"If a cartoon is worth printing at all," he said, "it is worth printing large and conspicuous. And to be worth printing it must be like an ideal editorial—one point sharply and swiftly made and so clear that the most careless glance-of-the-eye is enough."

Wickham had made a series of cartoons on the campaign, humorous and satirical, which had the distinction of being reproduced on lantern slides for use in all parts of the town. It was an admirable beginning of the new policy of illustration. Howard had been making a careful study of all the illustrators in the country, not overlooking those toiling in obscurity on the big western dailies. He had selected a staff of twenty; as soon as Coulter and Stokely assented, he engaged them by telegraph. Five were developed artists, the rest beginners with talent. He gave all of his attention for two weeks to organising this staff. He infected it with his enthusiasm. He impressed upon it his ideas of newspaper illustration—the dash and energy of the French illustrators adapted to American public taste. He insisted upon the artists studying the French illustrated papers and applying what they learned. It was not until the first Sunday in December that he felt ready to submit the results of these labours to the public.

Again he scored over the "contemporaries" of the News-Record. They printed many more illustrations than it did. It had only one illustration on a page, but there was one on every page and a good one. All the subjects were well chosen—either action or character—and as many good looking women as possible.

"Never publish a commonplace face," he said. "There is no such thing in life as an uninteresting face. Always find the element of interest and bring it out."

The result of this policy, interpreted by a carefully trained and enthusiastic staff, was what the out-of-town press was soon praising as "a revelation in newspaper-illustration." Howard himself was surprised. He had mentally insured against a long period of disappointment.

"This shows," he remarked to King and Vroom, "how much more competent men are than we usually think—if they get a chance, if they are pointed in the right direction and are left free."

"He certainly knows his business." Vroom was looking after Howard admiringly. "I never saw anybody who so well understood when to lead and when to let alone. What results he does get!"

"A pity to waste such talents on this thankless business," said King. "If he'd gone into real business, he would have a salary of a hundred thousand a year, would be rich and secure for life. Why, a business man could and would make a whole career on the ideas he has in a single week. As it is——"

King shrugged his shoulders and Vroom finished the sentence for him: "Coulter and Stokely could kick him out to-morrow and the News-Record would go straight on living upon his ideas for ten years at least."

Howard needed no one to make this truth clear to him to the full. Often, as he thought of his expanding tastes, his expanding expenditures and his expanding plans both for his private life and for his career, he felt an awful sinking at the heart and a sense of fundamental weakness.

"I am building upon sand," he said to himself. "In business, in the law, in almost any other career to-day's work would be to-morrow's capital. As it is, I am ever more and more a slave. To be free I ought to be poor or rich. And I cannot endure the thought of poverty again. I must be rich."

The idea allured him to a degree that made him ashamed of himself. Sometimes, when he was talking to Marian or writing editorials, all in the strain of high principle and contempt for sordidness, he would flush at the thought that he was in reality a good deal of a hypocrite. "I'm expressing the ideals I ought to have, the ideals I used to have, not the ideals I have."

But the clearer this discrepancy became to him and the wider the gap between what he ought to think and what he really did think, the more strenuously he protested to himself against himself, and the more fiercely he denounced in public the very poison he was himself taking.

"I am living in a tainted atmosphere," he said to Marian. "We all are. I fight against the taint but how can I hope to avoid the consequences if I persist in breathing it, in absorbing it at every pore of my body?"

"I don't understand you." Marian was used to his moods of self-criticism and did not attach much importance to them.

He thought a moment. "Oh, nothing," he said. "What's the use of discussing what can't be helped?" How could he tell her that the greatest factor in his enervating environment was herself; that the strongest chains which held him in it were the chains which bound him to her? Indeed, was he not indulging in cowardly self-excuse in thinking that this was true? Had not his success, rather than his love, made ambition unfettered by principle the mainspring of his life?



XX.

ILLUSION.

"How shall we be married?" Howard asked her in the late Autumn.

"I know it will not be in a church with ushers and bridesmaids and a crowd gaping at us. I suppose there is a public side to marriage since the state makes one enter into a formal contract. But that can be done privately. I should as soon think of driving down the Avenue with my arms about your neck as of a public wedding."

"Thank you," he laughed. "I was afraid—well, women are usually so fond of—but you're not usual. Let us see. The minister is absolutely necessary, I suppose. Would one feel married if there were not a minister?"

"I don't know—I feel—"

She hesitated and blushed but looked straight at him with that expression in her eyes which always made him think of their love as their religion.

"Feel—go on. I want to hear that very, very much."

"I feel as if I were just as much married to you now as I ever could be."

"And that is how I have felt ever since the day, when I hardly knew you, when you suddenly came into my life—my real, inner life where no one had been before—and sat down and at once made it look as if it were your home. And the place that had been lonely was lonely no more, and has not been since."

She put her hand in his and he saw that there were tears in her eyes.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Only that—that I am so happy. It—it frightens me. It seems so like a dream."

"It's going to be a long, long dream, isn't it?" He lifted her hand and kissed it, then put it down in her lap again gently as if he feared a sudden movement might awaken them. "Perhaps it had better be at Mrs. Carnarvon's house—some morning just before luncheon and we could go quietly away afterward."

"Yes—and—tell me," she said, "wouldn't it be better for us not to go far away—and not to stay long? It seems to me that I most want to begin—begin our life together just as it will be."

"Are you afraid you wouldn't know what to do with me if I were idling about all day long?"

"Not exactly that. But I'd rather not take a vacation until we had earned it together."

"What a beautiful idea! I'll see what I can do."

They postponed the wedding until Howard had the "art-department" of the News-Record well established. It was on a bright winter day in the second week of January that they stood up together and were married by the Mayor whom Howard had helped to elect. Only Mr. and Mrs. Carnarvon and Marian's brother were there. Then the six sat down to luncheon, and at three o'clock Howard and his wife started for Lakewood.

When they arrived a victoria was waiting. As soon as they were seated, Howard said "Home." The coachman touched his hat and the horses set out at a swift trot. The sun was setting and the dry, still air was saturated with the perfume of the snow-draped pines. Within five minutes the carriage was at a pretty little cottage with wide, glass-enclosed porches. They entered the hall. In the rooms on either side open fires were blazing an ecstatic welcome.

"How do you like 'home'?" asked Howard.

"I don't quite understand."

"You remember your plan of beginning at once. Well—this is the compromise. Stokely has let me have his house here for a month—we may keep it two if we like it. There is a telephone. The office isn't two hours away by rail. The newspapers are here early. We can combine work and play."

The manservant had left the room, a sort of library-reception room. Marian was seated in a big chair drawn near the fire. She had thrown back her wraps and was slowly drawing off her gloves. Howard stood at the side of the fire, leaning against the mantel and looking down at her.

"Before you definitely decide to stay—" he paused.

"Yes," she said, her colour heightening as she slowly lifted her eyes to his, "yes—why this solemn tone?"

"If ever—in the days that come—one never knows what may happen—if ever you should find that you had changed toward me——"

"Yes?"

"I ask you—don't promise—I never want you to promise me anything—I want you always—at every moment—to be perfectly free. So I just ask that you will let me see it. Then we can talk about it frankly, and we can decide what is best to do."

"But—suppose—you see I might still not wish to wound you—" she suggested, half teasing, half in earnest.

"It seems to me now that it is impossible that we can ever change. It seems to me—" he sat on the wide arm of her chair, and leaned over until his head touched hers, "that if you were to change it would break my heart. But if you were to change and were to hide it from me, I should find it out some day and——" "And what——"

"It would be worse—a broken heart, a horror of myself, a—a contempt for you."

"Whatever comes, I'll be myself or try to be. Is that what you mean?"

"Exactly."

"And if you change?"

"But I shall not!"

"Why do you say that so positively?"

"Because—well, there are some things that we wish to believe and half believe, and some things that we believe that we believe, and somethings that we know. I know about you—about my love for you."

"It is strange in a way, isn't it?" Marian was gently drawing her fingers through his. "This is all so different from what I used to think love would be. I used to picture to myself a man, something like you in appearance, only taller and fair, who would be my master, who would make me do what he wished. I think a woman always dreams of a lover who will be strong enough to be her ruler. And here——"

"So I am not the strong man that you look up to and tremble before? We shall see."

"Don't laugh at me. I mean that instead I have a man who makes me rule myself. You make me feel strong, not weak, and proud, not humble. You make me respect myself so."

"The democracy of love—freedom, equality, fraternity. Don't you like it?"

"Madame is served." It was the servant holding back one of the portieres, his face expressionless, his eyes down.

* * * * *

Happiness evades description or analysis. We can only say that it reaches its highest point when a man and a woman, intelligent, appreciative, sympathetic, endowed with youth, health and freedom, are devoting their energies solely and determinedly to verifying each a preconceived idea of the other.

"And what do you think of it by this time?"

Marian asked the question in the pause after a twenty minutes' canter over a straightaway stretch through the pines.

"Of what?" Howard inquired. "I mean of what phase of it. Of you?"

"Well,—yes, of me—after a week."

"As I expected, only more so—more than I could have imagined. And you, what do you think?"

"It's very different from what I expected. It seemed to me beforehand that you, even you, would 'get on my nerves' just a little at times. I didn't expect you to appreciate—to feel my moods and to avoid doing—or is it that you simply cannot do—anything jarring. You have amazing instincts or else—" Marian looked at him and smiled mischievously, "or else you have been well educated. Oh, I don't mind—not in the least. No matter what the cause, I'm glad—glad—glad that you have been taught how to treat a woman."

