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Title: Together

Author: Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

Release Date: May, 2005  [EBook #8134]
[This file was first posted on June 17, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, TOGETHER ***




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TOGETHER

BY

ROBERT HERRICK







PART ONE




CHAPTER I


She stood before the minister who was to marry them, very tall and
straight. With lips slightly parted she looked at him steadfastly, not at
the man beside her who was about to become her husband. Her father, with a
last gentle pressure of her arm, had taken his place behind her. In the
hush that had fallen throughout the little chapel, all the restless
movement of the people who had gathered there this warm June morning was
stilled, in the expectation of those ancient words that would unite the two
before the altar. Through the open window behind the altar a spray of young
woodbine had thrust its juicy green leaves and swayed slowly in the air,
which was heavy with earthy odors of all the riotous new growth that was
pushing forward in the fields outside. And beyond the vine could be seen a
bit of the cloudless, rain-washed sky.

There before the minister, who was fumbling mechanically at his
prayer-book, a great space seemed to divide the man and the woman from all
the others, their friends and relatives, who had come to witness the
ceremony of their union. In the woman's consciousness an unexpected
stillness settled, as if for these few moments she were poised between the
past of her whole life and the mysterious future. All the preoccupations of
the engagement weeks, the strange colorings of mood and feeling, all the
petty cares of the event itself, had suddenly vanished. She did not see
even him, the man she was to marry, only the rugged face of the old
minister, the bit of fluttering vine, the expanse of blue sky. She stood
before the veil of her life, which was about to be drawn aside.

This hushed moment was broken by the resonant tones of the minister as he
began the opening words of the sacrament that had been said over so many
millions of human beings. Familiar as the phrases were, she did not realize
them, could not summon back her attention from that depth within of awed
expectancy. After a time she became aware of the subdued movements in the
chapel, of people breaking into the remote circle of her mystery,--even
here they must needs have their part--and of the man beside her looking
intently at her, with flushed face. It was this man, this one here at her
side, whom she had chosen of all that might have come into her life; and
suddenly he seemed a stranger, standing there, ready to become her husband!
The woodbine waved, recalling to her flashing thoughts that day two years
before when the chapel was dedicated, and they two, then mere friends, had
planted this vine together. And now, after certain meetings, after some
surface intercourse, they had willed to come here to be made one...

"And who gives this woman in marriage?" the minister asked solemnly,
following the primitive formula which symbolizes that the woman is to be
made over from one family to another as a perpetual possession. She gave
herself of course! The words were but an outgrown form...

There was the necessary pause while the Colonel came forward, and taking
his daughter's hand from which the glove had been carefully turned back,
laid it gently in the minister's large palm. The father's lips twitched,
and she knew he was feeling the solemnity of his act, that he was
relinquishing a part of himself to another. Their marriage--her father's
and mother's--had been happy,--oh, very peaceful! And yet--hers must be
different, must strike deeper. For the first time she raised her shining
eyes to the man at her side...

"I, John, take thee Isabelle for my wedded wife, to have and to hold ... in
sickness and in health ... until death us do part ... and hereby I plight
thee my troth."

Those old words, heard so many times, which heretofore had echoed without
meaning to her,--she had vaguely thought them beautiful,--now came
freighted with sudden meaning, while from out the dreamlike space around
sounded the firm tones of the man at her side repeating slowly, with grave
pauses, word by word, the marriage oath. "I, John, take thee Isabelle,"
that voice was saying, and she knew that the man who spoke these words in
his calm, grave manner was the one she had chosen, to whom she had willed
to give herself for all time,--presently she would say it also,--for
always, always, "until death us do part." He was promising it with tranquil
assurance,--fidelity, the eternal bond, throughout the unknown years, out
of the known present. "And hereby I plight thee my troth." Without a tremor
the man's assured voice registered the oath--before God and man.

"I, Isabelle," and the priest took up with her this primal oath of
fidelity, body and soul. All at once the full personal import of the words
pierced her, and her low voice swelled unconsciously with her affirmation.
She was to be for always as she was now. They two had not been one before:
the words did not make them so now. It was their desire. But the old
divided selves, the old impulses, they were to die, here, forever.

She heard herself repeating the words after the minister. Her strong young
voice in the stillness of the chapel sounded strangely not her own voice,
but the voice of some unknown woman within her, who was taking the oath for
her in this barbaric ceremony whereby man and woman are bound together.
"And hereby I plight thee my troth,"--the voice sank to a whisper as of
prayer. Her eyes came back to the man's face, searching for his eyes.

There were little beads of perspiration on his broad brow, and the shaven
lips were closely pressed together, moulding the face into lines of
will,--the look of mastery. What was he, this man, now her husband for
always, his hand about hers in sign of perpetual possession and protection?
What beneath all was he who had taken with her, thus publicly, the mighty
oath of fidelity, "until death us do part"? Each had said it; each believed
it; each desired it wholly. Perversely, here in the moment of her deepest
feeling, intruded the consciousness of broken contracts, the waste of
shattered purposes. Ah, but _theirs_ was different! This absolute oath of
fidelity one to the other, each with his own will and his own desire,--this
irredeemable contract of union between man and woman,--it was not always a
binding sacrament. Often twisted and broken, men and women promising in the
belief of the best within them what was beyond their power to perform.
There were those in that very chapel who had said these words and broken
them, furtively or legally... With them, of course, it would be different,
would be the best; for she conceived their love to be of another kind,--the
enduring kind. Nevertheless, just here, while the priest of society
pronounced the final words of union, something spoke within the woman's
soul that it was a strange oath to be taking, a strange manner of making
two living beings one!

"And I pronounce you man and wife," the words ran. Then the minister
hastened on into his little homily upon the marriage state. But the woman's
thought rested at those fateful words,--"man and wife,"--the knot of the
contract. There should fall a new light in her heart that would make her
know they were really one, having now been joined as the book said "in holy
wedlock." From this sacramental union of persons there should issue to both
a new spirit...

Her husband was standing firm and erect, listening with all the
concentration of his mind to what the minister was saying--not tumultuously
distracted--as though he comprehended the exact gravity of this contract
into which he was entering, as he might that of any other he could make,
sure of his power to fulfil all, confident before Fate. She trembled
strangely. Did she know him, this other self? In the swift apprehension of
life's depths which came through her heightened mood she perceived that
ultimate division lying between all human beings, that impregnable fortress
of the individual soul.... It was all over. He looked tenderly at her. Her
lips trembled with a serious smile,--yes, they would understand now!

The people behind them moved more audibly. The thing was done; the priest's
words of exhortation were largely superfluous. All else that concerned
married life these two would have to find out for themselves. The thing was
done, as ordained by the church, according to the rules of society. Now it
was for Man and Wife to make of it what they would or--could.

The minister closed his book in dismissal. The groom offered his arm to the
bride. Facing the chapelful she came out of that dim world of wonder
whither she had strayed. Her veil thrown back, head proudly erect, eyes
mistily ranging above the onlookers, she descended the altar steps, gazing
down the straight aisle over the black figures, to the sunny village green,
beyond into the vista of life! ... Triumphant organ notes beat through the
chapel, as they passed between the rows of smiling faces,--familiar faces
only vaguely perceived, yet each with its own expression, its own reaction
from this ceremony. She swept on deliberately, with the grace of her long
stride, her head raised, a little smile on her open lips, her hand just
touching his,--going forward with him into life.

Only two faces stood out from the others at this moment,--the dark,
mischievous face of Nancy Lawton, smiling sceptically. Her dark, little
eyes seemed to say, 'Oh, you don't know yet!' And the other was the large,
placid face of a blond woman, older than the bride, standing beside a
stolid man at the end of a pew. The serene, soft eyes of this woman were
dim with tears, and a tender smile still lingered on her lips. She at
least, Alice Johnston, the bride's cousin, could smile through the tears--a
smile that told of the sweetness in life.....

At the door the frock-coated young ushers formed into double line through
which the couple passed. The village green outside was flooded with
sunshine, checkered by drooping elm branches. Bells began to ring from the
library across the green and from the schoolhouse farther down. It was
over--the fine old barbaric ceremony, the passing of the irredeemable
contract between man and woman, the public proclamation of eternal union.
Henceforth they were man and wife before the law, before their kind--one
and one, and yet not two.

Thus together they passed out of the church.




CHAPTER II


The company gathered within the chapel for the wedding now moved and talked
with evident relief, each one expressing his feeling of the solemn service.

"Very well done, very lovely!" the Senator was murmuring to the bride's
mother, just as he might give an opinion of a good dinner or some neat
business transaction or of a smartly dressed woman. It was a function of
life successfully performed--and he nodded gayly to a pretty woman three
rows away. He was handsome and gray-haired, long a widower, and evidently
considered weddings to be an attractive, ornamental feature of social life.
Mrs. Price, the bride's mother, intent upon escaping with the Colonel by
the side door and rejoining the bridal party at the house before the guests
arrived on foot, scarcely heeded the amiable Senator's remarks. This affair
of her daughter's marriage was, like most events, a matter of engrossing
details. The Colonel, in his usual gregarious manner, had strayed among the
guests, forgetful of his duties, listening with bent head to congratulatory
remarks. She had to send her younger son, Vickers, after him where he
lingered with Farrington Beals, the President of the great Atlantic and
Pacific Railroad, in which his new son-in-law held a position. When the
Colonel finally dragged himself away from the pleasant things that his old
friend Beals had to say about young Lane, he looked at his impatient wife
with his tender smile, as if he would like to pat her cheek and say, "Well,
we've started them right, haven't we?"

The guests flowed conversationally towards the door and the sunny green,
while the organ played deafeningly. But play as exultantly as it might, it
could not drown the babble of human voices. Every one wanted to utter those
excitable commonplaces that seem somehow to cover at such times deep
meanings.

"What a perfect wedding!"

"How pretty it all was!"

"Not a hitch."

"She looked the part."

"Good fellow--nice girl--ought to be happy ... Well, old man, when is your
turn coming? ... Could hear every word they said ... looked as though they
meant it, too! ..."

In an eddy of the centre aisle a tall, blond young woman with handsome,
square shoulders and dark eyes stood looking about her calmly, as if she
were estimating the gathering, setting each one down at the proper social
valuation, deciding, perhaps, in sum that they were a very "mixed lot," old
friends and new, poor and rich. A thin girl, also blond, with deep blue
eyes, and a fine bony contour of the face, was swept by the stream near the
solitary observer and held out a hand:--

"Cornelia!"

"Margaret!"

"Isn't it ideal!" Margaret Lawton exclaimed, her nervous face still stirred
by all that she had felt during the service,--"the day, the country, and
this dear little chapel!"

"Very sweet," the large woman replied in a purring voice, properly
modulated for the sentiment expressed. "Isabelle made an impressive bride."
And these two school friends moved on towards the door. Cornelia Pallanton,
still surveying the scene, nodded and said to her companion, "There's your
cousin Nannie Lawton. Her husband isn't here, I suppose? There are a good
many St. Louis people."

The guests were now scattered in little groups over the green, dawdling in
talk and breathing happily the June-scented air. The stolid man and his
placid wife who had sat near the rear had already started for the Colonel's
house, following the foot-path across the fields. They walked silently side
by side, as if long used to wordless companionship.

The amiable Senator and his friend Beals examined critically the little
Gothic chapel, which had been a gift to his native town by the Colonel, as
well as the stone library at the other end of the green. "Nice idea of
Price," the Senator was saying, "handsome buildings--pleasant little
village," and he moved in the direction of Miss Pallanton, who was alone.

Down below in the valley, on the railroad siding, lay the special train
that had brought most of the guests from New York that morning. The engine
emitted little puffs of white smoke in the still noon, ready to carry its
load back to the city after the breakfast. About the library steps were the
carriages of those who had driven over from neighboring towns; the whole
village had a disturbed and festal air.

The procession was straggling across the village street through the stile
and into the meadow, tramping down the thick young grass, up the slope to
the comfortable old white house that opened its broad verandas like
hospitable arms. The President of the Atlantic and Pacific, deserted by the
Senator, had offered his arm to a stern old lady with knotty hands partly
concealed in lace gloves. Her lined face had grown serious in age and
contention with life. She clung stiffly to the arm of the railroad
president,--proud, silent, and shy. She was _his_ mother. From her one
might conclude that the groom's people were less comfortably circumstanced
than the bride's--that this was not a marriage of ambition on the woman's
part. It was the first time Mrs. Lane had been "back east" since she had
left her country home as a young bride. It was a proud moment, walking with
her son's chief; but the old lady did not betray any elation, as she
listened to the kindly words that Beals found to say about her son.

"A first-rate railroad man, Mrs. Lane,--he will move up rapidly. We can't
get enough of that sort."

The mother, never relaxing her tight lips, drank it all in, treasured it as
a reward for the hard years spent in keeping that boarding-house in Omaha,
after the death of her husband, who had been a country doctor.

"He's a good son," she admitted as the eulogy flagged. "And he knows how to
get on with all kinds of folks...."

At their heels were Vickers Price and the thin Southern girl, Margaret
Lawton. Vickers, just back from Munich for this event, had managed to give
the conventional dress that he was obliged to wear a touch of strangeness,
with an enormous flowing tie of delicate pink, a velvet waistcoat, and
broad-brimmed hat. The clothes and the full beard, the rippling chestnut
hair and pointed mustache, showed a desire for eccentricity on the part of
the young man that distinguished him from all the other well-dressed young
Americans. He carried a thin cane and balanced a cigarette between his
lips.

"Yes," he was saying, "I had to come over to see Isabelle married, but I
shall go back after a look around--not the place for me!" He laughed and
waved his cane towards the company with an ironic sense of his
inappropriateness to an American domestic scene.

"You are a composer,--music, isn't it?" the girl asked, a flash in her blue
eyes at the thought of youth, Munich, music.

"I have written a few things; am getting ready, you know," Vickers Price
admitted modestly.

Just there they were joined by a handsome, fashionably dressed man, his
face red with rapid walking. He touched his long, well-brushed black
mustache with his handkerchief as he explained:--

"Missed the train--missed the show--but got here in time for the fun, on
the express."

He took his place beside the girl, whose color deepened and eyes turned
away,--perhaps annoyed, or pleased?

"That's what you come for, isn't it?" she said, forcing a little joke.
Noticing that the two men did not speak, she added hastily, "Don't you know
Mr. Price, Mr. Vickers Price? Mr. Hollenby."

The newcomer raised his silk hat, sweeping Vickers, who was fanning himself
with his broad-brimmed felt, in a light, critical stare. Then Mr. Hollenby
at once appropriated the young woman's attention, as though he would
indicate that it was for her sake he had taken this long, hot journey.

       *       *       *       *       *

There were other little groups at different stages on the hill,--one
gathered about a small, dark-haired woman, whose face burned duskily in the
June sun. She was Aline Goring,--the Eros of that schoolgirl band at St.
Mary's who had come to see their comrade married. And there was Elsie
Beals,--quite elegant, the only daughter of the President of the A. and P.
The Woodyards, Percy and Lancey, classmates of Vickers at the university,
both slim young men, wearing their clothes carelessly,--clearly not of the
Hollenby manner,--had attached themselves here. Behind them was Nan Lawton,
too boisterous even for the open air. At the head of the procession, now
nearly topping the hill beneath the house, was that silent married couple,
the heavy, sober man and the serene, large-eyed woman, who did not mingle
with the others. He had pointed out to her the amiable Senator and
President Beals, both well-known figures in the railroad world where he
worked, far down, obscurely, as a rate clerk. His wife looked at these two
great ones, who indirectly controlled the petty destiny of the Johnstons,
and squeezed her husband's hand more tightly, expressing thus many mixed
feelings,--content with him, pride and confidence in him, in spite of his
humble position in the race.

"It's just like the Pilgrim's Progress," she said with a little smile,
looking backward at the stream.

"But who is Christian?" the literal husband asked. Her eyes answered that
she knew, but would not tell.

       *       *       *       *       *

Just as each one had reflected his own emotion at the marriage, so each
one, looking up at the hospitable goal ahead,--that irregular, broad white
house poured over the little Connecticut hilltop,--had his word about the
Colonel's home.

"No wonder they call it the Farm," sneered Nan Lawton to the Senator.

"It's like the dear old Colonel, the new and the old," the Senator
sententiously interpreted.

Beals, overhearing this, added, "It's poor policy to do things that way.
Better to pull the old thing down and go at it afresh,--you save time and
money, and have it right in the end."

"It's been in the family a hundred years or more," some one remarked. "The
Colonel used to mow this field himself, before he took to making hardware."

"Isabelle will pull it about their ears when she gets the chance," Mrs.
Lawton said. "The present-day young haven't much sentiment for
uncomfortable souvenirs."

Her cousin Margaret was remarking to Vickers, "What a good, homey sort of
place,--like our old Virginia houses,--all but that great barn!"

It was, indeed, as the Senator had said, very like the Colonel, who could
spare neither the old nor the new. It was also like him to give Grafton a
new stone library and church, and piece on rooms here and there to his own
house. In spite of these additions demanded by comfort there was something
in the conglomeration to remind the Colonel, who had returned to Grafton
after tasting strife and success in the Middle West, of the plain home of
his youth.

"The dear old place!" Alice Johnston murmured to her husband. "It was never
more attractive than to-day, as if it knew that it was marrying off an only
daughter." To her, too, the Farm had memories, and no new villa spread out
spaciously in Italian, Tudor, or Classic style could ever equal this white,
four-chimneyed New England mansion.

On the west slope of the hill near the veranda a large tent had been
erected, and into this black-coated waiters were running excitedly to and
fro around a wing of the house which evidently held the servant quarters.
Just beyond the tent a band was playing a loud march. There was to be
dancing on the lawn after the breakfast, and in the evening on the village
green for everybody, and later fireworks. The Colonel had insisted on the
dancing and the fireworks, in spite of Vickers's jeers about pagan rites
and the Fourth of July.

The bride and groom had already taken their places in the broad hall, which
bisected the old house. The guests were to enter from the south veranda,
pass through the hall, and after greeting the couple gain the refreshment
tent through the library windows. The Colonel had worked it all out with
that wonderful attention to detail that had built up his great hardware
business. Upstairs in the front bedrooms the wedding presents had been
arranged, and nicely ticketed with cards for the amusement of aged
relatives,--a wonderful assortment of silver and gold and glass,--an
exhibition of the wide relationships of the contracting pair, at least of
the wife. And through these rooms soft-footed detectives patrolled,
examining the guests....

Isabelle Price had not wished her wedding to be of this kind, ordered so to
speak like the refreshments from Sherry and the presents from Tiffany, with
a special train on the siding. When she and John had decided to be married
at the old farm, she had thought of a country feast,--her St. Mary's girls
of course and one or two more, but quite to themselves! They were to walk
with these few friends to the little chapel, where the dull old village
parson would say the necessary words. The marriage over, and a simple
breakfast in the old house,--the scene of their love,--they were to ride
off among the hills to her camp on Dog Mountain, alone. And thus quietly,
without flourish, they would enter the new life. But as happens to all such
pretty idylls, reality had forced her hand. Colonel Price's daughter could
not marry like an eloping schoolgirl, so her mother had declared. Even John
had taken it as a matter of course, all this elaborate celebration, the
guests, the special train, the overflowing house. And she had yielded her
ideal of having something special in her wedding, acquiescing in the "usual
thing."

But now that the first guests began to top the hill and enter the hall with
warm, laughing greetings, all as gay as the June sunlight, the women in
their fresh summer gowns, she felt the joy of the moment. "Isn't it jolly,
so many of 'em!" she exclaimed to her husband, squeezing his arm gayly. He
took it, like most things, as a matter of course. The hall soon filled with
high tones and noisy laughter, as the guests crowded in from the lawn about
the couple, to offer their congratulations, to make their little jokes, and
premeditated speeches. Standing at the foot of the broad stairs, her veil
thrown back, her fair face flushed with color and her lips parted in a
smile, one arm about a thick bunch of roses, the bride made a bright spot
of light in the dark hall. All those whirling thoughts, the depths to which
her spirit had descended during the service, had fled; she was excited by
this throng of smiling, joking people, by the sense of her role. She had
the feeling of its being _her_ day, and she was eager to drink every drop
in the sparkling cup. A great kindness for everybody, a sort of beaming
sympathy for the world, bubbled up in her heart, making the repeated hand
squeeze which she gave--sometimes a double pressure--a personal expression
of her emotion. Her flashing hazel eyes, darting into each face in turn as
it came before her, seemed to say: 'Of course, I am the happiest woman in
the world, and you must be happy, too. It is such a good world!' While her
voice was repeating again and again, with the same tremulous intensity,
"Thank you--it is awfully nice of you--I am so glad you are here!"

To the amiable Senator's much worn compliment,--"It's the prettiest wedding
I have seen since your mother's, and the prettiest bride, too,"--she
blushed a pleased reply, though she had confessed to John only the night
before that the sprightly Senator was "horrid,--he has such a way of
squeezing your hand, as if he would like to do more,"--to which the young
man had replied in his perplexity, due to the Senator's exalted position in
the A. and P. Board, "I suppose it's only the old boy's way of being
cordial."

Even when Nannie Lawton came loudly with Hollenby--she had captured him
from her cousin--and threw her arms about the bride, Isabelle did not draw
back. She forgot that she disliked the gay little woman, with her muddy
eyes, whose "affairs"--one after the other--were condoned "for her
husband's sake." Perhaps Nannie felt what it might be to be as happy and
proud as she was,--she was large, generous, comprehending at this moment.
And she passed the explosive little woman over to her husband, who received
her with the calm courtesy that never made an enemy.

But when "her girls" came up the line, she felt happiest. Cornelia was
first, large, handsome, stately, her broad black hat nodding above the
feminine stream, her dark eyes observing all, while she slowly smiled to
the witticisms Vickers murmured in her ear. Every one glanced at Miss
Pallanton; she was a figure, as Isabelle realized when she finally stood
before her,--a very handsome figure, and would get her due attention from
her world. They had not cared very much for "Conny" at St. Mary's, though
she was a handsome girl then and had what was called "a good mind." There
was something coarse in the detail of this large figure, the plentiful
reddish hair, the strong, straight nose,--all of which the girls of St.
Mary's had interpreted their own way, and also the fact that she had come
from Duluth,--probably of "ordinary" people. Surely not a girl's girl, nor
a woman's woman! But one to be reckoned with when it came to men. Isabelle
was conscious of her old reserve as she listened to Conny's piping,
falsetto voice,--such a funny voice to come from that large person through
that magnificent white throat.

"It makes me so happy, dear Isabelle," the voice piped; "it is all so
ideal, so exactly what it ought to be for you, don't you know?" And as
Percy Woodyard bore her off--he had hovered near all the time--she smiled
again, leaving Isabelle to wonder what Conny thought would be "just right"
for her.

"You must hurry, Conny," she called on over Vickers's head, "and make up
your mind; you are almost our last!"

"You know I never hurry," the smiling lips piped languidly, and the large
hat sailed into the library, piloted on either side by Woodyard and
Vickers. Isabelle had a twinge of sisterly jealousy at seeing her younger
brother so persistently in the wake of the large, blond girl. Dear Vick,
her own chum, her girl's first ideal of a man, fascinatingly developed by
his two years in Munich, must not go bobbing between Nan Lawton and Conny!

And here was Margaret Lawton--so different from her cousin's wife--with the
delicate, high brow, the firm, aristocratic line from temple to chin. She
was the rarest and best of the St. Mary's set, and though Isabelle had
known her at school only a year, she had felt curiosity and admiration for
the Virginian. Her low, almost drawling voice, which reflected a controlled
spirit, always soothed her. The deep-set blue eyes had caught Isabelle's
glance at Vickers, and with an amused smile the Southern girl said, "He's
in the tide!"

Isabelle said, "I am so, so glad you could get here, Margaret."

"I wanted to--very much. I made mother put off our sailing."

"How is the Bishop?" she asked, as Margaret was pushed on.

"Oh, happy, riding about the mountains and converting the poor heathen, who
prefer whiskey to religion. Mother's taking him to England this summer to
show him off to the foreign clergy."

"And Washington?"

Margaret's thin, long lips curved ironically for answer. Hollenby, who
seemed to have recollected a purpose, was waiting for her at the library
door.... "Ah, my Eros!" Isabella exclaimed with delight, holding forth two
hands to a small, dark young woman, with waving brown hair and large eyes
that were fixed on distant objects.

"Eros with a husband and two children," Aline Goring murmured, in her soft
contralto. "You remember Eugene? At the Springs that summer?" The husband,
a tall, smooth-shaven, young man with glasses and the delicate air of the
steam-heated American scholar bowed stiffly.

"Of course! Didn't I aid and abet you two?"

"That's two years and a half ago," Aline remarked, as if the simple words
covered a multitude of facts about life. "We are on our way to St. Louis to
settle."

"Splendid!" Isabelle exclaimed. "We shall have you again. Torso, where we
are exiled for the present, is only a night's ride from St. Louis."

Aline smiled that slow, warm smile, which seemed to come from the remote
inner heart of her dreamy life. Isabelle looked at her eagerly, searching
for the radiant, woodsy creature she had known, that Eros, with her dreamy,
passionate, romantic temperament, a girl whom girls adored and kissed and
petted, divining in her the feminine spirit of themselves. Surely, she
should be happy, Aline, the beautiful girl made for love, poetic, tender.
The lovely eyes were there, but veiled; the velvety skin had roughened; and
the small body was almost heavy. The wood nymph had been submerged in
matrimony.

Goring was saying in a twinkling manner:--

"I've been reckoning up, Mrs. Lane. You are the seventh most intimate girl
friend Aline has married off the last two years. How many more of you are
there?"

Aline, putting her arms about the bride's neck, drew her face to her lips
and whispered:--

"Dearie, my darling! I hope you will be so happy,--that it will be all you
can wish!" After these two had disappeared into the library, where there
was much commotion about the punch-bowl, the bride wondered--were _they_
happy? She had seen the engagement at Southern Springs,--the two most
ecstatic, unearthly lovers she had ever known.... But now? ...

Thus the stream of her little world flowed on, repeating its high-pitched
note of gratulation, of jocular welcome to the married state, as if to say,
'Well, now you are one of us--you've been brought in--this is life.' That
was what these smiling people were thinking, as they welcomed the neophytes
to the large vale of human experience. 'We have seen you through this
business, started you joyously on the common path. And now what will you
make of it?' For the occasion they ignored, good naturedly, the stones
along the road, the mistakes, the miserable failures that lined the path,
assuming the bride's proper illusion of triumph and confidence.... Among
the very last came the Johnstons, who had lingered outside while the more
boisterous ones pressed about the couple. Isabelle noticed that the large
brown eyes of the placid woman, who always seemed to her much older than
herself, were moist, and her face was serious when she said, "May it be all
that your heart desires--the Real Thing!"

A persistent aunt interrupted them here, and it was hours afterward when
Isabelle's thought came back to these words and dwelt on them. 'The real
thing!' Of course, that was what it was to be, her marriage,--the woman's
symbol of the Perfect, not merely Success (though with John they could not
fail of worldly success), nor humdrum content--but, as Alice said, the real
thing,--a state of passionate and complete union. Something in those misty
brown eyes, something in the warm, deep voice of the older woman, in the
prayer-like form of the wish, sank deep into her consciousness.

She turned to her husband, who was chatting with Fosdick, a large, heavy
man with a Dr. Johnson head on massive shoulders. One fat hand leaned
heavily on a fat club, for Fosdick was slightly lame and rolled in his
gait.

"Isabelle," he remarked with a windy sigh, "I salute my victor!"

Old Dick, Vickers's playmate in the boy-and-girl days, her playmate,
too,--he had wanted to marry her for years, ever since Vick's freshman year
when he had made them a visit at the Farm. He had grown very heavy since
then,--time which he had spent roving about in odd corners of the earth. As
he stood there, his head bent mockingly before the two, Isabelle felt
herself Queen once more, the--American woman who, having surveyed all, and
dominated all within the compass of her little world, has chosen the One.
But not Dickie, humorous and charming as he was.

"How goes it, Dickie?"

"As always," he puffed; "I come from walking or rather limping up and down
this weary earth and observing--men and women--how they go about to make
themselves miserable."

"Stuff!"

"My dear friends," he continued, placing both hands on the big cane, "you
are about to undergo a new and wonderful experience. You haven't the
slightest conception of what it is. You think it is love; but it is the
holy state of matrimony,--a very different proposition--"

They interrupted him with laughing abuse, but he persisted,--a serious
undertone to his banter. "Yes, I have always observed the scepticism of
youth, no matter what may be the age of the contracting parties and their
previous experience, in this matter. But Love and Marriage are two distinct
and entirely independent states of being,--one is the creation of God, the
other of Society. I have observed that few make them coalesce."

As relatives again interposed, Fosdick rolled off, ostentatiously thumping
his stick on the floor, and made straight for the punch-bowl, where he
seemed to meet congenial company.




CHAPTER III


Meanwhile inside the great tent the commotion was at its height, most of
the guests--those who had escaped the fascination of the punch-bowl--having
found their way thither. Perspiring waiters rushed back and forth with
salad and champagne bottles, which were seized by the men and borne off to
the women waiting suitably to be fed by the men whom they had attached.
Near the entrance the Colonel, with his old friends Beals and Senator
Thomas, was surveying the breakfast scene, a contented smile on his kind
face, as he murmured assentingly, "So--so." He and the Senator had served
in the same regiment during the War, Price retiring as Colonel and the
Senator as Captain; while the bridegroom's father, Tyringham Lane, had been
the regimental surgeon.

"What a good fellow Tyringham was, and how he would have liked to be here!"
the Senator was saying sentimentally, as he held out a glass to be
refilled. "Poor fellow!--he never got much out of his life; didn't know how
to make the most of things,--went out there to that Iowa prairie after the
War. You say he left his widow badly off?"

The Colonel nodded, and added with pride, "But John has made that right
now."

The Senator, who had settled in Indianapolis and practised railroad law
until his clients had elevated him to the Senate, considered complacently
the various dispensations of Providence towards men. He said generously:--

"Well, Tyringham's son has good blood, and it will tell. He will make his
way. We'll see to that, eh, Beals?" and the Senator sauntered over to a
livelier group dominated by Cornelia Pallanton's waving black plumes.

"Oh, marriage!" Conny chaffed, "it's the easiest thing a woman can do,
isn't it? Why should one be in a hurry when it's so hard to go back?"

"Matrimony," Fosdick remarked, "is an experiment where nobody's experience
counts but your own." He had been torn from the punch-bowl and thus
returned to his previous train of thought.

"Is that why some repeat it so often?" Elsie Beals inquired. She had broken
her engagement the previous winter and had spent the summer hunting with
Indian guides among the Canadian Rockies. She regarded herself as unusual,
and turned sympathetically to Fosdick, who also had a reputation for being
odd.

"So let us eat and be merry," that young man said, seizing a pate and glass
of champagne, "though I never could see why good people should make such an
unholy rumpus when two poor souls decide to attempt the great experiment of
converting illusion into reality."

"Some succeed," an earnest young man suggested.

Conny, who had turned from the constant Woodyard to the voluble fat man,
who might be a Somebody, remarked:--

"I suppose you don't see the puddles when you are in their condition. It's
always the belief that we are going to escape 'em that drives us all into
your arms."

"What I object to," Fosdick persisted, feeding himself prodigiously, "is
not the fact, but this savage glee over it. It's as though a lot of caged
animals set up a howl of delight every time the cage door was opened and a
new pair was introduced into the pen. They ought to perform the wedding
ceremony in sackcloth and ashes, after duly fasting, accompanied by a few
faithful friends garbed in black with torches."

Conny gave him a cold, surface smile, setting down his talk as "young" and
beamed at the approaching Senator.

"Oh, what an idea!" giggled a little woman. "If you can't dance at your own
wedding, you may never have another chance."

Conny, though intent upon the Senator, kept an eye upon Woodyard,
introducing him to the distinguished man, thinking, no doubt, that the
Chairman of the A. and P. Board might be useful to the young lawyer. For
whatever she might be to women, this large blond creature with white neck,
voluptuous lips, and slow gaze from childlike eyes had the power of drawing
males to her, a power despised and also envied by women. Those simple eyes
seemed always to seek information about obvious matters. But behind the
eyes Conny was thinking, 'It's rather queer, this crowd. And these Prices
with all their money might do so much better. That Fosdick is a silly
fellow. The Senator is worn of course, but still important!' And yet Conny,
with all her sureness, did not know all her own mental processes. For she,
too, was really looking for a mate, weighing, estimating men to that end,
and some day she would come to a conclusion,--would take a man, Woodyard or
another, giving him her very handsome person, and her intelligence, in
exchange for certain definite powers of brain and will.

The bride and groom entered the tent at last. Isabelle, in a renewed glow
of triumph, stepped over to the table and with her husband's assistance
plunged a knife into the huge cake, while her health was being drunk with
cheers. As she firmly cut out a tiny piece, she exposed a thin but
beautifully moulded arm.

"Handsome girl," the Senator murmured in Conny's ear. "Must be some sore
hearts here to-day. I don't see how such a beauty could escape until she
was twenty-six. But girls want their fling these days, same as the men!"

"Toast! Toast the bride!" came voices from all sides, while the waiters
hurried here and there slopping the wine into empty glasses.

As the bride left the tent to get ready for departure, she caught sight of
Margaret Lawton in a corner of the veranda with Hollenby, who was bending
towards her, his eyes fastened on her face. Margaret was looking far away,
across the fields to where Dog Mountain rose in the summer haze. Was
Margaret deciding _her_ fate at this moment,--attracted, repulsed, waiting
for the deciding thrill, while her eyes searched for the ideal of happiness
on the distant mountain? She turned to look at the man, drawing back as his
hand reached forward. So little, so much--woman's fate was in the making
this June day, all about the old house,--attracting, repulsing,
weighing,--unconsciously moulding destiny that might easily be momentous in
the outcome of the years....

When the bride came down, a few couples had already begun to dance, but
they followed the other guests to the north side where the carriage stood
ready. Isabelle looked very smart in her new gown, a round travelling hat
just framing her brilliant eyes and dark hair. Mrs. Price followed her
daughter closely, her brows puckered in nervous fear lest something should
be forgotten. She was especially anxious about a certain small bag, and had
the maid take out all the hand luggage to make sure it had not been
mislaid.

Some of the younger ones led by Vickers pelted the couple with rice, while
this delay occurred. It was a silly custom that they felt bound to follow.
There was no longer any meaning in the symbol of fertility. Multiply and be
fruitful, the Bible might urge, following an ancient economic ideal of
happiness. But the end of marriage no longer being this gross purpose, the
sterile woman has at last come into honor! ...

The bride was busy kissing a group of young women who had clustered about
her,--Elsie Beals, Aline, Alice Johnston, Conny. Avoiding Nannie Lawton's
wide open arms, she jumped laughingly into the carriage, then turned for a
last kiss from the Colonel.

"Here, out with you Joe," Vickers exclaimed to the coachman. "I'll drive
them down to the station. Quick now,--they mustn't lose the express!"

He bundled the old man from the seat, gathered up the reins with a
flourish, and whipped the fresh horses. The bride's last look, as the
carriage shot through the bunch of oleanders at the gate, gathered in the
group of waving, gesticulating men and women, and above them on the steps
the Colonel, with his sweet, half-humorous smile, her mother at his side,
already greatly relieved, and behind all the serious face of Alice
Johnston, the one who knew the mysteries both tender and harsh, and who
could still call it all good! ...

Vickers whisked them to the station in a trice, soothing his excitement by
driving diabolically, cutting corners and speeding down hill. At the
platform President Beals's own car was standing ready for them, the two
porters at the steps. The engine of the special was to take them to the
junction where the "Bellefleur" would be attached to the night express,--a
special favor for the President of the A. and P. The Senator had insisted
on their having his camp in the Adirondacks for a month. Isabelle would
have preferred her own little log hut in the firs of Dog Mountain, which
she and Vickers had built. There they could be really quite alone, forced
to care for themselves. But the Colonel could not understand her bit of
sentiment, and John thought they ought not to offend the amiable Senator,
who had shown himself distinctly friendly. So they were to enter upon their
new life enjoying these luxuries of powerful friends.

The porters made haste to put the bags in the car, and the engine snorted.

"Good-by, Mr. Gerrish," Isabelle called to the station agent, who was
watching them at a respectful distance. Suddenly he seemed to be an old
friend, a part of all that she was leaving behind.

"Good-by, Miss Price--Mrs. Lane," he called back. "Good luck to you!"

"Dear old Vick," Isabelle murmured caressingly, "I hate most to leave you
behind."

"Better stay, then,--it isn't too late," he joked. "We could elope with the
ponies,--you always said you would run off with me!"

She hugged him more tightly, burying her head in his neck, shaking him
gently. "Dear old Vick! Don't be a fool! And be good to Dad, won't you?"

"I'll try not to abuse him."

"You know what I mean--about staying over for the summer. Oh dear, dear!"
There was a queer sob in her voice, as if now for the first time she knew
what it was. The old life was all over. Vick had been so much of that! And
she had seen little or nothing of him since his return from Europe, so
absorbed had she been in the bustle of her marriage. Up there on Dog
Mountain which swam in the haze of the June afternoon they had walked on
snowshoes one cold January night, over the new snow by moonlight, talking
marvellously of all that life was to be. She believed then that she should
never marry, but remain always Vick's comrade,--to guide him, to share his
triumphs. Now she was abandoning that child's plan. She shook with nervous
sobs.

"The engineer says we must start, dear," Lane suggested. "We have only just
time to make the connection."

Vickers untwisted his sister's arms from his neck and placed them gently in
her husband's hands.

"Good-by, girl," he called.

Sinking into a chair near the open door, Isabelle gazed back at the hills
of Grafton until the car plunged into a cut. She gave a long sigh. "We're
off!" her husband said joyously. He was standing beside her, one hand
resting on her shoulder.

"Yes, dear!" She took his strong, muscled hand in hers. But when he tried
to draw her to him, she shrank back involuntarily, startled, and looked at
him with wide-open eyes as if she would read Destiny in him,--the Man, her
husband.

For this was marriage, not the pantomime they had lived through all that
day. That was demanded by custom; but now, alone with this man, his eyes
alight with love and desire, his lips caressing her hair, his hands drawing
her to him,--this was marriage!

Her eyes closed as if to shut out his face,--"Don't, don't!" she murmured
vaguely. Suddenly she started to her feet, her eyes wide open, and she held
him away from her, looking into him, looking deep into his soul.




CHAPTER IV


It was a hot, close night. After the Bellefleur had been coupled to the
Western express at the junction, Lane had the porters make up a bed for
Isabelle on the floor of the little parlor next the observation platform,
and here at the rear of the long train, with the door open, she lay
sleepless through the night hours, listening to the rattle of the trucks,
the thud of heavy wheels on the rails, disturbed only when the car was
shifted to the Adirondack train by the blue glare of arc lights and phantom
figures rushing to and fro in the pallid night.

The excitement of the day had utterly exhausted her; but her mind was
extraordinarily alive with impressions,--faces and pictures from this great
day of her existence, her marriage. And out of all these crowding images
emerged persistently certain ones,--Aline, with the bloom almost gone, the
worn air of something carelessly used. That was due to the children, to
cares,--the Gorings were poor and the two years abroad must have been a
strain. All the girls at St. Mary's had thought that marriage ideal, made
all of love. For there was something of the poet in Eugene Goring, the slim
scholar, walking with raised head and speaking with melodious voice. He was
a girl's ideal.... And then came Nan Lawton, with her jesting tone, and
sly, half-shut eyes. Isabelle remembered how brilliant Nan's marriage was,
how proud she herself had been to have a part in it. Nan's face was blotted
by Alice Johnston's with her phlegmatic husband. She was happy, serene, but
old and acquainted with care.

Why should she think of them, of any other marriage? Hers was to be
different,--oh, yes, quite exceptional and perfect, with an intimacy, a
mutual helpfulness.... The girls at St. Mary's had all had their emotional
experiences, which they confessed to one another; and she had had hers, of
course, like her affair with Fosdick; but so innocent, so merely kittenish
that they had almost disappeared from memory. These girls at St. Mary's
read poetry, and had dreams of heroes, in the form of football players.
They all thought about marriage, coming as they did from well-to-do
parents, whose daughters might be expected to marry. Marriage, men,
position in the world,--all that was their proper inheritance.

After St. Mary's there had been two winters in St. Louis,--her first real
dinners and parties, her first real men. Then a brief season in Washington
as Senator Thomas's guest, where the horizon, especially the man part of
it, had considerably widened. She had made a fair success in Washington,
thanks to her fresh beauty and spirit, and also, she was frank to confess,
thanks to the Senator's interest and the reputation of her father's wealth.
Then had come a six months with her mother and Vickers in Europe, from
which she returned abruptly to get engaged, to begin life seriously.

These experimental years had seemed to her full of radiant avenues, any one
of which she was free to enter, and for a while she had gone joyously on,
discovering new avenues, pleasing herself with trying them all
imaginatively. At the head of all these avenues had stood a man, of course.
She could recall them all: the one in St. Louis who had followed her to
Washington, up the Nile, would not be turned away. Once he had touched her,
taken her hand, and she had felt cold,--she knew that his was not her way.
In Washington there had been a brilliant congressman whom the Senator
approved of,--an older man. She had given him some weeks of puzzled
deliberation, then rejected him, as she considered sagely, because he spoke
only to her mind. Perhaps the most dangerous had been the Austrian whom she
had met in Rome. She almost yielded there; but once when they were alone
together she had caught sight of depths in him, behind his black eyes and
smiling lips, that made her afraid,--deep differences of race. The Prices
were American in an old-fashioned, clean, plain sense. So when he
persisted, she made her mother engage passage for home and fled with the
feeling that she must put an ocean between herself and this man, fled to
the arms of the man she was to marry, who somehow in the midst of his busy
life managed to meet her in New York.

But why him? Out of all these avenues, her possibilities of various fate,
why had she chosen him, the least promising outwardly? Was it done in a
mood of reaction against the other men who had sought her? He was most
unlike them all, with a background of hard struggle, with limitations
instead of privileges such as they had. The Colonel's daughter could
understand John Lane's persistent force,--patient, quiet, sure. She
remembered his shy, inexperienced face when her father first brought him to
the house for dinner. She had thought little of him then,--the Colonel was
always bringing home some rough diamond,--but he had silently absorbed her
as he did everything in his path, and selected her, so to speak, as he
selected whatever he wanted. And after that whenever she came back to her
father's home from her little expeditions into the world, he was always
there, and she came to know that he wanted her,--was waiting until his
moment should come. It came.

Never since then had she had a regret for those possibilities that had been
hers,--for those other men standing at the other avenues and inviting her.
From the moment that his arms had held her, she knew that he was the
best,--so much stronger, finer, simpler than any other. She was proud that
she had been able to divine this quality and could prefer real things to
sham. During the engagement months she had learned, bit by bit, the story
of his struggle, what had been denied to him of comfort and advantage, what
he had done for himself and for his mother. She yearned to give him what he
had never had,--pleasure, joy, the soft suavities of life, what she had had
always.

Now she was his! Her wandering thoughts came back to that central fact.

Half frightened, she drew the blanket about her shoulders and listened. He
had been so considerate of her,--had left her here to rest after making
sure of her comfort and gone forward to the stuffy stateroom to sleep,
divining that she was not yet ready to accept him; that if he took her now,
he should violate something precious in her,--that she was not fully won.
She realized this delicate instinct and was grateful to him. Of course she
was his,--only his; all the other avenues had been closed forever by her
love for him, her marriage to him. Ah, that should be wonderful for them
both, all the years that were to come! Nevertheless, here on the threshold,
her wayward soul had paused the merest moment to consider those other
avenues, what they might have offered of experience, of knowledge, had she
taken any other one of them. Were she here with another than him, destiny,
her inmost self, the whole world of being would be changed, would be other
than it was to be! What was that mysterious power that settled fate on its
grooves? What were those other lives within her soul never to be lived, the
lives she might have lived? Bewildered, weary, she stretched out her arms
dreamily to life, and with parted lips sank into slumber....

The sun was streaming through the open door; the train had come to a halt.
Isabelle awoke with a start, afraid. Her husband was bending over her and
she stared up directly into his amused eyes, looked steadily at him,
remembering now all that she had thought the night before. This was her
avenue--this was _he_ ... yet she closed her eyes as he bent still nearer
to kiss her neck, her temples, her lips. Like a frightened child she drew
the clothes close about her, and turned from his eager embraces. Beyond his
face she saw a line of straight, stiff firs beside the track, and the blue
foot-hills through which the train was winding its way upwards to the
mountains. She stretched herself sleepily, murmuring:--

"Dear, I'm so tired! Is it late?"

"Ten o'clock. We're due in half an hour. I had to wake you."

"In half an hour!" She fled to the dressing-room, putting him off with a
fleeting kiss.

One of the Senator's guides met them at the station with a buckboard. All
the way driving upwards through the woods to the camp they were very gay.
It was like one of those excursions she used to take with Vickers when he
was in his best, most expansive mood, alternately chaffing and petting her.
Lane was in high spirits, throwing off completely that sober self which
made him so weighty in his world, revealing an unexpected boyishness. He
joked with the guide, talked fishing and shooting. With the deep breaths of
mountain air he expanded, his eyes flashing a new fire of joy at sight of
the woods and streams. Once when they stopped to water the horses he seized
the drinking-cup and dashed up the slope to a spring hidden among the
trees. He brought back a brimming cupful of cold water, which she emptied.
Then with a boyish, chivalrous smile he put his lips to the spot where she
had drunk and drained the last drop. "That's enough for me!" he said, and
they laughed self-consciously. His homage seemed to say that thus through
life he would be content with what she left him to drink,--absurd fancy,
but at this moment altogether delightful.... Later she rested, pillowing
her head on his shoulder, covered by his coat, while the trap jolted on
through the woods between high hills. Now and then he touched her face with
the tips of his strong fingers, brushing away the wandering threads of
hair. Very peaceful, happy, feeling that it was all as she would have
wished it, she shut her eyes, content to rest on this comrade, so strong
and so gentle. Life would be like this, always.

The Senator's camp was a camp only in name, of course; in fact it was an
elaborate and expensive rustic establishment on a steep bluff above a
little mountain lake. The Japanese cook had prepared a rich dinner, and the
champagne was properly iced. The couple tiptoed about the place, looking at
each other in some dismay, and John readily fell in with her suggestion
that they should try sleeping in the open, with a rough shelter of
boughs,--should make their first nest for themselves. The guide took them
to a spot some distance up the lake and helped them cut the fir boughs, all
but those for the bed, which they insisted upon gathering for themselves.
After bringing up the blankets and the bags he paddled back to the camp,
leaving them to themselves in the solitude of the woods, under the black,
star-strewn sky.

Alone with him thus beside their little fire her heart was full of dream
and content, of peace and love. They two seemed to have come up out of the
world to some higher level of life. After the joyous day this solitude of
the deep forest was perfect. When the fire had died down to the embers, he
circled her with his arms and kissed her. Although her body yielded to his
strong embrace her lips were cold, hard, and her eyes answered his passion
with a strange, aloof look, as if her soul waited in fear.... She knew what
marriage was to be, although she had never listened to the allusions
whispered among married women and more experienced girls. Something in the
sex side of the relations between men and women had always made her shrink.
She was not so much pure in body and soul, as without sex, unborn. She knew
the fact of nature, the eternal law of life repeating itself through desire
and passion; but she realized it remotely, only in her mind, as some
necessary physiological mechanism of living, like perspiration, fatigue,
hunger. But it had not spoken in her body, in her soul; she did not feel
that it ever could speak to her as it was speaking in the man's lighted
eyes, in his lips. So now as always she was cold, tranquil beneath her
lover's kisses.

And later on their bed of boughs, with her husband's arms about her, his
heart throbbing against her breast, his warm breath covering her neck, she
lay still, very still,--aloof, fearful of this mystery to be revealed, a
little weary, wishing that she were back once more in the car or in her own
room at the Farm, for this night, to return on the morrow to her comrade
for another joyous, free day.

"My love! ... Come to me! ... I love you, love you!" ...

The passionate tone beat against her ears, yet roused no thrilling
response. The trembling voice, the intensity of the worn old words coming
from him,--it was all like another man suddenly appearing in the guise of
one she thought she knew so well! The taut muscles of his powerful arm
pressing against her troubled her. She would have fled,--why could one be
like this! Still she caressed his face and hair, kissing him gently. Oh,
yes, she loved him,--she was his! He was her husband.' Nevertheless she
could not meet him wholly in this inmost intimacy, and her heart was
troubled. If he could be content to be her companion, her lover! But this
other thing was the male, the something which made all men differ from all
women in the crisis of emotion--so she supposed--and must be endured. She
lay passive in his arms, less yielding than merely acquiescent, drawn in
upon herself to something smaller than she was before....

When he slept at her side, his head pillowed close to hers on the fragrant
fir, she still lay awake, her eyes staring up at the golden stars, still
fearful, uncomprehending. At last she was his, as he would have
her,--wholly his, so she said, seeking comfort,--and thus kissing his brow,
with a long, wondering sigh she fell asleep by his side.

In the morning they dipped into the cold black lake, and as they paddled
back to the camp for breakfast while the first rays of the warm sun shone
through the firs in gold bars, she felt like herself once more,--a
companion ready for a frolic. The next morning Lane insisted on cooking
their breakfast, for he was a competent woodsman. She admired the deft way
in which he built his little fire and toasted the bacon. In the undress of
the woods he showed at his best,--self-reliant, capable. There followed a
month of lovely days which they spent together from sunrise to starlight,
walking, fishing, canoeing, swimming,--days of fine companionship when they
learned the human quality in each other. He was strong, buoyant, perfectly
sure of himself. No emergency could arise where he would be found wanting
in the man's part. The man in him she admired,--it was what first had
attracted her,--was proud of it, just as he was proud of her lithe figure,
her beauty, her gayety, and her little air of worldliness. She began to
assume that this was all of marriage, at least the essential part of it,
and that the other, the passionate desire, was something desired by the man
and to be avoided by the woman.

They liked their guide, one of those American gypsies, half poacher, half
farmer. He kept a wife and family in a shack at the foot of the lake, and
Isabelle, with a woman's need for the natural order of life, sought out and
made friends with the wild little brood. The woman had been a mill-hand,
discovered by the woodsman on a chance visit to the town where she worked,
and made his wife, his woman. Not yet thirty, she had had eight children,
and another was coming. Freckled, with a few wisps of thin blond hair, her
front teeth imperfect, she was an untidy, bedraggled object, used and
prematurely aged. Nevertheless the guide seemed attached to her, and when
on a Sunday the family went down to the settlement, following the trail
through the camp, Isabelle could see him help the woman at the wire fence,
carrying on one arm the youngest child, trailing his gun in the other hand.

"He must care for her!" Isabelle remarked.

"Why, of course. Why not?" her husband asked.

"But think--" It was all she could say, not knowing how to put into words
the mournful feeling this woman with her brood of young gave her. What joy,
what life for herself could such a creature have? Isabelle, her imagination
full of comfortable houses with little dinner parties, pretty furniture,
books, theatres, charity committees,--all that she conceived made up a
properly married young woman's life,--could not understand the existence of
the guide's wife. She was merely the man's woman, a creature to give him
children, to cook the food, to keep the fire going. He had the woods, the
wild things he hunted; he had, too, his time of drink and rioting; but she
was merely his drudge and the instrument of his animal passion. Well,
civilization had put a few milestones between herself and Molly Sewall! In
the years to come her mind would revert often to this family as she saw it
filing down the path to the settlement, the half-clothed children peeping
shyly at her, the woman trailing an old shawl from her bent shoulders, the
man striding on ahead with his gun and his youngest baby, careless so long
as there was a fire, a bit of food, and the forest to roam in....

So passed these days of their honeymoon, each one perfect, except for the
occasional disquieting presence of passion, of unappeasable desire in the
man. This male fire was as mysterious, as inexplicable to her as that first
night,--something to be endured forgivingly, but feared, almost hated for
its fierce invasion of her. If her husband could only take her as
companion,--the deep, deep friend, the first and best for the long journey
of life! Perhaps some day that would content him; perhaps this flower of
passion came only at first, to be subdued by the work of life. She never
dreamed that some day she herself might change, might be waked by passion.
And yet she knew that she loved her husband, yearned to give him all that
he desired. Taking his face between her hands, she would kiss it gently,
tenderly, as a mother might kiss a hot, impulsive child trying to still a
restless spirit within.

