It was plausible; it sounded convincing and logical; and yet, even while Stephen responded to the Governor's personal touch, some obstinate fibre of race or inflexible bent of judgment, refused to surrender. Vetch was probably sincere—it was fairer to give him the benefit of the doubt—but on the surface at least he was parading a spectacular pose. The role of the Friend of the People has seldom been absent from the drama of history.

With a glance at the window, where twilight was falling, Stephen rose, and held out his hand. "I shall remember your frankness," he said, "the next time I hear you speak. That, I hope, will be soon."

"And you will wait until then to be converted?"

"I shall wait until then to be wholly convinced."

"Well, Darrow may have better results. You go with Darrow?"

"If he will take me?" The deference with which the old man had inspired the Governor showed in Stephen's manner. "I shall be grateful for a lift on the way home."

Darrow had risen also; and after shaking hands with Vetch, he looked back at the younger man from the doorway. "I'll have my Ford round here in five minutes. Meet me at the nearest gate."

He went out hurriedly; and as Stephen followed him, after the delay of a few minutes, he found himself face to face with Patty, who was coming from "the blue room" on the opposite side of the hall.

"I hope you got what you came for," she said gaily.

"I came for nothing," he retorted lightly, "and I'm sure I got it."

"Well, that won't matter so much since it wasn't for yourself," she mocked. "Nobody ever wants anything for himself in politics. Father could tell you that."

"He told me a good many things—but not that."

"Did he tell you," she inquired daringly, "why he is falling out with Julius Gershom?"

"Is he falling out with him?"

"Didn't you see it—and hear it—when you came in?"

"I suspected as much; but after all it was none of my business."

"And you confine your curiosity to your own business?"

"Not entirely," he answered, and wondered if she were experimenting with the letter "C". "For instance I am curious about you."

Her eyes challenged him with their old defiance. "And I am certainly not your business."

"I admit that you are not—but that does not decrease my curiosity."

For a moment her smile grew wistful. "And what, I wonder," she asked, with the faintest quiver of her cherry-coloured lips, "would you like to know?"

"Oh, everything!" he replied unhesitatingly. There was no longer in his mind the slightest wish to avoid the approaching flirtation. On the contrary, he felt he should welcome it, if she would only continue to look like this. She was not beautiful—yet he realized that she did not need beauty when she could play so easily with a look or a smile on the heartstrings. A rush of tenderness overwhelmed his reserve at the very instant when her lashes trembled and drooped, and she murmured in a whisper that enchanted him: "Oh, but everything is too little." Though it was only the old lure of youth and sex, he felt that it was as divinely fresh and wonderful as first love.

"Is it too little?" he asked, and his voice sounded so far off that it was faint in his ears.

She raised her lashes and gave him a glance charged with meaning. "That depends," she answered, and suddenly, without warning, she passed to the lightest and gayest of tones. "Everything depends on something else, doesn't it? Now Father is coming out, and I must run upstairs and dress."

It was a dismissal, he knew, and yet he hesitated. "May I come again soon?" he asked, and held out his hand.

To his surprise Patty greeted his question with a laugh. "Do you really like politics so much?" she retorted; and fled lightly toward the staircase beyond the library.



CHAPTER XII

A JOURNEY INTO MEAN STREETS

Darrow's little car was waiting before the entrance; and as soon as Stephen had taken his place by the old man's side, they shot forward into the smoky twilight. A policeman, standing in the circle of electric light at the corner, held up a warning hand; and then, as he recognized Darrow, he nodded with a smile, and there stole into his face the look of deference which Stephen had seen in the Governor's eyes. Glancing up at the sombre ruggedness of the profile beside him, the younger man asked himself curiously from what source of character or Circumstance this old man had derived his strange impressiveness and his Authority over men. With his gaunt length, his wide curving nostrils, his thick majestic lips, he looked, as Stephen had first seen him, a rock-hewn Pharaoh of a man. An unusual type to survive in modern America—republican and imperial! Did he represent, this carpenter who was also a politician, the political despotism of the worker—the crook and scourge of the labourer's power?

Suddenly, while he wondered, Darrow turned toward him. "What do you think of the Governor?"

"I hardly know," answered Stephen thoughtfully. "It is too soon to ask; but I think he is honest."

"He is more than honest," rejoined the other quietly. "He is human. He understands. He belongs to us."

"Belongs?" Stephen repeated the word with a note of interrogation.

Very slowly the old man answered. "I mean that he is more than anything that he says or thinks. He is bigger than his message."

"I suppose he stands for a great deal?"

"A man stands only for what he is, not for an inch more, not for an inch less. The trouble with all the leaders we've had in the past was that their thought outstripped their characters. They believed more than they were and they broke down under it. I'm an old man now. I've watched them come and go."

"You think that Vetch is a great leader?"

"I think he is a great leader, but I don't mean that I think he will ever lead us anywhere."

"You feel that he is losing his grip on the crowd?"

Up from Main Street the workers were pouring out of the factories; and while they moved in a dark stream through the light and shadow on the pavement, the faces flowed past Stephen with a pallid intensity which made him think of dead flowers drifting on a river. In all those faces how little life there seemed, how little individuality and animation!

"When I was a small kid I used to live by the seashore," said the old man presently in his dry, emphatic tones. "Many is the time I've stood and watched the tide coming in, and I never once saw it come in that it didn't go out again."

"Then you believe that the tide is turning against Vetch?"

For a minute, while they sped on in the obscurity of a side street, Darrow meditated.

"No, sir, I ain't saying that much—not yet. But the way I calculate is something like this. Vetch came in on a wave of popular emotion, and a wave of popular emotion is just about like the tide of the sea. It may rise a certain distance, but it can't stand still, and it can't go any farther. It's obliged to turn; and when it turns, it's pretty sure to bring back a good deal that it carried with it. A crowd impulse—as they call it in the pulpit and on the platform—is a dangerous thing. It's dangerous because you can't count on it."

"It looks to me as if Vetch counted upon it a little too much."

"That's his nature. He was born on the sunny side of the street. He thinks because he sees the way to help people that they want to be helped. I've been mixed up in politics now for fifty years, and in the labour movement, as they say, ever since it began to move in the South—and I've found out that people don't really want to be helped—they want to be fooled. Vetch offers 'em facts, and all the time it ain't facts they're wanting, but names."

"I see," assented Stephen. "Names that they can repeat over and over until they get at last to believe that they are things. Long reverberating names like Democratic or Republican—"

Darrow laughed grimly. "That's right, sir, that's the way I've worked it out in my mind. The crowd will come a little way after a fact; but in the end it gets tired because the fact won't work magic, like that conjure-stuff of the darkeys, and then it turns and goes back to the old names that mean nothing. Only when a crowd moves all together it's dangerous because it's like the flood-tide and ebb-tide of the sea."

"And the most irritating part of it," said Stephen, with an insight which had sometimes visited him in the trenches, "is that it gets what it deserves because it can always have whatever it wants—even the truth and honest government."

They were passing rows of narrow old-fashioned tenement-houses, standing, like crumbling walls of red brick, behind sagging wooden fences; and suddenly, while Stephen's eyes were on the lights that came and went so fitfully in the basement dining-rooms, Darrow stopped the car in the gutter of cobblestones, and motioned in silence toward the pavement. As Stephen got out, he glanced vaguely round him at the strange neighbourhood.

"Where are we?"

"North of Marshall Street. A quarter which was once very prosperous; but that was before your day. This is one of several rows of old houses, well-built in their time, better built, indeed, than any houses we're putting up now; but their day is over. The cost of repairing them would be so great that the agent is deliberately letting the property run down in the hope that this part of the street will soon be turned over to negroes. The negroes are so crowded in their quarter that they are obliged to expand, and when they do, this investment will yield a still higher interest. Coloured tenants stand crowding better than white ones, and they will pay a better rent for worse housing. As it is the rent of these houses has doubled since the beginning of the war."

"Good God!" said Stephen. "Do we stop here?"

"I want you to see Canning, the man the Governor told you about. He can't pay his rent, which was raised last Saturday, and the family is moving to-morrow."

"He ought to be paid for living here. Where will he go?"

"Oh, people can always find a worse place, if they look long enough. Canning was in the war, by the way. He's got some nervous trouble—not crazy enough to be taken care of—just on edge and unstrung. The war used him up, I reckon, and anxiety and undernourishment used up his wife and children. It all seems to have come out in the baby—queerest little kid you ever saw—born about a year ago. Mighty funny—ain't it?—the way we let children just a few squares away from us grow up pinched, half-starved, undersized, uneducated, and as little moral as the gutters can make 'em, and all the time we're parading and begging and even collecting the pennies out of orphan asylums, for the sake of the children on the other side of the world. But it's a queer thing, charity, however you happen to look at it. My father used to say—and he had as much sense as any man I ever met—that charity is the greatest traveller under the sun; and even if it begins at home it ain't ever content to stop there over night."

Standing there in the dim street, before the silent rows of bleak houses with their tattered window-shades and their fitful lights, Stephen stared wonderingly at the gaunt shape of the man before him. For the first time he was brought face to face with the other half of his world, with the half of the world where poverty and toil are stark realities. This was the way men like Darrow were thinking, men perhaps like Gideon Vetch! These men saw poverty not as a sentimental term, but as a human experience. They knew, while he and his kind only imagined. With a sensation as acute as physical nausea, a sensation that the thought of the Germans used to bring when he was in the trenches, there swept over him a memory of the social hysteria which had followed, like a mental pestilence or famine, in the track of the war. The moral platitudes, the sentimental philanthropy, and the hypocritical command of conscience to put all the world, except our own cellars, in order, where were these impulses now in a time which had gone mad with the hatred of work and the craving for pleasure? Yet he had once thought that he was returning to a world which could be rebuilt on a foundation of justice, and it was this lost belief, he knew, which had made him bitter in spirit and unfair in judgment.

