Scarborough was still reflecting.

"True," pursued Whitney, "the young man would also have the motive of self-interest to keep him from making a success."

"How is that?" inquired Scarborough.

"Under the will," Whitney reminded him, "he can buy back the property at its market value. Obviously, the less the property is worth, the better for him."

Scarborough was staggered. Was Arthur crafty as well as able? With the human conscience ever eager to prove that what is personally advantageous is also right, how easy for a man in his circumstances to convince himself that any course would be justifiable in upsetting the "injustice" of Hiram Ranger's will.

"However," continued Whitney, "I've no doubt he's as honest as his father—and I couldn't say more than that. The only question is whether we can risk giving him the chance to show what there is in him."

Dr. Hargrave was looking dazedly from one of his colleagues to the other, as if he thought his mind were playing him a trick. "It is impossible—preposterous!" he exclaimed.

"A man has to make a beginning," said Whitney. "How can he show what there is in him unless he gets a chance? It seems to me, doctor, we owe it to Hiram to do this for the boy. We can keep an eye and a hand on him. What do you think, senator?"

Scarborough had won at every stage of his career, not merely because he had convictions and the courage of them, but chiefly because he had the courage to carry through the plans he laid in trying to make his convictions effective. He had come there, fixed that Arthur was the man for the place; why throw up his hand because Whitney was playing into it? Nothing had occurred to change his opinion of Arthur. "Let us try Arthur Ranger," he now said. "But let us give him a free hand."

He was watching Whitney's face; he saw it change expression—a slight frown. "I advise against the free hand," said Whitney.

"I protest against it!" cried Dr. Hargrave. "I protest against even considering this inexperienced boy for such a responsibility."

Scarborough addressed himself to Whitney. "If we do not give our new manager, whoever he may be, a free hand, and if he should fail, how shall we know whether the fault is his or—yours?"

At the direct "yours" Scarborough thought Whitney winced; but his reply was bland and frank enough. He turned to Dr. Hargrave. "The senator is right," said he. "I shall vote with him."

"Then it is settled," said Scarborough. "Ranger is to have absolute charge."

Dr. Hargrave was now showing every sign of his great age; the anguish of imminent despair was in his deep-set eyes and in his broken, trembling voice as he cried: "Gentlemen, this is madness! Charles, I implore you, do not take such precipitate action in so vital a matter! Let us talk it over—think it over. The life of the university is at stake!"

It was evident that the finality in the tones and in the faces of his colleagues had daunted him; but with a tremendous effort he put down the weakness of age and turned fiercely upon Whitney to shame him from indorsing Scarborough's suicidal policy. But Whitney, with intent of brutality, took out his watch. "I have just time to catch my train," said he, indifferently; "I can only use my best judgment, doctor. Sorry to have to disagree with you, but Senator Scarborough has convinced me." And having thus placed upon Scarborough the entire responsibility for the event of the experiment, he shook hands with his colleagues and hurried out to his waiting carriage.

Dr. Hargrave dropped into a chair and stared into vacancy. In all those long, long years of incessant struggle against heartbreaking obstacles he had never lost courage or faith. But this blow at the very life of the university and from its friends! He could not even lift himself enough to look to his God; it seemed to him that God had gone on a far journey. Scarborough, watching him, was profoundly moved. "If at the end of three months you wish Ranger to resign," said he, "I shall see to it that he does resign. Believe me, doctor, I have not taken this course without considering all the possibilities, so far as I could foresee them."

The old president, impressed by his peculiar tone, looked up quickly. "There is something in this that I don't understand," said he, searching Scarborough's face.

Scarborough was tempted to explain. But the consequences, should he fail to convince Hargrave, compelled him to withhold. "I hope, indeed I feel sure, you will be astonished in our young friend," said he, instead. "I have been talking with him a good deal lately, and I am struck by the strong resemblance to his father. It is more than mere physical likeness."

With a sternness he could have shown only where principle was at stake, the old man said: "But I must not conceal from you, senator, that I have the gravest doubts and fears. You have alienated the university's best friend—rich, powerful, able, and, until you exasperated him, devoted to its interests. I regard you as having—unintentionally, and no doubt for good motives—betrayed the solemn trust Hiram Ranger reposed in you." He was standing at his full height, with his piercing eyes fixed upon his young colleague's.

All the color left Scarborough's face. "Betrayed is a strong word," he said.

"A strong word, senator," answered Dr. Hargrave, "and used deliberately. I wish you good day, sir."

Hargrave was one of those few men who are respected without any reservation, and whose respect is, therefore, not given up without a sense of heavy loss. But to explain would be to risk rousing in him an even deeper anger—anger on account of his friend Whitney; so, without another word, Scarborough bowed and went. "Either he will be apologizing to me at the end of three months," said he to himself, "or I shall be apologizing to Whitney and shall owe Tecumseh a large sum of money."

* * * * *

Both Madelene and Arthur had that instinct for comfort and luxury which is an even larger factor in advancement than either energy or intelligence. The idea that clothing means something more than warmth, food something more than fodder, a house something more than shelter, is the beginning of progress; the measure of a civilized man or woman is the measure of his or her passion for and understanding of the art of living.

Madelene, by that right instinct which was perhaps the finest part of her sane and strong character, knew what comfort really means, knew the difference between luxury and the showy vulgarity of tawdriness or expensiveness; and she rapidly corrected, or, rather, restored, Arthur's good taste, which had been vitiated by his associations with fashionable people, whose standards are necessarily always poor. She was devoted to her profession as a science; but she did not neglect the vital material considerations. She had too much self-respect to become careless about her complexion or figure, about dress or personal habits, even if she had not had such shrewd insight into what makes a husband remain a lover, a wife a mistress. She had none of those self-complacent delusions which lure vain women on in slothfulness until Love vacates his neglected temple. And in large part, no doubt, Arthur's appearance—none of the stains and patches of the usual workingman, and this though he worked hard at manual labor and in a shop—was due to her influence of example; he, living with such a woman, would have been ashamed not to keep "up to the mark." Also her influence over old Mrs. Ranger became absolute; and swiftly yet imperceptibly the house, which had so distressed Adelaide, was transformed, not into the exhibit of fashionable ostentation which had once been Adelaide's and Arthur's ideal, but into a house of comfort and beauty, with colors harmonizing, the look of newness gone from the "best rooms," and finally the "best rooms" themselves abolished. And Ellen thought herself chiefly responsible for the change. "I'm gradually getting things just about as I want 'em," said she. "It does take a long time to do anything in this world!" Also she believed, and a boundless delight it was to her, that she was the cause of Madelene's professional success. Everyone talked of the way Madelene was getting on, and wondered at her luck. "She deserves it, though," said they, "for she can all but raise the dead." In fact, the secret was simple enough. She had been taught by her father to despise drugs and to compel dieting and exercise. She had the tact which he lacked; she made the allowances for human nature's ignorance and superstition which he refused to make; she lessened the hardship of taking her common-sense prescriptions by veiling them in medical hocus-pocus—a compromise of the disagreeable truth which her father had always inveighed against as both immoral and unwholesome.

Within six months after her marriage she was earning as much as her husband; and her fame was spreading so rapidly that not only women but also men, and men with a contempt for the "inferior mentality of the female," were coming to her from all sides. "You'll soon have a huge income," said Arthur. "Why, you'll be rich, you are so grasping."

"Indeed I am," replied she. "The way to teach people to strive for high wages and to learn thrift is to make them pay full value for what they get. I don't propose to encourage dishonesty or idleness. Besides, we'll need the money."

Arthur had none of that mean envy which can endure the prosperity of strangers only; he would not even have been able to be jealous of his wife's getting on better than did he. But, if he had been so disposed, he would have found it hard to indulge such feelings because of Madelene. She had put their married life on the right basis. She made him feel, with a certainty which no morbid imagining could have shaken, that she loved and respected him for qualities which could not be measured by any of the world's standards of success. He knew that in her eyes he was already an arrived success, that she was absolutely indifferent whether others ever recognized it or not. Only those who realize how powerful is the influence of intimate association will appreciate what an effect living with Madelene had upon Arthur's character—in withering the ugly in it, in developing its quality, and in directing its strength.

When Scarborough gave Arthur his "chance," Madelene took it as the matter of course. "I'm sorry it has come so soon," said she, "and in just this way. But it couldn't have been delayed long. With so much to be done and so few able or willing to do it, the world can't wait long enough for a man really to ripen. It's lucky that you inherit from your father so many important things that most men have to spend their lives in learning."

"Do you think so?" said he, brightening; for, with the "chance" secure, he was now much depressed by the difficulties which he had been resurveying from the inside point of view.

