Was there ever a young man who could see any reasons against the possession of the woman he loved? Was there ever any love worth the name that could be controlled by calculations of expediency? I have no doubt that John Lyon went through the usual process which is called weighing a thing in the mind. It is generally an amusing process, and it is consoling to the conscience. The mind has little to do with it except to furnish the platform on which the scales are set up. A humorist says that he must have a great deal of mind, it takes him so long to make it up. There is the same apparent deliberation where love is concerned. Everything "contra" is carefully placed in one scale of the balance, and it is always satisfactory and convincing to see how quickly it kicks the beam when love is placed in the other scale. The lightest love in the world, under a law as invariable as gravitation, is heavier than any other known consideration. It is perhaps doing injustice to Mr. Lyon not to dwell upon this struggle in his mind, and to say that in all honesty he may not have known that the result of it was predetermined. But interesting and commendable as are these processes of the mind, I confess that I should have respected him less if the result had not been predetermined. And this does not in any way take from him the merit of a restless night and a tasteless breakfast.

Philosophizers on this topic say that a man ought always to be able to tell by a woman's demeanor towards him whether she is favorably inclined, and that he need run no risk. Little signs, the eyes alone, draw people together, and make formal language superfluous. This theory is abundantly sustained by examples, and we might rest on it if all women knew their own minds, and if, on the other hand, they could always tell whether a man was serious before he made a definite avowal. There is another notion, fortunately not yet extinct, that the manliest thing a man can do is to take his life in his hand, pay the woman he loves the highest tribute in his power by offering her his heart and name, and giving her the definite word that may be the touchstone to reveal to herself her own feeling. In our conventional life women must move behind a mask in a world of uncertainties. What wonder that many of them learn in their defensive position to play a game, and sometimes experiment upon the honest natures of their admirers! But even this does not absolve the chivalrous man from the duty of frankness and explicitness. Life seems ideal in that far country where the handsome youth stops his carriage at the gate of the vineyard, and says to the laughing girl carrying a basket of grapes on her head, "My pretty maid, will you marry me?" And the pretty maid, dropping a courtesy, says, "Thank you, sir; I am already bespoken," or "Thank you; I will consider of it when I know you better."

Not for a moment, I suppose, is a woman ever ignorant of a man's admiration of her, however uncertain she may be of his intentions, and it was with an unusual flutter of the heart that Margaret received Mr. Lyon that afternoon. If she had doubts, they were dissipated by a certain constraint in his manner, and the importance he seemed to be attaching to his departure, and she was warned to go within her defenses. Even the most complaisant women like at least the appearance of a siege.

"I'm off tomorrow," he said, "for Washington. You know you recommended it as necessary to my American education."

"Yes. We send Representatives and strangers there to be educated. I have never been there myself."

"And do you not wish to go?"

"Very much. All Americans want to go to Washington. It is the great social opportunity; everybody there is in society. You will be able to see there, Mr. Lyon, how a republican democracy manages social life.

"Do you mean to say there are no distinctions?"

"Oh, no; there are plenty of official distinctions, and a code that is very curious and complicated, I believe. But still society is open."

"It must be—pardon me—a good deal like a mob."

"Well, our mobs of that sort are said to be very well behaved. Mr. Morgan says that Washington is the only capital in the world where the principle of natural selection applies to society; that it is there shown for the first time that society is able to take care of itself in the free play of democratic opportunities."

"It must be very interesting to see that."

"I hope you will find it so. The resident diplomats, I have heard, say that they find society there more agreeable than at any other capital—at least those who have the qualities to make themselves agreeable independent of their rank."

"Is there nothing like a court? I cannot see who sets the mode."

"Officially there may be something like a court, but it can be only temporary, for the personnel of it is dissolved every four years. And society, always forming and reforming, as the voters of the republic dictate, is almost independent of the Government, and has nothing of the social caste of Berlin or London."

"You make quite an ideal picture."

"Oh, I dare say it is not at all ideal; only it is rather fluid, and interesting, to see how society, without caste and subject to such constant change, can still be what is called 'society.' And I am told that while it is all open in a certain way, it nevertheless selects itself into agreeable groups, much as society does elsewhere. Yes, you ought to see what a democracy can do in this way."

"But I am told that money makes your aristocracy here."

"Very likely rich people think they are an aristocracy. You see, Mr. Lyon, I don't know much about the great world. Mrs. Fletcher, whose late husband was once a Representative in Washington, says that life is not nearly so simple there as it used to be, and that rich men in the Government, vying with rich men who have built fine houses and who live there permanently without any Government position, have introduced an element of expense and display that interferes very much with the natural selection of which Mr. Morgan speaks. But you will see. We are all right sorry to have you leave us," Margaret added, turning towards him with frank, unclouded eyes.

"It is very good in you to say so. I have spent here the most delightful days of my life."

"Oh, that is charming flattery. You will make us all very conceited."

"Don't mock me, Miss Debree. I hoped I had awakened something more valuable to me than conceit," Lyon said, with a smile.

"You have, I assure you: gratitude. You have opened quite another world to us. Reading about foreign life does not give one at all the same impression of it that seeing one who is a part of it does."

"And don't you want to see that life for yourself? I hope some time—"

"Of course," Margaret said, interrupting; "all Americans expect to go to Europe. I have a friend who says she should be mortified if she reached heaven and there had to confess that she never had seen Europe. It is one of the things that is expected of a person. Though you know now that the embarrassing question that everybody has to answer is, 'Have you been to Alaska?' Have you been to Alaska, Mr. Lyon?"

This icy suggestion seemed very inopportune to Lyon. He rose and walked a step or two, and stood by the fire facing her. He confessed, looking down, that he had not been in Alaska, and he had no desire to go there. "In fact, Miss Debree," he said, with effort at speaking lightly, "I fear I am not in a geographical mood today. I came to say good-by, and—and—"

"Shall I call my aunt?" said Margaret, rising also.

"No, I beg; I had something to say that concerns us; that is, that concerns myself. I couldn't go away without knowing from you—that is, without telling you—"

The color rose in Margaret's cheek, and she made a movement of embarrassment, and said, with haste: "Some other time; I beg you will not say—I trust that I have done nothing that—"

"Nothing, nothing," he went on quickly; "nothing except to be yourself; to be the one woman"—he would not heed her hand raised in a gesture of protest; he stood nearer her now, his face flushed and his eyes eager with determination—"the one woman I care for. Margaret, Miss Debree, I love you!"

Her hand that rested on the table trembled, and the hot blood rushed to her face, flooding her in an agony of shame, pleasure, embarrassment, and anger that her face should contradict the want of tenderness in her eyes. In an instant self-possession came back to her mind, but not strength to her body, and she sank into the chair, and looking up, with only pity in her eyes, said, "I am sorry."

Lyon stopped; his heart seemed to stand still; the blood left his face; for an instant the sunshine left the world. It was a terrible blow, the worst a man can receive—a bludgeon on the head is nothing to it. He half turned, he looked again for an instant at the form that was more to him than all the world besides, unable to face the dreadful loss, and recovering speech, falteringly said, "Is that all?"

"That is all, Mr. Lyon," Margaret answered, not looking up, and in a voice that was perfectly steady.

He turned to go mechanically, and passed to the door in a sort of daze, forgetful of all conventionality; but habit is strong, and he turned almost immediately back from the passage. Margaret was still sitting, with no recognition of his departure.

"I beg you will make my excuses, and say good-by to Miss Forsythe. I had mentioned it to her. I thought perhaps she had told you, perhaps—I should like to know if it is anything about difference in—in nationality, about family, or—"

"No, no," said Margaret; "this could never be anything but a personal question with me. I—"

"But you said, 'some other time:' Might I ever expect—"

"No, no; there is no other time; do not go on. It can only be painful."

And then, with a forced cheerfulness: "You will no doubt thank me some day. Your life must be so different from mine. And you must not doubt my esteem, my appreciation," (her sense of justice forced this from her), "my good wishes. Good-by." She gave him her hand. He held it for a second, and then was gone.

She heard his footstep, rapid and receding. So he had really gone! She was not sorry—no. If she could have loved him! She sank back in her chair.

No, she could not love him. The man to command her heart must be of another type. But the greatest experience in a woman's life had come to her here, just now, in this commonplace room. A man had said he loved her. A thousand times as a girl she had dreamed of that, hardly confessing it to herself, and thought of such a scene, and feared it. And a man had said that he loved her. Her eyes grew tenderer and her face burned at the thought. Was it with pleasure? Yes, and with womanly pain. What an awful thing it was! Why couldn't he have seen? A man had said he loved her. Perhaps it was not in her to love any one. Perhaps she should live on and on like her aunt Forsythe. Well, it was over; and Margaret roused herself as her aunt entered the room.

"Has Mr. Lyon been here?"

"Yes; he has just gone. He was so sorry not to see you and say good-by. He left ever so many messages for you."