This mystery of passion! It swept over the man, transfiguring him as the
summer storm swept across the little lake, blackening the sky with shadows
through which the lightning played fearsomely. She saw this face hot with
desire of her, as the face of a stranger,--another one than the strong,
self-contained man she had married,--a face with strange animal and
spiritual depths in it, all mixed and vivified. It was the brute, she said
to herself, and feared. Brute and God lie close together; but she could not
see the God,--felt only the fury of the brute.

Like the storm it passed off, leaving him as she loved him, her tender and
worshipping husband. It never entered her thought that she might love any
man more than she loved him, that perhaps some day she would long for a
passion to meet her own heart. She saw now no lack in her cold limbs, her
hard lips, her passionless eyes. She was still Diana,--long, shapely,
muscular. In her heart she loved this Diana self, so aloof from desire!

The last night of their stay in the mountains she revolved all these things
in her mind as they lay side by side on their fir couch, he asleep in a
deep, dreamless fatigue, she alert and tense after the long day in the
spirituous air, the night wind sighing to her from the upper branches of
the firs. To-morrow they would start for the West, to begin the prose of
life. Suddenly a thought flashed over her that stopped the beat of her
pulse,--she might already have conceived! She did not wish to escape having
children, at least one or two; she knew that it was to be expected, that it
was necessary and good. He would want his child and she also, and her
father and mother would be made happy by children. But her heart said,--not
yet, already. Something in which her part had been so slight! She felt the
injustice of Nature that let conception come to a woman indifferently,
merely of desire in man and acquiescence in woman. How could that be! How
could woman conceive so blindly? The child should be got with joy, should
flower from a sublime moment of perfect union when the man and the woman
were lifted out of themselves to some divine pinnacle of experience, of
soul and body union and self-effacement. Then conception would be but the
carrying over of their deep yearning, each for the other, the hunger of
souls and bodies to create.

Now she saw that it could be otherwise, as perhaps with her this very
moment: that Nature took the seed, however it might fall, and nourished it
wherever it fell, and made of it, regardless of human will, the New
Life,--heedless of the emotion of the two that were concerned in the
process. For the first time she saw that pitiless, indifferent face of
Nature, intent only on the Result, the thing created, scorning the
spiritual travail of the creator, ignoring any great revelation of the man
and the woman that would seem to count for so much in this process of
life-making. Thus a drunken beast might beget his child in the body of a
loathing woman, blind souls sowing life blindly for a blind future.

The idea clutched her like fear: she would defy this fate that would use
her like any other piece of matrix, merely to bear the seed and nourish it
for a certain period of its way, one small step in the long process. Her
heart demanded more than a passive part in the order of Nature. Her soul
needed its share from the first moment of conception in making that which
she was to give to the race. Some day a doctor would explain to her that
she was but the soil on which the fertile germ grew like a vegetable,
without her will, her consent, her creating soul! But she would reject that
coarse interpretation,--the very blasphemy of love.

And here, at this point, as she lay in the dark beneath the sighing firs,
it dawned in her dimly that something was wanting in her marriage, in the
union with the man she had chosen. She had taken him of her own free
choice; she was willingly his; she would bear his children if they came.
Her body and her soul were committed to him by choice, and by that ceremony
of marriage before the people in the chapel,--to take her part with him in
the endless process of Fate, the continuance of life.

Nevertheless, lying there in full contemplation of this new life that might
already be putting its clutch upon her life, to suck from her its own
being, she rebelled at it all. Her heart cried for her part, her very own,
for that mysterious exaltation that should make her really one with the
father in the act of creation, in the fulfilment of Love. And somehow she
knew assuredly that this could not be, not with this man by her side, not
with her husband....

She turned to him, pillowed there at her side, one hand resting fondly on
her arm. Her eyes stared at him through the darkness, trying to read the
familiar features. Did he, too, know this? Did he feel that it was
impossible ever to be really one with her? Did he suspect the terrible
defeat she was suffering now? A tear dropped from her eye and fell on the
upturned face of the sleeper. He moved, murmured, "dearest," and settled
back into his deep sleep; taking his hand from her arm. With a little cry
she fell on him and kissed him, asking his forgiveness for the mistake
between them. She put her head close to his, her lips to his lips; for she
was his and yet not his,--a strange division separating them, a cleavage
between their bodies and their souls.

"Why did we not know?" something whispered within. But she answered herself
more calmly,--"It will all come right in the end--it must come right--for
his sake!"




CHAPTER V


When young John Lane first came to St. Louis to work as a clerk in the
traffic department of the Atlantic and Pacific, he had called on Colonel
Price at his office, a dingy little room in the corner of the second story
of the old brick building which had housed the wholesale hardware business
of Parrott and Price for a generation. The old merchant had received the
young man with the pleasant kindliness that kept his three hundred
employees always devoted to him.

"I knew your father, sir!" he said, half-closing his eyes and leaning back
in his padded old office chair. "Let me see--it was in sixty-two in camp
before Vicksburg. I went to consult him about a boil on my leg. It was a
bad boil,--it hurt me.... Your father was a fine man--What are you doing in
St. Louis?" he concluded abruptly, looking out of his shrewd blue eyes at
the fresh-colored young man whose strong hands gripped squarely the arms of
his chair.

And from that day Lane knew that the Colonel never lost sight of him. When
his chance came, as in time it did come through one of the mutations of the
great corporation, he suspected that the old hardware merchant, who was a
close friend of the chief men in the road, had spoken the needed word to
lift the clerk out of the rut. At any rate the Colonel had not forgotten
the son of Tyringham Lane, and the young man had often been to the
generous, ugly Victorian house,--built when the hardware business made its
first success.

Nevertheless, when, three years later John Lane made another afternoon
visit to that dingy office in the Parrott and Price establishment, his
hands trembed nervously as he sat waiting while the Colonel scrawled his
signature to several papers.

"Well, John!" the old man remarked finally, shoving the papers towards the
waiting stenographer. "How's railroadin' these days?"

"All right," Lane answered buoyantly. "They have transferred me to the
Indiana division, headquarters at Torso--superintendent of the Torso and
Toledo."

"Indeed! But you'll be back here some day, eh?"

"I hope so!"

"That's good!" The Colonel smiled sympathetically, as he always did when he
contemplated energetic youth, climbing the long ladder with a firm grip on
each rung.

"I came to see you about another matter," Lane began hesitantly.

"Anything I can do for you?"

"Yes, sir; I want to marry your daughter,--and I'd like you to know it."

The old merchant's face became suddenly grave, the twinkle disappearing
from his blue eyes. He listened thoughtfully while the young man explained
himself. He was still a poor man, of course; his future was to be made. But
he did not intend to remain poor. His salary was not much to offer a girl
like the Colonel's daughter; but it would go far in Torso--and it was the
first step. Finally he was silent, well aware that there was small
possibility that he should ever be a rich man, as Colonel Price was, and
that it was presumptuous of him to seek to marry his daughter, and
therefore open to mean interpretation. But he felt that the Colonel was not
one to impute low motives. He knew the very real democracy of the
successful merchant, who never had forgotten his own story.

"What does Belle say?" the Colonel asked.

"I should not have come here if I didn't think--" the young man laughed.

"Of course!"

Then the Colonel pulled down the top of his desk, signifying that the day's
business was done.

"We have never desired what is called a good match for our girl," he
remarked slowly in reply to a further plea from Lane. "All we want is the
best;" he laid grave emphasis on this watchword. "And the best is that
Isabelle should be happy in her marriage. If she loves the man she marries,
she must be that.... And I don't suppose you would be here if you weren't
sure you could make her love you enough to be happy!"

The old man's smile returned for a fleeting moment, and then he mused.

"I am afraid it will be hard for her to settle down in a place like
Torso--after all she's had," Lane conceded. "But I don't expect that Torso
is the end of my rope. I shall give her a better chance than that, I hope."

The Colonel nodded sympathetically.

"I shouldn't consider it any hardship for my daughter to live in Torso or
in any other place--if she has a good husband and loves him. That is all,
my boy!"

Lane, who realized the grades of a plutocratic democracy better than three
years before, and knew the position of the Prices in the city, comprehended
the splendid simplicity, the single-mindedness of the man, who could thus
completely ignore considerations of wealth and social position in the
marriage of his only daughter.

"I shall do my best, sir, to make her happy all her life!" the young man
stammered.

"I know you will, my boy, and I think you will succeed, if she loves you as
you say she does."

Then the Colonel took his hat from the nail behind the door, and the two
men continued their conversation in the street. They did not turn up town
to the club and residence quarter, but descended towards the river, passing
on their way the massive skeleton of the ten-story building that was to
house, when completed, the Parrott and Price business. It rose in the smoky
sunset, stretching out spidery tendons of steel to the heavens, and from
its interior came a mighty clangor. The Colonel paused to look at the new
building,--the monument of his success as a merchant.

"Pretty good? Corbin's doing it,--he's the best in the country, they tell
me."

Soon they kept on past the new building into an old quarter of the city,
the Colonel apparently having some purpose that guided his devious course
through these unattractive streets.

"There!" he exclaimed at last, pointing across a dirty street to a shabby
little brick house. "That's the place where Isabelle's mother and I started
in St. Louis. We had a couple of rooms over there the first winter. The
store was just a block further west. It's torn down now. I passed some of
the best days of my life in those rooms on the second story.... It isn't
the outside that counts, my boy!" The Colonel tucked his hand beneath the
young man's arm, as they turned back to the newer quarters of the city.

Mrs. Price, it should be said, did not accept Lane's suit as easily as the
Colonel. Her imagination had been expanded by that winter in Washington,
and though she was glad that Isabelle had not accepted any of "those
foreigners," yet Harmony Price had very definite ideas of the position that
the Colonel's daughter might aspire to in America.... But her objections
could not stand before the Colonel's flat consent and Isabelle's decision.

"They'll be a great deal better off than we were," her husband reminded
her.

"That's no reason why Belle should have to start where we did, or anywhere
near it!" his wife retorted. What one generation had been able to gain in
the social fight, it seemed to her only natural that the next should at
least hold.

The Colonel gave the couple their new home in Torso, selecting, with a fine
eye for real estate values, a large "colonial" wooden house with ample
grounds out beyond the smoke of the little city, near the new country club.
Mrs. Price spent an exciting three months running back and forth between
New York, St. Louis, and Torso furnishing the new home. Isabelle's liberal
allowance was to continue indefinitely, and beyond this the Colonel
promised nothing, now or later; nor would Lane have accepted more from his
hand. It was to the Torso house that the Lanes went immediately after their
month in the Adirondacks.

       *       *       *       *       *

Torso, Indiana, is one of those towns in the Mississippi Valley which makes
more impression the farther from New York one travels. New York has never
heard of it, except as it appears occasionally on a hotel register among
other queer places that Americans confess to as home. At Pittsburg it is a
round black spot on the map, in the main ganglia of the great A. and P. and
the junction point of two other railroads. At Cincinnati it is a commercial
centre of considerable importance, almost a rival. While Torso to Torso is
the coming pivot of the universe.

It is an old settlement--some families with French names still own the
large distilleries--on the clay banks of a sluggish creek in the southern
part of the state, and there are many Kentuckians in its population.
Nourished by railroads, a division headquarters of the great A. and P.,
near the soft-coal beds, with a tin-plate factory, a carpet factory, a
carriage factory, and a dozen other mills and factories, Torso is a black
smudge in a flat green landscape from which many lines of electric railway
radiate forth along the country roads. And along the same roads across the
reaches of prairie, over the swelling hills, stalk towering poles, bearing
many fine wires glistening in the sunlight and singing the importance of
Torso to the world at large.

The Lanes arrived at night, and to Isabelle the prairie heavens seemed dark
and far away, the long broad streets with their bushy maple trees empty,
and the air filled with hoarse plaints, the rumbling speech of the
railroad. She was homesick and fearful, as they mounted the steps to the
new house and pushed open the shining oak door that stuck and smelled of
varnish. The next morning Lane whisked off on a trolley to the A. and P.
offices, while Isabelle walked around the house, which faced the main
northern artery of Torso. From the western veranda she could see the roof
of the new country club through a ragged group of trees. On the other side
were dotted the ample houses of Torso aristocracy, similar to hers, as she
knew, finished in hard wood, electric-lighted, telephoned, with many baths,
large "picture" windows of plate glass, with potted ferns in them, and much
the same furniture,--wholesome, comfortable "homes." Isabelle, turning back
to her house to cope with the three Swedes that her mother had sent on from
St. Louis, had a queer sense of anti-climax. She swept the landscape with a
critical eye, feeling she knew it all, even to what the people were saying
at this moment in those large American-Georgian mansions; what Torso was
doing at this moment in its main street.... No, it could not be for the
Lanes for long,--that was the conviction in her heart. Their destiny would
be larger, fuller than any to be found in Torso. Just what she meant by a
"large, full life," she had never stopped to set down; but she was sure it
was not to be found here in Torso.

Here began, however, the routine of her married life. Each morning she
watched her husband walk down the broad avenue to the electric car,--alert,
strong, waving his newspaper to her as he turned the corner. Each afternoon
she waited for him at the same place, or drove down to the office with the
Kentucky horses that she had bought, to take him for a drive before dinner.
He greeted her each time with the same satisfied smile, apparently not
wilted by the long hours in a hot office. There was a smudged, work-a-day
appearance to his face and linen, the mark of Torso, the same mark that the
mill-hands across the street from the A. and P. offices brought home to
their wives.... Thus the long summer days dragged. For distraction there
was a mutiny in the crew of Swedish servants, but Isabelle, with her
mother's instinct for domestic management, quickly produced order, in spite
of the completely servantless state of Torso. She would telegraph to St.
Louis for what she wanted and somehow always got it. The house ran,--that
was her business. It was pretty and attractive,--that was also her
business. But this woman's work she tossed off quickly. Then what? She
pottered in the garden a little, but when the hot blasts of prairie heat in
mid-August had shrivelled all the vines and flowers and cooked the beds
into slabs of clay, she retired from the garden and sent to St. Louis for
the daily flowers. She read a good deal, almost always novels, in the vague
belief that she was "keeping up" with modern literature, and she played at
translating some German lyrics.

Then people began to call,--the wives of the Torso great, her neighbors in
those ample mansions scattered all about the prairie. These she reported to
John with a mocking sense of their oddity.

"Mrs. Fraser came to-day. What is she? Tin-plate or coal?"

"He's the most important banker here," her husband explained seriously.

"Oh,--well, she asked me to join the 'travel-class.' They are going through
the Holy Land. What do you suppose a 'travel-class' is?"...

Again it was the wife of the chief coal operator, Freke, "who wanted me to
know that she always got her clothes from New York." She added gently, "I
think she wished to find out if we are fit for Torso society. I did my best
to give her the impression we were beneath it."...

These people, all the "society" of Torso, they met also at the country
club, where they went Sundays for a game of golf, which Lane was learning.
The wife of the A. and P. superintendent could not be ignored by Torso, and
so in spite of Isabelle's efforts there was forming around her a social
life. But the objective point of the day remained John,--his going and
coming.

"Busy day?" she would ask when he bent to kiss her.

"They're all busy days!"

"Tell me what you did."

"Oh," he would answer vaguely, "just saw people and dictated letters and
telegrams,--yes, it was a busy day." And he left her to dress for dinner.

She knew that he was weary after all the problems that he had thrust his
busy mind into since the morning. She had no great curiosity to know what
these problems were. She had been accustomed to the sanctity of business
reserve in her father's house: men disappeared in the morning to their work
and emerged to wash and dress and be as amusing as they might for the few
remaining hours of the day. There were rumors of what went on in that
mysterious world of business, but the right kind of men did not disclose
the secrets of the office to women.

It never occurred to Lane to go over with her the minute detail of his full
day: how he had considered an application from a large shipper for
switching privileges, had discussed the action of the Torso and Northern in
cutting the coal rates, had lunched with Freke, the president of a coal
company that did business with the A. and P.; and had received, just as he
left the office, the report of a serious freight wreck at one end of his
division. As he had said, a busy day! And this business of life, like an
endless steel chain, had caught hold of him at once and was carrying him
fast in its revolution. It was his life; he liked it. With cool head and
steady nerves he set himself at each problem, working it out according to
known rules, calling on his trained experience. He did not look into the
future, content with the preoccupation of the present, confident that the
future, whatever and wherever it might be, would be crowded with affairs,
activity, which he would meet competently....

"Well, what have _you_ been doing?" he asked as he sat down, fresh from his
bath, and relaxed comfortably in anticipation of a pleasant dinner.
Isabelle made a great point of dinner, having it served formally by two
maids, with five "Busy day?" she would ask when he bent to kiss her.

"They're all busy days!"

"Tell me what you did."

"Oh," he would answer vaguely, "just saw people and dictated letters and
telegrams,--yes, it was a busy day." And he left her to dress for dinner.

She knew that he was weary after all the problems that he had thrust his
busy mind into since the morning. She had no great curiosity to know what
these problems were. She had been accustomed to the sanctity of business
reserve in her father's house: men disappeared in the morning to their work
and emerged to wash and dress and be as amusing as they might for the few
remaining hours of the day. There were rumors of what went on in that
mysterious world of business, but the right kind of men did not disclose
the secrets of the office to women.

It never occurred to Lane to go over with her the minute detail of his full
day: how he had considered an application from a large shipper for
switching privileges, had discussed the action of the Torso and Northern in
cutting the coal rates, had lunched with Freke, the president of a coal
company that did business with the A. and P.; and had received, just as he
left the office, the report of a serious freight wreck at one end of his
division. As he had said, a busy day! And this business of life, like an
endless steel chain, had caught hold of him at once and was carrying him
fast in its revolution. It was his life; he liked it. With cool head and
steady nerves he set himself at each problem, working it out according to
known rules, calling on his trained experience. He did not look into the
future, content with the preoccupation of the present, confident that the
future, whatever and wherever it might be, would be crowded with affairs,
activity, which he would meet competently....

"Well, what have _you_ been doing?" he asked as he sat down, fresh from his
bath, and relaxed comfortably in anticipation of a pleasant dinner.
Isabelle made a great point of dinner, having it served formally by two
maids, with five courses and at least one wine, "to get used to living
properly," as she explained vaguely.

"Mrs. Adams called." She was the wife of the manager of the baking-powder
works and president of the country club, a young married woman from a
Western city with pretensions to social experience. "John," Isabelle added
after mentioning this name, "do you think we shall have to stay here long?"

Her husband paused in eating his soup to look at her. "Why--why?"

"It's so second-classy," she continued; "at least the women are, mostly.
There's only one I've met so far that seemed like other people one has
known."

"Who is she?" Lane inquired, ignoring the large question.

"Mrs. Falkner."

"Rob Falkner's wife? He's engineer at the Pleasant Valley mines."

"She came from Denver."

"They say he's a clever engineer."

"She is girlish and charming. She told me all about every one in Torso.
She's been here two years, and she seems to know everybody."

"And she thinks Torso is second-class?" Lane inquired.

"She would like to get away, I think. But they are poor, I suppose. Her
clothes look as if she knew what to wear,--pretty. She says there are some
interesting people here when you find them out.... Who is Mr. Darnell? A
lawyer."

"Tom Darnell? He's one of the local counsel for the road,--a Kentuckian,
politician, talkative sort of fellow, very popular with all sorts. What did
Mrs. Falkner have to say about Tom Darnell?"

"She told me all about his marriage,--how he ran away with his wife from a
boarding-school in Kentucky--and was chased by her father and brothers, and
they fired at him. A regular Southern scrimmage! But they got across the
river and were married."

"Sounds like Darnell," Lane remarked contemptuously.

"It sounds exciting!" his wife said.

The story, as related by the vivacious Mrs. Falkner, had stirred Isabelle's
curiosity; she could not dismiss this Kentucky politician as curtly as her
husband had disposed of him....

They were both wilted by the heat, and after dinner they strolled out into
the garden to get more air, walking leisurely arm in arm, while Lane smoked
his first, cigar. Having finished the gossip for the day, they had little
to say to each other,--Isabelle wondered that it should be so little! Two
months of daily companionship after the intimate weeks of their engagement
had exhausted the topics for mere talk which they had in common. To-night,
as Lane wished to learn the latest news from the wreck, they went into the
town, crossing on their way to the office the court-house square. This was
the centre of old Torso, where the distillery aristocracy still lived in
high, broad-eaved houses of the same pattern as the Colonel's city mansion.
In one of these, which needed painting and was generally neglected, the
long front windows on the first story were open, revealing a group of
people sitting around a supper-table.

"There's Mrs. Falkner," Isabelle remarked; "the one at the end of the
table, in white. This must be where they live."

Lane looked at the house with a mental estimate of the rent.

"Large house," he observed.

Isabelle watched the people laughing and talking about the table, which was
still covered with coffee cups and glasses. A sudden desire to be there, to
hear what they were saying, seized her. A dark-haired man was leaning
forward and emphasizing his remarks by tapping a wine glass with along
finger. That might be Tom Darnell, she thought.... The other houses about
the square were dark and gloomy, most of them closed for the summer.

"There's a good deal of money in Torso," Lane commented, glancing at a
brick house with wooden pillars. "It's a growing place,--more business
coming all the time."

He looked at the town with the observant eye of the railroad officer, who
sees in the prosperity of any community but one word writ large,--TRAFFIC.

And that word was blown through the soft night by the puffing locomotives
in the valley below, by the pall of smoke that hung night and day over this
quarter of the city, the dull glow of the coke-ovens on the distant hills.
To the man this was enough--this and his home; business and the woman he
had won,--they were his two poles!




CHAPTER VI


"You see," continued Bessie Falkner, drawing up her pretty feet into the
piazza cot, "it was just love at first sight. I was up there at the hotel
in the mountains, trying to make up my mind whether I could marry another
man, who was awfully rich--owned a mine and a ranch; but he was so dull the
horses would go to sleep when we were out driving ... And then just as I
concluded it was the only thing for me to do, to take him and make the best
of him,--then Rob rode up to the hotel in his old tattered suit--he was
building a dam or something up in the mountains--and I knew I couldn't
marry Mr. Mine-and-Ranch. That was all there was to it, my dear. The rest
of the story? Why, of course he made the hotel his headquarters while he
was at work on the dam; I stayed on, too, and it came along--naturally, you
know."

Mrs. Falkner dipped into a box of candy and swung the cot gently to and
fro. The men were still talking inside the house and the two wives had come
outside for long confidences. Isabelle, amused by this sketch of the
Colorado courtship, patted the blond woman's little hand. Mrs. Falkner had
large blue eyes, with waving tendrils of hair, which gave her face the look
of childish unsophistication;--especially at this moment when her
voluptuous lips were closing over a specially desired piece of candy.

"Of course it would come along--with you!"

"I didn't do a thing--just waited," Bessie protested, fishing about the
almost empty box for another delectable bit. "He did it all. He was in such
a hurry he wanted to marry me then and there at the hotel and go live up in
the mountains in a cabin above the dam where he was at work. He's romantic.
Men are all like that then, don't you think? But of course it couldn't be
that way; so we got married properly in the fall in Denver, and then came
straight here. And," with a long sigh, "we've been here ever since. Stuck!"

"I should think you would have preferred the cabin above the dam," Isabelle
suggested, recalling her own romantic notion of Dog Mountain. Mrs. Falkner
made a little grimace.

"That might do for two or three months. But snowed in all the winter, even
with the man you like best in all the world? He'd kill you or escape
through the drifts ... You see we hadn't a thing, not a cent, except his
salary and that ended with the dam. It was only eighty a month anyway. This
is better, a hundred and fifty," she explained with childish frankness.
"But Rob has to work harder and likes the mountains, is always talking of
going back. But I say there are better things than hiding yourself at the
land's end. There's St. Louis, or maybe New York!"

Isabelle wondered how the Falkners were able to support such a hospitable
house--they had two small children and Bessie had confided that another was
coming in the spring--on the engineer's salary.

"And the other one," Mrs. Falkner added in revery, "is more than a
millionnaire now."

Her face was full of speculation over what might have been as the wife of
all that money.

"But we are happy, Rob and I,--except for the bills! Don't you hate bills?"

Isabelle's only answer was a hearty laugh. She found this pretty, frank
little "Westerner" very attractive.

"It was bills that made my mother unhappy--broke her heart. Sometimes we
had money,--most generally not. Such horrid fusses when there wasn't any.
But what is one to do? You've got to go on living somehow. Rob says we
can't afford this house,--Rob is always afraid we won't get through. But we
do somehow. I tell him that the good time is coming,--we must just
anticipate it, draw a little on the future."

At this point the men came through the window to the piazza. Bessie shook
her box of candy coquettishly at Lane, who took the chair beside her.
Evidently he thought her amusing, as most men did. Falkner leaned against
the white pillar and stared up at the heavens. Isabelle, accustomed to men
of more conventional social qualities, had found the young engineer glum
and odd. He had a stern, rather handsome face, a deep furrow dividing his
forehead and meeting the part of his thick brown hair, which curled
slightly at the ends. "If he didn't look so cross, he would be quite
handsome," thought Isabelle, wondering how long it might be before her host
would speak to her. She could see him as he rode up to the hotel piazza
that day, when Bessie Falkner had made up her mind on the moment that she
could not marry "the other man." Finally Falkner broke his glum silence.

"Do you eat candy, Mrs. Lane? Pounds of it, I mean,--so that it is your
staple article of diet."

"Tut, tut," remarked his wife from her cot. "Don't complain."

His next remark was equally abrupt.

"There's only one good thing in this Torso hole," he observed with more
animation than he had shown all the evening, "and that's the coke-ovens at
night--have you noticed them? They are like the fiery pits, smouldering,
ready for the damned!"

It was not what she expected from a civil engineer, in Torso, Indiana, and
she was at a loss for a reply.

"You'd rather have stayed in Colorado?" she asked frankly.

He turned his face to her and said earnestly, "Did you ever sleep out on a
mountain with the stars close above you?--'the vast tellurian galleons'
voyaging through space?"

Isabelle suspected that he was quoting poetry, which also seemed odd in
Torso.

"Yes,--my brother and I used to camp out at our home in Connecticut. But I
don't suppose you would call our Berkshire Hills mountains."

"No," he replied dryly, "I shouldn't."

And their conversation ended. Isabella wished that the Darnells had not
been obliged to go home immediately after supper. The young lawyer knew how
to talk to women, and had made himself very agreeable, telling stories of
his youth spent among the mountains with a primitive people. She had
observed that he drank a good deal of whiskey, and there was something in
his black eyes that made her uncomfortable. But he was a man that women
liked to think about: he touched their imaginations. She did not talk about
him to John on their way home, however, but discussed the Falkners.

"Don't you think she is perfectly charming?" (Charming was the word she had
found for Bessie Falkner.) "So natural and amusing! She's very Western--she
can't have seen much of life--but she isn't a bit ordinary."

"Yes, I like her," Lane replied unenthusiastically, "and he seems original.
I shouldn't wonder if he were clever in his profession; he told me a lot
about Freke's mines."

What he had learned about the Pleasant Valley mines was the chief thing in
the evening to Lane. He did not understand why Isabelle seemed so much more
eager to know these people--these Darnells and Falkners--than the Frasers
and the Adamses. She had made fun of the solemn dinner that the Frasers had
given to introduce them into Torso "society."

"I wonder how they can live on that salary," Isabelle remarked. "One
hundred and fifty a month!"

"He must make something outside."

       *       *       *       *       *

After the Lanes had gone, Bessie Falkner prepared yawningly for bed,
leaving her husband to shut up the house. Her weekly excitement of
entertaining people over, she always felt let down, like a poet after the
stir of creation. It was useless to go over the affair with Rob, as he was
merely bored. But she spent hours thinking what the women said and how they
looked and deciding whom she could have the next time. On her way to bed
she went into the nursery where her two little girls were asleep in their
cots beside the nurse, and finding a window open woke the nurse to reprove
her for her carelessness. In the hall she met her husband bringing up the
silver.

"Emma is so thoughtless," she complained. "I shall have to let her go if I
can find another servant in this town."

Her husband listened negligently. The Falkners were perpetually changing
their two servants, or were getting on without them.

"Mrs. Lane's maids all wear caps," Mrs. Falkner had observed frequently to
her husband.

Bessie had strict ideas of how a house should be run, ideas derived from
the best houses that she was familiar with. Since the advent of the Lanes
she had extended these ideas and strove all the harder to achieve
magnificent results. Though the livery of service was practically unknown
in Torso, she had resolved to induce her cook (and maid of all work) to
serve the meals with cap and apron, and also endeavored to have the
nursemaid open the door and help serve when company was expected.

"What's the use!" her husband protested. "They'll only get up and go."

He could not understand the amount of earnest attention and real feeling
that his wife put into these things,--her pride to have her small domain
somewhat resemble the more affluent ones that she admired. Though her
family had been decidedly plain, they had given her "advantages" in
education and dress, and her own prettiness, her vivacity and charm, had
won her way into whatever society Kansas City and Denver could offer. She
had also visited here and there in different parts of the country,--once in
New York, and again at a cottage on the New England coast where there were
eight servants, a yacht, and horses. These experiences of luxury, of an
easy and large social life, she had absorbed through every pore. With that
marvellous adaptability of her race she had quickly formed her ideals of
"how people ought to live." It was frequently difficult to carry out these
ideals on a circumscribed income, with a husband who cared nothing for
appearances, and that was a source of constant discontent to Bessie.

"Coming to bed?" she asked her husband, as she looked in vain for the
drinking water that the maid was supposed to bring to her bedside at night.

"No," Falkner answered shortly. "I've got to make out those estimates
somehow before morning. If you will have people all the time--"

Bessie turned in at her door shrugging her shoulders. Rob was in one of his
"cross" moods,--overworked, poor boy! She slowly began to undress before
the mirror, thinking of Isabelle Lane's stylish figure and her perfect
clothes. "She must have lots of money," she reflected, "and so nice and
simple! He's attractive, too. Rob is foolish not to like them. He showed
his worst side to-night. If he wants to get on,--why, they are the sort of
people he ought to know." Her husband's freakish temper gave her much
trouble, his unexpectedly bearish moods when she was doing her very best
for him, "bringing him out" as she put it, making the right kind of
friends,--influential ones, so that he might have some chance in the
scramble for the good things of life. Surely that was a wife's part. Bessie
was satisfied that she had done much for her husband in this way, developed
him socially; for when he rode up to the mountain hotel, he was solitary,
moody, shy. Tonight he hadn't kissed her,--in fact hadn't done so for
several days. He was tired by the prolonged heat, she supposed, and worried
about the bills. He was always worried about expenses.

As the clothes slipped from her still shapely figure, she stood before the
glass, thinking in a haze of those first lover-days that had departed so
soon. Now instead of petting her, Rob spent his hours at home upstairs in
his attic workroom, doing extra work or reading. Could it be that he was
growing tired of her, so soon, in four years? She glanced over her shoulder
at her pretty arms, her plump white neck reflected in the glass, and smiled
unconsciously with assurance. Oh, he would come back to the lover-mood--she
was still desirable! And as the smile curved her lip she thought, "I
married him for love!" She was very proud of that....

The house was now deliciously cool and quiet. Bessie sank into her bed with
a sigh, putting out one hand for a magazine and turning on the electric
light beside the bed. It had been a tiresome day, with the supper to bring
off. There had been six courses, and everything had been very nice. The
black cook she had engaged to prepare the meal was a treasure, could serve
a better dinner than Mrs. Fraser's or Mrs. Adams's. She herself had made
the salad and prepared the iced grape-fruit. Every limb ached--she was
always so tired. She loved this last quiet hour of the day that she had by
herself, now that the nurse took both the children. With her delicate
health the nurse had been a necessity. She usually looked blooming and
rosy, but was always tired, always had been as long as she could remember.
The doctor had told Falkner after the second child came that his wife would
always be a delicate woman, must be carefully protected, or she would
collapse and have the fearful modern disease of nerves. So Falkner had
insisted on having the best nurse obtainable to relieve her from the
wearing nights,--though it meant that somehow eighteen hundred dollars must
grow of itself!

As midnight sounded from the court-house clock, Bessie laid down the
magazine and stretched her tired limbs, luxuriating in the comfort of her
soft bed. The story she had been reading was sentimental,--the love of a
cowboy for the fair daughter of a railroad president. She longed for the
caresses of her cow-boy lover, and wondered dreamily if Lane were a devoted
husband. He seemed so; but all men were probably alike: their first desires
gratified, they thought of other things. So she put out the light and
closed her eyes, in faint discontent with life, which was proving less
romantic than she had anticipated.

She had her own room. At first it had held two beds, her husband sharing
the room with her. But as the house was large he had taken a room on the
third story. Nowadays, as Bessie knew, the better sort of American
household does not use the primitive double bed. For hygiene and comfort
enlightened people have taken to separate beds, then separate quarters. A
book might be written on the doing away of the conjugal bed in American
life! There should be interesting observations on the effect of this
change, social, and hygienic, and moral,--oh, most interesting!  ... A
contented smile at last stole over the young wife's face. Was she dreaming
of her babies, of those first days of love, when her husband never wished
her out of his sight, or simply of the well-ordered, perfectly served,
pretty supper that she had given for the Lanes whom she was most anxious to
know well? The supper had quite met her aspirations except in the matter of
caps and aprons, had satisfied her cherished ideal of how "nice people"
lived in this world.

That ideal is constantly expanding these days. In America no one is classed
by birth or profession. All is to make, and the women with their marvellous
powers of absorption do the shaping. In a thousand ways they learn "how to
live as other people do,"--in magazines and on bill boards, in the theatre,
the churches, the trains, the illustrated novel. Suggestions how to live!

Meantime upstairs in the mansard room of the old house Falkner was figuring
over stresses and strains of an unemotional sort. When past midnight he
shoved the papers into the drawer, a familiar thought coursed through his
brain: somehow he must sell himself at a dearer price. Living was not cheap
even in Torso, and the cost of living was ever going higher, so the papers
said and the wives. There were four of them now, a fifth to come in a few
months. There should be a third servant, he knew, if they were to live
"like other people." With a gesture that said, "Oh, Hell!" he jumped from
his chair and took down a volume of verse from the pine shelf above the
mantel and lighted a cigarette. For a few minutes he might lose himself and
forget the fret of life, in the glowing pictures of things not seen.

The book dropped from his hand. He had carried it in his mountain kit, had
read it to Bessie when they were engaged. She had listened, flattered,
looking at him and smoothing his hair. But after marriage she confessed
flatly that she was not "literary." So they had read together a book of
travels, then a novel, then a magazine, and latterly nothing. Taking
another cigarette, the man read on, and before his tired eyes rose the
purple peaks of the Rockies, the shining crests of snow, the azure sky. And
also a cabin in a green meadow beside a still mountain lake, and a woman
fair and tall and straight, with blue eyes and a caressing hand,--a child
on one arm. But Bessie was sleeping downstairs. Putting out his light, the
man went to bed.

The man on horseback riding up the trail to look into the girl's eyes that
summer afternoon!




CHAPTER VII


The two young wives quickly became very intimate. They spent many mornings
together "reading," that is, they sat on the cool west veranda of the
Lanes's house, or less often on the balcony at the Falkners's, with a novel
turned down where their attention had relaxed, chatting and sewing.
Isabelle found Bessie Falkner "cunning," "amusing," "odd," and always
"charming." She had "an air about her," a picturesque style of gossip that
she used when instructing Isabelle in the intricacies of Torso society.
Isabelle also enjoyed the homage that Bessie paid her.

Bessie frankly admired Isabella's house, her clothes, her stylish self, and
enjoyed her larger experience of life,--the Washington winter, Europe, even
the St. Louis horizon,--all larger than anything she had ever known.
Isabelle was very nearly the ideal of what she herself would have liked to
be. So when they had exhausted Torso and their households, they filled the
morning hours with long tales about people they had known,--"Did you ever
hear of the Dysarts in St. Louis? Sallie Dysart was a great belle,--she had
no end of affairs, and then she married Paul Potter. The Potters were very
well-known people in Philadelphia, etc." Thus they gratified their
curiosity about _lives_, all the interesting complications into which men
and women might get. Often Bessie stayed for luncheon, a dainty affair
served on a little table which the maid brought out and set between them.
Sometimes Bessie had with her the baby girl, but oftener not, for she
became exacting and interfered with the luncheon.

Bessie had endless tidbits of observation about Torsonians. "Mrs. Freke was
a cashier in a Cleveland restaurant when he married her. Don't you see the
bang in her hair still? ... Mrs. Griscom came from Kentucky,--very old
family. Tom Griscom, their only son, went to Harvard,--he was very wild.
He's disappeared since.... Yes, Mrs. Adams is common, but the men seem to
like her. I don't trust her green eyes. Mr. Darnell, they say, is always
there. Oh, Mr. Adams isn't the one to care!"

Often they came back to Darnell,--that impetuous, black-haired young lawyer
with his deep-set, fiery eyes, who had run away with his wife.

"She looks scared most of the time, don't you think? They say he drinks.
Too bad, isn't it? Such a brilliant man, and with the best chances. He ran
for Congress two years ago on the Democratic ticket, and just failed. He is
going to try again this next fall, but his railroad connection is against
him.... Oh, Sue Darnell,--she is nobody; she can't hold him--that's plain."

"What does she think of Mrs. Adams?"

Bessie shrugged her shoulders significantly.

"Sue has to have her out at their farm. Well, they say she was pretty gay
herself,--engaged to three men at once,--one of them turned up in Torso
last year. Tom was very polite to him, elaborately polite; but he left town
very soon, and she seemed dazed.... I guess she has reason to be afraid of
her husband. He looks sometimes--well, I shouldn't like to have Rob look at
me that way, not for half a second!"

The two women clothed the brilliant Kentuckian with all the romance of
unbridled passion. "He sends to Alabama every week for the jasmine Mrs.
Adams wears--fancy!"

"Really! Oh, men! men!"

"It's probably _her_ fault--she can't hold him."

That was the simple philosophy which they evolved about marriage,--men were
uncertain creatures, only partly tamed, and it was the woman's business to
"hold" them. So much the worse for the women if they happened to be tied to
men they could not "hold." Isabelle, remembering on one occasion the
flashing eyes of the Kentuckian, his passionate denunciation of mere
commercialism in public life, felt that there might be some defence for
poor Tom Darnell,--even in his flirtation with the "common" Mrs. Adams.

Then the two friends went deeper and talked husbands, both admiring, both
hilariously amused at the masculine absurdities of their mates.

"I hate to see poor Rob so harassed with bills," Bessie confided. "It is
hard for him, with his tastes, poor boy. But I don't know what I can do
about it. When he complains, I tell him we eat everything we have, and I am
sure I never get a dress!"

Isabelle, recollecting the delicious suppers she had had at the Falkners's,
thought that less might be eaten. In her mother's house there had always
been comfort, but strict economy, even after the hardware business paid
enormous profits. This thrift was in her blood. Bessie had said to Rob that
Isabelle was "close." But Isabelle only laughed at Bessie when she was in
these moods of dejection, usually at the first of the month. Bessie was so
amusing about her troubles that she could not take her seriously.

"Never mind, Bessie!" she laughed. "He probably likes to work hard for
you,--every man does for the woman he loves."

And then they would have luncheon, specially devised for Bessie's epicurean
taste. For Bessie Falkner did devout homage to a properly cooked dish.
Isabelle, watching the contented look with which the little woman swallowed
a bit of jellied meat, felt that any man worth his salt would like to
gratify her innocent tastes. Probably Falkner couldn't endure a less
charming woman for his wife. So she condoned, as one does with a clever
child, all the little manifestations of waywardness and selfishness that
she was too intelligent not to see in her new friend. Isabelle liked to
spoil Bessie Falkner. Everybody liked to indulge her, just as one likes to
feed a pretty child with cake and candy, especially when the discomforts of
the resulting indigestion fall on some one else.

"Oh, it will all come out right in the end!" Bessie usually exclaimed,
after she had well lunched. She did not see things very vividly far
ahead,--nothing beyond the pleasant luncheon, the attractive house, her
adorable Isabelle. "I always tell Rob when he is blue that his chance will
come some day; he'll make a lucky strike, do some work that attracts public
attention, and then we'll all be as happy as can be."

She had the gambler's instinct; her whole life had been a gamble, now
winning, now losing, even to that moment when her lover had ridden up to
the hotel and solved her doubts about the rich suitor. In Colorado she had
known men whose fortunes came over night, "millions and millions," as she
told Isabelle, rolling the words in her little mouth toothsomely. Why not
to her? She felt that any day fortune might smile.

"My husband says that Mr. Falkner is doing excellent work,--Mr. Freke said
so," Isabelle told Bessie.

"And Rob talks as if he were going to lose his job next week! Sometimes I
wish he would lose it--and we could go away to a large city."

Bessie thus echoed the feeling in Isabelle's own heart,--"I don't want to
spend my life on an Indiana prairie!" To both of the women Torso was less a
home, a corner of the earth into which to put down roots, than a
way-station in the drama and mystery of life. Confident in their husbands'
ability to achieve Success, they dreamed of other scenes, of a larger
future, with that restlessness of a new civilization, which has latterly
seized even women--the supposedly stable sex.

       *       *       *       *       *

As the year wore on there were broader social levels into which Isabelle in
company with Bessie dipped from time to time. The Woman's Club had a
lecture course in art and sociology. They attended one of the lectures in
the Normal School building, and laughed furtively in their muffs at "Madam
President" of the Club,--a portly, silk-dressed dame,--and at the
ill-fitting black coat of the university professor who lectured. They came
away before the reception.

"Dowds!" Bessie summed up succinctly.

"Rather crude," Isabelle agreed tolerantly.

During the winter Isabelle did some desultory visiting among the Hungarians
employed at the coke-ovens, for Bessie's church society. Originally of
Presbyterian faith, she had changed at St. Mary's to the Episcopal church,
and latterly all church affiliations had grown faint. The Colonel
maintained a pew in the first Presbyterian Church, but usually went to hear
the excellent lectures of a Unitarian preacher. Isabelle's religious views
were vague, broad, liberal, and unvital. Bessie's were simpler, but
scarcely more effective. Lane took a lively interest in the railroad
Y.M.C.A., which he believed to be helpful for young men. He himself had
been a member in St. Louis and had used the gymnasium. Isabelle got up an
entertainment for the Hungarian children, which was ended by a disastrous
thunderstorm. She had an uneasy feeling that she "ought to do something for
somebody." Alice Johnston, she knew, had lived at a settlement for a couple
of years. But there were no settlements in Torso, and the acutely poor were
looked after by the various churches. Just what there was to be done for
others was not clear. When she expressed her desire "not to live selfishly"
to her husband, he replied easily:--

"There are societies for those things, I suppose. It ought to be natural,
what we do for others."

Just what was meant by "natural" was not clear to Isabelle, but the word
accorded with the general belief of her class that the best way to help in
the world was to help one's self, to become useful to others by becoming
important in the community,--a comfortable philosophy. But there was one
definite thing that they might accomplish, and that was to help the
Falkners into easier circumstances.

"Don't you suppose we could do something for them? Now that the baby has
come they are dreadfully poor,--can't think of going away for the summer,
and poor Bessie needs it and the children. I meant to ask the Colonel when
he was here last Christmas. Isn't there something Rob could do in the
road?"

Lane shook his head.

"That is not my department. There might be a place in St. Louis when they
begin work on the new terminals. I'll speak to Brundage the next time he's
here."

"St. Louis--Bessie would like that. She's such a dear, and would enjoy
pretty things so much! It seems as if she almost had a right to them."

"Why did she marry a poor man, then?" Lane demanded with masculine logic.

"Because she loved him, silly! She isn't mercenary."

"Well, then,--" but Lane did not finish his sentence, kissing his wife
instead. "She's rather extravagant, isn't she?" he asked after a time.

"Oh, she'll learn to manage."

"I will do what I can for him, of course."

And Isabelle considered the Falkners' fate settled; John, like her father,
always brought about what he wanted.

       *       *       *       *       *

They spent the Christmas holidays that year with her parents. Lane was
called to New York on railroad business, and Isabelle had a breathless ten
days with old friends, dining and lunching, listening to threads of gossip
that had been broken by her exile to Torso. She discovered an unexpected
avidity for diversion, and felt almost ashamed to enjoy people so keenly,
to miss her husband so little. She put it all down to the cramping effect
of Torso. So when the Colonel asked her how she liked her new home, she
burst forth, feeling that her opportunity had come:--

"It doesn't agree with me, I think. I've grown frightfully thin,--John says
I mustn't spend another summer there.... I hope we can get away soon. John
must have a wider field, don't you think?"

"He seems to find Torso pretty wide."

"He's done splendid work, I know. But I don't want him side-tracked all his
life in a little Indiana town. Don't you think you could speak to the
Senator or Mr. Beals?"

The Colonel smiled.

"Yes, I could speak to them, if John wants me to."

"He hasn't said anything about it," she hastened to add.

"So you are tired of Torso?" he asked, smiling still more.

"It seems so good to be here, to hear some music, and go to the theatre; to
be near old friends," she explained apologetically. "Don't you and mother
want us to be near you?"

"Of course, my dear! We want you to be happy."

"Why, we are happy there,--only it seems so out of the world, so
second-class. And John is not second-class."

"No, John is not second-class," the Colonel admitted with another smile.
"And for that reason I don't believe he will want me to interfere."

Nevertheless she kept at her idea, talking it over with her mother. All her
friends were settled in the great cities, and it was only natural that she
should aspire to something better than Torso--for the present, St. Louis.
So the Colonel spoke to Lane, and Lane spoke to his wife when they were
back once more in the Torso house. He was grave, almost hurt.

"I'm sorry, Belle, you are so tired of life here. I can take another
position or ask to be transferred; but you must understand, dear, that
whatever is done, it must be by myself. I don't want favors, not even from
the Colonel!"

She felt ashamed and small, yet protested: "I don't see why you should
object. Every one does the same,--uses all the pull he has."

"There are changes coming,--I prefer to wait. The man who uses least pull
usually hangs on longest."

As he walked to the office that morning, the thought of Isabelle's
restlessness occupied his mind. "It's dull for her here, of course. It
isn't the kind of life she's been used to, or had the right to expect as
the Colonel's daughter." He felt the obligation to live up to his wife,
having won her from a superior position. Like a chivalrous American
gentleman he was not aggrieved because even during the first two years of
marriage, he--their life together--was not enough to satisfy his wife. He
did not reflect that his mother had accepted unquestioningly the Iowa town
to which his father had brought her after the War; nor that Isabelle's
mother had accepted cheerfully the two rooms in the little brick house near
the hardware store. Those were other days.

He saw the picture of Isabelle standing beside the dining-room window with
the sun on her hair,--a developed type of human being, that demanded much
of life for satisfaction and adjustment. He plunged into his affairs with
an added grip, an unconscious feeling that he must by his exertions provide
those satisfactions and adjustments which his wife's nature demanded for
its perfect development.




CHAPTER VIII


It was to be Isabella's first real dinner-party, a large affair for Torso.
It had already absorbed her energies for a fortnight. The occasion was the
arrival of a party of Atlantic and Pacific officials and directors, who
were to inspect the Torso and Northern, with a view to its purchase and
absorption. The Torso and Northern was only a little scab line of railroad,
penetrating the soft-coal country for a couple of hundred miles, bankrupt
and demoralized. When Lane saw President Beals at Christmas, he pointed out
to him what might be made of this scrap-heap road, if it were rehabilitated
and extended into new coal fields. Beals had shown no interest in the Torso
and Northern at that time, and Lane forgot the matter until he noticed that
there was a market for Torso and Northern equipment bonds, which before had
been unsalable at twenty. Seeing them rise point by point for a month, he
had bought all he could pay for; he knew the weather signs in the railroad
world. When the inspection party was announced, his sagacity was proved.

Isabelle was excited by the prospect of her dinner for the distinguished
visitors. Who should she have of Torso's best to meet them? The Frasers and
the Griscoms, of course. John insisted on inviting the Frekes, and Isabelle
wanted the Darnells and the Adamses, though her husband demurred at
recognizing the bond. But Tom Darnell was so interesting, his wife urged,
and she was presentable. And the Falkners? There was no special reason for
having them, but Isabelle thought it might be a good thing for Rob to meet
some influential people, and Bessie would surely amuse the men. Isabelle's
executive energy was thoroughly aroused. The flowers and the wines were
ordered from St. Louis, the terrapin from Philadelphia, the fish and the
candies from New York. Should they have champagne? Lane thought not,
because "it's not quite our style." But Isabelle overbore his objections:--

"The Adamses always have it, and the Senator will expect it and all the New
York crowd."

Her husband acquiesced, feeling that in these things his wife knew the
world better than he,--though he would have preferred to offer his superior
officers a simpler meal.

The inspection party returned from their trip over the Torso and Northern
in the best of spirits. Lane felt sure that the purchase had been decided
upon by this inner coterie of the A. and P., of which the mouthpiece,
Senator Thomas, had emitted prophetic phrases,--"valuable possibilities
undeveloped," "would tap new fields,--good feeder," etc., etc. Lane thought
pleasantly of the twenty equipment bonds in his safe, which would be
redeemed by the Atlantic and Pacific at par and accrued interest, and he
resolved to secure another block, if they were to be had, before the sale
was officially confirmed by the directors. Altogether it had been an
agreeable jaunt. He had met several influential directors and had been
generally consulted as the man who knew the exact local conditions. And he
was aware that he had made a favorable impression as a practical railroad
man....

When his guests came down to the drawing-room, he was proud of what his
wife had done. The house was ablaze with candles--Bessie had persuaded
Isabelle to dispense with the electric light--and bunches of heavy,
thick-stemmed roses filled the vases. A large silver tray of decanters and
cocktails was placed in the hall beside the blazing fire. The Senator had
already possessed himself of a cocktail, and was making his little speeches
to Isabelle, who in a Paris gown that gave due emphasis to her pretty
shoulders and thin figure, was listening to him gayly.

"Did you think we lived in a log-cabin, Senator?" she protested to his
compliments. "We eat with knives and forks, silver ones too, and sometimes
we even have champagne in Torso!"...

Lane, coming up with the first Vice-president, Vernon Short, and a Mr.
Stanton, one of the New York directors ("a great swell," and "not just
money," "has brains, you know," as the Senator whispered), was proud of his
competent wife. She was vivaciously awake, and seemed to have forgotten her
girlish repugnance to the amorous Senator. As she stood by the drawing-room
door receiving her guests, he felt how much superior to all the Torso
"leaders" she was,--yes, she deserved a larger frame! And to-night he felt
confident that he should be able before long to place her in it.... The
Senator, having discharged his cargo of compliments, was saying:--

"Saw your friend Miss Pallanton that was--Mrs. Woodyard--at the Stantons's
the other night, looking like a blond Cleopatra. She's married a bright
fellow, and she'll be the making of him. He'll have to hop around to please
her,--I expect that's what husbands are for, isn't it, Lane?"

And here Isabelle passed him over to Bessie, who had come without Falkner,
he having made some silly excuse at the last moment,--"just cross," as
Bessie confided to Isabelle. She was looking very fresh in a gown that she
and Isabelle's seamstress had contrived, and she smiled up into the
Senator's face with her blandest child-manner. The Senator, who liked all
women, even those who asked his views on public questions, was especially
fond of what he called the "unsophisticated" variety, with whom his title
carried weight.

When they reached the dining room, Lane's elation rose to a higher pitch.
The table, strewn with sweet jasmine and glossy leaves, was adorned with
all the handsome gold and silver service and glass that Isabelle had
received at her marriage. It was too barbarically laden to be really
beautiful; but it was in the best prevailing taste of the time, and to
Lane, who never regarded such matters attentively, "was as good as the
best." Looking down the long table after they were seated, he smiled with
satisfaction and expanded, a subtle suavity born of being host to
distinguished folk unlocking his ordinarily reticent tongue, causing him
even to joke with Mrs. Adams, whom he did not like.

The food was excellent, and the maids, some borrowed, some specially
imported from St. Louis, made no mistakes, at least gross ones. The feast
moved as smoothly as need be. Isabelle, glancing over the table as the game
came on, had her moment of elation, too. This was a real dinner-party, as
elaborate and sumptuous as any that her friends in St. Louis might give.
The Farrington Beals, she remembered, had men servants,--most New York
families kept them, but that could hardly be expected in Torso. The dinner
was excellent, as the hungry visitors testified, and they seemed to find
the women agreeable and the whole affair unexpectedly cosmopolitan, which
was pleasing after spending a long week in a car, examining terminals and
coal properties. Indeed, it was very much the same dinner that was being
served at about that hour in thousands of well-to-do houses throughout the
country all the way from New York to San Francisco,--the same dishes, the
same wines, the same service, almost the same talk. Nothing in American
life is so completely standardized as what is known as a "dinner" in good,
that is well-to-do, society. Isabelle Lane, with all her executive ability,
her real cleverness, aspired to do "the proper thing," just as it was done
in the houses of the moderately rich everywhere.

