still be powerless to
hate him, if only because of his disturbing look, which came back to her
whenever she attempted to judge him harshly. "I might really hate him so
long as he was absent from me, and yet if he came again and looked at me
in that way for a single instant, I know that, in spite of my
resolution, I would throw myself into his arms." And she felt that she
despised herself for a bondage against which she struggled as hopelessly
as a bird caught in a fowler's net.

Of the two ways which remained to her, she chose, in the end, the course
which appeared to her to be the least ungenerous. She would not read the
letter--the opening and the closing sentences she had seen by
accident--for, when all was said, it had not been written for her eyes;
and it struck her, as she brooded over it, that there would be positive
disloyalty in thus stealing in upon the secrets of Kemper's past. No,
she would place it in his hands, she determined finally, still unread;
and in so doing she would not only defeat the purpose of the sender, but
would prove to him as well as to herself that her faith in him was as
unalterable as her love. After all to trust was easier than to distrust,
for the brief agony of her indecision had brought to her the knowledge
that the way of suspicion is the way of death.

And so when he came a little later she gave the letter, at which she
had not again looked, into his hands. "Here is something that reached me
only this morning," she said. "It is not worth thinking of, and I have
read only the first and the last sentence."

At her words he unfolded the paper, throwing a mere casual glance, as he
did so, upon the thin foreign envelope, which appeared to convey to him
no hint of its significant contents.

Then, after a hurried skimming of the first page, he turned back again
and carefully studied the address in a mystification which was pierced
presently by a flash of light.

"By Jove, so she's heard it!" he exclaimed; and the instant afterward he
added in a kind of grudging admiration, "Well, she's a devil!"

The incident appeared suddenly to engross him in a manner that Laura had
not expected, and he stooped to examine the postmark with an attention
which gave her, while she watched him, a queer sense of being left out
quite in the cold.

"But why, in thunder, should she care?" he demanded.

"She?" there was no trouble in her voice, only an indifferent question.

"Oh, it's Jennie Alta, of course--she's perfectly capable of such a
thing." Then, reaching out, he drew Laura into his arms with a
confidence which had the air, she thought, of taking the situation
almost too entirely for granted--of accepting too readily her attitude
as well as his possession of her. "My darling girl, what a regular brick
you are!" he said.

Though she realised, as he spoke, that this was the reward of her
silence and her struggle, she told herself, in the next breath that, in
some way, it was all inadequate. She had expected more than a phrase,
and the very fact that the note of earnestness was absent from his voice
but made her desire the sound of it the more passionately. Again she
felt the baffled sensation which came to her in moments of their closest
intimacy. Had his soul, in truth, eluded her for the last time? And was
there in the profoundest emotion always a distance which it was forever
impossible to bridge? Yet the uncertainty, the very lack of a fuller
understanding only added fervour to the passion that burned in her
heart.

"It's all over now, so we may as well warm ourselves by the failure of
her deviltry," he observed presently, as he flung the crumpled paper
into the fire. "I'm downright sorry she'll never know how little harm
she's done."

"It might, I suppose, have been worse," suggested Laura.

"Well, I suppose so--and you mean me to believe that you didn't even
read it?" he enquired with tender gayety.

She gave him her eyes frankly as an answer to his appeal for faith. "Why
should I? I love you," she replied.

For an instant--a single sufficing instant--he met her look with an
earnestness that was equal to her own. The man in him, she almost cried
out in her exultation, was touched at last.

"May God grant that your confidence will never fail me," he rejoined a
little sadly.

"When that comes it will be time to die," was her answer.

Taking her hand in his he held it in a close pressure for several
minutes. Then the earnestness she had arrested fled from her touch, and
when he spoke again she could not tell whether his words were uttered
sincerely or simply as the outcome of his sarcastic humour.

"If you were a flesh-and-blood woman instead of an eccentric sprite," he
remarked, "I suppose you'd want me to make a clean breast of the whole
affair, but I can't because, to tell the truth, I've forgotten
everything about it."

"Then you didn't honestly love her, so it doesn't matter."

"Love her! Pshaw!" Though he laughed out the words there was an angry
flush in his face. "Do you think I'm the kind of man to love a mere
singing animal? And besides," he concluded with a brutal cynicism which
repelled her sharply, "I'm of an economical turn, you know, and the love
of such women comes too high. I've seen them eat up a fellow's income as
if it were a box of Huyler's." The words were no sooner uttered than his
mood changed quickly and he was on his feet. "But I didn't mean to give
you the whole morning, sweetheart, I merely looked in to say that I
wanted you to come out with me in the car this afternoon. There's a fine
breeze blowing."

For a thoughtful moment she hesitated before she answered. "I told Roger
Adams that I should be at home," she returned, "but I dare say he won't
mind not seeing me."

"Oh, I dare say," he retorted gayly. "Well, I'll pick you up, then, on
the stroke of five."

