She did not question him, and evinced no curiosity about his world. She had touched it on the extreme edge, and she was content with that, satisfied probably that this unexpected renewal of their connection was most casual—too fortunate to happen again. So she took him into a perfectly easy intimacy; it was the nearness that comes between two people when there is slight probability of a common future.

At last she turned into one of the streets that crossed the avenue at long intervals. This one was more developed than those they had passed: a row of gigantic telephone poles stretched along its side; two car tracks in use indicated that it was a thoroughfare. At the corner there was an advertising sign of The Hub Clothing House; and beneath, on one spoke of a tiny hub, This is Ninety-first Street; and at right angles on another spoke, This is Washington Avenue. He remembered vaguely having seen a Washington Avenue miles to the north. The thing had been drawn on the map by a ruler, without regard to habitations; on the map it probably went on into Indiana, to the Ohio River,—to the Gulf for all he knew.

Yet the cross-road was more promising than anything they had met: a truck farm bordered one side; a line of tall willows suggested faintly the country. Just beyond the tracks of a railroad the ground rose almost imperceptibly, and a grove of stunted oaks covered the miniature hill. The bronzed leaves still hanging from the trees made something like shade beside the road.

"That is better," Sommers exclaimed, relieved to find a little oasis in the desert of sand and weeds.

The woman smiled. "It is almost a forest; it runs south for a block. And beyond there is the loveliest meadow, all tender green now. Over there you can see the Everglade School, where I spend my days. The people are Swedes, mostly,—operatives in the factories at Grand Crossing and on the railroads. Many of the children can scarcely understand a word of English,—and their habits! But they are better than the Poles, in the Halsted Street district, or the Russians in another West Side district. And we have a brick building, not rooms rented in a wooden house. And the principal is an old woman, too fat to climb all the stairs to my room. So I am left alone to reign among my young barbarians."

When they reached the grove, Mrs. Preston crossed the car tracks and entered a little grassy lane that skirted the stunted oaks. A few hundred feet from the street stood a cottage built of yellow "Milwaukee" brick. It was quite hidden from the street by the oak grove. The lane ended just beyond in a tangle of weeds and undergrowth. On the west side there was an open, marshy lot which separated the cottage in the trees from Stoney Island Avenue,—the artery that connects Pullman and the surrounding villages with Chicago.

An old German had lived in it, Mrs. Preston explained, until his death a year or two ago. He had a little chicken farm. As no one else wanted to live in such a desolate place, so far from the scattered hamlets, she had got it for a small rent. The house was a tiny imitation of a castle, with crenelated parapet and tower. Crumbling now and weather-stained, it had a quaint, human, wistful air. Its face was turned away from the road toward a bit of garden, which was fenced off from the lane by arbors of grape-vines.

Sommers tied his horse to the gate post. Mrs. Preston did not speak after they reached the house. Her face had lost its animation. They stood still for some time, gazing into the peaceful garden plot and the bronzed oaks beyond, as if loath to break the intimacy of the last half hour. In the solitude, the dead silence of the place, there seemed to lurk misfortune and pain. Suddenly from a distance sounded the whirr of an electric car, passing on the avenue behind them. The noise came softened across the open lot—a distant murmur from the big city that was otherwise so remote.

The spring twilight had descended, softening all brutal details. The broad horizon above the lake was piled deep with clouds. Beyond the oak trees, in the southern sky, great tongues of flame shot up into the dark heavens out of the blast furnaces of the steel works. Deep-toned, full-throated frogs had begun their monotonous chant.



CHAPTER VIII

"Shall we go in?" the doctor asked at last.

Mrs. Preston started, and her hand closed instinctively upon the gate, as if to bar further entrance to her privacy. Then without reply she opened the gate, led the way across the tiny lawn, and unlocked the cottage door. They entered a large room, from which some narrow stairs led to the chambers above. Floor and walls were bare, and the only furniture consisted of two wooden chairs, a small coal-stove, and a pine table of considerable size. This was covered with books, school exercises, and a few dishes. Mrs. Preston brusquely flung off her cape and hat, and faced the doctor.

"I might as well tell you the main thing before you see him. He—"

"That is scarcely necessary," Sommers replied gently. "I probably know what you are thinking of."

A flush, caused by the revealed shame, crept over her face, lighting it to the extreme corners under the temples and ears. As she stood there, humiliated, yet defiant of him and of the world, Sommers remembered the first time he had seen her that night at the hospital. He read her, somehow, extraordinarily well; he knew the misery, the longing, the anger, the hate, the stubborn power to fight. Her deep eyes glanced at him frankly, willing to be read by this stranger out of the multitude of men. They had no more need of words now than at that first moment in the operating room at St. Isidore's. They were man and woman, in the presence of a fate that could not be softened by words.

"You are right," she said softly. "Yet sometime I want to tell you things—not now. I will go and see how he is."

When she had left the room, Sommers examined the few objects about him in the manner of a man who draws his conclusions from innumerable, imponderable data. Then he took a chair to the window and sat down. She was very real to him, this woman, and compelling, with her silences, her broken phrases. Rarely, very rarely before in his life, had he had this experience of intimacy without foreknowledge, without background—the sense of dealing with a human soul nakedly.

"Will you come now?"

Mrs. Preston had returned and held the stair-door open for him. Sommers looked at her searchingly, curious to find where this power lay. Her face had grown white and set. The features and the figure were those of a large woman. Her hair, bronzed in the sunlight as he remembered, was dark in the gloom of this room. The plain, symmetrical arrangement of the hair above the large brow and features made her seem older than she was. The deep-set eyes, the quivering lips, and the thin nostrils gave life to the passive, restrained face. The passions of her life lay just beneath the surface of flesh.

"He is very talkative, and wanders—"

The doctor nodded and followed her up the steep stairs, which were closed at the head by a stout door. The upper story was divided about equally into two rooms. The east room, to which Mrs. Preston opened the door, was plainly furnished, yet in comparison with the room below it seemed almost luxurious. Two windows gave a clear view above the little oak copse, the lines of empty freight cars on the siding, and a mile of low meadow that lay between the cottage and the fringe of settlement along the lake. Through another window at the north the bleak prospect of Stoney Island Avenue could be seen, flanked on one side by a huge sign over a saloon. Near this window on a lounge lay the patient.

Preston's personal appearance had not improved during his illness: his face, over the lower half of which a black beard had grown rankly, was puffy with convalescent fat. His hands that drummed idly against the couch were white and flabby. As he half rose and extended his hand to the doctor, he betrayed, indefinably, remote traces of superior breeding.

"Excuse me, doctor," he said apologetically. "Mrs. Preston keeps me a close prisoner. But she won't have the whip-hand very long."

He laughed boisterously, as Sommers shook hands and sat down.

"Women know they've got you while you are sick. They like to keep an eye on a man, eh?"

He laughed again, confidentially, as if the doctor, being a man, would appreciate the point. Then he continued, nervously, without pause:

"But I have some business to attend to. I must get out of this as soon as you can patch me up so I can walk straight. I ought to have been in Denver a month ago. There's a man out there, who comes in from his ranch two hundred miles to see me. He is a fine fellow, strapping, big six-footer. He knows how to put in his time day and night, when he gets to town. I remember one time we were in Frisco together—ever been in Frisco? It's a great place for a good dinner, and all you want to drink. Drink—my! I've seen the time—"

He rambled on, now and then pausing to laugh boisterously at some recollection. As his whirligig tale touched upon indecent episodes, his voice lowered and he sought for convenient euphemisms, helped out by sympathetic nods. Mrs. Preston made several attempts to interrupt his aimless, wandering talk; but he started again each time, excited by the presence of the doctor. His mind was like a bag of loosely associated ideas. Any jar seemed to set loose a long line of reminiscences, very vaguely connected. The doctor encouraged him to talk, to develop himself, to reveal the story of his roadside debaucheries. He listened attentively, evincing an interest in the incoherent tale. Mrs. Preston watched the doctor's face with restless eyes.

Finally Preston ended his husky monotone in a querulous entreaty. "I need a little whiskey to keep me going. Tell her, won't you?—to let me have a little drink. My regular allowance was a pint a day, and I haven't had a drop for four weeks. Your Chicago whiskey is rotten bad, though, I tell you. I just stepped into a place to get a drink with Joe Campbell—his father owns a big pulp mill in Michigan—well—we had one or two drinks, and the first thing I knew there was shooting all over the place, and some one grabbed me, and I was thrown into the street—"

Mrs. Preston exclaimed, "Do you want to hear more?"

Sommers rose. "I'll come again to see you, Mr. Preston, and I will leave something that will help you. Good night."

"It was good of you to take this interest, doctor. I am glad to have met you, Doctor—?"

"Sommers," suggested the doctor, smiling at the evidences of forgotten breeding that cropped out of the general decay.

"Well, Dr. Sommers, I hope we shall meet again when I am more myself."

When they returned to the room below, Mrs. Preston lit a lamp. After some minutes Sommers asked, "How long has this been going on?"

"For years—before he left college; he was taken out of Yale because of it. All I know is what he tells when he is not—responsible."

"Ah!" the doctor exclaimed involuntarily.

"I never knew," Mrs. Preston added quickly, "until we had been married a year. He was away so much of the time, and he was very different then—I mean he didn't ramble on as he does now. He was not flabby and childish, not before the operation."

The doctor turned his face away.

"About two years ago some of the men he was with brought him home, drunk. Afterward he didn't seem to care. But he was away most of the time, travelling, going from place to place, always living in hotels, always drinking until some illness brought him back."

"And this time?" the doctor asked.

Mrs. Preston shut her lips, as if there were things she could not say yet.

