"No." Her tone was as firm as his. She lifted her head and put her cheek against his. "It makes me very proud that you ask it. But—I—I do not——"

"Do not—what?"

"I do not want—I will not—risk losing you."

"But you won't lose me. You will have me more than ever."

"Some men—yes. But not you."

"And why not I, O Wisdom?"

"Because—because—do you think I have watched you all this time, without learning something about you? The way to keep you is to leave you free. I do not want your name. I do not want your friends I do not want to be respectable. I want—just you."

"But are we not as good as married now?"

"Yes—that's it. And I want it to keep on. I never cared for anybody until I saw you. I shall never care for anybody else. I never shall try. I want you as long as I can have you. And then——"

"And then," Howard laughed or rather, pretended to laugh, "and then, 'Oh, dig me a grave both wide and deep, wide and deep.' How like twenty-years-old that is."

She seemed not to hear his jest and presently went on: "Do you remember the evening before I left, down there at Mrs. Sands's?"

"The night you proposed to me?" Howard said, pulling her ear.

She smiled faintly and continued: "I thought it all out that night. I intended to come back just as I did. I went deliberately. I——"

Howard put his hand over her lips.

"O, I am not going to tell anything,", said she, evading his fingers. "Only this—that I understood you then, understood just why you would never marry. Not so clearly as I understand it now, but still I—understood. And you have been teaching me ever since, teaching me manners, teaching me how to read and think and talk. And more than all, you've taught me your way of looking at life."

Howard held her away from him and studied her face, surprise in his eyes. "Isn't it strange?" he said.

"Here I've been seeing you day after day all this time, have had a chance to know you better than I ever knew any one in my life, have had you very near to me day and night. And just now, as I look at you, I see the real you for the first time in two years."

"I have been wondering when you would look at me again," said Alice with a small, sly smile.

"Why, you are a woman grown. Where is the little girl I knew, the little girl who used to look up to me?"

"Oh, she's gone these two years. She proposed to you and, when you refused her, she—died."

"Yes—we must be married," Howard went on. "Why not? It is more convenient, let us say."

Alice shook her head and put her cheek against his again and clasped his fingers in hers. "No, my instinct is against it. Some day—perhaps. But not now, not now. I want you. I want only you. We are together out here—out beyond the pale. Inside, others would come in and—and surely come between us. I want no others—none."



VII.

A LITTLE CANDLE GOES OUT.

Howard was now thirty years old. Park Row had long ceased talking of him as a "coming man." While his style of writing was steadily improving, he wrote with no fixed aim, wrote simply for the day, for the newspaper which dies with the day of its date. Some of his acquaintances wondered why a man of such ability should thus stand still. The less observant spoke of him as an impressive example of the "journalistic blight." Those who looked deeper saw the truth—a dangerous facility, a perilous inertia, a fatal entanglement. Facility enabled him to earn a good living with ease, working as he chose. Inertia prevented him from seeking opportunities for advancement. Entanglement shut him off from the men and women of his own kind who would have thrust opportunities upon him and compelled him.

Howard himself saw this clearly in his occasional moods of self-criticism. But as he saw no remedy, he raged intermittently and briefly, and straightway relapsed. Vanity supplied him with many excuses and consolations. Was he not one of the best reporters in the profession? Where was there another, where indeed in any profession were there many of his age, making five thousand a year? Was he not always improving his mind? Was he not more and more careful in his personal habits? Was he not respected by all who knew him; looked upon as a successful man; regarded by those with whom he came in daily contact as a leader in the profession, a model for style, a marvel for facility and versatility and for the quantity of good "copy" he could turn out in a brief time? But with all the soothings of vanity he never could quite hide from himself that his life was a failure up to that moment.

"Why try to lie to myself?" he thought. "It's never a question of what one has done but always of what one could have and should have done. I am thirty and I have been marking time for at least four years. Preparing by study and reading? Yes, but not preparing for anything."

On the whole he was glad that Alice had refused to marry him. Her reason was valid. But there was another which he thought she did not see. He was deceived as to the depth of her insight because he did not watch her closely. He had no suspicion how many, many times, in their moments of demonstrativeness, she listened for those words which never came, listened and turned away to hide from him the disappointment in her eyes.

He did not love her—and she knew it. She did not inspire ambition in him—and she knew it. She simply kept him comfortable and contented. She simply prevented his amatory instincts from gathering strength vigorously to renew that search which men and women keep up incessantly until they find what they seek. She knew this also but never permitted herself to see it clearly.

He was pleased with her but not proud of her. He was not exactly ashamed of his relation with her but—well, he never relaxed his precautions for keeping it conventionally concealed. He still had a room at his club and occupied it occasionally. He laughed at himself, despised himself in a—gentle, soothing way. But he excused himself to himself with earnestness despite his sarcasms at his own expense. And for the most of the time he was content—so well, so comfortably content that if his mind had not been so nervously active he would have taken on the form and look of settled middle-life.

There was just the one saving quality—his mental alertness. All his life he had had insatiable intellectual curiosity. It had kept him from wasting his time at play when he was a boy. It had kept him from plunging deeply into dissipation when youth was hot in his veins. It was now keeping him from the sluggard's fate.

* * * * *

On the last day of January—six weeks after his thirtieth birthday—he came home earlier than usual, as they were going to the theatre and were to dine at seven. He found Alice in bed and the doctor sitting beside her.

"You'll have to get some one else to go with you, I'm afraid," she said with good-humoured resignation, a trifle over-acted. "My cold is worse and the doctor says I must stay in bed."

"Nothing serious?" Howard asked anxiously, for her cheeks were flaming.

"Oh, no. Just the cold. And I am taking care of myself."

He accompanied the doctor to the door of the apartment. At the threshold the doctor whispered: "Make some excuse and come to my office. I wish to see you particularly."

He grew pale. "Don't let her see," urged the doctor. He went back to Alice, sick at heart. "I must go out and arrange for some one else to do the play for me," he said. "I shall spend the evening with you."

She protested, but faintly. He went to the doctor's office.

"She must go south at once," he began, after looking at Howard steadily and keenly. "Nothing can save her life. That may prolong it."

Howard seemed not to understand.

"She must go to-morrow or she'll be gone forever in ten days."

"Impossible," Howard said in a dull, dazed tone.

"At once, I tell you—at once."

"Impossible," Howard repeated. He was saying to himself, "And only this afternoon I wished I were free and wondered how I could free myself." He laughed strangely.

"Impossible," he said again. And again he laughed. The room swam around. He stood up. "Impossible!" he said a fourth time, almost shouting it. And he struck the doctor full in the face, reeled and fell headlong to the floor. When he recovered consciousness he was lying on a lounge, the doctor's assistant standing beside him.

"I must go to her," he exclaimed and sat up. He saw the doctor a few feet away, holding a cloth odorous of arnica to his cheek. Howard remembered and began, "I beg your pardon,"—The doctor interrupted with: "Not at all. I've had many queer experiences but never one like that." But Howard had ceased to hear. He was staring vacantly at the floor, repeating to himself, "And I wished to be free. And I am to be free."

"You must go back to her. Take her south tomorrow. Asheville is the best place."

Howard was on his way to the door. "We shall go by the first train," he said.

"Pardon me for telling you so abruptly," said the doctor, following him. "But I saw that you weren't—that is I couldn't help noticing that you and she were—And usually the man in such cases—well, my sympathy is for the woman."

"Do you think a man voluntarily lives with a woman because he hates her?" Howard asked, with an angry sneer. He bowed coldly and was gone.

As he looked at Alice he saw that it was of no use to try to deceive her. "We must go South in the morning," he almost whispered, taking her hand and kissing it again and again, slowly and gently.

The next day but one they were at Asheville and two weeks later Howard could not hide from himself that she would soon be gone.

* * * * *

Her bed was drawn up to the open window and she Was propped with pillows. A mild breeze was flooding the room with the odours of the pine forests and the gardens. She looked out, dilated her nostrils and her eyes.

"Beautiful!" she murmured. "It is so easy to die here."

She put out her hand and laid it in his.

"I want you, my Alice." He was looking into her eyes and she into his. "I need you. I can't do without you."

She smiled with an expression of happiness. "Is it wrong," she asked, "to take pleasure in another's pain? I see that you are in pain, that you suffer. And, oh, it makes me happy, so happy."

"Don't," he begged. "Please don't."

"But listen," she went on. "Don't you see why? Because I—because I love you. There," she was smiling again. "I promised myself I never, never would say it first. And I've broken my word."

"What do you mean?"

"For nearly four years—all the years I've really lived—I have had only one thought—my love for you. But I never would say it, never would say 'I love you,' because I knew that you did not love me."

He was beginning to speak but she lifted her hand to his lips. Then she put it back in his and pushed her fingers up his coat-sleeve until they were hidden, resting upon his bare arm.

"No, you did not." Her voice was low and the words came slowly. "But since we came here, you have loved me. If I were to get well, were to go back, you would not. Ah, if you knew, if you only knew how I have wanted your love, how I have lain awake night after night, hour after hour, whispering under my breath 'I love you. I love you. Why do you not love me?'"

Howard put his head down so that his face was hid from her in her lap.