As he left the room she went over to the window, and when he came out a
little later, he turned upon the sidewalk to glance up at her and wave
his hand. She was happy, perfectly happy, she told herself, as she
looked eagerly after the last glimpse of his figure; but even while she
framed the thought into words, she was conscious that her heart throbbed
high in disappointment and that her eyes were already blind with tears.

When Adams sent up his card, at twenty minutes before five o'clock, she
lingered a few moments before going downstairs in her motoring coat and
veil. In response to her embarrassed excuses, he made only a casual
expression of regret for the visit he had missed.

"It's a fine afternoon--just right for a run," he remarked, adding after
a brief hesitation. "It's the proper thing, I suppose, to offer you
congratulations, but I'm a poor hand, as you know, at making pretty
speeches. I wish you happiness with all my heart--that's about all there
is to say--isn't it?"

"That's about all," she echoed, "and at least if I'm not happy I shall
have only myself to blame."

The silence that followed seemed to them both unnatural and constrained;
and he broke it at last with a remark which sounded to him, while he
uttered it, almost irrelevant.

"I've never seen much of Kemper, but I always liked him."

"I know," she nodded, "you were chums at College."

"Oh, hardly that, but we knew each other pretty well. He's a lucky chap
and I hope he has the sense to see it."

"There's no doubt whatever of his sense!" she laughed. Then, growing
suddenly serious, she leaned toward him with her old earnest look. "No
one has ever known him, I think, just as I do," she went on, "because no
one understands how wonderfully good he really is. He's so good," she
finished almost triumphantly, as if she had overcome by her assertion a
point which he disputed, "that there are times when he makes me feel
positively wicked."

Having no answer ready but a smile, he gave her this pleasantly enough,
so that she might take it, if she chose, for a complete agreement.
Though his heart was filled with repressed tenderness, there was nothing
further now that he could say to her, for he realised as he looked into
her face, that there was little room in her happiness either for his
tenderness or for himself. An aversion, too, to meeting Kemper awoke in
him, and so, after a few minutes of trivial conversation, he rose and
held out his hand.

"I'm very busy just now, so I may not see you again for quite awhile,"
he said at parting, "but remember if ever you should want me that I am
always waiting."

A little later, as he walked up the street in the June sunshine, he saw
Kemper's new automobile spinning rapidly from the direction of Fifth
Avenue.




CHAPTER III

THE GREATEST OF THESE


For a minute after Kemper had passed in his car, Adams turned back and
stood looking down the long street filled with pleasant June sunshine.
In the distance a hand-organ was grinding out a jerky sentimental air,
and beside him, at the corner by which he stood, a crippled vender of
fruit had halted his little cart of oranges and apples.

A year ago Adams might have told himself, in the despair of ignorance,
that since Laura had given her love to Kemper she was lost to him
forever. But he had learned now that this could not be true--that she
was too closely knit into his destiny to separate herself entirely from
it; and there came to him, while he stood there, a strange mystic
assurance that she would some day feel that she had need of him again.
His love had passed triumphantly through its first earthly stages, and
in the large impassioned yearning with which he thought of her there
was, so far as he himself was conscious, but little left of a sharper
personal desire. All desire, indeed, which has its root in the physical
craving for possession seemed to have gone out of him in the last few
months; and since the earliest dawn of that deeper consciousness within
his soul, he had almost ceased to think of himself as an isolated
individual life.

To let go the personal was to fall back again on the Eternal; between
the soul and God, he had learned in his deepest agony, there is room for
nothing more impregnable than the illusion of self. As Roger Adams--as a
mere separate existence, he was a failure. The things which he had
desired in life he had not possessed; the things which he had possessed
he had ceased very soon, in any vital sense, to desire. Of his life's
work, so big at the beginning, he saw now that he had made but a small
achievement--a volume of essays on the writings of other men and a few
years editing of a magazine which had absorbed his strength without
yielding him the smallest return of fame. On every side, from all
avenues of hope or of mere impulse, there had crowded upon him, he
admitted smiling, but disappointment and disillusion. He had played for
happiness as every man plays for it from the cradle, he had staked his
throw as boldly, he had made his resolves as desperately, as any of his
fellows, and yet at the end of his forty years he had not a single
object to put forward as his reward. Nothing remained to him! As the
world counts success he could show only failure.

But the larger vision was still before him, and he knew that all these
thoughts were the cheapest falsehood. In spite of appearances, in spite
of the outward emptiness of his existence, he had not failed; and in the
hour that he had put life aside he had for the first time in his whole
experience begun really to live. In surrendering his own small
individual being he knew that he had entered into the possession of a
being immeasurably larger than his own.

He looked at the fruit vender smiling, and the man's answering smile
came to him like the clasp of fellowship. "Did he, too, understand?" was
Adams' unspoken question, "had he, also, found the key that unlocked his
prison?" and there flowed into his heart something of the rapture with
which Laura had cried: "I've grown to the light!" In each exclamation
there was ecstasy, but in hers it was the short, troubled ecstasy of the
senses, which hears its doom even in the hour of its own fulfilment;
while from his finer joy there shone forth that radiant energy, in which
is both warmth and light, both rest and action, which illumines not only
the soul within, but transfigures and refines the mere dull ordinary
facts of life.