"I see you are determined to destroy me," Howard was in jest, yet in earnest. "I am not used to being flattered. I have never had but one critic, and I have trained him to be severe and uncharitable. Now if you set me up on a high altar and wave the censers and cry 'glory, glory, glory,' I'll lose my head. You have a terrible responsibility. I trust you and I believe everything you say."

"I'll begin my duties as critic as soon as we go back to—to earth. But at present I'm going to be selfish. You see it makes me happier to blind myself to your faults."

They rode in silence for a few moments and then she said:

"I wish I had your feeling about—about democracy. I see your point of view but I can't take it. I know that you are right but I'm afraid my education is too strong for me. I don't believe in the people as you do. It's beautiful when you say it. I like to hear you. And I would not wish you to feel as I do. I'd hate it if you did. It would be stooping, grovelling for you to make distinctions among people. But——"

"Oh, but I do make distinctions among people—so much so that I have never had a friend in my life until you came. I have been on intimate terms with many, but no one except you has been on intimate terms with me. Oh, yes, I'm one of the most exclusive persons in the world."

"That sounds like autocracy, doesn't it?" laughed Marian. "But you know I don't mean that. You think all the others are just as good as you are, only in different ways, whereas I feel that they're not. You don't mind vulgarity and underbreeding because you are perfectly indifferent to people so long as they don't try to jump the fence about your own little private enclosure."

"Oh, I believe in letting other people alone, and I insist upon being let alone myself. You see you make the whole world revolve about social distinctions. The fact is, isn't it, that social distinctions are mere trifles—"

"You oughtn't to waste time arguing with a prejudice. I admit that what I believe and feel is unreasonable. But I can't change an instinct. To me some people are better than others and are entitled to more, and ought to be looked up to and respected."

Howard had an answer on the tip of his tongue. His passion for high principle seemed to have been rekindled for the time by his love and in this tranquillising environment. He felt strongly tempted to reason with her unreasonableness, thus practically boasted as a virtue. It seemed so unworthy, this streak of snobbery, so senseless in an American at most three generations away from manual labour. But he had made up his mind long ago to trust to new surroundings, new interests to create in her a spirit more in sympathy with his career.

"She is too intelligent, too high-minded," he often reassured himself, "to cling to this stupidity of class-feeling. She has heard nothing but class-distinction all her life. Now that she is away from those people, with their petty routine of petty ideas, she will begin to see things as they are."

So he suppressed the argument and, instead, said in a tone of mock-pity: "Poor fallen queen—to marry beneath her. How she must have fought against the idea of such a plebeian partner."

"Plebeian—you?" Marian looked at him proudly. "Why, one has only to see you to know."

"Yes, plebeian. I shall conceal it no longer. My ancestors were plain, ordinary, common, untitled Americans."

"Why, so were mine," she laughed.

"Don't! You distress me. I should never have married you had I known that."

"I am absurd, am I not?" Marian said gaily. "But let me have my craze for well-mannered people and I'll leave you your craze for the—the masses."

They began to canter. Howard was smiling in spite of his irritation; for it always irritated him to have her refuse to see his point in this matter—his distinction between a person as a friend and a person as a sociological unit.

He worked for an hour or two every morning and sometimes in the evening, Marian not far from his desk, so seated that when she turned the page of her book she could lift her eyes and look at him. She read the papers diligently every day for the first week. At the outset she thought she was interested. But she knew so little about newspaper details that she soon had to confess to herself that she was in fact interested in Howard as her husband and lover, and that his career interested her only in a broad, general way. What he talked about, that she understood and liked and was able to discuss. But the newspapers and the news direct suggested nothing to her, bored her.

"Just read that," he would say, pointing to an item. She would read it and wonder what he meant.

"It seems to me," she would think, "that it wouldn't in the least matter if that had not been printed." Then she would ask evasively but with an assumption of interest, "What are you going to do about it?"

And he would explain the meaning between the lines; the hinted facts that ought to be brought out; the possibilities of getting a piece of news that would attract wide attention. And she would see it, sometimes clearly, usually vaguely; and she would admire him, but resume her unconquerable indifference to news.

She was soon looking at the paper only to read what he wrote; and she often thought how much more interesting he was as a talker than as a writer. "I'll start right when we get to town," she was constantly promising herself. "It must, must, must be our work."

Howard was, as she had told him, acutely sensitive to her moods. He did not formulate it to himself but simply obeyed an instinct which defined for him the limits of her interest. Before they had been at Lakewood a month, he was working alone without any expectation of sympathy or interest from her and without the slightest sense of loss in not getting it. Why should he miss that which he had never had, had never counted upon getting? He had always been mentally alone, most alone in the plans and actions bearing directly upon his own career. He was perfectly content to have her as the companion of his leisure.

Possibly, if he had been insistent, or if they had been in real sympathy instead of in only surface sympathy in most respects, she might have become interested in his work, might have impelled him to right development. But her distaste and inertia and his habit of debating and deciding questions as to the paper in his own mind, the fear of boring her, the dread of intruding upon her rights to her own individual tastes and feelings, restrained him without his having a sense of restraint.

When, after two months, they went up to town to stay, their course of life was settled, though Marian was protesting that it was not and Howard was unconscious of there having been any settlement, or anything to settle.



XXI.

WAVERING.

Their home was an apartment at Twenty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue—just large enough for two with its eleven rooms, all bearing the stamp of Marian's individuality. She had a keen sense of the beautiful and she had given her thought and most of her time between the early autumn and the wedding to making an attractive home. He had not seen her work until they came together in the late afternoon of a day in the last week of February.

"You—everywhere you," he said, as they inspected room after room. "I don't see how I could add anything to that. It is beautiful—the things you have brought together, I mean, the furniture, curtains, carpets, pictures, all beautiful in themselves, but—"

He was looking at her in that way which made her feel his great love for her even more deeply than when he put his arms about her and kissed her. "It reminds me of what I so often think about you. Nature gave you beauty but you make it wonderful because you shine through it, give it the force, the expression of your individuality. Other women have noses, eyes, chins, mouths as beautiful as yours. But only you produce such effects with the materials. I don't express it very well but—you understand?"

"Yes, I understand." She was leaning against him, her head resting upon his shoulder. "And you like your home?"

"We shall be happy here. I feel it in the air. This is a temple of the three great gods—Freedom, Love and Happiness. And—we'll keep the fires on the altars blazing, won't we?"

His hours were most irregular. Sometimes he was off to work early in the morning. Again he would not rise until noon. Sometimes he did not go to the office after dinner, and again he came hurriedly to dinner, not having the time to dress, and left immediately afterward to be gone until two, three or even four in the morning. At first Marian tried to follow his irregularities; but she was soon compelled to give up. As he most often breakfasted about ten o'clock, she arranged to breakfast regularly at that hour. If he was not yet up, she waited about the house until she had seen him, listened while he talked of those "everlasting newspapers," praised his work a great deal, criticised it little and that gently. She made few and feeble struggles to interest herself in newspapers as newspapers. But he did not encourage her; other interests, domestic and social, clamoured for her time; and the idea of being directly useful to him in his work faded from her mind.

If she had loved him more sympathetically, if she had not been so super-sensitive to his passion for complete freedom, she would have resented what in another kind of man would have seemed frank neglect of her. But she thought she understood him and was deceived by his self-deceiving conviction that his work was her service and that the highest proof of his devotion to her was devotion to "our" career. Thus there was no bitterness or reproach of him, rarely much intensity, in her regret that they were together so little.

"Good morning, stranger!" she said, as he came into the dining room one day in early June.

He kissed her hand and then the "topknot" as he called the point into which her hair was gathered at the crown of her head. "It has been four days since I saw you," he said. And he sat opposite her looking at her with an expression of sadness which she had not seen since the first days of their acquaintance.

"I have missed you—you know," she was trying to look cheerful, "but I understand—"

"Yes," he interrupted. "You understand what I intend, understand that I mean my life to be for us. But sometimes—this morning—I think I am mistaken. It seems to me that I am letting this—" he threw his hand contemptuously toward the heap of morning newspapers beside him, "this trash comes between us. You are my real career, not these, and under the pretense of working for us I am spending my whole life, my one life, my one chance to help to make us happy, upon these." And he pushed the bundle of papers off the table.

"Something has depressed you." She was leaning her elbow upon the table and her chin upon her hand and was looking at him wistfully. "I wouldn't have you any different. You must follow the law of your nature. You must work at your ideal of being useful and influential in the world. You would not be satisfied to take my hand and trudge off with me through Arcadia to pick flowers and weave them into crowns for me. Nor should I," she laughed, "or I try to think I shouldn't."

"Let us go abroad for two months," he said. "I am tired, so tired. I am so weary of all these others, men and things."

"Can you spare the time?"

"I"—he corrected himself—"we have earned a vacation. It will be for me the first real vacation since I left Yale—thirteen years ago. I am growing narrow and stale. Let us get away and forget. Shall we?"

"The sooner the better—if this is not a passing mood. What has depressed you?" she persisted.

"What seems to be a piece of very good luck." He laughed almost sneeringly. "They have given me a share in the paper, twenty thousand in stock—which means a fixed income of five thousand a year so long as the paper pays what it does now—twenty-five per cent. And they offer me twenty thousand more at par to be paid for within two years. We are in a fair way to be rich."

