He had no patience with the theories of the newer medical practitioners who refuse to be frightened by the cry of "professional ethics" or by the demand that practice shall be "regular" whether the patient survives or not; and yet while he denounced all forms of mental therapeutics, he was conscious of a strain of superstition which he could in no wise overcome. Weird folk-lore and uncanny rites kept up by some of the primitive people of Hungary had had a strange fascination for him when he was abroad. In himself, he found a singular mixture of the primeval savage, and the ultra refined that approaches decadence. Of one thing alone he was certain. To lose Silvia was to lose his soul; without her there was neither here nor hereafter. Ruthlessly as he had brushed aside the one woman in his life who came between them, he was prepared to thrust out of his way any man who sought to become a part of her life.

It was in this mood that he entered her presence, and in this mood he accepted her amende honorable, which she made with charming humility, but when she would have led him to the music-room, for once he hesitated.

"In a few minutes," he said, "but just now there is something I must say to you. It is true that I was deeply hurt last night, but your regret, so graciously expressed, emboldens me to think that you would not willingly hurt me." He stopped, and she looked at him with a rather puzzled air. "We have been friends for a great while," he said irrelevantly.

"Yes," she said cordially, and somewhat relieved. "Haven't we? And what a friendship it has been! A triangular affair, like a loving cup—you and I and some one of the great masters of melody. Shall it be Chopin to-night, or shall we begin with something lighter and finish with the Twelfth Nocturne, as usual?"

She led the way, and stood by the piano, rippling her fingers over the keys, and he stood before her, his face white and intense with feeling. He laid his strong, brown fingers over the white ones, and raised them to his lips, and Silvia laughed a trifle nervously. It was one of his old-world ways that she liked, but disapproved with all proper democratic fervor.

"Has it indeed been a loving cup from which we have drunk?" he said, with passionate sadness. "I dare not think so, I dare not even hope so much grace! And yet how is it possible that a man should feel what I feel for you unless there is a response, little as he may deserve it——"

He paused, and she took away her hand, and laid it lightly on his shoulder as he sank down on the seat before the piano.

"Please don't," she said gently. "Don't you see that you are quite right? If it were really, truly love that had come to you, I should feel it also, there could be no question of doubting or daring; no thought of hopelessness. Some time you will know that this is true, when some other heart speaks to yours in the unmistakable tone of the one only love of your heart. Each of us has his place in life, and in the lives of those with whom we come in contact. No one can ever have your place; I can't tell you how much rest and happiness you have brought me when I have been a-weary of this world. Come, Orrin, don't rob me of my friend that I may lose a lover."

By a herculean effort he restrained his feelings, and answered lightly, "You shall keep your friend, my sorceress of song," but he added under his breath, "Look to it, when the lover comes, for you may still lose him." Then he took up his violin, and the night became a splendid harmony, despite the discord that raged in his soul.



CHAPTER X

A DISCUSSION OF PROGRESSIVE WOMEN

The group that had foregathered about Mrs. Ramsey's tea-table that Thursday afternoon had scattered and gone its several ways. The last of them was bidding her adieu as her husband entered and joined her brothers, who were lingering for a farewell word with her, each occupied in characteristic fashion, John gazing into the fire that smouldered on the grate, for it was a raw and chilly afternoon, and Frank endeavoring to coax a last cup of tea from the silver tea-ball and the still steaming kettle.

"If you really want another cup, Frank, let me have the tea-ball refilled," Mrs. Ramsey said, and then laying her hand on her elder brother's shoulder, "A new Lincoln penny for your thoughts, Jack. You look as if they might be romantic, but I suppose you are really off on the quest of the blooming bacillus or the meandering microbe, or hanging over—what is it you call your garden beds of disease—a culture?"

He looked up and patted her hand. "It is too bad not to be able to be a hero to one's own sister, but the truth is, I wasn't thinking at all, just wool-gathering. By the way, Frank, are you going to motor down to that meeting of Miss Holland's to-night?"

"Wool-gathering, he calls it!" said the younger man, letting his lump of sugar clatter on his saucer. "I'd say it was all cry and no wool; at least you are pulling none over my eyes. Am I going to motor down to hear the protests of the proletariat to-night? No, dear brother, I am not. When I go out to mingle with the down-trodden and oppressed I take the 'L'; a surface car would be even more appropriate, but they take forever, and I compromise on the 'L,' but you never did have any sense of dramatic fitness."

"Might I ask why this sudden interest in the militant laboring ladies?" said Ramsey, drawing up his chair before the fire, and lighting a cigarette. "Are you going to obtrude your somewhat massive personality upon the scene?"

"Yes, that's what I'd like to know," added Frank.

The doctor laughed rather diffidently. "Why not?" he said. "Why shouldn't I go, if I wish to?"

Frank flung out his hands with a gesture of mock despair. "Now, wouldn't that come and get you!" he said. "I appeal to you, Hilda. You were present; you heard Miss Holland invite me to this Manifesto Makers' meeting. You know she never said a word to Jack; she didn't even look at him. He was foolish enough to let her see that he was already a convert to her little gospel, and therefore no longer in need of her ministrations. But as for me, 'I was a wandering sheep; I did not love the fold,' and hence, as a good missionary, she feels a deep interest in me. Off and on, I should say at least fifty Colorado women have tried to make a suffragist of me. Some of them were very pretty," he added reminiscently, "and I've noticed that the prettier they are the longer it takes 'em to make me see the error of my ways. Now with Miss Holland, I wouldn't mind letting her tinker with my political views so long as we both shall live."

"Frank, you are incorrigible," said his sister. "If Miss Holland knew what a flighty, inconsequent infant you are, she wouldn't waste a thought on you, let alone a whole evening. What makes you want to go, anyhow?"

"What's the use of her wasting thoughts on a solemn dub like our brother?" he demanded aggrievedly. "What business has he trailing the soap-boxing suffragers around when he is about to take upon himself vows to cleave only to the daughter of a militant 'Anti' leader, some time when he can jar himself loose from his professional cares long enough for a honeymoon?"

"I'm afraid, Jack, you will find your prospective mother-in-law quite as strenuous as the most ardent of the suffragists," said his sister. "I haven't gone into this thing at all, I haven't time, but it is certainly amusing to watch the 'Antis' outdo even the most ardent suffragettes by way of proving their contention that woman's sphere is home. If they were consistent, they would never appear in public——"

"Except by 'Now comes the counsel for the defendant,'" interrupted Frank, "but they never are. There is a little bunch of them in Colorado who have failed to command the same attention in politics that their money imposes upon the social world, so they rush into type and get themselves interviewed and asked to speak when they come East, all by way of proving their sensitive and shrinking nature. I don't agree with the suffragists, not a little bit, but I can fraternize with them; they are sincere, but none of the 'Antis' for me; never saw one yet who wasn't either a snob or so narrow-minded that a toothpick would look like the Brooklyn Bridge by comparison."

"Hear, hear!" cried Jack. "Miss Holland has certainly made an impression upon you; not that I see what difference it makes, since women already vote where you hail from."

"That just goes to show how foolish a smart man can be," replied his brother cheerfully. "You think because you may have a vote on the enfranchisement of women that it is very important what you think, but is it? Not at all. But with me it is different. I've paid office rent in Denver for two years, and spent a third of the time here or in Washington. I've looked in on two State conventions, and forgot to register at the last election, but because I come from Colorado I am considered an authority on woman suffrage, and when I say it's no good, and swell out my chest and look gloomy, it has great weight, great weight!" He leaned back in his chair and gave way to unseemly mirth as he recalled some occasion on which he had evidently hoaxed some trusting reporter.

"Nonsense, Frank," his brother-in-law answered. "I don't believe you know the first thing about politics or suffrage, or what the women have done or haven't done."

"There you wrong me," the young man answered gravely. "The first thing to know in politics is when to come into the game and when to keep out. Personally, I can't make my firm believe that it is cheaper to buy the other fellows' men after they are elected than it is to try to elect our own, and have them raise the ante on us, but they'll come to it after a while. As to the women, bless you, voting doesn't change their nature, and so long as women are willing to believe what men tell them, it's mighty unsafe to trust them with the ballot. Before you know it, they'll find us out, and then you'll see the first result of the suffragist dream of heaven on earth—there'll be no more marrying or giving in marriage. Oh, I'm dead against it!"

They all joined in the laughter that followed this sally, and Hilda said thoughtfully, "If you boys are intent on this meeting, I'll hurry dinner, for they probably begin early." As she rose to go, Frank caught her hand with the piteous entreaty, "Oh, please make my big brother take his marbles and go home. He wasn't asked to this party. Miss Holland didn't say a thing to him. I don't see why he has to have first show with all the pretty girls in New York!"

"When Miss Holland knows you, and all your native charm, she will never smile again upon your older brother," laughed his sister, "but in the meantime I suppose it's an open meeting, and we can't prevent his going. But don't worry; his fatal beauty will but serve as a foil to your more sparkling type. Besides, with your vivid imagination, unhampered by a slavish subserviency to facts, you should be able to furnish canards that will occupy all Miss Holland's time for a month."

As she left the room her husband opened the door, and her brothers rose and remained standing until it was closed after her.

"If all women were like her——" Frank said impulsively, but Ramsey stopped him.

