And thus challenged I could not deny The sort of right he had to have me try; And yielding, I began—instinctively Proceeding by exclusion: "We agree It was not put there as a pious charm To keep the abandoned property from harm? The owner could have been no Catholic; And yet it was no sacrilegious trick To make folks wonder; and it was not chance Assuredly that set those boards askance In that shape, or before or after, so Painted them to that coloring of woe. Do you suppose, then, that it could have been Some secret sorrow or some secret sin, That tried to utter or to expiate Itself in that way: some unhappy hate Turned to remorse, or some life-rending grief That could not find in years or tears relief? Who lived here last?"

"Ah," my friend made reply, "You know as much concerning that as I. All I could tell is what those gravestones tell, And they have told it all to you as well. The names, the dates, the curious epitaphs At whose quaint phrase one either sighs or laughs, Just as one's heart or head happens to be Hollow or not, are there for each to see. But I believe they have nothing to reveal: No wrong to publish, no shame to conceal."

"And yet that Cross!" I turned at his reply, Fixing the silent symbol with my eye, Insistently. "And you consent," I said, "To leave the enigma uninterpreted?"

"Why, no," he faltered, then went on: "Suppose That some one that had known the average woes Of human nature, finding that the load Was overheavy for him on life's road, Had wished to leave some token in this Cross, Of what had been his gain and been his loss, Of what had been his suffering and of what Had also been the solace of his lot? Whoever that unknown brother-man might be, I think he must have been like you and me, Who bear our Cross, and when we fail at length, Bow down and pray to it for greater strength."

I mused, and as I mused, I seemed to find The fancy more and still more to my mind.

"Well, let it go at that! I think, for me, I like that better than some tragedy Of clearer physiognomy, which were In being more definite the vulgarer. For us, what, after all, would be the gain Of making the elusive meaning plain? I really think, if I were you and yours, I would not lift the veil that now obscures The appealing fact, lest I should spoil the charm Deeding me for my own the Black Cross Farm."

"A good suggestion! I am glad," said he, "We have always practised your philosophy."

He smiled, we laughed; we sighed and turned away, And left the mystery to the summer day That made as if it understood, and could Have read the riddle to us if it would: The wide, wise sky, the clouds that on the grass Let their vague shadows dreamlike trail and pass; The conscious woods, the stony meadows growing Up to birch pastures, where we heard the lowing Of one disconsolate cow. All the warm afternoon, Lulled in a reverie by the myriad tune Of insects, and the chirp of songless birds, Forgetful of the spring-time's lyric words, Drowsed round us while we tried to find the lane That to our coming feet had been so plain, And lost ourselves among the sweetfern's growth, And thickets of young pine-trees, nothing loath, Amidst the wilding loveliness to stray, And spend, if need were, looking for the way, Whole hours; but blundered into the right course Suddenly, and came out upon our horse, Where we had left him—to our great surprise, Stamping and switching at the pestering flies, But not apparently anxious to depart, When nearly overturning at the start, We followed down that evanescent trace Which, followed up, had brought us to the place.

Then, all the wayside scenes reversing, we Dropped to the glimpses of the distant sea, Content as if we brought, returning thus, The secret of the Black Cross back with us.



XIII

THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE

It had long been the notion of Frederick Erlcort, who held it playfully, held it seriously, according to the company he was in, that there might be a censorship of taste and conscience in literary matters strictly affiliated with the retail commerce in books. When he first began to propose it, playfully, seriously, as his listener chose, he said that he had noticed how in the great department stores where nearly everything to supply human need was sold, the shopmen and shopwomen seemed instructed by the ownership or the management to deal in absolute good faith with the customers, and not to misrepresent the quality, the make, or the material of any article in the slightest degree. A thing was not to be called silk or wool when it was partly cotton; it was not to be said that it would wash when it would not wash, or that the color would not come off when it would come off, or that the stuff was English or French when it was American.

When Erlcort once noted his interest in the fact to a floor-walker whom he happened to find at leisure, the floor-walker said, Yes, that was so; and the house did it because it was business, good business, the only good business. He was instantly enthusiastic, and he said that just in the same way, as an extension of its good faith with the public, the house had established the rule of taking back any article which a customer did not like, or did not find what she had supposed when she got it home, and refunding the money. This was the best sort of business; it held custom; the woman became a customer for life. The floor-walker laughed, and after he had told an anxious applicant, "Second aisle to the left, lady; three counters back," he concluded to Erlcort, "I say she because a man never brings a thing back when he's made a mistake; but a woman can always blame it on the house. That so?"

Erlcort laughed with him, and in going out he stopped at the book-counter. Rather it was a bookstore, and no small one, with ranks of new books covering the large tables and mounting to their level from the floor, neatly piled, and with shelves of complete editions and soberer-looking volumes stretching along the wall as high as the ceiling. "Do you happen to have a good book—a book that would read good, I mean—in your stock here?" he asked the neat blonde behind the literary barricade.

"Well, here's a book that a good many are reading," she answered, with prompt interest and a smile that told in the book's favor; it was a protectingly filial and guardedly ladylike smile.

"Yes, but is it a book worth reading—worth the money?"

"Well, I don't know as I'm a judge," the kind little blonde replied. She added, daringly, "All I can say is, I set up till two last night to finish it."

"And you advise me to buy it?"

"Well, we're not allowed to do that, exactly. I can only tell you what I know."

"But if I take it, and it isn't what I expected, I can return it and get my money back?"

"That's something I never was asked before. Mr. Jeffers! Mr. Jeffers!" she called to a floor-walker passing near; and when he stopped and came up to the counter, she put the case to him.

He took the book from Erlcort's hand and examined the outside of it curiously if not critically. Then he looked from it to Erlcort, and said, "Oh, how do you do again! Well, no, sir; I don't know as we could do that. You see, you would have to read it to find out that you didn't want it, and that would be like using or wearing an article, wouldn't it? We couldn't take back a thing that had been used or worn—heigh?"

"But you might have some means of knowing whether a book is good or not?"

"Well, yes, we might. That's a point we have never had raised before. Miss Prittiman, haven't we any means of knowing whether a book's something we can guarantee or not?"

"Well, Mr. Jeffers, there's the publisher's advertisement."

"Why, yes, so there is! And a respectable publisher wouldn't indorse a book that wasn't the genuine article, would he now, sir?"

"He mightn't," Erlcort said, as if he felt the force of the argument.

"And there are the notices in the newspapers. They ought to tell," Miss Prittiman added, more convincingly. "I don't know," she said, as from a sensitive conscience, "whether there have been any about this book yet, but I should think there would be."

"And in the mean time, as you won't guarantee the book so that I can bring it back and get my money if I find it worthless, I must accept the publisher's word?" Erlcort pressed further.

"I should think you could do that," the floor-walker suggested, with the appearance of being tired.

"Well, I think I will, for once," Erlcort relented. "But wait! What does the publisher say?"

"It's all printed on this slip inside," the blonde said, and she showed it as she took the book from him. "Shall I send it? Or will you—"

"No, no, thank you, I'll take it with me. Let me—"

He kept the printed slip and began to read it. The blonde wrapped the book up and laid it with a half-dollar in change on the counter before Erlcort. The floor-walker went away; Erlcort heard him saying, "No, madam; toys on the fifth floor, at the extreme rear, left," while he lost himself in the glowing promises of the publisher. It appeared that the book he had just bought was by a perfectly new author, an old lady of seventy who had never written a novel before, and might therefore be trusted for an entire freshness of thought and feeling. The plot was of a gripping intensity; the characters were painted with large, bold strokes, and were of an unexampled virility; the story was packed with passion from cover to cover; and the reader would be held breathless by the author's skill in working from the tragic conditions to an all-round happy conclusion.

From time to time Erlcort heard the gentle blonde saying such things as, "Oh yes; it's the best-seller, all right," and, "All I can say is I set up till two o'clock in the morning to finish it," and, "Yes, ma'am; it's by a new writer; a very old lady of seventy who is just beginning to write; well, that's what I heard."

On his way up-town in the Subway he clung to the wonted strap, unsupported by anything in the romance which he had bought; and yet he could not take the book back and get his money, or even exchange it for some article of neckwear or footwear. In his extremity he thought he would try giving it to the trainman just before he reached his stop.

"You want to give it to me? Well, that's something that never happened to me on this line before. I guess my wife will like it. I—1009th Street! Change for East Brooklyn and the Bronx!" the guard shouted, and he let Erlcort out of the car, the very first of the tide that spilled itself forth at the station. He called after him, "Do as much for you some time."

The incident first amused Erlcort, and then it began to trouble him; but he appeased his remorse by toying with his old notion of a critical bookstore. His mind was still at play with it when he stopped at the bell-pull of an elderly girl of his acquaintance who had a studio ten stories above, and the habit of giving him afternoon tea in it if he called there about five o'clock. She had her ugly painting-apron still on, and her thumb through the hole in her palette, when she opened her door to him.

"Too soon?" he asked.

She answered as well as she could with the brush held horizontally in her mouth while she glared inhospitably at him. "Well, not much," and then she let him in, and went and lighted her spirit-lamp.

He began at once to tell her of his strange experience, and went on till she said: "Well, there's your tea. I don't know what you've been driving at, but I suppose you do. Is it the old thing?"