As he stood there the car passed him again, and Laura and Kemper both
turned, smiling, to look back at him. When Laura's long white veil was
lost, with a last flutter, in the sunshine, he nodded to the fruit
vender, and crossing to Broadway started in the direction of his home.

He had asked Trent to dine with him--the boy looked fagged he thought,
and it might do him good to talk freely about his play. Then he recalled
several letters that he had put aside for the sake of seeing Laura; and
retracing his steps, he went back to his office and sat down before his
desk. It surprised him sometimes to find how little irksome such
uninteresting details had become.

They talked late over their cigars and coffee, and when at last Trent
rose, with a laughing reminder of his mother, and went out into the hall
to put on his overcoat, Adams passed by him, after a final handshake,
and entered his darkened study at the end of the hall. He heard the
door close quickly as Trent left the house, and his mind was still full
of the boy's dramatic ambitions, as he paused beside his desk and bent
down to raise the wick of the green lamp. He had fallen into the habit
of sitting up rather late now, and there was a paper on his blotting-pad
which he was preparing for the coming issue of his magazine. After
glancing hastily over, he found that the last few sentences were
rearranging themselves in his thoughts, and he had set himself patiently
to the redraughting of the paragraph, when a slight sound at the door
caused him to look up suddenly with the suspended blue pencil still, in
his hand. It was too late for the maids, he knew--they had already gone
to bed before Trent left--and he knew also that the person who entered
at this hour must have opened the outer door by means of a latch-key.
The soft, slow movement outside sent a nervous shiver through him; he
was aware the next instant that he gripped the pencil more closely in
his hand; and then, rising to his feet with a breathless impulse to be
face to face at once with the inevitable moment, he made a single step
forward, while he watched the knob turn, the door open slowly, and
Connie cross the threshold and pause confusedly as if blinded by the
lamplight.

The pencil dropped from his hand; he heard it fall with a thud upon the
carpet; and then he heard nothing else except the beating of his own
arteries in his ears. Time seemed to stop suddenly and then to whirl
madly forward while he stood rooted to his square of carpet, with his
useless hands hanging helplessly at his sides. It was the supreme
instant his life that was before him, and yet he was as powerless to
meet it as the infant in the womb to avert the hour of its birth. Dumb
and petrified by very force of the will within him, he waited immovable
on the spot of carpet, while his eyes saw only the visible wreck of the
woman who stood upon his threshold. His dreams of her had been visions
of horror, but the most pitiable of them had fallen far short of the
reality as he saw it now. From her streaked blonde hair, already
powdered with gray, to her exhausted bedraggled feet, which seemed
hardly to support her trembling body, she stood there, terrible and full
of anguish, like the most tragic ghost of his imaginary horrors. Face to
face with each other they were held speechless by the knowledge that
there was no word by which the past might be justified or the future
made any easier for them to meet; and as in all great instants of life
the thing that was said between them was uttered at last in an unbroken
silence.

Then as they stood there a slight sound changed the atmosphere of the
room. The shade of the lamp, which Adams had raised too high, cracked
with a sharp noise and fell to the floor in broken pieces; and at the
shock Connie gave a hysterical shriek and lifted to Adams the frightened
glance of her ignorant blue eyes.

"I--I had nowhere to go and I am very tired," she said, in her old tone
of childish irritation, "I don't think I was ever so tired in my life
before."

Her voice snapped the icy constraint which held him and he knew now that
he was ready to face the hour on its own terms. His will was as the
strength of the strong, and he felt standing there, that he would ask
no quarter of his fate. Let it be what it would, he knew that it was
powerless to close on him again the door of his prison.

"Then you did right to come back; Connie," he said quietly, "you did
right to come back."

His words rang out almost exultantly, but the moment afterward he was
terrified by their immediate effect--for Connie--throwing herself
forward upon the floor, burst wildly into one of her old spells of
weeping, calling upon God, upon himself, and upon the man whom she had
loved and hated. The frenzied beating of her small, helpless hands, the
streaming of her tears, the quiver of her wrecked, emaciated body, the
convulsed agony that looked at him from her face--these things made
their appeal to that compassion by which he lived, and he found that the
way which he had thought difficult had become to him as familiar as the
breath he drew.

"It is all over now--there is nothing but quiet here," he said.

She lay still instantly at his words, her face half hidden in the
cushions of the sofa; and turning from her he went into the dining-room
and brought back a glass of wine and some bread and milk. As he fed her,
she opened her lips with a little humble, tired movement which was
utterly unlike the Connie whom he remembered. Was it possible that in
her degradation she had learned the first rare grace of spirit which is
meekness?

"Take it all, every drop," he said once, when she would have pushed the
spoon away; and turning obediently, she swallowed the last drops of
milk.

