Confidences between the two firms were frequent and natural—not only because Vanorden and Dawson were intimate friends and of the greatest assistance each to the other socially and politically; not only because Ramsay and Bischoffsheimer had married sisters; but also, and chiefly, because big lawyers like to have big lawyers opposed to them in a big suit. For several reasons; for instance, ingenuity on each side prolongs the litigation and makes it intricate, and therefore highly expensive, and so multiplies the extent of the banquet.

"How so?" inquired Vanorden, put on the alert by the significant intonation of his friend.

"The whole Ranger-Whitney business is coming into court. Ranger, you know, passed over the other day. He cut his family off with almost nothing—gave his money to Tecumseh College. The son's engaged us to attack the will."

"Where do we come in?" asked Vanorden.

Dawson laughed and winked. "I guess your client, old Charley Whitney, won't miss the chance to intervene in the suit and annex the whole business, in the scrimmage."

Vanorden nodded. "Oh, I see," said he. "I see! Yes, we'll take a hand—sure!"

"There won't be much in it for us," continued Dawson. "The boy's got nothing, and between you and me, Len, the chances are against him. But you fellows and whoever gets the job of defending the college's rights—" Dawson opened his arms and made a humorous, huge, in-sweeping gesture. "And," he added, "Whitney's one of the trustees under the will. See?"

"Thanks, old man." Vanorden was laughing like a shrewd and mischievous but through-and-through good-natured boy. The two brilliant young leaders of the Illinois bar shook hands warmly.

And so it came about that Charles Whitney was soon indorsing a plan to cause, and to profit by, sly confusion—the plan of his able lawyers. They had for years steered his hardy craft, now under the flag of peaceful commerce and now under the black banner of the buccaneer. The best of pilots, they had enabled him to clear many a shoal of bankruptcy, many a reef of indictment. They served well, for he paid well.



CHAPTER XIII

BUT IS RESCUED

By the time he reached Saint X our young "man of affairs" believed his conscience soundly converted to his adventure; and, as he drove toward the house, a final survey of his defenses and justifications satisfied him that they were impregnable. Nevertheless, as he descended from the station hack and entered the grounds of the place that in his heart of heart was all that the word "home" can contain, he felt strangely like a traitor and a sneak. He kept his manner of composed seriousness, but he reasoned in vain against those qualms of shame and panic. At the open front door he dared not lift his eyes lest he should be overwhelmed by the sight of that colossal figure, with a look in its face that would force him to see the truth about his thoughts and his acts. The house seemed deserted; on the veranda that opened out from the back parlor he found Dory Hargrave, reading. He no longer felt bitter toward Dory. Thinking over the whole of the Ranger-Whitney relations and the sudden double break in them, he had begun to believe that perhaps Adelaide had had the good luck to make an extremely clever stroke when she shifted from Ross Whitney to Hargrave. Anyhow, Dory was a fine fellow, both in looks and in brains, with surprisingly good, yes, really amazing air and manner—considering his opportunities; he'd be an ornament to any family as soon as he had money enough properly to equip himself—which would be very soon, now that the great Dawson was about to open fire on the will and demolish it.

"Howdy," he accordingly said, with only a shade less than his old friendliness, and that due to embarrassment, and not at all to ill feeling. "Where's mother—and Del?"

"Your sister has taken your mother for a drive," replied Hargrave.

"Smoke?" said Arthur, extending his gold cigarette case, open.

Dory preferred his own brand of cigarettes; but, feeling that he ought to meet any advance of Arthur's, he took one of the big, powerful Egyptians with "A.K." on it in blue monogram. They smoked in silence a moment or so, Arthur considering whether to practise on Dory the story of his proposed contest, to enable him to tell it in better form to his mother and sister. "I've been to Chicago to see about contesting the will," he began, deciding for the rehearsal.

"I supposed so," said Hargrave.

"Of course, for mother's and Del's sake I simply have to do it," he went on, much encouraged. "Anyone who knew father knows he must have been out of his mind when he made that will."

"I see your point of view," said Dory, embarrassed. Then, with an effort he met Arthur's eyes, but met them fearlessly. "You misunderstood me. I think a contest is a mistake."

Arthur flamed. "Naturally you defend your father," he sneered.

"Let us leave my father out of this," said Dory. His manner made it impossible for Arthur to persist. For Dory was one of those who have the look of "peace with honor" that keeps to bounds even the man crazed by anger.

"You can't deny I have a legal right to make the contest," pursued Arthur.

"Undoubtedly."

"And a moral right, too," said Arthur, somewhat defiantly.

"Yes," assented Dory. The tone of the "yes"—or was it Arthur's own self-respect—made him suspect Dory of thinking that a man might have the clearest legal and moral right and still not be able to get his honor's consent. "But why discuss the matter, Arthur? You couldn't be changed by anything I'd say."

"We will discuss it!" exclaimed Arthur furiously. "I see what your plan is. You know I'm bound to win; so you'll try to influence Del and mother against me, and get the credit for taking high ground, and at the same time get the benefit of the breaking of the will. When the will's broken, mother'll have her third; you think you can stir up a quarrel between her and me, and she'll leave all of her third to Del and you."

Arthur had started up threateningly. There showed at his eyes and mouth the ugliest of those alien passions which his associations had thrust into him, and which had been master ever since the reading of the will. The signs were all for storm; but Dory sat impassive. He looked steadily at Arthur until Arthur could no longer withstand, but had to drop his eyes. Then he said: "I want you to think over what you have just said to me, Artie—especially your calculations on the death of your mother."

Arthur dropped back into his chair.

"Honestly, Artie, honestly," Dory went on, with the friendliest earnestness, "isn't there something wrong about anything that causes the man you are by nature to think and feel and talk that way, when his father is not a week dead?"

Arthur forced a sneer, but without looking at Dory.

"Do you remember the day of the funeral?" Dory went on. "It had been announced in the papers that the burial would be private. As we drove out of the front gates there, I looked round—you remember it was raining. There were uncovered farm wagons blocking the streets up and down. There were thousands of people standing in the rain with bared heads. And I saw tears thick as the rain drops streaming down faces of those who had known your father as boy and man, who had learned to know he was all that a human being should be."

Arthur turned away to hide his features from Dory.

"That was your father, Artie. What if he could have heard you a few minutes ago?"

"I don't need to have anyone praise my father to me," said Arthur, trying to mask his feelings behind anger. "And what you say is no reason why I should let mother and Del and myself be cheated out of what he wanted us to have."

Dory left it to Arthur's better self to discuss that point with him. "I know you'll do what is right," said he sincerely. "You are more like your father than you suspect as yet, Artie. I should have said nothing to you if you hadn't forced your confidence on me. What I've said is only what you'd say to me, were I in your place and you in mine—what you'll think yourself a month from now. What lawyer advised you to undertake the contest?"

"Dawson of Mitchell, Dawson, Vance & Bischoffsheimer. As good lawyers as there are in the country."

"I ought to tell you," said Dory, after brief hesitation, "that Judge Torrey calls them a quartette of unscrupulous scoundrels—says they're regarded as successful only because success has sunk to mean supremacy in cheating and double-dealing. Would you mind telling me what terms they gave you—about fee and expenses?"

"A thousand down, and a note for five thousand," replied Arthur, compelled to speech by the misgivings Dory was raising within him in spite of himself.

"That is, as the first installment, they take about all the money in sight. Does that look as if they believed in the contest?"

At this Arthur remembered and understood Dawson's remark, apparently casual, but really crucial, about the necessity of attaching Dr. Schulze. Without Schulze, he had no case; and Dawson had told him so! What kind of a self-hypnotized fool was he, not to hear the plainest warnings? And without waiting to see Schulze, he had handed over his money!

"I know you think I am not unprejudiced about this will," Dory went on. "But I ask you to have a talk with Judge Torrey. While he made the will, it was at your father's command, and he didn't and doesn't approve it. He knows all the circumstances. Before you go any further, wouldn't it be well to see him? You know there isn't an abler lawyer, and you also know he's honest. If there's any way of breaking the will, he'll tell you about it."

Hiram Ranger's son now had the look of his real self emerging from the subsiding fumes of his debauch of folly and fury. "Thank you, Hargrave," he said. "You are right."

"Go straight off," advised Dory. "Go before you've said anything to your mother about what you intend to do. And please let me say one thing more. Suppose you do finally decide to make this contest. It means a year, two years, three years, perhaps five or six, perhaps ten or more, of suspense, of degrading litigation, with the best of you shriveling, with your abilities to do for yourself paralyzed. If you finally lose—you'll owe those Chicago sharks an enormous sum of money, and you'll be embittered and blighted for life. If you win, they and their pals will have most of the estate; you will have little but the barren victory; and you will have lost your mother. For, Arthur, if you try to prove that your father was insane, and cut off his family in insane anger, you know it will kill her."

