Arthur passed, though he noted, the unconscious superciliousness in this tribute; he felt that it was a genuine tribute, that, for all its discoloration in its passage through the tainted outer part of Ross's nature, it had come from the unspoiled, untainted, deepest part. Fortunately for us all, the gold in human nature remains gold, whatever its alloys from base contacts; and it is worth the mining, though there be but a grain of it to the ton of dross. As Ross spoke Arthur warmed to him. "You must come to see us," he said cordially.

Ross became embarrassed, so embarrassed that all his ability to command his feelings went for nothing. "Thank you," said he hurriedly, "but I'm here only for a few hours. I go away to-night. I came about a matter that—that—I want to get back as soon as possible."

Arthur was mystified by the complete transformation of the self-complacent, superior Ross of a few minutes before. He now noted that Ross was looking almost ill, his eyes sunken, the lids red at the edges, as if from loss of sleep. Under Arthur's scrutiny his embarrassment increased to panic. He nervously shifted the reins, made the horse restless, shook hands with Arthur, reined in, tried to speak, said only, "I must be off—my horse is getting nervous," and was gone.

Arthur looked after him. "That's the sort of chap I was on the way to being when father pulled me up," he reflected. "I wonder if I'll ever get sense enough not to have a sneaking envy of him—and regret?"

If he could have looked in upon Ross's mind, he might have been abruptly thrust far along the toilsome road toward his goal. In this world, roses and thorns have a startling, preposterous way of suddenly exchanging natures so that what was thorn becomes fairest rose, and what was rose becomes most poisonous of thorns. Ross had just fallen an amazed and incredulous victim to this alchemy. Though somewhat uncomfortable and downright unhappy at times, he had been, on the whole, well pleased with himself and his prospects until he heard that Adelaide was actually about to marry Dory. His content collapsed with the foundation on which it was built—the feeling that Adelaide was for no other man, that if at any time he should change his mind he would find her waiting to welcome him gratefully. He took train for Saint X, telling himself that after he got there he could decide what to do. In fact, when he had heard that the wedding was about to be, it was over and Adelaide and Dory were off for New York and Europe; but he did not find this out until he reached Saint X. The man who gave him that final and overwhelming news noticed no change in his face, though looking for signs of emotion; nor did Ross leave him until he had confirmed the impression of a heart at ease. Far along the path between the Country Club and Point Helen he struck into the woods and, with only the birds and the squirrels as witnesses, gave way to his feelings.

Now, now that she was irrevocably gone, he knew. He had made a hideous mistake; he had been led on by his vanity, led on and on until the trap was closed and sprung; and it was too late. He sat there on a fallen tree with his head aching as if about to explode, with eyes, dry and burning and a great horror of heart-hunger sitting before him and staring at him. In their sufferings from defeated desire the selfish expiate their sins.

He had forgotten his engagement to Theresa Howland, the wedding only two weeks away. It suddenly burst in upon his despair like a shout of derisive laughter. "I'll not marry her!" he cried aloud. "I can't do it!"

But even as he spoke he knew that he could, and would, and must. He had been a miserable excuse for a lover to Theresa; but Theresa had never had love. All the men who had approached her with "intentions" had been fighting hard against their own contempt of themselves for seeking a wife for the sake of her money, and their efforts at love-making had been tame and lame; but Theresa, knowing no better, simply thought men not up to the expectations falsely raised by the romances and the songs. She believed she could not but get as good a quality of love as there was going; and Ross, with his delightful, aristocratic indifference, was perfectly satisfactory. Theresa had that thrice-armored self-complacence which nature so often relentingly gives, to more than supply the lack of the charms withheld. She thought she was fascinating beyond any woman of her acquaintance, indeed, of her time. She spent hours in admiring herself, in studying out poses for her head and body and arms, especially her arms, which she regarded as nature's last word on that kind of beauty—a not wholly fanciful notion, as they were not bad, if a bit too short between elbow and wrist, and rather fat at the shoulders. She always thought and, on several occasions in bursts of confidence, had imparted to girl friends that "no man who has once cared for me can ever care for another woman." Several of her confidantes had precisely the same modest opinion of their own powers; but they laughed at Theresa—behind her back.

Ross knew how vain she was. To break with her, he would have to tell her flatly that he would not marry her. "I'd be doing her no injury," thought he. "Her vanity would root out some explanation which would satisfy her that, whatever might be the cause, it wasn't lack of love for her on my part." But—To break off was unthinkable. The invitations out; the arrangements for the wedding all made; quantities of presents arrived—"I've got to go through with it. I've got to marry her," said Ross. "But God help me, how I shall hate her!"

And, stripped clean of the glamour of her wealth, she rose before him—her nose that was red and queer in the mornings; her little personal habits that got on the nerves, especially a covert self-infatuated smile that flitted over her face at any compliment, however obviously perfunctory; her way of talking about every trivial thing she did—and what did she do that was not trivial?—as if some diarist ought to take it down for the delight of ages to come. As Ross looked at the new-created realistic image of her, he was amazed. "Why, I've always disliked her!" he cried. "I've been lying to myself. I am too low for words," he groaned. "Was there ever such a sneaking cur?" Yes, many a one, full as unconscious of his own qualities as he himself had been until that moment; nor could he find consolation in the fact that he had company, plenty of company, and it of the world's most "gentlemanly" and most "ladylike."

The young man who left that wood, the young man whom Arthur saw that day, had in his heart a consciousness, an ache, of lonely poverty that dress and dogcarts and social position could do little—something, but little—to ease.

* * * * *

He stopped at Chicago and sent word to Windrift that he was ill—not seriously ill, but in such a state that he thought it best to take care of himself, with the wedding so near. Theresa was just as well pleased to have him away, as it gave her absolute freedom to plan and to superintend her triumph. For the wedding was to be her individual and exclusive triumph, with even Ross as part of the background—the most conspicuous part, but still simply background for her personal splendor.

Old Howland—called Bill until his early career as a pedlar and keeper of a Cheap Jack bazaar was forgotten and who, after the great fire, which wiped out so many pasts and purified and pedigreed Chicago's present aristocracy, called himself William G. Howland, merchant prince, had, in his ideal character for a wealth-chaser, one weakness—a doting fondness for his daughter. When she came into the world, the doctors told him his wife would have no more children; thereafter his manner was always insulting, and usually his tone and words, whenever and of whatever he spoke to her. Women were made by the Almighty solely to bear children to men; his woman had been made to bear him a son. Now that she would never have a son, she was of no use, and it galled him that he could find no plausibly respectable excuse for casting her off, as he cast off worn-out servants in his business. But as the years passed and he saw the various varieties of thorns into which the sons of so many of his fellow-princes developed, he became reconciled to Theresa—not to his wife. That unfortunate woman, the daughter of a drunkard and partially deranged by illness and by grief over her husband's brutality toward her, became—or rather, was made by her insistent doctor—what would have been called a drunkard, had she not been the wife of a prince. Her "dipsomania" took an unaggressive form, as she was by nature gentle and sweet; she simply used to shut herself in and drink until she would cry herself into a timid, suppressed hysteria. So secret was she that Theresa never knew the truth about these "spells."

Howland did not like Ross; but when Theresa told him she was going to marry him she had only to cry a little and sit in the old man's lap and tease. "Very well, then," said her father, "you can have him. But he's a gambler, like his father. They call it finance, but changing the name of a thing only changes the smell of it, not the thing itself. I'm going to tie my money up so that he can't get at it."

"I want you to, papa," replied Theresa, giving him a kiss and a great hug for emphasis. "I don't want anybody to be able to touch my property."

For the wedding, Howland gave Theresa a free hand. "I'll pay the bills, no matter what they are," said he. "Give yourself a good time." And Theresa, who had been brought up to be selfish, and was prudent about her impulses only where she suspected them of being generous, proceeded to arrange for herself the wedding that is still talked about in Chicago "society" and throughout the Middle West. A dressmaker from the Rue de la Paix came over with models and samples, and carried back a huge order and a plaster reproduction of Theresa's figure, and elaborate notes on the color of her skin, hair, eyes, and her preferences in shapes of hats. A jeweler, also of the Rue de la Paix, came with jewels—nearly a million dollars' worth—for her to make selections. Her boots and shoes and slippers she got from Rowney, in Fifth Avenue, who, as everybody knows, makes nothing for less than thirty-five dollars, and can put a hundred dollars worth of price, if not of value, into a pair of evening slippers. Theresa was proud of her feet; they were short and plump, and had those abrupt, towering insteps that are regarded by the people who have them as unfailing indications of haughty lineage, just as the people who have flat feet dwell fondly upon the flat feet of the Wittlesbachs, kings in Bavaria. She was not easy to please in the matter of casements for those feet; also, as she was very short in stature, she had to get three and a half extra inches of height out of her heels; and to make that sort of heel so that it can even be hobbled upon is not easy or cheap. Once Theresa, fretting about her red-ended nose and muddy skin, had gone to a specialist. "Let me see your foot," said he; and when he saw the heel, he exclaimed: "Cut that tight, high-heeled thing out or you'll never get a decent skin, and your eyes will trouble you by the time you are thirty." But Theresa, before adopting such drastic measures, went to a beauty doctor. He assured her that she could be cured without the sacrifice of the heel, and that the weakness of her eyes would disappear a year or so after marriage. And he was soon going into ecstasies over her improvement, over the radiance of her beauty. She saw with his eyes and ceased to bother about nose or skin—they were the least beautiful of her beauties, but—"One can't expect to be absolutely perfect. Besides, the absolutely perfect kind of beauty might be monotonous."

