It never occurred to Lane to go over with her the minute detail of his full day: how he had considered an application from a large shipper for switching privileges, had discussed the action of the Torso and Northern in cutting the coal rates, had lunched with Freke, the president of a coal company that did business with the A. and P.; and had received, just as he left the office, the report of a serious freight wreck at one end of his division. As he had said, a busy day! And this business of life, like an endless steel chain, had caught hold of him at once and was carrying him fast in its revolution. It was his life; he liked it. With cool head and steady nerves he set himself at each problem, working it out according to known rules, calling on his trained experience. He did not look into the future, content with the preoccupation of the present, confident that the future, whatever and wherever it might be, would be crowded with affairs, activity, which he would meet competently....

"Well, what have you been doing?" he asked as he sat down, fresh from his bath, and relaxed comfortably in anticipation of a pleasant dinner. Isabelle made a great point of dinner, having it served formally by two maids, with five "Busy day?" she would ask when he bent to kiss her.

"They're all busy days!"

"Tell me what you did."

"Oh," he would answer vaguely, "just saw people and dictated letters and telegrams,—yes, it was a busy day." And he left her to dress for dinner.

She knew that he was weary after all the problems that he had thrust his busy mind into since the morning. She had no great curiosity to know what these problems were. She had been accustomed to the sanctity of business reserve in her father's house: men disappeared in the morning to their work and emerged to wash and dress and be as amusing as they might for the few remaining hours of the day. There were rumors of what went on in that mysterious world of business, but the right kind of men did not disclose the secrets of the office to women.

It never occurred to Lane to go over with her the minute detail of his full day: how he had considered an application from a large shipper for switching privileges, had discussed the action of the Torso and Northern in cutting the coal rates, had lunched with Freke, the president of a coal company that did business with the A. and P.; and had received, just as he left the office, the report of a serious freight wreck at one end of his division. As he had said, a busy day! And this business of life, like an endless steel chain, had caught hold of him at once and was carrying him fast in its revolution. It was his life; he liked it. With cool head and steady nerves he set himself at each problem, working it out according to known rules, calling on his trained experience. He did not look into the future, content with the preoccupation of the present, confident that the future, whatever and wherever it might be, would be crowded with affairs, activity, which he would meet competently....

"Well, what have you been doing?" he asked as he sat down, fresh from his bath, and relaxed comfortably in anticipation of a pleasant dinner. Isabelle made a great point of dinner, having it served formally by two maids, with five courses and at least one wine, "to get used to living properly," as she explained vaguely.

"Mrs. Adams called." She was the wife of the manager of the baking-powder works and president of the country club, a young married woman from a Western city with pretensions to social experience. "John," Isabelle added after mentioning this name, "do you think we shall have to stay here long?"

Her husband paused in eating his soup to look at her. "Why—why?"

"It's so second-classy," she continued; "at least the women are, mostly. There's only one I've met so far that seemed like other people one has known."

"Who is she?" Lane inquired, ignoring the large question.

"Mrs. Falkner."

"Rob Falkner's wife? He's engineer at the Pleasant Valley mines."

"She came from Denver."

"They say he's a clever engineer."

"She is girlish and charming. She told me all about every one in Torso. She's been here two years, and she seems to know everybody."

"And she thinks Torso is second-class?" Lane inquired.

"She would like to get away, I think. But they are poor, I suppose. Her clothes look as if she knew what to wear,—pretty. She says there are some interesting people here when you find them out.... Who is Mr. Darnell? A lawyer."

"Tom Darnell? He's one of the local counsel for the road,—a Kentuckian, politician, talkative sort of fellow, very popular with all sorts. What did Mrs. Falkner have to say about Tom Darnell?"

"She told me all about his marriage,—how he ran away with his wife from a boarding-school in Kentucky—and was chased by her father and brothers, and they fired at him. A regular Southern scrimmage! But they got across the river and were married."

"Sounds like Darnell," Lane remarked contemptuously.

"It sounds exciting!" his wife said.

The story, as related by the vivacious Mrs. Falkner, had stirred Isabelle's curiosity; she could not dismiss this Kentucky politician as curtly as her husband had disposed of him....

They were both wilted by the heat, and after dinner they strolled out into the garden to get more air, walking leisurely arm in arm, while Lane smoked his first, cigar. Having finished the gossip for the day, they had little to say to each other,—Isabelle wondered that it should be so little! Two months of daily companionship after the intimate weeks of their engagement had exhausted the topics for mere talk which they had in common. To-night, as Lane wished to learn the latest news from the wreck, they went into the town, crossing on their way to the office the court-house square. This was the centre of old Torso, where the distillery aristocracy still lived in high, broad-eaved houses of the same pattern as the Colonel's city mansion. In one of these, which needed painting and was generally neglected, the long front windows on the first story were open, revealing a group of people sitting around a supper-table.

"There's Mrs. Falkner," Isabelle remarked; "the one at the end of the table, in white. This must be where they live."

Lane looked at the house with a mental estimate of the rent.

"Large house," he observed.

Isabelle watched the people laughing and talking about the table, which was still covered with coffee cups and glasses. A sudden desire to be there, to hear what they were saying, seized her. A dark-haired man was leaning forward and emphasizing his remarks by tapping a wine glass with along finger. That might be Tom Darnell, she thought.... The other houses about the square were dark and gloomy, most of them closed for the summer.

"There's a good deal of money in Torso," Lane commented, glancing at a brick house with wooden pillars. "It's a growing place,—more business coming all the time."

He looked at the town with the observant eye of the railroad officer, who sees in the prosperity of any community but one word writ large,—TRAFFIC.

And that word was blown through the soft night by the puffing locomotives in the valley below, by the pall of smoke that hung night and day over this quarter of the city, the dull glow of the coke-ovens on the distant hills. To the man this was enough—this and his home; business and the woman he had won,—they were his two poles!



CHAPTER VI

"You see," continued Bessie Falkner, drawing up her pretty feet into the piazza cot, "it was just love at first sight. I was up there at the hotel in the mountains, trying to make up my mind whether I could marry another man, who was awfully rich—owned a mine and a ranch; but he was so dull the horses would go to sleep when we were out driving ... And then just as I concluded it was the only thing for me to do, to take him and make the best of him,—then Rob rode up to the hotel in his old tattered suit—he was building a dam or something up in the mountains—and I knew I couldn't marry Mr. Mine-and-Ranch. That was all there was to it, my dear. The rest of the story? Why, of course he made the hotel his headquarters while he was at work on the dam; I stayed on, too, and it came along—naturally, you know."

Mrs. Falkner dipped into a box of candy and swung the cot gently to and fro. The men were still talking inside the house and the two wives had come outside for long confidences. Isabelle, amused by this sketch of the Colorado courtship, patted the blond woman's little hand. Mrs. Falkner had large blue eyes, with waving tendrils of hair, which gave her face the look of childish unsophistication;—especially at this moment when her voluptuous lips were closing over a specially desired piece of candy.

"Of course it would come along—with you!"

"I didn't do a thing—just waited," Bessie protested, fishing about the almost empty box for another delectable bit. "He did it all. He was in such a hurry he wanted to marry me then and there at the hotel and go live up in the mountains in a cabin above the dam where he was at work. He's romantic. Men are all like that then, don't you think? But of course it couldn't be that way; so we got married properly in the fall in Denver, and then came straight here. And," with a long sigh, "we've been here ever since. Stuck!"

"I should think you would have preferred the cabin above the dam," Isabelle suggested, recalling her own romantic notion of Dog Mountain. Mrs. Falkner made a little grimace.