A long silence; then Arthur moved toward the steps leading down to the drive. "I'll think it over," he said, in a tone very different from any he had used before.

Dory watched him depart with an expression of friendship and admiration. "He's going to Judge Torrey," he said to himself. "Scratch that veneer of his, and you find his mother and father."

The old judge received Arthur like a son, listened sympathetically as the young man gave him in detail the interview with Dawson. Even as Arthur recalled and related, he himself saw Dawson's duplicity; for, that past master of craft had blundered into the commonest error of craft of all degrees—he had underestimated the intelligence of the man he was trying to cozen. He, rough in dress and manners and regarding "dudishness" as unfailing proof of weak-mindedness, had set down the fashionable Arthur, with his Harvard accent and his ignorance of affairs, as an unmitigated ass. He had overlooked the excellent natural mind which false education and foolish associations had tricked out in the motley, bells and bauble of "culture"; and so, he had taken no pains to cozen artistically. Also, as he thought greediness the strongest and hardiest passion in all human beings, because it was so in himself, he had not the slightest fear that anyone or anything could deflect his client from pursuing the fortune which dangled, or seemed to dangle, tantalizingly near.

Arthur, recalling the whole interview, was accurate where he had been visionary, intelligent where he had been dazed. He saw it all, before he was half done; he did not need Torrey's ejaculated summary: "The swindling scoundrel!" to confirm him.

"You signed the note?" said the judge.

"Yes," replied Arthur. He laughed with the frankness of self-derision that augurs so well for a man's teachableness.

"He must have guessed," continued the judge, "that a contest is useless."

At that last word Arthur changed expression, changed color—or, rather, lost all color. "Useless?" he repeated, so overwhelmed that he clean forgot pride of appearances and let his feelings have full play in his face. Useless! A contest useless. Then—

"I did have some hopes," interrupted Judge Torrey's deliberate, judicial tones, "but I had to give them up after I talked with Schulze and President Hargrave. Your father may have been somewhat precipitate, Arthur, but he was sane when he made that will. He believed his wealth would be a curse to his children. And—I ain't at all sure he wasn't right. As I look round this town, this whole country, and see how the second generation of the rich is rotten with the money-cancer, I feel that your grand, wise father had one of the visions that come only to those who are about to leave the world and have their eyes cleared of the dust of the combat, and their minds cooled of its passions." Here the old man leaned forward and laid his hand on the knee of the white, haggard youth. "Arthur," he went on, "your father's mind may have been befogged by his affections in the years when he was letting his children do as they pleased, do like most children of the rich. And his mind may have been befogged by his affections again, after he made that will and went down into the Dark Valley. But, I tell you, boy, he was sane when he made that will. He was saner than most men have the strength of mind to be on the best day of their whole lives."

Arthur was sitting with elbows on the desk; his face stared out, somber and gaunt, from between his hands. "How much he favors his father," thought the old judge. "What a pity it don't go any deeper than looks." But the effect of the resemblance was sufficient to make it impossible for him to offer any empty phrases of cheer and consolation. After a long time the hopeless, dazed expression slowly faded from the young man's face; in its place came a calm, inscrutable look. The irresponsible boy was dead; the man had been born—in rancorous bitterness, but in strength and decision.

It was the man who said, as he rose to depart, "I'll write Dawson that I've decided to abandon the contest."

"Ask him to return the note," advised Torrey. "But," he added, "I doubt if he will."

"He won't," said Arthur. "And I'll not ask him. Anyhow, a few dollars would be of no use to me. I'd only prolong the agony of getting down to where I've got to go."

"Five thousand dollars is right smart of money," protested the judge. "On second thought, I guess you'd better let me negotiate with him." The old man's eyes were sparkling with satisfaction in the phrases that were forming in his mind for the first letter to Dawson.

"Thank you," said Arthur. But it was evident that he was not interested. "I must put the past behind me," he went on presently. "I mustn't think of it."

"After all," suggested Torrey, "you're not as bad off as more than ninety-nine per cent of the young men. You're just where they are—on bed rock. And you've got the advantage of your education."

Arthur smiled satirically. "The tools I learned to use at college," said he, "aren't the tools for the Crusoe Island I've been cast away on."

"Well, I reckon a college don't ruin a young chap with the right stuff in him, even if it don't do him any great sight of good." He looked uneasily at Arthur, then began: "If you'd like to study law"—as if he feared the offer would be accepted, should he make it outright.

"No; thank you, I've another plan," replied Arthur, though "plan" would have seemed to Judge Torrey a pretentious name for the hazy possibilities that were beginning to gather in the remote corners of his mind.

"I supposed you wouldn't care for the law," said Torrey, relieved that his faint hint of a possible offer had not got him into trouble. He liked Arthur, but estimated him by his accent and his dress, and so thought him probably handicapped out of the running by those years of training for a career of polite uselessness. "That East!" he said to himself, looking pityingly at the big, stalwart youth in the elaborate fopperies of fashionable mourning. "That damned East! We send it most of our money and our best young men; and what do we get from it in return? Why, sneers and snob-ideas." However, he tried to change his expression to one less discouraging; but his face could not wholly conceal his forebodings. "It's lucky for the boy," he reflected, "that Hiram left him a good home as long as his mother's alive. After she's gone—and the five thousand, if I get it back—I suppose he'll drop down and down, and end by clerking it somewhere." With a survey of Arthur's fashionable attire, "I should say he might do fairly well in a gent's furnishing store in one of those damn cities." The old man was not unfeeling—far from it; he had simply been educated by long years of experience out of any disposition to exaggerate the unimportant in the facts of life. "He'll be better off and more useful as a clerk than he would be as a pattern of damnfoolishness and snobbishness. So, Hiram was right anyway I look at it, and no matter how it comes out. But—it did take courage to make that will!"

"Well, good day, judge," Arthur was saying, to end both their reveries. "I must," he laughed curtly, "'get a move on.'"

"Good day, and God bless you, boy," said the old man, with a hearty earnestness that, for the moment, made Arthur's eyes less hard. "Take your time, settling on what to do. Don't be in a hurry."

"On the contrary," said Arthur. "I'm going to make up my mind at once. Nothing stales so quickly as a good resolution."



CHAPTER XIV

SIMEON

A crisis does not create character, but is simply its test. The young man who entered the gates of No. 64 Jefferson Street at five that afternoon was in all respects he who left them at a quarter before four, though he seemed very different to himself. He went direct to his own room and did not descend until the supper bell sounded—that funny little old jangling bell he and Del had striven to have abolished in the interests of fashionable progress, until they learned that in many of the best English houses it is a custom as sacredly part of the ghostly British Constitution as the bathless bath of the basin, as the jokeless joke of the pun, as the entertainment that entertains not, as the ruler that rules not and the freedom that frees not. When he appeared in the dining-room door, his mother and Del were already seated. His mother, her white face a shade whiter, said: "I expect you'd better sit—there." She neither pointed nor looked, but they understood that she meant Hiram's place. It was her formal announcement of her forgiveness and of her recognition of the new head of the family. With that in his face that gave Adelaide a sense of the ending of a tension within her, he seated himself where his father had always sat.

It was a silent supper, each one absorbed in thoughts which could not have been uttered, no one able to find any subject that would not make overwhelming the awful sense of the one that was not there and never again would be. Mrs. Ranger spoke once. "How did you find Janet?" she said to Arthur.

His face grew red, with gray underneath. After a pause he answered: "Very well." Another pause, then: "Our engagement is broken off."

Mrs. Ranger winced and shrank. She knew how her question and the effort of that answer must have hurt the boy; but she did not make matters worse with words. Indeed, she would have been unable to say anything, for sympathy would have been hypocritical, and hypocrisy was with her impossible. She thought Arthur loved Janet; she realized, too, the savage wound to his pride in losing her just at this time. But she had never liked her, and now felt justified in that secret and, so she had often reproached herself, unreasonable dislike; and she proceeded to hate her, the first time she had ever hated anybody—to hate her as a mother can hate one who has made her child suffer.

After supper, Mrs. Ranger plunged into the household duties that were saving her from insanity. Adelaide and Arthur went to the side veranda. When Arthur had lighted a cigarette, he looked at it with a grim smile—it was astonishing how much stronger and manlier his face was, all in a few hours. "I'm on my last thousand of these," said he. "After them, no more cigarettes."

