"You'd better keep a cat," observed the General, "they do less damage."

Young George and I, who had stood in the shadow of the wistaria awaiting the doctor's departure, came forward now, and I made my awkward bow to the General's bandaged foot.

"Any relative of Jack Starr?" he enquired affably as he shook my hand.

I towered so conspicuously above him, while I stood there with my hat in my hand, that I was for a moment embarrassed by my mere physical advantages.

"No, sir, not that I ever heard of," I answered.

"Then you ought to be thankful," he returned peevishly, "for the first time I ever met the fellow he deliberately trod on my toe—deliberately, sir. And now they're wanting to nominate him for governor—but I say they shan't do it. I've no idea of allowing it. It's utterly out of the question."

"Uncle George, I've brought Ben to see your library," interrupted young George at my elbow.

"Library, eh? Are you going to be a lawyer?" demanded the General.

I shook my head.

"A preacher?" in a more reverent voice.

"No, sir, I'm in the Old Dominion Tobacco Works. You got me my first job."

"I got you your job—did I? Then you're the young chap that discovered that blend for smoking. I told Bob you ought to have a royalty on that. Did he give it to you?"

"I'm to have ten per cent of the sales, sir. They've just begun."

"Well, hold on to it—it's a good blend. I tried it. And when you get your ten per cent, put it into the Old South Chemical Company, if you want to grow rich. It isn't everybody I'd give that tip to, but I like the looks of you. How tall are you?"

"Six feet one in my stockings."

"Well, I wouldn't grow any more. You're all right, if you can only manage to keep your hands and feet down. You've got good eyes and a good jaw, and it's the jaw that tells the man. Now, that's the trouble with that Jack Starr they want to nominate for governor. He lacks jaw. 'You can't make a governor out of a fellow who hasn't jaw,' that's what I said. And besides, he deliberately trod on my toe the first time I ever met him. Didn't know it was gouty, eh? What right has he got, I asked, to suppose that any gentleman's toe isn't gouty?"

His lower lip protruded angrily, and he sat staring into his glass of water with an enquiring and sulky look. It is no small tribute to my capacity for hero-worship to say that it survived even this nearer approach to the gouty presence of my divinity. But the glamour of success—the only glamour that shines without borrowed light in the hard, dry atmosphere of the workaday world—still hung around him; and his very dissipations—yes, even his fleshly frailties—reflected, for the moment at least, a romantic interest. I began to wonder if certain moral weaknesses were, indeed, the inevitable attributes of the great man, and there shot into my mind, with a youthful folly of regret, the memory of a drink I had declined that morning, and of a pretty maiden at the Old Market whom I might have kissed and did not. Was the doctor's teaching wrong, after all, and had his virtues made him a failure in life, while the General's vices had but helped him to his success? I was very young, and I had not yet reached the age when I could perceive the expediency of the path of virtue unless in the end it bordered on pleasant places. "The General is a bigger man than the doctor," I thought, half angrily, "and yet the General will be a gay old bird as long as the gout permits him to hobble." And it seemed to me suddenly that the moral order, on which the doctor loved to dilate, had gone topsy-turvy while I stood on the General's porch. As if reading my thoughts the great man looked up at me, with his roguish twinkle.

"Now there's Theophilus!" he observed. "Whatever you are, sir, don't be a damned mollycoddle."

Young George, plucking persistently at my sleeve, drew me at last out of the presence and into the house, where I smelt the fragrance of strawberries, freshly gathered.

"Here're the books," said George, leading me to the door of a long room, filled with rosewood bookcases and family portraits of departed Bolingbrokes. Then as I was about to cross the threshold, the sound of a bright voice speaking to the General on the porch caused me to stop short, and stand holding my breath in the hall.

"Good afternoon, General! You look as if you needed exercise."

"Exercise, indeed! Do you take me for your age, you minx?"

"Oh, come, General! You aren't old—you're lazy."

By this time George and I had edged nearer the porch, and even before he breathed her name in a whisper, I knew in the instant that her sparkling glance ran over me, that she was my little girl of the red shoes just budding into womanhood. She was standing in a square patch of sunlight, midway between the steps and a bed of red geraniums near the gate, and her dress of some thin white material was blown closely against the curves of her bosom and her rounded hips. Over her broad white forehead, with its heavily arched black eyebrows, the mass of her pale brown hair spread in the strong breeze and stood out like the wings of a bird in flight, and this gave her whole, finely poised figure a swift and expectant look, as of one who is swept forward by some radiant impulse. Her face, too, had this same ardent expression; I saw it in her eyes, which fixed me the next moment with her starry and friendly gaze; in her very full red lips that broke the pure outline of her features; and in her strong, square chin held always a little upward with a proud and impatient carriage. So vivid was my first glimpse of her, that for a single instant I wondered if the radiance in her figure was not produced by some fleeting accident of light and shadow. When I knew her better I learned that this quality of brightness belonged neither to the mind nor to an edge of light, but to the face itself—to some peculiar mingling of clear grey with intense darkness in her brow and eyes.

As she stood there chatting gayly with the General, young George eyed her from the darkened hall with a glance in which I read, when I turned to him, a touch of his uncle's playful masculine superiority.

"She'll be a stunner, if she doesn't get too big," he observed. "I don't like big girls—do you?"

Then as I made no rejoinder, he added after a moment, "Do you think her mouth spoils her? Aunt Hatty calls her mouth coarse."

"Coarse?" I echoed angrily. "What does she mean by coarse?"

"Oh, too red and too full. She says a lady's mouth ought to be a delicate bow."

"I never saw a delicate bow—"

"No more did I—but I'd call Sally a regular stunner now, mouth and all. Sally!" he broke out suddenly, and stepped out on the porch. "I'll go riding with you some day," he said, "if you want me."

She laughed up at him. "But I don't want you."

"You wanted me bad enough a year ago."

"That was a year ago."

Running hurriedly down the steps, he stood talking to her beside the bed of scarlet geraniums, while I felt a burning embarrassment pervade my body to the very palms of my hands.

"Where's the other fellow, George?" called the General, suddenly. "What's become of him?"

As he turned his head in my direction, I left the hall, and came out upon the porch, acutely conscious, all the time, that there was too much of me, that my hands and feet got in my way, that I ought to have put on a different shirt in the afternoon.

Sally was stooping over to snip off the head of a geranium, and when she looked up the next instant, with her hair blown back from her forehead, her starry, expectant gaze rested full on my own.

"Why, it's the boy I used to know," she exclaimed, moving toward me. "Boy, how do you do?" She put out her hand, and as I took it in mine, I saw for the first time that she was a large girl for her age, and would be a large woman. Her figure was already ripening under her thin white gown, but her hands and feet were still those of a child, and moulded, I saw, with that peculiar delicacy, which, I had learned from the doctor, was the distinguishing characteristic of the Virginian aristocracy.

"It is a long time since—since I saw you," she remarked in a cordial voice.

"It's been eight years," I answered. "I wonder that you remember me."

"Oh, I never forget. And besides, if I didn't see you for eight years more, I should still recognise you by your eyes. There aren't many boys," she said merrily, "who have eyes like a blue-eyed collie's."

With this she turned from me to George, and after a word or two to the General, and a nod in my direction, they passed through the gate, and went slowly along the street, her pale brown hair still blown like a bird's wing behind her.

The General's sister, young George's Aunt Hatty, a severe little lady, with a very flat figure, had come out on the porch, and was offering her brother a dose of medicine.

"A good girl, Hatty," remarked the great man, in an affable mood. "A little too much of her Aunt Matoaca's spirit for a wife, but a very good girl, as long as you ain't married to her."

"She would be handsome, George, except for her mouth. It's a pity her mouth spoils her."

"What's the matter with her mouth? I haven't got your eyesight, Hatty, but it appears a perfectly good mouth to me."

"That's because you have naturally coarse tastes, George. A lady's mouth should be a delicate bow."

A delicate bow, indeed! Those full, sensitive lips that showed like a splash of carmine in the clear pallor of her face! As I walked home under the broad, green leaves of the sycamores, I remembered the features of the pretty maiden at the Old Market, and they appeared to me suddenly divested of all beauty. It was as if a bright beam of sunshine had fallen on a blaze of artificial light, and extinguished it forever. Henceforth I should move straight toward a single love, as I had already begun to move straight toward a single ambition.



CHAPTER XI

IN WHICH I ENTER SOCIETY AND GET A FALL

My first successful speculation was made in my twenty-first year with five hundred dollars paid to me by Bob Brackett when the Nectar blend had been six months on the market. By the General's advice I put the money in the Old South Chemical Company, and selling out a little later at high profits, I immediately reinvested. As the years went by, that smoking mixture, discovered almost by accident in an idle moment, began to yield me considerably larger checks twice a year; and twice a year, with the General's enthusiastic assistance, I went in for a modest speculation from which I hoped sometime to reap a fortune. When I was twenty-five, a temporary depression in the market gave me the opportunity which, as Dr. Theophilus had informed me almost daily for ten years, "waits always around the corner for the man who walks quickly." I put everything I owned into copper mining stock, then selling very low, and a year later when the copper trade recovered quickly and grew active, I rushed to the General and enquired breathlessly if I must sell out.