"It's my critical bookstore, if that's what you call the old thing."

"Oh! That! I thought it had failed 'way back in the dark ages."

"The dark ages are not back, please; they're all 'round, and you know very well that my critical bookstore has never been tried yet. But tell me one thing: should you wish to live with a picture, even for a few hours, which had been painted by an old lady of seventy who had never tried to paint before?"

"If I intended to go crazy, yes. What has all that got to do with it?"

"That's the joint commendation of the publisher and the kind little blonde who united to sell me the book I just gave to that poor Subway trainman. Do you ever buy a new book?"

"No; I always borrow an old one."

"But if you had to buy a new one, wouldn't you like to know of a place where you could be sure of getting a good one?"

"I shouldn't mind. Or, yes, I should, rather. Where's it to be?"

"Oh, I know. I've had my eye on the place for a good while. It's a funny old place in Sixth Avenue—"

"Sixth Avenue!"

"Don't interrupt—where the dearest old codger in the world is just going out of the house-furnishing business in a small way. It's kept getting smaller and smaller—I've watched it shrink—till now it can't stand up against the big shops, and the old codger told me the other day that it was no use."

"Poor fellow!"

"No. He's not badly off, and he's going back up-state where he came from about forty years ago, and he can live—or die—very well on what he's put by. I've known him rather a good while, and we've been friends ever since we've been acquainted."

"Go on," the elderly girl said.

Erlcort was not stopping, but she spoke so as to close her mouth, which she was apt to let hang open in a way that she did not like; she had her intimates pledged to tell her when she was doing it, but she could not make a man promise, and she had to look after her mouth herself with Erlcort. It was not a bad mouth; her eyes were large, and it was merely large to match them.

"When shall you begin—open shop?" she asked.

"My old codger's lease expires in the fall," he answered, "but he would be glad to have me take it off his hands this spring. I could give the summer to changing and decorating, and begin my campaign in the fall—the first of October, say. Wouldn't you like to come some day and see the old place?"

"I should love it. But you're not supposing I shall be of the least use, I hope? I'm not decorational, you know. Easel pictures, and small ones at that."

"Of course. But you are a woman, and have ideas of the cozy. I mean that the place shall be made attractive."

"Do you think the situation will be—on Sixth Avenue?"

"It will be quaint. It's in a retarded region of low buildings, with a carpenter's shop two doors off. The L roars overhead and the surface cars squeal before, but that is New York, you know, and it's very central. Besides, at the back of the shop, with the front door shut, it is very quiet."

The next day the friends lunched together at an Italian restaurant very near the place, and rather hurried themselves away to the old codger's store.

"He is a dear," Margaret whispered to Erlcort in following him about to see the advantages of the place.

"Oh, mine's setting-hen's time," he justified his hospitality in finally asking them to take seats on a nail-keg apiece. "You mustn't think you're interruptin'. Look 'round all ye want to, or set down and rest ye."

"That would be a good motto for your bookstore," she screamed to Erlcort, when they got out into the roar of the avenue. "'Look 'round all ye want to, or set down and rest ye.' Wasn't he sweet? And I don't wonder you're taken with the place: it has such capabilities. You might as well begin imagining how you will arrange it."

They were walking involuntarily up the avenue, and when they came to the Park they went into it, and in the excitement of their planning they went as far as the Ramble, where they sat down on a bench and disappointed some squirrels who supposed they had brought peanuts with them.

They decided that the front of the shop should be elaborately simple; perhaps the door should be painted black, with a small-paned sash and a heavy brass latch. On each side should be a small-paned show-window, with books laid inside on an inclined shelving; on the door should be a modest bronze plate, reading, "The Critical Bookstore." They rejected shop as an affectation, and they hooted the notion of "Ye Critical Bookstore" as altogether loathsome. The door and window would be in a rather belated taste, but the beautiful is never out of date, and black paint and small panes might be found rococo in their old-fashionedness now. There should be a fireplace, or perhaps a Franklin stove, at the rear of the room, with a high-shouldered, small-paned sash on each side letting in the light from the yard of the carpenter-shop. On the chimneypiece should be lettered, "Look 'round all ye want to, or set down and rest ye."

The genius of the place should be a refined hospitality, such as the gentle old codger had practised with them, and to facilitate this there should be a pair of high-backed settles, one under each window. The book-counter should stretch the whole length of the store, and at intervals beside it, against the book-shelving, should be set old-fashioned chairs, but not too old-fashioned. Against the lower book-shelves on a deeper shelf might be stood against the books a few sketches in water-color, or even oil.

This was Margaret Green's idea.

"And would you guarantee the quality?" Erlcort asked.

"Perhaps they wouldn't be for sale, though if any one insisted—"

"I see. Well, pass the sketches. What else?"

"Well, a few little figures in plaster, or even marble or bronze, very Greek, or very American; things in low relief."

"Pass the little figures and low reliefs. But don't forget it's a bookstore."

"Oh, I won't. The sketches of all kinds would be strictly subordinated to the books. If I had a tea-room handy here, with a table and the backs of some menus to draw on, I could show you just how it would look."

"What's the matter with the Casino?"

"Nothing; only it's rather early for tea yet."

"It isn't for soda-lemonade."

She set him the example of instantly rising, and led the way back along the lake to the Casino, resting at that afternoon hour among its spring flowers and blossoms innocent of its lurid after-dark frequentation. He got some paper from the waiter who came to take their order. She began to draw rapidly, and by the time the waiter came again she was giving Erlcort the last scrap of paper.

"Well," he said, "I had no idea that I had imagined anything so charming! If this critical bookstore doesn't succeed, it'll be because there are no critics. But what—what are these little things hung against the partitions of the shelves?"

"Oh—mirrors. Little round ones."

"But why mirrors of any shape?"

"Nothing; only people like to see themselves in a glass of any shape. And when," Margaret added, in a burst of candor, "a woman looks up and sees herself with a book in her hand, she will feel so intellectual she will never put it down. She will buy it."

"Margaret Green, this is immoral. Strike out those mirrors, or I will smash them every one!"

"Oh, very well!" she said, and she rubbed them out with the top of her pencil. "If you want your place a howling wilderness."

He looked at the ruin her rubber had wrought. "They were rather nice. Could—could you rub them in again?"

"Not if I tried a hundred years. Besides, they were rather impudent. What time is it?"

"No time at all. It's half-past three."

"Dear me! I must be going. And if you're really going to start that precious critical bookstore in the fall, you must begin work on it right away."

"Work?"

"Reading up for it. If you're going to guarantee the books, you must know what's in them, mustn't you?"

He realized that he must do what she said; he must know from his own knowledge what was in the books he offered for sale, and he began reading, or reading at, the new books immediately. He was a good deal occupied by day with the arrangement of his store, though he left it mainly with the lively young decorator who undertook for a lump sum to realize Margaret Green's ideas. It was at night that he did most of his reading in the spring books which the publishers were willing to send him gratis, when they understood he was going to open a bookstore, and only wanted sample copies. As long as she remained in town Margaret Green helped him read, and they talked the books over, and mostly rejected them. By the time she went to Europe in August with another elderly girl they had not chosen more than eight or ten books; but they hoped for better things in the fall.

Word of what he was doing had gone out from Margaret, and a great many women of their rather esthetic circle began writing to him about the books they were reading, and commending them to him or warning him against them. The circle of his volunteer associates enlarged itself in the nature of an endless chain, and before society quite broke up for the summer a Sympathetic Tea was offered to Erlcort by a Leading Society Woman at the Intellectual Club, where he was invited to address the Intellectuals in explanation of his project. This was before Margaret sailed, and he hurried to her in horror.

"Why, of course you must accept. You're not going to hide your Critical Bookstore under a bushel; you can't have too much publicity."

The Leading Society Woman flowed in fulsome gratitude at his acceptance, and promised no one but the club should be there; he had hinted his reluctance. She kept her promise, but among the Intellectuals there was a girl who was a just beginning journalist, and who pumped Erlcort's whole scheme out of him, unsuspicious of what she was doing, till he saw it all, with his picture, in the Sunday Supplement. She rightly judged that the intimacy of an interview would be more popular with her readers than the cold and distant report of his formal address, which she must give, though she received it so ardently with all the other Intellectuals. They flocked flatteringly, almost suffocatingly, around him at the end. His scheme was just what every one had vaguely thought of: something must be done to stem the tide of worthless fiction, which was so often shocking as well as silly, and they would only be too glad to help read for him. They were nearly all just going to sail, but they would each take a spring book on the ship, and write him about it from the other side; they would each get a fall book coming home, and report as soon as they got back.

His scheme was discussed seriously and satirically by the press; it became a joke with many papers, and a byword quickly worn out, so that people thought that it had been dropped. But Erlcort gave his days and nights to preparation for his autumnal campaign. He studied in careful comparison the reviews of the different literary authorities, and was a little surprised to find, when he came to read the books they reviewed, how honest and adequate they often were. He was obliged to own to himself that if people were guided by them, few worthless books would be sold, and he decided that the immense majority of the book-buyers were not guided by the critics. The publishers themselves seemed not so much to blame when he went to see them and explained his wish to deal with them on the basis of a critical bookseller. They said they wished all the booksellers were like him, for they would ask nothing better than to publish only good books. The trouble, they said, lay with the authors; they wrote such worthless books. Or if now and then one of them did write a good book and they were over-tempted to publish it, the public united in refusing to buy it. So he saw? But if the booksellers persisted in selling none but good books, perhaps something might be done. At any rate they would like to see the experiment tried.

