The impudence of it! Their house, their home; and this newcomer into the family—a newcomer from nowhere—trying to get it away from them! "Mother said something about it," said Adelaide frostily. "But she didn't say you had been at her. I think she ought to be left alone in her old age."

"The main thing is to keep her interested in life, don't you think?" suggested Madelene, noting how Adelaide was holding herself in check, but disregarding it. "Your mother's a plain, natural person and never has felt at home in that big house. Indeed, I don't think any human being ever does feel at home in a big house. There was a time when they fitted in with the order of things; but now they've become silly, it seems to me, except for public purposes. When we all get sensible and go in for being somebody instead of for showing off, we'll live in convenient, comfortable, really tasteful and individual houses and have big buildings only for general use."

"I'm afraid the world will never grow up into your ideals, Madelene," said Del with restrained irony. "At least not in our day."

"I'm in no hurry," replied Madelene good-naturedly. "The most satisfactory thing about common sense is that one can act on it without waiting for others to get round to it. But we weren't talking of those who would rather be ignorantly envied than intelligently happy. We were talking of your mother."

"Mother was content with her mode of life until you put these 'advanced' ideas into her head."

"'Advanced' is hardly the word," said Madelene. "They used to be her ideas—always have been, underneath. If it weren't that she is afraid of hurting your feelings, she'd not hesitate an instant. She'd take the small house across the way and give herself the happiness of helping with the hospital she'd install in the big house. You know she always had a passion for waiting on people. Here's her chance to gratify it to good purpose. Why should she let the fact that she has money enough not to have to work stand between her and happy usefulness?"

"What does Arthur think?" asked Del. Her resentment was subsiding in spite of her determined efforts to keep it glowing; Madelene knew the secret of manner that enables one to be habitually right without giving others the sense of being put irritatingly in the wrong. "But," smiling, "I needn't inquire. Of course he assents to whatever you say."

"You know Arthur better than that," replied Madelene, with no trace of resentment. She had realized from the beginning of the conversation that Del's nerves were on edge; her color, alternately rising and fading, and her eyes, now sparkling now dull, could only mean fever from a tempest of secret emotion. "He and I usually agree simply because we see things in about the same light."

"You furnish the light," teased Adelaide.

"That was in part so at first," admitted her sister-in-law. "Arthur had got many foolish notions in his head through accepting thoughtlessly the ideas of the people he traveled with. But, once he let his good sense get the upper hand—He helps me now far more than I help him."

"Has he consented to let them give him a salary yet?" asked Adelaide, not because she was interested, but because she desperately felt that the conversation must be kept alive. Perhaps Ross was even now on his way to Saint X.

"He still gets what he fixed on at first—ten dollars a week more than the foreman."

"Honestly, Madelene," said Adelaide, in a flush and flash of irritation, "don't you think that's absurd? With the responsibility of the whole business on his shoulders, you know he ought to have more than a common workman."

"In the first place you must not forget that everyone is paid very high wages at the university works now."

"And he's the cause of that—of the mills doing so well," said Del. She could see Ross entering the gates—at the house—inquiring—What was she talking to Madelene about? Yes, about Arthur and the mills. "Even the men that criticise him—Arthur, I mean—most severely for 'sowing discontent in the working class,' as they call it," she went on, "concede that he has wonderful business ability. So he ought to have a huge salary."

"No doubt he earns it," replied Madelene. "But the difficulty is that he can't take it without it's coming from the other workmen. You see, money is coined sweat. All its value comes from somebody's labor. He deserves to be rewarded for happening to have a better brain than most men, and for using it better. But there's no fund for rewarding the clever for being cleverer than most of their fellow-beings, any more than there's a fund to reward the handsome for being above the average in looks. So he has to choose between robbing his fellow-workmen, who are in his power, and going without riches. He prefers going without."

"That's very noble of you both, I'm sure," said Adelaide absently. The Chicago express would be getting in at four o'clock—about five hours. Absurd! The morning papers said Mr. Whitney had had a relapse. "Very noble," she repeated absently. "But I doubt if anybody will appreciate it."

Madelene smiled cheerfully. "That doesn't worry Arthur or me," said she, with her unaffected simplicity. "We're not looking for appreciation. We're looking for a good time." Del, startled, began to listen to Madelene. A good time—"And it so happens," came in Madelene's sweet, honest voice, "that we're unable to have it, unless we feel that we aren't getting it by making some one else have a not-so-good time or a very bad time indeed. You've heard of Arthur's latest scheme?"

"Some one told me he was playing smash at the mills, encouraging the workmen to idleness and all that sort of thing," said Del. Somehow she felt less feverish, seemed compelled to attention by Madelene's voice and eyes. "But I didn't hear or understand just how."

"He's going to establish a seven-hours' working day; and, if possible, cut it down to six." Madelene's eyes were sparkling. Del watched her longingly, enviously. How interested she was in these useful things. How fine it must be to be interested where one could give one's whole heart without concealment—or shame! "And," Madelene was saying, "the university is to change its schedules so that all its practical courses will be at hours when men working in the factory can take them. It's simply another development of his and Dory's idea that a factory belonging to a university ought to set a decent example—ought not to compel its men to work longer than is necessary for them to earn at honest wages a good living for themselves and their families."

"So that they can sit round the saloons longer," suggested Adelaide, and then she colored and dropped her eyes; she was repeating Ross's comment on this sort of "concession to the working classes." She had thought it particularly acute when he made it. Now—

"No doubt most of them will spend their time foolishly at first," Madelene conceded. "Working people have had to work so hard for others—twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, just to be allowed to live—that they've had really no free time at all; so they've had no chance to learn how to spend free time sensibly. But they'll learn, those of them that have capacity for improvement. Those that haven't will soon drop out."

"The factories can't make money on such a plan as that," said Adelaide, again repeating a remark of Ross's, but deliberately, because she believed it could be answered, wished to hear it answered.

"No, not dividends," replied Madelene. "But dividends are to be abolished in that department of the university, just as they are in the other departments. And the money the university needs is to come from tuition fees. Everyone is to pay for what he gets. Some one has to pay for it; why not the person who gets the benefit? Especially when the university's farms and workshops and factories give every student, man and woman, a chance to earn a good living. I tell you Adelaide, the time is coming when every kind of school except kindergarten will be self-supporting. And then you'll see a human race that is really fine, really capable, has a real standard of self-respect."

As Madelene talked, her face lighted up and all her latent magnetism was radiating. Adelaide, for no reason that was clear to her, yielded to a surge of impulse and, half-laughing, half in tears, suddenly kissed Madelene. "No wonder Arthur is mad about you, stark mad," she cried.

Madelene was for a moment surprised out of that perfect self-unconsciousness which is probably the rarest of human qualities, and which was her greatest charm to those who knew her well. She blushed furiously and angrily. Her and Arthur's love was to her most sacred, absolutely between themselves. When any outsider could observe them, even her sister Walpurga, she seemed so much the comrade and fellow-worker in her attitude toward him that people thought and spoke of their married life as "charming, but cold." Alone with him, she showed that which was for him alone—a passion whose strength had made him strong, as the great waves give their might to the swimmer who does not shrink from adventuring them. Adelaide's impulsive remark, had violated her profoundest modesty; and in the shock she showed it.

"I beg your pardon!" exclaimed Adelaide, though she did not realize wherein she had offended. Love was an unexplored, an unsuspected mystery to her then—the more a mystery because she thought she knew from having read about it and discussed it and reasoned about it.

"Oh, I understand," said Madelene, contrite for her betraying expression. "Only—some day—when you really fall in love—you'll know why I was startled."

Adelaide shrank within herself. "Even Madelene," thought she, "who has not a glance for other people's affairs, knows how it is between Dory and me."

It was Madelene's turn to be repentant and apologetic. "I didn't mean quite that," she stammered. "Of course I know you care for Dory—"

The tears came to Del's eyes and the high color to her cheeks. "You needn't make excuses," she cried. "It's the truth. I don't care—in that way."

A silence; then Madelene, gently: "Was this what you came to tell me?"

Adelaide nodded slowly. "Yes, though I didn't know it."

"Why tell me?"

"Because I think I care for another man." Adelaide was not looking away. On the contrary, as she spoke, saying the words in an even, reflective tone, she returned her sister-in-law's gaze fully, frankly. "And I don't know what to do. It's very complicated—doubly complicated."

"The one you were first engaged to?"

"Yes," said Del. "Isn't it pitiful in me?" And there was real self-contempt in her voice and in her expression. "I assumed that I despised him because he was selfish and calculating, and such a snob! Now I find I don't mind his selfishness, and that I, too, am a snob." She smiled drearily. "I suppose you feel the proper degree of contempt and aversion."

"We are all snobs," answered Madelene tranquilly. "It's one of the deepest dyes of the dirt we came from, the hardest to wash out."

"Besides," pursued Adelaide, "he and I have both learned by experience—which has come too late; it always does."

"Not at all," said Madelene briskly. "Experience is never too late. It's always invaluably useful in some way, no matter when it comes."