"And" (Margaret was moving as if to go) "did he say nothing—nothing to you?"

"Oh yes, he said a great deal," answered this accomplished hypocrite, looking frankly in her aunt's eyes. "He said how delightful his visit had been, and how sorry he was to go."

"And nothing else, Margaret?"

"Oh yes; he said he was going to Washington." And the girl was gone from the room.



VI

Margaret hastened to her chamber. Was the air oppressive? She opened the window and sat down by it. A soft south wind was blowing, eating away the remaining patches of snow; the sky was full of fleecy clouds. Where do these days come from in January? Why should nature be in a melting mood? Margaret instinctively would have preferred a wild storm, violence, anything but this elemental languor. Her emotion was incredible to herself.

It was only an incident. It had all happened in a moment, and it was over. But it was the first of the kind in a woman's life. The thrilling, mysterious word had been dropped into a woman's heart. Hereafter she would be changed. She never again would be as she was before. Would her heart be hardened or softened by the experience? She did not love him; that was clear. She had done right; that was clear. But he had said he loved her. Unwittingly she was following him in her thought. She had rejected plain John Lyon, amiable, intelligent, unselfish, kindly, deferential. She had rejected also the Earl of Chisholm, a conspicuous position, an honorable family, luxury, a great opportunity in life. It came to the girl in a flash. She moved nervously in her chair. She put down the thought as unworthy of her. But she had entertained it for a moment. In that second, ambition had entered the girl's soul. She had a glimpse of her own nature that seemed new to her. Was this, then, the meaning of her restlessness, of her charitable activities, of her unconfessed dreams of some career? Ambition had entered her soul in a definite form. She expelled it. It would come again in some form or other. She was indignant at herself as she thought of it. How odd it was! Her privacy had been invaded. The even tenor of her life had been broken. Henceforth would she be less or more sensitive to the suggestion of love, to the allurements of ambition? Margaret tried, in accordance with her nature, to be sincere with herself.

After all, what nonsense it was! Nothing really had happened. A stranger of a few weeks before had declared himself. She did not love him; he was no more to her than any other man. It was a common occurrence. Her judgment accorded with her feeling in what she had done. How was she to know that she had made a mistake, if mistake it was? How was she to know that this hour was a crisis in her life? Surely the little tumult would pass; surely the little whisper of worldliness could not disturb her ideals. But all the power of exclusion in her mind could not exclude the returning thought of what might have been if she had loved him. Alas! in that moment was born in her heart something that would make the idea of love less simple than it had been in her mind. She was heart-free, but her nature was too deep not to be profoundly affected by this experience.

Looking back upon this afternoon in the light of after-years, she probably could not feel—no one could say—that she had done wrong. How was she to tell? Why is it that to do the right thing is often to make the mistake of a life? Nothing could have been nobler than for Margaret indignantly to put aside a temptation that her heart told her was unworthy. And yet if she had yielded to it?

I ought to ask pardon, perhaps, for dwelling upon a thing so slight as the entrance of a thought in a woman's life. For as to Margaret, she seemed unchanged. She made no sign that anything unusual had occurred. We only knew that Mr. Lyon went away less cheerful than he usually was, that he said nothing of returning in response to our invitations, and that he seemed to anticipate nothing but the fulfillment of a duty in his visit to Washington.

What had happened was regarded as only an episode. In fact, however, I doubt if there are any episodes in our lives, any asides, that do not permanently affect our entire career. Are not the episodes, the casual thoughts, the fortuitous, unplanned meetings, the brief and maybe at the moment unnoted events, those which exercise the most influence on our destiny? To all observation the career of Lyon, and not of Margaret, was most affected by their interview. But often the implanting of an idea in the mind is more potent than the frustration of a plan or the gratification of a desire, so hidden are the causes that make character.

For some time I saw little of Margaret. Affairs in which I was not alone or chiefly concerned took me from home. One of the most curious and interesting places in the world is a Chamber in the business heart of New York—if that scene of struggle and passion can be said to have a heart —situated midway where the currents of eagerness to acquire the money of other people, not to make it, ceaselessly meet and dash against each other. If we could suppose there was a web covering this region, spun by the most alert and busy of men to catch those less alert and more productive, here in this Chamber would sit the ingenious spiders. But the analogy fails, for spiders do not prey upon each other. Scientists say that the human system has two nerve-centres—one in the brain, to which and from which are telegraphed all movements depending upon the will, and another in the small of the back, the centre of the involuntary operations of respiration, digestion, and so on. It may be fanciful to suppose that in the national system Washington is the one nervous centre and New York the other. And yet it does sometimes seem that the nerves and ganglions in the small of the back in the commercial metropolis act automatically and without any visible intervention of intelligence. For all that, their operations may be as essential as the other, in which the will-power sometimes gets into a deadlock, and sometimes telegraphs the most eccentric and incomprehensible orders. Puzzled by these contradictions, some philosophers have said that there may be somewhere outside of these two material centres another power that keeps affairs moving along with some steadiness.

This noble Chamber has a large irregular area of floor space, is very high, and has running round three sides a narrow elevated gallery, from which spectators can look down upon the throng below. Upon a raised dais at one side sits the presiding genius of the place, who rules very much as Jupiter was supposed to govern the earthly swarms, by letting things run and occasionally launching a thunderbolt. High up on one side, in an Olympian seclusion, away from the noise and the strife, sits a Board, calm as fate, and panoplied in the responsibility of chance, whose function seems to be that of switch-shifters in their windowed cubby at a network of railway intersections—to prevent collisions.

At both ends of the floor and along one side are narrow railed-off spaces full of clerks figuring at desks, of telegraph operators clicking their machines, of messenger-boys arriving and departing in haste, of unprivileged operators nervously watching the scene and waiting the chance of a word with some one on the floor; through noiseless swinging doors men are entering and departing every moment—men in a hurry, men with anxious faces, conscious that the fate of the country is in their hands. On the floor itself are five hundred, perhaps a thousand, men, gathered for the most part in small groups about little stands upon the summit of which is a rallying legend, talking, laughing, screaming, good-natured, indifferent, excited, running hither and thither in response to changing figures in the checker-board squares on the great wall opposite—calm, cynical one moment, the next violently agitated, shouting, gesticulating, rushing together, shaking their fists in a tumult of passion which presently subsides.

The swarms ebb and flow about these little stands—bees, not bringing any honey, but attracted to the hive where it is rumored most honey is to be had. By habit some always stand or sit about a particular hive, waiting for the show of comb. By-and-by there is a stir; the crowd thickens; one beardless youth shouts out the figure "one-half"; another howls, "three-eighths." The first one nods. It is done. The electric wire running up the stand quivers and takes the figure, passes it to all the other wires, transmits it to every office and hotel in the city, to all the "tickers" in ten thousand chambers and "bucketshops" and offices in the republic. Suddenly on the bulletin-boards in New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, Podunk, Liverpool, appear the mysterious "three-eighths," electrifying the watchers of these boards, who begin to jabber and gesticulate and "transact business." It is wonderful.

What induced the beardless young man to make this "investment" in "three-eighths"—who can tell? Perhaps he had heard, as he came into the room, that the Secretary of the Treasury was going to make a call of Fives; perhaps he had heard that Bismarck had said that the French blood was too thin and needed a little more iron; perhaps he had heard that a norther in Texas had killed a herd of cattle, or that two grasshoppers had been seen in the neighborhood of Fargo, or that Jay Hawker had been observed that morning hurrying to his brokers with a scowl on his face and his hat pulled over his eyes. The young man sold what he did not have, and the other young man bought what he will never get.

This is business of the higher and almost immaterial sort, and has an element of faith in it, and, as one may say, belief in the unseen, whence it is characterized by an expression—"dealing in futures." It is not gambling, for there are no "chips" used, and there is no roulette-table in sight, and there are no piles of money or piles of anything else. It is not a lottery, for there is no wheel at which impartial men preside to insure honest drawings, and there are no predestined blanks and prizes, and the man who buys and the man who sells can do something, either in the newspapers or elsewhere, to affect the worth of the investment, whereas in a lottery everything depends upon the turn of the blind wheel. It is not necessary, however, to attempt a defense of the Chamber. It is one of the recognized ways of becoming important and powerful in this world. The privilege of the floor—a seat, as it is called—in this temple of the god Chance to be Rich is worth more than a seat in the Cabinet. It is not only true that a fortune may be made here in a day or lost here in a day, but that a nod and a wink here enable people all over the land to ruin others or ruin themselves with celerity. The relation of the Chamber to the business of the country is therefore evident. If an earthquake should suddenly sink this temple and all its votaries into the bowels of the earth, with all its nervousness and all its electricity, it is appalling to think what would become of the business of the country.