Erlcort felt obliged to read the books suggested to him by the endless chain of readers who volunteered to read for him, on both sides of the ocean, or going and coming on the ocean. Mostly the books they praised were abject rubbish, but it took time to find this out, and he formed the habit of reading far into the night, and if he was very much vexed at discovering that the book recommended to him was trash, he could not sleep unless he took veronal, and then he had a ghastly next day.

He did not go out of town except for a few brief sojourns at places where he knew cultivated people were staying, and could give him their opinions of the books he was reading. When the publishers began, as they had agreed, to send him their advance sheets, the stitched but unbound volumes roused so much interest by the novelty of their form that his readers could not give an undivided attention to their contents. He foresaw that in the end he should have to rely upon the taste of mercenaries in his warfare against rubbish, and more and more he found it necessary to expend himself in it, to read at second hand as well as at first. His greatest relief was in returning to town and watching the magical changes which the decorator was working in his store. This was consolation, this was inspiration, but he longed for the return of Margaret Green, that she might help him enjoy the realization of her ideas in the equipment of the place; and he held the decorator to the most slavish obedience through the carpenters and painters who created at his bidding a miraculous interior, all white, or just off-white, such as had never been imagined of a bookstore in New York before. It was actually ready by the end of August, though smelling a little of turpentine still, and Erlcort, letting himself in at the small-paned black door, and ranging up and down the long, beautiful room, and round and round the central book-table, and in and out between the side tables, under the soft, bright shelving of the walls, could hardly wait the arrival of the Minnedingdong in which the elderly girl had taken her passage back. One day, ten days ahead of time, she blew in at the front door in a paroxysm of explanation; she had swapped passages home with another girl who wanted to come back later, while she herself wanted to come back earlier. She had no very convincing reason for this as she gave it, but Erlcort did not listen to her reason, whatever it was. He said, between the raptures with the place that she fell in and out of, that now she was just in time for the furnishing, which he never could have dared to undertake alone.

In the gay September weather they visited all the antiquity shops in Fourth Avenue, and then threw themselves frankly upon reproductions, which they bought in the native wood and ordered painted, the settles and the spindle-backed chairs in the cool gray which she decided was the thing. In the same spirit they bought new brass fire-irons and new shovel and tongs, but all very tall and antique-looking, and then they got those little immoral mirrors, which Margaret Green attached with her own hands to the partitions of the shelving. She also got soft green silk curtains for the chimney windows and for the sash of the front door; even the front windows she curtained, but very low, so that a salesman or a saleswoman could easily reach over from the interior and get a book that any customer had seen from the outside.

One day when all this was done, and Erlcort had begun ordering in a stock of such books as he had selected to start with, she said: "You're looking rather peaked, aren't you?"

"Well, I've been feeling rather peaked, until lately, keeping awake to read and read after the volunteer readers."

"You mean you've lost sleep?"

"Something like that."

"Well, you mustn't. How many books do you start with?"

"About twenty-five."

"Good ones? It's a lot, isn't it? I didn't suppose there were so many."

"Well, to fill our shelves I shall have to order about a thousand of each."

"You'll never sell them in the world! You'll be ruined."

"Oh no; the publishers will take them back."

"How nice of them! But that's only what painters have to do when the dealers can't sell their pictures."

A month off, the prospect was brilliant, and when the shelves and tables were filled and the sketches and bas-reliefs were stuck about and the little immoral mirrors were hung, the place was charming. The chairs and settles were all that could be asked; Margaret Green helped put them about; and he let her light the low fire on the hearth of the Franklin stove; he said he should not always burn hickory, but he had got twenty-four sticks for two dollars from an Italian in a cellar near by, and he meant to burn that much. She upbraided him for his extravagance while touching the match to the paper under the kindling; but October opened cold, and he needed the fire.

The enterprise seemed rather to mystify the neighborhood, and some old customers of the old codger's came in upon one fictitious errand and another to see about it, and went away without quite making it out. It was a bookstore, all right, they owned in conference, but what did he mean by "critical"?

The first bona fide buyer appeared in a little girl who could just get her chin on the counter, and who asked for an egg-beater. Erlcort had begun with only one assistant, the young lady who typed his letters and who said she guessed she could help him when she was not working. She leaned over and tried to understand the little girl, and then she called to Erlcort where he stood with his back to the fire and the morning paper open before his face.

"Mr. Erlcort, have we got a book called The Egg-beater?"

"The Egg-beater?" he echoed, letting his paper drop below his face.

"No, no!" the little girl shouted, angrily. "It ain't a book. It's a thing to beat eggs with. Mother said to come here and get it."

"Well, she's sent you to the wrong place, little girl. You want to go to a hardware-store," the young lady argued.

"Ain't this No. 1232?"

"Yes."

"Well, this is the right place. Mother said to go to 1232. I guess she knows. She's an old customer."

"The Egg-beater! The Egg-beater!" the blithe young novelist to whom Erlcort told the story repeated. He was still happy in his original success as a best-seller, and he had come to the Critical Bookstore to spy out the stock and see whether his last novel was in it; but though it was not, he joyously extended an acquaintance with Erlcort which had begun elsewhere. "The Egg-beater? What a splendid title for a story of adventure! Keep the secret of its applicability to the last word, or perhaps never reveal it at all, and leave the reader worrying. That's one way; makes him go and talk about the book to all the girls he knows and get them guessing. Best ad. in the world. The Egg-beater! Doesn't it suggest desert islands and penguins' nests in the rocks? Fellow and girl shipwrecked, and girl wants to make an omelette after they've got sick of plain eggs, and can't for want of an egg-beater. Heigh? He invents one—makes it out of some wire that floats off from the wreck. See? When they are rescued, she brings it away, and doesn't let him know it till their Iron Wedding Day. They keep it over his study fireplace always."

This author was the first to stretch his legs before Erlcort's fire from his seat on one of the reproductions. He could not say enough of the beauty of the place, and he asked if he might sit there and watch for the old codger's old customers coming to buy hardware. There might be copy in it.

But the old customers did not come so often as he hoped and Erlcort feared. Instead there came bona fide book-buyers, who asked some for a book and some for a particular book. The first were not satisfied with the books that Erlcort or his acting saleslady recommended, and went away without buying. The last were indignant at not finding what they wanted in Erlcort's selection.

"Why don't you stock it?" they demanded.

"Because I don't think it's worth reading."

"Oh, indeed!" The sarcastic customers were commonly ladies. "I thought you let the public judge of that!"

"There are bookstores where they do. This is a critical bookstore. I sell only the books that I think worth reading. If you had noticed my sign—"

"Oh!" the customer would say, and she, too, would go away without buying.

There were other ladies who came, links of the endless chain of volunteer readers who had tried to help Erlcort in making his selection, and he could see them slyly looking his stock over for the books they had praised to him. Mostly they went away without comment, but with heads held high in the offense which he felt even more than saw. One, indeed, did ask him why he had not stocked her chosen book, and he had to say, "Well, when I came to go through it carefully, I didn't think it quite—"

"But here is The Green Bay Tree, and The Biggest Toad in the Puddle, and—"

"I know. For one reason and another I thought them worth stocking."

Then another head went away high in the air, with its plumes quivering. One afternoon late a lady came flying in with all the marks, whatever they are, of transatlantic travel upon her.

"I'm just through the customs, and I've motored up here the first thing, even before I went home, to stop you from selling that book I recommended. It's dreadful; and, horrors! horrors! here it is by the hundreds! Oh, Mr. Erlcort! You mustn't sell that dreadful book! You see, I had skipped through it in my berth going out, and posted my letter the first thing; and just now, coming home, I found it in the ship's library and came on that frightful episode. You know! Where— How could you order it without reading it, on a mere say-so? It's utterly immoral!"

"I don't agree with you," Erlcort answered, dryly. "I consider that passage one of the finest in modern fiction—one of the most ennobling and illumining—"

"Ennobling!" The lady made a gesture of horror. "Very well! If that is your idea of a critical bookstore, all I've got to say is—"

But she had apparently no words to say it in, and she went out banging but failing to latch the door which let through the indignant snort of her car as it whirled her away. She left Erlcort and his assistant to a common silence, but he imagined somehow a resolution in the stenographer not to let the book go unsearched till she had grasped the full iniquity of that episode and felt all its ennobling force. He was not consoled when another lady came in and, after drifting unmolestedly about (it was the primary rule of the place not to follow people up), stopped before the side shelf where the book was ranged in dozens and scores. She took a copy from the neat ranks, and opened it; then she lifted her head by chance and caught sight of her plume in one of the little mirrors. She stealthily lifted herself on tiptoe till she could see her face, and then she turned to the assistant and said, gently, "I believe I should like this book, please," and paid for it and went out.

It was now almost on the stroke of six, and Erlcort said to his assistant: "I'll close the store, Miss Pearsall. You needn't stay any longer."

"All right, sir," the girl said, and went into the little closet at the rear for her hat and coat. Did she contrive to get a copy of that book under her coat as she passed the shelf where it lay?