Adelaide was annoyed by Madelene's lack of emotion. She had thought her sister-in-law would be stirred by a recital so romantic, so dark with the menace of tragedy. Instead, the doctor was acting as if she were dealing with mere measles. Adelaide, unconsciously, of course—we are never conscious of the strong admixture of vanity in our "great" emotions—was piqued into explaining. "We can never be anything to each other. There's Dory; then there's Theresa. And I'd suffer anything rather than bring shame and pain on others."

Madelene smiled—somehow not irritatingly—an appeal to Del's sense of proportion. "Suffer," repeated she. "That's a good strong word for a woman to use who has health and youth and beauty, and material comfort—and a mind capable of an infinite variety of interests." Adelaide's tragic look was slipping from her. "Don't take too gloomy a view," continued the physician. "Disease and death and one other thing are the only really serious ills. In this case of yours everything will come round quite smooth, if you don't get hysterical and if Ross Whitney is really in earnest and not"—Madelene's tone grew even more deliberate—"not merely getting up a theatrical romance along the lines of the 'high-life' novels you idle people set such store by." She saw, in Del's wincing, that the shot had landed. "No," she went on, "your case is one of the commonplaces of life among those people—and they're in all classes—who look for emotions and not for opportunities to be useful."

Del smiled, and Madelene hailed the returning sense of humor as an encouraging sign.

"The one difficult factor is Theresa," said Madelene, pushing on with the prescription. "She—I judge from what I've heard—she's what's commonly called a 'poor excuse for a woman.' We all know that type. You may be sure her vanity would soon find ways of consoling her. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred where one holds on after the other has let go the reason is vanity, wounded vanity—where it isn't the material consideration that explains why there are so many abandoned wives and so few abandoned husbands. Theresa doesn't really care for her husband; love that isn't mutual isn't love. So she'd come up smiling for a second husband."

"She's certainly vain," said Del. "Losing him would all but kill her."

"Not if it's done tactfully," replied Madelene. "Ross'll no doubt be glad to sacrifice his own vanity and so arrange matters that she'll be able to say and feel that she got rid of him, not he of her. Of course that means a large sacrifice of his vanity—and of yours, too. But neither of you will mind that."

Adelaide looked uncomfortable; Madelene took advantage of her abstraction to smile at the confession hinted in that look.

"As for Dory—"

At that name Del colored and hung her head.

"As for Dory," repeated Madelene, not losing the chance to emphasize the effect, "he's no doubt fond of you. But no matter what he—or you—may imagine, his fondness cannot be deeper than that of a man for a woman between whom and him there isn't the perfect love that makes one of two."

"I don't understand his caring for me," cried Del. "I can't believe he does." This in the hope of being contradicted.

But Madelene simply said: "Perhaps he'd not feel toward you as he seems to think he does if he hadn't known you before you went East and got fond of the sort of thing that attracts you in Ross Whitney. Anyhow, Dory's the kind of man to be less unhappy over losing you than over keeping you when you didn't want to stay. You may be like his eyes to him, but you know if that sort of man loses his sight he puts seeing out of the calculation and goes on just the same. Dory Hargrave is a man; and a real man is bigger than any love affair, however big."

Del was trying to hide the deep and smarting wound to her vanity. "You are right, Madelene," said she. "Dory is cold."

"But I didn't say that," replied Madelene. "Most of us prefer people like those flabby sea creatures that are tossed aimlessly about by the waves and have no permanent shape or real purposes and desires, but take whatever their feeble tentacles can hold without effort." Del winced, and it was the highest tribute to Dr. Madelene's skill that the patient did not hate her and refuse further surgery. "We're used to that sort," continued she. "So when a really alive, vigorous, pushing, and resisting personality comes in contact with us, we say, 'How hard! How unfeeling!' The truth, of course, is that Ross is more like the flabby things—his environment dominates him, while Dory dominates his environment. But you like the Ross sort, and you're right to suit yourself. To suit yourself is the only way to avoid making a complete failure of life. Wait till Dory comes home. Then talk it out with him. Then—free yourself and marry Ross, who will have freed himself. It's quite simple. People are broad-minded about divorce nowadays. It never causes serious scandal, except among those who'd like to do the same, but don't dare."

It certainly was easy, and ought to have been attractive. Yet Del was not attracted. "One can't deal with love in such a cold, calculating fashion," thought she, by way of bolstering up her weakening confidence in the reality and depth of those sensations which had seemed so thrillingly romantic an hour before. "I've given you the impression that Ross and I have some—some understanding," said she. "But we haven't. For all I know, he may not care for me as I care for him."

"He probably doesn't," was Madelene's douche-like reply. "You attract him physically—which includes his feeling that you'd show off better than Theresa before the world for which he cares so much. But, after all, that's much the way you care for him, isn't it?"

Adelaide's bosom was swelling and falling agitatedly. Her eyes flashed; her reserve vanished. "I'm sure he'd love me!" cried she. "He'd give me what my whole soul, my whole body cry out for. Madelene, you don't understand! I am so starved, so out in the cold! I want to go in where it's warm—and—human!" The truth, the deep-down truth, was out at last; Adelaide had wrenched it from herself.

"And Dory will not give you that?" said Madelene, all gentleness and sympathy, and treading softly on this dangerous, delicate ground.

"He gives me nothing!" exclaimed Adelaide bitterly. "He is waiting for me to learn to love him. He ought to know that a woman has to be taught to love—at least the sort of woman I am. He treats me as if I were his equal, when he ought to see that I'm not; that I'm like a child, and have to be shown what's good for me, and made to take it."

"Then, perhaps, after all," said Madelene slowly, "you do care for Dory."

"Of course I care for him; how could anyone help it? But he won't let me—he won't let me!" She was on the verge of hysteria, and her loss of self-control was aggravated by the feeling that she was making a weak, silly exhibition of herself.

"If you do care for Dory, and Dory cares for you, and you don't care for Ross—" began Madelene.

"But I do care for Ross, too! Oh, I must be bad—bad! Could a nice woman care for two men at the same time?"

"I'd have said not," was Madelene's answer. "But now I see that she could—and I see why."

"Dory means something to me that Ross does not. Ross means something that Dory does not. I want it all—all that both of them represent. I can't give up Dory; I can't give up Ross. You don't understand, Madelene, because you've had the good luck to get it all from Arthur."

After a silence, Madelene said: "Well, Del, what are you going to do?"

"Nothing."

"That's sensible!" approved Madelene. "If Ross really loves you, then, whether he can have you or not, he'll free himself from Theresa. He simply couldn't go on with her. And if you really care for him, then, when Dory comes home he'll free you."

"That ought to be so," said Adelaide, not seeing the full meaning of Madelene's last words. "But it isn't. Neither Ross nor I is strong enough. We're just ordinary people, the sort that most everybody is and that most everybody despises when they see them or read about them as they really are. No, he and I will each do the conventional thing. We'll go our separate ways "—contemptuously—"the easiest ways. And we'll regard ourselves as martyrs to duty—that's how they put it in the novels, isn't it?"

"At least," said Madelene, with a calmness she was far from feeling, "both you and Ross have had your lesson in the consequence of doing things in a hurry."

"That's the only way people brought up as we've been ever do anything. If we don't act on impulse, we don't act at all; we drift on."

"Drifting is action, the most decisive kind of action." Madelene was again thinking what would surely happen the instant Dory found how matters stood; but she deemed it tactful to keep this thought to herself. Just then she was called to the telephone. When she came back she found Adelaide restored to her usual appearance—the fashionable, light-hearted, beautiful woman, mistress of herself, and seeming as secure against emotional violence from within as against discourtesy from without. But she showed how deep was the impression of Madelene's common-sense analysis of her romance by saying: "A while ago you said there were only three serious ills, disease and death, but you didn't name the third. What is it?"

"Dishonor," said Madelene, with a long, steady look at her.

Adelaide paled slightly, but met her sister-in-law's level gaze. "Yes," was all she said.

A silence; then Madelene: "Your problem, Del, is simple; is no problem at all, so far as Dory or Ross's wife is concerned; or the whole outside world, for that matter. It's purely personal; it's altogether the problem of bringing pain and shame on yourself. The others'll get over it; but can you?"

Del made no reply. A moment later Arthur came; after dinner she left before he did, and so was not alone with Madelene again. Reviewing her amazing confessions to her sister-in-law, she was both sorry and not sorry. Her mind was undoubtedly relieved, but at the price of showing to another her naked soul, and that other a woman—true, an unusual woman, by profession a confessor, but still a woman. Thenceforth some one other than herself would know her as she really was—not at all the nice, delicate lady with instincts as fine as those of the heroines of novels, who, even at their most realistic, are pictured as fully and grandly dressed of soul in the solitude of bedroom as in crowded drawing-room. "I don't care!" concluded Adelaide. "If she, or anyone, thinks the worse of me for being a human being, it will show either hypocrisy or ignorance of human nature."