The model of hospitality is set by the hotel manager and his chef, and all
that the clever hostess aspires to do is to offer the nearest copy of this
to her guests. Neither the Lanes nor any of their guests, however, felt
this lack of distinction, this sameness, in the entertainment provided for
them. They had the comfortable feeling of being in a cheerful house, well
warmed and well lighted, of eating all this superfluous food, which they
were accustomed to eat, of saying the things they always said on such
occasions....

Isabelle had distributed her Torsonians skilfully: Bessie was adorable and
kept three men hanging on her stories. Mrs. Adams, on the other side of
Stanton, was furtively eying Darnell, who was talking rather loudly, trying
to capture the Senator's attention from Bessie. Across the table Mrs.
Darnell, still the striking dark-haired schoolgirl, was watching her
husband, with a pitiful something in her frightened eyes that made Isabelle
shrink.... It was Darnell who finally brought the conversation to a full
stop.

"No, Senator," he said in his emphatic voice, "it is not scum like the
assassin of the President that this country should fear!"

"We're paying now for our liberal policy in giving homes to the anarchistic
refuse of Europe," the Senator insisted. "Congress must pass legislation
that will protect us from another Czolgocz."

Darnell threw up his head, his lips curving disdainfully. He had emptied
his champagne glass frequently, and there was a reckless light in his dark
eyes. Isabelle trembled for his next remark:--

"You are wrong, sir, if you will allow me to say so. The legislation that
we need is not against poor, feeble-minded rats like that murderer. We have
prisons and asylums enough for them. What the country needs is legislation
against its honored thieves, the real anarchists among us. We don't get 'em
from Europe, Senator; we breed 'em right here,--in Wall street."

If some one had discharged assafoetida over the table, there could not have
been a more unpleasant sensation.

"You don't mean quite that, Darnell," Lane began; but the Kentuckian
brushed him to one side.

"Just that; and some day you will see what Americans will do with their
anarchists. I tell you this land is full of discontent,--men hating
dishonesty, privilege, corruption, injustice! men ready to fight their
oppressors for freedom!"

The men about the table were all good Republicans, devout believers in the
gospel of prosperity, all sharers in it. They smiled contemptuously at
Darnell's passion.

"Our martyred President was a great and good man," the Senator observed
irrelevantly in his public tone.

"He was the greatest breeder of corruption that has ever held that office,"
retorted the Kentuckian. "With his connivance, a Mark Hanna has forged the
worst industrial tyranny the world has ever seen,--the corrupt grip of
corporations on the lives of the people."

"Pretty strong for a corporation lawyer!" Lane remarked, and the men
laughed cynically.

"I am no longer a corporation hireling," Darnell said in a loud voice.

Isabelle noticed that Mrs. Adams's eyes glowed, as she gazed at the man.

"I sent in my resignation last week."

"Getting ready for the public platform?" some one suggested. "You won't
find much enthusiasm for those sentiments; wages are too high!"

There was a moment of unpleasant silence. The Kentuckian raised his head as
if to retort, then collected himself, and remarked meekly:--

"Pardon me, Mrs. Lane, this is not the occasion for such a discussion. I
was carried away by my feelings. Sometimes the real thought will burst
out."

The apology scarcely bettered matters, and Isabelle's response was flat.

"I am sure it is always interesting to hear both sides."

"But I can't see that to a good citizen there can be two sides to the
lamentable massacre of our President," the Senator said severely. "I had
the privilege of knowing our late President intimately, and I may say that
I never knew a better man,--he was another Lincoln!"

"I don't see where Mr. Darnell can find this general discontent," the
Vice-president of the A. and P. put in suavely. "The country has never been
so prosperous as during the McKinley-Hanna regime,--wages at the high
level, exports increasing, crops abundant. What any honest and industrious
man has to complain of, I can't see. Why, we are looking for men all the
time, and we can't get them, at any price!"

"'Ye shall not live by bread alone,'" Darnell muttered. It was a curious
remark for a dinner-party, Isabelle thought. Mrs. Adams's lips curled as if
she understood it. But now that the fiery lawyer had taken to quoting the
Bible no one paid any further attention to him, and the party sank back
into little duologues appropriate to the occasion. Later Bessie confessed
to Isabelle that she had been positively frightened lest the Kentuckian
would do "something awful,"--he had been drinking, she thought. But Darnell
remained silent for the brief time before the ladies left the room, merely
once raising his eyes apologetically to Isabelle with his wine-glass at his
lips, murmuring so that she alone could hear him,--"I drink to the gods of
Prosperity!" She smiled back her forgiveness. He had behaved very badly,
almost wrecked her successful dinner; but somehow she could not dislike
him. She did not understand what he was saying or why he should say it when
people were having a good time; but she felt it was part of his interesting
and uncertain nature....

Presently the coffee and cigars came and the women went across the hall,
while the men talked desultorily until the sound of Bessie's voice singing
a French song to Isabella's accompaniment attracted them. After the next
song the visitors went, their car being due to leave on the Eastern
express. They said many pleasant things to Isabelle, and the Senator,
holding her hand in his broad, soft palm, whispered:--

"We can't let so much charm stay buried in Torso!"

So when the last home guest had departed and Lane sat down before the fire
for another cigar, Isabelle drew her chair close to his, her heart beating
with pleasant emotions.

"Well?" she said expectantly.

"Splendid--everything! They liked it, I am sure. I felt proud of you,
Belle!"

"It was all good but the fish,--yes, I thought our party was very nice!"
Then she told him what the Senator had said, and this time Lane did not
repel the idea of their moving to wider fields. He had made a good
impression on "the New York crowd," and he thought again complacently of
the Torso and Northern equipment bonds.

"Something may turn up before long, perhaps."

New York! It made her heart leap. She felt that she was now doing the
wife's part admirably, furthering John's interests by being a competent
hostess, and she liked to further his interests by giving pleasant dinners,
in an attractive gown, and receiving the admiration of clever men. It had
not been the way that her mother had helped on the Colonel; but it was
another way, the modern way, and a very agreeable way.

"Darnell is an awful fool," Lane commented. "If he can't hold on to himself
any better than he did to-night, he won't get far."

"Did you know that he had resigned?"

"No,--it's just as well he has. I don't think the A. and P. would have much
use for him. He's headed the wrong way;" and he added with hardly a pause,
"I think we had better cut the Darnells out, Isabelle. They are not our
sort."

Isabelle, thinking that this was the man's prejudice, made no reply.

"It was too bad Rob Falkner wouldn't come. It would have been a good thing
for him to meet influential people."

Already she spoke with an air of commanding the right sort that her husband
had referred to.

"He doesn't make a good impression on people," Lane remarked. "Perhaps he
will make good with his work."

As a man who had made his own way he felt the great importance of being
able to "get on" with people, to interest them, and keep them aware of
one's presence. But he was broad enough to recognize other roads to
success.

"So you were quite satisfied, John?" his wife asked as she kissed him
good-night.

"Perfectly--it was the right thing--every way--all but Darnell's rot; and
that didn't do much harm."

So the two went to their rest perfectly satisfied with themselves and their
world. Lane's last conscious thought was a jumble of equipment bonds, and
the idea of his wife at the head of a long dinner table in some very grand
house--in New York.




CHAPTER IX


The Darnells had a farm a few miles out of Torso, and this spring they had
given up their house on the square and moved to the farm permanently.
Bessie said it was for Mrs. Darnell's health; men said that the lawyer was
in a tight place with the banks; and gossip suggested that Darnell
preferred being in Torso without his wife whenever he was there. The farm
was on a small hill above a sluggish river, and was surrounded by a growth
of old sycamores and maples. There was a long stretch of fertile fields in
front of the house, dotted by the huge barns and steel windmills of
surrounding farms.

One Sunday in early May the Lanes were riding in the direction of the
Darnell place, and Isabelle persuaded her husband to call there. "I
promised to ride out here and show him the horses," she explained. The
house was a shabby frame affair, large for a farmhouse, with porticoes and
pillars in Southern style. They found the Darnells with the Falkners in the
living-room. Tom Darnell was reading an Elizabethan play aloud, rolling out
the verse in resounding declamation, punctuated by fervid
appreciation,--"God! but that's fine!" "Hear this thing sing." "Just listen
to this ripper."

  "O God! O God! that it were possible
   To undo things done; to call back yesterday!
   That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass,
   To untell the days, and to redeem the hours!" ...

When the Lanes had found chairs before the fire, he kept on reading, but
with less enthusiasm, as if he felt an alien atmosphere. Falkner listened
to the lines with closed eyes, his grim jaw relaxed, the deep frown
smoothed. Bessie stroked a white cat,--it was plain that her thoughts were
far away. Mrs. Darnell, who looked slovenly but pretty, stared vacantly out
of the window. The sun lay in broad, streaks on the dusty floor; there was
an air of drowsy peace, broken only by the warm tones of the lawyer as his
voice rose and fell over the spirited verse. Isabelle enjoyed it all; here
was something out of her usual routine. Darnell's face, which reflected the
emotion of the lines, was attractive to her. He might not be the "right
sort"; but he was unusual.... Finally Darnell flung the book into the
corner and jumped up.

"Here I am boring you good people with stuff dead and gone these hundreds
of years. Falkner always starts me off. Let's have a drink and take a look
at the horses."

The living-room was a mess of furniture and books, wineglasses, bottles,
wraps, whips, and riding-boots. Lane looked it over critically, while
Darnell found some tumblers and poured out wine. Then they all went to the
stable and dawdled about, talking horse. The fields were green with the
soft grass, already nearly a foot high. Over the house an old grape-vine
was budding in purple balls. There was a languor and sweetness to the air
that instigated laziness. Although Lane wished to be off, Isabelle lingered
on, and Darnell exclaimed hospitably: "You stay to dinner, of course! It is
just plain dinner, Mrs. Lane,"--and he swept away all denial. Turning to
his wife, who had said nothing, he remarked, "It's very good of them to
come in on us like this, isn't it, Irene?"

Mrs. Darnell started and mumbled:--

"Yes, I am sure!"

His manners to his wife were always perfect, deferential,--why should she
shrink before him? Isabelle wondered.... Dinner, plentiful and appetizing,
was finally provided by the one negro woman. Darnell tried to talk to Lane,
but to Isabelle's surprise her husband was at a disadvantage:--the two men
could not find common ground. Then Darnell and Falkner quoted poetry, and
Isabelle listened. It was all very different from anything she knew. While
the others waited for their coffee, Darnell showed her the old orchard,
--"to smell the first blossoms." It was languorously still there under the
trees, with the misty fields beyond. Darnell said dreamily:--

"This is where I'd like to be always,--no, not six miles from Torso, but in
some far-off country, a thousand miles from men!"

"You, a farmer!" laughed Isabelle. "And what about Congress, and the real
anarchists?"

"Oh, you cannot understand! You do not belong to the fields as I do." He
pointed ironically to her handsome riding skirt. "You are of the cities, of
people. You will flit from this Indiana landscape one day, from provincial
Torso, and spread your gay wings among the houses of men. While I--" He
made a gesture of despair,--half comic, half serious,--and his dark face
became gloomy.

Isabelle was amused at what she called his "heroics," but she felt
interested to know what he was; and it flattered her that he should see her
"spreading gay wings among the houses of men." These days she liked to
think of herself that way.

"You will be in Washington, while we are still in Torso!" she answered.

"Maybe," he mused. "Well, we play the game--play the game--until it is
played out!"

'He is not happy with his wife,' Isabelle concluded sagely; 'she doesn't
understand him, and that's why she has that half-scared look.'

"I believe you really want to play the game as much as anybody," she
ventured with a little thrill of surprise to find herself talking so
personally with a man other than her husband.

"You think so?" he demanded, and his face grew wistful. "There is nothing
in the game compared with the peace that one might have--"

Lane was calling to her, but she lingered to say:--

"How?"

"Far away--with love and the fields!"

They walked back to where John was holding the horses. She was oddly
fluttered. For the first time since she had become engaged a man had
somehow given her that special sensation, which women know, of confidence
between them. She wished that John had not been so anxious to be off, and
she did not repeat to him Darnell's talk, as she usually did every small
item. All that she said was, after a time of reflection, "He is not a happy
man."

"Who?"

"Mr. Darnell."

"From what I hear he is in a bad way. It is his own fault. He has plenty of
ability,--a splendid chance."

She felt that this was an entirely inadequate judgment. What interested the
man was the net result; what interested the woman was the human being in
whom that result was being worked out. They talked a little longer about
the fermenting tragedy of the household that they had just left, as the
world talks, from a distance. But Isabelle made the silent
reservation,--'she doesn't understand him--with another woman, it would be
different.'...

Their road home lay through a district devastated by the mammoth sheds of
some collieries. A smudged sign bore the legend:--

PLEASANT VALLEY COAL COMPANY

Lane pulled up his horse and looked carefully about the place. Then he
suggested turning west to examine another coal property.

"I suppose that Freke man is awfully rich," Isabelle remarked, associating
the name of the coal company with its president; "but he's so common,--I
can't see how you can stand him, John!"

Lane turned in his saddle and looked at the elegant figure that his wife
made on horseback.

"He isn't half as interesting as Tom Darnell or Rob," she added.

"I stand him," he explained, smiling, "for the reason men stand each other
most often,--we make money together."

"Why, how do you mean? He isn't in the railroad."

"I mean in coal mines," he replied vaguely, and Isabelle realized that she
was trespassing on that territory of man's business which she had been
brought up to keep away from. Nevertheless, as they rode homeward in the
westering golden light, she thought of several things:--John was in other
business than the railroad, and that puffy-faced German-American was in
some way connected with it; business covered many mysteries; a man did
business with people he would not ordinarily associate with. It even
crossed her mind that what with sleep and business a very large part of her
husband's life lay quite beyond her touch. Perhaps that was what the
Kentuckian meant by his ideal,--to live life with some loved one far away
in companionship altogether intimate.

But before long she was thinking of the set of her riding-skirt, and that
led to the subject of summer gowns which she meant to get when she went
East with her mother, and that led on to the question of the summer itself.
It had been decided that Isabelle should not spend another summer in the
Torso heat, but whether she should go to the Connecticut place or accept
Margaret Lawton's invitation to the mountains, she was uncertain. Thus
pleasantly her thoughts drifted on into her future.




CHAPTER X


If Isabelle had been curious about her husband's interest in the Pleasant
Valley Coal Company, she might have developed a highly interesting chapter
of commercial history, in which Mr. Freke and John Lane were enacting
typical parts.

The Atlantic and Pacific railroad corporation is, as may easily be
inferred, a vast organism, with a history, a life of its own, lying like a
thick ganglia of nerves and blood-vessels a third of the way across our
broad continent, sucking its nourishment from thousands of miles of rich
and populous territory. To write its history humanly, not statistically,
would be to reveal an important chapter in the national drama for the past
forty years,--a drama buried in dusty archives, in auditors' reports,
vouchers, mortgage deeds, general orders, etc. Some day there will come the
great master of irony, the man of insight, who will make this mass of
routine paper glow with meaning visible to all!

Meanwhile this Atlantic and Pacific, which to-day is a mighty system, was
once only a handful of atoms. There was the period of Birth; there was the
period of Conquest; and finally there has come the period of Domination.
Now, with its hold on the industry, the life of eight states, complete,
like the great Serpent it can grumble, "I lie here possessing!"

Farrington Beals came to be President of the Atlantic and Pacific at the
close of the period of Conquest. The condottieri leaders, those splendid
railroad brigands of the seventies and eighties, had retired with "the
fruits of their industry." To Farrington Beals and his associate was left
the care of the orchard. It was their task to solidify a conglomerate mass
of interest-bearing burden, to operate the property with the greatest
efficiency possible, in order that it might support the burdens laid upon
it and yet other burdens to come as the land waxed rich,--all burdens being
ultimately passed to the broad back of the Public, where burdens seem
naturally to belong. To this end, Beals men, as they were called, gradually
replaced throughout the length and breadth of the system the old
operatives, whose methods belonged to the coarse days of brigandage! These
Beals men were youngsters,--capable, active, full of "jump," with the word
"traffic, traffic" singing always in their ears. Beals was a splendid
"operator," and he rapidly brought the Atlantic and Pacific into the first
rank of the world's railroads. That shrewd and conservative statesman,
Senator Alonzo Thomas (who had skilfully marshalled the legal and political
forces during the period of Conquest) was now chairman of the Board, and he
and the President successfully readjusted the heterogeneous mass of bonds
and stocks, notes and prior liens, taking advantage of a period of
optimistic feeling in the market to float a tremendous general mortgage.
When this "Readjustment" had been successfully put through, the burden was
some forty or fifty millions larger than before,--where those millions went
is one of the mysteries to reward that future Carlyle!--but the public load
was adjusted more trimly. So it was spoken of as a "masterly stroke of
finance," and the ex-statesman gained much credit in the highest circles.

The Senator and the President are excellent men, as any financier will tell
you. They are charitable and genial, social beings, members of clubs, hard
working and intelligent, public spirited, too,--oh, the very best that the
Republic breeds! To see Farrington Beals, gray-haired, thoughtful, almost
the student, clothed in a sober dark suit, with a simple flower in the
buttonhole, and delicate glasses on the bridge of his shapely nose,--to see
him modestly enter the general offices of the Atlantic and Pacific, any one
would recognize an Industrial Flywheel of society. To accompany him over
the system in his car, with a party of distinguished foreign stockholders,
was in the nature of a religious ceremony, so much the interests of this
giant property in his care seemed allied with the best interests of our
great land!

Thus Beals men ran the road,--men like John Hamilton Lane, railroad men to
the core, loyal men, devoted to the great A. and P. And traffic increased
monthly, tonnage mounted, wheels turned faster, long freight trains wound
their snaky coils through the Alleghanies, over the flat prairies, into
Eastern ports, or Western terminals--Traffic, Traffic! And money poured
into the treasury, more than enough to provide for all those securities
that the Senator was so skilled in manufacturing. All worked in this
blessed land of freedom to the glory of Farrington Beals and the profit of
the great A. and P.

What has Isabelle to do with all this? Actually she was witness to one
event,--rather, just the surface of it, the odd-looking, concrete outside!
An afternoon early in her married life at Torso, she had gone down to the
railroad office to take her husband for a drive in the pleasant autumn
weather. As he was long in coming to meet her, she entered the brick
building; the elevator boy, recognizing her with a pleasant nod, whisked
her up to the floor where Lane had his private office. Entering the outer
room, which happened to be empty at this hour, she heard voices through the
half-open door that led to the inner office. It was first her husband's
voice, so low that she could not hear what he was saying. Presently it was
interrupted by a passionate treble. Through the door she could just see
John's side face where he was seated at his desk,--the look she liked best,
showing the firm cheek and jaw line, and resolute mouth. Over his desk a
thin, roughly dressed man with a ragged reddish beard was leaning on both
arms, and his shoulders trembled with the passion of his utterance.

"Mr. Lane," he was saying in that passionate treble, "I must have them
cars--or I shall lose my contract!"

"As I have told you a dozen times, Mr. Simonds, I have done my best for
you. I recognize your trouble, and it is most unfortunate,--but there seems
to be a shortage of coalers just now."

"The Pleasant Valley company get all they want!" the man blurted out.

Lane merely drummed on his desk.

"If I can't get cars to ship my coal, I shall be broke, bankrupt," the thin
man cried.

"I am very sorry--"

"Sorry be damned! Give me some cars!"

"You will have to see Mr. Brundage at St. Louis," Lane answered coldly. "He
has final say on such matters for the Western division. I merely follow
orders."

He rose and closed his desk. The thin man with an eloquent gesture turned
and rushed out of the office, past Isabelle, who caught a glimpse of a
white face working, of teeth chewing a scrubby mustache, of blood-shot
eyes. John locked his desk, took down his hat and coat, and came into the
outer office. He kissed his wife, and they went to drive behind the
Kentucky horses, talking of pleasant matters. After a time, Isabelle asked
irrelevantly:--

"John, why couldn't you give that man the cars he wanted?"

"Because I had no orders to do so."

"But aren't there cars to be had when the other company gets them?"

"There don't happen to be any cars for Simonds. The road is friendly to Mr.
Freke."

And he closed his explanation by kissing his wife on her pretty neck, as
though he would imply that more things than kisses go by favor in this
world. Isabelle had exhausted her interest in the troubled man's desire for
coal cars, and yet in that little phrase, "The road is friendly to Mr.
Freke," she had touched close upon a great secret of the Beals regime.
Unbeknownst to her, she had just witnessed one of those little modern
tragedies as intense in their way as any Caesarian welter of blood; she had
seen a plain little man, one of the negligible millions, being "squeezed,"
in other words the operation in an ordinary case of the divine law of
survival. Freke was to survive; Simonds was not. In what respects Simonds
was inferior to Freke, the Divine Mind alone could say. When that
convulsive face shot past Isabelle in Lane's office, it was merely the
tragic moment when the conscious atom was realizing fully that he was not
to be the one to survive! The moment when Suspense is converted into
Despair....

Nor could Isabelle trace the well-linked chain of cause and effect that led
from Simonds about-to-be-a-bankrupt _via_ Freke and the Pleasant Valley
Coal Company through the glory of the A. and P. (incidentally creating in
the Senator his fine patriotism and faith in the future of his country) to
her husband's check-book and her own brilliant little dinner, "where they
could afford to offer champagne." But in the maze of earthly affairs all
these unlike matters were related, and the relationship is worth our
notice, if not Isabelle's. If it had been expounded to her, if she had seen
certain certificates of Pleasant Valley stock lying snugly side by side
with Torso Northern bonds and other "good things" in her husband's
safe,--and also in the strong boxes of Messrs. Beals, Thomas, Stanton, _et
al_., she would have said, as she had been brought up to say, "that is my
husband's affair."...

The Atlantic and Pacific, under the shrewd guidance of the amiable Senator,
was a law-abiding citizen, outwardly. When the anti-rebate laws were
passed, the road reformed; it was glad to reform, it made money by
reforming. But within the law there was ample room for "efficient" men to
acquire more money than their salaries, and they naturally grasped their
opportunities, as did the general officers. Freke, whom Isabelle disliked,
with her trivial woman's prejudice about face and manners, embodied a
Device,--in other words he was an instrument whereby some persons could
make a profit, a very large profit, at the expense of other persons. The A.
and P. 'was friendly to Freke.' The Pleasant Valley Coal Company never
wanted cars, and it also enjoyed certain other valuable privileges, covered
by the vague term "switching," that enabled it to deliver its coal into the
gaping hulls at tidewater at seventy to eighty cents per ton cheaper than
any of its competitors in the Torso district. No wonder that the Pleasant
Valley company, with all this "friendliness" of the A. and P., prospered,
and that Mr. Freke, under one name or another, swallowed presently, at a
bargain, the little mine that the man Simonds had struggled to operate, as
well as thousands of acres of bituminous coal lands along the Pleasant
River, and along the Torso Northern road. (Perhaps the inwardness of that
Inspection Party can now be seen, also.) The signs of the Pleasant Valley
Coal Company and its aliases squatted here and there all through the Torso
coal region. As the Senator would say, it was a very successful business,
"thanks to the initiative of Mr. Freke." And that poor Simonds, who had
amply demonstrated his inability to survive, his utter lack of adaptation
to his environment, by not being able to be friendly with the great A. and
P., went--where all the inefficient, non-adaptable human refuse goes--to
the bottom. _Bien entendu!_

Freke was the Pleasant Valley Coal Company,--that is, he was its necessary
physiognomy,--but really the coal company was an incorporated private farm
of the officers and friends of the A. and P.,--an immensely profitable
farm. Lane in his callow youth did not know this fact; but he learned it
after he had been in Torso a few weeks. He was quick to learn, a typical
Beals man, thoroughly "efficient," one who could keep his eyes where they
belonged, his tongue in his mouth, and his ears open. As he told Isabelle
that Sunday afternoon, "he had had many business dealings with Freke,"
alias the Pleasant Valley Company, etc., and they had been uniformly
profitable.

For the fatherly Senator and the shrewd Beals believed that the "right
sort" should make a "good thing"; they believed in thrift. In a word, to
cut short this lengthy explanation, the great Atlantic and Pacific, one of
the two or three most efficiently operated railroads in the United States,
was honeycombed with that common thing "graft," or private "initiative"!
From the President's office all the way down to subordinates in the traffic
department, there were "good things" to be enjoyed. In that growing bunch
of securities that Lane was accumulating in his safe, there were, as has
been said, a number of certificates of stock in coal companies--and not
small ones.

And this is why Lane maintained social as well as financial relations with
the coarse Mr. Freke. And this is why, also, Lane felt that they could
afford "the best," when they undertook to give a dinner to the
distinguished gentlemen from New York. Of course he did not explain all
this to Isabelle that pleasant Sunday afternoon. Would Isabelle have
comprehended it, if he had? Her mind would have wandered off to another
dinner, to that cottage at Bedmouth, which she thought of taking for the
summer, or to the handsome figure that John made on horseback. At least
nine out of ten American husbands would have treated the matter as Lane
did,--given some sufficient general answer to their wives' amateurish
curiosity about business and paid their figures due compliments, and
thought complacently of the comfortable homes to which they were
progressing and the cheerful dinners therein,--all, wife, home, dinner, the
result of their fortunate adaptation to the environments they found
themselves in....

Perhaps may be seen by this time the remote connection between that tragic
gesture of Frank Simonds on the Saturday afternoon, calling on heaven and
the Divine Mind that pitilessly strains its little creatures through the
holes of a mighty colander--between that tragic gesture, I say, and
Isabelle's delightful dinner of ten courses,--champagne and terrapin!

       *       *       *       *       *

But this tiresome chapter on the affairs of the Atlantic and Pacific
railroad,--will it never be done! So sordid, so commonplace, so newspapery,
so--just what everything in life is--when we might have expected for the
dollar and a quarter expended on this pound of wood pulp and
ink,--something less dull than a magazine article; something about a
motor-car and a girl with a mischievous face whom a Russian baron seeks to
carry away by force and is barely thwarted by the brave American college
youth dashing in pursuit with a new eighty h. p., etc., etc. Or at least if
one must have a railroad in a novel (when every one knows just what a
railroad is), give us a private car and the lovely daughter of the
President together with a cow-punching hero, as in Bessie's beloved story.
But an entire chapter on graft and a common dinner-party with the champagne
drunk so long ago--what a bore!

And yet in the infinite hues of this our human life, the methods by which
our substantial hero, John Hamilton Lane, amassed his fortune, are worthy
of contemplation. There is more, O yawning reader, in the tragic gesture of
ragged-bearded Frank Simonds than in some tons of your favorite brand of
"real American women"; more in the sublime complacency of Senator Alonzo
Thomas, when he praised "that great and good man," and raised to his memory
his glass of Pommery brut, triple sec, than in all the adventures of
soldiers of fortune or yellow cars or mysterious yachts or hectic Russian
baronesses; more--at least for the purpose of this history--in John's
answer to Isabelle's random inquiry that Sunday afternoon than in all the
"heart-interest" you have absorbed in a twelvemonth. For in the atmosphere
of the ACTS here recorded, you and I, my reader, live and have our being,
such as it is--and also poor Frank Simonds (who will never appear again to
trouble us). And to the seeing eye, mystery and beauty lie in the hidden
meaning of things seen but not known....

Patience! We move to something more intimate and domestic, if not more
thrilling.




CHAPTER XI


The child was coming!

When Isabelle realized it, she had a shock, as if something quite outside
her had suddenly interposed in her affairs. That cottage at Bedmouth for
the summer would have to be given up and other plans as well. At first she
had refused to heed the warning,--allowed John to go away to New York on
business without confiding in him,--at last accepted it regretfully. Since
the terrifying fear those first days in the Adirondack forest lest she
might have conceived without her passionate consent, the thought of
children had gradually slipped out of her mind. They had settled into a
comfortable way of living, with their plans and their expectations. "That
side of life," as she called it, was still distasteful to her,--she did not
see why it had to be. Fortunately it did not play a large part in their
life, and the other, the companionable thing, the being admired and petted,
quite satisfied her. Children, of course, sometime; but "not just yet."

"It will be the wrong time,--September,--spoil everything!" she complained
to Bessie.

"Oh, it's always the wrong time, no matter when it happens. But you'll get
used to it. Rob had to keep me from going crazy at first. But in the end
you like it."

"It settles Bedmouth this year!"

"It is a bore," Bessie agreed sympathetically, feeling sorry for herself,
as she was to have spent six weeks with Isabelle. "It takes a year out of a
woman's life, of course, no matter how she is situated. And I'm so
fearfully ugly all the time. But you won't be,--your figure is better."

Bessie, like most childlike persons, took short views of immediate matters.
She repeated her idea of child-bearing:--

"I hated it each time,--especially the last time. It did seem so
unnecessary--for us.... And it spoils your love, being so afraid. But when
it comes, why you like it, of course!"

John arrived from his hurried trip to New York, smiling with news. He did
not notice his wife's dejected appearance when he kissed her, in his
eagerness to tell something.

"There is going to be a shake-up in the road," he announced. "That's why
they sent for me."

"Is there?" she asked listlessly.

"Well, I am slated for fourth Vice-president. They were pleased to say
handsome things about what I have done at Torso. Guess they heard of that
offer from the D. and O."

"What is fourth Vice-president?" Isabelle inquired.

"In charge of traffic west--headquarters at St. Louis!"

He expected that his wife would be elated at this fulfilment of her
desires; but instead Isabelle's eyes unaccountably filled with tears. When
he understood, he was still more mystified at her dejection. Very tenderly
holding her in his arms, he whispered his delight into her ears. His face
was radiant; it was far greater news than his promotion to the fourth
vice-presidency of the A. and P.

"And you knew all this time!" he exclaimed reproachfully.

"I wasn't sure!"

He seemed to take the event as natural and joyful, which irritated her
still more. As Bessie had said, "Whatever ties a woman to the home, makes
her a piece of domestic furniture, the men seem to approve of!"

"What a fright I look already!" Isabelle complained, gazing at the dark
circles under her eyes in the glass. She thought of Aline, whose complexion
like a Jacqueminot rose had been roughened and marred. Something still
virginal in her soul rebelled against it all.

"Oh, not so bad," Lane protested. "You are just a little pinched. You'll be
fitter than ever when it's over!"

The man doesn't care, she thought mutinously. It seems to him the proper
thing,--what woman is made for. Isabelle was conscious that she was made
for much more, for her own joy and her own activity, and she hated to part
with even a little of it!

He could not understand her attitude. As a man he had retained the
primitive joy in the coming of the child, any child,--but _his_ child and
the first one above all! Compared with that nothing was of the least
importance. Seeing her pouting into the glass, he said reproachfully:--

"But you like children, Belle!"

And taking her again into his arms and kissing her, he added, "We'll give
the little beggar a royal welcome, girl!"

His grave face took on a special look of content with the world and his
share in it, while Isabelle continued to stare at herself in the glass and
think of the change a child would make in her life. Thus the woman of the
new generation, with her eagerness for a "large, full life," feels towards
that process of nature for which the institution of marriage was primarily
designed.

       *       *       *       *       *

So for a time longer Isabelle tried to ignore the coming fact, to put it
out of her mind, and grasp as much of her own life as she could before the
life within her should deprive her of freedom. As Lane's new duties would
not begin until the summer, it was arranged that Isabelle should spend the
hot weeks at the Grafton farm with her mother, and then return to St. Louis
for her confinement in her old home. Later they would settle themselves in
the city at their leisure.... It was all so provoking, Isabelle persisted
in thinking. They might have had at least a year of freedom in which to
settle themselves in the new home. And she had had visions of a few months
in Europe with Vickers, who was now in Rome. John might have come over
after her. To give up all this for what any woman could do at any time!

As the months passed she could not evade the issue. By the time she was
settled in her old room at the Farm she had grown anaemic, nervous. The
coming of the child had sapped rather than created strength as it properly
should have done. White and wasted she lay for long hours on the lounge
near the window where she could see the gentle green hills. Here her cousin
Alice Johnston found her, when she arrived with her children to make Mrs.
Price a visit. The large, placid woman knelt by Isabelle's side and
gathered her in her arms.

"I'm so glad, dear! When is it to be?"

"Oh, sometime in the fall," Isabelle replied vaguely, bored that her
condition already revealed itself. "Did you want the first one?" she asked
after a time.

"Well, not at the very first. You see it was just so much more of a risk.
And our marriage was a risk without that.... I hated the idea of becoming a
burden for Steve. But with you it will be so different, from the start. And
then it always makes its own place, you see. When it comes, you will think
you always wanted it!"

She smiled in her large human way, as if she had tested the trials of life
and found that all held some sweet. Isabelle looked down at her thin arms.
The Johnstons had four, and they were so poor! As if divining her thought,
Alice said:--

"Every time I wondered how we were going to survive, but somehow we did.
And now it will all be well, with Steve's new position--"

"What is that?"

"Hasn't John told you? It has just been settled; Steve is going into the A.
and P.,--John's assistant in St. Louis."

"I'm so glad for you," Isabelle responded listlessly. She recalled now
something that her husband had said about Johnston being a good man, who
hadn't had his chance, and that he hoped to do something for him.

"Tremendous rise in salary,--four thousand," Alice continued buoyantly. "We
shan't know what to do with all that money! We can give the children the
best education."

Isabelle reflected that John's salary had been five thousand at Torso, and
as fourth Vice-president would be ten thousand. And she still had her
twenty-five hundred dollars of allowance from her father. Alice's elation
over Steve's rise gave her a sudden appreciation of her husband's growing
power,--his ability to offer a struggling man his chance. Perhaps he could
do something for the Falkners also. The thought took her out of herself for
a little while. Men were free to work out their destiny in life, to go
hither and thither, to alter fate. But a woman had to bear children. John
was growing all this time, and she was separated from him. She tried to
believe that this was the reason for her discontent, this separation from
her husband; but she knew that when she had been perfectly free, she had
not shared largely in his activity....

"You must tell me all about the St. Mary's girls," Alice said. "Have you
seen Aline?"

"Yes,--she has grown very faddy, I should think,--arts and crafts and all
that. Isn't it queer? I asked her to visit us, but she has another one
coming,--the third!"

Isabelle made a little grimace.

"And Margaret?"

"She has suddenly gone abroad with her husband--to Munich. He's given up
his business. Didn't her marriage surprise you?"

"Yes, I thought she was going to marry that Englishman who was at your
wedding."

"Mr. Hollenby? Yes, every one did. Something happened. Suddenly she became
engaged to this Pole,--a New York man. Very well connected, and has money,
I hear. Conny wrote me about him." ...

So they gossiped on. When Alice rose to leave her, Isabelle held her large
cool hand in hers. The older woman, whose experience had been so unlike
hers, so difficult, soothed her, gave her a suggestion of other kinds of
living than her own little life.

"I'm glad you are here," she said. "Come in often, won't you?"

And her cousin, leaning over to kiss her as she might a fretful child who
had much to learn, murmured, "Of course, dear. It will be all right!"




CHAPTER XII


The Steve Johnstons had had a hard time, as Isabelle would have phrased it.

He had been a faithful, somewhat dull and plodding student at the technical
school, where he took the civil engineering degree, and had gone forth to
lay track in Montana. He laid it well; but this job finished, there seemed
no permanent place for him. He was heavy and rather tongue-tied, and made
no impression on his superiors except that of commonplace efficiency. He
drifted into Canada, then back to the States, and finally found a place in
Detroit.

Here, while working for thirty dollars a week, he met Alice Johnston,--she
also was earning her living, being unwilling to accept from the Colonel
more than the means for her education,--and from the first he wished to
marry her, attracted by her gentle, calm beauty, her sincerity, and
buoyant, healthy enjoyment of life. She was teaching in a girls' school,
and was very happy. Other women had always left the heavy man on the road,
so to speak, marking him as stupid. But Alice Johnston was keener or kinder
than most young women: she perceived beneath the large body a will, an
intelligence, a character, merely inhibited in their envelope of large
bones and solid flesh, with an entire absence of nervous system. He was
silent before the world, but not foolish, and with her he was not long
silent. She loved him, and she consented to marry him on forty dollars a
week, hopefully planning to add something from her teaching to the budget,
until Steve's slow power might gain recognition.

"So we married," she said to Isabelle, recounting her little life history
in the drowsy summer afternoon. "And we were so happy on what we had! It
was real love. We took a little flat a long way out of the city, and when I
came home afternoons from the school, I got the dinner and Steve cooked the
breakfasts,--he's a splendid cook, learned on the plains. It all went
merrily the first months, though Aunt Harmony thought I was such a fool to
marry, you remember?" She laughed, and Isabella smiled at the memory of the
caustic comments which Mrs. Price had made when Alice Vance, a poor niece,
had dared to marry a poor man,--"They'll be coming to your father for help
before the year is out," she had said. But they hadn't gone to the Colonel
yet.

"Then little Steve came, and I had to leave the school and stay at home.
That was hard, but I had saved enough to pay for the doctor and the nurse.
Then that piece of track elevation was finished and Steve was out of work
for a couple of months. He tried so hard, poor boy! But he was never meant
to be an engineer. I knew that, of course, all along.... Well, the baby
came, and if it hadn't been for my savings,--why, I should have gone to the
hospital!

"Just then Steve met a man he had known at the Tech, and was given that
place on a railroad as clerk in the traffic department. He was doubtful
about taking it, but I wasn't. I was sure it would open up, and even
twenty-five dollars a week is something. So he left for Cleveland a week
after the baby was born, and somehow I packed up and followed with the baby
when I could.

"That wasn't the end of hard times by any means. You see Ned came the next
year,--we're such healthy, normal specimens!" She laughed heartily at this
admission of her powers of maternity. "And it wasn't eighteen months before
Alice was coming.... Oh, I know that we belong to the thriftless pauper
class that's always having children,--more than it can properly care for.
We ought to be discouraged! But somehow we have fed and clothed 'em all,
and we couldn't spare one o' the kiddies. There's James, too, you know. He
came last winter, just after Steve had the grippe and pneumonia; that was a
pull. But it doesn't seem right to--to keep them from coming--and when you
love each other--"

Her eyes shone with a certain joy as she frankly stated the woman's
problem, while Isabelle looked away, embarrassed. Mrs. Johnston continued
in her simple manner:--

"If Nature doesn't want us to have them, why does she give us the power?
... I know that is wretched political economy and that Nature really has
nothing to do with the modern civilized family. But as I see other women,
the families about me, those that are always worrying over having children,
trying to keep out of it,--why, they don't seem to be any better off. And
it is--well, undignified,--not nice, you know.... We can't spare 'em, nor
any more that may come! ... As I said, I believed all along that Steve had
it in him, that his mind and character must tell, and though it was
discouraging to have men put over him, younger men too, at last the
railroad found out what he could do."

Her face beamed with pride.

"You see Steve has a remarkable power of storing things up in that big head
of his. Remembers a lot of pesky little detail when he's once fixed his
mind on it,--the prices of things, figures, and distances, and rates and
differentials. Mr. Mason--that was the traffic manager of our road--
happened to take Steve to Buffalo with him about some rate-making business.
Steve, it turned out, knew the situation better than all the traffic
managers. He coached Mr. Mason, and so our road got something it wanted. It
was about the lumber rate, in competition with Canadian roads. Mr. Mason
made Steve his assistant--did you ever think what an awful lot the rate on
lumber might mean to _you_ and yours? It's a funny world. Because Steve
happened to be there and knew that with a rate of so much a thousand feet
our road could make money,--why, we had a house to live in for the first
time!

"Of course," she bubbled, "it isn't just that. It's Steve's head,--an
ability to find his way through those great sheets of figures the railroads
are always compiling. He stores the facts up in that big round head and
pulls 'em out when they are wanted. Why, he can tell you just what it would
cost to ship a car of tea from Seattle to New York!"

Isabella had a vision of Steve Johnston's large, heavy head with its thick,
black hair, and she began to feel a respect for the stolid man.

"John said he had great ability," she remarked. "I'm so glad it all came
out right in the end."

"I had my first servant when the promotion came, and that spring we took a
little house,--it was crowded in the flat, and noisy."

"You will find it so much easier now, and you will like St. Louis."

"Oh, yes! But it hasn't been really bad,--the struggle, the being poor. You
see we were both well and strong, and we loved so much, and we always had
the problem of how to live,--that draws you together if you have the real
thing in you. It isn't sordid trying to see what a quarter can be made to
do. It's exciting."

As she recalled the fight, a tender smile illuminated her face and curved
her lips upward. To her poverty had not been limiting, grinding, but an
exhilarating fight that taxed her resources of mind and body.

"Of course there are a lot of things you can't have. But most people have
more than they know how to handle, no matter where they are!"

Isabelle was puzzled by this remark, and explained Alice Johnston's content
by her age, her lack of experience, at least such experience as she had
had. For life to her presented a tantalizing feast of opportunities, and it
was her intention to grasp as many of these as one possibly could. Any
other view of living seemed not only foolish but small-minded. Without any
snobbishness she considered that her sphere and her husband's could not be
compared with the Johnstons'. The Lanes, she felt, were somehow called to
large issues.

Nevertheless, Isabelle could understand that Alice's marriage was quite a
different thing from what hers was,--something to glorify all the petty,
sordid details, to vivify the grimy struggle of keeping one's head above
the social waters.

"Now," Alice concluded, "we can save! And start the children fairly. But I
wonder if we shall ever be any happier than we have been,--any closer,
Steve and I?"

Alice, by her very presence, her calm acceptance of life as it shaped
itself, soothed Isabelle's restlessness, suggested trust and confidence.

"You are a dear," she whispered to her cousin. "I am so glad you are to be
near me in St. Louis!"




CHAPTER XIII


Isabelle saw the fat headlines in the Pittsburg paper that the porter
brought her,--"Congressman Darnell and his wife killed!" The bodies had
been found at the bottom of an abandoned quarry. It was supposed that
during a thunder-storm the night before, as he was driving from Torso to
his farm in company with his wife, the horses had become uncontrollable and
had dashed into the pit before Darnell could pull them up. He had just
taken his seat in Congress. Isabelle remembered that he called the day
before she left Torso, and when she had congratulated him on his election,
had said jokingly: "Now I shall get after your husband's bosses, Mrs. Lane.
We shan't be on speaking terms when next we meet." He seemed gay and vital.
So it had ended thus for the tempestuous Kentuckian....

John was waiting for her at the station in Torso, where she was to break
the journey. His face was eager and solicitous. He made many anxious
inquiries about her health and the journey. But she put it all to one side.

"Tell me about the Darnells. Isn't it dreadful!"

"Yes," he said slowly, "it is very bad." Lane's voice was grave, as if he
knew more than the published report.

"How could it have happened,--he was such a good driver? He must have been
drunk."

"Tom Darnell could have driven all right, even if he had been drunk. I am
afraid it's worse than that."

"Tell me!"

"There are all sorts of rumors. He came up from Washington unexpectedly,
and his wife met him at the station with their team. They went to the hotel
first, and then suddenly started for the farm in the midst of the storm. It
was a terrible storm.... One story is that he had trouble with a bank; it
is even said he had forged paper. I don't know! ... Another story was about
the Adams woman,--you know she followed him to Washington.... Too bad! He
was a brilliant fellow, but he tied himself all up, tied himself all up,"
he observed sententiously, thus explaining the catastrophe of an unbalanced
character.

"You mean it was--suicide?" Isabelle questioned.

"Looks that way!"

"How awful! and his wife killed, too!"

"He was always desperate--uncontrolled sort of fellow. You remember how he
went off the handle the night of our dinner."

"So he ended it--that way," she murmured.

And she saw the man driving along the road in the black storm, his young
wife by his side, with desperate purpose. She remembered his words in the
orchard, his wistful desire for another kind of life. "The Adams woman,
too," as John expressed it, and "he couldn't hold his horses." This nature
had flown in pieces, liked a cracked wheel, in the swift revolution of
life. To her husband it was only one of the messes recorded in the
newspapers. But her mind was full of wonder and fear. As little as she had
known the man, she had felt an interest in him altogether disproportionate
to what he said or did. He was a man of possibilities, of streaks, of
moods, one that could have been powerful, lived a rich life. And at
thirty-three he had come to the end, where his passions and his ideals in
perpetual warfare had held him bound. He had cut the knot! And she had
chosen to go with him, the poor, timid wife! ... Surely there were strange
elements in people, Isabelle felt, not commonly seen in her little
well-ordered existence, traits of character covered up before the world,
fissures running back through the years into old impulses. Life might be
terrible--when it got beyond your hand. She could not dismiss poor Tom
Darnell as summarily as John did,--"a bad lot, I'm afraid!"

"You mustn't think anything more about it," her husband said anxiously, as
she sat staring before her, trying to comprehend the tragedy. "I have
arranged to take you on to-morrow. The Colonel writes that your brother
Ezra is seedy,--touch of malaria, he thinks. The Colonel is looking forward
a lot to your coming."

He talked on about the little domestic things, but she held that picture in
the background of her mind and something within her said over and over,
'Why should it be like that for any one!'

And all the next day, on their way to St. Louis, she could not dismiss the
thought from her mind: 'Why, I saw him only a few weeks ago. How well he
read that poetry, as if he enjoyed it! And what he said that night at
dinner he really meant,--oh, he believed it! And he was sorry for his
wife,--yes, I am sure he was sorry for her. But he loved the other
woman,--she understood him. And so he ended it. It's quite dreadful!'

       *       *       *       *       *

The Colonel met them at the station with his new motor. His face was a bit
grave as he said in answer to their inquiry:--

"No, it is not malaria, I am afraid. The doctors think it is typhoid. There
has been a great deal of it in the city this summer, and the boy wouldn't
take a vacation, was afraid I would stay here if he did. So I went up to
Pelee, instead."

It was typhoid, and young Price died within the week. In the hush that
followed the death of her brother Isabelle lay waiting for the coming of
her child.... Her older brother Ezra! He was like a sturdy young tree in
the forest, scarce noticed in the familiar landscape until his loss. Quiet,
hard-working "Junior," as the family called him,--what would the Colonel do
without him? The old man--now he was obviously old even to Isabelle--would
come to her room and sit for long hours silent, as if he, too, was waiting
for the coming of the new life into his house.

These two deaths so unlike, the tragic end of Darnell and her brother's
sudden removal, sank deep into her, sounding to her in the midst of her own
childish preoccupation with her own life, the intricacy, the mystery of all
existence. Life was larger than a private garden hedged with personal
ambitions. She was the instrument of forces outside her being. And in her
weakness she shrank into herself.

They told her that she had given birth to a daughter--another being like
herself!




PART TWO



CHAPTER XIV


Colonel Price was a great merchant, one of those men who have been the
energy, the spirit of the country since the War, now fast disappearing,
giving way to another type in this era of "finance" as distinguished from
"business." When the final review was ended, and he was free to journey
back to the little Connecticut village where three years before he had left
with his parents his young wife and their one child, he was a man just over
thirty, very poor, and weak from a digestive complaint that troubled him
all his life. But the spirit of the man was unbroken. Taking his little
family with him, he moved to St. Louis, and falling in there with a couple
of young men with like metal to himself, who happened also to possess some
capital, he started the wholesale hardware business of Parrott, Price, and
Co., which rapidly became the leading house in that branch of trade
throughout the new West. The capital belonged to the other men, but the
leadership from the start to Colonel Price. It was his genius as a trader,
a diviner of needs, as an organizer, that within twenty years created the
immense volume of business that rolled through the doors of their old
warehouse. During the early years the Colonel was the chief salesman and
spent his days "on the road" up and down the Mississippi Valley, sleeping
in rough country taverns, dining on soda biscuit and milk, driving many
miles over clayey, rutty roads,--dealing with men, making business.

Meanwhile the wife--her maiden name was Harmony Vickers--was doing her part
in that little brick house which the Colonel had taken Lane to see. There
she worked and saved, treating her husband's money like a sacred fund to be
treasured. When the colonel came home from his weekly trips, he helped in
the housework, and nursed the boy through the croup at night, saving his
wife where he could. It was long after success had begun to look their way
before Mrs. Price would consent to move into the wooden cottage on a quiet
cross street that the Colonel wanted to buy, or employ more than one
servant. But the younger children as they came on, first Vickers, then
Isabelle, insensibly changed the family habits,--also the growing wealth
and luxury of their friends, and the fast increasing income of the Colonel,
no longer to be disguised. Yet when they built that lofty brick house in
the older quarter of the city, she would have but two servants and used
sparingly the livery carriage that her husband insisted on providing for
her. The habit of fearsome spending never could wholly be eradicated. When
the Colonel had become one of the leading merchants of the city, she
consented grudgingly to the addition of one servant, also a coachman and a
single pair of horses, although she preferred the streetcars on the next
block as safer and less troublesome; and she began gradually to entertain
her neighbors, to satisfy the Colonel's hospitable instincts, in the style
in which they entertained her.

Mrs. Price had an enormous pride in the Colonel and in his reputation in
St. Louis, a pride that no duke's wife could exceed. It was the Colonel who
had started the movement for a Commercial Association and was its first
president. As his wife she had entertained under her roof a President of
the United States, not to mention a Russian prince and an English peer. It
was the Colonel, as she told her children, who had carried through the
agitation for a Water Commission; who urged the Park system; who saved the
Second National Bank from failure in the panic days of ninety-three. She
knew that he might have been governor, senator, possibly vice-president, if
it had not been for his modesty and his disinclination to dip into the
muddy pool of politics. As she drove into the city on her errands she was
proudly conscious that she was the wife of the best-known private citizen,
and as such recognized by every important resident and every quick-witted
clerk in the stores where she dealt. To be plain Mrs. Ezra Price was ample
reward for all the hardship and deprivation of those beginning years!

She was proud, too, of the fact that the money which she spent was honest
money. For the hardware merchant belonged to the class that made its
fortunes honestly, in the eye of the Law and of Society, also. Although
latterly his investments had carried him into real estate, railroads, and
banks, nevertheless it was as the seller of hardware that he wished to be
known. He was prouder of the Lion brand of tools than of all his stock
holdings. And though for many years a director in the Atlantic and Pacific
and other great corporations, he had always resolutely refused to be drawn
into the New York whirlpool; he was an American merchant and preferred to
remain such all his life rather than add a number of millions to his estate
"by playing faro in Wall Street."

The American merchant of this sort is fast disappearing, alas! As a class
it has never held that position in the East that it had in the West. In the
older states the manufacturer and the speculator have had precedence.
Fortunes built on slaves and rum and cotton have brought more honor than
those made in groceries and dry goods. Odd snobbery of trade! But in that
broad, middle ground of the country, its great dorsal column, the merchant
found his field, after the War, to develop and civilize. The character of
those pioneers in trade, men from Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, was
such as to make them leaders. They were brave and unselfish, faithful, and
trusting of the future. With the plainest personal habits and tastes,
taking no tarnish from the luxury that rose about them, seeing things
larger than dollars on their horizon, they made the best aristocracy that
this country has seen. Their coat of arms bore the legend: Integrity and
Enterprise.

For their fortunes were built not speculatively, but on the ancient
principles of trade, of barter between men, which is to divine needs and
satisfy them, and hence they are the only fortunes in our rich land that do
not represent, to some degree, human blood, the sacrifice of the many for
the few. They were not fattened on a protective tariff, nor dug in wild
speculation out of the earth, nor gambled into being over night on the
price of foodstuffs, nor stolen from government lands, nor made of water in
Wall Street. These merchants earned them, as the pedler earns the profit of
his pack, as the farmer reaps the harvest of his seed. They earned them by
labor and sagacity, and having them, they stood with heads erect, looking
over their world and knowing that such as it is they helped to build it.