"Oh, it isn't so bad as all that!" said Adelaide. "We're still comfortable, and long before you could feel any change, you'll be making plenty of money."

"I'm going to work—next Monday—at the mills."

Adelaide caught her breath, beamed on him. "I knew you would!" she exclaimed. "I knew you were brave."

"Brave!" He laughed disagreeably. "Like the fellow that faces the fight because a bayonet's pricking his back. I can't go away somewhere and get a job, for there's nothing I can do. I've got to stay right here. I've got to stare this town out of countenance. I've got to get it used to the idea of me as a common workingman with overalls and a dinner pail."

She saw beneath his attempt to make light of the situation a deep and cruel humiliation. He was looking forward to the keenest torture to which a man trained in vanity to false ideals can be subjected; and the thing itself, so Adelaide was thinking, would be more cruel than his writhing anticipation of it.

"Still," she insisted to him, "you are brave. You might have borrowed of mother and gone off to make one failure after another in gentlemanly attempts. You might have"—she was going to say, "tried to make a rich marriage," but stopped herself in time. "Oh, I forgot," she said, instead, "there's the five thousand dollars. Why not spend it in studying law—or something?"

"I've lost my five thousand," he replied. "I paid it for a lesson that was cheap at the price." Then, thoughtfully, "I've dropped out of the class 'gentleman' for good and all."

"Or into it," suggested she.

He disregarded this; he knew it was an insincerity—one of the many he and Del were now trying to make themselves believe against the almost hopeless handicap of the unbelief they had acquired as part of their "Eastern culture." He went on: "There's one redeeming feature of the—the situation."

"Only one?"

"And that for you," he said. "At least, you've got a small income."

"But I haven't," she replied. "Dory made me turn it over to mother."

Arthur stared. "Dory!"

"Yes," she answered, with a nod and a smile. It would have given Dory a surprise, a vastly different notion as to what she thought of him, had he seen her unawares just then.

"Made you?"

"Made," she repeated.

"And you did it?"

"I've promised I will."

"Why?"

"I don't just know," was her slow reply.

"Because he was afraid it might make bad blood between you and me?"

"That was one of the reasons he urged," she admitted. "But he thought, too, it would be bad for him and me."

A long silence. Then Arthur: "Del, I almost think you're not making such a mistake as I feared, in marrying him."

"So do I—sometimes," was his sister's, to him, astonishing answer, in an absent, speculative tone.

Arthur withheld the question that was on his lips. He looked curiously at the small graceful head, barely visible in the deepening twilight. "She's a strange one," he reflected. "I don't understand her—and I doubt if she understands herself."

And that last was very near to the truth. Everyone has a reason for everything he does; but it by no means follows that he always knows that reason, or even could extricate it from the tangle of motives, real and reputed, behind any given act. This self-ignorance is less common among men than among women, with their deliberate training to self-consciousness and to duplicity; it is most common among those—men as well as women—who think about themselves chiefly. And Adelaide, having little to think about when all her thinking was hired out, had of necessity thought chiefly about herself.

"You guessed that Janet has thrown me over?" Arthur said, to open the way for relieving his mind.

Adelaide made a gallant effort, and her desire to console him conquered her vanity. "Just as Ross threw me over," she replied, with a successful imitation of indifference.

Instead of being astonished at the news, Arthur was astonished at his not having guessed it. His first sensation was the very human one of pleasure—the feeling that he had companionship in humiliation. He moved closer to her. Then came an instinct, perhaps true, perhaps false, that she was suffering, that Ross had wounded her cruelly, that she was not so calm as her slim, erect figure seemed in the deep dusk. He burst out in quiet, intense fury: "Del, I'll make those two wish to God they hadn't!"

"You can't do it, Artie," she replied. "The only power on earth that can do them up is themselves." She paused to vent the laugh that was as natural in the circumstances as it was unpleasant to hear. "And I think they'll do it," she went on, "without any effort on your part—or mine."

"You do not hate them as I do," said he.

"I'm afraid I'm not a good hater," she answered. "I admit I've got a sore spot where he—struck me. But as far as he's concerned, I honestly believe I'm already feeling a little bit obliged to him."

"Naturally," said he in a tone that solicited confidences. "Haven't you got what you really wanted?"

But his sister made no reply.

"Look here, Del," he said after waiting in vain, "if you don't want to marry, there's no reason why you should. You'll soon see I'm not as good-for-nothing as some people imagine."

"What makes you think I don't want to marry?" asked Adelaide, her face completely hid by the darkness, her voice betraying nothing.

"Why, what you've been saying—or, rather, what you've not been saying."

A very long silence, then out of the darkness came Adelaide's voice, even, but puzzling. "Well, Artie, I've made up my mind to marry. I've got to do something, and Dory'll give me something to do. If I sat about waiting, waiting, and thinking, thinking, I should do—something desperate. I've got to get away from myself. I've got to forget myself. I've got to get a new self."

"Just as I have," said Arthur.

Presently he sat on the arm of her chair and reached out for her hand which was seeking his.

When Hiram was first stricken, Adelaide's Simeon had installed himself as attendant-in-chief. The others took turns at nursing; Simeon was on duty every hour of every twenty-four. He lost all interest in Adelaide, in everything except the sick man. Most of the time he sat quietly, gazing at the huge, helpless object of his admiration as if fascinated. Whenever Hiram deigned to look at him, he chattered softly, timidly approached, retreated, went through all his tricks, watching the while for some sign of approval. The first week or so, Hiram simply tolerated the pathetic remembrancer to human humility because he did not wish to chagrin his daughter. But it is not in nature to resist a suit so meek, so persistent, and so unasking as Simeon's. Soon Hiram liked to have his adorer on his knee, on the arm of his chair, on the table beside him; occasionally he moved his unsteady hand slowly to Simeon's head to give it a pat. And in the long night hours of wakefulness there came to be a soothing companionship in the sound of Simeon's gentle breathing in the little bed at the head of his bed; for Simeon would sleep nowhere else.

The shy races of mankind, those that hide their affections and rarely give them expression, are fondest of domestic animals, because to them they can show themselves without fear of being laughed at or repulsed. But it happened that Hiram had never formed a friendship with a dog. In his sickness and loneliness, he was soon accepting and returning Simeon's fondness in kind. And at the time when a man must re-value everything in life and put a proper estimate upon it, this unselfish, incessant, wholly disinterested love of poor Simeon's gave him keen pleasure and content. After the stroke that entombed him, some subtle instinct seemed to guide Simeon when to sit and sympathize at a distance, when to approach and give a gentle caress, with tears running from his eyes. But the death Simeon did not understand at all. Those who came to make the last arrangements excited him to fury. Adelaide had to lock him in her dressing room until the funeral was over. When she released him, he flew to the room where he had been accustomed to sit with his great and good friend. No Hiram! He ran from room to room, chattering wildly, made the tour of gardens and outbuildings, returned to the room in which his quest had started. He seemed dumb with despair. He had always looked ludicrously old and shriveled; his appearance now became tragic. He would start up from hours of trancelike motionlessness, would make a tour of house and grounds; scrambling and shambling from place to place; chattering at doors he could not open, then pausing to listen; racing to the front fence and leaping to its top to crane up and down the street; always back in the old room in a few minutes, to resume his watch and wait. He would let no one but Adelaide touch him, and he merely endured her; good and loving though she seemed to be, he felt that she was somehow responsible for the mysterious vanishing of his god while she had him shut away.

Sometimes in the dead of night, Adelaide or Arthur or Mrs. Ranger, waking, would hear him hurrying softly, like a ghost, along the halls or up and down the stairs. They, with the crowding interests that compel the mind, no matter how fiercely the bereaved heart may fight against intrusion, would forget for an hour now and then the cause of the black shadow over them and all the house and all the world; and as the weeks passed their grief softened and their memories of the dead man began to give them that consoling illusion of his real presence. But not Simeon; he could think only that his friend had been there and was gone.

At last the truth in some form must have come to him. For he gave up the search and the hope, and lay down to die. Food he would not touch; he neither moved nor made a sound. When Adelaide took him up, he lifted dim tragic eyes to her for an instant, then sank back as if asleep. One morning, they found him in Hiram's great arm chair, huddled in its depths, his head upon his knees, his hairy hands stiff against his cheeks. They buried him in the clump of lilac bushes of which Hiram had been especially fond.

Stronger than any other one influence for good upon Adelaide and Arthur at that critical time, was this object lesson Simeon gave—Simeon with his single-hearted sorrow and single-minded love.