"If half of them were like her," he said reverently, "I would be in favor of turning the government over to them, certain that the hand that rocks the cradle would never give this storm-tossed old world more shaking up than is good for it."



CHAPTER XI

THE ADVANCING COLUMN OF DEMOCRACY

As the two brothers turned into the cross street that led to the hall where the Industrial League had its headquarters and held its weekly meetings, Dr. Earl laid his hand on Frank's shoulder.

"Dear old fellow," he said affectionately, "would you mind telling me what on earth possesses you to come down here to-night? I'm not asking out of mere curiosity, nor do I believe that is the motive that brings you."

"Then if I say the pursuit of the good, the true and the beautiful, you will not believe me?" his brother answered lightly.

"I shall know you do not wish to tell me the real reason, and will drop it, but I shall not be deceived. I haven't studied my kind for this long without knowing at least the a-b-c of human nature. You use your cap and bells and an air of frivolity to conceal your true character from the world, as other men cloak themselves in an atmosphere of austerity and reserve."

"Discovered!" cried Frank, with a laugh, "after all these years in which I flattered myself I had made such a good job of it, too. Truth to tell, no mask and domino ever afforded such perfect protection as the jingle of my jester's bells. I am apparently so given up to pomps and vanities that nobody gives me credit for a serious thought, and so takes no pains to conceal his own from me. It has long been one of the wonders of my world how I hold my job."

"Well, since you put it that way, I have asked myself at times how you have achieved the standing you have in your profession, a standing of which we are all immensely proud, by the way. But if you are a profound student, it is something recent; I used to think you learned too easily ever to know how to study, and law is a vocation."

"Law is one thing and success in the legal profession is another," said the young man oracularly. "Between our omnipresent legislatures which spend our time and money repealing what we lawyers already know, and enacting laws for the courts to set aside, these are what might be called parlous times for the profession, but my long suit is not in understanding statutes, but people."

Insensibly he had dropped his flippant tone, and was speaking, seriously, with conviction. There was a moment's pause and then Jack said, "And you go to this meeting because——?"

"Because, little as I like it, I am not such a fool that I do not know that the enfranchisement of women is certain, and it may help me to understand the new and troublesome element which is to be injected into public life if I watch the workings from the beginning. Anyhow, it is part of my business to understand these things, and hence my acceptance of Miss Holland's invitation. This is the place, isn't it?"

The house differed in no wise from the rest of the block, save in its air of thrift and cleanliness, and the brass plate on the door bore the name, "Industrial League House." It was evidently a settlement with resident workers, for a troop of boys was straggling down into the basement, where a gymnasium had been established, and several young women were standing in the hall discussing some matter connected with sterilized milk. At the right of the wide hall there was a large, old-fashioned double parlor, with plenty of chairs for a meeting of sixty or seventy people, and perhaps half that many were already in the room. They were singing as the two men entered, and Dr. Earl and Frank stood in the hallway listening to the words sung to the soul-stirring old tune of "John Brown's Body."

"These are they who build thy houses, weave thy raiment, win thy wheat, Smooth the rugged, fill the barren, turn the bitter into sweet; All for thee this day—and ever. What reward for them is meet? Till the host comes marching on."

As they struck into the chorus, the boys downstairs took up the swelling chords, and it was echoed from the street beyond.

"Hark, the rolling of the thunder; Lo, the sun! and lo! thereunder Riseth wrath, and hope, and wonder, And the host comes marching on."

"I wonder whether they sing the sixth stanza," said Frank curiously. Jack looked at him in amazement. "What is the song?" he asked, conscious that he was getting new sidelights upon his younger brother's character this evening.

"It's William Morris' 'March of the Workers,' and the verse I'm talking about begins, 'O, ye rich men, hear and tremble.' Come on in, Jack," and a moment later John Earl heard his brother's beautiful voice take up the words:

"Many a hundred years, passed over, have they labored deaf and blind; Never tidings reached their sorrow, never hope their toil might find. Now at last they've heard and hear it, and the cry comes down the wind And their feet are marching on.

"On we march, then, we, the workers, and the rumor that ye hear Is the blended sound of battle and deliv'rance drawing near; For the hope of every creature is the banner that we bear, And the world is marching on."

Silvia Holland turned quickly when she heard the strong, unknown voice join in the ringing words, and fairly gasped when she saw that it was Frank Earl who was singing, while his brother looked at her with an air as bewildered as her own. The moment that the song was concluded she greeted them, and found them comfortable seats where they could see and hear without being too conspicuous.

"We like to have men come to our meetings, and a few generally drop in. I expect several to-night, for we have a speaker from Colorado, but we don't often have the luxury of a baritone note for our music, so we owe you a special vote of thanks, Mr. Earl," she said to Frank.

He bowed. "Oh, no; it's the other way about," he said lightly. "You don't know how grateful I am to you for not singing the 'Day of Wrath' verse, in which all of us who haven't succeeded in swearing off our taxes hear what is coming to us. How well that girl presides," he added, as a businesslike young woman dispatched the reading and adoption of minutes and the reports of committees without a hitch or a moment's useless delay.

"That is Florence Dresser," explained Miss Holland. "She is one of the leaders in the Laundry Girls' Association. The secretary," indicating a young woman who might have been a twelve-year-old child, save for her sad, careworn face, "has nearly killed herself sewing for sweaters to take care of her family; we've found homes for the children and she lives here now; we are trying to make up to her for the lost years, but it is hard work," and she sighed.

"We have one meeting a month when we have a program," Miss Holland explained. "At the other three we consider various phases of industrial life as it affects our own membership or women in general. I am rather sorry that this happens to be a program night, for you would have had a better idea of the scope we try to cover at the other kind, but perhaps this will be more entertaining." She turned more directly to Frank. "A business meeting here always makes me think of the 'Antis,' and their twaddle about woman's sphere, which they would like to reduce to a demi-hemisphere."

Frank nodded. "Of course there's nothing to that with intelligent people now; woman's sphere is wherever she can make good, but I think it is a pity that she has to take so large a place in the industrial world, and I don't believe that voting will help her."

"But it has helped men," Miss Holland replied quickly.

"Not half so much as their unions," he answered. "The thing that helps is getting together and standing together."

"Now you've lost your whole case," laughed Dr. Earl. "There has never been anything that brought all sorts and conditions of women together like the suffrage cause. You see that in England. In fact, you see it everywhere. Women are waking up, and getting to their feet and stretching out their hands—to us? Not at all, to each other."

"Oh, I wish you'd say that to my comrades here," said Miss Holland. "We should all be so glad to hear you. Will you not let me present you for a few minutes during the informal discussion?"

For an instant he wavered, then the face of Leonora flashed before him, and he shook his head decisively. "I'm too new at this sort of thing," he answered. "Get my brother here to talk to you about Colorado, and let the audience heckle him."

"We'd be delighted," laughed Miss Holland. "The lady who is to conduct the question box, which is the main thing to-night, comes from Denver. Her name is Carroll Renner; do you happen to know her? Will she be able to hold her own? Sometimes they ask pretty sharp questions."

"Don't give yourself a moment's uneasiness," Frank answered. "There'll be no twelve baskets needed to remove the fragments of the contumacious when she gets through. A small blotter will answer."

"You know her very well, then?" Miss Holland said, openly surprised.

"Rather," he answered laconically. "She is the most persistent lobbyist in the State, and she infallibly discovers the one deadly section in a bill that you thought so well hidden that no one would ever notice it. She's the most troublesome woman I know and the best fellow."

Miss Holland and Dr. Earl both turned and looked at the little woman, who had come in a few minutes before with a party of people, with added interest. She was very simply gowned in black, and but for a certain twinkle of the dark gray eyes, and a rather mocking smile, there was nothing particularly distinctive about her.

"Tell me some more," said Miss Holland curiously. "Sometimes the voting woman helps and sometimes she hurts; if they're freaky, and of course some of them are, they hurt dreadfully."

"I've seen her a good deal while I've been watching the Senate," he said. "I'd been out there for several sessions of the General Assembly before I located there. She came in one day with a letter from some national woman's organization—wanted the Beveridge Child Labor Law endorsed, I think. Anyhow, time was of the essence of the contract, so we drew up a concurrent resolution, and she got a Republican and a Democrat to introduce it together, and it slid along on its way to Washington within forty-eight hours; she and a Mrs. Platt worked it together. All they said was that the women wanted it."

Miss Holland gasped. "Go on," she said.

He lowered his voice, for the president was introducing a handsome girl who was to give a reading.

"Another time there was a bill—I don't recollect it, but something about committing girl prisoners, or something of the sort; I saw her get pretty white, and shut her lips hard, and then she got up and started to walk out, and one of the Senators saw her, too. 'Say, you don't like that bill?' he said, and she answered, as if she could hardly control her anger, 'It's infamous!' 'Oh, it is, is it?' he said. 'Well, then, we'll make them adjourn over until we can get a conference and amend the thing.' No fuss, no talk; just straight goods. That's Carroll Renner."

"And that's what it means to be an enfranchised woman!" said Miss Holland, with a long breath. "None of us could do that here!"