The day of the great merchant has already gone. Already the names of these
honorable firms are mere symbols, cloaking corporate management, trading on
the old personalities. No one saw the inevitable drift clearer than Colonel
Price. In common with his class he cherished the desire of handing on the
structure that he had built to the next generation, with the same
sign-manual over the door,--to his son and his grandson. So he had resisted
the temptation to incorporate the business and "take his profits." There
was a son to sit in his seat. The sons of the other partners would not be
fit: Starbird's only son, after a dissipated youth, was nursing himself
somewhere on the Riviera; his daughter had married an Easterner, and beyond
the quarterly check which the daughter and son received from the business,
this family no longer had a share in it. As for Parrott there was a younger
son serving somewhere in the immense establishment, but he had already
proved his amiable incapacity for responsibility. The second generation, as
the Colonel was forced to admit, was a disappointment. Somehow these
merchants had failed to transmit the iron in their blood to their children.
The sons and sons-in-law either lacked ability and grit, or were frankly
degenerate,--withered limbs!

With the Colonel it had promised to be different; that first boy he had
left behind when he went to the War had grown up under his eye, was
saturated with the business idea. Young Ezra had preferred to leave the
military academy where he had been at school and enter the store at
eighteen. At twenty-six he had been made treasurer of the firm, only a few
months before his death.... The Colonel's thin figure bent perceptibly
after that autumn of ninety-seven. He erected a pseudo-Greek temple in
Fairview Cemetery, with the name Price cut in deep Roman letters above the
door, to hold the ashes of his son,--then devoted all his energies to
measures for sanitary reform in the city. He was a fighter, even of
death....

Vickers had cabled at once when the news reached him that he was sailing
for home. He and Isabelle had inherited their mother's nervous constitution
and had come later in the family fortunes. They had known only ease and
luxury, tempered as it was by their father's democratic simplicity and
their mother's plain tastes. Insensibly they had acquired the outlook of
the richer generation, the sense of freedom to do with themselves what they
pleased. Both had been sent East to school,--to what the Colonel had been
told were the best schools,--and Vickers had gone to a great university.

There for a time the boy had tried to compete in athletics, as the one
inevitable path of ambition for an American boy at college; but realizing
soon that he was too slightly built for this field, he had drifted into
desultory reading and sketching for the college comic paper. Then a social
talent and a gift for writing music gave him the composition of the score
for the annual musical play. This was a hit, and from that time he began to
think seriously of studying music. It was agreed in the family that after
his graduation he should go abroad "to see what he could do." Ezra had
already taken his place in the hardware business, and the younger son could
be spared for the ornamental side of life, all the more as he was delicate
in health and had not shown the slightest evidence of "practical ability."
So the summer that he took his degree, a creditable degree with honors in
music, the Prices sailed for Europe to undertake one of those elaborate
tasting tours of foreign lands that well-to-do American families still
essay. In the autumn it concluded by the Colonel's establishing the family
in Munich and returning to his affairs. Vickers had been in Europe most of
the time since, living leisurely, studying, writing "little things" that
Isabelle played over for the Colonel on the piano.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now he had come home at the family call,--an odd figure it must be
confessed in St. Louis, with his little pointed beard, and thin mustache,
his fondness for flowing neckwear and velveteen waistcoats, his little
canes and varnished boots. And he stayed on; for the family seemed to need
him, in a general way, though it was not clear to him what good he could do
to them and there were tempting reasons for returning to Rome. In spite of
the sadness of the family situation the young man could not repress his
humorous sense of the futility of all hopes built upon himself.

"Just think of me selling nails,"--he always referred to the hardware
business as "selling nails,"--he said to his mother when she spoke to him
of the Colonel's hope that he would try to take his brother's place. "All I
know about business is just enough to draw a check if the bank will keep
the account straight. Poor Colonel! That germ ought to have got me instead
of Junior!"

"You owe it to your father, Vick. You can't be more useless than Bob
Parrott, and your father would like to see you in the office--for a time
any way."

Vickers refrained from saying that there was an unmentioned difference
between him and Bob Parrott. Young Parrott had never shown the desire to do
anything, except play polo; while he might,--at least he had the passion
for other things. The family, he thought, took his music very lightly, as a
kind of elegant toy that should be put aside at the first call of real
duty. Perhaps he had given them reason by his slow preparation, his waiting
on the fulness of time and his own development to produce results for the
world to see. Isabelle alone voiced a protest against this absorption of
the young man into the family business.

"Why, he has his own life! It is too much of a sacrifice," she
remonstrated.

"Nothing that can give your father comfort is too much of a sacrifice,"
Mrs. Price replied sharply.

"It can't last long," Isabelle said to Vickers. "The Colonel will see,--he
is generous."

"He will see that I am no good fast enough!"

"He will understand what you are giving up, and he is too large hearted to
want other people to do what they are not fitted to do."

"I don't suppose that the family fortunes need my strong right arm
exactly?" the young man inquired.

"Of course not! It's the sentiment, don't you see?"

"Yes, of course, the sentiment for nails!" the young man accepted
whimsically. "Poor Junior did the sentiment as well as the business so
admirably, and I shall be such a hollow bluff at both, I fear."

Nevertheless, the next morning Vickers was at breakfast on time, and when
the Colonel's motor came around at eight-thirty, he followed his father
into the hall, put on an unobtrusive black hat, selected a sober pair of
gloves, and leaving his little cane behind him took the seat beside his
father. Their neighbor in the block was getting into his brougham at the
same moment.

"Alexander Harmon," the Colonel explained, "president of the Commercial
Trust Company."

They passed more of the Colonel's acquaintances on their way down the
avenue, emerging from their comfortable houses for the day's work. It was
the order of an industrial society, the young man realized, in a depressed
frame of mind. He also realized, sympathetically, that he was occupying his
brother's seat in the motor, and he was sorry for the old man at his side.
The Colonel looked at him as if he were debating whether he should ask his
son to stop at a barber shop and sacrifice his pointed beard,--but he
refrained.

Vickers had never seen the towering steel and terra-cotta building in which
the hardware business was now housed. It stood in a cloud of mist and smoke
close by the river in the warehouse district. As the car drew up before its
pillared entrance, the Colonel pointed with pride to the brass plaque
beside the door on which was engraved the architect's name.

"Corbin did it,--you know him? They say he's the best man in America. It
was his idea to sign it, the same as they do in Paris. Pretty good
building, eh?"

The young man threw back his head and cast a critical glance over the
twelve-story monster and again at the dwarfed classic entrance through
which was pouring just now a stream of young men.

"Yes, Corbin is a good man," he assented vaguely, looking through the smoke
drifts down the long crowded thoroughfare, on into a mass of telegraph
wires, masts, and smokestacks, and lines of bulky freight cars. Some huge
drays were backed against the Price building receiving bundles of iron rods
that fell clanging into their place. Wagons rattled past over the uneven
pavement, and below along the river locomotives whistled. Above all was the
bass overtone of the city, swelling louder each minute with the day's work.
A picture of a fair palace in the cavernous depths of a Sienna street came
over the young man with a vivid sense of pain. Under his breath he muttered
to himself, "Fierce!" Then he glanced with compunction at the gentle old
face by his side. How had he kept so perfectly sweet, so fine in the midst
of all this welter? The Colonel was like an old Venetian lord, shrewd with
the wisdom of men, gentle with more than a woman's mercy; but the current
that flowed by his palace was not that of the Grand Canal, the winds not
those of the Levant!

But mayhap there was a harmony in this shrill battlefield, if it could be
found....

Within those long double doors there was a vast open area of floor space,
dotted with iron beams, and divided economically into little plots by
screens, in each one of which was a desk with the name of its occupant on
an enamel sign.

"The city sales department," the Colonel explained as they crossed to the
bank of shooting elevators. The Colonel was obliged to stop and speak and
shake hands with many men, mostly in shirt sleeves, with hats on their
heads, smoking cigars or pipes. They all smiled when they caught sight of
the old man's face, and when he stopped to shake hands with some one, the
man's face shone with pride. It was plain enough that the "old man" was
popular with his employees. The mere handshake that he gave had something
instinctively human and kind in it. He had a little habit of kneading
gently the hand he held, of clinging to it a trifle longer than was needed.
Every one of the six or seven hundred men in the building knew that the
head of the business was at heart a plain man like themselves, who had
never forgotten the day he sold his first bill of goods, and respected all
his men each in his place as a man. They knew his "record" as a merchant
and were proud of it. They thought him a "big man." Were he to drop out,
they were convinced the business would run down, as if the main belt had
slipped from the great fly-wheel of the machine shop. All the other
"upstairs" men, as the firm members and managers of departments were
called, were nonentities beside "our Colonel," the "whole thing," "it," as
he was affectionately described.

So the progress to the elevators was slow, for the Colonel stopped to
introduce his son to every man whose desk they passed or whose eye he
caught.

"My boy, Vickers, Mr. Slason--Mr. Slason is our credit man, Vick--you'll
know him better soon.... Mr. Jameson, just a moment, please; I want you to
meet this young man!"

"If he's got any of your blood in him, Colonel, he's all right," a beefy,
red-faced man jerked out, chewing at an unlighted cigar and looking Vickers
hard in the face.

Even the porters had to be introduced. It was a democratic advance! But
finally they reached the "upstairs" quarters, where in one corner was the
Colonel's private den, partitioned off from the other offices by ground
glass,--a bare space with a little old black walnut desk, a private safe,
and a set of desk telephones. Here Vickers stood looking down at the
turmoil of traffic in the street below, while his father glanced over a
mass of telegrams and memoranda piled on his desk.

The roar of business that had begun to rumble through the streets at
daybreak and was now approaching its meridian stunned the young man's
nerves. Deadened by the sound of it all, he could not dissociate from the
volume that particular note, which would be his note, and live oblivious to
the rest.... So this was business! And what a feeble reed he was with which
to prop it! Visions of that other life came thronging to his mind,--the
human note of other cities he had learned to love, the placid hours of
contemplation, visions of things beautiful in a world of joy! Humorously he
thought of the hundreds of thousands of dollars this busy hive earned each
year. A minute fraction of its profits would satisfy him, make him richer
than all of it. And he suspected that the thrifty Colonel had much more
wealth stored away in that old-fashioned iron safe. What was the use of
throwing himself into this great machine? It would merely grind the soul
out of him and spit him forth.

To keep it going,--that was the reason for sacrificing his youth, his
desire. But why keep the thing going? Pride, sentiment? He did not know the
Colonel's feeling of fatherhood towards all the men who worked for him, his
conviction that in this enterprise which he had created, all these human
beings were able to live happier lives because of him, his leadership.
There was poetry in the old man, and imagination. But the young man, with
his eyes filled with those other--more brilliant--glories, saw only the
grime, heard only the dull roar of the wheels that turned out a meaningless
flood of gold, like an engine contrived to supply desires and reap its
percentage of profits.

"Father!" he cried involuntarily.

Hot words of protest were in his throat. Let some other young man be found
to run the machine; or let them make a corporation of it and sell it in the
market. Or close the doors, its work having been done. But give him his
life, and a few dollars!

"Eh, Vick? Hungry? We'll go over to the club for luncheon in just a
minute." And the old Colonel smiled affectionately at his son over his
glasses.

"Not now--not just yet," Vickers said to himself, with a quick rush of
comprehension.

But the "now" never seemed to come, the right moment for delivering the
blow, through all those months that followed, while the young man was
settling into his corner of the great establishment. When the mother or
Isabelle confessed their doubts to the Colonel, the old man would say:--

"It will do him no harm, a little of it. He'll know how to look after your
money, mother, when I am gone." And he added, "It's making a man of him,
you'll see!"

There was another matter, little suspected by the Colonel, that was rapidly
to make a man of his engaging young son.




CHAPTER XV


When Vickers Price raised his eyes from his desk and, losing for the moment
the clattering note of business that surged all around him, looked through
dusky panes into the cloud of mist and smoke, visions rose before him that
were strange to the smoky horizon of the river city....

From the little balcony of his room on the Pincio, all Rome lay spread
before him,--Rome smiling under the blue heaven of an April morning! The
cypresses in the garden pointed to a cloudless sky. Beyond the city roofs,
where the domes of churches rose like little islands, was the green band of
the Janiculum, and farther southwards the river cut the city and was lost
behind the Aventine. And still beyond the Campagna reached to the hills
about Albano.

Beneath he could see the Piazza del Popolo, with a line of tiny cabs
standing lazily in the sunlight, and just below the balcony was a garden
where a fountain poured softly, night and day. Brilliant balls of colored
fruit hung from the orange trees, glossy against the yellow walls of the
palazzo across the garden. From the steep street on the other side of the
wall rose the thin voice of a girl, singing a song of the mountains, with a
sad note of ancient woe, and farther away in the city sounded the hoarse
call of a pedler.... This was not the Rome of the antiquary, not the tawdry
Rome of the tourist. It was the Rome of sunshine and color and music, the
Rome of joy, of youth! And the young man, leaning there over the iron
railing, his eyes wandering up and down the city at his feet, drank deep of
the blessed draught,--the beauty and the joy of it, the spirit of youth and
romance in his heart....

From some one of the rooms behind a neighboring balcony floated a woman's
voice, swelling into a full contralto note, then sinking low and sweet into
brooding contemplation. After a time Vickers went to his work, trying to
forget the golden city outside the open window, but when the voice he had
heard burst forth joyously outside, he looked up and saw the singer
standing on her balcony, shading her eyes with a hand, gazing out over the
city, her voice breaking forth again and again in scattered notes, as
though compelled by the light and the joy of it all. She was dressed in a
loose black morning gown that rippled in the breeze over her figure. She
clasped her hands above her bronze-colored hair, the action revealing the
pure white tint of neck and arms, the well-knit body of small bones. She
stood there singing to herself softly, the note of spring and Rome in her
voice. Still singing she turned into her room, and Vickers could hear her,
as she moved back and forth, singing to herself. And as he hung brooding
over Rome, listening to the gurgle of the fountain in the garden, he often
listened to this contralto voice echoing the spirit within him....
Sometimes a little girl came out on the balcony to play.

"Are you English?" she asked the young man one day.

"No, American, like you, eh?" Vickers replied.

They talked, and presently the little girl running back into the room spoke
to some one: "There is a nice man out there, mother. He says he's American,
too." Vickers could not hear what the woman said in reply....

The child made them friends. Mrs. Conry, Vickers learned, was his
neighbor's name, and she was taking lessons in singing, preparing herself,
he gathered, for professional work,--a widow, he supposed, until he heard
the little girl say one day, "when we go home to father,--we are going
home, mother, aren't we? Soon?" And when the mother answered something
unintelligible, the little girl with a child's subtle tact was silent....

This woman standing there on the balcony above the city,--all gold and
white and black, save for the gray eyes, the curving lines of her supple
body,--this was what he saw of Europe,--all outside those vivid Roman weeks
that he shared with her fading into a vague background. Together they
tasted the city,--its sunny climbing streets, its white squares, and dark
churches, the fields beyond the Colosseum, the green Campagna, the vivid
mornings, the windless moonlight nights! All without this marvellous
circle, this charmed being of Rome, had the formlessness of a distant
planet. Here life began and closed, and neither wished to know what the
other had been in the world behind.

That she was from some Southern state,--"a little tiny place near the Gulf,
far from every civilized thing," Mrs. Conry told him; and it was plain
enough that she was meagrely educated,--there had been few advantages in
that "tiny place." But her sensuous temperament was now absorbing all that
it touched. Rome meant little to her beyond the day's charm, the music it
made in her heart; while the man vibrated to every association, every
memory of the laden city....

Thus the days and weeks slipped by until the gathering heat warned them of
the passing of time. One June day that promised to be fresh and cool they
walked through the woods above the lake of Albano. Stacia Conry hummed the
words of a song that Vickers had written and set to music, one of a cycle
they had planned for her to sing--the Songs of the Cities. This was the
song of Rome, and in it Vickers had embedded the sad strain that the girl
sang coming up the street,--the cry of the past.

"That is too high for me," she said, breaking off. "And it is melancholy. I
hate sad things. It reminds me of that desolate place at the end of the
earth where I came from."

"All the purest music has a strain of sadness," Vickers protested.

"No, no; it has longing, passion! ... I escaped!" She looked down on the
cuplike lake, shimmering in the sun below. "I knew in my heart that _this_
lived, this world of sunshine and beauty and joy. I thirsted for it. Now I
drink it!"

She turned on him her gray eyes, which were cool in spite of her emotion.
She had begun again the song in a lower key, when at a turn in the path
they came upon a little wooden shrine, one of those wayside altars still
left in a land where religion has been life. Before the weather-stained
blue-and-red madonna knelt a strangely mediaeval figure,--a man wasted and
bare-headed, with long hair falling matted over his eyes. An old sheepskin
coat came to his bare knees. Dirty, forlorn, leaning wearily on his
pilgrim's staff, the man was praying before the shrine, his lips moving
silently.

"What a figure!" Vickers exclaimed in a low voice, taking from his pocket a
little camera. As he tiptoed ahead of Mrs. Conry to get his picture before
the pilgrim should rise, he saw the intense yearning on the man's face.
Beckoning to his companion, Vickers put the camera into his pocket and
passed on, Mrs. Conry following, shrinking to the opposite side of the way,
a look of aversion on her mobile face.

"Why didn't you take him?" she asked as they turned the corner of the road.

"He was praying,--and he meant it," Vickers answered vaguely.

The woman's lips curved in disgust at the thought of the dirty pilgrim on
his knees by the roadside.

"Only the weak pray! I hate that sort of thing,--prayer and penitence."

"Perhaps it is the only real thing in life," Vickers replied from some
unknown depth within him.

"No, no! How can you say that? You who know what life can be. Never! That
is what they tried to teach me at school. But I did not believe it. I
escaped. I wanted to sing. I wanted my own life." She became grave, and
added under her breath: "And I shall get it. That is best, best, best!" She
broke into a run down the sun-flecked road, and they emerged breathless in
an olive orchard beside the lake. Her body panted as she threw herself down
on the grass. "Now!" she smiled, her skin all rose; "can you say that?" And
her voice chanted, "To live,--my friend,--to LIVE! And you and I are made
to live,--isn't it so?"

The artist in Vickers, the young man of romance, his heart tender with
sentiment, responded to the creed. But woven with the threads of this
artist temperament were other impulses that stirred. The pilgrim in the act
of penitence and ecstatic devotion was beautiful, too, and real,--ah, very
real, as he was to know....

They supped that afternoon in a little wine shop looking towards the great
dome swimming above Rome. And as the sun shot level and golden over the
Campagna, lighting the old, gray tombs, they drove back to the city along
the ancient Latin road. The wonderful plain, the most human landscape in
the world, began to take twilight shadows. Rome hung, in a mist of sun,
like a mirage in the far distance, and between them and the city flowed the
massive arches of an aqueduct, and all about were the crumbling tombs, half
hidden by the sod. The carriage rolled monotonously onwards. The woman's
eyes nearly closed; she looked dreamily out through the white lids, fringed
with heavy auburn lashes. She still hummed from time to time the old
refrain of Vickers's song. Thus they returned, hearing the voice of the old
world in its peculiar hour.

"I am glad that I have had it--that I have lived--a little. This, this!--I
can sing to-night! You must come and sit on my balcony and look at the
stars while I sing to you--the music of the day."

As the Porta San Paolo drew near, Vickers remarked:--

"I shall write you a song of Venice,--that is the music for you."

"Venice, and Paris, and Vienna, and Rome,--all! I love them all!"

She reached her arms to the great cities of the earth, seeing herself in
triumph, singing to multitudes the joy of life.... "Come to-night,--I will
sing for you!"...

On the porter's table at the hotel lay a thick letter for Mrs. Conry. It
bore the printed business address,--THE CONRY CONSTRUCTION COMPANY. Mrs.
Conry took it negligently in her white hand. "You will come later?" she
said, smiling back at the young man.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sitting crowded in front of Arragno's and sipping a liqueur, Fosdick
remarked to Vickers: "So you have run across the Conry? Of course I know
her. I saw her in Munich the first time. The little girl still with her?
Then it was Vienna.... She's got as far as Rome! Been over here two or
three years studying music. Pretty-good voice, and a better figure. Oh,
Stacia is much of a siren."

Vickers moved uneasily and in reply to a question Fosdick continued:--

"Widow--grass widow--properly linked--who knows? Our pretty country-women
have such a habit of trotting around by themselves for their own
delectation that you never can tell how to place them. She may be
divorced--she may be the other thing! You can't tell. But she is a very
handsome woman."...

Mrs. Conry herself told Vickers the facts, as they sat at a little
restaurant on the Aventine where they loved to go to watch the night steal
across the Palatine.

"... He offered me my education--my chance. I took it. I went to the
conservatory at Cincinnati. Then he wanted to marry me, and promised to
send me abroad to study more."... Her tone was dry, impartially recounting
the fact. Then her eyes dropped, and Vickers's cigarette glowed between
them as they leaned across the little iron table.... "I was a child
then--did not know anything. I married him. The first years business was
poor, and he could not let me have the money. When times got better, he let
me come--kept his promise. I have been here nearly three years, back two or
three times. And now," her voice dropped, "I must go back for good--soon."

Nothing more. But it seemed to Vickers as if a ghost had risen from the
river mist and come to sit between them. That the woman was paying a price
for her chance, a heavy price, he could see. They walked back to the city
between the deserted vineyards. As they crossed the river, Mrs. Conry
stopped, and remarked sombrely, "A bargain is a bargain the world over, is
it not?"

Vickers felt the warm breathing woman close to him, felt her brooding eyes.
"One pays," he murmured, "I suppose!"

She threw up her hand in protest, and they walked on into the lighted city.

       *       *       *       *       *

Occasionally Fosdick joined their excursions, and after one of them he said
to Vickers:--

"My friend, she is wonderful; more so every time I see her. But beneath
that soft, rounded body, with its smooth white skin, is something hard. Oh,
I know the eyes and the hair and the throat and the voice! I, too, am a
man. Paint her, if you like, or set her to music. She is for _bel canto_
and moonlight and the voice of Rome. But there is a world outside this all,
my friend, to which you and I belong, and _you_ rather more than I....
Stacia Conry doesn't belong at all."

"Which means?" demanded Vickers steadily of the burly Fosdick.

"Take care that you don't get stuck in the sea of Sargasso. I think
something bitter might rise out of all that loveliness."

Nevertheless, instead of going to the Maloya with Fosdick, Vickers stayed
on in Rome, and September found him there and Mrs. Conry, too, having
returned to the city from the mountain resort, where she had left the
little girl with her governess. They roamed the deserted city, and again
began to work on the songs which Mrs. Conry hoped to give in concerts on
her return to America. Very foolish of the young man, and the woman, thus
to prolong the moment of charm, to linger in the Sargasso Sea! But at least
with the man, the feeling that kept him in Rome those summer months was
pure and fine, the sweetest and the best that man may know, where he gives
of his depths with no thought of reward, willing to accept the coming
pain.... Little Delia, who had seen quite as much of Vickers as her mother,
said to him the day she left with her governess:--

"We're going home soon--before Thanksgiving. I'm so glad! And you'll be
there, too?"

"I suppose not, Delia," the young man replied. But as it happened he was
the first to go back....

That late September day they had returned from a ramble in the hills. It
was nearly midnight when the cab rattled up the deserted streets to their
hotel. As Vickers bade his companion good-night, with some word about a
long-projected excursion to Volterra, she said:--

"Come in and I will sing for a while. I don't feel like sleep.... Yes,
come! Perhaps it will be the last of all our good times."

In the large dark apartment the night wind was drawing over the roofs of
the hill through the open windows, fluttering stray sheets of music along
the stone floor. Mrs. Conry lighted a candle on the piano, and throwing
aside her hat and veil, dropping her gloves on the floor, struck some heavy
chords. She sang the song they had been working over, the song of Venice,
with a swaying melody as of floating water-grasses. Then she plunged into a
throbbing aria,--singing freely, none too accurately, but with a passion
and self-forgetfulness which promised greater things than the concert
performer. From this on to other snatches of opera, to songs, wandering as
the mood took her, coming finally to the street song that Vickers had woven
into his composition for Rome, with its high, sad note. There her voice
stopped, died in a cry half stifled in the throat, and leaving the piano
she came to the window. A puff of wind blew out the candle. With the
curtains swaying in the night wind, they stood side by side looking down
into the dark city, dotted irregularly with points of light, and up above
the Janiculum to the shining stars.

"Rome, Rome," she murmured, and the words sighed past the young man's
ears,--"and life--LIFE!"

It was life that was calling them, close together, looking forth into the
night, their hearts beating, the longing to grasp it, to go out alone into
the night for it. Freedom, and love, and life,--they beckoned! Vickers saw
her eyes turn to him in the dark....

"And now I go," he said softly. He found his way to the door in the dark
salon, and as he turned he saw her white figure against the swaying
curtain, and felt her eyes following him.

In his room he found the little blue despatch, sent up from his banker,
which announced his brother's death, and the next morning he left by the
early express for the north to catch the Cherbourg boat. As he passed Mrs.
Conry's salon he slipped under the door the despatch with a note, which
ended, "I know that we shall see each other again, somewhere, somehow!" and
from the piazza he sent back an armful of great white _fleur-de-lys_. Later
that morning, while Vickers was staring at the vintage in the Umbrian
Valley and thinking of the woman all white and bronze with the gray eyes,
Mrs. Conry was reading his note. A bitter smile curved her lips, as she
gathered up the white flowers and laid them on the piano.




CHAPTER XVI


One winter day while Vickers Price was "selling nails," as he still
expressed his business career, there came in his mail a queer little
scrawl, postmarked Pittsburg. It was from Delia Conry, and it ran:--

"We've been home a month. We live in a hotel. I don't like it. The bird you
gave me died. Mother says she'll get me a new one. I wish I could see you.
Love from Delia."

But not a word from Mrs. Conry! Fosdick, drifting through Rome on his way
to Turkestan, wrote:--

"... What has become of the Conry? She has disappeared from the cities of
Europe with her melodious songs and beautiful hair. Are you touring the
States with her? Or has she rediscovered Mr. Conry--for a period of
seclusion? ... To think of you serving hardware to the barbarians across
the counter enlivens my dull moments. From the Sargasso Sea to St.
Louis,--there is a leap for you, my dear."...

While he "served hardware to the barbarians" and in other respects
conformed to the life of a privileged young American gentleman, Vickers
Price dreamed of those Roman days, the happiest of his life. If that night
they two had taken life in their hands? ... Could the old Colonel have read
his son's heart,--if from the pinnacle of his years filled with ripe deeds
he could have comprehended youth,--he might have been less sure that the
hardware business was to be "the making of Vick"!

What had come to her? Had she accepted her lot, once back in the groove of
fate, or had she rebelled, striking out for her own vivid desire of joy and
song, of fame? Vickers would have liked to hear that she had rebelled, was
making her own life,--had taken the other road than the one he had accepted
for himself. His tender, idealizing heart could not hold a woman to the
sterner courses of conduct.

For, as Fosdick had told him in Rome, the young man was a Sentimentalist
with no exact vision of life. His heart was perpetually distorting whatever
his mind told him was fact. This woman, with her beauty, her love of music,
had touched him at the lyric moment of life, when reality was but the
unstable foundation for dream. Life as might be, glowing, colored, and
splendid,--life as it was within him, not as this hideous maelstrom all
about him reported. And why not the I, the I! cried the spirit of youth,
the egotistic spirit of the age. For all reply there was the bent, gray
head of the Colonel at his desk in the office beside him. "One sentiment
against another," Fosdick might say....

Finally Stacia Conry wrote, a little note: she was to be in St. Louis on
the fourteenth for a short time and hoped that he would call on her at the
hotel. A perfectly proper, colorless little note, written in an unformed
hand, with a word or two misspelled,--the kind of note that gave no
indication of the writer, but seemed like the voice of a stranger. However,
as Vickers reflected, literary skill, the power to write personal little
notes did not go necessarily with a talent for music--or for life. Nannie
Lawton wrote intimate notes, and other women, single and married, whom
Vickers had come to know these past months. But their cleverest phrases
could not stir his pulses as did this crude production.

The woman who was waiting for him in the little hotel parlor, however, gave
him a curious shock,--she was so different in her rich street costume from
the woman in black and white, whose picture had grown into his memory. She
seemed older, he thought, thus accounting for that strange idealizing power
of the mind to select from a face what that face has specially given it and
create an altogether new being, with its own lineaments graven in place of
actual bone and tissue. It takes time to correct this ideal misreport of
the soul, to accept the fact! Except for the one glance from the gray eyes
which she gave him as they shook hands, Stacia Conry did not stir the past.
But she was voluble of the present.

"You did not expect this! You see my husband had some work to attend to
near here, and I thought I would come with him.... No, we left Delia in
Pittsburg with his mother,--she wanted to see you, but she would be in the
way."

They came soon to her singing, and her face clouded.

"I haven't been able to get an opening. I wanted to sing the Cycle with an
orchestra. But I haven't succeeded,--our Pittsburg orchestra won't look at
any talent purely domestic. It is all pull over here. I haven't any
influence.... You must start with some backing,--sing in private houses for
great people! We don't know that kind, you see."

"And concerts?" Vickers inquired.

"The same way,--to get good engagements you must have something to show....
I've sung once or twice,--in little places, church affairs and that kind of
thing."

Vickers laughed as Mrs. Conry's expressive lips curled.

"They tell you to take everything to begin with. But singing for church
sociables in Frankfort and Alleghany,--that doesn't do much! I want to go
to New York,--I know people there, but--"

Vickers understood that Mr. Conry objected.

"It must come sometime," she said vehemently; "only waiting is killing. It
takes the life out of you, the power, don't you think?"

"Could you sing here?" Vickers asked,--"now, I mean? I might be able to
arrange it."

"Oh, if you could!" Mrs. Conry's face glowed, and her fingers played
nervously with her long chain. "If I could give the Cycle with your
accompaniment, here in St. Louis where you are so well known--"

Vickers smiled at the picture of his debut in St. Louis drawing-rooms.

"I will ask my sister to help," he said. "I should like her to call."

Mrs. Conry became suddenly animated, as if after a period of depressing
darkness she saw a large ray of sunshine. She had thought of possibilities
when she had persuaded her husband to take her to St. Louis, but had not
expected them to develop at once.

"You see," she continued quickly, "if I can get a hearing here, it means
that other people may want me,--I'll become known, a little."

"My mother couldn't have it," Vickers explained, "nor my sister, because of
our mourning. But Mrs. Lawton,--that would be better any way." He thought
of Nannie Lawton's love of _reclame_, and he knew that though she would
never have considered inviting the unheralded Mrs. Conry to sing in her
drawing-room, she would gladly have _him_ appear there with any one,
playing his own music.

"Yes, we'll put it through! The Songs of the Cities." He repeated the words
with sentimental visions of the hours of their composition.

"And then I have some more,--Spanish songs. They take, you know! And
folk-songs." Mrs. Conry talked on eagerly of her ambitions until Vickers
left, having arranged for Isabelle to call the next day. As he took his way
to the Lawtons' to use his influence with the volatile Nan in behalf of
Mrs. Conry, his memory of their talk was sad. 'America, that's it,' he
explained. 'She wants to do something for herself, to get her
independence.' And he resolved to leave no stone unturned, no influence
unused, to gratify her ambition.

So Isabelle called on Mrs. Conry in company with Nannie Lawton. Vickers
little knew what an ordeal the woman he loved was passing through in this
simple affair. A woman may present no difficulties to the most fastidiously
bred man, and yet be found wanting in a thousand particulars by the women
of his social class. As the two emerged from the hotel, Isabelle looked
dubiously at Mrs. Lawton.

"Queer, isn't she?" that frank lady remarked. "Oh, she's one of those stray
people you run across in Europe. Perhaps she can sing all right, though I
don't care. The men will be crazy after her,--she's the kind,--red hair and
soft skin and all that.... Better look out for that young brother of yours,
Isabelle. She is just the one to nab our innocent Vickie."

Isabelle's report of her call had some reserves.

"Of course she is very striking, Vick. But, you see,--she--she isn't
exactly our kind!"

"That is Nan," the young man retorted impatiently. "I never heard you say
that sort of thing before. What on earth is 'our kind'? She is beautiful
and has talent, a lot of it,--all she wants is her chance. And why
shouldn't she have it?"

Isabelle smiled at his heat, and replied caressingly:--

"She shall have all that Nan and I can do for her here. But don't be
foolish about her. I suspect you could be with a woman--because of your
dear old heart.... If she can't sing a note, she'll make a hit with her
looks, Nan says!"

So the musicale was arranged. There were mostly women in Mrs. Lawton's
smart little music room when Mrs. Conry rose to sing a series of
introductory songs. She was very striking, as Isabelle and Mrs. Lawton had
foreseen that she would be,--rather bizarrely dressed in a white and gold
costume that she had designed herself, with a girdle of old stones strung
loosely about her waist. She was nervous and sang uncertainly at first so
that Vickers had to favor her in his accompaniment. He could see the
trembling of her white arm beside him. The Cycle of the Cities came near
the end of the programme, and when Vickers took his seat to play the
accompaniments, he was aware that a number of men had arrived and were
standing in the hall, peering through the doors at the performance. He knew
well enough what the men were thinking of him, sitting there playing his
own songs,--that it was a queer, monkey performance for the son of Colonel
Price! The fine arts are duly recognized in American cities; but the
commercial class, as always has been its wont, places them in a category
between millinery and theology.

She had chosen _Paris_ to open with, and gave the song with assurance,
eliciting especially from the men in the hall the first real applause. Then
followed _Vienna, Munich_. She was singing well, gaining confidence. When
it came to _Venice_,--Vickers remembered as he followed her swimming voice
the twilight over the Campagna, the approaching mass of Rome,--even the
women woke to something like enthusiasm. As she uttered the first note of
_Rome_, she glanced down at Vickers, with a little smile, which said:--

"Do you remember? This is _ours_,--I am singing this for you!"

Her face was flushed and happy. She sang the difficult music as she had
sung that last night in Rome, and Vickers, listening to the full voice so
close to him, heard again the high sad note of the street singer, in the
golden spring day, uttering this ancient melody of tears,--only this time
it was woven with laughter and joy. When she finished, he sought her eyes;
but Mrs. Conry was sweeping the gathering with a restless glance, thinking
of her encore....

Afterwards the women said agreeable things about Vickers's music,
especially the _Paris_ and the _Venice_. About Mrs. Conry they said that
her voice was good, "somewhat uncultivated," "too loud for drawing-room
music,"--safe criticisms. The men said little about the music, but they
clustered around the singer. Mrs. Lawton looked significantly at Isabelle
and winked. One old gentleman, something of a beau as well as a successful
lawyer, congratulated Vickers on his "tuneful" music. "It must be a
pleasant avocation to write songs," he said....

They dined at the Lawtons', and afterwards Vickers took Mrs. Conry to the
hotel. She was gay with the success she had had, the impression she had
made on the men.

"Something'll come of this, I am sure. Do you think they liked me?"

"You sang well," Vickers replied evasively, "better than well, the _Rome_."

In the lobby of the hotel she turned as though to dismiss him, but Vickers,
who was talking of a change to be made in one of the songs, accompanied her
to the parlor above, where they had practised the music in preparation for
the concert. Mrs. Conry glanced quickly into the room as they entered, as
if expecting to find some one there. Vickers was saying:--

"I think we shall have to add another one to the Cycle,--_New York_ or
something to stand for--well, what it is over here,--just living!"

The door of the inner room opened and a man appeared, coatless, with a
much-flowered waistcoat.

"So you're back," the man remarked in a heavy voice.

"My husband," Mrs. Conry explained, "Mr. Vickers Price!"

Mr. Conry shuffled heavily into the room. He was a large man with a big
grizzled head and very red face, finely chased with purple veins. He gave
Vickers a stubby hand.

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Price. Heard about you from Delia. Sit down."
Conry himself stood, swaying slightly on his stout legs. After a time he
chose a seat with great deliberation and continued to stare at the young
man. "Have a cigar?" He took one from his waistcoat pocket and held it
towards the young man. "It's a good one,--none of your barroom smokes,--oh,
I see you are one of those cigarette fiends, same as Stacia!"

There was a conversational hiatus, and Vickers was thinking of going.

"Well, how was the show?" Conry demanded of his wife. "Did you sing
good,--make a hit with the swells? She thinks she wants to sing," he
explained with a wink to Vickers, "but I tell her she's after
sassiety,--that's what the women want; ain't it so?"

"Mrs. Conry sang very well indeed," Vickers remarked in default of better,
and rose to leave.

"Don't go,--what's your hurry? Have something to drink? I got some in there
you don't see every day in the week, young man. A racing friend of mine
from Kentuck sends it to me. What's yours, Stacy?" ...

When the young man departed, Stacia Conry stared at the door through which
he had disappeared, with a dead expression that had something disagreeable
in it. Conry, who had had his drink, came back to the parlor and began to
talk.

"I went to a show myself to-night, seeing you were amusing yourself....
There was a girl there who danced and sang,--you'd oughter seen her....
Well, what are you sittin' staring at? Ain't you coming to bed?"

His wife rose from her seat, exclaiming harshly, "Let me alone!" And Conry,
with a half-sober scrutiny of the woman, who had flung herself face down on
the lounge, mumbled:--

"Singing don't seem to agree with you. Well, I kept my word; gave you the
money to educate yourself." ...

"And I have paid you!" the wife flashed. "God, I have paid!"

The man stumbled off to bed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Vickers, on leaving the hotel, walked home in the chill night, a sickening
sensation in his heart. If he had been a shrewd young man, he might have
foreseen the somewhat boozy Mr. Conry, the vulgar setting of the woman he
loved. If there had been the least thing base in him, he might have
welcomed it, for his own uses. But being a sentimentalist and simple in
nature, the few moments of intercourse with Mr. Conry had come like a
revelation to him. This was what she had sold herself to for her education.
This was what she was tied to! And this what she sought to escape from by
her music, to place herself and her child beyond the touch of that man!

Vickers in his disgust overlooked the fact that little Delia seemed to love
her father, and that though Conry might not be to his taste, he might also
be a perfectly worthy citizen, given occasionally to liquor. But love and
youth and the idealizing temperament make few allowances. To give her that
freedom which her beauty and her nature craved, he would do what he could,
and he searched his memory for names and persons of influence in the
professional world of music. He had the fragments of a score for an opera
that he had scarce looked at since he had begun "to sell nails"; but
to-night he took it from the drawer and ran it over,--"Love Among the
Ruins,"--and as he went to sleep he saw Stacia Conry singing as she had
sung that last night in Rome, singing the music of his opera, success and
fame at her feet....

The something that Mrs. Conry hoped for did come from that introduction at
the Lawtons'. The wife of one of those men she had charmed called on her
and invited her to sing "those pleasant little songs Mr. Price wrote for
you" (with Mr. Price's appearance, of course!). And several women, who were
anxious to be counted as of the Lawton set, hastened to engage Mrs. Conry
to sing at their houses, with the same condition. Vickers understood the
meaning of this condition and disliked the position, but consented in his
desire to give Mrs. Conry every chance in his power. Others understood the
situation, and disliked it,--among them Isabelle. Nannie Lawton threw at
her across a dinner-table the remark: "When is Vick going to offer his
'Love Among the Ruins'? Mrs. Conry is the 'ruins,' I suppose!"

And the musicales, in spite of all that Vickers could do, were only
moderately successful. In any community, the people who hunt the latest
novelty are limited in number, and that spring there arrived a Swedish
portrait painter and an Antarctic traveller to push the beautiful singer
from the centre of attention. So after the first weeks the engagements
became farther spaced and less desirable, less influential. Mrs. Conry
still stayed at the hotel, though her husband had been called to another
city on a contract he had undertaken. She realized that her debut had not
been brilliant, but she clung to the opportunity, in the hope that
something would come of it. And naturally enough Vickers saw a good deal of
her; not merely the days they appeared together, but almost every day he
found an excuse for dropping in at the hotel, to play over some music, to
take her to ride in his new motor, which he ran himself, or to dine with
her. Mrs. Conry was lonely. After Isabelle went to California for her
health, she saw almost no one. The women she met at her engagements found
her "not our kind," and Nan Lawton's witticism about "the ruins" and
Vickers did not help matters. Vickers saw the situation and resented it.
This loneliness and disappointment were bad for her. She worked at her
music in a desultory fashion, dawdled over novels, and smoked too many
cigarettes for the good of her voice. She seemed listless and discouraged.
Vickers redoubled his efforts to have her sing before a celebrated manager,
who was coming presently to the city with an opera company.

'She sees no way, no escape,' he said to himself. 'One ray of hope, and she
would wake to what she was in Europe!'

In his blind, sentimental devotion, he blamed the accidents of life for her
disappointment, not the woman herself. When he came, she awoke, and it was
an unconscious joy to him, this power he had to rouse her from her apathy,
to make her become for the time the woman he always saw just beneath the
surface, eager to emerge if life would but grant her the chance.

His own situation had changed with the growing year. The Colonel, closely
watching "the boy," was coming gradually to comprehend the sacrifice that
he had accepted, all the more as Vickers never murmured but kept steadily
at his work. Before Isabelle left for California, she spoke plainly to her
father:--

"What's the use, Colonel! No matter how he tries, Vick can never be like
you,--and why should he be any way?"

"It won't have done any harm," the old man replied dubiously. "We'll see!"

First he made his son independent of salary or allowance by giving him a
small fortune in stocks and bonds. Then one day, while Mrs. Conry was still
in the city, he suggested that Vickers might expect a considerable vacation
in the summer. "You can go to Europe and write something," he remarked, in
his simple faith that art could be laid down or resumed at will. Vickers
smiled, but did not grasp the opportunity eagerly. When he told Mrs. Conry
that afternoon of the proposed "vacation," she exclaimed enviously:--

"I knew you would go back!"

"I am not sure that I shall go."

She said perfunctorily: "Of course you must go--will you go back to Rome? I
shall be so glad to think you are doing what you want to do."

He turned the matter off with a laugh:--

"The dear old boy thinks two months out of a year is long enough to give to
composing an opera. It's like fishing,--a few weeks now and then if you can
afford it!"

"But you wouldn't have to stay here at all, if you made up your mind not
to," she remarked with a touch of hardness. "They'll give you what you
want."

"I am not sure that I want it," he replied slowly, "at the price."

She looked at him uncomprehendingly, then perceiving another meaning in his
words, lowered her eyes. She was thinking swiftly, 'If we could both go!'
But he was reflecting rather bitterly on that new wealth which his father
had given him, the dollars piling up to his credit, not one of which he
might use as he most dearly desired to use them--for her! With all this
power within his easy reach he could not stretch forth his hand to save a
human soul. For thus he conceived the woman's need.

It came to Mrs. Conry's last engagement,--the last possible excuse for her
lingering in the city. It was a suburban affair, and the place was
difficult to reach. Vickers had invited the Falkners to go with them, to
prevent gossip, and Bessie willingly accepted as a spree, though she had
confided to Isabelle that "Mrs. Conry was dreadful ordinary," "not half
good enough for our adorable Vickers to _afficher_ himself with."
Nevertheless, she was very sweet to the beautiful Mrs. Conry, as was
Bessie's wont to be with pretty nearly all the world. It was late on their
return, and the Falkners left them at the station. With the sense that
to-night they must part, they walked slowly towards the hotel, then stopped
at a little German restaurant for supper. They looked at each other across
the marble-top table without speaking. The evening had been a depressing
conclusion to the concert season they had had together. And that morning
Vickers had found it impossible to arrange a meeting for Mrs. Conry with
the director of a famous orchestra, who happened to be in the city.

"You must go to-morrow?" Vickers asked at last. "I may get a reply from
Moller any day."

Mrs. Conry looked at him out of her gray eyes, as if she were thinking many
things that a woman might think but could not say, before she replied
slowly:--

"My husband's coming back to-morrow--to get me." As Vickers said nothing,
she continued, slowly shaking the yellow wine in her glass until it
circled,--"And it's no use--I'm not good enough for Moller--and you know
it. I must have more training, more experience."

Vickers did know it, but had not let himself believe it.

"My little struggle does not matter,--I'm only a woman--and must do as most
women do.... Perhaps, who knows! the combination may change some day,
and--" she glanced fearlessly at him--"we shall all do as we want in
another world!"

Then she looked at her watch. It was very late, and the tired waiters stood
leaning listlessly against their tables.

"I am tired," she said at last. "Will you call a cab, please?"

They drove silently down the empty boulevard. A mist came through the cab
window, touching her hair with fine points. Her hand lay close to his.

"How happy we were in Rome! Rome!" she looked out into the dark night, and
there were tears in her eyes. "You have been very good to me, dear friend.
Sometime I shall sing to you again, to you alone. Now good-by." ...

His hand held hers, while his heart beat and words rose clamorously to his
lips,--the words of rebellion, of protest and love, the words of youth. But
he said nothing,--it was better that they should part without a spoken
word,--better for her and better for him. His feeling for her, compact of
tenderness, pity, and belief, had never been tested by any clear light. She
was not his; and beyond that fact he had never looked.

So the carriage rolled on while the two sat silent with beating hearts, and
as it approached the hotel he quickly bent his head and kissed the hand
that was in his.

"Come to-morrow," she whispered, "in the morning,--once more."

"No," he said simply; "I can't. You know why."

As Vickers stepped out of the cab he recognized Conry. The contractor had
been looking up and down the street, and had started to walk away, but
turned at the sound of the carriage wheels and came over towards them.
Something in his appearance, the slouch hat pulled forward over his face,
the quick jerky step, suggested that he had been drinking. Vickers with a
sensation of disgust foresaw a scene there on the pavement, and he could
feel the shrinking of the woman by his side.

"Good evening, Mr. Conry," Vickers said coolly, turning to give Mrs. Conry
his hand. A glance into Conry's eyes had convinced him that the man was in
a drunken temper, and his one thought was to save her from a public brawl.
Already a couple of people sauntering past had paused to look at them.
Conry grasped the young man by the arm and flung him to one side, and
thrusting his other hand into the cab jerked his wife out of it.

"Come here!" he roared. "I'll show you--you--"

Mrs. Conry, trembling and white, tried to free her arm and cross the
pavement. The driver, arranging himself on the seat, looked down at
Vickers, winked, and waited. Conry still dragged his wife by the arm, and
as she tried to free herself he raised his other hand and slapped her
across the face as he would cuff a struggling dog, then struck her again.
She groaned and half sank to the pavement. The curious bystanders said
nothing, made no move to interfere. Here was a domestic difference, about a
woman apparently; and the husband was exerting his ancient, impregnable
rights of domination over the woman, who was his....

All these months Vickers had never even in imagination crossed the barrier
of Fact. Now without a moment's wavering he raised his hand and struck
Conry full in the face, and as the man staggered from the unexpected blow
he struck him again, knocking him to the ground. Then, swiftly
disentangling the woman's hand from her husband's grasp, he motioned to the
cab driver to pull up at the curb and carried her into the cab. When
Vickers closed the door, the driver without further orders whipped up his
horse and drove into a side street, leaving the group on the pavement
staring at them and at Conry, who was staggering to his feet....

Within the cab Mrs. Conry moaned inarticulately. Vickers held her in his
arms, and slowly bending his head to hers he kissed her upon the lips. Her
lips were cold, but after a time to the touch of his lips hers responded
with a trembling, yielding kiss.

Thus they drove on, without words, away from the city.




CHAPTER XVII


It had all happened in a brief moment of time,--the blow, the rescue, the
kiss. But it had changed the face of the world for Vickers. What hitherto
had been clouded in dream, a mingling of sentiment, pity, tender yearning,
became at once reality. With that blow, that kiss, his soul had opened to a
new conception of life....

They drove to the Lanes' house. Isabelle had returned that day from
California, and her husband was away on business. Vickers, who had a
latch-key, let himself into the house and tapped at his sister's door. When
she saw him, she cried out, frightened by his white face:--

"Vick! What has happened?"

"Mrs. Conry is downstairs, Isabelle. I want her to stay here with you
to-night!"

"Vick! What is it?" Isabelle demanded with staring eyes.

"I will tell you to-morrow."

"No--now!" She clutched her wrap about her shiveringly and drew him within
the room.

"It's--I am going away, Isabelle, at once--with Mrs. Conry. There has been
trouble--her husband struck her on the street, when she was with me. I took
her from him."

"Vick!" Her voice trembled as she cried, "No,--it wasn't that!"

"No," he said gravely. "There was no cause, none at all. He was drunk. But
I don't know that it would have made any difference. The man is a low
brute, and her life is killing her. I love her--well, that is all!"

"Vick!" she cried; "I knew you would do some--" she hesitated before his
glittering eyes--"something very risky," she faltered at last.

He waved this aside impatiently.

"What will you do now?" she asked hesitantly.

"I don't know,--we shall go away," he replied vaguely; "but she is waiting,
needs me. Will you help her,--help _us_?" he demanded, turning to the door,
"or shall we have to go to-night?"

"Wait," she said, putting her hands on his arms; "you can't do that! Just
think what it will mean to father and mother, to everybody.... Let me dress
and take her back!" she suggested half heartedly.

"Isabelle!" he cried. "She shall never go back to that brute."

"You love her so much?"

"Enough for anything," he answered gravely, turning to the door.

In the face of his set look, his short words, all the protesting
considerations on the tip of her tongue seemed futile. To a man in a mood
like his they would but drive him to further folly. And admiration rose
unexpectedly in her heart for the man who could hold his fate in his hands
like this and unshakenly cast it on the ground. The very madness of it all
awed her. She threw her arms about him, murmuring:--

"Oh, Vick--for you--it seems so horrid, so--"

"It _is_ mean," he admitted through his compressed lips. "For that very
reason, don't you see, I will take her beyond where it can touch her, at
once, this very night,--if you will not help us!"

And all that she could do was to kiss him, the tears falling from her eyes.

"I will, Vick, dear.... It makes no difference to me what happens,--if you
are only happy!"

       *       *       *       *       *

As he drove to his father's house in the damp April night, he tried to
think of the steps he must take on the morrow. He had acted irresistibly,
out of the depths of his nature, unconcerned that he was about to tear in
pieces the fabric of his life. It was not until he had let himself into the
silent house and noiselessly passed his mother's door that he realized in
sudden pain what it must mean to others.

He lay awake thinking, thinking. First of all she must telegraph for Delia
to meet them somewhere,--she must have the child with her at once; and they
must leave the city before Conry could find her and make trouble.... And he
must tell the Colonel....

The next morning when Vickers entered his sister's library, Stacia Conry
rose from the lounge where she had been lying reading a newspaper, and
waited hesitantly while he came forward. She was very pretty this morning,
with a faint touch of rose beneath her pale skin, her long lashes falling
over fresh, shy eyes. In spite of it all she had slept, while the sleepless
hours he had spent showed in his worn, white face. He put out his arms, and
she clung to him.

"We must decide what to do," he said.

"You will not leave me?" she whispered, her head lying passive against his
breast. Suddenly raising her head, she clasped her arms about his neck,
drawing him passionately to her, crying, "I love you--love you,--you will
never leave me?"

And the man looking down into her eyes answered from his heart in all
truth:--

"Never, never so long as I live!" The words muttered in his broken voice
had all the solemnity of a marriage oath; and he kissed her, sealing the
promise, while she lay passive in his arms.

Holding her thus to him, her head against his beating heart, he felt the
helplessness, the dependence of the woman, and it filled him with a
subdued, sad joy. His part was to protect her, to defend her always, and
his grip tightened about her yielding form. Their lips met again, and this
time the sensuous appeal of the woman entered his senses, clouding for the
time his delicate vision, submerging that nobler feeling which hitherto
alone she had roused. She was a woman,--his to desire, to have!

"What shall we do?" she asked, sitting down, still holding his hand.

"First we must get Delia. We had better telegraph your mother at once to
meet us somewhere."

"Oh!"

"You must have Delia, of course. He will probably make trouble, try to get
hold of the child, and so we must leave here as soon as possible, to-day if
we can."

"Where shall we go?" she asked, bewildered.

"Somewhere--out of the country," he replied slowly, looking at her
significantly. "Of course it would be better to wait and have the divorce;
but he might fight that, and make a mess,--try to keep the child, you
understand."

She was silent, and he thought she objected to his summary plan. But it was
on her lips to say, 'Why not leave Delia with him until it can all be
arranged?' Something in the young man's stern face restrained her; she was
afraid of outraging instincts, delicacies that were strange to her.

"Should you mind," he asked pleadingly, "going without the divorce? Of
course to me it is the same thing. You are mine now, as I look at it,--any
marriage would mean little to either of us after--the past! Somehow to hang
about here, with the danger of trouble to you, waiting for a divorce, with
the row and all,--I can't see you going through it. I think the--other
way--is better."

