The small brick house with its scrap of garden and gravelled drive proved to be the pleasantest of Milly's European experiences. It was the most regularly domestic thing they did. The artist still went to the school in the mornings, but worked at home in the afternoons. Milly convalesced healthily and was properly absorbed in her baby and her house, so that she did not feel lonely during her husband's absences in Paris. Now that the child had got into the world, after all her fears and forebodings, Milly was surprised at the naturalness of the event. As Marion Reddon had said, it really simplified life. First consideration must always be the Baby. Mdle. Virginia, as she was called after Milly's mother, could do so little in this world at present that its parents' ambitions were necessarily curbed. Milly was an admirably devoted mother. She had always liked babies since she was a very little girl, and she became wholly wrapped up in her own human venture. The summer while the child was coming had drawn her very close to Marion Reddon, with whom she had established a staunch bond of the woman's league, offensive and defensive, against men. Marion, she felt, understood both babies and men. Although she could not approve of all Marion's ideas about the relations of the sexes, she admired the frank, brave, humorous way in which she solved her own life.

Curiously enough, the child seemed to set Milly apart from her husband—and from the world of men in general. Jack was no longer the supreme emotional fact in her life. He was a good husband; she was more conscious of that than ever before. He had been very tender and considerate of her during her pregnancy, keeping up her spirits, guarding her against folly, insisting on luxuries in their travels so that she might be thoroughly comfortable. Thus he went to Gossensass, not for his own profit and pleasure, but because the doctor they consulted in Venice advised this secluded mountain resort. And when the time of the birth came, he had been properly solicitous to see that she was provided with the best attendance and care, and Milly knew vaguely that he had spent lavishly of their hoard for this purpose. Milly was sure he loved her, and what was also very important to her, she was sure that he was "a good man,"—clean-minded and unselfish with a woman. Even if he should come to love her less passionately than at the beginning, he was the loyal sort of American, who would not let that fact furnish him with excuse for errancy. And she loved him, of course—was "quite crazy" about him, as she expressed it to Marion—and still believed in his glorious future as a great painter.

Yet in some indefinable way he had sunk from first to second place in her thoughts and might soon—who knows?—descend to third place in the family triangle. As for all other men, like Sam Reddon and the artists Jack brought to the house, they began to have for her the aspect of coarse and rather silly beings, essentially selfish and sensual. "Oh, he's just a man" became more and more in her mouth the mocking formula to indicate male inferiority. Later it was, "They're all alike, men." Thus the child brought out in Milly the consciousness of womanhood. She was more the mother now than the wife, as was natural, but she had no desire to become again the wife, paramount, to any man....

Meanwhile any one of those who came in upon them in the Neuilly house and saw the father and mother grouped about the baby's bassinet would say,—"An ideal young pair—has he much talent?"

This winter when she grew stronger Milly saw more of people than before. She had two very capable servants and her little household ran smoothly, though its cost made severe inroads on the "hoard." People she knew drifted through Paris and were glad to lunch or dine in the little Neuilly house. Sally Norton, who was now Mrs. Willie Ashforth, having finally secured the elderly bachelor, was one of the first to come. Sally laughed over the small house, over Milly's baby, over Milly as a mother. She seemed determined to consider Milly as an irresponsible joke in everything she did, but she was good-natured and lively as always, and absorbed in her own plans. The Ashforths were building at Highland Forest, a fashionable suburb outside of Chicago. Vivie had had a "desperate affair" with a divorced man, etc., etc. Then the Gilberts turned up unexpectedly one day, gracious and forgiving to Milly, and apparently very much bored with themselves in Paris. Milly gave them a nice little dinner, to which she had the smartest people she knew, which was her way of "getting even" with Nettie for the snubs. Others came more frequently as the spring influx of Americans arrived. Occasionally Jack complained of the time these idle wanderers consumed, especially of the precious afternoons lost when they came for luncheon and stayed until tea. Milly thought it selfish of him to object to "her one pleasure," now that "she was tied up in the house." Perhaps he felt so too, for he said no more, and remained at the school to work when there was likely to be company at the Neuilly house. On the whole he was amiably indulgent with his wife, according to the best American tradition.... So with friends, new and old, the second year of their foreign life drew on towards summer. The baby flourished, and all was well. They began to talk of summer plans.

A cheap place in the country was imperative, for by this time their "hoard" had shrunk to a mite in three figures, and unless Big Brother, who had been doing well in Big Business by all accounts, should remember to send over additional funds as he had promised, they must return to America in the autumn. Jack seemed loath to remind Big Brother of their needs as Milly wanted him to do. Yet he must have more time: he was not yet ready to get a living out of his pictures. He had not done enough work, he said. Milly, who had expected that in a year or so he would become an accomplished painter, was disturbed. She found the oils he was doing,—the picture of her beside the baby's bassinet on the terrace, for instance,—disappointing. It was distinctly less understandable and amusing than his pen-and-ink work had been, and she felt a certain relief when he did some comic sketches of the Brittany nurses to send to a magazine. His hand had not lost the old cunning, if it had not gained the new. Was it possible that her husband was not born to be a great painter?... "I don't know about such things," she murmured into the baby's ear. "Jack must decide for himself what's best."

She found it very convenient to have a husband to take upon himself decision and responsibility, the two most annoying things in life.



VII

BESIDE THE RESOUNDING SEA

After much of the usual futile discussion they decided upon Klerac, a little place on the coast of Brittany, which certain artists whom Bragdon knew recommended. One American landscapist of established reputation painted in that region, and around him had gathered a number of his countrymen, in the hope of acquiring if not his skill at least some of his commercial talent for self-exploitation.

So the end of June found them settled comfortably enough in the Hotel du Passage just across the bay from Douarnenez, where the great one had his studio. Milly, who usually had some difficulty in adjusting herself to a new situation and missed the freedoms of her own house, took to Klerac after the first few days of strangeness. The tiny village and the sleepy country were utterly unlike anything she had ever seen or dreamed of before. Green branches of broad chestnut trees overhung the dark water of the little bay, and a sea of the deepest purple lay out beyond the headland and boomed against the sand-dunes. The bay and the brilliant sea were perpetually alive with the fishing craft, which were picturesquely adorned with colored sails. And inland, only a few steps from all this vivid coloring of the sea, green lanes meandered between lofty hedges of thick blackberry vines. Always, even among the remoter fields, there was the muffled murmur of the sea on the sand and the tang of salt in the air. The queer, dark little people of the place still wore about their daily tasks their picturesque costumes, and spoke little French. One met them as in an opera, gathering kelp on the beach, driving their little tip carts through the lanes, or singing beside their thatched cottages.

From her first exploratory walks with her husband Milly returned quite ravished by the quality of the place, its beauty of colored sea and peaceful country, and the little gray houses sheltered by large trees. Here she dreamed, in this fragrant salty air, they would have an enchanting summer withdrawn from the world, and great deeds would be done by her husband. "I could almost paint myself here," she said to him, "it all looks so quaint and lovely." Jack liked the place, and quickly set up his easel under the trees down by the stone pier where the fishing-boats landed and where there was always a noisy, lively scene. Milly idled near by in the sand with the baby. But the work did not go fast. She thought that Jack must be fagged after the long winter indoors, and urged him to rest for a while. They took to walking through the lanes and along the beaches. They found little to say to each other; sometimes she thought that she bored him and he would rather be alone. They were suffering, naturally, from the too great intimacy of the past two years. Neither had a spontaneous thought to offer the other,—no reaction to arouse surprise and discussion. Milly could not comprehend her husband's restless depression, his wish to be at something which he could not formulate to himself clearly enough to do. She decided that he was developing nerves and recommended bathing in the sea. When he took to painting again, she would wander along the beach by herself and watch the boys fishing for ecrevisses in the salt pools among the rocks, or lay prone on the sand gazing at the colored sails on the dark sea. In spite of all the peace and the beauty about her she was lonely, and asked herself sometimes if this was what it meant to be an artist's wife. Was this all? Was life to be like this for years and years?...

Their hotel was a rambling low building surrounded by high walls, with a high terrace behind, from which there was a glimpse of the sea and which was well shaded by branching plane trees. Here on calm summer nights the dinner table was spread for the pensionnaires, who gradually arrived. There were a few French, of a nondescript sort, a fat American from Honolulu, who had been rolling about Europe since the Spanish War, in which he had had some part. Then there was a Russian lady with two children and a Finnish maid. She was already there when they arrived and kept by herself, taking her meals at a little table with her oldest child. This Russian, a Madame Saratoff, piqued Milly's curiosity, and she soon became acquainted with her. One day when they happened to be alone on the terrace, the Russian lady turned to her with a swift smile,—

"You are American?" and when Milly admitted it, she added, "One can always tell the American women from the English."