"I was not living with him." In a few moments, she continued quietly: "I suppose I should have been but for one thing. He told me he was going to New York, and I found him with another woman, living in a hotel not a mile from our home. I don't know why I should have made so much of that. I had suspected for months that there were other women; but seeing it, knowing that he knew I had seen it! I nearly starved before I got work."

Confession, the details, the whole story, appealed to her evidently as obvious, typical, useless. She tried to select simple words, to leave the facts undimmed by passionate speech.

"As I told you, an old friend of my father's helped me to get work. That kept me from ending it just there. As the months went on and he did not try to find me, I got used to the round, to the school, the living on, dead and alive. I thought of getting a divorce, of finding some country school in another state. Dr. Leonard urged me to. I might have—I don't know. But accidentally he was brought back. I was going home from a teachers' meeting that night. I saw him lying on the pavement, thrown out of the saloon, as he told you. A crowd gathered. He was unconscious. I wanted to run away, to leave him, to escape. He groaned. I couldn't—I couldn't."

She sighed wearily at the memory of her illogical act. The doctor nodded sympathetically. It was a fatal moment, the point of decision in her life. He understood what it meant to her.

"There was no one else to take him—to be responsible. He had been mine. After all, the divorce would have made no difference; it never can. You have to take your failures; you have to endure."

"Has he any relatives?" Sommers asked.

"A few; they were done with him long ago. They had money, and they wanted to get rid of him. They put him into a business that would keep him away from them; that would give him the best chance to kill himself—going about everywhere, always travelling, always with men who drink and live in hotels as he has. They shoved him into the world to let the world, or any one who would, take care of him."

It had been her lot, because of the error of her incompetent heart, to take charge of this flotsam. That was so evident that she had given up seeking for escape.

"He is helpless now," she added, as for excuse. "It would be cruel."

For a moment the doctor's face looked hard. Was it, he seemed to be turning over in his mind, that she loved him a little in the depths of her heart? That was an irritating trait of feminine stupidity. But one intelligent glance at her calm face rendered that supposition impossible. She was merely largely human, with a sense of remote claims.

"And now what will you do?" he asked.

Her eyes were brooding on that now. Finally she exclaimed with an impatient gesture:

"How can I tell! He may get strong enough to leave me—in peace. He may come back again to rest and get well. And that may go on and on until one of us dies, or I am discharged. As I told you, they are trying now to exclude married teachers from the schools. And I am married!"

Sommers saw that she had faced the sordid situation; that she expected no relief from the clouds. He got up and looked at his watch.

"I shall come again. We will see what can be done."

This was a convention of the profession. Nothing could be done for that man, and he knew it. She knew it also. She smiled mournfully as they shook hands. Yet as he moved toward the door she asked in a low tone:

"Won't you tell me what you call it? There is no use in not telling me."

"Paresis," Sommers replied shortly. As her face was still inquiring, he added: "Brain trouble. In his case a kind of decay of the tissue; perhaps inherited, certainly hastened by his habits, probably precipitated by the operation."

His glance met hers, and they both fell silent before the common thought. In the practice of his profession he had done this for her, in obedience to the cowardly rules of that profession. He had saved life—animation—to this mass of corruption. Except for his skill, this waste being would have gone its way quietly to death, thereby purifying all life by that little. He added at last in a mechanical tone:

"That results sometimes from such an operation. You can't tell how it will affect the brain, especially when the history of the case is a bad one. He will have to be sent away to an institution if—; but the only thing now is to wait to see what will happen. Good night. I shall see you in a few days," he concluded abruptly.

He was determined to speculate no more, to give her no hopes that might prove groundless. The future was uncertain: the patient might have convulsions, paralysis, locomotor ataxia, mere imbecility with normal physical functions, or intermittent insanity. It was highly unprofessional to speculate in this loose fashion about the outcome of an operation.

Mrs. Preston watched him as he crossed the lawn and untied his horse. She had not thanked him for coming, for promising to come again, he reflected with relief. She was no weak, dependent fool. He rode down the sodded lane, and as his horse picked his way carefully toward the avenue where the electric cars were shooting back and forth like magnified fireflies, he turned in his saddle to look once more at the cottage. One light gleamed from the room he had just left. He could see the outline of the woman's form standing by the open window. The place was lonely and forbidding enough, isolated and withdrawn as the life of the woman within it. She was set apart with the thing that had been man stretched out above in stupor, or restlessly babbling over his dirty tale. God knew why! Yet, physician and unsentimental thinker that he was, he felt to a certain degree the inevitableness of her fate. The common thing would be to shake the dirt from one's shoes, to turn one's back on the diseased and mistaken being, "to put it away where it would not trouble,"—but she did not seek to escape.

And he had been the instrument to execute for her this decree of fate, to bind it permanently, a lifetime curse.

The frogs were making merry in the marshy fields along the avenue. Their robust chorus mingled with the whir of the cars. Soft, dark clouds were driving lakeward. The blast furnaces of the steel works in South Chicago silently opened and belched flame, and silently closed again. A rosy vapor, as from some Tartarean breathing, hovered about the mouths of the furnaces. Moment by moment these mouths opened and belched and closed. It was the fiery respiration of a gigantic beast, of a long worm whose dark body enveloped the smoky city. The beast heaved and panted and rested, again and again—the beast that lay on its belly for many a mile, whose ample stomach was the city, there northward, hid in smoke.



CHAPTER IX

Long after the horse's hoofs had ceased to beat in the still evening, Mrs. Preston sat by the open window in the bare cottage room, her head resting on her arms, her eyes peering into the soft darkness in the path of the shadowy figure that had passed down Stoney Island Avenue into the night beyond her ken. She had not asked him to return. But he had promised to. Indeed, he did not seem to be far away: she could feel his gentle eyes, his imperious face, his sympathetic voice. It was not much that she could make of him; but her imagination built gratefully on his few words and simple acts, until he became—as when he had spoken to her at the hospital—a masterful spirit, dominating that vague, warm land of dreams in which she took refuge during waking hours.

She should see him again—she must see him again, that was all. And yet what was the good of it? Only a new pain in thus revealing her sores—a pain mixed with a subtle anaesthetic, sweeter than anything she had known in this life. In the end she would have to do without this anodyne; would have to meet her hard and brutal world. Just now, while the yoke was hot to the neck, she might take this mercy to temper the anguish. On the long hill road before her it would be a grateful memory. It seemed now that she had put herself to the yoke, had taken the hill road very lightly. She had not thought of accepting the dentist's advice. With the fierce energy of her crushed, spoiled youth, she had taken her measures: had found this little cottage, hid in the oak copse; had prepared it with her own hands; had gone to the hospital to fetch her husband. That never ending journey from the hospital to the cottage! His ceaseless babble, the foul overflow from his feeble mind, had sapped her courage.

Her head dropped weakly upon her arms; useless tears started. Before that day she had had some joy in this cottage. There were glorious sunrises from the lake and sunsets over the desolate marshes. The rank swamp grasses were growing long, covering decently the unkempt soil. At night, alone, she had comfort in the multitudinous cries from the railroads that ribbed the prairie in this outskirt of the city. The shrieks of the locomotives were like the calls of great savage birds, raising their voices melodiously as they fled to and fro into the roaring cavern of the city, outward to the silent country, to the happier, freer regions of man. As they rushed, they bore her with them to those shadowy lands far away in the sweet stillness of summer-scented noons, in the solemn quiet of autumn nights. Her days were beset with visions like these—visions of a cool, quiet, tranquil world; of conditions of peace; of yearnings satisfied; of toil that did not lacerate. Yes! that world was, somewhere. Her heart was convinced of it, as her father's had been convinced of the reality of paradise. That which she had never been, that which she could not be now—it must exist somewhere. Singularly childish it seemed even to herself, this perpetual obsession by the desire for happiness,—inarticulate, unformed desire. It haunted her, night and morning, haunted her as the desire for food haunts the famished, the desire for action the prisoned. It urged on her footsteps in the still afternoons as she wandered over this vast waste of houseless blocks. Up and down the endless checker-board of empty streets and avenues she had roamed, gleaning what joys were to be had in the metallic atmosphere, the stunted copses, the marshy pools spotted with the blue shields of fleur-de-lys. For even here, in the refuse corner of the great city, Nature doled out niggardly gifts of green growth—proofs of her unquenchable bounty.

This hunger for joy had included no desire for companionship. When her child died, the last person had slipped out of her world. To-night there was a strange, almost fearful sense that this vacant, tenantless life might change. Was there some one among these dull figures that would take life, speak, touch her?

There was a movement in the rooms above. She started. Had she locked the door securely? Preston had tried before to drag himself out of the cottage, across the intervening lot, to the saloon on Stoney Island Avenue, whose immense black and gold sign he could see from his chamber. That must not happen here, in the neighborhood of the Everglade School. She must keep him well concealed until he should be strong enough to go far away, on the old round of travel and debauch, from city to city, wearing out his brutishness and returning to her only when spent.

The movements above increased. He was pounding at the door.

"Are you going to let me starve? Where are you?" the sick man called out querulously.

She sprang up; she had forgotten to get supper. When she took the food upstairs, Preston was dragging himself about the room. He was excited, and anxious to talk.

"Did that doctor fix me up? I don't remember seeing him in the hospital."

"He operated when you were received. He left the next day," she answered.

"It must have been a neat job. I guess I was in a pretty tough state," he mused more quietly. "How did he happen to look me up?"

"I met him accidentally in the park," she explained briefly, anxious to have done with the subject. "He offered to come back with me to see you. Perhaps," she added more bitterly, "he wanted to see what he had done."

"I suppose he knows?"

She nodded.

"Well, I can't see why he bothers around. I don't want his attentions."