CHAPTER XXV

MAN AND GENTLEMAN

A few evenings later, Del, in a less strained, less despondent frame of mind, coming home from supper at her mother's, found Estelle Wilmot on the front veranda talking with Lorry Tague. She had seen this same sight perhaps half-a-dozen times since Estelle and Arden had come to stop with her at the Villa d'Orsay. On this particular evening his manner toward Estelle was no different from what it had been the other times; yet, as Del approached them, she felt the electric atmosphere which so often envelops two who love each other, and betrays their secret carefully guarded behind formal manner and indifferent look and tone. She wondered that she had been blind to what was now obvious.

"Well, Arthur has at last compelled you to go to work," said she smilingly to the big cooper with the waving tawny hair and the keen, kind gray eyes. Then, to show her respect for the secret, she said to Estelle, "Perhaps he hasn't told you that he was made superintendent of the cooperage to-day?"

Estelle blushed a little, her eyes dancing. "He was just telling me," replied she.

"I understand why you yielded," continued Adelaide to Lorry. "Arthur has been showing me the plans for the new factories. Gardens all round, big windows, high ceilings, everything done by electricity, no smoke or soot, a big swimming pool for winter or summer, a big restaurant, dressing rooms—everything! Who'd have believed that work could be carried on in such surroundings?"

"It's about time, isn't it," said Lorry, in his slow, musical voice, "that idleness was deprived of its monopoly of comforts and luxuries?"

"How sensible that is!" said Del admiringly. "Yet nobody thinks of it."

"Why," Lorry went on, "the day'll come when they'll look back on the way we work nowadays, as we do on the time when a lot of men never went out to work except in chains and with keepers armed with lashes. The fellows that call Dory and Arthur crazy dreamers don't realize what ignorant savages they themselves are."

"They have no imagination," said Estelle.

"No imagination," echoed Lorry. "That's the secret of the stupidity and the horror of change, and of the notion that the way a thing's done to-day is the way it'll always be done."

"I'm afraid Arthur is going to get himself into even deeper trouble when these new plans are announced," said Del.

Arthur's revolution had already inflamed the other manufacturers at Saint X against him. Huge incomes were necessary to the support of their extravagant families and to the increase of the fortunes they were piling up "to save their children from fear of want"—as if that same "fear of want" were not the only known spur to the natural lethargy of the human animal! They explained to their workmen that the university industries were not business enterprises at all, and therefore must not be confused and compared with enterprises that were "practical"; but the workmen fixed tenaciously upon the central fact that the university's men worked at mechanical labor fewer hours each day by four to seven, and even eight, got higher wages, got more out of life in every way. Nor was there any of the restraint and degradation of the "model town." The workers could live and act as they pleased; it was by the power of an intelligent public opinion that Arthur was inducing his fellows and their families to build for themselves attractive homes, to live in tasteful comfort, to acquire sane habits of eating, drinking, and personal appearance. And no one was more amazed than himself at the swiftness with which the overwhelming majority responded to the opportunity. Small wonder that the other manufacturers, who at best never went beyond the crafty, inexpensive schemes of benevolent charity, were roaring against the university as a "hotbed of anarchy."

At Adelaide's suggestion of the outburst that would follow the new and still more "inflammatory" revolution, Lorry shrugged his shoulders and laughed easily. "Nobody need worry for that brother of yours, Mrs. Hargrave," said he. "There may be some factories for sale cheap before many years. If so, the university can buy them in and increase its usefulness. Dory and Arthur are going to have a university that will be up to the name before they get through—one for all ages and kinds, and both sexes, and for everybody all his life long and in all his relations."

"It's a beautiful dream," said Del. She was remembering how Dory used to enlarge upon it in Paris until his eloquence made her feel that she loved him at the same time that it also gave her a chilling sense of his being far from her, too big and impersonal for so intimate and personal a thing as the love she craved. "A beautiful dream," she repeated with a sigh.

"That's the joy of life," said Estelle, "isn't it? To have beautiful dreams, and to help make them come true."

"And this one is actually coming true," said Lorry. "Wait a few years, only a few, and you'll see the discoveries of science make everything so cheap that vulgar, vain people will give up vulgarity and vanity in despair. A good many of the once aristocratic vulgarities have been cheapened into absurdity already. The rest will follow."

"Only a few years?" said Del, laughing, yet more than half-convinced.

"Use your imagination, Mrs. Hargrave," replied Lorry, in his large, good-humored way. "Don't be afraid to be sensible just because most people look on common sense as insanity. A hundred things that used to be luxuries for the king alone are now so cheap that the day-laborer has them—all in less than two lifetimes of real science! To-morrow or next day some one will discover, say, the secret of easily and cheaply interchanging the so-called elements. Bang! the whole structure of swagger and envy will collapse!"

They all laughed, and Del went into the house. "Estelle—no woman, no matter who—could hope to get a better husband than Lorry," she was thinking. "And, now that he's superintendent, there's no reason why they shouldn't marry. What a fine thing, what an American thing, that a man with no chance at all in the start should be able to develop himself so that a girl like Estelle could—yes, and should—be proud of his love and proud to love him." She recalled how Lorry at the high school was about the most amusing of the boys, with the best natural manner, and far and away the best dancer; how he used to be invited everywhere, until excitement about fashion and "family" reached Saint X; how he was then gradually dropped until he, realizing what was the matter, haughtily "cut" all his former friends and associates. "We've certainly been racing downhill these last few years. Where the Wilmots used to be about the only silly people in town, there are scores of families now with noses in the air and eyes looking eagerly about for chances to snub. But, on the other hand, there's the university, and Arthur—and Dory." She dismissed Lorry and Estelle and Saint X's fashionable strivings and, in the library, sat down to compose a letter to Dory—no easy task in those days, when there were seething in her mind and heart so much that she longed to tell him but ought not, so much that she ought to tell but could not.

Lorry had acted as if he were about to depart, while Adelaide was there; he resumed his seat on the steps at Estelle's feet as soon as she disappeared. "I suppose I ought to go," said he, with a humorous glance up at her face with its regular features and steadfast eyes.

She ran her slim fingers through his hair, let the tips of them linger an instant on his lips before she took her hand away.

"I couldn't let you go just yet," said she slowly, absently. "This is the climax of the day. In this great, silent, dim light all my dreams—all our dreams—seem to become realities and to be trooping down from the sky to make us happy."

A pause, then he: "I can see them now." But soon he moved to rise. "It frightens me to be as happy as I am this evening. I must go, dear. We're getting bolder and bolder. First thing you know, your brother will be suspecting—and that means your mother."

"I don't seem to care any more," replied the girl. "Mother is really in much better health, and has got pretty well prepared to expect almost anything from me. She has become resigned to me as a 'working person.' Then, too, I'm thoroughly inoculated with the habit of doing as I please. I guess that's from being independent and having my own money. What a good thing money is!"

"So long as it means independence," suggested Lorry; "but not after it means dependence."

But Estelle was thinking of their future. The delay, the seemingly endless delay, made her even more impatient than it made him, as is always the case where the woman is really in love. In the man love holds the impetuosity of passion in leash; in the woman it rouses the deeper, the more enduring force of the maternal instinct—not merely the unconscious or, at most, half-conscious longing for the children that are to be, but the desire to do for the man—to look after his health, his physical comfort, to watch over and protect him; for, to the woman in love, the man seems in those humble ways less strong than she—a helpless creature, dependent on her. "It's going to be much harder to wait," said she, "now that you are superintendent and I have bought out Mrs. Hastings's share of my business."

They both laughed, but Lorry said: "It's no joke. A little too much money has made fools of as wise people as we are—many and many's the time."

"Not as wise a person as you are, and as you'll always make me be, or seem to be," replied Estelle.

Lorry pressed his big hand over hers for an instant. "Now that I've left off real work," said he, "I'll soon be able to take your hand without giving you a rough reminder of the difference between us."

He held out his hands, palms upward. They were certainly not soft and smooth, but they more than made up in look of use and strength what they lacked in smoothness. She put her small hands one on either side of his, and they both thrilled with the keen pleasure the touch of edge of hand against edge of hand gave them. In the ends of her fingers were the marks of her needlework. He bent and kissed those slightly roughened finger ends passionately. "I love those marks!" he exclaimed. "They make me feel that we belong to each other."

"I'd be sorry to see your hands different," said she, her eyes shining upon his. "There are many things you don't understand about me—for instance, that it's just those marks of work that make you so dear to me. A woman may begin by liking a man because he's her ideal in certain ways, but once she really cares, she loves whatever is part of him."