She spoke English easily, with the slightest sort of accent that merely added distinction to whatever she said. Madame Saratoff was still young, and though not a beautiful woman, had an air of privilege and breeding, with something odd in the glitter of her eyes and the wolfish way in which her curving upper lip revealed strong white teeth. She had a good figure, as Milly had already recognized, and she dressed well, with great simplicity. Milly felt interested in her, and the women talked for an hour. Milly reported to her husband:—

"She's really a Baroness. Her husband is in the diplomatic service—off in the east somewhere, and she's here alone with the children and her maid. Don't you think she's interesting looking?"

The artist replied indifferently,—

"Not particularly—she has fine hands."

He seemed to have noticed that about her.

They quickly became better acquainted with Madame Saratoff, who, it seemed, had been in Brittany before and knew the coast thoroughly. She explained that the little hotel became unendurable later with the canaille des artistes, and so she had rented an old manoir in the neighborhood, which was being put to rights for her. The next afternoon the three walked to see the manoir through a maze of little lanes. It was a lovely old gray building with crumbling walls and had evidently once been the seat of a considerable family. But only a half dozen rooms were now habitable, and in the cracks of the great walls that surrounded the garden thick roots of creepers twisted and curled upwards. From the other end of the garden, through a break in the old hedge, there was a glimpse of the sea, and in one corner was the ruin of a chapel surmounted by an iron cross. Madame Saratoff showed them all the rooms, into which men were putting some furniture she had bought in the neighborhood—old armoires and brass-bound chests of black oak as well as some modern iron beds and dressing-tables. Milly admired the peaceful gray manoir, and Bragdon observed as they retraced their way alone through the lanes:—

"That woman has a lot of energy in her! It shows in her movements—she has personality, character."

Milly had never heard him say as much as that about any other woman, and she wondered how such large generalizations could be made from the fact that a woman was fitting up an old house. She was vaguely jealous, as any woman might be, that her husband should choose just those qualities for commendation.

She went often thereafter to the manoir while her husband was painting, and marvelled at the ease and sureness with which the Russian installed herself, her only helpers being the stupid peasants, who seemed to understand no language but their own jargon.

"I'm used to driving cattle," the Russian explained to Milly with a little laugh. "You see my father had estates in southern Russia, and I lived there a good deal before I was married."

"They must be quite important," Milly reported to Jack. "They seem to know people all over Europe."

"Oh, that's Russian," he explained.

"And Baron Saratoff is away on a most important mission."

"Absent husbands ought to be!"

"I don't believe she cares for him much."

"How can you tell that so soon?"

"Oh!" Milly replied vaguely, as if that were a point few women could keep from other women.

As a matter of fact the Russian lady had given Milly some new and startling lights upon marriage.

"I am," she told Milly in her precise speech, "what you call the 'show wife.' I go to parties, to court—all rigged up,—you say rigged, no?—dressed then very grand with my jewels. And I have children, see!" She pointed to the healthy little Saratoffs playing in the garden. "My husband goes away on his business—makes long journeys. He amuses himself. When he comes back, I have a child,—voila." She laughed and showed her white teeth. "But I have my vacations sometimes, too, like this."

Milly thought that the Russian type of marriage must be much inferior to the American, at least the Chicago variety, where if there was any going away from home, it was usually the wife who went, and she confided this opinion to Jack, who said with a laugh:—

"Oh, you can never understand these foreigners. She's probably like every one else.... But I'd like to paint her and get that smile of hers."

"Why don't you ask her?"

"Perhaps I will one of these days."

* * * * *

The hotel gradually filled up. The great painter had come and with him his satellites, chiefly young American women, who "painted all over the place," as Bragdon put it. The long table d'hote under the plane trees was a cheerful if somewhat noisy occasion these summer nights, with the black, star-strewn canopy above. They all drank the bottled cider and talked pictures and joked and sang when so moved. Even if the spirit was somewhat cheaply effervescent, like the cider, there was plenty of talk, clashing of eager ideas, and Milly liked it even more than Bragdon. He seemed older than the other artists, perhaps because he was married and less given to idle chatter. The great man singled him out for companionship after the first week, and gave patronizing praise to his work.

"You are still young," he said, with a sigh for his own sixty years. "Wait another ten years and you may find something to say."

Jack, repeating these words to his wife, added,—"And where do you suppose we'd be if I should wait another ten years? On the street."

Tell an American to wait ten years in order to have something to say!

"He's jealous," Milly pronounced. "You're going to do something stunning this summer, I just know it."

"How do you know it?" he asked teasingly.

"Because we can't wait ten years!"

"Um," the artist sighed, "I should think not."



VIII

THE PICTURE

Just how it came about Milly never remembered, but in the weeks that followed it was arranged that Jack should do the Russian lady's portrait. Milly flattered herself at the time that she had produced this result. Madame Saratoff came rarely to the hotel after she was installed in her old manoir, but she often drove to the beach for her bath and took Milly home with her for luncheon. And Jack would join them late in the long afternoon for tea. On one of these occasions the affair was settled.

Bragdon decided to do the figure out of doors in a corner of the ruined garden wall with a clustering festoon of purple creeper above and a narrow slit of sea in the distant background. Against the gray and green and purple of the wall he placed Madame Saratoff, who was tall, with a supple, bony figure. It was for him a daring and difficult composition. The first afternoon, while the figure was being lined in with charcoal, Milly was much excited. She tried to keep quite still, but Madame Saratoff persisted in making little jokes and impertinent comments upon the artist. She did not seem to feel the importance of the event. Milly thought to herself, "How wonderful if he should do a really stunning picture and have it in the Salon next season!" and she said to herself, "Portrait of the Baroness Saratoff by John Archer Bragdon." That would be a start towards fame!

But the start was scarcely perceptible those first days. Milly could make nothing of the blurred canvas and was depressed. Jack seemed more intent on watching the lithe figure, with the mottled flesh tones, the steel-blue eyes, the mocking mouth than in putting brush to canvas. When Milly complained of his dawdling, the Baroness remarked with a curl of her lips,—

"How do you expect an artist to work with his wife hanging over his brushes and counting every stroke?"

Milly pretended to be hurt and ran off to the other end of the garden. She asked her husband on their way back if she were really in the way, and though he laughed at her question and considered the Russian woman's remark as merely one of her rather feline jokes, Milly did not come the next day. She said the baby was sick, and needed her attention. It was several days before she returned to the manoir, and then because Jack made a point of it. She was astonished at the progress which he had made. The picture had suddenly leaped into life.

"See!" the Russian remarked, indicating the canvas with a slow sweep of her long, thin fingers. "The painter has done all that without his wife's help."

Milly resented the joke. But it was true that in these few days the picture had grown surprisingly: the pose of the tall figure, the background was all firmly worked in, and he had begun to define the features,—the perilous part. Already something of the subtle mockery of the Russian woman's expression was there. Milly turned away. For the first time she felt outside her husband's world and in the way. Presently, in spite of the Baroness's protests, she took little Paul Saratoff to the beach. When her husband came in at the hotel just in time for dinner and expressed surprise that she had not returned to the manoir for him, she said coldly,—

"Oh, I didn't care to—I didn't want to interrupt."

"Anna expected you back to tea."

"I guess not."

Bragdon gave her a swift glance, but said nothing. This was a new aspect of his wife, and it evidently puzzled him. He was too much absorbed by his picture, however, to give much heed to anything.

* * * * *

Latterly another American had joined the circle around the dinner table on the terrace,—a long, lanky young man who had been in the navy during the late war and was now engaged in the production of literature. That is, he contributed profusely to those American magazines with flaming covers stories of love and adventure in strange seas,—the highly seasoned bonbon entertainment for the young. He was southern by birth with a pronounced manner towards women. And Milly found him attractive. Roberts and the fat Hawaiian wit had many encounters that kept the table stirred. To-night they were discussing the needs of the artist nature,—and "temperament." That was a term not much in vogue in the Chicago of Milly's time, but it seemed to occupy endlessly the talkers about the table at the Hotel du Passage. Milly never understood exactly what was meant by "having a temperament," or the "needs of the artistic temperament" except vaguely that it was a license to do flighty things that all reasonable Chicago folk would deplore.