"That might do for two or three months. But snowed in all the winter, even with the man you like best in all the world? He'd kill you or escape through the drifts ... You see we hadn't a thing, not a cent, except his salary and that ended with the dam. It was only eighty a month anyway. This is better, a hundred and fifty," she explained with childish frankness. "But Rob has to work harder and likes the mountains, is always talking of going back. But I say there are better things than hiding yourself at the land's end. There's St. Louis, or maybe New York!"

Isabelle wondered how the Falkners were able to support such a hospitable house—they had two small children and Bessie had confided that another was coming in the spring—on the engineer's salary.

"And the other one," Mrs. Falkner added in revery, "is more than a millionnaire now."

Her face was full of speculation over what might have been as the wife of all that money.

"But we are happy, Rob and I,—except for the bills! Don't you hate bills?"

Isabelle's only answer was a hearty laugh. She found this pretty, frank little "Westerner" very attractive.

"It was bills that made my mother unhappy—broke her heart. Sometimes we had money,—most generally not. Such horrid fusses when there wasn't any. But what is one to do? You've got to go on living somehow. Rob says we can't afford this house,—Rob is always afraid we won't get through. But we do somehow. I tell him that the good time is coming,—we must just anticipate it, draw a little on the future."

At this point the men came through the window to the piazza. Bessie shook her box of candy coquettishly at Lane, who took the chair beside her. Evidently he thought her amusing, as most men did. Falkner leaned against the white pillar and stared up at the heavens. Isabelle, accustomed to men of more conventional social qualities, had found the young engineer glum and odd. He had a stern, rather handsome face, a deep furrow dividing his forehead and meeting the part of his thick brown hair, which curled slightly at the ends. "If he didn't look so cross, he would be quite handsome," thought Isabelle, wondering how long it might be before her host would speak to her. She could see him as he rode up to the hotel piazza that day, when Bessie Falkner had made up her mind on the moment that she could not marry "the other man." Finally Falkner broke his glum silence.

"Do you eat candy, Mrs. Lane? Pounds of it, I mean,—so that it is your staple article of diet."

"Tut, tut," remarked his wife from her cot. "Don't complain."

His next remark was equally abrupt.

"There's only one good thing in this Torso hole," he observed with more animation than he had shown all the evening, "and that's the coke-ovens at night—have you noticed them? They are like the fiery pits, smouldering, ready for the damned!"

It was not what she expected from a civil engineer, in Torso, Indiana, and she was at a loss for a reply.

"You'd rather have stayed in Colorado?" she asked frankly.

He turned his face to her and said earnestly, "Did you ever sleep out on a mountain with the stars close above you?—'the vast tellurian galleons' voyaging through space?"

Isabelle suspected that he was quoting poetry, which also seemed odd in Torso.

"Yes,—my brother and I used to camp out at our home in Connecticut. But I don't suppose you would call our Berkshire Hills mountains."

"No," he replied dryly, "I shouldn't."

And their conversation ended. Isabella wished that the Darnells had not been obliged to go home immediately after supper. The young lawyer knew how to talk to women, and had made himself very agreeable, telling stories of his youth spent among the mountains with a primitive people. She had observed that he drank a good deal of whiskey, and there was something in his black eyes that made her uncomfortable. But he was a man that women liked to think about: he touched their imaginations. She did not talk about him to John on their way home, however, but discussed the Falkners.

"Don't you think she is perfectly charming?" (Charming was the word she had found for Bessie Falkner.) "So natural and amusing! She's very Western—she can't have seen much of life—but she isn't a bit ordinary."

"Yes, I like her," Lane replied unenthusiastically, "and he seems original. I shouldn't wonder if he were clever in his profession; he told me a lot about Freke's mines."

What he had learned about the Pleasant Valley mines was the chief thing in the evening to Lane. He did not understand why Isabelle seemed so much more eager to know these people—these Darnells and Falkners—than the Frasers and the Adamses. She had made fun of the solemn dinner that the Frasers had given to introduce them into Torso "society."

"I wonder how they can live on that salary," Isabelle remarked. "One hundred and fifty a month!"

"He must make something outside."

* * * * *

After the Lanes had gone, Bessie Falkner prepared yawningly for bed, leaving her husband to shut up the house. Her weekly excitement of entertaining people over, she always felt let down, like a poet after the stir of creation. It was useless to go over the affair with Rob, as he was merely bored. But she spent hours thinking what the women said and how they looked and deciding whom she could have the next time. On her way to bed she went into the nursery where her two little girls were asleep in their cots beside the nurse, and finding a window open woke the nurse to reprove her for her carelessness. In the hall she met her husband bringing up the silver.

"Emma is so thoughtless," she complained. "I shall have to let her go if I can find another servant in this town."

Her husband listened negligently. The Falkners were perpetually changing their two servants, or were getting on without them.

"Mrs. Lane's maids all wear caps," Mrs. Falkner had observed frequently to her husband.

Bessie had strict ideas of how a house should be run, ideas derived from the best houses that she was familiar with. Since the advent of the Lanes she had extended these ideas and strove all the harder to achieve magnificent results. Though the livery of service was practically unknown in Torso, she had resolved to induce her cook (and maid of all work) to serve the meals with cap and apron, and also endeavored to have the nursemaid open the door and help serve when company was expected.

"What's the use!" her husband protested. "They'll only get up and go."

He could not understand the amount of earnest attention and real feeling that his wife put into these things,—her pride to have her small domain somewhat resemble the more affluent ones that she admired. Though her family had been decidedly plain, they had given her "advantages" in education and dress, and her own prettiness, her vivacity and charm, had won her way into whatever society Kansas City and Denver could offer. She had also visited here and there in different parts of the country,—once in New York, and again at a cottage on the New England coast where there were eight servants, a yacht, and horses. These experiences of luxury, of an easy and large social life, she had absorbed through every pore. With that marvellous adaptability of her race she had quickly formed her ideals of "how people ought to live." It was frequently difficult to carry out these ideals on a circumscribed income, with a husband who cared nothing for appearances, and that was a source of constant discontent to Bessie.

"Coming to bed?" she asked her husband, as she looked in vain for the drinking water that the maid was supposed to bring to her bedside at night.

"No," Falkner answered shortly. "I've got to make out those estimates somehow before morning. If you will have people all the time—"

Bessie turned in at her door shrugging her shoulders. Rob was in one of his "cross" moods,—overworked, poor boy! She slowly began to undress before the mirror, thinking of Isabelle Lane's stylish figure and her perfect clothes. "She must have lots of money," she reflected, "and so nice and simple! He's attractive, too. Rob is foolish not to like them. He showed his worst side to-night. If he wants to get on,—why, they are the sort of people he ought to know." Her husband's freakish temper gave her much trouble, his unexpectedly bearish moods when she was doing her very best for him, "bringing him out" as she put it, making the right kind of friends,—influential ones, so that he might have some chance in the scramble for the good things of life. Surely that was a wife's part. Bessie was satisfied that she had done much for her husband in this way, developed him socially; for when he rode up to the mountain hotel, he was solitary, moody, shy. Tonight he hadn't kissed her,—in fact hadn't done so for several days. He was tired by the prolonged heat, she supposed, and worried about the bills. He was always worried about expenses.

As the clothes slipped from her still shapely figure, she stood before the glass, thinking in a haze of those first lover-days that had departed so soon. Now instead of petting her, Rob spent his hours at home upstairs in his attic workroom, doing extra work or reading. Could it be that he was growing tired of her, so soon, in four years? She glanced over her shoulder at her pretty arms, her plump white neck reflected in the glass, and smiled unconsciously with assurance. Oh, he would come back to the lover-mood—she was still desirable! And as the smile curved her lip she thought, "I married him for love!" She was very proud of that....