CHAPTER XV

EARLY ADVENTURES OF A 'PRENTICE

Arthur, about to issue forth at a quarter to seven on Monday morning to begin work as a cooper's apprentice, felt as if he would find all Saint X lined up to watch him make the journey in working clothes. He had a bold front as he descended the lawn toward the gates; but at the risk of opening him to those with no sympathy for weaknesses other than their own, and for their own only in themselves, it must be set down that he seemed to himself to be shaking and skulking. He set his teeth together, gave himself a final savage cut with the lash of "What a damned coward I am!" and closed the gate behind him and was in the street—a workingman. He did not realize it, but he had shown his mettle; for, no man with any real cowardice anywhere in him would have passed through that gate and faced a world that loves to sneer.

From the other big houses of that prosperous neighborhood were coming, also in working clothes, the fathers, and occasionally the sons, of families he was accustomed to regard as "all right—for Saint X." At the corner of Cherry Lane, old Bolingbroke, many times a millionaire thanks to a thriving woolen factory, came up behind him and cried out, "Well, young man! This is something like." In his enthusiasm he put his arm through Arthur's. "As soon as I read your father's will, I made one myself," he continued as they hurried along at Bolingbroke's always furious speed. "I always did have my boys at work; I send 'em down half an hour before me every morning. But it occurred to me they might bury their enthusiasm in the cemetery along with me." He gave his crackling, snapping laugh that was strange and even startling in itself, but seemed the natural expression of his snapping eyes and tight-curling, wiry whiskers and hair. "So I fixed up my will. No pack of worthless heirs to make a mockery of my life and teachings after I'm gone. No, sir-ee!"

Arthur was more at ease. "Appearances" were no longer against him—distinctly the reverse. He wondered that his vanity could have made him overlook the fact that what he was about to do was as much the regular order in prosperous Saint X, throughout the West for that matter, as posing as a European gentleman was the regular order of the "upper classes" of New York and Boston—and that even there the European gentleman was a recent and rather rare importation. And Bolingbroke's hearty admiration, undeserved though Arthur felt it to be, put what he thought was nerve into him and stimulated what he then regarded as pride. "After all, I'm not really a common workman," reflected he. "It's like mother helping Mary." And he felt still better when, passing the little millinery shop of "Wilmot & Company" arm in arm with the great woolen manufacturer, he saw Estelle Wilmot—sweeping out. Estelle would have looked like a storybook princess about royal business, had she been down on her knees scrubbing a sidewalk. He was glad she didn't happen to see him, but he was gladder that he had seen her. Clearly, toil was beginning to take on the appearance of "good form."

He thought pretty well of himself all that day. Howells treated him like the proprietor's son; Pat Waugh, foreman of the cooperage, put "Mr. Arthur" or "Mr. Ranger" into every sentence; the workingmen addressed him as "sir," and seemed to appreciate his talking as affably with them as if he were unaware of the precipice of caste which stretched from him down to them. He was in a pleasant frame of mind as he went home and bathed and dressed for dinner. And, while he knew he had really been in the way at the cooperage and had earned nothing, yet—his ease about his social status permitting—he felt a sense of self-respect which was of an entirely new kind, and had the taste of the fresh air of a keen, clear winter day.

This, however, could not last. The estate was settled up; the fiction that he was of the proprietorship slowly yielded to the reality; the men, not only those over him but also those on whose level he was supposed to be, began to judge him as a man. "The boys say," growled Waugh to Howells, "that he acts like one of them damn spying dude sons proprietors sometimes puts in among the men to learn how to work 'em harder for less. He don't seem to catch on that he's got to get his money out of his own hands."

"Touch him up a bit," said Howells, who had worshiped Hiram Ranger and in a measure understood what had been in his mind when he dedicated his son to a life of labor. "If it becomes absolutely necessary I'll talk to him. But maybe you can do the trick."

Waugh, who had the useful man's disdain of deliberately useless men and the rough man's way of feeling it and showing it, was not slow to act on Howells's license. That very day he found Arthur unconsciously and even patronizingly shirking the tending of a planer so that his teacher, Bud Rollins, had to do double work. Waugh watched this until it had "riled" him sufficiently to loosen his temper and his language. "Hi, there, Ranger!" he shouted. "What the hell! You've been here goin' on six months now, and you're more in the way than you was the first day."

Arthur flushed, flashed, clenched his fists; but the planer was between him and Waugh, and that gave Waugh's tremendous shoulders and fists a chance to produce a subduing visual impression. A man, even a young man, who is nervous on the subject of his dignity, will, no matter how brave and physically competent, shrink from avoidable encounter that means doubtful battle. And dignity was a grave matter with young Ranger in those days.

"Don't hoist your dander up at me," said Waugh. "Get it up agin' yourself. Bud, next time he soldiers on you, send him to me."

"All right, sir," replied Bud, with a soothing grin. And when Waugh was gone, he said to Arthur, "Don't mind him. Just keep pegging along, and you'll learn all right."

Bud's was the tone a teacher uses to encourage a defective child. It stung Arthur more fiercely than had Waugh's. It flashed on him that the men—well, they certainly hadn't been looking up to him as he had been fondly imagining. He went at his work resolutely, but blunderingly; he spoiled a plank and all but clogged the machine. His temper got clean away from him, and he shook with a rage hard to restrain from venting itself against the inanimate objects whose possessing devils he could hear jeering at him through the roar of the machinery.

"Steady! Steady!" warned good-natured Rollins. "You'll drop a hand under that knife."

The words had just reached Arthur when he gave a sharp cry. With a cut as clean as the edge that made it, off came the little finger of his left hand, and he was staring at it as it lay upon the bed of the planer, twitching, seeming to breathe as its blood pulsed out, while the blood spurted from his maimed hand. In an instant Lorry Tague had the machine still.

"A bucket of clean water," he yelled to the man at the next planer.

He grabbed dazed Arthur's hand, and pressed hard with his powerful thumb and forefinger upon the edges of the wound.

"A doctor!" he shouted at the men crowding round.

Arthur did not realize what had happened until he found himself forced to his knees, his hand submerged in the ice-cold water, Lorry still holding shut the severed veins and arteries.

"Another bucket of water, you, Bill," cried Lorry.

When it came he had Bill Johnstone throw the severed finger into it. Bud Rollins, who had jumped through the window into the street in a dash for a physician, saw Doctor Schulze's buggy just turning out of High Street. He gave chase, had Schulze beside Arthur within two minutes. More water, both hot and cold, was brought, and a cleared work bench; with swift, sure fingers the doctor cleaned the stump, cleaned the severed finger, joined and sewed them, bandaged the hand.

"Now, I'll take you home," he said. "I guess you've distinguished yourself enough for the day."

Arthur followed him, silent and meek as a humbled dog. As they were driving along Schulze misread a mournful look which Arthur cast at his bandaged hand. "It's nothing—nothing at all," he said gruffly. "In a week or less you could be back at work." The accompanying sardonic grin said plain as print, "But this dainty dandy is done with work."

Weak and done though Arthur was, some blood came into his pale face and he bit his lip with anger.

Schulze saw these signs.

"Several men are killed every year in those works—and not through their carelessness, either," he went on in a milder, friendlier tone. "And forty or fifty are maimed—not like that little pin scratch of yours, my dear Mr. Ranger, but hands lost, legs lost—accidents that make cripples for life. That means tragedy—not the wolf at the door, but with his snout right in the platter."

"I've seen that," said Arthur. "But I never thought much about it—until now."

"Naturally," commented Schulze, with sarcasm. Then he added philosophically, "And it's just as well not to bother about it. Mankind found this world a hell, and is trying to make it over into a heaven. And a hell it still is, even more of a hell than at first, and it'll be still more of a hell—for these machines and these slave-driving capitalists with their luxury-crazy families are worse than wars and aristocrats. They make the men work, and the women and the children—make 'em all work as the Pharaohs never sweated the wretches they set at building the pyramids. The nearer the structure gets toward completion, the worse the driving and the madder the haste. Some day the world'll be worth living in—probably just about the time it's going to drop into the sun. Meanwhile, it's a hell of a place. We're a race of slaves, toiling for the benefit of the race of gods that'll some day be born into a habitable world and live happily ever afterwards. Science will give them happiness—and immortality, if they lose the taste for the adventure into the Beyond."

Arthur's brain heard clearly enough to remember afterwards; but Schulze's voice seemed to be coming through a thick wall. When they reached the Ranger house, Schulze had to lift him from the buggy and support his weight and guide his staggering steps. Out ran Mrs. Ranger, with the terror in her eyes.