The two weeks before the wedding were the happiest of her life. All day long, each day, vans were thundering up to the rear doors of Windrift, each van loaded to bursting with new and magnificent, if not beautiful costliness. The house was full of the employees of florists, dressmakers, decorators, each one striving to outdo the other in servility. Theresa was like an autocratic sovereign, queening it over these menials and fancying herself adored. They showed so plainly that they were awed by her and were in ecstasies of admiration over her taste. And, as the grounds and the house were transformed, Theresa's exaltation grew until she went about fairly dizzy with delight in herself.

The bridesmaids and ushers came. They were wealth-worshipers all, and their homage lifted Theresa still higher. They marched and swept about in her train, lording it over the menials and feeling that they were not a whit behind the grand ladies and gentlemen of the French courts of the eighteenth century. They had read the memoirs of that idyllic period diligently, had read with minds only for the flimsy glitter which hid the vulgarity and silliness and shame as a gorgeous robe hastily donned by a dirty chambermaid might conceal from a casual glance the sardonic and repulsive contrast. The wedding day approached all too swiftly for Theresa and her court. True, that would be the magnificent climax; but they knew it would also dissipate the spell—after the wedding, life in twentieth century America again.

"If only it don't rain!" said Harry Legendre.

"It won't," replied Theresa with conviction—and her look of command toward the heavens made the courtiers exchange winks and smiles behind her back. They were courtiers to wealth, not to Theresa, just as their European prototypes are awed before a "king's most excellent Majesty," not before his swollen body and shrunken brain.

And it did not rain. Ross arrived in the red sunset of the wedding eve, Tom Glenning, his best man, coming with him. They were put, with the ushers, in rooms at the pavilion where were the squash courts and winter tennis courts and the swimming baths. Theresa and Ross stood on the front porch alone in the moonlight, looking out over the enchantment-like scene into which the florists and decorators had transformed the terraces and gardens. She was a little alarmed by his white face and sunken eyes; but she accepted his reassurances without question—she would have disbelieved anything which did not fit in with her plans. And now, as they gazed out upon that beauty under the soft shimmer of the moonlight, her heart suddenly expanded in tenderness. "I am so happy," she murmured, slipping an arm through his.

Her act called for a return pressure. He gave it, much as a woman's salutation would have made him unconsciously move to lift his hat.

"While Adele was dressing me for dinner—" she began.

At that name, he moved so that her arm dropped from his; but she did not connect her maid with her former bosom friend.

"I got to thinking about those who are not so well off as we," she went on; "about the poor. And so, I've asked papa to give all his employees and the servants nice presents, and I've sent five thousand dollars to be divided among the churches in the town, down there—for the poor. Do you think I did wrong? I'm always afraid of encouraging those kind of people to expect too much of us."

She had asked that he might echo the eulogies she had been bestowing upon herself. But he disappointed her. "Oh, I guess it was well enough," he replied. "I must go down to the pavilion. I'm fagged, and you must be, too."

The suggestion that he might not be looking his best on the morrow was enough to change the current of her thoughts. "Yes, do, dear!" she urged. "And don't let Tom and Harry and the rest keep you up."

They did not even see him. He sat in the shed at the end of the boat-landing, staring out over the lake until the moon set. Then he went to the pavilion. It was all dark; he stole in, and to bed, but not to sleep. Before his closed but seeing eyes floated a vision of two women—Adelaide as he had last seen her, Theresa as she looked in the mornings, as she had looked that afternoon.

He was haggard next day. But it was becoming to him, gave the finishing touch to his customary bored, distinguished air; and he was dressed in a way that made every man there envy him. As Theresa, on insignificant-looking little Bill Howland's arm, advanced to meet him at the altar erected under a canopy of silk and flowers in the bower of lilies and roses into which the big drawing-room had been transformed, she thrilled with pride. There was a man one could look at with delight, as one said, "My husband!"

It was a perfect day—perfect weather, everything going forward without hitch, everybody looking his and her best, and "Mama" providentially compelled by one of her "spells" to keep to her room. Those absences of hers were so frequent and so much the matter of course that no one gave them a second thought. Theresa had studied up the customs at fashionable English and French weddings, and had combined the most aristocratic features of both. Perhaps the most successful feature was when she and Ross, dressed for the going away, walked, she leaning upon his arm, across the lawns to the silk marquee where the wedding breakfast was served. Before them, walking backward, were a dozen little girls from the village school, all in white, strewing roses from beribboned baskets, and singing, "Behold! The bride in beauty comes!"

"Well, I'm glad it's all over," said Theresa as she settled back in a chair in the private car that was to take them to Wilderness Lodge, in northern Wisconsin for the honeymoon.

"So am I," Ross disappointed her by saying. "I've felt like a damn fool ever since I began to face that gaping gang."

"But you must admit it was beautiful," objected Theresa pouting.

Ross shut his teeth together to keep back a rude reply. He was understanding how men can be brutal to women. To look at her was to have an all but uncontrollable impulse to rise up and in a series of noisy and profane explosions reveal to her the truth that was poisoning him. After a while, a sound from her direction made him glance at her. She was sobbing. He did not then know that, to her, tears were simply the means to getting what she wanted; so his heart softened. While she was thinking that she was looking particularly well and femininely attractive, he was pitying her as a forlorn creature, who could never inspire love and ought to be treated with consideration, much as one tries to hide by an effusive show of courtesy the repulsion deformity inspires.

"Don't cry, Theresa," he said gently, trying to make up his mind to touch her. But he groaned to himself, "I can't! I must wait until I can't see her." And he ordered the porter to bring him whisky and soda.

"Won't you join me?" he said.

"You know, I never touch anything to drink," she replied. "Papa and Dr. Massey both made me promise not to."

Ross's hand, reaching out for the bottle of whisky, drew slowly back. He averted his face that she might not see. He knew about her mother—and knew Theresa did not. It had never entered his head that the weakness of the mother might be transmitted to the daughter. Now—Just before they left, Dr. Massey had taken him aside and, in a manner that would have impressed him instantly but for his mood, had said: "Mr. Whitney, I want you never to forget that Theresa must not be depressed. You must take the greatest care of her. We must talk about it again—when you return."

And this was what he meant!

He almost leaped to his feet at Theresa's softly interrupting voice, "Are you ill, dear?"

"A little—the strain—I'll be all right—" And leaving the whisky untouched, he went into his own compartment. As he was closing the door, he gave a gasp of dismay. "She might begin now!" he muttered. He rang for the porter. "Bring that bottle," he said. Then, as an afterthought of "appearances," "And the soda and a glass."

"I can get you another, sir," said the porter.

"No—that one," ordered Ross.

Behind the returning porter came Theresa. "Can't I do something for you, dear? Rub your head, or fix the pillows?"

Ross did not look at her. "Do, please—fix the pillows," he said. "Then if I can sleep a little, I'll be all right, and will soon rejoin you."

"Can't I fix your drink for you?" she asked, putting her hand on the bottle.

Ross restrained an impulse to snatch it away from her. "Thanks, no—dear," he answered. "I've decided to swear off—with you. Is it a go?"

She laughed. "Silly!" she murmured, bending and kissing him. "If you wish."

"That settles it," said Ross, with a forced, pained smile. "We'll neither of us touch it. I was getting into the habit of taking too much—not really too much—but—Oh, you understand."

"That's the way father feels about it," said Theresa, laughing. "We never drink at home—except mother when she has a spell, and has to be kept up on brandy."

Ross threw his arm up to hide his face. "Let me sleep, do," he said gently.



CHAPTER XVIII

LOVE, THE BLUNDERER

As Dory had several months' work before him at Paris, he and Del took a furnished apartment in the Rue de Rivoli, high up, attractive within, before its balconied windows the stately trees, the fountains, the bright flower beds, the thronged playgrounds of the Tuileries. But they were not long left to themselves; in their second week, the concierge's little girl late one afternoon brought Janet's card up to Adelaide. As Janet entered, Del regretted having yielded to impulse and admitted her. For, the granddaughter of "blue-jeans Jones," the tavern keeper, was looking the elegant and idle aristocrat from the tip of the tall, graceful plume in her most Parisian of hats to the buckles of shoes which matched her dress, parasol, and jewels. A lovely Janet, a marvelous Janet; a toilette it must have taken her two hours to make, and spiritual hazel eyes that forbade the idea of her giving so much as a moment's thought to any material thing, even to dress. Adelaide had spent with the dressmakers a good part of the letter of credit her mother slipped into her traveling bag at the parting; she herself was in a negligee which had as much style as Janet's costume and, in addition, individual taste, whereof Janet had but little; and besides, while her beauty had the same American delicateness, as of the finest, least florid Sevres or Dresden, it also had a look of durability which Janet's beauty lacked—for Janet's beauty depended upon those fragilities, coloring and contour. Adelaide was not notably vain, had a clear sense of her defects, tended to exaggerate them, rather than her many and decisive good points. It was not Janet's appearance that unsettled Del; she brought into the room the atmosphere Del had breathed during all those important years of girlhood, and had not yet lost her fondness for. It depressed her at once about herself to note how this vision of the life that had been but would never be again affected her.

"You are sad, dear," said Janet, as she kissed her on both cheeks with a diffusing of perfume that gave her a sense of a bouquet of priceless exotics waving before her face.

"You are sad, dear," she repeated, with that air of tenderest sympathy which can be the safest cover for subtle malice.

Adelaide shrank.

"I'm so glad I've come when I may be able to do some good."

Adelaide winced.

"How cozy these rooms are—"

At "cozy" Adelaide shuddered. No one ever used, except apologetically, that word, which is the desperate last resort of compliment.

"And what a beautiful view from the windows—so much better than ours at the pompous old Bristol, looking out on that bare square!"