"They don't want to lose you, evidently," she said. "But why does this make you sad? We are independent now—absolutely independent, both of us."

"Yes—we are rich. Together we have more than thirty-five thousand a year. But it is not what I wanted. I wanted to be free. Can a man be free who is rich, and rich in the way we are? Will my mind be open? Shall I dare to act and speak the truth? Or will our property, our environment, speak for me?"

"I can't imagine you a slave to mere dollars."

"Can't you? Well, I am afraid—I'm really afraid. I have always said that if I wished to—enslave a people I would make them prosperous, would give them property, make them dependent upon their dollars. Then the fear of losing their dollars, their investments, would make them endure any oppression. Freedom's battles were never fought by men with full stomachs and full purses."

"But rich men have given up everything for freedom—Washington was a rich man."

"Ah, but how many Washingtons has the world produced? I see the time coming when I shall have to choose. I see it and—I dread it."

She rose and stood behind him leaning over with her arms about his neck and her check against his.

"You are brave. You are strong," she whispered. "You will meet that crisis if it comes and I have no fear, Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, as to how the battle will go."

He was glad that he did not have to face her eyes just then. "We will go abroad next Wednesday week," he whispered, "and we'll be happy in France—in Switzerland—in Holland—I want to see the park at the Hague again; and the tall trees with their straight big trunks green with moss; and the boughs meeting over the canals and making the clear water so black; and the snow-white swans sailing statelily about."

* * * * *

With the Atlantic between him and his work, he was able to suspend the habit of so many years. You would have fancied them just married, at whatever stage of their wanderings you might have met them. They were always laughing and talking—an endless flow of high spirits, absorption each in the other. They rose when they pleased, went to bed when it suited them. They had a manservant and a maid with them to relieve them of all the details. They travelled only in the afternoons, and then not far. If they missed one train, they cheerfully waited for another.

"I think we are achieving my ideal of vacation," he said.

"What is that—perfect idleness? We certainly are idle. I shouldn't have believed you could be so idle."

"Perfect idleness—yes. But more than that. I aimed far higher. My ideal was perfect irresponsibility. We have become like the wind that bloweth where it listeth."

And again, she said: "Let me see, what day is this?"

"I think it is Thursday or Friday," he replied. "But it may be Sunday. I can assure you that it is afternoon, late afternoon, and I think we ought to dress for dinner soon. After dinner, if you still care to know, and will remind me, I'll try to find out the day. But I'm sure we shall have forgotten before to-morrow."

Howard got an extension of his leave of absence and they roamed about England in August, reaching New York on the first day of September. Marian went on to Mrs. Carnarvon at Newport and Howard took rooms at the Waldorf. She stayed away a full week, then came to town, opened their apartment, and surprised him with a formal invitation to dinner.

He came like a guest and they went through all the formalities of meeting for the first time, of increasing intimacy—condensing a complete courtship into one evening.

"I thought you had had enough of me for the time," he said, as they sat in the wide window-seat, he tracing with his forefinger the line of the straps over her bare shoulders.

"And I thought that I would give you a chance to forget how nice I am and so give you the pleasure of learning all over again. But it was so lonely and miserable up there. 'Who can come after the king?'"

"Sometimes I think I ought to stir about more—meet the men who lead in the city. But it seems such a waste of time when I can come and call upon you."

"But might it not be better in the long run if you did meet these men? Mightn't it make your getting on quicker and easier?"

"Perhaps—if I were a gregarious animal, but I'm not. I'm shy and solitary and hard to get acquainted with. And it takes time to make friends. Besides, in making friends you also make enemies, and one enemy can do you more harm than all your friends can do you good. Then too, friends take up too much time. We have so little time and—we can spend it to so much better advantage—can't we?"

Marian pushed herself closer against him and presently said dreamily: "So much happiness, such utter happiness which no one, nothing can take away. I wonder when and how the first storm will come?"

"It needn't come at all—not for a long, long time. And when it does—we can weather it, don't you think?"

* * * * *

During the next two months they were together more than they had been in the spring. He imposed day office hours upon himself and did no work in the evenings except the correcting of editorial proofs which he had sent to him at the house, at the theatre, or at whatever restaurant they were dining. And at midnight he called up the office on the telephone and talked with Mr. King or Mr. Vroom about the news in hand and the programme for presenting it in the next morning's paper.

But as "people"—meaning Marian's friends—returned to town, they fell into the former routine. It was in part his doing, in part hers. He was now thirty-seven years old and his mind, always of a serious cast, was intolerant of trifles and triflers.

Marian's range of interests was shallower but much wider than his. Her beauty, her cleverness, her tact caused her to be sought. She invited many to their house and accepted more and more invitations. At first she never went without him. But he was sometimes compelled by his work to send her alone. He rarely went except for her sake—because he thought going about amused her. And he was glad and relieved when she began to go without him, instead of spending the evenings in solitude.

"There is no reason why you should punish yourself and punish me because you had the ill luck to marry a working-man," he said. "It cannot be agreeable to sit here all by yourself evening after evening. And it depresses me when I am at the office at night to think of you as lonely. It makes me happier in my work—my pleasure, you know—to think of you enjoying yourself."

"But aren't you afraid that some one will steal me?" she asked, laughingly.

"Not I." He was smiling proudly at her. "If you could be stolen, if you could be happier anywhere than with me, you have only to let me into the plot."

"There are some women who would not like that."

"And there are men who wouldn't feel as I do. But you and I, we belong to a class all by ourselves, don't we?"

Apparently they were as devoted each to the other as ever. But each now sought a separate happiness—he perforce in his work, she perforce in the only way left open to her. When they were together, which meant several hours every day and usually one whole day in the week, they were at once seemingly absorbed each in the other with all the rest as background. But none the less, they were leading separate lives, with separate interests, separate tastes, separate modes of thinking. The "bourgeois" life which they had planned—both standing behind the counter and both adding up the results of the day's business after they had put up the shutters, two as one in all the interests of life—became a dead and forgotten dream.



XXII.

THE SHENSTONE EPISODE.

On the way to or from the opera or a party, she would peep in on him, watching the back of his head as he bent over his desk or read away at some dull-looking book, wishing that he would feel her presence and turn with that smile which was always hers from him, yet fearing to make a sound and compel his attention.

"At times I think," she said one day when he caught her in his arms on a sudden impulse and kissed her, "that the reason you don't try to rule me is because you don't care enough."

"That's precisely it." He was smoothing her eyebrows with his forefinger. "I don't care enough about ruling. I don't care enough for the sort of love that responds to 'must.'"

"But a woman likes to have 'must' said to her sometimes."

"Does she? Do you? Well—I'll say 'must' to you. You must love me freely and voluntarily, or not at all. You must do as you please."

"But don't you see that that drives me from you often, keeps us apart in many ways. Now if you compelled me to think as you do, to like what you like—"

"But I couldn't. Then you would no longer be you. And I like you so well just as you are that I would not change an idea in your head."

Marian sighed and went away to her dinner party. She felt that she was in danger. "Not of falling in love with some other man," she thought, "for that's impossible. But if a man were to come along who invited me to be interested in his work, to keep him at whatever he was doing, I'd accept and that would lead on and on—where?"

She soon had an opportunity to answer that question. Howard went away to Washington to assist the party leaders in putting through a difficult tariff-reform bill which all the protected interests were fighting. He expected to be gone a week; but week after week passed and he was still at the capital, directing the paper by telegraph and sending Marian hurried notes postponing his return. She was going about daily, early and late, her life vacant, her mind restlessly seeking occupation, interest.

After he had been gone three weeks she found herself at dinner at Mrs. Provost's next to a tall, fair-haired athletic young man of about her own age. Something in his expression—perhaps the amused way in which he studied the faces of the others—attracted her to him. She glanced over at his card. It read "Mr. Shenstone."

"It doesn't add much to your information, does it?" he smiled, as he caught her glance rising from the card.

"Nothing," she confessed candidly. "I never heard of you before."

"And yet I've been splashing about, trying to attract attention to myself, for twelve years."

"Perhaps not in this particular pond."

"No, that is true."

"I was wondering what you do—lawyer, doctor, journalist, business man or what.

"And what did you conclude?"

"I concluded that you did nothing."

"You are right. But I try—I paint."

"Portraits?"

"Yes."

"That explains your way of looking at people. Only, you'll get no customers if you paint them as you see them."

"I only see what they see when they look in the mirror."

"Yes, but you see it impartial—or rather, I should say, cynically."

"Thank you."

"For what?"

"For calling me cynical. The two keenest pleasures a man can attain are for a woman to call him a cynic and for a woman to call him a devil with the women."

"Are you a 'devil with the women'?"

"Not I—not any more than I am a cynic. But let us talk about you—I am about exhausted as a topic of conversation. Why do you look so discontented?"

"Because I have nothing to occupy my mind."

"No children?"

"None—and no dogs."

"No husband?"

"Husbands are busy."

"So you are the typical American woman—the American instinct for doing, the universal woman's instinct for sunshine and laziness; the husband absorbed in his business or profession with his domestic life as an incident; the wife—like you."

"That is right, and wrong—nearer right than wrong, a little unjust to the husband."

"Oh, it's probably your fault that you are not absorbed in his business or profession. It ought to be as much yours as his. What does he do?"