"Hold on and await developments," he replied from his wicker chair over his bandaged foot, "and remember that the successful speculator is the man who always runs in the other direction from the crowd. When you see people sitting still, you'd better get up, and when you see them begin to get up, you'd better sit still. Fortune's a woman, you know; don't try to flirt with her, but at the same time don't throw your boots at her head."

Five years before I had left the tobacco factory to go into the General's office, and my days were spent now, absorbed and alert, beside the chair in which he sat, coolly playing his big game of chess, and controlling a railroad. He was in his day the strongest financier in the South, and he taught me my lesson. Tireless, sleepless, throbbing with a fever that was like the fever of love, I studied at his side every movement of the market, I weighed every word he uttered, I watched every stroke of his stout cork-handled pen. An infallible judge of men, my intimate knowledge soon taught me that it was by judging men, not things, he had won his success. "Learn men, learn men, learn men," he would repeat in one of his frequent losses of temper. "Everything rests on a man, and the way to know the thing is to know the man."

"That's why I'm learning you, General," I once replied, as he hobbled out of his office on my arm.

"Oh, I know, I know," he retorted with his sly chuckle. "You are letting me lean on you now because you think the time will come when you can throw me aside and stand up by yourself. It's age and youth, my boy, age and youth."

He sighed wearily, and looking at him I saw for the first time that he was growing old.

"Well, you've stood straight enough in your day, sir," I answered.

"Oh, I've had my youth, and I shan't begin to put on a long face because I've lost it. I didn't have your stature, Ben, but I had a pretty fair middling-size one of my own. They used to say of me that I had an eye for the big chance, and that's a thing a man's got to be born with. To see big you've got to be big, and that's what I like about you—you ain't busy looking for specks."

"If I can only become as big a man as you, General, I shall be content."

"No, you won't, no, you won't, don't stop at me. Already they are beginning to call you my 'wonderful boy,' you know. 'I like that wonderful boy of yours, George,' Jessoms said to me only last night at the club. You know Jessoms—don't you? He's president of the Union Bank."

"Yes, I talked to him for two solid hours yesterday."

"He told me so, and I said to him: 'By Jove, you're right, Jessoms, and that boy's got a future ahead of him if he doesn't swell.' Now that's the Gospel truth, Ben, and all the body you've got ain't going to save you if you don't keep your head. If you ever feel it beginning to swell, you step outside and put it under a pump, that's the best thing I know of. How old are you?"

"Twenty-six."

"And you've got fifty thousand dollars already?"

"Thanks to you, sir."

"So you ain't swelled yet. Well, I've given you six years of hard training, and I made it all the blamed harder because I liked you. You've got the look of success about you, I've seen enough of it to know it. They used to say of me in Washington that I could sit in my office chair and overlook a line of men and spot every last one of them that was going to get on. I never went wrong but once, and that was because the poor devil began to swell and thought he was as big as his own shadow. But if the look's there, I see it—it's something in the eye and the jaw, and the grip of the hands that nobody can give you except God Almighty—and by George, it turns me into a downright heathen and makes me believe in fate. When a man has that something in the eye and in the jaw and in the grip of the hand, there ain't enough devils in the universe to keep him from coming out on top at the last. He may go under, but he won't stay under—no, sir, not if they pile all the bu'sted stocks in the market on top his shoulders."

"Anyway, you've started me rolling, General, whether I spin on or come to a dead stop."

"Then remember," he retorted slyly, as we parted,' "that my earnest advice to a young man starting in business is—don't begin to swell!"

There was small danger of that, I thought, as I went on alone with my vision of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. From my childhood I had seen the big road, as I saw it to-day, sweeping in a bright track over the entire South, lengthening, branching, winding away toward the distant horizon, girdling the cotton fields, the rice fields, and the coal fields, like a protecting arm. One by one, I saw now, the small adjunct lines, absorbed by the main system, until in the whole South only the Great South Midland and Atlantic would be left. To dominate that living organism, to control, in my turn, that splendid liberator of a people's resources, this was still the inaccessible hope upon which I had fixed my heart.

In my room I found young George Bolingbroke, who had been waiting, as he at once informed me, "a good half an hour."

"I say, Ben," he broke out the next minute, "why don't you get the housemaid to tie your cravats? She'd do it a long sight better. Are your fingers all thumbs?"

"They must be," I replied with a humility I had never assumed before the General, "I can't do the thing properly to save my life."

"I wonder it doesn't give you a common look," he remarked dispassionately, while I winced at the word, "but somehow it only makes you appear superior to such trifles, like a giant gazing over molehills at a mountain. It's your size, I reckon, but you're the kind of chap who can put on a turned-down collar with your evening clothes, or a tie that's been twisted through a wringer, and not look ridiculous. It's the rest of us that seem fops because we're properly dressed."

"I'd prefer to wear the right thing, you know," I returned, crestfallen.

"You never will. Anybody might as well expect a mountain to put forth rose-bushes instead of pine. It suits you, somehow, like your hair, which would make the rest of us look a regular guy. But I'm forgetting my mission. I've brought you an invitation to a party."

"What on earth should I do at a party?"

"Look pleasant. Did I take you to Miss Lessie Bell's dancing class for nothing? and were you put through the steps of the Highland Fling in vain?"

"I wasn't put through, I never learned."

"Well, you kicked at it anyway. I say, is all your pirouetting to be done with stocks? Are you going to pass away in ignorance of polite society and the manners of the ladies?"

"When I make a fortune, perhaps—"

"Perhaps is always too late. To-morrow is better."

"Where is the party?"

"The Blands are giving it. Uncle George was puffing and blowing about you when we dined there last Sunday, and Sally Mickleborough told me to bring you to her party on Wednesday night."

Rising hurriedly I walked away from young George to the fireplace. A mist was before my eyes, I smelt again the scent of wallflowers, and I saw in a dream the old grey house, with its delicate lace curtains parted from the small square window-panes as if a face looked out on the crooked pavement.

"I'll go, George," I said, wheeling about, "if you'll pledge yourself that I go properly dressed."

"Done," he responded, with his unfailing amiability. "I'll tie your cravat myself; and thank your stars, Ben, that whatever you are, you can't be little, for that's the unforgivable sin in Sally's eyes."

On Wednesday night he proved as good as his promise, and when nine o'clock struck, it found me, in irreproachable evening clothes, following him down Franklin Street, to the old house, where a softly coloured light streamed through the windows and lay in a rosy pool under the sycamores. All day I had been very nervous. At the moment when I was reading telegrams for the General, I had suddenly remembered that I possessed no gloves suitable to be worn at my first party, and I had committed so many blunders that the great man had roared the word "Swelled!" in a furious tone. Now, however, when the sound of a waltz, played softly on stringed instruments, fell on my ears, my nervousness departed as quickly as it had come. The big mahogany doors swung open before us, and as I passed with George, into the brilliantly lighted hall, where the perfume of roses filled the air, I managed to move, if not with grace, at least with the necessary dignity of an invited guest. The lamps, placed here and there amid feathery palm branches, glowed under pink shades like enormous roses in full bloom, and up and down the wide staircase, carpeted in white, a number of pretty girls tripped under trailing garlands of Southern smilax. As we entered the door on the right, I saw Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca, standing very erect in their black brocades and old lace, with outstretched hands and constantly smiling lips.

George presented me, with the slightly formal manner which seemed appropriate to the occasion. I had held the little hand of each lady for a minute in my own, and had looked once into each pair of brightly shining eyes, when my glance, dropping from theirs, flew straight as a bird to Sally Mickleborough, who stood talking animatedly to an elderly gentleman with grey side-whiskers and a pleasant laugh. She was dressed all in white, and her pale brown hair, which I had last seen flying like the wing of a bird, was now braided and wound in a wreath about her head. As the elderly gentleman bowed and passed on, she lifted her eyes, and her starry, expectant gaze rested full on my face.

Between us there stretched an expanse of polished floor, in which the pink-shaded lamps and the nodding roses were mirrored as in a pool. Around us there was the music of stringed instruments, playing a waltz softly; the sound, too, of many voices, now laughing, now whispering; of Miss Mitty's repeated "It was so good of you to come"; of Miss Matoaca's gently murmured "We are so glad to have you with us"; of Dr. Theophilus's "You grow younger every day, ladies. Will you dance to-night?"; of General Bolingbroke's "I never missed an opportunity of coming to you in my life, ma'am"; of a confused chorus of girlish murmurs, of youthful merriment.