When she was gone, he turned the key in the door and went back and sat down before the fire dying on the hearth of the Franklin stove. It was not a very cheerful moment with him, but he could not have said that the day had been unprofitable, either spiritually or pecuniarily. In its experiences it had been a varied day, and he had really sold a good many books. More people than he could have expected had taken him seriously and even intelligently. It is true that he had been somewhat vexed by the sort of authority the president of the Intellectual Club had shown in the way she swelled into the store and patronized him and it, as if she had invented them both, and blamed him in a high, sweet voice for having so many old books. "My idea was that it would be a place where one could come for the best of the new books. But here! Why, half of them I saw in June before I sailed!" She chided him merrily, and she acted as if it were quite part of the joke when he said that he did not think a good book could age much in four months. She laughed patronizingly at his conceit of getting in the fall books by Thanksgiving; but even for the humor of it she could not let him say he should not do anything in holiday books. "I had expected to get all my Christmas books of you, Mr. Erlcort," she crowed, but for the present she bought nothing. In compensation he recalled the gratitude, almost humble gratitude, of a lady (she was a lady!) who had come that day, bringing her daughter to get a book, any book in his stock, and to thank him for his enterprise, which she had found worked perfectly in the case of the book she had got the week before; the book had been an unalloyed delight, and had left a sense of heightened self-respect with her: that book of the dreadful episode.

He wished Margaret Green had been there; but she had been there only once since his opening; he could not think why. He heard a rattling at the door-latch, and he said before he turned to look, "What if it should be she now?" But when he went to peer through the door-curtain it was only an old fellow who had spent the better part of the afternoon in the best chair, reading a book. Erlcort went back to the fire and let him rattle, which he did rather a long time, and then went away, Erlcort hoped, in dudgeon. He was one of a number of customers who had acted on the half of his motto asking them to sit down and rest them, after acting on the other half to look round all they wanted. Most of them did not read, even; they seemed to know one another, and they talked comfortably together. Erlcort recognized a companionship of four whom he had noticed in the Park formerly; they were clean-enough-looking elderly men, but occupied nearly all the chairs and settles, so that lady customers did not like to bring books and look over them in the few places left, and Erlcort foresaw the time when he should have to ask the old fellows to look around more and rest them less. In resuming his own place before the fire he felt the fleeting ache of a desire to ask Margaret Green whether it would not be a good plan to remove the motto from the chimneypiece. He would not have liked to do it without asking her; it had been her notion to put it there, and her other notion of the immoral mirrors had certainly worked well. The thoughtful expression they had reflected on the faces of lady customers had sold a good many books; not that Erlcort wished to sell books that way, though he argued with himself that his responsibility ought strictly to end with the provision of books which he had critically approved before offering them for sale.

His conscience was not wholly at peace as to his stock, not only the books which he had included, but also those he had excluded. Some of these tacitly pleaded against his severity; in one case an author came and personally protested. This was the case of a book by the ex-best-seller, who held that his last book was so much better than his first that it ought certainly to be found in any critical bookstore. The proceeds of his best-seller had enabled him to buy an electric runabout, and he purred up to Erlcort's door in it to argue the matter with him. He sat down in a reproduction and proved, gaily, that Erlcort was quite wrong about it. He had the book with him, and read passages from it; then he read passages from some of the books on sale and defied Erlcort to say that his passages were not just as good, or, as he put it merrily, the same as. He held that his marked improvement entitled him to the favor of a critical bookstore; without this, what motive had he in keeping from a reversion to the errors which had won him the vicious prosperity of his first venture? Hadn't Erlcort a duty to perform in preventing his going back to the bad? Refuse this markedly improved fiction, and you drove him to writing nothing but best-sellers from now on. He urged Erlcort to reflect.

They had a jolly time, and the ex-best-seller went away in high spirits, prophesying that Erlcort would come to his fiction yet.

There were authors who did not leave Erlcort so cheerful when they failed to see their books on his shelves or tables. Some of them were young authors who had written their worthless books with a devout faith in their worth, and they went away more in sorrow than in anger, and yet more in bewilderment. Some were old authors who had been all their lives acceptably writing second-rate books and trying to make them unacceptably first-rate. If he knew them he kept out of their way, but the dejection of their looks was not less a pang to him if he saw them searching his stock for their books in vain.

He had his own moments of dejection. The interest of the press in his enterprise had flashed through the Sunday issues of a single week, and then flashed out in lasting darkness. He wondered vaguely if he had counted without the counting-house in hoping for their continued favor; he could not realize that nothing is so stale as old news, and that no excess of advertising would have relumed those fitful fires.

He would have liked to talk the case over with Margaret Green. After his first revolt from the easy publicity the reporters had first given him, he was aware of having enjoyed it—perhaps vulgarly enjoyed it. But he hoped not quite that; he hoped that in his fleeting celebrity he had cared for his scheme rather than himself. He had really believed in it, and he liked having it recognized as a feature of modern civilization, an innovation which did his city and his country credit. Now and then an essayist of those who wrote thoughtful articles in the Sunday or Saturday-evening editions had dropped in, and he had opened his heart to them in a way he would not have minded their taking advantage of. Secretly he hoped they would see a topic in his enterprise and his philosophy of it. But they never did, and he was left to the shame of hopes which had held nothing to support defeat. He would have liked to confess his shame and own the justice of his punishment to Margaret Green, but she seemed the only friend who never came near. Other friends came, and many strangers, the friends to look and the strangers to buy. He had no reason to complain of his sales; the fame of his critical bookstore might have ceased in New York, because it had gone abroad to Chicago and St. Louis and Pittsburg; people who were clearly from these commercial capitals and others came and bought copiously of his criticized stock, and they praised the notion of it in telling him that he ought to open branches in their several cities.

They were all women, and it was nearly all women who frequented the Critical Bookstore, but in their multitude Margaret Green was not. He thought it the greater pity because she would have enjoyed many of them with him, and would have divined such as hoped the culture implicated by a critical bookstore would come off on them without great effort of their own; she would have known the sincere spirits, too, and could have helped direct their choice of the best where all was so good. He smiled to find that he was invoking her help, which he had no right to.

His longing had no effect upon her till deep in January, when the weather was engaged late one afternoon in keeping the promise of a January thaw in the form of the worst snow-storm of the winter. Then she came thumping with her umbrella-handle at his door as if, he divined, she were too stiff-handed or too package-laden to press the latch and let herself in, and she almost fell in, but saved herself by spilling on the floor some canvases and other things which she had been getting at the artist's-materials store near by. "Don't bother about them," she said, "but take me to the fire as fast as you can," and when she had turned from snow to rain and had dripped partially dry before the Franklin stove, she asked, "Where have you been all the time?"

"Waiting here for you," he answered.

"Well, you needn't. I wasn't going to come—or at least not till you sent for me, or said you wanted my advice."

"I don't want your advice now."

"I didn't come to give it. I just dropped in because if I hadn't I should have just dropped outside. How have you been getting along with your ridiculous critical bookstore?"

"Well, things are rather quiet with us just now, as the publishers say to the authors when they don't want to publish their books."

"Yes, I know that saying. Why didn't you go in for the holiday books?"

"How did you know I didn't?"

"Lots of people told me."

"Well, then, I'll tell you why. I would have had to read them first, and no human being could do that—not even a volunteer link in an endless chain."

"I see. But since Christmas?"

"You know very well that after Christmas the book market drops dead."

"Yes, so I've been told." She had flung her wet veil back over her shoulders, and he thought she had never looked so adorably plain before; if she could have seen herself in a glass she would have found her whole face out of drawing. It seemed as if his thinking had put her in mind of them, and she said, "Those immoral mirrors are shameful."

"They've sold more of the best books than anything else."

"No matter. As soon as I get a little drier I shall take them down."

"Very well. I didn't put them up." He laid a log of hickory on the fire. "I'm not doing it to dry you quicker."

"Oh, I know. I'll tell you one thing. You ought to keep the magazines, or at least the Big Four. You could keep them with a good conscience, and you could sell them without reading; they're always good."

"There's an idea in that. I believe I'll try it."

Margaret Green was now dry enough, and she rose and removed the mirrors. In doing this she noticed that Erlcort had apparently sold a good many of his best books, and she said: "Well! I don't see why you should be discouraged."

"Who said I was? I'm exultant."

"Then you were exulting with the corners of your mouth down just now. Well, I must be going. Will you get a taxi to flounder over to the Subway with me?" While Erlcort was telephoning she was talking to him. "I believe the magazines will revive public interest in your scheme. Put them in your window. Try to get advance copies for it."

"You have a commercial genius, Margaret Green."

"When it comes to selling literature, I have. Selling art is where I fall down."

"That's because you always try to sell your own art. I should fall down, too, if I tried to sell my own literature."

They got quite back to their old friendliness; the coming of the taxi gave them plenty of time. The electric lights were turned brilliantly on, but there, at the far end of the store, before the Franklin stove, they had a cozy privacy. At the moment of parting she said:

"If I were you I should take out these settles. They simply invite loafing."

"I've noticed that they seem to do that."

"And better paint out that motto."

"I've sometimes fancied I'd better. That invites loafing, too; though some nice people like it."