"Don't lose your head, ma'am," said Schulze. "It's only a cut finger. The young fool forgot he was steering a machine, and had a sharp but slight reminder."

Schulze was heavily down on the "interesting-invalid" habit. He held that the world's supply of sympathy was so small that there wasn't enough to provide encouragement for those working hard and well; that those who fell into the traps of illness set in folly by themselves should get, at most, toleration in the misfortunes in which others were compelled to share. "The world discourages strength and encourages weakness," he used to declaim. "That injustice and cruelty must be reversed!"

"Doctor Schulze is right," Arthur was saying to his mother, with an attempt at a smile. But he was glad of the softness and ease of the big divan in the back parlor, of the sense of hovering and protecting love he got from his mother's and Adelaide's anxious faces. Sorer than the really trifling wound was the deep cut into his vanity. How his fellow-workmen were pitying him!—a poor blockhead of a bungler who had thus brought to a pitiful climax his failure to learn a simple trade. And how the whole town would talk and laugh! "Hiram Ranger, he begat a fool!"

Schulze, with proper equipment, redressed and rebandaged the wound, and left, after cautioning the young man not to move the sick arm. "You'll be all right to strum the guitar and sport a diamond ring in a fortnight at the outside," said he. At the door he lectured Adelaide: "For God's sake, Miss Ranger, don't let his mother coddle him. He's got the makings of a man like his father—not as big, perhaps, but still a lot of a man. Give him a chance! Give him a chance! If this had happened in a football game or a fox-hunt, nobody would have thought anything of it. But just because it was done at useful work, you've got yourself all fixed to make a fearful to-do."

How absurdly does practice limp along, far behind firm-striding theory! Schulze came twice that day, looked in twice the next day, and fussed like a disturbed setting-hen when his patient forestalled the next day's visit by appearing at his office for treatment. "I want to see if I can't heal that cut without a scar," was his explanation—but it was a mere excuse.

When Arthur called on the fifth day, Schulze's elder daughter, Madelene, opened the door. "Will you please tell the doctor," said he, "that the workman who cut his finger at the cooperage wishes to see him?"

Madelene's dark gray eyes twinkled. She was a tall and, so he thought, rather severe-looking young woman; her jet black hair was simply, yet not without a suspicion of coquetry, drawn back over her ears from a central part—or what would have been a part had her hair been less thick. She was studying medicine under her father. It was the first time he had seen her, it so happened, since she was in knee dresses at public school. As he looked he thought: "A splendid advertisement for the old man's business." Just why she seemed so much healthier than even the healthiest, he found it hard to understand. She was neither robust nor radiant. Perhaps it was the singular clearness of her dead-white skin and of the whites of her eyes; again it might have been the deep crimson of her lips and of the inside of her mouth—a wide mouth with two perfect rows of small, strong teeth of the kind that go with intense vitality.

"Just wait here," said she, in a businesslike tone, as she indicated the reception room.

"You don't remember me?" said Arthur, to detain her.

"No, I don't remember you," replied Madelene. "But I know who you are."

"Who I was," thought Arthur, his fall never far from the foreground of his mind. "You used to be very serious, and always perfect in your lessons," he continued aloud, "and—most superior."

Madelene laughed. "I was a silly little prig," said she. Then, not without a subtle hint of sarcasm, "But I suppose we all go through that period—some of us in childhood, others further along."

Arthur smiled, with embarrassment. So he had the reputation of being a prig.

Madelene was in the doorway. "Father will be free—presently," said she. "He has another patient with him. If you don't care to wait, perhaps I can look after the cut. Father said it was a trifle."

Arthur slipped his arm out of the sling.

"In here," said Madelene, opening the door of a small room to the left of her father's consultation room.

Arthur entered. "This is your office?" he asked, looking round curiously, admiringly. It certainly was an interesting room, as the habitat of an interesting personality is bound to be.

"Yes," she replied. "Sit here, please."

Arthur seated himself in the chair by the window and rested his arm on the table. He thought he had never seen fingers so long as hers, or so graceful. Evidently she had inherited from her father that sure, firm touch which is perhaps the highest talent of the surgeon. "It seems such an—an—such a hard profession for a woman," said he, to induce those fascinating lips of hers to move.

"It isn't soft," she replied. "But then father hasn't brought us up soft."

This was discouraging, but Arthur tried again. "You like it?"

"I love it," said she, and now her eyes were a delight. "It makes me hate to go to bed at night, and eager to get up in the morning. And that means really living, doesn't it?"

"A man like me must seem to you a petty sort of creature."

"Oh, I haven't any professional haughtiness," was her laughing reply. "One kind of work seems to me just as good as another. It's the spirit of the workman that makes the only differences."

"That's it," said Arthur, with a humility which he thought genuine and which was perhaps not wholly false. "I don't seem to be able to give my heart to my work."

"I fancy you'll give it attention hereafter," suggested Madelene. She had dressed the almost healed finger and was dexterously rebandaging it. She was necessarily very near to him, and from her skin there seemed to issue a perfumed energy that stimulated his nerves. Their eyes met. Both smiled and flushed.

"That wasn't very kind—that remark," said he.

"What's all this?" broke in the sharp voice of the doctor.

Arthur started guiltily, but Madelene, without lifting her eyes from her task, answered: "Mr. Ranger didn't want to be kept waiting."

"She's trying to steal my practice away from me!" cried Schulze. He looked utterly unlike his daughter at first glance, but on closer inspection there was an intimate resemblance, like that between the nut and its rough, needle-armored shell. "Well, I guess she hasn't botched it." This in a pleased voice, after an admiring inspection of the workmanlike bandage. "Come again to-morrow, young man."

Arthur bowed to Madelene and somehow got out into the street. He was astonished at himself and at the world. He had gone drearily into that office out of a dreary world; he had issued forth light of heart and delighted with the fresh, smiling, interesting look of the shaded streets and the green hedges and lawns and flower beds. "A fine old town," he said to himself. "Nice, friendly people—and the really right sort. As soon as I'm done with the rough stretch I've got just ahead of me, I'm going to like it. Let me see—one of those girls was named Walpurga and one was named—Madelene—this one, I'm sure—Yes!" And he could hear the teacher calling the roll, could hear the alto voice from the serious face answer to "Madelene Schulze," could hear the light voice from the face that was always ready to burst into smiles answer to "Walpurga Schulze."

But though it was quite unnecessary he, with a quite unnecessary show of carelessness, asked Del which was which. "The black one is Madelene," replied she, and her ability to speak in such an indifferent tone of such an important person surprised him. "The blonde is Walpurga. I used to detest Madelene. She always treated me as if I hadn't any sense."

"Well, you can't blame her for that, Del," said Arthur. "You've been a great deal of a fool in your day—before you blossomed out. Do you remember the time Dory called you down for learning things to show off, and how furious you got?"

Adelaide looked suddenly warm, though she laughed too. "Why did you ask about Dr. Schulze's daughters?" she asked.

"I saw one of them this morning—a beauty, a tip-topper. And no nonsense about her. As she's 'black,' I suppose her name is Madelene."

"Oh, I remember now!" exclaimed Adelaide. "Madelene is going to be a doctor. They say she's got nerves of iron—can cut and slash like her father."

Arthur was furious, just why he didn't know. No doubt what Del said was true, but there were ways and ways of saying things. "I suppose there is some sneering at her," said he, "among the girls who couldn't do anything if they tried. It seems to me, if there is any profession a woman could follow without losing her womanliness, it is that of doctor. Every woman ought to be a doctor, whether she ever tries to make a living out of it or not."

Adelaide was not a little astonished by this outburst.

"You'll be coming round to Dory's views of women, if you aren't careful," said she.

"There's a lot of sense in what Dory says about a lot of things," replied Arthur.

Del sheered off. "How did the doctor say your hand is?"

"Oh—all right," said Arthur. "I'm going to work on Monday."

"Did he say you could?"

"No, but I'm tired of doing nothing. I've got to 'get busy' if I'm to pull out of this mess."

His look, his tone made his words sound revolutionary. And, in fact, his mood was revolutionary. He was puzzled at his own change of attitude. His sky had cleared of black clouds; the air was no longer heavy and oppressive. He wanted to work; he felt that by working he could accomplish something, could deserve and win the approval of people who were worthwhile—people like Madelene Schulze, for instance.

Next day he lurked round the corner below the doctor's house until he saw him drive away; then he went up and rang the bell. This time it was the "blonde" that answered—small and sweet, pink and white, with tawny hair. This was disconcerting. "I couldn't get here earlier," he explained. "I saw the doctor just driving away. But, as these bandages feel uncomfortable, I thought perhaps his daughter—your sister, is she not?—might—might fix them."