To-night the Hawaiian was maintaining his favorite thesis,—that the first duty of the artist was to himself, to preserve and make effective his "temperament." Modern life, especially in America, he held, made bourgeois of us all. The inevitable ruin of the artist was to attempt to live according to the bourgeois ideal of morality. (That was another term which puzzled Milly always,—bourgeois. These young artists used it with infinite contempt, and yet she concluded shrewdly that the people she had known best and respected all her life would have to come under this anathema. To be healthy and normal, to pay one's bills and be true to husband or wife, was to be just bourgeois. According to that standard Jack was bourgeois, she supposed, and she was glad of it, and yet a little afraid at the same time, because it seemed to mark him out for artistic ineptitude.) But the fat man was talking heatedly, and Milly was listening.

"In our society artists have no chance to experiment in life, to perfect their natures untrammelled by public opinion, as the artists of old did." (And he cited a lot of names, beginning, of course, with Benvenuto and including Goethe, but Milly was not interested in these historical cases. It was the immediate application of the principle she was waiting for.)

"In those days," some one said, "artists were content to live in their own class like actors and had no social ambitions."

"And much better for them, too!" the Honolulu man put in.

"How about Leonardo and Petrarch?" the great artist queried from his end of the table, and then for a few moments the conversation got off into the question of the social position of artists in the renaissance and their relation to their patrons, which bored Milly, but the Hawaiian brought it back to his point.

"So that's why we have no real creators to-day in any of the arts," he asserted. "They're merely a lot of little citizens who daub canvass to support a wife and a respectable house or pay the butcher's bill with fluffy stories about silly women and impossible heroes." (This, Milly thought, was a raw stab at young Roberts. She wondered how men could say such things to one another and still remain friends.) "They have bank-accounts and go to dinner-parties."

To which the story-teller retorted when he got his chance:—

"What you fellows always mean by 'living' is messing around with some woman who isn't your own wife. A good many of our modern citizens manage to live their own lives that way, and what does it do for them?"

Milly approved.

"That's just the trouble: society damns them and finishes them if they don't behave like proper bourgeois. Take the case of——" and he cited an instance of a young artist who was having much newspaper notoriety over his passional experiments. "Women kill art, anyway," he concluded with a growl.

Thereat Roberts' southern blood was touched, and he launched into a glowing sentimental eulogy of Woman as the Inspirer of Men towards the Noblest Things, and incidentally of the peace and the purity of marriage. Milly liked what he said, although it seemed to her rather florid in phrasing, and she felt an instinctive hostility towards the fat gentleman from Honolulu, whom she suspected of disgusting immorality. (Later in New York she was astonished to learn that Roberts had had a very scandalous divorce from a wife, while the Hawaiian lived a laborious and apparently upright life, supporting a mother, as a newspaper correspondent. She learned then that men's expressed views had very little to do with their conduct, and that an ideal was often merely the sentimental reaction from experience.)

Just as Milly, thinking she heard Virginia cry in the room above, slipped away from the table some one said,—

"A man who has anything to do in the world will never let a woman stand in his way. If he does, he is soft, and that's the end of him."

Milly felt moved to put a word in here in behalf of her sex, but the child's cry came more loudly and as she left she heard her husband ask mildly,—

"And how about the children?"

"Oh, the kids—that's woman's business," the fat man replied carelessly. "Pass the cigarettes, will you," and the talk went off somewhere else....

Children were not all "woman's business," Milly felt indignantly. She had surprised her pretty little maid Yvonne in a lonely lane one moonlight night, in company with a tall man, who did not look like a Breton. She had reported the fact to her husband, with her suspicions as to the tall man, observing,—"Men are so horrid!" to which Jack had merely laughed easily. She had scolded him for his frivolity, also scolded Yvonne, who cried, yet somehow seemed to smile through her tears.

To-night when her husband came up for bed, she asked seriously,—

"You don't believe all that stuff Steve Belchers was saying, do you?"

"What stuff?"

"About artists and women."

Bragdon yawned and laughed. Milly came close to him and put her arm about his neck.

"You don't feel that your temperament is ruined by marriage, do you?"

"Never knew I had one before," he replied jokingly.

"Because you know if you ever want your freedom, you can have it."

"Thanks."

"If you need that sort of experience, I shan't stand in your way," she concluded in a heroic burst....

Nevertheless she was glad that her husband had shown no symptoms hitherto of this dangerous "temperament" and was content to be as bourgeois as the best. All the time there was growing in her a sense of sex distinction, and a dislike, or rather disapproval, of men as a whole. God, she was convinced, as the Southerner had said, had meant the perfect type to be Woman, rather than Man.



IX

THE PARDON

One day the noisy chatter at the mid-day meal was interrupted by the terrific splutter and throbbing of a motor-car. Those were still the days when touring cars with strangely clad occupants were less familiar, even on French roads, than they have since become, and the machines announced themselves from afar by their ponderous groans. Very few cars, indeed, got down to this secluded Brittany village which was reached by only one road of the third class that penetrated the little peninsula from Morlaix, a number of miles away to the north.

So every one left the table and crowded to the terrace wall to observe the arrivals. As a dusty, becapped and begoggled figure got down from the seat beside the driver, Milly exclaimed excitedly, "Why, it's Roy Gilbert!" and ran towards the courtyard. The car finally disgorged Nettie Gilbert and her uninteresting fourteen-year-old daughter. They came in for luncheon, and their story was soon told. Paris was hot, and in despair of dispelling Roy's thickening ennui at his European exile, which threatened to terminate their trip, Mrs. Gilbert had induced her husband to charter the car for a tour of Normandy and Brittany. Having done all the north-coast watering-places and remembering that the Bragdons were staying at this little place "with a funny name," they had decided to make them a call. Roy Gilbert ate copiously and denounced hotels, food, and the people, while Milly and Nettie Gilbert talked Chicago and Baby.

"We want to see a 'Pardon,'" Mrs. Gilbert announced at last, "and we've come to take you and your husband with us."

It was the season of that famous Brittany festival, so Baedeker said, and they had seen some evidences of it in the little villages through which they had passed. Did Milly know of a good one? The Gilberts were as aesthetically lazy as they were weak in French, and of course quite helpless in Brittany, whose peasants seemed to them dirty baboons with a monkey language. Milly quickly recalled that some of the artists had been talking of the famous Pardon at Poldau, a little fisher-settlement at the extreme tip of the western coast, where the costumes were said to be peculiarly rich and quaint. She had wanted to visit it with Jack, but he had become so much absorbed in his new picture that they had given up the idea. And there was Baby—she did not like to leave her.

"Yvonne will do all right," her husband urged. "Better take the chance—I'll look after Virgie."

So after much encouragement, though with misgivings, Milly consented to accompany the Gilberts in their car for a couple of days and show them the glories of the Brittany countryside.

"I owe Nettie so much," she explained privately to her husband, by way of apology. "I can't very well refuse—and they are so helpless, poor dears!"

"You'll have a bully time," he replied encouragingly. "Don't worry about anything. I'll watch Yvonne like a cat."

"And telegraph me instantly if anything goes wrong."

"Of course.... Don't hurry back if they should want you to go farther. It'll be good for you."

"Oh, not more than two days—I couldn't."

She did not give a thought to the Russian woman, or to anything but the baby. (Afterwards she became convinced that the whole plan had been arranged with skilful prescience by the wicked Baroness in order that she might have the artist to herself these few days....)

* * * * *

The departure in the freshness of the August morning was a great event. Every one in the hotel, including the patron in his cook's white costume, the patronne, the grinning ape of a waiter, all the artists, and half the village gathered to watch the motor get under way. The lumbering ark of a car was laden with bags and trunks and bundles, for the Americans meant to be comfortable. Then Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert, their natural amplitude swollen by their dust-coats, goggles, and veils, mounted with stately complacency to their respective seats, and Milly tucked herself into a corner. Then the ratlike French chauffeur attempted to crank the engine, and perspiring, red in the face, spluttering with oaths, made many desperate efforts to arouse his monster. There were sympathetic murmurs from the audience. "Now he's got her—ah—oh—no! Hang to it Pierrot, etc." Finally Pierre exploded in a tragic tirade to his employer, who sat stolidly through all the rumpus, merely asking at the end, "What's he saying, Milly?"

"He can do nothing with the cursed beast," Milly abridged.

"That's evident," Gilbert remarked with cynical satisfaction.

"He thinks it's the water; he warned you not to come down here."