"He edits a newspaper."

"Oh, he's the Mr. Howard. A very interesting, a very remarkable man."

Marian was delighted by this appreciation. She talked with Shenstone again after dinner and was pleased that he was to be in the same box with her at the opera the next night. He had spent much of his time on the other side of the Atlantic. He was unusually well educated for an artist's, and his mind was not developed in one direction only. Like Marian, his point of view was artistic and emotional. Like her he had a reverence for tradition, a deference to caste—the latter not offensive for the same reason that hers was not, because good birth and good breeding made him of the "high caste" and not a cringer with his eyes craned upward. It seemed in him, as in her, a sort of self-respect.

Marian showed a candid liking for his society and he was quick to take advantage of it. For a month they saw more and more each of the other, she discreet without deliberation and he discreet with deliberation. He talked to her of his work, of his ambition. He showed her himself without egotism. He made an impression upon her so distinct and so favourable that she admitted to herself that he was the most fascinating man—except one—whom she had ever met.

When Howard at last returned, defeated by corruption within his own party and for the time disgusted with politics, she at once had Shenstone at the house to dine. "What do you think of Mr. Shenstone?" she asked when they were alone.

"No wonder you're enthusiastic about him. As he talked to me, I could hardly keep from laughing. It was your own views, almost your own words. He has the look of a great man. I think he will 'arrive,' as they say in the Bowery."

Howard went out of his way to be agreeable to Shenstone, often inviting him to the house and giving him a commission to paint Marian. For the rest of the winter Shenstone was constantly in Marian's company; so constantly that they were gossiped about, and all the women who were unpleasantly discussed "for cause" conspired to throw them together as much as possible.

One evening in the very end of the winter, Howard called to Marian from his dressing room: "Why, lady, Shenstone's gone, hasn't he? I've just read a note from him."

There was a pause before Marian answered in a constrained voice: "Yes, he sailed to-day."

Howard was tying his bow. He paused at the curious tone, then smiled mysteriously to himself. He put on his waistcoat and coat and knocked on the half-open door. "May I come in?" he asked.

"Yes—I'm waiting for dinner to be announced."

She was sitting before the fire, very beautiful in her evening gown. She seemed not to observe that he had entered but stared on into the flames. He stood beside her, looking down at her with the half mocking, half tender smile. Presently he sat upon the arm of her chair and took one of her hands. "Poor, friendless, beautiful lady," he said softly.

She glanced up quickly, her cheeks flaming but her eyes clear and frank. "Why do you say that?" she asked in the tone of one who knows why.

"Other women will not be her friends because they are jealous of her, and as for the men—how can a man be really a friend to a woman, a fascinating, sympathetic woman?"

Marian hid her face against the lapel of his coat. "He told me," she whispered, "and then he went away."

"He always does tell her. But——"

"But—what?"

"She doesn't always send him away. Poor fellow! Still, he went into it with his eyes open."

"He was very nice. He told it in a roundabout way. And I wasn't a bit afraid that he'd—he'd—you know. But I got to thinking about how I'd feel if he did—did touch me. And it made me—nervous."

There was a long pause, then she went on: "I wonder how you'd feel about touching another woman?"

"I? Dear me, I wonder! I never thought. You see I'm such a domestic, unattractive creature——"

"Don't laugh at me, please," she pleaded.

"I'm not laughing. Underneath, I'm thinking—thinking what I would do if I met you and lost you. It's very black on the Atlantic for one pair of eyes to-night."

"And the worst of it is," she said, "that my vanity is flattered and I'm not really sorry for him."

"Rather proud of her conquest, is she?"

"Yes, it pleased me to have him care."

"She likes to think that he'll carry his broken heart to the grave, does she?"

"Yes. Isn't it shameful?"

"Shameful? Shameless. I have always held that even the best woman dearly loves to ruin a man. It's such a triumph. And the more she loves him, the more she'd like to ruin him—that is, if ruin came solely through love for her and didn't involve her."

"But I would not want to ruin you."

"If that seemed to be the supreme test of my love for you—are you sure? I'm not. There's Thomas, knocking to announce dinner."

The Shenstone incident was apparently closed. Marian, a most attractive woman of thirty, absorbed in a social life that demanded all her physical and mental energy as well as all of her time, did not long vividly remember him. But he had given her a standard by which she unconsciously measured her husband. She contrasted the life he had promised her, the life Shenstone reminded her of, with the life that was—so material, so suspiciously physical when it professed to be loving, so suspiciously chill when it professed to be friendly. She thrust aside these thoughts as disloyal and false. But they persisted in returning.

If she had been less appreciative of Howard's intellect, less fascinated by the charm of his personality, she would soon have become one of the "misunderstood" women in search of "consolation." Instead, she turned her mind in the direction natural to her character—social ambition.



XXIII.

EXPANDING AND CONTRACTING.

In such a city as New York, to be deliberately careful about money is the only way to keep within one's income, whether it be vast or small. There are temptations to buy at the end of every glance of the eye. The merchants are crafty in producing new and insidious allurements, in creating new and expensive tastes. But these might be resisted were it not that the habits of all one's associates are constantly and all but irresistibly stimulating the faculty of imitation.

Neither Howard nor Marian had been brought up to be watchful about money. Both had been accustomed to having their wants supplied. And now that they had a household and a growing income, it was a matter of course that their expenditures should steadily expand. Before three years had passed they were spending more than double the sum which at the outset they had fixed upon as their limit. A merely decent and self-respecting return of the hospitalities they accepted, a carriage and pair and two saddle horses and the servants to look after them—these items accounted for the increase. They looked upon this as really necessary expenditure and soon would have found that curtailment involved genuine deprivation. From the very beginning each step in expansion made the next logical and inevitable, made the plea of necessity seem valid.

An aunt of Marian's died, leaving her a "small" house—worth perhaps a quarter of a million—near the Avenue in Sixty-fifth Street, and eighty thousand in cash. About the same time Stokely told Howard of a fine speculative opportunity in certain copper properties. Howard hesitated. He knew that the way of speculation was the way of bondage for his newspaper and for him. But this particular adventure seemed harmless and he yielded. The money was invested and within a few months was producing an income of fifteen thousand a year which promised to be steady. Howard's ownership of stock in the paper increased; and as the profits advanced swiftly with its swift growth in its illustrated form, his own income was nearly fifty thousand a year. They were growing very rich. There was no longer the slightest anxiety as to money in his mind.

"You know the great dread I had in marrying," he said to her one day, "was lest I should make myself and you dependents, should some day sacrifice my freedom to my fear of losing—happiness."

"Yes, and very foolish you were, not to have more confidence in yourself and in me."

"Perhaps. But what I am thinking is that you have brought me luck. I am free, beyond anybody's reach. I could quit the paper to-morrow and we should hardly have to change our style of living even if I did not get something else to do."

"Style of living—" in that phrase lay the key to the change that was swiftly going on in Howard's mind and mental attitude. It is not easy for a man with environment wholly in his favour to keep his point of view correct, to keep his horizon wide and clear, his sense of proportion just. It is next to impossible for him to do so when his environment opposes.

The man who looks out from misery and squalor upon misery and squalor is, if he thinks at all, naturally an anarchist. To him the established order shows only injustice and persistence of injustice. The man who looks out from luxury and ease and well-being upon luxury and ease and well-being is forced by the very limitations of the human mind to an over-reverence for the established order. He is unreasonably suspicious of anything that threatens change. "When I'm comfortable all's well in the world; change might bring discomfort to me." And he flatters himself that he is a "conservative."

Howard had had a long training at the correct standpoint and in right thinking. But the influences were there, were at work, were destroying his devotion to a social and political ideal wholly alien to the life he was now living under the leading of his wife. He did not blame her, indeed he could not justly have blamed her, for his falling away from what he knew were correct principles for him. While she had brought him into this environment, while at first it was in large part for her that he gave so much time and thought to the accumulation of wealth, soon love of luxury, dependence upon a train of servants, fondness for the great extravagances to which New York tempts the rich and those living near the rich, became stronger in him than it was in her. And through the inevitable reaction of environment upon the man, the central point in his valuation of men and women tended to shift from the fundamentals, mind and character, to the surface qualities—dress and style and manners and refinement, and even dress.

This process of demoralisation was well advanced when they moved from the apartment. After four years of "expansion" there, they had begun to feel cramped; and a year after Marian inherited the house Howard had progressed to the mental, the moral, the financial state where it seemed natural, logical, practically necessary that they should set up a real New York "establishment."

"Isn't this just the house for us?" she said. "I hate huge, big houses. Like you, I think the taste of the occupants should be everywhere. Now this house is just big enough. You don't know how wonderful it would be."

"Oh, yes, I do," he laughed, "and you must try it." He was as enthusiastic as she.

In the late autumn the house was ready; and there was not a more artistic interior in New York. It was not so much the result of great expense as of intelligence and taste. It was an expression of an individuality—a revelation of a woman's beautiful mind, inspired by love.

"At last I have something to interest, to occupy me," she said. "This is our very own, through and through our own. It will be such a pleasure to me to keep it always like this."

"You—degenerated into a household drudge," he mocked. "Why, you used to laugh at me when I held up a wife who was a good housekeeper as one of my ideals."

"Did I?" she answered. "Well, as you would say, see what I've come to through living with—a member of the working-classes."