Walpurga looked doubtful. "I think she's busy," she said. "I don't like to disturb her."

Just then Madelene crossed the hall. Her masses of black hair were rolled into a huge knot on top of her head; she was wearing a white work slip and her arms were bare to the elbows—the finest arms he had ever seen, Arthur thought. She seemed in a hurry and her face was flushed—she would have looked no differently if she had heard his voice and had come forth to prevent his getting away without having seen him. "Meg!" called her sister. "Can you—"

Madelene apparently saw her sister and Arthur for the first time. "Good morning, Mr. Ranger. You've come too late. Father's out."

Arthur repeated his doleful tale, convincingly now, for his hand did feel queer—as what hand would not, remembering such a touch as Madelene's, and longing to experience it again?

"Certainly," said Madelene. "I'll do the best I can. Come in."

And once more he was in her office, with her bending over him. And presently her hair came unrolled, came showering down on his arm, on his face; and he shook like a leaf and felt as if he were going to faint, into such an ecstasy did the soft rain of these tresses throw him. As for Madelene, she was almost hysterical in her confusion. She darted from the room.

When she returned she seemed calm, but that was because she did not lift those tell-tale gray eyes. Neither spoke as she finished her work. If Arthur had opened his lips it would have been to say words which he thought she would resent, and he repent. Not until his last chance had almost ebbed did he get himself sufficiently in hand to speak. "It wasn't true—what I said," he began. "I waited until your father was gone. Then I came—to see you. As you probably know, I'm only a workman, hardly even that, at the cooperage, but—I want to come to see you. May I?"

She hesitated.

"I know the people in this town have a very poor opinion of me," he went on, "and I deserve it, no doubt. You see, the bottom dropped out of my life not long ago, and I haven't found myself yet. But you did more for me in ten minutes the other day than everything and everybody, including myself, have been able to do since my father died."

"I don't remember that I said anything," she murmured.

"I didn't say that what you said helped me. I said what you did—and looked. And—I'd like to come."

"We never have any callers," she explained. "You see, father's—our—views—People don't understand us. And, too, we've found ourselves very congenial and sufficient unto one another. So—I—I—don't know what to say."

He looked so cast down that she hastened on: "Yes—come whenever you like. We're always at home. But we work all day."

"So do I," said Arthur. "Thank you. I'll come—some evening next week."

Suddenly he felt peculiarly at ease with her, as if he had always known her, as if she and he understood each other perfectly. "I'm afraid you'll find me stupid," he went on. "I don't know much about any of the things you're interested in."

"Perhaps I'm interested in more things than you imagine," said she. "My sister says I'm a fraud—that I really have a frivolous mind and that my serious look is a hollow pretense."

And so they talked on, not getting better acquainted but enjoying the realization of how extremely well acquainted they were. When he was gone, Madelene found that her father had been in for some time. "Didn't he ask for me?" she said to Walpurga.

"Yes," answered Walpurga. "And I told him you were flirting with Arthur Ranger."

Madelene colored violently. "I never heard that word in this house before," she said stiffly.

"Nor I," replied Walpurga, the pink and white. "And I think it's high time—with you nearly twenty-two and me nearly twenty."

At dinner her father said: "Well, Lena, so you've got a beau at last. I'd given up hope."

"For Heaven's sake don't scare him away, father!" cried Walpurga.

"A pretty poor excuse," pursued the doctor. "I doubt if Arthur Ranger can make enough to pay his own board in a River Street lodging house."

"It took courage—real courage—to go to work as he did," replied Madelene, her color high.

"Yes," admitted her father, "if he sticks to it."

"He will stick to it," affirmed Madelene.

"I think so," assented her father, dropping his teasing pretense and coming out frankly for Arthur. "When a man shows that he has the courage to cross the Rubicon, there's no need to worry about whether he'll go on or turn back."

"You mustn't let him know he's the only beau you've ever had, Meg," cautioned her sister.

"And why not?" demanded Madelene. "If I ever did care especially for a man, I'd not care for him because other women had. And I shouldn't want a man to be so weak and vain as to feel that way about me."

It was a temptation to that aloof and isolated, yet anything but lonely or lonesome, household to discuss this new and strange phenomenon—the intrusion of an outsider, and he a young man. But the earnestness in Madelene's voice made her father and her sister feel that to tease her further would be impertinent.

Arthur had said he would not call until the next week because then he would be at work again. He went once more to Dr. Schulze's, but was careful to go in office hours. He did not see Madelene—though she, behind the white sash curtains of her own office, saw him come, watched him go until he was out of sight far down the street. On Monday he went to work, really to work. No more shame; no more shirking or shrinking; no more lingering on the irrevocable. He squarely faced the future, and, with his will like his father's, set dogged and unconquerable energy to battering at the obstacles before him. "All a man needs," said he to himself, at the end of the first day of real work, "is a purpose. He never knows where he's at until he gets one. And once he gets it, he can't rest till he has accomplished it."

What was his purpose? He didn't know—beyond a feeling that he must lift himself from his present position of being an object of pity to all Saint X and the sort of man that hasn't the right to ask any woman to be his wife.



CHAPTER XVI

A CAST-OFF SLIPPER

A large sum would soon be available; so the carrying out of the plans to extend, or, rather, to construct Tecumseh, must be begun. The trustees commissioned young Hargrave to go abroad at once in search of educational and architectural ideas, and to get apparatus that would make the laboratories the best in America. Chemistry and its most closely related sciences were to be the foundation of the new university, as they are at the foundation of life. "We'll model our school, not upon what the ignorant wise of the Middle Ages thought ought to be life, but upon life itself," said Dr. Hargrave. "We'll build not from the clouds down, but from the ground up." He knew in the broad outline what was wanted for the Tecumseh of his dream; but he felt that he was too old, perhaps too rusted in old-fashioned ways and ideas, himself to realize the dream; so he put the whole practical task upon Dory, whom he had trained from infancy to just that end.

When it was settled that Dory was to go, would be away a year at the least, perhaps two years, he explained to Adelaide. "They expect me to leave within a fortnight," he ended. And she knew what was in his mind—what he was hoping she would say.

It so happened that, in the months since their engagement, an immense amount of work had been thrust upon Dory. Part of it was a study of the great American universities, and that meant long absences from home. All of it was of the kind that must be done at once or not at all—and Work is the one mistress who, if she be enamored enough of a man to resolve to have him and no other, can compel him, whether he be enamored of her or not. However, for the beginning of the artificial relation between this engaged couple, the chief cause was not his work but his attitude toward her, his not unnatural but highly unwise regard for the peculiar circumstances in which they had become engaged. Respect for the real feelings of others is all very well, if not carried too far; but respect for the purely imaginary feelings of others simply encourages them to plunge deeper into the fogs and bogs of folly. There was excuse for Dory's withholding from his love affair the strong and firm hand he laid upon all his other affairs; but it cannot be denied that he deserved what he got, or, rather, that he failed to deserve what he did not get. And the irony of it was that his unselfishness was chiefly to blame; for a selfish man would have gone straight at Del and, with Dory's advantages, would have captured her forthwith.

As it was, she drifted aimlessly through day after day, keeping close at home, interested in nothing. She answered briefly or not at all the letters from her old friends, and she noted with a certain blunted bitterness how their importunities fainted and died away, as the news of the change in her fortunes got round. If she had been seeing them face to face every day, or if she had been persistent and tenacious, they would have extricated themselves less abruptly; for not the least important among the sacred "appearances" of conventionality is the "appearance" of good-heartedness; it is the graceful cloak for that icy selfishness which is as inevitable among the sheltered and pampered as sympathy and helpfulness are among those naked to the joys and sorrows of real life. Adelaide was far from her friends, and she deliberately gave them every opportunity to abandon and to forget her without qualms or fears of "appearing" mean and snobbish. There were two girls from whom she rather hoped for signs of real friendship. She had sought them in the first place because they were "of the right sort," but she had come to like them for themselves and she believed they liked her for herself. And so they did; but their time was filled with the relentless routine of the fashionable life, and they had not a moment to spare for their own personal lives; besides, Adelaide wouldn't have "fitted in" comfortably. The men of their set would be shy of her now; the women would regard her as a waste of time.

Her beauty and her cleverness might have saved her, had she been of one of those "good families" whom fashionables the world over recognize, regardless of their wealth or poverty, because recognition of them gives an elegant plausibility to the pretense that Mammon is not the supreme god in the Olympus of aristocracy. But—who were the Rangers? They might be "all right" in Saint X, but where was Saint X? Certainly, not on any map in the geography of fashion.