"You understand how to manage men," she replied, "and you understand business."

"But, unfortunately, this isn't business."

He was right. The problem of business is, in its two main factors, perfectly simple—to make a wanted article, and to put it where those who want it can buy. But this was not Arthur Ranger's problem, nor is it the problem of most business men in our time. Between maker and customer, nowadays, lie the brigands who control the railways—that is, the highways; and they with equal facility use or defy the law, according to their needs. When Arthur went a-buying grain or stave timber, he and those with whom he was trading had to placate the brigands before they could trade; when he went a-selling flour, he had to fight his way to the markets through the brigands. It was the battle which causes more than ninety out of every hundred in independent business to fail—and of the remaining ten, how many succeed only because they either escaped the notice of the brigands or compromised with them?

"I wish you luck," said Jenkins, when, at the end of two weeks of his tutelage, Arthur told him he would try it alone.

Arthur laughed. "No, you don't, Jenkins," replied he, with good-humored bluntness. "But I'm going to have it, all the same."

Discriminating prices and freight rates against his grain, discriminating freight rates against his flour; the courts either powerless to aid him or under the rule of bandits; and, on the top of all, a strike within two weeks after Jenkins left—such was the situation. Arthur thought it hopeless; but he did not lose courage nor his front of serenity, even when alone with Madelene. Each was careful not to tempt the malice of fate by concealments; each was careful also not to annoy the other with unnecessary disagreeable recitals. If he could have seen where good advice could possibly help him, he would have laid all his troubles before her; but it seemed to him that to ask her advice would be as if she were to ask him to tell her how to put life into a corpse. He imagined that she was deceived by his silence about the details of his affairs because she gave no sign, did not even ask questions beyond generalities. She, however, was always watching his handsome face with its fascinating evidences of power inwardly developing; and, as it was her habit to get valuable information as to what was going on inside her fellow-beings from a close study of surface appearances, the growing gauntness of his features, the coming out of the lines of sternness, did not escape her, made her heart throb with pride even as it ached with sympathy and anxiety. At last she decided for speech.

He was sitting in their dressing room, smoking his last cigarette as he watched her braid her wonderful hair for the night. She, observing him in the glass, saw that he was looking at her with that yearning for sympathy which is always at its strongest in a man in the mood that was his at sight of those waves and showers of soft black hair on the pallid whiteness of her shoulders. Before he realized what she was about she was in his lap, her arms round his neck, his face pillowed against her cheek and her hair. "What is it, little boy?" she murmured, with that mingling of the mistress and the mother which every woman who ever loved feels for and, at certain times, shows the man she loves.

He laughed. "Business—business," said he. "But let's not talk about it. The important thing is that I have you. The rest is—smoke!" And he blew out a great cloud of it and threw the cigarette through the open window.

"Tell me," she said; "I've been waiting for you to speak, and I can't wait any longer."

"I couldn't—just now. It doesn't at all fit in with my thoughts." And he kissed her.

She moved to rise. "Then I'll go back to the dressing table. Perhaps you'll be able to tell me with the width of the room between us."

He drew her head against his again. "Very well—if I must, I will. But you know all about it. For some mysterious reason, somebody—you say it's Whitney, and probably it is—won't let me buy grain or anything else as cheaply as others buy it. And for the same mysterious reason, somebody, probably Whitney again, won't let me get to market without paying a heavier toll than our competitors pay. And now for some mysterious reason somebody, probably Whitney again, has sent labor organizers from Chicago among the men and has induced them to make impossible demands and to walk out without warning."

"And you think there's nothing to do but walk out, too," said Madelene.

"Or wait until I'm put out."

His tone made those words mean that his desperate situation had roused his combativeness, that he would not give up. Her blood beat faster and her eyes shone. "You'll win," she said, with the quiet confidence which strengthens when it comes from a person whose judgment one has tested and found good. And he believed in her as absolutely as she believed in him.

"I've been tempted to resign," he went on. "If I don't everybody'll say I'm a failure when the crash comes. But—Madelene, there's something in me that simply won't let me quit."

"There is," replied she; "it's your father."

"Anyhow, you are the only public opinion for me."

"You'll win," repeated Madelene. "I've been thinking over that whole business. If I were you, Arthur"—she was sitting up so that she could look at him and make her words more impressive—"I'd dismiss strike and freight rates and the mill, and I'd put my whole mind on Whitney. There's a weak spot somewhere in his armor. There always is in a scoundrel's."

Arthur reflected. Presently he drew her head down against his; it seemed to her that she could feel his brain at work, and soon she knew from the change in the clasp of his arms about her that that keen, quick mind of his was serving him well. "What a joy it is to a woman," she thought, "to know that she can trust the man she loves—trust him absolutely, always, and in every way." And she fell asleep after awhile, lulled by the rhythmic beat of his pulse, so steady, so strong, giving her such a restful sense of security. She did not awaken until he was gently laying her in the bed.

"You have found it?" said she, reading the news in the altered expression of his face.

"I hope so," replied he.

She saw that he did not wish to discuss. So she said, "I knew you would," and went contentedly back into sleep again.

* * * * *

Next day he carefully read the company's articles of incorporation to make sure that they contained no obstacle to his plan. Then he went to Scarborough, and together they went to Judge Torrey. Three days later there was a special meeting of the board of directors; the president, Charles Whitney, was unable to attend, but his Monday morning mail contained this extract from the minutes:

"Mr. Ranger offered a resolution that an assessment of two thousand dollars be at once laid upon each share of the capital stock, the proceeds to be expended by the superintendent in betterments. Seconded by Mr. Scarborough. Unanimously passed."

Whitney reread this very carefully. He laid the letter down and stared at it. Two thousand dollars a share meant that he, owner of four hundred and eighty-seven shares, would have to pay in cash nine hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars. He ordered his private car attached to the noon express, and at five o'clock he was in Scarborough's library.

"What is the meaning of this assessment?" he demanded, as Scarborough entered.

"Mr. Ranger explained the situation to us," replied Scarborough. "He showed us we had to choose between ruin and a complete reorganization with big improvements and extensions."

"Lunacy, sheer lunacy!" cried Whitney. "A meeting of the board must be called and the resolution rescinded."

Scarborough simply looked at him, a smile in his eyes.

"I never heard of such an outrage! You ask me to pay an assessment of nearly a million dollars on stock that is worthless."

"And," replied Scarborough, "at the end of the year we expect to levy another assessment of a thousand a share."

Whitney had been tramping stormily up and down the room. As Scarborough uttered those last words he halted. He eyed his tranquil fellow-trustee, then seated himself, and said, with not a trace of his recent fury: "You must know, Scarborough, the mills have no future. I hadn't the heart to say so before Dr. Hargrave. But I supposed you were reading the signs right. The plain truth is, this is no longer a good location for the flour industry."

Scarborough waited before replying; when he did speak his tones were deliberate and suggestive of strong emotion well under control. "True," said he, "not just at present. But Judge Beverwick, your friend and silent partner who sits on the federal bench in this district, is at the point of death. I shall see to it that his successor is a man with a less intense prejudice against justice. Thus we may be able to convince some of your friends in control of the railways that Saint X is as good a place for mills as any in the country."

Whitney grunted. His face was inscrutable. He paced the length of the room twice; he stood at the window gazing out at the arbors, at the bees buzzing contentedly, at the flies darting across the sifting sunbeams. "Beautiful place, this," said he at last; "very homelike. No wonder you're a happy man." A pause. "As to the other matter, I'll see. No doubt I can stop this through the courts, if you push me to it."

"Not without giving us a chance to explain," replied Scarborough; "and the higher courts may agree with us that we ought to defend the university's rights against your railway friends and your 'labor' men whom you sent down here to cause the strike."

"Rubbish!" said Whitney; and he laughed. "Rubbish!" he repeated. "It's not a matter either for argument or for anger." He took his hat, made a slight ironic bow, and was gone.

He spent the next morning with Arthur, discussing the main phases of the business, with little said by either about the vast new project. They lunched together in the car, which was on a siding before the offices, ready to join the early afternoon express. Arthur was on his guard against Whitney, but he could not resist the charm of the financier's manner and conversation. Like all men of force, Whitney had great magnetism, and his conversation was frank to apparent indiscretion, a most plausible presentation of the cynical philosophy of practical life as it is lived by men of bold and generous nature.

"That assessment scheme was yours, wasn't it?" he said, when he and Arthur had got on terms of intimacy.

"The first suggestion came from me," admitted Arthur.