For one delirious instant it seemed to me that if I stepped on the shining floor, I should go down as on a frozen pool. Then her look summoned me, and as I drew nearer she held out her hand and stood waiting. There was a white rose in her wreath of plaits, and when I bent to speak to her the fragrance floated about me.

"Do you still remember me because of the blue-eyed collie?" I asked, for it was all I could think of.

Her firm square chin was tilted a little upward, and as she smiled at me, her thick black eyebrows were raised in the old childish expression of charming archness. It was the face of an idea rather than the face of a woman, and the power, the humour, the radiant energy in her look, appeared to divide her, as by an immeasurable distance, from the pretty girls of her own age among whom she stood. She seemed at once older and younger than her companions—older by some deeper and sadder knowledge of life, younger because of the peculiar buoyancy with which she moved and spoke. As I looked at her mouth, very full, of an almost violent red, and tremulous with expression, I remembered Miss Hatty's "delicate bow" with an odd feeling of anger.

"It has been a long time, but I haven't forgotten you, Ben Starr," she said.

"Do you remember the night of the storm and the cup of milk you wouldn't drink?"

"How horrid I was! And the geranium you gave me?"

"And the churchyard and the red shoes and Samuel?"

"Poor Samuel. I can't have any dogs now. Aunt Mitty doesn't like them—"

Some one came up to speak to her, and while I bowed awkwardly and turned away, I saw her gaze looking back at me from the roses and the pink-shaded lamps. A touch on my arm brought the face of young George between me and my ecstatic visions.

"I say, Ben, there's an awfully pretty girl over there I want you to waltz with—Bessy Dandridge."

In spite of my protest he led me the next instant to a slim figure in pink tarlatan, with a crown of azaleas, who sat in one corner between two very stout ladies. As I approached, the stout ladies smiled at me benignly, hiding suppressed yawns behind feather fans. Miss Dandridge was, as George said, "awfully pretty," with large shallow eyes of pale blue, an insipid mouth, and a shy little smile that looked as if she had put it on with her crown of azaleas and would take it off again and lay it away in her bureau drawer when the party was over.

"Get up and dance, dear," urged one of the stout ladies sleepily, "we ought to have come earlier."

"The girls look very well," remarked the other, suddenly alert and interested, "but I don't like this new fashion of wearing the hair. Sally Mickleborough is handsome, though it's a pity she takes so much after her father."

My arm was already around the pink tarlatan waist of my partner, the crown of azaleas had brushed my shoulder like a gentle caress, and I had whirled halfway down the room in triumphant agony, when a floating phrase uttered in a girlish voice entered my ears and carried confusion into my brain.

"Get out of the way. Doesn't Bessy look for all the world like a rose-bush uprooted by a whirlwind?"

I caught the words as I went, and they proved too much for the trembling balance of my self-confidence. My strained gaze, fixed on the glassy surface beneath my feet, plunged suddenly downward amid the reflected roses and lamps. The music went wild and out of tune on the air. My blood beat violently in my pulses, I made a single false step, tripped over a flounce of pink tarlatan, which seemed to shriek as I went down, and the next instant my partner and I were flat on the polished floor, clutching desperately for support at the mirrored roses beneath.

The wreck lasted only a minute. A single suppressed titter fell on my ears, and was instantly checked. I looked up in time to see a smile freeze on Miss Mitty's face, and melt immediately into an expression of sympathy. The pretty girl, with the crown of azalea hanging awry on her flaxen tresses, and her flounce of pink tarlatan held disconsolately in her hand, looked for one dreadful instant as if she were about to burst into tears. A few dancers had stopped and gathered sympathetically around us, but the rest were happily whirling on, while the music, after a piercing crescendo, came breathlessly to a pause amid a silence that I felt to be far louder than sound. The perspiration, forced out by inward agony, stood in drops on my forehead, and as I wiped it away, I said almost defiantly:—

"It was the fault of George Bolingbroke. I told him I didn't know how to dance."

"I think I'd better go home," murmured the heroine of the disaster, catching her lower lip in her teeth to bite back a sob, "I wonder where mamma can be?"

"Here, dear," responded a commiserating voice, and I was about to turn away in disgrace without a further apology, when the little circle around us divided with a flutter, and Sally appeared, leaning on the arm of a youth with bulging eyes and a lantern jaw.

"Go home, Bessy? Why, how silly!" she exclaimed, and her energetic voice seemed suddenly to dominate the situation. "It wasn't so many years ago, I'm sure, that you used to tumble for the pleasure of it. Here, let me pin on your crown, and then run straight upstairs to the red room and get mammy to mend your flounce. It won't take her a minute. There, now, you're all the prettier for a high colour."

When she had pushed Bessy across the threshold with her small, strong hands, she turned to me, laughing a little, and slipped her arm into mine with the air of a young queen bestowing a favour.

"It's just as well, Ben Starr," she said, "that you're engaged to me for this dance, and not to a timid lady."

It wasn't my dance, I knew; in fact, I had not had sufficient boldness to ask her for one, and I discovered the next minute, when she sent away rather impatiently a youth who approached, that she had taken such glorious possession merely from some indomitable instinct to give people pleasure.

"Shall we sit down and talk a little over there under the smilax?" she asked, "or would you rather dance? If you'd like to dance," she added with a sparkle in her face, "I am not afraid."

"Well, I am," I retorted, "I shall never dance again."

"How serious that sounds—but since you've made the resolution I hope you'll keep it. I like things to be kept."

"There's no chance of my breaking it. I never made but one other solemn vow in my life."

"And you've kept that?"

"I am keeping it now."

She sat down, arranging her white draperies under the festoons of smilax, her left hand, from which a big feather fan drooped, resting on her knees, her small, white-slippered foot moving to the sound of the waltz.

"Was it a vow not to grow any more?" she asked with a soft laugh.

"It was," I leaned toward her and the fragrance of the white rose, drooping a little in her wreath of plaits, filled my nostrils, "that I would not stay common."

Her lashes, which had been lowered, were raised suddenly, and I met her eyes. "O Ben Starr, Ben Starr," she said, "how well you have kept it!"

"Do you remember the stormy night when you would not let me take your wet cap because I was a common boy?".

"How hateful I must have been!"

"On that night I determined that I would not grow up to be a common man. That was why I ran away, that was why I went into the tobacco factory, that was why I started to learn Johnson's Dictionary by heart—why I drudged over my Latin, why I went into stocks, why—"

Her eyes had not left my face, but unfurling the big feather fan, she waved it slowly between us. I, who had, in the words of Dr. Theophilus, "no small wits in my head," who could stand, dumb and a clown, in a ballroom, who could even trip up my partner, had found words that could arrest the gaze of the woman before me. To talk at all I must talk of big things, and it was of big things that I now spoke—of poverty, of struggle, of failure, of aspiration. My mind, like my body, was not rounded to the lighter graces, the rippling surface, that society requires. In my everyday clothes, among men, I was at no loss for words, but the high collar and the correctly tied cravat I wore seemed to strangle my throat, until those starry eyes, seeking big things also, had looked into mine. Then I forgot my fruitless efforts at conversation, I forgot the height of my collar, the stiffness of my shirt, the size of my hands and my feet. I forgot that I was a plain man, and remembered only that I was a man. The merely social, the trivial, the commonplace, dropped from my thoughts. My dignity,—the dignity that George Bolingbroke had called that of size,—was restored to me; and beyond the rosy lights and the disturbing music, we stood a man and a woman together. Our consciousness had left the surface of life. We had become acutely aware of each other and aware, too, of the silence in which our eyes wavered and met.

"That was why I starved and sweated and drudged and longed," I added, while her fan waved with its large, slow movement between us, "that was why—"

Her lips parted, she leaned slightly forward, and I saw in her face what I had never seen in the face of a woman before—the bloom of a soul.

"And you've done this all your life?"

"Since that stormy evening."

"You have won—already you have won—"

"Not yet. I am beginning and I may win in the end if I keep steady, if I don't lose my head. I shall win in the end—perhaps—"

"You will win what?"

"A fortune it may be, or it may be even the thing that has made the fortune seem worth the having."

"And that is?" she asked simply.

"It is too long a story. Some day, if you will listen, I may tell you, but not now—"

The dance stopped, she rose to her feet, and George Bolingbroke, rushing excitedly to where we stood, claimed the coming Virginia reel as his own.

"Some day you shall tell me the long story, Ben Starr," she said, as she gave me her hand.

I watched her take her place in the Virginia reel, watched the dance begin, watched her full, womanly figure, in its soft white draperies, glide between the lines, with her head held high, her hand in George Bolingbroke's, her white slippers skimming the polished floor. Then turning away, I walked slowly down the length of the two drawing-rooms, and said "Good-night" to Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca near the door. As I passed into the hall, I heard a woman's voice murmur distinctly:—

"Yes, he is a magnificent animal, but he has no social manner."