"After the doctor had talked to me a few minutes, had asked me a few questions," she went on, "I knew. And I was not sorry. It was nearly over, anyhow, dear. Did you know it? I often wondered if you did. Yes, I saw many little signs. I wouldn't admit it to myself until this illness came. Then I confessed it to myself. And I was not sorry we were to part this way. But I did not expect"—and she drew a long breath—"happiness!"

"No, no," he protested, lifting his face and looking at her. She drank in the expression of his eyes—the love, the longing, the misery—as if it had been a draught of life.

"Ah, you make me so happy, so happy. How much I owe to you. Four long, long, beautiful years. How much! How much! And at last—love!"

There was silence for several minutes. Then he spoke: "I loved you from the first, I believe. Only I never appreciated you. I was so self-absorbed. And you—you fed my vanity, never insisted upon yourself."

"But we have had happiness. And no one, no one, no one will ever be to you what I have been."

"I love you." Howard's voice had a passionate earnestness in it that carried conviction. "The light goes out with you."

"With this little candle? No, no, dear—my dear. You will be a great man. You will not forget; but you will go on and do the things that I'm afraid I didn't help, maybe hindered, you in trying to do. And you will keep a little room in your heart, a very little room. And I shall be in there. And you'll open the door every once in a while and come in and take me in your arms and kiss me. And I think—yes, I feel that—that I shall know and thrill."

Her voice sank lower and lower and then her eyes closed, and presently he called the nurse.

The next day he rose from his bed, just at the connecting door between his room and hers, and looked in at her. The shades were drawn and only a faint light crept into the room. He thought he saw her stir and went nearer.

"Why, they've made you very gay this morning," he laughed, "with the red ribbons at your neck."

There was no answer. He came still nearer. The red ribbons were long streamers of blood. She was dead.



VIII.

A STRUGGLE FOR SELF-CONTROL.

He left her at Asheville as she wished—"where I have been happiest and where I wish you to think of me." On the train coming north he reviewed his past and made his plans for the future.

As to the past he had only one regret—that he had not learned to appreciate Alice until too late. He felt that his failure to advance had been due entirely to himself—to his inertia, his willingness to seize any pretext for refraining from action. As to the future—work, work with a purpose. His mind must be fully and actively occupied. There must be no leisure, for leisure meant paralysis.

At the Twenty-third Street ferry-house he got into a hansom and gave the address of "the flat." He did not note where he was until the hansom drew up at the curb. He leaned forward and looked at the house—at their windows with the curtains which she had draped so gracefully, which she and he had selected at Vantine's one morning. How often he had seen her standing between those curtains, looking out for him, her blue-black hair waving back from her forehead so beautifully and her face ready to smile so soon as ever she should catch sight of him.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. The blood was pounding through his temples and his eyeballs seemed to be scalding under the lids.

"Never again," he moaned. "How lonely it is."

The cabman lifted the trap. "Here we are, sir."

"Yes—in a moment." Where should he go? But what did it matter? "To a hotel," he said. "The nearest."

"The Imperial?"

"That will do—yes—go there."

He resolved never to return to "the flat." On the following day he sent for the maid and arranged the breaking up. He gave her everything except his personal belongings and a few of Alice's few possessions—those he could keep, and those which he must destroy because he could not endure the thought of any one having them.

At the office all understood his mourning; but no one, not even Kittredge, knew him well enough to intrude beyond gentler looks and tones. Kittredge had written a successful novel and was going abroad for two years of travel and writing. Howard took his rooms in the Royalton. They dined together a few nights before he sailed.

"And now," said Kittredge, "I'm my own master. Why, I can't begin to fill the request for 'stuff.' I can go where I please, do as I please. At last I shall work. For I don't call the drudgery done under compulsion work."

"Work!" Howard repeated the word several times absently. Then he leaned forward and said with what was for him an approach to the confidential: "What a mess I have been making of my life! What waste! What folly! I've behaved like a child, an impulsive, irresponsible child. And now I must get to work, really to work."

"With your talents a year or so of work would free you."

"Oh, I'm free." Howard hesitated and flushed. "Yes, I'm free," he repeated bitterly. "We are all free except for the shackles we fasten upon ourselves and can unlock for ourselves. I don't agree with you that earning one's daily bread is drudgery."

"Well, let's see you work—work for something definite. Why don't you try for some higher place on the paper—correspondent at Washington or London—no, not London, for that is a lounging job which would ruin even an energetic man. Why not try for the editorial staff? They ought to have somebody upstairs who takes an interest in something besides politics."

"But doesn't a man have to write what he doesn't believe? You know how Segur is always laughing at the protection editorials he writes, although he is a free-trader."

"Oh, there must be many directions in which the paper is free to express honest opinions."

Howard began that very night. As soon as he reached his club where he was living for a few days he sat down to the file of the News-Record and began to study its editorial style and method. He had learned a great deal before three o'clock in the morning and had written a short editorial on a subject he took from the news. In the morning he read his article again and decided that with a few changes—adjectives cut out, long sentences cut up, short sentences made shorter and the introduction and the conclusion omitted—it would be worth handing in. With the corrected article in his hand he knocked at the door of the editor's room.

It was a small, plainly furnished office—no carpet, three severe chairs, a revolving book case with a battered and dusty bust of Lincoln on it, a table strewn with newspaper cuttings. Newspapers from all parts of the world were scattered about the floor. At the table sat the editor, Mr. Malcolm, whom Howard had never before seen.

He was short and slender, with thin white hair and a smooth, satirical face, deeply wrinkled and unhealthily pale. He was dressed in black but wore a string tie of a peculiarly lively shade of red. His most conspicuous feature was his nose—long, narrow, pointed, sarcastic.

"My name is Howard," began the candidate, all but stammering before Mr. Malcolm's politely uninterested glance, "and I come from downstairs."

"Oh—so you are Mr. Howard. I've heard of you often. Will you be seated?"

"Thank you—no. I've only brought in a little article I thought I'd submit for your page. I'd like to write for it and, if you don't mind, I'll bring in an article occasionally."

"Glad to have it. We like new ideas; and a new pen, a new mind, ought to produce them. If you don't see your articles in the paper, you'll know what has happened to them. If you do, paste them on space slips and send them up by the boy on Thursdays." Mr. Malcolm nodded and smiled and dipped his pen in the ink-well.

The editorial appeared just as Howard wrote it. He read and reread it, admiring the large, handsome editorial type in which it was printed, and deciding that it was worthy of the excellent place in the column which Mr. Malcolm had given it. He wrote another that very day and sent it up by the boy. He found it in his desk the next noon with "Too abstract—never forget that you are writing for a newspaper" scrawled across the last page in blue pencil.

In the two following months Howard submitted thirty-five articles. Three were published in the main as he wrote them, six were "cut" to paragraphs, one appeared as a letter to the editor with "H" signed to it. The others disappeared. It was not encouraging, but Howard kept on. He knew that if he stopped marching steadily, even though hopelessly, toward a definite goal, a heavy hand would be laid upon his shoulder to drag him away and fling him down upon a grave.

As it was, desperately though he fought to refrain from backward glances, he was now and again taken off his guard. A few of her pencil marks on the margin of a leaf in one of his books; a gesture, a little mannerism of some woman passing him in the street—and he would be ready to sink down with weariness and loneliness, like a tired traveller in a vast desert.

He completely lost self-control only once. It was a cold, wet May night and everything had gone against him that day. He looked drearily round his rooms as he came in. How stiff, how forbidding, how desert they seemed! He threw himself into a big chair.

"No friends," he thought, "no one that cares a rap whether I live or die, suffer or am happy. Nothing to care for. Why do I go on? What's the use if one has not an object—a human object?"

And their life together came flooding back—her eyes, her kisses, her attentions, her passionate love for him, so pervasive yet so unobtrusive; the feeling of her smooth, round arm about his neck; her way of pressing close up to him and locking her fingers in his; the music of her voice, singing her heartsong to him yet never putting it into words——

He stumbled over to the divan and stretched himself out and buried his face in the cushions. "Come back!" he sobbed. "Come back to me, dear." And then he cried, as a man cries—without tears, with sobs choking up into his throat and issuing in moans.

"Curious," he said aloud when the storm was over and he was sitting up, ashamed before himself for his weakness, "who would have suspected me of this?"



IX.

AMBITION AWAKENS.

Howard was now thirty-two. He was still trying for the editorial staff; but in the last month only five of his articles had been printed to twenty-three thrown away. A national campaign was coming on and the News-Record was taking a political stand that seemed to him sound and right. For the first time he tried political editorials.

The cause aroused his passion for justice, for democratic equality and the abolition of privilege. He had something to say and he succeeded in saying it vigorously, effectively, with clearness and moderation of statement. How to avoid hysteria; how to set others on fire instead of only making of himself a fiery spectacle; how to be earnest, yet calm; how to be satirical yet sincere; how to be interesting, yet direct—these were his objects, pursued with incessant toiling, rewriting again and again, recasting of sentences, careful balancing of words for exact shades of meaning.