So Adelaide, sore but too lethargic to suffer, drifted drearily along, feeling that if Dory Hargrave were not under the influence of that brilliant, vanished past of hers, even he would abandon her as had the rest, or, at least, wouldn't care for her. Not that she doubted his sincerity in the ideals he professed; but people deceived themselves so completely. There was her own case; had she for an instant suspected how flimsily based was her own idea of herself and of her place in the world?—the "world" meaning, of course, "the set." As is the rule in "sets," her self-esteem's sole foundation had been what she had, or, rather, what the family had, and now that that was gone, she held what was left cheap indeed—and held herself the cheaper that she could feel thus. At the outset, Arthur, after the familiar male fashion, was apparently the weaker of the two. But when the test came, when the time for courageous words was succeeded by the time for deeds, the shrinking from action that, since the nation grew rich, has become part of the education of the women of the classes which shelter and coddle their women, caused Adelaide to seem feeble indeed beside her brother. Also—and this should never be forgotten in judging such a woman—Arthur had the advantage of the man's compulsion to act, while Adelaide had the disadvantage of being under no material necessity to act—and what necessity but the material is there?

Dory—his love misleading his passion, as it usually does when it has much influence before marriage—reasoned that, in the interest of the Adelaide that was to be, after they were married, and in his own interest with her as well, the wise course for him to pursue was to wait until time and the compulsion of new circumstances should drive away her mood, should give her mind and her real character a chance to assert themselves. In the commission to go abroad, he saw the external force for which he had been waiting and hoping. And it seemed to him most timely—for Ross's wedding invitations were out.

"Two weeks," said Adelaide absently. "You will sail in two weeks." Then in two weeks she could be out of it all, could be far away in new surroundings, among new ideas, among strangers. She could make the new start; she could submerge, drown her old self in the new interests.

"Will you come?" he said, when he could endure the suspense no longer. "Won't you come?"

She temporized. "I'm afraid I couldn't—oughtn't to leave—mother and Arthur just now."

He smiled sadly. She might need her mother and her brother; but in the mood in which she had been for the last few months, they certainly did not need her. "Adelaide," said he, with that firmness which he knew so well how to combine with gentleness, without weakening it, "our whole future depends on this. If our lives are to grow together, we must begin. This is our opportunity."

She knew that Dory was not a man she could play fast and loose with, even had she been so disposed. Clearly, she must decide whether she intended to marry him, to make his life hers and her life his. She looked helplessly round. What but him was there to build on? Without him—She broke the long silence with, "That is true. We must begin." Then, after a pause during which she tried to think and found she couldn't, "Make up my mind for me."

"Let us be married day after to-morrow," said he. "We can leave for New York on the one o'clock train and sail on Thursday."

"You had it planned!"

"I had several plans," he answered. "That's the best one."

What should she do? Impulsively—why, she did not know—she gave Dory her answer: "Yes, that is the best plan. I must begin—at once." And she started up, in a fever to be doing.

Dory, dazed by his unexpected, complete victory, went immediately, lest he should say or do something that would break or weaken the current of her aroused energy. He went without as much as touching her hand. Certainly, if ever man tempted fate to snatch from him the woman he loved, Dory did then; and at that time Del must, indeed, have been strongly drawn to him, or she would have been unable to persist.

The problem of the trousseau was almost as simple for her as for him. She had been extravagant and luxurious, had accumulated really unmanageable quantities of clothing of all kinds, far, far more than any woman without a maid could take care of. The fact that she had not had a maid was in part responsible for this superfluity. She had neither the time nor the patience for making or for directing the thousand exasperating little repairs that are necessary if a woman with a small wardrobe is always to look well. So, whenever repairs were necessary, she bought instead; and as she always kept herself fresh and perfect to the smallest detail she had to buy profusely. As soon as a dress or a hat or a blouse or a parasol, a pair of boots, slippers, stockings, or any of the costly, flimsy, all but unlaunderable underwear she affected, became not quite perfect, she put it aside against that vague day when she should have leisure or inclination for superintending a seamstress. Within two hours of her decision she had a seamstress in the house, and they and her mother were at work. There was no necessity to bother about new dresses. She would soon be putting off black, and she could get in Paris what she would then need.

In the whirlwind of those thirty-six hours, she had not a moment to think of anything but the material side of the wedding—the preparations for the journey and for the long absence. She was half an hour late in getting down to the front parlor for the ceremony, and she looked so tired from toil and lack of sleep that Dory in his anxiety about her was all but unconscious that they were going through the supposedly solemn marriage rite. Looking back on it afterwards, they could remember little about it—perhaps even less than can the average couple, under our social system which makes a wedding a social function, not a personal rite. They had once in jesting earnest agreed that they would have the word "obey" left out of the vows; but they forgot this, and neither was conscious of repeating "obey" after the preacher. Adelaide was thinking of her trunks, was trying to recall the things she felt she must have neglected in the rush; Dory was worrying over her paleness and the heavy circles under her eyes, was fretting about the train—Del's tardiness had not been in the calculations. Even the preacher, infected by the atmosphere of haste, ran over the sentences, hardly waiting for the responses. Adelaide's mother was hearing the trunks going down to the van, and was impatient to be where she could superintend—there was a very important small trunk, full of underclothes, which she was sure they were overlooking. Arthur was gloomily abstracted, was in fierce combat with the bitter and melancholy thoughts which arose from the contrast he could not but make—this simple wedding, with Dory Hargrave as her groom, when in other circumstances there would have been such pomp and grandeur. He and Mary the cook and Ellen the upstairs girl and old Miss Skeffington, generalissimo of the Hargrave household, were the only persons present keenly conscious that there was in progress a wedding, a supposedly irrevocable union of a man and woman for life and for death and for posterity. Even old Dr. Hargrave was thinking of what Dory was to do on the other side, was mentally going over the elaborate scheme for his son's guidance which he had drawn up and committed to paper. Judge Torrey, the only outsider, was putting into form the speech he intended to make at the wedding breakfast.

But there was no wedding breakfast—at least, none for bride and groom. The instant the ceremony was over, Mary the cook whispered to Mrs. Ranger: "Mike says they've just got time to miss the train."

"Good gracious!" cried Mrs. Ranger. And she darted out to halt the van and count the trunks. Then she rushed in and was at Adelaide's arm. "Hurry, child!" she exclaimed. "Here is my present for you."

And she thrust into her hand a small black leather case, the cover of a letter of credit. Seeing that Del was too dazed to realize what was going on, she snatched it away and put it into the traveling case which Mary was carrying. Amid much shaking hands and kissing and nervous crying, amid flooding commonplaces and hysterical repetitions of "Good-by! Good luck!" the young people were got off. There was no time for Mary to bring the rice from the kitchen table, but Ellen had sequestered one of Adelaide's old dancing slippers under the front stair. She contrived to get it out and into action, and to land it full in Adelaide's lap by a lucky carom against the upright of the coach window.

Adelaide looked down at it vaguely. It was one of a pair of slippers she had got for the biggest and most fashionable ball she had ever attended. She remembered it all—the gorgeousness of the rooms, the flowers, the dresses, the favors, her own ecstasy in being where it was supposed to be so difficult to get; how her happiness had been marred in the early part of the evening by Ross's attendance on Helen Galloway in whose honor the ball was given; how he made her happy again by staying beside her the whole latter part of the evening, he and more young men than any other girl had. And here was the slipper, with its handsome buckle torn off, stained, out of shape from having been so long cast aside. Where did it come from? How did it get here? Why had this ghost suddenly appeared to her? On the opposite seat, beside her traveling case, fashionable, obviously expensive, with her initials in gold, was a bag marked "T.H."—of an unfashionable appearance, obviously inexpensive, painfully new. She could not take her fascinated eyes from it; and the hammering of her blood upon her brain, as the carriage flew toward the station, seemed to be a voice monotonously repeating, "Married—married—" She shuddered. "My fate is settled for life," she said to herself. "I am married!"

She dared not look at her husband—Husband! In that moment of cruel memory, of ghastly chopfallen vanity, it was all she could do not visibly to shrink from him. She forgot that he was her best friend, her friend from babyhood almost, Theodore Hargrave. She felt only that he was her husband, her jailer, the representative of all that divided her forever from the life of luxury and show which had so permeated her young blood with its sweet, lingering poison. She descended from the carriage, passed the crowd of gaping, grinning loungers, and entered the train, with cheeks burning and eyes downcast, an ideal bride in appearance of shy and refined modesty. And none who saw her delicate, aristocratic beauty of face and figure and dress could have attributed to her the angry, ugly, snobbish thoughts, like a black core hidden deep in the heart of a bewitching flower.