The gate swung back with a grating noise, and they entered the yard, and walked over scattered papers and empty bottles to the narrow flight of brick steps, which led from the ground to the area in front of the basement dining-room. As Stephen descended by the light from the dust-laden window, a chill dampness rose like a fog from the earth below and filled his nostrils and mouth and throat—a dampness which choked him like the effluvium of poverty. Glancing in from the area a moment later, he saw a scantily furnished room, heated by an open stove and lighted by a single jet of gas, which flickered in a thin greenish flame. In the centre of the room a pine table, without a cloth, was laid for supper, and three small children, in chairs drawn close together, were impatiently drumming with tin spoons on the wood. A haggard woman, in a soiled blue gingham dress, was bringing a pot of coffee from the adjoining room; and in one corner, on a sofa from which the stuffing sagged in bunches, a man sat staring vacantly at a hole in the rag carpet. Tied in a high chair, which stood apart as if it were the pedestal of an idol, a baby, with the smooth unlined face not of an infant, but of a philosopher, was mutely surveying the scene.

More than anything else in the room, more even than the sodden hopelessness of the man's expression, the hopelessness of neurasthenia, this baby, tied with a strip of gingham in his high chair, arrested and held Stephen's attention. Very pallid, with the pallor not of flesh but of an ivory image, with hair as thin and white as the hair of an old man, and eyes that were as opaque as blue marbles, the baby sat there, with its look of stoical philosophy and superhuman experience. And this look said as plainly as if the tiny mute lips had opened and spoken aloud: "I am tired before I begin. I am old before I begin. I am ending before I begin."

Darrow knocked at the door, and the woman opened it with the coffee-pot still in her hand.

"So you've come back," she said in a voice that was without surprise and without gratitude.

"I came back to ask what you've done about a place. This gentleman is with me. You don't mind his stepping inside a minute?"

"Oh, no, I don't mind. I don't mind anything." She drew back as she answered, and the two men entered the room and stood gazing at the stove with the look of embarrassment which the sight of poverty brings to the faces of the well-to-do.

"When are you moving?" asked Darrow, withdrawing his gaze from the glimmer of the embers in the stove, and fixing it on the steam that issued from the coffee-pot.

"In the morning. We've found a cheaper place, though with rent going up every week, it looks as if we'd soon have nowhere worse to move to, unless it's gaol alley." Her tone dripped bitterness, and the lines of her pale lips settled into an expression of scornful resignation.

Without replying to her words, Darrow nodded in the direction of the young man, who had never looked up, but sat in the same rigid attitude, with his vacant eyes staring at the hole in the carpet.

"Any better?"

"How can he be better," returned the woman grimly, "when all he does is to walk the streets until he's fit to drop, and then drag himself home and sit there like that for hours, too worn out even to lift his eyes from the floor. This is the last coffee I've got. I've been saving it since Christmas, but I made it for him because he seems more down than usual to-night." Then a nervous spasm shook her thin figure, and she added in a fierce whisper: "He's sick, that's the matter with him. He ain't sick enough to be in a government hospital, but he'd be better off if he was. Even when he gets work he ain't able to stick to it. The folks that hire him don't have any patience. As long as he was over yonder in France it looked as if every woman in America was knitting for him; and now since he's back here he can't get a job to keep him and the children alive."

"How have you fed the children?"

"On what I could get cheapest. You see how sickly and peaked they look, and it's been awful damp in these rooms sometimes. The doctor says he ain't sick; it ain't his body, it's his mind. He says he's had a kind of horror inside of him ever since he came home. He's turned against everything he used to do, and even everything he used to believe in."

"That's hell!" exclaimed Stephen suddenly; and at her surprised glance, he added, "I've been there and I know. Nerves, they say, but just as real as your skin." He looked away from her to the man on the sofa. "To have that, and be in poverty!" Turning away from the father, his glance met the calm eyes of the baby fixed on him with that gaze which was as old and as pitiless as philosophy.

"Ma, may I help myself?" screamed one of the children, drumming loudly on the table. "I'd rather have bread and molasses!" cried another; and "Oh, Ma, when we move to-morrow will you let me take the kitten I found?"

"Well, I've talked to the Governor," said Darrow, in his level voice which sounded to Stephen so unemotional, "and I think we can find a job for your husband."

Suddenly the man on the sofa looked up. "I voted against him," he whispered angrily.

Darrow laughed shortly. "You don't know the Governor if you think he'd hold that against you," he replied. "But for that little weakness of his he might not be a political problem."

"That's the way he goes on," remarked the woman despairingly. "Always saying things straight out that other people would keep back. He don't care what happens, that's the whole truth of it. He don't care about anything on earth, not even his tobacco."

"Life!" thought Stephen, with a dull pain in his heart. "That's what life is!" And the old familiar feeling of suffocation, of distaste for everything that he had ever felt or thought or believed, smothered him with the dryness of dust. Going quickly over to the sofa, he laid his hand on the man's shoulder, and spoke in a high ringing voice which he tried to make cheerful. "It will pass, old fellow," he said, and could have laughed aloud at the insincerity of his tone. "I know because I've been there." And he added cynically, as a kind of sacrifice on the altar of truth: "Everything will pass if you only wait long enough."

The man started and looked up. With an air of surprise he glanced round the dingy room, at his wife, at the whimpering children, at the dispassionate baby enthroned in his high chair, and at the majestic profile of Darrow. "It's the rottenness of the whole blooming show," he said doggedly. "It ain't just the hole I'm in. I could put up with that if it wasn't for the rottenness of it all."

"I know," replied Stephen quietly. "There are times when the show does look rotten, but we're all in it together."

Then, because he felt that he could stand it no longer, he turned abruptly, and went out into the dusk of the area. In a few minutes Darrow joined him, and in silence the two men felt their way up the brick steps to the bare ground of the front yard.

"I don't know what I ought to do, but I've got to do something," said Stephen, when he had opened the gate and passed through to the pavement where the car waited. Lifting his sensitive young face, he stared up at the row of decaying tenements. "What places for homes!"

For a moment Darrow looked at him without speaking; and then he answered in a voice which sounded as impersonal as the distant rumble of street cars. "I thought you might be interested because these houses, these and the other rows on the next block or two, are part of the Culpeper estate."

"The Culpeper estate?" repeated Stephen in an expressionless tone; and raising his eyes again he looked up at the bleak houses. In that instant, it seemed to him that he was seeing, not the sharp projection of the roofs against the ashen sky, but a long line of pleasant and prosperous generations. Beyond him stood his father, beyond his father stood his grandfather, beyond the tranquil succession of his grandfathers stood—what? Civilization? Humanity?

"Do you mean," he asked quietly, "that we—our family—own these houses?"

"The whole block, and the next, and the next. It is the Culpeper estate. You've never seen 'em before, I reckon. I doubt even if your father has ever seen 'em. The agent attends to all this, and if the agent didn't see that the rents were as high as people would pay, or were paying in the next places, he would be soon out of a job. I'm not blaming him, you know. I've got a son-in-law who is a real estate agent. It's just one of the cases where it's nobody's fault, and everybody's."

Without replying, Stephen turned away and got into the car. He felt bruised and sick, and he wanted to be alone, to think things out by himself in the darkness. "This is only one instance," he thought, as they started down the dim street toward the white blaze of the business quarter in the distance. "Only one out of millions! In every city. All over the world it is the same. Wherever there is wealth it casts its shadow of poverty."

"I used to bother about it too when I was young," said the old man at his side. "I used to feel, I reckon, pretty near as bad as you are feeling now, but it don't last. When you get on a bit you'll sort of settle down and begin to work it out. That's life. Yes, but it ain't the whole of life. It ain't even the biggest part. Those folks we've been to see have had their good times like the rest of us, only we saw 'em just now when they were in the midst of a bad time. Life ain't confined to a ditch any more than it is to what Gideon calls a lily-pond. Keep your balance, that's the main thing. Whatever else you lose, you must be sure to keep your balance, or you'll be in danger of going overboard."

"Do you mean that there is no remedy for conditions like this?"

The old man pondered his answer so long that Stephen thought he had either given up or forgotten the question.

"The only remedy I have ever been able to see is to work not on conditions, but on human nature," he replied. "Improve human nature, and then you will improve the conditions in which it lives. Improve the rich as well as the poor. Teach 'em to be human beings, not machines, to one another—that's Gideon's idea, you know,—humanize—Christianize, if you like it better—civilize. It's a pretty hopeless problem—the individual case—charity is all rotten from root to branch. If you could see the harm that's been done by mistaken charity! Why, look at my friend, Mrs. Page, now. She tried to work it out that way, and what came of it except more rottenness? And yet until the State looks after the unemployed, there is obliged to be charity."

"Do you mean Mrs. Kent Page?" asked Stephen in surprise, and remembered that his mother had once accused Corinna of trying to "undermine society."

"She is one of my best friends," answered the old man, with mingled pride and affection. "I go to see her in her shop every now and then, and I reckon she values my advice about her affairs as much as anybody's. Well, when she came home from Europe she found that she owned a row of tenements like this one, and her agent was profiteering in rents like most of the others. I wish you could have seen her when she discovered it. Splendid? Well, I reckon she's the most splendid thing this old world has ever had on top of it! She went straight to work and had those houses made into modern apartments—bathrooms, steam heat, and back yards full of trees and grass and flowers, just like Monroe Park, only better. The rent wasn't raised either! She put that back just where it was before the war; and then she let the whole row to the tenants for two years. You never saw anything like the interest she took in that speculation—you'd have thought to hear her that she was setting out to bring what the preachers call the social millennium."

"She never mentioned it to me," said Stephen, with interest. "How did it turn out?"

Darrow threw back his great head with a laugh. "I don't reckon she did mention it, bless her! It don't bear mentioning even now. Why, when she went back last fall to see those houses, she found that the tenants had all moved into dirty little places in the alley, and were letting out the apartments, at five times the rent they paid, to other tenants. They were doing a little special profiteering of their own—and, bless your life, there wasn't so much as a blade of grass left in the yards, even the trees had been cut down and sold for wood. And you say she never mentioned it?"