Adelaide laughed. Not by chance, she knew, did Miss Janet, with her softly sheathed but swift and sharp cat claws, drag in the delicate hint that while Adelaide was "cozy" in an unaristocratic maison meublee, she herself was ensconced in the haunts of royalty; and it suddenly came back to Del how essentially cheap was "aristocracy."

"But I mustn't look at those adorable gardens," continued Janet. "They fill me with longing for the country, for the pure, simple things. I am so sick of the life mamma and I lead. And you are married to dear Dory—how romantic! And I hear that Arthur is to marry Margaret Schultz—or whatever her name was—that splendid creature! She was a dear friend of the trained nurse I had last spring, and what the nurse told me about her made me positively love her. Such character! And getting ready to lead such a useful life." This without the least suggestion of struggle with a difficult subject. "Arthur is a noble fellow, too. If we had been in spiritual accord, I'd have loved to go and lead his life with him."

Adelaide was in high good humor now—Janet was too preposterous to be taken seriously. "What do you want me to do for you, Jen?" said she.

"Why, nothing!" exclaimed Janet, looking a little wonder and much reproach.

Del laughed. "Now, really, Jen," said she. "You know you never in the world went to all the trouble of getting my address, and then left royalty at the Bristol for a maison meublee, four flights up and no elevator, just to see me!"

"I had thought of something I was sure would give you pleasure," said Janet, injured.

"What do you want me to do for you?" repeated Adelaide, with smiling persistence.

"Mamma and I have an invitation to spend a week at Besancon—you know, it's the splendid old chateau Louis Treize used to love to visit. It's still the seat of the Saint Berthe family, and the present Marquis, a dear friend of ours, is such a wonderful, fine old nobleman—so simple and gracious and full of epigrams. He really ought to wear lace and ruffles and a beautiful peruke. At any rate, as I was saying, he has asked us down. But mamma has to go to England to see papa before he sails, and I thought you'd love to visit the chateau—you and Dory. It's so poetic—and historic, too."

"Your mother is going away and you'll be unable to make this visit unless you get a chaperon, and you want me to chaperon you," said Adelaide, who was not minded to be put in the attitude of being the recipient of a favor from this particular young woman at this particular time, when in truth she was being asked to confer a favor. "Adversity" had already sharpened her wits to the extent of making her alert to the selfishness disguised as generosity which the prosperous love to shower upon their little brothers and sisters of the poor. She knew at once that Janet must have been desperately off for a chaperon to come to her.

A look of irritation marred Janet's spiritual countenance for an instant. But she never permitted anything whatsoever to stand between her and what she wished. She masked herself and said sweetly: "Won't you go, dear? I know you'll enjoy it—you and Dory. And it would be a great favor to me. I don't see how I can go unless you consent. You know, I mayn't go with just anyone."

Adelaide's first impulse was to refuse; but she did not. She put off decision by saying, "I'll ask Dory to-night, and let you know in the morning. Will that do?"

"Perfectly," said Janet, rising to go. "I'll count on you, for I know Dory will want to see the chateau and get a glimpse of life in the old aristocracy. It will be so educational."

Dory felt the change in Del the instant he entered their little salon—felt that during the day some new element had intruded into their friendly life together, to interrupt, to unsettle, and to cloud the brightening vistas ahead. At the mention of Janet he began to understand. He saw it all when she said with a show of indifference that deceived only herself, "Wouldn't you like to go down to Besancon?"

"Not I," replied he coldly. "Europe is full of that kind of places. You can't glance outdoors without seeing a house or a ruin where the sweat and blood of peasants were squandered."

"Janet thought you'd be interested in it as history," persisted Adelaide, beginning to feel irritated.

"That's amusing," said Dory. "You might have told her that scandal isn't history, that history never was made in such places. As for the people who live there now, they're certainly not worth while—the same pretentious ignoramuses that used to live there, except they no longer have fangs."

"You ought not to be so prejudiced," said Adelaide, who in those days often found common sense irritating. She had the all but universal habit of setting down to "prejudice" such views as are out of accord with the set of views held by one's business or professional or social associates.

Her irritation confirmed Dory's suspicions. "I spoke only for myself," said he. "Of course, you'll accept Janet's invitation. She included me only as a matter of form."

"I couldn't, without you."

"Why not?"

"Well—wouldn't, then."

"But I urge you to go—want you to go! I can't possibly leave Paris, not for a day—at present."

"I shan't go without you," said Adelaide, trying hard to make her tone firm and final.

Dory leaned across the table toward her—they were in the garden of a cafe in the Latin Quarter. "If you don't go, Del," said he, "you'll make me feel that I am restraining you in a way far meaner than a direct request not to go. You want to go. I want you to go. There is no reason why you shouldn't."

Adelaide smiled shamefacedly. "You honestly want to get rid of me?"

"Honestly. I'd feel like a jailer, if you didn't go."

"What'll you do in the evenings?"

"Work later, dine later, go to bed and get up earlier."

"Work—always work," she said. She sighed, not wholly insincerely. "I wish I weren't so idle and aimless. If I were the woman I ought to be—"

"None of that—none of that!" he cried, in mock sternness.

"I ought to be interested in your work."

"Why, I thought you were!" he exclaimed, in smiling astonishment.

"Oh, of course, in a way—in an 'entertainment' sort of way. I like to hear you talk about it—who wouldn't? But I don't give the kind of interest I should—the interest that thinks and suggests and stimulates."

"Don't be too sure of that," said Dory. "The 'helpful' sort of people are usually a nuisance."

But she knew the truth, though passion might still be veiling it from him. Life, before her father's will forced an abrupt change, had been to her a showman, submitting his exhibits for her gracious approval, shifting them as soon as she looked as if she were about to be bored; and the change had come before she had lived long enough to exhaust and weary of the few things he has for the well-paying passive spectator, but not before she had formed the habit of making only the passive spectator's slight mental exertion.

"Dory is so generous," she thought, with the not acutely painful kind of remorse we lay upon the penitential altar for our own shortcomings, "that he doesn't realize how I'm shirking and letting him do all the pulling." And to him she said, "If you could have seen into my mind while Janet was here, you'd give me up as hopeless."

Dory laughed. "I had a glimpse of it just now—when you didn't like it because I couldn't see my way clear to taking certain people so seriously as you think they deserve."

"But you are prejudiced on that subject," she maintained.

"And ever shall be," admitted he, so good-humoredly that she could not but respond. "It's impossible for me to forget that every luxurious idler means scores who have to work long hours for almost nothing in order that he may be of no use to the world or to himself."

"You'd have the whole race on a dead level," said Adelaide.

"Of material prosperity—yes," replied Dory. "A high dead level. I'd abolish the coarse, brutal contrasts between waste and want. Then there'd be a chance for the really interesting contrasts—the infinite varieties of thought and taste and character and individuality."

"I see," said Adelaide, as if struck by a new idea. "You'd have the contrasts, differences among flowers, not merely between flower and weed. You'd abolish the weeds."

"Root and stalk," answered Dory, admiring her way of putting it. "My objection to these aristocratic ideals is that they are so vulgar—and so dishonest. Is that prejudice?"

"No—oh, no!" replied Del sincerely. "Now, it seems to me, I don't care to go with Janet."

"Not to oblige me—very particularly? I want you to go. I want you to see for yourself, Del."

She laughed. "Then I'll go—but only because you ask it."

* * * * *

That was indeed an elegant company at Besancon—elegant in dress, elegant in graceful carelessness of manners, elegant in graceful sinuosities of cleverly turned phrases. But after the passing of the first and second days' sensations, Hiram and Ellen Ranger's daughter began to have somewhat the same feeling she remembered having as a little girl, when she went to both the afternoon and the evening performances of the circus. These people, going through always the same tricks in the same old narrow ring of class ideas, lost much of their charm after a few repetitions of their undoubtedly clever and attractive performance; she even began to see how they would become drearily monotonous. "No wonder they look bored," she thought. "They are." What enormous importance they attached to trifles! What ludicrous tenacity in exploded delusions! And what self-complacent claiming of remote, powerful ancestors who had founded their families, when those ancestors would have disclaimed them as puny nonentities. Their ideas were wholly provided for them, precisely as were their clothes and every artistic thing that gave them "background." They would have made as absurd a failure of trying to evolve the one as the other. Yet they posed—and were widely accepted—as the superiors of those who made their clothes and furniture and of those who made their ideas. And she had thought Dory partly insincere, partly prejudiced when he had laughed at them. Why, he had only shown the plainest kind of American good sense. As for snobbishness, was not the silly-child American brand of it less ridiculous than this unblushing and unconcealed self-reverence, without any physical, mental or material justification whatsoever? They hadn't good manners even, because—as Dory had once said—no one could have really good manners who believed, and acted upon the belief, that he was the superior of most of the members of his own family—the human race.

"I suppose I could compress myself back into being satisfied with this sort of people and things," she thought, as she looked round the ballroom from which pose and self-consciousness and rigid conventionality had banished spontaneous gayety. "I suppose I could even again come to fancying this the only life. But I certainly don't care for it now."

But, although Adelaide was thus using her eyes and her mind—her own eyes and her own mind—in observing what was going on around her, she did not disconcert the others, not even Janet, by expressing her thoughts. Common sense—absolute common sense—always sounds incongruous in a conventional atmosphere. In its milder forms it produces the effect of wit; in stronger doses it is a violent irritant; in large quantity, it causes those to whom it is administered to regard the person administering it as insane. Perhaps Adelaide might have talked more or less frankly to Janet had Janet not been so obviously in the highest of her own kind of heavens. She was raised to this pinnacle by the devoted attentions of the Viscount Brunais, eldest son of Saint Berthe and the most agreeable and adaptable of men, if the smallest and homeliest. Adelaide spoke of his intelligence to Janet, when they were alone before dinner on the fourth day, and Janet at once responded.