Howard's own particular part of this house included a library with a small study next to it. In the study was a most attractive table with plenty of room to spread about books and papers, a huge divan in the corner and a fire-place near by. He found himself doing more and more of his work at home. There were not so many interruptions as at the office, the beauty of the surroundings, the consciousness that "she" was not far away—all combined to keep him at home and to enable him to do more and better work there.

He was justly and greatly proud of her achievement; and where he used to be more regretful than he admitted even to himself when they had guests, he was now glad to see others about, admiring her taste, appreciating her skill as a hostess and giving him opportunities to look at her from an ever new point of view.

Of course these guests were almost all "their kind of people"—amiable, well mannered persons who thought and acted in that most conventional of moulds, the mould of "good society." They fitted into the surroundings, they did their part toward making those surroundings luxurious—a "wallow of self-complacent content." And this environment soon suited and fitted him exactly.

But to her he was still The Democrat. She loved him in the way and to the degree which her character, as the years had developed it, permitted her to love. And this love, or rather admiring respect, was wholly based upon her ideal of him, her belief in the honesty and intensity of his convictions. While she did not share them, she had breadth enough to admire them and to regard them as high removed above her own ideas to which for herself she held tenaciously, instinct and association and "tradition" triumphing over reason.

Howard retained his ideal of her, never examining her closely, never seeing or suspecting what a pale love she gave him and how shrivelled had become the part of her nature which she and he both assumed was most strongly developed. He knew how she idealised him and did not dare to undeceive her. Therefore he practised toward her a hypocrisy that grew steadily more disgraceful, yet grew so gradually that there was no single moment at which he could conveniently halt and "straighten the record." At first he was often and heartily ashamed of himself; but by degrees this feeling deadened into cynical insensibility and he was only ashamed to let her see him as he really was. She had kept her self-respect. She esteemed self-respect at the exalted valuation he had formerly put upon it. What if she should find him out?

* * * * *

When the famous "coal conspiracy" was formed, three of the men conspicuous in it were among their intimates—that is, their families were often at his house and he and Marian were often at theirs. Yet he had never made a more relentless attack. Nor did he, either in the news columns or on the editorial page, conceal the connection of his three friends with the conspiracy.

"Mrs. Mercer was here this morning," Marian said as they were waiting for the butler to announce dinner. She was flushed and embarrassed.

Howard laughed. "And did she tell you what a dreadful husband you had?"

"Oh, she didn't blame you at all. She said they all knew how perfectly upright you were. Only, she said you did not understand and were doing Mr. Mercer a great injustice."

"Well, what do you think?"

"Why—I can't believe—is it possible, dear—I was just reading one of your editorials. Can Mr. Mercer be in such a scheme? The way she told it to me, he and the others were really doing a lot of people a valuable service, putting their property on a paying basis, enabling the railroads to meet their expenses and to keep thousands and thousands of men employed."

"Poor Mercer!" Howard said ironically. "Poor misunderstood philanthropist! What a pity that that sort of benevolence has to be carried on by bribing judges and prosecutors and legislatures, by making the poor shiver and freeze, by subtracting from the pleasures and adding to the anxieties of millions. One would almost say that such a philanthropy had better not be undertaken. It is so likely to be misunderstood by the 'unruly classes.'"

"Oh, I knew you were right. I told her you must be right, that you never wrote until you knew."

"And what was the result?"

"Well, we are making some very bitter enemies."

"I doubt it. I suspect that before long they'll come wheedling about in the hope that I'll let up on them or be a little easier next time."

"I'm sure I do not care what they do," said Marian, drawing herself up. "All I care for is—you, and to see you do your duty at whatever cost or regardless of cost—" she was leaning over the back of his chair with her arms about his neck and her lips very near to his ear—"you are my love without fear and without reproach."

"Listen, dear." He took her hand and drew her arms more closely about his neck. "Suppose that the lines were drawn—as they may be any day. Suppose that we had to choose, with all these friends of yours, with our position, yes, even the place I have won in my profession, my place as editor—all that we now have on the one side; and on the other side a thankless, unprofitable, apparently useless standing up for the right. Wouldn't you miss your friends?"

"All our friends? And who will be on the other side?"

"Almost no one that we know—that you would care to call upon or go about with or have here at the house. Nobody with any great amount of wealth or social position. Those other people who are in town when it is said 'Nobody is in town now!'"

She did not answer.

"Where would you be?" he repeated.

"Oh, I wasn't thinking of that." She came around and sat on his knee. "Where? Why, there's only one 'where' in all this world for me—'wheresoever thou goest.'"

And so the half-formed impulse to begin to straighten himself out with her was smothered by her.

Both were silent through dinner. She was thinking how honest, how fearless he was, how he loved her, how eagerly she would follow him, how blessed she was in the love of such a man. And he—he was regretting that his "pose" had carried him so far; he was wishing that he had not been so bitter in his attacks upon his and his wife's friends, the coal conspirators. When he had definitely cast in his lot with "the shearers" why persist in making his hypocrisy more abominable by protesting more loudly than ever in behalf of "the sheep?" Above all, why had he let his habit of voluble denunciation lead him into this hypocrisy with the woman he loved?

He admitted to himself that "causes" had ceased to interest him except as they might contribute to the advancement of his power. Power!—that was his ambition now. First he had wished to have an independent income in order to be free. When he had achieved that, it was at the sacrifice of his mental freedom. And now, with the clearness of self-knowledge which only men of great ability have, he knew that the one cause for which he would make sacrifices was—himself.

"Of what are you thinking so gloomily?" she interrupted.

"Oh—I—let me see—well, I was thinking what a fraud I am; and that I wished I could dupe myself as completely as I can dupe—"

"Me?" she laughed. "Oh, we're all frauds—shocking frauds. I wouldn't have you see me as I really am for anything."

Although her remark was a commonplace, of small meaning, as he knew, he got comfort out of it, so desperately was he casting about for some consolation.

"That's true, my dear," he said. "And I wish that you liked the kind of a fraud I am as well as I like the kind of a fraud you are."



XXIV.

"MR. VALIANT-FOR-TRUTH."

Stokely came rushing into his office the next morning. "Good God, old man," he exclaimed, "What's the meaning of this attack on the coal roads?"

Howard flushed with resentment, not at what Stokely said, but at his tone.

"Now, don't get on your high horse. I don't think you understand." Stokely's tone had moderated. "Don't you know that the Delaware Valley road is in this?"

Howard started. He had just invested two hundred thousand dollars in that stock on Stokely's advice "No, I didn't know it." He recovered himself. "And furthermore I don't give a damn." He struck his desk angrily. His simulation of incorruptible indignation for the moment half deceived himself.

"Why, man, if this infernal roast is kept up, you'll lose a hundred thousand. Then there are my interests. I'm up to my neck in this deal."

"My advice to you is to get out of it. I'm sorry, but you know as well as I do that the thing is infamous." "Infamous—nonsense! It will double our dividends and the consumers won't feel it."

"Let us not discuss it, Stokely. There—don't say anything you'll regret."

"But—"

"Now, Stokely—don't argue it with me."

Stokely put on his hat, stood up and looked at Howard with sullen admiration. "You will drive away the last friend you've got on earth, if you keep this up. Good morning."

Howard sent a smile of cynical amusement after him, then stared thoughtfully into the mass of papers on his desk for five, ten, fifteen minutes. When his plan was formed he touched the electric button.

"Please tell Mr. King I'd like to see him," he said to the answering boy.

Mr. King entered with a bundle of legal documents. "I suppose it's the injunction you want to discuss," he said. "We've got the papers all ready. It's simply great. Those fellows will be in a corner and will have to give up. They can't get away from us. The price of coal will drop half a dollar within a week, I'll bet."

"I'm afraid you are over sanguine," Howard said. "I've just been going over the matter with my lawyer. But leave the papers with me. And—about the news—be careful what you say. We've been going a little strong. I think a little less personal matter would be advisable."

Mr. King was amazed and looked it. He slowly pulled himself together to say, "All right, Mr. Howard. I think I understand." He laid the papers down and departed. Outside the door he laughed softly to himself. "Somebody's been cutting his comb, I guess," he murmured. "Well, I didn't think he'd last. New York always gets 'em when they're worth while."

As the door closed behind King, Howard drew out the lowest and deepest drawer of his desk. It was half-filled with long-undisturbed pamphlets and newspaper cuttings. He tossed in the injunction papers. A cloud of dust flew up and settled thickly upon them. He shut the drawer.

He went to the window and looked out over the city—that seductive, that overwhelming expression of wealth and power. "What was it my father wrote me when I told him I was going to New York?" and he recalled almost the exact words—"New York that lures young men from the towns and the farms, and prostitutes them, teaches them to sell themselves with unblushing cheeks for a fee, for an office, for riches, for power." He shrugged his shoulders, smiled, drew himself up, returned to his desk and was soon absorbed in his work.

The next morning the News-Record's double-leaded "leader" on the Coal Trust was a discharge of heavy artillery. But it was artillery in retreat. And in the succeeding days, the retreat continued—not precipitate but orderly, masterly.

* * * * *

Ten days after their talk on the "coal conspiracy" Marian greeted him late in the afternoon with "Oh, such a row with Mrs. Mercer!"

"Mrs. Mercer! Why, what was she angry about?"

"She wasn't—at least, not at first. It was I. I went to see her and she asked me to thank you for stopping that fight on the coal conspiracy."