"How could she? But, after all, I suppose the question goes deeper than that?"

"The question," replied Darrow, with an energy that shook the little car, "goes as deep as hell!"

They were driving rapidly up Grace Street; and as they shot past the club on the corner, Stephen noticed the serene aristocratic profile of Peyton at one of the brilliantly lighted windows. A little farther on, when they turned into Franklin Street, he saw that the old print shop was in darkness, except for the lights in the rooms of the caretaker and the lodgers in the upper storey. Corinna had gone home, he supposed, and he wondered idly if she were with Benham? As they went on they passed the house of the Blairs, where he caught a glimpse of Margaret on the porch, parting from the handsome young clergyman. The sight stirred him strangely, as if the memory of his dead life had been awakened by a scent or a faded flower in a book. How different he was from the boy Margaret had known in that primitive period which people defined as "before the war"! It was as if he had belonged then to some primary emotional stratum of life. All the complex forces, the play and interplay of desire and repulsion, of energy and lassitude, had developed in the last two or three years.

On either side, softly shaded lights were shining from the windows, and women, in rich furs, were getting out of luxurious cars. It was the world that Stephen knew; life moulded in sculptural forms and encrusted with the delicate patina of tradition. Here was all that he had once loved; yet he realized suddenly, with a sensation of loneliness, that here, not in the mean streets, he felt, as Vetch would have said, "stranger than Robinson Crusoe." Something was missing. Something was lost that he could never recover. Was it Vetch, after all, who had shown him the way out, who had knocked a hole in the wall?

When Darrow stopped the car before the Culpeper gate, Stephen turned and held out his hand. "Thank you," he said simply. "I shall see you again."

Crossing the pavement with a rapid step, he entered the gate and ran up the steps to the porch between the white columns. As he passed into the richly tempered glow of the hall, it seemed to him that an invisible force, an aroma of the past, drifted out of the old house and enveloped him like the sweetness of flowers. He was caught again, he was submerged, in the spirit of race.

A little later, when he was passing his mother's door, he glanced in and saw her standing before the mirror in her evening gown of gray silk, with the foam-like ruffles of rose-point on her bosom and at her elbows, which were still round and young looking.

Catching his reflection in the glass, she called out in her crisp tones, "My dear boy, where on earth have you been? You know we promised to dine with Julia, and then to go to those tableaux for the benefit of the children in Vienna. She has worked so hard to make them a success that she would never forgive us if we stayed away."

"Yes, I know. I had forgotten," he replied. Why was he always forgetting? Then he asked impulsively, while pity burned at white heat within him, "Is Father here? I want to speak to him before we go out."

"He came in an hour ago," said Mrs. Culpeper; and as she spoke the mild leonine countenance of Mr. Culpeper, vaguely resembling some playful and domesticated king of beasts, appeared at the door of his dressing-room.

"Do you wish to see me, my boy?" he asked affectionately. "We were just wondering if you had forgotten and stayed at the club."

"No, I wasn't at the club. I've been looking over the Culpeper estate—a part of it." Stephen's voice trembled in spite of the effort he made to keep it impersonal and indifferent. "Father, do you know anything about those old houses beyond Marshall Street?"

It was the peculiar distinction of Mr. Culpeper that, in a community where everybody talked all the time, he had been able to form the habit of silence. While his acquaintances continually vociferated opinions, scandals, experiences, or anecdotes, he remained imperturbably reticent and subdued. All that he responded now to Stephen's outburst was, "Has anybody offered to buy them?"

"Why, what in the world!" exclaimed Mrs. Culpeper, who was neither reticent nor subdued. From the depths of the mirror her bright brown eyes gazed back at her husband, while she fastened a cameo pin, containing the head of Minerva framed in pearls, in the rose-point on her bosom.

"To buy them?" repeated Stephen. "Why, they are horrors, Father, to live in—crumbling, insanitary horrors! And yet the rent has been doubled in the last two or three years."

From the mirror his mother's face looked back at him, so small and clear and delicately tinted that it seemed to him merely an exaggerated copy of the cameo on her bosom, "I hope that means we shall have a little more to live on next year," she said reflectively, while the expression that Mary Byrd impertinently called her "economic look" appeared in her eyes. "What with the high cost of everything, and the low interest on Liberty Bonds, and the innumerable relief organizations to which one is simply forced to contribute, it has been almost impossible to make two ends meet. Poor Mary Byrd hasn't been able to give a single party this winter."

Before Stephen's gaze there passed a vision of the dingy basement room, the embittered face of the woman, the sickly tow-headed children, the man who could not lift his eyes from the hole in the carpet, and the baby with that look of having been born not young, but old, the look of pre-natal experience and disillusionment. And he heard Darrow's dry voice complaining because the well-to-do classes still gave to starving orphans across the world. After all, what was there to choose between the near-sighted and the far-sighted social vision? How narrow they both appeared and how crooked! Darrow would let all the children of Europe starve as long as their crying did not interfere with the aims of his Federation of Labour; Stephen's sister Julia, with her instinct for imitation and her remote sense of responsibility, would step over the poverty at her door, while she held out her hands, in the latest fashionable gesture of philanthropy, to the orphans in France or Vienna. And beside them both his mother, who because of her constitutional inability to see anything beyond the family, perceived merely the fact that her own child would be disappointed if the tableaux for the benefit of starving children somewhere did not go off well. The question, he realized, was not which one of the three points of view was the most admirable, but simply which one served best the ultimate purpose of the race. Selfishness seemed to have as little as altruism to do with the problem. Was Corinna, who had failed in philanthropy and chosen beauty, the only wise one among them?

"But children are living in these houses," he said, "and not only living—they are forced to move out because the rent has become so high that they must find a worse place. I've just seen it with my own eyes. Three sickly little children and a dreadful baby—a baby that knows everything already."

A quiver of pain crossed Mr. Culpeper's handsome features; but he said only, "I will speak to the agent."

"Won't you look into it yourself?" asked Stephen hopelessly. "The agent is only the agent—but the responsibility is yours—ours. Of course the agent doesn't want to make expensive repairs when he can get as high rent without doing so. He knows that people are obliged to have a roof over them; and if the roofs are too bad for white people, he can always find negroes to pay anything that he asks. Can't you see what it is in reality—that we are preying on the helpless?"

Turning suddenly from the mirror, Mrs. Culpeper crossed the floor hastily and put her arms about her son's shoulders. Her face was very motherly and there was a compassionate light in her eyes, "My dear, dear boy," she murmured in the soothing tone that one uses to the ill or the mentally unbalanced. "My dear boy, you must really go and dress. Julia will never forgive us." In her heart she was sincerely grieved by what he had told her. She would have helped cheerfully if it had been possible to her nature; but stronger than compassion, stronger even than reason, was the instinct of evasive idealism which the generations had bred. He understood, while he looked down on her white hair and unlined face, that even if he took her with him to that basement room, she would see it not as it actually was, but as she wished it to be. Her romanticism was invulnerable because it had no contact, even through imagination, with the edge of reality.

And he knew also, while she held him in her motherly arms, that something had broken down within his soul—some barrier between himself and humanity. The wall of tradition and sentiment no longer divided him from Darrow, or Gideon Vetch, or the man who could not look at anything but the hole in the carpet. Never again could he take his inherited place in the world of which he had once been a part. For an instant a nervous impulse to protest, to startle by some violent gesture that look of gentle self-esteem from the faces before him, jerked over him like a spasm. Then the last habit that he would ever break in his life, the very law of his being, which was the law of order, of manners, of self-control, the inbred horror, older than himself or his parents, of giving himself away, of making a scene of his own emotions, this ancestral custom of good breeding closed over him like the lid of a coffin.

With a smile he looked into the anxious face of his father. "Isn't there some way out of it, Dad?"

The muscles about Mr. Culpeper's mouth contracted as if he were going to cry; but when he spoke his voice was completely under control. "I can't interfere, son, with the way the agent manages the property," he answered, "but, of course, if you have discovered a peculiarly distressing case—if it is an object of charity—"

He paused abruptly in amazement, for Stephen was laughing, laughing in a way, as Mrs. Culpeper remarked afterward, that nobody had ever even thought of laughing before the whole world had become demoralized.

"Damn charity!" he exclaimed hilariously. "I beg your pardon, Mother, but if you only knew how inexpressibly funny it is!" Then the laughter stopped, and a wistful look came into his eyes, for beyond the broken walls he saw Patty Vetch in her red cape, and around her stretched the wind-swept roads of that hidden country.

A minute later, as he left the room, his mother's eyes followed him anxiously. "Poor boy, we must bear with him," she said in melting maternal accents.



CHAPTER XIII

CORINNA WONDERS

After a winter of Italian skies spring had come in a night. It was a morning in April, blue and soft as a cloud, with a roving fragrance of lilacs and hyacinths in the air. Already the early bloom of the orchard had dropped, and the freshly ploughed fields, with splashes of henna in the dun-coloured soil, were surrounded by the budding green of the woods.

As Mrs. Culpeper knocked at the door of Corinna's shop, she noticed that the pine bough in the window had been replaced by bowls of growing narcissi. For a moment her stern expression relaxed, and her face, framed in a bonnet of black straw with velvet strings, became soft and anxious. Beneath the veil of white illusion which reached only to the tip of her small sharp nose, her eyes were suddenly touched with spring.

"How delicious the flowers smell," she remarked when Corinna opened the door; and then, as she entered the room and glanced curiously round her, she asked incredulously, "Do people really pay money for these old illustrations, Corinna?"

"Not here, Cousin Harriet. I bought these in London."

"And they cost you something?"

"Some of these, of course, cost more than others. That," Corinna pointed to a mezzotint of the Ladies Waldegrave by Valentine Green, "cost a little less than ten thousand dollars."