"Nice people? Why haven't some of them bought a picture?" He perceived that she had taken in the persistent presence of the sketches when removing the mirrors, and he shared the indignation she expressed: "Shabby things!"

She stood with the mirrors under her arm, and he asked what she was going to do with them, as he followed her to the door with her other things.

"Put them around the studio. But you needn't come to see the effect."

"No. I shall come to see you."

But when he came in a lull of February, and he could walk part of the way up through the Park on the sunny Saturday afternoon, she said:

"I suppose you've come to pour out some more of your griefs. Well, pour away! Has the magazine project failed?"

"On the contrary, it has been a succes fou. But I don't feel altogether easy in my mind about it. The fact is, they seem to print much more rubbish than I supposed."

"Of course they do; they must; rubbish is the breath in their nostrils."

She painted away, screwing her eyes almost shut and getting very close to her picture. He had never thought her so plain; she was letting her mouth hang open. He wondered why she was so charming; but when she stepped back rhythmically, tilting her pretty head this way and that, he saw why: it was her unfailing grace. She suddenly remembered her mouth and shut it to say, "Well?"

"Well, some people have come back at me. They've said, What a rotten number this or that was! They were right; and yet there were things in all those magazines better than anything they had ever printed. What's to be done about it? I can't ask people to buy truck or read truck because it comes bound up with essays and stories and poems of the first quality."

"No. You can't. Why," she asked, drifting up to her picture again, "don't you tear the bad out, and sell the good?"

Erlcort gave a disdainful sound, such as cannot be spelled in English. "Do you know how defiantly the bad is bound up with the good in the magazines? They're wired together, and you could no more tear out the bad and leave the good than you could part vice from virtue in human nature."

"I see," Margaret Green said, but she saw no further, and she had to let him go disconsolate. After waiting a decent time she went to find him in his critical bookstore. It was late in an afternoon of the days that were getting longer, and only one electric was lighted in the rear of the room, where Erlcort sat before the fireless Franklin stove, so busy at something that he scarcely seemed aware of her.

"What in the world are you doing?" she demanded.

He looked up. "Who? I? Oh, it's you! Why, I'm merely censoring the truck in the May number of this magazine." He held up a little roller, as long as the magazine was wide, blacked with printer's ink, which he had been applying to the open periodical. "I've taken a hint from the way the Russian censorship blots out seditious literature before it lets it go to the public."

"And what a mess you're making!"

"Of course it will have to dry before it's put on sale."

"I should think so. Listen to me, Frederick Erlcort: you're going crazy."

"I've sometimes thought so: crazy with conceit and vanity and arrogance. Who am I that I should set up for a critical bookstore-keeper? What is the Republic of Letters, anyway? A vast, benevolent, generous democracy, where one may have what one likes, or a cold oligarchy where he is compelled to take what is good for him? Is it a restricted citizenship, with a minority representation, or is it universal suffrage?"

"Now," Margaret Green said, "you are talking sense. Why didn't you think of this in the beginning?"

"Is it a world, a whole earth," he went on, "where the weeds mostly outflourish the flowers, or is it a wretched little florist's conservatory where the watering-pot assumes to better the instruction of the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust? What is all the worthy family of asses to do if there are no thistles to feed them? Because the succulent fruits and nourishing cereals are better for the finer organisms, are the coarser not to have fodder? No; I have made a mistake. Literature is the whole world; it is the expression of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, and it is the pleasure of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the multitude have their truck, their rubbish, their rot; it may not be the truck, the rubbish, the rot that it would be to us, or may slowly and by natural selection become to certain of them. But let there be no artificial selection, no survival of the fittest by main force—the force of the spectator, who thinks he knows better than the creator of the ugly and the beautiful, the fair and foul, the evil and good."

"Oh, now if the Intellectual Club could hear you!" Margaret Green said, with a long, deep, admiring suspiration. "And what are you going to do with your critical bookstore?"

"I'm going to sell it. I've had an offer from the author of that best-seller—I've told you about him. I was just trying to censor that magazine while I was thinking it over. He's got an idea. He's going to keep it a critical bookstore, but the criticism is to be made by universal suffrage and the will of the majority. The latest books will be put to a vote; and the one getting the greatest number of votes will be the first offered for sale, and the author will receive a free passage to Europe by the southern route."

"The southern route!" Margaret mused. "I've never been that way. It must be delightful."

"Then come with me! I'm going."

"But how can I?"

"By marrying me!"

"I never thought of that," she said. Then, with the conscientious resolution of an elderly girl who puts her fate to the touch of any risk the truth compels, she added: "Or, yes! I have. But I never supposed you would ask me." She stared at him, and she was aware she was letting her mouth hang open. While she was trying for some word to close it with he closed it for her.



XIV

A FEAST OF REASON

Florindo and Lindora had come to the end of another winter in town, and had packed up for another summer in the country. They were sitting together over their last breakfast until the taxi should arrive to whirl them away to the station, and were brooding in a joint gloom from the effect of the dinner they had eaten at the house of a friend the night before, and, "Well, thank goodness," she said, "there is an end to that sort of thing for one while."

"An end to that thing," he partially assented, "but not that sort of thing."

"What do you mean?" she demanded excitedly, almost resentfully.

"I mean that the lunch is of the nature of the dinner, and that in the country we shall begin lunching where we left off dining."

"Not instantly," she protested shrilly. "There will be nobody there for a while—not for a whole month, nearly."

"They will be there before you can turn round, almost; and then you women will begin feeding one another there before you have well left off here."

"We women!" she protested.

"Yes, you—you women. You give the dinners. Can you deny it?"

"It's because we can't get you to the lunches."

"In the country you can; and so you will give the lunches."

"We would give dinners if it were not for the distance, and the darkness on those bad roads."

"I don't see where your reasoning is carrying you."

"No," she despaired, "there is no reason in it. No sense. How tired of it all I am! And, as you say, it will be no time before it is all going on again."

They computed the number of dinners they had given during the winter; that was not hard, and the sum was not great: six or seven at the most, large and small. When it came to the dinners they had received, it was another thing; but still she considered, "Were they really so few? It's nothing to what the English do. They never dine alone at home, and they never dine alone abroad—of course not! I wonder they can stand it. I think a dinner, the happy-to-accept kind, is always loathsome: the everlasting soup, if there aren't oysters first, or grape-fruit, or melon, and the fish, and the entree, and the roast and salad, and the ice-cream and the fruit nobody touches, and the coffee and cigarettes and cigars—how I hate it all!"

Lindora sank back in her chair and toyed desperately with the fragment of bacon on her plate.

"And yet," Florindo said, "there is a charm about the first dinner of autumn, after you've got back."

"Oh, yes," she assented; "it's like a part of our lost youth. We think all the dinners of the winter will be like that, and we come away beaming."

"But when it keeps on and there's more and more of our lost youth, till it comes to being the whole—"

"Florindo!" she stopped him. He pretended that he was not going to have said it, and she resumed, dreamily, "I wonder what it is makes it so detestable as the winter goes on."

"All customs are detestable, the best of them," he suggested, "and I should say, in spite of the first autumnal dinner, that the society dinner was an unlovely rite. You try to carry if off with china and glass, and silver and linen, and if people could fix their minds on these, or even on the dishes of the dinner as they come successively on, it would be all very well; but the diners, the diners!"

"Yes," she said, "the old men are hideous, certainly; and the young ones—I try not to look at them, poking things into the hollows of their faces with spoons and forks—"

"Better than when it was done with knives! Still, it's a horror! A veteran diner-out in full action is certainly a hideous spectacle. Often he has few teeth of his own, and the dentists don't serve him perfectly. He is in danger of dropping things out of his mouth, both liquids and solids: better not look! His eyes bulge and roll in his head in the stress of mastication and deglutition; his color rises and spreads to his gray hair or over his baldness; his person seems to swell vividly in his chair, and when he laughs—"

"Don't, Florindo! It is awful."

"Well, perhaps no worse than the sight of a middle-aged matron tending to overweight and bulking above her plate—"

"Yes, yes! That's dreadful, too. But when people are young—"

"Oh, when people are young!" He said this in despair. Then he went on in an audible muse. "When people are young they are not only in their own youth; they are in the youth of the world, the race. They dine, but they don't think of the dinner or the unpleasantness of the diners, and the grotesqueness of feeding in common. They think—" he broke off in defect of other ideas, and concluded with a laugh, "they think of themselves. And they don't think of how they are looking."

"They needn't; they are looking very well. Don't keep harping on that! I remember when we first began going to dinners, I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world. I don't mean when I was a girl; a girl only goes to a dinner because it comes before a dance. I mean when we were young married people; and I pinned up my dress and we went in the horse-cars, or even walked. I enjoyed every instant of it: the finding who was going to take me in and who you were; and the going in; and the hovering round the table to find our places from the cards; and the seeing how you looked next some one else, and wondering how you thought I looked; and the beads sparkling up through the champagne and getting into one's nose; and the laughing and joking and talking! Oh, the talking! What's become of it? The talking, last night, it bored me to death! And what good stories people used to tell, women as well as men! You can't deny it was beautiful."

"I don't; and I don't deny that the forms of dining are still charming. It's the dining itself that I object to."

"That's because your digestion is bad."

"Isn't yours?"

"Of course it is. What has that got to do with it?"