"I shall never learn to write," had been his complaint of himself to himself for years. And in these days it seemed to him that he was farther from a good style than ever. His standards had risen, were rising; he feared that his power of accomplishment was failing. Therefore his heart sank and his face paled when an office boy told him that Mr. Malcolm wished to see him.

"I suppose it's to tell me not to annoy him with any more of my attempts," he thought. "Well, anyway, I've had the benefit of the work. I'll try a novel next."

"Take a seat," said Mr. Malcolm with an absent nod. "Just a moment, if you please."

On a chair beside him was the remnant of what had been a huge up-piling of newspapers—the exchanges that had come in during the past twenty-four hours. The Exchange Editor had been through them and Mr. Malcolm was reading "to feel the pulse of the country" and also to make sure that nothing of importance had been overlooked.

On the floor were newspapers by the score, thrown about tumultuously. Mr. Malcolm would seize a paper from the unread heap, whirl it open and send his glance and his long pointed nose tearing down one column and up another, and so from page to page. It took less than a minute for him to finish and filing away great sixteen page dailies. A few seconds sufficed for the smaller papers. Occasionally he took his long shears and with a skilful twist cut out a piece from the middle of a page and laid it and the shears upon the table with a single motion.

"Now, Mr. Howard." Malcolm sent the last paper to increase the chaos on the floor and faced about in his revolving chair. "How would you like to come up here?"

Howard looked at him in amazement. "You mean——"

"We want you to join the editorial staff. Mr. Walker has married him a rich wife and is going abroad to do literary work, which means that he is going to do nothing. Will you come?"

"It is what I have been working for."

"And very hard you have worked." Mr. Malcolm's cold face relaxed into a half-friendly, half-satirical smile. "After you'd been sending up articles for a fortnight, I knew you'd make it. You went about it systematically. An intelligent plan, persisted in, is hard to beat in this world of laggards and hap-hazard strugglers."

"And I was on the point of giving up—that is, giving up this particular ambition," Howard confessed.

"Yes, I saw it in your articles—a certain pessimism and despondency. You show your feelings plainly, young man. It is an excellent quality—but dangerous. A man ought to make his mind a machine working evenly without regard to his feelings or physical condition. The night my oldest child died—I was editor of a country newspaper—I wrote my leaders as usual. I never had written better. You can be absolute master inside, if you will. You can learn to use your feelings when they're helpful and to shut them off when they hinder."

"But don't you think that temperament——"

"Temperament—that's one of the subtlest forms of self-excuse. However, the place is yours. The salary is a hundred and twenty-five a week—an advance of about twelve hundred a year, I believe, on your average downstairs. Can you begin soon?"

"Immediately," said Howard, "if the City Editor is satisfied."

An office boy showed him to his room—a mere hole-in-the-wall with just space for a table-desk, a small table, a case of shelves for books of reference, and two chairs. The one window overlooked the lower end of Manhattan Island—the forest of business buildings peaked with the Titan-tenements of financial New York. Their big, white plumes of smoke and steam were waving in the wind and reflecting in pale pink the crimson of the setting sun.

Howard had his first taste of the intoxication of triumph, his first deep inspiration of ambition. He recalled his arrival in New York, his timidity, his dread lest he should be unable to make a living—"Poor boy," they used to say at home, "he will have to be supported. He is too much of a dreamer." He remembered his explorations of those now familiar streets—how acutely conscious he had been that they were paved with stone, walled with stone, roofed with a stony sky, peopled with faces and hearts of stone. How miserably insignificant he had felt!

And all these years he had been almost content to be one of the crowd, like them exerting himself barely enough to provide himself with the essentials of existence. Like them, he had given no real thought to the morrow. And now, with comparatively little labour, he had put himself in the way to become a master, a director of the enormous concentrated energies summed up in the magic word New York.

The key to the situation was—work, incessant, self-improving, self-developing. "And it is the key to happiness also," he thought. "Work and sleep—the two periods of unconsciousness of self—are the two periods of happiness."

His aloofness freed him from the temptations of distraction. He knew no women. He did not put himself in the way of meeting them. He kept away from theatres. He sunk himself in a routine of labour which, viewed from the outside, seemed dull and monotonous. Viewed from his stand-point of acquisition, of achievement, it was just the reverse.

The mind soon adapts itself to and enjoys any mental routine which exercises it. The only difficulty is in forming the habit of the routine.

Howard was greatly helped by his natural bent toward editorial writing. The idea of discussing important questions each day with a vast multitude as an audience stirred his imagination and aroused his instincts for helping on the great world-task of elevating the race. This enthusiasm pleased and also amused his cynical chief.

"You believe in things?" Malcolm said to him after they had become well acquainted. "Well, it is an admirable quality—but dangerous. You will need careful editing. Your best plan is to give yourself up to your belief while you are writing—then to edit yourself in cold blood. That is the secret of success, of great success in any line, business, politics, a profession—enthusiasm, carefully revised and edited."

"It is difficult to be cold blooded when one is in earnest."

"True," Malcolm answered, "and there is the danger. My own enthusiasms are confined to the important things—food, clothing and shelter. It seems to me that the rest is largely a matter of taste, training and time of life. But don't let me discourage you. I only suggest that you may have to guard against believing so intensely that you produce the impression of being an impracticable, a fanatic. Be cautious always; be especially cautious when you are cocksure you're right. Unadulterated truth always arouses suspicion in the unaccustomed public. It has the alarming tastelessness of distilled water."

Howard was acute enough to separate the wisdom from the cynicism of his chief. He saw the lesson of moderation. "You have failed, my very able chief," he said to himself, "because you have never believed intensely enough to move you to act. You have attached too much importance to the adulteration—the folly and the humbug. And here you are, still only a critic, destructive but never constructive."

At first his associates were much amused by his intensity. But as he learned to temper and train his enthusiasm they grew to respect both his ability and his character. Before a year had passed they were feeling the influence of his force—his trained, informed mind, made vigorous by principles and ideals.

Malcolm had the keen appreciation of a broad mind for this honest, intelligent energy. He used the editorial "blue-pencil" for alteration and condensation with the hand of a master. He cut away Howard's crudities, toned down and so increased his intensity, and pointed it with the irony and satire necessary to make it carry far and penetrate easily.

Malcolm was at once giving Howard a reputation greater than he deserved and training him to deserve it.

* * * * *

In the office next to Howard's sat Segur, a bachelor of forty-five who took life as a good-humoured jest and amused his leisure with the New Yorkers who devote a life of idleness to a nervous flight from boredom. Howard interested Segur who resolved to try to draw him out of his seclusion.

"I'm having some people to dinner at the Waldorf on Thursday," he said, looking in at the door. "Won't you join us?"

"I'd be glad to," replied Howard, casting about for an excuse for declining. "But I'm afraid I'd ruin your dinner. I haven't been out for years. I've been too busy to make friends or, rather, acquaintances."

"A great mistake. You ought to see more of people."

"Why? Can they tell me anything that I can't learn from newspapers or books more accurately and without wasting so much time? I'd like to know the interesting people and to see them in their interesting moments. But I can't afford to hunt for them through the wilderness of nonentities and wait for them to become interesting."

"But you get amusement, relaxation. Then too, it's first-hand study of life."

"I'm not sure of that. Yawning is not a very attractive kind of relaxation, is it? And as for study of life, eight years of reporting gave me more of that than I could assimilate. And it was study of realities, not of pretenses. As I remember them, 'respectable' people are all about the same, whether in their vices or in their virtues. They are cut from a few familiar, 'old reliable' patterns. No, I don't think there is much to be learned from respectability on dress parade."

"You'll be amused on Thursday. You must come. I'm counting on you."

Howard accepted—cordially as he could not refuse decently. Yet he had a presentiment or a shyness or an impatience at the interruption of his routine which reproached him for accepting with insistence and persistence.



X.

THE ETERNAL MASCULINE.

It was the first week in November, and in those days "everybody" did not stay in the country so late as now. There were many New Yorkers in the crowd of out-of-town people at the Waldorf. Howard was attracted, fascinated by the scene—carefully-groomed men and women, the air of gaiety and ease, the flowers, the music, the lights, the perfumes. At a glance it seemed a dream of life with evil and sorrow and pain banished.

"No place for a working man," thought he, "at least not for my kind of a working man. It appeals too sharply to the instincts for laziness and luxury."

He was late and stood in the entrance to the palm-garden, looking about for Segur. Soon he saw him waving from a table near the wall under the music-alcove.

"The oysters are just coming," said Segur. "Sit over there between Mrs. Carnarvon and Miss Trevor. They are cousins, Howard, so be cautious what you say to one about the other. Oh, here is Mr. Berersford."

The others knew each other well; Howard knew them only as he had seen their names in the "fashionable intelligence" columns of the newspapers. Mrs. Carnarvon was a small thin woman in a black velvet gown which made her thinness obtrusive and attractive or the reverse according as one's taste is toward or away from attenuation. Her eyes were a dull, greenish grey, her skin brown and smooth and tough from much exposure in the hunting field. Her cheeks were beginning to hang slightly, so that one said: "She is pretty, but she will soon not be." Her mouth proclaimed strong appetites—not unpleasantly since she was good-looking.