"Ten thousand dollars!" Mrs. Culpeper gazed at the print as disapprovingly as if it were an open violation of the Eighteenth Amendment. "We didn't pay anything like that for our largest copy of a Murillo. Well, I may not be artistic, but, for my part, I could never understand why any one should want an old book or an old picture." Sitting rigidly upright in one of the tapestry-covered chairs, she added condescendingly: "Stephen admires this room very much."

"Stephen," remarked Corinna pleasantly, "is a dear boy."

"Just now," returned Stephen's mother, with her accustomed air of duty unflinchingly performed, "he is giving us a great deal of anxiety. Never before, not even when he was in the war, have I spent so many sleepless nights over him."

"I am sorry. Poor Stephen, what has he done?"

"I have always hoped," observed Mrs. Culpeper firmly, "that Stephen would marry Margaret."

"I am aware of that." A flicker of amusement brightened Corinna's eyes. "So, I think, is Stephen."

"I have tried to be honest. It seems to me that a mother's wish should carry a great deal of weight in such matters."

"It ought to," assented Corinna, "but I've never heard of its doing so."

"Everything would have been satisfactory if he had not allowed himself to be carried away by a foolish fancy."

"I cannot imagine," said Corinna primly, "that Stephen could ever be foolish. It gives me hope of him."

Impaling her, as if she had been a butterfly, with a glance as sharp as a needle, Mrs. Culpeper demanded sternly, "How much do you know of this affair, my dear?"

In spite of her natural courage Corinna was seized with a shiver of apprehension. "Do you think it is an affair?" she asked.

"I think it is worse. I think it is an infatuation."

"What, Stephen? Not really?" Corinna's voice was mirthfully incredulous.

"I have seen the girl once or twice," resumed Mrs. Culpeper, "and she seems to me objectionable from every point of view."

"Only from the Culpeper one," protested Corinna. "I find her very attractive."

"Well, I do not." Mrs. Culpeper had relapsed into her tone of habitual martyrdom. "If Stephen chooses to kill me," she added, "he may do it."

Corinna leaned toward her ingratiatingly. "Don't you admit, Cousin Harriet, that I have improved Patty tremendously?"

"I see no difference."

"Oh, but there is one—a great difference! If you had come to one of the Governor's receptions last winter, you couldn't have told that she wasn't—well, one of us. She has been so quick to pick up things that it is amazing."

Mrs. Culpeper lifted the transparent mesh from the point of her nose. "Do you know," she demanded, "that the girl was born in a circus tent?"

"So I have heard. It was a romantic beginning."

Foiled but undaunted, the older woman fixed on Corinna the stare with which she would have attempted the conversion of an undraped pagan if she had ever encountered one. Though she was unconscious of the fact as she sat there, suffering yet unbending, in the Florentine chair, she represented the logical result of the conservative principle in nature, of the spirit that forgets nothing and learns nothing, of the instinct of the type to reproduce itself, without variation or development, until the pattern is worn too thin to endure. That Stephen had inherited this passive force, Corinna knew, but she knew also, that it was threatened by his incurable romanticism, by that inarticulate longing for heroic adventures.

Suddenly, as if moved by a steel spring, Mrs. Culpeper rose. "I know you have a great deal of influence over Stephen," she said, "and I hoped that, instead of encouraging him in his folly, you would sympathize with me."

"I do sympathize with you, Cousin Harriet—only I have learned that it is sometimes very difficult to decide what is folly and what is wisdom in a man's life."

"There can scarcely be a doubt, I think, about this. Surely you cannot imagine that there would be happiness for my son in a marriage with the daughter of Gideon Vetch?"

There was a dreamy sweetness in Corinna's eyes. "I can't answer that, Cousin Harriet, because I don't know. But are you sure it has gone as far as that? Has Stephen really thought of marriage?"

"I don't know. He tells me nothing," replied Mrs. Culpeper hopelessly, and she added after a pause: "But I can't help having eyes. It is either that—or he is going into politics." Her tone was as despairing as if she had said, "he is coming down with fever."

For a minute Corinna hesitated; then she responded cheerfully, "If it is any comfort to you, Cousin Harriet, I feel that you are making a mountain out of a mole hill. When it comes to the point, I believe that Stephen will revert to type like the rest of us."

Mrs. Culpeper clutched desperately at the straw that was offered her. "You think he won't ask her to marry him?"

"If he does," said Corinna firmly, "I shall be more surprised than I have ever been in my life."

The look of martyrdom faded slowly from her visitor's features. "You say this because you know Stephen?"

"Because I know Stephen—and men," answered Corinna, while she thought of John Benham. "Frankly, I think it would be a splendid thing for Stephen to do. It would prove, you know, that he cared enough to make a sacrifice. I think it would be splendid; but I think also that we are of the breed that looks too long before it leaps. Our great adventures take place in dreams or in talk. We like to play with forlorn hopes; but the only forlorn hope we have actually embraced is the conservative principle; and we couldn't let that go, even if we tried, because it is bred in our bone. So I believe that the ^hereditary habit will drag Stephen safely back before he rushes into danger. He may play with the thought of Patty, but he will probably marry Margaret."

If Mrs. Culpeper's too refined features could have expressed passion, it would have been the passion of thankfulness. "It was worth coming," she said, "to hear you say that of Stephen."

When at last she had gone, primly grateful for the scrap of comfort, Corinna stood for a minute with her eyes on the sunbeams at the window. Outside there were the roving winds and the restless spirit of April; and feeling suddenly that she could stand the close walls and the familiar objects no longer, she put on her hat and gloves and went out into the street. Scarcely knowing why, with some vague thought that she might go to see Patty, she turned in the direction of the Capitol Square, walking with her buoyant grace which seemed a part of the fugitive beauty of April. The air was so fragrant, the sunshine so softly burning, that it was as if summer were advancing, not gradually, but in a single miracle of florescence. It was one of those days which release all the secret inexpressible dreams of the heart. Every face that she passed was touched with the wistful longing which is the very essence of spring. She saw it in the faces of the women who hurried, warm, flushed, and impatient, from the shops or the markets; she saw it in the faces of the men returning from work and thinking of freedom; and she saw it again in the long sad faces of the dray-horses standing hitched to a city cart at the corner.

In the Square the sunlight lay in splinters over the young grass, which was dotted with buttercups, and overhead the long black boughs of the trees were sprinkled with pale green leaves. Back and forth from the grassy slopes to the winding brick walks, squirrels darted, busy and joyous; and a few old men, never absent from the benches, were smiling vaguely at the passers-by.

When she reached the gate of the Governor's house, her wish to see Patty had vanished, and she decided that she would go on to the library and ask for a book that she had recently heard John Benham discussing. How much of her life now, in spite of its active impersonal interests, was beginning to centre in John Benham! They were planning to be married in June, and beyond that month of roses, which was once so saturated with memories of her early romance, she saw ahead of her long years of tranquil happiness. Well, she could not complain. After all, was not tranquil happiness the best that life had to offer?

She had ascended the steps of the library, and was about to enter the swinging doors, when she turned and glanced back at the dappled boughs of an old sycamore, outlined so softly, with its budding leaves, against the green hill and the changeable blue of the sky. The long walk was almost deserted. A fountain played gently at the end of the slope; a few coloured nurses were dozing on a bench, while their be-ribboned charges scattered peanuts before a fluttering crowd of sparrows, pigeons, and squirrels; and, leaning on a rude crutch, a lame old negro woman was dragging a basket of brushwood to the brow of the hill. The scene was very peaceful, wrapped in that languorous stillness which is the pervading charm of the South; and beyond the high spikes of the iron fence, the noise of passing street cars sounded far off and unreal.

She was still standing there, with her dreamy eyes on the old negress toiling up the hill with her basket of brushwood, when a man passed the fountain hurriedly, and came with a brisk, springy stride up the brick walk below the library. As she watched him, at first without recognition, she thought vaguely that his rugged figure made a picture of embodied activity, of physical energy and enjoyment. The next minute he reached the old negress, glanced at her casually in passing, and turning abruptly round, lifted the basket, and carried it to the top of the hill. Then, as he looked back at the old woman, who limped after him, he laughed with boyish merriment, and Corinna saw in amazement that the man was Gideon Vetch.

"He is obliged to be theatrical," remarked a voice behind her, and glancing over her shoulder she saw that she had been joined by a severe-looking young woman with several books under her arm.

"Is it that?" asked Corinna doubtfully, and she added to herself after a moment, "I wonder?"

A little later, as she was leaving the Square, Stephen overtook her, and she told him of the incident. "The Governor is always breaking out like an epidemic where you least expect him," she concluded with a smile.

"I know. I've caught him." Though the young man's eyes reflected her smile, his tone was serious. "I can't rid myself of the fellow."

"Have you been to see him this morning?"

He laughed. "I should say not! But I've been in a worse fix. I've just walked up the street with—well, imagine it!—that bounder Gershom."

"So you both haunt the Square?"

At the question Stephen turned and faced her frankly. "How, in Heaven's name, does she stand him?"

"That's a riddle. To me he is impossible."

"He is more than that. He is unspeakable." As he looked into her eyes a deep anxiety or disturbance appeared beneath the superficial gaiety of his smile. "The fellow had evidently had a quarrel, perhaps a permanent break, with Vetch. He was in a kind of cold rage; and do you know what he said to me? He told me,—not openly, but in pretended secrecy,—that Vetch had never married Patty's mother—"

For an instant Corinna gazed at him in silence. Then her words came in a gasp of indignation. "Of course there isn't a word of truth in it!"

"So I said to him. He insists that he has the proofs. You know what it means?"

"Oh, I know—poor Patty! You understand why he told you?"

"I couldn't at first see the reason; but afterward it came to me."

"The reason is as clear as daylight. He is infatuated, and he imagines that you stand in his way."

"Not only that. I think he has some idea of using whatever proofs he has to bend Vetch to his will. He was sharp enough not to say so, for he knew that would be pure blackmail. The ground he took was one of nauseating morality, but I inferred that he is trying to force Vetch to agree to this general strike, and that he is prepared to threaten him with some kind of exposure if he doesn't. This, however, was mere surmise on my part. The fellow is as shrewd as he is unprincipled."