As she prepared to leave the room, after pulling down the shades and opening the bed, he said apologetically:

"It was pretty good of you to take me in after—I have treated you badly, Alves. But it's no use in going back over that. I guess I was made so. There are lots of men like that, or worse."

"I suppose so," she assented coldly.

"Why are you so stiff with me? You hardly look at me, and you touch me as if I were a piece of dirt. Supposing I take a brace and we start over, somewhere else? I am tired of knocking round. Come over and kiss me, won't you?"

Mrs. Preston paused in her work, the color mounting in her face. At first she made no reply, but as she crossed to the door, she said in a cool, distant tone:

"I don't think I shall ever kiss you again or let you touch me, if I can help it. Do you happen to remember where I saw you last—I mean before I found you in the street—six months ago?"

His face grew troubled, as if he were trying to recollect.

"Oh! that woman? Well, that's past."

"Yes, that woman. I took you here," she continued, her full voice gathering passion, "because you are helpless and an outcast. And because I had taken you before, ignorantly, I feel bound to defend you as you never defended me. But I am not bound to do more, and you have sense enough—"

"You were ready enough to bind yourself, if I remember."

She answered meekly:

"I can't think it was the same woman who did that—who was blind and cheap enough to do that. Something has shown me that I am other than the foolish creature you took so easily with a marriage ring, because you could not have her in an easier way! But the old, silly country girl has gone and left me this——Why did it have to be?" she exclaimed more incoherently. "Why did you not let me read what you are? I had only a few wretched weeks to learn you—and I was ignorant and foolish and young. You had me helpless at Barrington! Was it such a clever thing to cheat a girl from a Wisconsin village?"

Preston answered apologetically,—

"Well, I married you."

"Married me! You make a good deal of that! Perhaps it would have been better if you had not married me. My child and I could have died together then. But I was married, and so I struggled. The child died, died, do you hear, because you had left me without money to get it what it needed. I sat and saw it die. You were—"

She closed her lips as if to repress further words. As she reached the door, she said in her usual neutral tones:

"So long as you are decent, keep from drinking, and don't get me into trouble at the school, you may stay and take what I can give you."

"'May stay!'" Preston roared, getting to his feet and making a step to intercept her before she closed the door. His legs trembled, and he fell. She knelt over him to see if he had injured himself, and then satisfied that he was not hurt, she left the room, barring the door from the outside. She was none too soon in taking this precaution, for as she swung the heavy oak bar into its socket,—a convenient device of the old German, who had the reputation of being a miser,—she could hear Preston dragging himself toward the door, cursing as he stumbled over the furniture. She crept wearily downstairs into the bare room. Some one was moving in the tiny kitchen beyond.

"Is that you, Anna?" Mrs. Preston called.

"Ye-es," a slow voice responded. Presently a young woman came forward. She was large and very fair, with the pale complexion and intense blue eyes of the Swede.

"I came in and found no one here, so I was cleaning up for you. I have time. John has gone to a meeting—there are many meetings now and not much work. You will eat something?"

She went back to the kitchen and returned with warm food.

"Yes, I am faint." Mrs. Preston's arms trembled. She laughed nervously as she spilled her tea.

"You are not well? You cannot live so—it's no use," the strong Swede continued monotonously. "The men are bad enough when they are good; but when they are bad, a woman can do nothing."

"Tell me about the strike."

Anna Svenson laughed contemptuously, as if such affairs were a part of men's foolishness.

"They're talking of going out, all the railroad men, if the roads use the Pullmans. That's what John has gone to see about. Work is hard to find, so they're going to make less of it."

She stood easily, her arms by her side, watching Mrs. Preston eat, and talking in an even, unexcited tone.

"Father likes the job I told you about—over at the lumber yards. He came in last Sunday. He says the folks out his way are near starving. Svenson thinks of quitting his job."

She laughed gently.

"Life is like that," Mrs. Preston assented. "You can't manage it."

"No, why should one?" Anna Svenson replied coolly. "Children come, they die, they grow up, they fight, they starve, and they have children. It was so over there; it is so here—only more pay and more drink some days; less pay, less drink other days. I shall wash the dishes. Sit still."

She came and went quickly, noiselessly. When everything had been done, she opened a window and leaned out, looking into the darkness. The fact of her presence seemed to bring peace to the room.

"It is a good night," she said, drawing her head in. "There, Svenson has lit the lamp. I must go."

"Good night, Anna." Mrs. Preston took her hand. It was large and cool.

"You shake hands?" Mrs. Svenson asked, with a smile. "When I was working out, people like you never shook hands."

"People like me! What have I that makes me different from you?"

"Oh, nothing; not much," she replied tranquilly.

With a sigh Mrs. Preston took up a bundle of grammar exercises and sorted them. She was too weary for this task: she could not go on just yet. She drew her chair over to the window and sat there long quarter hours, watching the electric cars. They announced themselves from a great distance by a low singing on the overhead wire; then with a rush and a rumble the big, lighted things dashed across the void, and rumbled on with a clatter of smashing iron as they took the switches recklessly. The noise soothed her; in the quiet intervals she was listening for sounds from upstairs. The night was still and languorous, one of the peaceful nights of large spaces when the heavens brood over the earth like a mother over a fretful child. At last no more cars came booming out of the distance. She shut the windows and bolted the door; then she prepared slowly to undress.

For the first time in months she looked at herself curiously, taking an impersonal, calm survey of this body. She sought for signs of slovenly decay,—thinning rusty hair, untidy nails, grimy hands, dried skin,—those marks which she had seen in so many teachers who had abandoned themselves without hope to the unmarried state and had grown careless of their bodies. As she wound her hair into heavy ropes and braided them, it gave her a sharp sense of joy, this body of hers, so firm and warm with blood, so unmarked by her sordid struggle. It was well to be one's self, to own the tenement of the soul; for a time it had not been hers—she reddened with the shame of the thought! But she had gained possession once more, never, never to lose it.

She listened carefully for noises from above; then flung herself on the couch, utterly wearied. In a moment she was asleep, having shed the years of pain, and a frank smile crept over the calm face.



CHAPTER X

After giving the invalid his breakfast, and arranging him on his couch where he could see the cars pass, Mrs. Preston hurried over to the Everglade School, which was only two blocks west of Stoney Island Avenue. At noon she slipped out, while the other teachers gathered in one of the larger rooms to chat and unroll their luncheons. These were wrapped in little fancy napkins that were carefully shaken and folded to serve for the next day. As the Everglade teachers had dismissed Mrs. Preston from the first as queer, her absence from the noon gossip was rather welcome, though resented.

The recess hour gave Mrs. Preston enough time to carry upstairs a cold meal, to take a hasty nibble of food, and to hurry back across the vacant lots before the gong should ring for the afternoon session. At the close of school she returned to the cottage more deliberately, to finish her house work before taking her daily walk. Occasionally she found this work already performed; Anna Svenson's robust form would greet her as she entered the cottage, with the apologetic phrase, "My fingers were restless." Mrs. Svenson had an unquenchable appetite for work. The two women would have a silent cup of tea; then Mrs. Svenson would smile in her broad, apathetic manner, saying, "One lives, you see, after all," and disappear through the oak copse. Thus very quickly between the school and the cottage Mrs. Preston's day arranged itself in a routine.

Three days after the unexpected visit from the doctor, Mrs. Preston found on her return from the school a woman's bicycle leaning against the gate. Under the arbor sat the owner of the bicycle, fanning herself with a little "perky" hat. She wore a short plaid skirt, high shoes elaborately laced, and a flaming violet waist. Her eyes were travelling over the cottage and all its premises.

"Miss M'Gann!" Mrs. Preston exclaimed.

"My!" the young woman responded, "but they did send you to kingdom come. You're the next thing, Alves, to Indiana. I do hope you can get out of this soon."

Mrs. Preston sat down beside her in the little arbor, and made polite inquiries about the school where they had taught together, about Jane M'Gann's "beaux," the "cat," and the "house" where she boarded.

"It was good of you to come all this way to see me," she concluded.

"I wanted a ride. We had a half day off—infectious disease in Rosa Macraw's room. Besides, I told the girls I'd hunt you out. How are you? You look rather down. Say, you mustn't shut yourself off here where folks can't get at you. Why don't you live up town, at the house?"

"I can't," Mrs. Preston answered briefly.

"Do you know the news? The 'cat' has gone up higher. They made him supervisor, 'count of his sly walk, I guess. And we've got a new principal. He's fine. You can just do what you want with him, if you handle him right. Oh, do you know Rosemarry King, the girl that used to dress so queer, has been discharged? She lived in bachelor-girl apartments with a lot of artists, and they say they were pretty lively. And Miss Cohen is going to be married, ain't coming back any more after this year. Some of us thought we could work it so as the new principal—Hoff's his name—would ask to have you transferred back to one of those places. There's just a chance. Now I've told all my news and everything!"

At that moment a man's figure appeared at an upper window. He was in a dressing-gown, and unshaven. Miss M'Gann's keen vision spied him at once.

"You'll get queer, if you stay here!" she said falteringly. "I guess I am queer already," Mrs. Preston answered with a smile. "Let us go inside and have some tea."

Miss M'Gann looked the room over critically.

"You must come down to the house some night soon and meet the principal. He rides a wheel, and we girls see considerable of him. If you are nice to him, he'll do anything—he is one of the soft kind, sweet on all women, and likes a little adoration."

"No, I don't believe I can." Mrs. Preston listened. There was noise in the chamber above. "Besides, I like it out here. I like the quiet," she added.

Miss M'Gann looked at her incredulously, as if she were waiting to hear more. As nothing came, she went on:

"We are having high times over the new readers. The 'cat' has done a set of readers for the fourth and fifth. McNamara and Hills are bringing 'em out. The Express Book Co. has a lot of money in the old ones, and they are fighting hard to keep the cat's out of the schools. They're sending men around to get reports from the teachers. There's a man, one of their agents, who comes over to the house pretty often. He's a college man, was a professor at Exonia."