"It seems to me that we have arrived at what is called an impasse in French." He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she gave a little jump in her chair. "Oh, there's plenty of time. The taxi won't be here for half an hour yet. Is there any heat left in that coffee?"

"There will be," she said, and she lighted the lamp under the pot. "But I don't like being scared out of half a year's growth."

"I'm sorry. I won't look at the clock any more; I don't care if we're left. Where were we? Oh, I remember—the objection to dining itself. If we could have the forms without the facts, dining would be all right. Our superstition is that we can't be gay without gorging; that society can't be run without meat and drink. But don't you remember when we first went to Italy there was no supper at Italian houses where we thought it such a favor to be asked?"

"I remember that the young Italian swells wouldn't go to the American and English houses where they weren't sure of supper. They didn't give supper at the Italian houses because they couldn't afford it."

"I know that. I believe they do, now. But—

'Sweet are the uses of adversity,'

and the fasting made for beauty then more than the feasting does now. It was a lovelier sight to see the guests of those Italian houses conversing together without the grossness of feeding or being fed—the sort of thing one saw at our houses when people went out to supper."

"I wonder," Lindora said, "whether the same sort of thing goes on at evening parties still—it's so long since I've been at one. It was awful standing jammed up in a corner or behind a door and eating vis-a-vis with a man who brought you a plate; and it wasn't much better when you sat down and he stood over you gabbling and gobbling, with his plate in one hand and his fork in the other. I was always afraid of his dropping things into my lap; and the sight of his jaws champing as you looked up at them from below!"

"Yes, ridiculous. But there was an element of the grotesque in a bird's-eye view of a lady making shots at her mouth with a spoon and trying to smile and look spirituelle between the shots."

Lindora as she laughed bowed her forehead on the back of her hand in the way Florindo thought so pretty when they were both young. "Yes," she said, "awful, awful! Why should people want to flock together when they feed? Do you suppose it's a survival of the primitive hospitality when those who had something to eat hurried to share it with those who had nothing?"

"Possibly," Florindo said, flattered into consequence by her momentary deference, or show of it. "But the people who mostly meet to feed together now are not hungry; they are already so stuffed that they loathe the sight of the things. Some of them shirk the consequences by frankly dining at home first, and then openly or covertly dodging the courses."

"Yes, and you hear that praised as a mark of high civilization, or social wisdom. I call it wicked, and an insult to the very genius of hospitality."

"Well, I don't know. It must give the faster a good chance of seeing how funny the feeders all look."

"I wonder, I do wonder, how the feeding in common came to be the custom," she said, thoughtfully. "Of course where it's done for convenience, like hotels or in boarding-houses—but to do it wantonly, as people do in society, it ought to be stopped."

"We might call art to our aid—have a large tableful of people kodaked in the moments of ingulfing, chewing, or swallowing, as the act varied from guest to guest; might be reproduced as picture postals, or from films for the movies. That would give the ten and twenty cent audiences a chance to see what life in the exclusive circles was."

She listened in dreamy inattention. "It was a step in the right direction when people began to have afternoon teas. To be sure, there was the biting and chewing sandwiches, but you needn't take them, and most women could manage their teacups gracefully."

"Or hide their faces in them when they couldn't."

"Only," she continued, "the men wouldn't come after the first go off. It was as bad as lunches. Now that the English way of serving tea to callers has come in, it's better. You really get the men, and it keeps them from taking cocktails so much."

"They're rather glad of that. But still, still, there's the guttling and guzzling."

"It's reduced to a minimum."

"But it's there. And the first thing you know you've loaded yourself up with cake or bread-and-butter and spoiled your appetite for dinner. No, afternoon tea must go with the rest of it, if we're going to be truly civilized. If people could come to one another's tables with full minds instead of stomachs, there would be some excuse for hospitality. Perhaps if we reversed the practice of the professional diner-out, and read up at home as he now eats at home, and— No, I don't see how it could be done. But we might take a leaf from the book of people who are not in society. They never ask anybody to meals if they can possibly help it; if some one happens in at meal-times they tell him to pull up a chair—if they have to, or he shows no signs first of going. But even among these people the instinct of hospitality—the feeding form of it—lurks somewhere. In our farm-boarding days—"

"Don't speak of them!" she implored.

"We once went to an evening party," he pursued, "where raw apples and cold water were served."

"I thought I should die of hunger. And when we got home to our own farmer's we ravaged the pantry for everything left from supper. It wasn't much. There!" Lindora screamed. "There is the taxi!" And the shuddering sound of the clock making time at their expense penetrated from the street. "Come!"

"How the instinct of economy lingers in us, too, long after the use of it is outgrown. It's as bad as the instinct of hospitality. We could easily afford to pay extra for the comfort of sitting here over these broken victuals—"

"I tell you we shall be left," she retorted; and in the thirty-five minutes they had at the station before their train started she outlined a scheme of social reform which she meant to put in force as soon as people began to gather in summer force at Lobster Cove.

He derided the notion; but she said, "You will see!" and in rather more time than it takes to tell it they were settled in their cottage, where, after some unavoidable changes of cook and laundress, they were soon in perfect running order.

By this time Lobster Cove was in the full tide of lunching and being lunched. The lunches were almost exclusively ladies' lunches, and the ladies came to them with appetites sharpened by the incomparable air of those real Lobster Cove days which were all cloudless skies and west winds, and by the vigorous automobile exercise of getting to one another's cottages. They seized every pretext for giving these feasts, marked each by some vivid touch of invention within the limits of the graceful convention which all felt bound not to transcend. It was some surprising flavor in the salad, or some touch of color appealing to the eye only; or it was some touch in the ice-cream, or some daring substitution of a native dish for it, as strawberry or peach shortcake; or some bold transposition in the order of the courses; or some capricious arrangement of the decoration, or the use of wild flowers, or even weeds (as meadow-rue or field-lilies), for the local florist's flowers, which set the ladies screaming at the moment and talking of it till the next lunch. This would follow perhaps the next day, or the next but one, according as a new cottager's claims insisted or a lady had a change of guests, or three days at the latest, for no reason.

In their rapid succession people scarcely noticed that Lindora had not given a lunch, and she had so far abandoned herself to the enjoyment of the others' lunches that she had half forgotten her high purposes of reform, when she was sharply recalled to them by a lunch which had not at all agreed with her; she had, in fact, had to have the doctor, and many people had asked one another whether they had heard how she was. Then she took her good resolution in both hands and gave an afternoon, asking people by note or 'phone simply whether they would not come in at four sharp. People were a good deal mystified, but for this very reason everybody came. Some of them came from somebody's lunch, which had been so nice that they lingered over it till four, and then walked, partly to fill in the time and partly to walk off the lunch, as there would be sure to be something at Lindora's later on.

It would be invidious to say what the nature of Lindora's entertainment was. It was certainly to the last degree original, and those who said the worst of it could say no worse than that it was queer. It quite filled the time till six o'clock, and may be perhaps best described as a negative rather than a positive triumph, though what Lindora had aimed at she had undoubtedly achieved. Whatever it was, whether original or queer, it was certainly novel.

A good many men had come, one at least to every five ladies, but as the time passed and a certain blankness began to gather over the spirits of all, they fell into different attitudes of the despair which the ladies did their best to pass off for rapture. At each unscheduled noise they started in a vain expectation, and when the end came, it came so without accent, so without anything but the clock to mark it as the close, that they could hardly get themselves together for going away. They did what was nice and right, of course, in thanking Lindora for her fascinating afternoon, but when they were well beyond hearing one said to another: "Well, I shall certainly have an appetite for my dinner to-night! Why, if there had only been a cup of the weakest kind of tea, or even of cold water!"

Then those who had come in autos gathered as many pedestrians into them as they would hold in leaving the house, or caught them up fainting by the way.

Lindora and Florindo watched them from their veranda.

"Well, my dear," he said, "it's been a wonderful afternoon; an immense stride forward in the cause of anti-eating—or—"

"Don't speak to me!" she cried.

"But it leaves one rather hungry, doesn't it?"

"Hungry!" she hurled back at him. "I could eat a—I don't know what!"



XV

CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL

A Long-distance Eclogue

1902

Morrison. Hello! Hello! Is that you, Wetherbee?

Wetherbee. Yes. Who are you? What do you want with me?

Morrison. Oh, nothing much. It's Morrison, you know; Morrison—down at Clamhurst Shortsands.

Wetherbee. Oh! Why, Morrison, of course! Of course, I know! How are you, Morrison? And, by the way, Where are you? What! You never mean to say You are down there yet? Well, by the Holy Poker! What are you doing there, you ancient joker?