It seemed as if Milly's little trip was not to come off, after all, when Bragdon, who had picked up some knowledge of the new machines in his earlier singlestate, tipped up the hood and dove for the carburetor. After a time he signalled to the Hawaiian to work the crank, and then with a whir, a rumble, at last a clear bellow, the monster responded, trembled, turned its snout up the narrow road, and disappeared. Milly threw a kiss to her husband, who waved his hat in answer. He had saved the day, and she was proud of him.

* * * * *

They had a wonderful time, in spite of Pierre and his balky car, bowling along the winding, leafy roads not far from the sea, through little gray stone villages whose inhabitants turned out en masse, including children and animals, to witness their stately progress of ten miles an hour. They got stuck once in a ford and had to be fished out with three yoke of cream-colored bulls and a long ship's rope. That was about noon, and they decided to lunch at the next inn, though it did not look inviting. However, Milly's French coaxed a tolerable meal from the fat housewife whom they discovered cleaning fish in the kitchen, and even the stodgy Roy mellowed under the influence of fresh fish and a drinkable bottle of wine which he and Milly discovered somewhere.

That evening, without further mishap, they rumbled into the hamlet of Poldau. For the last hour they had seen signs of the coming fete. All the natives, arrayed in their best clothes, were drifting westward to the rocky cape, where, perched on a lonely cliff, was the tiny chapel, "Our Lady of the Guard," which was the scene of the Pardon on the morrow. Before they entered Poldau night had fallen, and the long yellow beams from the powerful Phare glanced out across the sullen waters and the level land. It was beneath this lofty lighthouse they slept, in a clean, bare little inn. Milly, lying in her cushiony bed, could hear the waves grumbling around the rocks, and watch the sweep of that golden beam of light,—speaking to the distant passers-by upon the Atlantic, warning them of the dangers of this treacherous coast....

It was the first time she had been separated from her family, and she lay awake long hours, restless and sleepless, wondering whether Yvonne would remember to pull up the extra blanket over Virginia before the early morning dampness. And she thought about her husband, fleetingly, contrasting him with Roy Gilbert, who seemed to have grown heavier in mind as well as in person these last years. Roy was surely what the artists called bourgeois, but she liked him—he was so kind and good to Nettie. She felt at home, getting back to the familiar bourgeois atmosphere of the Gilberts, where life was made easy and comfortable, and you knew every idea any one would advance before the words were half spoken....

Milly was wakened before dawn by the sound of a drunken quarrel beneath her window. Some Breton evidently had begun to celebrate the Pardon too soon; a shrill woman's voice broke the silence with unintelligible reproaches. There was the sound of blows, of crashing glass, a scuffle, sobs,—then silence, broken now and again by fresh sobs. Ah, those men,—men!... The lamp in the Phare went out: it was dawn. Milly fell into a broken sleep.

* * * * *

The Pardon itself, they all agreed, was wonderfully impressive and picturesque, as Baedeker had promised. The little chapel on the cliffs was stuffed with kneeling women in their stiff, starched coifs and heavy velvet-trimmed skirts. The men, slinking up sheepishly, as always to religious ceremonies, fell on their knees on the rocky ground all about the chapel when the priests advanced with the sacred emblems, and prayed vigorously with tight-closed eyes. The strangers, under the guidance of the chauffeur, who maintained a supercilious disdain for these "stupid Brittany pigs," took their position at the apex of the cliff, where they could see everything to advantage. The Gilbert girl kodaked the kneeling throng, which distressed Milly; she thought the people might resent it, but they paid no attention to the Americans.

Her own eyes were filled with unaccountable tears. The symbols of the Catholic religion always affected her in this way; while Nettie Gilbert stared rather disapprovingly at the superstitious ceremony. In spite of its quaint mediaevalism, it seemed to Milly quite human,—the gathering together of suffering, sinning human beings around the gray chapel on the storm-beaten coast—"Our Lady of the Guard"—their prayers, the absolution granted by the robed priests, and the going forth to another year of trials and temptations, efforts and sins.... Just below the chapel, withdrawn only a few feet from the religious ceremony, was a cluster of tents, sheltering hurdy-gurdys, merry-go-rounds, cook-shops, and cider—plenty of cider. A few indifferent males, bedecked in their short coats brightly trimmed with yellow braid, were already feasting, even while the host was being elevated above the kneeling throng. But most of the people, with reverently bent heads and murmuring lips, received the sacrament, kneeling around the gray chapel. It was solemn and moving, Milly thought, and she wished that Jack might have had the experience....

"Baedeker says," Roy Gilbert pronounced in her ear, in the midst of the ceremony, "that there must be Spanish blood among these people because their costumes show Spanish designs.... They all look like Irish or monkeys to me."

Milly smiled responsively to him.

"The costumes are lovely, aren't they?"

The crowd of women worshippers had burst forth from the chapel: there was a swarm of white and black figures over the rocky headland. The faces beneath the broad white caps did not seem to Milly monkeylike. They were weather-beaten and bronzed like their coast, but eager and smiling, and some of the younger ones quite bonny and sweet. And the young men sidled up to the young women here as elsewhere in the world. Milly was full of the spirit of forgiveness that the ceremony had taught: men and women must mutually forgive and strive to do better. She said this to Nettie Gilbert, who seemed only moderately impressed with the semi-pagan scene.

They went down the hill to the booths, which were already thronged with a noisy crowd of eating and drinking peasants, and straightway became too evil-smelling for the Americans.

"If the ladies like this barbaric show," the chauffeur confided to Gilbert, "there is an even larger one to be seen a day's run farther north on the coast at the celebrated shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupre."

So they went on that afternoon to "the other show," as Gilbert expressed it. Milly's doubts were quickly overborne: they must have her longer now that she was with them; she could return any time if necessary by rail; they would telegraph that evening, etc. And they set forth hopefully again in search of the picturesque. The larger pardon proved disappointing, less religious and characteristic, more like a country fair. The next afternoon they meant to return to Klerac, in time for dinner, but the car balked and finally gave out altogether. All Pierre's ingenuity, as well as his heartfelt curses, availed nothing, and they had to abandon it. They drove to the nearest railroad station, which proved to be many kilometres distant, and waited there half a day for a train.

Milly left the Gilberts at Morlaix. They were bound for Paris, and judging from Roy Gilbert's remarks they would shortly be on their way back to America and "some decent living." Four months of Europe and strange beds was all he could endure at a stretch. Milly laughed at his complaints. The way the rich spent their money had always seemed to her a little stupid. If she and Jack had the Gilberts' money! She mused of all the exciting freedom they could get out of it, while the little one-horse trap she had hired at the station rattled her over the hard road towards Klerac.

She had enjoyed her trip greatly, yet after the five days' absence she was eager to get back and see her child. She even looked forward to the noisy Hotel du Passage, with its cluttered table of talkative artists and her own two small rooms. As she had said to Nettie Gilbert, "I'm something of a cat and like my own garret best," even if it were a traveller's garret. And though she had liked being with the Gilberts, going over old Chicago times with Nettie, and had enjoyed the car and the luxurious, easy way of travelling, she suspected that long contact with these good people would be boresome. They were so persistently occupied with how they should sleep and eat, with all their multitudinous contrivances for comfort, with fear of the dust or of getting tired, that they had little energy for other things. She decided that the Gilbert sort made a fetich of comfort and missed most of the landscape of life in their excessive attention to the roadbed. Perhaps that was what clever folk meant by being bourgeois. If so, she hoped that she should never be bourgeois to the extent the Gilberts were.

Thus Milly, in a properly contented frame of mind, urged the peasant lad to whip up his lazy pony and get her more quickly home to her family.



X

THE PAINTED FACE

There was a midsummer silence about the hotel in the early afternoon when Milly arrived. Yvonne, so the patronne informed her, had taken the baby to the dunes, and thither Milly, without stopping to change her dusty dress, set out to find her. She descried her little Brittany maid on the sands safely above tide-water, and by her side a small white bundle that made Milly's heart beat faster.

Virginia received her returned mother with disappointing indifference, more concerned for the moment in the depth of the excavation into the sand which her nurse was making for her benefit. Milly covered her with kisses, nevertheless, while Yvonne explained that all had gone well, "tres, tres bien, Madame." Bebe, it seemed, had slept and eaten as a celestial bebe should. They were looking for Madame yesterday, but Monsieur had not been disturbed even before the depeche arrived.... And Monsieur was at his work as usual at the other madame's manoir.