Miss Trevor was perhaps ten years younger than her cousin, not far from twenty-four. She had a critical, almost amused yet not unpleasant way of looking out of unusually clear blue-green eyes. Her hair was of an ordinary shade of dark brown, but fine and thick and admirably arranged to set off her long, sensitive, high bred features. Her chin and mouth expressed decision and strong emotions.

There was a vacant chair between Segur and Berersford and it was presently filled by a fat, middle-aged woman, neither blonde nor brunette, with a large, serene face. Upon it was written a frank confession that she had never in her life had an original thought capable of creating a ripple of interest. She was Mrs. Sidney, rich, of an "old" family—in the New York meaning of the word "old"—both by marriage and by birth, much courted because of her position and because she entertained a great deal both in town and at a large and hospitable country house.

The conversation was lively and amused, or seemed to amuse, all. It was purely personal—about Kittie and Nellie and Jim and Peggie and Amy and Bob; about the sayings and doings of a few dozen people who constituted the intimates of these five persons.

Mrs. Carnarvon turned to the silent Howard at last and began about the weather.

"Horrible in the city, isn't it?"

"Well, perhaps it is," replied Howard. "But I fancied it delightful. You see I have not lived anywhere but New York for so long that I am hardly capable to judge."

"Why everybody says we have the worst climate in the world."

"Far be it from me to contradict everybody. But for me New York has the ideal climate. Isn't it the best of any great city in the world? You see, we have the air of the sea in our streets. And when the sun shines, which it does more days in the year than in any other great city, the effect is like champagne—or rather, like the effect champagne looks as if it ought to have."

"I hate champagne," said Mrs. Carnarvon. "Marian, you must not drink it; you know you mustn't." This to Miss Trevor who was lifting the glass to her lips. She drank a little of the champagne, then set the glass down slowly.

"What you said made me want to drink it," she said to Howard. "I was glad to hear your lecture on the weather. I had never thought of it before, but New York really has a fine climate. And only this afternoon I let that stupid Englishman—Plymouth—you've met him? No?—Well, at any rate, he was denouncing our climate and for the moment I forgot about London."

"Frightful there, isn't it, after October and until May?"

"Yes, and the air is usually stale even in the late spring. When it's warm, it's sticky. And when it's cold, it's raw."

"You are a New Yorker?"

"Yes," said Miss Trevor faintly, and for an instant showing surprise at his ignorance. "That is, I spend part of the winter here—like all New Yorkers."

"All?"

"Oh, all except those who don't count, or rather, who merely count."

"How do you mean?" Howard was taking advantage of her looking into her plate to smile with a suggestion of irony. She happened to glance up and so caught him.

"Oh," she said, smiling with frank irony at him, "I mean all those people—the masses, I think they're called—the people who have to be fussed over and reformed and who keep shops and—and all that."

"The people who work, you mean?"

"No, I mean the people you never meet about anywhere, the people who read the newspapers and come to the basement door."

"Oh, yes, I understand." Howard was laughing. "Well, that's one way of looking at life. Of course it's not my way."

"What is your way?"

"Why, being one of those who count only in the census, I naturally take a view rather different from yours. Now I should say that your people don't count. You see, I am most deeply interested in people who read newspapers."

"Oh, you write for the papers, like Jim Segur? What do you write?"

"What they call editorials."

"You are an editor?"

"Yes and no. I am one of the editors who does not edit but is edited."

"It must be interesting," said Miss Trevor, vaguely.

"More interesting than you imagine. But then all work is that. In fact work is the only permanently interesting thing in life. The rest produces dissatisfaction and regret."

"Oh, I'm not so very dissatisfied. Yet I don't work."

"Are you quite sure? Think how hard you work at being fitted for gowns, at going about to dinners and balls and the like, at chasing foxes and anise seed bags and golf balls."

"But that is not work. It is amusing myself."

"Yes, you think so. But you forget that you are doing it in order that all these people who don't count may read about it in the papers and so get a little harmless relaxation."

"But we don't do it to get into the papers."

"Probably not. Neither did this—what is it here in my plate, a lamb chop?—this lamb gambol about and keep itself in condition to form a course at Segur's dinner. But after all, wasn't that what it was really for? Then think how many people you support by your work."

"You make me feel like a day-labourer."

"Oh, you're a much harder worker than any day labourer. And the saddest part of it to me is that you work altogether for others. You give, give and get in return nothing but a few flattering glances, a few careless pats on the back of your vanity. I should hate to work so hard for so little."

"But what would you do?" Miss Trevor was looking at him, interested and amused.

"Well, I'd work for myself. I'd insist on a return, on getting back something equivalent or near it. I'd insist on having my mind improved, or having my power or my reputation advanced."

"I was only jesting when I said that about people not counting."

"Altogether?"

"No, not altogether. I don't care much about the masses. They seem to me to be underbred, of a different sort. I hate doing things that are useful and I hate people that do useful things—in a general way, I mean."

"That is doubtless due to defective education," said Howard, with a smile that carried off the thrust as a jest.

"Is that the way you'd describe a horror of contact with—well, with unpleasant things?" Miss Trevor was serious.

"But is it that? Isn't it just an unconscious affectation, taken up simply because all the people about you think that way—if one can call the process thinking? You don't think, do you, that it is a sign of superiority to be narrow, to be ignorant, to be out of touch with the great masses of one's fellow-beings, to play the part of a harlequin or a ballet-girl on the stage of life? I understand how a stupid ass can fritter away his one chance to live in saying and hearing and doing silly things. But ought not an intelligent person try to enjoy life, try to get something substantial out of it, try to possess himself of its ideas and emotions? Why should one play the fool simply because those about one are incapable of playing any other part?"

"I'm surprised that you are here to-night. Still, I suppose you'll give yourself absolution on the plea that one must dine somewhere."

"But I'm not wasting my time. I'm learning. I'm observing a phase of life. And I'm seeing the latest styles in women's gowns and—"

"Is that important—styles, I mean?"

"Do you suppose that my kind of people, the working classes, would spend so much time and thought in making anything that was not important? There is nothing more important."

"Then you don't think we women are wasting time when we talk about dress so much?"

"On the contrary, it is an evidence of your superior sagacity. Women talk trade, 'shop,' as soon as they get away from the men. They talk men and dress—fish and nets."

Berersford heard the word fish and interrupted.

"Do you go South next month, Marian?"

"Yes—about the fifteenth." Miss Trevor explained to Howard: "Bobby—Mr. Berersford here—always fishes in Florida in January."

The conversation again became general and personal. Howard knew none of the people of whom they were talking and all that they said was of the nature of gossip. But they talked in a sparkling way, using good English, speaking in agreeable voices with a correct accent, and indulging in a great deal of malicious humour.

As they separated Mrs. Sidney, to whom Howard had not spoken during the evening, said to Segur: "You must bring Mr. Howard on Sunday afternoon."

"Will you drop Marian at the house for me?" Mrs. Carnarvon asked her. "I want to go on to Edith's."

Segur went with Mrs. Sidney and Marian to their carriage. "Who is Mr. Howard?" Mrs. Sidney said, and Miss Trevor drew nearer to hear the answer.

"One of the editorial writers down on the paper and a very clever one—none better. He works hard and is desperately serious and a regular hermit."

"I think he's very handsome—don't you, Marian?"

"I found him interesting," said Miss Trevor.

Howard thought a great deal about Miss Trevor that night, and she was still in his head the next day. "This comes of never seeing women," he said to himself. "The first girl I meet seems the most beautiful I ever saw, and the most intellectual. And, when I think it over, what did she say that was startling?"

Nevertheless he went with Segur the next Sunday to Mrs. Sidney's great house in the upper Avenue overlooking the Park.

"Why do I come here?" he asked himself. "It is a sheer waste of time. Mrs. Sidney can do me no good, or I her. It must be the hope of seeing Miss Trevor."

When the gaudy and be-powdered flunkey held back the heavy curtains of the salon to announce him and Segur, he saw Miss Trevor on a low chair absently staring into the fire. Yet when he had spoken to Mrs. Sidney and turned toward her she at once stretched out her hand with a slight smile. Some others came in and Howard was free to talk to her. He sat looking at her steadily, admiring her almost perfect profile, delicate yet strong.

"And what have you been doing since I saw you?" Miss Trevor asked.

"Writing little pieces about politics for the paper," replied Howard.

"Politics? I detest it. It is all stealing and calling names, isn't it? And something dreadful is always going to happen if somebody or other isn't elected, or is elected, to something or other. And then, whether he is or not, nothing happens. I should think the men who have been so excited and angry and alarmed would feel very cheap. But they don't. And the next time they carry on in just the same ridiculous way."

"Politics is like everything else—interesting if you understand what it is all about. But like everything else, you can't understand it without a little study at first. It's a pity women don't take an interest. If they did the men might become more reasonable and sane about it than they are now. But you—what have you been doing?"

"I—oh, industriously superintending the making of my new nets." Marian laughed and Howard was flattered. "And also, well, riding in the Park every morning. But I never do anything interesting. I simply drift."

"That's so much simpler and more satisfactory than threshing and splashing about as I do. It seems so fussy and foolish and futile. I wish—that is, sometimes I wish—that I had learned to amuse myself in some less violent and exhausting way."