"That was tactful of her," Howard said, turning away to hide his nervousness.

"And I told her that you had not stopped, that you wouldn't stop until you had broken it up. And she smiled in a superior way and said I was quite mistaken, that I didn't read the paper, I haven't read it for several days, but I knew you, dear, and I remembered what you had said. And so we just had it. We were polite but furious when I went. I shall never go near her again."

"But, unfortunately, we have stopped. We had to do it. We could accomplish nothing."

"Oh, it doesn't matter. What angered me was her insinuation."

"That was irritating. But, tell me, what if it had been true?" Howard's voice was strained and he was looking at her eagerly, with fever in his eyes.

"But it couldn't be. It isn't worth while imagining. You could not be a coward and a traitor." So complete was her confidence in him that suspicion of him was impossible.

"Would you sit in judgment on me?"

"Not if I could help it."

"But you can—you could help it." His manner was agitated, and he spoke almost fiercely. "I am free," he went on, and as she watched his eyes she understood why men feared him. "I do what I will. I am not accountable to you, not even to you. I have never asked you to approve of me, to approve what I do, to love me. You are free also, free to love, free to withdraw your love. I follow the law of my own being. You must take me as you find me or not at all."

She tried to stop him but could not. His words poured on. He leaned forward and took her hand and his eyes were brilliant and piercing. "I love you," he said. "Ah, how I love you—not because you love me, not because you are an angel, not because you are a superior being. No, not for any reason in all this wide world but because you are you. Do what you will and I shall love you. Whether I had to look up among the stars or down in the mire to find you, I would look just as steadily, just as proudly."

He drew along breath and his hand trembled. "If I were a traitor, then, if you loved me, you would say, 'What! Is he to be found among traitors? How I love treason!' If I were a coward, liar, thief, a sum of all the vices, then, if you ever had loved me you would love me still. I want no love with mental reservations, no love with ifs and buts and provided-thats. I want love, free and fearless, that adapts itself to changing human nature as the colour of the sea adapts itself to the colour of the sky; love that does not have to be cajoled and persuaded lest it be not there when I most need it. I want the love that loves."

"You know you have it." She had been compelled by his mood and was herself in a fever. She looked at him with the expression which used to make his nerves vibrate. "You know that no human being ever was more to another than I to you. But you can't expect me to be just the same as you are. I love you—not the false, base creature you picture. I admire the way you love, but I could not love in that way. Thank God, my love, my dear—I shall never be put to that test. For my love for you is my—my all."

"We are very serious about a mere supposition."

Howard was laughing, but not naturally. "We take each the other far too seriously. I'm sorry you idealise me so. Who knows—you might find me out some day—and then—well, don't blame me."

Marian said no more, but late that evening she put her hands on his shoulders and said: "You're not hiding something from me—something we ought to bear together?"

"Not I." Howard smiled down into her eyes and kissed her.

His mood of reaction, of hysteria had passed. He was thinking how little in reality she had had to do with his outburst. He had not been addressing her at all, except as she seemed to him for the moment the embodiment of his self-respect—or rather, of an "absurd," "extremely youthful" ideal of self-respect which he had "outgrown."



XXV.

THE PROMISED LAND.

A woman with a powerful personality may absorb in herself a man of strong and resolute ambition, may compel him to make her his career, to feel that to get and to keep her is all that he asks from destiny. But Marian was not such a woman.

She had come into Howard's life at just the time and in just the way to arouse his latent passion for power and to give it a sufficient initial impetus. It was love for her that set him to lifting himself from among those who work through themselves alone to the potent few who work chiefly by directing the labour of others.

Once in this class, once having tasted the joy of power, Howard was lost to her. She was unable to restrain or direct, or even clearly to understand. She became an incident in his life. As riches came with power, they pushed him to one side in her life. Living in separate parts of a large house, leading separate lives, rarely meeting except when others were present—following the typical life of New Yorkers of fortune and fashion—they gradually grew to know little and see little and think little each of the other.

There was no abruptness in the transition. Every day had contributed its little toward widening the gap. There was no coolness, no consciousness of separation; simply the slow formation of the habit of complete independence each of the other.

His ambitions absorbed his thought and his time. To them he found her very useful. The social side—forming and keeping up friendly relations with the families whose heads were men of influence—was a vital part of his plan. But he used her just as he used every and any one else whom he found capable of contributing to his advancement; and, as she never insisted upon herself, never sought to influence or even to inquire into his course of action, she did not find him out.

She was in a vague way an unhappy woman. A discontent, a feeling that her life was incomplete, perpetually teased her. He was distinctly unhappy, often gloomy, at times morose. In her rare analytic moods she attributed their failure to prolong the happiness of their courtship to the hard work which kept him from her, kept them from enjoying the great love which she assumed they felt each for the other. She would not and could not see that that love had long disappeared, leaving a mask of forms, of phrases and of impulses of passion to conceal its departure. And to this view he outwardly assented, when she suggested it; but he knew that she was deceiving herself as to him, and wondered if she were not deceiving herself as to her own feelings.

Up to the time of the "Coal Conspiracy" and his attempt to put himself straight with her, the idea of his love for her and of her oneness with him had at least a hold upon his imagination. He then saw how far apart they had drifted; and he dismissed from his mind even the pretense that love played any part in his life. After that definite break with principle and self-respect for the sake of his coal holdings, his Wall Street friends and his newspaper career, the development of his character continued along strictly logical lines with accelerating speed. And it was accompanied by an ever franker, more cynical acceptance of the change.

He could not deceive himself, nor can any man with the clearness of judgment necessary to great achievement—although many "successful" men, for obvious reasons of self-interest, diligently encourage the popular theory of warped conscience. He was well aware that he had shifted from the ideal of use to his fellow-beings to the ideal of use of his fellow-beings, from the ideal of character to the ideal of reputation. And he knew that the two ideals can not be combined and that he not only was not attempting to combine them but had no desire so to do. He despised his former ideals; but also he despised himself for despising them.

His quarrel with himself was that he seemed to himself a rather vulgar sort of hypocrite. This was highly disagreeable to him, as his whole nature tended to make him wish to be himself, to make him shrink from the part of the truckler and the sycophant which he was playing so haughtily and so artistically. At times it exasperated him that he could not regard his change of front as a deliberate sale for value received, and not as the weak and cowardly surrender which he saw that it really was.

* * * * *

On the day after Howard's forty-fourth birthday Coulter fell dead at the entrance to the Union Club. When Stokely heard of it he went direct to the News-Record office.

"I happen to know something about Coulter's will," he said to Howard. "The News-Record stock is to be sold and you and I are to have the first chance to take it at three hundred and fifty—which is certainly cheap enough."

"Why did he arrange to dispose of the most valuable part of his estate?"

"Well, we had an agreement about it. Then, too, Coulter had no faith in newspapers as a permanent investment. You know there are only the widow, the girl and that worthless boy. Heavens, what an ass that boy is! Coulter has tied up his estate until the youngest grandchild comes of age. He hopes that there will be a son among the grandchildren who will realise his dream."

"Dream?" Howard smiled. "I didn't know that Coulter ever indulged in dreams."

"Yes, he had the rich man's mania—the craze for founding a family. So everything is to be put into real estate and long-term bonds. And for years New York is to be reminded of Samuel Coulter by some incapable who'll use his name and his money to advertise nature's contempt for family pride in her distributions of brains. I think even a fine tomb is a wiser memorial."

"Well, how much of the stock shall you take?" Howard asked.

"Not a share," Stokely replied dejectedly. "Coulter couldn't have died at a worse time for me. I'm tied in every direction and shall be for a year at least. So you've got a chance to become controlling owner."

"I?" Howard laughed. "Where could I get a million and a half?"

"How much could you take in cash?"

"Well—let me see—perhaps—five hundred thousand."

"You can borrow the million with the stock as collateral."

"But how could I pay?"

"Why, your dividends at our present rate would be more than two hundred thousand a year. Your interest charge would be under seventy-five thousand. Perhaps I can arrange it so that it won't be more than fifty thousand. You can let the balance go on reducing the loan. Then I may be able to put you onto a few good things. At any rate you can't lose anything. Your stock would bring five hundred even at forced sale. It's your chance, old man. I want to see you take it."

"I'll think it over. I have no head for figures."

"Let me manage it for you." Stokely rose to go. Howard began thanking him, but he cut him off with:

"You owe me no thanks. You've made money for me—big money. I owe you my help. Besides, I don't want any outsider in here. Let me know when you're ready." He nodded and was gone.

"What a chance!" Howard repeated again and again.

He was looking out over New York.

Twenty years before he had faced it, asking of it nothing but a living and his freedom. For twenty years he had fought. Year by year, even when he seemed to be standing still or going backward, he had steadily gained, making each step won a vantage-ground for forward attack. And now—victory. Power, wealth, fame, all his!

Yet a deep melancholy came over him. And he fell to despising himself for the kind of exultation that filled him, its selfishness, its sordidness, the absence of all high enthusiasm. Why was he denied the happiness of self-deception? Why could he not forget the means, blot it out, now that the end was attained?

His mind went out, not to Marian, but to that other—the one sleeping under the many, many layers of autumn leaves at Asheville. And he heard a voice saying so faintly, so timidly: "I lay awake night after night listening to your breathing, and whispering under my breath, 'I love you, I love you. Why can't you love me?'" And then—he flung down the cover of his desk and rushed away home.