In addition to the reasons she had given for feeling "bolder" about her "plebeian" lover, there was another that was the strongest of all. A few months before, a cousin of her father's had died in Boston, where he was the preacher of a most exclusive and fashionable church. He had endeared himself to his congregation by preaching one Easter Sunday a sermon called "The Badge of Birth." In it he proceeded to show from the Scriptures themselves how baseless was the common theory that Jesus was of lowly origin. "The common people heard Him gladly," cried the Rev. Eliot Wilmot, "because they instinctively felt His superiority of birth, felt the dominance of His lineage. In His veins flowed the blood of the royal house of Israel, the blood of the first anointed kings of Almighty God." And from this interesting premise the Reverend Wilmot deduced the divine intent that the "best blood" should have superior rights—leadership, respect, deference. So dear was he to his flock that they made him rich in this world's goods as well as in love and honor. The Wilmots of Saint X had had lively expectations from his estate. They thought that one holding the views eloquently set forth in "The Badge of Birth" must dedicate his fortune to restoring the dignity and splendor of the main branch of the Wilmot family. But, like all their dreams, this came to naught. His fortune went to a theological seminary to endow scholarships and fellowships for decayed gentlemen's sons; he remembered only Verbena Wilmot. On his one visit to the crumbling, weed-choked seat of the head of the house, he had seen Verbena's wonderful hands, so precious and so useless that had she possessed rings and deigned to wear them she would not have permitted the fingers of the one hand to put them on the fingers of the other. The legacy was five thousand dollars, at four per cent., an income of two hundred dollars a year. Verbena invested the first quarterly installment in a long-dreamed-of marble reproduction of her right hand which, after years of thinking daily about the matter, she had decided was a shade more perfect than the left.

If one dim eye makes a man king among blind men—to translate to the vernacular Verbena's elegant reasoning—an income, however trifling, if it have no taint of toil, no stench of sweat upon it, makes its possessor entitled to royal consideration in a family of paupers and dead beats, degraded by harboring a breadwinner of an Estelle. No sudden recipient of a dazzling, drenching shower of wealth was ever more exalted than was Verbena, once in possession of "my legacy." Until the Rev. Eliot Wilmot's posthumous blessing descended upon her, the Wilmots lived together in comparative peace and loving kindness. They were all, except for their mania of genealogy, good-humored, extremely well-mannered people, courteous as much by nature as by deliberate intent. But, with the coming of the blessing, peace and friendliness in that family were at an end. Old Preston Wilmot and Arden railed unceasingly against the "traitor" Eliot; Verbena defended him. Their mother and Estelle were drawn into the battle from time to time, Estelle always against her will. Before Verbena had been a woman of property three months, she was hating her father and brother for their sneers and insults, Arden had gone back to drinking, and the old gentleman was in a savage and most ungentlemanly humor from morning until night.

Estelle, the "black sheep" ever since she began to support them by engaging in trade, drew aloof now, was at home as little as she could contrive, often ate a cold supper in the back of her shop. She said nothing to Lorry of the family shame; she simply drew nearer to him. And out of this changed situation came, unconsciously to herself, a deep contempt for her father and her brother, a sense that she was indeed as alien as the Wilmots so often alleged, in scorn of her and her shop; Verbena's income went to buy adornments for herself, dresses that would give the hands a fitting background; Estelle's earnings went to her mother, who distributed them, the old gentleman and Arden ignoring whence and how the money came.

As Estelle and Lorry lingered on the porch of the Villa d'Orsay that August evening, alone in the universe under that vast, faintly luminous, late-twilight sky, Arden Wilmot came up the lawn. Neither Lorry nor Estelle saw or heard him until his voice, rough with drink and passion, savagely stung them with, "What the hell does this mean?"

Lorry dropped Estelle's hand and stood up, Estelle behind him, a restraining hand on his shoulder. Both were white to the lips; their sky, the moment before so clear and still, was now black and thunderous with a frightful storm. Estelle saw that her brother was far from sober; and the sight of his sister caressed by Lorry Tague would have maddened him even had he not touched liquor. She darted between the two men. "Don't be a goose, Arden," she panted, with a hysterical attempt to laugh.

"That fellow was touching you!" stormed Arden. "You miserable disgrace!" And he lifted his hand threateningly to her.

Lorry put his arm round her and drew her back, himself advancing. "You must be careful how you act toward the woman who is to be my wife, Mr. Wilmot," he said, afire in all his blood of the man who has the right to demand of the whole world the justice he gives it.

Arden Wilmot stared dumfounded, first at Lorry, then at Estelle. In the pause, Adelaide, drawn from the library by the sound of Arden's fury, reached the front doorway, saw the three, instantly knew the whole cause of this sudden, harsh commotion. With a twitch that was like the shaking off of a detaining grasp, with a roar like a mortally wounded beast's, Arden recovered the use of limbs and voice. "You infernal lump of dirt!" he yelled. Adelaide saw his arm swing backward, then forward, and up—saw something bright in his hand. A flash—"O God, God!" she moaned. But she could not turn her eyes away or close them.

Lorry stood straight as a young sycamore for an instant, turned toward Estelle. "Good-by—my love!" he said softly, and fell, face downward, with his hands clasping the edge of her dress.

And Estelle—

She made no sound. Like a ghost, she knelt and took Lorry's head in her lap; with one hand against each of his cheeks she turned his head. "Lorry! Lorry!" she murmured in a heartbreaking voice that carried far through the stillness.

Arden put the revolver back in his pocket, seized her by the shoulder. "Come away from that!" he ordered roughly, and half-lifted her to her feet.

With a cry so awful that Adelaide swayed and almost swooned at hearing it, Estelle wrenched herself free, flung herself on her lover's body, buried her fingers in his hair, covered his dead face with kisses, bathed her lips in the blood that welled from his heart. Shouts and heavy, quick tramping from many directions—the tempest of murder was drawing people to its center as a cyclone sucks in leaves. Fright in Arden Wilmot's face, revealed to Adelaide in the light streaming from the big drawing-room windows. A group—a crowd—a multitude—pouring upon the lawns from every direction—swirling round Arden as he stood over the prostrate intermingled forms of his sister and her dead lover.

Then Adelaide, clinging to the door frame to steady herself, heard Arden say in a loud blustering voice: "I found this fellow insulting my sister, and I treated him as a Wilmot always treats an insult." And as the words reached her, they fired her. All her weakness, all her sense of helplessness fled.

Out of the circle came a man bearing unconscious Estelle, blood upon her face, upon her bosom, blood dripping from her hands. "Where shall I take her?" asked the man of Adelaide. "A doctor's been sent for."

"Into the hall—on the sofa—at the end—and watch by her," said Del, in quick, jerking tones. Her eyes were ablaze, her breath came in gusts. Without waiting to see where he went with his burden, she rushed down the broad steps and through the crowd, pushing them this way and that. She faced Arden Wilmot—not a lady, but a woman, a flaming torch of outraged human feeling.

"You lie!" she cried, and he seemed to wither before her. "You lie about him and about her! You, with the very clothes you're dressed in, the very liquor you're drunk with, the very pistol that shot him down, paid for by her earnings! He never offended you—not by look or word. You murdered him—I saw—heard. You murdered the man she was to marry, the man she loved—murdered him because she loved him. Look at him!"

The crowd widened its circle before the sweep of her arm. Lorry's blood-stained body came into view. His face, beautiful and, in its pale calm, stronger than life, was open to the paling sky. "There lies a man," she sobbed, and her tears were of the kind that make the fires of passion burn the fiercer. "A man any woman with a woman's heart would have been proud to be loved by. And you—you've murdered him!"

"Take care, Mrs. Hargrave," a voice whispered in her ear. "They'll lynch him."

"And why not?" she cried out. "Why should such a creature live?"

A hundred men were reaching for Arden, and from the crowd rose that hoarse, low, hideous sound which is the first deep bay of the unleashed blood-madness. "No, no!" she begged in horror, and waved them back.

"Adelaide!" gasped Arden, wrenching himself free and crouching at her feet and clinging to her skirts. "Save me! I only did my duty as a gentleman."

She looked down at him in unpitying scorn, then out at the crowd. "Hear that!" she cried, with a wild, terrible laugh. "A gentleman! Yes, that's true—a gentleman. Saving your sister from the coarse contamination of an honest man!" Then to the men who were dragging at him: "No, I say—no! Let him alone! Don't touch the creature! He'll only foul your hands." And she pushed them back. "Let him live. What worse fate could he have than to be pointed at every day of a long life as the worthless drunken thing who murdered a man, and then tried to save himself by defaming his victim and his own sister?"

Under cover of her barrier of command, the constable led Arden into the house, past where his sister lay in a swoon, and by the back way got him to jail. The crowd, fascinated by her beauty, which the tempest of passion had transfigured into terrible and compelling majesty, was completely under her control. She stayed on, facing that throng of men, many of whom she knew by name, until Lorry's body was taken away. She was about to go into the house, as the crowd began quietly to disperse, when there arose a murmur that made her turn quickly toward the doors. There was Estelle, all disheveled and bloodstained. Her face was like death; her movements were like one walking in a deep sleep as she descended to the lawn and came toward them.

"Where is he? Where is he?" she wailed, pushing this way and that through the crowd, her hands outstretched, her long fair hair streaming like a bridal veil. Her feet slipped on the wet grass—where it was wet with his blood. She staggered, swayed uncertainly, fell with her arms outstretched as if the earth were he she sought. She lay there moaning—the cry of her tortured nerves alone, for her mind was unconscious.