After a time Milly, wearied of bestowing unreciprocated caresses upon her daughter, left her to the mystery of the hole in the sand and sauntered up the beach. Dotted here and there in the sunlight at favorable points along the dunes were the broad umbrellas of the artists, who were doubtless all busily engaged in trying to transfer a bit of the dazzling sunlight and dancing purple sea to their little squares of canvases. To Milly this ceaseless effort to comment on nature had something of the ridiculous,—perhaps supererogatory would be a better word. It was so much pleasanter to look at the landscape, and easier! Offshore the dun-colored sails of the fishing fleet dipped and fluttered where the sturdy men of Douarnenez were engaged in their task of getting the herring from the sea. That seemed to Milly more real and important in a world of fact. Such a view betrayed the bourgeois in her, she suspected, but according to the Hawaiian all women were bourgeois at heart.

After a time her feet turned into one of the lanes, and she followed unconsciously the well-known path until the gray wall of the ruined manoir came in sight. She paused for a moment—she had not meant to go there—then impulsively went forward, crossed the empty courtyard, and finding the garden door ajar pushed it open. The drowsy midsummer silence seemed to possess both house and garden. The place was deserted. In the corner stood the painter's large canvas on the easel, with the brushes and palette on the bench by its side, as if just abandoned, and one of Madame Saratoff's large hats of coarse straw.

Milly went over and examined the picture. It was almost finished, in that last stage where the artist can play with his creation, fondly touching and perfecting infinitesimal details, knowing that the thing has really been "pulled off." And it was triumphantly done! Even to Milly's untutored eyes, the triumph of it was indubitable. There the Russian stood on her thin, lithe haunches, her head tipped a little back disdainfully as in life, the open mouth about to emit some cold brutality, the long curving lip daringly drawn up over the teeth,—the look of "one who eats what she wants," as she herself had said one day. Milly shuddered before the insolence of the painted face. She felt that this was one of the few creatures on the earth whom she feared and hated. Instinctively she made a gesture as if she would deface the portrait. The face seemed to answer her with a sneer,—"Well, and if you did, what good would that do? Would he love you any more for that?" it said, and she paused.

Even the background and all the details were admirably conceived and rendered,—the crumbling, lichened wall, in cold gray, with the gnarled root of the creeper and the wreath of purple blossoms, in sharp contrast to the pallor of the face and the bold assurance of the figure. The light fell across the canvas, leading down to a slab of vivid purple water in the far distance. There was nothing pretty or affected or conventional about the painting: it was life caught and rendered with the true boldness of actuality. Milly, gazing in fascination at the creation of line and color and light, realized that here was the work of a new man, totally unknown to her. Its maker was no youthful pupil, stumbling at his set task. No dabbler, this one, no trivial illustrator or petty drawing-room amuser, but a man who had found within himself something long sought for. She shuddered and turned away. So that was what it was to be an Artist! She understood, and she hated it,—Art and all the tribe of artists big and little. In this strange woman, whom chance had put in his way, he had seen what she had not noticed, and he had projected what he saw. He was able to divine the soul of things beneath their superficial appearance, and he was able, exultantly, to project in material form that hidden meaning for others to see and understand, if they would. And that was what an artist, a real artist, was for.

Naturally Milly did not analyze closely her own troubled mind. Here was plain evidence of her husband's being in which she no longer had the smallest share. She had been slightly jealous, more than she would admit, that other time at the beginning of the portrait because of Jack's absorption in his subject and his work. Her egotism had been wounded. But that was trifling compared with the present feeling. In this completed creation she no more existed than the fly which rested for a moment upon the painted canvas. His creation had nothing whatsoever to do with her. And something deeper than egotism, far deeper than jealousy, rose from the depths of her nature in antagonism—a sex-antagonism to the whole affair. Her husband had a new mistress—not necessarily the Russian woman, for that idea had not yet come to her—but his Art. And he might follow this mistress whither she beckoned,—to poverty, defeat, or victory,—unmindful of her and her child, forgetting them like idle memories in the pursuit of his blind purpose. It was a force inimical to her and antagonistic to all orderly living, as the Hawaiian had said,—a demonic force which rises in the midst of society to give the lie to all the pretences men make to themselves and call "civilization."

Milly hated it, instinctively. Jack must paint no more such pictures for love or for money, if their life were not to end in disaster. Did he know what he had done with this Russian woman?... Where were they, anyway?

She looked up at the silent manoir. The green blinds were drawn to shut out the western sun. Milly knew the long, high room with its timbered ceiling which Madame Saratoff had restored and furnished in English style, and where, for the most part, she lived. The two were there together now—she was sure of it. A new and fiercer emotion swept Milly towards the house: she would discover them in their shame, in their cruel selfishness. But she stopped on the stairs, suffocated by her passion. She felt their presence just above her with a physical sense of pain, but she lacked the strength to go forward. A terrible sense of weakness in face of her defeat made her tremble. Her heart was broken, she said; what mattered it now what they did. She had no doubts: all was revealed as if she saw them in each other's arms. No man could have discovered the secret of a woman's inmost being, if she had not voluntarily yielded to him the key....

After a time she left the place, slipped out through the garden-gate into the green field behind the manoir and wandered unseeingly along the hedge, and at length flung herself down on the ground, sobbing. She was alone, so utterly alone. The one in whose hands she had put her whole life had betrayed her and deserted her. It was worse than death. They were there in that dim, silent room, in the utmost intimacy, and she lay here outside, robbed and abandoned.... She rose to get farther away from the place, when she heard steps approaching on the other side of the hedge. Kneeling close to the ground, she could see through the thick roots of the hedge and watch the two as they came up the lane. It was her husband and the Russian woman. They were not closeted in the house. She had been wrong. They had been for a stroll after his work, and were coming back now for their tea, silently and companionably, side by side. For the merest moment Milly had a sense of relief: it might not be true what her heart had said, after all. But almost at once she knew that it made no difference just what their relations were or had been.

She could read their faces as they came slowly towards her,—the Russian woman's slanting glance from covered eyes of hateful content as she looked at the artist. The "one who eats what she wants!"... They walked very slowly, as if full of thoughts and weary with the day. Bragdon's head was high, his glance fell far off across the fields, his mind intent on something within, his brow slightly contracted as in stern resolve. He was pale, and he seemed to his wife older, much older than she remembered. He was a man, not the careless boy she had married so many, many years ago, and her heart tightened anew with intolerable pain.... His glance fell to the expectant face of his companion, and both smiled with profound intimacy as at a meeting where words are needless.... Milly's hand grasped the prickly vines of the hedge, and she held herself still until they had passed. No, it made no difference to her now what they thought or did. She knew.

She fled. She heard her name faintly through the din of rushing blood in her ears, but she stumbled across the field out into the lane, towards the sea. There followed the most atrocious hour Milly was ever to know in her life, while she wandered aimlessly to and fro on the lonely beach. Her marriage was over—that thought returned like a mournful chant in the storm of blind feeling. Latterly she had come to take her husband as a matter of course, as a part of the married life of a woman. Though she had said to Nettie Gilbert, "I'm as much in love with Jack as when I married him," and believed it, she hadn't been. But now that another had dared to take her husband from her, if only for a few days or hours, she was outraged. She persistently focussed her whole anguish upon this foreign creature with her vampire mouth, though she might know in the depth of her heart that her quarrel was not with the Russian or any woman, but with fate.... She kept repeating to herself,—"He doesn't love me any longer. He loves her—her!... He will be hers now—for a time. They are all like that,—artists. It's bourgeois to love one woman always." So Womanhood from the beginning of time seemed outraged in her person.

Had she not joyfully "given up everything for him," as all women did for the men they loved? (Even her worldly prospects when she married the penniless artist began to seem to her brighter than they really had been.) Had she not, at any rate, given herself to him, first, and always, and only? And borne him a child in pain and danger? What more could woman do? He was her debtor for eternity, as every man was to the woman who gave herself to him. And four years had barely passed before another one plucked him easily from her side!... Women were cheated always in the game of life because of their hearts, fated unfairly in the primal scheme of things. Marion Reddon knew—she probably had had her experiences. But at least she had the child.

On that note her heart became centred, and she hurried back to the hotel and began aimlessly to gather her clothes together and throw them into the trunks. She must take her child and leave at once. She did not want to see him again.... But where should she go—how? Jack always arranged everything for her: she couldn't even make out a time-table or buy a railroad ticket. Marriage had made her dependent—she would have to learn.

At this moment Bragdon entered the room. His face still wore the stern expression she had noted, which gave him the look of age.

"What are you doing?" he demanded abruptly.

"Don't you see—packing!"

"What for?... I've cabled home for more money—I'm going to stay here and paint."