"It is very good," she murmured as he rose to put down the emptied
bowl. The words brought a quick moisture of recollection to his eyes,
and he found himself asking if the time had come at last when Connie
could find pleasure in the taste of bread and milk?

After this she lay motionless on the floor until he carried her upstairs
and placed her upon the bed as he had done so often on her past reckless
nights. But there was no remembrance in his mind now of that former
service; and as he turned on the electric light and drew the blankets
over her shivering body, he was hardly surprised even by the readiness
with which events, left perfectly alone, had managed to adjust
themselves. Why he had acted as he had done, he could not have told; had
he stopped to think of it he would probably have said that he had seen
no other way. Connie as his wife, as the mother even of his dead child,
had come to mean nothing to him any more; but Connie as something far
deeper than this--as the object of inexhaustible compassion, as the
tragedy of mortal failure--possessed now a significance which no human
relation could cover by a name. Beyond the abandoned wife, he could
see--not less clearly than on that night when he had waited in the snow
outside the opera house--the small terrified soul caught in a web of
circumstance from which there was no escape.

Standing at daybreak in the centre of his study floor, he remembered the
last humble look with which she had closed her eyes; and he saw in it a
gratitude that was like the first faint dawning of the daybreak. For the
first time in his life he had watched in Connie's eyes the struggle for
consciousness which was as the struggle of an animal in whom a soul had
come painfully to birth; and the memory of it sent a strange, an almost
divine happiness to his heart. Was it possible that the will of God had
moved here while he slept? Was it possible, he asked himself in an
ecstasy of wonder, that in spite of all sin, all failure, all
degradation, all despair, he had really won Connie's soul?




CHAPTER IV

ADAMS WATCHES IN THE NIGHT AND SEES THE DAWN


For a week after her home-coming Connie lay ill and almost unconscious
in her chamber. Since her first wild outburst on the night of her return
she had allowed no hint of remorse or gratitude to break through the
obstinate silence upon her lips; and the impression she gave Adams, on
his occasional visits to her room, was of a soul and body too exhausted
for even the slightest emotional activity. She had made of her life what
her desire prompted; and she seemed to suggest now, lying there wrecked
and silent, that the end of all self-gratification is in utter weariness
of spirit.

Then gradually, as the long June days went by, life appeared feebly to
renew itself and move within her. At first it was only a look, raised to
Adams, when he bent over her, with something of the pathetic, expectant
wonder of a sick child; then a helpless expressive gesture, and at last
he found in her eye a clearer and fuller recognition of her surroundings
and of himself. The gratitude he had seen on that terrible night
surprised him again one day as he spoke to her; and after this he began
to watch for its reappearance with an eagerness which he himself found
it difficult to understand. Of all virtues gratitude was most lacking
in the woman who had been his wife; and this slow, silent growth of it,
showed to him as no less a miracle than the coming of the spring or the
resurrection of the dead earth beneath the rain. There were moments
even, when he felt that he must move softly, lest he disturb the working
of those spiritual forces which make for righteousness by strange and
wonderful ways. Strange and wonderful, indeed, he had found, beyond all
miracles were the means by which the soul might be brought back to the
knowledge of its immortal destiny. Was it not under the eyes of a harlot
that he, himself, had seen the mystery which is God's goodness? and so
might he not find that Connie had learned, in the depths of her
self-abasement, that the light which surrounds the pleasures of the
senses is full of enchantment only for the distant, deluded vision?

But there were other hours when he asked himself if he were strong
enough for the thing which he had before him--strong enough, not for the
swift, exalted moment of the sacrifice, but for the daily fret and
torment of a perfectly unpoetic self-denial. Would the light go out
again and the exaltation fail him before many days? Then he remembered
the pathos of her struggling smile, the timid groping of her hands, the
deprecating gratitude he found in her look; and it seemed to him when
all other resources were exhausted--when his energy, his duty, his
religion flagged--that his compassion would still remain in his heart to
render possible all that was impossible to his will alone. Compassion!
this, he came to find in the end, was the true and the necessary key to
any serious understanding of life.

He was still putting these questions to himself, when, coming in one
afternoon from his office, he found Connie, wearing a loose fitting
wrapper of some pale coloured muslin, awaiting him in an easy chair
beside her window. It was the first time that she had left her bed; and
when he offered a few cheerful congratulations upon her recovered
strength, she looked up at him with a face which still showed signs of
the hideous ravages of the last few months. In her hollowed cheeks, in
her quivering unsteady lips, and in the dull grayness of her hair, from
which the golden dye had faded, he could find now no faint traces of
that delicate beauty he had loved. At less than thirty years she looked
the embodiment of uncontrolled and reckless middle-age.

"It isn't that I'm really better--not really," she said, in answer to
his look almost more than to his words, "but the doctor told me that I
must get up and dress to-day. He wants me to go to the hospital this
afternoon."

Her voice was so composed--so unlike the usual nervous quiver of her
speech--that at first he could only repeat her words in the vague
blankness of his surprise.

"To the hospital? Then you are ill?"