"Marian—I say, Marian," called Mrs. Sidney. "Has Teddy come down?"

Miss Trevor coloured slightly as she answered: "No, he comes a week Wednesday. He's still hunting."

"Hunting," Howard repeated when Mrs. Sidney was again busy with the others. "Now there is a kind of work that never bothers a man's brains or sets him to worrying. I wish I knew how to amuse myself in some such way."

"You should go about more."

"Go—where?"

"To see people."

"But I do see a great many people. I'm always seeing them—all day long."

"Yes—but that is in a serious way. I mean go where you will be amused—to dinners for instance."

"I don't dare. I can't work at work and also work at play. I must work at one or the other all the time. I can do nothing without a definite object. I can't be just a little interested in anything or anybody. With me it is no interest at all or else absorption until interest is exhausted."

"Then if you were interested in a woman, let us say, you'd be absorbed until you found out all there was, and then you'd—take to your heels."

"But she might always be new. She might interest me more and more. Anyhow I fancy that she would weary of me long before I wearied of her. I think women usually weary first. Men are very monotonous. We are as vain as women, if not vainer, without their capacity for concealing it. And vanity makes one think he does not need to exert himself to please."

"But why do people usually say that it is the men that are difficult to hold?"

"Because the men hold the women, not through the kind of interest we are talking about, but through another kind—quite different. Women are so lazy and so dependent—dependent upon men for homes, for money, for escort even."

Miss Trevor was flushing, as if the fire were too hot—at least she moved a little farther away from it. "Your ideal woman would be a shop-girl, I should say from what you've told me."

"Perhaps—in the abstract. I really do think that if I were going to marry, I should look about for a working-girl, a girl that supported herself. How can a man be certain of the love of a woman who is dependent upon him? I should be afraid she was only tolerating me as a labour-saving device."

Miss Trevor laughed. "There certainly is no vanity in that remark," she said. "Now I can't imagine most of the men I know thinking that."

"It's only theory with me. In practice doubtless I should be as self-complacent as any other man."

They left Mrs. Sidney's together and Howard walked down the Avenue with her. It seemed a wonderful afternoon—the air dazzling, intoxicating. He was filled with the joy of living and was glad this particular tall, slender, distinguished-looking girl was there to make his enjoyment perfect. They were gay with the delight of being young and in health and attractive physically and mentally each to the other. They looked each at the other a great deal, and more and more frankly.

"Am I never to see you again?" he asked as he rang the bell for her.

"I believe Mrs. Carnarvon is going to invite you to dine here Thursday night."

"Thank you," said Howard.

Miss Trevor coloured. But she met his glance boldly and laughed. Howard wondered why her laugh was defiant, almost reckless.

* * * * *

He saw Segur at the club after dinner that same night. "And how do you like Miss Trevor?" Segur began as the whiskey and carbonic were set before them.

"A very attractive girl," said Howard.

"Yes—so a good many men have thought in the last five years. She's marrying Teddy Danvers in the spring, I believe. At any rate it's generally looked on as settled. Teddy's a good deal of a 'chump.' But he's a decent fellow—good-looking, good-natured, domestic in his tastes, and nothing but money."

Howard was smiling to himself. He understood Miss Trevor's sudden consciousness of the nearness of the fire, her flush when Mrs. Sidney asked about "Teddy," and the recklessness in her parting laugh.

"Well, Teddy's in luck," he said aloud.

"Not so sure of that. She's quite capable of leading him a dance if he bores her. And bore her he will. But that is nothing new. This town is full of it."

"Full of what?"

"Of weary women—weary wives. The men are hobby-riders. They have just one interest and that usually small and dull—stocks or iron or real estate or hunting or automobiles. Our women are not like the English women—stupid, sodden. They are alive, acute. They wish to be interested. Their husbands bore them. So—well, what is the natural temptation to a lazy woman in search of an interest?"

"It's like Paris—like France?"

"Yes, something. Except that perhaps our women are more sentimental, not fond of intrigue for its own sake—at least, not as a rule."

"Doesn't interest them deeply enough, I suppose. It's the American blood coming out—the passion for achievement. They want a man of whom they can be proud, a man who is doing something interesting and doing it well."

"I doubt that," replied Segur shrugging his shoulders. "When a woman loves a man, she wants to absorb him."

Howard soon went away to his rooms for a long evening of undisturbed thought about Teddy Danvers's fiancee—the first temptation that had entered his loneliness since Alice died.

In the few weeks of her illness and the few months immediately following her death, he had been at his very best. He was able to see her as she was and to appreciate her. He was living in the clear pure air of the Valley of the Great Shadow where all things appear in their true relations and true proportions. But only there was it possible for the gap between him and Alice to close—that gap of which she was more acutely conscious than he, and which she made wider far than it really was by being too humble with him, too obviously on her knees before him. Such superiority as she thought he possessed is not in human nature; but neither is it in human nature to refuse worship, to refuse to pose upon a pedestal if the opportunity presses.

In the three years between her death and his meeting Marian, the eternal masculine had been secretly gaining strength to resume its pursuit of the eternal feminine. And the eternal feminine was certainly most alluringly personified in this beautiful, graceful girl, at once appreciative and worthy of appreciation.

Perhaps she appealed most strongly to Howard in her vivid suggestion of the open air—of health and strength and nature. He had been leading a cloistered existence and his blood had grown sluggish. She gave him the sensation that a prisoner gets when he catches a glimpse from his barred window of the fields and the streams radiating the joy of life and freedom. And Marian was of his own kind—like the women among whom he had been brought up. She satisfied his idea of what a "lady" should be, but at the same time she was none the less a woman to him—a woman to love and to be loved; to give him sympathy, companionship; to inspire him to overcome his weaknesses by striving to be worthy of her; to bring into his life that feminine charm without which a man's life must be cold and cheerless.

He knew that he could not marry her, that he had no right to make love to her, that it was unwise to go near her again. But he had no power to resist the temptation. And even in those days he had small regard for the means when the end was one upon which he had fixed his mind. "Why not take what I can get?" he thought, as he dreamed of her. "She's engaged—her future practically settled. Yes, I'll be as happy as she'll let me." And he resumed his idealising.

At his time of life idealisation is still not a difficult or a long process. And in this case there was an ample physical basis for it—and far more of a mental basis than young imagination demands. He took the draught she so frankly offered him; he added a love potion of his own concocting, and drank it off.

He was in love.



XI.

TRESPASSING.

For the first time since he had been in newspaper work, Howard came to the office the next day in a long coat and a top hat. He left early and went for a walk in the Avenue. But Miss Trevor was neither driving nor walking. He repeated this excursion the next afternoon with better success. At Fortieth Street he saw her and her cousin half a block ahead of him. He walked slowly and examined her. She was satisfactory from the aigrette in her hat to her heels—a long, narrow, graceful figure, dressed with the expensive simplicity characteristic of the most intelligent class of the women of New York and Paris. She walked as if she were accustomed to walking. Mrs. Carnarvon had that slight hesitation, almost stumble, which indicates the woman who usually drives and never walks if she can avoid it. As they paused at the crowded crossing of Forty-second Street he joined them. When Mrs. Carnarvon found that he was "just out for the air" she left them, to go home—in Forty-seventh Street, a few doors east of the Avenue.

"Come back to tea with her," she said as she nodded to Howard.

"We have at least an hour." Howard was looking at Miss Trevor with his happiness dancing in his eyes. "Why shouldn't we go to the Park?"

"I believe it's not customary," objected Miss Trevor in a tone that made the walk in the Park a certainty.

"I'm glad to hear that. I don't care to do customary things as a rule."

"I see that you don't."

"Do you say so because I show what I am thinking so plainly that you can't help seeing it—and don't in the least mind?"

"Why shouldn't you be glad to be alive and to be seeing me this fine winter day?"

"Why indeed!" Howard looked at her from head to foot and then into her eyes.

"We are not in the Park yet." Miss Trevor accompanied her hint with a laugh and added: "I feel reckless to-day."

"You mean you forget that there is any to-morrow. I have shut out to-morrow ever since I saw you."

"And yesterday?" She noted that he coloured slightly, but continued to look at her, his eyes sad. "But there is a to-morrow," she went on.

"Yes—my work, my career is my to-morrow and yours is——"

"Well?"

"Your engagement, of course."

Miss Trevor flushed, but Howard was smiling and she did not long resist the contagion.

"My to-morrow," he continued, "is far more menacing than yours. Yours is just an ordinary, every-day, cut-and-dried affair. Mine is full of doubts and uncertainties with the chances for failure and disappointment. If I can turn my back on my to-morrow, surely you can waive yours for the moment?"

"But why are you so certain that I wish to?"

"Instinct. I could not be so happy as I am with you if you were not content to have me here."

They spoke little until they were well within the Park. There they turned down a by-path and took the walk skirting the lower lake. Miss Trevor looked at Howard with a puzzled expression.

"I never met any one like you," she said. "I have always felt so sure of myself. You take me off my feet. I feel as if I did not know where I was going and—didn't much care. And that's the worst of it."