CHAPTER XII

I WALK INTO THE COUNTRY AND MEET WITH AN ADVENTURE

My sleep that night was broken by dreams of roses and pink-shaded lamps. For the first time in my life my brain and body alike refused rest, and the one was illumined as by the rosy glow of a flame, while the other was scorched by a fever which kept me tossing sleeplessly between Mrs. Clay's lavender-scented sheets. At last when the sun rose, I got out of bed, and hurriedly dressing, went up Franklin Street, and turned into one of the straight country roads which led through bronzed levels of broomsedge. Eastward the sun was ploughing a purple furrow across the sky, and toward the south a single golden cloud hung over some thin stretches of pine. The ghost of a moon, pale and watery, was riding low, after a night of high frolic, and as the young dawn grew stronger, I watched her melt gradually away like a face that one sees through smoke. The October wind, blowing with a biting edge over the broomsedge, bent the blood-red tops of the sumach like pointed flames toward the road.

For me a new light shone on the landscape—a light that seemed to have its part in the high wind, in the waving broomsedge, and in the rising sun. For the first time since those old days in the churchyard I felt with every fibre of me, with every beat of my pulses, with every drop of my blood, that it was good to be alive—that it was worth while every bit of it. My starved boyhood, the drudgery in the tobacco factory, the breathless nights in the Old Market, the hours when, leaning over Johnson's Dictionary, I had been obliged to pinch myself to keep wide awake—the squalor out of which I had come, and the future into which I was going—all these were a part to-day of this strange new ecstasy that sang in the wind and moved in the waving broomsedge.

And through it all ran my thoughts: "How fragrant the white rose was in her hair! How tremulous her mouth! Are her eyes grey or green, and is it only the heavy shadow of her lashes that makes them appear black at times, as if they changed colour with her thoughts? Is it possible that she could ever love me? If I make a fortune will that bring me any nearer to her? Obscure as I am my cause is hopeless, but even if I were rich and powerful, should I ever dare to ascend the steps of that house where I had once delivered marketing at the kitchen door?"

The memory of the spring morning when I had first gone there with my basket on my arm returned to me, and I saw myself again as a ragged, barefooted boy resting beneath the silvery branches of the great sycamore. Even then I had dreamed of her; all through my life the thought of her had run like a thread of gold. I remembered her as she had stood in our little kitchen on that stormy October evening, holding her mop of a muff in her cold little hands, and looking back at me with her sparkling defiant gaze. Then she came to me in her red shoes, dancing over the coloured leaves in the churchyard, and a minute later, as she had knelt in the box-bordered path patiently building her houses of moss and stones. As a child she had stirred my imagination, as a woman she had filled and possessed my thoughts. Always I had seen her a little above, a little beyond, but still beckoning me on.

The next instant my thoughts dropped back to the evening before, and I went over word for word every careless phrase she had spoken. Was she merely kind to the boor in her house? or had there been a deeper meaning in her divine smile—in her suddenly lifted eyes? "O Ben Starr, you have won!" she had said, and had the thrill in her voice, the tremor of her bosom under its fall of lace, meant that her heart was touched? Modest or humble I had never been. The will to fight—the exaggerated self-importance, the overweening pride of the strong man who has made his way by buffeting obstacles, were all mine; and yet, walking there that morning in the high wind between the rolling broomsedge and the blood-red sumach, I was aware again of the boyish timidity with which I had carried my market basket so many years ago to her kitchen doorstep. She had said of me last night that I was no longer "common." Was that because she had read in my glance that I had kept myself pure for her sake?—that for her sake I had made myself strong to resist as well as to achieve? Would Miss Mitty's or Miss Matoaca's verdict, I wondered, have been as merciful, as large as hers? "A magnificent animal, but with no social manner," the voice had said of me, and the words burned now, hot with shame, in my memory. The recollection of my fall in the dance, of the crying lips of the pretty girl in pink tarlatan, while she stood holding her ruined flounce, became positive agony. What did she think of my boorishness? Was I, for her also, merely a magnificent animal? Had she noticed how ill at ease I felt in my evening clothes? O young Love, young Love, your sharpest torments are not with arrows, but with pin pricks!

A trailing blackberry vine, running like a crimson vein close to the earth, caught my foot, and I stooped for a minute. When I looked up she was standing clear against the reflected light of the sunrise, where a low hill rose above the stretches of broomsedge. Her sorrel mare was beside her, licking contentedly at a bright branch of sassafras; and I saw that she had evidently dismounted but the moment before. As I approached, she fastened her riding skirt above her high boots, and kneeling down on the dusty roadside, lifted the mare's foot and examined it with searching and anxious eyes. Her three-cornered riding hat had slipped to her shoulders, where it was held by a broad black band of elastic, and I saw her charming head, with its wreath of plaits, defined against the golden cloud that hung above the thin stretch of pines. At my back the full sunrise broke, and when she turned toward me, her gaze was dazzled for a moment by the flood of light.

"Let me have a look," I said, as I reached her, "is the mare hurt?"

"She went lame a few minutes ago. There's a stone in her foot, but I can't get it out."

"Perhaps I can."

Rising from her knees, she yielded me her place, and then stood looking down on me while I removed the stone.

"She'll still limp, I fear, it was a bad one," I said as I finished.

Without replying, she turned from me and ran a few steps along the road, calling, "Come, Dolly," in a caressing voice. The mare followed with difficulty, flinching as she put her sore foot to the ground.

"See how it hurts her," she said, coming back to me. "I'll have to lead her slowly—there's no other way."

"Why not ride at a walk?"

She shook her head. "My feet are better than a lame horse. It's not more than two miles anyway."

"And you danced all night?"

I hung the reins over my arm and we turned together, facing the sunrise.

"Yes, but the way to rest is to run out-of-doors. Are you often up with the dawn, too?"

"No, but I couldn't sleep. The music got into my head."

"Into mine also. But I often take a canter at sunrise. It is my hour."

"And this is your road?"

"Not always. I go different ways. This one I call the road-to-what-might-have-been because it turns off just as it reaches a glorious view."

"Then don't let's travel it. I'd rather go with you on the road-to-what-is-to-be."

She looked at me steadily for a minute with arching brows. "I wonder why they say of you that you have no social amenities?" she observed mockingly.

"I haven't. That isn't an amenity, it is a fact. To save my life I couldn't find a blessed thing to say last night to the little lady in pink tarlatan whose dress I tore."

"Poor Bessy!" she laughed softly, "she vows she'll never waltz with you again."

"She's perfectly safe to vow it."

"Oh, yes, I remember, and I hope you won't dance any more. Do you know, I like you better out-of-doors."

"Out-of-doors?"

"Well, the broomsedge is becoming to you. It seems your natural background somehow. Now it makes George Bolingbroke look frivolous."

"His natural background is the ballroom, and I'm not sure he hasn't the best of it. I can't live always in the broomsedge."

"Oh, it isn't only the broomsedge, though that goes admirably with your hair—it's the bigness, the space, the simplicity. You take up too much room among lamps and palms, you trip on a waxed floor, and down goes poor Bessy. But out here you are natural and at home. The sky sets off your head—and it's really very fine if you only knew it. Out here, with me, you are in your native element."

"Is that because you are my native element? Can you imagine poor Bessy fitting into the picture?"

"To tell the truth I can't imagine poor Bessy fitting you at all. Her native element is pink tarlatan."

"And yours?" I demanded.

"That you must find out for yourself." A smile played on her face like an edge of light.

"The sunrise," I answered.

"Like you, I am sorry that I can't be always in my proper setting," she replied.

"You are always. The sunrise never leaves you."

Her brows arched merrily, and I saw the tiny scar I had remembered from childhood catch up the corner of her mouth with its provoking and irresistible trick of expression.

"Do you mean to tell me that you learned these gallantries in Johnson's Dictionary?" she enquired, "or have you taken other lessons from the General besides those in speculations?"

I had got out of my starched shirt and my evening clothes, and the timidity of the ballroom had no part in me under the open sky. "Johnson's Dictionary wasn't my only teacher," I retorted, "nor was the General. At ten years of age I could recite the prosiest speeches of Sir Charles Grandison."

"Ah, that explains it. Well, I'm glad anyway you didn't learn it from the General. He broke poor Aunt Matoaca's heart, you know."

"Then I hope he managed to break his own at the same time."