Adelaide and Madelene, who had just come, bent to lift her. But their strength failed them and they sank to their knees in terror; for, from the silent crowd there burst a shriek: "Kill him, kill him!" And all in an instant the grounds were emptied of those thousands; and to the two women came an ever fainter but not less awful roar as the mob swept on uptown toward the jail.

Madelene was first to recover. "Let us carry her in," she said. And when the limp form was once more on the big sofa and the eyelids were trembling to unclose, she ripped open the right sleeve and thrust in the needle that gives oblivion.

Adelaide went to the window and listened. Before her in the moonlight was the place where that tempest of hate and murder had burst and raged. Once more her heart hardened in the pitiless fury of outraged mercy. A moan from Estelle stung her, and she leaned forward the better to catch the music of the mob's distant shriek. Silence for full five minutes; then a sound like that which bursts from the throats of the bloodhounds as they bury their fangs in their quarry. She gave a faint scream, covered her face. "Oh, spare him! Spare him!" she cried. And she sank to the floor in a faint, for she knew that Arden Wilmot was dead.

* * * * *

Adelaide took Estelle's store until Estelle came back to it, her surface calm like the smooth river that hides in its tortured bosom the deep-plunged rapids below the falls. The day after Estelle's return Adelaide began to study architecture at the university; soon she was made an instructor, with the dean delighted and not a little mystified by her energy and enthusiasm. Yet the matter was simple and natural: she had emerged from her baptism of blood and fire—a woman; at last she had learned what in life is not worth while; she was ready to learn what it has to offer that is worth while—the sole source of the joys that have no reaction, of the content that is founded upon the rock.



CHAPTER XXVI

CHARLES WHITNEY'S HEIRS

Eight specialists, including Romney, of New York and Saltonstal, of Chicago, had given Charles Whitney their verdicts on why he was weak and lethargic. In essential details these diagnoses differed as widely as opinions always differ where no one knows, or can know, and so everyone is free to please his own fancy in choosing a cloak for his ignorance. Some of the doctors declared kidneys sound but liver suspicious; others exonerated liver but condemned one or both kidneys; others viewed kidneys and liver with equal pessimism; still others put those organs aside and shook their heads and unlimbered their Latin at spleen and pancreas. In one respect, however, the eight narrowed to two groups. "Let's figure it out trial-balance fashion," said Whitney to his private secretary, Vagen. "Five, including two-thousand-dollar Romney, say I 'may go soon.' Three, including our one-thousand-dollar neighbor, Saltonstal, say I am 'in no immediate danger.' But what the Romneys mean by 'soon,' and what the Saltonstals mean by 'immediate,' none of the eight says."

"But they all say that 'with proper care'—" began Vagen, with the faith of the little in the pretentious.

"So they do! So they do!" interrupted Whitney, whom life had taught not to measure wisdom by profession of it, nor yet by repute for it. And he went on in a drowsy drawl, significantly different from his wonted rather explosive method of speech: "But does any of 'em say what 'proper care' is? Each gives his opinion. Eight opinions, each different and each cautioning me against the kind of 'care' prescribed by the other seven. And I paid six thousand dollars!" A cynical smile played round his thin-lipped, sensual, selfish mouth.

"Sixty-three hundred," corrected Vagen. He never missed this sort of chance to impress his master with his passion for accuracy.

"Sixty-three, then. I'd better have given you the money to blow in on your fliers on wheat and pork."

At this Vagen looked much depressed. It was his first intimation that his chief knew about his private life. "I hope, sir, nobody has been poisoning your mind against me," said he. "I court the fullest investigation. I have been honest—"

"Of course, of course," replied Whitney. "There never was a man as timid as you are that wasn't honest. What a shallow world it is! How often envy and cowardice pass for virtue!"

"I often say, sir," replied Vagen, with intent to soothe and flatter, "there ain't one man in ten million that wouldn't have done the things you've done if they'd had the brains and the nerve."

"And pray what are the 'things I've done'?" inquired Whitney. But the flame of irritation was so feeble that it died down before his words were out. "I'm going down to Saint X to see old Schulze," he drawled on. "Schulze knows more than any of 'em—and ain't afraid to say when he don't know." A slow, somewhat sardonic smile. "That's why he's unknown. What can a wise man, who insists on showing that he's wise, expect in a world of damn fools?" A long silence during which the uncomfortable Vagen had the consolation of seeing in that haggard, baggy, pasty-white face that his master's thoughts were serving him much worse than mere discomfort. Then Whitney spoke again: "Yes, I'm going to Saint X. I'm going home to—"

He did not finish; he could not speak the word of finality. Vagen saw the look in his pale, blue-green eyes, saw that the great financier knew he would never again fling his terrible nets broadcast for vast hauls of golden fish, knew his days were numbered and that the number was small. But, instead of this making him feel sympathetic and equal toward his master, thus unmasked as mere galvanized clay, it filled him with greater awe; for, to the Vagens, Death seems to wear a special costume and walk with grander step to summon the rich and the high.

"Yes, I'll go—this very afternoon," said Whitney more loudly, turning his face toward the door through which came a faint feminine rustling—the froufrou of the finest, softest silk and finest, softest linen.

He looked attentively at his wife as she crossed the threshold—looked with eyes that saw mercilessly but indifferently, the eyes of those who are out of the game of life, out for good and all, and so care nothing about it. He noted in her figure—in its solidity, its settledness—the signs of age the beauty doctors were still almost successful in keeping out of that masklike face which was their creation rather than nature's; he noted the rough-looking red of that hair whose thinness was not altogether concealed despite the elaborate care with which it was arranged to give the impression of careless abundance. He noted her hands; his eyes did not linger there, for the hands had the wrinkles and hollows and age marks which but for art would have been in the face, and they gave him a feeling—he could not have defined it, but it made him shudder. His eyes rested again upon her face, with an expression of pity that was slightly satirical. This struggle of hers seemed so petty and silly to him now; how could any human being think any other fact important when the Great Fact hung from birth threateningly over all?

"You feel worse to-day, dear?" said she, in the tones that sound carefully attuned to create an impression of sympathy. Hers had now become the mechanically saccharine voice which sardonic time ultimately fastens upon the professionally sympathetic to make them known and mocked of all, even of the vainest seekers after sympathy.

"On the contrary, I feel better," he drawled, eyes half-shut. "No pain at all. But—horribly weak, as if I were going to faint in a minute or two—and I don't give a damn for anything." There was a personal fling in that last word, an insinuation that he knew her state of mind toward him, and reciprocated.

"Well, to-morrow Janet and her baby will be here," said Mrs. Whitney, and her soothing tones seemed to stimulate him by irritation. "Then we'll all go down to Saint X together, if you still wish it."

"Don't take that tone with me, I tell you!" he said with some energy in his drawl. "Don't talk to me as if you were hanging over my deathbed lying to me about my going to live!" And he closed his eyes, and his breath made his parted, languid lips flutter.

"Mr. Vagen," said Matilda, in her tone of sweet graciousness, "may I trouble you to go and—"

"Go to the devil, Vagen," said Charles, starting up again that slow stream of fainting words and sentences. "Anywhere to get you out of the room so you won't fill the flapping ears of your friends with gossip about Whitney and his wife. Though why she should send you out I can't understand. If you and the servants don't hear what's going on, you make up and tattle worse than what really happens."

Mrs. Whitney gave Vagen a look of sweet resignation and Vagen responded with an expression which said: "I understand. He is very ill. He is not responsible. I admire your ladylike patience." As Whitney's eyes were closed he missed this byplay.

"Here, Vagen—before you go," he drawled, waving a weary hand toward the table at his elbow. "Here's a check for ten thousand. You don't deserve it, for you've used your position to try to get rich on the sly. But inasmuch as I was 'on to' you, and dropped hints that made you lose, I've no hard feelings. Then, too, you did no worse than any other would have done in your place. A man's as good, and as bad, as he has the chance to be. So take it. I've not made my will yet, and as I may not be able to, I give you the money now. You'll find the check in this top drawer, and some other checks for the people near me. I suppose they'll expect something—I've got 'em into the habit of it. Take 'em and run along and send 'em off right away."

Vagen muttered inarticulate thanks. In fact, the check was making small impression on him, or the revelation that his chief had eyes as keen for what was going on under his nose as for the great movements in the big field. He could think only of that terrifying weakness, that significant garrulousness.

When Vagen was out of the way, Charles repeated: "I'm going this afternoon." His listless eyes were gazing vacantly at the carved rosewood ceiling. His hands—the hands of a corpse—looked horribly like sheathed, crumpled claws in the gold silk cuffs of his dark-blue dressing gown. His nose, protruding from his sunken cheeks, seemed not like a huge beak, but indeed a beak.

"But Janet—" began Mrs. Whitney, thinking as she spoke that he surely would "not be spared to us much longer."

"Janet can follow—or stay here—or—I don't care what she does," droned Whitney. "Do you suppose I'm thinking about anybody but myself now? Would you, if you were in my fix. I should say," he amended cynically, "will you, when you're in my fix?"

"Charles!" exclaimed Matilda.