She did not fully understand his feeling about it, which was that with the
soiled experience of her marriage another ceremony with him would be a mere
legal farce. To the pure idealism of his nature it seemed cleaner, nobler
for them to take this step without any attempt to regularize it in the eyes
of Society. To him she was justified in doing what she had done, in leaving
her husband for him, and that would have to be enough for them both. He
despised half measures, compromises. He was ready to cast all into his
defiance of law. Meanwhile she pondered the matter with lowered eyes and
presently she asked:--

"How long would it take to get a divorce?"

"If he fought it, a year perhaps, or longer."

"And I should have to stay here in the city?"

"Or go somewhere else to get a residence."

"And we--" she hesitated to complete the thought.

He drew her to him and kissed her.

"I think we shall be enough for each other," he said.

"I will do whatever you wish," she murmured, thus softly putting on his
shoulders the burden of the step.

He was the man, the strong protector that had come to her in her distress,
to whom she fled as naturally as a hunted animal flies to a hole, as a
crippled bird to the deep underbrush. Her beauty, her sex, herself, had
somehow attracted to her this male arm, and the right to take it never
occurred to her. He loved her, of course, and she would make him love her
more, and all would be well. If he had been penniless, unable to give her
the full protection that she needed, then they would have been obliged to
consider this step more carefully, and doubts might have forced themselves
upon her. But as it was she clung to him, trusting to the power of her sex
to hold him constant, to shield her....

"Now I must go down to the office to see my father," Vickers said finally.
"I'll be back early in the afternoon, and then--we will make our plans."

"Will you tell him, your father?" Mrs. Conry asked tensely.

"He will have to know, of course." As he spoke a wave of pain shot over the
young man's face. He stepped to the door and then turned:--

"You will telegraph about Delia,--she might meet us in New York--in two
days."

"Very well," Mrs. Conry murmured submissively.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Colonel was sitting in his little corner office before the
old-fashioned dingy desk, where he had transacted so many affairs of one
sort or another for nearly thirty years. He was not even reading his mail
this morning, but musing, as he often was when the clerks thought that he
was more busily employed. Isabelle and her child had returned from
California, the day before. She had not recovered from bearing the child,
and the St. Louis doctors who had been consulted had not helped her. It
might be well to see some one in New York.... But the Colonel was thinking
most of all this morning of his son. The tenacious old merchant was
wondering whether he had done right in accepting the young man's sacrifice.
In his disgust for the do-nothing, parasitic offspring about him, perhaps
he had taken a delicate instrument and blunted it by setting it at coarse
work. Well, it was not too late to change that.

'The boy didn't start right,' the Colonel mused sadly. 'He didn't start
selling hardware on the road. He's done his best, and he's no such duffer
as Parrott's boy anyhow. But he would make only a front office kind of
business man. The business must get on by itself pretty soon. Perhaps that
idea for a selling company would not be a bad thing. And that would be the
end of Parrott and Price.'

Nevertheless, the old man's heart having come slowly to this generous
decision was not light,--if the other boy had lived, if Belle had married
some one who could have gone into the business. The bricks and mortar of
the building were part of his own being, and he longed to live out these
last few years in the shadow of his great enterprise....

"Father, can I see you about something important?"

The Colonel, startled from his revery, looked up at his son with his sweet
smile.

"Why, yes, my boy,--I wasn't doing much, and I had something to say to you.
Sit down. You got away from home early this morning."

He glanced inquiringly at his son's white, set face and tense lips. Playing
with his eye-glasses, he began to talk lightly of other matters, as was his
wont when he felt the coming of a storm.

Vickers listened patiently, staring straight across his father to the wall,
and when the Colonel came to a full pause,

"Father, you said you were ready for me to take a vacation. I must go at
once, to-day if possible. And, father, I can't come back."

The old man moved slightly in his chair. It was his intention to offer the
young man his freedom, but it hurt him to have it taken for granted in this
light manner. He waited.

"Something has happened," Vickers continued in a low voice, "something
which will alter my whole life."

The Colonel still waited.

"I love a woman, and I must take her away from here at once."

"Who is she?" the old man asked gently.

"Mrs. Conry--"

"But she's a married woman, isn't she, Vick?"

"She has a dirty brute of a husband--she's left him forever!"

The Colonel's blue eyes opened in speechless surprise, as his son went on
to tell rapidly what had happened the previous night. Before he had
finished the old man interrupted by a low exclamation:--

"But she is a married woman, Vickers!"

"Her marriage was a mistake, and she's paid for it, poor woman,--paid with
soul and body! She will not pay any longer."

"But what are you going to do, my boy?"

"I love her, father. I mean to take her away, at once, take her and her
child."

"Run away with a married woman?" The Colonel's pale face flushed slightly,
less in anger than in shame, and his eyes fell from his son's face.

"I wish with all my heart it wasn't so, of course; that she wasn't married,
or that she had left him long ago. But that can't be helped. And I don't
see how a divorce could make any difference, and it would take a long time,
and cause a dirty mess. He's the kind who would fight it for spite, or
blackmail. Perhaps later it will come. Now she must not suffer any more. I
love her all the deeper for what she has been through. I want to make her
life happy, make it up to her somehow, if I can."

The Colonel rose and with an old man's slow step went over to the office
door and locked it.

"Vickers," he said as he turned around from the door, still averting his
shamed face, "you must be crazy, out of your mind, my son!"

"No, father," the young man replied calmly; "I was never surer of anything
in my life! I knew it would hurt you and mother,--you can't understand. But
you must trust me in this. It has to be."

"Why does it have to be?"

"Because I love her!" he burst out. "Because I want to save her from that
man, from the degradation she's lived in. With me she will have some joy,
at last,--her life, her soul,--oh, father, you can't say these things to
any one! You can't give good reasons."

The old merchant's face became stern as he replied:--

"You wish to do all this for her, and yet you do not mean to marry her."

"I can't marry her! I would to-day if I could. Some day perhaps we
can,--for the sake of the child it would be better. But that makes no
difference to me. It is the same as marriage for us--"

"'Doesn't make any difference'--'the same as marriage'--what are you
talking about?"

The young man tried to find words which would fully express his feeling. He
had come a long way these last hours in his ideas of life; he saw things
naked and clear cut, without dubious shades. But he had to realize now that
what _his_ soul accepted as incontrovertible logic was meaningless to
others.

"I mean," he said at last slowly, "that this woman is the woman I love. I
care more for her happiness, for her well-being than for anything else in
life. And so no matter how we arrange to live, she is all that a woman can
be to a man, married or not as it may happen."

"To take another man's wife and live with her!" the Colonel summed up
bitterly. "No, Vick, you don't mean that. You can't do a dirty thing like
that. Think it over!"

So they argued a little while longer, and finally the old man pleaded with
his son for time, offering to see Mrs. Conry, to help her get a separation
from her husband, to send her abroad with her child,--to all of which
Vickers replied steadily:--

"But I love her, father--you forget that! And she needs me now!"

"Love her!" the old man cried. "Don't call that love!"

Vickers shut his lips and rose, very white.

"I must go now. Let's not say any more. We've never had any bitter words
between us, father. You don't understand this--do you think I would hurt
you and mother, if it didn't have to be? I gave up my own life, when it was
only myself at stake; but I cannot give her up--and everything it will mean
to her."

The Colonel turned away his face and refused to see his son's outstretched
hand. He could not think without a blush that his son should be able to
contemplate this thing. Vickers, as he turned the handle of the door,
recollected something and came back.

"Oh, you must cancel that stock agreement. I shouldn't want to own it now
that I have quit. The other things, the money, I shall keep. You would like
me to have it, father, and it will be quite enough."

The old man made a gesture as if to wave aside the money matter.

"Good-by, father!" he said slowly, tenderly.

"You'll see your mother?"

"Yes--I'm going there now."

Thus father and son parted.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nothing, it seemed to Vickers, after this painful half hour, could be as
miserable as what he had been through, and as a matter of fact his
interview with his mother was comparatively easy.

To Mrs. Price her son's determination was merely an unexpected outburst of
wild folly, such as happened in other families,--coming rather late in
Vick's life, but by no means irremediable. Vickers had fallen into the
hands of a designing woman, who intended to capture a rich man's son. Her
first thought was that the Colonel would have to buy Mrs. Conry off, as Mr.
Stewart had done in a similar accident that befell Ted Stewart, and when
Vickers finally made it plain to her that his was not that kind of case,
she fell to berating him for the scandal he would create by "trapesing off
to Europe with a singer." Oddly enough that delicate modesty, like a
woman's, which had made it almost impossible for the Colonel to mention the
affair, did not seem to trouble her. To live with another man's wife was in
the Colonel's eyes a sin little short of incest, and more shocking than
many kinds of murder. But his wife, with a deeper comprehension of the
powers of her sex, of the appeal of woman to man, saw in it merely a
weakness that threatened to become a family disgrace. When she found after
an hour's talk that her arguments made no impression, while Vickers sat,
harassed and silent, his head resting on his hands, she burst into tears.

"It's just like those things you read of in the papers," she sobbed, "those
queer Pittsburg people, who are always doing some nasty thing, and no
decent folks will associate with them."

"It's not the thing you do, mother; it's the way you do it, the purpose,
the feeling," the young man protested. "And there won't be a scandal, if
that's what's troubling you. You can tell your friends that I have gone
abroad suddenly for my health."

"Who would believe that? Do you think her husband's going to keep quiet?"
Mrs. Price sniffled, with considerable worldly wisdom.

"Well, let them believe what they like. They'll forget me in a week."

"Where are you going?"

"To Europe, somewhere,--I haven't thought about the place. I'll let you
know."

"And how about her child?"

"We shall take her with us."

"She wants her along, does she?"

"Of course!"

Vickers rose impatiently.

"Good-by, mother."

She let him kiss her.

"I shall come to see you sometimes, if you want me to."

"Oh, you'll be coming back fast enough," she retorted quickly.

And then she straightened the sofa pillows where he had been sitting and
picked up a book she had been reading. As Vickers went to his room to get a
bag, Isabelle opened the door of her mother's room, where she had been
waiting for him. She put her arms about his neck, as she had that night of
her marriage on the station platform at Grafton, and pressed him tightly to
her.

"Vick! Vick!" she cried. "That it had to be like this, your love! Like
this!"

"It had to be, Belle," he answered with a smile. "It comes to us in
different ways, old girl."

"But you! You!" She led him by the hand to the sofa, where she threw
herself, a white exhausted look coming into her face. He stroked her hair
with the ends of his fingers. Suddenly she half turned, grasping his hand
with both of hers.

"Can you be happy--really happy?"

"I think so; but even that makes no difference, perhaps. I should do it all
the same, if I knew it meant no happiness for me."

She looked at him searchingly, trying to read his heart in his eyes. After
the year of her marriage, knowing now the mystery of human relations, she
wondered whether he might not be right. That precious something, pain or
joy, which was wanting in her union he might find in this forbidden
by-path, in this woman who seemed to her so immeasurably beneath her
brother. She kissed him, and he went away.

When the hall door clicked, she rose from the lounge and dragged herself to
the window to watch him, holding her breath, her heart beating rapidly,
almost glad that he was strong enough to take his fate in his hands, to
test life, to break the rules, to defy reason! "Vick, dear Vick," she
murmured.

In the room below Mrs. Price, also, was looking out of the bay window,
watching her son disappear down the avenue. She had not been reading, and
she had heard him come down into the hall, but let him go without another
word. He walked slowly, erect as the Colonel used to walk. Tears dropped
from her eyes,--tears of mortification. For in her heart she knew that he
would come back some day, this woman who had lured him having fallen from
him like a dead leaf. She sat on at the window until the Colonel's figure
appeared in the distance coming up the avenue. His head was bent; he looked
neither to the right nor to the left; and he walked very slowly, like an
old man, dragging his feet after him. He was crushed. It would not have
been thus if he had lost his fortune, the work of all his years. Such a
fate he would have looked in the eye, with raised head....

That night Vickers and Stacia Conry left for New York, and a few days later
Mrs. Price read their names in a list of outgoing passengers for Genoa. She
did not show the list to the Colonel, and their son's name was never
mentioned in the house.

When the people who knew the Prices intimately began to whisper, then
chatter, they said many hard things of Vickers, chiefly that he was a Fool,
a judgment that could not be gainsaid. Nevertheless the heart of a Fool may
be pure.




CHAPTER XVIII


Isabelle did not regain her strength after the birth of her child. She lay
nerveless and white, so that her husband, her mother, the Colonel, all
became alarmed. The celebrated accoucheur who had attended her alarmed them
still more.

"Something's wrong,--she couldn't stand the strain. Oh, it's another case
of American woman,--too finely organized for the plain animal duties. A lot
of my women patients are the same way. They take child-bearing
hard,--damned hard.... What's the matter with them? I don't know!" he
concluded irritably. "She must just go slow until she gets back her
strength."

She went "slow," but Nature refused to assert itself, to proclaim the will
to live. For months the days crept by with hardly a sign of change in her
condition, and then began the period of doctors. The family physician, who
had a reputation for diagnosis, pronounced her case "anaemia and nervous
debility." "She must be built up,--baths, massage, distraction." Of course
she was not to nurse her child, and the little girl was handed over to a
trained nurse. Then this doctor called in another, a specialist in nerves,
who listened to all that the others said, tapped her here and there, and
wished the opinion of an obstetrical surgeon. After his examination there
was a discussion of the advisability of "surgical interference," and the
conclusion "to wait."

"It may be a long time--years--before Mrs. Lane fully recovers her tone,"
the nerve specialist told the husband. "We must have patience. It would be
a good thing to take her to Europe for a change."

This was the invariable suggestion that he made to his wealthy patients
when he saw no immediate results from his treatment. It could do no harm,
Europe, and most of his patients liked the prescription. They returned, to
be sure, in many cases in about the same condition as when they left, or
merely rested temporarily,--but of course that was the fault of the
patient.

When Lane objected that it would be almost impossible for him to leave his
duties for a trip abroad and that he did not like to have his wife go
without him, the specialist advised California:--

"A mild climate where she can be out-of-doors and relaxed."

Isabelle went to California with her mother, the trained nurse, and the
child. But instead of the "mild climate," Pasadena happened to be raw and
rainy. She disliked the hotel, and the hosts of idle, overdressed, and
vulgar women. So her mother brought her back, as we have seen, and then
there was talk of the Virginia Springs, "an excellent spring climate."

A new doctor was called in, who had his own peculiar regime of sprays and
baths, of subcutaneous medicine, and then a third nerve specialist, who
said, "We must find the right key," and looked as if he might have it in
his office.

"The right key?"

"Her combination, the secret of her vitality. We must find it for
her,--distraction, a system of physical exercises, perhaps. But we must
occupy the mind. Those Christian Scientists have an idea, you know,--not
that I recommend their tomfoolery; but we must accomplish their results by
scientific means." And he went away highly satisfied with his liberality of
view....

On one vital point the doctors were hopelessly divided. Some thought
Isabelle should have another child, "as soon as may be,"--it was a chance
that Nature might take to right matters. The others strongly dissented: a
child in the patient's present debilitated condition would be criminal. As
these doctors seemed to have the best of the argument, it was decided that
for the present the wife should remain sterile, and the physicians
undertook to watch over the life process, to guard against its asserting
its rights.

The last illusions of romance seemed to go at this period. The simple old
tale that a man and a woman loving each other marry and have the children
that live within them and come from their mutual love has been rewritten
for the higher classes of American women, with the aid of science. Health,
economic pressure, the hectic struggle to survive in an ambitious world
have altered the simple axioms of nature. Isabelle accepted easily the
judgment of the doctors,--she had known so many women in a like case. Yet
when she referred to this matter in talking to Alice Johnston, she caught
an odd look on her cousin's face.

"I wonder if they know, the doctors--they seem always to be finding excuses
for women not to have children.... We've been all through that, Steve and
I; and decided we wouldn't have anything to do with it, no matter what
happened. It--tarnishes you somehow, and after all does it help? There's
Lulu Baxter, living in daily fear of having a child because they think they
are too poor. He gets twenty-five hundred from the road--he's under Steve,
you know--and they live in a nice apartment with two servants and
entertain. They are afraid of falling in the social scale, if they should
live differently. But she's as nervous as a witch, never wholly well, and
they'll just go on, as he rises and gets more money, adding to their
expenses. They will never have money enough for children, or only for one,
maybe,--no, I don't believe it pays!"

"But she's so pretty, and they live nicely," Isabelle protested, and added,
"There are other things to live for besides having a lot of children--"

"What?" the older woman asked gravely.

"Your husband"; and thinking of John's present homeless condition, she
continued hastily, "and life itself,--to be some one,--you owe something to
yourself."

"Yes," Alice assented, smiling,--"if we only knew what it was!"

"Besides if we were all like you, Alice dear, we should be paupers. Even we
can't afford--"

"We should be paupers together, then! No, you can't convince me--it's
against Nature."

"All modern life is against Nature," the young woman retorted glibly; "just
at present I regard Nature as a mighty poor thing."

She stretched her thin arms behind her head and turned on the lounge.

"That's why the people who made this country are dying out so rapidly,
giving way before Swedes and Slavs and others,--because those people are
willing to have children."

"Meantime we have the success!" Isabelle cried languidly. "_Apres nous_ the
Slavs,--we are the flower! An aristocracy is always nourished on
sterility!"

"Dr. Fuller!" Alice commented.... "So the Colonel is going with you to the
Springs?"

"Yes, poor old Colonel!--he must get away--he's awfully broken up," and she
added sombrely. "That's one trouble with having children,--you expect them
to think and act like you. You can't be willing to let them be themselves."

"But, Isabelle!"

"Oh, I know what you are going to say about Vick. I have heard it over and
over. John has said it. Mother has said it. Father looks it. You needn't
bother to say it, Alice!" She glanced at her cousin mutinously. "John
thought I was partly to blame; that I ought to have been able to control
Vick. He speaks as if the poor boy were insane or drunk or
something--because he did what he did!"

"And you?"

Isabelle sat upright, leaning her head thoughtfully on her hands, and
staring with bright eyes at Alice.

"Do you want to know what I really believe? ... I have done a lot of
thinking these months, all by myself. Well, I admire Vick tremendously; he
had the courage--"

"Does that take courage?"

"Yes! For a man like Vickers.... Oh, I suppose she is horrid and not worth
it--I only hope he will never find it out! But to love any one enough to be
willing, to be glad to give up your life for him, for her--why, it is
tremendous, Alice! ... Here is Tots," she broke off as the nurse wheeled
the baby through the hall,--"Miss Marian Lane.... Nurse, cover up her face
with the veil so her ladyship won't get frostbitten," and Isabelle sank
back again with a sigh on the lounge and resumed the thread of her thought.
"And I am not so sure that what John objects to isn't largely the
mess,--the papers, the scandal, the fact they went off without waiting for
a divorce and all that. Of course that wasn't pleasant for respectable folk
like the Lanes and the Prices. But why should Vickers have given up what
seemed to him right, what was his life and hers, just for our prejudices
about not having our names in the papers?"

"That wasn't all!"

"Well, I shall always believe in Vick, no matter what comes of it....
Marriage--the regular thing--doesn't seem to be such a great success with
many people, I know. Perhaps life would be better if more people had Vick's
courage!"

Isabelle forced her point with an invalid's desire to relieve a wayward
feeling and also a childish wish to shock this good cousin, who saw life
simply and was so sure of herself. Alice Johnston rose with a smile.

"I hope you will be a great deal stronger when you come back, dear."

"I shall be--or I shall have an operation. I don't intend to remain in the
noble army of N.P.'s."

"How is John?"

"Flourishing and busy--oh, tremendously busy! He might just as well live in
New York or Washington for all I see of him."

"Steve says he is very clever and successful,--you must be so proud!"

Isabelle smiled. "Of course! But sometimes I think I should like a
substitute husband, one for everyday use, you know!"

"There are plenty of that kind!" laughed Alice. "But I don't believe they
would satisfy you wholly."

"Perhaps not.... How is Steve? Does he like his new work?"

"Yes," Alice replied without enthusiasm. "He's working very hard, too."

"Oh, men love it,--it makes them feel important."

"Did you ever think, Belle, that men have difficulties to meet,--problems
that we never dream of?"

"Worse than the child-bearing question?" queried Isabelle, kicking out the
folds of her tea-gown with a slippered foot.

"Well, different; harder, perhaps.... Steve doesn't talk them over as he
used to with me."

"Too tired. John never talks to me about business. We discuss what the last
doctor thinks, and how the baby is, and whether we'll take the Jackson
house or build or live at the Monopole and go abroad, and Nan Lawton's
latest,--really vital things, you see! Business is such a bore."

The older woman seemed to have something on her mind and sat down again at
the end of the lounge.

"By the way," Isabelle continued idly, "did you know that the Falkners were
coming to St. Louis to live? John found Rob a place in the terminal work.
It isn't permanent, but Bessie was crazy to come, and it may be an opening.
She is a nice thing,--mad about people."

"But, Isabelle," her cousin persisted, "don't you want to know the things
that make your husband's life,--that go down to the roots?"

"If you mean business, no, I don't. Besides they are confidential matters,
I suppose. He couldn't make me understand...."

"They have to face the fight, the men; make the decisions that count--for
character."

"Of course,--John attends to that side and I to mine. We should be treading
on each other's toes if I tried to decide his matters for him!"

"But when they are questions of right and wrong--"

"Don't worry. Steve and John are all right. Besides they are only officers.
You don't believe all that stuff in the magazines about Senator Thomas and
the railroads? John says that is a form of modern blackmail."

"I don't know what to believe," the older woman replied. "I know it's
terrible,--it's like war!"

"Of course it's war, and men must do the fighting."

"And fight fair."

"Of course,--as fair as the others. What are you driving at?"

"I wonder if the A. and P. always fights fair?"

"It isn't a charitable organization, my dear.... But Steve and John are
just officers. They don't have to decide. They take their orders from
headquarters and carry them out."

"No matter what they are?"

"Naturally,--that's what officers are for, isn't it? If they don't want to
carry them out, they must resign."

"But they can't always resign,"

"Why not?"

"Because of you and me and the children!"

"Oh, don't worry about it! They don't worry. That's what I like a man for.
If he's good for anything, he isn't perpetually pawing himself over."

This did not seem wholly to satisfy Alice, but she leaned over Isabelle and
kissed her:--

"Only get well, my dear, and paw some of your notions over,--it won't do
you any harm!"

That evening when the Lanes were alone, after they had discussed the topics
that Isabelle had enumerated, with the addition of the arrangements for the
trip to the Springs, Isabelle asked casually:--

"John, is it easy to be honest in business?"

"That depends," he replied guardedly, "on the business and the man. Why?"

"You don't believe what those magazine articles say about the Senator and
the others?"

"I don't read them."

"Why?"

"Because the men who write them don't understand the facts, and what they
know they distort--for money."

"Um," she observed thoughtfully. "But are there facts--like those? _You_
know the facts."

"I don't know all of them."

"Are those you know straight or crooked?" she asked, feeling considerable
interest in the question, now that it was started.

"I don't know what you would mean by crooked,--what is it you want to
know?"

"Are you honest?" she asked with mild curiosity. "I mean in the way of
railroad business. Of course I know you are other ways."

Lane smiled at her childlike seriousness.

"I always try to do what seems to me right under the circumstances."

"But the circumstances are sometimes--queer?"

"The circumstances are usually complex."

"The circumstances are complex," she mused aloud. "I'll tell Alice that."

"What has Alice to do with it?"

"She seems bothered about the circumstances--that's all,--the circumstances
and Steve."

"I guess Steve can manage the circumstances by himself," he replied coldly,
turning over the evening paper. "She probably reads the magazines and
believes all she hears."

"All intelligent women read the magazines--and believe what they hear or
else what their husbands tell them," she rejoined flippantly. Presently, as
Lane continued to look over the stock page of the paper, she observed:--

"Don't you suppose that in Vickers's case the circumstances may have
been--complex?"

Lane looked at her steadily.

"I can't see what that has to do with the question."

"Oh?" she queried mischievously. He considered the working of her mind as
merely whimsical, but she had a sense of logical triumph over the man.
Apparently he would make allowances of "circumstances" in business, his
life, that he would not admit in private affairs. As he kissed her and was
turning out the light, before joining the Colonel for another cigar, she
asked:--

"Supposing that you refused to be involved in circumstances that
were--complex? What would happen?"

"What a girl!" he laughed cheerfully. "For one thing I think we should not
be going to the Springs to-morrow in a private car, or buying the Jackson
house--or any other. Now put it all out of your head and have a good rest."

He kissed her again, and she murmured wearily:--

"I'm so useless,--they should kill things like me! How can you love me?"

She was confident that he did love her, that like so many husbands he had
accepted her invalidism cheerfully, with an unconscious chivalry for the
wife who instead of flowering forth in marriage had for the time being
withered. His confidence, in her sinking moods like this, that it would all
come right, buoyed her up. And John was a wise man as well as a good
husband; the Colonel trusted him, admired him. Alice Johnston's doubts
slipped easily from her mind. Nevertheless, there were now two subjects of
serious interest that husband and wife would always avoid,--Vickers, and
business honesty!

She lay there feeling weak and forlorn before the journey, preoccupied with
herself. These days she was beset with a tantalizing sense that life was
slipping past her just beyond her reach, flowing like a mighty river to
issues that she was not permitted to share. And while she was forced to lie
useless on the bank, her youth, her own life, was somehow running out, too.
Just what it was that she was missing she could not say,--something
alluring, something more than her husband's activity, than her child,
something that made her stretch out longing hands in the dark.... She would
not submit to invalidism.




CHAPTER XIX


The Virginia mountains made a narrow horizon of brilliant blue. On their
lower slopes the misty outlines of early spring had begun with the budding
trees. Here and there the feathery forest was spotted by dashes of pink
coolness where the wild peach and plum had blossomed, and the faint blue of
the rhododendron bushes mounted to the sky-line. The morning was brilliant
after a rain and the fresh mountain air blew invigoratingly, as Isabelle
left the car on her husband's arm. With the quick change of mood of the
nervous invalid she already felt stronger, more hopeful. There was color in
her thin face, and her eyes had again the vivacious sparkle that had been
so largely her charm.

"We must find some good horses," she said to her father as they approached
the hotel cottage which had been engaged; "I want to get up in those hills.
Margaret promised to come for a week.... Oh, I am going to be all right
now!"

The hotel was one of those huge structures dropped down in the mountains or
by the sea to provide for the taste for fresh air, the need for
recuperation, of a wealthy society that crams its pleasures and its
business into small periods,--days and hours. It rambled over an acre or
two and provided as nearly as possible the same luxuries and occupations
that its frequenters had at home. At this season it was crowded with rich
people, who had sought the balm of early spring in the Virginia mountains
after their weeks of frantic activity in the cities, instead of taking the
steamers to Europe. They were sitting, beautifully wrapped in furs, on the
long verandas, or smartly costumed were setting out for the links or for
horseback excursions. The Colonel and Lane quickly discovered acquaintances
in the broker's office where prominent "operators" were sitting, smoking
cigars and looking at the country through large plate-glass windows, while
the ticker chattered within hearing. There was music in the hall, and fresh
arrivals with spotless luggage poured in from the trains. This mountain inn
was a little piece of New York moved out into the country.

But it was peaceful on the piazza of the cottage, which was somewhat
removed from the great caravansary, where Isabelle lay and watched the blue
recesses of the receding hills. Here her husband found her when it was time
to say good-by.

"You'll be very well off," he remarked, laying his hand affectionately on
his wife's arm. "The Stantons are here--you remember him at Torso?--and the
Blakes from St. Louis, and no doubt a lot more people your father
knows,--so you won't be lonely. I have arranged about the horses and
selected a quiet table for you."

"That is very good of you,--I don't want to see people," she replied, her
eyes still on the hills. "When will you be back?"

"In a week or ten days I can run up again and stay for a couple of days,
over Sunday."

"You'll telegraph about Marian?"

"Of course."

And bending over to kiss her forehead, he hurried away. It seemed to her
that he was always leaving, always going somewhere. When he was away, he
wrote or telegraphed her each day as a matter of course, and sent her
flowers every other day, and brought her some piece of jewellery when he
went to New York. Yes, he was very fond of her, she felt, and his was a
loyal nature,--she never need fear that in these many absences from his
wife he might become entangled with women, as other men did. He was not
that kind....

The Colonel crossed the lawn in the direction of the golf links with a
party of young old men. It was fortunate that the Colonel had become
interested, almost boyishly, in golf; for since that morning when his son
had left him he had lost all zest for business. A year ago he would never
have thought it possible to come away like this for a month in the busy
season. To Isabelle it was sad and also curious the way he took this matter
of Vickers. He seemed to feel that he had but one child now, had put his
boy quite out of his mind. He was gradually arranging his affairs--already
there was talk of incorporating the hardware business and taking in new
blood. And he had aged still more. But he was so tremendously vital,--the
Colonel! No one could say he was heart-broken. He took more interest than
ever in public affairs, like the General Hospital, and the Park Board. But
he was different, as Isabelle felt,--abstracted, more silent, apparently
revising his philosophy of life at an advanced age, and that is always
painful. If she had only given him a man child, something male and vital
like himself! He was fond of John, but no one could take the place of his
own blood. That, too, was a curious limitation in the eyes of the younger
generation.

"Isabelle!"

She was wakened from her brooding by a soft Southern voice, and perceived
Margaret Pole coming up the steps. With the grasp of Margaret's small
hands, the kiss, all the years since St. Mary's seemed to fall away. The
two women drew off and looked at each other, Margaret smiling
enigmatically, understanding that Isabelle was trying to read the record of
the years, the experience of marriage on her. Coloring slightly, she turned
away and drew up a chair.

"Is your husband with you?" Isabelle asked. "I do so want to meet him."

"No; I left him at my father's with the children. He's very good with the
children," she added with a mocking smile, "and he doesn't like little
trips. He doesn't understand how I can get up at five in the morning and
travel all day across country to see an old friend.... Men don't understand
things, do you think?"

"So you are going abroad to live?"

"Yes," Margaret answered without enthusiasm. "We are going to study
music,--the voice. My husband doesn't like business!"

Isabelle had heard that Mr. Pole, agreeable as he was, had not been
successful in business. But the Poles and the Lawtons were all comfortably
off, and it was natural that he should follow his tastes.

"He has a very good voice," Margaret added.

"How exciting--to change your whole life like that!" Isabelle exclaimed,
fired by the prospect of escape from routine, from the known.

"Think so?" Margaret remarked in a dull voice. "Well, perhaps. Tell me how
you are--everything."

And they began to talk, and yet carefully avoided what was uppermost in the
minds of both,--'How has it been with you? How has marriage been? Has it
given you all that you looked for? Are you happy?' For in spite of all the
education, the freedom so much talked about for women, that remains the
central theme of their existence,--the emotional and material satisfaction
of their natures through marriage. Margaret Pole was accounted intellectual
among women, with bookish tastes, thoughtful, and she knew many women who
had been educated in colleges. "They are all like us," she once said to
Isabelle; "just like us. They want to marry a man who will give them
everything, and they aren't any wiser in their choice, either. The only
difference is that a smaller number of them have the chance to marry, and
when they can't be married, they have something besides cats and maiden
aunts to fall back upon. But interests in common with their husbands,
intellectual interests,--rubbish! A man who amounts to anything is always a
specialist, and he doesn't care for feminine amateurishness. An
acquaintance with Dante and the housing of the poor doesn't broaden the
breakfast table, not a little bit."

When Margaret Pole talked in this strain, men thought her intelligent and
women cynical. Isabelle felt that this cynicism had grown upon her. It
appeared in little things, as when she said: "I can stay only a week. I
must see to breaking up the house and a lot of business. We shall never
sail if I don't go back and get at it. Men are supposed to be practical and
attend to the details, but they don't if they can get out of them." When
Isabelle complimented her on her pretty figure, Margaret said with a
mocking grimace: "Yes, the figure is there yet. The face goes first
usually." Isabelle had to admit that Margaret's delicate, girlish face had
grown strangely old and grave. The smile about the thin lips was there, but
it was a mocking or a wistful smile. The blue eyes were deeper underneath
the high brow. Life was writing its record on this fine face,--a record not
easily read, however. They fell to talking over the St. Mary's girls.

"Aline,--have you seen much of her?" Margaret asked.

"Not as much as I hoped to,--I have been so useless," Isabelle replied.
"She's grown queer!"

"Queer?"

"She is rather dowdy, and they live in such a funny way,--always in a mess.
Of course they haven't much money, but they needn't be so--squalid,--the
children and the mussy house and all."

"Aline doesn't care for things," Margaret observed.

"But one must care enough to be clean! And she has gone in for fads,--she
has taken to spinning and weaving and designing jewellery and I don't know
what."

"That is her escape," Margaret explained.

"Escape? It must be horrid for her husband and awful for the children."

"What would you have her do? Scrub and wash and mend and keep a tidy house?
That would take all the poetry out of Aline, destroy her personality. Isn't
it better for her husband and for the children that she should keep herself
alive and give them something better than a good housewife?"

"Keep herself alive by making weird cloths and impossible bracelets?"

Margaret laughed at Isabelle's philistine horror of the Goring household,
and amused herself with suggesting more of the philosophy of the
Intellectuals, the creed of Woman's Independence. She pointed out that
Aline did not interfere with Goring's pursuit of his profession though it
might not interest her or benefit her. Why should Goring interfere with
Aline's endeavors to develop herself, to be something more than a mother
and a nurse?

"She has kept something of her own soul,--that is it!"

"Her own soul!" mocked Isabelle. "If you were to take a meal with them, you
would wish there was less soul, and more clean table napkins."

"My dear little _bourgeoise_," Margaret commented with amusement, "you must
get a larger point of view. The housewife ideal is doomed. Women won't
submit to it,--intelligent ones. And Goring probably likes Aline better as
she is than he would any competent wife of the old sort."

"I don't believe any sane man likes to see his children dirty, and never
know where to find a clean towel,--don't tell me!"

"Then men must change their characters," Margaret replied vaguely; "we
women have been changing our characters for centuries to conform to men's
desires. It's time that the men adjusted themselves to us."

"I wonder what John would say if I told him he must change his character,"
mused Isabelle.

"There is Cornelia Woodyard," Margaret continued; "she combines the two
ideals--but she is very clever."

"We never thought so at St. Mary's."

"That's because we judged her by woman's standards, sentimental
ones,--old-fashioned ones. But she is New."

"How new?" asked Isabelle, who felt that she had been dwelling in a dark
place the past three years.

"Why, she made up her mind just what she wanted out of life,--a certain
kind of husband, a certain kind of married life, a certain set of
associates,--and she's got just what she planned. She isn't an opportunist
like most of us, who take the husbands we marry because they are there, we
don't know why, and take the children they give us because they come, and
live and do what turns up in the circumstances chosen for us by the Male.
No, Conny is very clever!"

"But how?"

"Eugene Woodyard is not a rich man,--Conny was not after money,--but he is
a clever lawyer, well connected,--in with a lot of interesting people, and
has possibilities. Conny saw those and has developed them,--that has been
her success. You see she combines the old and the new. She makes the mould
of their life, but she works through him. As a result she has just what she
wants, and her husband adores her,--he is the outward and visible symbol of
Conny's inward and material strength!"

Isabelle laughed, and Margaret continued in her pleasant drawl, painting
the Woodyard firmament.

"She understood her man better than he did himself. She knew that he would
never be a great money-getter, hadn't the mental or the physical
qualifications for it. So she turns him deftly into a reformer, a kind of
gentlemanly politician. She'll make him Congressman or better,--much
better! Meantime she has given him a delightful home, one of the nicest I
know,--on a street down town near a little park, where the herd does not
know enough to live. And there Conny receives the best picked set of people
I ever see. It is all quite wonderful!"

"And we thought her coarse," mused Isabelle.

"Perhaps she is,--I don't think she is fine. But a strong hand is rarely
fine. I don't think she would hesitate to use any means to arrive,--and
that is Power, my dear little girl!"

Margaret Pole rose, the enigmatic smile on her lips.

"I must leave you now to your nap and the peace of the hills," she said
lightly. "We'll meet at luncheon. By the way, I ran across a cousin of mine
coming in on the train,--a Virginian cousin, which means that he is close
enough to ask favors when he wants them. He wishes to meet you,--he is a
great favorite of the Woodyards, of Conny, I should say,--Tom Cairy.... He
was at college with your brother, I think. I will bring him over in the
afternoon if you say so. He's amusing, Thomas; but I don't vouch for him.
Good-by, girl."

Isabelle watched Margaret Pole cross the light green of the lawn, walking
leisurely, her head raised towards the mountains. 'She is not happy,'
thought Isabelle. 'There is something wrong in her marriage. I wonder if it
is always so!' Margaret had given her so much to think about, with her
sharp suggestions of strange, new views, that she felt extraordinarily
refreshed. And Margaret, her eyes on the blue hills, was thinking, 'She is
still the girl,--she doesn't know herself yet, does not know life!' Her
lips smiled wistfully, as though to add: 'But she is eager. She will have
to learn, as we all do.' Thus the two young women, carefully avoiding any
reference to the thought nearest their hearts, discovered in a brief half
hour what each wanted to know....

After the noisy luncheon, with its interminable variety of food, in the
crowded, hot dining room, Isabelle and Margaret with Cairy sought refuge in
one of the foot-paths that led up into the hills. Cairy dragged his left
leg with a perceptible limp. He was slight, blond hair with auburn tinge,
smooth shaven, with appealing eyes that, like Margaret's, were recessed
beneath delicate brows. He had pleased Isabelle by talking to her about
Vickers, whom he had known slightly at the university, talking warmly and
naturally, as if nothing had happened to Vickers. Now he devoted himself to
her quite personally, while Margaret walked on ahead. Cairy had a way of
seeing but one woman at a time, no matter what the circumstances might be,
because his emotional horizon was always limited. That was one reason why
he was liked so much by women. He had a good deal to say about the
Woodyards, especially Conny.

"She is so sure in her judgments," he said. "I always show her everything I
write!" (He had already explained that he was a literary "jobber," as he
called it, at the Springs to see a well-known Wall Street man for an
article on "the other side" that he was preparing for _The People's
Magazine_, and also hinted that his ambitions rose above his magazine
efforts.)

"But I did not know that Conny was literary," Isabelle remarked in
surprise.

The young Southerner smiled at her simplicity.

"I don't know that she is what _you_ mean by literary; perhaps that is the
reason she is such a good judge. She knows what people want to read, at
least what the editors think they want and will pay for. If Con--Mrs.
Woodyard likes a thing, I know I shall get a check for it. If she throws it
down, I might as well save postage stamps."

"A valuable friend," Margaret called back lightly, "for a struggling man of
letters!"

"Rather," Cairy agreed. "You see," turning to Isabelle again, "that sort of
judgment is worth reams of literary criticism."

"It's practical."

"Yes, that is just what she is,--the genius of the practical; it's an
instinct with her. That is why she can give really elaborate dinners in her
little house, and you have the feeling that there are at least a dozen
servants where they ought to be, and all that."

From the Woodyards they digressed to New York and insensibly to Cairy's
life there. Before they had turned back for tea Isabelle knew that the lame
young Southerner had written a play which he hoped to induce some actress
to take, and that meantime he was supporting himself in the various ways
that modern genius has found as a substitute for Grub Street. He had also
told her that New York was the only place one could live in, if one was
interested in the arts, and that in his opinion the drama was the coming
art of America,--"real American drama with blood in it"; and had said
something about the necessity of a knowledge of life, "a broad
understanding of the national forces," if a man were to write anything
worth while.

"You mean dinner-parties?" Margaret asked at this point....

When he left the women, he had arranged to ride with Isabelle.

"It's the only sport I can indulge in," he said, referring to his physical
infirmity, "and I don't get much of it in New York."

As he limped away across the lawn, Margaret asked mischievously:--

"Well, what do you think of Cousin Thomas? He lets you know a good deal
about himself all at once."

"He is so interesting--and appealing, don't you think so, with those eyes?
Isn't it a pity he is lame?"

"I don't know about that. He's used that lameness of his very effectively.
It's procured him no end of sympathy, and sympathy is what Thomas
likes,--from women. He will tell you all about it some time,--how his negro
nurse was frightened by a snake and dropped him on a stone step when he was
a baby."

"We don't have men like him in St. Louis," Isabelle reflected aloud; "men
who write or do things that are really interesting--it is all business or
gossip. I should like to see Conny,--it must be exciting to live in New
York, and be somebody!"

"Come and try it; you will, I suppose?"

In spite of Margaret's gibes at her distant cousin, Isabelle enjoyed Cairy.
He was the kind of man she had rarely seen and never known: by birth a
gentleman, by education and ambition a writer, with a distinct social sense
and the charm of an artist. In spite of his poverty he had found the means
to run about the world--the habited part of it--a good deal, and had always
managed to meet the right people,--the ones "whose names mean something."
He was of the parasite species, but of the higher types. To Isabelle his
rapid talk, about plays, people, pictures, the opera, books, was a
revelation of some of that flowing, stream of life which she felt she was
missing. And he gave her the pleasant illusion of "being worth while." The
way he would look at her as he rolled a cigarette on the veranda steps,
awaiting her least word, flattered her woman's sympathy. When he left for
Washington, going, as he said, "where the _People's_ call me," she missed
him distinctly.

"I hope I shall meet him again!"

"You will," Margaret replied. "Thomas is the kind one meets pretty often if
you are his sort. And I take it you are!"

Isabelle believed that Margaret Pole was jealous of her young cousin or
piqued because of a sentimental encounter in their youth. Cairy had hinted
at something of this kind. Margaret patted Isabella's pretty head.

"My little girl," she mocked, "how wonderful the world is, and all the
creatures in it!"

       *       *       *       *       *

From this month's visit at the Springs the Colonel got some good golf, Mrs.
Price a vivid sense of the way people threw their money about these days
("They say that Wall Street broker gave the head waiter a hundred dollar
bill when he left!"). And Isabelle had absorbed a miscellaneous assortment
of ideas, the dominant one being that intelligent Americans who really
wished to have interesting lives went East to live, particularly to New
York. And incidentally there was inserted in the nether layers of her
consciousness the belief that the world was changing its ideas about women
and marriage, "and all that." She desired eagerly to be in the current of
these new ideas.




CHAPTER XX


"What makes a happy marriage?" Rob Falkner queried in his brutal and
ironical mood, which made his wife shiver for the proprieties of pleasant
society. It was at one of Bessie's famous Torso suppers, when the Lanes and
Darnells were present.

"A good cook and a good provider," Lane suggested pleasantly, to keep the
topic off conversational reefs.

"A husband who thinks everything you do just right!" sighed Bessie.

"Plenty of money and a few children--for appearances," some one threw in.

Isabelle remarked sagely, "A husband who knows what is best for you in the
big things, and a wife who does what is best in the small ones."

"Unity of Purpose--Unity of Souls," Tom Darnell announced in his oratorical
voice, with an earnestness that made the party self-conscious. His wife
said nothing, and Falkner summed up cynically:--

"You've won, Lane! The American husband must be a good provider, but it
doesn't follow that the wife must be a good cook. Say a good entertainer,
and there you have a complete formula of matrimony: PROVIDER (Hustler,
Money-getter, Liberal) and ENTERTAINER (A woman pretty, charming, social)."

"Here's to the Falkner household,--the perfect example!"

Thus the talk drifted off with a laugh into a discussion of masculine
deficiencies and feminine endurances. Isabelle, looking back with the
experience of after years, remembered this "puppy-dog" conversation. How
young they all were and how they played with ideas! Bessie, also,
remembered the occasion, with an injured feeling. On the way home that
night Lane had remarked to his wife:--

"Falkner is a queer chap,--he was too personal to-night."

"I suppose it is hard on him; Bessie is rather wilful and extravagant. He
looked badly to-night. And he told me he had to take an early train to
examine some new work."

Lane shrugged his shoulders, as does the man of imperturbable will, perfect
digestion, and constant equilibrium, for the troubles of a weaker vessel.

"If he doesn't like what his wife does, he should have character enough to
control her. Besides he should have known all that before he married!"

Isabelle smiled at this piece of masculine complacency,--as if a man could
know any essential fact about a woman from the way she did her hair to the
way she spent money before he had lived with her!

"I do hope he will get a better place," Isabelle remarked good-naturedly.
"It would do them both so much good."

As we have seen, Falkner's chance came at last through Lane, who
recommended him to the A. and P. engineer in charge of the great terminal
works that the road had undertaken in St. Louis. The salary of the new
position was four thousand dollars a year,--a very considerable advance
over the Torso position, and the work gave Falkner an opportunity such as
he had never had before. The railroad system had other large projects in
contemplation also.

"Bessie has written me such a letter,--the child!" Isabelle told her
husband. "You would think they had inherited a million. And yet she seems
sad to leave Torso, after all the ragging she gave the place. She has a
good word to say even for Mrs. Fraser!"

Bessie Falkner was one of those who put down many small roots wherever
chance places them. She had settled into Torso more solidly than she knew
until she came to pull up her roots and put them down in a large, strange
city. "We won't know any one there," she said dolefully to her Torso
friends. "The Lanes, of course; but they are such grand folk now--and
Isabella has all her old friends about her." Nevertheless, it scarcely
entered her mind to remain "in this prairie village all our days." Bessie
had to the full the American ambition to move on and up as far as
possible....

Fortune, having turned its attention to the Falkners, seemed determined to
smile on them this year. An uncle of Bessie's died on his lonely ranch in
Wyoming, and when the infrequent local authorities got around to settling
his affairs, they found that he had left his little estate to Elizabeth
Bissell, who was now Mrs. Robert Falkner of Torso. The lonely old rancher,
it seemed, had remembered the pretty, vivacious blond girl of eighteen, who
had taken the trouble to show him the sights of Denver the one time he had
visited his sister ten years before. Bessie, amused at his eccentric
appearance, had tried to give "Uncle Billy" a good time. "Uncle Billy," she
would say, "you must do this,--you will remember it all your life. Uncle
Billy, won't you lunch with me down town to-day? You must go to the
theatre, while you are here. Uncle, I am going to make you a necktie!" So
she had chirped from morning until night, flattering, coaxing, and also
making sport of the old man. "Bess has a good heart," her mother said to
Uncle Bill, and it must be added Bessie also had a woman's instinct to
please a possible benefactor. Uncle Billy when he returned to the lonely
ranch wrote a letter to his pretty niece, which Bessie neglected to answer.
Nevertheless, when Uncle Billy made ready to die, he bestowed all that he
had to give upon the girl who had smiled on him once.

Thus Bessie's purring good nature bore fruit, Before the property could be
sold, the most imaginative ideas about her inheritance filled Bessie's
dreams. Day and night she planned what they would do with this
fortune,--everything from a year in Europe to new dresses for the children!
When it came finally in the form of a draft for thirteen thousand and some
odd dollars, her visions were dampened for a time,--so many of her castles
could not be acquired for thirteen thousand and some odd dollars.

Falkner was for investing the legacy in Freke's mines, which, he had good
reason to believe, were better than gold mines. But when Bessie learned
that the annual dividends would only be about twelve hundred dollars, she
demurred. That was too slow. Secretly she thought that "if Rob were only
clever about money," he might in a few years make a real fortune out of
this capital. There were men she had known in Denver, as she told her
husband, "who hadn't half of that and who had bought mines that had brought
them hundreds of thousands of dollars." To which remark, Rob had replied
curtly that he was not in that sort of business and that there were many
more suckers than millionnaires in Denver--and elsewhere.

So, finally, after paying some Torso debts, it came down to buying a house
in St. Louis; for the flat that they had first rented was crowded and
Bessie found great difficulty in keeping a servant longer than a week. Rob
thought that it would be more prudent to rent a house for six to nine
hundred than to buy outright or build, until they saw how his work for the
A. and P. developed. But Bessie wanted a home,--a house of her own. So they
began the wearisome search for a house. Bessie already had her views about
the desirable section to live in,--outside the smoke in one of "those
private estate parks,"--where the Lanes were thinking of settling. (A few
months had been sufficient for Bessie to orientate herself socially in her
new surroundings.) "That's where all the nice young people are going," she
announced. In vain Rob pointed out that there were no houses to be bought
for less than eighteen thousand in this fashionable neighborhood. "You
never dare!" she retorted reproachfully. "You have to take risks if you
want anything in this world! How many houses in St. Louis that aren't
mortgaged do you suppose there are?"

"But there is only about eleven thousand of Uncle Billy's money left, and
those houses in Buena Vista Park cost from eighteen to twenty-four thousand
dollars."

"And they have only one bath-room," sighed Bessie.

The summer went by in "looking," and the more houses they looked at the
less satisfied was Bessie. She had in the foreground of her mind an image
of the Lanes' Torso house, only "more artistic"; but Falkner convinced her
that such a house in St. Louis would cost thirty thousand dollars at the
present cost of building materials.

"It is so difficult," she explained to Mrs. Price, "to find anything small
and your own, don't you know?" She arched her brows prettily over her
dilemma. Mrs. Price, who, in spite of the fascination that Bessie exerted,
had prim ideas "of what young persons in moderate circumstances" should do,
suggested that the Johnstons were buying a very good house in the new
suburb of Bryn Mawr on the installment plan.

"As if we could bury ourselves in that swamp,--we might as well stay in
Torso!" Bessie said to her husband disgustedly.

Falkner reflected that the train service to Bryn Mawr made it easier of
access to his work than the newer residential quarter inside the city which
Bessie was considering. But that was the kind of remark he had learned not
to make....

In the end it came to their building. For Bessie found nothing "small and
pretty, and just her own," with three bath-rooms, two maids' rooms, etc.,
in any "possible" neighborhood. She had met at a dinner-party an attractive
young architect, who had recently come from the East to settle in St.
Louis. Mr. Bowles prepared some water-color sketches which were so pretty
that she decided to engage him. With misgivings Rob gave his consent. A
narrow strip of frontage was found next a large house in the desired
section. They had to pay three thousand dollars for the strip of land. Mr.
Bowles thought the house could be built for eight or ten thousand dollars,
depending on the price of materials, which seemed to be going up with
astonishing rapidity.

Then Bessie plunged into plans. It was a gusty March day when the Falkners
went out with the architect to consider the lot, and spent an afternoon
trying to decide how to secure the most sun. Falkner, weary of the whole
matter, listened to the glib young architect. Another windy day in April
they returned to the lot to look at the excavation. The contracts were not
yet signed. Lumber had gone soaring, and there was a strike in the brick
business, the kind of brick they had chosen being unobtainable, while
hardware seemed unaccountably precious. Already it was impossible to build
the house for less than twelve thousand, even after sacrificing Bessie's
private bath. Falkner had consented to the mortgage,--"only four thousand,"
Bessie said; "we'll save our rent and pay it off in a year or two!"
Bessie's periods of economy were always just dawning!

Falkner, looking at the contractor's tool shed, had a sense of depressing
fatality. From the moment that the first spadeful of ground had been dug,
it seemed to him that the foundation of his domestic peace had begun to
crumble. But this depression was only an attack of the grippe, he said to
himself, and he tried to take an interest in the architect's description of
how they should terrace the front of the lot....

Of course, as the novelists tell us, the man of Strong Will, of Mature
Character, of Determined Purpose, would not have allowed his wife to
entangle him in this house business (or in matrimony, perhaps, in the first
instance)! But if society were composed of men of S. W., M. C., and D. P.,
there would be no real novels,--merely epics of Slaughter and Success, of
Passionate Love and Heroic Accomplishment.... At this period Falkner still
loved his wife,--wanted to give her every gratification within his power,
and some just beyond,--though that love had been strained by five hard
years, when her efforts as an economic partner had not been intelligent.
(Bessie would have scorned such an unromantic term as "economic partner.")
They still had their times of amiable understanding, of pleasant
comradeship, even of passionate endearment. But by the time the young
architect's creation at number 26 Buena Vista Pleasance had become their
residence, that love was in a moribund condition.... Yet after all, as
Bessie sometimes reminded him, it was her money that was building the
house, at least the larger part of it; and further it was all her life that
was to be spent in it, presumably. The woman's home was her world.

Thus, in the division that had come between them, the man began to consider
his wife's rights, what he owed to her as a woman that he had taken under
his protection,--a very dangerous state of mind in matrimony. If he had
discovered that her conception of the desirable end of life was not his, he
must respect her individuality, and so far as possible provide for her that
which she seemed to need. The faithful husband, or dray-horse
interpretation of marriage, this.