"Well, that's part of it," acquiesced Frank, and then they listened silently. The girl who was reading was not particularly well-trained, but there were passion and pathos in her voice as she told the story of the eaglet, chained to a log for fear it might fall if permitted to attempt to fly.

"We also have our dream of a Garden," the strong young voice went on. "But it lies in a distant future. We dream that woman shall eat of the tree of knowledge together with man, and that side by side and hand close to hand, through ages of much toil and labor, they shall together raise about them an Eden nobler than any the Chaldean dreamed of; an Eden created by their own labor and made beautiful by their own fellowship.

"In his Apocalypse there was one who saw a new heaven and a new earth; we see a new earth; but therein dwells love—the love of comrades and co-workers.

"It is because so wide and gracious to us are the possibilities of the future, so impossible is a return to the past, so deadly is a passive acquiescence in the present, that to-day we are found everywhere raising our strange new cry, 'Labor, and the training that fits us for labor!'"

"You recognize it, of course?" Silvia said to Dr. Earl, but he shook his head, and Frank answered, "It's Olive Schreiner, isn't it? She does good work, but I've never read anything that compared with that book on 'Woman and Economics,' and when an American writer has the whole world sitting up and taking notice, I don't see why we don't boost her game."

There was a little buzz and stir while slips of paper and pencils were distributed to the audience, and the questions collected for the next speaker.

The presiding officer made the usual preliminary remarks, and introduced Miss Renner, who gathered up the goodly sheaf of white slips in her hands and ran over them as if looking for some query that would make a specially apt beginning. Her face lit up as she came across one with which she was evidently familiar.

"This is a favorite question of mine," she said cheerfully. "I should miss it dreadfully if it failed to turn up, but it is such a troublesome and comprehensive question to answer that I have set the reply to music, and will have it sung for you, in order that you may all remember it. The question is, 'What have Colorado women done with the ballot?' I don't, myself, consider that a fair question, since none of us come down to Philadelphia or New York or Pittsburg or any of the other cities of sweetness and light and ask what you men have done with your all-powerful vote, but this seems to be the main one, especially to the masculine mind."

Dr. Earl laughed, for he had written the question, and seating herself at the piano, Miss Renner looked up at a merry-faced girl, who began singing to her rippling accompaniment a song of miraculous changes which should have ensued upon woman's enfranchisement, and concluded with a long chant, recounting some of the more notable achievements of the voting woman, ranging all the way from joint ownership of children and property, minimum salary laws, juvenile courts, medical inspection of school children, State institutions built and endowed, equality in inheritance and a host of other things, up to the adoption by her State of the initiative and referendum.

After that, Miss Renner had her audience with her until she dropped the last twist of paper on the table beside her. "You ask me why it took us so many years to pass a good law regulating child labor, and why we have failed in limiting the hours of woman's labor. As to the first, it is true that our law was by no means equal to yours, but we had the means to enforce it, and as a consequence we have little or no child labor. You have a good statute, one of the best in the Union"—there was a ripple of applause—"but in addition to this excellent law prohibiting child labor," she went on evenly, "you have in this city alone over twenty thousand child wage-earners.

"When we have gone to our legislatures asking for laws for the protection of the weak, we have generally obtained them easily, when they did not interfere with 'big business.' It took Illinois women nine years to get a State Home for children. We passed such a law without any effort whatever. In two-thirds of the States of the Union women are trying to make mothers co-equal guardians of their children, and trying in vain. That was the first law our enfranchised women wrote upon our statute books. One only learns to understand these things by experience. You may find it hard to see why railroads should go into a deal to defeat an eight-hour law for women, but that statute was flagged by a Pullman palace car towel and fell asleep at the switch, because that company complained that it couldn't get a change of sheets unless laundry girls could be compelled to work overtime. You don't dream when you talk of 'big business' to what little business it will descend."

There was a sudden hush, and she flung out her hands with an impulsive gesture, and there was a passionate earnestness in her voice that gripped her hearers. "Let me tell you something you do not know when you hold the women in the suffrage States responsible for conditions they are the first to deplore. A handful of men in this city have more to do with Western industries and their regulation than have both the men and women. We have steel works; their policy is dictated from lower Broadway. We have smelters; they are closed at the order of a syndicate in this city. We have railroads, all of them controlled by your fellow citizens, and it was the deals entered into between the representatives of these interests and our local corporations that defeated the eight-hour law for women, and every bit of reform legislation pledged to the people. It was this condition, this failure of alleged democracy, that made us go on record for real democracy, for the initiative that makes it possible for us to enact the laws our representatives are cajoled into pigeon-holing, for the referendum that enables us to scotch the snake so that the people may have a chance to kill it. This was the first great fundamental reform which the women demanded, and it was owing to the work of education they began twenty years ago, and kept up untiringly, that Colorado has won this great victory. Woman suffrage is not alone for women, or to enable us to secure certain readjustments of law. It is for our country, which cannot exist half enfranchised and half irresponsible, half democracy and half a feudalism; half of it privileged to shirk or exercise its civic rights, and half denied aught but the burden of those rights. Women need the franchise if only to make their influence, of which we hear so much, effective, but more than they need the ballot, this nation needs the active devotion of its women to transmute to golden fulfillment its leaden life; it needs, it must have all that we can give it, your life and mine; if it is to go forward, its sons and daughters must go forward—together!"

There was generous applause, and the two young men followed Miss Holland, and she presented Dr. Earl and was about to introduce his brother, when Miss Renner held out both hands to him.

"Hast thou found me, O mine enemy," she cried. "I'm awfully glad to see you, Frank. I was much minded to tell how you helped me get my dove bill through, but I feared they might hold you responsible for the defeat of the eight-hour law and turn and rend you."

"You promised never to reveal any of my good deeds," he answered. "Keep it out of the papers, Miss Holland. I can't afford to lose prestige as the exponent of the Mammon of Unrighteousness."

"Unfortunately, he is a great god with legislatures, East as well as West," answered Miss Holland, and then they all went out together.



CHAPTER XII

A TUBERCULAR KNEE AND A WORRIED SURGEON

Dr. Earl found his hands uncommonly full for the next few weeks. What with the endless detail attendant upon the arrangements for his new offices, and the perfection of his equipment, it seemed as if there were not enough hours in the day to meet all the calls upon him. Leonora looked aggrieved, and Hilda complained loudly that he had deserted them.

The spectacular manner in which the yellower part of the New York press had handled his first case after his return, brought him telephone calls and personal visits from many old patients, and a goodly number from new ones, not to mention freaky interviews with persons representing all sorts of cults. He was asked to address half a dozen different branches of the New Thought movement. The Society for the Propagation of Esoteric Buddhism asked him to tell them of his experiences in Hindoostan; "Purple Mother" and "Besant" Theosophists sent committees to wait on him, and various believers in Spiritist exploitations, astrologists, psychometrists and all sorts and conditions of dabblers in occultism pestered him with letters, circulars and requests of every conceivable nature.

It had been no part of his plan to return to his native land and set up a practice by which he should exploit to the world the results of his study. A real student, he knew very well that a lifetime would be all too short to devote to the as yet but little known field of mental therapeutics, and nothing could have been more foreign to his character, individually or professionally, than the fanfare of trumpets with which his return had been heralded. The principles which he wished to prove must be brought home to his profession if they were to be of great and lasting benefit, and the publicity and advertising which a man of a different calibre might have enjoyed, were annoying in the extreme to Earl. He was still a young man, and modest withal, and he felt that nothing could be more detrimental with the men whose regard he wished to secure and hold, so he declined all invitations to speak, all requests for articles or interviews, and gave himself up to getting back into the harness. His patients, both old and new, took up more time than he could have hoped for, and before the middle of summer he found himself not only well launched in his profession, but with all that he could possibly find time to do, and work piling up ahead of him, so that he could only promise indefinitely when the Ramseys urged him to come down to their Newport place, and Leonora had to put up with fractions of Sundays until she and her mother left for Bar Harbor.

There were times when that young lady was by no means certain that she wished to marry a successful physician. "You wouldn't like me any better if I were unsuccessful?" he asked teasingly, but she came back to her point, and he had to explain gravely that the theories of the laboratory must be worked out in actual practice before they can be transmuted into accepted facts.

"But you don't need the money," she argued, trying dimly to apply some of the principles which he was fond of expounding. It seemed rather hopeless, but with infinite patience he sought to make clear to her that any human being whose life is not to be useless and profitless must have some object to attain, some work to do which will develop his character. When she replied that he had character enough, and her only object in life was to be his wife, what more was there to say? Flattery at once so charming and so complete left him defenseless, and he kissed her and went away, trying not to ask himself whether a legal ceremony could ever make wedded souls of two mortals of such diverse views of life. And yet, she was so sweet, so sweet!