"He didn't. I don't believe he had a big enough one to break. Oh, yes, I've always detested your great man, the General. They were engaged to be married, you have heard, I suppose, and three weeks before the wedding she found out some dreadful things about his life—and she behaved then, as Dr. Theophilus used to say, 'like a gentleman of honour.' He—he ought to have married another woman, but even after Aunt Matoaca gave him up, he refused to do it—and this was what she never got over. If he had behaved as dishonourably as that in business, no man would have spoken to him, she said—and can you believe it?—she declined to speak to him for twenty years, though she was desperately in love with him all the time. She only began again when he got old and gouty and humbled himself to her. In my heart of hearts I can't help disliking him in spite of all his success, but I really believe that he has never in his life cared for any woman except Aunt Matoaca. It's because she's so perfectly honourable, I think—but, of course, it is her terrible experience that has made her so—so extreme in her views."

"What are her views?"

"She calls them principles—but Aunt Mitty says, and I suppose she's right, that it would have been more ladylike to have borne her wrongs in silence instead of shrieking them aloud. For my part I think that, however loud she shrieked, she couldn't shriek as loud as the General has acted."

"I hope she isn't still in love with him?"

Her clear rippling laugh—the laugh of a free spirit—fluted over the broomsedge. "Can you imagine it? One might quite as well be in love with one's Thanksgiving turkey. No, she isn't in love with him now, but she's in love with the idea that she used to be, and that's almost as bad. I know it's her own past that makes her think all the time about the wrongs of women. She wants to have them vote, and make the laws, and have a voice in the government. Do you?"

"I never thought about it, but I'm pretty sure I shouldn't like my wife to go to the polls," I answered.

Again she laughed. "It's funny, isn't it?—that when you ask a man anything about women, he always begins to talk about his wife, even when he hasn't got one?"

"That's because he's always hoping to have one, I suppose."

"Do you want one very badly?" she taunted.

"Dreadfully—the one I want."

"A real dream lady in pink tarlatan?"

"No, a living lady in a riding habit."

If I had thought to embarrass her by this flight of gallantry, my hope was fruitless, for the arrow, splintered by her smile, fell harmlessly to the dust of the road.

"An Amazon seems hardly the appropriate mate to Sir Charles Grandison," she retorted.

"Just now it was the General that I resembled."

"Oh, you out-generaled the General a mile back. Even he didn't attempt to break the heart of Aunt Matoaca at their second meeting."

The candid merriment in her face had put me wholly at ease,—I who had stood tongue-tied and blushing before the simpers of poor Bessy. Dare as I might, I could bring no shadow of self-consciousness, no armour of sex, into her sparkling eyes.

"And have I tried to break yours?" I asked bluntly.

"Have you? You know best. I am not familiar with Grandisonian tactics."

"I don't believe there's a man alive who could break your heart," I said.

With her arm on the neck of the sorrel mare, she gave me back my glance, straight and full, like a gallant boy.

"Nothing," she remarked blithely, "short of a hammer could do it."

We laughed together, and the laughter brought us into an intimacy which to me, at least, was dangerously sweet. My head whirled suddenly.

"You asked me last night about the one thing I'd wanted most all my life," I said.

"The thing that made you learn Johnson's Dictionary by heart?" she asked.

"Only to the end of the c's. Don't credit me, please, with the whole alphabet."

"The thing, then," she corrected herself, "that made you learn the a, b, c's of Johnson's Dictionary by heart?"

"If you wish it I will tell you what it was."

For the first time her look wavered. "Is it very long? Here is Franklin Street, and in a little while we shall be at home."

"It is not long—it is very short. It is a single word of three letters."

"I thought you said it had covered every hour of your life?"

"Every hour of my life has been covered by a word of three letters."

"What an elastic word!"

"It is, for it has covered everything at which I looked—both the earth and the sky."

"And the General and the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad?"

"Without that word the General and the railroad would have been nothing."

"How very much obliged to it the poor General must be!"

"Will you hear it?" I asked, for when I was once started to the goal there was no turning me by laughter.

She raised her eyes, which had been lowered, and looked at me long and deeply—so long and deeply that it seemed as if she were seeking something within myself of which even I was unconscious.

"Will you hear it?" I asked again.

Her gaze was still on mine. "What is the word?" she asked, almost in a whisper.

At the instant I felt that I staked my whole future, and yet that it was no longer in my power to hesitate or to draw back. "The word is—you," I replied.

Her hand dropped from the mare's neck, where it had almost touched mine, and I watched her mouth grow tremulous until the red of it showed in a violent contrast to the clear pallor of her face. Then she turned her head away from me toward the sun, and thoughtful and in silence, we passed down Franklin Street to the old grey house.



CHAPTER XIII

IN WHICH I RUN AGAINST TRADITIONS

When we had delivered the mare to the coloured groom waiting on the sidewalk, she turned to me for the first time since I had uttered my daring word.

"You must come in to breakfast with us," she said, with a friendly and careless smile, "Aunt Mitty will be disappointed if I return without what she calls 'a cavalier.'"

The doubt occurred to me if Miss Mitty would consider me entitled to so felicitous a phrase, but smothering it the next minute as best I could, I followed Sally, not without trepidation, up the short flight of steps, and into the wide hall, where the air was heavy with the perfume of fading roses. Great silver bowls of them drooped now, with blighted heads, amid the withered smilax, and the floor was strewn thickly with petals, as if a strong wind had blown down the staircase. From the dining room came a delicious aroma of coffee, and as we crossed the threshold, I saw that the two ladies, in their lace morning caps, were already seated at the round mahogany table. From behind the tall old silver service, the grave oval face of Miss Mitty cast on me, as I entered, a look in which a faint wonder was mingled with a pleasant hereditary habit of welcome. A cover was already laid for the chance comer, and as I took possession of it in response to her invitation, I felt again that terrible shyness—that burning physical embarrassment of the plain man in unfamiliar surroundings. So had I felt on the morning when I had stood in the kitchen, with my basket on my arm, and declined the plum cake for which my mouth watered. In the road with Sally I had appeared to share, as she had said, something of the dignity of the broomsedge and the open sky; here opposite to Miss Matoaca, with the rich mahogany table and the vase of chrysanthemums between us, I seemed ridiculously out of proportion to the surroundings amid which I sat, speechless and awkward. Was it possible that any woman could look beneath that mountain of shyness, and discern a self-confidence in large matters that would some day make a greater man than the General?

"Cream and sugar?" enquired Miss Mitty, in a tone from which I knew she had striven to banish the recognition that she addressed a social inferior. Her pleasant smile seemed etched about her mouth, over the expression of faint wonder which persisted beneath. I felt that her racial breeding, like Miss Matoaca's, was battling against her instinctive aversion, and at the same moment I knew that I ought to have declined the invitation Sally had given. A sense of outrage—of resentment—swelled hot and strong in my heart. What was this social barrier—this aristocratic standard that could accept the General and reject such men as I? If it had sprung back, strong and flexible as a steel wire, before the man, would it still present its irresistible strength against the power of money? In that instant I resolved that if wealth alone could triumph over it, wealth should become the weapon of my attack. Then my gaze met Sally's over the chrysanthemums, and the thought in my brain shrank back suddenly abashed.

"Dolly got a stone in her foot, poor dear," she remarked to her aunts, "and Ben Starr got it out. She limped all the way home."

At her playful use of my name, a glance flashed from Miss Mitty to Miss Matoaca and back again across the high silver service.

"Then we are very grateful to Mr. Starr," replied Miss Mitty in a prim voice. "Sister Matoaca and I were just agreeing that you ought not to be allowed to ride alone outside the city."

"Perhaps we can arrange with Ben to go walking along the same road," responded Sally provokingly, "and I shouldn't be in need of a groom."

For the first time I raised my eyes. "I'll walk anywhere except along the road-to-what-might-have-been," I said, and my voice was quite steady.

Her glance dropped to her plate. Then she looked across the vase of chrysanthemums into Miss Mitty's face.

"Ben and I used to play together, Aunt Mitty," she said, offering the information as if it were the most pleasant fact in the world, "when I lived on Church Hill."

A flush rose to Miss Mitty's cheeks, and passed the next instant, as if by a wave of sympathy, into Miss Matoaca's.

"I hoped, Sally, that you had forgotten that part of your life," observed the elder lady stiffly.

"How can I forget it, Aunt Mitty? I was very happy over there."

"And are you not happy here, dear?" asked Miss Matoaca, hurt by the words, and bending over, she smelt a spray of lilies-of-the-valley that had lain beside her plate.

"Of course I am, Aunt Matoaca, but one doesn't forget. I met Ben first when I was six years old. Mamma and I stopped at his house in a storm one night on our way over to grandmama's. We were soaking wet, and they were very kind and dried us and gave us hot things to drink, and his mother wrapped me up in a shawl and sent me here with mamma. I shall always remember how good they were, and how he broke off a red geranium from his mother's plant and gave it to me."

As she told her story, Miss Mitty watched her attentively, the expression of faint wonder in her eyes and her narrow eyebrows, and her pleasant, rather pained smile etched delicately about her fine, thin lips. Her long, oval face, suffused now by an unusual colour, rose above the quaint old coffee urn, on which the Fairfax crest, belonging to her mother's family, was engraved. If any passion could have been supposed to rock that flat, virgin bosom, I should have said that it was moved by a passion of wounded pride.