"Excuse me," Mrs. Preston interrupted. The continued noise in the room overhead had made her more and more nervous. She had not heard Miss M'Gann's story, which would probably be the preface of a tender personal episode. "I will be back in a moment," she said, closing the sitting-room door carefully.

Miss M'Gann sat forward, listening intently. She could hear the stairs creak under Mrs. Preston's quick steps; then there was silence; then an angry voice, a man's voice. Excited by this mystery, she rose noiselessly and set the hall door ajar. She could hear Alves Preston's voice:

"You must not come down. You aren't fit."

"Thank you for your advice," a man's voice replied. "Who's your visitor? Some man? I am going to see. Don't make a scene."

There was the sound of a scuffle; then the cry of a woman, as she fell back exhausted from her physical struggle.

"P'r'aps he's murdering her!"

Miss M'Gann opened the door at the foot of the stairs wide enough to detect a half-clothed man trying to pry open with one arm a heavy door above. She hesitated for a moment, but when the man had shoved the door back a little farther, enough for her to see Mrs. Preston struggling with all her force, she called out:

"Can I help you, Mrs. Preston?"

"No, no, go back! Go out of the house!"

"Well, I never!" Miss M'Gann ejaculated, and retreated to the sitting room, leaving the door ajar, however.

The struggle ended shortly, and soon the man appeared, plunging, tumbling over the stairs. Wrenching open the front door he stumbled down the steps to the road. He was hatless, collarless, and his feet were shod in slippers. As he reached the gate he looked at himself as if accustomed to take pride in his personal appearance, drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wound it negligently about his neck. Then, gazing about to get his bearings, he aimed for the road. Just as he crossed the car tracks, heading for the saloon with the big sign, Mrs. Preston entered the room. Her face was pale and drawn. Miss M'Gann was too embarrassed to speak, and she pretended to look into the kitchen.

"You will see now why I don't want a transfer," Mrs. Preston began, to break the awkward silence. "I must look after my husband."

"My!" Miss M'Gann exclaimed, and then restrained herself. She nodded her head slowly, and crossed to where Mrs. Preston had seated herself.

"But it's terrible to think of you here alone," she remarked gently. She had intended to put her arm about Mrs. Preston's waist, but something deterred her. "I wish I could come out and stay right on. I'm going to spend the night, anyway. Father was that kind," she added in a lower voice.

Mrs. Preston winced under her sympathy and shook her head. "No, no! I am better alone. You mustn't stay."

"You'd ought to have some woman here," the girl insisted, with the feminine instinct for the natural league of women. "At least, some one to look after the house and keep you company."

"I have thought of trying to find a servant," Mrs. Preston admitted. "But what servant—" she left the sentence unfinished, "even if I could pay the wages," she continued. "Anna comes in sometimes—she's a young Swede who has a sister in the school. But I've got to get on alone somehow."

"Well, if that's what getting married is, it's no wonder more of us girls don't get married, as I told Mr. Dresser."

There was a knock at the outside door. Miss M'Gann quickly barricaded herself behind the long table, while Mrs. Preston opened the door and admitted the visitor. Miss M'Gann came forward with evident relief, and Mrs. Preston introduced her visitors, "Dr. Sommers, Miss M'Gann."

Miss M'Gann greeted the doctor warmly.

"Why, this must be Mr. Dresser's Dr. Sommers." The young doctor bowed and look annoyed. Miss M'Gann, finding that she could get little from either of the two silent people, took her leave.

"I'll not forget you, dear," she said, squeezing Mrs. Preston's hand.

When she had ridden away, Mrs. Preston returned to the little sitting room and dropped wearily into a chair.

"He has just gone, escaped!" she exclaimed. "Just before you came."

The doctor whistled. "Do you know where he's gone to?"

She pointed silently to the low wooden building across the neighboring avenue.

"If he makes a row, it will all get out. I shall lose my place."

The doctor nodded.

"Has it happened before?"

"He's tried of late. But I have kept him in and barred the door. This time he forced it open. I was not strong enough to hold it."

The doctor hesitated a moment, and then, as if making a sudden resolve, he took his hat.

"I'll try to bring him back."

From the open window she could see him walk leisurely down the lane to the street, and pick his way carefully over the broken planks of the sidewalk to the avenue. Then he disappeared behind the short shutters that crossed the door of the saloon.

For some reason this seemed the one thing unbearable in her experience. The bitterness of it all welled up and overflowed in a few hot tears that stung her hands as they dropped slowly from the burning eyes. It was a long time before the little blinds swung out, and the doctor appeared with her husband. Preston was talking affably, fluently, and now and then he tapped the doctor familiarly on his shoulders to emphasize a remark. Sommers responded enough to keep his companion's interest. Once he gently restrained him, as the hatless man plunged carelessly forward in front of an approaching car. As the pair neared the house, the woman at the window could hear the rapid flow of talk. Preston was excited, self-assertive, and elaborately courteous.

"After you, doctor. Will you come upstairs to my room?" she caught as they entered the gate. "My wife, doctor, is all right, good woman; but, like the rest of them, foolish."

And the babbling continued until some one closed the heavy door at the head of the stairs. Then there was noise, as of a man getting into bed. In time it was quiet, and just as she was about to make the effort of finding out what had happened, Sommers came downstairs and signed to her to sit down.

"I have given him a hypodermic injection. He won't trouble you any more to-night," he said, staring dreamily out into the twilight.



CHAPTER XI

"This is too much for you," Sommers observed finally.

After his meditation he had come to much the same obvious conclusion that Miss M'Gann had formed previously. The woman moved wearily in her chair.

"It can't go on," the doctor proceeded. "No one can tell what he might do in his accesses—what violence he would do to you, to himself."

"He may get better," she suggested.

Sommers shook his head slowly.

"I am afraid not; the only thing to be hoped for is that he will get worse, much worse, as rapidly as possible."

Mrs. Preston stood his questioning eyes as he delivered this unprofessional opinion.

"Meantime you must protect yourself. The least harm his outbreaks will do will be to make a scandal, to make it necessary for you to leave your school."

"What can I do?" she asked, almost irritably.

"There are institutions."

"I have no money."

"And I suppose they would not do, now, while he is apparently getting better. They would not help him, even if we should get him confined. His is one of those cases where the common law prescribes liberty."

There was nothing further to say in this direction. Sommers seemed to be thinking. At last, with an impulsive motion, he exclaimed:

"It should not have been! No, it should not have been."

He paused. Her eyes had lowered from his face. She knew his unexpressed thought.

"And more than that, if you and I and the world thought straight, he would not be here now."

"No, I suppose not," she acquiesced quietly, following his thought word by word. "Well, as it is, I guess it's for life—for my life, at least."

"If one could only love enough—" he mused.

"Love!" she exclaimed passionately, at this blasphemous intrusion. "Does one love such as that,—the man who betrayed your youth?"

"Not you and I. But one who could love enough—"

Her disdainful smile stopped him.

"I followed him to the hospital. I took him here, I don't know why. I guess it's my fate. He was once mine, and I can't escape that—but as to love—do you think I am as low as that?"

"You have no duties except the duties love makes," the doctor suggested. "He is no longer even the man you married. He is not a man in any sense of the word. He is merely a failure, a mistake; and if society is afraid to rid itself of him, society must provide for him."

"Yes, yes," she murmured, as if all this were familiar ground to her mind. "But I am the nearest member of society—the one whose business it is to attend to this mistake. It's my contribution," she ended with a feeble smile.

"Society has no right to expect too much from any one. The whole sacrifice mustn't fall where it crushes. I say that such a case should be treated by the public authorities, and should be treated once for all."

She rose and looked into his eyes, as if to say, 'You were society, and you did not dare.' In a moment she turned away, and said, "Don't you believe in a soul?"

"Yes," he smiled back. "And that poor soul and others like it, many, many thousands, who cannot grow, should be at rest—one long rest; to let other souls grow, unblasted by their foul touch."

"I have thought so," she replied calmly, taking his belief as an equal. "To let joy into the world somewhere before death." Her wistful tone rang out into the room. "But that would be murder," she continued. "We should have to call it murder, shouldn't we? And that is a fearful word. I could never quite forget it. I should always ask myself if I were right, if I had the right to judge. I am a coward. The work is too much for me."

"We will not think of it," Sommers replied abruptly, unconsciously putting himself in company with her, as she had herself with him. "We have but to follow the conventions of medicine and wait."

"Yes, wait!"

"Medicine, medicine," he continued irritably. "All our medicine is but a contrivance to keep up the farce, to continue the ills of humanity, to keep the wretched and diseased where they have no right to be!"

"And you are a doctor! How can you be?"

"Because," he answered in the same tone of unprofessional honesty that he had used toward her, "like most men, I am a coward and conventional. I have learned to do as the others do. Medicine and education!" Sommers laughed ironically. "They are the two sciences where men turn and turn and emit noise and do nothing. The doctor and the teacher learn a few tricks and keep on repeating them as the priest does the ceremony of the mass."

"That's about right for the teacher," she laughed. "We cut our cloth almost all alike."

Unconsciously they drifted farther and farther into intimacy. Sommers talked as he thought, with question and protest, intolerant of conventions, of formulas. They forgot the diseased burden that lay in the chamber above, with its incessant claims, its daily problems. They forgot themselves, thus strangely brought together and revealed to each other, at one glance as it were, without the tiresome preliminary acquaintanceship of civilization. It had grown dark in the room before Sommers came back to the reality of an evening engagement.

"You can get a train on the railroad west of the avenue," Mrs. Preston suggested. "But won't you let me give you something to eat?"