In spite of the many other demands upon his time, Dr. Earl saw his first patient very frequently. Mrs. Bell did not appear cramped for means, and provided everything that could add to her little daughter's comfort, including not a few luxuries, which Dr. Earl felt convinced were the gift of Miss Holland. If he had vaguely hoped that he might meet her at his patient's he was destined to disappointment. Once her car arrived just as he was leaving, and another time they passed on the stairs. He told himself that it was better so, and yet when he took her hand, and felt the firm, strong fingers, well-knit and efficient, for no soft, yielding little five-and-a-half glove-wearer ever compassed Beethoven, he knew that hers was a nature that could answer to his own, and his hand tightened involuntarily. There was something in his look as he met the blue eyes on the step above that brought the warm blood to her face, and she swayed toward him almost imperceptibly, and then with a word of courteous greeting went on her way, for she knew that according to common report he was to marry Miss Kimball that fall. Her lip curled a little, for she remembered Leonora of old; she knew her pink-and-white prettiness and the few and simple enfoldments of her elementary little brain, just large enough to hold a few attractive near-ideas, a thorough comprehension of all the social conventionalities, and a fixed and stubborn conviction as to what was or was not "smart." "If she has a soul," Silvia said to herself with rather unusual heat, "no one could tell whether it is in a condition of arrested development, hopeless atrophy or complete ossification. As well seek diamonds in a common sandbank as inspiration or aspiration in its sawdusty recesses." Then she laughed, and said, "Cat!" softly, which was really most irrelevant.

The day that the cast was to be removed, Silvia appeared laden with good things that they might celebrate the occasion with due ceremony.

With infinite care and gentleness, Dr. Earl cut down through the cast, and took it off. The fracture was perfectly knit, but there was a slight swelling about the knee, and as Earl examined it Silvia saw him compress his lips in a hard, straight line. Without looking up, or changing his tone, he asked the child if she had had a fall since the cast had been changed. She answered readily that about a week before her crutch had slipped as she was coming indoors, and she had fallen, striking the injured leg against the stone step, and she winced as he touched the thin knee.

"It's too bad," he said, "but there will have to be another cast about this knee, and you must be more careful, little girl."

The tears came to her eyes, and her mother turned to him with an expression of anxiety. His cheerful face reassured her. "We'll hope it won't be for long," he said, "but there's no use taking chances. Has her health generally been good?" he asked Mrs. Bell.

"The diseases common to childhood went rather hard with her and she had considerable trouble with her neck and throat a few years ago," Mrs. Bell replied.

He made an examination of the glands of her neck, but said no more.

In spite of many insistent calls elsewhere, Dr. Earl remained long enough to help lend an air of festivity to the small party, which Silvia presided over with infinite tact, and with a last admonition to Mrs. Bell to keep the little girl in bed until he came again, and as quiet as possible, he took his departure, and Silvia went with him.

"Tell me what is the matter?" she said, with her usual directness, when they were out on the street.

"What makes you think anything is?" he parried.

"I beg your pardon," she said, a trifle coldly. "I should not have asked."

He turned to her and stopped, mute reproach in his eyes. "There isn't a shadow of doubt that tuberculosis has developed in that knee, and while I hope to arrest it, and perfect a cure in time, I am very anxious, nevertheless."

"But the break has united?" she asked.

"Oh, yes, and that goes to show that this condition is very recent, and mild, but with her antecedent history no one can tell what may happen," he said.

"Antecedent history?" Silvia said, rather puzzled. "I thought you did not know the family?"

"I didn't," he answered, "but you may remember that I looked very carefully at the bruises about the knee when I set the leg, and I asked Mrs. Bell some general questions but received no very definite replies until to-day, and what you heard indicates that the child has already had a slight attack of tuberculosis. I had counted on my treatment to overcome the weakening influences of confinement to bed and crutch for so long a time."

Silvia was silent, as if thinking out some plan, and said suddenly, "Then it will all resolve itself into a contest between health and disease, with a considerable handicap against the patient?"

"Yes," he said. "With plenty of good food and good air and the right kind of care, there is no reason why she should not win. And I intend that she shall," he concluded energetically.



CHAPTER XIII

AN ANTI-SUFFRAGE MEETING

Dr. Earl redoubled his attentions to Leonora, determined to give her no just cause for complaint. The doubts that had beset him disappeared, for no one could be more charming than Leonora, when she was permitted to follow her own bent. Her mother also showed her gratification at his devotion, and tried, with consummate tact, to wean him away from his evident partiality for the suffrage cause. She gave him the best of the tracts issued by the Anti-Suffrage Society; while he was waiting for his offices to be fitted up, she took him to lectures and teas and receptions where anti-suffrage sentiment abounded, and tried in various ways to convince him of the superior social status of the "Anti" women.

The culmination was reached, however, when he escorted her and Leonora to a meeting in a large theatre one afternoon. They were prominent figures in one of the boxes nearest the stage, and Silvia Holland and Carroll Renner, who were sitting well toward the rear of the parquet, had ample opportunity to watch the effect of the meeting upon him.

Frank Earl, who had come in directly afterward and taken a seat just back of them, leaned forward and talked while the crowd gathered. "Oh, don't mind him," he said, when Miss Renner asked if that were not his brother with the anti-suffrage leaders. "He can't help himself, but if he doesn't go away from here ready to enlist under Miss Holland's banner I miss my count. Even I should, were it not that I have seen the folly of it all on its native heath. Don't make faces at me, Carroll, or people will know you are a suffragette."

The theatre had been profusely decorated with flags, flowers and bunting, and mottoes were festooned along the walls, one of which was "God Bless Our Homes," and another, "Imbecile Children Will Be the Product of Imbecile Voting Women."

Dr. Earl was much impressed with the audience, which, nevertheless, seemed rather chilly and unresponsive. A dignity prevailed which either could not or dared not give way to any decided demonstration, in marked contradistinction to the enthusiasm which characterized the suffrage meetings he had witnessed.

In addition to the bunting and the mottoes, there were a number of large pictures, done in the style of the cartoonist. One of these showed a colonial dame at her spinning-wheel, with the words "An American Lady of Four Generations Ago" beneath it; beside it was the picture of a masculine-looking woman, in a harem skirt, standing on a box at a street corner, addressing other women similarly attired; this was called "The American Suffragette." Another picture showed a nurse caring for the sick and dying soldiers on one side, and on the other a suffragette charging the police; this picture was labeled "Before and After Taking."

The meeting opened with a spirited address by the president of the association, Mrs. Briglow-Jorliss, who was welcomed with a brief rustle of well-bred applause, led by Frank Earl.

"Got to do it," he said, in answer to Carroll's reproachful look. "You'll see; even Jack will catch on before the end of the meeting. Always applaud these folks when they begin; maybe you can't when they quit."

Mrs. Briglow-Jorliss told of the enormous gains recently made by the "Antis" among the select people of the city, and passed off the suffrage parade as merely a tatterdemalion host of the riff-raff of the city led by a few notoriety seekers.

"You see, Miss Holland," Frank whispered, "what a good thing it is that I came here; I never should have known that that parade wasn't one of the finest assemblages of women in the world if I hadn't."

Silvia laughed in spite of herself, and the stout lady on the platform went on piling up the indictment against her sex, and showing how demoralizing the vote had proved to women; how the suffrage sentiment was dying out in the West; how the "Antis" were organizing even in the suffrage States to lift the curse from their kind; how much purer and nobler politics would be without the influence of woman, and wound up with a glowing peroration on behalf of the women who were fighting to maintain the sanctity of the home and the elevation of the children.

Silvia gave an impatient ejaculation. "How can you take it so quietly, Miss Renner?" she asked. "I confess it always stirs me up."

"It wouldn't if you had the ballot," said the smaller woman. "It's just amusing, or tiresome, according to how well it is done. You women are the worried and worrying Marthas; we are the Marys, who have chosen the better part that shall not be taken away; we know it can't be, and this is something like hearing people laboriously argue that the world is flat with the sun revolving around it."

After the opening speech there were brief addresses by Dr. David Dearson on the disastrous results to motherhood should women participate in the active life of the nation; by the Reverend Jayson Yerkes on the Pauline doctrine of the subserviency of the truly feminine woman; by Mrs. Workman Werther on the decadence of feminine charm among women aping men's interests in life, and Crawford Dorer, a labor leader, opposed the movement because the natural timidity of woman would, he predicted, set back all hope of militant progress for the workers of the world. The "Antis" listened with a somewhat strained and puzzled attention, and a group of working-women, out on strike, and sitting in the balcony, gave an angry hiss, which was instantly suppressed. The last speaker, Mr. Reuben Rice, was one of those wandering scribes who travel through the West and write up suffrage from a Pullman-car window, and as he exposed the weaknesses, the failures and the pitiful spectacle that voting women make of themselves, he galvanized the audience into a semblance of real life and interest.

Dr. Earl found the speeches entertaining if not enlightening, and after the second, gave himself up to the silent enjoyment of collating the arguments presented in juxtaposition. No sooner had one speaker convinced his hearers that women would precipitate anarchy by their radicalism than the next proved equally conclusively that an era of dilettantism and millinery shop legislation would be the inevitable result of woman suffrage; no sooner were they filled with the horror of the degradation of politics by the class of women certain to participate in it, than another speaker assured them that politics was already so vile that any woman would be hopelessly contaminated who had anything to do with the gangrenous growth, and yet another showed that women wouldn't vote anyhow. It was all he could do to control the muscles of his face when the Reverend Mr. Yerkes told them in one sentence of the dissension that would rend families and in the next that married women simply voted as their husbands dictated, and he could not repress a smile when the doctor and the professor made it clear that if woman is to reproduce the race she must not be expected to do anything else, only to have Mrs. Werther show how woman must be free to take part in the ennobling activities of the world, philanthropy, charity, etc., if she is to "bring to motherhood that crown which is the glory of the race," and much more of the same sort. He heard the ancient argument about bullets and ballots, and in the same breath his attention was called to Semiramis conquering Assyria, the Amazons invading Asia, the triumph of Sappho in song, Aspasia in the salon, Deborah among the Judges of Israel, George Eliot in literature, and a host of others who had won distinction.