Morrison. Sticking it out over Thanksgiving Day. I said I would. I tell you, it is gay Down here. You ought to see the Hunter's Moon, These silver nights, prinking in our lagoon. You ought to see our sunsets, glassy red, Shading to pink and violet overhead. You ought to see our mornings, still and clear, White silence, far as you can look and hear. You ought to see the leaves—our oaks and ashes Crimson and yellow, with those gorgeous splashes, Purple and orange, against the bluish green Of the pine woods; and scattered in between The scarlet of the maples; and the blaze Of blackberry-vines, along the dusty ways And on the old stone walls; the air just balm, And the crows cawing through the perfect calm Of afternoons all gold and turquoise. Say, You ought to have been with wife and me to-day, A drive we took—it would have made you sick: The pigeons and the partridges so thick; And on the hill just beyond Barkin's lane, Before you reach the barn of Widow Payne, Showing right up against the sky, as clear And motionless as sculpture, stood a deer! Say, does that jar you just a little? Say, How have you found things up there, anyway, Since you got back? Air like a cotton string To breathe? The same old dust on everything, And in your teeth, and in your eyes? The smoke From the soft coal, got long beyond a joke? The trolleys rather more upon your curves, And all the roar and clatter in your nerves? Don't you wish you had stayed here, too?

Wetherbee. Well, yes, I do at certain times, I must confess. I swear it is enough at times to make you swear You would almost rather be anywhere Than here. The building up and pulling down, The getting to and fro about the town, The turmoil underfoot and overhead, Certainly make you wish that you were dead, At first; and all the mean vulgarity Of city life, the filth and misery You see around you, make you want to put Back to the country anywhere, hot-foot. Yet—there are compensations.

Morrison. Such as?

Wetherbee. Why, There is the club.

Morrison. The club I can't deny. Many o' the fellows back there?

Wetherbee. Nearly all. Over the twilight cocktails there are tall Stories and talk. But you would hardly care; You have the natives to talk with down there, And always find them meaty.

Morrison. Well, so-so. Their words outlast their ideas at times, you know, And they have staying powers. The theaters All open now?

Wetherbee. Yes, all. And it occurs To me: there's one among the things that you Would have enjoyed; an opera with the new— Or at least the last—music by Sullivan, And words, though not Gilbertian, that ran Trippingly with it. Oh, I tell you what, I'd rather that you had been there than not.

Morrison. Thanks ever so!

Wetherbee. Oh, there is nothing mean About your early friend. That deer and autumn scene Were kind of you! And, say, I think you like Afternoon teas when good. I have chanced to strike Some of the best of late, where people said They had sent you cards, but thought you must be dead. I told them I left you down there by the sea, And then they sort of looked askance at me, As if it were a joke, and bade me get Myself some bouillon or some chocolate, And turned the subject—did not even give Me time to prove it is not life to live In town as long as you can keep from freezing Beside the autumn sea. A little sneezing, At Clamhurst Shortsands, since the frosts set in?

Morrison. Well, not enough to make a true friend grin. Slight colds, mere nothings. With our open fires We've all the warmth and cheer that heart desires. Next year we'll have a furnace in, and stay Not till Thanksgiving, but till Christmas Day. It's glorious in these roomy autumn nights To sit between the firelight and the lights Of our big lamps, and read aloud by turns As long as kerosene or hickory burns. We hate to go to bed.

Wetherbee. Of course you do! And hate to get up in the morning, too— To pull the coverlet from your frost-bit nose, And touch the glary matting with your toes! Are you beginning yet to break the ice In your wash-pitchers? No? Well, that is nice. I always hate to do it—seems as if Summer was going; but when your hand is stiff With cold, it can be done. Still, I prefer To wash and dress beside my register, When summer gets a little on, like this. But some folks find the other thing pure bliss— Lusty young chaps, like you.

Morrison. And some folks find A sizzling radiator to their mind. What else have you, there, you could recommend To the attention of a country friend?

Wetherbee. Well, you know how it is in Madison Square, Late afternoons, now, if the day's been fair— How all the western sidewalk ebbs and flows With pretty women in their pretty clo'es: I've never seen them prettier than this year. Of course, I know a dear is not a deer, But still, I think that if I had to meet One or the other in the road, or street, All by myself, I am not sure but that I'd choose the dear that wears the fetching hat.

Morrison. Get out! What else?

Wetherbee. Well, it is not so bad, If you are feeling a little down, or sad, To walk along Fifth Avenue to the Park, When the day thinks perhaps of getting dark, And meet that mighty flood of vehicles Laden with all the different kinds of swells, Homing to dinner, in their carriages— Victorias, landaus, chariots, coupes— There's nothing like it to lift up the heart And make you realize yourself a part, Sure, of the greatest show on earth.

Morrison. Oh, yes, I know. I've felt that rapture more or less. But I would rather put it off as long As possible. I suppose you like the song Of the sweet car-gongs better than the cry Of jays and yellowhammers when the sky Begins to redden these October mornings, And the loons sound their melancholy warnings; Or honk of the wild-geese that write their A Along the horizon in the evening's gray. Or when the squirrels look down on you and bark From the nut trees—

Wetherbee. We have them in the Park Plenty enough. But, say, you aged sinner, Have you been out much recently at dinner?

Morrison. What do you mean? You know there's no one here That dines except ourselves now.

Wetherbee. Well, that's queer! I thought the natives— But I recollect! It was not reasonable to expect—

Morrison. What are you driving at?

Wetherbee. Oh, nothing much. But I was thinking how you come in touch With life at the first dinner in the fall, When you get back, first, as you can't at all Later along. But you, of course, won't care With your idyllic pleasures.

Morrison. Who was there?

Wetherbee. Oh—ha, ha! What d'you mean by there?

Morrison. Come off!

Wetherbee. What! you remain to pray that came to scoff!

Morrison. You know what I am after.

Wetherbee. Yes, that dinner. Just a round dozen: Ferguson and Binner For the fine arts; Bowyer the novelist; Dr. Le Martin; the psychologist Fletcher; the English actor Philipson; The two newspaper Witkins, Bob and John; A nice Bostonian, Bane the archaeologer, And a queer Russian amateur astrologer; And Father Gray, the jolly ritualist priest, And last your humble servant, but not least. The food was not so filthy, and the wine Was not so poison. We made out to dine From eight till one A.M. One could endure The dinner. But, oh say! The talk was poor! Your natives down at Clamhurst—

Morrison. Look ye here! What date does Thanksgiving come on this year?

Wetherbee. Why, I suppose—although I don't remember Certainly—the usual 28th November.

Morrison. Novem— You should have waited to get sober! It comes on the 11th of October! And that's to-morrow; and if you happen down Later, you'd better look for us in town.



XVI

TABLE TALK

They were talking after dinner in that cozy moment when the conversation has ripened, just before the coffee, into mocking guesses and laughing suggestions. The thing they were talking of was something that would have held them apart if less happily timed and placed, but then and there it drew these together in what most of them felt a charming and flattering intimacy. Not all of them took part in the talk, and of those who did, none perhaps assumed to talk with authority or finality. At first they spoke of the subject as it, forbearing to name it, as if the name of it would convey an unpleasant shock, out of temper with the general feeling.

"I don't suppose," the host said, "that it's really so much commoner than it used to be. But the publicity is more invasive and explosive. That's perhaps because it has got higher up in the world and has spread more among the first circles. The time was when you seldom heard of it there, and now it is scarcely a scandal. I remember that when I went abroad, twenty or thirty years ago, and the English brought me to book about it, I could put them down by saying that I didn't know a single divorced person."

"And of course," a bachelor guest ventured, "a person of that sort must be single."

At first the others did not take the joke; then they laughed, but the women not so much as the men.

"And you couldn't say that now?" the lady on the right of the host inquired.

"Why, I don't know," he returned, thoughtfully, after a little interval. "I don't just call one to mind."

"Then," the bachelor said, "that classes you. If you moved in our best society you would certainly know some of the many smart people whose disunions alternate with the morning murders in the daily papers."

"Yes, the fact seems to rank me rather low; but I'm rather proud of the fact."

The hostess seemed not quite to like this arrogant humility. She said, over the length of the table (it was not very long), "I'm sure you know some very nice people who have not been."

"Well, yes, I do. But are they really smart people? They're of very good family, certainly."

"You mustn't brag," the bachelor said.

A husband on the right of the hostess wondered if there were really more of the thing than there used to be.

"Qualitatively, yes, I should say. Quantitatively, I'm not convinced," the host answered. "In a good many of the States it's been made difficult."

The husband on the right of the hostess was not convinced, he said, as to the qualitative increase. The parties to the suits were rich enough, and sometimes they were high enough placed and far enough derived. But there was nearly always a leak in them, a social leak somewhere, on one side or the other. They could not be said to be persons of quality in the highest sense.

"Why, persons of quality seldom can be," the bachelor contended.

The girl opposite, who had been invited to balance him in the scale of celibacy by the hostess in her study of her dinner-party, first smiled, and then alleged a very distinguished instance of divorce in which the parties were both of immaculate origin and unimpeachable fashion. "Nobody," she said, "can accuse them of a want of quality." She was good-looking, though no longer so young as she could have wished; she flung out her answer to the bachelor defiantly, but she addressed it to the host, and he said that was true; certainly it was a signal case; but wasn't it exceptional? The others mentioned like cases, though none quite so perfect, and then there was a lull till the husband on the left of the hostess noted a fact which renewed the life of the discussion.

"There was a good deal of agitation, six or eight years ago, about it. I don't know whether the agitation accomplished anything."

The host believed it had influenced legislation.

"For or against?" the bachelor inquired.

"Oh, against."

"But in other countries it's been coming in more and more. It seems to be as easy in England now as it used to be in Indiana. In France it's nothing scandalous, and in Norwegian society you meet so many disunited couples in a state of quadruplicate reunion that it is very embarrassing. It doesn't seem to bother the parties to the new relation themselves."