"Not this time," Sommers answered, taking his hat "Perhaps when I come again—in a few days. I want to think—what can be done."

She did not urge him to stay. She was surprised at her boldness in suggesting it. He had assumed the impersonal, professional manner once more. That precious hour of free talk had been but an episode, a relaxation. He gave directions as he went to the door.

"The patient will sleep till to-morrow. It will take two or three days to get over this relapse."

Then he took a pad from his pocket and scribbled a prescription.

"Should he grow unmanageable, you had better give him one of these powders—two, if necessary. But no more; they are pretty strong."

He placed the leaf of pencilled paper on the table. The next minute his rapid footsteps crunched on the gravel path. Even after he was gone and she was left quite alone in her old condition, the dead, nerveless sense of despair did not return. An unreasonable lightness of spirit buoyed her—a feeling that after a desolate winter a new season was coming, that her little world was growing larger, lighting indefinably with rare beauty.



CHAPTER XII

The engagement was not one to be missed, at least by a young professional man who had his way to make, his patients to assemble, in the fierce struggle of Chicago. The occasion was innocent enough and stupid enough,—a lecture at the Carsons' by one of the innumerable lecturers to the polite world that infest large cities. The Pre-Aztec Remains in Mexico, Sommers surmised, were but a subterfuge; this lecture was merely one of the signs that the Carsons had arrived at a certain stage in their pilgrimage.

They had come from Omaha five years before; they were on their way to New York, where they would be due five years hence. From railroad law, Carson had grown to the business of organizing monopolies. Some of his handiworks in this order of art had been among the first to take the field. He was resting now, while the country was suffering from its prolonged fit of the blues, and his wife was organizing their social life. They had picked up a large house on the North Boulevard, a bargain ready for their needs; it had been built for the Bidwells, just before the panic.

A rapid glance over the rooms proved to Sommers that Mrs. Carson was as clever a manipulator of capitalists as her husband. There were a few of the more important people of the city, such as Alexander Hitchcock, Ferdinand Dunster, the Polot families, the Blaisdells, the Anthons. There were also a few of the more distinctly "smart" people, and a number who might be counted as social possibilities. Sommers had seen something in a superficial way of many of these people. Thanks to the Hitchcocks' introduction, and also to the receptive attitude of a society that was still very largely fluid, he had gone hither and thither pretty widely during this past year. There were quieter, less pretentious circles than this in which the Carsons aspired to move, but he had not yet found them. Anything that had a retiring disposition disappeared from sight in Chicago. Society was still a collection of heterogeneous names that appeared daily in print. As such it offered unrivalled opportunities for aspiration.

Sommers had not come to the Carsons in the fulfilment of an aspiration. Mrs. R. Gordon Carson bored him. Her fussy conscious manners bespoke too plainly the insignificant suburban society in which she had played a minor part. He came because Dr. Lindsay had told him casually that Louise Hitchcock was in town again. He arrived late, when the lecture was nearly over, and lingered in the hall on the fringe of the gathering.

Carson had some reputation for his pictures. There was one, a Sargent, a portrait of the protagonist in this little drama of success, that hung in a recess of the hall at the foot of the stairs. R. Gordon Carson, as the great psychologist had seen him, was a striking person, an embodiment of modern waywardness, an outcropping of the trivial and vulgar. In a sacque coat, with the negligent lounging air of the hotel foyer, he stared at you, this Mr. R. Gordon Carson, impudently almost, very much at his ease. Narrow head, high forehead, thin hair, large eyes, a great protruding nose, a thin chin, smooth-shaven, yet with a bristly complexion,—there he was, the man from an Iowa farm, the man from the Sioux Falls court-house, the man from Omaha, the man now fully ripe from Chicago. Here was no class, no race, nothing in order; a feature picked up here, another there, a third developed, a fourth dormant—the whole memorable but unforgivably ordinary.

Not far away, standing in the doorway of the next room, was Carson himself. The great painter had undressed him and revealed him. What a comment to hang in one's own home! The abiding impression of the portrait was self-assurance; hasty criticism would have called it conceit. All the deeper qualities of humanity were rubbed out for the sake of this one great expression of egotism.

When the lecture was finished, a little group formed about the host; he was telling his experience with the great master, a series of anecdotes that had made his way in circles where success was not enough.

"I knew he was a hard customer," Sommers overheard him saying, "and I gave him all the rope he wanted. 'It may be two years before I do anything on your portrait, Mr. Carson,' he said.

"'Take five,' I told him.

"'I shall charge five thousand.'

"'Make it ten,' said I.

"'I shall paint your ears.'

"'And the nose too.'

"Well, he sent it to me inside of a year with his compliments. The fancy struck him, he wrote. It was easy to do; I was a good type and all that. Well, there it is."

He turned on an additional bunch of electric lights before the picture.

"Good, isn't it?" Miss Hitchcock exclaimed behind Sommers.

"Too good," he muttered. "I shouldn't have dared to hang it."

The girl's smooth brow contracted.

"Don't you think it was fine, though, his making up his mind out there in Sioux Falls that what he wanted was pictures, and the best pictures, and that he'd have Sargent do his portrait?"

"No more than it's fine for all the rest of these well-dressed men and women to make up their minds that they want to be rich and luxurious and important and all that."

Her face became still more puzzled.

"But it is fine! And the successful people are the interesting people."

"That has nothing to do with the matter," he returned dogmatically.

"Don't you think so?" she replied distantly, with a note of reproof in her voice. He was too young, too unimportant to cast such aspersion upon this comfortable, good-natured world where there was so much fun to be had. She could not see the possessing image in his mind, the picture of the afternoon—the unsuccessful woman.

"There is nothing honorable in wealth," he added, as she turned to examine a delicate landscape. Her eyes flashed defiantly.

"It means—"

"All this," he moved his hand contemptuously. "Ah, yes, and a lot more," he added, as her lip trembled. "It shows power and ability and thrift and purpose and provides means for generosity and philanthropy. But it rots."

"What do you mean?"

"Because it turns the people who have it into a class that come to feel themselves divinely appointed. Whereas it is all a gamble, a lucky gamble!"

"Not all wealth is a lucky gamble!" she retorted hotly.

Sommers paused, discomfited at the personal turn to the thought.

"I think the most successful would be the first to admit it," he answered thoughtfully.

"I don't understand you," the girl replied more calmly. "I suppose you are a socialist, or something of that sort. I can't understand such matters well enough to argue with you. And I hoped to find you in another mood when I came back; but we fall out always, it seems, over the most trivial matters."

"I am afraid I am very blunt," he said contritely. "I came here to find you; what do you want me to talk about,—Stewart's engagement to Miss Polot? It was given the chief place in the newspaper this morning."

"Sh, sh!" Miss Hitchcock exclaimed cautiously. Little groups were moving in and out of the rooms, and at that moment a pale-faced, slight young man came up to Miss Hitchcock.

"May I offer my congratulations?" she said, turning to him with the smile that Sommers's remark had caused still on her lips. The young man simpered, uttered the requisite platitude, and moved away.

"Did you congratulate him on the Polot connection or on the girl?" the young doctor asked.

"You don't know Estelle Polot! She is impossible. But Burton Stewart has got just what he wanted. No one thought that he would do as well as that. You know they are fearfully rich—she can't escape having a number of millions. Don't you think a man of forty is to be congratulated on having what he has been looking for for twenty years?"

Miss Hitchcock's neat, nonchalant enunciation gave the picture additional relief.

"I don't see how he has the face to show himself. All these people are laughing about it."

"It is a bad case, but don't you believe that they are not envying him and praising him. He is a clever man, and he won't let the Polot money go to waste. He has taken the largest purse—the rest were too light."

Miss Hitchcock seemed to find infinite resources of mirth in the affair. Other people drifted by them. Several of the younger women stopped and exchanged amused glances with Miss Hitchcock.

"He's been attentive to all these," Miss Hitchcock explained to Sommers.

"The Polot money is very bad, isn't it?"

Miss Hitchcock shrugged her shoulders.

"It is current coin."

"The system is worse than the dot and mariage de convenance. There is no pretension of sentiment in that, at least. See him hanging over the girl—faugh!"

"You are crude," Miss Hitchcock admitted, candidly. "Let us move out of this crowd. Some one will overhear you."

They sauntered into the dimly lighted hall, where there were fewer people, and he continued truculently:

"I remember that side by side with the report of Miss Polot's engagement was a short account of the starvation at Pullman, and another column was headed, 'Nothing to arbitrate: Pullman says he has nothing to arbitrate.' Did you see that the reporters carefully estimated just how much Miss Polot's share of the plunder would be?"

"What you need is golf. I have been teaching papa at the Springs. It is a great resource, and it increases your sense of humor."

"It doesn't seem to have rested you," Sommers answered. "You are tired or worried."

"Worse yet!" she laughed nervously. "Clearly, you won't do. You must go back to Marion."

She looked up at him from her low seat with brilliant, mocking eyes. "I have thought of that. It would not be the worst thing that could happen. Would you think it possible—Marion?" he asked clumsily.

Her eyes did not fall, but rested steadily on his face. Under this clear gaze his remark appeared to him preposterous. She seemed to show him how precipitate, unformed,—crude, as she said,—all his acts were. Instead of answering his question, she said gently:

"Yes, you are right. I am worried, and I came here tonight to escape it. But one doesn't escape worries with you. One increases them. You make me feel guilty, uncomfortable. Now get me something thoroughly cold, and perhaps we can have that long-promised talk."