Not far from this vast Chamber, where great financial operations are conducted on the highest principles of honor, and with the strictest regard to the Marquis of Dusenbury's rules, there is another less pretentious Chamber, known as "open," a sort of overflow meeting. Those who have not quite left hope behind can go in here. Here are the tickers communicating with the Chamber, tended by lads, who transfer the figures to big blackboards on the wall. In front of these boards sit, from morning to night, rows, perhaps relays, of men intently or listlessly watching the figures. Many of them, who seldom make a sign, come here from habit; they have nowhere else to go. Some of them were once lords in the great Chamber, who have been, as the phrase is, "cleaned out." There is a gray-bearded veteran in seedy clothes, with sunken fiery eyes, who was once many times a millionaire, was a power in the Board, followed by reporters, had a palace in the Avenue, and drove to his office with coachman and footman in livery, and his wife headed the list of charities. Now he spends his old age watching this blackboard, and considers it a good day that brings him five dollars and his car-fare. At one end of the low-ceiled apartment are busy clerks behind a counter, alert and cheerful. If one should go through a side door and down a passage he might encounter the smell of rum. Smart young men, clad in the choicest raiment from the misfit counters, with greed stamped on their astute faces, bustle about, watch the blackboards, and make investments with each other. Middle-aged men in slouch hats lounge around with hungry eyes. The place is feverish rather than exciting. A tall fellow, whose gait and clothes proclaim him English, with a hard face and lack-lustre eyes, saunters about; his friends at home suppose he is making his fortune in America. A dapper young gentleman, quite in the mode, and with the quick air of prosperity, rapidly enters the room and confers with a clerk at the counter. He has the run of the Chamber, and is from the great house of Flamm and Slamm. Perhaps he is taking a "flier" on his own account, perhaps he represents his house in a side transactionthere are so many ways open to enterprising young men in the city; at any rate, his entrance is regarded as significant: This is not a hospital for the broken down and "cleaned out" of the Chamber, but it is a place of business, which is created and fed by the incessant "ticker." How men existed or did any business at all before the advent of the "ticker" is a wonder.

But the Chamber, the creator of low-pressure and high-pressure, the inspirer of the "ticker," is the great generator of business. Here I found Henderson in the morning hour, and he came up to me on the call of a messenger. He approached, nonchalant and smiling as usual. "Do you see that man," he said, as we stood a moment looking down, "sitting there on a side bench—big body, small head, hair grayish, long beard parted—apparently taking no interest in anything?

"That's Flink, who made the corner in O. B.—one of the longest-headed operators in the Chamber. He is about the only man who dare try a hold with Jay Hawker. And for some reason or another, though they have apparent tussles, Hawker rather favors him. Five years ago he could just raise money enough to get into the Chamber. Now he is reckoned at anywhere from five to ten millions. I was at his home the other night. Everybody was there. I had a queer feeling, in all the magnificence, that the sheriff might be in there in ten days. Yet he may own a good slice of the island in ten years. His wife, whom I complimented, and who thanked me for coming, said she had invited none but the reshershy."

"He looks like a rascal," I ventured to remark.

"Oh, that is not a word used in the Chamber. He is called a 'daisy.' I was put into his pew in church the other Sunday, and the preacher described him and his methods so exactly that I didn't dare look at him. When we came out he whispered, 'That was rather hard on Slack; he must have felt it.' These men rather like that sort of preaching."

"I don't come here often," Henderson resumed, as we walked away. "The market is flat today. There promised to be a little flurry in L. and P., and I looked in for a customer."

We walked to his down-town club to lunch. Everybody, I noticed, seemed to know Henderson, and his presence was hailed with a cordial smile, a good-humored nod, or a hearty grasp of the hand. I never knew a more prepossessing man; his bonhomie was infectious. Though his demeanor was perfectly quiet and modest, he carried the air of good-fellowship. He was entirely frank, cordial, and had that sort of sincerity which one can afford to have who does not take life too seriously. Tall—at least six feet-with a well-shaped head set on square shoulders, brown hair inclined to curl, large blue eyes which could be merry or exceedingly grave, I thought him a picture of manly beauty. Good-natured, clever, prosperous, and not yet thirty. What a dower!

After we had disposed of our little matter of business, which I confess was not exactly satisfactory to me, although when I was told that "the first bondholders will be obliged to come in," he added that "of course we shall take care of our friends," we went to his bachelor quarters uptown. "I want you to see," he said, "how a hermit lives."

The apartments were not my idea of a hermitage—except in the city. A charming library, spacious, but so full as to be cozy, with an open fire; chamber, dressing-room, and bathroom connecting, furnished with everything that a luxurious habit could suggest and good taste would not refuse, made a retreat that could almost reconcile a sinner to solitude. There were a few good paintings, many rare engravings, on the walls, a notable absence, even in the sleeping-room, of photographs of actresses and professional beauties, but here and there souvenirs of travel and evidences that the gentler sex had contributed the skill of their slender fingers to the cheerfulness of the bachelor's home. Scattered about were the daily and monthly products of the press, the newest sensations, the things talked about at dinners, but the walls for the most part were lined with books that are recognized as the proper possessions of the lover of books, and most of them in exquisite bindings. Less care, I thought, had been given in the collection to "sets" of "standards" than to those that are rare, or for some reason, either from distinguished ownership or autograph notes, have a peculiar value.

In this atmosphere, when we were prepared to take our ease, the talk was no longer of stocks, or railways, or schemes, but of books. Whether or not Henderson loved literature I did not then make up my mind, but he had a passion for books, especially for rare and first editions; and the delight with which he exhibited his library, the manner in which he handled the books that he took down one after the other, the sparkle in his eyes over a "find" or a bargain, gave me a side of his character quite different from that I should have gained by seeing him "in the street" only. He had that genuine respect and affection for a "book" which has become almost traditional in these days of cheap and flimsy publications, a taste held by scholars and collectors, and quite beyond the popular comprehension. The respect for a book is essential to the dignity and consideration of the place of literature in the world, and when books are treated with no more regard than the newspaper, it is a sign that literature is losing its power. Even the collector, who may read little and care more for the externals than for the soul of his favorites, by the honor he pays them, by the solicitude he expends upon their preservation without spot, by the lavishness of expense upon binding, contributes much to the dignity of that art which preserves for the race the continuity of its thought and development. If Henderson loved books merely as a collector whose taste for luxury and expense takes this direction, his indulgence could not but have a certain refining influence. I could not see that he cultivated any decided specialty, but he had many rare copies which had cost fabulous prices, the possession of which gives a reputation to any owner. "My shelves of Americana," he said, "are nothing like Goodloe's, who has a lot of scarce things that I am hoping to get hold of some day. But there's a little thing" (it was a small coffee-colored tract of six leaves, upon which the binder of the city had exercised his utmost skill) "which Goodloe offered me five hundred dollars for the other day. I picked it up in a New Hampshire garret." Not the least interesting part of the collection was first editions of American authors—a person's value to a collector is often in proportion to his obscurity—and what most delighted him among them were certain thin volumes of poetry, which the authors since becoming famous had gone to a good deal of time and expense to suppress. The world seems to experience a lively pleasure in holding a man to his early follies. There were many examples of superb binding, especially of exquisite tooling on hog-skin covers—the appreciation of which has lately greatly revived. The recent rage for bindings has been a sore trouble to students and collectors in special lines, raising the prices of books far beyond their intrinsic value. I had a charming afternoon in Henderson's library, an enjoyment not much lessened at the time by experiencing in it, with him, rather a sense of luxury than of learning. It is true, one might pass an hour altogether different in the garret of a student, and come away with quite other impressions of the pageant of life.

At five o'clock his stylish trap was sent around from the boarding stable, and we drove in the Park till twilight. Henderson handling the reins, and making a part of that daily display which is too heterogeneous to have distinction, reverted quite naturally to the tone of worldliness and tolerant cynicism which had characterized his conversation in the morning. If the Park and the moving assemblage had not the air of distinction, it had that of expense, which is quite as attractive to many. Here, as downtown, my companion seemed to know and be known by everybody, returning the familiar salutes of brokers and club men, receiving gracious bows from stout matrons, smiles and nods from pretty women, and more formal recognition from stately and stiff elderly men, who sat bolt-upright beside their wives and tried to look like millionaires. For every passerby Henderson had a quick word of characterization sufficiently amusing, and about many a story which illuminated the social life of the day. It was wonderful how many of this chance company had little "histories"—comic, tragic, pitiful, interesting enough for the pages of a novel.

"There is a young lady"—Henderson touched his hat, and I caught a glimpse of golden hair and a flash of dark eyes out of a mass of furs —"who has no history: the world is all before her."

"Who is that?"

"The daughter of old Eschelle—Carmen Eschelle—the banker and politician, you remember; had a diplomatic position abroad, and the girl was educated in Europe. She is very clever. She and her mother have more money than they ought to know what to do with."

"That was the celebrated Jay Hawker" ( a moment after), "in the modest coupe—not much display about him."

"Is he recognized by respectable people?"