"A great stroke," said Whitney. "You will arrive, young man. I thought it was your doing, because it reminded me of your father. I never knew a more direct man than he, yet he was without an equal at flanking movements. What a pity his mind went before he died! My first impulse was to admire his will. But, now that I've come to know you, I see that if he had lived to get acquainted with you he'd have made a very; different disposition of the family property. As it is, it's bound to go to pieces. No board ever managed anything successfully. It's always a man—one man. In this case it ought to be you. But the time will come—soon, probably—when your view will conflict with that of the majority of the board. Then out you'll go; and your years of intelligent labor will be destroyed."

It was plain in Arthur's face that this common-sense statement of the case produced instant and strong effect. He merely said: "Well, one must take that risk."

"Not necessarily," replied Whitney; he was talking in the most careless, impersonal way. "A man of your sort, with the strength and the ability you inherit, and with the power that they give you to play an important part in the world, doesn't let things drift to ruin. I intend, ultimately, to give my share of the Ranger-Whitney Company to Tecumseh—I'm telling you this in confidence."

Arthur glanced quickly at the great financier, suspicion and wonder in his eyes.

"But I want it to be a value when I give it," continued Whitney; "not the worse than worthless paper it threatens to become. Scarborough and Dr. Hargrave are splendid men. No one honors them more highly than I do. But they are not business men. And who will be their successors? Probably men even less practical."

Arthur, keen-witted but young, acute but youthfully ready to attribute the generous motive rather than the sinister, felt that he was getting a new light on Whitney's character. Perhaps Whitney wasn't so unworthy, after all. Perhaps, in trying to wreck the business and so get hold of it, he had been carrying out a really noble purpose, in the unscrupulous way characteristic of the leaders of the world of commerce and finance. To Whitney he said: "I haven't given any thought to these matters." With a good-natured laugh of raillery: "You have kept me too busy."

Whitney smiled—an admission that yet did not commit him. "When you've lived a while longer, Arthur," said he, "you'll not be so swift and harsh in your judgments of men who have to lay the far-sighted plans and have to deal with mankind as it is, not as it ought to be. However, by that time the Ranger-Whitney Company will be wiped out. It's a pity. If only there were some way of getting the control definitely in your hands—where your father would have put it if he had lived. It's a shame to permit his life work and his plans for the university to be demolished. In your place I'd not permit it."

Arthur slowly flushed. Without looking at Whitney, he said: "I don't see how I could prevent it."

Whitney studied his flushed face, his lowered eyes, reflected carefully on the longing note in the voice in which he had made that statement, a note that changed it to a question. "Control could be got only by ownership," explained he. "If I were sure you were working with a definite, practical purpose really to secure the future of the company, I'd go heartily into your assessment plan. In fact, I'd—" Whitney was feeling his way. The change in Arthur's expression, the sudden tightening of the lips, warned him that he was about to go too far, that he had sowed as much seed as it was wise to sow at that time. He dropped the subject abruptly, saying: "But I've got to go up to the bank before train time. I'm glad we've had this little talk. Something of value may grow out of it. Think it over, and if any new ideas come to you run up to Chicago and see me."

Arthur did indeed think it over, every moment of that afternoon; and before going home he took a long walk alone. He saw that Charles Whitney had proposed a secret partnership, in which he was to play Whitney's game and, in exchange, was to get control of the Ranger-Whitney Company. And what Whitney had said about the folly of board managements, about the insecurity of his own position, was undeniably true; and the sacrifice of the "smaller morality" for the "larger good" would be merely doing what the biographies of the world's men of achievement revealed them as doing again and again. Further, once in control, once free to put into action the plans for a truly vast concern, of which he had so often dreamed, he could give Tecumseh a far larger income than it had ever hoped to have through his father's gift, and also could himself be rich and powerful. To the men who have operated with success and worldly acclaim under the code of the "larger good," the men who have aggrandized themselves at the expense of personal honor and the rights of others and the progress of the race, the first, the crucial temptation to sacrifice "smaller morality" and "short-sighted scruples" has always come in some such form as it here presented itself to Arthur Ranger. The Napoleons begin as defenders of rational freedom against the insane license of the mob; the Rockefellers begin as cheapeners of a necessity of life to the straitened millions of their fellow-beings.

If Arthur had been weak, he would have put aside the temptation through fear of the consequences of failure. If he had been ignorant, he would have put it aside through superstition. Being neither weak nor ignorant, and having a human passion for wealth and power and a willingness to get them if he could do it without sacrifice of self-respect, he sat calmly down with the temptation and listened to it and debated with it. He was silent all through dinner; and after dinner, when he and Madelene were in their sitting room upstairs, she reading, he sat with his eyes upon her, and continued to think.

All at once he gave a curious laugh, went to the writing table and wrote a few moments. Then he brought the letter to her. "Read that," said he, standing behind her, his hands on her shoulders and an expression in his face that made his resemblance to Hiram startling.

She read:

"MY DEAR MR. WHITNEY: I've been 'thinking it over' as you suggested. I've decided to plug along in the old way, between the old landmarks. Let me add that, if you should offer to give your stock to Tecumseh now, I'd have to do my utmost to persuade the trustees not to take it until the company was once more secure. You see, I feel it is absolutely necessary that you have a large pecuniary interest in the success of our plans."

When Madelene had read she turned in the chair until she was looking up at him. "Well?" she inquired. "What does it mean?"

He told her. "And," he concluded, "I wish I could be a great man, but I can't. There's something small in me that won't permit it. No doubt Franklin was right when he said life was a tunnel and one had to stoop, and even occasionally to crawl, in order to get through it successfully. Now—if I hadn't married you—"

"Always blaming me," she said, tenderly. "But even if you hadn't married me, I suspect that sooner or later you'd have decided for being a large man in a valley rather than a very small imitation man on a mountain." Then, after a moment's thought, and with sudden radiance: "But a man as big as you are wouldn't be let stay in the valley, no matter how hard he tried."

He laughed. "I've no objection to the mountain top," said he. "But I see that, if I get there, it'll have to be in my own way. Let's go out and mail the letter."

And they went down the drive together to the post box, and, strolling back, sat under the trees in the moonlight until nearly midnight, feeling as if they had only just begun life together—and had begun it right.

* * * * *

When Charles Whitney had read the letter he tore it up, saying half-aloud and contemptuously, "I was afraid there was too big a streak of fool in him." Then, with a shrug: "What's the use of wasting time on that little game—especially as I'd probably have left the university the whole business in my will." He wrote Scarborough, proposing that they delay the assessment until he had a chance to look further into the railway situation. "I begin to understand the troubles down there, now that I've taken time to think them over. I feel I can guarantee that no assessment will be necessary."

And when the railways had mysteriously and abruptly ceased to misbehave, and the strike had suddenly fizzled out, he offered his stock to the university as a gift. "I shall see to it," he wrote, "that the company is not molested again, but is helped in every way." Arthur was for holding off, but Scarborough said, "No. He will keep his word." And Scarborough was right in regarding the matter as settled and acceptance of the splendid gift as safe. Whitney had his own code of honesty, of honor. It was not square dealing, but doing exactly what he specifically engaged to do. He would have stolen anything he could—anything he regarded as worth his while. On the other hand, he would have sacrificed nearly all, if not all, his fortune, to live up to the letter of his given word. This, though no court would have enforced the agreement he had made, though there was no written record of it, no witness other than himself, the other party, and the Almighty—for Charles Whitney believed in an Almighty God and an old-fashioned hell and a Day of Judgment. He conducted his religious bookkeeping precisely as he conducted his business bookkeeping, and was confident that he could escape hell as he had escaped the penitentiary.



CHAPTER XXII

VILLA D'ORSAY

Adelaide did not reach home until the troubles with and through Charles Whitney were settled, and Arthur and Dory were deep in carrying out the plans to make the mills and factories part of the university and not merely its property. When Scarborough's urgent cable came, Dory found that all the steamers were full. Adelaide could go with him only by taking a berth in a room with three women in the bottom of the ship. "Impossible accommodations," thought he, "for so luxurious a person and so poor a sailor"; and he did not tell her that this berth could be had. "You'll have to wait a week or so," said he. "As you can't well stay on here alone, why not accept Mrs. Whitney's invitation to join her?"