The audience was told that it was entirely proper to agitate, cajole, coax, beseech, threaten, bully and browbeat men into voting for candidates and measures desired by the women; anything that stopped short of blackmail and personal intimidation bore the hallmark of refined femininity, but to take two minutes to accomplish results for themselves by depositing a ballot on election day meant everlasting damnation to all feminine traits! And Leonora patted her pretty little hands, and looked up to Earl for approval, feeling that at last he must see that Silvia and her cohorts were routed horse and foot.

When the attack upon Western women was well under way, and Mr. Rice, a dapper little chap, looking like a freshman from high school, was rolling out his arraignment of Denver women in particular as typical of the nethermost depths to which the voting female may descend, Carroll Renner wrote a few lines on a bit of paper, and gave it to one of the ushers, and a few minutes later she had the satisfaction of watching the portly Mrs. Briglow-Jorliss read it. When Mr. Rice had concluded his diatribe, the lady stated in dulcet tones that Mr. Frank Earl was said to be in the audience, and as he lived in Denver, and was known to have strong views on this question, there was an urgent request that he should come to the platform, that they might know from one who had long witnessed with regret the deteriorating effects of woman suffrage that nothing that they had heard was in any way exaggerated. She vouched for Earl as one whom she had known since his boyhood, a member of one of the most highly respected families in New York, and who had never failed to reply when she had needed statistics from the field of woman's dethronement.

There was a bustle and stir over the audience, and John Earl looked a good deal startled, while Leonora was openly delighted. An excellent speaker, and a trained debater, the occasion had no terrors for Frank Earl. In fact, he confessed to himself as he made his way to the platform, he had not had so much fun as he expected to enjoy in the next fifteen minutes for many a long day. He was introduced with many rather florid expressions, and began by stating his position calmly, unmistakably, as opposed to the extension of the franchise to women. He then made a few complimentary references to those ladies who nobly put aside their own devotion to the home, the sphere they adorned so admirably, in order to save their misguided suffrage sisters from the evil effects of their mistaken zeal.

There were a good many suffragists and some suffragettes in that anti-suffrage meeting, and Frank saw that the chilly audience had at last thawed, melted, warmed up and was rapidly approaching the point where it might reasonably be expected to boil over.

"I am unalterably against the extension of the franchise to women," he repeated, and went on, "but my reasons for this opposition are concrete and practical rather than abstract and theoretical, and are based upon the experience I have gained from my residence in Colorado. I am also opposed to it because it is all too evident that the suffrage should be restricted rather than extended. The ballot should be the reward of intelligence, education, and a comprehension of the great political problems of the nation."

"Give us the truth," some one at the left of the parquet cried.

"I shall," he said, "and that necessitates correcting a few impressions which seem to me at variance with the facts. If it were true that women would not vote, or would vote as directed by the male members of their families, I should not so much deprecate giving them the ballot; but neither contention is true. Women do vote, and what is worse, they vote in steadily increasing numbers. Out of seventy thousand votes cast at the last election in my city a little less than half of them were cast by women, and judging from the results, I must say that the men of their families had very little influence with them. The possession of the franchise has developed the secretive instinct among women; they no longer confide their intentions to their doting husbands; they listen to their words of wisdom and then—they vote the secret ballot as they please."

There was a wave of laughter that swelled into a gleeful sort of shout of mirth, but with an air of the most grieved surprise the speaker turned wonderingly to Mrs. Briglow-Jorliss, who still beamed upon him, though she was looking worried.

"But surely, Mr. Earl," she said, "when the disagreeable duty is thrust upon them, the conservative women do what they can to protect the interests of the State?"

He shook his head sadly.

"This is one of the most frightful discoveries we have made since women began to vote. When Mr. Dorer speaks of the innate conservatism of women he shows that he is not conversant with the woman movement. It is true that there are a few intensely partisan women, who can be held by party ties, but the rank and file observe no such allegiance. They read and study, but in addition they go to the legislative halls, and there they see that both parties make and break promises with equal facility, and what is the result?"

"Well, what is it?" cried an impatient feminine voice.

"I hardly know how to break it to you," he said, "but the result is revolt, revolt all along the line. Yes, ladies; women, lovely, refined, gentle, educated women utterly refuse to be dictated to by political leaders, and openly sneer at ward bosses. They can't be kept in line. They no longer sing the sweet strains of 'The land of the free and the home of the brave.' On the contrary, they raise the battle cry, 'Let independence be our boast,' and in spite of the passionate pleas of their natural leaders, they go on record for the most radical legislation. Why, I'm told that nearly every so-called progressive law enacted in my State has been passed by their continued efforts.

"They have no conception of the ideal of government laid down by Hamilton; they will submit to neither checks nor balances, and would subvert the whole scheme of representative government and replace it with an out-and-out democracy. In accord with this mistaken view they have adopted the initiative and referendum, carried it overwhelmingly, three to one, in every county in the State, and I need not tell an audience of intelligence that this is the most insidious form of attack now being made upon the fundamental principles of our government."

By this time Silvia and all the suffragists in the audience were applauding wildly, while Carroll Renner laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks, and once more Frank turned a patient and puzzled countenance to the presiding officer.

"I do not understand the applause, ladies," he said mildly, with a gleam in his eyes that none but Carroll understood. "The thing I am telling you is frightful. The enfranchisement of women means the end of the Republic as it now is; it means the rejection of all theories that are found wanting, and the putting out on the vast uncharted sea of experiment; it means interference with those great business enterprises that have built up, I had nearly said that 'make and preserve us a nation'! It means a reckless disregard for property rights in the sentimental desire to protect the individual, as if a nation could become great and strong by individual effort alone, and without the guiding and sustaining hands of statecraft and financial genius gripping the rudder of the ship of state. They will not listen to the voice of experience; they cannot be intimidated; they cannot be deceived for an indefinite number of years; if the established order seems to them unfair, unjust or illiberal, they have little respect for tradition when it's results they're after."

"But if the anti-suffrage movement is growing as we have been told, can't the anti-suffragists overcome those tendencies?" asked an old lady on the platform.

Frank restated the question for the benefit of the audience, and then answered with indescribable pathos, "I cannot conceal the truth from you; improbable as it seems, when once this poison becomes virulent in the body politic it spares none, and the very women who have battled most nobly against this corroding innovation are apt to succumb to its insidious influence; even the anti-suffragist, home-loving, God-fearing, modest and retiring as is her nature, has developed a talent for political intrigue that has led to the downfall of more than one of the best laid plans of mice and men."

He tried to go on, but the audience was convulsed, not so much by what he said as by his manner, and by the sudden turning of the tables after the long tension had reached the snapping point. Still uncertain whether to regard his as friend or foe, Mrs. Briglow-Jorliss, after rapping vainly for order, was obliged to dismiss the meeting, and by some irony of fate the orchestra played "Hail Columbia," and the suffragettes took up the words and sung them with much unction, especially the lines—

"Let independence be our boast, Ever mindful what it cost."



CHAPTER XIV

FAITH IS THE BASIS OF ALL PROGRESS

Early in June, Dr. Earl received a letter which puzzled him not a little. It was complimentary in the extreme, and yet something back of it made him say, "'For it is not an open enemy that hath done this.'" The letter asked him to speak on "Mental Therapeutics" before a meeting of one of the great medical societies of the city of New York; stated that there would be no other speaker, but there would be an open discussion after his address, and hoped he would find time to comply with the request. Once he started to write his acceptance; twice he actually wrote, declining, and then tore up both letters. It was true that he was crowded for time, but he could make time, and in his heart he knew perfectly well that he would have done so without a thought, but for the unexpected complications which had occurred with Alice Bell. Already he had heard one or two thinly veiled sneers at the result of this much-lauded case. He had met Towers and Hershell, both of them eminent in the profession, but the day before, and their greetings had been singularly cool; once or twice at the club they both frequented Morris had been little short of insulting, but his well-known infatuation for Silvia Holland would account for that. A reporter from one of the less reputable dailies had asked for an interview, and had written an article which barely escaped being libelous. There were not wanting those in the profession who openly denounced him as a "fakir."

The longer he thought about it, the more unwilling he was to act upon his own judgment alone, and so he turned to the one unfailing counsellor of his life, his sister Hilda. With him, to will was to do, so within an hour he was in his sister's drawing-room, and not five minutes later Silvia Holland entered and was warmly greeted by Mrs. Ramsey. The day was dismal and the rain was descending in a steady downpour that gave no promise of ever ceasing; it was late afternoon, and Mrs. Ramsey said cordially, "Let us have tea in my sitting-room; nobody else will come such a day as this, and it will be so much more cosy. I distrust from his air of supernatural gravity that my brother has something on his mind——"

"Then I will be de trop" said Miss Holland. "I will amuse myself in the library until you are at liberty. I was awfully glad to get your 'phone message to come over, for it's a wretched day, and I was wondering where I should go for tea as I came up town from my office. Have your conference and never mind about me."