As he sat opposite her in the compartment, she was exaggerating into glaring faults the many little signs of indifference to fashion in his dress. She had never especially noted before, but now she was noting as a shuddering exhibition of "commonness," that he wore detachable cuffs—and upon this detail her distraught mind fixed as typical. She could not take her eyes off his wrists; every time he moved his arms so that she could see the wristband within his cuff, she felt as if a piece of sandpaper were scraping her skin. He laid his hand on her two gloved hands, folded loosely in her lap. Every muscle, every nerve of her body grew tense; she only just fought down the impulse to snatch her hands away and shriek at him.

She sat rigid, her teeth set, her eyes closed, until her real self got some control over the monstrous, crazy creature raving within her. Then she said: "Please don't—touch me—just now. I've been on such a strain—and I'm almost breaking down."

He drew his hand away. "I ought to have understood," he said. "Would you like to be left alone for a while?"

Without waiting for her answer, he left the compartment to her. She locked the door and let herself loose. When she had had her cry "out," she felt calm; but oh, so utterly depressed. "This is only a mood," she said to herself. "I don't really feel that way toward him. Still—I've made a miserable mistake. I ought not to have married him. I must hide it. I mustn't make him suffer for what's altogether my own fault. I must make the best of it."

When he came back, she proceeded to put her programme into action. All the afternoon he strove with her sweet gentleness and exaggerated consideration for him; he tried to make her see that there was no necessity for this elaborate pose and pretense. But she was too absorbed in her part to heed him. In the evening, soon after they returned to the compartment from the dining car, he rose. "I am going out to smoke," he said. "I'll tell the porter to make up your berth. You must be very tired. I have taken another—out in the car—so that you will not be disturbed."

She grew white, and a timid, terrified look came into her eyes.

He touched her shoulder—gently. "Don't—please!" he said quietly. "In all the years we've known each other, have you ever seen anything in me to make you feel—like—that?"

Her head drooped still lower, and her face became crimson.

"Adelaide, look at me!"

She lifted her eyes until they met his uncertainly.

He put out his hand. "We are friends, aren't we?"

She instantly laid her hand in his.

"Friends," he repeated. "Let us hold fast to that—and let the rest take care of itself."

"I'm ashamed of myself," said she. And in her swift revulsion of feeling there was again opportunity for him. But he was not in the mood to see it.

"You certainly ought to be," replied he, with his frank smile that was so full of the suggestions of health and sanity and good humor. "You'll never get a martyr's crown at my expense."

At New York he rearranged their steamer accommodations. It was no longer diffidence and misplaced consideration that moved him permanently to establish the most difficult of barriers between them; it was pride now, for in her first stormy, moments in the train he had seen farther into her thoughts than he dared let himself realize.



CHAPTER XVII

POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE

The day after the wedding, as Arthur was going home from work, he saw Ross on the lofty seat of a dogcart, driving toward him along lower Monroe Street. His anger instantly flamed and flared; he crushed an oath between his teeth and glanced about for some way to avoid the humiliating meeting. But there was no cross street between him and the on-coming cart. Pride, or vanity, came to his support, as soon as he was convinced that escape was impossible. With an air that was too near to defiance to create the intended impression of indifference, he swung along and, just as the cart was passing, glanced at his high-enthroned former friend.

Ross had not seen him until their eyes met. He drew his horse in so sharply that it reared and pawed in amazement and indignation at the bit's coarse insult to thoroughbred instincts for courteous treatment. He knew Arthur was at work in the factory; but he did not expect to see him in workman's dress, with a dinner pail in his hand. And from his height, he, clad in the carefully careless, ostentatiously unostentatious garments of the "perfect gentleman," gazed speechless at the spectacle. Arthur reddened violently. Not all the daily contrasts thrust upon him in those months at the cooperage had so brought home to his soul the differences of caste. And there came to him for the first time that hatred of inequalities which, repulsive though it is in theory, is yet the true nerver of the strong right arm of progress. It is as characteristic of the homely, human countenance of Democracy as the supercilious smirk is of the homely, inhuman countenance of caste. Arthur did not want to get up where Ross was seated in such elegant state; he wanted to tear Ross, all the Rosses down. "The damn fool!" he fumed. "He goes lounging about, wasting the money we make. It's all wrong. And if we weren't a herd of tame asses, we wouldn't permit it."

And now he began to feel that he was the superior of this showy idler, that his own garments and dinner pail and used hands were the titles to a nobility which could justly look down upon those who filched from the treasury of the toiler the means to buzz and flit and glitter in dronelike ease. "As for these Whitneys," he thought, "mother's right about them." Then he called out in a tone of good-natured contempt, which his stature and his powerful frame and strong, handsome face made effective: "Hello, Ross! When did you come to town?"

"This morning," replied Ross. "I heard you were working, but I had no idea it was—I've just been to your house, looking for you, and was on the way to the factory. Father told me to see that you get a suitable position. I'm going to Howells and arrange it. You know, father's been in the East and very busy."

"Don't bother," said Arthur, and there was no pretense in his air of ease. "I've got just what I want. I am carrying out father's plan, and I'm far enough into it to see that he was right."

In unbelieving silence Ross looked down at his former equal with condescending sympathy; how well Arthur knew that look! And he remembered that he had once, so short a time before, regarded it as kindly, and the thoughts behind it as generous!

"I like my job," he continued. "It gives me a sense of doing something useful—of getting valuable education. Already I've had a thousand damn-fool ideas knocked out of my head."

"I suppose it is interesting," said Ross, with gracious encouragement. "The associations must be rather trying."

"They were rather trying," replied Arthur with a smile. "Trying to the other men, until I got my bearings and lost the silliest of the silly ideas put in my head by college and that sort of thing. But, now that I realize I'm an apprentice and not a gentleman deigning to associate with the common herd, I think I'm less despicable—and less ridiculous. Still, I'm finding it hard to get it through my head that practically everything I learned is false and must be unlearned."

"Don't let your bitterness over the injustice to you swing you too far the other way, Artie," said Ross with a faint smile in his eyes and a suspicious, irritating friendliness in his voice. "You'll soon work out of that class and back where you belong."

Arthur was both angry and amused. No doubt Ross was right as to the origin of this new breadth of his; but a wrong motive may start a man right just as readily as a right motive may start him wrong. Arthur would have admitted frankly his first feelings about his changed position, would have admitted that those feelings still lingered, still seemed to influence him, as grown people often catch themselves thinking in terms of beliefs impressed on them in childhood, but exploded and abandoned at the very threshold of youth. But he knew, also, that his present beliefs and resolves and aspirations were sincere, were sane, were final—the expression of the mind and heart that were really himself. Of what use, however, to argue with Ross? "I could no more convince him," thought Arthur, "than I could myself have been convinced less than a year ago." Besides, of what importance were Ross's beliefs about him or about his views? So he said to him, and his tone and manner were now convincing: "Well, we'll see. However, as long as I'm a workman, I'll stand with my class—just as you stand with your class. And while you are pretending to be generous to us, we'll pretend to be contemptuous of you. You'll think we are living off of your money; we'll think you are living off of our work. You'll say we're earning less than half what we get; we'll say you're stealing more than half what you get. It may amuse you to hear that I am one of the organizers of the trades union that's starting. I'm on the committee on wages. So some day you and I are likely to meet."

"I don't know much about those things," said Ross politely. "I can see that you're right to ingratiate yourself with those working chaps. It will stand you in good stead when you get on top and have to manage them."

Arthur laughed, and so did Ross. They eyed each the other with covert hostility. "Poor creature!" thought Ross. And "Pup!" thought Arthur. "How could I have wanted Del to marry him?" He wished to pass on, but was detained by some suggestion in Ross's manner that he had not yet discharged his mind of its real burden.

"I was glad to see your mother so well," said Ross.

"I wish she were," replied Arthur. "She seemed to be better while the excitement about Del's wedding was on; but as soon as Del and Dory went, she dropped back again. I think the only thing that keeps her from—from joining father is the feeling that, if she were to go, the family income would stop. I feel sure we'd not have her, if father had left us well provided for, as they call it."

"That is true," said Ross, the decent side of his nature now full to the fore. "I can't tell you what a sense of loss I had when your father died. Artie, he was a splendid gentleman. And there is a quality in your mother that makes me feel very humble indeed before her."