Adelaide disliked Mrs. Whitney, but there seemed to be no alternative. Mrs. Whitney was at Paris, on the way to America after the wedding and a severe cure at Aix and an aftercure in Switzerland. She had come for the finishing touches of rejuvenation—to get her hair redone and to go through her biennial agony of having Auguste, beauty specialist to the royalty, nobility and fashion, and demimonde, of three continents, burn off her outer skin that nature might replace it with one new and fresh and unwrinkled. She was heavily veiled as she and Adelaide traveled down to Cherbourg to the steamer. As soon as she got aboard she retired to her room and remained hidden there during the voyage, seen only by her maid, her face covered day and night with Auguste's marvelous skin-coaxing mask. Adelaide did not see her again until the morning of the last day, when she appeared on deck dressed beautifully and youthfully for the shore, her skin as fair and smooth as a girl's, and looking like an elder sister of Adelaide's—at a distance.

She paused in New York; Adelaide hastened to Saint X, though she was looking forward uneasily to her arrival because she feared she would have to live at the old Hargrave house in University Avenue. Miss Skeffington ruled there, and she knew Miss Skeffington—one of those old-fashioned old maids whose rigid ideas of morality extend to the ordering of personal habits in minutest detail. Under her military sway everyone had to rise for breakfast at seven sharp, had to dine exactly at noon, sup when the clock struck the half hour after five. Ingress and egress for members of the family was by the side door only, the front door being reserved for company. For company also was the parlor, and for company the front stairs with their brilliant carpet, new, though laid for the first time nearly a quarter of a century before; for company also was the best room in the house, which ought to have been attractive, but was a little damp from being shut up so much, and was the cause of many a cold to guests. "I simply can't stand it to live by the striking of clocks!" thought Adelaide. "I must do something! But what?"

Her uneasiness proved unnecessary, however. Dory disappointed his aunt, of a new and interestingly difficult spirit to subdue, by taking rooms at the Hendricks Hotel until they should find a place of their own. Mrs. Ranger asked them to live with her; but Adelaide shrank from putting herself in a position where her mother and Arthur could, and her sister-in-law undoubtedly would, "know too much about our private affairs." Mrs. Ranger did not insist. She would not admit it to herself, but, while she worshiped Del and thought her even more beautiful than she was, and just about perfection in every way, still Madelene was more satisfactory for daily companionship. Also, Ellen doubted whether two such positive natures as Madelene's and Adelaide's would be harmonious under the same roof. "What's more," she reflected, "there may be a baby—babies."

Within a fortnight of Del's return, and before she and Dory had got quite used to each other again, she fixed on an abode. "Mrs. Dorsey was here this afternoon," said she, with enthusiasm which, to Dory's acute perceptions, seemed slightly exaggerated, in fact, forced, "and offered us her house for a year, just to have somebody in it whom she could trust to look after things. You know she's taking her daughter abroad to finish. It was too good a chance to let pass; so I accepted at once."

Dory turned away abruptly. With slow deliberation he took a cigarette from his case, lighted it, watched the smoke drift out at the open window. She was observing him, though she seemed not to be. And his expression made her just a little afraid. Unlike most men who lead purely intellectual lives, he had not the slightest suggestion of sexlessness; on the contrary, he seemed as strong, as positive physically, as the look of his forehead and eyes showed him to be mentally. And now that he had learned to dress with greater care, out of deference to her, she could find nothing about him to help her in protecting herself by criticising him.

"Do you think, Del," said he, "that we'll be able to live in that big place on eighteen hundred a year?"

It wasn't as easy for him thus to remind her of their limited means as it theoretically should have been. Del was distinctly an expensive-looking luxury. That dress of hers, pale green, with hat and everything to match or in harmony, was a "simple thing," but the best dressmaker in the Rue de la Paix had spent a great deal of his costly time in producing that effect of simplicity. Throughout, she had the cleanness, the freshness, the freedom from affectations which Dory had learned could be got only by large expenditure. Nor would he have had her any different. He wanted just the settings she chose for her fair, fine beauty. The only change he would have asked would have been in the expression of those violet eyes of hers when they looked at him.

"You wish I hadn't done it!" she exclaimed. And if he had not glanced away so quickly he would have seen that she was ready to retreat.

"Well, it's not exactly the start I'd been thinking of," replied he, reluctantly but tentatively.

It is not in human nature to refuse to press an offered advantage. Said Del: "Can't we close up most of the house—use only five or six rooms on the ground floor? And Mrs. Dorsey's gardener and his helpers will be there. All we have to do is to see that they've not neglected the grounds." She was once more all belief and enthusiasm. "It seemed to me, taking that place was most economical, and so comfortable. Really, Dory, I didn't accept without thinking."

Dory was debating with himself: To take that house—it was one of those trifles that are anything but trifles—like the slight but crucial motion at the crossroads in choosing the road to the left instead of the road to the right. Not to take the house—Del would feel humiliated, reasoned he, would think him unreasonably small, would chafe under the restraint their limited means put upon them, whereas, if he left the question of living on their income entirely to her good sense, she would not care about the deprivations, would regard them as self-imposed.

"Of course, if you don't like it, Dory," she now said, "I suppose Mrs. Dorsey will let me off. But I'm sure you'd be delighted, once we got settled. The house is so attractive—at least, I think I can make it attractive by packing away her showy stuff and rearranging the furniture. And the grounds—Dory, I don't see how you can object!"

Dory gave a shrug and a smile. "Well, go ahead. We'll scramble through somehow." He shook his head at her in good-humored warning. "Only, please don't forget what's coming at the end of your brief year of grandeur."

Adelaide checked the reply that was all but out. She hastily reflected that it might not be wise to let him know, just then, that Mrs. Dorsey had said they could have the house for two years, probably for three, perhaps for five. Instead, she said, "It isn't the expense, after all, that disturbs you, is it?"

He smiled confession. "No."

"I know it's snobbish of me to long for finery so much that I'm even willing to live in another person's and show off in it," she sighed. "But—I'm learning gradually."

He colored. Unconsciously she had put into her tone—and this not for the first time, by any means—a suggestion that there wasn't the slightest danger of his wearying of waiting, that she could safely take her time in getting round to sensible ideas and to falling in love with him. His eyes had the look of the veiled amusement that deliberately shows through, as he said, "That's good. I'll try to be patient."

It was her turn to color. But, elbowing instinctive resentment, came uneasiness. His love seemed to her of the sort that flowers in the romances—the love that endures all, asks nothing, lives forever upon its own unfed fire. As is so often the case with women whose charms move men to extravagance of speech and emotion, it was a great satisfaction to her, to her vanity, to feel that she had inspired this wonderful immortal flame; obviously, to feed such a flame by giving love for love would reduce it to the commonplace. All women start with these exaggerated notions of the value of being loved; few of them ever realize and rouse themselves, or are aroused, from their vanity to the truth that the value is all the other way. Adelaide was only the natural woman in blindly fancying that Dory was the one to be commiserated, in not seeing that she herself was a greater loser than he, that to return his love would not be a concession but an acquisition. Most men are content to love, to compel women to receive their love; they prefer the passive, the receptive attitude in the woman, and are even bored by being actively loved in return; for love is exacting, and the male is impatient of exaction. Adelaide did not understand just this broad but subtle difference between Dory and "most men"—that he would feel that he was violating her were he to sweep her away in the arms of his impetuous released passion, as he knew he could. He felt that such a yielding was, after all, like the inert obedience of the leaf to the storm wind—that what he could compel, what women call love, would be as utterly without substance as an image in a mirror, indeed, would be a mere passive reflection of his own love—all most men want, but worthless to him.

Could it be that Dory's love had become—no, not less, but less ardent? She saw that he was deep in thought—about her, she assumed, with an unconscious vanity which would have excited the mockery of many who have more vanity than had she, and perhaps with less excuse. In fact, he was not thinking of her; having the ability to turn his mind completely where he willed—the quality of all strong men, and the one that often makes the weak-willed think them hard—he was revolving the vast and inspiring plans Arthur and he had just got into practical form—plans for new factories and mills such as a university, professing to be in the forefront of progress need not be ashamed to own or to offer to its students as workshops. All that science has bestowed in the way of making labor and its surroundings clean and comfortable, healthful and attractive, was to be provided; all that the ignorance and the shortsighted greediness of employers, bent only on immediate profits and keeping their philanthropy for the smug penuriousness and degrading stupidity of charity, deny to their own self-respect and to justice for their brothers in their power. Arthur and he had wrought it all out, had discovered as a crowning vindication that the result would be profitable in dollars, that their sane and shrewd utopianism would produce larger dividends than the sordid and slovenly methods of their competitors. "It is always so. Science is always economical as well as enlightened and humane," Dory was thinking when Adelaide's voice broke into his reverie.

"You are right, Dory," said she. "And I shall give up the house. I'll go to see Mrs. Dorsey now."

"The house?—What—Oh, yes—well—no—What made you change?"