"Is your coffee right, Mr. Starr? Have you cream enough?" she enquired politely. "Selim, give Mr. Starr a partridge."

My coffee was right, and I declined the bird, which would have stuck in my throat. The united pride of the Blands and the Fairfaxes, I told myself, could not equal that possessed by a single obscure son of a stone-cutter.

"If you are as hungry as I am, you are famished," observed Sally, with a gallant effort to make a semblance of gayety sport on a frozen atmosphere. "Aunt Matoaca, have pity and give me a muffin."

Muffins were passed by Miss Matoaca; waffles were presented immediately by Selim.

"Do take a hot one," urged Miss Matoaca anxiously, "yours is quite cold."

I took a hot one, and after placing it on the small white and gold plate, swore desperately to myself that I would not eat a mouthful in that house until I could eat there as an equal. The faint wonder beneath the pained fixed smile on Miss Mitty's face stabbed me like a knife. All her anxious hospitality, all her offers of cream and partridges, could not for a single minute efface it. Turning my head I discerned the same expression, still fainter, still gentler, reflected on Miss Matoaca's lips—as if some subtle bond of sympathy between them were asking always, beneath the hereditary courtesy: "Can this be possible? Are we, whose mother was a Fairfax, whose father was a Bland, sitting at our own table with a man who is not a gentleman by birth?—who has even brought a market basket to our kitchen door? What has become of the established order if such a thing as this can happen to two unprotected Virginia ladies?"

And it was quite characteristic of their race, of their class, that the greater the wonder grew in their gentle minds, the more sedulously they plied me with coffee and partridges and preserves—that the more their souls abhorred me, the more lavish became their hands. Divided as they were by their principles, something stronger than a principle now held the sisters together, and this was a passionate belief in the integrity of their race.

Again Selim handed the waffles in a frozen silence, and again Sally made an unsuccessful attempt to produce an appearance of animation.

"Are you going to market, Aunt Matoaca?" she asked, "and will you remember to buy seed for my canary?"

The flush in Miss Matoaca's cheek this time, I could not explain.

"Sister Mitty will go," she replied, in confusion, "I—I have another engagement."

"She alludes to a meeting of one of her boards," observed Miss Mitty, and turning to me she added, with what I felt to be an unfair thrust at the shrinking bosom of Miss Matoaca, "My sister is a great reader, Mr. Starr, and she has drawn many of her opinions out of books instead of from life."

I looked up, my eyes met Miss Matoaca's, and I remembered her love story.

"We all do that, I suppose," I answered. "Even when we get them from life, haven't most of them had their beginning in books?"

"I am not a great reader myself," remarked Miss Mitty, a trifle primly. "My father used to say that when a lady had read a chapter of her Bible in the morning, and consulted her cook-book, she had done as much literary work as was good for her. Too intimate an acquaintance with books, he always said, was apt to unsettle the views, and the best judgment a woman can have, I am sure, is the opinion of the gentlemen of her family."

"That may be true," I admitted, and my self-possession returned to me, until a certain masculine assurance sounded in my voice, "but I'm quite sure I shouldn't like anybody else's opinion to decide mine."

"You are a man," rejoined Miss Mitty, and I felt that she had not been able to bring her truthful lips to utter the word "gentleman." "It is natural that you should have independent ideas, but, as far as I am concerned, I am perfectly content to think as my grandmother and my great-grandmother have thought before me. Indeed, it seems to me almost disrespectful to differ from them."

"And it was dear great-grandmama," laughed Sally, "who when the doctor once enquired if her tooth ached, turned to great-grandpapa and asked, 'Does it ache, Bolivar?'"

She had tossed her riding hat aside, and a single loosened wave of her hair had fallen low on her forehead above her arched black eyebrows. Beneath it her eyes, very wide and bright, held a puzzled yet resolute look, as if they were fixed upon an obstacle which frightened her, and which she was determined to overcome.

"You are speaking of my grandmama, Sally," observed Miss Mitty, and I could see that the levity of the girl had wounded her.

"I'm sorry, dear Aunt Mitty, she was my great-grandmama, too, but that doesn't keep me from thinking her a very silly person."

"A silly person? Your own great-grandmama, Sally!" Her mind, long and narrow, like her face, had never diverged, I felt, from the straight line of descent.

"My sister and I unfortunately do not agree in our principles, Mr. Starr," said Miss Matoaca, breaking her strained silence suddenly in a high voice, and with an energy that left tremors in her thin, delicate figure. "Indeed, I believe that I hold views which are opposed generally by Virginia ladies—but I feel it to be a point of honour that I should let them be known." She paused breathlessly, having delivered herself of the heresy that worked in her bosom, and a moment later she sat trembling from head to foot with her eyes on her plate. Poor little gallant lady, I thought, did she remember the time when at the call of that same word "honour," she had thrown away, not only her peace, but her happiness?

"Whatever your opinions may be, Miss Matoaca, I respect your honest and loyal support of them," I said.

The embarrassment that had overwhelmed me five minutes before had vanished utterly. At the first chance to declare myself—to contend, not merely with a manner, but with a situation, I felt the full strength of my manhood. The General himself could not have uttered his piquant pleasantries in a blither tone than I did my impulsive defence of the right of private judgment. Miss Mitty raised her eyes to mine, and Miss Matoaca did likewise. Over me their looks clashed, and I saw at once that it was the relentless warfare between individual temperament and racial instinct. In spite of the obscurity of my birth, I knew that in Miss Matoaca, at that instant, I had won a friend.

"Surely Aunt Matoaca is right to express what she thinks," said Sally, loyally following my lead.

"No woman of our family has ever thought such things, Sally, or has ever felt called upon to express her views in the presence of men."

"Well, I suppose, some woman has got to begin some day, and it may as well be Aunt Matoaca."

"There is no reason why any woman should begin. Your great-grandmama did not."

"But my great-grandmama couldn't tell when her tooth ached, and you can, I've heard you do it. It was very disrespectful of you, dear Auntie."

"If you cannot be serious, Sally, I refuse to discuss the subject."

"But how can anybody be serious, Aunt Mitty, about a person who didn't know when her own tooth ached?"

"Dear sister," remarked Miss Matoaca, in a voice of gentle obstinacy, "I do not wish to be the cause of a disagreement between Sally and yourself. Any question that was not one of principle I should gladly give up. I know you are not much of a reader, but if you would only glance at an article in the last Fortnightly Review on the Emancipation of Women—"

"I should have thought, sister Matoaca, that Dr. Peterson's last sermon in St. Paul's on the feminine sphere would have been a far safer guide for you. His text, Mr. Starr," she added, turning to me, "was, 'She looketh well to the ways of her household.'"

"At least you can't accuse Aunt Matoaca of neglecting the ways of her household," said Sally, merrily, "even the General rises up after dinner and praises her mince pies. Do you like mince pies, Ben?"

I replied that I was sure that I should like Miss Matoaca's, for I had heard them lauded by General Bolingbroke; at which the poor lady blushed until her cheeks looked like withered rose leaves. She was one of those unhappy women, I had learned during breakfast, who suffered from a greater mental activity than was usually allotted to the females of their generation. Behind that long and narrow face, with its pencilled eyebrows, its fine, straight nose, and restlessly shining eyes, what battles of conviction against tradition must have waged. Was the final triumph of intellect due, in reality, to the accident of an unhappy love? Had the General's frailties driven this shy little lady, with her devotion to law and order, and her excellent mince pies, into a martyr for the rights of sex?

"I am told that Mrs. Clay prides herself upon her pies," she remarked. "I have never eaten them, but Dr. Theophilus tells me that he prefers mine because I use less suet."

"I am sure nobody's could compare with yours, sister Matoaca," observed Miss Mitty in an affable tone, "and I happen to know that Mrs. Clay resorts to Mrs. Camberwell's cook-book. We prefer Mrs. Randolph's," she added, turning to me.

"Well, we'll ask Ben to dinner some day, and he may judge," said Sally.

Instantly I felt that her words were a challenge, and the shining mahogany table, with its delicate lace mats, its silver and its chrysanthemums, became a battle-field for opposing spirits. I saw Miss Mitty stiffen and the corners of her mouth grow rigid under her pleasant, fixed smile.

"Will you have some marmalade, Mr. Starr?" she asked, and I knew that with the phrase, she had flung down her gauntlet on the table. Her very politeness veiled a purpose, not of iron, but finely tempered and resistless as a blade. Had she said to me: "Sir, you are an upstart, and I, sitting quietly at the same table with you, and inviting you to eat of the same dish of marmalade, am a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes,"—her words would have stabbed me less deeply than did the pathetic "Can this be possible?" of her smiling features.