"Recognized?" Henderson laughed. "He's a power. There are plenty of people who live by trying to guess what he is going to do. Hawker isn't such a bad fellow. Other people have used the means he used to get rich and haven't succeeded. They are not held up to point a moral. The trouble is that Hawker succeeded. Of course, it's a game. He plays as fair as anybody."

"Yes," Henderson resumed, walking his horses in sight of the obelisk, which suggested the long continuance of the human race, "it is the same old game, and it is very interesting to those who are in it. Outsiders think it is all greed. In the Chamber it is a good deal the love of the game, to watch each other, to find out a man's plans, to circumvent him, to thwart him, to start a scheme and manipulate it, to catch somebody, to escape somebody; it is a perpetual excitement."

"The machine in the Chamber appears to run very smoothly," I said. "Oh, that is a public register and indicator. The system back of it is comprehensive, and appears to be complicated, but it is really very simple. Spend an hour some day in the office of Flamm and Slamm, and you will see a part of the system. There are, always a number of men watching the blackboard, figures on which are changed every minute by the attendants. Telegrams are constantly arriving from every part of the Union, from all over the continent, from all the centres in Europe, which are read by some one connected with the firm, and then displayed for the guidance of the watchers of the blackboard. Upon this news one or another says, 'I think I'll buy,' or 'I think I'll sell,' so and so. His order is transmitted instantly to the Chamber. In two minutes the result comes back and appears upon the blackboard."

"But where does the news come from?"

"From the men whose special business it is to pick it up or make it. They are inside of politics, of the railways, of the weather bureau, everywhere. The other day in Chicago I sat some time in a broker's office with others watching the market, and dropped into conversation with a bright young fellow, at whose right hand, across the rail, was a telegraph operator at the end of a private wire. Soon a man came in quietly, and whispered in the ear of my neighbor and went out. The young fellow instantly wrote a despatch and handed it to the operator, and turning to me, said, 'Now watch the blackboard.'

"In an incredibly short space of time a fall in a leading railway showed on the blackboard. 'What was it?' I asked. 'Why, that man was the general freight manager of the A. B. road. He told me that they were to cut rates. I sent it to New York by a private wire.' I learned by further conversation that my young gentleman was a Manufacturer of News, and that such was his address and intelligence that though he was not a member of the broker's firm, he made ten thousand a year in the business. Soon another man came in, whispered his news, and went away. Another despatch—another responsive change in the figures. 'That,' explained my companion, 'was a man connected with the weather bureau. He told me that there would be a heavy frost tonight in the Northwest.'"

"Do they sell the weather?" I asked, very much amused.

"Yes, twice; once over a private wire, and then to the public, after the value of it has been squeezed out, in the shape of predictions. Oh, the weather bureau is worth all the money it costs, for business purposes. It is a great auxiliary."

Dining that evening with Henderson at his club, I had further opportunity to study a representative man. He was of a good New Hampshire family, exceedingly respectable without being distinguished. Over the chimney-place in the old farmhouse hung a rusty Queen Anne that had been at the taking of Louisburg. His grandfather shouldered a musket at Bunker Hill; his father, the youngest son, had been a judge as well as a farmer, and noted for his shrewdness and reticence. Rodney, inheriting the thrift of his ancestors, had pushed out from his home, adapting this thrift to the modern methods of turning it to account. He had brought also to the city the stamina of three generations of plain living—a splendid capital, by which the city is constantly reinforced, and which one generation does not exhaust, except by the aid of extreme dissipation. With sound health, good ability, and fair education, he had the cheerful temperament which makes friends, and does not allow their misfortunes to injure his career. Generous by impulse, he would rather do a favor than not, and yet he would be likely to let nothing interfere with any object he had in view for himself. Inheriting a conventional respect for religion and morality, he was not so bigoted as to rebuke the gayety of a convivial company, nor so intractable as to make him an uncomfortable associate in any scheme, according to the modern notions of business, that promised profit. His engaging manner made him popular, and his good-natured adroitness made him successful. If his early experience of life caused him to be cynical, he was not bitterly so; his cynicism was of the tolerant sort that does not condemn the world and withdraw from it, but courts it and makes the most of it, lowering his private opinion of men in proportion as he is successful in the game he plays with them. At this period I could see that he had determined to be successful, and that he had not determined to be unscrupulous. He would only drift with the tide that made for fortune. He enjoyed the world—a sufficient reason why the world should like him. His business morality was gauged by what other people do in similar circumstances. In short, he was a product of the period since the civil war closed, that great upheaval of patriotic feeling and sacrifice, which ended in so much expansion and so many opportunities. If he had remained in New Hampshire he would probably have been a successful politician, successful not only in keeping in place, but in teaching younger aspirants that serving the country is a very good way to the attainment of luxury and the consideration that money brings. But having chosen the law as a stepping-stone to the lobby, to speculation, and the manipulation of chances, he had a poor opinion of politics and of politicians. His success thus far, though considerable, had not been sufficient to create for him powerful enemies, so that he may be said to be admired by all and feared by none. In the general opinion he was a downright good fellow and amazingly clever.



VII

In youth, as at the opera, everything seems possible. Surely it is not necessary to choose between love and riches. One may have both, and the one all the more easily for having attained the other. It must be a fiction of the moralists who construct the dramas that the god of love and the god of money each claims an undivided allegiance. It was in some wholly legendary, perhaps spiritual, world that it was necessary to renounce love to gain the Rhine gold. The boxes at the Metropolitan did not believe this. The spectators of the boxes could believe it still less. For was not beauty there seen shining in jewels that have a market value, and did not love visibly preside over the union, and make it known that his sweetest favors go with a prosperous world? And yet, is the charm of life somewhat depending upon a sense of its fleetingness, of its phantasmagorial character, a note of coming disaster, maybe, in the midst of its most seductive pageantry, in the whirl and glitter and hurry of it? Is there some subtle sense of exquisite satisfaction in snatching the sweet moments of life out of the very delirium of it, that must soon end in an awakening to bankruptcy of the affections, and the dreadful loss of illusions? Else why do we take pleasure—a pleasure so deep that it touches the heart like melancholy—in the common drama of the opera? How gay and joyous is the beginning! Mirth, hilarity, entrancing sound, brilliant color, the note of a trumpet calling to heroism, the beseeching of the concordant strings, and the soft flute inviting to pleasure; scenes placid, pastoral, innocent; light-hearted love, the dance on the green, the stately pageant in the sunlit streets, the court, the ball, the mad splendor of life. And then love becomes passion, and passion thwarted hurries on to sin, and sin lifts to the heights of the immortal, sweetly smiling gods, and plunges to the depths of despair. In vain the orchestra, the inevitable accompaniment of life, warns and pleads and admonishes; calm has gone, and gayety has gone; there is no sweetness now but in the wildness of surrender and of sacrifice. How sad are the remembered strains that aforetime were incentives to love and promises of happiness! Gloom settles upon the scene; Mephisto, the only radiant one, flits across it, and mocks the poor broken-hearted girl clinging to the church door. There is a dungeon, the chanting of the procession of tonsured priests, the passing-bell. Seldom appears the golden bridge over which the baffled and tired pass into Valhalla.

Do we like this because it is life, or because there is a certain satisfaction in seeing the tragedy which impends over all, pervades the atmosphere, as it were, and adds something of zest to the mildest enjoyment? Should we go away from the mimic stage any, better and stronger if the drama began in the dungeon and ended on the greensward, with innocent love and resplendent beauty in possession of the Rhine gold?

How simple, after all, was the created world on the stage to the real world in the auditorium, with its thousand complexities and dramatic situations, and if the little knot of players of parts for an hour could have had leisure to be spectators of the audience, what a deeper revelation of life would they not have seen! For the world has never assembled such an epitome of itself, in its passion for pleasure and its passion for display, as in the modern opera, with its ranks and tiers of votaries from the pit to the dome. I fancy that even Margaret, whose love for music was genuine, was almost as much fascinated by the greater spectacle as by the less.

It was a crowded night, for the opera was one that appealed to the senses and stimulated them to activity, and left the mind free to pursue its own schemes; in a word, orchestra and the scenes formed a sort of accompaniment and interpreter to the private dramas in the boxes. The opera was made for society, and not society for the opera. We occupied a box in the second tier—the Morgans, Margaret, and my wife. Morgan said that the glasses were raised to us from the parquet and leveled at us from the loges because we were a country party, but he well enough knew whose fresh beauty and enthusiastic young face it was that drew the fire when the curtain fell on the first act, and there was for a moment a little lull in the hum of conversation.

"I had heard," Morgan was saying, "that the opera was not acclimated in New York; but it is nearly so. The audience do not jabber so loud nor so incessantly as at San Carlo, and they do not hum the airs with the singers—"

"Perhaps," said my wife, "that is because they do not know the airs."

"But they are getting on in cultivation, and learning how to assert the social side of the opera, which is not to be seriously interfered with by the music on the stage."

"But the music, the scenery, were never before so good," I replied to these cynical observations.