"It's very common in Germany, too," the husband on the right of the hostess said.

The husband on her left side said he did not know just how it was in Italy and Spain, and no one offered to disperse his ignorance.

In the silence which ensued the lady on the left of the host created a diversion in her favor by saying that she had heard they had a very good law in Switzerland.

Being asked to tell what it was, she could not remember, but her husband, on the right of the hostess, saved the credit of his family by supplying her defect. "Oh, yes. It's very curious. We heard of it when we were there. When people want to be put asunder, for any reason or other, they go before a magistrate and declare their wish. Then they go home, and at the end of a certain time—weeks or months—the magistrate summons them before him with a view to reconciliation. If they come, it is a good sign; if they don't come, or come and persist in their desire, then they are summoned after another interval, and are either reconciled or put asunder, as the case may be, or as they choose. It is not expensive, and I believe it isn't scandalous."

"It seems very sensible," the husband on the left of the hostess said, as if to keep the other husband in countenance. But for an interval no one else joined him, and the mature girl said to the man next her that it seemed rather cold-blooded. He was a man who had been entreated to come in, on the frank confession that he was asked as a stop-gap, the original guest having fallen by the way. Such men are apt to abuse their magnanimity, their condescension. They think that being there out of compassion, and in compliance with a hospitality that had not at first contemplated their presence, they can say anything; they are usually asked without but through their wives, who are asked to "lend" them, and who lend them with a grudge veiled in eager acquiescence; and the men think it will afterward advantage them with their wives, when they find they are enjoying themselves, if they will go home and report that they said something vexing or verging on the offensive to their hostess. This man now addressed himself to the lady at the head of the table.

"Why do we all talk as if we thought divorce was an unquestionable evil?"

The hostess looked with a frightened air to the right and left, and then down the table to her husband. But no one came to her rescue, and she asked feebly, as if foreboding trouble (for she knew she had taken a liberty with this man's wife), "Why, don't we?"

"About one in seven of us doesn't," the stop-gap said.

"Oh!" the girl beside him cried out, in a horror-stricken voice which seemed not to interpret her emotion truly. "Is it so bad as that?"

"Perhaps not quite, even if it is bad at all," he returned, and the hostess smiled gratefully at the girl for drawing his fire. But it appeared she had not, for he directed his further speech at the hostess again: really the most inoffensive person there, and the least able to contend with adverse opinions.

"No, I don't believe we do think it an unquestionable evil, unless we think marriage is so." Everybody sat up, as the stop-gap had intended, no doubt, and he "held them with his glittering eye," or as many as he could sweep with his glance. "I suppose that the greatest hypocrite at this table, where we are all so frankly hypocrites together, will not deny that marriage is the prime cause of divorce. In fact, divorce couldn't exist without it."

The women all looked bewilderedly at one another, and then appealingly at the men. None of these answered directly, but the bachelor softly intoned out of Gilbert and Sullivan—he was of that date:

"'A paradox, a paradox; A most ingenious paradox!'"

"Yes," the stop-gap defiantly assented. "A paradox; and all aboriginal verities, all giant truths, are paradoxes."

"Giant truths is good," the bachelor noted, but the stop-gap did not mind him.

He turned to the host: "I suppose that if divorce is an evil, and we wish to extirpate it, we must strike at its root, at marriage?"

The host laughed. "I prefer not to take the floor. I'm sure we all want to hear what you have to say in support of your mammoth idea."

"Oh yes, indeed," the women chorused, but rather tremulously, as not knowing what might be coming.

"Which do you mean? That all truth is paradoxical, or that marriage is the mother of divorce?"

"Whichever you like."

"The last proposition is self-evident," the stop-gap said, supplying himself with a small bunch of the grapes which nobody ever takes at dinner; the hostess was going to have coffee for the women in the drawing-room, and to leave the men to theirs with their tobacco at the table. "And you must allow that if divorce is a good thing or a bad thing, it equally partakes of the nature of its parent. Or else there's nothing in heredity."

"Oh, come!" one of the husbands said.

"Very well!" the stop-gap submitted. "I yield the word to you." But as the other went no further, he continued. "The case is so clear that it needs no argument. Up to this time, in dealing with the evil of divorce, if it is an evil, we have simply been suppressing the symptoms; and your Swiss method—"

"Oh, it isn't mine," the man said who had stated it.

"—Is only a part of the general practice. It is another attempt to make divorce difficult, when it is marriage that ought to be made difficult."

"Some," the daring bachelor said, "think it ought to be made impossible." The girl across the table began to laugh hysterically, but caught herself up and tried to look as if she had not laughed at all.

"I don't go as far as that," the stop-gap resumed, "but as an inveterate enemy of divorce—"

An "Oh!" varying from surprise to derision chorused up; but he did not mind it; he went on as if uninterrupted.

"I should put every possible obstacle, and at every step, in the way of marriage. The attitude of society toward marriage is now simply preposterous, absolutely grotesque. Society? The whole human framework in all its manifestations, social, literary, religious, artistic, and civic, is perpetually guilty of the greatest mischief in the matter. Nothing is done to retard or prevent marriage; everything to accelerate and promote it. Marriage is universally treated as a virtue which of itself consecrates the lives of the mostly vulgar and entirely selfish young creatures who enter into it. The blind and witless passion in which it oftenest originates, at least with us, is flattered out of all semblance to its sister emotions, and revered as if it were a celestial inspiration, a spiritual impulse. But is it? I defy any one here to say that it is."

As if they were afraid of worse things if they spoke, the company remained silent. But this did not save them.

"You all know it isn't. You all know that it is the caprice of chance encounter, the result of propinquity, the invention of poets and novelists, the superstition of the victims, the unscrupulous make-believe of the witnesses. As an impulse it quickly wears itself out in marriage, and makes way for divorce. In this country nine-tenths of the marriages are love-matches. The old motives which delay and prevent marriage in other countries, aristocratic countries, like questions of rank and descent, even of money, do not exist. Yet this is the land of unhappy unions beyond all other lands, the very home of divorce. The conditions of marriage are ideally favorable according to the opinions of its friends, who are all more or less active in bottling husbands and wives up in its felicity and preventing their escape through divorce."

Still the others were silent, and again the stop-gap triumphed on. "Now, I am an enemy of divorce, too; but I would have it begin before marriage."

"Rather paradoxical again?" the bachelor alone had the hardihood to suggest.

"Not at all. I am quite literal. I would have it begin with the engagement. I would have the betrothed—the mistress and the lover—come before the magistrate or the minister, and declare their motives in wishing to marry, and then I would have him reason with them, and represent that they were acting emotionally in obedience to a passion which must soon spend itself, or a fancy which they would quickly find illusory. If they agreed with him, well and good; if not, he should dismiss them to their homes, for say three months, to think it over. Then he should summon them again, and again reason with them, and dismiss them as before, if they continued obstinate. After three months more, he should call them before him and reason with them for the last time. If they persisted in spite of everything, he should marry them, and let them take the consequences."

The stop-gap leaned back in his chair defiantly, and fixed the host with an eye of challenge. Upon the whole the host seemed not so much frightened. He said: "I don't see anything so original in all that. It's merely a travesty of the Swiss law of divorce."

"And you see nothing novel, nothing that makes for the higher civilization in the application of that law to marriage? You all approve of that law because you believe it prevents nine-tenths of the divorces; but if you had a law that would similarly prevent nine-tenths of the marriages, you would need no divorce law at all."

"Oh, I don't know that," the hardy bachelor said. "What about the one-tenth of the marriages which it didn't prevent? Would you have the parties hopelessly shut up to them? Would you forbid them all hope of escape? Would you have no divorce for any cause whatever?"

"Yes," the husband on the right of the hostess asked (but his wife on the right of the host looked as if she wished he had not mixed in), "wouldn't more unhappiness result from that one marriage than from all the marriages as we have them now?"

"Aren't you both rather precipitate?" the stop-gap demanded. "I said, let the parties to the final marriage take the consequences. But if these consequences were too dire, I would not forbid them the hope of relief. I haven't thought the matter out very clearly yet, but there are one or two causes for divorce which I would admit."

"Ah?" the host inquired, with a provisional smile.

"Yes, causes going down into the very nature of things—the nature of men and of women. Incompatibility of temperament ought always to be very seriously considered as a cause."

"Yes?"

"And, above all," and here the stop-gap swept the board with his eye, "difference of sex."

The sort of laugh which expresses uncertainty of perception and conditional approval went up.

The hostess rose with rather a frightened air. "Shall we leave them to their tobacco?" she said to the other women.

When he went home the stop-gap celebrated his triumph to his wife. "I don't think she'll ask you for the loan of me again to fill a place without you."

"Yes," she answered, remotely. "You don't suppose she'll think we live unhappily together?"



XVII

THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER

"Well, what are you doing here?" the younger of the two sages asked, with a resolute air of bonhomie, as he dragged himself over the asphalt path, and sank, gasping, into the seat beside the other in the Park. His senior lifted his head and looked him carefully over to make sure of his identity, and then he said:

"I suppose, to answer your fatuous question, I am waiting here to get my breath before I move on; and in the next place, I am watching the feet of the women who go by in their high-heeled shoes."