A canary, swinging in a gilt cage between the curtains at the window, broke suddenly into a jubilant fluting; and rising from the table, we stood for a minute, as if petrified, with our eyes on the bird, and on the box of blossoming sweet alyssum upon the sill. A little later, when I left with the plea that the General expected me at nine o'clock, the two elder ladies gave me their small, transparent hands, while their polite farewell sounded as final as if it had been uttered on the edge of an open grave. Only Sally, smiling up at me, with that puzzled yet determined look still in her eyes, said gayly, "When you go walking at sunrise, Ben, choose the road-to-what-might-have-been!"



CHAPTER XIV

IN WHICH I TEST MY STRENGTH

Her words rang in my ears while I went along the crooked pavement under the burnished sycamore. As I met the General at the corner I was still hearing them, and they prompted the speech that burst impulsively from my lips.

"General, I've got to get rich quickly, and I'm finding a way."

"You'd better make sure first that your royal road doesn't end in a ditch."

"I was talking to a man from West Virginia yesterday about buying out the National Oil Company, and I dreamed of it all night. He wants me to go in with him, and start a refining plant. If I can get special privileges and rebates from the railroads to give us advantages, we may make a big business of it."

"You may and you mayn't. Who's your man?"

"Sam Brackett. Bob's brother, you know."

"A mighty good fellow, and shrewd, too. But I'd think it over carefully, if I were you."

I did think it over, and the result of my thoughts was, as I told the General a fortnight later, the purchase of a refining plant near Clarksburg, and the beginning of a lively war with the competitors in the business.

"We're going to sweep the South, General, with the help of the railroad," I said.

The great man, with his gouty foot in a felt slipper, sat gazing meditatively over the words of a telegram, which had come on his private wire.

"Midland stock is selling at 160," he said. "It's a big railroad, my boy, and I've made it."

Even to-day, with the living presence of Sally still in my eyes, I was filled again with the old unappeasable desire for the great railroad. The woman and the road were distinct and yet blended in my thoughts.

At dinner-time, when the General hobbled to his buggy on my arm, I made again the remark I had blurted out so inopportunely.

"General, I've been to West Virginia and started the plant, and we're going to give Hail Columbia to our competitors."

He looked at me attentively, and a sly twinkle appeared in his little watery grey eyes, which were sunk deep in the bluish and swollen sockets.

"Do you feel yourself getting big, Ben?" he enquired, with a chuckle.

I shook my head. "Not yet, but it's a fair risk and a good chance to make a big business."

"Well, you're right, I suppose, and if you ain't you'll find out before long. What's luck, after all, but the thing that enables a man to see a long way ahead?"

He settled himself under his fur rug, flicked the reins over the old grey horse, and we drove slowly up Main Street behind a street car.

"I don't know about luck, General, but I'm going to win out if hard pushing can do it."

"It can do 'most anything if you only push hard, enough. But you talk as if you were in love, Ben, I've said the same thing a hundred times in my day, I reckon."

I blushed furiously, and then turning my face from him, stared at a group of children upon the sidewalk.

"Whom could I marry, General?" I asked. "You know well enough that a woman in your class wouldn't marry a man in mine—unless—"

"Unless she were over head and heels in love with him," he chuckled.

"Unless he were a great man," I corrected.

"You mean a rich man, Ben? So your oil business is merely a little love attention, after all."

"No, money has very little to do with it, and the woman I want to marry wouldn't marry me for money. But it's the mettle that counts, and in this age, given the position I've started from, how can a man prove his mettle except by success?—and success does mean money. The president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad is obliged to be a rich man, isn't he?"

"So you're still after my job, eh? Is that why you've let me bully and badger you for the last six years?"

"It was at the bottom of it," I answered honestly, for the gay old bird liked downright speaking, and I knew it. "I'd rather have been your confidential secretary for six years than general manager of traffic. I was learning what I wanted to know."

"And what was that?"

"The way you did things. The way you handled men and bought and sold stocks."

"You like the road, too, eh?"

"I like the road as long as it can be of use to me."

"And when it ceases to be you'll throw it over?"

"Yes, if it ever ceases to be I'll throw it over—honestly," I answered.

"Now that's the thing," he said, "remember always that in handling men honesty is a big asset. I've always been honest, my boy, and it's helped me when I needed it. Why, when I came in and got control of the road in that slump after the war, I was able to reorganise it principally because of the reputation for honesty I had earned. It was a long time before it began to pay dividends, but nobody grumbled. They knew I was doing my best—and that I was doing it fair and square, and to-day we control nearly twenty thousand miles of road."

"Yes, honesty I've learned in your office, sir."

"Well, it's good training,—it's mighty good training, if I do say it myself. You could have got with a darn bloater like Dick Horseley, and he'd have worked your ruin. Now you never saw me lose my head, did you, eh, Ben?"

I replied that I had not—not even when his private wire had ticked off news of the last panic.

"Well, I never did," he said reflectively, "except with women. Take my advice, Ben, and find a good sensible wife, even if she's in your own class, and marry and settle down. It steadies a man, somehow. I'd be a long ways happier to-day," he added, a little wistfully, "if I'd taken a wife when I was young."

I thought of Miss Matoaca, with her bright brown eyes, her withered roseleaf cheeks, and her sacrifice in the cause of honour.

"Whatever you are don't be an old bachelor," he pursued after a pause, "it may be pleasant in the beginning, but I'll be blamed if it pays in the end. Find a good sensible woman who hasn't any opinions of her own, and you will be happy. But as you value your peace, don't go and fall in love with a woman who has any heathenish ideas in her head. When a woman once gets that maggot in her brain, she stops believing in gentleness and self-sacrifice, and by George, she ceases to be a woman. Every man knows there's got to be a lot of sacrifice in marriage, and he likes to feel that he's marrying a woman who is fully capable of making it. A strong-minded woman can't—she's gone and unsexed herself—and instead of taking pleasure in giving up, she begins to talk everlastingly about her 'honour.' Pshaw! the next thing she'll expect to be treated as punctiliously as if she were a business partner!"

The old wound still ached sometimes, it was easy to see; and because of his age and his growing infirmities, he found it harder to keep back the querulous complaints that rose to his lips.

"Now, there's that George of mine," he resumed, still fretting, "he's probably gone and set his eyes on Sally Mickleborough, and it's as plain as daylight that she's got a plenty of that outlandish spirit of her aunt's. I don't mean she's got her notions—I ain't saying any harm of the girl—she's handsome enough in spite of Hatty's nonsense about her mouth—and I call it downright scandalous of Edmund Bland to leave every last penny of his money away from her. But, mark my words, and I tell George so every single day I live, if she marries George he's going to have trouble as sure as shot. She's just the kind to expect him to make sacrifices, and by Jove, no man wants to be expected to make sacrifices in his own home!"

Sacrifices! My blood sang in my ears. If she would only marry me I'd promise to make a sacrifice for her every blessed minute that I lived.

"And do you think she likes George, General?" I asked timidly.

"Oh, I don't suppose she knows her own mind," he retorted. "I never in my life, sir, knew but one woman who did."

We drove on for a minute in silence, and from the red and watery look in the General's eyes, I inferred that, in spite of his broken engagement and his bitter judgment, Miss Matoaca had managed to retain her place in his memory. As I looked at him, sitting there like a wounded eagle, huddled under his fur rug, a feeling of thanksgiving that was almost one of rapture swelled in my heart. If I had a plain name, I had also a clean life to offer the woman I loved. When I remembered the strong, pure line of her features, her broad, intelligent brow, her clear, unswerving gaze, I told myself that whatever the world had to say, she, at least, would consider the difference a fair one. At the great moment she would choose me, I knew, for myself alone; choose in a democracy the man who, God helping him, would stand always for the best in the democratic spirit—for courage and truth and strength and a clean honour toward men and women.

"Who was that pretty girl, Ben," the General enquired presently, "I saw you walking with last Sunday? A sweetheart?"

"No, sir. My sister."

"A lady? She looked it."

"She has been taught like one."

"What'll you do with her? Marry her off?"

"I haven't thought—but she won't look at any of the men she knows."

"Oh, well, if the National Oil wins, you may give her a fortune. There are plenty of young chaps who would jump at her. Bless my soul, she's more to my taste than Sally Mickleborough. It's the women who are such fools about birth, you know, men don't care a rap. Why, if I'd loved a woman, she might have been born in the poorhouse for all the thought I'd have given it. A pretty face or a small foot goes a long sight farther with a man than the tallest grandfather that ever lived." For a moment he was silent, and then he spoke softly, unconscious that he uttered his thought aloud. "No, Matoaca's birth, whatever it might have been, couldn't have come between us—it was her damned principles."