She did not know the real reason—that, studying his face, the curve and set of his head, the strength of the personality which she was too apt to take for granted most of the time because he was simple and free from pretense, she had been reminded that he was not a man to be trifled with, that she would better bestir herself and give more thought and attention to what was going on in that superbly shaped head of his—about her, about her and him. "Oh, I don't just know," replied she, quite honestly. "It seems to me now that there'll be too much fuss and care and—sham. And I intend to interest myself in your work. You've hardly spoken of it since I got back."

"There's been so little time—"

"You mean," she interrupted, "I've been so busy unpacking my silly dresses and hats and making and receiving silly calls."

"Now you're in one of your penitential moods," laughed Dory. "And to-morrow you'll wish you hadn't changed about the house. No—that's settled. We'll take it, and see what the consequences are."

Adelaide brightened. His tone was his old self, and she did want that house so intensely! "I can be useful to Dory there; I can do so much on the social side of the university life. He doesn't appreciate the value of those things in advancing a career. He thinks a career is made by work only. But I'll show him! I'll make his house the center of the university!"

Mrs. Dorsey had "Villa d'Orsay" carved on the stone pillars of her great wrought-iron gates, to remind the populace that, while her late father-in-law, "Buck" Dorsey, was the plainest of butchers and meat packers, his ancestry was of the proudest. With the rise of its "upper class" Saint X had gone in diligently for genealogy, had developed reverence for "tradition" and "blood," had established a Society of Family Histories, a chapter of the Colonial Dames, another of Daughters of the Revolution, and was in a fair way to rival the seaboard cities in devotion to the imported follies and frauds of "family." Dory at first indulged his sense of humor upon their Dorsey or d'Orsay finery. It seemed to him they must choose between making a joke of it and having it make a joke of them. But he desisted when he saw that it grated on Del for him to speak of her and himself as "caretakers for the rich." And presently his disposition to levity died of itself. It sobered and disheartened and, yes, disgusted him as he was forced to admit to himself the reality of her delight in receiving people in the great drawing room, of her content in the vacuous, time-wasting habits, of her sense of superiority through having at her command a troop of servants—Mrs. Dorsey's servants! He himself disliked servants about, hated to abet a fellow-being in looking on himself or herself as an inferior; and he regarded as one of the basest, as well as subtlest poisons of snobbishness, the habit of telling others to do for one the menial, personal things which can be done with dignity only by oneself. Once, in Paris—after Besancon—Janet spoke of some of her aristocratic acquaintances on the other side as "acting as if they had always been used to everything; so different from even the best people at home." Dory remembered how Adelaide promptly took her up, gave instance after instance in proof that European aristocrats were in fact as vulgar in their satisfaction in servility as were the newest of the newly aristocratic at home, but simply had a different way of showing it. "A more vulgar way," she said, Janet unable to refute her. "Yes, far more vulgar, Jen, because deliberately concealed; just as vanity that swells in secret is far worse than frank, childish conceit."

And now—These vanities of hers, sprung from the old roots which in Paris she had been eager to kill and he was hoping were about dead, sprung in vigor and spreading in weedy exuberance! He often looked at her in sad wonder when she was unconscious of it. "What is the matter?" he would repeat. "She is farther away than in Paris, where the temptation to this sort of nonsense was at least plausible." And he grew silent with her and shut himself in alone during the evening hours which he could not spend at the university. She knew why, knew also that he was right, ceased to bore herself and irritate him with attempts to make the Villa d'Orsay the social center of the university. But she continued to waste her days in the inane pastimes of Saint X's fashionable world, though ashamed of herself and disgusted with her mode of life. For snobbishness is essentially a provincial vice, due full as much to narrowness as to ignorance; and, thus, it is most potent in the small "set" in the small town. In the city even the narrowest are compelled to at least an occasional glimpse of wider horizons; but in the small town only the vigilant and resolute ever get so much as a momentary point of view. She told herself, in angry attempt at self-excuse, that he ought to take her in hand, ought to snatch her away from that which she had not the courage to give up of herself. Yet she knew she would hate him should he try to do it. She assumed that was the reason he didn't; and it was part of the reason, but a lesser part than his unacknowledged, furtive fear of what he might discover as to his own feelings toward her, were there just then a casting up and balancing of their confused accounts with each other.

Both were relieved, as at a crisis postponed, when it became necessary for him to go abroad again immediately. "I don't see how you can leave," said he, thus intentionally sparing her a painful effort in saying what at once came into the mind of each.

"We could cable Mrs. Dorsey," she suggested lamely. She was at the Louis Quinze desk in the Louis Quinze sitting room, and her old gold negligee matched in charmingly, and the whole setting brought out the sheen, faintly golden, over her clear skin, the peculiarly fresh and intense shade of her violet eyes, the suggestion of gold in her thick hair, with its wan, autumnal coloring, such as one sees in a field of dead ripe grain. She was doing her monthly accounts, and the showing was not pleasant. She was a good housekeeper, a surprisingly good manager; but she did too much entertaining for their income.

Dory was too much occupied with the picture she made as she sat there to reply immediately. "I doubt," he finally replied, "if she could arrange by cable for some one else whom she would trust with her treasures. No, I guess you'll have to stay."

"I wish I hadn't taken this place!" she exclaimed. It was the first confession of what her real, her sane and intelligent self had been proclaiming loudly since the first flush of interest and pleasure in her "borrowed plumage" had receded. "Why do you let me make a fool of myself?"

"No use going into that," replied he, on guard not to take too seriously this belated penitence. He was used to Del's fits of remorse, so used to them that he thought them less valuable than they really were, or might have been had he understood her better—or, not bothered about trying to understand her. "I shan't be away long, I imagine," he went on, "and I'll have to rush round from England to France, to Germany, to Austria, to Switzerland. All that would be exhausting for you, and only a little of the time pleasant."

His words sounded to her like a tolling over the grave of that former friendship and comradeship of theirs. "I really believe you'll be glad to get away alone," cried she, lips smiling raillery, eyes full of tears.

"Do you think so?" said Dory, as if tossing back her jest. But both knew the truth, and each knew that the other knew it. He was as glad to escape from those surroundings as she to be relieved of a presence which edged on her other-self to scoff and rail and sneer at her. It had become bitterness to him to enter the gates of the Villa d'Orsay. His nerves were so wrought up that to look about the magnificent but too palace-like, too hotel-like rooms was to struggle with a longing to run amuck and pause not until he had reduced the splendor to smithereens. And in that injustice of chronic self-excuse which characterizes all human beings who do not live by intelligently formed and intelligently executed plan, she was now trying to soothe herself with blaming him for her low spirits; in fact, they were wholly the result of her consciously unworthy mode of life, and of an incessant internal warfare, exhausting and depressing. Also, the day would surely come when he would ask how she was contriving to keep up such imposing appearances on their eighteen hundred a year; and then she would have to choose between directly deceiving him and telling him that she had broken—no, not broken, that was too harsh—rather, had not yet fulfilled the promise to give up the income her father left her.

After a constrained silence, "I really don't need anyone to stop here with me," she said to him, as if she had been thinking of it and not of the situation between them, "but I'll get Stella Wilmot and her brother."

"Arden?" said Dory, doubtfully. "I know he's all right in some ways, and he has stopped drinking since he got the place at the bank. But—"

"If we show we have confidence in him," replied Adelaide, "I think it will help him."

"Very well," said Dory. "Besides, it isn't easy to find people of the sort you'd be willing to have, who can leave home and come here."

Adelaide colored as she smiled. "Perhaps that was my reason, rather than helping him," she said.

Dory flushed. "Oh, I didn't mean to insinuate that!" he protested, and checked himself from saying more. In their mood each would search the other's every word for a hidden thrust, and would find it.

The constraint between them, which thus definitely entered the stage of deep cleavage where there had never been a joining, persisted until the parting. Since the wedding he had kissed her but once—on her arrival from Europe. Then, there was much bustle of greeting from others, and neither had had chance to be self-conscious. When they were at the station for his departure, it so happened that no one had come with them. As the porter warned them that the train was about to move, they shook hands and hesitated, blushing and conscious of themselves and of spectators, "Good-by," stammered Dory, with a dash at her cheek.

"Good-by," she murmured, making her effort at the same instant.

The result was a confusion of features and hat brims that threw them into a panic, then into laughter, and so made the second attempt easy and successful. It was a real meeting of the lips. His arm went round her, her hand pressed tenderly on his shoulder, and he felt a trembling in her form, saw a sudden gleam of light leap into and from her eyes. And all in that flash the secret of his mistake in managing his love affair burst upon him.