Whitney's smile checked her. "I'm not a fool," he rambled on. "Do you suppose I haven't seen what was going on? Do you suppose I don't know all of you wish I was out of it? Yes, out of it. And you needn't bother to put on that shocked look; it doesn't fool me. I used to say: 'I'll be generous with my family and give 'em more than they'd have if I was gone.' 'No children waiting round eager for me to pass off,' said I, 'so that they can divide up my fortune.' I've said that often and often. And I've acted on it. And I've raised up two as pampered, selfish children as ever lived. And now—The last seven months I've been losing money hand over fist. Everything I've gone into has turned out bad. I'm down to about half what I had a year ago—maybe less than half. And you and Ross—and no doubt that marchioness ex-daughter of mine—all know it. And you're afraid if I live on, I'll lose more, maybe everything. Do you deny it?"

Matilda was unable to speak. She had known he was less rich; but half!—"maybe less!" The cuirass of steel, whalebone, kid, and linen which molded her body to a fashionable figure seemed to be closing in on her heart and lungs with a stifling clutch.

"No, you don't deny it. You couldn't," Whitney drawled on. "And so my 'indulgent father' damned foolishness ends just where I might have known it'd end. We've brought up the children to love money and show off, instead of to love us and character and self-respect—God forgive me!"

The room was profoundly silent: Charles thinking drowsily, yet vividly, too, of his life; Matilda burning in anguish over the lost half, or more, of the fortune—and Charles had always been secretive about his wealth, so she didn't know how much the fortune was a year ago and couldn't judge whether much or little was left! Enough to uphold her social position? Or only enough to keep her barely clear of the "middle class"?

Soon Whitney's voice broke in upon her torments. "I've been thinking a great deal, this last week, about Hiram Ranger."

Matilda, startled, gave him a wild look. "Charles!" she exclaimed.

"Exactly," said Whitney, a gleam of enjoyment in his dull eyes.

In fact, ever since Hiram's death his colossal figure had often dominated the thoughts of Charles and Matilda Whitney. The will had set Charles to observing, to seeing; it had set Matilda to speculating on the possibilities of her own husband's stealthy relentlessness. At these definite, dreadful words of his, her vague alarms burst into a deafening chorus, jangling and clanging in her very ears.

"Arthur Ranger," continued Whitney, languid and absent, "has got out of the beaten track of business—"

"Yes; look at Hiram's children!" urged Matilda. "Everybody that is anybody is down on Arthur. See what his wife has brought him to, with her crazy, upsetting ideas! They tell me a good many of the best people in Saint X hardly speak to him. Yes, Charles, look at Hiram's doings."

"Thanks to Hiram—what he inherited from Hiram and what Hiram had the good sense not to let him inherit—he has become a somebody. He's doing things, and the fact that they aren't just the kind of things I like doesn't make me fool enough to underestimate them or him. Success is the test, and in his line he's a success."

"If it hadn't been for his wife he'd not have done much," said Matilda sourly.

"You've lived long enough, I'd think, to have learned not to say such shallow things," drawled he. "Of course, he has learned from her—don't everybody have to learn somewhere? Where a man learns is nothing; the important thing is his capacity to learn. If a man's got the capacity to learn, he'll learn, he'll become somebody. If he hasn't, then no man nor no woman can teach him. No, my dear, you may be sure that anybody who amounts to anything has got it in himself. And Arthur Ranger is a credit to any father. He's becoming famous—the papers are full of what he's accomplishing. And he's respected, honest, able, with a wife that loves him. Would he have been anybody if his father had left him the money that would have compelled him to be a fool? As for the girl, she's got a showy streak in her—she's your regular American woman of nowadays—the kind of daughter your sort of mother and my sort of damn-fool father breed up. But Del's mother wasn't like you, Mattie, and she hadn't a fool father like me, so she's married to a young fellow that's already doing big things, in his line—and a good line his is, a better line than trimming dollars and donkeys. Our Jenny—Jane that used to be—We've sold her to a Frenchman, and she's sold herself to the devil. Hiram's daughter—God forgive us, Matilda, for what we've done to Janet." All this, including that last devout appeal, in the manner of a spectator of a scene at which he is taking a last, indifferent, backward glance as he is leaving.

His wife's brain was too busy making plans and tearing them up to follow his monotonous garrulity except in a general way. He waited in vain for her to defend her daughter and herself.

"As for Ross," he went on, "he's keen and quick enough. He's got together quite a fortune of his own—and he'll hold on to it and get more. It's easy enough to make money if you've got money—and ain't too finicky about the look and the smell of the dollars before you gulp 'em down. Your Ross has a good strong stomach that way—as good as his father's—and mother's. But—He ain't exactly the man I used to picture as I was wheeling him up and down the street in his baby carriage in Saint X."

That vulgar reminiscence seemed to be the signal for which Matilda was waiting. "Charles Whitney," she said, "you and I have brought up our children to take their proper place in our aristocracy of wealth and birth and breeding. And I know you're not going to undo what we've done, and done well."

"That's your 'bossy' tone, Mattie," he drawled, his desire to talk getting a fresh excuse for indulging itself. "I guess this is a good time to let you into a secret. You've thought you ran me ever since we were engaged. That delusion of yours nearly lost you the chance to lead these thirty years of wedded bliss with me. If you hadn't happened to make me jealous and afraid the one man I used to envy in those days would get you—I laughed the other day when he was appointed postmaster at Indianapolis—However, I did marry you, and did let you imagine you wore the pants. It seemed to amuse you, and it certainly amused me—though not in the same way. Now I want you to look back and think hard. You can't remember a single time that what you bossed me to do was ever done. I was always fond of playing tricks and pulling secret wires, and I did a lot of it in making you think you were bossing me when you were really being bossed."

It was all Mrs. Whitney could do to keep her mind on how sick he was, and how imperative it was not to get him out of humor. "I never meant to try to influence you, Charles," she said, "except as anyone tries to help those about one. And certainly you've been the one that has put us all in our present position. That's why it distressed me for you even to talk of undoing your work."

Whitney smiled satirically, mysteriously. "I'll do what I think best," was all he replied. And presently he added, "though I don't feel like doing anything. It seems to me I don't care what happens, or whether I live—or—don't. I'll go to Saint X. I'm just about strong enough to stand the trip—and have Schulze come out to Point Helen this evening."

"Why not save your strength and have him come here?" urged Matilda.

"He wouldn't," replied her husband. "Last time I saw him he looked me over and said: 'Champagne. If you don't stop it you won't live. Don't come here again unless you cut out that poison.' But I never could resist champagne. So I told myself he was an old crank, and found a great doctor I could hire to agree with me. No use to send for Schulze to come all this distance. I might even have to go to his office if I was at Saint X. He won't go to see anybody who's able to move about. 'As they want me, let 'em come to me, just as I'd go to them if I wanted them,' he says. 'The air they get on the way is part of the cure.' Besides, he and I had a quarrel. He was talking his nonsense against religion, and I said something, and he implied I wasn't as straight in business as I should be—quoted something about 'He that hasteth to be rich shall not be innocent,' and one thing led to another, and finally he said, with that ugly jeer of his: 'You pious bandits are lucky to have a forgiving God to go to. Now we poor devils have only our self-respect, and it never forgives anything.'" Whitney laughed, reflected, laughed again. "Yes, I must see Schulze. Maybe—Anyhow, I'm going to Saint X—going home, or as near home as anything my money has left me."

He drowsed off. She sat watching him—the great beak, the bulging forehead, the thin, cruel lips; and everywhere in the garden of artificial flowers which formed the surface of her nature, hiding its reality even from herself, there appeared the poisonous snakes of hateful thoughts to shoot their fangs and hiss at him. She shrank and shuddered; yet—"It's altogether his own fault that I feel this way toward him as he lies dying," she said to herself, resorting to human nature's unfailing, universally sought comforter in all trying circumstances—self-excuse. "He always was cold and hard. He has become a monster. And even in his best days he wasn't worthy to have such a woman as I am. And now he is thinking of cheating me—and will do it—unless God prevents him."

He drowsed on, more asleep than awake, not even rousing when they put him to bed. He did not go to Saint X that day. But he did go later—went to lie in state in the corridor of the splendid hall he had given Tecumseh; to be gaped at by thousands who could not see that they were viewing a few pounds of molded clay, so busy were their imaginations with the vast fortune it was supposed he left; to be preached over, the sermon by Dr. Hargrave, who believed in him—and so, in estimating the man as distinguished from what the system he lived under had made of him, perhaps came nearer the truth than those who talked only of the facts of his public career—his piracy, his bushwhacking, his gambling with the marked cards and loaded dice of "high finance"; to be buried in the old Cedar Grove Cemetery, with an imposing monument presently over him, before it fresh flowers every day for a year—the Marchioness of St. Berthe contracted with a florist to attend to that.