When Sommers returned with a glass of champagne, a number of men had gathered about Miss Hitchcock, and she left him on the outside, intentionally it seemed, while she chatted with them, bandying allusions that meant nothing to him. Sommers saw that he had been a bore. He slipped out of the group and wandered into the large library, where the guests were eating and drinking. A heavy, serious man, whom he had seen at various places, spoke to him. He said something about the lecture, then something about Miss Polot's engagement. "They'll go to New York," he ventured. "Stewart has some position there, some family." He talked about the Stewarts and the Polots, and finally he went to the dressing room to smoke.

Sommers had made up his mind to leave, and was looking for Mrs. Carson, when he came across Miss Hitchcock again.

"The man you were talking with is quite a tragedy," she said unconcernedly, picking up the conversation where she had dropped it. "I knew him when he left college. He was an athletic fellow, a handsome man. His people were nice, but not rich. He was planning to go to Montana to take a place in some mines, but he got engaged to the daughter of a very wealthy man. He didn't go. He married Miss Prudence Fisher, and he has simply grown fat. It's an old story—"

"And a tragic enough one. We ought to change the old proverb, 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a poor man to marry a rich man's daughter.'"

"It ought not to be so, if the man were a man."

She dwelt upon the last word until the young doctor's face flushed. Then with the sudden transition of mood, which so often perplexed Sommers, she said gently, confidently:

"You are quite right. My journey did me no good. There were worries, and we can't go away this summer. The business situation will keep papa here, and he is so lonely without me that I hadn't the heart to suggest leaving him. So we have taken a house at Lake Forest. I shall teach you golf at the new Country Club, if you will deign to waste your time on us. You will see more of these good people."

"You must think me—" Sommers began penitently.

"Yes, they would say 'raw' and 'green.' I don't know. I must go now."

A few minutes later, Sommers met Colonel Hitchcock in the dressing room. As he was leaving, the old merchant detained him.

"Are you going north? Perhaps you will wait for me and let me take you to the city. Louise is going on to a dance."

Sommers waited outside the room. From the bedroom at the end of the hall came a soft murmur of women's voices. He hoped that Miss Hitchcock would appear before her father took him off. He should like to see her again—to hear her voice. Every moment some one nodded to him, distracting his attention, but his eyes reverted immediately to the end of the hall. Men and women were passing out, down the broad staircase that ended in front of the intelligent portrait. The women in rich opera cloaks, the men in black capes carrying their crush hats under their arms, were all alike; they were more like every other collection of the successful in the broad earth than one might have expected.

Sommers caught bits of the conversation.

"Jim has taken the Paysons' place."

"Is that so? We are going to York."

"—Shall join them in Paris—dinner last Friday—did you see The Second Mrs. Tanqueray—our horses are always ill—"

It sounded like the rustle of skirts, the stretching of kid. There was dulness in the atmosphere. Yet if it was dull, Sommers realized that it was his own fault—a conclusion he usually took away with him from the feasts of the rich which he attended. He lacked the power to make the most of his opportunities. The ability to cultivate acquaintances, to push his way into a good place in this sleek company of the well-to-do,—an ability characteristically American,—he was utterly without. It would be better for him, he reflected with depression, to return to Marion, Ohio, or some similar side-track of the world, or to reenter the hospital and bury himself in a quite subordinate position.

There was still an eddy of guests about the host and his wife near the great portrait. They were laughing loudly. Carson's thin face was beaming. Even Mrs. Carson's face had lost some of its tension. Sommers could watch her manner from his position in the upper hall. She was dismissing a minor guest with a metallic smile. 'To aspire to this!' he murmured unconsciously. 'This, the triumph of success!'

"Still waiting?"

Miss Hitchcock was passing, her long wrap trailing lightly behind. Her eyes glowed underneath a white mantilla.

"I am ready to go now," Sommers replied. "You are too tired for the dance."

"I must go—I can't bear to miss anything. It is stupid—but it is exciting at the same time. Good-by. Remember, Lake Forest in a fortnight. And learn to take it easily!"

She smiled and disappeared in the wake of Mrs. Porter. How easily she seemed to take it! The man she married would have to be of the world, as large a world as she could contrive to get. She would always be "going on." Imaginatively, with the ignorance of a young man, he attributed to her appetites for luxury, for power, for success. He was merely an instance of her tolerance. Really he was a very little thing in her cosmos, and if he wished to be more, he would have to take an interest in just this.

Colonel Hitchcock came out at last, in close conversation with old Blaisdell. They were talking business. Hitchcock's kindly face was furrowed and aged, Sommers noticed. The old merchant put his arm through the young doctor's, and with this support Sommers received the intimate farewell from Mrs. Carson.

Colonel Hitchcock ordered the driver to take them to the Metropolitan Club.

"Our talk may take us some time," he explained. "I have been trying to find you for several days. I have something to ask you to do for me. You may think it strange that I should go to you instead of to one of my old friends. But it is something Isaac would have done for me. It is for my boy."

The weariness of years was in his voice. As briefly and as simply as he could, he stated the matter. Parker had disappeared; he had gone to New York and there drawn heavily on his father. The journey which Colonel Hitchcock had made with his daughter had been largely for the purpose of finding Parker, and had failed. The boy was ashamed to come back. Now there was a clew, but it seemed unwise for the father to follow it up himself.

"I don't understand the boy," Colonel Hitchcock concluded. "I'm afraid everything I do is wrong. I get angry. I have no patience with his polo, his spending so much money uselessly—he spends ten times as much money as any man among my friends did at his age."

"You have ten times as much as any one of their fathers had," Sommers protested with a smile.

"Well, then, I guess I had better stop, if that's what it means. He may find there isn't so much after all. This panic is pushing me. I can't leave Chicago another day. He should be here fighting with me, helping me—and he is sneaking in some hotel, with his tail between his legs."

He breathed heavily at the bitterness of the thought. Everything in his life had been honorable, open to all: he had fought fair and hard and long—for this.

"If it weren't for Louise and his mother, I would let him starve until he was ready to come home. But his mother is ill—she can't be troubled."

"And you can't let him disgrace himself publicly—do something that would make it hard for him to come back at all," Sommers suggested.

"No, I suppose not," the older man admitted, with a grateful glance. "I can't refuse to help him, poor boy; perhaps I have made him weak."

Sommers offered to do what he could,—to hunt Parker up, get him on his feet, and bring him back to Chicago. He would leave that night. They had stopped at the club to finish their talk, and while Colonel Hitchcock was writing some letters, Sommers drove to his rooms for his bag. It was nearly midnight before he returned. As they drove over to the station, Colonel Hitchcock said:

"I have told him the whole thing: how hard pressed I am; how his mother is worrying and ill—well, I don't feel it will make much difference. He could see all that."

"You must remember that he has always had every inducement to enjoy himself," the young doctor ventured. "He doesn't understand your life. You sent him to a very nice private school, and whenever he failed got him tutors. You made him feel that he was a special case in the world. And he has always been thrown with boys and young men who felt they were special cases. At college he lived with the same set—"

"His mother and I wanted him to start with every advantage, to have a gentleman's education. At home he's seen nothing of extravagance and self-indulgence."

Sommers nodded sympathetically. It was useless to discuss the matter. The upright, courageous old merchant, whose pride was that he had never committed one mean action in the accumulation of his fortune, could never understand this common misfortune. He belonged to a different world from that in which his son was to take his part. They turned to other topics,—the business depression, the strike, the threatened interference of the American Railway Union.

"Blaisdell, who is the general manager of the C. K. and G.," Colonel Hitchcock remarked, "was saying tonight that he expected the Pullman people would induce the A. R. U. to strike. If they stir up the unions all over the country, business will get worse and worse. All we needed to make things as bad as can be was a great railroad strike."

"I suppose so," Sommers responded. "Why won't the Pullman people consent to arbitrate?"

The old merchant shook his head.

"They'd divide their twenty millions of surplus and go out of business first. They say they're saving money on the strike. Did you ever know of people with the whip-hand who had anything to arbitrate?"



CHAPTER XIII

Dr. Lindsay's offices were ingeniously arranged on three sides of the Athenian Building. The patient entering from the hall, just beside the elevators, passed by a long, narrow corridor to the waiting room, and thence to one of the tiny offices of the attending physicians; or, if he were fortunate enough, he was led at once to the private office of the great Lindsay, at the end of the inner corridor. By a transverse passage he was then shunted off to a door that opened into the public hall just opposite the elevator well. The incoming patient was received by a woman clerk, who took his name, and was dismissed by another woman clerk, who collected fees and made appointments. If he came by special appointment, several stages in his progress were omitted, and he passed at once to one of the smaller offices, where he waited until the machine was ready to proceed with his case. Thus in the office there was a perpetual stream of the sick and suffering, in, around, out, crossed by the coming and going through transverse passages of the "staff," the attendants, the clerks, messengers, etc. Each atom in the stream was welling over with egotistic woes, far too many for the brief moment in which he would be closeted with the great one, who held the invisible keys of relief, who penetrated this mystery of human maladjustment. It was a busy, toiling, active, subdued place, where the tinkle of the telephone bell, the hum of electric annunciators, as one member of the staff signalled to another, vibrated in the tense atmosphere. Into this hive poured the suffering, mounting from the street, load after load, in the swiftly flying cages; their visit made, their joss-sticks burned, they dropped down once more to the chill world below, where they must carry on the burden of living.

The attending physicians arrived at nine. The "shop," as they called it, opened at ten; Lindsay was due at eleven and departed at three. Thereafter the hive gradually emptied, and by four the stenographers and clerks were left alone to attend to purely business matters. Sommers came late the day after his return from New York. The general door being opened to admit a patient, he walked in and handed his coat and hat to the boy in buttons at the door. The patient who had entered with him was being questioned by the neat young woman whose business it was to stand guard at the outer door.

"What is your name, please?"

Her tones were finely adjusted to the caste of the patient. Judging from the icy sharpness on this occasion, the patient was not high in the scale.