CHAPTER XXI


If it takes Strong Will, Mature Character, and Determined Purpose to live
effectively, it takes all of that and more--humor and patience--to build a
house in America, unless one can afford to order his habitation as he does
a suit of clothes and spend the season in Europe until the contractor and
the architect have fought it out between them. But Bessie was a young woman
of visions. She had improved all her opportunities to acquire taste,--the
young architect said she had "very intelligent ideas." And he, Bertram
Bowles, fresh from Paris, with haunting memories of chateaux and villas,
and a knowledge of what the leading young architects of the East were
turning out, had visions too, in carrying out this first real commission
that he had received in St. Louis. "Something _chic_, with his stamp on
it," he said....

The hours with the contractors to persuade them that they could do
something they had never seen done before! The debates over wood finish,
and lumber going up while you talked! The intricacies of heating, plumbing,
electric lighting, and house telephones--when all men are discovered to be
liars! Falkner thought it would be easier to lay out the entire terminal
system of the A. and P. than to build one "small house, pretty and just
your own, you know." Occasionally even Bessie and the polite Bertram Bowles
fell out, when Falkner was called in to arbitrate. Before the question of
interior decoration came up the house had already cost fourteen thousand
dollars, which would necessitate a mortgage of six thousand dollars at
once. Here Falkner put his foot down,--no more; they would live in it with
bare walls. Bessie pleaded and sulked,--"only another thousand." And "not
to be perfectly ridiculous," Falkner was forced to concede another
thousand. "Not much when you consider," as the architect said to Bessie....
Time dragged on, and the house was not ready. The apartment hotel into
which they had moved was expensive and bad for the children. In June
Falkner insisted on moving into the unfinished house, with carpenters,
painters, decorators still hanging on through the sultry summer months.

"I met your poor little friend Mrs. Falkner at Sneeson's this morning," Nan
Lawton said to Isabelle. "She was looking over hangings and curtains for
her house.... She is nothing but a bag of bones, she's so worn. That
husband of hers must be a brute to let her wear herself all out. She was
telling me some long yarn about their troubles with the gas men,--very
amusing and bright. She is a charming little thing."

"Yes," Isabelle replied; "I am afraid the house has been too much for them
both."

She had been Bessie's confidant in all her troubles, and sympathized--who
could not sympathize with Bessie?--though she thought her rather foolish to
undertake so much.

"We'll simply have to have rugs, I tell Rob," Bessie said to her. "He is in
such bad humor these days, and says we must go on the bare floors or use
the old Torso carpets. Fancy!"

And Isabelle said, as she was expected to say, "Of course you will have to
have rugs. They are having a sale at Moritz's,--some beauties and cheap."

Yet she had a sneaking sympathy for Falkner. Isabelle did not suspect that
she herself was the chief undoing of the Falkner household, nor did any one
else suspect it. It was Bessie's ideal of Isabelle that rode her hard from
the beginning of her acquaintance with the Lanes. And it was Isabelle who
very naturally introduced them to most of the people they had come to know
in their new world. Isabelle herself had much of her mother's thrift and
her father's sagacity in practical matters. She would never have done what
Bessie was doing in Bessie's circumstances. But in her own circumstances
she did unconsciously a great deal more,--and she disliked to fill her mind
with money matters, considering it vulgar and underbred to dwell long on
them. The rich and the very wise can indulge in these aristocratic
refinements! Isabelle, to be sure, felt flattered by Bessie's admiring
discipleship,--who does not like to lead a friend? She never dreamed of her
evil influence. The power of suggestion, subtle, far-reaching, ever working
on plastic human souls! Society evolves out of these petty reactions....

The rugs came.

"We simply have to have rugs,--the house calls for it," asserted Bessie,
using one of Mr. Bertram Bowles's favorite expressions.

"My purse doesn't," growled Falkner.

Nevertheless Bessie selected some pretty cheap rugs at Moritz's, which
could be had on credit. In the great rug room of the department store she
met Alice Johnston, who was looking at a drugget. The two women exchanged
experiences as the perspiring clerks rolled and rerolled rugs.

"Yes, we shall like Bryn Mawr," Mrs. Johnston said, "now that the foliage
covers up the tin cans and real estate signs. The schools are really very
good, and there is plenty of room for the boys to make rough house in. We
are to have a garden another year.... Oh, yes, it is rural middle
class,--that's why I can get drugget for the halls."

Bessie thought of her pretty house and shuddered.

"We are planning to call and see the house--Isabelle says it's
wonderful--but it will have to be on a Sunday--the distance--"

"Can't you come next Sunday for luncheon? I will ask Isabelle and her
husband," Bessie interrupted hospitably, proud to show off her new toy.

And on Sunday they all had a very good time and the new "toy" was much
admired, although the paint was still sticky,--the painter had been
optimistic when he took the contract and had tried to save himself
later,--the colors wrong, and the furniture, which had done well enough in
Torso, looked decidedly shabby.

"It's the prettiest house I know," Isabelle said warmly, and Bessie felt
repaid.

She was very tired, and to-day looked worn. The new toy was dragging her
out. As the long St. Louis summer drew to an end, she was always tired.
Some obscure woman's trouble, something in the delicate organism that had
never been quite right, was becoming acutely wrong. She lived in fear of
having another child,--the last baby had died. By the new year she was in
care of Isabelle's specialist, who advised an operation. When that was
over, it was nearly spring, and though she was still delicate, she wished
to give some dinners "to return their obligations." Falkner objected for
many reasons, and she thought him very hard.

"It is always sickness and babies for me," she pouted; "and when I want a
little fun, you think we can't afford it or something."

Her hospitable heart was so bent on this project, it seemed so natural that
she should desire to show off her toy, after her struggle for it, so
innocent "to have our friends about us," that he yielded in part. A good
deal might be told about that dinner, from an economic, a social, a
domestic point of view. But we must lose it and hasten on. Imagine merely,
what a charming woman like Bessie Falkner, whose scheme of the universe was
founded on the giving of "pleasant little dinners," would do,--a woman who
was making her life, building her wigwam, filling it with those she wished
to have as friends, and you will see it all. It was, of course, a great
success. Mrs. Anstruthers Leason said of the hostess (reported by Nan
Lawton through Isabelle), "Little Mrs. Falkner has the real social gift,--a
very rare thing among our women!" And when an invitation came from Mrs.
Anstruthers Leason to dinner and her box at the French opera, Bessie was
sure that she had found her sphere.

       *       *       *       *       *

Falkner seemed to Bessie these days to be growing harder,--he was
"exacting," "unsympathetic," "tyrannical." "He won't go places, and he
won't have people,--isn't nice to them, even in his own house," Bessie said
sadly to Isabelle. "I suppose that marriage usually comes to that: the wife
stands for bills and trouble, and the husband scolds. Most people squabble,
don't they?"

"Of course he loves you, dear," Isabelle consoled her. "American husbands
always take their wives for granted, as Nannie says. A foreigner pays
attentions to his wife after marriage that our husbands don't think are
necessary once they have us. Our husbands take us too much as a matter of
course,--and pay the bills!"

Bessie felt and said that Rob took life too hard, worried too much. After
all, when a man married a woman and had children, he must expect a certain
amount of trouble and anxiety. She wasn't sure but that wives were needed
to keep men spurred to their highest pitch of working efficiency. She had
an obscure idea that the male was by nature lazy and self-indulgent, and
required the steel prod of necessity to do his best work. As she looked
about her among the struggling households, it seemed such was the
rule,--that if it weren't for the fact of wife and children and bills, the
men would deteriorate.... Naturally there were differences,--"squabbles,"
as she called them; but she would have been horrified if any one had
suggested that these petty squabbles, the state of mind they produced or
indicated, were infinitely more degrading, more deteriorating to them both,
than adultery. It never entered her mind that either she or her husband
could be unfaithful, that Falkner could ever care for any other woman than
her. "Why, we married for love!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Love! That divine unreason of the gods, which lures man as a universal
solvent of his sorrow, the great solution to the great enigma! Where was
it? Bessie asked when Rob passed her door in the morning on his way to his
solitary breakfast without a word of greeting or a kiss, and finally left
the house without remembering to go upstairs again. And Falkner asked
himself much the same thing, when Bessie persisted in doing certain things
"because everybody does," or when he realized that after two years in his
new position, with a five hundred dollars' increase in his salary the
second year, he was nearly a thousand dollars in debt, and losing steadily
each quarter. Something must be done--and by him!--for in marriage, he
perceived with a certain bitterness, Man was the Forager, the Provider. And
in America if he didn't bring in enough from the day's hunt to satisfy the
charming squaw that he had made his consort, why,--he must trudge forth
again and get it! A poor hunter does not deserve the embellishment of a
Bessie and two pretty children.

So he went forth to bring in more game, and he read no poetry these days.




CHAPTER XXII


The calm male observer might marvel at Bessie's elation over the prospect
of sitting in Mrs. Anstruthers Leason's box at the performance of "Faust"
given by the French Opera Company on tour. But no candid woman will. It
could be explained partly by the natural desire to associate with
entertaining, well-dressed folk, who were generally considered to be "the
best," "the leaders" of local society. Sitting there in the stuffy box,
which was a poor place for seeing or hearing, Bessie felt the satisfaction
of being in the right company. She had discovered in one of the serried
rows of the first balcony Kitty Sanders, whom she had known as a girl in
Kansas City, where Bessie had once lived in the peregrinations of the
Bissell family. Kitty had married a prosperous dentist and enjoyed with him
an income nearly twice that of Rob Falkner. Kitty, scanning the boxes
closely, also spied Bessie, and exclaimed to her husband:--

"Why, there's Bessie Bissell in that box! You know she married a young
fellow, an engineer or something." And she added either aloud or to
herself, "They seem to be _in it_,--that's the Leason box." While the
alluring strains of the overture floated across the house, she mused at the
strange mutations of fortune, which had landed Bessie Bissell there and
herself here beside the dentist,--with some envy, in spite of three beloved
children at home and a motorcar....

To the dispassionate male observer this state of mind might be more
comprehensible if Bessie had appeared in Mrs. Corporation's box on a gala
night at the Metropolitan, or in the Duchess of Thatshire's box at Covent
Garden. But the strange fact of democracy is that instead of discouraging
social desires it has multiplied them ten thousand fold. Every city in the
land has its own Mrs. Anstruthers Leason or Mrs. Corporation, to form the
local constellation, towards which the active-minded women of a certain
type will always strive or gravitate, as you choose to put it. This being
so, the American husband, one might suppose, would sigh for an absolute
monarchy, where there is but one fixed social firmament, admission to which
is determined by a despot's edict. Then the great middle class could rest
content, knowing that forever, no matter what their gifts might be, their
wives could not aspire to social heights. With us the field is clear, the
race open to money and brains, and the result? Each one can answer for
himself.

Isabelle, returning to her home that fall, with a slight surplus of
vitality, was eager for life. "I have been dead so long," she said to her
husband. "I want to see people!" Born inside the local constellation, as
she had been, that was not difficult. Yet she realized soon enough that the
Prices, prominent as they were, had never belonged to the heart of the
constellation. It remained for her to penetrate there, under the guidance
of the same Nannie Lawton whom as a girl she had rather despised. For every
constellation has its inner circle, the members of which touch
telepathically all other inner circles. The fact that Nannie Lawton called
her by her first name would help her socially more, than the Colonel's
record as a citizen or her husband's position in the railroad or their
ample means. Before her second winter of married life had elapsed, she had
begun to exhaust this form of excitement, to find herself always tired.
After all, although the smudge of St. Louis on the level alluvial plains of
America was a number of times larger than the smudge of Torso, the human
formula, at least in its ornamental form, remained much the same. She was
patroness where she should be patroness, she was invited where she would
have felt neglected not to be invited, she entertained very much as the
others she knew entertained, and she and her husband had more engagements
than they could keep. She saw this existence stretching down the years with
monotonous iteration, and began to ask herself what else there was to
satisfy the thirst for experience which had never been assuaged.

Bessie, with a keener social sense, kept her eye on the game,--she had to,
and her little triumphs satisfied her. Nan Lawton varied the monotony of
"the ordinary round" by emotional dissipations that Isabelle felt herself
to be above. Other women of their set got variety by running about the
country to New York or Washington, to a hotel in Florida or in the
mountains of Carolina, or as a perpetual resource to Paris and Aix and
Trouville and London....

Isabelle was too intelligent, too much the daughter of her father, to
believe that a part of the world did not exist outside the social
constellation, and an interesting part, too. Some of those outside she
touched as time went on. She was one of the board of governors for the
Society of Country Homes for Girls, and here and on the Orphanage board she
met energetic and well-bred young married women, who apparently genuinely
preferred their charities, their reading clubs, the little country places
where they spent the summers, to the glory of Mrs. Anstruthers Leason's
opera box or dinner dance. As she shot about the city on her errands,
social and philanthropic, Isabelle sometimes mused on the lives of the
"others,"--all those thousands that filled the streets and great buildings
of the city. Of course the poor,--that was simple enough; the struggle for
life settled how one would live with ruthless severity. If it was a daily
question how you could keep yourself housed and fed, why it did not matter
what you did with your life. In the ranks above the poor, the little people
who lived in steam-heated apartments and in small suburban boxes had their
small fixed round of church and friends, still closely circumscribed and to
Isabelle, in her present mood,--simply dreadful. When she expressed this to
Fosdick, whom she was taking one morning to a gallery to see the work of a
local artist that fashionable people were patronizing, he had scoffed at
her:--

"_Madame la princesse_," he said, waving his hand towards the throng of
morning shoppers, "don't you suppose that the same capacity for human
sensation exists in every unit of that crowd bent towards Sneeson's as in
you?"

"No," protested Isabelle, promptly; "they haven't the same experience."

"As thrilling a drama can be unrolled in a twenty-five dollar flat as in a
palace."

"Stuff! There isn't one of those women who wouldn't be keen to try the
palace!"

"As you ought to be to try the flat, in a normally constituted society."

"What do you mean by a normally constituted society?"

"One where the goal of ease is not merely entertainment."

"You are preaching now, aren't you?" demanded Isabelle. "Society has always
been pretty much the same, hasn't it? First necessities, then comforts,
then luxuries, and then--"

"Well, what?"

"Oh, experience, art, culture, I suppose."

"Isabelle," the big man smilingly commented, "you are the same woman you
were six years ago."

"I am not!" she protested, really irritated. "I have done a lot of
thinking, and I have seen a good deal of life. Besides I am a good wife,
and a mother, which I wasn't six years ago, and a member of the Country
Homes Society and the Orphanage, and a lot more." They laughed at her
defence, and Isabelle added as a concession: "I know that there are plenty
of women not in society who lead interesting lives, are intelligent and all
that. But I am a good wife, and a good mother, and I am intelligent, and
what is more, I see amusing people and more of them than the others,--the
just plain women. What would you have me do?"

"Live," Fosdick replied enigmatically.

"We all live."

"Very few do."

"You mean emotional--heart experiences, like Nan's affairs? ... Sometimes I
wonder if that wouldn't be--interesting. But it would give John such a
shock! ... Well, here are the pictures. There's Mrs. Leason's
portrait,--flatters her, don't you think?"

Fosdick, leaning his fat hands on his heavy stick, slowly made the round of
the canvasses, concluding with the portrait of Mrs. Leason.

"Got some talent in him," he pronounced; "a penny worth. If he can only
keep away from this sort of thing," pointing with his stick to the
portrait, "he might paint in twenty years."

"But why shouldn't he do portraits? They all have to, to live."

"It isn't the portrait,--it's the sort of thing it brings with it. You met
him, I suppose?"

"Yes; dined with him at Mrs. Leason's last week."

"I thought so. That's the beginning of his end."

"You silly! Art has always been parasitic,--why shouldn't the young man go
to pleasant people's houses and have a good time and be agreeable and get
them to buy his pictures?"

"Isabelle, you have fallen into the bad habit of echoing phrases. 'Art has
always been parasitic.' That's the second commonplace of the drawing-room
you have got off this morning."

"Come over here and tell me something.... I can't quarrel with you,
Dickie!" Isabelle said, leading the way to a secluded bench.

"If I were not modest, I should say you were flirting with me."

"I never flirt with any man; I am known as the Saint, the Puritan,--I might
try it, but I couldn't--with you.... Tell me about Vick. Have you seen
him?"

"Yes," Fosdick replied gravely. "I ran across him in Venice."

"How was he?"

"He looked well, has grown rather stout.... The first time I saw him was on
the Grand Canal; met him in a smart gondola, with men all togged out, no
end of a get-up!"

"You saw them _both_?"

"Of course,--I looked him up at once. They have an old place on the
Giudecca, you know. I spent a week with them. He's still working on the
opera,--it doesn't get on very fast, I gather. He played me some of the
music,--it's great, parts of it. And he has written other things."

"I know all that," Isabelle interrupted impatiently. "But is he happy?"

"A man like Vickers doesn't tell you that, you know."

"But you can tell--how did they seem?"

"Well," Fosdick replied slowly, "when I saw them in the gondola the first
time, I thought--it was too bad!"

"I was afraid so," Isabelle cried. "Why don't they marry and come to New
York or go to London or some place and make a life?--people can't live like
that."

"I think he wants to marry her," Fosdick replied.

"But she won't?"

"Precisely,--not now."

"Why--what?"

Fosdick avoided the answer, and observed, "Vick seems awfully fond of the
little girl, Delia."

"Poor, poor Vick!" Isabelle sighed. "He ought to leave that creature."

"He won't; Vick was the kind that the world sells cheap,--it's best kind.
He lives the dream and believes his shadows; it was always so. It will be
so until the end. Life will stab him at every corner."

"Dear, dear Vick!" Isabelle said softly; "some days I feel as if I would
have done as he did."

"But fortunately there is John to puncture your dream with solid fact."

"John even might not be able to do it! ... I am going over to see Vick this
summer."

"Wouldn't that make complications--family ones?"

Isabelle threw up her head wilfully.

"Dickie, I think there is something in me deeper than my love for John or
for the child,--and that is the feeling I have about Vick!"

Fosdick looked at her penetratingly.

"You ought not to have married, Isabelle."

"Why? Every one marries--and John and I are very happy.... Come; there are
some people I don't want to meet."

As they descended the steps into the murky light of the noisy city,
Isabelle remarked:--

"Don't forget to-night, promptly at seven,--we are going to the theatre
afterwards. I shall show you some of our smart people and let you see if
they aren't more interesting than the mob."

She nodded gayly and drove off. As she went to a luncheon engagement, she
thought of Vickers, of Fosdick's remarks about living, and a great wave of
dissatisfaction swept over her. "It's this ugly city," she said to herself,
letting down the window. "Or it's nerves again,--I must do something!" That
phrase was often on her lips these days. In her restlessness nothing seemed
just right,--she was ever trying to find something beyond the horizon. As
Fosdick would have said, "The race vitality being exhausted in its
primitive force, nothing has come to take its place." But at luncheon she
was gay and talkative, the excitement of human contact stimulating her. And
afterwards she packed the afternoon with trivial engagements until it was
time to dress for her guests.

The dinner and the theatre might have passed off uneventfully, if it had
not been for Fosdick. That unwieldy social vessel broke early in the
dinner. Isabelle had placed him next Mrs. Leason because the lady liked
celebrities, and Fosdick, having lately been put gently but firmly beyond
the confines of the Tzar's realm for undue intimacy with the rebellious
majority of the Tzar's subjects, might be counted such. For the time being
he had come to a momentary equilibrium in the city of his birth. Fosdick
and Mrs. Leason seemed to find common ground, while the other men, the
usual speechless contingent of tired business men, allowed themselves to be
talked at by the women. Presently Fosdick's voice boomed forth:--

"Let me tell you a story which will illustrate my point, Mrs. Leason. Some
years ago I was riding through the Kentucky mountains, and after a wretched
luncheon in one of the log-and-mud huts I was sitting on the bench in front
of the cabin trying to make peace with my digestion. The ground in that
spot sloped down towards me, and on the side of this little hill there lay
a large hog, a razor-back sow. There were eight little pigs clustered in
voracious attitudes about her, and she could supply but six at a time,--I
mean that she was provided by nature with but six teats."

Mrs. Leason visibly moved away from her neighbor, and for the rest of his
story Fosdick had a silent dinner table.

"The mother was asleep," Fosdick continued, turning his great head closer
to Mrs. Leason, "probably attending to her digestion as I was to mine, and
she left her offspring to fight it out among themselves for the possession
of her teats. There was a lively scrap, a lot of hollerin' and squealin'
from that bunch of porkers, grunts from the ins and yaps from the outs, you
know. Every now and then one of the outs would make a flying start, get a
wedge in and take a nip, forcing some one of his brothers out of the heap
so that he would roll down the hill into the path. Up he'd get and start
over, and maybe he would dislodge some other porker. And the old sow kept
grunting and sleeping peacefully in the sun while her children got their
dinner in the usual free-fight fashion.

"Now," Fosdick raised his heavy, square-pointed finger and shook it at the
horrified Mrs. Leason and also across the table, noticing what seemed to
him serious interest in his allegory, "I observed that there was a
difference among those little porkers,--some were fat and some were peaked,
and the peaked fellers got little show at the mother. Now what I ask myself
is,--were they weak because they couldn't manage to get a square feed, or
were they hustled out more than the others because they were naturally
weak? I leave that to my friends the sociologists to determine--"

"Isabella," Lane interposed from his end of the table, "if Mr. Fosdick has
finished his pig story, perhaps--"

Isabelle, divided between a desire to laugh and a very vivid sense of Mrs.
Leason's feelings, rose, but Fosdick had not finished and she sat down
again.

"But what I meant to say was this, madam,--there's only one difference
between that old sow and her brood and society as it is run at present, and
that is there are a thousand mouths to every teat, and a few big, fat
fellows are getting all the food."

He looked up triumphantly from his exposition. There was a titter at Mrs.
Lawton's end of the table. This lady had been listening to an indecent
story told in French-English when Fosdick had upset things. Now she
remarked in an audible tone:--

"Disgusting, I say!"

"Eh! What's the matter? Don't you believe what I told you?" Fosdick
demanded.

"Oh, yes, Dickie,--anything you say,--only don't repeat it!" Isabelle
exclaimed, rising from the table.

"Does he come from a farm?" one woman murmured indignantly. "Such _gros
mots_!" She too had been listening to the story of adultery at Mrs.
Lawton's end of the table. Isabelle, who had taken in the whole situation
from her husband's shocked face, Nan Lawton's sly giggle over the salacious
tidbit, and Mrs. Leason's offended countenance, felt that she must shriek
to relieve her feelings.

The party finally reached the theatre and saw a "sex" play, which caused a
furious discussion among the women. "No woman would have done that." "The
man was not worth the sacrifice," etc. And Fosdick gloomily remarked in
Isabelle's ears: "Rot like this is all you see on the modern stage. And
it's because women want it,--they must forever be fooling with sex. Why
don't they--"

"Hush, Dickie! you have exploded enough to-night. Don't say that to Mrs.
Leason!"

Her world appeared to her that night a harlequin tangle, and, above all,
meaningless--yes, dispiritedly without sense. John, somehow, seemed
displeased with her, as if she were responsible for Dickie's breaks. She
laughed again as she thought of the sow story, and the way the women took
it. "What a silly world,--talk and flutter and gadding, all about nothing!"




CHAPTER XXIII


Isabelle did not see much of the Falkners as time went on. Little lines of
social divergence began to separate them more and more widely. "After all,
one sees chiefly the people who do the same things one does," Isabelle
explained to herself. Bessie thought Isabelle "uncertain," perhaps
snobbish, and felt hurt; though she remarked to Rob merely, "The Lanes are
very successful, of course."

Affairs in the Buena Vista Pleasance house had progressed meantime. There
were, naturally, so many meals to be got and eaten, so many little
illnesses of the children, and other roughnesses of the road of life. There
was also Bessie's developing social talent, and above all there was the
infinitely complex action and reaction of the man and the wife upon each
other. Seen as an all-seeing eye might observe, with all the emotional
shading, the perspective of each act, the most commonplace household
created by man and woman would be a wonderful cosmography. But the
novelist, even he who has the courage to write a dull book, can touch but
here and there, on the little promontories of daily life, where it seems to
him the spiritual lava boils up near the surface and betrays most
poignantly the nature of the fire beneath....

It was a little over three years since the Falkners had moved into the
Buena Vista Pleasance house. Husband and wife sat in the front room after
their silent dinner alone, with the September breeze playing through the
windows, which after a hot day had been thrown open. There was the debris
of a children's party in the room and the hall,--dolls and toys,
half-nibbled cakes and saucers of ice-cream. Bessie, who was very neat
about herself, was quite Southern in her disregard for order. She was also
an adorable hostess for children, because she gave them loose rein.

"What is it you wish to say?" she asked her husband in a cold, defensive
tone that had grown almost habitual.

Though pale she was looking very pretty in a new dress that she had worn at
a woman's luncheon, where she had spent the first part of the afternoon.
She had been much admired at the luncheon, had taken the lead in the talk
about a new novel which was making a ten days' sensation. Her mind was
still occupied partly with what she had said about the book. These
discussions with Rob on household matters, at increasingly frequent
periods, always froze her. "He makes me show my worst side," she said to
herself. At the children's tea, moreover, an attack of indigestion had
developed. Bessie was fond of rich food, and in her nervous condition,
which was almost chronic, it did not agree with her, and made her
irritable.

"I have been going over our affairs," Falkner began in measured tones. That
was the usual formula! Bessie thought he understood women very badly. She
wondered if he ever did anything else those evenings he spent at home
except "go over their affairs." She wished he would devote himself to some
more profitable occupation.

"Well?"

Falkner looked tired and listless. The summer was always his hardest time,
and this summer the road had been pushing its terminal work with actual
ferocity. He wore glasses now, and was perceptibly bald. He was also
slouchy about dress; Bessie could rarely induce him to put on evening
clothes when they dined alone.

"Well?" she asked again. It was not polite of him to sit staring there as
if his mind were a thousand miles away. A husband should show some good
manners to a woman, even if she was his wife!

Their chairs were not far apart, but the tones of their voices indicated an
immeasurable gulf that had been deepening for years. Falkner cleared his
voice.

"As I have told you so often, Bessie, we are running behind all the time.
It has got to a point where it must stop."

"What do you suggest?"

"You say that three servants are necessary?"

"You can see for yourself that they are busy all the time. There's work for
four persons in this house, and there ought to be a governess beside. I
don't at all like the influence of that school on Mildred--"

"Ought!" he exclaimed.

"If people live in a certain kind of house, in a certain neighborhood, they
must live up to it,--that is all. If you wish to live as the Johnstons
live, why that is another matter altogether."

Her logic was imperturbable. There was an unexpressed axiom: "If you want a
dowd for your wife who can't dress or talk and whom nobody cares to
know,--why you should have married some one else." Bessie awaited his reply
in unassailable attractiveness.

"Very well," Falkner said slowly. "That being so, I have made up my mind
what to do."

Mildred entered the room at this moment, looking for a book. She was eight,
and one swift glance at her parents' faces was enough to show her quick
intelligence that they were "discussing."

"What is it, Mildred?" Bessie asked in the cooing voice she always had for
children.

"I want my _Jungle Book_," the little girl replied, taking a book from the
table.

"Run along, girlie," Bessie said; and Mildred, having decided that it was
not an opportune moment to make affectionate good-nights, went upstairs.

"Well, what is it?" Bessie demanded in the other tone.

"I have a purchaser for the house, at fair terms."

"Please remember that it is _my_ house."

"Wait! Whatever remains after paying off the mortgage and our debts, not
more than six thousand dollars, I suppose, will be placed to your credit in
the trust company."

"Why should I pay all our debts?"

Her husband looked at her, and she continued hastily:--

"What do you mean to do then? We can't live on the street."

"We can hire a smaller house somewhere else, or live in a flat."

Bessie waved her hand in despair; they had been over this so many times and
she had proved so conclusively the impossibility of their squeezing into a
flat. Men never stay convinced!

"Or board."

"Never!" she said firmly.

"You will have to choose."

This was the leading topic of their discussion, and enough has been said to
reveal the lines along which it developed. There was much of a discursive
nature, naturally, introduced by Bessie, who sought thereby to fog the
issue and effect a compromise. She had found that was a good way to deal
with a husband. But to-night Falkner kept steadily at his object.

"No, no, no!" he iterated in weary cadence. "It's no use to keep on
expecting; five thousand is all they will pay me, and it is all I am really
worth to them. And after this terminal work is finished, they may have
nothing to offer me.... We must make a clean sweep to start afresh, right,
on the proper basis." After a moment, he added by way of appeal, "And I
think that will be the best for us, also."

"You expect me to do all the work?"

"Expect!" Falkner leaned his head wearily against the chair-back. Words
seemed useless at this point. Bessie continued rather pitilessly:--

"Don't you want a home? Don't you want your children brought up decently
with friends about them?"

"God knows I want a home!" the husband murmured.

"I think I have made a very good one,--other people think so."

"That's the trouble--too good for me!"

"I should think it would be an incentive for a man--"

"God!" Falkner thundered; "that you should say that!"

It had been in her heart a long time, but she had never dared to express it
before,--the feeling that other men, no abler than Rob, contrived to give
their wives, no more seductive than she, so much more than she had had.

"Other men find the means--"

She was thinking of John Lane, of Purrington,--a lively young broker of
their acquaintance,--of Dr. Larned,--all men whose earning power had leaped
ahead of Falkner's. Bessie resented the economic dependence of married
women on their husbands. She believed in the foreign _dot_ system. "My
daughters shall never marry as I did," she would say frankly to her
friends. "There can be no perfectly happy marriage unless the woman is
independent of her husband in money matters to a certain extent." ... For
she felt that she had a right to her ideals, so long as they were not bad,
vicious; a right to her own life as distinct from her husband's life, or
the family life. "The old idea of the woman's complete subordination has
gone," she would say. "It is better for the men, too, that women are no
longer mere possessions without wills of their own." It was such ideas as
this that earned for Bessie among her acquaintances the reputation of being
"intelligent" and "modern."

And Falkner, a vision of the mountains and the lonely cabin before his
eyes, remarked with ironic calm:--

"And why should I earn more than I do, assuming that I could sell myself at
a higher figure?"

For the man, too, had his dumb idea,--the feeling that something precious
inside him was being murdered by this pressing struggle to earn more,
always more. As man he did not accept the simple theory that men were
better off the harder they were pushed, that the male brute needed the spur
of necessity to function, that all the man was good for was to be the
competent forager. No! Within him there was a protest to the whole spirit
of his times,--to the fierce competitive struggle. Something inside him
proclaimed that he was not a mere maker of dollars, that life was more than
food and lodging, even for those he loved most.

"What do I get out of it?" he added bitterly. "Perhaps I have done too
much."

"Oh, if that is the way you feel,--if you don't love me!" Bessie exclaimed
with wounded pride. "Probably you are tired of me. When a man is sick of
his wife, he finds his family a burden, naturally."

And there they paused at the brink of domestic vulgarity.

Falkner saw the girl on the veranda of the mountain hotel, with her golden
hair, her fresh complexion, her allurement. Bessie, most men would think,
was even more desirable this minute than then as an unformed girl. The
arched eyebrows, so clearly marked, the full lips, the dimpled neck, all
spake:--

"Come kiss me, and stop talking like that!"

For a moment the old lure seized the man, the call of the woman who had
once been sweet to him. Then his blood turned cold within him. That was the
last shame of marriage,--that a wife should throw this lure into the
reasoning, a husband to console himself--that way! Falkner rose to his
feet.

"I shall make arrangements to sell the house."

"Very well; then I shall take the children and go to my mother in Denver."

"As you please."

Without looking again at his wife, he left the room.

Bessie had played blindly her last card, the wife's last card, and lost!
There was bitterness and rebellion in her heart. She had loved her
husband,--hadn't she shown it by marrying him instead of the mine owner?
She had been a good woman, not because she hadn't had her chances of other
men's admiration, as she sometimes let her husband know. Dickie Lawton had
made love to her outrageously, and the last time the old Senator had been
in St. Louis,--well, he would never come again to her house. Not a shadow
of disloyalty had ever crossed her heart.

Bessie thought that a good wife must be chaste, of course; other matters of
wifely duty were less distinct.

No! her husband did not care for her any more,--that was the real cause of
their troubles. It was hard to wake up to such a fact after nine years of
marriage with a man whom you loved!

There was a tragedy between, but not the one that Bessie suspected, nor the
mere tragedy of extravagance. Each realized dimly that the other hindered
rather than promoted that something within which each held tenaciously as
most precious. Instead of giving mutually, they stole mutually, and the end
of that sort of life must be concubinage or the divorce court--or a
spiritual readjustment beyond the horizon of either Falkner or his wife.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Did you know that the Falkners were going to give up their house?" Lane
asked his wife.

"No, indeed. I saw Bessie at the symphony the other day, and she spoke of
going out to Denver to visit her mother; but she didn't say anything about
the house. Are you sure?"

"Yes; Falkner told Bainbridge he was selling it. And he wanted Bainbridge
to see if there was an opening for him on the road in the East. I am afraid
things haven't gone well with them."

"After all the trouble they had building, and such a pretty house! What a
shame!"

Lane was in his outing clothes, about to go to the country club for an
afternoon of golf with the Colonel. He looked very strong and handsome in
his Scotch tweeds. Lately he had begun to take more exercise than he had
found time for the first years of his marriage, had developed a taste for
sport, and often found a day or two to fish or hunt when friends turned up
from the East. Isabelle encouraged this taste, though she saw all the less
of her husband; she had a feeling that it was good for him to relax, made
him more of the gentleman, less of the hard-working clerk. The motor was at
the door, but he dawdled.

"It is a pity about the Falkners,--I am afraid they are not getting on well
together. He's a, peculiar fellow. Bainbridge tells me his work is only
pretty good,--doesn't put his back into it the way a man must who means to
get up in his profession these days. There is a lot doing in his line, too.
It will be a shame if trouble comes to Bessie."

"The old difficulty, I suppose," Isabelle remarked; "not enough money--same
story everywhere!"

It was the same story everywhere, even in these piping times of prosperity,
with fortunes doubling, salaries going up, and the country pouring out its
wealth. So few of her friends, even the wealthy ones, seemed to have enough
money for their necessities or desires. If they had four servants, they
needed six; if they had one motor, they must have two; and the new idea of
country houses had simply doubled or trebled domestic budgets. It wasn't
merely in the homes of ambitious middle-class folk that the cry went
up,--"We must have more!" Isabelle herself had begun to feel that the
Colonel might very well have given her a package of stocks and bonds at her
wedding. Even with her skilful management, and John's excellent salary,
there was so much they could not do that seemed highly desirable to do.
"Everything costs so these days!" And to live meant to spend,--to live!




CHAPTER XXIV


Isabelle did not go to Vickers as she firmly intended to that summer. Lane
offered a stubborn if silent opposition to the idea of her joining her
brother,--"so long as that woman is with him." He could not understand
Isabelle's passionate longing for her brother, nor the fact that his
loyalty to his mistake endeared Vickers all the more to her. She divined
the ashes in her brother's heart, the waste in which he dwelt, and the fact
that he "had made a complete mess of life" did not subtract from her love.
After all, did the others, their respectable acquaintance, often make much
of living?

It was not John's opposition, however, that prevented the journey, but the
alarming weakness of the Colonel. In spite of his activity and his exercise
the old man had been growing perceptibly weaker, and his digestive trouble
had developed until the doctors hinted at cancer. To leave the Colonel now
and go to the son he had put out of his life would be mere brutality.
Vickers might come back, but Mrs. Price felt that this would cause the
Colonel more pain than pleasure.

During the spring Isabelle made many expeditions about the city in company
with her father, who gave as an excuse for penetrating all sorts of new
neighborhoods that he wished to look at his real estate, which was widely
scattered. But this was merely an excuse, as Isabelle easily perceived;
what he really cared about was to see the city itself, the building, the
evidences of growth, of thriving.

"When your mother and I came to live in the city," he would say, laying a
large white hand on his daughter's knee, "it was all swamp out this
way,--we used to bring Ezra with us in the early spring and pick
pussy-willows. Now look at it!" And what Isabelle saw, when she looked in
the direction that the old man waved his hand, was a row of ugly brick
apartment houses or little suburban cottages, or brick stores and
tenements. There was nothing in the scene, for her, to inspire enthusiasm,
and yet the Colonel would smile and gaze fondly out of those kindly blue
eyes at the acres of human hive. It was not pride in his shrewd foresight
in investing his money, so much as a generous sympathy for the growth of
the city, the forthputting of a strong organism.

"I bought this tract in eighty-two," he said, pointing to a stretch of
factories and grain elevators. "Had to borrow part of the money to do it.
Parrott thought I was a fool, but I knew the time would come when it would
be sold by the foot,--folks are born and must work and live," he mused. He
made the man drive the car slowly through the rutty street while he looked
keenly at the hands pouring from the mills, the elevators, the railroad
yards. "Too many of those Polaks," he commented, "but they are better than
niggers. It is a great country!"

In the old man's pride there was more than selfish satisfaction, more than
flamboyant patriotism over his "big" country; there was an almost pathetic
belief in the goodness of life, merely as life. These breeding millions, in
this teeming country, were working out their destiny,--on the whole a
better destiny than the world had yet seen. And the old man, who had lived
his life and fought vitally, felt deep in the inner recesses of his being
that all was good; the more chance for the human organism to be born and
work out its day, the better. In the eyes of the woman of the newer
generation this was a singular-pantheism,--incomprehensible. Unless one
were born under favorable conditions, what good was there in the struggle?
Mere life was not interesting.

They went, too, to see the site of the coming Exposition. The great trees
were being cut down and uprooted to give space for the vast buildings. The
Colonel lamented the loss of the trees. "Your mother and I used to come out
here Sundays in summer," he said regretfully. "It was a great way from town
then--there was only a steam road--and those oaks were grateful, after the
heat. I used to lie on the ground and your mother would read to me. She had
a very sweet voice, Isabelle!"

But he believed in the Exposition, even if the old trees must be sacrificed
for it. He had contributed largely to the fund, and had been made a
director, though the days of his leadership were over. "It is good for
people to see how strong they are," he said. "These fairs are our Olympic
games!"

       *       *       *       *       *

At first he did not wish to leave the city, which was part of his bone and
flesh; but as the summer drew on and he was unable to endure the motor his
thoughts turned back to his Connecticut hills, to the old farm and the
woods and the fields. Something deeper than all was calling to him to
return to the land that was first in his blood. So they carried him--now a
bony simulacrum of his vigorous self--to the old house at Grafton. For a
few weeks he lay wrapped in rugs on the veranda, his eyes on Dog Mountain.
At first he liked to talk with the farm-hands, who slouched past the
veranda. But more and more his spirit withdrew even from this peaceful
scene of his activity, and at last he died, as one who has no more concern
about life....

To Isabelle, who had been with him constantly these last fading months,
there was much that remained for a long time inexplicable in her father's
attitude towards life. He seemed to regret nothing, not even the death of
his elder son, nor his estrangement from Vickers, and he had little of the
old man's pessimism. There were certain modern manifestations that she knew
he disliked; but he seemed to have a fine tolerance even for them, as being
of no special concern to him. He had lived his life, such as it was,
without swerving, without doubts or hesitations, which beset the younger
generation, and now that it was over he had neither regret nor desire to
grasp more.

When the Colonel's will was opened, it caused surprise not only in his
family, but in the city where he had lived. It was long talked about. In
the first place his estate was much larger than even those nearest him had
supposed; it mounted upwards from eight millions. The will apparently had
been most carefully considered, largely rewritten after the departure of
Vickers. His son was not mentioned in the document. Nor were there the
large bequests, at least outright, to charities that had been expected of
so public spirited a man. The will was a document in the trust field. To
sum it all up, it seemed as if the old man had little faith in the
immediate generation, even in his daughter and her successful husband. For
he left Isabelle only the farm at Grafton and a few hundred thousand
dollars. To be sure, after his wife's death the bulk of the estate would be
held in trust for her child, or children, should her marriage prove more
fruitful in the future. Failing heirs, he willed that the bulk of the
estate should go to certain specified charities,--an Old Man's Home, The
Home for Crippled Children, etc. And it was arranged that the business
should be continued under the direction of the trustees. The name of
Parrott and Price should still stand for another generation!

"A singular will!" Lane, who was one of the trustees, said to his wife.

Isabelle was more hurt than she cared to have known. She had always
supposed that some day she would be a rich woman in her own right. But it
was the silent comment, the mark of disapproval, that she read in the lines
of the will which hurt. The Colonel had never criticised, never chided her;
but she had felt at times that he did not like the kind of life she had
elected to lead latterly.

"He thought we were extravagant, probably," she replied to her husband.

"I can't see why,--we never went to him for help!"

She knew that was not exactly the reason,--extravagance. The old man did
not like the modern spirit--at least the spirit of so many of her
friends--of spending for themselves. The Colonel did not trust the present
generation; he preferred that his money should wait until possibly the
passing of the years had brought wisdom.

"A selfish will!" the public said.




PART THREE



CHAPTER XXV


Fosdick had called Cornelia Woodyard the "Vampire,"--why, none of her
admirers could say. She did not look the part this afternoon, standing
before the fire in her library, negligently holding a cup of tea in one
hand, while she nibbled gourmandizingly at a frosted cake. She had come in
from an expedition with Cairy, and had not removed her hat and gloves,
merely letting her furs slip off to the floor. While she had her tea, Cairy
was looking through the diamond panes of a bank of windows at a strip of
small park, which was dripping in the fog of a dubious December day. Conny,
having finished her tea, examined lazily some notes, pushed them back into
their envelopes with a disgusted curl of her long lips, and glancing over
her shoulder at Cairy drawled in an exhausted voice:--

"Poke the fire, please, Tommy!"

Cairy did as he was told, then lighted a cigarette and stood expectantly.
Conny seemed lost in a maze of dreary thoughts, and the man looked about
the room for amusement. It was a pleasant little room, with sufficient
color of flowers and personal disorderliness of letters and books and
papers to soften the severity of the Empire furniture. Evidently the
architect who had done over this small down-town house had been
supplemented by the strong hand of its mistress. Outside and inside he had
done his best to create something French out of the old-fashioned New York
block house, but Cornelia Woodyard had Americanized his creation enough to
make it intimate, livable.

"Can't you say something, Tommy?" Conny murmured in her childish treble.

"I have said a good deal first and last, haven't I?"

"Don't be cross, Tommy! I am down on my job to-day."

"Suppose you quit it! Shall we go to the Bahamas? Or Paris? Or Rio?"

"Do you think that you could manage the excursion, Tommy?" Although she
smiled good-naturedly, the remark seemed to cut. The young man slumped into
a chair and leaned his head on his hands.

"Besides, where would Percy come in?"

Cairy asked half humorously, "And where, may I ask, do I come in?"

"Oh, Tommy, don't look like that!" Conny complained. "You _do_ come in, you
know!"

Cairy brought his chair and placed himself near the fire; then leaned
forward, looking intently into the woman's eyes.

"I think sometimes the women must be right about you, you know."

"What do they say?"

... "That you are a calculating machine,--one of those things they have in
banks to do arithmetic stunts!"

"No, you don't, ... silly! Tell me what Gossom said about the place."

"He didn't say much about that; he talked about G. Lafayette Gossom and
_The People's Magazine_ chiefly.... The mess of pottage is three hundred a
month. I am to be understudy to the great fount of ideas. When he has an
inspiration he will push a bell, and I am to run and catch it as it flows
red hot from his lips and put it into shape,--if I can."

Cairy nursed his injured leg with a disgusted air.

"Don't sniff, Tommy,--there are lots of men who would like to be in your
shoes."

"I know.... Oh, I am not ungrateful for my daily bread. I kiss the hand
that found it,--the hand of power!"

"Silly! Don't be literary with me. Perhaps I put the idea into old Noddy
Gossom's head when he was here the other night. You'll have to humor him,
listen to his pomposity. But he has made a success of that _People's
Magazine_. It is an influence, and it pays!"

"Four hundred thousand a year, chiefly automobile and corset ads, I should
say."

"Nearly half a million a year!" Conny cried with the air of 'See what I
have done for you!'

"Yes!" the Southerner remarked with scornful emphasis ... "I shall harness
myself once more to the car of triumphant prosperity, and stretch forth my
hungry hands to catch the grains that dribble in the rear. Compromise!
Compromise! All is Compromise!"

"Now you are literary again," Conny pronounced severely. "Your play wasn't
a success,--there was no compromise about that! The managers don't want
your new play. Gossom does want your little articles. You have to live, and
you take the best you can get,--pretty good, too."

"Madam Materialist!"

Conny made a little face, and continued in the same lecturing tone.

"Had you rather go back to that cross-roads in the Virginia
mountains--something Court-house--or go to London and write slop home to
the papers, as Ted Stevens does?"

"You know why I don't go back to the something Courthouse and live on
corn-bread and bacon!" Cairy sat down once more very near the blond woman
and leaned forward slowly. Conny's mouth relaxed, and her eyes softened.

"You are dear," she said with a little laugh; "but you are silly about
things." As the young man leaned still farther forward, his hand touching
her arm, Conny's large brown eyes opened speculatively on him....

The other night he had kissed her for the first time, that is, really
kissed her in unequivocal fashion, and she had been debating since whether
she should mention the matter to Percy. The right moment for such a
confidence had not yet come. She must tell him some day. She prided herself
that her relation with her husband had always been honest and frank, and
this seemed the kind of thing he ought to know about, if she were going to
keep that relation what it had been. She had had tender
intimacies--"emotional friendships," her phrase was--before this affair
with Cairy. They had always been perfectly open: she had lunched and dined
them, so to speak, in public as well as at the domestic table. Percy had
rather liked her special friends, had been nice to them always.

But looking into the Southerner's eyes, she felt that there was something
different in this case; it had troubled her from the time he kissed her, it
troubled her now--what she could read in his eyes. He would not be content
with that "emotional friendship" she had given the others. Perhaps, and
this was the strangest thrill in her consciousness, she might not be
content to have him satisfied so easily.... Little Wrexton Grant had sent
her flowers and written notes--and kissed her strong fingers, once. Bertie
Sollowell had dedicated one of his books to her (the author's copy was
somewhere in Percy's study), and hinted that his life missed the guiding
hand that she could have afforded him. He had since found a guiding hand
that seemed satisfactory. Dear old Royal Salters had squired her, bought
her silver in Europe, and Jevons had painted her portrait the year he
opened his studio in New York, and kissed a very beautiful white
shoulder,--purely by way of compliment to the shoulder. All these marks of
gallantry had been duly reported to Percy, and laughed at together by
husband and wife in that morning hour when Conny had her coffee in bed.
Nevertheless, they had touched her vanity, as evidences that she was still
attractive as a woman. No woman--few women at any rate--of thirty-one
resents the fact that some man other than her husband can feel tenderly
towards her. And "these friends"--the special ones--had all been respecters
of the law; not one would have thought of coveting his neighbor's wife, any
more than of looting his safe.

But with Tom Cairy it was different. Not merely because he was Southern and
hence presumably ardent in temperament, nor because of his reputation for
being "successful" with women; not wholly because he appealed to her on
account of his physical disability,--that unfortunate slip by the negro
nurse. But because there was in this man the strain of feminine
understanding, of vibrating sentiment--the lyric chord of
temperament--which made him lover first and last! That is why he had
stirred most women he had known well,--women in whom the emotional life had
been dormant, or unappeased, or petrified.

"You are such a dear!" Conny murmured, looking at him with her full soft
eyes, realizing in her own way that in this fragile body there was the soul
of the lover,--born to love, to burn in some fashion before some altar,
always.

The special aroma that Cairy brought to his love-making was this sense that
for the time it was all there was in life, that it shut out past and
future. The special woman enveloped by his sentiment did not hear the steps
of other women echoing through outer rooms. She was, for the moment, first
and last. He was able to create this emotional delusion genuinely; for into
each new love he poured himself, like a fiery liquor, that swept the heart
clean.

"Dearest," he had murmured that night to Conny, "you are wonderful,--woman
and man,--the soul of a woman, the mind of a man! To love you is to love
life."

And Conny, in whose ears the style of lover's sighs was immaterial, was
stirred with an unaccountable feeling. When Cairy put his hand on hers, and
his lips quivered beneath his mustache, her face inevitably softened and
her eyes widened like a child's eyes. For Conny, even Conny, with her
robust intelligence and strong will to grasp that out of life which seemed
good to her, wanted to love--in a way she had never loved before. Like many
women she had passed thirty with a husband of her choice, two children, and
an establishment entirely of her making before she became aware that she
had missed something on the way,--a something that other women had. She had
seen Severine Wilson go white when a certain man entered the room--then
light brilliantly with joy when his eyes sought her.... That must be worth
having, too! ...

Her relations with her husband were perfect,--she had said so for years and
every one said the same thing about the Woodyards. They were very intimate
friends, close comrades. She knew that Percy respected and admired her more
than any woman in the world, and paid her the last flattery of conceding to
her will, respecting her intelligence. But there was something that he had
not done, could not do, and that was a something that Cairy seemed able to
do,--give her a sensation partly physical, wholly emotional, like the
effect of stimulant, touching every nerve. Conny, with her sure grasp of
herself, however, had no mind to submit blindly to this intoxication; she
would examine it, like other matters,--was testing it now in her capacious
intelligence, as the man bent his eyes upon her, so close to her lips.

Had she only been the "other sort," the conventional ordinary sort, she
would have either gulped her sensation blindly,--"let herself go,"--or
trembled with horror and run away as from some evil thing. Being as she
was, modern, intellectual, proudly questioning all maxims, she kept this
new phenomenon in her hand, saying, "What does it mean for _me_?" The note
of the Intellectuals!




CHAPTER XXVI


There was the soft sound of a footstep on the padded stairs, and Percy
Woodyard glanced into the room.

"Hello, Tom!" he said briskly, and crossed to Conny, whose smooth brow he
touched softly with the tips of his fingers. "How goes it, Tom?"

"You are home early," Conny complained in her treble drawl.

"Must go to Albany to-night," Percy explained, a weary note in his voice.
"Not dining out to-night, Tom?"

It was a little joke they had, that when Cairy was not with them he was
"dining out."...

When Cairy had left, Conny rose from her lounging position as if to resume
the burden of life.

"It's the Commission?" she inquired.

"Yes! I sent you the governor's letter."

For a time they discussed the political situation in the new Commission, to
which Woodyard had recently been appointed, his first conspicuous public
position. Then his wife observed wearily: "I was at Potts's this morning
and saw Isabelle Lane there. She was in mourning."

"Her father died,--you know we saw it in the papers."

"She must be awfully rich."

"He left considerable property,--I don't know to whom."

"Well, they are in New York. Her husband has been made something or other
in the railroad, so they are going to live here."

"He is a very able man, I am told."

After a time Conny drawled: "I suppose we must have 'em here to
dinner,--they are at a hotel up town. Whom shall we have?"

Evidently after due consideration Conny had concluded that the Lanes must
come under her cognizance. She ran over half a dozen names from her best
dinner list, and added, "And Tom."

"Why Tom this time?" Percy demanded.

"He's met Isabelle--and we always have Tommy! You aren't jealous, are you,
Percy?" She glanced at him in amusement.

"I must dress," Percy observed negligently, setting down his cup of tea.

"Come here and tell me you are not jealous," Conny commanded. As her
husband smiled and brushed her fair hair with his lips, she muttered, "You
silly!" just as she had to Cairy's unreasonableness. Why! She was Percy's
destiny and he knew it.... She had a contempt for people who ruffled
themselves over petty emotions. This sex matter had been exaggerated by
Poets and Prudes, and their hysterical utterances should not inhibit her
impulses.

Nevertheless she did not consider it a suitable opportunity to tell Percy
about the kiss.

       *       *       *       *       *

Percy Woodyard and Cornelia Pallanton had married on a new, radical basis.
They had first met in the house of an intellectual woman, the wife of a
university professor, where clever young persons were drawn in and taught
to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Ibsen and George Moore, and to engage
gracefully in perilous topics. They had been rather conscious that they
were radicals,--"did their own thinking," as they phrased it, these young
persons. They were not willing to accept the current morality, not even
that part of it engraved in law; but so far as regarded all of morality
that lay outside the domain of sex their actions were not in conflict with
society, though they were Idealists, and in most cases Sentimentalists. But
in the matter of sex relation, which is the knot of the tangle for youth,
they believed in the "development of the individual." It must be determined
by him, or her, whether this development could be obtained best through
regular or irregular relations. The end of all this individual development?
"The fullest activity, the largest experience, the most complete
presentation of personality," etc. Or as Fosdick railed, "Suck all and spit
out what you don't like!"