When Corinna believed it was in full measure and overflowing. "It's not true. I know it's not true."

"Has Patty told you anything?"

"Nobody has told me anything. One doesn't have to have a reason for knowing things—at least one doesn't unless one is a man. I know it because I know it." Then, without waiting for his reply, she continued with cheerful firmness: "The best way to treat scandal is to forget it. Don't you think that Patty improves every day?"

He reddened and looked away from her. "Yes, she grows more attractive, I—" While she still waited for him to complete his sentence, he shot out in an embarrassed tone: "Corinna, do you believe in Gideon Vetch?"

For an instant Corinna hesitated. "I believe that he is—well, just Gideon Vetch," she answered enigmatically.

"Just a professional politician?"

"Not at all. He is a great deal more than that, but what that great deal is I cannot pretend to say."

"Do you ever see him away from Patty?"

"Now and then. He has been to the shop."

"And you like him?"

Again she hesitated. "Yes, I like him." Turning her head, she looked straight at him with a glow in her eyes. "That is," she corrected softly, "I should like him if it were not for John."

"You compare him with John?"

"Don't you?"

"Naturally. Of course the Governor loses by that."

"Who wouldn't?"

Her face flushed at the thought, and as Stephen watched her, he asked in a gentler voice, "Are you really to be married in June?"

She smiled an assent, with her dreaming gaze on the young leaves and the blue sky.

"Are you happy?" he persisted.

Her smile answered him again. "One dreads the lonely fireside as one grows older." Then suddenly, as if the shadow of a cloud had drifted over the bright sky, he saw the smile fade from her lips and the glow from her upraised eyes. Somewhere within her brain a voice as hollow as an echo was repeating, "Isn't that life—sparrows for larks always?"

"Well, you know what I feel about you, and what I think about Benham," replied Stephen. "You two together stand for all that I admire." As if ashamed of the tone of sentiment, he continued carelessly after a moment: "Vetch is very far from being a Benham, and yet there is something about the man that holds one's attention. People are for ever discussing him. A little while ago we were talking about his personal peculiarities and his political offences. Now we are wondering how he will handle this strike if it comes off; and what effect it will have on his career? Benham, of course, thinks that he is an instrument in the hands of a political group; that his office was the price they paid him not to interfere in the strike. As for me I have no opinion. I am waiting to see what will happen."

They had reached the old print shop; and, as they paused beneath the cedars in the front yard, Stephen glanced up at the window under the quaint shingled roof. The upper storey, he knew, was rented to a couple of tenants, and he was not surprised when he saw the curtains of dotted swiss pushed aside and a woman's face look down on him over the red geranium on the window-sill. The face was familiar; but, while he stared back at it, searching his memory for a resemblance, the white curtains dropped together again, veiling the features. Where had he seen that woman before? What association of ideas did the sight of her recall? In a flash, while he still groped through mental obscurity, light broke on him.

"Who is that woman, Corinna?" he asked. "What do you know of her?"

"That woman?" Corinna repeated; then, as he lifted his eyes to the window, she added, "Oh, that's Mrs. Green. A pathetic face, isn't it? I know nothing about her except that she came in a few weeks ago, and the caretaker tells me that she is leaving to-morrow."

"Do you know where she came from?"

"My dear Stephen! Why, what in the world?" A laugh broke from Corinna's lips. "Did you ever see her before?"

"Twice, and both times in the Capitol Square. I thought her dreadful to look at."

"I've only glanced at her, but she appeared to me more pathetic than dreadful. She has been ill, I imagine, and she looks terribly poor. I'm afraid the rent is too high, but I can't do anything, for she rented her room from the tenants. I suppose, poor thing, that she is merely a sad adventuress, and it is not the sad adventuresses, but the glad ones, who usually enlist a young man's sympathy. By the way, I am lunching with the Governor to-morrow."

"Is it a party?"

"No, just the family. That shows how intimate I have become with the Vetches. Don't tell Cousin Harriet, or she would think I was beginning to corrupt your politics. But I may use my influence to find out what the Governor intends to do about the strike, and a cousin with a political secret is worth having."

With a laugh Stephen went on his way, wondering vaguely what there was about the woman at the window, Mrs. Green Corinna had called her, that made it impossible for him to rid his mind of her? Glancing back from the end of the block, he saw that Corinna had entered the shop and that the curtains at the upper window had been pushed back again while the dim face of Mrs. Green looked down into the street. Was she watching for some one? Or was she merely relieving the monotony of life indoors by gazing down into Franklin Street at an hour when it was almost deserted?



CHAPTER XIV

A LITTLE LIGHT ON HUMAN NATURE

Corinna had not expected to see the Governor until luncheon next day; but, to her surprise, he came to the shop just as she was about to lock the door and go home for the afternoon. At first she thought that the visit was merely a casual one—it was not unusual for him to drop in as he was going by—but he had no sooner glanced about the room to see if they were alone than he broke out with his characteristic directness.

"There is something I want to ask you. Will you answer me frankly?"

"That depends. Tell me what it is and then I will answer your question."

"It is about Patty. You've seen a great deal of her, haven't you?"

"A great deal. I am very fond of her."

"Then perhaps you can tell me if she is interested in this young Culpeper?"

For a minute Corinna struggled against a burst of hysterical laughter. Oh, if Cousin Harriet had only met him here, she thought, what a comedy they would have made!

"Surely if any one has an opinion about that, it must be you," she rejoined as gravely as she could.

"I haven't; not the shadow of one." He was plainly puzzled. "I thought you might help me. You have a way of seeing things."

"Have I?" The spontaneous tribute touched her. "I wish I could see this, but I can't. Frankly, since you ask me, I may say that I have been troubled about it. There are things that Patty hides, even from me, and I think I have her confidence."

"I dare say you wonder why I have come to you to-day," he said. "I can handle most situations; but I have never had to handle the love affairs of a girl, and I'm perfectly capable of making a mess of them. Things like that are outside of my job."

He seemed to her a pathetic figure as he stood there, in his boyish embarrassment and his redundant vitality, confessing an inability to surmount the obstacle in his way. She had never known any one, man or woman, who was so obviously lacking in subtlety of perception, in all those delicate intuitions on which she relied more completely than on judgment for an accurate impression of life. Was he, with his bigness, his earnestness, his luminous candour, only an overgrown child? Even his physical magnetism, and she felt this in the very moment when she was trying to analyse it, even his physical magnetism might be nothing more than the spell exercised by primitive impulse over the too complex problems of civilization. She had heard that he was unscrupulous—vague charges that he had never been able to repel—yet she was conscious now of a secret wish to protect him from the consequences of his duplicity, as she might have wished to protect an irresponsible child. Some mysterious sense perception made her aware that beneath what appeared to be discreditable public actions there was the simple bed-rock of honesty. For the quality she felt in Vetch was a profound moral integrity, an integrity which was bred by nature in the innermost fibre of the man.

"If you will tell me—" she began, and checked herself with a sensation of helplessness. After all, what could he tell her that she did not know?

"I want to do what is right for her," he said abruptly. "I should hate for her to be hurt."

While he talked it seemed to Corinna that she was living in some absurd comedy, which mimicked life but was only acting, not reality. In her world of reserves and implications no man would have dared to make himself ridiculous by a visit like this.

"Do you believe that she cares for Stephen?" she asked bluntly.

"It didn't start with me. Miss Spencer, that's the lady who lives with us you know, is afraid that Patty sees too much of him. He is at the house every day—"

"Well?" Corinna waited patiently. She was not in the least afraid of what Stephen might do. She knew that she could trust him to be a gentleman; but being a gentleman, she reflected, did not necessarily keep one from breaking a woman's heart. And Patty had a wild, free heart that might be broken.

"I don't know what to do about it," Vetch was saying while she pondered the problem. "As I told you a minute ago this is all outside my job."

"Have you spoken to Patty?"

"I started to, but she made fun of the idea—you know the way she has. She asked me if I had ever heard of any one falling in love with a plaster saint?"

Corinna smiled. "So she called Stephen a plaster saint?"

"She was chaffing, of course."

"Well, I don't see that there is anything you can do unless you send Patty away."

"She wouldn't go," he responded simply; then after a moment of embarrassed hesitation, he blurted out nervously, "Is this young Culpeper what you would call a marrying man?"

This time it was impossible for Corinna to suppress her amusement, and it broke out in a laugh that was like the chiming of silver bells. Oh, if only Cousin Harriet could hear him! Then observing the gravity of Vetch's expression, she checked her untimely mirth with an effort.

"That depends, I suppose. At his age how can any one tell?" In her heart she did not believe that Stephen would marry Patty; she was not sure even that she, Corinna, should wish him to do so. There was too much at stake, and though her philosophy was fearless, her conduct had never been anything but conventional. While in theory she despised discretion, she realized that the virtue she despised, not the theory she admired, had dominated her life. The great trouble with acts of reckless nobility was that the recklessness was only for a moment, but the nobility was obliged to last a lifetime. It was not difficult, she knew, for persons like Stephen or herself to be heroic in appropriate circumstances; the difficulty began when one was compelled to sustain the heroic role long after the appropriate circumstances had passed away. Yet, in spite of the cynical lucidity of her judgment, the romantic in her heart longed to have Stephen, by one generous act of devotion, prove her theory fallacious. Her strongest impulse, the impulse to create happiness, to repair, as her father had once described it, crippled destinies; this impulse urged her now to help Patty's pathetic romance in every way in her power. It would be very fine if Stephen cared enough to forget what he was losing. It would be magnificent, she felt, but it would not be masculine. For she had had great experience; and though men might vary in a multitude of particulars, she had found that the solidarity of sex was preserved in some general code of emotional expediency.

"Do you think," Vetch was making another attempt to explain his meaning, "that he is seriously interested?"

"I am perfectly sure," she replied, "that he is more than half in love with her."

"Is he the kind, then, to let himself go the rest of the way?"