"And such a soul!" she exclaimed. "He inherits all the splendid, noble traditions of their old, old family. You see in his face that he is descended from generations of refinement and—and—freedom from contact with vulgarizing work, don't you?"

"That hadn't struck me," said Adelaide amiably. "But he's a well-meaning, good-hearted little man, and, of course, he feels as at home in the surroundings he's had all his life as a bird on a bough. Who doesn't?"

"But when you know him better, when you know him as I know him—" Janet's expression disclosed the secret.

"But won't you be lonely—away off here—among—foreign people?" said Adelaide.

"Oh, I should love it here!" exclaimed Janet. "It seems to me I—he and I—must have lived in this very chateau in a former existence. We have talked about it, and he agrees with me. We are so harmonious."

"You've really made up your mind to—to marry him?" Adelaide had almost said "to buy him"; she had a sense that it was her duty to disregard Janet's pretenses, and "buy" was so exactly the word to use with these people to whom money was the paramount consideration, the thought behind every other thought, the feeling behind every other feeling, the mainspring of their lives, the mainstay of all the fictions of their aristocracy.

"That depends on father," replied Janet. "Mother has gone to talk to him about it."

"I'm sure your father won't stand between you and happiness," said Adelaide.

"But he doesn't understand these aristocratic people," replied she. "Of course, if it depended upon Aristide and me, we should be married without consulting anybody. But he can't legally marry without his father's consent, and his father naturally wants proper settlements. It's a cruel law, don't you think?"

Adelaide thought not; she thought it, on the contrary, an admirable device to "save the face" of a mercenary lover posing as a sentimentalist and money-spurner. But she merely said, "I think it's most characteristic, most aristocratic." She knew Janet, how shrewd she was, how thoroughly she understood the "coarse side of life." She added, "And your father'll come round."

"I wish I could believe it," sighed Janet. "The Saint Berthes have an exaggerated notion of papa's wealth. Besides, they need a good deal. They were robbed horribly by those dreadful revolutionists. They used to own all this part of the country. All these people round here with their little farms were once the peasants of Aristide's ancestors. Now—even this chateau has a mortgage on it. I couldn't keep back the tears, while Aristide was telling me."

Adelaide thought of Charles Whitney listening to that same recital, and almost laughed. "Well, I feel sure it will turn out all right," she said. "Your mother'll see to that. And I believe you'll be very, very happy." Theatricals in private life was Janet's passion—why should she not be happy? Frenchmen were famous for their politeness and consideration to their wives; Aristide would never let her see or feel that she bored him, that her reverence for the things he was too intelligent and modern not to despise appealed to him only through his sense of humor. Janet would push her shrewd, soulful way into social leadership, would bring her children up to be more aristocratic than the children of the oldest aristocrats.

Adelaide smiled as she pictured it all—smiled, yet sighed. She was not under Janet's fixed and unshakable delusions. She saw that high-sounding titles were no more part of the personalities bearing them than the mass of frankly false hair so grandly worn by Aristide's grand-aunt was part of the wisp-like remnant of natural head covering. But that other self of hers, so reluctant to be laughed or frowned down and out by the self that was Hiram Ranger's daughter, still forced her to share in the ancient, ignorant allegiance to "appearances." She did not appreciate how bored she was, how impatient to be back with Dory, the never monotonous, the always interesting, until she discovered that Janet, with her usual subtlety, had arranged for them to stay another week, had made it impossible for her to refuse without seeming to be disobliging and even downright rude. They were to have returned to Paris on a Monday. On Sunday she wrote Dory to telegraph for her on Tuesday.

"I'd hate to be looking forward to that life of dull foolery," thought she, as the mossy bastions of Besancon drifted from her horizon—she was journeying up alone, Janet staying on with one of the Saint Berthe women as chaperone. "It is foolery and it is dull. I don't see how grown-up people endure it, unless they've never known any better. Yet I seem unable to content myself with the life father stands for—and Dory." She appreciated the meaning of the legend of the creature with the two bodies and the two wills, each always opposed to the other, with the result that all motion was in a dazing circle in which neither wished to go. "Still," she concluded, "I am learning"—which was the truth; indeed, she was learning with astonishing rapidity for a girl who had had such an insidiously wrong start and was getting but slight encouragement.

Dory, of course, was helping her, but not as he might. Instead of bringing to bear that most powerful of influences, the influence of passionate love, he held to his stupid compact with his supersensitive self—the compact that he would never intrude his longings upon her. He constantly reminded himself how often woman gives through a sense of duty or through fear of alienating or wounding one she respects and likes; and, so he saw in each impulse to enter Eden boldly a temptation to him to trespass, a temptation to her to mask her real feelings and suffer it. The mystery in which respectable womanhood is kept veiled from the male, has bred in him an awe of the female that she does not fully realize or altogether approve—though she is not slow to advantage herself of it. In the smaller cities and towns of the West, this awe of respectable womanhood exists in a degree difficult for the sophisticated to believe possible, unless they have had experience of it. Dory had never had that familiarity with women which breeds knowledge of their absolute and unmysterious humanness. Thus, not only did he not have the key which enables its possessor to unlock them; he did not even know how to use it when Del offered it to him, all but thrust it into his hand. Poor Dory, indeed—but let only those who have not loved too well to love wisely strut at his expense by pitying him; for, in matters of the heart, sophisticated and unsophisticated act much alike. "Men would dare much more, if they knew what women think," says George Sand. It is also true that the men who dare most, who win most, are those who do not stop to bother about what the women think. Thought does not yet govern the world, but appetite and action—bold appetite and the courage of it.



CHAPTER XIX

MADELENE

To give himself, journeyman cooper, the feeling of ease and equality, Arthur dressed, with long-discontinued attention to detail, from his extensive wardrobe which the eighteen months since its last accessions had not impaired or antiquated. And, in the twilight of an early September evening, he went forth to settle the matter that had become the most momentous.

There is in dress a something independent of material and cut and even of the individuality of the wearer; there is a spirit of caste. If the lady dons her maid's dress, some subtle essence of the menial permeates her, even to her blood, her mind, and heart. The maid, in madame's dress, putting on "airs," is merely giving an outlet to that which has entered into her from her clothes. Thus, Arthur assumed again with his "grande toilette" the feeling of the caste from which he had been ejected. Madelene, come herself to open the door for him, was in a summer dress of no pretentions to style other than that which her figure, with its large, free, splendid lines, gave whatever she happened to wear. His nerves, his blood, responded to her beauty, as always; her hair, her features, the grace of the movements of that strong, slender, supple form, gave him the sense of her kinship with freedom and force and fire and all things keen and bright. But stealthily and subtly it came to him, in this mood superinduced by his raiment, that in marrying her he was, after all, making sacrifices—she was ascending socially, he descending, condescending. The feeling was far too vague to be at all conscious; it is, however, just those hazy, stealthy feelings that exert the most potent influence upon us. When the strong are conquered is it not always by feeble forces from the dark and from behind?

"You have had good news," said Madelene, when they were in the dim daylight on the creeper-screened back porch. For such was her generous interpretation of his expression of self-confidence and self-satisfaction.

"Not yet," he replied, looking away reflectively. "But I hope for it."

There wasn't any mistaking the meaning of that tone; she knew what was coming. She folded her hands in her lap, and there softly entered and pervaded her a quiet, enormous content that made her seem the crown of the quiet beauty of that evening sky whose ocean of purple-tinted crystal stretched away toward the shores of the infinite.

"Madelene," he began in a self-conscious voice, "you know what my position is, and what I get, and my prospects. But you know what I was, too; and so, I feel I've the right to ask you to marry me—to wait until I get back to the place from which I had to come down."

The light was fading from the sky, from her eyes, from her heart. A moment before he had been there, so near her, so at one with her; now he was far away, and this voice she heard wasn't his at all. And his words—She felt alone in the dark and the cold, the victim of a cheat upon her deepest feelings.

"I was bitter against my father at first," he went on. "But since I have come to know you I have forgiven him. I am grateful to him. If it hadn't been for what he did I might never have learned to appreciate you, to—"

"Don't—please!" she said in the tone that is from an aching heart. "Don't say any more."

Arthur was astounded. He looked at her for the first time since he began; instantly fear was shaking his self-confidence at its foundations. "Madelene!" he exclaimed. "I know that you love me!"

She hid her face in her hands—the sight of them, long and narrow and strong, filled him with the longing to seize them, to feel the throb of their life thrill from them into him, troop through and through him like victory-bringing legions into a besieged city. But her broken voice stopped him. "And I thought you loved me," she said.

"You know I do!" he cried.

She was silent.

"What is it, Madelene?" he implored. "What has come between us? Does your father object because I am—am not well enough off?"

She dropped her hands from before her face and looked at him. The first time he saw her he had thought she was severe; ever since he had wondered how he could have imagined severity into a countenance so gentle and sweet. Now he knew that his first impression was not imaginary; for she had again the expression with which she had faced the hostile world of Saint X until he, his love, came into her life. "It is I that must ask you what has changed you, Arthur," she said, more in sadness than in bitterness, though in both. "I don't seem to know you this evening."

Arthur lost the last remnant of his self-consciousness. He saw he was about to lose, if indeed he had not already lost, that which had come to mean life to him—the happiness from this woman's beauty, the strength from her character, the sympathy from her mind and heart. It was in terror that he asked: "Why, Madelene? What is it? What have I done?" And in dread he studied her firm, regular profile, a graceful strength that was Greek, and so wonderfully completed by her hair, blue black and thick and wavy about the temple and ear and the nape of the neck.