"Good-by, Dory—dear," she was murmuring, a note in her voice like the shy answer of a hermit thrush to the call of her mate.

"All aboard!" shouted the conductor, and the wheels began to move.

"Good-by—good-by," he stammered, his blood surging through his head.

It came into her mind to say, "I care for you more than I knew." But his friend the conductor was thrusting him up the steps of the car. "I wish I had said it," thought she, watching the train disappear round the curve. "I'll write it."

But she did not. When the time came to write, that idea somehow would not fit in with the other things she was setting down. "I think I do care for him—as a friend," she decided. "If he had only compelled me to find out the state of my own mind! What a strange man! I don't see how he can love me, for he knows me as I am. Perhaps he really doesn't; sometimes I think he couldn't care for a woman as a woman wants to be cared for." Then as his face as she had last seen it rose before her, and her lips once more tingled, "Oh, yes, he does care! And without his love how wretched I'd be! What a greedy I am—wanting his love and taking it, and giving nothing in return." That last more than half-sincere, though she, like not a few of her sisters in the "Woman's Paradise," otherwise known as the United States of America, had been spoiled into greatly exaggerating the value of her graciously condescending to let herself be loved.

And she was lonely without him. If he could have come back at the end of a week or a month, he would have been received with an ardor that would have melted every real obstacle between them. Also, it would have dissipated the far more obstructive imaginary obstacles from their infection with the latter-day vice of psychologizing about matters which lie in the realm of physiology, not of psychology. But he did not come; and absence, like bereavement, has its climax, after which the thing that was begins to be as if it had not been.

He was gone; and that impetuous parting caress of his had roused in her an impulse that would never again sleep, would pace its cage restlessly, eager for the chance to burst forth. And he had roused it when he would not be there to make its imperious clamor personal to himself.

As Estelle was at her shop all day, and not a few of the evenings, Del began to see much of Henrietta Hastings. Grandfather Fuller was now dead and forgotten in the mausoleum into which he had put one-fifth of his fortune, to the great discontent of the heirs. Henrietta's income had expanded from four thousand a year to twenty; and she spent her days in thinking of and talking of the careers to which she could help her husband if he would only shake off the lethargy which seized him the year after his marriage to a Fuller heiress. But Hastings would not; he was happy in his books and in his local repute for knowing everything there was to be known. Month by month he grew fatter and lazier and slower of speech. Henrietta pretended to be irritated against him, and the town had the habit of saying that "If Hastings had some of his wife's 'get up' he wouldn't be making her unhappy but would be winning a big name for himself." In fact, had Hastings tried to bestir himself at something definite in the way of action, Henrietta would have been really disturbed instead of simply pretending to be. She had a good mind, a keen wit that had become bitter with unlicensed indulgence; but she was as indolent and purposeless as her husband. All her energy went in talk about doing something, and every day she had a new scheme, with yesterday's forgotten or disdained.

Adelaide pretended to herself to regard Henrietta as an energetic and stimulating person, though she knew that Henrietta's energy, like her own, like that of most women of the sheltered, servant-attended class, was a mere blowing off of steam by an active but valveless engine of a mind. But this pretense enabled her to justify herself for long mornings and afternoons at the Country Club with Henrietta. They talked of activity, of accomplishing this and that and the other; they read fitfully at serious books; they planned novels and plays; they separated each day with a comfortable feeling that they had been usefully employed. And each did learn much from the other; but, as each confirmed the other in the habitual mental vices of the women, and of an increasing number of the men, of our quite comfortable classes, the net result of their intercourse was pitifully poor, the poorer for their fond delusions that they were improving themselves. They laughed at the "culture craze" which, raging westward, had seized upon all the women of Saint X with incomes, or with husbands or fathers to support them in idleness—the craze for thinking, reading, and talking cloudily or muddily on cloudy or muddy subjects. Henrietta and Adelaide jeered; yet they were themselves the victims of another, and, if possible, more poisonous, bacillus of the same sluggard family.

One morning Adelaide, in graceful ease in her favorite nook in the small northwest portico of the club house, was reading a most imposingly bound and illustrated work on Italian architecture written by a smatterer for smatterers. She did a great deal of reading in this direction because it was also the direction of her talent, and so she could make herself think she was getting ready to join in Dory's work when he returned. She heard footsteps just round the corner, and looked up. She and Ross Whitney were face to face.

There was no chance for evasion. He, with heightened color, lifted his hat; she, with a nonchalance that made her proud of herself, smiled and stretched out her hand. "Hello, Ross," said she, languidly friendly. "When did you come to town?" And she congratulated herself that her hair had gone up so well that morning and that her dress was one of her most becoming—from Paris, from Paquin—a year old, it is true, but later than the latest in Saint X and fashionable even for Sherry's at lunch time.

Ross, the expert, got himself together and made cover without any seeming of scramble; but his not quite easy eyes betrayed him to her. "About two hours ago," replied he.

"Is Theresa with you?" She gazed tranquilly at him as she fired this center shot. She admired the coolness with which he received it.

"No; she's up at her father's place—on the lake shore," he answered. He, too, was looking particularly well, fresh yet experienced, and in dress a model, with his serge of a strange, beautiful shade of blue, his red tie and socks, and his ruby-set cuff-links. "Mr. Howland is ill, and she's nursing him. I'm taking a few days off—came down to try to sell father's place for him."

"You're going to sell Point Helen?" said Adelaide, politely regretful. "Then I suppose we shan't see your people here any more. Your mother'll no doubt spend most of her time abroad, now that Janet is married there."

Ross did not answer immediately. He was looking into the distance, his expression melancholy. His abstraction gave Adelaide a chance to verify the impression she had got from a swift but femininely penetrating first glance. Yes, he did look older; no, not exactly older—sad, rather. Evidently he was unhappy, distinctly unhappy. And as handsome and as tasteful as ever—the band of his straw hat, the flower in his buttonhole, his tie, his socks—all in harmony; no ostentation, just the unerring, quiet taste of a gentleman. What a satisfactory person to look at! To be sure, his character—However, character has nothing to do with the eye-pleasures, and they are undeniably agreeable. Then there were his manners, and his mind—such a man of the world! Of course he wasn't for one instant to be compared with Dory—who was? Still, it was a pity that Dory had a prejudice against showing all that he really was, a pity he had to be known to be appreciated—that is, appreciated by the "right sort" of people. Of course, the observant few could see him in his face, which was certainly distinguished—yes, far more distinguished than Ross's, if not so regularly handsome.

"I've been looking over the old place," Ross was saying, "and I've decided to ask father to keep it. Theresa doesn't like it here; but I do, and I can't bring myself to cut the last cords. As I wandered over the place I found myself getting so sad and sentimental that I hurried away to escape a fit of the blues."

"We're accustomed to that sort of talk," said Adelaide with a mocking smile in her delightful eyes. "People who used to live here and come back on business occasionally always tell us how much more beautiful Saint X is than any other place on earth. But they take the first train for Chicago or Cincinnati or anywhere at all."

"So you find it dull here?"

"I?" Adelaide shrugged her charming shoulders slightly. "Not so very. My life is here—the people, the things I'm used to. I've a sense of peace that I don't have anywhere else." She gazed dreamily away. "And peace is the greatest asset."

"The greatest asset," repeated Ross absently. "You are to be envied."

"I think so," assented she, a curious undertone of defiance in her voice. She had a paniclike impulse to begin to talk of Dory; but, though she cast about diligently, she could find no way of introducing him that would not have seemed awkward—pointed and provincially prudish.

"What are you reading?" he asked presently.

She turned the book so that he could see the title. His eyes wandered from it to linger on her slender white fingers—on the one where a plain band of gold shone eloquently. It fascinated and angered him; and she saw it, and was delighted. Her voice had a note of triumph in it as she said, putting the book on the table beside her, "Foolish, isn't it, to be reading how to build beautiful houses"—she was going to say, "when one will probably never build any house at all." She bethought her that this might sound like a sigh over Dory's poverty and over the might-have-been. So she ended, "when the weather is so deliciously lazy."

"I know the chap who wrote it," said Ross, "Clever—really unusual talent. But the fashionable women took him up, made him a toady and a snob, like the rest of the men of their set. How that sort of thing eats out manhood and womanhood!"

Just what Dory often said! "My husband says," she answered, "that whenever the world has got a fair start toward becoming civilized, along have come wealth and luxury to smother and kill. It's very interesting to read history from that standpoint, instead of taking the usual view—that luxury produces the arts and graces."

"Dory is a remarkable man," said Ross with enthusiasm. "He's amazingly modest; but there are some men so big that they can't hide, no matter how hard they try. He's one of them."