She shook her head. "That I cannot answer. From my knowledge of the restraining force of the Culpeper fibre, I should say that he is not."

"You mean he wouldn't think it a suitable marriage?"

She blushed for his crudeness. "I mean his mother wouldn't think it a suitable marriage. Patty is very attractive, but they know nothing about her except that. You see they have had the disadvantage of knowing everything about every one who has married, or who has even wished to marry, into the family for the last two hundred years. It is a disadvantage, as I've said, for the strain is so highly bred that each generation becomes mentally more and more like the fish in caves that have lost their eyes because they stopped trying to see. Stephen is different in a way—and yet not different enough. It would be his salvation if he could care enough for Patty to take a risk for her sake; but his mother, of course, would fight against it with every particle of her influence, and her influence is enormous." Then she met his eyes boldly: "Wouldn't you fight against it in her place?" she asked.

"I? Oh, I shouldn't care a hang what anybody thought if I liked the girl," he retorted. His smile shone out warmly. "Would you?" he demanded in his turn.

For an instant his blunt question disconcerted her, and while she hesitated she felt his blue eyes on her downcast face. "You can't judge by me," she answered presently. "Only those who have been in chains know the meaning of freedom."

"Are you free now?"

"Not entirely. Who is?"

He was looking at her more closely; and when at last she raised her eyelashes and met his gaze, the lovely glow which gave her beauty its look of October splendour suffused her features. Anger seized her in the very moment that the colour rushed to her cheeks. Why should she blush like a schoolgirl because of the way this man—or any man—looked at her?

"Are you going to marry Benham?" he asked; and there was a note in his voice which disturbed her in spite of herself. Though she denied passionately his right to question her, she answered simply enough: "Yes, I am going to marry him."

"Do you care for him?"

With an effort she turned her eyes away and looked beyond the green stems and the white flowers of the narcissi in the window to the street outside, where the shadows of the young leaves lay like gauze over the brick pavement.

"If I didn't care do you think that I would marry him?" she asked in a low voice. Through the open window a breeze came, honey-sweet with the scent of narcissi, and she realized, with a start, that this early spring was poignantly lovely and sad.

"Well, I wish I'd known you twenty years ago," said Vetch presently. "If I'd had a woman like you to help me, I might have been almost anything. Nobody knows better than I how much help a woman can be when she's the right sort."

She tore her gaze from the sunshine beyond, from the beauty and the wistfulness of April. What was there in this man that convinced her in spite of everything that Benham had told her?

"Your wife has been dead a long time?" She spoke gently, for his tone more than his words had touched her sympathy.

As soon as she asked the question, she realized that it was a mistake. An expressionless mask closed over his face, and she received the impression that he had withdrawn to a distance.

"A long time," was all he answered. His voice had become so impersonal that it was toneless.

"Well, it hasn't kept you back—not having help," she hastened to reply as naturally as she could. "You are almost everything you wished to be in the world, aren't you?" It was a foolish speech, she felt, but the change in his manner had surprised and bewildered her.

He laughed shortly without merriment. "I?" he replied, and she noticed for the first time that he looked tired and worried beneath his exuberant optimism. "I am the loneliest man on earth. The loneliest man on earth is the one who stands between two extremes." As she made no reply, he continued after a moment, "You think, of course, that I stand with one extreme, not in the centre, but you are mistaken. I am in the middle. When I try to bring the two millstones together they will grind me to powder."

She had never heard him speak despondently before; and while she listened to the sound of his expressive voice, so full, for the hour at least, of discouragement, she felt drawn to him in a new and personal way. It was as if, by showing her a side of his nature the public had never seen, he had taken her into his confidence.

"But surely your influence is as great as ever," she said presently. A trite remark, but the only one that occurred to her.

"I brought the crowd with me as far as I thought safe," he answered, "and now it is beginning to turn against me because I won't lead it over the precipice into the sea. That's the way it always is, I reckon. That's the way it's been, anyhow, ever since Moses tried to lead the Children of Israel out of bondage. Take these strikers, for instance. I believe in the right to strike. I believe that they ought to have every possible protection. I believe that their families ought to be provided for in order to take the weapon of starvation out of the hands of the capitalists. I'd give them as fair a field as it is in my power to provide, and anybody would think that they would be satisfied with simple fairness. But, no, what they are trying to do is not to strike for themselves, but to strike at somebody else. They are not satisfied with protection from starvation unless that protection involves the right to starve somebody else. They want to tie up the markets and stop the dairy trains, and they won't wink an eyelash if all the babies that don't belong to them are without milk. That's war, they tell me; and I answer that I'd treat war just as I'd treat a strike, if I had the power. As soon as an army began to prey on the helpless, I'd raise a bigger army if I could and throw the first one out into the jungle where it belonged. But people don't see things like that now, though they may in the next five hundred years. The trouble is that all human nature, including capitalist and labourer, is tarred with the same brush and tarred with selfishness. What the oppressed want is not freedom from oppression, but the opportunity to become oppressors."

Was this only a mood, she wondered, or was it the expression of a profound disappointment? Sympathy such as John Benham had never awakened overflowed from her heart, and she was conscious suddenly of some deep intuitive understanding of Vetch's nature. All that had been alien or ambiguous became as close and true and simple as the thoughts in her own mind. What she saw in Vetch, she perceived now, was that resemblance to herself which the Judge had once turned into a jest. She discerned his point of view not by looking outside of herself, but by looking within.

"I know," she responded in her rich voice. "I think I know."

He gazed at her with a smile which had grown as tired as the rest of him. "Then if you know why don't you help—you others?" he asked. "Don't you see that by standing aside, by keeping apart, you are doing all the harm that you can? If democracy doesn't seem good enough for you, then get down into the midst of it and make it better. That's the only way—the only way on earth to make a better democracy—by putting the best we've got into it. You can't make bread rise from the outside. You've got to mix the yeast with the dough, if you want it to leaven the whole lump."

She had been standing with her hands clasped before her and her eyes on the sky beyond the window; and when he paused, with a husky tone in his voice, she spoke almost as if she were in a dream. "I believe in you," she said, and then again, as he did not speak she repeated very slowly: "I believe in you."

"That helps," he answered gravely. "I don't suppose you will ever realize how much that will help me." As he finished he turned toward the door; and a minute afterward, without another word or look, he went out into the street, and she saw his figure cross the flowers and the sunlight in the window.

When he had gone Corinna opened the door and stood watching the long black shadows of the cedars creep over the walk of broken flagstones. Always when she was alone her thoughts would return like homing birds to John Benham; but this afternoon, though she spoke his name in her reflections, she was conscious of an inner detachment from the vital interests of her personal life. For a little while, so strong was the mental impression Vetch had made on her, she saw his image even while she thought the name of John Benham. Then, with an effort of will, she put the Governor and all that he had said out of her mind. After all, how little would she ever see of him now—how seldom would their paths cross in the future! A strange and interesting man, a man who had, in one instant of mental sympathy, stirred something within her heart that no one, not even Kent Page, had ever awakened before. For that one instant a ripple, nothing more, had moved on the face of the deep—of the deep which was so ancient that it was older even than the blood of her race. Then the ripple passed and the sunny stillness settled again on her spirit.

She thought of John Benham easily now; and while she stood there a quiet happiness shone in her eyes. After the storm and stress of twenty years, life in this Indian summer of the emotions was like an enclosed garden of sweetness and bloom. She had had enough of hunger and rapture and disappointment. Never again would she take up the old search for perfection, for the starry flower of the heights. Something that she could worship! So often in the past it had seemed to her that she missed it by the turn of a corner, the stop on the roadside, by the choice of a path that led down into the valley instead of up into the hills. So often her god had revealed the feet of clay just as she was preparing to scatter marigolds on his altar. It appeared to her as she looked back on the past, that life had been merely a succession of great opportunities that one did not grasp, of high adventures that one never followed.

The sound of a motor horn interrupted her reverie, and she saw that a big open car, with a green body, had turned the corner and was about to stop at her door. An instant later anger burned in her heart, for she saw that the car was driven by Rose Stribling. Even a glimpse of that flaunting pink hollyhock of a woman was sufficient to ruffle the placid current of Corinna's thoughts. Could she never forget? Must she, who had long ago ceased to love the man, still be enslaved to resentment against the woman?

With an ample grace, Mrs. Stribling descended from the car, and crossed the pavement to the flagged walk which led to the white door of the old print shop. In her trimly fitting dress of blue serge, with her small straw hat ornamented by stiff black quills, she looked fresher, harder, more durably glazed than ever. A slight excess, too deep a carmine in her smooth cheeks, too high a polish on her pale gold hair, too thick a dusk on her lashes; this was the only flaw that one could detect in her appearance. If men liked that sort of thing, and they apparently did, Corinna reflected, then they could scarcely complain of an emphasis on perfection.

"I've just got back," began Rose Stribling in a tone as soft as her metallic voice could produce. "It's been an age since I've seen you—not since the night of that stupid dinner at the Berkeleys', and I'm so much interested in the news I have heard."

For a minute Corinna stared at her. "Yes, my shop has been very successful," she answered, after a pause in which she tried and failed to think of a reply that would sound more disdainful. "If you are looking for prints, I can show you some very good ones."

"Oh, I don't mean that." Mrs. Stribling appeared genuinely amused by the mistake. "I am not looking for prints—to tell the truth I shouldn't know one if I saw it. I mean your engagement, of course. There isn't anybody in the world who admires John Benham more than I do. I always say of him that he is the only man I know who will sacrifice himself for a principle. All his splendid record in the army—when he was over age too—and then the way he behaved about that corporation! I never understood just why he did it—I'm sure I could never bring myself to refuse so much money,—but that doesn't keep me from admiring him." For a minute she looked at Corinna with a smile which seemed as permanent as the rest of her surface, while she discreetly sharpened her wits for the stab which was about to be dealt. "I can't tell you how surprised I was to hear you had announced your engagement. You know we were so sure that he was going to marry Alice Rokeby after she got her divorce. Of course nobody knew. It was just gossip, and you and I both know how absurd gossip can be."