"Indeed," said Jack eagerly, "if you would be so kind as to give me your opinion also on the matter I have called to consult my sister about, you would confer a great favor," and even as he spoke he knew it was for her quick comprehension he had been unconsciously wishing all the time.

She laughed and assented graciously, and they followed Mrs. Ramsey to her own charming little room, as dainty and distinctive as its owner. Upon the tea-tray there were cigarettes, and Dr. Earl rather wondered whether Silvia would accept, but she shook her head. "No," she said lightly, "I emulate men's virtues, not their vices; maybe my nerves may need alternate sedatives and stimulants some day, but as yet I hardly know that I have any."

Hilda lit one rather languidly. "My doctor says it isn't so much nerves as lack of nerve with me; I don't know what you call it, but I confess I find the smoke-wreaths pleasant; you won't join me either, Jack? Well, let us have the story in all its native simplicity and be sure you nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice."

"I am told," he said, "that no well-bred New Yorker makes literary allusions, and that to quote Shakespeare is to relegate oneself to his century; however, this is the problem," and then he read them the letter.

Hilda was openly pleased. "Why not?" she said. "It seems to me a very courteous and appreciative note, and I should think you would enjoy speaking before that kind of an audience, all of them picked men, trained and scientific and able to take in shades of meaning and distinctions that are wasted on the laity. Unless you are keeping something back, I should say, accept by all means. But are you?"

He paused. "In just a moment, Hilda. How does it strike you, Miss Holland?"

She held out her hand for the note, and read and then reread it, and her forehead contracted. "I wonder," she said to herself, "whether this is what Orrin meant when he said the profession would furnish Dr. Earl enough rope—I meant to ask him what he did mean, but I forgot it." Aloud she said, "Isn't Dr. Morris one of the directors of this society? He's a fellow alumnus of yours; it doesn't seem as if he would be likely to show you an affront, does it?"

"That's just the point," answered Dr. Earl. "Is it a case of 'mine own familiar friend'?"

His sister looked at him quizzically. "When it comes to literary allusion, Jack," she said, "New York might permit Shakespeare, but I assure you it wouldn't stand for the psalmist. Do you really think it is a plan to get you into some false position or to embarrass you with criticisms or queries not made in good faith?"

"That is exactly what I want to know," he said.

"And what if it is?" asked Silvia.

He colored. "You mean I ought to be willing to bear testimony to my beliefs whether they meet with acceptance or not?"

Hilda blew a ring of smoke ceilingwards. "That's the trouble with these suffragettes," she said reminiscently. "They never question the advisability of 'casting pearls before swine.'"

Jack laughed and Silvia turned on her reproachfully. "Hilda! That isn't fair; haven't you just said yourself that this would be a picked audience? Suppose a little clique of them have arranged the meeting with the intention of heckling the speaker? The bulk of them will be there in good faith, anxious to learn, willing to listen to your brother's account of his experiences, and profit by them. If he can't gain a respectful hearing there, where will he gain it?"

"Forgive me for being biblical to-night," Hilda answered. "I can't seem to get away from the suggestion; you know it was the high priests and the rulers of the synagogue that stirred up their followers to cry, 'Crucify Him, crucify Him!' And times have changed more than people. The poor will hear gladly enough of healing that is to be had without money and without price, and operations that may be avoided by simply keeping well, but my experience is that the fetish of the professional man is a jealous god, given to heresy hunting, and bowing down and worshiping at the shrine of 'regularity.' They want to preserve the status quo at any cost."

"Yes," said Silvia bluntly, "even after it has long been lost. They are like people who might discover an ostrich egg-shell after the bird was half grown, and go chasing after it, trying to put it back inside the shell. I think it is Emerson who says that there are quantities of people who are always trying to become settled, whereas our only salvation consists in being constantly unsettled. I think the English women are infinitely braver and finer in their attitude on the suffrage question than we are. What I feel, Dr. Earl, is this: we have come to a time when nothing is really worth while unless it is worth fighting for. There are other worth while things, of course, for the laboratory man or woman, but for those of us who are in the thick of the fight, who want to do things now, it is necessary that we should be willing to do battle for our beliefs."

"But is that the way to win?" asked the doctor. "We've all heard about catching flies with molasses, to use a homely simile."

"Yes," responded Silvia; "the more molasses the more flies. No, the old methods are gone or are going. Do you suppose anything would do the suffrage cause as much good in this country as clubbing a few old women who want respectfully to present a petition to the other old women in Congress? A few years ago a petition was presented, signed by a million women, and a jocose member rolled it down the aisle with his foot, saying it might as well be signed by mice! But just let them try the English methods and every State in the Union would enfranchise its women just as soon as they could get a popular vote on it." She stopped short. "Oh, I beg your pardon, doctor, I didn't mean to give you a suffrage lecture."

"You are not," he said. "At least, what I understand is that you are trying to make me see that, the spirit of the age is the militant spirit, that does not wait to have its own presented to it, but takes it wherever it finds it." She nodded and he went on: "I think that is true, but with this difference between the illustration you cite and the case in point. You women must be passionate enthusiasts to win, because the thing you want is concrete and imminent and personal. I have no intention of setting up as a vade mecum, founding a new cult, proselyting or even preaching my own doctrines; in the first place I shall change them as I discover better ones, or when they fail to bring results, and in the second I shall be too busy practicing my theories to find time to exploit them."

"There you are wrong," said his sister. "When a man like Jenner comes along that is the time for practicing, but when smallpox has been rooted out and tuberculosis forgotten, men will still read what Socrates had to say of immortality and the sermon on the mount. When you hear people belittle the written and the spoken Word, it becomes us to remember that 'In the beginning the Word was God,' and all that we know of past civilizations is the word they have left behind, painted on their stony walls or burned in a brick to say, 'After me cometh a builder. Tell him I too have known.'"

"But, my dear sister," Jack answered, "don't you think assuming the role of the teacher may be just a trifle, only a trifle, presumptuous on my part?"

"I don't quite know what your new views are," she answered.

"They are not new," he said. "In fact they are most of them of such hoary antiquity that they are lost in the mists that brooded over the face of the deep. It is only the application that is new. Even that has always been understood by certain great souls. Pythagoras is said to have taught the Greeks to believe in metempsychosis for the purpose of making them kinder to lesser forms of life; like many beauty worshipers they were frankly inhuman, and it took heroic measures to create even a glimmering perception of the unity of life which is the basis of all the great world religions, whether it be Buddha's 'Who hurteth another hurteth himself,' or Christ's commandment, 'Love one another'; the Yogi looking first at the prince and then at the pauper and saying, 'I am that,' or Father Damien going into voluntary exile for the sake of the souls of the wretched lepers. The Prince of Peace preached the doctrine of spiritual inspiration, and the King of Conquerors said 'Imagination rules the world.' Jesus or Napoleon—both knew that back of the visible man himself is the thought of the man, which controls him, and other men through him, if it possesses power and vitality and truth."

"Then it is a kind of new thought?" asked Hilda.

"Rather a renaissance of old thought. The modern quest of the Grail is not for the crystal cup that held the holy elements, but for the divine life itself, the principle that inspires men to action. The philosopher of our day is not a hermit, theorizing about vague abstractions, but vitally alive to the problems that confront this day and generation, and modern psychology is changing all the methods of the great processes of existence. Education, medicine, law, are all in process of transformation. Grandsons of the men who denounced Mesmer as a charlatan thronged the clinics of Charcot."

"Yes," said Silvia, "and within the next decade Muensterberg will have compelled a complete remodeling of our forms of legal procedure. No attorney worth his salt would undertake to ignore the apparatus devised by the psychologist, and the time is nearly gone by when, as he says, courts will prefer to listen to the 'science' of the handwriting experts, rather than permit the examination of a witness by methods in accord with the exact work of the psychologist."

"That is true," assented Jack, "and not the least gratifying part of the whole matter is that it isn't the unimportant who are the ones to speak respectfully of the changing ideal; in fact, the smaller a man's calibre the more sure you can be that he will cling to the established order. It is only very great men who have the courage of their intuitions long enough to prove them. Muensterberg can afford to say what he thinks. Now if I go to this meeting and tell these men that 'there are cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming,' what do you think they will say?"

Hilda smiled. "Most of them will suspect you of quoting 'Science and Health.' If they accuse you of it, read them the rest of the paragraph."

"What is it?" asked Silvia eagerly.

"I can find it in a moment," said Hilda, going to the bookshelves, and taking down a modest olive-colored volume. "Here it is. 'And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the lowest kind of immorality into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives.' That is from the late Professor James, who is said to have been the profoundest thinker this country has ever produced, and he has said much more equally startling to those little minds that, like full bottles, have no room for more."

Dr. Earl threw back his head and laughed; his quandary was over, his course settled. He turned to Silvia with a genial smile. "Score one more victory for the Feminists," he said. "I wonder if there ever has been a time, anywhere on earth, where women were actually and aggressively noncombatants. The Spartan woman handing over her husband's shield is typical. Whenever and wherever there has been a cause worth fighting for, worth dying for—always and forever we can see the figure of the woman, shield on arm and javelin in hand, standing at the door of the slothful warrior's tent, calling him to action. Sometimes the eternal feminine leads on, but very frequently, I regret to say, it has to get back and drive, and sometimes if it did not kneel and push I fear the wheels of progress would not revolve at all; that we do go on, slowly and uncertainly, it is true, but that we go on at all, is due to the woman soul that will not let us waste our years in the wilderness when the land of promise is so near at hand. Ladies, I go!"