"Caroline Ducharme," the woman replied.

"Write it out, please."

The patient did so with some difficulty, scrawling half over the neat pad the clerk pushed toward her.

"You wish to consult Dr. Lindsay?"

"The big doctor,—yes, mum."

"Did he make an appointment with you?"

"What's that?"

"Have you been here before?"

"No, mum."

"You will have to pay the fee in advance."

"What's that, please?"

"Ten dollars."

"Ten?"

The clerk tapped irritably on her desk with her pencil.

"Yes, ten dollars for the first visit; five after that; operations from fifty to five hundred."

The woman clutched tightly a small reticule. "I hain't the money!" she exclaimed at last. "I thought it would be two dollars."

"You'll have to go to the hospital, then."

The clerk turned to a pile of letters.

"Don't he see nobody here without he pays ten?" the woman asked.

"No."

"Where is the hospital?"

"St. Isidore's—the clinic is every other Saturday at nine."

"But my head hurts awful bad. The doctor up our way don't know anything about it."

The clerk no longer answered; she had turned half around in her swivel-chair. Sommers leaned over her desk, and said,—

"Show her into my room, No. 3, Miss Clark."

"Dr. Lindsay is very particular," the clerk protested.

"I will be responsible," Sommers answered sharply, in the tone he had learned to use with hospital clerks when they opposed his will. He turned to get his mail. The clerk shrugged her shoulders with a motion that said, 'Take her there yourself.' Sommers beckoned to the woman to follow him. He took her to one of the little compartments on the inner corridor, which was lined with strange devices: electrical machines, compressed air valves, steam sprays—all the enginery of the latest invention.

"Now what is it?" he asked gruffly. He was vexed that the matter should occur at this time, when he was on rather cool terms with Lindsay. The case proved to be an interesting one, however. There were nervous complications; it could not be diagnosed at a glance. After spending half an hour in making a careful examination, he gave the woman a preliminary treatment, and dismissed her with directions to call the next day.

"You will lose your eyesight, if you don't take care," he said. "We'll see to-morrow."

"No," the woman shook her head. "I've had enough of her lip. You'se all right; but I guess I'll have to go blind. I can't stand your prices. Here's two dollars, all I got."

She held out a dirty bill.

"In the world?" Sommers added smilingly. It was a familiar formula.

"Just about," she admitted defiantly. "And if my eyes go back on me, I guess 'twill be St. Isidore, or St. Somebody. You see I need my eyes pretty bad just now for one thing."

"What's that?" the doctor asked good-naturedly, waving the money aside.

"To look for him. He's in Chicago somewheres, I know."

"Ducharme?" the doctor inquired carelessly.

The woman nodded, her not uncomely broad face assuming a strange expression of determined fierceness. At that moment an assistant rapped at the door with a summons from Dr. Lindsay.

"Turn up this evening, then, at the address on this card," Sommers said to Mrs. Ducharme, handing her his card.

He would have preferred hearing that story about Ducharme to charging old P. F. Wort with electricity. He went through the treatment with his accustomed deftness, however. As he was leaving the room, Dr. Lindsay asked him to wait.

"Mr. Porter is about to go abroad, to try the baths at Marienbad. I have advised him to take one of our doctors with him to look after his diet and comfort in travelling,—one that can continue our treatment and be companionable. It will just take the dull season. I'd like to run over myself, but my affairs—"

Lindsay completed the idea by sweeping his broad, fleshy hand over the large office desk, which was loaded with letters, reports, and documents of various kinds.

"What d'ye say, Sommers?"

"Do you think Porter would want me?" Sommers asked idly. He had seen in the paper that morning that Porter was out of town, and was going to Europe for his health. Porter had been out of town, persistently, ever since the Pullman strike had grown ugly. The duties of the directors were performed, to all intents and purposes, by an under-official, a third vice-president. Those duties at present consisted chiefly in saying from day to day: "The company has nothing to arbitrate. There is a strike; the men have a right to strike. The company doesn't interfere with the men," etc. The third vice-president could make these announcements as judiciously as the great Porter.

"I have an idea," continued Sommers, "that Porter might not want me; he has never been over-cordial."

"Nonsense!" replied the busy doctor. "Porter will take any one I advise him to. All expenses and a thousand dollars—very good pay."

"Is Porter very ill?" Sommers asked. "I thought he was in fair health, the last time I saw him."

Lindsay looked at the young doctor with a sharp, experienced glance. There was a half smile on his face as he answered soberly:

"Porter has been living rather hard. He needs a rest—fatty degeneration may set in."

"Brought on by the strike?"

Lindsay smiled broadly this time.

"Coincident with the strike, let us say."

"I don't believe I can leave Chicago just now," the young doctor replied finally.

Lindsay stared at him as if he were demented.

"I've a case or two I am interested in," Sommers explained nonchalantly. "Nothing much, but I don't care to leave. Besides, I don't think Porter would be an agreeable companion."

"Very well," Lindsay replied indifferently. "French will go—a jolly, companionable, chatty fellow."

The young doctor felt that Lindsay was enumerating pointedly the qualities he lacked.

"Porter's connection will be worth thousands to the man he takes to. He's in a dozen different corporations where they pay good salaries to physicians. Of course, if you've started a practice already—"

"I don't suppose my cases are good for ten dollars."

Lindsay's handsome, gray-whiskered face expressed a polite disgust.

"There's another matter I'd like to speak about—"

"The patient Ducharme?" Sommers asked quickly.

"I don't know her name,—the woman Miss Clark says you admitted against my rules. You know there are the free dispensaries for those who can't pay, and, indeed, I give my own services. I cannot afford to maintain this plant without fees. In short, I am surprised at such a breach of professional etiquette."

Sommers got up from his seat nervously and then sat down again. Lindsay undoubtedly had the right to do exactly what he pleased on his own premises.

"Very well," he replied shortly. "It shan't occur again. I have told the Ducharme woman to call at my rooms for treatment, and I will give Miss Clark her ten dollars. She was an exceptionally interesting and instructive case."

Lindsay elevated his eyebrows politely.

"Yes, yes, but you know we specialists are so liable to be imposed upon. Every one tries to escape his fee; no one would employ Carson, for example, unless he had the means to pay his fee, would he?"

"The cases are not exactly parallel."

"All cases of employment are parallel," Lindsay replied with emphasis. "Every man is entitled to what he can get, from the roustabout on the wharf to our friend Porter, and no more."

"I have often thought," Sommers protested rather vaguely, "that clergymen and doctors should be employed by the state to do what they can; it isn't much!"

"There are the hospitals." Lindsay got up from his chair at the sound of an electric bell. "And our very best professional men practise there, give their time and money and strength. You will have to excuse me, as Mr. Carson has an appointment, and I have already kept him waiting. Will you see Mrs. Winter and young Long at eleven thirty and eleven forty-five?"

As Sommers was leaving, Lindsay called out over his shoulder, "And can you take the clinic, Saturday? I must go to St. Louis in consultation. General R. P. Atkinson, president of the Omaha and Gulf, an old friend—"

"Shall be delighted," the young doctor replied with a smile.

As he stepped into the corridor, one of the young women clerks was filling in an appointment slip on the long roll that hung on a metal cylinder. This was an improved device, something like a cash-register machine, that printed off the name opposite a certain hour that was permanently printed on the slip. The hours of the office day were divided into five-minute periods, but, as two assisting physicians were constantly in attendance beside Sommers, the allotted time for each patient was about fifteen minutes.

"Mrs. Winter is in No. 3," the clerk told him. "Long in No. 1, and Mr. Harrison and a Miss Frost in the reception room."

So the machine ground on. Even the prescriptions were formularized to such an extent that most of them were stencilled and went by numbers. The clerk at the end of the corridor handed the patient a little card, on which was printed No. 3033, No. 3127, etc., as he circled by in the last turn of the office. There was an apothecary store on the floor below, where the patient could sit in an easy-chair and read the papers while the prescription called for by his number was being fetched by an elegant young woman.

Sommers hurried through with Mrs. Winter, who was a fussy, nervous little woman from the West Side; she resented having "a young feller" thrust on her.

"I knew Dr. Lindsay when he was filling prescriptions on Madison Street," she said spitefully.

Sommers smiled. "That must have been a good while ago, before Chicago was a big place."

"Before you was born, young man; before all the doctors who could came down here in a bunch and set up offices and asked fees enough of a body to keep 'em going for a year!"

Then young Long; then one, two, three new patients, who had to have physical examinations before being admitted to Lindsay. Once or twice Lindsay sent for Sommers to assist him in a delicate matter, and Sommers hurried off, leaving his half-dressed patient to cool his heels before a radiator. After the examinations there was an odd patient or two that Lindsay had left when he had gone out to lunch with some gentlemen at the Metropolitan Club. By two o'clock Sommers got away to take a hasty luncheon in a bakery, after which he returned to a new string of cases.

To-day "the rush," as the clerks called it, was greater than usual. The attendants were nervous and irritable, answered sharply and saucily, until Sommers felt that the place was intolerable. All this office practice got on his nerves. It was too "intensive." He could not keep his head and enter thoroughly into the complications of a dozen cases, when they were shoved at him pell-mell. He realized that he was falling into a routine, was giving conventional directions, relying upon the printed prescriptions and mechanical devices. All these devices were ingenious,—they would do no harm,—and they might do good, ought to do good,—if the cursed human system would only come up to the standard.