The house was now deliciously cool and quiet. Bessie sank into her bed with a sigh, putting out one hand for a magazine and turning on the electric light beside the bed. It had been a tiresome day, with the supper to bring off. There had been six courses, and everything had been very nice. The black cook she had engaged to prepare the meal was a treasure, could serve a better dinner than Mrs. Fraser's or Mrs. Adams's. She herself had made the salad and prepared the iced grape-fruit. Every limb ached—she was always so tired. She loved this last quiet hour of the day that she had by herself, now that the nurse took both the children. With her delicate health the nurse had been a necessity. She usually looked blooming and rosy, but was always tired, always had been as long as she could remember. The doctor had told Falkner after the second child came that his wife would always be a delicate woman, must be carefully protected, or she would collapse and have the fearful modern disease of nerves. So Falkner had insisted on having the best nurse obtainable to relieve her from the wearing nights,—though it meant that somehow eighteen hundred dollars must grow of itself!

As midnight sounded from the court-house clock, Bessie laid down the magazine and stretched her tired limbs, luxuriating in the comfort of her soft bed. The story she had been reading was sentimental,—the love of a cowboy for the fair daughter of a railroad president. She longed for the caresses of her cow-boy lover, and wondered dreamily if Lane were a devoted husband. He seemed so; but all men were probably alike: their first desires gratified, they thought of other things. So she put out the light and closed her eyes, in faint discontent with life, which was proving less romantic than she had anticipated.

She had her own room. At first it had held two beds, her husband sharing the room with her. But as the house was large he had taken a room on the third story. Nowadays, as Bessie knew, the better sort of American household does not use the primitive double bed. For hygiene and comfort enlightened people have taken to separate beds, then separate quarters. A book might be written on the doing away of the conjugal bed in American life! There should be interesting observations on the effect of this change, social, and hygienic, and moral,—oh, most interesting! ... A contented smile at last stole over the young wife's face. Was she dreaming of her babies, of those first days of love, when her husband never wished her out of his sight, or simply of the well-ordered, perfectly served, pretty supper that she had given for the Lanes whom she was most anxious to know well? The supper had quite met her aspirations except in the matter of caps and aprons, had satisfied her cherished ideal of how "nice people" lived in this world.

That ideal is constantly expanding these days. In America no one is classed by birth or profession. All is to make, and the women with their marvellous powers of absorption do the shaping. In a thousand ways they learn "how to live as other people do,"—in magazines and on bill boards, in the theatre, the churches, the trains, the illustrated novel. Suggestions how to live!

Meantime upstairs in the mansard room of the old house Falkner was figuring over stresses and strains of an unemotional sort. When past midnight he shoved the papers into the drawer, a familiar thought coursed through his brain: somehow he must sell himself at a dearer price. Living was not cheap even in Torso, and the cost of living was ever going higher, so the papers said and the wives. There were four of them now, a fifth to come in a few months. There should be a third servant, he knew, if they were to live "like other people." With a gesture that said, "Oh, Hell!" he jumped from his chair and took down a volume of verse from the pine shelf above the mantel and lighted a cigarette. For a few minutes he might lose himself and forget the fret of life, in the glowing pictures of things not seen.

The book dropped from his hand. He had carried it in his mountain kit, had read it to Bessie when they were engaged. She had listened, flattered, looking at him and smoothing his hair. But after marriage she confessed flatly that she was not "literary." So they had read together a book of travels, then a novel, then a magazine, and latterly nothing. Taking another cigarette, the man read on, and before his tired eyes rose the purple peaks of the Rockies, the shining crests of snow, the azure sky. And also a cabin in a green meadow beside a still mountain lake, and a woman fair and tall and straight, with blue eyes and a caressing hand,—a child on one arm. But Bessie was sleeping downstairs. Putting out his light, the man went to bed.

The man on horseback riding up the trail to look into the girl's eyes that summer afternoon!



CHAPTER VII

The two young wives quickly became very intimate. They spent many mornings together "reading," that is, they sat on the cool west veranda of the Lanes's house, or less often on the balcony at the Falkners's, with a novel turned down where their attention had relaxed, chatting and sewing. Isabelle found Bessie Falkner "cunning," "amusing," "odd," and always "charming." She had "an air about her," a picturesque style of gossip that she used when instructing Isabelle in the intricacies of Torso society. Isabelle also enjoyed the homage that Bessie paid her.

Bessie frankly admired Isabella's house, her clothes, her stylish self, and enjoyed her larger experience of life,—the Washington winter, Europe, even the St. Louis horizon,—all larger than anything she had ever known. Isabelle was very nearly the ideal of what she herself would have liked to be. So when they had exhausted Torso and their households, they filled the morning hours with long tales about people they had known,—"Did you ever hear of the Dysarts in St. Louis? Sallie Dysart was a great belle,—she had no end of affairs, and then she married Paul Potter. The Potters were very well-known people in Philadelphia, etc." Thus they gratified their curiosity about lives, all the interesting complications into which men and women might get. Often Bessie stayed for luncheon, a dainty affair served on a little table which the maid brought out and set between them. Sometimes Bessie had with her the baby girl, but oftener not, for she became exacting and interfered with the luncheon.

Bessie had endless tidbits of observation about Torsonians. "Mrs. Freke was a cashier in a Cleveland restaurant when he married her. Don't you see the bang in her hair still? ... Mrs. Griscom came from Kentucky,—very old family. Tom Griscom, their only son, went to Harvard,—he was very wild. He's disappeared since.... Yes, Mrs. Adams is common, but the men seem to like her. I don't trust her green eyes. Mr. Darnell, they say, is always there. Oh, Mr. Adams isn't the one to care!"

Often they came back to Darnell,—that impetuous, black-haired young lawyer with his deep-set, fiery eyes, who had run away with his wife.

"She looks scared most of the time, don't you think? They say he drinks. Too bad, isn't it? Such a brilliant man, and with the best chances. He ran for Congress two years ago on the Democratic ticket, and just failed. He is going to try again this next fall, but his railroad connection is against him.... Oh, Sue Darnell,—she is nobody; she can't hold him—that's plain."

"What does she think of Mrs. Adams?"

Bessie shrugged her shoulders significantly.

"Sue has to have her out at their farm. Well, they say she was pretty gay herself,—engaged to three men at once,—one of them turned up in Torso last year. Tom was very polite to him, elaborately polite; but he left town very soon, and she seemed dazed.... I guess she has reason to be afraid of her husband. He looks sometimes—well, I shouldn't like to have Rob look at me that way, not for half a second!"

The two women clothed the brilliant Kentuckian with all the romance of unbridled passion. "He sends to Alabama every week for the jasmine Mrs. Adams wears—fancy!"

"Really! Oh, men! men!"

"It's probably her fault—she can't hold him."

That was the simple philosophy which they evolved about marriage,—men were uncertain creatures, only partly tamed, and it was the woman's business to "hold" them. So much the worse for the women if they happened to be tied to men they could not "hold." Isabelle, remembering on one occasion the flashing eyes of the Kentuckian, his passionate denunciation of mere commercialism in public life, felt that there might be some defence for poor Tom Darnell,—even in his flirtation with the "common" Mrs. Adams.

Then the two friends went deeper and talked husbands, both admiring, both hilariously amused at the masculine absurdities of their mates.

"I hate to see poor Rob so harassed with bills," Bessie confided. "It is hard for him, with his tastes, poor boy. But I don't know what I can do about it. When he complains, I tell him we eat everything we have, and I am sure I never get a dress!"

Isabelle, recollecting the delicious suppers she had had at the Falkners's, thought that less might be eaten. In her mother's house there had always been comfort, but strict economy, even after the hardware business paid enormous profits. This thrift was in her blood. Bessie had said to Rob that Isabelle was "close." But Isabelle only laughed at Bessie when she was in these moods of dejection, usually at the first of the month. Bessie was so amusing about her troubles that she could not take her seriously.

"Never mind, Bessie!" she laughed. "He probably likes to work hard for you,—every man does for the woman he loves."