"I asked him not to tell you," she replied, with a tremor of the lips
which had almost the effect of a smile, "he didn't understand--he
couldn't, so I wanted you to hear it first from me. I'll never be any
better--I'll never get really well again--without such an operation--and
he thinks, he says, that it must be at once--without delay."

As she spoke she stretched out her hand for a glass of water that stood
at her side, and in the movement her wedding ring slipped from her thin
finger and rolled to a little distance upon the floor. Picking it up he
handed it back to her, but she placed it indifferently upon the table.
Her attitude, with its dull quiet of sensation, impressed him at the
instant almost more than the greater importance of what she told him.
Was it this acceptance of the thing, he wondered, which appeared to rob
it of all terror in her mind? and was the dumb resignation in her face
and voice, merely an expression of the physical listlessness of despair?
There was about her now that peculiar dignity which belongs less to the
human creature than to the gravity of the moment in which he stands; and
he remembered vividly that he had never watched any soul in the supreme
crisis of its experience without the stirring in himself of a strange
sentiment of reverence. Even the most abandoned was covered in that
exalted hour by some last rag of honour.

"Then you have suffered great pain?" he asked, because no other words
came to him that he could utter.

"Weeks ago--yes--but not now. It does not hurt me now."

"And you thought, yourself, that it was so serious as this?"

She shook her head. "Oh, no, I never thought of it. When it came I drove
it off with brandy."

The absence in her of any appeal for pity moved him far more than the
loudest outcry could have done.

"Poor girl!" he said, and stopped in terror, lest he had obtruded the
personal element into a situation which seemed so devoid of feeling.

"It was a pity," she returned to his surprise very quietly; and without
looking at him, she spoke presently in a voice which struck him as
having a strange quality of hollowness, "it was a pity; but it can't be
helped. You might try and try because you're made that way, but it
wouldn't, in the end, do the very least bit of good. If I live till
to-morrow and get well and come out of the hospital, it will all be over
just exactly what it was before. Not at first, perhaps--oh, I know, not
at first!--but afterward, when things bored me, the taste would come
back again."

"Hush!" he said quickly, with a forward movement, "hush! you shall not
think such things!"

"The taste would come back again!" she repeated, with a kind of savage
sternness. "I am not strong and the doctor told me long ago that there
was no cure."

"Then he lied--there is always a cure."

"There is not--there is not," she insisted harshly, dwelling upon the
words because in them she found a keen agony which relieved her lethargy
of bitterness, "I am different now for a while, but it would not last. I
am very tired, but after I have rested--"

"What would not last?" he broke in, as she hesitated over her unfinished
sentence.

For a long pause she waited, searching in vain, he saw, for some phrase
which might describe the thing she had not as yet thought out clearly in
her own dazed mind. Then, at last, she spoke almost in a whisper, "the
freedom."

The word gave him a sudden shock of gladness. "Then you are free
to-day--you feel it now?"

She raised her hand, pushing back her faded hair, as if she would look
more closely at an object which rose but dimly before her eyes.

"I want you to know all--everything," she went on slowly, "I want you to
understand how low I sank--to what fearful places I came in the end. At
first it was merely discontent, and I felt that it was only happiness I
wanted. I loved him--for a time, I think, I really loved him--you know
whom I mean--but at last, when I began to weary him, when he knew what I
took, he cursed me and left me alone in the street one night. Then a
devil was let loose within me--I wanted hell, and I went
further--further."

Her voice was still lifeless, but while she spoke he felt his teeth bite
into his lips with a force which stung him to the consciousness of what
she said. There awoke in him a triumph, almost a glory in the rage he
felt, and he knew now why men had always believed in a hell--why they
had even come at last to hope for it.

"I never meant to come back," she began again, after a pause in which
the tumult of his feeling seemed to fill the air with violence, "but I
had reached the end of wretchedness, I was tired and hungry, and nothing
that happened really mattered. If you had told me to go away I don't
think that I should have cared. I meant, in that case, to sell my coat
for a bottle of brandy, and to put an end to it all while I had the
courage of drink."

Her bent disordered head trembled slightly, but she appeared to him to
have passed in her misery beyond the bounds where any human sympathy
could be of use. She was no longer his wife, nor he her husband; she was
no longer even a fellow mortal between whom and himself there might be
some common ground of understanding. Absolutely alone and
unapproachable, he knew that she had reached the ultimate desolation of
her soul.

"It was because you did not send me away that I have told you," she said
quietly. "It is because, too, I want you to know that I--understand."

To the end her thoughts were but poor faltering, half-developed things;
yet he knew what she meant to say, though she, herself, had divined it
only through some pathetic, dumb instinct.

"I think I know what you mean," he said presently, when it appeared to
him that her confession was over; but after he had spoken she took up
her sentence with the dead calm in which she had come to rest.

"There's no use saying that I'm sorry and yet--I am sorry."

Her look of weariness was so great that with the words she seemed to
lose instantly her remaining strength; and he gathered in her silence,
an impression that she was reaching blindly out to him for help.