At last he seized his coat and hat, and escaped. The noiseless cage dropped down, down, past numerous suites of doctors' offices similar to Lindsay's, with their ground-glass windows emblazoned by dozens of names. This building was a kind of modern Chicago Lourdes. All but two or three of the suites were rented to some form of the medical fraternity. Down, down: here a druggist's clerk hailing the descending car; there an upward car stopping to deliver its load of human freight bound for the rooms of another great specialist,—Thornton, the skin doctor. At last he reached the ground floor and the gusty street. Across the way stood a line of carriages waiting for women who were shopping at the huge dry-goods emporium, and through the barbaric displays of the great windows Sommers could see the clerks moving hither and thither behind the counters. It did not differ materially from his emporium: it was less select, larger, but not more profitable, considering the amount of capital employed, than his shop. Marshall Field decked out the body; Lindsay, Thornton, and Co. repaired the body as best they could. It was all one trade.

On State Street the sandwich men were sauntering dejectedly through the crowd of shoppers: "Professor Herman Sorter, Chiropodist." "Go to Manassas for Spectacles";—it was the same thing. Across the street, on the less reputable western side, flared the celluloid signs of the quacks: "The parlors of famous old Dr. Green." "The original and only Dr. Potter. Visit Dr. Potter. No cure, no charge. Examination free." The same business! Lindsay would advertise as "old Dr. Lindsay," if it paid to advertise,—paid socially and commercially. Dr. Lindsay's offices probably "took in" more in a month than "old Dr. Green" made in a year, without the expense of advertising. Lindsay would lose much more by adopting the methods of quackery than he could ever make: he would lose hospital connections, standing in the professional journals, and social prestige. Lindsay was quite shrewd in sticking to the conventions of the profession.



CHAPTER XIV

When Sommers reached his rooms that evening, he found Mrs. Ducharme waiting for him. She held in her hand his card.

"I thought you'd give me the go-by," she exclaimed, as he entered. "Your kind is smooth enough, but they don't want to be bothered. But I came all the same—on the chance."

"What have you been doing?" the doctor inquired, without noticing her surliness. "Walking about in the streets all day and making your inflammation worse?"

"Well, you see I must find him, and I don't know where to look for him."

"Well, you won't find your husband walking about the streets, especially if he's gone off with another woman; but you will get blind and have to go to the hospital!"

"Well, I'll kill her first."

"You will do nothing of the sort," said the doctor, wearily. "You'll make a fuss, and your husband will hit you again, and go away."

"He was all right, as nice a man as you could find before she came to Peory. You see she is married to another man, a baker, and they lived in Decatur. Ducharme—he's a Frenchman—knew her in Decatur where he worked in a restaurant, and he came to Peory to get rid of her. And he got a job and was real steady and quiet. Then we got married, and Ducharme was as nice a man as you ever knew. But we wasn't married a week—we had a kafe together—before she got wind o' his being married and come to town. He told me she was trying to get him to go away, and he said how he didn't want to; but she had influence with him and was worrying around. Well, the third day he sent me a note by a little boy. 'Caroline,' it said, 'you'se a good woman and an honest woman and we could get on first rate together; but, Caroline, I don't love you when she is about. She calls me, and I go.'"

"Well, that's all there is to it, isn't it?" Sommers asked, half amused. "You can't keep him away from the other woman. Now you are a sensible, capable woman. Just give him up and find a place to work."

Mrs. Ducharme shook her head sorrowfully.

"That won't do. I just think and think, and I can't work. He was such a nice man, so gentlemanlike and quiet, so long as she stayed away. But I didn't tell you: I found 'em in Peory in a place not fit for hogs to live in, and I watched my chance and gave it to the woman. But Ducharme came in and he pushed me out, and I fell, and guess I cracked my head. That's when my eye began to hurt. The kafe business ran out, and I followed them to Chicago. And here I been for three months, doing most anything, housework generally. But I can't keep a place. Just so often I have to up and out on the road and try to find him. I'll brain that woman yet!"

She uttered this last assertion tranquilly.

"She don't amount to much,—a measly, sandy-haired, cheap thing. I come of respectable folks, who had a farm outer Gales City, and never worked out 'fore this happened. But now I can't settle down to nothin'; it's always that Frenchman before my eyes, and her."

"Well, and after you have found her and disposed of her?" asked Sommers.

"Oh, Ducharme will be all right then! He'll follow me like a lamb. He doesn't want to mess around with such. But she's got some power over him."

"Simply he wants to live with her and not with you."

The woman nodded her head sadly.

"I guess that's about it; but you see if she weren't around, he wouldn't know that he didn't love me."

Mrs. Ducharme wiped away her tears, and looked at the doctor in hopes that he might suggest some plan by which she could accomplish her end. To him she was but another case of a badly working mechanism. Either from the blow on her head or from hereditary influences she had a predisposition to a fixed idea. That tendency had cultivated this aberration about the woman her husband preferred to her. Should she happen on this woman in her wanderings about Chicago, there would be one of those blind newspaper tragedies,—a trial, and a term of years in prison. As he meditated on this an idea seized the doctor; there was a way to distract her.

"The best thing for you to do," he said severely, "is to go to work."

"Can't get no place," she replied despondently. "Have no references and can't keep a place. See a feller going up the street that looks like Ducharme, and I must go after him."

"I have a place in mind where you won't be likely to see many men that look like Ducharme!"

He explained to her the situation of the Ninety-first Street cottage, and what Mrs. Preston needed.

"You take this note there to-morrow morning, and tell her that you are willing to work for a home. Then I'll attend to the wages. If you do what I want,—keep that fellow well locked up and relieve Mrs. Preston of care,—I'll give you good wages. Not a word to her, mind, about that. And when you want to hunt Ducharme, just notify Mrs. Preston and go ahead. Only see that you hunt him in the daytime. Don't leave her alone nights. Now, let's see your eye."

The woman took the brief note which he scribbled after examining her, and said dejectedly:

"She won't want me long—no one does, least of all Ducharme."

Sommers laughed.

"Guess I better go straight down," she remarked more hopefully as she left.

He should have taken the woman to the cottage, he reflected after she had gone, instead of sending her in this brusque manner. He had not seen Mrs. Preston since his return, and he did not know what had happened to her in the meantime. To-morrow he would find time to ride down there and see how things were going with the sick man.

There was much mail lying on his table. Nothing had been forwarded by Dresser, in accordance with the directions he had telegraphed him. And he had seen nothing of Dresser yesterday or to-day. The rooms looked as if the man had been gone some time. Dresser owed him money,—more than he could spare conveniently,—but that troubled him less than the thought of Dresser's folly. It was likely that he had thrown up his position—he had chafed against it from the first—and had taken to the precarious career of professional agitator. Dresser had been speaking at meetings in Pullman, with apparent success, and his mind had been full of "the industrial war," as he called it. Sommers recalled that the man had been allowed to leave Exonia College, where he had taught for a year on his return from Germany, because (as he put it) "he held doctrines subversive of the holy state of wealth and a high tariff." That he was of the stuff that martyrs of speech are made, Sommers knew well enough, and such men return to their haven sooner or later.

Sommers sorted his letters listlessly. The Ducharme affair troubled him. He could see that a split with Lindsay was coming; but it must not be brought about by any act of professional discourtesy on his part. Although he was the most efficient surgeon Lindsay had, it would not take much to bring about his discharge. Probably the suggestion about Porter was merely a polite means of getting him out of the office. Lindsay had said some pointed things about "the critical attitude." The "critical attitude" to Lindsay's kind was the last crime.

Ordinarily he would not have cared. The sacrifice of the three thousand dollars which Lindsay paid him would have its own consolation. He could get back his freedom. But the matter was not so simple as it had been. It was mixed now with another affair: if he should leave Lindsay, especially after any disagreement with the popular specialist, he would put himself farther from Miss Hitchcock than ever. As it was, he was quite penniless enough; but thrown on his own resources—he remembered the heavy, sad young man at the Carsons', and Miss Hitchcock's remark about him.

Yet this reflection that in some way it was complicated, that he could not act impulsively and naturally, angered him. He was shrewd enough to know that Lindsay's patronage was due, not to the fact that he was the cleverest surgeon he had, but to the fact that, well—the daughter of Alexander Hitchcock thought kindly of him. These rich and successful! They formed a kind of secret society, pledged to advance any member, to keep the others out by indifference. When the others managed to get in, for any reason, they lent them aid to the exclusion of those left outside. So long as it looked as if he were to have a berth in their cabin, they would be amiable, but not otherwise.

Among the letters on the desk was one from Miss Hitchcock, asking him to spend the coming Saturday and Sunday at Lake Forest. There was to be a small house party, and the new club was to be open. Sommers prepared to answer it at once—to regret. He had promised himself to see Mrs. Preston instead. In writing the letter it seemed to him that he was taking a position, was definitely deciding something, and at the close he tore it in two and took a fresh sheet. Now was the time, if he cared for the girl, to come nearer to her. He had told himself all the way back from New York that he did care—too much. She was not like the rest. He laughed at himself. A few years hence she would be like the rest and, what is more, he should not find her so absorbing now, if she were not like the rest, essentially.

He wrote a conventional note of acceptance, and went out to mail it. Possibly all these people were right in reading the world, and the aim of life was to show one's power to get on. He was worried over that elementary aspect of things rather late in life.



CHAPTER XV

These days there were many people on the streets, but few were busy. The large department stores were empty; at the doors stood idle floor-walkers and clerks. It was too warm for the rich to buy, and the poor had no money. The poor had come lean and hungry out of the terrible winter that followed the World's Fair. In that beautiful enterprise the prodigal city had put forth her utmost strength, and, having shown the world the supreme flower of her energy, had collapsed. There was gloom, not only in La Salle Street where people failed, but throughout the city, where the engine of play had exhausted the forces of all. The city's huge garment was too large for it; miles of empty stores, hotels, flat-buildings, showed its shrunken state. Tens of thousands of human beings, lured to the festive city by abnormal wages, had been left stranded, without food or a right to shelter in its tenantless buildings.