And then they would have luncheon, specially devised for Bessie's epicurean taste. For Bessie Falkner did devout homage to a properly cooked dish. Isabelle, watching the contented look with which the little woman swallowed a bit of jellied meat, felt that any man worth his salt would like to gratify her innocent tastes. Probably Falkner couldn't endure a less charming woman for his wife. So she condoned, as one does with a clever child, all the little manifestations of waywardness and selfishness that she was too intelligent not to see in her new friend. Isabelle liked to spoil Bessie Falkner. Everybody liked to indulge her, just as one likes to feed a pretty child with cake and candy, especially when the discomforts of the resulting indigestion fall on some one else.

"Oh, it will all come out right in the end!" Bessie usually exclaimed, after she had well lunched. She did not see things very vividly far ahead,—nothing beyond the pleasant luncheon, the attractive house, her adorable Isabelle. "I always tell Rob when he is blue that his chance will come some day; he'll make a lucky strike, do some work that attracts public attention, and then we'll all be as happy as can be."

She had the gambler's instinct; her whole life had been a gamble, now winning, now losing, even to that moment when her lover had ridden up to the hotel and solved her doubts about the rich suitor. In Colorado she had known men whose fortunes came over night, "millions and millions," as she told Isabelle, rolling the words in her little mouth toothsomely. Why not to her? She felt that any day fortune might smile.

"My husband says that Mr. Falkner is doing excellent work,—Mr. Freke said so," Isabelle told Bessie.

"And Rob talks as if he were going to lose his job next week! Sometimes I wish he would lose it—and we could go away to a large city."

Bessie thus echoed the feeling in Isabelle's own heart,—"I don't want to spend my life on an Indiana prairie!" To both of the women Torso was less a home, a corner of the earth into which to put down roots, than a way-station in the drama and mystery of life. Confident in their husbands' ability to achieve Success, they dreamed of other scenes, of a larger future, with that restlessness of a new civilization, which has latterly seized even women—the supposedly stable sex.

* * * * *

As the year wore on there were broader social levels into which Isabelle in company with Bessie dipped from time to time. The Woman's Club had a lecture course in art and sociology. They attended one of the lectures in the Normal School building, and laughed furtively in their muffs at "Madam President" of the Club,—a portly, silk-dressed dame,—and at the ill-fitting black coat of the university professor who lectured. They came away before the reception.

"Dowds!" Bessie summed up succinctly.

"Rather crude," Isabelle agreed tolerantly.

During the winter Isabelle did some desultory visiting among the Hungarians employed at the coke-ovens, for Bessie's church society. Originally of Presbyterian faith, she had changed at St. Mary's to the Episcopal church, and latterly all church affiliations had grown faint. The Colonel maintained a pew in the first Presbyterian Church, but usually went to hear the excellent lectures of a Unitarian preacher. Isabelle's religious views were vague, broad, liberal, and unvital. Bessie's were simpler, but scarcely more effective. Lane took a lively interest in the railroad Y.M.C.A., which he believed to be helpful for young men. He himself had been a member in St. Louis and had used the gymnasium. Isabelle got up an entertainment for the Hungarian children, which was ended by a disastrous thunderstorm. She had an uneasy feeling that she "ought to do something for somebody." Alice Johnston, she knew, had lived at a settlement for a couple of years. But there were no settlements in Torso, and the acutely poor were looked after by the various churches. Just what there was to be done for others was not clear. When she expressed her desire "not to live selfishly" to her husband, he replied easily:—

"There are societies for those things, I suppose. It ought to be natural, what we do for others."

Just what was meant by "natural" was not clear to Isabelle, but the word accorded with the general belief of her class that the best way to help in the world was to help one's self, to become useful to others by becoming important in the community,—a comfortable philosophy. But there was one definite thing that they might accomplish, and that was to help the Falkners into easier circumstances.

"Don't you suppose we could do something for them? Now that the baby has come they are dreadfully poor,—can't think of going away for the summer, and poor Bessie needs it and the children. I meant to ask the Colonel when he was here last Christmas. Isn't there something Rob could do in the road?"

Lane shook his head.

"That is not my department. There might be a place in St. Louis when they begin work on the new terminals. I'll speak to Brundage the next time he's here."

"St. Louis—Bessie would like that. She's such a dear, and would enjoy pretty things so much! It seems as if she almost had a right to them."

"Why did she marry a poor man, then?" Lane demanded with masculine logic.

"Because she loved him, silly! She isn't mercenary."

"Well, then,—" but Lane did not finish his sentence, kissing his wife instead. "She's rather extravagant, isn't she?" he asked after a time.

"Oh, she'll learn to manage."

"I will do what I can for him, of course."

And Isabelle considered the Falkners' fate settled; John, like her father, always brought about what he wanted.

* * * * *

They spent the Christmas holidays that year with her parents. Lane was called to New York on railroad business, and Isabelle had a breathless ten days with old friends, dining and lunching, listening to threads of gossip that had been broken by her exile to Torso. She discovered an unexpected avidity for diversion, and felt almost ashamed to enjoy people so keenly, to miss her husband so little. She put it all down to the cramping effect of Torso. So when the Colonel asked her how she liked her new home, she burst forth, feeling that her opportunity had come:—

"It doesn't agree with me, I think. I've grown frightfully thin,—John says I mustn't spend another summer there.... I hope we can get away soon. John must have a wider field, don't you think?"

"He seems to find Torso pretty wide."

"He's done splendid work, I know. But I don't want him side-tracked all his life in a little Indiana town. Don't you think you could speak to the Senator or Mr. Beals?"

The Colonel smiled.

"Yes, I could speak to them, if John wants me to."

"He hasn't said anything about it," she hastened to add.

"So you are tired of Torso?" he asked, smiling still more.

"It seems so good to be here, to hear some music, and go to the theatre; to be near old friends," she explained apologetically. "Don't you and mother want us to be near you?"

"Of course, my dear! We want you to be happy."

"Why, we are happy there,—only it seems so out of the world, so second-class. And John is not second-class."

"No, John is not second-class," the Colonel admitted with another smile. "And for that reason I don't believe he will want me to interfere."

Nevertheless she kept at her idea, talking it over with her mother. All her friends were settled in the great cities, and it was only natural that she should aspire to something better than Torso—for the present, St. Louis. So the Colonel spoke to Lane, and Lane spoke to his wife when they were back once more in the Torso house. He was grave, almost hurt.

"I'm sorry, Belle, you are so tired of life here. I can take another position or ask to be transferred; but you must understand, dear, that whatever is done, it must be by myself. I don't want favors, not even from the Colonel!"

She felt ashamed and small, yet protested: "I don't see why you should object. Every one does the same,—uses all the pull he has."

"There are changes coming,—I prefer to wait. The man who uses least pull usually hangs on longest."

As he walked to the office that morning, the thought of Isabelle's restlessness occupied his mind. "It's dull for her here, of course. It isn't the kind of life she's been used to, or had the right to expect as the Colonel's daughter." He felt the obligation to live up to his wife, having won her from a superior position. Like a chivalrous American gentleman he was not aggrieved because even during the first two years of marriage, he—their life together—was not enough to satisfy his wife. He did not reflect that his mother had accepted unquestioningly the Iowa town to which his father had brought her after the War; nor that Isabelle's mother had accepted cheerfully the two rooms in the little brick house near the hardware store. Those were other days.

He saw the picture of Isabelle standing beside the dining-room window with the sun on her hair,—a developed type of human being, that demanded much of life for satisfaction and adjustment. He plunged into his affairs with an added grip, an unconscious feeling that he must by his exertions provide those satisfactions and adjustments which his wife's nature demanded for its perfect development.