"That is true. And the social side has risen with it. Do you know what an impudent thing the managers did the other night in protesting against the raising of the lights by which the house was made brilliant and the cheap illusions of the stage were destroyed? They wanted to make the house positively gloomy for the sake of a little artificial moonlight on the painted towers and the canvas lakes."

As the world goes, the scene was brilliant, of course with republican simplicity. The imagination was helped by no titled names any more than the eye was by the insignia of rank, but there was a certain glow of feeling, as the glass swept the circle, to know that there were ten millions in this box, and twenty in the next, and fifty in the next, attested well enough by the flash of jewels and the splendor of attire, and one might indulge a genuine pride in the prosperity of the republic. As for beauty, the world, surely, in this later time, had flowered here —flowered with something of Aspasia's grace and something of the haughty coldness of Agrippina. And yet it was American. Here and there in the boxes was a thoroughbred portrait by Copley—the long shapely neck, the sloping shoulders, the drooping eyelids, even to the gown in which the great-grandmother danced with the French officers.

"Who is that lovely creature?" asked Margaret, indicating a box opposite.

I did not know. There were two ladies, and behind them I had no difficulty in making out Henderson and—Margaret evidently had not seen him Mr. Lyon. Almost at the same moment Henderson recognized me, and signaled for me to come to his box. As I rose to do so, Mrs. Morgan exclaimed: "Why, there is Mr. Lyon! Do tell him we are here." I saw Margaret's color rise, but she did not speak.

I was presented to Mrs. Eschelle and her daughter; in the latter I recognized the beauty who had flashed by us in the Park. The elder lady inclined to stoutness, and her too youthful apparel could not mislead one as to the length of her pilgrimage in this world, nor soften the hard lines of her worldly face-lines acquired, one could see, by a social struggle, and not drawn there by an innate patrician insolence.

"We are glad to see a friend of Mr. Henderson's," she said, "and of Mr. Lyon's also. Mr. Lyon has told us much of your charming country home. Who is that pretty girl in your box, Mr. Fairchild?"

Miss Eschelle had her glass pointed at Margaret as I gave the desired information.

"How innocent!" she murmured. "And she's quite in the style—isn't she, Mr. Lyon?" she asked, turning about, her sweet mobile face quite the picture of what she was describing. "We are all innocent in these days."

"It is a very good style," I said.

"Isn't it becoming?" asked the girl, making her dark eyes at once merry and demure.

Mr. Lyon was looking intently at the opposite box, and a slight shade came over his fine face. "Ah, I see!"

"I beg your pardon, Miss Eschelle," he said, after a second, "I hardly know which to admire most, the beauty, or the wit, or the innocence of the American women."

"There is nothing so confusing, though, as the country innocence," the girl said, with the most natural air; "it never knows where to stop."

"You are too absurd, Carmen," her mother interposed; "as if the town girl did!"

"Well, mamma, there is authority for saying that there is a time for everything, only one must be in the fashion, you know."

Mr. Lyon looked a little dubious at this turn of the talk; Mr. Henderson was as evidently amused at the girl's acting. I said I was glad to see that goodness was in fashion.

"Oh, it often is. You know we were promised a knowledge of good as well as evil. It depends upon the point of view. I fancy, now, that Mr. Henderson tolerates the good—that is the reason we get on so well together; and Mr. Lyon tolerates the evil—that's the reason he likes New York. I have almost promised him that I will have a mission school."

The girl looked quite capable of it, or of any other form of devotion. Notwithstanding her persistent banter, she had a most inviting innocence of manner, almost an ingenuousness, that well became her exquisite beauty. And but for a tentative daring in her talk, as if the gentle creature were experimenting as to how far one could safely go, her innocence might have seemed that of ignorance.

It came out in the talk that Mr. Lyon had been in Washington for a week, and would return there later on.

"We had a claim on him," said Mrs. Eschelle, "for his kindness to us in London, and we are trying to convince him that New York is the real capital."

"Unfortunately," added Miss Eschelle, looking up in Mr. Lyon's face, "he visited Brandon first, and you seem to have bewitched him with your simple country ways. I can get him to talk of nothing else."

"You mean to say," Mr. Lyon replied, with the air of retorting, "that you have asked me about nothing else."

"Oh, you know we felt a little responsible for you; and there is no place so dangerous as the country. Now here you are protected—we put all the wickedness on the stage, and learn to recognize and shun it."

"It may be wicked," said her mother, "but it is dull. Don't you find it so, Mr. Henderson? I am passionately fond of Wagner, but it is too noisy for anything tonight."

"I notice, dear," the dutiful daughter replied for all of us, "that you have to raise your voice. But there is the ballet. Let us all listen now."

Mr. Lyon excused himself from going with me, saying that he would call at our hotel, and I took Henderson. "I shall count the minutes you are going to lose," the girl said as we went out-to our box. The lobbies in the interact were thronged with men—for the most part the young speculators of the Chamber turned into loungers in the foyer—knowing, alert, attitudinizing in the extreme of the mode, unable even in this hour to give beauty the preference to business, well knowing, perhaps, that beauty itself in these days has a fine eye for business.

I liked Henderson better in our box than in his own. Was it because the atmosphere was more natural and genuine? Or was it Margaret's transparent nature, her sincere enjoyment of the scene, her evident pleasure in the music, the color, the gayety of the house, that made him drop the slight cynical air of the world which had fitted him so admirably a moment before? He already knew my wife and the Morgans, and, after the greetings were made, he took a seat by Margaret, quite content while the act was going on to watch its progress in the play of her responsive features. How quickly she felt, how the frown followed the smile, how, she seemed to weigh and try to apprehend the meaning of what went on—how her every sense enjoyed life!

"It is absurd," she said, turning her bright face to him when the curtain dropped, "to be so interested in fictitious trouble."

"I'm not so sure that it is," he replied, in her own tone; "the opera is a sort of pulpit, and not seldom preaches an awful sermon—more plainly than the preacher dares to make it."

"But not in nomine Dei."

"No. But who can say what is most effective? I often wonder, as I watch the congregations coming from the churches on the Avenue, if they are any more solemnized than the audiences that pour out of this house. I confess that I cannot shake off 'Lohengrin' in a good while after I hear it."

"And so you think the theatres have a moral influence?"

"Honestly"—and I heard his good-natured laugh—"I couldn't swear to that. But then we don't know what New York might be without them."

"I don't know," said Margaret, reflectively, "that my own good impulses, such as I have, are excited by anything I see on the stage; perhaps I am more tolerant, and maybe toleration is not good. I wonder if I should grow worldly, seeing more of it?"

"Perhaps it is not the stage so much as the house," Henderson replied, beginning to read the girl's mind.

"Yes, it would be different if one came alone and saw the play, unconscious of the house, as if it were a picture. I think it is the house that disturbs one, makes one restless and discontented."

"I never analyzed my emotions," said Henderson, "but when I was a boy and came to the theatre I well remember that it made me ambitious; every sort of thing seemed possible of attainment in the excitement of the crowded house, the music, the lights, the easy successes on the stage; nothing else is more stimulating to a lad; nothing else makes the world more attractive."

"And does it continue to have the same effect, Mr. Henderson?"

"Hardly," and he smiled; "the illusion goes, and the stage is about as real as the house—usually less interesting. It can hardly compete with the comedy in the boxes."

"Perhaps it is lack of experience, but I like the play for itself."

"Oh yes; desire for the dramatic is natural. People will have it somehow. In the country village where there are no theatres the people make dramas out of each other's lives; the most trivial incidents are magnified and talked about—dramatized, in short."

"You mean gossiped about?"

"Well, you may call it gossip—nothing can be concealed; everybody knows about everybody else; there is no privacy; everything is used to create that illusory spectacle which the stage tries to give. I think that in the country village a good theatre would be a wholesome influence, satisfy a natural appetite indicated by the inquisition into the affairs of neighbors, and by the petty scandal."

"We are on the way to it," said Mr. Morgan, who sat behind them; "we have theatricals in the church parlors, which may grow into a nineteenth century substitute for the miracle-plays. You mustn't, Margaret, let Mr. Henderson prejudice you against the country."

"No," said the latter, quickly; "I was only trying to defend the city. We country people always do that. We must base our theatrical life on something in nature."

"What is the difference, Mr. Henderson," asked Margaret, "between the gossip in the boxes and the country gossip you spoke of?"

"In toleration mainly, and lack of exact knowledge. It is here rather cynical persiflage, not concentrated public opinion."

"I don't follow you," said Morgan. "It seems to me that in the city you've got gossip plus the stage."

"That is to say, we have the world."

"I don't like to believe that," said Margaret, seriously—"your definition of the world."

"You make me see that it was a poor jest," he said, rising to go. "By-the-way, we have a friend of yours in our box tonight—a young Englishman."

"Oh, Mr. Lyon. We were all delighted with him. Such a transparent, genuine nature!"

"Tell him," said my wife, "that we should be happy to see him at our hotel."