"No, the best of it. You are a star going comfortably through your universe in a fixed orbit. You maintain your exact relations with your brother and sister stars. You keep all your engagements, you never wobble in your path—everything exact, mathematical. And up darts a wild-haired, impetuous comet, a hurrying, bustling, irregular wanderer coming from you don't know where, going you don't know whither. We pass very near each to the other. The social astronomers may or may not note a little variation in your movement—a very little, and soon over. They probably will not note the insignificant meteor that darted close up to you—close enough to get his poor face sadly scorched and his long hair cruelly singed—and then hurried sadly away. And——"

"And—what? Isn't there any more to the story?" Marian's eyes were shining with a light which she was conscious had never been there before.

"And—and——" Howard stopped and faced her. His hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his overcoat. He looked at her in a way that made the colour fly from her face and then leap back again. "And—I love you."

"Oh"—Marian said, hiding her face in her white muff. "Oh."

"I don't wish to touch you," he went on, "I just wish to look at you—so tall, so straight, so—so alive, and to love you and be happy." Then he laughed and turned. "But you'll catch cold. Let us walk on."

"So you are trying to make a career?" she asked after a few minutes' silence.

"Yes—trying—or, rather, I was. And shall again when you have gone your way and I mine."

Marian was amazed at herself. Every tradition, every instinct of her life was being trampled by this unknown whom she had just met. And she was assisting in the trampling. In fact it was difficult for her to restrain herself from leading in the iconoclasm. She looked at him in wonder and delighted terror.

"Why do you look at me in that way?" he said, turning his head suddenly.

"Because you are stronger than I—and I am afraid—yet I—well—I like it."

"It is not I that is stronger than you, nor you that are stronger than I. It is a third that is stronger than both of us. I need not mention the gentleman's name?"

"It is not necessary. But I'd like to hear you pronounce it. At least I did a moment ago."

"I'll not risk repetition. I've been thinking of what might have been."

"What?" Marian laughed a little, rather satirically. "A commonplace engagement and a commonplace wedding and a commonplace honeymoon leading into a land of commonplace disillusion and yawning—or worse?"

"Not unlikely. But since we're only dreaming why not dream more to our taste? Now as I look at your strong, clear, ambitious profile, I can dream of a career made by two working as one, working cheerfully day in and day out, fair and foul weather, working with the certainty of success as the crown."

"But failure might come."

"It couldn't. We wouldn't work for fame or for riches or for any outside thing. We would work to make ourselves wiser and better and more worthy each of the other and both of our great love."

Again they were walking in silence.

"I am so sad," Marian said at last. "But I am so happy too. What has come over me? But—you will work on, won't you? And you will accomplish everything. Yes, I am sure you will."

"Oh, I'll work—in my own way. And I'll get a good deal of what I want. But not everything. You say you can't understand yourself. No more can I understand myself. I thought my purpose fixed. I knew that I had nothing to do with marrying and giving in marriage, so I kept away from danger. And here, as miraculously as if a thunderbolt had dropped from this open winter sky, here is—you."

They were in the Avenue again—"the awakening," Howard said as the flood of carriages rolled about them.

"You will win," she repeated, when they were almost at Forty-seventh Street. "You will be famous."

"Probably not. The price for fame may be too big."

"The price? But you are willing to work?"

"Work—yes. But not to lie, not to cheat, not to exchange self-respect for self-contempt—at least, I think, I hope not."

"But why should that be necessary?"

"It may not be if I am free—free to meet every situation as it arises, with no responsibility for others resting upon me in the decision. If I had a wife, how could I be free? I might be forced to sell myself—not for fame but for a bare living. Suppose choice between freedom with poverty and comfort with self-contempt were put squarely at me, and I a married man. She would decide, wouldn't she?"

"Yes, and if she were the right sort of a woman, decide instantly for self-respect."

"Of course—if I asked her. But do you imagine that when a man loves a woman he lets her know?"

"It would be a crime not to let her know."

"It would be a greater crime to put her to the test—if she were a woman brought up, say, as you have been."

"How can you say that? How can you so overestimate the value of mere incidentals?"

"How can I? Because I have known poverty—have known what it was to look want in the face. Because I have seen women, brought up as you have been, crawling miserably about in the sloughs of poverty. Because I have seen the weaknesses of human nature and know that they exist in me—yes, and in you, for all your standing there so strong and arrogant and self-reliant. It is easy to talk of misery when one does not understand it. It is easy to be the martyr of an hour or a day. But to drag into a sordid and squalid martyrdom the woman one loves—well, the man does not live who would do it, if he knew what I know, had seen what I have seen. No, love is a luxury of the rich and the poor and the steady-going. It is not for my kind, not for me."

They were pausing at Mrs. Carnarvon's door.

"I shall not come in this afternoon," he said. "But to-morrow—if I don't come in to-day, don't you think it will be all right for me to come then?"

"I shall expect you," she said.

The talk of those who had come in for tea seemed artificial and flat. She soon went up-stairs, eager to be alone. Mechanically she went to her desk to write her customary daily letter to Danvers. She looked vacantly at the pen and paper, and then she remembered why she was sitting there.

"You are a traitor," she said to her reflection in the mirror over the desk. "But you will pay for your treason. Has not one a right to that for which she is willing to pay?"



XII.

MAKING THE MOST OF A MONTH.

To be sure of a woman a man must be confident either of his own powers or of her absolute frankness and honesty. It was self-assurance that made Edward Danvers blindly confident of Marian.

His father, a man with none but selfish uses for his fellow men, had given him a pains-taking training as a vigilant guard for a great fortune. His favourite maxim was, "Always look for motives." And he once summed up his own character and idea of life by saying: "I often wake at night and laugh as I think how many men are lying awake in their beds, scheming to get something out of me for nothing."

There could be but one result of such an education by such an educator. Danvers was acutely suspicious, saved from cynicism and misanthropy by his vanity only. He was the familiar combination of credulity and incredulity, now trusting not at all and again trusting with an utter incapacity to judge. Had he been far more attractive personally, he might still have failed to find genuine affection. To be liked for one's self alone or even chiefly is rarely the lot of any human being who has a possession that is all but universally coveted—wealth or position or power or beauty.

Danvers and Marian had known each the other from childhood. And she perhaps came nearer to liking him for himself than did any one else of his acquaintance. She was used to his conceit, his selfishness, his meanness and smallness in suspicion, his arrogance, his narrow-mindedness. She knew his good qualities—his kindness of heart, his shamed-face generosity, his honesty, the strong if limited sense of justice which made him a good employer and a good landlord. They had much in common—the same companions, the same idea of the agreeable and the proper, the same passion for out-door life, especially for hunting. He fell in love with her when she came back from two years in England and France, and she thought that she was in love with him. She undoubtedly was fond of him, proud of his handsome, athletic look and bearing, proud of his skill and daring in the hunting field.

One day—it was in the autumn a year before Howard met her—they were "in at the death" together after a run across a stiff country that included several dangerous jumps. "You're the only one that can keep up with me," he said, admiring her glowing face and star-like eyes, her graceful, assured seat on a hunter that no one else either cared or dared to ride.

"You mean you are the only one who can keep up with me," she laughed, preparing for what his face warned her was coming.

"No I don't, Marian dear. I mean that we ought to go right on keeping up with each other. You won't say no, will you?"

Marian was liking him that day—he was looking his best. She particularly liked his expression as he proposed to her. She had intended to pretend to refuse him; instead her colour rose and she said: "No—which means yes. Everybody expects it of us, Teddy. So I suppose we mustn't disappoint them."

The fact that "everybody" did expect it, the fact that he was the great "catch" in their set, with his two hundred and fifty thousand a year, his good looks and his good character—these were her real reasons, with the first dominant. But she did not admit it to herself then. At twenty-four even the mercenary instinct tricks itself out in a most deceptive romantic disguise if there is the ghost of an opportunity. Besides, there was no reason, and no sign of an approaching reason, for the shadow of a suspicion that life with Teddy Danvers would not be full of all that she and her friends regarded as happiness.

But she would not marry immediately. She was tenacious of her freedom. She was restless, dissatisfied with herself and not elated by her prospects. She had an excellent mind, reasonable, appreciative, ambitious. Until she "came out" she had spent much time among books; but as she had had no capable director of her reading, she got from it only a vague sense, that there was somewhere something in the way of achievement which she might possibly like to attain if she knew what it was or where to look for it. As she became settled in her place in the routine of social life, as her horizon narrowed to the conventional ideas of her set, this sense of possible and attractive achievement became vaguer. But her restlessness did not diminish.

"I never saw such an ungrateful girl," was Mrs. Carnarvon's comment upon one of Marian's outbursts of almost peevish fretting. "What do you want?"

"That's just it," exclaimed Marian, half-laughing. "What do I want? I look all about me and I can't see it. Yet I know that there must be something. I think I ought to have been a man. Sometimes I feel like running away—away off somewhere. I feel as if I were getting second-bests, paste substitutes for the real jewels. I feel as I did when I was a child and demanded the moon. They gave me a little gilt crescent and said: 'Here is a nice little moon for baby;' and it made me furious."