"Promise me that you will stay with me as long as they will let you?"
she implored, with a quick return to her convulsion of childish terror.

He promised readily; but when the time came for her to go, she had
entirely recovered her aspect of listless fortitude, and during the
short drive to the hospital, she talked, without stopping, of perfectly
indifferent subjects--of the dust in the street, the deserted look of
the closed houses, and of the wedding present she wished to buy for a
maid who was to be married in the coming week.

"Let it be something really thee," she asked, and this single request
marked for him, as she uttered it, a change in Connie greater than any
he had seen before.

At the hospital he expected a relapse into her hysterical dread, but, to
his surprise, she watched the surgical preparations with a calmness in
which there was a kind of passive curiosity. While the nurse laid out
her nightdress on the small white iron bed, and braided her hair in two
long, slender braids, she assisted with a patient attention to such
details which seemed hardly to account for the terrible event for which
they prepared. Her hair, he noticed, was combed straight back from her
forehead in the fashion in which she might have worn it as a little
girl; and this simple change gave her an expression which was almost one
of injured innocence. Age and experience were suddenly wiped out of her
face, not by any act of mental illumination, but merely by the ruffles
of her white nightdress and the simple childish fashion in which they
had combed her hair.

When they came to take her upstairs to the operating room upon the roof,
he would have gone also, but after reaching the top landing, she turned
to him upon the threshold and told him that she would rather he came no
farther.

"I can bear everything better alone now," she said; and so when they
carried her inside he turned away and entered the little waiting room
at the other end of the hail. The place stifled him with the odours of
chloroform and ether, and going to the window, he threw open the blinds
and leaned out into the street. With the first breath of air in his
face, he realised that it was he, and not Connie, who had turned coward
at the end; and he wondered if it were merely waning vitality which had
assumed in her an appearance of such natural dignity. She had lived her
life in terror of imaginary horrors and now in presence of the actual
suffering she could show herself to be absolutely unafraid. Not she but
he, himself, now shivered at the thought of her unconscious body in the
surgeon's hands, and he felt that it would be a positive relief to
change places with her at the instant--to confront in her stead either
the returning pangs of consciousness or the greater mystery of her
unawakening.

In the small, newly painted room, which smelt of chloroform and varnish,
he sat staring through the half open door to the hail where a surgeon,
wearing a shirt with roiled-up sleeves, had just hurried by. A nurse
passed carrying a basin from which a light steam rose; then a young
doctor with a brown leather bag, and presently a second surgeon, who
walked rapidly, and turned up his cuffs over his fat arms, just before
he reached the threshold.

Connie was no longer his wife, Adams had told himself; and yet this fact
seemed not in the least to lessen the importance of the news which he
awaited. For the first time he understood clearly how trivial are any
mere social relations between man and woman.

Then, while he watched the hand of the clock on the mantel drag slowly
around the great staring face, he compelled his thoughts gradually to
detach themselves from her helpless body, as it lay outstretched on the
table across the hail, and to regather about the girlish figure he had
first seen under cherry coloured ribbons. The old vibrant emotion was
but ashes; try as he would he could bring back but a pale memory of that
golden moment; and this emptiness where there had once been life,
lessened forever in his mind the value of all purely human passion. But
his personal attitude to her was lost suddenly in his wider regret that
such tragedies were possible--that the girl with the delicate babyish
face could have become a creature to whom vice was a desired familiar
thing.

"Did the outcome lie in my hands? and might I have prevented it?" he
demanded. "If I had stood in the way of her impulse, would it have
turned aside from me at the last?" And the salvation of the world
appeared to him to depend upon just this courageous coming between evil
and the desire which it invited--for had not the soul of the weak, been
delivered, in spite of all moral subterfuge, into the power of the
strong?

Then his vision broadened, and he looked from Connie's life to the lives
of men and women who were more fortunate than she; but all human
existence, everywhere one and the same, showed to him as the ceaseless
struggle after the illusion of a happiness which had no part in any
possession nor in any object. He thought of Laura, with the radiance of
her illusion still upon her; of Gerty, groping after the torn and
soiled shreds of hers; of Kemper, stripped of his and yet making the
pretence that it had not left him naked; of Perry Bridewell, dragging
his through the defiling mire that led to emptiness; and then of all the
miserable multitude of those that live for pleasure. And he saw them,
one and all, bound to the wheel which turned even as he looked.

The door across the hail opened and they brought Connie out, breathing
quietly and still unconscious. He followed the stretcher downstairs; but
after they had placed her upon the bed, he came back again and sat down,
as before, in the little stuffy room. Presently he would go home, he
thought, but as the night wore on, he became too exhausted for further
effort, and closing his eyes at last, he fell heavily asleep.

When he awoke the day was already breaking, and the electric light
burned dimly in the general wash of grayness. About him the atmosphere
had a strangely sketchy effect, as if it had been laid on crudely with a
few strokes from a paint brush.