When Henderson came back to his box Carmen did not look up, but she said, indifferently: "What, so soon? But your absence has made one person thoroughly miserable. Mr. Lyon has not taken his eyes off you. I never saw such an international attachment."

"What more could I do for Miss Eschelle than to leave her in such company?"

"I beg your pardon," said Lyon. "Miss Eschelle must believe that I thoroughly appreciate Mr. Henderson's self-sacrifice. If I occasionally looked over where he was, I assure you it was in pity."

"You are both altogether too self-sacrificing," the beauty replied, turning to Henderson a look that was sweetly forgiving. "They who sin much shall be forgiven much, you know."

"That leaves me," Mr. Lyon answered, with a laugh, "as you say over here, out in the cold, for I have passed a too happy evening to feel like a transgressor."

"The sins of omission are the worst sort," she retorted.

"You see what you must do to be forgiven," Henderson said to Lyon, with that good-natured smile that was so potent to smooth away sharpness.

"I fear I can never do enough to qualify myself." And he also laughed.

"You never will," Carmen answered, but she accompanied the doubt with a witching smile that denied it.

"What is all this about forgiveness?" asked Mrs. Eschelle, turning to them from regarding the stage.

"Oh, we were having an experience meeting behind your back, mamma, only Mr. Henderson won't tell his experience."

"Miss Eschelle is in such a forgiving humor tonight that she absolves before any one has a chance to confess," he replied.

"Don't you think I am always so, Mr. Lyon?"

Mr. Lyon bowed. "I think that an opera-box with Miss Eschelle is the easiest confessional in the world."

"That's something like a compliment. You see" (to Henderson) "how much you Americans have to learn."

"Will you be my teacher?"

"Or your pupil," the girl said, in a low voice, standing near him as she rose.

The play was over. In the robing and descending through the corridors there were the usual chatter, meaning looks, confidential asides. It is always at the last moment, in the hurry, as in a postscript, that woman says what she means, or what for the moment she wishes to be thought to mean. In the crowd on the main stairway the two parties saw each other at a distance, but without speaking.

"Is it true that Lyon is 'epris' there?" Carmen whispered to Henderson when she had scanned and thoroughly inventoried Margaret.

"You know as much as I do."

"Well, you did stay a long time," she said, in a lower tone.

As Margaret's party waited for their carriage she saw Mrs. Eschelle and her daughter enter a shining coach, with footman and coachman in livery. Henderson stood raising his hat. A little white hand was shaken to him from the window, and a sweet, innocent face leaned forward—a face with dark, eyes and golden hair, lit up with a radiant smile. That face for the moment was New York to Margaret, and New York seemed a vain show.

Carmen threw herself back in her seat as if weary. Mrs. Eschelle sat bolt-upright.

"What in the world, child, made you go on so tonight?"

"I don't know."

"What made you snub Mr. Lyon so often?"

"Did I? He won't mind much. Didn't you see, mother, that he was distrait the moment he espied that girl? I'm not going to waste my time. I know the signs. No fisheries imbroglio for me, thank you."

"Fish? Who said anything about fish?"

"Oh, the international business. Ask Mr. Henderson to explain it. The English want to fish in our waters, I believe. I think Mr. Lyon has had a nibble from a fresh-water fish. Perhaps it's the other way, and he's hooked. There be fishers of men, you know, mother."

"You are a strange child, Carmen. I hope you will be civil to both of them." And they rode on in silence.



VIII

In real life the opera or the theatre is only the prologue to the evening. Our little party supped at Delgardo's. The play then begins. New York is quite awake by that time, and ready to amuse itself. After the public duty, the public attitudinizing, after assisting at the artificial comedy and tragedy which imitate life under a mask, and suggest without satisfying, comes the actual experience. My gentle girl—God bless your sweet face and pure heart!—who looked down from the sky-parlor at the Metropolitan upon the legendary splendor of the stage, and the alluring beauty and wealth of the boxes, and went home to create in dreams the dearest romance in a maiden's life, you did not know that for many the romance of the night just began when the curtain fell.

The streets were as light as day. At no other hour were the pavements so thronged, was there such a crush of carriages, such a blockade of cars, such running, and shouting, greetings and decorous laughter, such a swirl of pleasurable excitement. Never were the fashionable cafes and restaurants so crowded and brilliant. It is not a carnival time; it is just the flow and ebb of a night's pleasure, an electric night which has all of the morning except its peace, a night of the gayest opportunity and unlimited possibility.

At each little table was a drama in progress, light or serious—all the more serious for being light at the moment and unconsidered. Morgan, who was so well informed in the gossip of society and so little involved in it—some men have this faculty, which makes them much more entertaining than the daily newspaper—knew the histories of half the people in the room. There were an Italian marquis and his wife supping together like lovers, so strong is the force of habit that makes this public life necessary even when the domestic life is established. There is a man who shot himself rather seriously on the doorsteps of the beauty who rejected him, and in a year married the handsome and more wealthy woman who sits opposite him in that convivial party. There is a Russian princess, a fair woman with cool observant eyes, making herself agreeable to a mixed company in three languages. In this brilliant light is it not wonderful how dazzlingly beautiful the women are—brunettes in yellow and diamonds, blondes in elaborately simple toilets, with only a bunch of roses for ornament, in the flush of the midnight hour, in a radiant glow that even the excitement and the lifted glass cannot heighten? That pretty girl yonder—is she wife or widow?—slight and fresh and fair, they say has an ambition to extend her notoriety by going upon the stage; the young lady with her, who does not seem to fear a public place, may be helping her on the road. The two young gentlemen, their attendants, have the air of taking life more seriously than the girls, but regard with respectful interest the mounting vivacity of their companions, which rises and sparkles like the bubbles in the slender glasses which they raise to their lips with the dainty grace of practice. The staid family parties who are supping at adjoining tables notice this group with curiosity, and express their opinion by elevated eyebrows.

Margaret leaned back in her chair and regarded the whole in a musing' frame of mind. I think she apprehended nothing of it except the light, the color, the beauty, the movement of gayety. For her the notes of the orchestra sounded through it all—the voices of the singers, the hum of the house; it was all a spectacle and a play. Why should she not enjoy it? There was something in the nature of the girl that responded to this form of pleasure—the legitimate pleasure the senses take in being gratified. "It is so different," she said to me, "from the pleasure one has in an evening by the fire. Do you know, even Mr. Morgan seems worldly here."

It was a deeper matter than she thought, this about worldliness, which had been raised in Margaret's mind. Have we all double natures, and do we simply conform to whatever surrounds us? Is there any difference in kind between the country worldliness and the city worldliness? I do not suppose that Margaret formulated any of these ideas in words. Her knowledge of the city had hitherto been superficial. It was a place for shopping, for a day in a picture exhibition, for an evening in the theatre, no more a part of her existence than a novel or a book of travels: of the life of the town she knew nothing. That night in her room she became aware for the first time of another world, restless, fascinating, striving, full of opportunities. What must London be?

If we could only note the first coming into the mind of a thought that changes life and re-forms character—supposing that every act and every new departure has this subtle beginning—we might be less the sport of circumstances than we seem to be. Unnoted, the desire so swiftly follows the thought and juggles with the will.

The next day Mr. Henderson left his card and a basket of roses. Mr. Lyon called. It was a constrained visit. Margaret was cordially civil, and I fancied that Mr. Lyon would have been more content if she had been less so. If he were a lover, there was little to please him in the exchange of the commonplaces of the day.

"Yes," he was saying to my wife, "perhaps I shall have to change my mind about the simplicity of your American life. It is much the same in New York and London. It is only a question of more or less sophistication."

"Mr. Henderson tells us," said my wife, "that you knew the Eschelles in London."

"Yes. Miss Eschelle almost had a career there last season."

"Why almost?"

"Well—you will pardon me—one needs for success in these days to be not only very clever, but equally daring. It is every day more difficult to make a sensation."

"I thought her, across the house," Margaret said, "very pretty and attractive. I did not know you were so satirical, Mr. Lyon. Do you mean that one must be more daring, as you call it, in London than in New York?"

"I hope it will not hurt your national pride, Miss Debree, if I say that there is always the greater competition in the larger market."

"Oh, my pride," Margaret answered, "does not lie in that direction."

"And to do her justice, I don't think Miss Eschelle's does, either. She appears to be more interested now in New York than in London."

He laughed as he said this, and Margaret laughed also, and then stopped suddenly, thinking of the roses that came that morning. Could she be comparing the Londoner with the handsome American who sat by her side at the opera last night? She was half annoyed with herself at the thought.

"And are not you also interested in New York, Mr. Lyon?" my wife asked.