So when these two young souls had felt sufficiently moved, one to the
other, to contemplate marriage, they had had an "understanding": they would
go through with the customary formula and oaths of marriage, to please
their relatives and a foolish world; but neither was to be "bound" by any
such piece of silly archaism as the marriage contract. Both recognized that
both had diversified natures, which might require in either case more
varied experience than the other could give. In their enlightened affection
for each other, neither would stand in the light of the other's best
good.... There are many such young people, in whom intellectual pride has
erased deeper human instincts. But as middle life draws on, they
conform--or seek refuge in the divorce court.

Neither Percy nor Cornelia had any intention of practising adultery as a
habit: they merely wished to be honest with themselves, and felt superior
to the herd in recognizing the errant or variant possibilities in
themselves. Conny took pleasure in throwing temptation in Percy's way, in
encouraging him to know other women,--secretly gratified that he proved
hopelessly domestic. And on her side we have seen the innocent lengths to
which she had hitherto gone.

For it proved as life began in earnest for these two that much of their
clear philosophy crumbled. Instead of the vision of feminine Idealism that
the young lawyer had worshipped, Conny developed a neat, practical nature,
immensely capable of "making things go." As her husband was the most
obvious channel through which things could move, her husband became her
chief care. She had no theory of exploiting him,--she had no theories at
all. She saw him as so much capacity to be utilized. Just as she never was
entrapped into a useless acquaintance, never had a "wrong person" at her
house, never wasted her energies on the mere ebullition of good feeling, so
she never allowed Percy to waste his energies on fruitless works.
Everything must count. Their life was a pattern of simple and pronounced
design, from the situation of their house to the footing on which it was
established and the people who were encouraged to attach themselves there.

Woodyard had been interested in social good works, and as a young man had
served the Legal Aid Society. A merely worldly woman would have discouraged
this mild weakness for philanthropy. But Conny knew her material; out of
such as Percy, corporation lawyers--those gross feeders at the public
trough--were not made. Woodyard was a man of fine fibre, rather
unaggressive. He must either be steered into a shady pool of legal
sinecure, or take the more dangerous course through the rapids of public
life. It was the moment of Reform. Conny realized the capabilities of
Reform, and Percy's especial fitness for it; Reform, if not remunerative,
was fashionable and prominent.

So Conny had steered their little bark, hoisting sail to every favorable
wind, no matter how slight the puff, until Woodyard now was a minor figure
in the political world. When his name occurred in the newspapers, a good
many people knew who he was, and his remarks at dinners and his occasional
speeches were quoted from, if there was not more valuable matter. He had
been spoken of for Congress. (Conny, of course, would never permit him to
engulf himself in that hopeless sea.) Just what Conny designed as the
ultimate end, she herself did not know; like all great generals, she was an
opportunist and took what seemed to her worth taking from the fortunes of
the day. The last good thing which had floated up on her shore was this
Commissionership. She had fished that up with the aid of the amiable
Senator, who had spoken a word here and a word there in behalf of young
Woodyard.

Conny was very well pleased with herself as a wife, and she knew that her
husband was pleased with her. Moreover, she had not the slightest intention
of permitting anything to interfere with her wifely duties as she saw
them....

Percy had gone upstairs to that roof story where in New York children are
housed, to see his boy and girl. He was very fond of his children. When he
came down, his thoughtful face was worried.

"The kids seem always to have colds," he remarked.

"I know it," Conny admitted. "I must take them to Dr. Snow to-morrow."
(They had their own doctor, and also their own throat specialist.)

"I wonder if it is good for them here, so far down in the city,--they have
only that scrap of park to play in."

Conny, who had been over this question a good many times, answered
irrefutably,--

"There seem to be a good many children growing up all right in the same
conditions."

She knew that Percy would like some excuse to escape into the country.
Conny had no liking for suburban life, and with her husband's career at the
critical point the real country was out of the question.

"I suppose Jack will have to go to boarding school another year," Percy
said with a sigh.

He was not a strong man himself, though of solid build and barely thirty.
He had that bloodless whiteness of skin so often found among young American
men, which contrasted with his dark mustache, and after a long day's work
like this his step dragged. He wore glasses over his blue eyes, and when he
removed them the dark circles could be seen. Conny knew the limits of his
strength and looked carefully to his physical exercise.

"You didn't get your squash this afternoon?"

When Percy was worried about anything, she immediately searched for a
physical cause.

"No! I had to finish up things at the office so that I could get away
to-night."

Then husband and wife went to their dinner, and Woodyard gave Conny a
short-hand account of his doings, the people he had seen, what they had
said, the events at the office. Conny required this account each day,
either in the morning or in the evening. And Woodyard yielded quite
unconsciously to his wife's strong will, to her singularly definite idea of
"what is best." He admired her deeply, was grateful to her for that
complete mastery of the detail of life which she had shown, aware that if
it were not for the dominating personality of this woman he had somehow had
the good fortune to marry, life would have been a smaller matter for him.

"Con," he said when they had gone back to the library for their coffee, "I
am afraid this Commission is going to be ticklish business."

"Why?" she demanded alertly.

"There are some dreadful grafters on it,--I suspect that the chairman is a
wolf. I suspect further that it has been arranged to whitewash certain rank
deals."

"But why should the governor have appointed you?"

"Possibly to hold the whitewash brush."

"You think that the Senator knows that?"

"You can't tell where the Senator's tracks lead."

"Well, don't worry! Keep your eyes open. You can always resign, you know."

Woodyard went off to his train after kissing his wife affectionately. Conny
called out as he was getting into his coat:--

"Will you be back Sunday? Shall I have the Lanes then?"

"Yes,--and you will go to the Hillyers to-morrow?"

"I think so,--Tom will take me."

After the door closed Conny went to her desk and wrote the note to
Isabelle. Then after meditating a few moments, more notes of invitation.
She had decided on her combination,--Gossom, the Silvers, the Hillyers (to
get them off her mind), Senator Thomas, and Cairy. She did not take Percy's
objection to Tom seriously.

She had decided to present a variety of people to the Lanes. Isabelle and
she had never been intimate, and Conny had a woman's desire to show an
accomplished superiority to the rich friend, who had been inclined to snub
her in boarding school. Conny was eminently skilful in "combinations."
Every one that composed her circle or even entered it might some day be of
use in creating what is called "publicity." That, as Cornelia Woodyard
felt, was the note of the day. "You must be talked about by the right
people, if you want to be heard, if you want your show!" she had said to
Cairy. Thanks to Lane's rapid rise in the railroad corporation, Isabelle
had come legitimately within the zone of interest.

After she had settled this matter to her satisfaction, she turned to some
house accounts and made various calculations. It was a wonder to every one
who knew them how the Woodyards "could do so much on what they had." As a
matter of fact, with the rising scale of living, it required all Conny's
practical adroitness to make the household come out nearly even. Thanks to
a great-aunt who admired Percy, they had been able to buy this house and
alter it over, and with good business judgment it had been done so that the
property was now worth nearly a third more than when they took it. But a
second man-servant had been added, and Conny felt that she must have a
motor; she pushed away the papers and glanced up, thinking, planning.

The Senator and she had talked investments the last time they had met. She
had a little money of her own. If the old fox would only take it and roll
it up into a big snowball! Isabelle, now, with all that wealth! Conny
pursed her lips in disgust to think that so much of the ammunition of war
had fallen into such incompetent hands. "Yes," she said to herself, "the
Senator must show me how to do it." Perhaps it flitted vaguely through her
mind that Percy might object to using stock market tips from the Senator.
But Percy must accept her judgment on this matter. They could not go on any
longer with only twenty thousand a year.

Turning out the lights, she went to her bedroom. It was very plain and
bare, with none of the little toilette elegances or chamber comforts that
women usually love. Conny never spent except where it showed saliently. Her
evening gowns were sometimes almost splendid, but her dressing gowns were
dowdy, and poor little Bessie Falkner spent twice as much on lingerie.

Having discharged the duties of her day, her mind returned to Cairy, to his
work for Gossom, to his appealing self, and her lips relaxed in a gentle
smile. Hers was a simple nature, the cue once caught. She had come of
rather plain people, who knew the worth of a dollar, and had spent their
lives saving or investing money. The energy of the proletariat had been
handed to her undiminished. The blood was evident in the large bones, the
solid figure, and tenacious fingers, as well as in the shrewdness with
which she had created this household. It was her instinct to push out into
the troubled waters of the material world. She never weakened herself by
questioning values. She knew--what she wanted.

Nevertheless, as she reached up her hand to turn out the night light, she
was smiling with dreamy eyes, and her thoughts were no longer practical!




CHAPTER XXVII


When Isabelle emerged from the great hotel and turned down the avenue to
walk to the office of Dr. Potts, as he required her to do every day, she
had a momentary thrill of exultation. Descending the gentle incline, she
could see a good part of the city extending into a distant blue horizon
before her. The vast buildings rose like islands in the morning mist. It
reminded her, this general panorama, of the awe-compelling spaces of the
Arizona canon into which she had once descended. Here were the same
irregular, beetling cliffs, the same isolated crags, with sharply outlined
lower and minor levels of building. The delicate blue, the many grays of
storm and mist gave it color, also. But in place of the canon's eternal
quiet,--the solitude of the remote gods,--this city boiled and hummed.
That, too,--the realization of multitudinous humanity,--made Isabelle's
pulses leap.

In spite of her poor health, she had the satisfaction of at last being
here, in the big hive, where she had wished to be so long. She was a part
of it, a painfully insignificant mite as yet, but still a part of it.
Hitherto New York had been a sort of varied hotel, an entertainment. Now it
was to be her scene, and she had begun already to take possession. It had
all come about very naturally, shortly after her father's death. While she
was dreading the return to St. Louis, which must be emptier than ever
without the Colonel, and she and her mother were discussing the possibility
of Europe, John's new position had come. A Western road had made him an
offer; for he had a splendid record as a "traffic getter." The Atlantic and
Pacific could not lose him; they gave him the third vice-presidency with
headquarters in New York and general charge of traffic. Thus the Lanes'
horizon shifted, and it was decided that the first year in the city they
should spend in a hotel with Mrs. Price. Isabelle's health was again
miserable; there had been the delayed operation; and now she was in the
care of the famous Potts, trying to recover from the operation, from the
old fatigue and the recent strains, "to be made fit."

The move to New York had not meant much to Lane. He had spent a great deal
of his time there these last years, as well as in Washington,
Pittsburg,--in this city and that,--as business called him. His was what is
usually regarded as a cosmopolitan view of life,--it might better be called
a hotel-view. Home still meant to him the city where his wife and child
were temporarily housed, but he was equally familiar with half a dozen
cities. Isabelle, too, had the same rootless feeling. She had spent but a
short time in any one place since she had left her father's house to go to
St. Mary's. That is the privilege or the curse of the prosperous American.
Life thus becomes a shifting panorama of surfaces. Even in the same city
there are a dozen spots where the family ark has rested, which for the sake
of a better term may be called "homes." That sense of rooted attachment
which comes from long habituation to one set of physical images is
practically a lost emotion to Americans....

There were days when New York roared too loudly for Isabelle's nerves, when
the jammed streets, the buzzing shops, the overflowing hotels and theatres,
made her long for quiet. Then she thought of the Farm as the most stable
memory of a fixed condition, and she had an unformed plan of "doing over"
the old place, which was now her own, and making it the centre of the
family's centrifugal energy. Meantime there was the great Potts, who
promised her health, and the flashing charm of the city.

Occasionally she felt lonely in this packed procession, this hotel
existence, with its multitude of strange faces, and longed for something
familiar, even Torso! At such times when she saw the face of an old
acquaintance, perhaps in a cab at a standstill in the press of the avenue,
her heart warmed. Even a fleeting glimpse of something known was a relief.
Clearly she must settle herself into this whirlpool, put out her tentacles,
and grasp an anchorage. But where? What?

One morning as she and her mother were making slow progress down the
avenue, she caught sight of Margaret Pole on the sidewalk, waiting to cross
the stream, a little boy's hand in hers. Isabelle waved to her frantically,
and then leaped from the cab, dodged between the pushing motors, and
grasped Margaret.

"You here!" she gasped.

"We came back some months ago," Margaret explained.

She was thin, Isabelle thought, and her face seemed much older than the
years warranted. Margaret, raising her voice above the roar, explained that
they were living out of town, "in the country, in Westchester," and
promised to come to lunch the next time she was in the city. Then with a
nod and a smile she slipped into the stream again as if anxious to be lost,
and Isabelle rejoined her mother.

"She looks as if she were saving her clothes," Mrs. Price announced with
her precise view of what she observed. Isabelle, while she waited for the
doctor, mused on the momentary vision of her old friend at the street
corner. Margaret turned up in the noise and mist of the city, as everybody
might turn up; but Margaret old, worn, and almost shabby! Then the nurse
came for her and she went into the doctor's room, with a depressing
sensation compounded of a bad night, the city roar, the vision of Margaret.

"Well, my lady, what's the story to-day?"

Dr. Potts looked up from his desk, and scrutinized the new patient out of
his shaggy eyebrows. Isabelle began at once the neurasthenic's involved and
particularized tale of woe, breaking at the end with almost a sob:--

"I am so useless! I am never going to be well,--what is the matter with
me?"

"So it's a bad world this morning, eh?" the doctor quizzed in an indulgent
voice. "We'll try to make it better,--shake up the combination." He broke
off suddenly and remarked in an ordinary, conversational voice: "Your
friend Mrs. Woodyard was in here this morning,--a clever woman! My, but she
is clever!"

"What is the matter with her?"

"Same thing,--Americanitis; but she'll pull out if she will give herself
half a chance."

Then he returned to Isabelle, wrote her a prescription, talked to her for
ten minutes, and when she left the office she felt better, was sure it
would "all come out right."

The great Dr. Potts! He served as God to several hundred neurasthenic
women. Born in a back street of a small town, he had emerged into the
fashionable light after prodigious labor and exercise of will. Physically
he stood six feet, with a heavy head covered with thick black hair, and
deep-set black eyes. He had been well educated professionally, but his
training, his medical attainments, had little to do with his success. He
had the power to look through the small souls of his women patients, and he
found generally Fear, and sometimes Hypocrisy,--a desire to evade, to get
pleasure and escape the bill. These he bullied. Others he found struggling,
feeble of purpose, desiring light, willingly confessing their weakness, and
begging for strength. These he despised; he gave them drugs and flattered
them. There were some, like Conny, who were perfectly poised, with a plain
philosophy of selfishness. These he understood, being of fellow clay, and
plotted with them how to entrap what they desired.

Power! That was Potts's keynote,--power, effectiveness, accomplishment, at
any and all cost. He was the spirit of the city, nay of the country itself!
"Results--get results at all costs," that was the one lesson of life which
he had learned from the back street, where luckier men had shouldered
him.... "I must supply backbone," he would say to his patients. "I am your
temporary dynamo!"

To Isabelle this mass of energy, Dr. Alexander Potts, seemed like the
incarnate will to live of the great city. After her visit at his office she
came out into the sharp air, the shrill discords of the busy streets,
attuned--with purpose,--"I am going to be well now! I am going to do this.
Life will arrange itself, and at last I shall be able to live as others
live." This borrowed purpose might last the day out, and she would plunge
into a dozen matters; or it might wear off in an hour or two. Then back she
went the next day to be keyed up once more.

"Do something! Deliver the goods, no matter what goods or how you get them
into the premises!" Potts thundered, beating the desk in the energy of his
lecture. "Live! That's what we must all do. Never mind _how_ you
live,--don't waste good tissue worrying over that. _Live!_"

Dr. Potts was an education to Isabelle. His moods of brutality and of
sympathy came like the shifting shadows of a gusty day. His perfectly
material philosophy frightened her and allured her. He was
Mephistopheles,--one hand on the medicine chest of life, the other pointing
satirically towards the towered city.

"See, my child," he purred; "I will tinker this little toy of your body for
you; then run along down there and play with your brothers and sisters."

In the mood of reaction that the neurasthenic must meet, the trough of the
wave, Isabelle doubted. Potts had not yet found the key to her mechanism;
the old listless cloud befogged her still. After a sleepless night she
would sit by her window, high up in the mountain of stone, and look out
over the city, its voice dull at this hour of dawn,--a dozing monster.
Something like terror filled her at these times, fear of herself, of the
slumbering monster, so soon to wake and roar. "Act, do!" thundered Potts;
"don't think! Live and get what you want...." Was that all? The peaceful
pastures at Grafton, the still September afternoon when the Colonel died,
the old man himself,--there was something in them beyond mere energy, quite
outside the Potts philosophy.

Once she ventured to suggest this doubt to Cornelia Woodyard, who, being
temporarily in need of a bracer, had resorted to "old Pot." She had planned
to go to the opera that night and wanted to "be herself."

"I wonder if he's right about it all," said Isabelle; "if we are just
machines, with a need to be oiled now and then,--to take this drug or that?
Is it all as simple as he makes out? All just autointoxication, chemistry,
and delusion?"

"You're ill,--that's why you doubt," Conny replied with tranquil
positiveness. "When you've got the poison out of your system, you'll see,
or rather you won't see crooked,--won't have ideas."

"It's all a formula?"

Conny nodded, shutting her large mouth firmly.

"And he has the key. You are merely an organ, and he pulls out this stop or
that; gives you one thing to take and then another. You tell him this dotty
idea you've got in your head and he'll pull the right stop to shake it
out."

"I wonder! Some days I feel that I must go away by myself, get out of all
the noise, and live up among the mountains far off--"

She stopped. For Conny was not one to whom to confide a longing for the
stars and the winds in the pines and the scent of the earth. Such vaporing
would be merely another symptom!

"What would you go mooning off by yourself for? You'd be crazy, for a fact.
Better come down to Palm Beach with me next month."

The great Potts had the unfortunate habit of gossiping about his patients
with one another. He had said to Conny: "Your friend Isabelle interests me.
I should say that she had a case of festering conscience." He crossed his
legs and gazed wisely up at the ceiling. "A rudimentary organ left over
from her hard-working ancestors. She is inhibited, tied, thinks she can't
do this and that. What she needs"--Potts had found the answer to his riddle
and brought his eyes from the ceiling--"is a lover! Can't you find her
one?"

"Women usually prefer to select _that_ for themselves."

"Oh, no,--one is as good as another. What she needs is a counter-irritant.
That husband of hers, what is he like?"

"Just husband, very successful, good-natured, gives her what she wants,--I
should say they pull well together."

"That's it! He's one of the smooth, get-everything-the-dear-woman-wants
kind, eh? And then busies himself about his old railroad? Well, it is the
worst sort for her. She needs a man who will beat her."

"Is that what the lover would do?"

"Bless you, no! He would make her stop thinking she had an ache." When
Conny went, the doctor came to the door with her and as he held her hand
cried breezily: "Remember what I said about your friend. Look up some nice
young man, who will hang around and make her think she's got a soul." He
pressed Conny's hand and smiled.




CHAPTER XXVIII


When the Lanes went to Sunday luncheon at the Woodyards', the impression on
Isabelle was exactly what Conny wished it to be. The little house had a
distinct "atmosphere," Conny herself had an "atmosphere," and the people,
who seemed much at home there and very gay, were what is termed
"interesting." That is, each person had his ticket of "distinction," as
Isabelle quickly found out. One was a lawyer whose name often appeared in
the newspapers as counsel for powerful interests; another was a woman
novelist, whose last book was then running serially in a magazine and
causing discussion; a third--a small man with a boyish open face--Isabelle
discovered with a thrill of delight was the Ned Silver whose clever little
articles on the current drama she had read in a fashionable weekly paper.

Isabelle found her hostess leaning against the mantelpiece with the air of
having just come in and discovered her guests.

"How are you, dearie?" she drawled in greeting. "This is Mr. Thomas Randall
Cairy, Margaret's cousin,--do you remember? He says he has met you before,
but Thomas usually believes he has met ladies whom he wants to know!" Then
Conny turned away, and thereafter paid little attention to the Lanes, as
though she wished them to understand that the luncheon was not given for
them.

"In this case," Cairy remarked, "Mrs. Woodyard's gibe happens to miss. I
haven't forgotten the Virginian hills, and I hope you haven't."

It was Cairy who explained the people to Isabelle:--

"There is Gossom, the little moth-eaten, fat man at the door. He is the
mouthpiece of the _People's_, but he doesn't dislike to feast with the
classes. He is probably telling Woodyard at this moment what the President
said to him last week about Princhard's articles on the distillery trust!"

Among the Colonel's friends the magazine reporter Princhard had been
considered an ignorant and malicious liar. Isabelle looked eagerly as Cairy
pointed him out,--a short, bespectacled man with a thin beard, who was
talking to Silver.

"There is the only representative of the fashionable world present, Mrs.
George Bertram, just coming in the door. We do not go in for the purely
fashionable--yet," he remarked mockingly. "Mrs. Bertram is interested in
music,--she has a history, too."...

By the time the company were ready to lunch, Isabelle's pulse had risen
with excitement. She had known, hitherto, but two methods of assimilating
friends and acquaintances,--pure friendship, a good-natured acceptance of
those likable or endurable people fate threw in one's way; and
fashion,--the desire to know people who were generally supposed to be the
people best worth knowing. But here she perceived quickly there was a third
principle of selection--"interest." And as she glanced about the
appointments of Conny's smart little house, her admiration for her old
schoolmate rose. Conny evidently had a definite purpose in life, and had
the power and intelligence to pursue it. To the purposeless person, such as
Isabelle had been, the evidences of this power were almost mysterious.

At first the talk at the table went quite over Isabelle's head. It
consisted of light gibe and allusion to persons and things she had never
heard of,--a new actress whom the serious Percy was supposed to be in love
with, Princhard's adventure with a political notability, a new very
"American" play. Isabelle glanced apprehensively at her husband, who was at
Conny's end of the table. Lane was listening appreciatively, now and then
exchanging a remark with the lawyer across the table. John Lane had that
solid acquaintance with life which made him at home in almost all
circumstances. If he felt as she did, hopelessly countrified, he would
never betray it. Presently the conversation got to politics, the President,
the situation at Albany. Conny, with her negligent manner and her childish
treble voice, gave the talk a poke here and there and steered it skilfully,
never allowing it to get into serious pools or become mere noise. In one of
the shifts Cairy asked Isabelle, "Have you seen Margaret since her return?"

"Yes; tell me why they came back!"

Cairy raised his eyebrows. "Too much husband, I should say,--shouldn't
you?"

"I don't know him. Margaret seemed older, not strong,--what is the matter
with us all!"

"You'll understand what is the matter with Margaret when you see Larry! And
then she has three children,--an indecent excess, with her health and that
husband."...

The company broke up after the prolonged luncheon almost at once, to
Isabelle's regret; for she wished to see more of these people. As they
strolled upstairs to the library Cairy followed her and said:--

"Are you going to Mrs. Bertram's with us? She has some music and people
Sundays--I'll tell Mrs. Woodyard," and before she could reply he had
slipped over to Conny. That lady glanced at Isabelle, smiled on Cairy, and
nodded. What she said to Cairy was: "So you've got a new interest. Take
care, Tommy,--you'll complicate your life!" But apparently she did not
regard Isabelle seriously; for presently she was saying to her, "Mrs.
Bertram wants me to bring you around with us this afternoon,--you'll like
it."

Lane begged off and walked back to the hotel in company with the lawyer.
After a time which was filled with the flutter of amiable little speeches,
appointments, and good-bys, Isabelle found herself in company with the
Silvers and Gossom, Cornelia and Cairy on her way to Mrs. Bertram's, which
was "just around the corner,"--that is, half a dozen blocks farther up town
on Madison Avenue. Mrs. Silver was a pretty, girlish woman with a troubled
face, who seemed to be making great efforts to be gay. She and Cornelia
called each other by first names, and when Isabelle asked about her later,
Conny replied with a preoccupied drawl:--

"Yes, Annie Silver is a nice little thing,--an awful drag on him, you know.
They haven't a dollar, and she is going to have a baby; she is in fits
about it."

As a matter of fact Silver managed to earn by his swiftly flowing pen over
four thousand dollars a year, without any more application than the average
clerk.

"But in New York, you know!" as Conny explained. "They have lived in a
little apartment, very comfortably, and know nice people. Their friends are
good to them. But if they take to having children!" It meant, according to
Conny's expressive gesture, suburban life, or something "way up town," "no
friends." Small wonder that Annie Silver's face was drawn, and that she was
making nervous efforts to keep up to the last. Isabelle felt that it must
be a tragedy, and as Conny said, "Such a clever man, too!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Bertram's deep rooms were well filled, and Cairy, who still served as
her monitor, told Isabelle that most of the women were merely fashionable.
The men--and there was a good sprinkling of them--counted; they all had
tickets of one sort or another, and he told them off with a keen phrase for
each. When the music began, Isabelle found herself in a recess of the
farther room with several people whom she did not know. Cairy had
disappeared, and Isabelle settled back to enjoy the music and study the
company. In the kaleidoscope of the day, however, another change was to
come,--one that at the time made no special impression on her, but one that
she was to remember years afterward.

A young man had been singing some songs. When he rose from the piano, the
people near Isabelle began to chatter:--

"Isn't he good looking! ... That was his own music,--the Granite City ...
Can't you see the tall buildings, hear the wind sweeping from the sea and
rushing through the streets!" etc. Presently there was a piece of music for
a quartette. At its conclusion a voice said to Isabelle from behind her
chair:--

"Pardon me, but do you know what that was?"

She looked over her shoulder expecting to see an acquaintance. The man who
had spoken was leaning forwards, resting one elbow on her chair, his hand
carelessly plucking his gray hair. He had deep piercing black eyes, and an
odd bony face. In spite of his gray hair and lined face she saw that he was
not old.

"Something Russian, I heard some one say," Isabelle replied.

"I don't like to sit through music and not know anything about it," the
stranger continued with a delicate, deliberate enunciation. "I don't
believe that I should be any wiser if I heard the name of the piece; but it
flatters your vanity, I suppose, to know it. There is Carova standing
beside Mrs. Bertram; he's going to sing."

"Who is Carova?" Isabelle demanded eagerly.

"The new tenor at the Manhattan,--you haven't heard him?"

"No," Isabelle faltered and felt ashamed as she added, "You see I am almost
a stranger in New York."

"Mrs. Bertram knows a lot of these musical chaps."

Then the tenor sang, and after the applause had given way to another rustle
of talk, the gray-haired man continued as if there had been no
interruption:--

"So you don't live in New York?--lucky woman!"

Isabelle moved her chair to look at this person, who wanted to talk. She
thought him unusual in appearance, and liked his friendliness. His face was
lined and thin, and the long, thin hand on his knee was muscular. Isabelle
decided that he must be Somebody.

"I am here for my health, but I expect to live in New York," she explained.

"In New York for your health?" he asked in a puzzled tone. "You see, I am a
doctor."

"Yes--I came to consult Dr. Potts. I gave out,--am always giving out,"
Isabelle continued with that confiding frankness that always pleased men.
"I'm like so many women these days,--no good, nerves! If you are a doctor,
please tell me why we should all go to pieces in this foolish fashion?"

"If _I_ could do that satisfactorily and also tell you how not to go to
pieces, I should be a very famous man," he replied pleasantly.

"Perhaps you are!"

"Perhaps. But I haven't discovered that secret, yet."

"Dr. Potts says it's all the chemistry inside us--autointoxication,
poison!"

"Yes, that is the latest theory."

"It seems reasonable; but why didn't our grandmothers get poisoned?"

"Perhaps they did,--but they didn't know what to call it."

"You think that is so,--that we are poor little chemical retorts? It
sounds--horrid."

"It sounds sensible, but it isn't the whole of it."

"Tell me what you think!"

"I don't like to interfere with Dr. Potts," he suggested.

"I shouldn't talk to you professionally, I know; but it is in my mind most
of the time. What is the matter? What is wrong?"

"I, too, have thought about it a great deal." He smiled and his black eyes
had a kindly gleam.

"Do you believe as Dr. Potts does that it is all what you eat, just matter?
If your mind is so much troubled, if you have these queer ideas, it can't
be altogether the chemistry?"

"It might be the soul."

"Don't laugh--"

"But I really think it might be the soul."

The music burst upon them, and when there was another interval, Isabelle
persisted with the topic which filled her mind.

"Will you tell me what you mean by the soul?"

"Can _you_ answer the question? ... Well, since we are both in doubt, let
us drop the term for a while and get back to the body."

"Only we must not end with it, as Potts does!"

"No, we must not end with the body."

"First, what causes it,--hysterics, nerves, no-goodness,--the whole thing?"

"Improper food, bad education, steam heat, variable climate, inbreeding,
lack of children,--shall I stop?"

"No! I can't find a reasonable cause yet."

"I haven't really begun.... The brain is a delicate instrument. It can do a
good deal of work in its own way, if you don't abuse it--"

"Overwork it?" suggested Isabelle.

"I never knew an American woman who overworked her brain," he retorted
impatiently. "I mean abuse it. It's grossly abused."

"Wrong ideas?"

"No ideas at all, in the proper sense,--it's stuffed with all sorts of
things,--sensations, emotions.... Where are you living?"

"At the Metropole."

"And where were you last month?"

"In St. Louis."

"And the month before?"

"I went to Washington with my husband and--"

"Precisely--that's enough!" he waved his thin hand.

"But it rests me to travel," Isabelle protested.

"It seems to rest you. Did you ever think what all those whisking changes
in your environment mean to the brain cells? And it isn't just travelling,
with new scenes, new people; it is everything in your life,--every act from
the time you get up to the time you go to bed. You are cramming those brain
cells all the time, giving them new records to make,--even when you lie
down with an illustrated paper. Why, the merest backwoodsman in Iowa is
living faster in a sense than Cicero or Webster.... The gray matter cannot
stand the strain. It isn't the quality of what it has to do; it is the mere
amount! Understand?"

"I see! I never thought before what it means to be tired. I have worked the
machine foolishly. But one must travel fast--be geared up, as you say--or
fall behind and become dull and uninteresting. What is living if we can't
keep the pace others do?"

"Must we? Is that _living_?" he asked ironically. "I have a diary kept by
an old great-aunt of mine. She was a country clergyman's wife, away back in
a little village. She brought up four sons, helped her husband fit them for
college as well as pupils he took in, and baked and washed and sewed. And
learned German for amusement when she was fifty! I think she lived
somewhat, but she probably never lived at the pressure you have the past
month."

"One can't repeat--can't go back to old conditions. Each generation has its
own lesson, its own way."

"But is our way _living_? Are we living now this very minute, listening to
music we don't apparently care for, that means nothing to us, with our mind
crammed full of distracting purposes and reflections? When I read my aunt
Merelda's journal of the silent winter days on the snowy farm, I think
_she_ lived, as much as one should live. Living doesn't consist in the
number of muscular or nervous reactions that you undergo."

"What is your formula?"

"We haven't yet mentioned the most formidable reason for the American
plague," he continued, ignoring her question. "It has to do with that
troublesome term we evaded,--the Soul."

"The Soul?"...

The music had come to an end, and the people were moving about them.
Cornelia came up and drawled:--

"Tom and I are going on,--will you go with us?"

When Isabelle reached her hostess, she had but one idea in her mind, and
exclaimed impulsively to that somewhat bored lady:--

"Who is that man just going out? With gray hair? The tall, thin man?"

"Dr. Renault? He's a surgeon, operates on children,--has done something or
other lately."...

She smiled at Isabelle's impulsiveness, and turned to another.

'A surgeon,' Isabelle thought. 'What has he to do with the soul?'

In a few moments she had a chance to repeat her question aloud to Dr.
Renault when they left the house together.

"Did you ever hear," he replied directly, "that a house divided against
itself will fall?"

"Of course."

"I should say that this national disease, which we have been discussing, is
one of the results of trying to live with divided souls,--souls torn,
distraught!"

"And we need--?"

"A religion."

The doctor raised his hat and sauntered down the avenue.

"A religion!" Isabelle murmured,--a queer word, here at the close of Mrs.
Bertram's pleasantly pagan Sunday afternoon, with ladies of undoubted
social position getting into their motors, and men lighting cigarettes and
cigars to solace them on the way to their clubs. Religion! and the need of
it suggested by a surgeon, a man of science....

When the three reached the Woodyards' house, Conny paused with, "When shall
I see you again?" which Isabelle understood as a polite dismissal. Cairy to
her surprise proposed to walk to the hotel with her. Isabelle felt that
this arrangement was not in the plan, but Conny merely waved her hand with
a smile,--"By-by, children."

They sauntered up the avenue, at the pace required by Cairy's disability.
The city, although filled with people loitering in holiday ease, had a
strange air of subdued life, of Sunday peace, not disturbed even by the
dashing motors. Isabelle, bubbling with the day's impressions, was eager to
talk, and Cairy, as she had found him before at the Virginia Springs, was a
sympathetic man to be with. He told her the little semi-scandalous story of
her recent hostess.... "And now they have settled down to bring up the
children like any good couple, and it threatens to end on the 'live happy
ever after' note. Sam Bertram is really domestic,--you can see he admires
her tremendously. He sits and listens to the music and nods his sleepy old
head."

"And the--other one?" Isabelle asked, laughing in spite of the fact that
she felt a little shocked.

"Who knows? ... The lady disappears at rare intervals, and there are
rumors. But she is a good sort, and you see Sam admires her, needs her."

"But it is rather awful when you stop to think of it!"

"Why more awful than if Sam had stuck a knife into the other's ribs or
punctured him with a bullet? ... I think it is rather more intelligent."

Cairy did not know Renault. "Mrs. Bertram gets everybody," he said.
Isabelle felt no inclination to discuss with Cairy her talk about
neurasthenia and religion. So their chatter drifted from the people they
had seen to Cairy himself, his last play, "which was a rank fizzle," and
the plan of the new one. One got on fast and far with Cairy, if one were a
woman and felt his charm. By the time they had reached the hotel, he was
counselling Isabelle most wisely how she should settle herself in New York.
"But why don't you live in the country? in that old village Mrs. Woodyard
told me about? The city is nothing but a club, a way-station these days, a
sort of Fair, you know, where you come two or three times a year to see
your dressmaker and hear the gossip."

"But there's my husband!" Isabelle suggested. "You see his business is
here."

"I forgot the husband,--make him change his business. Besides, men like
country life."

       *       *       *       *       *

Isabelle found her husband comfortably settled near a hot radiator, reading
a novel. Lane occasionally read novels on a Sunday when there was
absolutely nothing else to do. He read them slowly, with a curious interest
in the world they depicted, the same kind of interest that he would take in
a strange civilization, like that of the Esquimaux, where phenomena would
have only an amusing significance. He dropped his glasses when his wife
appeared and helped himself to a fresh cigar from the box beside him.

"Have a good time?"

It was the formula that he used for almost every occupation pursued by
women. Isabelle, throbbing with her new impressions and ideas, found the
question depressing. John was not the person to pour out one's mind to when
that mind was in a tumult. He would listen kindly, assent at the wrong
place, and yawn at the end. Undoubtedly his life was exciting, but it had
no fine shades. He was growing stout, Isabelle perceived, and a little
heavy. New York life was not good for him.

"I thought Conny's house and the people so--interesting,"--she used the
universal term for a new sensation,--"didn't you?"

"Yes,--very pleasant," he assented as he would have if it had been the
Falkners or the Lawtons or the Frasers.

In the same undiscriminating manner he agreed with her other remarks about
the Woodyards. People were people to him, and life was life,--more or less
the same thing everywhere; while Isabelle felt the fine shades.

"I think it would be delightful to know people worth while," she observed
almost childishly, "people who _do_ something."

"You mean writers and artists and that kind? I guess it isn't very
difficult," Lane replied indulgently.

Isabelle sighed. Such a remark betrayed his remoteness from her idea; she
would have it all to do for herself, when she started her life in New York.

"I think I shall make over the place at Grafton," she said after a time.
Her husband looked at her with some surprise. She was standing at the
window, gazing down into the cavernous city in the twilight. He could not
possibly follow the erratic course of ideas through her brain, the tissue
of impression and suggestion, that resulted in such a conclusion.

"Why? what do you want to do with it? I thought you didn't care for the
country."

"One must have a background," she replied vaguely, and continued to stare
at the city. This was the sum of her new experience, with all its elements.
The man calmly smoking there did not realize that his life, their life, was
to be affected profoundly by such trivial matters as a Sunday luncheon, a
remark by Tom Cairy, the savage aspect of the great city seen through April
mist, and the low vitality of a nervous organism. But everything plays its
part with an impressionable character in which the equilibrium is not found
and fixed. As the woman stared down into the twilight, she seemed to see
afar off what she had longed for, held out her hands towards,--life.

Pictures, music, the play of interesting personalities, books,
plays,--ideas,--that was the note of the higher civilization that Conny had
caught. If Conny had absorbed all this so quickly, why could not she?
Cornelia Woodyard--that somewhat ordinary schoolmate of her youth--was
becoming for Isabelle a powerful source of suggestion, just as Isabelle had
been for Bessie Falkner in the Torso days.




CHAPTER XXIX


When Mrs. Woodyard returned to her house at nine o'clock in the evening and
found it dark, no lights in the drawing-room or the library, no fire
lighted in either room, she pushed the button disgustedly and flung her
cloak into a chair.

"Why is the house like a tomb?" she demanded sharply of the servant, who
appeared tardily.

"Mrs. Woodyard was not expected until later."

"That should make no difference," she observed curtly, and the flustered
servant hastened to pull curtains, light lamps, and build up the fire.

Conny disliked entering a gloomy house. Moreover, she disliked explaining
things to servants. Her attitude was that of the grand marshal of life, who
once having expressed an idea or wish expects that it will be properly
fulfilled. This attitude worked perfectly with Percy and the children, and
usually with servants. No one "got more results" in her establishment with
less worry and thought than Mrs. Woodyard. The resolutely expectant
attitude is a large part of efficiency.

After the servant had gathered up her wrap and gloves, Conny looked over
the room, gave another curve to the dark curtains, and ordered whiskey and
cigarettes. It was plain that she was expecting some one. She had gone to
the Hillyers' to dinner as she had promised Percy, and just as the party
was about to leave for the opera had pleaded a headache and returned home.
It was true that she was not well; the winter had taxed her strength, and
she lived quite up to the margin of her vitality. That was her plan, also.
Moreover, the day had contained rather more than its share of problems....

When Cairy's light step pressed the stair, she turned quickly from the
fire.

"Ah, Tommy,--so you got my message?" She greeted him with a slow smile.
"Where were you dining?"

"With the Lanes. Mrs. Lane and I saw _The Doll's House_ this afternoon." As
Conny did not look pleased, he added, "It is amusing to show Ibsen to a
child."

"Isabelle Lane is no child."

"She takes Shaw and Ibsen with that childlike earnestness which has given
those two great fakirs a posthumous vogue," Cairy remarked with a yawn. "If
it were not for America,--for the Mississippi Valley of America, one might
say,--Ibsen would have had a quiet grave, and Shaw might remain the Celtic
buffoon. But the women of the Mississippi Valley have made a gospel out of
them.... It is as interesting to hear them discuss the new dogmas on
marriage as it is to see a child eat candy."

"You seem to find it so--with Isabelle."

"She is very intelligent--she will get over the Shaw-measles quickly."

"You think so?" Conny queried. "Well, with all that money she might do
something, if she had it in her.... But she is middle class, in
ideas,--always was."

That afternoon Isabelle had confided her schoolgirl opinion of Mrs.
Woodyard to Cairy. The young man balancing the two judgments smiled.

"She is good to behold," he observed, helping himself to whiskey.

"Not your kind, Tommy!" Conny warned with a laugh. "The Prices are very
_good_ people. You'll find that Isabelle will keep you at the proper
distance."

Cairy yawned as if the topic did not touch him. "I thought you were going
to _Manon_ with the Hillyers."

"I was,--but I came home instead!" Conny replied softly, and their eyes
met.

"That was kind of you," he murmured, and they were silent a long time.

It had come over her suddenly in the afternoon that she must see Cairy,
must drink again the peculiar and potent draught which he alone of men
seemed to be able to offer her. So she had written the note and made the
excuse. She would not have given up the Hillyers altogether. They were
important to Percy just now, and she expected to see the Senator there and
accomplish something with him. It was clearly her duty, her plan of life as
she saw it, for her to go to the Hillyers'. But having put in an
appearance, flattered the old lawyer, and had her little talk with Senator
Thomas before dinner, she felt that she had earned her right to a few hours
of sentimental indulgence....

Conny, sitting there before the fire, looking her most seductive best, had
the clear conscience of a child. Her life, she thought, was arduous, and
she met its demands admirably, she also thought. The subtleties of feeling
and perception never troubled her. She felt entitled to her sentimental
repose with Cairy as she felt entitled to her well-ordered house. She did
not see that her "affair" interfered with her duties, or with Percy, or
with the children. If it should,--then it would be time to consider....

"Tommy," she murmured plaintively, "I am so tired! You are the only person
who rests me."

She meant it quite literally, that he always rested and soothed her, and
that she was grateful to him for it. But the Southerner's pulses leaped at
the purring words. To him they meant more, oh, much more! He gave her
strength; his love was the one vital thing she had missed in life. The
sentimentalist must believe that; must believe that he is giving, and that
some generous issue justifies his passion. Cairy leaning forward
caressingly said:--

"You make me feel your love to-night! ... Wonderful one! ... It is all ours
to-night, in this still room."

She did not always make him feel that she loved him, far from it. And it
hurt his sentimental soul, and injured his vanity. He would be capable of a
great folly with sufficient delusion, but he was not capable of loving
intensely a woman who did not love him. To-night they seemed in harmony,
and as their lips met at last, the man had the desired illusion--she was
his!

They are not coarsely physiological,--these Cairys, the born lovers. They
look abhorrently on mere flesh. With them it must always be the spirit that
leads to the flesh, and that is their peculiar danger. Society can always
take care of the simply licentious males; women know them and for the most
part hate them. But the poet lovers--the men of "temperament"--are fatal to
its prosaic peace. These must "love" before they can desire, must gratify
that emotional longing first, pour themselves out, and have the ecstasy
before the union. That is their fatal nature. The state of love is their
opiate, and each time they dream, it is the only dream. Each woman who can
give them the dream is the only woman,--she calls to them with a single
voice. And they divine afar off those women whose voices will call....

What would come after? ... The woman looked up at the man with a peculiar
light in her eyes, a gentleness which never appeared except for him, and
held him from her, dreaming intangible things.... She, too, could dream
with him,--that was the wonder of it all to her! This was the force that
had taken her out of her ordinary self. She slipped into nothing--never
drifted--looked blind fate between the eyes. But now she dreamed! ... And
as the man spoke to her, covered her with his warm terms of endearment, she
listened--and forgot her little world.

Even the most selfish woman has something of the large mother, the giving
quality, when a man's arms hold her. She reads the man's need and would
supply it. She would comfort the inner sore, supply the lack. And for this
moment, Conny was not selfish: she was thinking of her lover's needs, and
how she could meet them.

Thus the hour sped.

"You love--you love!" the man said again and again,--to convince himself.

Conny smiled disdainfully, as at the childish iteration of a child, but
said nothing. Finally with a long sigh, coming back from her dream, she
rose and stood thoughtfully before the fire, looking down at Cairy
reflectively. He had the bewildered feeling of not understanding what was
in her mind.

"I will dine with you to-morrow," she remarked at last.

Cairy laughed ironically. It was the perfect anti-climax,--after all this
unfathomable silence, after resting in his arms,--"I will dine with you
to-morrow!"

But Conny never wasted words,--the commonest had a meaning. While he was
searching for the meaning under this commonplace, there was the noise of
some one entering the hall below. Conny frowned. Another interruption in
her ordered household! Some servant was coming in at the front door. Or a
burglar?

If it were a burglar, it was a very well assured one that closed the door
carefully, took time to lay down hat and coat, and then with well-bred
quiet ascended the stairs.

"It must be Percy," Conny observed, with a puzzled frown. "Something must
have happened to bring him back to-night."

Woodyard, seeing a light in the library, looked in, the traveller's weary
smile on his face.

"Hello, Percy!" Conny drawled. "What brings you back at this time?"

Woodyard came into the room draggingly, nodded to Cairy, and drew a chair
up to the fire. His manner showed no surprise at the situation.

"Some things came up at Albany," he replied vaguely. "I shall have to go
back to-morrow."

"What is it?" his wife demanded quickly.

"Will you give me a cigarette, Tom?" he asked equably, indicating that he
preferred not to mention his business, whatever it might be. Cairy handed
him his cigarette case.

"These are so much better than the brand Con supplies me with," he observed
lightly.

He examined the cigarette closely, then lit it, and remarked:--

"The train was beastly hot. You seem very comfortable here."

Cairy threw away his cigarette and said good-by.

"Tom," Conny called from the door, as he descended, "don't forget the
dinner." She turned to Percy,--"Tom is taking me to dinner to-morrow."

There was silence between husband and wife until the door below clicked,
and then Conny murmured interrogatively, "Well?"

"I came back," Percy remarked calmly, "because I made up my mind that there
is something rotten on in that Commission."

Conny, after her talk with the Senator, knew rather more about the
Commission than her husband; but she merely asked, "What do you mean?"

"I mean that I want to find just who is interested in this up-state
water-power grant before I go any farther. That is why I came down,--to see
one or two men, especially Princhard."

While Cornelia was thinking of certain remarks that the Senator had made,
Percy added, "I am not the Senator's hired man."

"Of course not!"

Her husband's next remark was startling,--"I have almost made up my mind to
get out, Con,--to take Jackson's offer of a partnership and stick to the
law."

Here, Conny recognized, was a crisis, and like most crises it came
unexpectedly. Conny rose to meet it. Husband and wife discussed the
situation, personal and political, of Percy's fortunes for a long time, and
it was not settled when it was time for bed.

"Con," her husband said, still sitting before the fire as she turned out
the lights and selected a book for night reading, "aren't you going pretty
far with Tom?"

Conny paused and looked at him questioningly.

"Yes," she admitted in an even voice. "I have gone pretty far.... I wanted
to tell you about it. But this political business has worried you so much
lately that I didn't like to add anything."

As Percy made no reply, she said tentatively:--

"I may go farther, Percy.... Tom loves me--very much!"

"It means that--you care for him--the same way?"

"He's given me something," Conny replied evasively, "something I never
felt--just that way--before."

"Yes, Tom is of an emotional nature," Woodyard remarked dryly.

"You don't like Tom. Men wouldn't, I can understand. He isn't like most
men.... But women like him!"

Then for a while they waited, until he spoke, a little wearily,
dispassionately.

"You know, Con, I always want you to have everything that is best for
you--that you feel you need to complete your life. We have been the best
sort of partners, trying not to limit each other in any way.... I know I
have never been enough for you, given you all that you ought to have, in
some ways. I am not emotional, as Tom is! And you have done everything for
me. I shall never forget that. So if another can do something for you, make
your life happier, fuller,--you must do it, take it. I should be a beastly
pig to interfere!"

He spoke evenly, and at the end he smiled rather wanly.

"I know you mean it, Percy,--every word. But I shouldn't want you to be
unhappy," replied Conny, in a subdued voice.

"You need not think of me--if you feel sure that this is best for you."

"You know that I could not do anything that might hurt our life,--_that_ is
the most important!"

Her husband nodded.

"The trouble is that I want both!" she analyzed gravely; "both in different
ways."

A slight smile crept under her husband's mustache, but he made no comment.

"I shall always be honest with you, Percy, and if at any time it becomes--"

"You needn't explain," Percy interrupted hurriedly. "I don't ask! I don't
want to know what is peculiarly your own affair, as this.... As I said, you
must live your life as you choose, not hampered by me. We have always
believed that was the best way, and meant it, too, haven't we?"

"But you have never wanted your own life," Conny remarked reflectively.

"No, not that way!" The look on Percy's face made Conny frown. She was
afraid that he was keeping something back.

"I suppose it is different with a man."

"No, not always," and the smile reappeared under the mustache, a painful
smile. "But you see in my case I never wanted--more."

"Oh!" murmured Conny, more troubled than ever.

"You won't do it lightly, whatever you do, I know! ... And I'll manage--I
shall be away a good deal this winter."

There was another long silence, and when Conny sighed and prepared to leave
the room, Percy spoke:--

"There's one thing, Conny.... This mustn't affect the children."

"Oh, Percy!" she protested. "Of course not."

"You must be careful that it won't--in any way, you understand. That would
be very--wrong."

"Of course," Conny admitted in the same slightly injured tone, as if he
were undervaluing her character. "Whatever I do," she added, "I shall not
sacrifice you or the children, naturally."

"We needn't talk more about it, then, need we?"

Conny slowly crossed the room to her husband, and putting one hand on his
shoulder she leaned down and pushed up the hair from his forehead,
murmuring:--

"You know I love you, Percy!"

"I know it, dear," he answered, caressing her face with his fingers. "If I
don't happen to be enough for you, it is my fault--not yours."

"It isn't that!" she protested. But she could not explain what else it was
that drew her to Cairy so strongly. "It mustn't make any difference between
us. It won't, will it?"

Percy hesitated a moment, still caressing the lovely face.

"I don't think so, Con.... But you can't tell that now--do you think?"

"It mustn't!" she said decisively, as if the matter was wholly in her own
hands. And leaning still closer towards him, she whispered: "You are
wonderful to me. A man who can take things as you do is really--big!" She
meant him to understand that she admired him more than ever, that in
respect to character she recognized that he was larger and finer than the
other man.

Percy kissed the cheek so close to his lips. Conny shrank back perceptibly.
Some elemental instinct of the female pushed its way through her
broad-minded modern philosophy and made her shudder at the double embrace.
She controlled herself at once and again bowed her beautiful head to his.
But Percy did not offer to kiss her.

"There are other things in life than passion," she remarked slowly.

Percy looking directly into her eyes observed dryly: "Oh, many more.... But
passion plays the deuce with the rest sometimes!"

And he held open the door for his wife to leave the room.




CHAPTER XXX


"That snipe!" Conny called Margaret's husband, Mr. Lawrence Pole. Larry, as
he was known in his flourishing days when he loafed in brokers' offices,
and idiotically dribbled away his own fortune and most of his wife's,
rarely earned a better word than this epithet. "She ought to leave
him--divorce him--get rid of such rubbish somehow," Conny continued with
unwonted heat, as the tired motor chugged up the steep Westchester hillside
on its way to Dudley Farms where the Poles lived.

"Perhaps Margaret has prejudices," Isabella suggested. "You know she used
to be religious, and there's her father, the Bishop."

"It would take a good many bishops to keep me tied to Larry!"

Conny was enjoying the early spring air, the virginal complexion of the
April landscape. She surveyed the scene from Isabelle's motor with
complacent superiority. How much better she had arranged her life than
either Margaret or Isabelle! After the talk with Percy the previous
evening, she felt a new sense of power and competency, with a touch of
gratitude for that husband who had so frankly and unselfishly "accepted her
point of view" and allowed her "to have her own life" without a distressing
sense of wrecking anything. Conny's conscience was simple, almost
rudimentary; but it had to be satisfied, such as it was. To-day it was
completely satisfied, and she took an ample pleasure in realizing how well
she had managed a difficult situation,--and also in the prospect of dinner
with her lover in the evening.

That morning before the motor had come for her, she had gone over with
Percy the complicated situation that had developed at Albany. It was her
way in a crisis to let him talk it all out first, and then later,
preferably when he came to her room in the morning after his breakfast with
the children, to suggest those points which she wished to determine his
action. Thus her husband absorbed her views when they would make most
impression and in time came to believe that they were all evolved from his
inner being.... To-day when he appeared shortly before her coffee, she had
glanced at him apprehensively out of her sleepy eyes. But he betrayed no
sign of travail of spirit. Though naturally weary after his brief rest, he
had the same calm, friendly manner that was habitual with him. So they got
at once to the political situation.

She was content with the way in which she had led him, for the time at
least, to resolve his doubts and suspicions. They had no reason to suspect
the Senator,--he had always encouraged Woodyard's independent position in
politics and pushed him. There was not yet sufficient evidence of fraud in
the hearings before the Commission to warrant aggressive action. It would
be a pity to fire too soon, or to resign and lose an opportunity later. It
would mean not only political oblivion, but also put him in a ridiculous
light in the press, and suggest cowardice, etc. So he had gone away to
attend to some matters at his office, and take an afternoon train back to
Albany, with the conviction that "he must do nothing hurriedly, before the
situation had cleared up." Those were his own phrases; Conny always
preferred to have Percy use his own words to express his resolves.