Mrs. Carnarvon looked irritated. "I don't understand it. You are getting the best of everything. Of course you can't expect to be happy. I don't suppose that any one is happy. But all the solid things of life are yours, and you can and should be comfortable and contented."

"That's just it," answered Marian indignantly. "I have always been swaddled in cotton wool. I have never been allowed really to feel. I think it is the spirit of revolt in me. Yes, I ought to have been a man. I'm sure that then I could have made life a little less tiresome."

It was this dissatisfaction that postponed the announcement of the engagement from month to month until a year had slipped away.

Instead of coming to New York, Danvers went off to Montana for a mountain-lion hunt with two Englishmen who had been staying with him in "The Valley." He would join Marian for the trip South, the engagement would be announced, and the wedding would be in May—such was the arrangement which Marian succeeded in making. It settled everything and at the same time it gave her a month of freedom in New York. She hinted enough of this programme to Howard to enable him to grasp its essential points.

"A month's holiday," was his comment. They were alone on the second seat of George Browning's coach, driving through the Park. "If we were like those people"—he was looking at a young man and young woman, side by side upon a Park bench, blue with cold but absorbed in themselves and obviously ecstatic. Marian glanced at them with slightly supercilious amusement and became so interested that she turned her head to follow them with her eyes after the coach had passed.

"Is he kissing her?" asked Howard.

"No—not yet. But I'm sure he will as soon as we have turned the corner." She said nothing for a moment or two, her glance straight ahead and upon vacancy, he admiring the curve of her cheek at the edge of its effective framing of fur.

"But we are not——" She spoke in a low tone, regretful, pensive, almost sad. "We are not like them."

"Oh, yes we are. But—we fancy we are not. We've sold our birthright, our freedom, our independence for—for——"

"Well—what?"

"Baubles—childish toys—vanities—shadows. Doesn't it show what ridiculous little creatures we human beings are that we regard the most valueless things as of the highest value, and think least of the true valuables. For, tell me, Lady-Whom-I-Love, what is most valuable in the few minutes of this little journey among the stars on the good ship Mother Earth?"

"But you would not care always as you care now? It would not, could not, last. If we—if we were like those people on the bench back there, we'd go on and—and spoil it all."

"Perhaps—who can say? But in some circumstances couldn't I make you just as happy as—as some one else could?"

"Not if you had made me infinitely happier at one time than even you could hope to make me all the time. At least I think not. It would always be—be racing against a record; we both would be, wouldn't we?"

Howard looked at her with an expression which transfigured his face and sent the colour flaming to her cheeks. "That being the case," he said, "let us—let us make the record one that will not be forgotten—soon."

During the month he saw her almost every day. She was most ingenious in arranging these meetings. They were together afternoons and evenings. They were often alone. Yet she was careful not to violate any convention, always to keep, or seem to be keeping, one foot "on the line." Howard threw himself into his infatuation with all his power of concentration He practically took a month's holiday from the office. He thought about her incessantly. He used all his skill with words in making love to her. And she abandoned herself to an equal infatuation with equal absorption. Neither of them spoke of the past or the future. They lived in the present, talked of the present.

One day she spoke of herself as an orphan.

"I did not know that," he said. "But then what do I know about you in relation to the rest of the world? To me you are an isolated act of creation."

"You must tell me about yourself." She was looking at him, surprised. "Why, I know nothing at all about you."

"Oh, yes, you do. You know all that there is to know—all that is important."

"What?" She was asking for the pleasure of hearing him say it.

"That I love you—you—all of you—all of you, with all of me."

Her eyes answered for her lips, which only said smilingly: "No, we haven't time to get acquainted—at least not to-day."

* * * * *

She was to start for Florida at ten the next morning. Mrs. Carnarvon was going away to the opera, giving them the last evening alone. Marian had asked this of her point-blank.

"You are an extraordinarily sensible as well as strong-willed girl, Marian," Mrs. Carnarvon replied.

"I can't find it in my heart to blame you for what you're doing. The fact that I haven't even hinted a protest, but have lent myself to your little plots, shows that that young man has hypnotized me also."

"You needn't disturb yourself, as you know," Marian said gaily. "I'm not hypnotized. I shall not see Mr. Howard again until—after it's all over. Perhaps not then."

He came to dinner and they were not alone until almost nine. She sat near the open fire among the cushions heaped high upon the little sofa. She had never been more beautiful, and apparently never in a happier mood. They both laughed and talked as if it were the first instead of the last day of their month. Neither spoke of the parting; each avoided all subjects that pointed in direction of the one subject of which both thought whenever their minds left the immediate present. As the little clock on the mantle began to intimate in a faint, polite voice the quarter before eleven, he said abruptly, almost brusquely:

"I feel like a coward, giving you up in this way. Yes—giving you up; for you have a traitor in your fortress who has offered me the keys, who offers them to me now. But I do not trust you; and I can't trust myself. The curse of luxury is on you, the curse of ambition on me. If we had found each the other younger; if I had lived less alone, more in the ordinary habit of dependence upon others; if you had been brought up to live instead of to have all the machinery of living provided and conducted for you—well, it might have been different."

"You are wrong as to me, right as to yourself. But yours is not the curse of ambition. It is the passion for freedom. It would be madness for you, thinking as you do, even if you could—and you can't."

He stood up and held out his hand. She did not rise or look at him.

"Good night," she said at last, putting her hand in his. "Of course I am thinking I shall see you tomorrow. One does not come out of such a dream," —she looked up at him smiling—"all in a moment."

"Good night," he smiled back at her. "I shall not open 'the fiddler's bill' until—until I have to." At the door he turned. She had risen and was kneeling on the sofa, her elbow on its low arm, her chin upon her hand, her eyes staring into the fire. He came toward her.

"May I kiss you?" he said.

"Yes." Her voice was expressionless.

He bent over and just touched his lips to the back of her neck at the edge of her hair. He thought that she trembled slightly, but her face was set and she did not look toward him. He turned and left her. Half an hour later she heard the bell ring—it was Mrs. Carnarvon. She wished to see no one, so she fled through the rear door of the reception room and up the great stairway to lock herself in her boudoir. She sank slowly upon the lounge in front of the fire and closed her eyes. The fire died out and the room grew cold. A warning chilliness made her rise to get ready for bed.

"No," she said aloud. "It isn't ambition and it isn't lack of love. It's a queer sort of cowardice; but it's cowardice for all that. He's a coward or he wouldn't have given up. But—I wonder—how am I going to live without him? I need him—more than he needs me, I'm afraid."

She was standing before her dressing table. On it was a picture of Danvers—handsome, self-satisfied, healthy, unintellectual. She looked at it, gave a little shiver, and with the end of her comb toppled it over upon its face.



XIII.

RECKONING WITH DANVERS.

On that journey south Marian for the first time studied Danvers as a husband in prospect.

The morning after they left New York, their private car arrived at Savannah. At dark the night before they were rushing through a snow storm raging in a wintry landscape. Now they were looking out upon spring from the open windows. As soon as the train stopped, all except Marian and Danvers left the car to walk up and down the platform. Danvers, standing behind Marian, looked around to make sure that none of the servants was about, then rubbed his hand caressingly and familiarly upon her cheek.

"Did you miss me?" he asked.

Marian could not prevent her head from shrinking from his touch.

"There's nobody about," Danvers said, reassuringly. But he acted upon the hint and, taking his hand away, came around and sat beside her.

"Did you miss me?" he repeated, looking at her with an expression in his frank, manly blue eyes that made her flush at the thought of "treason" past and to come.

"Did you miss me?" she evaded.

"I would have returned long ago if I had not been ashamed," he answered, smiling. "I never thought that I should come not to care for as good shooting as that. You almost cost me my life."

"Yes?" Marian spoke absently. She was absorbed in her mental comparison of the two men.

"I got away from the others and was looking at your picture. They started up a lion and he came straight at me from behind. If he hadn't made a misstep in his hurry and loosened a stone, I guess he would have got me. As it was, I got him."

"You mean your gun got him."

"Of course. You don't suppose I tackled him bare-handed."

"It might have been fairer. I don't see how you can boast of having killed a creature that never bothered you, that you had to go thousands of miles out of your way to find, and that you attacked with a gun, giving him no chance to escape."

"What nonsense!" laughed Danvers. "I never expected to hear you say anything like that. Who's been putting such stuff into your head?"

Marian coloured. She did not like his tone. She resented the suggestion of the truth that her speech was borrowed. It made her uncomfortable to find herself thus unexpectedly on the dangerous ground.

"I suppose it must have been that newspaper fellow Mrs. Carnarvon has taken up. She talked about him for an hour after you left us to go to bed last night."

"Yes, it was—was Mr. Howard." Marian had recovered herself. "I want you to meet him some time. You'll like him, I'm sure."

"I doubt it. Mrs. Carnarvon seemed not to know much about him. I suppose he's more or less of an adventurer."

Marian wondered if this obvious dislike was the result of one of those strange instincts that sometimes enable men to scent danger before any sign of it appears.

"Perhaps he is an adventurer," she replied. "I'm sure I don't know. Why should one bother to find out about a passing acquaintance? It is enough to know that he is amusing."

"I'm not so sure of that. He might make off with the jewels when you had your back turned."