The girl did not answer immediately; he thought she was refusing to hear, yet he could find no words with which to try to stem the current of those ominous thoughts. At last she said: "You talk about the position you have 'come down from' and the position you are going back to—and that you are grateful to your father for having brought you down where you were humble enough to find me."

"Madelene!"

"Wait!" she commanded. "You wish to know what is the matter with me. Let me tell you. We didn't receive you here because you are a cooper or because you had been rich. I never thought about your position or your prospects. A woman—at least a woman like me—doesn't love a man for his position, doesn't love him for his prospects. I've been taking you at just what you were—or seemed to be. And you—you haven't come, asking me to marry you. You treat me like one of those silly women in what they call 'society' here in Saint X. You ask me to wait until you can support me fashionably—I who am not fashionable—and who will always support myself. What you talked isn't what I call love, Arthur. I don't want to hear any more about it—or, we might not be able to be even friends."

She paused; but Arthur could not reply. To deny was impossible, and he had no wish to attempt to make excuses. She had shown him to himself, and he could only echo her just scorn.

"As for waiting," she went on, "I am sure, from what you say, that if you ever got back in the lofty place of a parasite living idly and foolishly on what you abstracted from the labor of others, you'd forget me—just as your rich friends have forgotten you." She laughed bitterly. "O Arthur, Arthur, what a fraud you are! Here, I've been admiring your fine talk about your being a laborer, about what you'd do if you ever got the power. And it was all simply envy and jealousy and trying to make yourself believe you weren't so low down in the social scale as you thought you were. You're too fine a gentleman for Madelene Schulze, Arthur. Wait till you get back your lost paradise; then take a wife who gives her heart only where her vanity permits. You don't want me, and I—don't want you!"

Her voice broke there. With a cry that might have been her name or just an inarticulate call from his heart to hers, he caught her in his arms, and she was sobbing against his shoulder. "You can't mean it, Madelene," he murmured, holding her tight and kissing her cheek, her hair, her ear. "You don't mean it."

"Oh, yes, I do," she sobbed. "But—I love you, too."

"Then everything else will straighten out of itself. Help me, Madelene. Help me to be what we both wish me to be—what I can't help being, with you by my side."

When a vanity of superiority rests on what used to be, it dies much harder than when it rests upon what is. But Arthur's self-infatuation, based though it was on the "used-to-be," then and there crumbled and vanished forever. Love cleared his sight in an instant, where reason would have striven in vain against the stubborn prejudices of snobbism. Madelene's instinct had searched out the false ring in his voice and manner; it was again instinct that assured her all was now well. And she straightway, and without hesitation from coquetry or doubt, gave herself frankly to the happiness of the love that knows it is returned in kind and in degree.

"Yes, everything else will come right," she said. "For you are strong, Arthur."

"I shall be," was his reply, as he held her closer. "Do I not love a woman who believes in me?"

"And who believes because she knows." She drew away to look at him. "You are like your father!" she exclaimed. "Oh, my dear, my love, how rich he made you—and me!"

* * * * *

At breakfast, the next morning, he broke the news to his mother. Instead of returning his serene and delighted look she kept her eyes on her plate and was ominously silent. "When you are well acquainted with her, mother, you'll love her," he said. He knew what she was thinking—Dr. Schulze's "unorthodox" views, to put it gently; the notorious fact that his daughters did not frown on them; the family's absolute lack of standing from the point of view of reputable Saint X.

"Well," said his mother finally, and without looking at her big, handsome son, "I suppose you're set on it."

"Set—that's precisely the word," replied Arthur. "We're only waiting for your consent and her father's."

"I ain't got anything to do with it," said she, with a pathetic attempt at a smile. "Nor the old doctor, either, judging by the look of the young lady's eyes and chin. I never thought you'd take to a strong-minded woman."

"You wouldn't have her weak-minded, would you, mother?"

"There's something between."

"Yes," said he. "There's the woman whose mind is weak when it ought to be strong, and strong when it ought to be weak. I decided for one like you, mother dear—one that would cure me of foolishness and keep me cured."

"A female doctor!"

Arthur laughed. "And she's going to practice, mother. We shouldn't have enough to live on with only what I'd make—or am likely to make anyway soon."

Mrs. Ranger lifted her drooping head in sudden panic.

"Why, you'll live here, won't you?"

"Of course," replied Arthur, though, as a matter of fact, he hadn't thought where they would live. He hastened to add, "Only we've got to pay board."

"I guess we won't quarrel about that," said the old woman, so immensely relieved that she was almost resigned to the prospect of a Schulze, a strong-minded Schulze and a practicing female doctor, as a daughter-in-law.

"Madelene is coming up to see you this morning," continued Arthur. "I know you'll make her—welcome." This wistfully, for he was now awake to the prejudices his mother must be fighting.

"I'll have the horses hitched up, and go and see her," said Ellen, promptly. "She's a good girl. Nobody could ever say a word against her character, and that's the main thing." She began to contrast Madelene and Janet, and the situation brightened. At least, she was getting a daughter-in-law whom she could feel at ease with, and for whom she could have respect, possibly even liking of a certain reserved kind.

"I suggested that you'd come," Arthur was replying. "But Madelene said she'd prefer to come to you. She thinks it's her place, whether it's etiquette or not. We're not going to go in for etiquette—Madelene and I."

Mrs. Ranger looked amused. This from the young man who had for years been "picking" at her because she was unconventional! "People will misunderstand you, mother," had been his oft-repeated polite phrase. She couldn't resist a mild revenge. "People'll misunderstand, if she comes. They'll think she's running after me."

Like all renegades, the renegades from the religion of conventionality are happiest when they are showing their contempt for that before which they once knelt. "Let 'em think," retorted Arthur cheerfully. "I'll telephone her it's all right," he said, as he rose from the table, "and she'll be up here about eleven."

And exactly at eleven she came, not a bit self-conscious or confused. Mrs. Ranger looked up at her—she was more than a head the taller—and found a pair of eyes she thought finest of all for their honesty looking down into hers. "I reckon we've got—to kiss," said she, with a nervous laugh.

"I reckon so," said Madelene, kissing her, and then, after a glance and an irresistible smile, kissing her again. "You were awfully put out when Arthur told you, weren't you?"

"Well, you know, the saying is 'A bad beginning makes a good ending,'" said Ellen. "Since there was only Arthur left to me, I hadn't been calculating on a daughter-in-law to come and take him away."

Madelene felt what lay behind that timid, subtle statement of the case. Her face shadowed. She had been picturing a life, a home, with just Arthur and herself; here was a far different prospect opening up. But Mrs. Ranger was waiting, expectant; she must be answered. "I couldn't take him away from you," Madelene said. "I'd only lose him myself if I tried."

Tears came into Ellen's eyes and her hands clasped in her lap to steady their trembling. "I know how it is," she said. "I'm an old woman, and"—with an appeal for contradiction that went straight to Madelene's heart—"I'm afraid I'd be in the way?"

"In the way!" cried Madelene. "Why, you're the only one that can teach me how to take care of him. He says you've always taken care of him, and I suppose he's too old now to learn how to look after himself."

"You wouldn't mind coming here to live?" asked Ellen humbly. She hardly dared speak out thus plainly; but she felt that never again would there be such a good chance of success.

It was full a minute before Madelene could trust her voice to make reply, not because she hesitated to commit herself, but because she was moved to the depths of her tender heart by this her first experience of about the most tragic of the everyday tragedies in human life—a lone old woman pleading with a young one for a little corner to sit in and wait for death. "I wish it weren't quite such a grand house," she said at last with a look at the old woman—how old she seemed just then!—a look that was like light. "We're too poor to have the right to make any such start. But, if you'd let me—if you're sure you wouldn't think me an intruder—I'd be glad to come."

"Then that's settled," said Mrs. Ranger, with a deep sigh of relief. But her head and her hands were still trembling from the nervous shock of the suspense, the danger that she would be left childless and alone. "We'll get along once you're used to the idea of having me about. I know my place. I never was a great hand at meddling. You'll hardly know I'm around."

Again Madelene had the choke in her throat, the ache at the heart. "But you wouldn't throw the care of this house on my hands!" she exclaimed in well-pretended dismay. "Oh, no, you've simply got to look after things! Why, I was even counting on your helping me with my practice."

Ellen Ranger thrilled with a delight such as she had not had in many a year—the matchless delight of a new interest. Her mother had been famous throughout those regions in the pioneer days for skill at "yarbs" and at nursing, and had taught her a great deal. But she had had small chance to practice, she and her husband and her children being all and always so healthy. All those years she had had to content herself with thinking and talking of hypothetical cases and with commenting, usually rather severely, upon the conduct of every case in the town of which she heard. Now, in her old age, just as she was feeling that she had no longer an excuse for being alive, here, into her very house, was coming a career for her, and it the career of which she had always dreamed!

She forgot about the marriage and its problems, and plunged at once into an exposition of her views of medicine—her hostility to the allopaths, with their huge, fierce doses of dreadful poisons that had ruined most of the teeth and stomachs in the town; her disdain of the homeopaths, with their petty pills and their silly notion that the hair of the dog would cure its bite. She was all for the medicine of nature and common sense; and Madelene, able honestly to assent, rose in her esteem by leaps and bounds. Before the end of that conversation Mrs. Ranger was convinced that she had always believed the doctors should be women. "Who understands a woman but a woman? Who understands a child but a woman? And what's a man when he's sick but a child?" She was impatient for the marriage. And when Madelene asked if she'd object to having a small doctor's sign somewhere on the front fence, she looked astounded at the question. "We must do better than that," she said. "I'll have you an office—just two or three rooms—built down by the street so as to save people coming clear up here. That'd lose you many a customer."