"Yes, moderately so, if you will permit me to say it." It was an effort on his part to keep up the conversation, Margaret was so wholly unresponsive; and afterwards, knowing how affairs stood with them, I could understand his well-bred misery. The hardest thing in the world is to suffer decorously and make no sign in the midst of a society which insists on stoicism, no matter how badly one is hurt. The Society for First Aid to the Injured hardens its heart in these cases. "I have never seen another place," he continued, "where the women are so busy in improving themselves. Societies, clubs, parlor lectures, readings, recitations, musicales, classes—it fatigues one to keep in sight of them. Every afternoon, every evening, something. I doubt if men are capable of such incessant energy, Mrs. Fairchild."

"And you find they have no time to be agreeable?"

"Quite the contrary. There is nothing they are not interesting in, nothing about which they cannot talk, and talk intensely. They absorb everything, and have the gift of acquiring intelligence without, as one of them told me, having to waste time in reading. Yes, it is a most interesting city."

The coming in of Mr. Morgan gave another turn to the talk. He had been to see a rural American play, an exhibition of country life and character, constructed in absolute disregard of any traditions of the stage.

"I don't suppose," Mr. Morgan said, "a foreigner would understand it; it would be impossible in Paris, incomprehensible in London."

"Yes, I saw it," said Mr. Lyon, thus appealed to. "It was very odd, and seemed to amuse the audience immensely. I suppose one must be familiar with American farm life to see the points of it. I confess that while I sat there, in an audience so keenly in sympathy with the play—almost a part of it, one might say—I doubted if I understood your people as well as I thought I did when I had been here a week only. Perhaps this is the beginning of an American drama."

"Some people say that it is."

"But it is so local!"

"Anything that is true must be true to local conditions, to begin with. The only question is, is it true to human nature? What puzzled me in this American play was its raising the old question of nature and art. You've seen Coquelin? Well, that is acting, as artificial as a sonnet, the perfection of training, skill in an art. You never doubt that he is performing in a play for the entertainment of an audience. You have the same enjoyment of it that you have of a picture—a picture, I mean, full of character and sentiment, not a photograph. But I don't think of Denman Thompson as an actor trained to perfection in a dramatic school, but as a New Hampshire farmer. I don't admire his skill; I admire him. There is plenty that is artificial, vulgarly conventional, in his play, plenty of imitation of the rustic that shows it is imitation, but he is the natural man. If he is a stage illusion, he does not seem so to me." "Probably to an American audience only he does not," Mr. Lyon remarked.

"Well, that is getting to be a tolerably large audience."

"I doubt if you will change the laws of art," said Mr. Lyon, rising to go.

"We shall hope to see you again at our house," my wife said.

"You are very good. I should like it; but my time is running out."

"If you cannot come, you may leave your adieus with Miss Debree, who is staying some time in the city," my wife said, evidently to Margaret's annoyance. But she could do no less than give him her city address, though the information was not accompanied by any invitation in her manner.

Margaret was to stay some time with two maiden ladies, old friends of her mother, the Misses Arbuser. The Arbusers were people of consequence in their day, with a certain social prestige; in fact, the excellent ladies were two generations removed from successful mercantile life, which in the remote prospective took on an old-family solidity. Nowhere else in the city could Margaret have come closer in contact with a certain phase of New York life in which women are the chief actors—a phase which may be a transition, and may be only a craze. It is not so much a condescension of society to literature as it is a discovery that literature and art, in the persons of those who produce both, may be sources of amusement, or perhaps, to be just, of the enlargement of the horizon and the improvement of the mind. The society mind was never before so hospitable to new ideas and new sensations. Charities, boards of managers, missions, hospitals, news-rooms, and lodging-houses for the illiterate and the homeless—these are not sufficient, even with balls, dancing classes, and teas, for the superfluous energies of this restless, improving generation; there must be also radical clubs, reading classes, study classes, ethical, historical, scientific, literary lectures, the reading of papers by ladies of distinction and gentlemen of special attainments—an unremitting pursuit of culture and information. Curiosity is awake. The extreme of social refinement and a mild Bohemianism almost touch. It passes beyond the affectation of knowing persons who write books and write for the press, artists in paint and artists in music. "You cannot be sure in the most exclusive circle"—it was Carmen Eschelle who said this—"that you will not meet an author or even a journalist." Not all the women, however, adore letters or affect enthusiasm at drawing-room lectures; there are some bright and cynical ones who do not, who write papers themselves, and have an air of being behind the scenes.

Margaret had thought that she was fully occupied in the country, with her teaching, her reading, her literature and historical clubs, but she had never known before what it was to be busy and not have time for anything, always in pursuit of some new thing, and getting a fragment here and there; life was a good deal like reading the dictionary and remembering none of the words. And it was all so cosmopolitan and all-embracingly sympathetic. One day it was a paper by a Servian countess on the social life of the Servians, absorbingly interesting both in itself and because it was a countess who read it; and this was followed by the singing of an Icelandic tenor and a Swedish soprano, and a recital on the violin by a slight, red-haired, middle-aged woman from London. All the talents seem to be afloat and at the service of the strenuous ones who are cultivating themselves.

The first function at which Margaret assisted in the long drawing-rooms of the Arbusers was a serious one—one that combined the charm of culture with the temptations of benevolence. The rooms were crowded with the fashion of the town, with a sprinkling of clergymen and of thin philanthropic gentlemen in advanced years. It was a four-o'clock, and the assembly had the cheerfulness of a reception, only that the display of toilets was felt to be sanctified by a purpose. The performance opened with a tremendous prelude on the piano by Herr Bloomgarten, who had been Liszt's favorite pupil; indeed, it was whispered that Liszt had said that, old as he was, he never heard Bloomgarten without learning something. There was a good deal of subdued conversation while the pianist was in his extreme agony of execution, and a hush of extreme admiration—it was divine, divine, ravishing—when he had finished. The speaker was a learned female pundit from India, and her object was to interest the women of America in the condition of their unfortunate Hindoo sisters. It appeared that thousands and tens of thousands of them were doomed to early and lifelong widowhood, owing to the operation of cruel caste laws, which condemned even girls betrothed to deceased Brahmins to perpetual celibacy. This fate could only be alleviated by the education and elevation of women. And money was needed for schools, especially for medical schools, which would break down the walls of prejudice and enfranchise the sex. The appeal was so charmingly made that every one was moved by it, especially the maiden ladies present, who might be supposed to enter into the feelings of their dusky sisters beyond the seas. The speaker said, with a touch of humor that always intensifies a serious discourse, that she had been told that in one of the New England States there was a superfluity of unmarried women; but this was an entirely different affair; it was a matter of choice with these highly educated and accomplished women. And the day had come when woman could make her choice! At this there was a great clapping of hands. It was one thing to be free to lead a life of single self-culture, and quite another to be compelled to lead a single fife without self-culture. The address was a great success, and much enthusiasm spread abroad for the cause of the unmarried women of India.

In the audience were Mrs. Eschelle and her daughter. Margaret and Carmen were made acquainted, and were drawn together by curiosity, and perhaps by a secret feeling of repulsion. Carmen was all candor and sweetness, and absorbingly interested in the women of India, she said. With Margaret's permission she would come and see her, for she believed they had common friends.

It would seem that there could not be much sympathy between natures so opposed, persons who looked at life from such different points of view, but undeniably Carmen had a certain attraction for Margaret. The New Englander, whose climate is at once his enemy and his tonic, always longs for the tropics, which to him are a region of romance, as Italy is to the German. In his nature, also, there is something easily awakened to the allurements of a sensuous existence, and to a desire for a freer experience of life than custom has allowed him. Carmen, who showed to Margaret only her best side—she would have been wise to exhibit no other to Henderson, but women of her nature are apt to cheapen themselves with men—seemed an embodiment of that graceful gayety and fascinating worldliness which make the world agreeable.

One morning, a few days after the Indian function, Margaret was alone in her own cozy sitting-room. Nothing was wanting that luxury could suggest to make it in harmony with a beautiful woman, nothing that did not flatter and please, or nurse, perhaps, a personal sense of beauty, and impart that glow of satisfaction which comes when the senses are adroitly ministered to. Margaret had been in a mood that morning to pay extreme attention to her toilet. The result was the perfection of simplicity, of freshness, of maiden purity, enhanced by the touch of art. As she surveyed herself in the pier-glass, and noted the refined lines of the morning-gown which draped but did not conceal the more exquisite lines of her figure, and adjusted a rose in her bosom, she did not feel like a Puritan, and, although she may not have noted the fact, she did not look like one. It was not a look of vanity that she threw into the mirror, or of special self-consciousness; in her toilet she had obeyed only her instinct (that infallible guide in a woman of refinement), and if she was conscious of any emotion, it was of the stirring within her of the deepest womanly nature.