CHAPTER VIII

It was to be Isabella's first real dinner-party, a large affair for Torso. It had already absorbed her energies for a fortnight. The occasion was the arrival of a party of Atlantic and Pacific officials and directors, who were to inspect the Torso and Northern, with a view to its purchase and absorption. The Torso and Northern was only a little scab line of railroad, penetrating the soft-coal country for a couple of hundred miles, bankrupt and demoralized. When Lane saw President Beals at Christmas, he pointed out to him what might be made of this scrap-heap road, if it were rehabilitated and extended into new coal fields. Beals had shown no interest in the Torso and Northern at that time, and Lane forgot the matter until he noticed that there was a market for Torso and Northern equipment bonds, which before had been unsalable at twenty. Seeing them rise point by point for a month, he had bought all he could pay for; he knew the weather signs in the railroad world. When the inspection party was announced, his sagacity was proved.

Isabelle was excited by the prospect of her dinner for the distinguished visitors. Who should she have of Torso's best to meet them? The Frasers and the Griscoms, of course. John insisted on inviting the Frekes, and Isabelle wanted the Darnells and the Adamses, though her husband demurred at recognizing the bond. But Tom Darnell was so interesting, his wife urged, and she was presentable. And the Falkners? There was no special reason for having them, but Isabelle thought it might be a good thing for Rob to meet some influential people, and Bessie would surely amuse the men. Isabelle's executive energy was thoroughly aroused. The flowers and the wines were ordered from St. Louis, the terrapin from Philadelphia, the fish and the candies from New York. Should they have champagne? Lane thought not, because "it's not quite our style." But Isabelle overbore his objections:—

"The Adamses always have it, and the Senator will expect it and all the New York crowd."

Her husband acquiesced, feeling that in these things his wife knew the world better than he,—though he would have preferred to offer his superior officers a simpler meal.

The inspection party returned from their trip over the Torso and Northern in the best of spirits. Lane felt sure that the purchase had been decided upon by this inner coterie of the A. and P., of which the mouthpiece, Senator Thomas, had emitted prophetic phrases,—"valuable possibilities undeveloped," "would tap new fields,—good feeder," etc., etc. Lane thought pleasantly of the twenty equipment bonds in his safe, which would be redeemed by the Atlantic and Pacific at par and accrued interest, and he resolved to secure another block, if they were to be had, before the sale was officially confirmed by the directors. Altogether it had been an agreeable jaunt. He had met several influential directors and had been generally consulted as the man who knew the exact local conditions. And he was aware that he had made a favorable impression as a practical railroad man....

When his guests came down to the drawing-room, he was proud of what his wife had done. The house was ablaze with candles—Bessie had persuaded Isabelle to dispense with the electric light—and bunches of heavy, thick-stemmed roses filled the vases. A large silver tray of decanters and cocktails was placed in the hall beside the blazing fire. The Senator had already possessed himself of a cocktail, and was making his little speeches to Isabelle, who in a Paris gown that gave due emphasis to her pretty shoulders and thin figure, was listening to him gayly.

"Did you think we lived in a log-cabin, Senator?" she protested to his compliments. "We eat with knives and forks, silver ones too, and sometimes we even have champagne in Torso!"...

Lane, coming up with the first Vice-president, Vernon Short, and a Mr. Stanton, one of the New York directors ("a great swell," and "not just money," "has brains, you know," as the Senator whispered), was proud of his competent wife. She was vivaciously awake, and seemed to have forgotten her girlish repugnance to the amorous Senator. As she stood by the drawing-room door receiving her guests, he felt how much superior to all the Torso "leaders" she was,—yes, she deserved a larger frame! And to-night he felt confident that he should be able before long to place her in it.... The Senator, having discharged his cargo of compliments, was saying:—

"Saw your friend Miss Pallanton that was—Mrs. Woodyard—at the Stantons's the other night, looking like a blond Cleopatra. She's married a bright fellow, and she'll be the making of him. He'll have to hop around to please her,—I expect that's what husbands are for, isn't it, Lane?"

And here Isabelle passed him over to Bessie, who had come without Falkner, he having made some silly excuse at the last moment,—"just cross," as Bessie confided to Isabelle. She was looking very fresh in a gown that she and Isabelle's seamstress had contrived, and she smiled up into the Senator's face with her blandest child-manner. The Senator, who liked all women, even those who asked his views on public questions, was especially fond of what he called the "unsophisticated" variety, with whom his title carried weight.

When they reached the dining room, Lane's elation rose to a higher pitch. The table, strewn with sweet jasmine and glossy leaves, was adorned with all the handsome gold and silver service and glass that Isabelle had received at her marriage. It was too barbarically laden to be really beautiful; but it was in the best prevailing taste of the time, and to Lane, who never regarded such matters attentively, "was as good as the best." Looking down the long table after they were seated, he smiled with satisfaction and expanded, a subtle suavity born of being host to distinguished folk unlocking his ordinarily reticent tongue, causing him even to joke with Mrs. Adams, whom he did not like.

The food was excellent, and the maids, some borrowed, some specially imported from St. Louis, made no mistakes, at least gross ones. The feast moved as smoothly as need be. Isabelle, glancing over the table as the game came on, had her moment of elation, too. This was a real dinner-party, as elaborate and sumptuous as any that her friends in St. Louis might give. The Farrington Beals, she remembered, had men servants,—most New York families kept them, but that could hardly be expected in Torso. The dinner was excellent, as the hungry visitors testified, and they seemed to find the women agreeable and the whole affair unexpectedly cosmopolitan, which was pleasing after spending a long week in a car, examining terminals and coal properties. Indeed, it was very much the same dinner that was being served at about that hour in thousands of well-to-do houses throughout the country all the way from New York to San Francisco,—the same dishes, the same wines, the same service, almost the same talk. Nothing in American life is so completely standardized as what is known as a "dinner" in good, that is well-to-do, society. Isabelle Lane, with all her executive ability, her real cleverness, aspired to do "the proper thing," just as it was done in the houses of the moderately rich everywhere.

The model of hospitality is set by the hotel manager and his chef, and all that the clever hostess aspires to do is to offer the nearest copy of this to her guests. Neither the Lanes nor any of their guests, however, felt this lack of distinction, this sameness, in the entertainment provided for them. They had the comfortable feeling of being in a cheerful house, well warmed and well lighted, of eating all this superfluous food, which they were accustomed to eat, of saying the things they always said on such occasions....

Isabelle had distributed her Torsonians skilfully: Bessie was adorable and kept three men hanging on her stories. Mrs. Adams, on the other side of Stanton, was furtively eying Darnell, who was talking rather loudly, trying to capture the Senator's attention from Bessie. Across the table Mrs. Darnell, still the striking dark-haired schoolgirl, was watching her husband, with a pitiful something in her frightened eyes that made Isabelle shrink.... It was Darnell who finally brought the conversation to a full stop.

"No, Senator," he said in his emphatic voice, "it is not scum like the assassin of the President that this country should fear!"

"We're paying now for our liberal policy in giving homes to the anarchistic refuse of Europe," the Senator insisted. "Congress must pass legislation that will protect us from another Czolgocz."

Darnell threw up his head, his lips curving disdainfully. He had emptied his champagne glass frequently, and there was a reckless light in his dark eyes. Isabelle trembled for his next remark:—

"You are wrong, sir, if you will allow me to say so. The legislation that we need is not against poor, feeble-minded rats like that murderer. We have prisons and asylums enough for them. What the country needs is legislation against its honored thieves, the real anarchists among us. We don't get 'em from Europe, Senator; we breed 'em right here,—in Wall street."

If some one had discharged assafoetida over the table, there could not have been a more unpleasant sensation.

"You don't mean quite that, Darnell," Lane began; but the Kentuckian brushed him to one side.