He looked tired and old, now that his armour of business had dropped from him, as he sat there, with the fur rug drawn over his chest, and his loose lower lip hanging slightly away from his shrunken gums. A sudden pity, the first I had ever dared feel for the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, shot through my heart. The gay old bird, I told myself, was shedding his plumage at last.

"Well, as long as I can't rest on my birth, I might as well stand up on something," I said.

"Women think a lot of it," he resumed, as if he had not noticed my flippant interjection; "and I reckon it about fits the size of their minds. Why, to hear Miss Mitty Bland talk you would think good birth was the only virtue she admitted to the first rank. I was telling her about you," he added with a chuckle, "and you've got sense enough to see the humour of what she said."

"I hope I have, General."

"Well, I began it by boasting about your looks, Ben, if you don't mind. 'That wonderful boy of ours is the finest-looking fellow in the South to-day, Miss Mitty,' I burst out, 'and he stands six feet two in his stockings.' 'Ah, General,' she replied sadly, 'what are six feet two inches without a grandfather?'"

He threw back his head with a roar, appearing a trifle chagrined the next instant by my faint-hearted pretence of mirth.

"Doesn't it tickle you, Ben?" he enquired, checking his laughter.

"I'm afraid it makes me rather angry, General," I answered.

"Oh, well, I didn't think you'd take it seriously. It's just a joke, you know. Go ahead and make your fortune, and they'll receive you quick enough."

"But they have received me. They asked me to their party."

"That was Sally, my boy—it was her party, and she fought the ladies for you. That girl's a born fighter, and I reckon she gets it from Harry Mickleborough—for the only blessed thing he could do was to fight. He was a mighty poor man, was Harry, but a God Almighty soldier—and he sent more Yankees to glory than any single man in the whole South. The girl gets it from him, and she hasn't any of her aunts' aristocratic nonsense in her either. She told Miss Mitty, on the spot, and I can see her eyes shine now, that she liked you and she meant to know you."

"That she meant to know me," I repeated, with a singing heart.

"The ladies were put out, I could see, but they ain't a match for that scamp Harry, and he's in her. There never lived the general that could command him, and he'd have been shot for insubordination in '63 if he hadn't been as good as a whole company to the army. 'I'll fight for the South and welcome,' he used to say, 'but, by God, sir, I'll fight as I damn please.' 'Twas the same way about the church, too. Old Dr. Peterson got after him once about standing, instead of kneeling, during prayers, and 'I'll pray as I damn please, sir!' responded Harry. Oh, he was a sad scamp!"

"So his daughter fought for me?" I said. "How did it end?"

"It will end all right when you are president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, and have shipped me to Kingdom Come. They won't shut their doors in your face, then."

"But she stood up for me?" I asked, and my voice trembled.

"She? Do you mean Miss Matoaca? Well, she granted your good looks and your virtues, but she regretted that they couldn't ask you to their house."

"And Miss Mitty?"

"Oh, Miss Mitty assured me that six feet two were as an inch in her sight, without a grandfather."

"But her niece—Miss Mickleborough?" I had worked delicately up to my point.

"The girl fought for you—but then she's obliged to fight for something?—it's Harry in her. That's why, as I said to George at breakfast, I don't want him to marry her. She's a good girl, and I like her, but who in the deuce wants to marry a fighting wife? Look at that fellow mauling his horse, Ben. It makes me sick to see 'em do it, but it's no business of mine, I reckon."

"It is of mine, General," I replied, for the sight of an ill-treated animal had made my blood boil since childhood. Before he could answer, I had jumped over the moving wheel, and had reached the miserable, sore-backed horse struggling under a load of coal and a big stick.

"Come off and put your shoulder to the wheel, you drunken brute," I said, as my rage rose in my throat.

"I'll be damned if I will," replied the fellow, and he was about to begin belabouring again, when I seized him by the collar and swung him clear to the street.

"I'll be damned if you don't," I retorted.

I was a strong man, and when my passions were roused, the thought of my own strength slipped from consciousness.

"You'll break his bones, Ben," said the General, leaning out of his buggy, but his eyes shone as they might have shone at the sight of his first battle.

"I hope I shall," I responded grimly, and going over to the wagon I put my shoulder to the wheel, and began the ascent of the steep hill. Somebody on the pavement came to my help on the other side, and we went up slowly, with a half-drunken driver reeling at our sides and the General following, in his buggy, a short way behind.

"I thought you were a diffident fellow, Ben," remarked the great man, as I took my seat again by his side; "but I don't believe there's another man in Richmond that would make such a spectacle of himself."

"I forget myself when I'm worked up," I answered, "and I forget that anybody is looking."

"Well, somebody was," he replied slyly. "You didn't see Miss Matoaca Bland pass you in a carriage as you were pushing that wheel?"

"No, I didn't see anybody."

"She saw you—and so did Sally Mickleborough. Why, I'd have given something pretty in my day to make a girl's eyes blaze like that."

A week later I swallowed my pride, with an effort, and called at the old grey house at the hour of sunset. Selim, stepping softly, conducted me into the dimly lighted drawing-room, where a cedar log burned, with a delicious fragrance, on a pair of high brass andirons. The red glow, half light, half shadow, flickered over the quaint tapestried furniture, the white-painted woodwork, and the portraits of departed Blands and Fairfaxes that smiled gravely down, with averted eyes. In a massive gilt frame over a rosewood spinet there was a picture of Miss Mitty and Miss Mataoca, painted in fancy dress, with clasped hands, under a garland of roses. My gaze was upon it, when the sound of a door opening quickly somewhere in the rear came to my ears; and the next instant I heard Miss Mitty's prim tones saying distinctly:—

"Tell Mr. Starr, Selim, that the ladies are not receiving."

There was a moment's silence, followed by a voice that brought my delighted heart with a bound into my throat.

"Aunt Mitty, I will see him."

"Sally, how can you receive a man who was not born a gentleman?"

"Aunt Mitty, if you don't let me see him here, I'll—I'll meet him in the street."

The door shut sharply, there was a sound of rapid steps, and the voices ceased. Harry Mickleborough, in his daughter, I judged, had gained the victory; for an instant afterwards I heard her cross the hall, with a defiant and energetic rustle of skirts. When she entered the room, and held out her hand, I saw that she was dressed in her walking gown. There were soft brown furs about her throat, and on her head she wore a small fur hat, with a bunch of violets at one side, under a thin white veil.

"I was just going to walk," she said, breathing a little quickly, while her eyes, very wide and bright, held that puzzled and resolute look I remembered; "will you come with me?"

She turned at once to the door, as if eager to leave the house, and while I followed her through the hall, and down the short flight of steps to the pavement, I was conscious of a sharp presentiment that I should never again cross that threshold.



CHAPTER XV

A MEETING IN THE ENCHANTED GARDEN

I spoke no word of love in that brisk walk up Franklin Street, and when I remembered this a month afterwards, it seemed to me that I had let the opportunity of a lifetime slip by. Since that afternoon I had not seen Sally again—some fierce instinct held me back from entering the doors that would have closed against me—and as the days passed, crowded with work and cheered by the immediate success of the National Oil Company, I felt that Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca, and even Sally, whom I loved, had faded out of the actual world into a vague cloud-like horizon. To women it is given, I suppose, to merge the ideal into everyday life, but with men it is different. I saw Sally still every minute that I lived, but I saw her as a star, set high above the common business world in which I had my place—above the strain and stress of the General's office, above the rise and fall of the stock market, above the brisk triumphant war with competitors for the National Oil Company, above even the hope of the future presidency of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. Between my love and its fulfilment, stretched, I knew, hard years of struggle, but bred in me, bone and structure, the instinct of democracy was still strong enough to support me in the hour of defeat. Never once—not even when I sat, condescendingly plied with coffee and partridges, face to face with the wonder expressed in Miss Mitty's eyes, had I admitted to myself that I was obliged to remain in the class from which I had sprung. Courage I had never lost for an instant; the present might embarrass me, but the future, I felt always, I held securely grasped in my own hands. The birthright of a Republic was mine as well as the General's, and I knew that among a free people it was the mettle of the man that would count in the struggle. In the fight between democratic ideals and Old World institutions I had no fear, even to-day, of what the future would bring. The right of a man to make his own standing was all that I asked.

And yet the long waiting! As I walked one Sunday afternoon over to Church Hill, after a visit to Jessy (who was living now with a friend of the doctor's), I asked myself again and again if Sally had read my heart that last afternoon and had seen in it the reason of my fierce reserve. Jessy had been affectionate and very pretty—she was a cold, small, blond woman, with a perfect face and the manner of an indifferent child—but she had been unable to wean me from the thought which returned to take royal possession as soon as the high pressure of my working day was relaxed. It controlled me utterly from the moment I put the question of the stock market aside; and it was driving me now, like the ghost of an unhappy lover, back for a passionate hour in the enchanted garden.