So this was why she had stopped! Corinna flinched from the thrust even while she told herself that there was no shadow of truth in the old rumour, that malice alone had prompted Rose Stribling to repeat it. In a woman like that, an incorrigible coquette, every relation with her own sex would be edged with malice.

"Well, I just stopped to wish you happiness. I must go now, but I'll come again, when I have time, and look at your shop. Such a funny idea—a shop, with all the money you've got! But no idea seems too funny for people to-day. And that reminds me of the Governor. Have you seen the Governor again since the evening we dined with him?"

Her turn had come, and Corinna, for she was very human, planted the sting without mercy. "Oh, very often. He was here a few minutes ago."

"Then it's true? Somebody told me he admired you so much."

Corinna smiled blandly. "I hope he does. We are great friends." Would there always be women like that in the world, she asked herself—women whose horizon ended with the beginning of sex? It was a feminine type that seemed to her as archaic as some reptilian bird of the primeval forests. How long would it be, she wondered, before it would survive only in the dry bones of genealogical scandals? As she looked after Rose Stribling's bright green car, darting like some gigantic dragon-fly up the street, her lips quivered with scorn and disgust. "I wonder if she thought I believed her?" she said to herself in a whisper. "I wonder if she thought she could hurt me?"

The sunshine was in her eyes, and she was about to turn and go back into the shop, when she saw that Alice Rokeby was coming toward her with a slow dragging step, as if she were mentally and bodily tired. The lace-work of shadows fell over her like a veil; and high above her head the early buds of a tulip tree made a mosaic of green and yellow lotus cups against the Egyptian blue of the sky. Framed in the vivid colours of spring she had the look of a flower that has been blighted by frost.

"How ill, how very ill she looks," thought Corinna, with an impulse of sympathy. "I wish she would come in and rest. I wish she would let me help her."

For an instant the violet eyes, with their vague wistfulness, their mute appeal, looked straight into Corinna's; and in that instant an inscrutable expression quivered in Alice Rokeby's face, as if a wan light had flickered up and died down in an empty room.

"The heat is too much for you," said Corinna gently. "It is like summer."

"Yes, I have never known so early a spring. It has come and gone in a week."

"You look tired, and your furs are too heavy. Won't you come in and rest until my car comes?"

The other woman shook her head. She was still pretty, for hers was a face to which pallor lent the delicate sweetness of a white rose-leaf.

"It is only a block or two farther. I am going home," she answered in a low voice.

"Won't you come to my shop sometimes? I have missed seeing you this winter." The words were spoken sincerely, for Corinna's heart was open to all the world but Rose Stribling.

"Thank you. How lovely your cedars are!" The wan light shone again in Alice Rokeby's face. Then she threw her fur stole from her shoulders as if she were fainting under the weight of it, and passed on, with her dragging step, through the lengthening shadows on the pavement.



CHAPTER XV

CORINNA OBSERVES

Yes, Patty was in love, this Corinna decided after a single glance. The girl appeared to have changed miraculously over-night, for her hard brightness had melted in the warmth of some glowing flame that burned at her heart. Never had she looked so Ariel-like and elusive; never had she brought so hauntingly to Corinna's memory the loveliness of youth and spring that is vivid and fleeting.

"Can it be that Stephen is really in earnest?" asked the older woman of her disturbed heart; and the next instant, shaking her wise head, she added, "Poor little redbird! What does she know of life outside of a cedar tree?"

At luncheon the Governor, in an effort to hide some perfectly evident anxiety, over-shot the mark as usual, Corinna reflected. It was his way, she had observed, to cover a mental disturbance with pretended hilarity. There was, as always when he was unnatural and ill at ease, a touch of coarseness in his humour, a grotesque exaggeration of his rhetorical style. With his mind obviously distracted he told several anecdotes of dubious wit; and while he related them Miss Spencer sat primly silent with her gaze on her plate. Only Corinna laughed, as she laughed at any honest jest however out of place. After all, if you began to judge men by the quality of their jokes where would it lead you?

Patty, with her eyes drooping beneath her black lashes, sat lost in a day dream. She dressed now, by Corinna's advice, in straight slim gowns of serge or velvet; and to-day she was wearing a scant little frock of blue serge, with a wide white collar that gave her the look of a delicate boy. There were wonderful possibilities in the girl, Corinna mused, looking her over. She had not a single beautiful feature, except her remarkable eyes; and yet the softness and vagueness of her face lent a poetic and impressionistic charm to her appearance. "In that dress she looks as if she had stepped out of the Middle Ages, and might step back again at any minute," thought Corinna. "I wonder if I can be mistaken in Stephen, and if he is seriously in love with her?"

"Patty is grooming me for the White House," remarked Vetch, with his hearty laugh which sounded a trifle strained and affected to-day. "She thinks it probable that I shall be President."

"Why not, Father?" asked Patty loyally. "They couldn't find a better one."

"Do you hear that?" demanded the Governor in delight. "That is what one coming voter thinks of me."

"And a good many others, I haven't a doubt," replied Corinna, with her cheerful friendliness. Through the windows of the dining-room she could see the long grape arbour and the gray boughs of the crepe myrtle trees in the garden.

She had dressed herself carefully for the occasion in a black gown that followed closely the lines of her figure. Her beauty, which a painter in Europe had once compared to a lamp, was still so radiant that it seemed to drain the colour and light from her surroundings. Even Patty, with her fresh youth, lost a little of her vividness beside the glowing maturity of the other woman. When Corinna had accepted the girl's invitation, she had resolved that she would do her best; that, however tiresome it was, she would "carry it off." Always a match for any situation that did not include Kent Page or a dangerous emotion, she felt entirely competent to "manage," as Mrs. Culpeper would have said, the most radical of Governors. She liked the man in spite of his errors; she was sincerely attached to Patty; and their artless respect for her opinion gave her a sense of power which she told herself merrily was "almost political." Though the Governor might be without the rectitude which both Benham and Stephen regarded as fundamental, she perceived clearly that, even if Vetch were lacking in the particular principle involved, he was not devoid of some moral excellence which filled not ignobly the place where principle should have been. She was prepared to concede that the Governor was a man of many defects and a single virtue; but this single virtue impressed her as more tremendous than any combination of qualities that she had ever encountered. She admitted that, from Benham's point of view, Vetch was probably not to be trusted; yet she felt instinctively that she could trust him. The two men, she told herself tolerantly, were as far apart as the poles. That the cardinal virtue Vetch possessed in abundance was the one in which Benham was inadequate had not occurred to her; for, at the moment, she could not bring herself to acknowledge that any admirable trait was absent from the man whom she intended to marry.

"You would make a splendid president, Father," Patty was insisting.

"Well, I'm inclined to think that you're right," Vetch responded whimsically, "but you'll have to convince a few others of that, I reckon, before we begin to plan for the White House. First of all, you'll have to convince the folks that started the boom to make me Governor. It looks as if some of them were already thinking that they'd made a mistake."

"Oh, that horrid Julius," said Patty lightly. "He doesn't matter a bit, does he, Mrs. Page?"

"Not to me," laughed Corinna, "but I'm not a politician. Politicians have queer preferences."

"Or queer needs," suggested Vetch. "You don't like Gershom, I infer; but when you are ready to sweep, remember you mustn't be over-squeamish about your broom."

"I have heard," rejoined Corinna, still laughing, "that a new broom sweeps clean. Why not try a new one next time?"

"You mean when I run for the Presidency?" Was he joking, or was there an undercurrent of seriousness in his words?

They had risen from the table; and as they passed through the long reception-room, which stretched between the dining-room and the wide front hall, Abijah brought the information that Mr. Gershom awaited the Governor in the library.

"I shall probably be kept there most of the afternoon," said Vetch, and she could see that his regret was not assumed. "The next time you come I hope I shall have better luck." Then he hurried off to his appointment, while Corinna stopped at the foot of the staircase and followed with her gaze the slender balustrade of mahogany. "If they had only left everything as it was!" she thought; and then she said aloud: "It is so lovely out of doors. Get your hat and we'll walk awhile in the Square. I can talk to you better there, and I want to talk to you seriously."

After the girl had disappeared up the quaint flight of stairs, Corinna stood gazing meditatively at the bar of sunlight over the front door. She was thinking of what she should say to Patty—how could she possibly warn the girl without wounding her?—and it was very gradually that she became aware of raised voices in the library and the hard, short sound of words that beat like hail into her consciousness.

"I tell you we can put it over all right if you will only have the sense to keep your hands off!" stormed Gershom in a tone that he was trying in vain to subdue.

"Are you sure they will strike?"

"Dead sure. You may bet your bottom dollar on that. We can tie up every road in this state within twenty-four hours after the order goes out—"

Arousing herself with a start, Corinna opened the door and went out. She could not have helped hearing what Gershom had said; and after all this was nothing more than a repetition of the plain facts that Vetch had already confided to her. But why, she wondered, did they persist in holding their conferences at the top of their voices?

In a few minutes Patty came down, wearing a sailor hat which made her look more than ever like an attractive boy; and they descended the steps together, and strolled past the fountain of the white heron to the gate in front of the house. Turning to the left as they entered the Square, they walked slowly down the wide brick pavement, which trailed by the library and a larger fountain, to the dingy business street beyond the iron fence at the foot of the hill. As they went by, a woman, who was feeding the squirrels from one of the benches, lifted her face to stare at them curiously, and something vaguely familiar in her features caused Corinna to pause and glance back. Where had she seen her before? And how ill, how hopelessly stricken, the haggard face looked under the thick mass of badly dyed hair. The next minute she remembered that the woman had lodged for a week or two above the old print shop, and that only yesterday Stephen had asked about her. Poor creature, what a life she must have had to have wrecked her so utterly.

In the golden-green light of afternoon the Square was looking peaceful and lovely. For the hour a magic veil had dropped over the nakedness of its outlines, and the bare buildings and bare walks were touched with the glamour of spring. Soft, pale shadows of waving branches moved back and forth, like the ghosts of dreams, over the grassy hill and the brick pavements.