As soon as she had made her jesting denial of her real lover Marian was ashamed of herself. And Danvers' remark, though a jest, cut her. "What I said about a passing acquaintance was not just or true," she said impulsively and too warmly. "Mr. Howard is not an adventurer. I admire and like him very much indeed. I'm proud of his friendship."

Danvers shrugged his shoulders and looked at her suspiciously.

"You saw a good deal of this—this friend of yours?" he demanded, his mouth straightening into a dictatorial line.

At this Marian grew haughty and her eyes flashed: "Why do you ask?" she inquired, her tone dangerously calm.

"Because I have the right to know." He pointed to the diamond on her third finger.

"Oh—that is soon settled." Marian drew off the ring and held it out to him. "Really, Teddy, I think you ought to have waited a little longer before insisting so fiercely on your rights."

"Don't be absurd, Marian." Danvers did not take the ring but fixed his eyes upon her face and changed his tone to friendly remonstrance. "You know the ring doesn't mean anything. It's your promise that counts. And honestly don't you think your promise does give me the right to ask you about your new friends when you speak of them, of one of them, in—in such a way?"

"I don't intend to deceive you," she said, turning the ring around slowly on her finger. "I didn't know how to tell you. I suppose the only way to speak is just to speak."

"Do you think you are in love with this man, Marian?"

She nodded, then after a long pause, said, "Yes, Teddy, I love him."

"But I thought——"

"And so did I, Teddy. But he came, and I—well I couldn't help it."

As he did not speak, she looked at him. His face was haggard and white and in his eyes which met hers frankly there was suffering.

"It wasn't my fault, Teddy," Marian laid her hand on his arm, "at least, not altogether. I might have kept away and I didn't."

"Oh, I don't blame you. I blame him."

"But it wasn't his fault. I—I—encouraged him."

"Did he know that we were engaged?"

"Yes," reluctantly.

"The scoundrel! I suspected that he was rotten somewhere."

"You are unjust to him. I have not told you properly."

"Did he tell you that he cared for you?"

"Yes—but he didn't try to get me to break my engagement."

"So much the more a scoundrel, he. Tell me, Marian—come to your senses and tell me—what in the devil did he hang about you for and make love to you, if he didn't want to marry you? Would an honest man, a decent man, do that?"

Marian's face confessed assent.

"I should think you would have seen what sort of a fellow he is. I should think you would despise him."

"Sometimes it seems to me that I ought to. But I always end by despising myself—and—and—it makes no difference in the way I feel toward him."

"I think I would do well to look him up and give him a horse-whipping. But you'll get over him, Marian. I am astonished at your cousin. How could she let this go on? But then, she's crazy about him too."

Marian smiled miserably. "I've owned up and you ought to congratulate yourself on so luckily getting rid of such an untrustworthy person as I."

"Getting rid of you?" Danvers looked at her defiantly. "Do you think I'm going to let you go on and ruin yourself on an impulse? Not much! I hold you to your promise. You'll come round all right after you've been away from this fellow for a few days. You'll be amazed at yourself a week from now."

"You don't understand, Teddy." Marian wished him to see once for all that, whatever might be the future for her and Howard, there was no future for her and him. "Don't make it so hard for me to tell you."

"I don't want to hear any more about it now, Marian. I can't stand it—I hardly know what I'm saying—wait a few days—let's go on as we have been—here they come."

The others of the party came bustling into the car and the train started. For the rest of the journey Danvers avoided her, keeping to the smoking room and the game of poker there. Marian could neither read nor watch the landscape. She did not know whether to be glad or sorry that she had told him. She hated to think that she had inflicted pain and she could not believe, in spite of what she had seen in his eyes, that his feeling in the matter was more than jealousy and wounded vanity.

"He doesn't really care for me," she thought. "It's his pride that is hurt. He will flare out at me and break it off. I do hope he'll get angry. It will make it so much easier for me."

Late in the afternoon she took Mrs. Carnarvon into her confidence. "I've told Teddy," she said.

"I might have known!" exclaimed her cousin. "What on earth made you do that?"

"I don't know—perhaps shame."

"Shame—trash! Your life is going to be a fine turmoil if you run to Teddy with an account of every little mild flirtation you happen to have. Of all the imbeciles, the most imbecile is the woman who confesses."

"But how could I marry him when——"

"When you don't love him?"

"No—I might have done that. I like him. But, when I love another man."

"It does make a difference. But you ought to be able to foresee that you'll get over Howard in a few weeks——"

"Precisely what Teddy said."

"Did he? I'm surprised at his having so much sense. For, if you'll forgive me, I don't think Teddy will ever set New York on fire—at least, he's—well, he has the makings of an ideal husband. And has he broken it off?"

"No. He wouldn't have it."

"Really? Well he is in love. Most men in his position—able to get any girl he wants—would have thrown up the whole business. Yes, he must be awfully in love."

"Do you think that?" Marian's voice spoke distress but she felt only satisfaction. "Oh, I hope not—that is, I'd like to think he cared a great deal and at the same time I don't want to hurt him."

"Don't fret yourself about these two men. Just go on thinking as you please. You'll be surprised how soon Howard will fade." Mrs. Carnarvon smiled satirically at some thought—perhaps a memory. "You're a good deal of a goose, my dear, but you are a great deal more of a woman. That's why I feel sure that Teddy will win."

With such an opportunity—with the field clear and the woman half-remorseful over her treachery, half-indignant at the man who had shown himself so weak and spiritless—a cleverer or a less vain man than Danvers would have triumphed easily. And for the first week he did make progress. He acted upon the theory that Marian had been hypnotized and that the proper treatment was to ignore her delusion and to treat her with assiduous but not annoying consideration. He did not pose as an injured or jealous lover. He was the friend, always at her service, always thinking out plans for her amusement. He made no reference to their engagement or to Howard.

Several people of their set were at the hotel and Marian was soon drifting back into her accustomed modes of thought. The wider horizon which she fancied Howard had shown her was growing dim and hazy. The horizon which he had made her think narrow was beginning again to seem the only one. This meant Danvers; but he was not acute enough to understand her and to follow up his advantage.

One morning as he was walking up and down under the palms, waiting for Mrs. Carnarvon and Marian, Mrs. Fortescue called him. She was a cold, rather handsome woman. In her eyes was the expression that always betrays the wife or the mistress who loathes the man she lives with, enduring him only because he gives her that which she most wants—money. She had one fixed idea—to marry her daughter "well," that is, to money.

"Can you join us to-day, Teddy?" she asked. "We need one more man."

"I'm waiting for Mrs. Carnarvon and Marian," he explained.

"Oh, of course." Mrs. Fortescue smiled. "What a nice girl she is—so clever, so—so independent. I admired her immensely for deciding to marry that poor, obscure young fellow. I like to see the young people romantic."

Danvers flushed angrily and pulled at his mustache. He tried to smile. "We've teased her about it a good deal," he said, "but she denies it."

"I suppose they aren't ready to announce the engagement yet," Mrs. Fortescue suggested. "I suppose they are waiting until he betters his position a little. It's never a good idea to have too long a time between the announcement and the marriage."

"Perhaps that is it." Danvers tried to look indifferent but his eyes were sullen with jealousy.

"I always rather thought that you and Marian were going to make a match of it," continued Mrs. Fortescue. Just then her daughter came down the walk. She was fashionably dressed in white and blue that brought out all the loveliness of her golden hair and violet eyes and faintly-coloured, smooth fair skin. Danvers had not seen her since she "came out," and was dazzled by her radiance.

They say that every man must be a little in love with every pretty woman he sees. And Danvers at once gave Ellen Fortescue her due. She sat silent beside her mother, looking the personification of innocence, purity and poetry. Her mother continued subtly to poison Danvers against Marian, to make him feel that she had not appreciated him, that she had trifled with him, that she had not treated him as his dignity and importance merited. When she and Mrs. Carnarvon appeared, he joined them tardily, after having made an arrangement with the Fortescues for the next day.

That evening he danced several times with Ellen Fortescue and adopted the familiar lover's tactics—he set about making Marian jealous. He scored the customary success. When she went to bed she lay for several hours looking out into the moonlight, raging against the Fortescues and against Danvers. The mere fact that a man whom she regarded as hers was permitting himself to show marked attention to another woman would have been sufficient. But in addition, Marian was perfectly aware of the material advantages of this particular man. She did not want to marry him; at least she was of that mind at the moment. But she might change her mind. Certainly, if there was to be any breaking off, she wished it to be of her doing. She did not fancy the idea of him departing joyfully.

She was far too wise to show that she saw what was going on. She praised Miss Fortescue to Danvers with apparent frankness and insisted on him devoting more time to her. Danvers persisted in his scheme boldly for a week and then, just as Marian was despairing and was casting about for another plan of campaign, he gave in. They were sitting apart in the shadow near one of the windows of the ball-room. He had been sullen all the evening, almost rude.

"How much longer are you going to keep me in suspense?" he burst out angrily.

"In suspense?"

"You know what I mean. I think I've been very patient."

"You mean our engagement?" Marian was looking at him, repelled by his expression, his manner, the tone of his voice, his whole mood.