"Just that; and some day you will see what Americans will do with their anarchists. I tell you this land is full of discontent,—men hating dishonesty, privilege, corruption, injustice! men ready to fight their oppressors for freedom!"

The men about the table were all good Republicans, devout believers in the gospel of prosperity, all sharers in it. They smiled contemptuously at Darnell's passion.

"Our martyred President was a great and good man," the Senator observed irrelevantly in his public tone.

"He was the greatest breeder of corruption that has ever held that office," retorted the Kentuckian. "With his connivance, a Mark Hanna has forged the worst industrial tyranny the world has ever seen,—the corrupt grip of corporations on the lives of the people."

"Pretty strong for a corporation lawyer!" Lane remarked, and the men laughed cynically.

"I am no longer a corporation hireling," Darnell said in a loud voice.

Isabelle noticed that Mrs. Adams's eyes glowed, as she gazed at the man.

"I sent in my resignation last week."

"Getting ready for the public platform?" some one suggested. "You won't find much enthusiasm for those sentiments; wages are too high!"

There was a moment of unpleasant silence. The Kentuckian raised his head as if to retort, then collected himself, and remarked meekly:—

"Pardon me, Mrs. Lane, this is not the occasion for such a discussion. I was carried away by my feelings. Sometimes the real thought will burst out."

The apology scarcely bettered matters, and Isabelle's response was flat.

"I am sure it is always interesting to hear both sides."

"But I can't see that to a good citizen there can be two sides to the lamentable massacre of our President," the Senator said severely. "I had the privilege of knowing our late President intimately, and I may say that I never knew a better man,—he was another Lincoln!"

"I don't see where Mr. Darnell can find this general discontent," the Vice-president of the A. and P. put in suavely. "The country has never been so prosperous as during the McKinley-Hanna regime,—wages at the high level, exports increasing, crops abundant. What any honest and industrious man has to complain of, I can't see. Why, we are looking for men all the time, and we can't get them, at any price!"

"'Ye shall not live by bread alone,'" Darnell muttered. It was a curious remark for a dinner-party, Isabelle thought. Mrs. Adams's lips curled as if she understood it. But now that the fiery lawyer had taken to quoting the Bible no one paid any further attention to him, and the party sank back into little duologues appropriate to the occasion. Later Bessie confessed to Isabelle that she had been positively frightened lest the Kentuckian would do "something awful,"—he had been drinking, she thought. But Darnell remained silent for the brief time before the ladies left the room, merely once raising his eyes apologetically to Isabelle with his wine-glass at his lips, murmuring so that she alone could hear him,—"I drink to the gods of Prosperity!" She smiled back her forgiveness. He had behaved very badly, almost wrecked her successful dinner; but somehow she could not dislike him. She did not understand what he was saying or why he should say it when people were having a good time; but she felt it was part of his interesting and uncertain nature....

Presently the coffee and cigars came and the women went across the hall, while the men talked desultorily until the sound of Bessie's voice singing a French song to Isabella's accompaniment attracted them. After the next song the visitors went, their car being due to leave on the Eastern express. They said many pleasant things to Isabelle, and the Senator, holding her hand in his broad, soft palm, whispered:—

"We can't let so much charm stay buried in Torso!"

So when the last home guest had departed and Lane sat down before the fire for another cigar, Isabelle drew her chair close to his, her heart beating with pleasant emotions.

"Well?" she said expectantly.

"Splendid—everything! They liked it, I am sure. I felt proud of you, Belle!"

"It was all good but the fish,—yes, I thought our party was very nice!" Then she told him what the Senator had said, and this time Lane did not repel the idea of their moving to wider fields. He had made a good impression on "the New York crowd," and he thought again complacently of the Torso and Northern equipment bonds.

"Something may turn up before long, perhaps."

New York! It made her heart leap. She felt that she was now doing the wife's part admirably, furthering John's interests by being a competent hostess, and she liked to further his interests by giving pleasant dinners, in an attractive gown, and receiving the admiration of clever men. It had not been the way that her mother had helped on the Colonel; but it was another way, the modern way, and a very agreeable way.

"Darnell is an awful fool," Lane commented. "If he can't hold on to himself any better than he did to-night, he won't get far."

"Did you know that he had resigned?"

"No,—it's just as well he has. I don't think the A. and P. would have much use for him. He's headed the wrong way;" and he added with hardly a pause, "I think we had better cut the Darnells out, Isabelle. They are not our sort."

Isabelle, thinking that this was the man's prejudice, made no reply.

"It was too bad Rob Falkner wouldn't come. It would have been a good thing for him to meet influential people."

Already she spoke with an air of commanding the right sort that her husband had referred to.

"He doesn't make a good impression on people," Lane remarked. "Perhaps he will make good with his work."

As a man who had made his own way he felt the great importance of being able to "get on" with people, to interest them, and keep them aware of one's presence. But he was broad enough to recognize other roads to success.

"So you were quite satisfied, John?" his wife asked as she kissed him good-night.

"Perfectly—it was the right thing—every way—all but Darnell's rot; and that didn't do much harm."

So the two went to their rest perfectly satisfied with themselves and their world. Lane's last conscious thought was a jumble of equipment bonds, and the idea of his wife at the head of a long dinner table in some very grand house—in New York.



CHAPTER IX

The Darnells had a farm a few miles out of Torso, and this spring they had given up their house on the square and moved to the farm permanently. Bessie said it was for Mrs. Darnell's health; men said that the lawyer was in a tight place with the banks; and gossip suggested that Darnell preferred being in Torso without his wife whenever he was there. The farm was on a small hill above a sluggish river, and was surrounded by a growth of old sycamores and maples. There was a long stretch of fertile fields in front of the house, dotted by the huge barns and steel windmills of surrounding farms.

One Sunday in early May the Lanes were riding in the direction of the Darnell place, and Isabelle persuaded her husband to call there. "I promised to ride out here and show him the horses," she explained. The house was a shabby frame affair, large for a farmhouse, with porticoes and pillars in Southern style. They found the Darnells with the Falkners in the living-room. Tom Darnell was reading an Elizabethan play aloud, rolling out the verse in resounding declamation, punctuated by fervid appreciation,—"God! but that's fine!" "Hear this thing sing." "Just listen to this ripper."

"O God! O God! that it were possible To undo things done; to call back yesterday! That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass, To untell the days, and to redeem the hours!" ...

When the Lanes had found chairs before the fire, he kept on reading, but with less enthusiasm, as if he felt an alien atmosphere. Falkner listened to the lines with closed eyes, his grim jaw relaxed, the deep frown smoothed. Bessie stroked a white cat,—it was plain that her thoughts were far away. Mrs. Darnell, who looked slovenly but pretty, stared vacantly out of the window. The sun lay in broad, streaks on the dusty floor; there was an air of drowsy peace, broken only by the warm tones of the lawyer as his voice rose and fell over the spirited verse. Isabelle enjoyed it all; here was something out of her usual routine. Darnell's face, which reflected the emotion of the lines, was attractive to her. He might not be the "right sort"; but he was unusual.... Finally Darnell flung the book into the corner and jumped up.

"Here I am boring you good people with stuff dead and gone these hundreds of years. Falkner always starts me off. Let's have a drink and take a look at the horses."

The living-room was a mess of furniture and books, wineglasses, bottles, wraps, whips, and riding-boots. Lane looked it over critically, while Darnell found some tumblers and poured out wine. Then they all went to the stable and dawdled about, talking horse. The fields were green with the soft grass, already nearly a foot high. Over the house an old grape-vine was budding in purple balls. There was a languor and sweetness to the air that instigated laziness. Although Lane wished to be off, Isabelle lingered on, and Darnell exclaimed hospitably: "You stay to dinner, of course! It is just plain dinner, Mrs. Lane,"—and he swept away all denial. Turning to his wife, who had said nothing, he remarked, "It's very good of them to come in on us like this, isn't it, Irene?"