He rose as if to make good his words, but Hilda entered a peremptory negative, and it ended by his staying to dinner and spending a long and utterly delightful evening, which became in a sense the beginning of what he felt was a new epoch in his life. This was the understanding, the fellowship, the bon camaraderie that gives existence its zest and permits one to dream of life eternal without a horror of impending weariness and boredom.



CHAPTER XV

AN EVIL PROPHECY BEGINS TO BEAR FRUIT

Leonora and Mrs. Kimball accompanied Dr. Earl to the meeting of the medical society, and if he had some doubts whether or not she would be able to follow his discourse perfectly, he had none whatever as to his own pride and pleasure in her dainty loveliness. She was gowned in white, and the season's styles were particularly becoming to her graceful and well-rounded figure. Her radiant face with its sensitive coloring resembled the delicate glow of one of those rare Sevres vases of the Empire Period.

She appreciated the compliment of the invitation, as people always appreciate the compliment of being invited to distinguished gatherings where the subjects of discussion are likely to be much beyond their range of knowledge or understanding.

There was a large attendance, for while many members of the profession had come from idle curiosity, most of those present were interested in the views of any man of standing who might throw new light upon the successful application of either medical or surgical remedies.

Whatever criticisms may be passed upon individual practitioners, or however many Bourbons may exist in the fraternity, yet it must be apparent to the student of such matters that nowhere in the world does as large a percentage of the medical or surgical profession adopt new and improved methods of treatment of the maimed and the ill as in the United States. And nowhere in the world are such new and improved methods applied with anything like the aptness or skill as by American doctors of medicine or surgery.

The old school, the newer school, the newest school of legally recognized practitioners were there in force, as well as numbers of those who were effecting remarkable cures without any special sanction of law for their methods.

Modestly and earnestly, Dr. Earl discussed the subject that had been assigned him, amplifying as much as his time would permit, and occasionally citing authorities bound to command respectful attention from scientific minds.

He was aware that he had the sympathy of most of his audience, and he was just as fully conscious of the hostility of Drs. Morris, Tower, Hershell, Bainbridge and two or three more of those who believed with something approaching fanaticism that all physicians and surgeons must adhere strictly to what they denominated "standard methods."

While Leonora could not comprehend the larger significance of his discourse, it gratified her pride and pleased her vanity that her fiancee was a man who could obtain such a hearing from the medical profession. The discussion that followed the address was animated and intelligent, and if the malcontents had intended any discourtesy to Dr. Earl their plans went awry.

Dr. Earl found himself plunged deeper and deeper every day in the seemingly innumerable duties that crowded upon him. Summer came with tropical heat, but feeling that he had already enjoyed a long vacation, he made no plans, save to take his week-ends out of town, and prepared to keep office hours all summer.

Early in July, Leonora and her mother went to Bar Harbor and the Ramseys to Newport. Frank had gone West in May. He would have missed them had he possessed a free moment, but the first of August found him as busy as ever, in spite of the fact that the city was deserted by the fashionable world. Sickness has fashions of its own, and the fame he had achieved as "the surgeon who cures without operating," brought him not a few calls from those who had nothing to commend them save their suffering and their faith. Every doctor worthy the name has a set of books kept only by his recording angel, and Earl's invisible guardian made many entries that summer, and there were times when even the insistence of Leonora could not make him feel willing to leave those who seemed so wholly dependent upon his presence for their physical welfare.

Now and then, in spite of his all-absorbing work, there came to his sensitive consciousness a feeling of foreboding and dread that he could not explain, save by some subtle law of suggestion, as he recalled half in mirth and half in seriousness the dark prophecies of the astrologist at the suffrage ball. He had suspected his brother Frank, and when he learned that the seeress was Miss Renner, that suspicion had been confirmed; Frank might have given her the date of Leonora's birthday, but he had nothing to do with the warning she had given him that something would happen within the next twenty-four hours which would have a bearing on his whole career. Within two hours he had treated little Alice Bell, and out of that event had grown his more intimate acquaintance with Silvia, and the marked hostility of Dr. Morris. The child was doing as well as could be expected, but he was greatly disturbed over her condition, and was building up her general health in the hope of overcoming the disease.

He had asked Miss Renner one or two questions, but she had evaded him, and while he had thought of calling on her and asking for the promised horoscope, which she did not send, the idea seemed absurd, and he had no time to carry it out.

On the fourth of August he received a summons to come to Magnolia, Massachusetts, to attend a former patient who was spending the summer there, and he left New York, intending to remain a week.

His movements had become a matter of interest to the ubiquitous newspaper reporter, and as the dog-days in New York were not prolific in startling items, the fact of his being sent for to attend a prominent New York man at Magnolia was seized upon and made into a fairly readable first page news story.

He arranged for the care of his patients, saw the Bells and told them of his intended absence, and spent some time talking with the frail little child who had become greatly attached to him. As he rose to go, he turned to the couch once more. "What shall I send you from Boston, little Miss Alice?" he said kindly, and the girl replied in true child fashion, "Candy." He shook his head. "You know I don't approve of much candy for small girls; but you shall have something better," he said, "you may be sure I won't forget," and with another good-by he was gone. He took the midnight train for Boston, and his patient's motor car was waiting for him when he arrived there.

Perhaps it was the excitement of thinking what the "something better" could be that kept Alice Bell awake that night; whatever it was, when Silvia Holland saw her the next morning her heart sank. She had a feeling that she was in some way responsible for the child also, and that she was still Dr. Earl's assistant. She watched her while she talked to Mrs. Bell, and suggested, in a tentative way, that Mrs. Bell should go to some quiet country place for a month, but the woman shook her head.

"I cannot leave the city, now," she said. "I have a great quantity of sewing that must be done for Miss Lanier's wedding in September."

"Couldn't you take it along?" asked Silvia.

"No," she said quietly, but decidedly. "Some of the things she wants fitted, and I have said I would be here any time she wanted to run into town. Besides, there are other reasons why I cannot go away now." She controlled herself with an effort. "I can never tell you, Miss Holland, how thankful I am for the work you have brought my way. You can't understand, no woman who has never been anxious to know how she was going to get the rent can understand what a blessing it is to be independent! You are doing great things for all women, Miss Holland, and not forgetting individual women as some people would, but do try to make girls understand that they can never be free so long as they are dependent on somebody else for their bread and butter."

Silvia flushed. "You're not fretting because of the paltry little sum I advanced for your rent, are you?" she said. "I thought we were friends, and such things should not be spoken of between friends."

The woman turned to her with a face in which gratitude and some great sorrow were contending emotions, and caught her hands and held them tight.

"No," she said, "I don't mind being under obligations to you; I'm almost glad to be, for the sake of knowing such a woman. You can do a kindness without making it a burden; there are people who pay a debt as if they were doing you a favor. The only thing I mind is that I am not more worthy of all you have done for me."

Silvia put her hands on the other woman's shoulders. "Don't talk to me of unworthiness," she said. "You are a brave woman and a devoted mother; it is one of the crimes of civilization that you should lack for any creature comforts, and you shall not any more. You shall earn what you need yourself, and this fall I intend to start a class of girls in domestic economy, and you shall teach them how to make these pretty things you fashion so exquisitely."

An indescribable look of pain and rebellion passed over Mrs. Bell's face, and she turned away from Silvia, with a quick gesture of renunciation.

"In the meantime," Silvia went on, feeling that the time had not come to seek any further confidence, "I am going to borrow Alice. I want to take her up to Nutwood for a week or two, and as I'm going this noon, suppose you gather her things together, and I'll take her right along."

The little girl gave a cry of joy, and then her face dropped. "But, mamma," she said, "will I miss my present from Dr. Earl?"

Her mother smiled and explained that the doctor had promised to send Allie "something better than candy" from Boston, where he had gone the night before. "I will forward it," she said; "you can trust mother for that."

"He has been very good to you, hasn't he?" said Silvia absently, thinking of him once more as she had seen him first, as he bent over the child, the sleeves rolled back from his powerful white arms while he bathed the matted locks and set the broken leg.

"He has that," said the woman laconically. "I'm glad to have Allie go with you, for she would miss him; he said he wouldn't be back for a week. Now be a good girl, Allie, and do just as Miss Holland tells you, and you will write mother a little letter every day, and mother will write to you." She flung her arms about the child in a sudden passion of emotion, but the eyes that looked into Silvia's as she took her hand were dry and wretched.

"I wish you could tell me all about it," Silvia said impulsively.

"I shall, soon," she answered; "unless Fate turns kind for once, I shall tell you all, soon, very soon."



CHAPTER XVI

THE MYSTERIOUS MURDER OF EMMA BELL

The crowd going home from the resorts and roof gardens August 9th was startled by the wild cries of the newsboys: "Extra! Extra! All about the mysterious murder!"