She thought swiftly to herself that the Other had persuaded him to do what he had refused to do for her. She made no reply, but continued to put things blindly into the trunk.



XI

CRISIS

When two human beings—above all when man and wife—meet at such tense moments, one of Virgil's beneficent clouds should descend upon them, hiding all, and they should be wafted apart to remote places, there to abide until once more a sense of the proportion and the harmony in this mundane system has taken possession of them, and they have become, if not gods and goddesses, at least reasonable human beings. The least the historian can do under the circumstances is to imitate Virgil and draw a merciful veil between the cruel battle-field and all profane eyes. The more so as few of the hot words then uttered, the sharp agony displayed, the giving and the baring of wounds have any real effect upon the result. What is done counts, and that is about all, always.

It might be that afterwards Milly derived some deeper understanding of herself, of her husband, and of the married way of life from the agony she then experienced. It might be that the young artist, headstrong in his first triumphant mastery, the first achievement of his whole being, entertained, for some moments at least, the idea of cutting the knot then and there and taking his freedom which he had surrendered at the altar, choosing what might seem to him then spiritual life instead of prolonged death. The blood was in his head, the scent of delirious deeds which he knew now that he could do. But he was an honest and loyal young American, no matter what he had done: he could not hesitate long. One glance at the sleeping form of his small child, dependent upon him for the best in life, probably settled the matter.

In the calm of the still night it was settled—and by him.

* * * * *

The little colony of the Hotel du Passage were genuinely concerned over the hurried departure of the Bragdons, who were much liked. All—but one—were at the pier that September morning to wish them farewell and good luck and much happiness. It was understood that family matters had recalled them unexpectedly to the States. Too bad! Bragdon was a promising chap, the great painter pronounced at dejeuner,—willing to work, intelligent, with his own ideas. Had any one seen Madame Saratoff's portrait? He had kept very quiet about that—perhaps it had not come off. Well, he needed years of hard work, which he wouldn't get in America, worse luck. With a sigh he went to his day's task of completing the thirty-seventh edition of the well-known landscape,—"Beside the Bay at Klerac," with a fresh variation of four colored sails on the horizon instead of three....

And meanwhile the slow train to Paris was carrying a man, who having climbed his hill and looked upon the promised land from afar, must turn his back for the present upon all its glories and await Opportunity.



XII

"COME HOME"

It is a long and tiresome journey in a second-class compartment from the farther end of Brittany to Paris, even under the best of circumstances. To Jack Bragdon and Milly, with the vivid memory of their personal wreck on that rocky coast, it was monotonously painful. They dared not ask each other,—"What next?" At first Milly thought there could be no next, though she was really glad not to be making this journey alone with her child, as she had expected to do. To the man who sat in the opposite corner with closed eyes and set lips, it seemed to matter little for the present what the next step was to be.

Happily an impersonal fate settled this for them. Bragdon found at the bankers in Paris an answer to his appeal for funds. The curt cable read, without the aid of code,—"Come Home." Probably that would have been the wisest thing to do in any case. But it would have meant a hard struggle with himself to turn his back so quickly upon the promised land of accomplishment. Now it was beyond his power to do otherwise, unless he were willing to force Milly and the child to starve on what he could make. If that had ever been possible, it surely was not any longer.

So with the last of the hoard he bought their tickets, and all three sailed for New York on the next steamer.



PART FOUR

REALITIES



I

HOME ONCE MORE

There was no one at the dock to greet them.

"Your friends come down to see you off," Milly reflected sadly, while Bragdon was struggling with the inspectors, "but they let you find your way back by yourself!"

It was hot and very noisy,—the New World,—and no one seemed to care about anything. As they made their way up town through the crowded streets, Milly felt it must be impossible for human beings to do more than keep alive in this maelstrom. The aspect of an American city with its savage roar, especially of New York in the full cry of the day's work, was simply terrifying after two years of Europe. There was something so sordidly repellent in the flimsily furnished rooms of the hotel where they went first, that she shed a few tears of pure homesickness. She longed to take the first train west; for the sights and the sounds of Chicago, if no gentler, were at least more familiar.

She did not know what they would do; husband and wife had not discussed plans on the homeward voyage or referred in any way to the future, both shrinking from the quaking bog that lay between them. Now their course must speedily be settled. When Bragdon went out after establishing them in their hotel, Milly felt curiously like a passenger on a ship whose ticket had been taken for her and all arrangements made by another. All she could do, for the present at least, was to wait and see what would happen....

Towards evening Big Brother came in with Jack and welcomed her back nonchalantly. He had the New York air of unconcern over departures and arrivals, living as he had all his life in a place where coming and going was the daily order of life. He declared that Milly had grown prettier than ever and accepted his niece with condescending irony,—"Hello, missy, so you came along, too? Made in France, eh!" and chuckled over the worn joke.

It seemed that no business disaster had caused him to send his cable recalling them. Business, he declared, was "fine, fine, better all the time," in the American manner. It was merely on general principles that he had cabled,—"Come home." Two years was enough for any American to spend out of his own country, even for an artist. Eying his younger brother humorously, he remarked,—"I thought you'd better get a taste of real life, and earn a few dollars. You can go back later on for another vacation.... I saw Clive Reinhard on the Avenue the other day. He wanted to know how you were getting on. Think he has another of his books on the way. You'd better see him, Jack. He's a money-maker!"

The artist meantime sat cross-legged on his chair and stroked his mustache meditatively, saying nothing. Milly glanced at him timidly, but she could not divine what he was thinking of all this. As he was American-trained he was probably realizing the force of Big Brother's wholesome doctrine. He could not live on other people's bounty and prosecute the artist's vague chimeras. Having taken to himself a wife and added thereto a child, he must earn their living and his own, like other men, by offering the world something it cared to pay for.

Nevertheless, there smouldered in his eyes the hint of another thought,—a suggestion of the artist's fierce egotism, the desire to fulfil his purpose no matter at whose cost,—the willingness to commit crime rather than surrender his life purpose. It was the complement of the Russian's "will to eat," only deeper, more impersonal, and more tragic. But nowadays men like Jack Bragdon neither steal nor murder—nor commit lesser crimes—for the sake of Art.

Instead he inquired casually,—"Where is Reinhard staying? The same place?" and when his brother replied,—"He's got an apartment somewhere up town. They'll know at the club—he's been very successful,"—Bragdon merely nodded. And the next morning after breakfast he sallied from the hotel, leaving Milly to dispose of herself and the child as she would. For several days she hardly saw him. He had caught the key of the New World symphony at once, and had set forth on the warpath without losing time to get the Job. He succeeded without much difficulty in securing the illustration of Reinhard's new piece of popular sentimentality and also put himself in touch with the editors of a new magazine. Then to work, not his own work, but the world's work,—what it apparently wanted, at least would pay well for. And the first step was to find some sort of abiding-place where his family could live less expensively than at the hotel. Here Milly came in.

The one distinct memory Milly kept of that first year in New York was of hunting apartments and moving. It seemed to her that she must have looked at a cityful of dark, noisy rooms ambitiously called apartments, each more impossible than the others. (As long as they lived in New York she never gave up the desire for light and quiet,—the two most expensive luxuries in that luxurious metropolis.) They settled temporarily in a small furnished "studio-apartment" near Washington Square, where they were constantly in each other's way. Milly called it a tenement. Although they had done very well in two rooms in Brittany, it required much more space than the studio-apartment offered to house two people with divided hearts. So in the spring they moved farther up-town to a larger and more expensive apartment without a studio. Bragdon preferred, anyway, to do his work outside and shared a studio with a friend. Milly regarded this new abode as merely temporary—they had taken it for only one year—and they talked intermittently of moving.

Once or twice Jack suggested going to one of the innumerable suburbs or abandoning the city altogether for some small country place, as other artists had done. It would be cheaper, and they could have a house, their own patch of earth, and some quiet. Milly received this suggestion in silence. Indeed they both shrank from facing each other in suburban solitude. They were both by nature and training cockneys. Milly especially had rather perch among the chimney-pots and see the procession go by from the roof than possess all that Nature had to offer. And they were still young, she felt: much might happen in the city, "if they didn't give up." But she said equivocally,—

"Your work keeps you so much in the city; you have to see people."

What he wanted to reply was that he should abandon all this job-hunting and live lean until he could sell his real work, instead of striving to maintain the semblance of an expensive comfort in the city by selling himself to magazines and publishers. But Milly would not understand the urgency of that—how could she? And what had he to offer her now for the sacrifice he should be demanding? What would she do with the long, silent days in the country, while he worked and destroyed what he did, only to begin again on the morrow at the ceaseless task, with its doubtful result? If there had been real companionship, or if the flame of their passion had still burned, then it might not have proved an intolerable exile for the woman....