Adelaide was in a glow, so happy did this sincere and just tribute make her, so relieved did she feel. She was talking to one of Dory's friends and admirers, not with an old sweetheart of hers about whom her heart, perhaps, might be—well, a little sore, and from whom radiated a respectful, and therefore subtle, suggestion that the past was very much the present for him. She hastened to expand upon Dory, upon his work; and, as she talked of the university, she found she had a pride in it, and an interest, and a knowledge, too, which astonished her. And Ross listened, made appreciative comments. And so, on and on. When Henrietta came they were laughing and talking like the best of old friends; and at Ross's invitation the three lunched at the club and spent the afternoon together.

"I think marriage has improved Ross," said Henrietta, as she and Adelaide were driving home together after tea—tea with Ross.

"Theresa is a very sweet woman," said Adelaide dutifully.

"Oh, I don't mean that—any more than you do," replied Henrietta. "I mean marriage has chastened him—the only way it ever improves anybody."

"No doubt he and Theresa are happy together," said Adelaide, clinging to her pretense with a persistence that might have given her interesting and valuable light upon herself had she noted it.

"Happy?" Henrietta Hastings laughed. "Only stupid people are happy, my dear. Theresa may be happy, but not Ross. He's far too intelligent. And Theresa isn't capable of giving him even those moments of happiness that repay the intelligent for their routine of the other sort of thing."

"Marriage doesn't mean much in a man's life," said Adelaide. "He has his business or profession. He is married only part of each day, and that the least important part to him."

"Yes," replied Henrietta, "marriage is for a man simply a peg in his shoe—in place or, as with Ross Whitney, out of place. One look at his face was enough to show me that he was limping and aching and groaning."

Adelaide found this pleasantry amusing far beyond its merits. "You can't tell," said she. "Theresa doesn't seem the same to him that she does to—to us."

"Worse," replied Henrietta, "worse. It's fortunate they're rich. If the better class of people hadn't the money that enables them to put buffers round themselves, wife-beating wouldn't be confined to the slums. Think of life in one of two small rooms with a Theresa Howland!"

Adelaide had fallen, as far as could one of her generous and tolerant disposition, into Henrietta's most infectious habit of girding at everyone humorously—the favorite pastime of the idle who are profoundly discontented with themselves. By the time Mrs. Hastings left her at the lofty imported gates of Villa d'Orsay, they had done the subject of Theresa full justice, and Adelaide entered the house with that sense of self-contempt which cannot but come to any decent person after meting out untempered justice to a fellow-mortal. This did not last, however; the pleasure in the realization that Ross did not care for Theresa and did care for herself was too keen. As the feminine test of feminine success is the impression a woman makes upon men, Adelaide would have been neither human nor woman had she not been pleased with Ross's discreet and sincerely respectful, and by no means deliberate or designing disclosure. It was not the proof of her power to charm the male that had made her indignant at herself. "How weak we women are!" she said to herself, trying to assume a penitence she could not make herself feel. "We really ought to be locked away in harems. No doubt Dory trusts me absolutely—that's because other women are no temptation to him—that is, I suppose they aren't. If he were different, he'd be afraid I had his weakness—we all think everybody has at least a touch of our infirmities. Of course I can be trusted; I've sense enough not to have my head turned by what may have been a mere clever attempt to smooth over the past." Then she remembered Ross's look at her hand, at her wedding ring, and Henrietta's confirmation of her own diagnosis. "But why should that interest me," she thought, impatient with herself for lingering where her ideal of self-respect forbade. "I don't love Ross Whitney. He pleases me, as he pleases any woman he wishes to make an agreeable impression upon. And, naturally, I like to know that he really did care for me and is ashamed and repentant of the baseness that made him act as he did. But beyond that, I care nothing about him—nothing. I may not care for Dory exactly as I should; but at least knowing him has made it impossible for me to go back to the Ross sort of man."

That seemed clear and satisfactory. But, strangely, her mind jumped to the somewhat unexpected conclusion, "And I'll not see him again."

She wrote Dory that night a long, long letter, the nearest to a love letter she had ever written him. She brought Ross in quite casually; yet—What is the mystery of the telltale penumbra round the written word? Why was it that Dory, in far-away Vienna, with the memory of her strong and of the Villa d'Orsay dim, reading the letter for the first time, thought it the best he had ever got from her; and the next morning, reading it again, could think of nothing but Ross, and what Adelaide had really thought about him deep down in that dark well of the heart where we rarely let even our own eyes look intently?



CHAPTER XXIII

A STROLL IN A BYPATH

Ross had intended to dine at the club; but Mrs. Hastings's trap was hardly clear of the grounds when he, to be free to think uninterruptedly, set out through the woods for Point Helen.

Even had he had interests more absorbing than pastimes, display, and money-making by the "brace" game of "high finance" with its small risks of losing and smaller risks of being caught, even if he had been married to a less positive and incessant irritant than Theresa was to him, he would still not have forgotten Adelaide. Forgetfulness comes with the finished episode, never with the unfinished. In the circumstances, there could be but one effect from seeing her again. His regrets blazed up into fierce remorse, became the reckless raging of a passion to which obstacles and difficulties are as fuel to fire.

Theresa, once the matter of husband-getting was safely settled, had no restraint of prudence upon her self-complacence. She "let herself go" completely, with results upon her character, her mind, and her personal appearance that were depressing enough to the casual beholder, but appalling to those who were in her intimacy of the home. Ross watched her deteriorate in gloomy and unreproving silence. She got herself together sufficiently for as good public appearance as a person of her wealth and position needed to make, he reasoned; what did it matter how she looked and talked at home where, after all, the only person she could hope to please was herself? He held aloof, drawn from his aloofness occasionally by her whim to indulge herself in what she regarded as proofs of his love. Her pouting, her whimpering, her abject but meaningless self-depreciation, her tears, were potent, not for the flattering reason she assigned, but because he, out of pity for her and self-reproach, and dread of her developing her mother's weakness, would lash himself into the small show of tenderness sufficient to satisfy her.

And now, steeped in the gall of as bitter a draught as experience forces folly to drink anew each day to the dregs—the realization that, though the man marries the money only, he lives with the wife only—Ross had met Adelaide again. "I'll go to Chicago in the morning," was his conclusion. "I'll do the honorable thing"—he sneered at himself—"since trying the other would only result in her laughing at me and in my being still more miserable."

But when morning came he was critical of the clothes his valet offered him, spent an hour in getting himself groomed for public appearance, then appeared at the Country Club for breakfast instead of driving to the station. And after breakfast, he put off his departure "until to-morrow or next day," and went to see Mr. and Mrs. Hastings. And what more natural then than that Henrietta should take him to the Villa d'Orsay "to show you how charmingly Del has installed herself." "And perhaps," said Henrietta, "she and Arden Wilmot will go for a drive. He has quit the bank because they objected to his resting two hours in the middle of the day." What more natural than that Adelaide should alter her resolution under the compulsion of circumstance, should spend the entire morning in the gardens, she with Ross, Henrietta with Arden? Finally, to avoid strain upon her simple domestic arrangements in that period of retrenchment, what more natural than falling in with Ross's proposal of lunch at Indian Mound? And who ever came back in a hurry from Indian Mound, with its quaint vast earthworks, its ugly, incredibly ancient potteries and flint instruments that could be uncovered anywhere with the point of a cane or parasol; its superb panorama, bounded by the far blue hills where, in days that were ancient when history began, fires were lighted by sentinels to signal the enemy's approach to a people whose very dust, whose very name has perished? It was six o'clock before they began the return drive; at seven they were passing the Country Club, and, of course, they dined there and joined in the little informal dance afterwards; and later, supper and cooling drinks in a corner of the veranda, with the moon streaming upon them and the enchanted breath of the forest enchaining the senses.

What a day! How obligingly all unpleasant thoughts fled! How high and bright rose the mountains all round the horizon of the present, shutting out yesterday and to-morrow! "This has been the happy day of my life," said Ross as they lingered behind the other two on the way to the last 'bus for the town. "The happiest"—in a lower tone—"thus far."

And Del was sparkling assent, encouragement even; and her eyes were gleaming defiantly at the only-too-plainly-to-be-read faces of the few hilltop people still left at the club house. "Surely a woman has the right to enjoy herself innocently in the twentieth century," she was saying to herself. "Dory wouldn't want me to sit moping alone. I am young; I'll have enough of that after I'm old—one is old so much longer than young." And she looked up at Ross, and very handsome he was in that soft moonlight, his high-blazing passion glorifying his features. "I, too, have been happy," she said to him. Then, with a vain effort to seem and to believe herself at ease, "I wish Dory could have been along."