The window was still open, and going over to it he leaned out and stood
for several minutes, too tired to make the necessary effort to collect
his thoughts, while he looked across the sleeping city to the pale amber
dawn which was beginning to streak the sky with colour. The silence was
very great; in the faint light the ordinary objects upon which he
gazed--the familiar look of the houses and the streets--appeared to him
less the forms of a material substance than the result of some shadowy
projection of mind. All the earth and sky showed suddenly as belonging
to this same transient manifestation of thought; and gradually, as he
stood there, his perceptions were reinforced by a sense which is not
that of the eye nor of the ear. He neither saw nor heard, yet he felt
that the spirit had moved toward him on the face of the dawn; and the
"I" was not more evident to his illumined consciousness than was the
"Thou." He beheld God, with the vision which is beyond vision; the light
of his eyes, the breath of his body were less plain to him than was the
mystery of his soul. And the universal life, he saw--spirit and matter,
fibre and impulse, vibration of atom and quiver of aspiration--was but
an agonised working out into this consciousness of God. With the
revelation his own life was changed as by a miracle of nature; right
became no longer difficult, but easy; and not the day only, but his
whole existence and the end to which it moved were made as clear to him
as the light before his eyes.

Again he thought of Laura, still under the troubled radiance of her
illusion, and his heart dissolved in sympathy, not for her only, but for
all mankind--for Kemper, whom she loved, for Gerty, for Connie, for
Perry Bridewell. "They seek for happiness, but it is mine," he thought;
"and because they seek it first, it will keep away from them forever. It
is not to be found in pleasure, nor in the desire of any object, nor in
the fulfilment of any love--for I, who have none of these things, am
happier than they."

He turned away from the window toward the door, and it was at this
instant that one of the nurses ran up to him.

"We thought you had gone home," she said, "so we have rung you up by
telephone for an hour--" She stopped and paused hesitating for an
instant; then meeting the quiet question in his look, she added simply,
"Your wife died, still unconscious, an hour ago."




CHAPTER V

TREATS OF THE POVERTY OF RICHES


On the morning of Connie's death, Gerty, dropping in shortly before
luncheon, brought the news to Laura.

"Do you know for once in my life my social instinct has failed me," she
confessed in her first breath, "I am perfectly at a loss as to how the
situation should be met. Ought one to ignore her death or ought one not
to?"

"Do you mean," asked Laura, "that you can't decide whether to write to
him or not?"

"Of course that's a part of it, but, the main thing is to know in one's
own mind whether one ought to regard it as an affliction or a blessing.
It really isn't just to Providence to be so undecided about the
character of its actions--particularly when in this case it appears to
have arranged things so beautifully to suit everybody who is concerned."

"It was, to say the least, considerate," remarked Laura, with the
cynical flavour she adopted occasionally from Kemper or from Gerty, "and
it is certainly a merciful solution of the problem, but does it ever
occur to you," she added more earnestly, "to wonder what would have
happened if she hadn't died?"

"Oh, she simply had to die," said Gerty, "there was nothing else that
she could do in decency--not that she would have been greatly
influenced by such a necessity," she commented blandly.

"I'd like all the same to know how he would have met the difficulty, for
that he would have met it, I am perfectly assured."

"Well, I, for one, can afford to leave my curiosity unsatisfied,"
responded Gerty; then she added in a voice that was almost serious. "Do
you know there's really something strangely loveable about the man. I
sometimes think," she concluded with her fantastic humour, "that I might
have married him myself with very little effort on either side."

"And lived happily forever after on the _International Review?_"

"Oh, I don't know but what it would be quite as easy as to live on
clothes. I don't believe poverty, after all, is a bit worse than
boredom. What one wants is to be interested, and if one isn't, life is
pretty much the same in a surface car or in an automobile. I don't
believe I should have minded surface cars the least bit," she finished
pensively.

"Wait till you've tried them--I have."

"What really matters is the one great thing," pursued Gerty with a
positive philosophy, "and money has about as much relation to happiness
as the frame has to the finished picture--all it does is to show it off
to the world. Now I like being shown off, I admit--but I'd like it all
the better if there were a little more of the stuff upon the canvas."

"If you were only as happy as I am!" said Laura softly.

For a moment Gerty looked at her with a sweetness in which there was an
almost maternal understanding. "I wish I were, darling," was what she
answered.