They did as others would do under the circumstances—hung on in the great city as best they could, in the hope of a better fortune soon, living expectantly from day to day. Each month the city life seemed to demand more money, and each month Bragdon sank deeper into the mire of journalistic art. Worst of all they got into the habit of regarding their life as a temporary makeshift, which they expected to change when they could, tolerating it for the present as best they could,—like most of the workers of the world. Bragdon, at least, knew what he hoped for, impossible as it might be,—a total escape from the debauching work he was doing. Milly hoped vaguely for a pleasanter apartment and an easier way of living,—more friends and more good times with them.

One of the first familiar faces Milly met in the bewildering new city was Marion Reddon's. She came across the little New Englander standing at the curb of a crowded street, a child by either hand, waiting until the flow of traffic should halt long enough to permit crossing.

"Marion!" Milly cried, her eyes dancing with delight on recognizing her. A smile came to the white, tired face of the other woman,—the smile that gave something of beauty to the plain face. "Are you living here, too—in New York?"

"Yes, since the autumn."

"Has Sam given up his teaching?"

"I made him resign."

They drew to one side where they could hear each other's voices. The sight of Marion Reddon brought back happy days,—at least they seemed to be happy now, by comparison. Marion continued:—

"The teaching was too easy for him—besides he didn't like it. And if a man doesn't like that work, he's no business doing it. He had much better get out into the fight with other men and make his way against them."

"But you loved the college town: you must have hated to leave it."

"It was what I had known all my life, and it was a good sort of place to bring the children up in—pleasant and easy. But New York is the big game for men, of course. I wanted Sam to go up against it."

She smiled, but Milly might divine something of the courage it had taken for Marion to launch her small craft in the seething city. They talked a little longer, then parted, having exchanged addresses.

"Take the subway," Marion called out as she plunged into the street, "get out when it stops, then walk! Don't forget!" and with a last smile she was gone.

Milly went on her way about some errand, thinking that Marion was no longer in the least pretty,—quite homely, in fact, she was so worn and white. She had nice, regular features and a quaintly becoming way of wearing her hair in simple Greek fashion, waving over her brows. If she only dressed better and took more care of herself, she might be attractive still. She had let herself fade. Milly wondered if Sam loved her still, really loved her, as he seemed to in his rough way when they were together that summer at Gossensass. How could he? That was the cruelty in marriage for women. Men took the best they had to offer of their youth and beauty, gave them the burdens of children, and then wanted something else when they had become homely and unattractive. At least Jack did not yet have that excuse with her.

Milly did not think that a man might love even a faded flower like Marion Reddon, if she had kept the sweet savor of her spirit alive.... So the Reddons were in New York, living far out in the impossible hinterland of the Bronx. When she told her husband at dinner of meeting Marion Reddon and of their new move, Jack seemed neither greatly surprised nor interested.

"We must try to see them," he remarked vaguely.

Perhaps, she thought, he did not care to recall those happier days in Europe. The truth was that the New York struggle specialized men intensely, removing to the vague background every one not directly in the path. Bragdon's efforts were so supremely concentrated on rolling his own small cart in the push, that he had little spirit to bestow elsewhere, however well he might wish people like the Reddons and others not in his immediate game.

"I thought you liked the Reddons," Milly said, half accusingly.

"I do—what makes you think I don't?" he asked, taking up a pipe preparatory to work.

"You don't seem much interested in their being in New York."

"Oh," he said lightly, "every one comes to New York."

And he turned to his evening task. This habit of working evenings, which Milly rather resented, served to prevent discussion—of all kinds. She played a few bars on the piano, then settled herself comfortably with Clive Reinhard's latest book. That was the way their evenings usually went unless some one came in, which did not happen often, or Jack was called out.

Even New York could be dull, Milly found.



II

"BUNKER'S"

Milly could not remember just when she first heard of Bunker's Magazine,—certainly not before their return from Europe, but soon thereafter, for its name was associated with her first experiences in New York. Shortly after they landed, Bunker's was added to the highly colored piles on the news-stands among the other periodicals that increased almost daily in number. During that first year of apartment hunting and moving, the name of Bunker's became a household word with them. Some of the men Bragdon knew were interested in the new magazine, and one of the first jobs he did was a cover design for an early number. The magazine with his picture—a Brittany girl knee-deep in the dark water helping to unload a fishing boat—lay on the centre table for weeks. Clive Reinhard's new novel, for which Jack did the pictures, also came out in Bunker's this year. The novelist had been paid ten thousand dollars for the serial rights, Jack told Milly, which seemed to her a large price. Some forms of art, she concluded, were well paid.

Bunker's was to be a magazine of a very special kind, of course, altogether different from any other magazine,—literary and popular and artistic all at once. Also it was to have an "uplift"—they were just beginning to use that canting term and Bunker's did much to popularize it. The magazine was to be intensely American in spirit, optimistic and enthusiastic in tone, and very chummy with its readers. Each month it discussed confidentially with "our readers" the glorious success of the previous issue and the astonishing triumphs in the way of amusement and instruction that were to be expected in the future.... All this Milly gathered from the editor's "talks" and also from the men who worked for it or hoped to work for it, who were among their first friends in New York. Its owner, who had boldly given to it his name, was a rich young man, something of an amateur in life, but intensely ambitious of "making himself felt." And this was his way of doing it, instead of buying a newspaper, which would have been more expensive, or of running for public office, which would have meant nothing at all to anybody. Jack pointed him out to his wife one night at the theatre. He was in a box with a party of men and women,—all very well dressed and quite smart-looking. He had a regular, smooth-shaven face with a square jaw like hundreds of other men in New York at that moment. Milly thought Mrs. Bunker overdressed and "ordinary." She was a very blonde, high-colored woman, of the kind a rich man might marry for her physical charm.

All that first year Bunker's came more and more to the fore in their life. The wife of the Responsible Editor, Mrs. Montgomery Billman, called on Milly in company with Mrs. Fredericks, the wife of the Fiction Editor, and the two ladies, while critically examining Milly, talked of "our magazine" and described the Howard Bunkers, who evidently played a large role in their lives. Mrs. Billman, Milly decided, and so confided to her husband, was hard and ambitious socially. Mrs. Fredericks she "could not quite make out," and liked her better. Both the ladies seemed to "go in for things" hard and meant to "count." They knew much more about their husbands' affairs than Milly had ever cared to know about Jack's. She decided that was the modern way, and that Jack ought to take her more fully into his confidence. By the time she had returned these visits and realized the importance felt by the editors' wives for their husbands' work Bunker's gained greatly in her eyes.

Then, unexpectedly, the magazine became of first importance to the Bragdons. Jack was asked to become the Art Editor. He had been at luncheon with Bunker himself and the Responsible Editor, who was a gaunt and rather slouchy person from the other shore of the Mississippi. The Responsible Editor, who had a way of looking through his spectacles as if he were carrying heavy public burdens, unfolded to Bragdon the aims and purposes of the magazine, while Bunker contented himself with ordering the lunch and, at the close, making him the offer. Milly, when she learned of the offer, was surprised that her husband did not show more elation. She had a woman's respect for any institution, and Mrs. Billman had made her feel that Bunker's was a very important institution.

"What will they give?" she asked.

"Six thousand."

It was more than she had ever dreamed an "artist" could make as an assured income.

"Aren't you glad—all that!" she exclaimed.

"That's not much. Billman gets twelve thousand and Fredericks eight. But I shall be able to make something 'on the side.'"

"I think it's wonderful!" Milly said.

But Jack exhibited slight enthusiasm.

"I'll have to see to getting illustrations for their idiotic stories and half tones and colors—all that rubbish, you know."

There was nothing inspiring to him in "educating the people in the best art," as the Responsible Editor had talked about the job.

"And they want me to contribute a series of articles on the new art centres in the United States: Denver in Art, Pittsburgh in Art, Milwaukee in Art—that sort of rot," he scoffed.

Milly saw nothing contemptible in this; all the magazines did the same thing in one subject or another to arouse local enthusiasm for themselves.

"You write so easily," she suggested, by way of encouragement, remembering the newspaper paragraphs he used to contribute to the Star.

"But I want to paint!" Bragdon growled, and dropped the subject.