* * * * *

Four days after the funeral Janet sent a servant down to Adelaide and to Mrs. Ranger with notes begging them to come to Point Helen for lunch. "We are lonely and so dreary," she wrote Adelaide. "We want you—need you." Only one answer was possible, and at half-past twelve they set out in Mrs. Ranger's carriage. As they drove away from the Villa d'Orsay Mrs. Ranger said: "When does Mrs. Dorsey allow to come home?"

"Not for two years more," replied Del.

Ellen's expression suggested that she was debating whether or not to speak some thought which she feared Del might regard as meddlesome. "When you finally do have to get out," she said presently, "it'll be like giving up your own home, won't it?"

"No," said Del. "I hate the place!" A pause, then: "I wrote Mrs. Dorsey yesterday that we wouldn't stay but three months longer—not in any circumstances."

The old woman's face brightened. "I'm mighty glad of that," she said heartily. "Then, you'll have a home of your own at last."

"Not exactly," was Del's reply, in a curious tone. "The fact is, I'm going to live with Dr. Hargrave."

Ellen showed her astonishment. "And old Martha Skeffington!"

"She's not so difficult, once you get to know her," replied Del. "I find that everything depends on the point of view you take in looking at people. I've been getting better acquainted with Dory's aunt the last few weeks. I think she has begun to like me. We'll get along."

"Don't you think you'd better wait till Dory gets back?"

"No," said Adelaide firmly, a look in her eyes which made her mother say to herself: "There's the Ranger in her."

They drove in silence awhile; then Del, with an effort which brought a bright color to her cheeks, began: "I want to tell you, mother, that I went to Judge Torrey this morning, and made over to you the income father left me."

"Whatever did you do that for?" cried Ellen, turning in the seat to stare at her daughter through her glasses.

"I promised Dory I would. I've spent some of the money—about fifteen hundred dollars—You see, the house was more expensive than I thought. But everything's paid up now."

"I don't need it, and don't want it," said Ellen. "And I won't take it!"

"I promised Dory I would—before we were married. He thinks I've done it. I've let him think so. And—lately—I've been having a sort of house cleaning—straightening things up—and I straightened that up, too."

Ellen Ranger understood. A long pause, during which she looked lovingly at her daughter's beautiful face. At last she said: "No, there don't seem to be no other way out of it." Then, anxiously, "You ain't written Dory what you've done?"

"No," replied Del. "Not yet."

"Not never!" exclaimed her mother. "That's one of the things a body mustn't ever tell anyone. You did wrong; you've done right—and it's all settled and over. He'd probably understand if you told him. But he'd never quite trust you the same again—that's human nature."

"But you'd trust me," objected Del.

"I'm older'n Dory," replied her mother; "and, besides, I ain't your husband. There's no end of husbands and wives that get into hot water through telling, where it don't do any earthly good and makes the other one uneasy and unhappy."

Adelaide reflected. "It is better not to tell him," she concluded.

Ellen was relieved. "That's common sense," said she. "And you can't use too much common sense in marriage. The woman's got to have it, for the men never do where women are concerned." She reflected a few minutes, then, after a keen glance at her daughter and away, she said with an appearance of impersonality that evidenced diplomatic skill of no mean order: "And there's this habit the women are getting nowadays of always peeping into their heads and hearts to see what's going on. How can they expect the cake to bake right if they're first at the fire door, then at the oven door, openin' and shuttin' 'em, peepin' and pokin' and tastin'—that's what I'd like to know."

Adelaide looked at her mother's apparently unconscious face in surprise and admiration. "What a sensible, wonderful woman you are, Ellen Ranger!" she exclaimed, giving her mother the sisterly name she always gave her when she felt a particular delight in the bond between them. And half to herself, yet so that her mother heard, she added: "And what a fool your daughter has been!"

"Nobody's born wise," said Ellen, "and mighty few takes the trouble to learn."

At Point Helen the mourning livery of the lodge keeper and of the hall servants prepared Ellen and her daughter for the correct and elegant habiliments of woe in which Matilda and her son and daughter were garbed. If Whitney had died before he began to lose his fortune, and while his family were in a good humor with him because of his careless generosity, or, rather, indifference to extravagance, he would have been mourned as sincerely as it is possible for human beings to mourn one by whose death they are to profit enormously in title to the material possessions they have been trained to esteem above all else in the world. As it was, those last few months of anxiety—Mrs. Whitney worrying lest her luxury and social leadership should be passing, Ross exasperated by the daily struggle to dissuade his father from fatuous enterprises—had changed Whitney's death from a grief to a relief. However, "appearances" constrained Ross to a decent show of sorrow, compelled Mrs. Whitney to a still stronger exhibit. Janet, who in far-away France had not been touched by the financial anxieties, felt a genuine grief that gave her an admirable stimulus to her efflorescent oversoul. She had "prepared for the worst," had brought from Paris a marvelous mourning wardrobe—dresses and hats and jewelry that set off her delicate loveliness as it had never been set off before. She made of herself an embodiment, an apotheosis, rather, of poetic woe—and so, roused to emulation her mother's passion for pose. Ross had refused to gratify them even to the extent of taking a spectator's part in their refined theatricals. The coming of Mrs. Ranger and Adelaide gave them an audience other than servile; they proceeded to strive to rise to the opportunity. The result of this struggle between mother and daughter was a spectacle so painful that even Ellen, determined to see only sincerity, found it impossible not to suspect a grief that could find so much and such language in which to vent itself. She fancied she appreciated why Ross eyed his mother and sister with unconcealed hostility and spoke almost harshly when they compelled him to break his silence.

Adelaide hardly gave the two women a thought. She was surprised to find that she was looking at Ross and thinking of him quite calmly and most critically. His face seemed to her trivial, with a selfishness that more than suggested meanness, the eyes looking out from a mind which habitually entertained ideas not worth a real man's while. What was the matter with him—"or with me?" What is he thinking about? Why is he looking so mean and petty? Why had he no longer the least physical attraction for her? Why did her intense emotions of a few brief weeks ago seem as vague as an unimportant occurrence of many years ago? What had broken the spell? She could not answer her own puzzled questions; she simply knew that it was so, that any idea that she did, or ever could, love Ross Whitney was gone, and gone forever. "It's so," she thought. "What's the difference why? Shall I never learn to let the stove doors alone?"

As soon as lunch was over Matilda took Ellen to her boudoir and Ross went away, leaving Janet and Adelaide to walk up and down the shaded west terrace with its vast outlook upon the sinuous river and the hills. To draw Janet from the painful theatricals, she took advantage of a casual question about the lynching, and went into the details of that red evening as she had not with anyone. It was now almost two months into the past; but all Saint X was still feverish from it, and she herself had only begun again to have unhaunted and unbroken sleep. While she was relating Janet forgot herself; but when the story was told—all of it except Adelaide's own part; that she entirely omitted—Janet went back to her personal point of view. "A beautiful love story!" she exclaimed. "And right here in prosaic Saint X!"

"Is it Saint X that is prosaic," said Adelaide, "or is it we, in failing to see the truth about familiar things?"

"Perhaps," replied Janet, in the tone that means "not at all." To her a thrill of emotion or a throb of pain felt by a titled person differed from the same sensation in an untitled person as a bar of supernal or infernal music differs from the whistling of a farm boy on his way to gather the eggs; if the title was royal—Janet wept when an empress died of a cancer and talked of her "heroism" for weeks.

"Of course," she went on musingly, to Adelaide, "it was very beautiful for Lorry and Estelle to love each other. Still, I can't help feeling that—At least, I can understand Arden Wilmot's rage. After all, Estelle stepped out of her class; didn't she, Del?"

"Yes," said Del, not recognizing the remark as one she herself might have made not many months before. "Both she and Lorry stepped out of their classes, and into the class where there is no class, but only just men and women, hearts and hands and brains." She checked herself just in time to refrain from adding, "the class our fathers and mothers belonged in."

Janet did not inquire into the mystery of this. "And Estelle has gone to live with poor Lorry's mother!" said she. "How noble and touching! Such beautiful self-sacrifice!"

"Why self-sacrifice?" asked Del, irritated. "She couldn't possibly go home, could she? And she is fond of Lorry's mother."

"Yes, of course. No doubt she's a dear, lovely old woman. But—a washerwoman, and constant, daily contact—and not as lady and servant, but on what must be, after all, a sort of equality—" Janet finished her sentence with a ladylike look.

Adelaide burned with the resentment of the new convert. "A woman who brought into the world and brought up such a son as Lorry was," said she, "needn't yield to anybody." Then the silliness of arguing such a matter with Madame la Marquise de Saint Berthe came over her. "You and I don't look at life from the same standpoint, Janet," she added, smiling. "You see, you're a lady, and I'm not—any more."

"Oh, yes, you are," Janet, the devoid of the sense of humor, hastened to assure her earnestly. "You know we in France don't feel as they do in America, that one gets or loses caste when one gets or loses money. Besides, Dory is in a profession that is quite aristocratic, and those lectures he delivered at Goettingen are really talked about everywhere on the other side."

But Adelaide refused to be consoled. "No, I'm not a lady—not what you'd call a lady, even as a Frenchwoman."