Murders are not so rare in New York as to cause any genuine sensation among its people when one is announced in the public press, but mystery has ever been attractive to the human race, and the details of the present case as contained in the columns of the papers were so involved in conjecture as to arouse the interest of every reader. The only facts that were clear were that Mrs. Emma Bell had been found dead in the sitting-room of her apartment on East 56th Street with a box of candied fruit on the table near her, which had just been opened, and which, according to the postmark stamped on the paper enclosing the box, had been mailed to her from Boston. Written on thin paper that was so pasted as to cover the entire top of the box was the inscription, "With best wishes to you and Alice. J. E."

A weird description of the lifelike appearance of the woman when found, seated in her chair, with eyes staring and pupils dilated, was given in the best reportorial style. The coroner had taken possession of everything and had ordered the apartment sealed until an inquest could be held. Whether or not the candied fruit had anything to do with the death, and if so who could have sent it, were all matters of speculation which the various writers had covered in from one to four columns, according to their respective imaginative qualities and newspaper instinct, but none of them gave the slightest intimation as to the suspected person, if murder really had been committed.

More or less accurate likenesses of Mrs. Bell were given with all the events of her life that seemed spectacular, the most prominent of which was that her neighbors had long speculated as to her source of livelihood, since her husband's death some four years previously, and with characteristic charity such speculation led to hints along salacious trails and the dark recesses of public suspicion. The events of the injury to her little girl, and her treatment by Dr. Earl, and the devotion of the volunteer nurse, lacked nothing in their interesting narration in connection with the supposed murder mystery, and assisted very materially in enhancing that mystery through the glamour of prominent personages who were so well in the foreground of the story.

The coroner's jury sat upon the case as coroners' juries have been sitting upon similar cases ever since English jurisprudence advanced to the stage of not executing people on suspicion. There was the same dank, solemn atmosphere of the morgue, the same density of intellect and understanding, the same owl-like gaze of stupidity that passed muster for wisdom, the same perfervid desire to get a certificate on the public treasury without undue mental or physical effort, the same ambition to give a duly impressive but harmless verdict, that must have characterized the first empaneled jury of this nature. Never by any possibility could these original qualities have deteriorated, and it would require a wild stretch of the imagination to note any traces of improvement.

The reading of the verdict of a coroner's jury has never been known to disqualify any person from serving on a trial jury in a murder case by unduly influencing the opinion, or arousing the passions of such involuntary candidate for the jury box. No jails have been stormed or revolutions started by the verdict of an American coroner's jury, and New York was not destined to have its sensibilities too harshly jarred by a sensational verdict in this case.

After solemnly sitting for hours, the jury found that "Said Emma Bell came to her death from the effects of hydrocyanic acid administered by some person to the said jurors unknown, and whether said hydrocyanic acid was administered with felonious intent the said jurors cannot at this time ascertain."

The facts established by the jury were, that the woman was dead; that hydrocyanic acid had killed her; that the cause of death was so evident that it was only necessary to examine the contents of the stomach; that apparently none of the candied fruit had been disturbed, as the box was even full and the top layer as smooth as when first packed; that a chemical analysis proved that no poison of any kind was in any of the candied fruit in the box; that no vial could be found on or near the woman after death, and that a thorough search of the apartment failed to disclose any of this or any other kind of poison; that the woman was quite alone in the apartment when death took place and was only discovered by the janitress at ten o'clock at night, at which time she entered the apartment, having been invited to sleep there during the absence of the child in the country, whither she had gone a few days previous to this for a week's stay; that Mrs. Bell had been doing her own work for several months and taking in fine sewing.

But ambitious newspaper reporters bent themselves to this new task, as is their custom in all matters of public concern, i. e., to outrival the most noted expert in the line of that particular phase of public endeavor uppermost at the time. Theories were advanced in the daily papers that made Sherlock Holmes seem like a novice in detective work and Lucretia Borgia a mere infant in the skillful administration of poisons. The regular detectives, both public and private, were aroused by the mystery that shrouded the case. It remained, however, for the ubiquitous reporter, to whom society really owes a debt along every line of worthy public endeavor impossible either to estimate or discharge, to discover that the handwriting on the box was that of Dr. John Earl, and that he had been in the habit, for months, of paying almost daily visits to the Bell home; that he was at Magnolia Beach, but a short ride from Boston, at the time the package was mailed there; that ostensibly he had visited the Bell home to attend the little girl who was injured by the automobile, but that the mother was undoubtedly much interested in him; that there were many rumors among surgeons that his operation on the leg of the child had produced tuberculosis; that the district attorney had received anonymous letters to the effect that Earl had deliberately attempted to poison both mother and daughter, to be rid of an unpleasant liaison on the one hand and the evidence of his lack of skill on the other; that the child had gone to the country after he left the city and he still supposed her with her mother, hence the saving of the child's life; that the box of candied fruit was only a blind, and that some other package must have arrived containing the poison in another form, possibly in the same wrapping paper with the fruit; that no possible motive could be discovered for the poisoning by any other person and no clue could be found leading to a suspicion of any one else.

With five hundred thousand visitors constantly within the gates of their city; with a shifting population of nearly a million more; with permanent residents absorbed in the most strenuous existence known on the American Continent; with sensation in high life of such frequent occurrence as to benumb any effort to form a discriminating opinion—the people of New York (visitors, temporary denizens, those of fixed habitation) welcomed these ready-made conclusions of the daily press and blindly adopted them as their own.

Individual character counts for less in the metropolis of the United States than it does anywhere else in the nation. There are several reasons for this, but the principal ones are a lack of time on the part of the permanent residents to inform themselves on such matters and a lack of interest in the subject on the part of the remainder of the population. The result is, that when charges are made, with any degree of sanction from the constituted authorities, against ordinary citizens of hitherto blameless lives, the great majority of the people accept such charges as well founded until they are effectively disproved.

So it was in this case. Just as soon as the incriminating facts seriously involved Dr. John Earl it was taken for granted that he was guilty, and such presumption was certain to grip the public mind until his innocence could be duly established, if such result were at all possible.

This was also the golden opportunity for the Bourbon members of his own profession to assail his theories and, secretly and openly, certain of them charged that the result in Dr. Earl's case was but the natural one where "standard methods" of practice were set aside for the, as yet, "unscientific paths of suggestive therapeutics," as these reactionary medical men denominated Earl's system, for he had cured through suggestive methods a score of patients who had been condemned to the operating table by other surgeons, and as a result he had aroused the resentment of such surgeons in particular and the condemnation in general of all those who believed in the supreme curative power of the knife.

Those in other walks of life, who, from conviction or selfishness, were opposed to disturbing present conditions, and who appreciated and feared the interdependence of the whole progressive movement, were also easily convinced that, properly enough, he was in the toils of the law.

It was not long until his friends and defenders began to realize that a secret sentiment was being created against him which had for its purpose the discrediting of his mental stability, as well as his medical methods, and that they would be compelled to combat not only menacing facts and conditions, but also the still more powerful influences of centuries of prejudice against men of his type, who had dared to get too far ahead of the general parade.

Psychologically, some interesting impressions were made upon observant minds. Many of our national hypocrisies were emphasized, and these occurrences revealed certain inconsistencies of public pretension and action in other fields closely correlated to this one, and it became evident that improvement in theory and practice, in matters of this sort, was impossible so long as more fundamental abuses were not only permitted but sanctioned in a most aggressively affirmative manner.

These observing people were reminded that in this Christian nation a cross of considerable dimensions is generally ready for instant use in immolating the person who is rash enough to interfere too strenuously or persistently with the operations of our morally depraved and generally rum-soaked political bosses, who have boldly usurped the functions of government and whose aims and purposes are widely at variance with all of the teachings of the lowly Nazarene; that, much as we pride ourselves upon our philosophical advancement, there is usually a cup of hemlock in reserve for a master spirit that attempts too far to outdistance the crowd; that, fond as we are of orating and writing about the dark days of barbarism, we continually applaud the barbarian methods of those who appropriate the property and liberties of their fellow men to increase their own wealth and power; that, while there is no longer much of a disposition to consider the earth flat, there is a marked tendency to regard most every other mysterious thing as of that character.

Dr. John Earl had friends who understood the complex and extensive nature of these sentiments, and, whatever might be their opinion concerning his guilt or innocence of the specific charge under discussion, they greatly feared the graver charge which emanated from the chaotic darkness of superstition, ignorance, prejudice and jealousy and the location of which could be determined only by occasional and angry flashes of venom.

While these things were occurring, Dr. Earl had come to New York and had gone directly to the district attorney and notified him that, if needed, he could be found at his house on East 53rd Street, but he assured that official that he knew nothing of the affair whatever.

This was treated as bravado by those who believed in his guilt and as vindication by those who asserted his innocence.

His brother Frank hastened from a summer resort in the fastnesses of the Rockies and his sister and brother-in-law returned to town from Newport.

One day, Silvia Holland appeared at the coroner's office and asked to see the box in which the candied fruit had arrived. She examined it critically for several minutes, and then asked for the wrapper containing the address and postage stamps. There were three ten-cent and two fifteen-cent stamps on the paper, although it was apparent that half that amount in postage would have carried the package. She compared the handwriting with samples of Dr. Earl's, and it was only too evident that both address and message were written by him.