Turning to the girl beside her, Corinna looked thoughtfully at the fresh young face above the white collar which framed the lovely line of the throat. Under the brim of the sailor hat Patty's eyes were dewy with happiness.

"Are you happy, Patty?"

"Oh, yes," rejoined Patty fervently, "so much happier than I ever was in my life!"

"I am glad," said the older woman tenderly. Then taking the girl's hand in hers she added earnestly: "But, my dear, we must be careful, you and I, not to let our happiness depend too much upon one thing. We must scatter it as much as we can."

"I can't do that," answered Patty simply. "I am not made that way. I pour everything into one thought."

"I know," responded Corinna sadly, and she did. She had lived through it all long ago in what seemed to her now another life.

For a moment she was silent; and when she spoke again there was an anxious sound in her voice and an anxious look in the eyes she lifted to the arching boughs of the sycamore. "Do you like Stephen very much, Patty?" she asked.

Though Corinna did not see it, a glow that was like the flush of dawn broke over the girl's sensitive face. "He is so superior," she began as if she were repeating a phrase she had learned to speak; then in a low voice she added impulsively, "Oh, very much!"

"He is a dear boy," returned Corinna, really troubled. "Do you see him often?" Now, since she felt she had won the girl's confidence, her purpose appeared more difficult than ever.

"Very often," replied Patty in a thrilling tone. "He comes every day." The luminous candour, the fearless sincerity of Gideon Vetch, seemed to envelop her as she answered.

"Do you think he cares for you, dear?" asked Corinna softly.

"Oh, yes." The response was unhesitating. "I know it."

How naive, how touchingly ingenuous, the girl was in spite of her experience of life and of the uglier side of politicians. No girl in Corinna's circle would ever have appeared so confiding, so innocent, so completely beneath the spell of a sentimental illusion. The girls that Corinna knew might be unguarded about everything else on earth; but even the most artless one of them, even Margaret Blair, would have learned by instinct to guard the secret of her emotions.

"Has he asked you to marry him?" Corinna's voice wavered over the question, which seemed to her cruel; but Patty met it with transparent simplicity.

"Not yet," she answered, lifting her shining eyes to the sky, "but he will. How can he help it when he cares for me so much?"

"If he hasn't yet, my dear"—while the words dropped from her reluctant lips, Corinna felt as if she were inflicting a physical stab,—"how can you tell that he cares so much for you?"

"I wasn't sure until yesterday," replied Patty, with beaming lucidity, "but I knew yesterday because—because he showed it so plainly."

With a lovely protective movement the older woman put her arm about the girl's shoulders. "You may be right—but, oh, don't trust too much, Patty," she pleaded, with the wisdom that the years bring and take away. "Life is so uncertain—fine impulses—even love—yes, love most of all—is so uncertain—"

"Of course you feel that way," responded the girl, sympathetic but incredulous. "How could you help it?"

After this what could Corinna answer? She knew Stephen, she told herself, and she knew that she could trust him. She believed that lie was capable of generous impulses; but she doubted if an impulse, however generous, could sweep away the inherited sentiments which encrusted his outlook on life. In spite of his youth, he was in reality so old. He was as old as that indestructible entity, the spirit of race—as that impalpable strain which had existed in every Culpeper, and in all the Culpepers together, from the beginning. It was not, she realized plainly, such an anachronism as a survival of the aristocratic tradition. Deeper than this, it had its roots not in belief but in instinct—in the bone and fibre of Stephen's character. It was a part of that motive power which impelled him in the direction of the beaten road, of the established custom, of things as they have always been in the past.

Her kind heart was troubled; yet before the happiness in the girl's face what could she say except that she hoped Stephen was as fine as Patty believed him to be? "You may be right. I hope so with all my heart; but, oh, my dear, try not to care too much. It never does any good to care too much." She stooped and kissed the girl's cheek. "There, my car is at the door, and I must hurry back to the shop. I'll do anything in the world that I can for you, Patty, anything in the world."

As the car rolled through the gate and down the wide drive to the Washington monument, Patty stood gazing after it, with a burning moisture in her eyes and a lump in her throat. Terror had seized her in an instant, terror of unhappiness, of missing the one thing in life on which she had passionately set her heart. What had Mrs. Page meant by her questions? Had she intended them as a warning? And why should she have thought it necessary to warn her against caring too much for Stephen?

The girl had started to enter the house when, remembering suddenly that Gershom was still there, she turned hurriedly away from the door, and walked back down the brick pavement to the fountain beyond the library. The squirrels still scampered over the walk; the thirsty sparrows were still drinking; the few loungers on the benches still stared at her with dull and incurious eyes. Not a cloud stained the intense blue of the sky; and over the bright grass on the hillside the sunshine quivered like an immense swarm of bees.

As she approached the fountain where she had first met Stephen, it seemed to her that a romantic light, a visionary enchantment, fell over this one spot of ground, and divided it by some magic circle from every other place in the world. The crude iron railing, the bare gravel, the ugly spouting fountain which was stripped of every leaf or blade of grass—these things appeared to her through an indescribable glamour, as if they stood there as the visible gateway to some invisible garden of dreams. Whenever she looked at this ordinary spot of earth a breathless realization of the wonder and delight of life rushed over her. She knew nothing of the mental processes by which these external objects were associated with the deepest emotions of the heart. Only when she visited this place that wave of happiness swept over her; and she lived again as vividly as she lived in the moments when Stephen was with her and she was looking into his eyes.

His voice called her while she stood there; and turning quickly, she saw that he was coming toward her down the walk. Immediately the loungers on the benches vanished by magic; the murmur of the fountain became like the music of harps; and the sunshine on the grassy hill was alive with the quiver of wings. As she went toward him she was aware of the blue sky, of the golden green of the trees, of the happy sounds of the birds, and over all, as if it were outside of herself, of the rapturous beating of her own heart.

"I was looking for you," he said when he reached her.

"And you found me at last." Her eyes were like wells of joy.

"I'd never have given up until I found you." The words were trivial; but it was the things he said without words that really mattered. Already they had established a communion that was independent of speech. He had never told her that he loved her; yet she saw it in every glance of his eyes and heard it in every tone of his voice.

While they walked slowly up the hill she wondered trustingly why, when he had told her so plainly in every other way that he loved her, he should never have put it into words. There could not be any doubt of it; perhaps this was the reason he hesitated. The present was so perfect that it was like the most exquisite hour of a spring afternoon. One longed to hold it back even though one knew that it led to something more lovely still.

"Are you happy?" she asked, and wondered if he would kiss her again when they parted as he had kissed her yesterday in the dusk of the hall?

"Yes, and no." He drew nearer to her. "I am happy now like this—here with you—but at other times I am troubled. I can't see my way clearly."

"But why should you? Why should any one be troubled when it is so easy to be happy?"

"Easy?" He laughed. "If life were only as simple as that!"

"It is if one knows what one wants."

"Well, one may know what one wants, and yet not know if one is wise in wanting it."

"Oh, wise!" She shook her head with an impatient movement. "Isn't the only wisdom to be happy and kind?"

He looked at her thoughtfully, while a frown drew his straight dark eyebrows together. "If you wanted a thing with all your heart, and yet were not sure—"

Her impatience answered him. "I couldn't want it with all my heart without being sure."

"Sure I mean that it is best—best for every one—not just for oneself—"

Her laugh was like a song. "Do you suppose there has ever been anything since the world began that was best for every one? If I knew what I wanted I shouldn't ask anything more. I would spread my wings and fly to it."

He smiled. "You are so much like your father at times—even in the things that you say. Yes, I suppose you would fly to it because you have been trained that way—to be direct and daring. But I am made differently. Life has taught me; it is in my blood and bone to stop and question, to look so long that at last I lose the will to choose, or to leap. There are some of us like that, you know."

"Perhaps," she smiled. "I don't know. It seems to me a very silly way to be." The song had gone out of her voice, and a heaviness, an impalpable fear, had descended again on her heart. Why did one's path lead always through mazes of uncertainty and disappointment instead of straight onward toward one's desire? A passionate impulse seized her to fight for what she wanted, to grasp the fragile opportunity before it eluded her. Yet she knew that fighting would not do any good. She could do nothing while her happiness hung on a thread. She could do nothing but fold her hands and wait, though her heart burned hot with the injustice of it, and she longed to speak aloud all the words that were rising to her tightly closed lips.

"Oh, don't you see—can't you see?" she asked brokenly, baring her heart with a desperate impulse. Her eyes were drawing him toward the future; and, in the deep stillness of her look, it seemed to him that she was putting forth all her power to charm; that her youth and bloom shed a sweetness that was like the fragrance of a flower.

For an instant every thought, every feeling, surrendered to her appeal. Then his face changed as abruptly as if he had put a mask over his features; and glancing back over her shoulder, she saw that his mother and Margaret Blair were walking along the concrete pavement under the few old linden trees. As they approached it seemed to the girl that Stephen turned slowly from a man of flesh and blood into a figure of granite. In one instant he was petrified by the force of tradition.

"It is my mother," he said in a low voice. "She has not been in the Square for years. I was telling her yesterday how pretty it looks in the spring." He went forward with an embarrassed air, and Mrs. Culpeper laid a firm, possessive touch on his arm.

"I thought a little stroll might do me good," she explained. "The car is waiting across the street at Doctor Bradley's." Then she held out her free hand to Patty, with a smile which, the girl said afterward to Corinna, looked as if it had frozen on her lips. "Stephen speaks of you very often, Miss Vetch," she said. "He talks a great deal about his friends, doesn't he, Margaret?"

Margaret assented with a charming manner; and the two girls stood looking guardedly into each other's eyes. "She is attractive," thought Margaret, not unkindly, for she was never unkind, "but I can't understand just what he sees in her." And at the same moment Patty was saying to herself, "Oh, she is everything that he admires and nothing that he enjoys."