Mrs. Darnell started and mumbled:—

"Yes, I am sure!"

His manners to his wife were always perfect, deferential,—why should she shrink before him? Isabelle wondered.... Dinner, plentiful and appetizing, was finally provided by the one negro woman. Darnell tried to talk to Lane, but to Isabelle's surprise her husband was at a disadvantage:—the two men could not find common ground. Then Darnell and Falkner quoted poetry, and Isabelle listened. It was all very different from anything she knew. While the others waited for their coffee, Darnell showed her the old orchard, —"to smell the first blossoms." It was languorously still there under the trees, with the misty fields beyond. Darnell said dreamily:—

"This is where I'd like to be always,—no, not six miles from Torso, but in some far-off country, a thousand miles from men!"

"You, a farmer!" laughed Isabelle. "And what about Congress, and the real anarchists?"

"Oh, you cannot understand! You do not belong to the fields as I do." He pointed ironically to her handsome riding skirt. "You are of the cities, of people. You will flit from this Indiana landscape one day, from provincial Torso, and spread your gay wings among the houses of men. While I—" He made a gesture of despair,—half comic, half serious,—and his dark face became gloomy.

Isabelle was amused at what she called his "heroics," but she felt interested to know what he was; and it flattered her that he should see her "spreading gay wings among the houses of men." These days she liked to think of herself that way.

"You will be in Washington, while we are still in Torso!" she answered.

"Maybe," he mused. "Well, we play the game—play the game—until it is played out!"

'He is not happy with his wife,' Isabelle concluded sagely; 'she doesn't understand him, and that's why she has that half-scared look.'

"I believe you really want to play the game as much as anybody," she ventured with a little thrill of surprise to find herself talking so personally with a man other than her husband.

"You think so?" he demanded, and his face grew wistful. "There is nothing in the game compared with the peace that one might have—"

Lane was calling to her, but she lingered to say:—

"How?"

"Far away—with love and the fields!"

They walked back to where John was holding the horses. She was oddly fluttered. For the first time since she had become engaged a man had somehow given her that special sensation, which women know, of confidence between them. She wished that John had not been so anxious to be off, and she did not repeat to him Darnell's talk, as she usually did every small item. All that she said was, after a time of reflection, "He is not a happy man."

"Who?"

"Mr. Darnell."

"From what I hear he is in a bad way. It is his own fault. He has plenty of ability,—a splendid chance."

She felt that this was an entirely inadequate judgment. What interested the man was the net result; what interested the woman was the human being in whom that result was being worked out. They talked a little longer about the fermenting tragedy of the household that they had just left, as the world talks, from a distance. But Isabelle made the silent reservation,—'she doesn't understand him—with another woman, it would be different.'...

Their road home lay through a district devastated by the mammoth sheds of some collieries. A smudged sign bore the legend:—

PLEASANT VALLEY COAL COMPANY

Lane pulled up his horse and looked carefully about the place. Then he suggested turning west to examine another coal property.

"I suppose that Freke man is awfully rich," Isabelle remarked, associating the name of the coal company with its president; "but he's so common,—I can't see how you can stand him, John!"

Lane turned in his saddle and looked at the elegant figure that his wife made on horseback.

"He isn't half as interesting as Tom Darnell or Rob," she added.

"I stand him," he explained, smiling, "for the reason men stand each other most often,—we make money together."

"Why, how do you mean? He isn't in the railroad."

"I mean in coal mines," he replied vaguely, and Isabelle realized that she was trespassing on that territory of man's business which she had been brought up to keep away from. Nevertheless, as they rode homeward in the westering golden light, she thought of several things:—John was in other business than the railroad, and that puffy-faced German-American was in some way connected with it; business covered many mysteries; a man did business with people he would not ordinarily associate with. It even crossed her mind that what with sleep and business a very large part of her husband's life lay quite beyond her touch. Perhaps that was what the Kentuckian meant by his ideal,—to live life with some loved one far away in companionship altogether intimate.

But before long she was thinking of the set of her riding-skirt, and that led to the subject of summer gowns which she meant to get when she went East with her mother, and that led on to the question of the summer itself. It had been decided that Isabelle should not spend another summer in the Torso heat, but whether she should go to the Connecticut place or accept Margaret Lawton's invitation to the mountains, she was uncertain. Thus pleasantly her thoughts drifted on into her future.



CHAPTER X

If Isabelle had been curious about her husband's interest in the Pleasant Valley Coal Company, she might have developed a highly interesting chapter of commercial history, in which Mr. Freke and John Lane were enacting typical parts.

The Atlantic and Pacific railroad corporation is, as may easily be inferred, a vast organism, with a history, a life of its own, lying like a thick ganglia of nerves and blood-vessels a third of the way across our broad continent, sucking its nourishment from thousands of miles of rich and populous territory. To write its history humanly, not statistically, would be to reveal an important chapter in the national drama for the past forty years,—a drama buried in dusty archives, in auditors' reports, vouchers, mortgage deeds, general orders, etc. Some day there will come the great master of irony, the man of insight, who will make this mass of routine paper glow with meaning visible to all!

Meanwhile this Atlantic and Pacific, which to-day is a mighty system, was once only a handful of atoms. There was the period of Birth; there was the period of Conquest; and finally there has come the period of Domination. Now, with its hold on the industry, the life of eight states, complete, like the great Serpent it can grumble, "I lie here possessing!"

Farrington Beals came to be President of the Atlantic and Pacific at the close of the period of Conquest. The condottieri leaders, those splendid railroad brigands of the seventies and eighties, had retired with "the fruits of their industry." To Farrington Beals and his associate was left the care of the orchard. It was their task to solidify a conglomerate mass of interest-bearing burden, to operate the property with the greatest efficiency possible, in order that it might support the burdens laid upon it and yet other burdens to come as the land waxed rich,—all burdens being ultimately passed to the broad back of the Public, where burdens seem naturally to belong. To this end, Beals men, as they were called, gradually replaced throughout the length and breadth of the system the old operatives, whose methods belonged to the coarse days of brigandage! These Beals men were youngsters,—capable, active, full of "jump," with the word "traffic, traffic" singing always in their ears. Beals was a splendid "operator," and he rapidly brought the Atlantic and Pacific into the first rank of the world's railroads. That shrewd and conservative statesman, Senator Alonzo Thomas (who had skilfully marshalled the legal and political forces during the period of Conquest) was now chairman of the Board, and he and the President successfully readjusted the heterogeneous mass of bonds and stocks, notes and prior liens, taking advantage of a period of optimistic feeling in the market to float a tremendous general mortgage. When this "Readjustment" had been successfully put through, the burden was some forty or fifty millions larger than before,—where those millions went is one of the mysteries to reward that future Carlyle!—but the public load was adjusted more trimly. So it was spoken of as a "masterly stroke of finance," and the ex-statesman gained much credit in the highest circles.

The Senator and the President are excellent men, as any financier will tell you. They are charitable and genial, social beings, members of clubs, hard working and intelligent, public spirited, too,—oh, the very best that the Republic breeds! To see Farrington Beals, gray-haired, thoughtful, almost the student, clothed in a sober dark suit, with a simple flower in the buttonhole, and delicate glasses on the bridge of his shapely nose,—to see him modestly enter the general offices of the Atlantic and Pacific, any one would recognize an Industrial Flywheel of society. To accompany him over the system in his car, with a party of distinguished foreign stockholders, was in the nature of a religious ceremony, so much the interests of this giant property in his care seemed allied with the best interests of our great land!