In fact, she was restless. She flung herself into an easy-chair before the fire, and took up a novel. It was a novel with a religious problem. In vain she tried to be interested in it. At home she would have absorbed it eagerly; they would have discussed it; the doubts and suggestions in it would have assumed the deepest personal importance. It might have made an era in her thoughtful country life. Here it did not so appeal to her; it seemed unreal and shadowy in a life that had so much more of action than of reflection in it. It was a life fascinating and exciting, and profoundly unsatisfactory. Yet, after all, it was more really life than that placid vegetation in the country. She felt that in the whirl of only a few days of it—operas, receptions, teas, readings, dances, dinners, where everybody sparkled with a bewildering brilliancy, and yet from which one brought away nothing but a sense of strain; such gallantry, such compliments, such an easy tossing about of every topic under heaven; such an air of knowing everything, and not caring about anything very much; so much mutual admiration and personal satisfaction! She liked it, and perhaps was restless because she liked it. To be admired, to be deferred to—was there any harm in that? Only, if one suffers admiration today, it becomes a necessity tomorrow. She began to feel the influence of that life which will not let one stand still for a moment. If it is not the opera, it is a charity; if it is not a lover, it is some endowed cot in a hospital. There must be something going on every day, every hour.

Yes, she was restless, and could not read. She thought of Mr. Henderson. He had called formally. She had seen him, here and there, again and again. He had sought her out in all companies; his face had broken into a smile when he met her; he had talked with her lightly, gayly; she remembered the sound of his voice; she had learned to know his figure in a room among a hundred; and she blushed as she remembered that she had once or twice followed him with her eyes in a throng. He was, to be sure, nothing to her; but he was friendly; he was certainly entertaining; he was a part, somehow, of this easy-flowing life.

Miss Eschelle was announced. Margaret begged that she would come upstairs without ceremony. The mutual taking-in of the pretty street costume and the pretty morning toilet was the work of a moment—the photographer has invented no machine that equals a woman's eyes for such a purpose.

"How delightful it is! how altogether charming!" and Margaret felt that she was included with the room in this admiration. "I told mamma that I was coming to see you this morning, even if I missed the Nestors' luncheon. I like to please myself sometimes. Mamma says I'm frivolous, but do you know"—the girls were comfortably seated by the fire, and Carmen turned her sweet face and candid eyes to her companion—"I get dreadfully tired of all this going round and round. No, I don't even go to the Indigent Mothers' Home; it's part of the same thing, but I haven't any gift that way. Ah, you were reading—that novel."

"Yes; I was trying to read it; I intend to read it."

"Oh, we have had it! It's a little past now, but it has been all the rage. Everybody has read it; that is, I don't know that anybody has read it, but everybody has been talking about it. Of course somebody must have read it, to set the thing agoing. And it has been discussed to death. I sometimes feel as if I had changed my religion half a dozen times in a fortnight. But I haven't heard anything about it for a week. We have taken up the Hindoo widows now, you know." And the girl laughed, as if she knew she were talking nonsense.

"And you do not read much in the city?" Margaret asked, with an answering smile.

"Yes; in the summer. That is, some do. There is a reading set. I don't know that they read much, but there is a reading set. You know, Miss Debree, that when a book is published—really published, as Mr. Henderson says—you don't need to read it. Somehow it gets into the air and becomes common property. Everybody hears the whole thing. You can talk about it from a notice. Of course there are some novels that one must read in order to understand human nature. Do you read French?"

"Yes; but not many French novels; I cannot."

"Nor can I," said Carmen, with a sincere face. "They are too realistic for me." She was at the moment running over in her mind a "situation" in a paper-covered novel turned down on her nightstand. "Mr. Henderson says that everybody condemns the French novels, and that people praise the novels they don't read."

"You know Mr. Henderson very well?"

"Yes; we've known him a long time. He is the only man I'm afraid of."

"Afraid of?"

"Well, you know he is a sort of Club man; that style of man provokes your curiosity, for you never can tell how much such men know. It makes you a little uneasy."

Carmen was looking into the fire, as if abstractedly reflecting upon the nature of men in general, but she did not fail to notice a slight expression of pain on Margaret's face.

"But there is your Mr. Lyon—"

Margaret laughed. "You do me too much honor. I think you discovered him first."

"Well, our Mr. Lyon." Carmen was still looking into the fire. "He is such a good young man!"

Margaret did not exactly fancy this sort of commendation, and she replied, with somewhat the tone of defending him, "We all have the highest regard for Mr. Lyon."

"Yes, and he is quite gone on Brandon, I assure you. He intends to do a great deal of good in the world. I think he spends half his time in New York studying, he calls it, our charitable institutions. Mamma reproaches me that I don't take more interest in philanthropy. That is her worldly side. Everybody has a worldly side. I'm as worldly as I can be"—this with a look of innocence that denied the self-accusation—"but I haven't any call to marry into Exeter Hall and that sort of thing. That is what she means—dear mamma. Are you High-Church or evangelical?" she asked, after a moment, turning to Margaret?

Margaret explained that she was neither.

"Well, I am High-Church, and Mr. Lyon is evangelical-Church evangelical. There couldn't be any happiness, you know, without harmony in religious belief."

"I should think not," said Margaret, now quite recovering herself. "It must be a matter of great anxiety to you here."

Carmen was quick to note the change of tone, and her face beamed with merriment as she rose.

"What nonsense I've been talking! I did not intend to go into such deep things. You must not mind what I said about Mr.—(a little pause to read Margaret's face)—Mr. Lyon. We esteem him as much as you do. How charming you are looking this morning! I wish I had your secret of not letting this life tell on one." And she was gone in a shower of compliments and smiles and caressing ways. She had found out what she came to find out. Mr. Henderson needs watching, she said to herself.

The interview, as Margaret thought it over, was amusing, but it did not raise her spirits. Was everybody worldly and shallow? Was this the sort of woman whom Mr. Henderson fancied? Was Mr. Henderson the sort of man to whom such a woman would be attracted?



IX

It was a dinner party in one of the up-town houses—palaces—that begin to repeat in size, spaciousness of apartments, and decoration the splendor of the Medicean merchant princes. It is the penalty that we pay for the freedom of republican opportunity that some must be very rich. This is the logical outcome of the open chance for everybody to be rich —and it is the surest way to distinction. In a free country the course must be run, and it is by the accumulation of great wealth that one can get beyond anxiety, and be at liberty to indulge in republican simplicity.

Margaret and Miss Arbuser were ushered in through a double row of servants in livery—shortclothes and stockings—in decorous vacuity—an array necessary to bring into relief the naturalness and simplicity of the entertainers. Vulgarity, one can see, consists in making one's self a part of the display of wealth: the thing to be attained is personal simplicity on a background of the richest ostentation. It is difficult to attain this, and theory says that it takes three generations for a man to separate himself thus from his display. It was the tattle of the town that the first owner of the pictures in the gallery of the Stott mansion used to tell the prices to his visitors; the third owner is quite beyond remembering them. He might mention, laughingly, that the ornamented shovel in the great fireplace in the library was decorated by Vavani—it was his wife's fancy. But he did not say that the ceiling in the music-room was painted by Pontifex Lodge, or that six Italian artists had worked four years making the Corean room, every inch of it exquisite as an intaglio—indeed, the reporters had made the town familiar with the costly facts.

The present occupants understood quite well the value of a background: the house swarmed with servants—retainers, one might say. Margaret, who was fresh from her history class, recalled the days of Elizabeth, when a man's importance was gauged by the retinue of servitors and men and women in waiting. And this is, after all, a better test of wealth than a mere accumulation of things and cost of decoration; for though men and women do not cost so much originally as good pictures—that is, good men and women—everybody knows that it needs more revenue to maintain them. Though the dinner party was not large, there was to be a dance afterwards, and for every guest was provided a special attendant.

The dinner was served in the state dining-room, to which Mr. Henderson had the honor of conducting Margaret. Here prevailed also the same studied simplicity. The seats were for sixteen. The table went to the extremity of elegant plainness, no crowding, no confusion of colors under the soft lights; if there was ostentation anywhere, it was in the dazzling fineness of the expanse of table-linen, not in the few rare flowers, or the crystal, or the plate, which was of solid gold, simply modest. The eye is pleased by this chastity—pure whiteness, the glow of yellow, the slight touch of sensuous warmth in the rose. The dinner was in keeping, short, noiselessly served under the eye of the maitre d'hotel, few courses, few wines; no anxiety on the part of the host and hostess—perhaps just a little consciousness that everything was simple and elegant, a little consciousness of the background; but another generation will remove that.

If to Margaret's country apprehension the conversation was not quite up to the level of the dinner and the house—what except that of a circle of wits, who would be out of place there, could be?—the presence of Mr. Henderson, who devoted himself to her, made the lack unnoticed. The talk ran, as usual, on the opera, Wagner, a Christmas party at Lenox, at Tuxedo, somebody's engagement, some lucky hit in the Exchange, the irritating personalities of the newspapers, the last English season, the marriage of the Duchess of Bolinbroke, a confidential disclosure of who would be in the Cabinet and who would have missions, a jocular remark across the table about a "corner" (it is impossible absolutely here, as well as at a literary dinner, to sink the shop), the Sunday opening of galleries—anything to pass the hour, the ladies contributing most of the vivacity and persiflage.