"Oh, but I'm a good American!" Janet protested, suddenly prudent and rushing into the pretenses our transplanted and acclimatized sisters are careful to make when talking with us of the land whence comes their sole claim to foreign aristocratic consideration—their income. "I'm really quite famous for my Americanism. I've done a great deal toward establishing our ambassador at Paris in the best society. Coming from a republic and to a republic that isn't recognized by our set in France, he was having a hard time, though he and his wife are all right at home. Now that there are more gentlemen in authority at Washington, our diplomats are of a much better class than they used to be. Everyone over there says so. Of course, you—that is we, are gradually becoming civilized and building up an aristocracy."

"Yes, I suppose so," said Adelaide, feeling that she must change the subject or show her exasperation, yet unable to find any subject which Janet would not adorn with refined and cultured views. "Isn't Ross, there, looking for you?"

He had just rushed from the house, his face, his manner violently agitated. As he saw Adelaide looking at him, he folded and put in his pocket a letter which seemed to be the cause of his agitation. When the two young women came to where he was standing, he joined them and walked up and down with them, his sister, between him and Del, doing all the talking. Out of the corner of her eye Del saw that his gaze was bent savagely upon the ground and that his struggle for self-control was still on. At the first opportunity she said: "I must get mother. We'll have to be going."

"Oh, no, not yet," urged Janet, sincerity strong in her affected accents. Del felt that the sister, for some reason, as strongly wished not to be left alone with the brother as the brother wished to be left alone with the sister. In confirmation of this, Janet went on to say: "Anyhow, Ross will tell your mother."

Ross scowled at his sister, made a hesitating, reluctant movement toward the steps; just then Matilda and Ellen appeared. Adelaide saw that her mother had succeeded in getting through Matilda's crust of sham and in touch with her heart. At sight of her son Mrs. Whitney's softened countenance changed—hardened, Adelaide thought—and she said to him eagerly: "Any news, any letters?"

"This," answered Ross explosively. He jerked the letter from his pocket, gave it to his mother.

"You'll excuse me—Ellen—Adelaide," said Matilda, as she unfolded the paper with ringers that trembled. "This is very important." Silence, as she read, her eager glance leaping along the lines. Her expression became terrible; she burst out in a voice that was both anger and despair: "No will! He wasn't just trying to torment me when he said he hadn't made one. No will! Nothing but the draft of a scheme to leave everything to Tecumseh—there's your Hiram's work, Ellen!"

Adelaide's gentle pressure on her mother's arm was unnecessary; it was too evident that Matilda, beside herself, could not be held responsible for anything she said. There was no pretense, no "oversoul" in her emotion now. She was as different from the Matilda of the luncheon table as the swollen and guttered face of woe in real life is different from the graceful tragedy of the stage.

"No will; what of it?" said Ellen gently. "It won't make the least difference. There's just you and the children."

Adelaide, with clearer knowledge of certain dark phases of human nature and of the Whitney family, hastily interposed. "Yes, we must go," said she. "Good-by, Mrs. Whitney," and she put out her hand.

Mrs. Whitney neither saw nor heard. "Ellen!" she cried, her voice like her wild and haggard face. "What do you think of such a daughter as mine here? Her father—"

Janet, with eyes that dilated and contracted strangely, interrupted with a sweet, deprecating, "Good-by, Adelaide dear. As I told you, I am leaving to-night—"

There Ross laid his hand heavily on Janet's shoulder. "You are going to stay, young lady," he said between his teeth, "and hear what your mother has to say about you." His voice made Adelaide shudder, even before she saw the black hate his eyes were hurling at his sister.

"Yes, we want you, Ellen, and you, Del, to know her as she is," Mrs. Whitney now raged on. "When she married, her father gave her a dowry, bought that title for her—paid as much as his whole fortune now amounts to. He did it solely because I begged him to. She knows the fight I had to win him over. And now that he's gone, without making a will, she says she'll have her legal rights! Her legal rights! She'll take one-third of what he left. She'll rob her brother and her mother!"

Janet was plainly reminding herself that she must not forget that she was a lady and a marchioness. In a manner in which quiet dignity was mingled with a delicate soul's shrinking from such brawling vulgarity as this that was being forced upon her, she said, looking at Adelaide: "Papa never intended that my dowry should be taken out of my share. It was a present." She looked calmly at her mother. "Just like your jewels, mamma." She turned her clear, luminous eyes upon Ross. "Just like the opportunities he gave you to get your independent fortune."

Mrs. Whitney, trembling so that she could scarcely articulate, retorted: "At the time he said, and I told you, it was to come out of your share. And how you thanked me and kissed me and—" She stretched toward Ellen her shaking old woman's hands, made repellent by the contrasting splendor of magnificent black pearl rings. "O Ellen, Ellen!" she quavered. "I think my heart will burst!"

"You did say he said so," replied Janet softly, "but he never told me."

"You—you—" stuttered Ross, flinging out his arms at her in a paroxysm of fury.

"I refuse to discuss this any further," said Janet, drawing herself up in the full majesty of her black-robed figure and turning her long shapely back on Ross. "Mrs. Ranger, I'm sure you and Del realize that mother and Ross are terribly upset, and not—"

"They'll realize that you are a cheat, a vulture in the guise of woman!" cried Mrs. Whitney. "Ellen, tell her what she is!"

Mrs. Ranger, her eyes down and her face expressing her agonized embarrassment, contrived to say: "You mustn't bring me in, Mattie. Adelaide and I must go."

"No, you shall hear!" shrieked Mrs. Whitney, barring the way. "All the world shall hear how this treacherous, ingrate daughter of mine—oh, the sting of that!—how she purposes to steal, yes, steal four times as much of her father's estate as Ross or I get. Four times as much! I can't believe the law allows it! But whether it does or not, Janet Whitney, God won't allow it! God will hear my cry, my curse on you."

"My conscience is clear," said Janet, and her gaze, spiritual, exalted, patient, showed that she spoke the truth, that her mother's looks and words left her quite unscathed.

Ross vented a vicious, jeering laugh. His mother, overcome with the sense of helplessness, collapsed from rage to grief and tears. She turned to Mrs. Ranger. "Your Hiram was right," she wailed, "and my Charles said so just before he went. Look at my daughter, Ellen. Look at my son—for he, too, is robbing me. He has his own fortune that his dead father made for him; yet he, too, talks about his legal rights. He demands his full third!"

Adelaide did not look at Ross; yet she was seeing him inside and out, the inside through the outside.

"My heartless children!" sobbed Matilda. "I can't believe that they are the same I brought into the world and watched over and saw that they had everything. God forgive them—and me. Your Hiram was right. Money has done it. Money has made monsters of them. And I—oh, how I am punished!"

All this time Ellen and Adelaide had been gradually retreating, the Whitneys following them. When Mrs. Whitney at last opened wide the casket of her woe and revealed Ross there, too, he wheeled on Adelaide with a protesting, appealing look. He was confident that he was in the right, that his case was different from Janet's; confident also that Adelaide would feel that in defending his rights he was also defending hers that were to be. But before Del there had risen the scene after the reading of her own father's will. She recalled her rebellious thoughts, saw again Arthur's fine face distorted by evil passions, heard again her mother's terrible, just words: "Don't trample on your father's grave, Arthur Ranger! I'll put you both out of the house! Go to the Whitneys, where you belong!" And then she saw Arthur as he now was, and herself the wife of Dory Hargrave. And she for the first time realized, as we realize things only when they have become an accepted and unshakable basic part of our lives, what her father had done, what her father was. Hiram had won his daughter.

"We are going now," said Ellen, coming from the stupor of shame and horror into which this volcanic disgorging of the secret minds and hearts of the Whitneys had plunged her. And the expression she fixed first upon Janet, then upon Ross, then upon Matilda, killed any disposition they might have had to try to detain her. As she and Adelaide went toward her carriage, Ross followed. Walking beside Adelaide, he began to protest in a low tone and with passionate appeal against the verdict he could not but read in her face. "It isn't fair, it isn't just!" he pleaded. "Adelaide, hear me! Don't misjudge me. You know what your—your good opinion means to me."

She took her mother's arm, and so drew farther away from him.

"Forgive me," he begged. "Janet put me out of my mind. It drove me mad to have her rob—us."

At that "us" Adelaide fixed her gaze on his for an instant. And what he saw in her eyes silenced him—silenced him on one subject forever.

He left for Chicago without seeing either his sister or his mother again. His impulse was to renounce to his mother his share of his father's estate. But one does not act hastily upon an impulse to give up nearly a million dollars. On reflection he decided against such expensive and futile generosity. If it would gain him Adelaide—then, yes. But when it would gain him nothing but the applause of people who in the same circumstances would not have had even the impulse to forego a million—"Mother's proper share will give her as much of an income as a woman needs at her age and alone," reasoned he. "Besides, she may marry again. And I must not forget that but for her Janet would never have got that dowry. She brought this upon herself. Her folly has cost me dearly enough. If I go away to live abroad or in New York—anywhere to be free of the Howlands—why I'll need all I've got properly to establish myself."