But Ross was not abashed by the exorcism of that name; her bringing it in was too strained, would have been amusing if passion were not devoid of the sense of humor. "She does care for me!" he was thinking dizzily. "And I can't live without her—and won't!"

His mother had been writing him her discoveries that his father, in wretched health and goaded by physical torment to furious play at the green tables of "high finance," was losing steadily, swiftly, heavily. But Ross read her letters as indifferently as he read Theresa's appeals to him to come to Windrift. It took a telegram—"Matters much worse than I thought. You must be here to talk with him before he begins business to-morrow"—to shock him into the realization that he had been imperiling the future he was dreaming of and planning—his and Del's future.

On the way to the train he stopped at the Villa d'Orsay, saw her and Henrietta at the far end of Mrs. Dorsey's famed white-and-gold garden. Henrietta was in the pavilion reading. A few yards away Adelaide, head bent and blue sunshade slowly turning as it rested on her shoulder, was strolling round the great flower-rimmed, lily-strewn outer basin of Mrs. Dorsey's famed fountain, the school of crimson fish, like a streak of fire in the water, following her. When she saw him coming toward them in traveling suit, instead of the white serge he always wore on such days as was that, she knew he was going away—a fortunate forewarning, for she thus had time to force a less telltale expression before he announced the reason for his call. "But," he added, "I'll be back in a few days—a very few."

"Oh!" was all Del said; but her tone of relief, her sudden brightening, were more significant than any words could have been.

Henrietta now joined them. "You take the afternoon express?" said she.

Ross could not conceal how severe a test of his civility this interruption was. "Yes," said he. "My trap is in front of the house."

There he colored before Henrietta's expression, a mingling of amusement, indignation, and contempt, a caustic comment upon his disregard of the effect of such indiscretion upon a Saint X young married woman's reputation. "Then," said she, looking straight and significantly at him, "you'll be able to drop me at my house on the way."

"Certainly," was his prompt assent. When Saint X's morality police should see him leaving the grounds with her, they would be silenced as to this particular occurrence at least. After a few minutes of awkward commonplaces, he and Henrietta went up the lawns, leaving Del there. At the last point from which the end of the garden could be seen, he dropped behind, turned, saw her in exactly the same position, the fountain and the water lilies before her, the center and climax of those stretches of white-and-gold blossoms. The sunshade rested lightly upon her shoulder, and its azure concave made a harmonious background for her small, graceful head with the airily plumed hat set so becomingly upon those waves of dead-gold hair. He waved to her; but she made no sign of having seen.

When Henrietta returned, Adelaide had resumed her reverie and her slow march round the fountain. Henrietta watched with a quizzical expression for some time before saying: "If I hadn't discouraged him, I believe he'd have blurted it all out to me—all he came to say to you."

Del was still absent-minded as she answered: "It's too absurd. People are so censorious, so low-minded."

"They are," rejoined Mrs. Hastings. "And, I'm sorry to say, as a rule they're right."

The curve of Del's delicate eyebrows and of her lips straightened.

"All the trouble comes through our having nothing to do," pursued Henrietta, disregarding those signs that her "meddling" was unwelcome. "The idle women! We ought to be busy at something useful—you and I and the rest of 'em. Then we'd not be tempted to kill time doing things that cause gossip, and may cause scandal." Seeing that Adelaide was about to make some curt retort, she added: "Now, don't pretend, Del. You know, yourself, that they're always getting into mischief and getting the men into mischief."

"Don't you ever feel, Henrietta, that we're simply straws in the strong wind?"

"Fate sometimes does force mischief on men and women," was Henrietta's retort, "and it ceases to be mischief—becomes something else, I'm not sure just what. But usually fate has nothing to do with the matter. It's we ourselves that course for mischief, like a dog for rabbits."

Del, in sudden disdain of evasion, faced her with, "Well, Henrietta, what of it?"

Mrs. Hastings elevated and lowered her shoulders. "Simply that you're seeing too much of Ross—too much for his good, if not for your own."

Del's sunshade was revolving impatiently.

"It's as plain as black on white," continued Mrs. Hastings, "that he's madly in love with you—in love as only an experienced man can be with an experienced and developed woman."

"Well, what of it?" Del's tone was hostile, defiant.

"You can't abruptly stop seeing him. Everyone'd say you and he were meeting secretly."

"Really!"

"But you can be careful how you treat him. You can show him, and everybody, that there's nothing in it. You must—" Henrietta hesitated, dared; "you must be just friendly, as you are with Arden and the rest of the men."

Hiram's daughter was scarlet. Full a minute, and a very full minute, of silence. Then Adelaide said coldly: "Thank you. And now that you've freed your mind I hope you'll keep it free for your own affairs."

"Ouch!" cried Henrietta, making a wry face. And she devoted the rest of the afternoon to what she realized, at the parting, was the vain task of mollifying Del. She knew that thenceforth she and Adelaide would drift apart; and she was sorry, for she liked her—liked to talk with her, liked to go about with her. Adelaide's beauty attracted the men, and a male audience was essential to Henrietta's happiness; she found the conversation of women—the women she felt socially at ease with—tedious, and their rather problematic power of appreciation limited to what came from men. As she grew older, and less and less pleasing to the eye, the men showed more and more clearly how they had deceived themselves in thinking it was her brains that had made them like her. As Henrietta, with mournful cynicism, put it: "Men the world over care little about women beyond their physical charm. To realize it, look at us American women, who can do nothing toward furthering men's ambitions. We've only our physical charms to offer; we fall when we lose them. And so our old women and our homely women, except those that work or that have big houses and social power, have no life of their own, live on sufferance, alone or the slaves of their daughters or of some pretty young woman to whom they attach themselves."

The days dragged for Adelaide. "I'm afraid he'll write," said she—meaning that she hoped he would. Indeed, she felt that he had written, but had destroyed the letters. And she was right; almost all the time he could spare from his efforts to save his father from a sick but obstinately active man's bad judgment was given to writing to her—formal letters which he tore up as too formal, passionate letters which he destroyed as unwarranted and unwise, when he had not yet, face to face, in words, told her his love and drawn from her what he believed was in her heart. The days dragged; she kept away from Henrietta, from all "our set," lest they should read in her dejected countenance the truth, and more.



CHAPTER XXIV

DR. MADELENE PRESCRIBES

Madelene's anteroom was full of poor people. They flocked to her, though she did not pauperize them by giving her services free. She had got the reputation of miraculous cures, the theory in the tenements being that her father had swindled his satanic "familiar" by teaching his daughter without price what he had had to pay for with his immortal soul. Adelaide refused the chair a sick-looking young artisan awkwardly pressed upon her. Leaning against the window seat, she tried to interest herself in her fellow-invalids. But she had not then the secret which unlocks the mystery of faces; she was still in the darkness in which most of us proudly strut away our lives, deriding as dreamers or cranks those who are in the light and see. With almost all of us the innate sympathies of race, which give even wolves and vultures the sense of fraternal companionship in the storm and stress of the struggle for existence, are deep overlaid with various kinds of that egotistic ignorance called class feeling. Adelaide felt sorry for "the poor," but she had yet to learn that she was of them, as poor in other and more important ways as they in money and drawing-room manners. Surfaces and the things of the surface obscured or distorted all the realities for her, as for most of us; and the fact that her intelligence laughed at and scorned her perverted instincts was of as little help to her as it is to most of us.

When Madelene was free she said to her sister-in-law, in mock seriousness, "Well, and what can I do for you!" as if she were another patient.

Adelaide's eyes shifted. Clearly Madelene's keen, pretense-scattering gaze was not one to invite to inspect a matter which might not look at all well stripped of its envelopes of phrase and haze. She wished she had not come; indeed, she had been half-wishing it during the whole three-quarters of an hour of watching and thinking on Madelene's wonderful life, so crowded with interest, with achievement, with all that Hiram Ranger's daughter called, and believed, "the real thing."

"Nothing, nothing at all," replied she to Madelene's question. "I just dropped in to annoy you with my idle self—or, maybe, to please you. You know we're taught at church that a large part of the joy of the saved comes from watching the misery of the damned."

But Madelene had the instinct of the physician born. "She has something on her mind and wants me to help her," she thought. Aloud she said: "I feel idle, myself. We'll sit about for an hour, and you'll stay to dinner with Arthur and me—we have it here to-day, as your mother is going out. Afterwards I must do my round."

A silence, with Adelaide wondering where Ross was and just when he would return. Then Madelene went on: "I've been trying to persuade your mother to give up the house, change it into a hospital."