Her hard, bright eyes grew suddenly wistful, and she looked at Laura as
if she would pierce through the enveloping flesh to the soul within. Of
all the people she had ever known Laura was the only one, she had
sometimes declared, who had never lied to her. The world had lied to
her, Kemper had lied to her, Perry had lied to her more than all; and
she had come at last to feel, almost without explaining it to herself,
that the truth was in Laura as in some obscure, mystic sense the
sacrament was in the bread and wine upon the altar. Though she herself
was quite content to slip away from her ideals, she felt that to believe
in somebody was as necessary to her life as the bread she ate. It made
no difference that she should number among the profane multitude who
found their way back to the fleshpots, but her heart demanded that her
friend should remain constant to the prophetic vision and the promised
land. Laura was not only the woman whom she loved, she had become to her
at last almost a vicarious worship. What she couldn't believe Laura
believed in her stead; where she was powerless even to be good, Laura
became not only good but noble. And through all her friendship, from
that first day at school to the present moment, she remembered now that
no hint of jealousy had ever looked at her from Laura's eyes. "A thrush
could hardly borrow the plumage of a paroquet," Trent had said; and the
brilliant loveliness which had disturbed the peace of other women she
had known, had produced in Laura only an increasing delight, a more
fervent rapture. As she looked on the delicate, poetic face of the
woman before her, she found herself asking, almost in terror, if it were
possible that her friend was not only reconciled but positively
enamoured of the world? Had Laura, also, entered into a rivalry which
would be as relentless and more futile than her own? Would she, too,
waste her life in an effort to give substance to a shadow and to render
permanent the most impermanent of earthly things? But the question came
and went so abruptly that the minute afterward she had entirely
forgotten the passage of it through her mind.

"What a bore of a summer I shall have," she observed lightly, with one
of those swift changes of subject so characteristic of her restless
temperament. "The doctor has ordered me back to camp in the Adirondacks,
and unless Arnold and yourself take pity on me heaven knows whether I'll
be any better than a fungus by the autumn."

She was arranging her veil before the mirror as she spoke, and she
paused now to survey with a dissatisfied frown one of the large black
spots which had settled across her nose. "I told Camille I couldn't
stand dots like these," she remarked with an equally irrelevant flash of
irritation.

"Of course I'll come for July if you ask me," replied Laura, ignoring
the question of the veil for the sake of the more important issue, "I
can't answer for Arnold, but I think it's rather what he's looking
forward to."

"Oh, he told me yesterday that he'd come if I could persuade you. He
didn't have the good manners to leave me in doubt as to what the
attraction for him would be."

Laura's happy laugh rewarded her. "This will be the first summer he's
spent in America for ten years," she replied, "so I hope he'll find me
worth the sacrifice of Europe."

"Then he's really given up his trip abroad for you?"

"There's hardly need to ask that--but don't you think it a quite
sufficient reason?"

"Oh, I guess so," returned Gerty carelessly. "Once I'd have been quite
positive about it, but that was in the days when I was a fool. Now I'm
not honestly sure that you're doing wisely to let him stay. A man is
perfectly capable of making a sacrifice for a woman in the heat of
emotion, but there are nine chances to one that he never forgives her
for it afterward. Take my advice, my dear, and simply _make_ him
go--shove the boat off yourself if there's no other way. He'll probably
love you ten times more while he's missing you than he will be able to
do through a long hot summer at your side."

"Gerty, Gerty, how little you know love!" said Laura.

"My dear, I never pretended to. I've given my undivided time and
attention to men."

"Well, he doesn't want in the least to go--he'll tell you so himself
when you see him--but I do wish that your views of life weren't quite so
awful."

Gerty was still critically regarding her appearance in the mirror, and
before answering she ran her hand lightly over the exquisite curve of
her hip in her velvet gown.

"I'm sorry they strike you that way," she responded amiably, "because
they are probably what your own will be five years from now. Then I may
positively count on you both for July?" she asked without the slightest
change in her flippant tone, "and I'll try to decoy Billy Lancaster for
August. He's still young enough to find the virgin forest congenial
company."

"But I thought Perry hated him!" exclaimed Laura, in surprise.

"He does--perfectly--but I can't see that you've made an argument out of
that. Billy's really very handsome--I wish you knew him--he's one of the
few men of my acquaintance who has any hair left on the top of his
head."

Her flippancy, her shallowness left Laura for a minute in doubt as to
how she should accept her words. Then rising from her chair, she laid
her restraining hands on Gerty's shoulders.

"My darling, do be careful," she entreated.

The shoulders beneath her hands rose in an indifferent shrug. "Oh, I've
been careful," laughed Gerty, "but it isn't any fun. Perry isn't careful
and he gets a great deal more out of life than I do."

"A great deal more of what?" demanded Laura.

For an instant Gerty thought attentively, while the mocking gayety
changed to a serious hardness upon her face.

"More forgetfulness," she answered presently. "That's what we all want
isn't it? Call it by what name you will--religion, dissipation,
morphia--what we are all trying to do is to intoxicate ourselves into
forgetting that life is life."

"But it isn't what I want," insisted Laura, "I want to feel everything
and to know that I feel it."

"Well, you're different," rejoined Gerty. "What I'm after is to be
happy, and I care very little what form it takes or what kind of
happiness mine may be. I've ceased to be particular about the details
even--if Billy Lancaster is my happiness I'll devour him and never waste
an idle moment in regret. Why should I?--Perry doesn't."

"So there's an end to Perry?"

"An end! Oh, you delicious child, there's only a beginning. Perry's cult
is the inaccessible--present him with al