"Why did I think of Alice?" he asked himself. And the answer came—because in those days, in the days of his youth, he had had beliefs, high principles; he had been incapable of this slavery to appearances, to vain show, incapable of this passion for reputation regardless of character. His weaknesses were then weaknesses only, and not, as now, the laws of his being controlling his every act.

He smiled cynically at the self of such a few years ago—yet he could not meet those honest, fearless eyes that looked out at him from the mirror of memory.

He was triumphant, but self-respect had gone and not all the thick swathings of vanity covered him from the stabs of self-contempt.

"When I am really free, when the paper is paid for and I can do as I please, why not try to be a man again? Why not? It would cost me nothing."

But a man is the sum of all his past.



XXVI.

IN POSSESSION.

Stokely arranged the loan, and within six months Howard was controlling owner of the News-Record. There was a debt of a million and a quarter attached to his ownership, but he saw how that would be wiped out. Once more he threw himself into his work with the energy of a boy. He had to give much of his time to the business department—to the details of circulation and advertising. He felt that the profits of the paper could be greatly increased by improving its facilities for reaching the advertiser and the public. He had never been satisfied with the circulation methods; but theretofore his ignorance of business and his position as mere salaried editor had acted in restraint upon his interference with the "ground floor."

As he had suspected, the business office was afflicted with the twin diseases—routine and imitativeness. It followed an old system, devised in days of small circulation and grudgingly improved, not by thought on the part of those who circulated the paper, but by compulsion on the part of the public. No attempts were made to originate schemes for advertising the paper. The only methods were wooden variations upon placards in the street cars and the elevated stations, and cards hung up at the news-stands. As forgetting advertising business, they thought they showed enterprise by a little canvassing among the conspicuous merchants in Greater New York.

Howard had charts made showing the circulation by districts. With these as a basis he ordered an elaborate campaign to "push" the paper in the districts where it was circulated least and to increase its hold where it was strong. "We do not reach one-third of the people who would like to take our paper," he told Jowett, the business manager. "Let us have an army of agents and let us take up our territory by districts."

The Sunday edition was the largest source of revenue, both because it carried a great deal more advertising at much higher rates than did the week-day editions, and because it sold at a price which yielded a profit on the paper itself, while the price of the weekday editions did not. News constituted less than one-fourth of its contents. The rest was "feature articles," as interesting a week late to a man in Seattle as on the day of publication within a mile of the office.

"We get out the very best magazine in the market," said Howard to Jowett. "Are we pushing it in the east, in the west, in the south? Look at the charts.

"We have a Sunday circulation of five hundred in Oregon, of one thousand in Texas, of six hundred in Georgia, of two thousand in Maine. Why not ten times as much in each of those states? Why not ten times as much as we now have near New York?"

There was no reason except failure to "push" the paper. That reason Howard proceeded to remove. But these enterprises involved large expenditures, perhaps might mean postponement of the payment of the debt. Receipts must be increased and the most promising way was an increase in the advertising business.

Howard noted on the chart nineteen cities and large towns near New York in each of which the daily circulation of the News-Record was equal to that of any paper published there and far exceeded the combined circulations of all the home dailies on Sunday. This suggested a system of local advertising pages, and for its working out he engaged one of the most capable newspaper advertising men in the city. Within three months the idea had "caught on" and, instead of sending useless columns of New York "want-ads" and the like to places where they could not be useful, the News-Record was presenting to its readers in twelve cities and towns the advertisements of their local merchants.

A year of this work, with Howard giving many hours of each day personally to tiresome details, brought the natural results. The profits of the News-Record had risen to five hundred and forty thousand, of which Howard's share was nearly three hundred thousand. The next year the profits were seven hundred and fifty thousand, and Howard had reduced his debt to eight hundred thousand.

"We shall be free and clear in less than three years," he said to Marian.

"If we have luck," she added.

"No—if we work—and we shall. Luck is a stone which envy flings at success."

"Then you don't think you have been lucky?"

"Indeed I do not."

"Not even," she smiled, drawing herself up.

"Not even—" he said with a faint, sad answering smile. "If you only knew how hard I worked preparing myself to be able to get you when you came; if you only, only knew how life made me pay, pay, pay; if you only knew—"

"Go on," she said, coming closer to him.

He sighed—not for the reason of sentiment which she fancied, though he put his arms around her. "How willingly I paid," he evaded.

He went to his desk and she stood looking at him. There was still the charm of youth, even freshness, in her beauty—and she was not unconscious of the fact.

And he—he was handsome, distinguished looking and certainly did not suggest age or the approach of age; but in his hair, so grey at the temples, in the stern, rather haughty lines of his features, in the weariness of his eyes, there was not a vestige of youth. "How he has worked for me and for his ideals," she thought, sadly yet proudly. "Ah, he is indeed a great man, and my husband!" And she bent over him and kissed him on an impulse to a kind of tenderness which was now so strange to her that it made her feel shy.

"And what a radical you'll be," she laughed, after a moment's silence. "What a radical, what a democrat!"

"When?" He was flushing a little and avoided her eyes.

"When you're free—really the proprietor—able to express your own views, all your own views. We shall become outcasts."

"I wonder," he replied slowly, "does a rich man own his property or does it own him?"

For an instant he had an impulse of his old longing for sympathy, for companionship. She was now thirty-six and, save for an expression of experience, of self-control, seemed hardly so much as thirty. But with the years, with the habit of self-restraint, with instinctive rather than conscious realisation of his indifference toward her, had come a chill perceptible at the surface and permeating her entire character. In her own way she had become as self-absorbed, as ambitious as he.

He looked at her, felt this chill, sighed, smiled at himself. Yes, he was alone—and he preferred to be alone.



XXVII.

THE HARVEST.

Through all his scheming and shifting Howard had kept the News-Record in the main an "organ of the people." Coulter and Stokely had on many occasions tried to persuade him to change, but he had stood out. He did not confess to them that his real reason was not his alleged principles but his cold judgment that the increases in circulation which produced increases in advertising patronage were dependent upon the paper's reputation of fearless democracy.

In the fourth year of his ownership he felt that the time had come for the change, that he could safely slip over to the other side—the side of wealth and power, the winning side, the side with offices and privileges to distribute. His debt was so far reduced that he had nothing to fear from it. A presidential campaign was coming on and was causing unusual confusion, a general shift of party lines. And he had put the News-Record in such a position that it could move in any direction without shock to its readers.

The "great battle" was on—the battle he had in his younger days looked forward to and longed for—the battle against Privilege and for a "restoration of government by the people." The candidates were nominated, the platforms put forward and the issue squarely joined.

The same issue had been involved in previous campaigns; but the statement of the case by the party opposed to "government of, by and for plutocracy" had been fantastic, extreme, entangled with social, economic and political lunacies. And Howard had strengthened the News-Record by refusing to permit it to "go crazy." Now, however, there was in honesty no reason for refusing support to the advocates of his professed principles.

But the News-Record was silent. Howard and Marian went away to their cottage at Newport, and he left rigid instructions that no political editorials were to be published except those which he might send. There he got typhoid fever and was at the point of death for two weeks.

Marian gave herself to nursing him, stayed close beside him, read books and the newspapers to him throughout his convalescence. They were more intimate than they had been for years. A feeling bearing a remote resemblance to the love he had once had for her arose out of his weakness and dependence and his seclusion from the instruments and objects of his ambition. And she swept aside the barriers she had erected between herself and him and returned, as nearly as one may, to the love and interest of their early days together.

In the first week of September came Stokely with Senator Hereford, the chairman of the "Plutocracy" campaign committee.

"I shall not annoy you with evasions," said Hereford, "as Mr. Stokely assures me that I may speak freely to you, that you personally are with us. The fact is, our campaign is in a bad way, especially in New York State, and there especially in New York City."

"You surprise me," said Howard. "All my information has come from the newspapers which my wife reads me. I had gathered that the victory was all but won."

"We encourage that impression. You know how many weak-kneed fellows there are who like to be on the winning side. We've been pouring out the money and stand ready to pour it out like water. But these damned reform ballot-laws make it hard for us to control the vote. We buy, but we fear that the goods will not be delivered. Feeling is high against us. Even our farmers and shopkeepers are acting queerly. And the other fellows have at last put up a safe man on a conservative platform."

Howard turned his face away. There was still the memory, the now quickened memory, of his former self to make him wince at being included in such an "us."

"You can't afford to keep silent any longer," Hereford continued. "You've done the cause a world of good by your silence thus far. You have the reputation of being the leading popular organ, and your keeping quiet has meant thousands of votes for us. But the time has come to attack. And you must attack if we are to carry New York. You can turn the tide in the state, and—well, we have a very high regard for your genius for making your points clearly and interestingly. We need your ideas for our editors and speakers as much as we need your influence."

"I cannot discuss it to-day," Howard answered after a moment's silence. "It would be a grave step for the News-Record to take. I am not well, as you see. To-morrow or next day I'll decide. You'll see my answer in the paper, I think." He closed his eyes with significant weariness.

Hereford looked at him uneasily. Just outside the door Stokely whispered, "Don't be alarmed. You've got him. He's with us, I tell you."

"I must make sure," whispered Hereford. "I wish to speak to him alone for a moment."