"Yes, it might lose us a good many," said Madelene, and you'd never have thought the "us" deliberate.

That capped the climax. Mrs. Ranger was her new daughter's thenceforth. And Madelene went away, if possible happier than when she and Arthur had straightened it all out between themselves the night before. Had she not lifted that fine old woman up from the grave upon which she was wearily lying, waiting for death? Had she not made her happy by giving her something to live for? Something to live for! "She looked years younger immediately," thought Madelene. "That's the secret of happiness—something to live for, something real and useful."

"I never thought you'd find anybody good enough for you," said Mrs. Ranger to her son that evening. "But you have. She's got a heart and a head both—and most of the women nowadays ain't got much of either."

And it was that night as Ellen was saying her prayers, that she asked God to forgive her the sin of secret protest she had let live deep in a dark corner of her heart—reproach of Hiram for having cut off their son. "It was for the best," she said. "I see it now."



CHAPTER XX

LORRY'S ROMANCE

When Charles Whitney heard Arthur was about to be married, he offered him a place on the office staff of the Ranger-Whitney Company at fifteen hundred a year. "It is less than you deserve on your record," he wrote, "but there is no vacancy just now, and you shall go up rapidly. I take this opportunity to say that I regard your father's will as the finest act of the finest man I ever knew, and that your conduct, since he left us, is a vindication of his wisdom. America has gone stark mad on the subject of money. The day is not far distant when it has got to decide whether property shall rule work or work shall rule property. Your father was a courageous pioneer. All right-thinking men honor him."

This, a fortnight after his return from Europe, from marrying Janet to Aristide, Viscount Brunais. He had yielded to his secret snobbishness—Matilda thought it was her diplomacy—and had given Janet a dowry so extravagant that when old Saint Berthe heard the figures, he took advantage of the fact that only the family lawyer was present to permit a gleam of nature to show through his mask of elegant indifference to the "coarse side of life." Whitney had the American good sense to despise his wife, his daughter, and himself for the transaction. For years furious had been his protestations to his family, to his acquaintances, and to himself against "society," and especially against the incursions of that "worm-eaten titled crowd from the other side." So often had he repeated those protests that certain phrases had become fixedly part of his conversation, to make the most noise when he was violently agitated, as do the dead leaves of a long-withered but still firmly attached bough. Thus he was regarded in Chicago as an American of the old type; but being human, his strength had not been strong enough to resist the taint in the atmosphere he had breathed ever since he began to be very rich and to keep the company of the pretentious. His originally sound constitution had been gradually undermined, just as "doing like everybody else"—that is, everybody in his set of pirates disguised under merchant flag and with a few deceptive bales of goods piled on deck—had undermined his originally sound business honor.

Arthur answered, thanking him for the offered position, but declining it. "What you say about my work," he wrote, "encourages me to ask a favor. I wish to be transferred from one mechanical department to another until I have made the round. Then, perhaps, I may venture to ask you to renew your offer."

Whitney showed this to Ross. "Now, there's the sort of son I'd be proud of!" he exclaimed.

Ross lifted his eyebrows. "Really!" said he. "Why?"

"Because he's a man," retorted his father, with obvious intent of satirical contrast. "Because within a year or two he'll know the business from end to end—as his father did—as I do."

"And what good will that do him?" inquired Ross, with fine irony. "You know it isn't in the manufacturing end that the money's made nowadays. We can hire hundreds of good men to manufacture for us. I should say he'd be wiser were he trying to get a practical education."

"Practical!"

"Precisely. Studying how to stab competitors in the back and establish monopoly. As a manager, he may some day rise to ten or fifteen thousand a year—unless managers' salaries go down, as it's likely they will. As a financier, he might rise to—to our class."

Whitney grunted, the frown of his brows and the smile on his sardonic mouth contradicting each other. He could not but be pleased by the shrewdness of his son's criticism of his own half-sincere, half-hypocritical tribute to virtues that were on the wane; but at the same time he did not like such frank expression of cynical truth from a son of his. Also, he at the bottom still had some of the squeamishness that was born into him and trained into him in early youth; he did not like to be forced squarely to face the fact that real business had been relegated to the less able or less honest, while the big rewards of riches and respect were for the sly and stealthy. Enforcing what Ross had said, there came into his mind the reflection that he himself had just bribed through the Legislature, for a comparatively trifling sum, a law that would swell his fortune and income within the next five years more than would a lifetime of devotion to business.

He would have been irritated far more deeply had he known that Arthur was as well aware of the change from the old order as was Ross, and that deliberately and on principle he was refusing to adapt himself to the new order, the new conditions of "success." When Arthur's manliness first asserted itself, there was perhaps as much of vanity as of pride in his acceptance of the consequences of Hiram's will. But to an intelligent man any environment, except one of inaction or futile action, soon becomes interesting; the coming of Madelene was all that was needed to raise his interest to enthusiasm. He soon understood his fellow-workers as few of them understood themselves. Every human group, of whatever size or kind, is apt to think its characteristics peculiar to itself, when in fact they are as universal as human nature, and the modifications due to the group's environment are insignificant matters of mere surface. Nationality, trade, class no more affect the oneness of mankind than do the ocean's surface variations of color or weather affect its unchangeable chemistry. Waugh, who had risen from the ranks, Howells, who had begun as shipping clerk, despised those above whom they had risen, regarded as the peculiar weaknesses of the working classes such universal failings as prejudice, short-sightedness, and shirking. They lost no opportunity to show their lack of sympathy with the class from which they had sprung and to which they still belonged in reality, their devotion to the class plutocratic to which they aspired. Arthur, in losing the narrowness of the class from which he had been ejected, lost all class narrowness. The graduates from the top have the best chance to graduate into the wide, wide world of human brotherhood. By an artificial process—by compulsion, vanity, reason, love—he became what Madelene was by nature. She was one of those rare human beings born with a just and clear sense of proportion. It was thus impossible for her to exaggerate into importance the trivial differences of mental stature. She saw that they were no greater than the differences of men's physical stature, if men be compared with mountains or any other just measure of the vast scale on which the universe is constructed. And so it came naturally to her to appreciate that the vital differences among men are matters of character and usefulness, just as among things they are matters of beauty and use.

Arthur's close friend was now Laurent Tague, a young cooper—huge, deep-chested, tawny, slow of body and swift of mind. They had been friends as boys at school. When Arthur came home from Exeter from his first long vacation, their friendship had been renewed after a fashion, then had ended abruptly in a quarrel and a pitched battle, from which neither had emerged victor, both leaving the battle ground exhausted and anguished by a humiliating sense of defeat. From that time Laurent had been a "damned mucker" to Arthur, Arthur a "stuck-up smart Alec" to Laurent. The renewal of the friendship dated from the accident to Arthur's hand; it rapidly developed as he lost the sense of patronizing Laurent, and as Laurent for his part lost the suspicion that Arthur was secretly patronizing him. Then Arthur discovered that Lorry had, several years before, sent for a catalogue of the University of Michigan, had selected a course leading to the B.S. degree, had bought the necessary text-books, had studied as men work only at that which they love for its own sake and not for any advantage to be got from it. His father, a captain of volunteers in the Civil War, was killed in the Wilderness; his mother was a washerwoman. His father's father—Jean Montague, the first blacksmith of Saint X—had shortened the family name. In those early, nakedly practical days, long names and difficult names, such as naturally develop among peoples of leisure, were ruthlessly taken to the chopping block by a people among whom a man's name was nothing in itself, was simply a convenience for designating him. Everybody called Jean Montague "Jim Tague," and pronounced the Tague in one syllable; when he finally acquiesced in the sensible, popular decision, from which he could not well appeal, his very children were unaware that they were Montagues.

Arthur told Lorry of his engagement to Madelene an hour after he told his mother—he and Lorry were heading a barrel as they talked. This supreme proof of friendship moved Laurent to give proof of appreciation. That evening he and Arthur took a walk to the top of Reservoir Hill, to see the sun set and the moon rise. It was under the softening and expanding influence of the big, yellow moon upon the hills and valleys and ghostly river that Laurent told his secret—a secret that in the mere telling, and still more in itself, was to have a profound influence upon the persons of this narrative.

"When I was at school," he began, "you may remember I used to carry the washing to and fro for mother."

"Yes," said Arthur. He remembered how he liked to slip away from home and help Lorry with the big baskets.

"Well, one of the places I used to go to was old Preston Wilmot's; they had a little money left in those days and used to hire mother now and then."

"So the Wilmots owe her, too," said Arthur, with a laugh. The universal indebtedness of the most aristocratic family in Saint X was the town joke.

Lorry smiled. "Yes, but she don't know it," he replied. "I used to do all her collecting for her. When the Wilmots quit paying, I paid for 'em—out of money I made at odd jobs. I paid for 'em for over two years. Then, one evening—Estelle Wilmot"—Lorry paused before this name, lingered on it, paused after it—"said to me—she waylaid me at the back gate—I always had to go in and out by the alley way—no wash by the front gate for them! Anyhow, she stopped me and said—all red and nervous—'You mustn't come for the wash any more.'

"'Why not?' says I. 'Is the family complaining?'

"'No,' says she, 'but we owe you for two years.'

"'What makes you think that?' said I, astonished and pretty badly scared for the minute.

"'I've kept account,' she said. And she was fiery red. 'I keep a list of all we owe, so as to have it when we're able to pay.'"

"What a woman she is!" exclaimed Arthur. "I suppose she's putting by out of the profits of that little millinery store of hers to pay off the family debts. I hear she's doing well."