In the intervals of pot boiling he had been working on several canvases that he hoped to exhibit in the spring. Milly had lost confidence in painting since she had come to New York and had heard about the lives of young painters. Even if Jack could finish his pictures in time for the exhibition, they might not be accepted, and if they were, would probably be hung in some obscure corner of the crowded galleries for several weeks, with a lot of other "good-enough" canvases, only to be returned to the artist—a dead loss, the fate of most pictures, she had learned.

So Milly was for the Art Editorship. She took counsel with Big Brother, who happened to call, and B. B., who regarded Milly as a sensible woman, the right sort for an impracticable artist to have married, said: "Jack would be crazy to let such a chance slip by him. I know Bunker—he's all right." So when he saw Jack next, he went at him boisterously on the subject, but the artist cut him short by remarking quietly,—"I've told them I'd take it—the thing's settled."

When Milly heard this, she felt a little reaction. Would Marion Reddon have done the same with Sam? But she put her doubts aside easily. "It'll be a good start. Jack is still young, and he will have plenty of time to paint—if he has it in him" (a reservation she would not have made two years before), "and it will do him good to know more people."

Milly would like herself to know more people in this great city, which was just beginning to interest her, and she was not at all inclined to immure herself in a suburb or the depths of the country with a husband who, after all, had not fully satisfied her heart. To know people, to have a wide circle of acquaintance, seemed to her, as it did to most people, of the highest importance, not merely for pleasure but for business as well. How otherwise was one to get on in this life, except through knowing people? Even an artist must make himself seen.... So she considered that in urging her husband to become part of the Bunker machine, she was acting wisely for both,—nay, for all three of the family, for should not Virginia's future already be taken into account?

The wife of the Fiction Editor, with whom she had become intimate in her rapid way, confirmed this view of things. Hazel Fredericks fascinated Milly much more than the aggressive Mrs. Billman, perhaps because she went out of her way to be nice to the artist's wife. Milly had not yet convinced the wife of the Responsible Editor that she was important, and she never wasted time over "negative" people. The dark little Hazel Fredericks, with her muddy eyes and rather thick lips, was a more subtle woman than Mrs. Billman and took the pains to cultivate "possibilities." She had Milly at lunch one day and listened attentively to all her dubitations about her husband's career. Then she pronounced:—

"Stanny was like that. He wanted to write stories. They are pretty good stories, too, but you know there's not much sale for the merely good thing. And unsuccessful art of any kind is hardly worth while, is it?... When we were first married, he had an idea of going away somewhere and living on nothing at all until he had made a name. But that is not the way things are done, is it?"

She paused to laugh sympathetically and look at Milly, as if she must understand what foolish creatures men often were and how wives like Milly and herself had to save them from their follies.

"Of course," she continued, "if he had had Reinhard's luck, it would have been another thing. Clive Reinhard's stuff is just rot, of course, but people like it and he gets all kinds of prices."

She took a cigarette and throwing herself comfortably on a divan blew a silvery wreath upwards. Meditatively she summed up the philosophy she held,—

"It's better to stay with the game and make the most you can out of it, don't you think so?"

Milly agreed.

"And Bunker's is a very good game, if you haven't any money."

Milly admired her new friend's cleverness. She was the kind who knew how to manage life,—her own life especially,—and get what she wanted out of the game. Milly began to have great respect for that sort of women and wished she were more like them. She felt that Hazel Fredericks never did things waywardly: she always had a well-calculated purpose hidden in her mind, just as she had a carefully conceived picture of herself that she desired to leave upon the minds of others. If Mrs. Billman had put her husband where he was in Bunker's by force, as her rival hinted, Mrs. Fredericks had also engineered "Stanny's" career with skilful strategy.

* * * * *

Just at present she was involved in a project for a cooeperative apartment building, which some people she knew were to put up in a desirable neighborhood. She quite fired Milly with the desire to buy space in the building.

"It's really the only way you can live in New York, if you haven't money," Mrs. Fredericks said convincingly, displaying the plan of their tiny apartment. "Of course we can't have children—there's no room for them—but Stanny is so delicate I shouldn't feel it was right to have them, anyway."

She spoke as if it were a sacrifice she had deliberately made for her husband....

Milly talked enthusiastically to Jack that night of the new cooeperative building and urged him to look into it. "I do so want a home of my own," she said with a touch of pathos. "Mrs. Fredericks still thinks there's space to be had on one of the floors."

Bragdon looked into it, and reported that a good deal of space was to be had. He was dubious of the wisdom of the scheme, even if by a complicated arrangement of loans they could manage to buy a nominal share. But Milly was persistent and proved to him with a sudden command of figures that it would really reduce the cost of rent. She found out more details, and she gained the support of Big Brother, who generously offered to finance the undertaking for them. "It will make you feel settled," he said, "to own your own home." Jack could not see that in the end he should own much of anything unless by some surprising stroke of luck a good many thousands of dollars fell into his lap. But he felt that Milly should have a permanent place of her own, such as the slice of the new ten-story building offered, and it would be better for the child than to be wandering from rented apartment to apartment. So the plans were drawn, the agreements practically made, when he had a final misgiving.

The agreements lay on the table before him to be signed, and he had just read them over carefully. They seemed to him like a chain that, once signed, bound him to the city, to Bunker's for an indefinite future. His editorial chair had been specially galling that day, perhaps, or the impulse to paint stronger than usual. He threw down the papers and exclaimed,—

"Let's quit, Milly, before it's too late!"

"What do you mean?"

And he made his plea, for the last time seriously, to take their lives in their hands and like brave people walk out of the city-maze to freedom, to a simple, rational life without pretence.

"I want to cut out all this!" he cried with passion, waving his hand carelessly over the huddle of city roofs, "get into some quiet spot and paint, paint, paint! until I make 'em see that I have something to say. It's the only way to do things!"

With passionate vividness he saw the years of his youth and desire slipping away in the round of trivial "jobs" in the city; he saw the slow decay of resolves under the ever increasing demands to "make good" by earning money. And he shrank from it as from the pit.

"I don't see why you say that," Milly replied. "Most painters live in the city part of the year. There's —— and ——"

She argued the matter with him long into the night, obstinately refusing to see the fatality of the choice they were making.

"We can get rid of the apartment any time, if we don't want it," she said, and quoted Hazel Fredericks.

They came nearer to seeing into each other's souls that night than ever before or ever again. They saw that their inmost interests were antagonistic and must always remain so for all the active, creative years of their lives, and the best they could do, for the sake of their dead ideals, much more for the sake of the living child, was decently to compromise between their respective egotisms and thus "live and let live."

"If I had married a plain business man," Milly let fall in the heat of the argument, revealing in that phrase the knowledge she had arrived at of her mistake, "it would have been different."

Bragdon was not sure of that, but he was sure that in so far as he could he must supply for her the things that "plain business man" could have given her. Or they must part—they even looked into that gulf, from which both shrank back. At the end Milly said:—

"If you don't think it's best, don't do it. You must do what you think is best for your career."

Such was her present ideal of wifely submission to husband in all matters that concerned his "career," but she let him plainly perceive that in saying this she was merely putting the responsibility of their lives wholly upon his shoulders, as he was the breadwinner.

With an impatient gesture, Bragdon drew the agreements towards him and signed them.

"There!" he said, with a somewhat bitter laugh, "nothing in life is worth so much talk."

Afterwards Milly reminded him that he had made this choice himself of his own free will: he could not reproach her for their having bought a slice in the East River Terrace Building.



III

MORE OF "BUNKER'S"

One of the notable incidents of this period was the visit they made to the Bunker's place on Long Island. It was in the autumn after Bragdon had been on the magazine staff for some months. Milly went out in the train with Hazel Fredericks, who took this occasion to air her views of the Bunkers and the Billmans more fully than she had before. She described the magazine proprietor and his wife in a succinct sentence,—

"They're second-class New York: everything the others have but the right crowd—you'll see."

Howard Bunker, she admitted, was likable,—a jolly, unpretentious, shrewd business man, with a hearty American appetite for the bustle of existence. As for the handsome Mrs. Bunker,—"She was from Waterbury, Connecticut, you know," she said, assuming that Milly, who had heard of the Connecticut town solely as a place where a popular cheap watch was manufactured, would understand the depth of social inferiority Mrs. Howard Bunker's origin implied. "She's too lazy to be really ambitious. They have a box at the Opera, but that means nothing these days. She's kind, if you don't put her to any trouble, and they have awfully good food.... It's a bore coming out to their place, but you have to, once in so often, you understand. You sit around and eat and look over the stables and the garden and all that sort of thing."