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Howard," he said as he re-entered the room. "I forgot an important part of my mission. Our candidate authorized me to say to you on his behalf that he felt sure you would see your duty; that he esteemed your character and judgment too highly to have any doubts; and that he intends to show his appreciation of the conscientious, independent vote which is rallying to his support; in the event of his election, he feels that he could not do so in a more satisfactory manner than by offering you either a place in his cabinet or an ambassadorship as you may prefer."

As soon as Howard saw Hereford returning, he knew the reason. He had never before been offered a bribe; but he could not mistake the meaning of Hereford's bold yet frightened expression. He kept his eyes averted during the delivery of the long, rambling sentence. At the end, he looked at Hereford frankly and said in his most gracious manner:

"Thank him for me, will you? And express my appreciation of so high a compliment from such a man."

Hereford looked relieved, delighted. "I'm glad to have met you, Mr. Howard, and to have had so satisfactory an interview."

Again outside the door, he muttered gleefully: "Yes, we've him. Otherwise he would have had his servants kick me down stairs. Gad, no wonder —— is on his way to the Presidency, I had a sneaking fear that this fellow might be sincere. But he saw through him without ever having seen him. I suppose two men of that stripe instinctively understand each other."

* * * * *

That was on a Sunday afternoon. On the following Wednesday, as Marian came into Howard's sitting-room with the newspapers, she laughed: "I've been reading such a speech from your candidate, you radical! I must say I liked to read it. It was so like you, your very phrases in many places, the things you used to talk to me before you gave me up as hopeless. Just listen."

And she read him the oration—a reproduction of the Howard she first saw, the Howard she admired and loved and had never lost. "Isn't it superb?" she asked at the end. "You must have written it for him. Don't you like it?"

"Very able," was Howard's only comment.

Marian continued to read the paper, glancing from column to column, giving him the substance of the news. Soon she reached the editorial page. He was stealthily watching her face. He saw her glance through a few lines of the leader, start, read on, look in a terrified way at him, and then skip abruptly to the next page.

"Read me the leader, won't you?" he asked.

"My voice is tired," she pleaded. "I'll read it after awhile."

"Please," he insisted. "I'm especially anxious to hear it."

"I think," she almost stammered, "that somebody has taken advantage of your illness. I didn't want to tell you until I'd had a chance to think."

"Please read it." His tone was abrupt. She had never heard that tone before.

She read. It was an assertion of that which her Howard most disbelieved, most protested against; a defense of the public corruption she had heard him denounce so often; an attack upon the ideas, the principles, the elements she had so often heard him eulogize. It was as adroit as it was detestable, as plausible as it was unprincipled.

When she had done, there was a long silence which he broke. "What do you think of it?"

"Only a wretch, an enemy of yours could have written it. Who can it have been?" Her eyes were ablaze and her voice trembled with anger.

"I wrote it," he said.

He did not dare to look at her for a few seconds. Then, with a flimsy mask of pretended calmness only the more clearly revealing self-contempt and cowardice, he faced her amazed eyes, her pale cheeks, her parted lips—and dropped his gaze to the floor.

"You?" she whispered. "You?"

"Yes, I."

She sat so still that he reached over and touched her hand. It was cold. She shivered and drew it away. They were silent for a long time—several minutes. She was looking at his face. It was old and sad and feeble—pitiful, contemptible. She had never seen those lines of weakness about his mouth before. She had never before noted that his features had lost the expression of exalted character, the light of free and independent manhood which made her look again the first time she saw him. When had the man she loved departed? When had the new man come? How long had she been giving herself to a stranger—and such a stranger?

"Yes—I," he repeated. "I have come over to your side." He laughed and she shivered again. "Well—what do you think?"

"Think?—I?—Oh, I think——"

She burst into tears, flung herself down at his feet and buried her head in his lap.

"I think nothing," she sobbed, "except that I—I love you."

He fell to smoothing her hair, slowly, gently, patronisingly. His face was composed and he was looking down at her trembling head and agitated shoulders with an absent-minded smile. How easily this once dreaded crisis had passed! How he had overestimated her! How he had underestimated himself!

His glance and his thoughts soon fastened upon the copy of his newspaper which she had thrown aside—his newspaper indeed, his creation and his creature, the epitome of his intellect and character, of his strength and his weakness. Half a million circulation daily, three quarters of a million on Sunday—how mighty as a direct influence upon the people! Its clearness and vigour, its intelligence, its truth-like sophistry—how mighty as an indirect influence upon the minds of other editors and of public men! "Power—Success," he repeated to himself in an exaltation of vanity and arrogance.

Marian lifted her head and, turning, put it against his knee. She reached out for his hand. He began to speak at once in a low persuasive voice:

"Trust me, dear, can't you? You do not—have not been reading the paper until recently. You are not interested in politics. There have been many changes in the few last years. And I too have changed. I am no longer without responsibilities. They have sobered me, have given me an appreciation of property, stability, conservatism. Youth is enthusiastic, theoretical. I have—"

"Ah, but I do trust you," she interrupted eagerly, fearful lest his explanations would make it the more difficult for her to convince herself of what she felt she must believe if life were to go on. "And you—I don't want you to excite yourself. You must be quiet—must get well."

Each avoided meeting the other's eyes as she arranged the pillows for him before leaving him alone to rest.

The longer she juggled with her discovery the less appalling it seemed. His line of action fitted too closely to her own ambitions of social distinction, social leadership. If he had been her lover, the shock would have killed love and set up contempt in its stead. But he was not her lover, had not been for years; and to find that her husband was doing a husband's duty, was winning position and power for himself and therefore for his wife—that was a disclosure with mitigating aspects at least. Besides, might she not be in part mistaken? Surely any course so satisfactory in its results could not be wholly wrong, might perhaps be the right in an unexpected, unaccustomed form.



XXVIII.

SUCCESS.

French had made a portrait of the new American ambassador to the Court of St. James and it was shown at the spring exhibition of the Royal Academy. The ambassador and his wife wished to see how it had been hung, but they did not wish to be seen. So they chose an early hour of a chill, rainy May morning to drive in a hansom from their place in Park Lane to Burlington House.

They found the portrait in Room VI, on the line, in a corner, but where it had the benefit of such light as there was. When they entered no one was there; but, as they were standing close to the picture, admiring the energy and simplicity of the strokes of the master's brush, a crowd swept in and enclosed them.

"Let us go," Howard said in a low tone.

Just then a man, almost at his shoulder because of the pressure of those behind, said: "Wonderful, isn't it? I've never seen a better example of his work. He had a subject that suited him perfectly."

"No, let us stay," Marian whispered in reply to her husband. "They can't see our faces and I'd like to hear."

"Yes, it is superb," came the answer to the man behind them in a voice unmistakably American. "Now, tell me, Saverhill, what sort of a person would you say the ambassador is from that picture? You don't know him?"

"Never heard of him until I read of his appointment," replied the first voice.

"I've heard of him often enough," came in the American voice. "But I've never seen him."

"You know him now," resumed the Englishman, "inside as well as out. French always paints what he sees and always sees what he's painting."

"Well, what is it?"

"Let us go," whispered Marian. But Howard did not heed her.

"I see—a fallen man. He was evidently a real man once; but he sold himself."

"Yes? Where does it show?"

"He's got a good mind, this fellow-countryman of yours. There are the eyes of a thinker and a doer. Nothing could have kept him down. His face is almost as relentless as Kitchener's and fully as aggressive, except that it shows intellect, and Kitchener's doesn't. Now note the corners of his eyes, Marshall, and his mouth and nostrils and chin, and you'll see why he sold himself, and the—the consequences."

Howard and Marian, fascinated, compelled, looked where the unknown requested.

"I think I see what you mean," came in Marshall's voice, laughingly. "But go on."

"Ah, there it all is—hypocrisy, vanity, lack of principle, and, plainest of all, weakness. It's a common enough type among your successful men. The man himself is the fixed market price for a certain kind of success. But, according to French, this ambassador of yours seems to know what he has paid; and the knowledge doesn't make him more content with his bargain. He has more brains than vanity; therefore he's an unhappy hypocrite instead of a happy self-deceiver."

Howard and Marian shrunk together with their heads close in the effort to make sure of concealing their faces. She was suffering for herself, but more acutely for him. She knew, as if she were looking into his mind, his frightful humiliation. "Hereafter," she thought, "whenever any one looks at him he will feel the thought behind the look."

"How nearly did I come to him?" asked Saverhill.

Howard started and Marian caught the rail for support.

"A centre-shot," replied Marshall, "if the people who know him and have talked to me about him tell the truth."

"Oh, they're 'on to' him, as you say, over there, are they?"

"No, not everybody. Only his friends and the few who are on the inside. There's an ugly story going about privately as to how he got the ambassadorship. They say he was bought with it. But—he's admired and envied even by a good many who know or suspect that he's only an article of commerce. He's got the cash and he's got position; and his paper gives him tremendous power. Then too, as you say, all about him there are men like himself. The only punishment he's likely to get is the penalty of having to live with himself."

"A good, round price if French is not mistaken," replied Saverhill.

The two men passed on. Howard and Marian looked guiltily about, then slipped away in the opposite direction. He helped her into the waiting hansom. As they were driven homeward she cast a stealthy side-glance at him.

"Yes," she thought, "the portrait is a portrait of his face; and his face is a portrait of himself."

He caught her glance in the little mirror in the side of the hansom—caught it and read it. And he began to hate her, this instrument to his punishment, this constant remembrancer of his downfall.

THE END