"A smashing business," replied Lorry, in a tone that made Arthur glance quickly at him. "But, as I was saying, I being a young fool and frightened out of my wits, said to her: 'You don't owe mother a cent, Miss Estelle. It's all been settled—except a few weeks lately. I'm collectin', and I ought to know.'

"I ain't much of a hand at lying, and she saw straight through me. I guess what was going on in her head helped her, for she looked as if she was about to faint. 'It's mighty little for me to do, to get to see you,' I went on. 'It's my only chance. Your people would never let me in at the front gate. And seeing you is the only thing I care about.' Then I set down the washbasket and, being desperate, took courage and looked straight at her. 'And,' said I, 'I've noticed that for the last year you always make a point of being on hand to give me the wash.'"

Somehow a lump came in Arthur's throat just then. He gave his Hercules-like friend a tremendous clap on the knee. "Good for you, Lorry!" he cried. "That was the talk!"

"It was," replied Lorry. "Well, she got red again, where she had been white as a dogwood blossom, and she hung her head. 'You don't deny it, do you?' said I. She didn't make any answer. 'It wasn't altogether to ask me how I was getting on with my college course, was it, Miss Estelle?' And she said 'No' so low that I had to guess at it."

Lorry suspended his story. He and Arthur sat looking at the moon. Finally Arthur asked, rather huskily, "Is that the end, Lorry?"

Lorry's keen, indolent face lit up with an absent and tender smile. "That was the end of the beginning," replied he.

Arthur thrilled and resisted a feminine instinct to put his arm round his friend. "I don't know which of you is the luckier," he said.

Lorry laughed. "You're always envying me my good disposition," he went on. "Now, I've given away the secret of it. Who isn't happy when he's got what he wants—heaven without the bother of dying first? I drop into her store two evenings a week to see her. I can't stay long or people would talk. Then I see her now and again—other places. We have to be careful—mighty careful."

"You must have been," said Arthur. "I never heard a hint of this; and if anyone suspected, the whole town would be talking."

"I guess the fact that she's a Wilmot has helped us. Who'd ever suspect a Wilmot of such a thing?"

"Why not?" said Arthur. "She couldn't do better."

Lorry looked amused. "What'd you have said a few months ago, Ranger?"

"But my father was a workingman."

"That was a long time ago," Lorry reminded him. "That was when America used to be American. Anyhow, she and I don't care, except about the mother. You know the old lady isn't strong, especially the last year or so. It wouldn't exactly improve her health to know there was anything between her daughter and a washerwoman's son, a plain workingman at that. We—Estelle and I—don't want to be responsible for any harm to her. So—we're waiting."

"But there's the old gentleman, and Arden—and Verbena!"

Lorry's cheerfulness was not ruffled by this marshaling of the full and formidable Wilmot array. "It'd be a pleasure to Estelle to give them a shock, especially Verbena. Did you ever see Verbena's hands?"

"I don't think so," replied Arthur; "but, of course, I've heard of them."

"Did you know she wouldn't even take hold of a knob to open a door, for fear of stretching them?"

"She is a lady, sure."

"Well, Estelle's not, thank God!" exclaimed Lorry. "She says one of her grandmothers was the daughter of a fellow who kept a kind of pawn shop, and that she's a case of atavism."

"But, Lorry," said Arthur, letting his train of thought come to the surface, "this ought to rouse your ambition. You could get anywhere you liked. To win her, I should think you'd exert yourself at the factory as you did at home when you were going through Ann Arbor."

"To win her—perhaps I would," replied Lorry. "But, you see, I've won her. I'm satisfied with my position. I make enough for us two to live on as well as any sensible person'd care to live. I've got four thousand dollars put by, and I'm insured for ten thousand, and mother's got twelve thousand at interest that she saved out of the washing. I like to live. They made me assistant foreman once, but I was no good at it. I couldn't 'speed' the men. It seemed to me they got a small enough part of what they earned, no matter how little they worked. Did you ever think, it takes one of us only about a day to make enough barrels to pay his week's wages, and that he has to donate the other five days' work for the privilege of being allowed to live? If I rose I'd be living off those five days of stolen labor. Somehow I don't fancy doing it. So I do my ten hours a day, and have evenings and Sundays for the things I like."

"Doesn't Estelle try to spur you on?"

"She used to, but she soon came round to my point of view. She saw what I meant, and she hasn't, any more than I, the fancy for stealing time from being somebody, to use it in making fools think and say you're somebody, when you ain't."

"It'd be a queer world if everybody were like you."

"It'd be a queer world if everybody were like any particular person," retorted Lorry.

Arthur's mind continually returned to this story, to revolve it, to find some new suggestion as to what was stupid or savage or silly in the present social system, as to what would be the social system of to-morrow, which is to to-day's as to-day's is to yesterday's; for Lorry and Dr. Schulze and Madelene and his own awakened mind had lifted him out of the silly current notion that mankind is never going to grow any more, but will wear its present suit of social clothes forever, will always creep and totter and lisp, will never learn to walk and to talk. He was in the habit of passing Estelle's shop twice each day—early in the morning, when she was opening, again when the day's business was over; and he had often fancied he could see in her evening expression how the tide of trade had gone. Now, he thought he could tell whether it was to be one of Lorry's evenings or not. He understood why she had so eagerly taken up Henrietta Hastings's suggestion, made probably with no idea that anything would come of it—Henrietta was full of schemes, evolved not for action, but simply to pass the time and to cause talk in the town. Estelle's shop became to him vastly different from a mere place for buying and selling; and presently he was looking on the other side, the human side, of all the shops and businesses and material activities, great and small. Just as a knowledge of botany makes every step taken in the country an advance through thronging miracles, so his new knowledge was transforming surroundings he had thought commonplace into a garden of wonders. "How poor and tedious the life I marked out for myself at college was," he was presently thinking, "in comparison with this life of realities!" He saw that Lorry, instead of being without ambitions, was inspired by the highest ambitions. "A good son, a good lover, a good workman," thought Arthur. "What more can a man be, or aspire to be?" Before his mind's eyes there was, clear as light, vivid as life, the master workman—his father. And for the first time Arthur welcomed that vision, felt that he could look into Hiram's grave, kind eyes without flinching and without the slightest inward reservation of blame or reproach.

It was some time before the bearing of the case of Lorry and Estelle upon the case of Arthur and Madelene occurred to him. Once he saw this he could think of nothing else. He got Lorry's permission to tell Madelene; and when she had the whole story he said, "You see its message to us?"

And Madelene's softly shining eyes showed that she did, even before her lips had the chance to say, "We certainly have no respectable excuse for waiting."

"As soon as mother gets the office done," suggested Arthur.

* * * * *

On the morning after the wedding, at a quarter before seven, Arthur and Madelene came down the drive together to the new little house by the gate. And very handsome and well matched they seemed as they stood before her office and gazed at the sign: "Madelene Ranger, M.D." She unlocked and opened the door; he followed her in. When, a moment later, he reappeared and went swinging down the street to his work, his expression would have made you like him—and envy him. And at the window watching him was Madelene. There were tears in her fine eyes, and her bosom was heaving in a storm of emotion. She was saying, "It almost seems wicked to feel as happy as I do."



CHAPTER XXI

HIRAM'S SON

In Hiram Ranger's last year the Ranger-Whitney Company made half a million; the first year under the trustees there was a small deficit. Charles Whitney was most apologetic to his fellow trustees who had given him full control because he owned just under half the stock and was the business man of the three. "I've relied wholly on Howells," explained he. "I knew Ranger had the highest opinion of his ability, but evidently he's one of those chaps who are good only as lieutenants. However, there's no excuse for me—none. During the coming year I'll try to make up for my negligence. I'll give the business my personal attention."

But at the end of the second year the books showed that, while the company had never done so much business, there was a loss of half a million; another such year and the surplus would be exhausted. At the trustees' meeting, of the three faces staring gloomily at these ruinous figures the gloomiest was Charles Whitney's. "There can be only one explanation," said he. "The shifting of the centers of production is making it increasingly difficult to manufacture here at a profit."

"Perhaps the railways are discriminating against us," suggested Scarborough.

Whitney smiled slightly. "That's your reform politics," said he. "You fellows never seek the natural causes for things; you at once accuse the financiers."

Scarborough smiled back at him. "But haven't there been instances of rings in control of railways using their power for plants they were interested in and against competing plants?"

"Possibly—to a limited extent," conceded Whitney. "But I hold to the old-fashioned idea. My dear sir, this is a land of opportunity—"

"Still, Whitney," interrupted Dr. Hargrave, "there may be something in what Senator Scarborough says."

"Undoubtedly," Whitney hastened to answer. "I only hope there is. Then our problem will be simple. I'll set my lawyers to work at once. If that is the cause"—he struck the table resolutely with his clenched fist—"the scoundrels shall be brought to book!"

His eyes shifted as he lifted them to find Scarborough looking at him. "You have inside connections with the Chicago railway crowd, have you not, Mr. Whitney?" he inquired.

"I think I have," said Whitney, with easy candor. "That's why I feel confident your suggestion has no foundation—beyond your suspicion of all men engaged in large enterprises. It's a wonder you don't suspect me. Indeed, you probably will."

He spoke laughingly. Scarborough's answer was a grave smile.

"My personal loss may save me from you," Whitney went on. "I hesitate to speak of it, but, as you can see, it is large—almost as large as the university's."

"Yes," said Scarborough absently, though his gaze was still fixed on Whitney. "You think you can do nothing?"

"Indeed I do not!" exclaimed Whitney. "I shall begin with the assumption that you are right. And if you are, I'll have those scoundrels in court within a month."