There was only one small matter on her mind: she must see the Senator and
find out--well, as much as she could discreetly, and be prepared for the
next crisis....

"I don't see why Margaret buries herself like this," Conny remarked, coming
back to the present foreground, with a disgusted glance at the little
settlement of Dudley Farms, a sorry combination of the suburb and the
village, which they were approaching. "She might at least have a flat in
the city somewhere, like others."

"Margaret wants the children to be in the country. Probably she gets less
of Larry out here,--that may compensate!"

"As for the children," Conny pronounced with lazy dogmatism, "I don't
believe in fussing. Children must camp where it's best for the parents.
They can get fresh air in the Park."

The motor turned in at a neglected driveway, forbidding with black
tree-trunks, and whirled up to the piazza of a brick house, an ugly
survival of the early country mansion. Mrs. Pole, who was bending over a
baby carriage within a sun parlor, came forward, a smile of welcome on her
pale face. She seemed very small and fragile as she stood above them on the
steps, and her thin, delicate face had the marked lines of a woman of
forty. She said in her slow, Southern voice, which had a pleasant human
quality:--

"I hope you weren't mired. The roads are something awful about here. I am
so glad to see you both."

When she spoke her face lost some of the years.

"It is a long way out,--one can't exactly run in on you, Margaret! If it
hadn't been for Isabelle's magnificent car, you might have died without
seeing me!" Conny poured forth.

"It _is_ a journey; but you see people don't run in on us often."

"You've got a landscape," Conny continued, turning to look across the bare
treetops towards the Sound. It would have been a pleasant prospect except
for the eruption of small houses on every side. "But how can you stand it
the whole year round? Are there any civilized people--in those houses?" She
indicated vaguely the patch of wooden villas below.

"Very few, I suppose, according to your standard, Cornelia. But we don't
know them. I pulled up the drawbridge when we first came."

Mrs. Pole's thin lips twitched with mirth, and Conny, who was never content
with mere inference, asked bluntly:--

"Then what do you do with yourselves--evenings?" Her tone reflected the
emptiness of the landscape, and she added with a treble laugh, "I've always
wondered what suburban life is like!"

"Oh, you eat and read and sleep. Then there are the children daytimes. I
help teach 'em. We live the model life,--flowers and shrubs in the summer,
I suppose.... The Bishop was with me for a time."

The large bare drawing-room, which was sunnily lighted from the southwest,
was singularly without the usual furniture of what Conny called "civilized
life." There were no rugs, few chairs, but one table, such as might be made
by the village carpenter and stained black, which was littered with books
and magazines. There was also a large writing cabinet of mahogany,--a
magnificent piece of Southern colonial design,--and before the fire a
modern couch. Conny inventoried all this in a glance. She could not "make
it out." 'They can't be as poor as that,' she reflected, and turned to the
books on the table.

"Weiniger's _Sex and Character_," she announced, "Brieux's _Maternite_,
Lavedan, Stendhal, Strobel on Child Life,--well, you do read! And this?"
She held up a yellow volume of French plays. "What do you do with this when
the, Bishop comes?"

"The Bishop is used to me now. Besides, he doesn't see very well, poor
dear, and has forgotten his French. Have you read that book of Weiniger's?
It is a good dose for woman's conceit these days."

There was a touch of playful cynicism in the tone, which went with the
fleeting smile. Mrs. Pole understood Cornelia Woodyard perfectly, and was
amused by her. But Conny's coarse and determined handling of life did not
fascinate her fastidious nature as it had fascinated Isabelle's.

Conny continued to poke among the books, emitting comments as she happened
upon unexpected things. It was the heterogeneous reading of an untrained
woman, who was seeking blindly in many directions for guidance, for light,
trying to appease an awakened intellect, and to answer certain gnawing
questions of her soul....

Isabelle and Margaret talked of their visit at the Virginia Springs. In the
mature face, Isabelle was seeking the blond-haired girl, with deep-set blue
eyes, and sensitive mouth, that she had admired at St. Mary's. Now it was
not even pretty, although it spoke of race, for the bony features, the high
brow, the thin nose, had emerged, as if chiselled from the flesh by pain.

'She has suffered,' Isabelle thought, 'suffered--and lived.'

Conny had recounted to Isabelle on their way out some of the rumors about
the Poles. Larry Pole was a weakling, had gone wrong in money
matters,--nothing that had flared up in scandal, merely family
transactions. Margaret had taken the family abroad--she had inherited
something from her mother--and suddenly they had come back to New York, and
Larry had found a petty job in the city. Evidently, from the bare house,
their hiding themselves out here, most of the wife's money had gone, too.

Pity! because Margaret was proud. She had her Virginian mother's pride with
a note of difference. The mother had been proud in the conventional way, of
her family, her position,--things. Margaret had the pride of
accomplishment,--of deeds. She was the kind who would have gone ragged with
a poet or lived content in a sod hut with a Man. And she had married this
Larry Pole, who according to Conny looked seedy and was often rather
"boozy." How could she have made such a mistake,--Margaret of all women?
That Englishman Hollenby, who really was somebody, had been much interested
in her. Why hadn't she married him? Nobody would know the reason....

The luncheon was very good. The black cook, "a relic of my mother's
establishment," as Margaret explained, gave them a few savory family
dishes, and there was a light French wine. Margaret ate little and talked
little, seeming to enjoy the vivacity of the other women.

"Tell about your visit to the Gorings," Conny drawled. "Percy's cousin,
Eugene Goring, who married Aline, you know. Boots in the bath-tub, and the
babies running around naked, and Aline lost in the metaphysics of the arts,
making chairs."

And Isabelle recounted what she had seen of Aline's establishment in St.
Louis, with its total disregard of what Conny called the "decencies" of
life. They all laughed at her picture of their "wood-nymph," as they had
named Aline.

"And Eugene talking anarchy, and washing the dishes,--it sounds like a
Weber and Field's farce," gurgled Conny. "He wrote Percy about lecturing in
New York,--wanted to come East. But Percy couldn't do anything for him. It
isn't a combination to make a drawing-room impression."

"But," Margaret protested, "Aline is a person, and that is more than you
can say of most of us married women. She has kept her personality."

"If I were 'Gene," Conny replied contemptuously, "I'd tone her
'personality' down."

"He's probably big enough to respect it."

There followed a discussion of the woman's part in marriage, Margaret
defending independence, "the woman's right to live for herself," and Conny
taking the practical view.

"She can't be anything any way, just by herself. She had better make the
most of the material she's got to work with--or get another helping," she
added, thinking of Larry.

"And Aline isn't happy," Isabelle remarked; "she has a look on her face as
if she were a thousand miles away, and had forgotten her marriage as much
as she could. Her chairs and tables are just ways of forgetting."

"But they have something to think about,--those two. They don't vegetate."

"I should say they had,--but no anarchy in my domestic circle, thank you!"
Conny observed.

"I shouldn't object to anarchy," sighed Margaret, with her whimsical smile.

"Margaret is bored," Isabelle pronounced, "simply awfully bored. She's so
bored that I expect some day she will poison herself and the children,
merely to find out what comes next."

"No wonder--buried in the snowdrifts out here," Conny agreed. "Isn't there
anything you want to do, even something wicked?"

"Yes," Mrs. Pole answered half seriously. "There is _one_ thing I'd like to
do before I die."

"Tell us!"

"I'd like to find Somebody--man or woman--who cared for the things I care
for--sky and clouds and mountains,--and go away with him anywhere for--a
little while, just a little while," she drawled dreamily, resting her
elbows on the table.

"Elope! Fie, fie!" Conny laughed.

"My mother's father had a plantation in one of the Windward Islands,"
Margaret continued. "It must be nice down there--warm and sunny. I'd like
to lie out on the beach and forget children and servants and husbands, and
stop wondering what life is. Yes, I'd like a vacation--in the Windward
Islands, with somebody who understood."

"To wit, a man!" added Conny.

"Yes, a man! But only for the trip."

They laughed a good deal about Margaret's vacation, called her the
"Windward Islands," and asked her to make reservations for them in her
Paradise when they had found desirable partners.

"Only, I should have to bring John, and he wouldn't know what to do with
himself on a beach," Isabelle remarked. "I don't know any one else to
take."

"You mustn't go Windwarding until you have to," Margaret explained....

At the dessert, the children came in,--two boys and a girl. The elder boy
was eight, with his mother's fair hair, blue eyes, and fine features, and
the same suggestion of race in the narrow high brow, the upward poise of
the head. His younger brother was nondescript, with dark hair and full
lips. Margaret observed her children with a curiously detached air,
Isabelle thought. Was she looking for signs of Larry in that second son?
Alas, she might see Larry always, with the cold apprehension of a woman too
wise to deceive herself! The little girl, fresh from her nap, was round and
undefined, and the mother took her into her arms, cuddling her close to her
breast, as if nothing, not even the seed of Larry, could separate her from
this one; as if she felt in her heart all the ills and sorrows, the woman's
pains to be,--the eternal feminine defeat,--in this tiny ball of freshness.
And the ironical smile subtly softened to a glow of affection. Here, at
least, was an illusion!

Isabelle, watching these two, understood--all the lines, the smile, the
light cynicism--the Windward Islands! She put her arms impulsively about
the mother and the child, hugging them closely. Margaret looked up into her
shining eyes and pressed her hand....

"There are some cigarettes in the other room," Margaret suggested; "we'll
build up the fire and continue the argument in favor of the Windward
Islands."

"It is a long way to New York over that road," Conny observed. "I have an
engagement."

Now that she had satisfied her curiosity about "how the Poles lived," she
began to think of her dinner with Cairy, and was fearful lest she might be
delayed.

"Spend the night," suggested Margaret; but Isabelle, who understood Conny,
telephoned at once for the motor.

"You aren't going back to the West, Isabelle?" Margaret asked, while they
waited for the motor. "Won't you miss it?"

"Miss the West? Did you ever know a woman that had escaped from the
Mississippi Valley who would go back there?" Conny drawled. "Why, Belle is
like a girl just out of school, looking at the shop windows!"

Cornelia Woodyard, who had lived a number of years in a corner of that same
vast valley, looked from metropolitan heights on the monotony of the
"middle West." She had the New Yorker's amusing incapacity to comprehend
existence outside the neighborhood of Fifth Avenue and Central Park.

"One lives out there," Margaret protested with sudden fire, "in those great
spaces. Men grow there. They _do_ things. When my boys are educated I shall
take them away from New York, to the Virginia mountains, perhaps, and have
them grow up there, doing things, real things, working with their hands,
becoming men! Perhaps not there," she mused, recollecting that the acres of
timber and coal in the mountains, her sons' inheritance from her vigorous
ancestors, had been lost to them in a vulgar stock dealer's gamble by their
father,--"perhaps out to Oregon, where I have an uncle. His father rode his
horse all the way from Louisiana across the continent, after the War! He
had nothing but his horse--and before he died he built a city in his new
country. That is where men do things!"

Margaret had flashed into life again. As Tom Cairy would have said,
"_Vraiment, ma petite cousine a une grande ame--etouffee_" (For Cairy
always made his acute observations in the French tongue).

"There's something of the Amazon in you, Margaret," Conny remarked, "in
spite of your desire to seclude yourself in the Windward Islands with a
suitable mate."

The motor finally came puffing up the drive, and the women stood on the
veranda, prolonging their farewells. A round, red, important sun peeped
from under the gray cloud bank that had lowered all the afternoon, flooding
the thin branches of the budding trees, falling warm and gold across the
dead fields.

"See!" Margaret cried, raising her thin arms to the sun. "The Promise!"

"I hope it will hold until we reach Jerome Avenue," Conny replied
practically, preparing to enter the car.

"The promise of another life!"

Margaret was standing in the sun, her nostrils dilated, absorbing the
light, the source of joy and life.

"Windward Islands, eh?" Conny coughed, settling herself comfortably in her
corner.

"The real land," Margaret murmured to herself.

The chauffeur had reached for the lever when there appeared on the drive
two men bearing something between them, a human something, carefully.

"What's that!" exclaimed Conny in a frightened voice. "What is it?" she
repeated to the chauffeur,--demanding of a man something in his province to
know.

"Looks though they had a child--hurt," the chauffeur replied.

Margaret, shading her eyes with a thin hand, looked down the avenue. She
made no movement to go towards the men,--merely waited motionless for the
thing to come. And the men came slowly forward, past the car, up the steps.

It was the older boy. The man who held the head and shoulders of the child
said, "An accident--not serious, I believe."

Margaret opened the door and pointed to the lounge before the fire. The man
who had spoken laid the boy down very gently with his head on a cushion,
and smoothed back the rumpled hair.

"I will go for the doctor," the other man said, and presently there was the
sound of the motor leaping down the hill.

Margaret had dropped on her knees beside the unconscious boy, and placed
one hand on his brow. "Bring some water," she said to Isabelle, and began
to unbutton the torn sweater.

Conny, with one look at the white face and closed eyes, went softly out
into the hall and sat down.

"Will you telephone to Dr. W. S. Rogers in New York, and ask him to send
some one if he can't come himself?" Margaret asked the stranger, who was
helping her with the boy's clothes.

"Can I telephone any one else--his father?" the man suggested, as he turned
to the door.

"No--it would be no use--it's too late to reach him."

Then she turned again to the boy, who was still unconscious....

When the man had finished telephoning, he came back through the hall, where
Conny was sitting.

"How did it happen?" she asked.

"He fell over the culvert,--the high one just as you leave the station, you
know. He was riding his bicycle,--I saw the little chap pushing it up the
hill as I got out of the train. Then a big touring car passed me, and met
another one coming down at full speed. I suppose the boy was frightened and
tried to get too far out on the culvert and fell over. The motors didn't
notice him; but when I reached the spot, I saw his bicycle hanging on the
edge and looked over for him,--could just see his head in the bushes and
leaves. Poor little fellow! It was a nasty fall. But the leaves and the
rubbish must have broken it somewhat."

"Rob! Rob Falkner!" Isabelle exclaimed, as the man turned and met her at
the door. "I didn't recognize you--with your beard! How is Bessie?"

"Very well, I believe. She is in Denver, you know."

When he had gone back to the boy, Isabelle said to Conny:--

"We used to know the Falkners very well. There is a story! ... Strange he
should be _here_. But I heard he was in the East somewhere."

Conny did not seem interested in Rob Falkner and his turning up at this
juncture. She sat with a solemn face, wondering how she could get back to
the city. Finally she resolved to telephone Cairy.

       *       *       *       *       *

Falkner went over to the unconscious boy, and taking his hand, counted the
pulse. "It's all right so far," he said to the mother, who did not hear
him. After a time she looked up, and her low voice dragged hoarsely,--"You
mustn't wait. The doctor will be here soon, and we can do everything now."

"I will wait until the doctor comes," Falkner replied gently, and stepped
to the window to watch for the motor.

After the local doctor had come and said, "A slight concussion,--nothing
serious, I expect," and the boy had revived somewhat, Conny departed alone
in the motor, Isabelle having decided to stay with Margaret over the night.
Falkner helped the doctor carry the patient upstairs, and then started to
leave. Isabelle waited for him at the door.

"Mrs. Pole wishes me to thank you for all your kindness."

"I shall look in to-morrow morning," he replied hurriedly. "I would stay
now until the boy's father came; but I don't suppose there is anything I
can do. I am living at the hotel below, and you can telephone if you want
me."

"You are living here?"

"Yes; I am working on the new dam, a few miles from this place."

"I am so glad to see you again," Isabelle said, the only words she could
think of.

"Thank you."

Then with a curt nod he was off. He had not shown in any way that he was
glad to see her, Isabelle reflected. Falkner was always moody, but she had
thought he liked her,--and after all their friendship! Something had kept
her from asking more about Bessie.




CHAPTER XXXI


Larry did not return for dinner, which Isabelle ate by herself in sombre
silence. When she went upstairs to take the mother's place with the boy,
Margaret did not seem to notice her husband's absence, though she inquired
repeatedly whether the New York doctor had telephoned. Later in the evening
when Isabelle suggested that some effort should be made to find the boy's
father, Margaret exclaimed impatiently:--

"I can't tell where he is! ... It is easier for me that he isn't here." And
in answer to Isabelle's expression, she added: "Don't look so shocked, B!
Larry gets on my nerves frightfully when there is anything extra to bear or
do. Of course I shall telephone his office in the morning, and he will come
out at once. That doctor said there would be no change before morning. Do
you suppose he knows anything, that doctor? He had the look of polite
ignorance!"

The New York doctor arrived towards midnight with a nurse, and stayed the
night to await developments. Margaret still sat by the boy's bed, and
Isabelle left her huddled in a large chair, her eyes staring at the shadow
on the faintly lighted bed. She had listened to what Dr. Rogers had to say
without a word. She was almost stone, Isabelle felt, looking at her with
some awe. What could have made her like this!

She was still in this stony mood the next morning when Larry reached the
house. Dressed in a loose black gown that clung to her slight figure and
brought out the perfect whiteness of her skin, she stood and listened
indifferently to the vague explanation of his absence that her husband
poured out profusely. Then with a remark that the doctor would see him
before he went, she left the room. Isabelle, who was present, watched the
two keenly, trying to divine the secret. To be sure, Larry was not
attractive, she decided,--too effusive, too anxious to make the right
impression, as if he were acting a part before Isabelle, and full of wordy
concern for every one. A little below the medium height, he stood very
erect, consciously making the most of his inches. His sandy hair was thin,
and he wore glasses, behind which one eye kept winking nervously. Neatly,
almost fashionably dressed, he bore no evident marks of dissipation. After
Conny's description, Isabelle had expected to see his shortcomings written
all over him. Though he was over-mannered and talkative, there was nothing
to mark him as of the outcast class. "One doesn't despise one's husband
because he's foolish or unfortunate about money matters," Isabelle said to
herself. And the sympathy that she had felt for Margaret began to
evaporate.

"You say that he fell off that embankment?" Larry remarked to her. "I was
afraid he was too young to ride about here by himself with all the motors
there are in this neighborhood. But Margaret was anxious to have him
fearless.... People who motor are so careless--it has become a curse in the
country.... Mrs. Woodyard came out with you? I am so sorry this frightful
accident spoiled your day."...

He ran on from remark to remark, with no prompting from Isabelle, and had
got to their life in Germany when the doctor entered the room. Larry shook
hands punctiliously with him, inquiring in a special tone: "I hope you have
good news of the little fellow, Doctor? I thought I would not go up until I
had seen you first."...

The doctor cut short the father's prolixity in a burly voice:--

"It's concussion, passing off, I think. But nobody can say what will happen
then,--whether there is anything wrong with the cord. It may clear up in a
few days. It may not. No use speculating.... I shall be back to-morrow or
send some one. Good day."

Larry followed him into the hall, talking, questioning, exclaiming.
Isabella noticed that the doctor gave Pole a quick, impatient glance,
shaking him off with a curt reply, and jumped into the waiting carriage. In
some ways men read men more rapidly than women can. They look for fewer
details, with an eye to the essential stuff of character.

What had the doctor said to Margaret? Had he let her know his evident
fears? When she came into the room for a moment, there was an expression of
fixed will in her white face, as if she had gone down into herself and
found there the courage to meet whatever was coming.... 'The older boy,
too,' thought Isabelle,--'the one so like her, with no outward trace of the
father!'

While Margaret was giving directions for telephoning, making in brief
phrases her arrangements for the day, Falkner came in. He was in his
working clothes, and with his thick beard and scrubby mustache looked quite
rough beside the trim Larry.

"How is the boy?" he demanded directly, going up to the mother.

"Better, I think,--comfortable at least," she answered gently. There was a
warm gleam in her eyes as she spoke to this stranger, as if she had felt
his fibre and liked it.

"I will come in this afternoon. I should like to see him when I can."

"Yes, this afternoon," Margaret replied. "I should be glad to have you
come."

Isabelle had told Pole that Falkner was the man who had found the boy and
brought him home. Larry, with the subtle air of superiority that clothes
seem to give a small man, thanked Falkner in suitable language. Isabelle
had the suspicion that he was debating with himself whether he should give
this workingman a couple of dollars for his trouble, and with an hysterical
desire to laugh interposed:--

"Mr. Pole, this is Mr. Falkner, an old friend of ours!"

"Oh," Larry remarked, "I didn't understand!" and he looked at Falkner
again, still from a distance.

"Rob," Isabelle continued, turning to Falkner, "you didn't tell me
yesterday how Bessie is. I haven't heard from her for a long while,--and
Mildred?"

"They are well, I believe. Bessie doesn't write often."

Pole followed him into the hall, making remarks. Isabelle heard Falkner
reply gruffly: "Yes, it was a nasty fall. But a kid can fall a good way
without hurting himself seriously."

When Pole came back and began to talk to her, Isabelle's sympathy for his
wife revived. The house had settled into the dreary imitation of its
customary routine that the house of suspense takes on. To live in this,
with the mild irritation of Larry's conversational fluency, was quite
intolerable. It was not what he said, but the fact that he was forever
saying it. "A bag of words," Isabelle called him. "Poor Margaret!" And she
concluded that there was nothing more useful for her to do than to take
upon herself the burden of Larry until he should dispose of himself in some
harmless way.




CHAPTER XXXII


No, women such as Margaret Pole do not "despise their husbands because they
are unfortunate in money matters,"--not altogether because they prove
themselves generally incompetent in the man's struggle for life! This
process of the petrification of a woman's heart, slow or rapid as it may
be, is always interesting,--if the woman is endowed in the first place with
the power to feel. How Margaret Lawton may have come to marry Lawrence
Pole, we can defer for the present, as a matter of post-mortem psychology,
unprofitable, melancholy, and inexact, however interesting. How does any
woman come to marry any man? Poets, psychologists, and philosophers have
failed to account for the accidents of this emotional nexus.

What is determinable and more to our purpose is the subsequent process of
dissolution, or petrifaction. All that need be said is that Margaret
married her husband when she was twenty-four, with confidence, belief in
him, and a spiritual aspiration concerning marriage not possible to many
who marry. However foolishly she may have deluded herself,--betrayed a
fatal incapacity to divine,--she believed when she went to the altar with
Lawrence Pole that she was marrying a Man,--one whom she could respect as
well as love, and to whom she should remain loyally bound in mind and heart
and soul.

She was ardent, this delicate Southern girl. Under a manner that had seemed
to comrades at St. Mary's cold because of its reticence, there burned the
fire of a crusading race,--of those Southerners who had pushed from the fat
lowlands about the sea into the mountains and across them to the
wilderness; of that uncle, who after the defeat of his cause had ridden his
cavalry horse across the entire country in search of a new opening, to
build at forty-three a new life for himself and his wife--after defeat!
There was courage, aspiration, the power of deeds in that blood,--note the
high forehead, the moulded chin, the deep eyes of this woman. And there was
also in her religious faith, received from her father the Bishop, piety,
and accepted beliefs in honor, loyalty, love to one's family and friends,
and charity to the world. All this was untested, handed down to her wrapped
in the prayer-book by the Bishop. And she had seen a bit of what we call
the world, there in Washington among her mother's friends,--had been gay,
perhaps reckless, played like a girl with love and life, those hours of
sunshine. She knew vaguely that some men were liars, and some were carnal;
but she came to her marriage virgin in soul as well as body, without a spot
from living, without a vicious nerve in her body, ready to learn.

And folly with money, mere incompetence, did not turn that heart to
stone,--not that alone. The small segment of the world that knew the Poles
might think so, hearing how Larry had gone into Wall Street and fatuously
left there his own small fortune, and later, going back after his lesson,
had lost what he could of his wife's property. To be sure, after that first
"ill luck," Margaret's eyes had opened to the fact that her husband was not
"practical," was easily led by vanity. In the Lawton family it had been the
Man's part to deal effectively with practical life, and women did not
concern themselves with their judgments. But as Margaret had never expected
to be rich,--had no ambition for place in the social race,--she would have
gone back to her blue-capped mountains and lived there contented, "with
something to look at." She had urged this course upon her husband after the
first disaster; but he was too vain to "get out," to "quit the game," to
leave New York. So with the understanding that henceforth he would stick to
prosaic methods of money making, he had started again in his brokerage
business. This was at the time when Margaret was occupied with her babies.
As the indubitable clay of her idol revealed itself, she had thought that
child-bearing, child-having would be a tolerable compensation for her idyl.
Margaret Pole was one who "didn't mind having babies," and did not consider
the fatal nine months a serious deprivation of life. She liked it all, she
told Isabelle, and was completely happy only when the children were coming
and while they were helpless babies. One real interest suffices for all.

Then one day, after the second boy was born, Larry came in, shaking in hand
and heart, and the miserable news was soon out,--"caught in the panic,"
"unexpected turn of the market." But how could he be caught, his wife
demanded, with contracting blue eyes? Had his firm failed? And after a
little,--lie and subterfuge within lie and subterfuge being unwrapped,--it
appeared,--the fact. He had "gone into cotton"--with whose money? His
mother's estate,--those excellent four per cent gold bonds that the thrifty
judge had put aside for his widow!

With the look that Margaret gave her husband, he might have seen that the
process of petrifaction had set in, had gone far, indeed.

Margaret loved her mother-in-law,--the sweet old woman of gentle fancies
who lived in an old house in an old town on the Massachusetts coast, the
town where she and the judge had grown up. An unworldly, gentle woman, who
had somehow told her daughter-in-law without words that she knew what was
missing in her woman's heart. No, the judge's widow should not pay for her
son's folly! So Margaret sold the New York house, which was hers, and also
some of those mountain lands that had a growing value now, realizing
bitterly that by this early sale she was sacrificing her boys'
heritage--the gift of her forefathers--for a miserable tithe of its real
value,--just because their father was too weak to hold what others had
given him; and hadn't kept faith with her like a frank comrade.... What was
left she took into her own possession.

So the Poles went abroad, after this. In doubt and distress, in sickness
and divorce, what else does an American do? Margaret had one lingering hope
for her husband. He had a good voice. At college it was considered
remarkable,--a clear, high tenor. He had done little with his gift except
make social capital out of it. And he had some aptitude for acting. He had
been a four years' star in the college operas. If the judge had not
belonged to the settled classes, Larry might have adorned a "Broadway
show." Instead, through his father's influence, he had attempted
finance--and remained an amateur, a "gentleman." But now, Margaret said to
herself, over there, away from trivial society,--the bungled business
career ended,--Larry might turn to his gift seriously. He was only
thirty-two,--not too old, with hard work and steady persistence, which she
would supply, to achieve something. For she would have been content to have
him in the Broadway show; it mattered not to her now what he should do. And
then she beguiled herself with the hope that some of that intellectual
life, the interests in books, music, art--in ideas--could come to them in
common,--a little of what she had dreamed the husband-and-wife life might
be like. Thus with clear insight into her husband's nature, with few
illusions, but with tolerance and hope, Margaret betook herself to Munich
and settled her family in a little villa on the outskirts, conformable to
their income,--_her_ income, which was all they had. But it mattered not
what she had to live on; her mother had shown her how to make a little
answer....

At first Larry liked this Munich life. It saved his vanity, and offered an
easy solution for his catastrophe in cotton. He was the artist, not fitted
for business, as his wife saw. He liked to go to concerts and opera, and
take lessons,--but he had to learn German and he was lazy about that.
Margaret studied German with him, until the little girl came. Then Larry
was left to amuse himself, and did it. First he found some idle American
students, and ran about with them, and through them he fell in with a woman
of the Stacia Conry type, of which there is always a supply in every
agreeable European centre. When Margaret emerged from her retirement and
began to look about, she found this Englishwoman very prominent on the
horizon. Larry sang with her and drove with her and did the other things
that he could not do with his wife. He was the kind of man who finds the
nine months of his wife's disability socially irksome, and amuses himself
more or less innocently.

Margaret understood. Whether Larry's fondness for Mrs. Demarest was
innocent or not, she did not care; she was surprised with herself to find
that she had no jealousy whatever. Mrs. Demarest did not exist for her.
This Mrs. Conry had a husband who came to Munich after her and bore her
back to London. When Larry proposed that they should spend the next season
in London, his wife said calmly:--

"You may if you like. I am going to return to America."

"And my work?"

Margaret waved a hand ironically:--

"You will be better alone.... My father is getting old and feeble; I must
see him."...

When the family sailed, Larry was in the party. Mrs. Demarest had written
him the proper thing to write after such an intimacy, and Larry felt that
he must "get a job."...

In those months of the coming of the little girl and the summer afterwards,
the new Margaret had been born. It was a quiet woman, outwardly calm,
inwardly thinking its way slowly to conclusions,--thoughts that would have
surprised the good Bishop. For when her heart had begun to grow cold in the
process of petrifaction, there had awakened a new faculty,--her mind. She
began to digest the world. Those little rules of life, the ones handed down
with the prayer-book, having failed, she asked questions,--'What is life?
What is a woman's life? What is my life? What is duty? A woman's duty? My
duty, married to Larry?'...

And one by one with relentless clarity she stripped bare all those
platitudinous precepts that she had inherited, had accepted, as one accepts
the physical facts of the world. When the untrained mind of a woman, driven
in on itself by some spiritual bruise, begins to reach out for light, the
end may be social Anarchy. Margaret read and understood French and German,
and she had ample time to read. She saw modern plays that presented facts,
naked and raw, and women's lives from the inside, without regard to the
moral convention. She perceived that she had a soul, an inner life of her
own, apart from her husband, her children, her father, from all the world.
That soul had its own rights,--must be respected. What it might compel her
to do in the years to come, was not yet clear. She waited,--growing. If it
had not been for her father, she would have been content to stay on in
Europe as she was, reading, thinking, loving her children.

On the way back to America, Larry, becoming conscious in the monotony of
the voyage of his own insufficiency and failure, hinted that he was ready
to accept the mountain home, which Margaret still retained, her mother's
old house. "We might try living in the country," he suggested. But
Margaret, focussing in one rapid image the picture of her husband always
before her in the intimacy of a lonely country life, Larry disintegrating
in small ways, shook her head firmly, giving as an excuse, "The children
must have schools." She would set him at some petty job in the city,
anything to keep him from rotting completely. For he was the father of her
children!

The good old Bishop met them at the pier in New York. In spite of his
hardened convictions about life, the little rule of thumb by which he
lived, he knew something of men and women; and he suspected that process of
petrifaction in his daughter's heart. So he took occasion to say in their
first intimate talk:--

"I am glad that you and Lawrence have decided to come home to live. It is
not well for people to remain long away from their own country, to evade
the responsibilities of our social brotherhood. The Church preaches the
highest communism, ... and you must help your husband to find some definite
service in life, and do it."

Margaret's lips curved dangerously, and the Bishop, as if answering this
sign, continued:--

"Lawrence does not show great power, I know, my dear. But he is a good
man,--a faithful husband and a kind father. That is much, Margaret. It
rests with you to make him more!"

'Does it?' Margaret was asking herself behind her blank countenance. 'One
cannot make bricks without straw.... What is that sort of goodness worth in
a man? I had rather my husband were what you call a bad man--and a Man.'
But she said nothing.

"Thus our Lord has ordered it in this life," continued the Bishop, feeling
that he was making headway; "that one who is weak is bound to one who is
stronger,--perchance for the good of both."

Margaret smiled.

"And a good woman has always the comfort of her children,--when she has
been blessed with them,--who will grow to fill the desolate places in her
heart," concluded the good Bishop, feeling that he had irrefutably
presented to his daughter the right ideas. But the daughter was thinking,
with the new faculty that was awakening in her:--

'Do children fill the desolate spots in a woman's heart completely? I love
mine, even if they are spotted with his weaknesses. I am a good mother,--I
know that I am,--yet I could love,--oh, I could love grandly some one else,
and love them more because of it! At thirty a woman is not done with
loving, even though she has three children.'

But she did not dispute her father's words, merely saying in a weary voice,
"I suppose Larry and I will make a life of it, as most people do, somehow!"

Nevertheless, as she spoke these words of endurance, there was welling up
within her the spirit of rebellion against her lot,--the ordinary lot of
acceptance. She had a consciousness of power in herself to live, to be
something other than the prosaic animal that endures.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Poles took the house at Dudley Farms and began the routine of American
suburban life, forty miles from New York. After several months of futile
effort, spaced by periods of laziness that Margaret put an end to, a
gentleman's job was secured for Larry, through the kindness of one of his
father's friends. At first Larry was inclined to think that the work would
belittle him, spoil his chances of "better things." But Margaret, seeing
that as assistant secretary to the Malachite Company he could do no harm,
could neither gamble nor loaf, replied to these doubts in a tone of cold
irony:--

"You can resign when you find something better suited to your talents."

Thus at thirty-five Larry was _range_ and a commuter. He dressed well, kept
up one of his clubs, talked the condition of the country, and was a kind
father to his boys.... 'What more should a woman expect?' Margaret asked
herself, thinking of her father's words and enumerating her blessings.
Three healthy children, a home and enough to eat and wear, a husband who
(in spite of Conny's gossip) neither drank to excess nor was unfaithful nor
beat her,--who had none of the obvious vices of the male! Good God!
Margaret sighed with a bitter sense of irony.

"I must be a wicked woman," her mother would have said under similar
circumstances,--and there lies the change in woman's attitude.

Looking across the table at Larry in his neat evening clothes,--he was
growing a trifle stout these days,--listening to his observations on the
railroad service, or his suggestion that she should pay more attention to
dress, Margaret felt that some day she must shriek maniacally. But instead
her heart grew still and cold, and her blue eyes icy.

"What is there in woman that makes trifles so important?" she asked
Isabelle in a rare effusion of truth-speaking. "Why do some voices--correct
and well-bred ones--exasperate you, and others, no better, fill you with
content, comfort? Why do little acts--the way a man holds a book or strokes
his mustache--annoy you? Why are you dead and bored when you walk with one
person, and are gay when you walk by yourself?"

To all of which Isabelle sagely replied: "You think too much, Margaret
dear. As John says when I ask him profound questions, 'Get up against
something real!'"

For Isabelle could be admirably wise where another was concerned.

"Yes," Margaret admitted, "I suppose I am at fault. It is my job to make
life worth living for all of us,--the Bishop, mother-in-law, children,
Larry,--all but myself. That's a woman's privilege."

So she did her "job." But within her the lassitude of dead things was ever
growing, sapping her physical buoyancy, sapping her will. She called to her
soul, and the weary spirit seemed to have withdrawn.

"A case of low vitality," in the medical jargon of the day. And hers was a
vital stock, too.

'In time,' she said, 'I shall be dead, and then I shall be a good
woman,--wholly good! The Bishop will be content.' And she smiled in denial
of her own words. For even then, at the lowest ebb, her soul spoke: there
was wonder and joy and beauty somewhere in this gray procession of
phenomena, and it must come to her sometime. And when it came, her heart
said, she would grasp it!




CHAPTER XXXIII


These days Larry Pole began to think well of himself once more. He had made
his mistakes,--what man hasn't?--but he had wiped out the score, and he was
fulfilling the office of under-secretary to the great Malachite Company
admirably. He was conscious that the men in the office felt that his
personality, his bearing, and associations gave distinction to the place.
And he still secretly looked for some turn in the game which would put him
where he desired to be. In New York the game is always on, the tables
always set: from the newsboy to the magnate the gambler's hope is open to
every man.

Only one thing disturbed his self-complacency,--Margaret treated him
indifferently, coldly. He even suspected that though by some accident she
had borne him three children he had never won her love, that she had never
been really his. Since their return from Europe and establishing themselves
in the country, she had withdrawn more and more from him--where? Into
herself. She had her own room and dressing-room, beyond the children's
quarters, in the rear of the rambling house, and her life seemed to go on
in those rooms more and more. It was almost, Larry observed discontentedly,
as if there were not a husband in the situation. Well, he reflected
philosophically, women were like that,--American women; they thought they
owned themselves even after they had married. If a wife took that attitude,
she must not complain if the husband went his way, too. Larry in these
injured moods felt vague possibilities of wickedness within him,--justified
errancies....

One day he was to see deep into that privacy, to learn all--all he was
capable of understanding--about his wife. Margaret had been to the city,--a
rare event,--had lunched with Isabella, and gone to see a new actress in a
clever little German play. She and Isabelle had talked it over,--very
animatedly. Then she had brought back with her some new books and foreign
reviews. After dinner she was lying on the great lounge before the fire,
curled up in a soft dress of pale lilac, seriously absorbing an article on
a Russian playwright. Hers was a little face,--pale, thin, with sunken
eyes. The brow was too high, and latterly Margaret paid no attention to
arranging her hair becomingly. It was not a face that could be called
pretty; it would not be attractive to most men, her husband thought as he
watched her. But it had drawn some men strongly, fired them; and Larry
still longed for its smiles,--desired her.

He had felt talkative that evening, had chattered all through dinner, and
she had listened tolerantly, as she might to her younger boy when he had a
great deal to say about nothing. But now she had taken refuge in this
review, and Larry had dropped from sight. When he had finished his
cigarette, he sat down on the edge of the lounge, taking her idle hand in
his. She let him caress it, still reading on. After a time, as he continued
to press the hand, his wife said without raising her eyes:--

"What do you want?"

"'What do you want?'" Larry mimicked! "Lord! you American women are as hard
as stone."

"Are the others different?" Margaret asked, raising her eyes.

"They say they are--how should I know?"

"I thought you might know from experience," she observed equably.

"I have never loved any woman but you, Margaret!" he said tenderly. "You
know that!"

Margaret made no response. The statement seemed to demand something of her
which she could not give. He took her hand again, caressed it, and finally
kissed her. She looked at him steadily, coldly.

"Please--sit over there!" As her husband continued to caress her, she sat
upright. "I want to say something to you, Larry."

"What is it?"

"There can't be any more of _that_--you understand?--between us."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean--_that_, what you call love, passion, is over between us."

"Why? ... what have I done?"

Margaret waved her hand impatiently:--

"It makes no difference,--I don't want it--I can't--that is all."

"You refuse to be my wife?"

"Yes,--that way."

"You take back your marriage vow?" (Larry was a high churchman, which fact
had condoned much in the Bishop's eyes.)

"I take back--myself!"

Margaret's eyes shone, but her voice was calm.

"If you loved any other man--but you are as cold as ice!"

"Am I?"

"Yes! ... I have been faithful to you always," he observed by way of
defence and accusation.

Margaret rose from the couch, and looked down at her husband, almost
compassionately. But when she spoke, her low voice shook with scorn:--

"That is your affair,--I have never wanted to know.... You seem to pride
yourself on that. Good God! if you were more of a man,--if you were man
enough to want anything, even sin,--I might love you!"

It was like a bolt of white fire from the clear heavens. Her husband
gasped, scarcely comprehending the words.

"I don't believe you know what you are saying. Something has upset you....
Would you like me to love another woman? That's a pretty idea for a wife to
advance!"

"I want you to--oh, what's the use of talking about it, Larry? You know
what I mean--what I think, what I have felt--for a long time, even before
little Elsa came. How can you want love with a woman who feels towards you
as I do?"

"It is natural enough for a man who cares for his wife--"

"Too natural," Margaret laughed bitterly. "No, Larry; that's all over! You
can do as you like,--I shan't ask questions. And we shall get on very well,
like this."

"This comes of the rotten books you read!" he fumed.

"I do my own thinking."

"Suppose I don't want the freedom you hand out so readily?" he asked with
an appealing note. "Suppose I still love you, my wife? have always loved
you! You married me.... I've been unfortunate--"

"It isn't that, you know! It isn't the money--the fact that you would have
beggared your mother--not quite that. It's everything--_you!_ Why go into
it? I don't blame you, Larry. But I know you now, and I don't love
you--that is all."

"You knew me when you married me. Why did you marry me?"

"Why--why did I marry you?"

Margaret's voice had the habit of growing lower and stiller as passion
touched her heart. "Yes--you may well ask that! Why does a woman see those
things she wants to see in a man, and is blind to what she might see! ...
Oh, why does any woman marry, my husband?"

And in the silence that followed they were both thinking of those days in
Washington, eight years before, when they had met. He was acting as
secretary to some great man then, and was flashing in the pleasant light of
youth, popularity, social approbation. He had "won out" against the
Englishman, Hollenby,--why, he had never exactly known.

Margaret was thinking of that why, as a woman does think at times for long
years afterwards, trying to solve the psychological puzzle of her foolish
youth! Hollenby was certainly the abler man, as well as the more brilliant
prospect. And there were others who had loved her, and whom even as a girl
she had wit enough to value.... A girl's choice, when her heart speaks, as
the novelists say, is a curious process, compounded of an infinite number
of subtle elements,--suggestions, traits of character, and above all
temporary atmospheric conditions of mind. It is a marvel if it ever can be
resolved into its elements! ... The Englishman--she was almost his--had
lost her because once he had betrayed to the girl the brute. One frightened
glimpse of the animal in his nature had been enough. And in the rebound
from this chance perception of man as brute, she had listened to Lawrence
Pole, because he seemed to her all that the other was not,--high-souled,
poetic, restrained, tender,--all the ideals. With him life would be a
communion of lovely and lovable things. He would secure some place in the
diplomatic service abroad, and they would live on the heights, with art,
ideas, beauty....

"Wasn't I a fool--not to know!" she remarked aloud. She was thinking, with
the tolerance of mature womanhood: 'I could have tamed the brute in the
other one. At least he was a man!' "Well, we dream our dreams, sentimental
little girls that we are! And after a time we open our eyes like kittens on
life. I have opened mine, Larry,--very wide open. There isn't a sentimental
chord in my being that you can twang any longer.... But we can be
good-tempered and sensible about it. Run along now and have your cigar, or
go over to the country club and find some one to play billiards,--only let
me finish what you are pleased to call my rotten reading,--it is so
amusing!"

She had descended from the crest of her passion, and could play with the
situation. But her husband, realizing in some small way the significance of
these words they had exchanged, still probed the ground:--

"If you feel like that, why do you still live with me? Why do you consent
to bear my name?"

The pomposity of the last words roused a wicked gleam in his wife's eyes.
She looked up from her article again.

"Perhaps I shan't always 'consent to bear your name,' Larry. I'm still
thinking, and I haven't thought it all out yet. When I do, I may give up
your name,--go away. Meanwhile I think we get on very well: I make a
comfortable home for you; you have your children,--and they are well
brought up. I have kept you trying to toe the mark, too. Take it all in
all, I haven't been a bad wife,--if we are to present references?"

"No," Larry admitted generously; "I have always said you were too good for
me,--too fine."

"And so, still being a good wife, I have decided to take myself back." She
drew her small body together, clasping her arms about the review. "My body
and my soul,--what is personally most mine. But I will serve you--make you
comfortable. And after a time you won't mind, and you will see that it was
best."

"It goes deeper than that," her husband protested, groping for the idea
that he caught imperfectly; "it means practically that we are living under
the same roof but aren't married!"

"With perfect respectability, Larry, which is more than is always the case
when a man and a woman live under the same roof, either married or
unmarried! ... I am afraid that is it in plain words. But I will do my best
to make it tolerable for you."

"Perhaps some day you'll find a man,--what then?"

Margaret looked at him for a long minute before replying.

"And if I should find a Man, God alone knows what would happen!"

Then in reply to the frightened look on her husband's face, she added
lightly:--

"Don't worry, Larry! No immediate scandal. I haven't any one in view, and
living as I do it isn't likely that I shall be tempted by some knightly or
idiotic man, who wants to run away with a middle-aged woman and three
children. I am anchored safely--at any rate as long as dad lives and your
mother, and the children need my good name. Oh!" she broke off suddenly;
"don't let us talk any more about it!" ...

Leaning her head on her hands, she looked into the fire, and murmured to
herself as if she had forgotten Larry's presence:--

"God! why are we so blind, so blind,--and our feet caught in the net of
life before we know what is in our souls!"

For she realized that when she said she was middle-aged and anchored, it
was but the surface truth. At thirty, with three children, she was more the
woman, more capable of love, passion, understanding, devotion--more capable
of giving herself wholly and greatly to a mate--than any girl could be. The
well of life still poured its flood into her! Her husband could never know
that agony of longing, those arms stretched out to--what? When would this
torture of defeated capacity be ended--when had God set the term for her to
suffer!

In the black silence that had fallen between them, Pole betook himself to
the club, as his wife had suggested, for the consolation of billiards and
talk among sensible folk, "who didn't take life so damned hard." In the
intervals of these distractions his mind would revert to what had passed
between him and his wife that evening. Margaret's last remarks comforted
him somewhat. Nothing of a scandalous or public demonstration of her
feeling about her marriage was imminent. Nevertheless, his pride was hurt.
In spite of the fact that he had suspected for a long time that his wife
was cold,--was not "won,"--he had hitherto travelled along in complacent
egotism. "They were a fairly happy couple" or "they geed as well as most,"
as he would have expressed it. He had not suspected that Margaret might
feel the need of more than that. To-night he had heard and understood the
truth,--and it was a blow. Deep down in his masculine heart he felt that he
had been unjustly put in the wrong, somehow. No woman had the right--no
wife--to say without cause that having thought better of the marriage
bargain she had "taken herself back." There was something preposterous in
the idea. It was due to the modern fad of a woman's reading all sorts of
stuff, when her mind was inflammable. He recognized that his wife was the
more important, the stronger person of the two,--that was the trouble with
American women (Larry always made national generalizations when he wished
to express a personal truth)--they knew when they were strong,--felt their
oats. They needed to be "tamed."

But Larry was aware that he was not fitted for the task of woman-tamer, and
moreover it should have been begun long before this.

So having won his game of billiards Larry had a drink, which made him even
more philosophical. "Margaret is all right," he said to himself. "She was
strung up to-night,--something made her go loose. But she'll come
around,--she'll never do the other thing!" Yet in spite of a second whiskey
and soda before starting for home, he was not absolutely convinced of this
last statement.

What makes a man like Larry Pole content to remain the master of the fort
merely in name, when the woman has escaped him in spirit? Why will such men
as he live on for years, aye and get children, with women, who do not even
pretend to love them?

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile the wife sat there before the fire, her reading forgotten,
thinking, thinking. She had said more than she herself knew to be in her
heart. For one lives on monotonously, from day to day, unresolved, and then
on occasion there flame forth unsuspected ideas, resolves. For the soul has
not been idle.... It was true that their marriage was at an end. And it was
not because of her husband's failures, his follies,--not the money
mistakes. It was himself,--the petty nature he revealed in every act. For
women like Margaret Pole can endure vice and folly and disappointment, but
not a petty, trivial, chattering biped that masquerades as Man.




CHAPTER XXXIV


IN the weeks that followed the accident Margaret Pole saw much of Falkner.
The engineer would come up the hill to the old house late in the afternoon
after his work, or ride up on his bicycle in the morning on his way to the
dam he was building. Ned--"the Little Man" as Falkner called him--came to
expect this daily visit as one of his invalid rights. Several times Falkner
stayed to dinner; but he bored Larry, who called him "a Western bounder,"
and grumbled, "He hasn't anything to say for himself." It was true that
Falkner developed chronic dumbness in Larry's conversational presence. But
Margaret seemed to like the "bounder." She discovered that he carried in
his pocket a volume of verse. An engineer who went to his job these days
with a poetry book in his coat pocket was not ordinary, as she remarked to
her husband....

Falkner's was one of those commonplace figures to be seen by the thousands
in an American city. He dressed neither well nor ill, as if long ago the
question of appearances had ceased to interest him, and he bought what was
necessary for decency in the nearest shop. His manners, though brusque,
indicated that he had always been within that vague line which marks off
the modern "gentleman." His face, largely covered by beard and mustache,
was pale and thoughtful, and his eyes were tired, usually dull. He was
merely one of the undistinguished units in the industrial army. Obviously
he had not "arrived," had not pushed into the circle of power. Some lack of
energy, or natal unfitness for the present environment? Or was he inhibited
by a twist of fate, needing an incentive, a spur?

At any rate the day when Margaret met him, the day when he had brought her
boy home in his arms, the book of life seemed closed and fastened for him
forever. The fellow-units in the industrial scheme in which he had become
fixed, might say of him,--"Yes, a good fellow, steady, intelligent, but
lacks push,--he'll never get there." Such are the trite summaries of man
among men. Of all the inner territory of the man's soul, which had resolved
him in its history to what he was, had left him this negative unit of life,
his fellows were ignorant, as man must be of man. They saw the Result, and
in the rough arithmetic of life results are all that count with most
people.

But the woman--Margaret,--possessing her own hidden territory of soul
existence, had divined more, even in that first tragic moment, when he had
borne her maimed child into the house and laid his burden tenderly on the
lounge. As he came and went, telephoning, doing the little that could be
done, she saw more than the commonplace figure, clothed in ready-made
garments; more than the dull, bearded face, the strong, thin hands, the
rumpled hair. Something out of that vast beyond which this stranger had in
common with her had spoken through the husk, even then....

And it had not ended there, as it would have ended, had Falkner been the
mere "bounder" Larry saw. It was Falkner to whom the mother first told the
doctors' decision about the boy. Certain days impress their atmosphere
indelibly; they have being to them like persons, and through years the
odor, the light, the sense of their few hours may be recalled as vividly as
when they were lived. This May day the birds were twittering beside the
veranda where Margaret was reading to the Little Man, when Falkner came up
the drive. The long windows of the house were opened to admit the soft air,
for it was already summer. Margaret was dressed in a black gown that
relieved the pallor of her neck and face like the dark background of an old
portrait. As the boy called, "There's big Bob!" she looked up from her book
and smiled. Yet in spite of the placid scene, the welcoming smile, Falkner
knew that something had happened,--something of moment. The three talked
and the birds chattered; the haze of the gentle brooding day deepened. Far
away above the feathery treetops, which did their best to hide the little
houses, there was the blue line of sea, gleaming in the sun. It seemed to
Falkner after the long day's work the very spot of Peace, and yet in the
woman's controlled manner there was the something not peace. When Falkner
rose to go, Margaret accompanied him to the steps.

"It's like the South to-day, all this sun and windless air. You have never
been in the South? Some days I ache for it."

In the full light she seemed a slight, worn figure with a blanched face.

"Bring me my puppy, please, Bob!" the child called from his couch. "He's in
the garden."

Falkner searched among the flower-beds beneath the veranda and finally
captured the fat puppy and carried him up to the boy, who hugged him as a
girl would a doll, crooning to him. Margaret was still staring into space.

"What has happened?" Falkner asked.

She looked at him out of her deep eyes, as if he might read there what had
happened. They descended the steps and walked away from the house.

"He hears so quickly," she explained; "I don't want him to know yet."

So they kept on down the drive.

"Dr. Rogers was here this morning.... He brought two other doctors with
him.... There is no longer any doubt--it is paralysis of the lower limbs.
He will never walk, they think."

They kept on down the drive, Falkner looking before him. He knew that the
woman was not crying, would never betray her pain that watery way; but he
could not bear to see the misery of those eyes.

"My father the Bishop has written me ... spiritual consolation for Ned's
illness. Should I feel thankful for the chastening to my rebellious spirit
administered to me through my poor boy? Should I thank God for the lash of
the whip on my stubborn back?"

Falkner smiled.

"My father the Bishop is a good man, a kind man in his way, yet he never
considered my mother--he lived his own life with his own God.... It would
surprise him if he knew what I thought about God,--_his_ God, at least."...

Falkner looked at her at last, and they stopped. Afterwards he knew that he
already loved Margaret Pole. He, too, had divined that the woman, stricken
through her child, was essentially alone in the world, and in her hungry
eyes lay the story of the same dreary road over which he had passed. And
these two, defeated ones in the riotous world of circumstance, silently,
instinctively held out hands across the void and looked at each other with
closed lips.

Among the trees the golden haze deepened, and the birds sang. Down below in
the village sounded the deep throbs of an engine: the evening train had
come from the city. It was the only disturbing note in the peace, the
silence. The old house had caught the full western sun, and its dull red
bricks glowed. On the veranda the small boy was still caressing the puppy.

"Mother!" a thin voice sounded. Margaret started.

"Good-by," Falkner said. "I shall come to-morrow."

At the gate he met Pole, lightly swinging a neat green bag, his gloves in
his hand. Larry stopped to talk, but Falkner, with a short, "Pleasant
afternoon," kept on. Somehow the sight of Pole made the thing he had just
learned all the worse.

Thus it happened that in the spac