"And then?"

The young senator's expression and tone were calm, but Whitney seemed to find covert hostility in them. "Then—justice!" he replied angrily.

Dr. Hargrave beamed benevolent confidence. "Justice!" he echoed. "Thank God for our courts!"

"But when?" said Scarborough. As there was no answer, he went on: "In five—ten—fifteen—perhaps twenty years. The lawyers are in no hurry—a brief case means a small fee. The judges—they've got their places for life, so there's no reason why they should muss their silk gowns in undignified haste. Besides—It seems to me I've heard somewhere the phrase 'railway judges.'"

Dr. Hargrave looked gentle but strong disapproval. "You are too pessimistic, Hampden," said he.

"The senator should not let the wounds from his political fights gangrene," suggested Whitney, with good-humored raillery.

"Have you nothing but the court remedy to offer?" asked Scarborough, a slight smile on his handsome face, so deceptively youthful.

"That's quite enough," answered Whitney. "In my own affairs I've never appealed to the courts in vain."

"I can believe it," said Scarborough, and Whitney looked as if he had scented sarcasm, though Scarborough was correctly colorless. "But, if you should be unable to discover any grounds for a case against the railways?"

"Then all we can do is to work harder than ever along the old lines—cut down expenses, readjust wages, stop waste." Whitney sneered politely. "But no doubt you have some other plan to propose."

Scarborough continued to look at him with the same faint smile. "I've nothing to suggest—to-day," said he. "The court proceedings will do no harm—you see, Mr. Whitney, I can't get my wicked suspicion of your friends out of my mind. But we must also try something less—less leisurely than courts. I'll think it over."

Whitney laughed rather uncomfortably; and when they adjourned he lingered with Dr. Hargrave. "We must not let ourselves be carried away by our young friend's suspicions," said he to his old friend. "Scarborough is a fine fellow. But he lacks your experience and my knowledge of practical business. And he has been made something of a crank by combating the opposition his extreme views have aroused among conservative people."

"You are mistaken, Whitney," replied the doctor. "Hampden's views are sound. He is misrepresented by the highly placed rascals he has exposed and dislodged. But in these business matters we rely upon you." He linked his arm affectionately in that of the powerful and successful "captain of industry" whom he had known from boyhood. "I know how devoted you are to Tecumseh, and how ably you manage practical affairs; and I have not for a moment lost confidence that you will bring us safely through."

Whitney's face was interesting. There was a certain hangdog look in it, but there was also a suggestion—very covert—of cynical amusement, as of a good player's jeer at a blunder by his opponent. His tone, however, was melancholy, tinged with just resentment, as he said: "Scarborough forgets how my own personal interest is involved. I don't like to lose two hundred and odd thousand a year."

"Scarborough meant nothing, I'm sure," said Hargrave soothingly. "He knows we are all single hearted for the university."

"I don't like to be distrusted," persisted Whitney sadly. Then brightening: "But you and I understand each other, doctor. And we will carry the business through. Every man who tries to do anything in this world must expect to be misunderstood."

"You are mistaken about Scarborough, I know you are," said Hargrave earnestly.

Whitney listened to Hargrave, finally professed to be reassured; but, before he left, a strong doubt of Scarborough's judgment had been implanted by him in the mind of the old doctor. That was easy enough; for, while Hargrave was too acute a man to give his trust impulsively, he gave without reserve when he did give—and he believed in Charles Whitney. The ability absolutely to trust where trust is necessary is as essential to effective character as is the ability to withhold trust until its wisdom has been justified; and exceptions only confirm a rule.

Scarborough, feeling that he had been neglecting his trusteeship, now devoted himself to the Ranger-Whitney Company.

He had long consultations with Howells, and studied the daily and weekly balance sheets which Howells sent him. In the second month after the annual meeting he cabled Dory to come home. The entire foundation upon which Dory was building seemed to be going; Saint X was, therefore, the place for him, not Europe.

"And there you have all I have been able to find out," concluded Scarborough, when he had given Dory the last of the facts and figures. "What do you make of it?"

"There's something wrong—something rotten," replied Dory.

"But where?" inquired Scarborough, who had taken care not to speak or hint his vague doubts of Whitney. "Everything looks all right, except the totals on the balance sheets."

"We must talk this over with some one who knows more about the business than either of us." Then he added, as if the idea had just come to him, "Why not call in Arthur—Arthur Ranger?"

Scarborough looked receptive, but not enthusiastic.

"He has been studying this business in the most practical way ever since his father died," urged Dory. "It can't do any harm to consult with him. We don't want to call in outside experts if we can help it."

"If we did we'd have to let Mr. Whitney select them," said Scarborough. And he drew Dory out upon the subject of Arthur and got such complete and intelligent answers that he presently had a wholly new and true idea of the young man whose boyish follies Saint X had not yet forgotten. "Yes, let's give Arthur a chance," he finally said.

Accordingly, they laid the case in its entirety before Arthur, and he took home with him the mass of reports which Scarborough had gathered. Night after night he and Madelene worked at the problem; for both knew that its solution would be his opportunity, their opportunity.

It was Madelene who discovered the truth—not by searching the figures, not by any process of surface reasoning, but by that instinct for motive which woman has developed through her ages of dealing with and in motives only. "They must get a new management," said she; "one that Charles Whitney has no control over."

"Why?"

"Because he's wrecking the business to get hold of it. He wants the whole thing, and he couldn't resist the chance the inexperience and confidence of the other two gave him."

"I see no indication of it," objected Arthur, to draw her out. "On the contrary, wherever he directly controls there's a good showing."

"That's it!" exclaimed Madelene, feeling that she now had her feet on the firm ground of reason on which alone stupid men will discuss practical affairs.

Arthur had lived with Madelene long enough to learn that her mind was indeed as clear as her eyes, that when she looked at anything she saw it as it was, and saw all of it. Like any man who has the right material in him, he needed only the object lesson of her quick dexterity at stripping a problem of its shell of nonessentials. He had become what the ineffective call a pessimist. He had learned the primer lesson of large success—that one must build upon the hard, pessimistic facts of human nature's instability and fate's fondness for mischief, not upon the optimistic clouds of belief that everybody is good and faithful and friendly disposed and everything will "come out all right somehow." The instant Madelene suggested Whitney as the cause, Arthur's judgment echoed approval; but, to get her whole mind as one gives it only in combating opposition, he continued to object. "But suppose," said he, "Whitney insists on selecting the new management? As he's the only one competent, how can they refuse?"

"We must find a way round that," replied Madelene. "It's perfectly plain, isn't it, that there's only one course—an absolutely new management. And how can Mr. Whitney object? If he's not guilty he won't object, because he'll be eager to try the obvious remedy. If he's guilty he won't object—he'll be afraid of being suspected."

"Dory suggested—" began Arthur, and stopped.

"That you be put in as manager?"

"How did you know that?"

"It's the sensible thing. It's the only thing," answered his wife. "And Dory has the genius of good sense. You ought to go to Scarborough and ask for the place. Take Dory with you."

"That's good advice," said Arthur, heartily.

Madelene laughed. "When a man praises a woman's advice, it means she has told him to do what he had made up his mind to do anyhow."

* * * * *

Next day Scarborough called a meeting of the trustees. Down from Chicago came Whitney—at the greatest personal inconvenience, so he showed his colleagues, but eager to do anything for Tecumseh. Scarborough gave a clear and appalling account of how the Ranger-Whitney Company's prosperity was slipping into the abyss like a caving sand bank, on all sides, apparently under pressure of forces beyond human control. "In view of the facts," said he, in conclusion, "our sole hope is in putting ourselves to one side and giving an entirely new management an entirely free hand."

Whitney had listened to Scarborough's speech with the funereal countenance befitting so melancholy a recital. As Scarborough finished and sank back in his chair, he said, with energy and heartiness, "I agree with you, senator. The lawyers tell me there are as yet no signs of a case against the railways. Besides, the trouble seems to be, as I feared, deeper than this possible rebating. Jenkins—one of my best men—I sent him down to help Howells out—he's clearly an utter failure—utter! And I am getting old. The new conditions of business life call for young men with open minds."

"No, no!" protested Dr. Hargrave. "I will not consent to any change that takes your hand off the lever, my friend. These are stormy times in our industrial world, and we need the wise, experienced pilot."

Scarborough had feared this; but he and Dory, forced to choose between taking him into their confidence and boldly challenging the man in whom he believed implicitly, had chosen the far safer course. "While Mr. Whitney must appreciate your eulogy, doctor," said he, suave yet with a certain iciness, "I think he will insist upon the trial of the only plan that offers. In our plight we must not shrink from desperate remedies—even a remedy as desperate as eliminating the one man who understands the business from end to end." This last with slight emphasis and a steady look at Whitney.

Whitney reddened. "We need not waste words," said he, in his bluff, sharp voice. "The senator and I are in accord, and we are the majority."

"At least, Mr. Whitney," said the doctor, "you must suggest the new man. You know the business world. We don't."

A long pause; then from Whitney: "Why not try young Ranger?"

Scarborough looked at him in frank amazement. By what process of infernal telepathy had he found out? Or was there some deep reason why Arthur would be the best possible man for his purpose, if his purpose was indeed malign? Was Arthur his tool? Or was Arthur subtly making tools of both Whitney and himself?

Dr. Hargrave was dumfounded. When he recovered himself sufficiently to speak, it was to say, "Why, he's a mere boy, Whitney—not yet thirty. He has had no experience!"

"Inexperience seems to be what we need," replied Whitney, eyes twinkling sneeringly at Scarborough. "We have tried experience, and it is a disastrous failure."