Thus Beals men ran the road,—men like John Hamilton Lane, railroad men to the core, loyal men, devoted to the great A. and P. And traffic increased monthly, tonnage mounted, wheels turned faster, long freight trains wound their snaky coils through the Alleghanies, over the flat prairies, into Eastern ports, or Western terminals—Traffic, Traffic! And money poured into the treasury, more than enough to provide for all those securities that the Senator was so skilled in manufacturing. All worked in this blessed land of freedom to the glory of Farrington Beals and the profit of the great A. and P.

What has Isabelle to do with all this? Actually she was witness to one event,—rather, just the surface of it, the odd-looking, concrete outside! An afternoon early in her married life at Torso, she had gone down to the railroad office to take her husband for a drive in the pleasant autumn weather. As he was long in coming to meet her, she entered the brick building; the elevator boy, recognizing her with a pleasant nod, whisked her up to the floor where Lane had his private office. Entering the outer room, which happened to be empty at this hour, she heard voices through the half-open door that led to the inner office. It was first her husband's voice, so low that she could not hear what he was saying. Presently it was interrupted by a passionate treble. Through the door she could just see John's side face where he was seated at his desk,—the look she liked best, showing the firm cheek and jaw line, and resolute mouth. Over his desk a thin, roughly dressed man with a ragged reddish beard was leaning on both arms, and his shoulders trembled with the passion of his utterance.

"Mr. Lane," he was saying in that passionate treble, "I must have them cars—or I shall lose my contract!"

"As I have told you a dozen times, Mr. Simonds, I have done my best for you. I recognize your trouble, and it is most unfortunate,—but there seems to be a shortage of coalers just now."

"The Pleasant Valley company get all they want!" the man blurted out.

Lane merely drummed on his desk.

"If I can't get cars to ship my coal, I shall be broke, bankrupt," the thin man cried.

"I am very sorry—"

"Sorry be damned! Give me some cars!"

"You will have to see Mr. Brundage at St. Louis," Lane answered coldly. "He has final say on such matters for the Western division. I merely follow orders."

He rose and closed his desk. The thin man with an eloquent gesture turned and rushed out of the office, past Isabelle, who caught a glimpse of a white face working, of teeth chewing a scrubby mustache, of blood-shot eyes. John locked his desk, took down his hat and coat, and came into the outer office. He kissed his wife, and they went to drive behind the Kentucky horses, talking of pleasant matters. After a time, Isabelle asked irrelevantly:—

"John, why couldn't you give that man the cars he wanted?"

"Because I had no orders to do so."

"But aren't there cars to be had when the other company gets them?"

"There don't happen to be any cars for Simonds. The road is friendly to Mr. Freke."

And he closed his explanation by kissing his wife on her pretty neck, as though he would imply that more things than kisses go by favor in this world. Isabelle had exhausted her interest in the troubled man's desire for coal cars, and yet in that little phrase, "The road is friendly to Mr. Freke," she had touched close upon a great secret of the Beals regime. Unbeknownst to her, she had just witnessed one of those little modern tragedies as intense in their way as any Caesarian welter of blood; she had seen a plain little man, one of the negligible millions, being "squeezed," in other words the operation in an ordinary case of the divine law of survival. Freke was to survive; Simonds was not. In what respects Simonds was inferior to Freke, the Divine Mind alone could say. When that convulsive face shot past Isabelle in Lane's office, it was merely the tragic moment when the conscious atom was realizing fully that he was not to be the one to survive! The moment when Suspense is converted into Despair....

Nor could Isabelle trace the well-linked chain of cause and effect that led from Simonds about-to-be-a-bankrupt via Freke and the Pleasant Valley Coal Company through the glory of the A. and P. (incidentally creating in the Senator his fine patriotism and faith in the future of his country) to her husband's check-book and her own brilliant little dinner, "where they could afford to offer champagne." But in the maze of earthly affairs all these unlike matters were related, and the relationship is worth our notice, if not Isabelle's. If it had been expounded to her, if she had seen certain certificates of Pleasant Valley stock lying snugly side by side with Torso Northern bonds and other "good things" in her husband's safe,—and also in the strong boxes of Messrs. Beals, Thomas, Stanton, et al., she would have said, as she had been brought up to say, "that is my husband's affair."...

The Atlantic and Pacific, under the shrewd guidance of the amiable Senator, was a law-abiding citizen, outwardly. When the anti-rebate laws were passed, the road reformed; it was glad to reform, it made money by reforming. But within the law there was ample room for "efficient" men to acquire more money than their salaries, and they naturally grasped their opportunities, as did the general officers. Freke, whom Isabelle disliked, with her trivial woman's prejudice about face and manners, embodied a Device,—in other words he was an instrument whereby some persons could make a profit, a very large profit, at the expense of other persons. The A. and P. 'was friendly to Freke.' The Pleasant Valley Coal Company never wanted cars, and it also enjoyed certain other valuable privileges, covered by the vague term "switching," that enabled it to deliver its coal into the gaping hulls at tidewater at seventy to eighty cents per ton cheaper than any of its competitors in the Torso district. No wonder that the Pleasant Valley company, with all this "friendliness" of the A. and P., prospered, and that Mr. Freke, under one name or another, swallowed presently, at a bargain, the little mine that the man Simonds had struggled to operate, as well as thousands of acres of bituminous coal lands along the Pleasant River, and along the Torso Northern road. (Perhaps the inwardness of that Inspection Party can now be seen, also.) The signs of the Pleasant Valley Coal Company and its aliases squatted here and there all through the Torso coal region. As the Senator would say, it was a very successful business, "thanks to the initiative of Mr. Freke." And that poor Simonds, who had amply demonstrated his inability to survive, his utter lack of adaptation to his environment, by not being able to be friendly with the great A. and P., went—where all the inefficient, non-adaptable human refuse goes—to the bottom. Bien entendu!

Freke was the Pleasant Valley Coal Company,—that is, he was its necessary physiognomy,—but really the coal company was an incorporated private farm of the officers and friends of the A. and P.,—an immensely profitable farm. Lane in his callow youth did not know this fact; but he learned it after he had been in Torso a few weeks. He was quick to learn, a typical Beals man, thoroughly "efficient," one who could keep his eyes where they belonged, his tongue in his mouth, and his ears open. As he told Isabelle that Sunday afternoon, "he had had many business dealings with Freke," alias the Pleasant Valley Company, etc., and they had been uniformly profitable.

For the fatherly Senator and the shrewd Beals believed that the "right sort" should make a "good thing"; they believed in thrift. In a word, to cut short this lengthy explanation, the great Atlantic and Pacific, one of the two or three most efficiently operated railroads in the United States, was honeycombed with that common thing "graft," or private "initiative"! From the President's office all the way down to subordinates in the traffic department, there were "good things" to be enjoyed. In that growing bunch of securities that Lane was accumulating in his safe, there were, as has been said, a number of certificates of stock in coal companies—and not small ones.

And this is why Lane maintained social as well as financial relations with the coarse Mr. Freke. And this is why, also, Lane felt that they could afford "the best," when they undertook to give a dinner to the distinguished gentlemen from New York. Of course he did not explain all this to Isabelle that pleasant Sunday afternoon. Would Isabelle have comprehended it, if he had? Her mind would have wandered off to another dinner, to that cottage at Bedmouth, which she thought of taking for the summer, or to the handsome figure that John made on horseback. At least nine out of ten American husbands would have treated the matter as Lane did,—given some sufficient general answer to their wives' amateurish curiosity about business and paid their figures due compliments, and thought complacently of the comfortable homes to which they were progressing and the cheerful dinners therein,—all, wife, home, dinner, the result of their fortunate adaptation to the environments they found themselves in....

Perhaps may be seen by this time the remote connection between that tragic gesture of Frank Simonds on the Saturday afternoon, calling on heaven and the Divine Mind that pitilessly strains its little creatures through the holes of a mighty colander—between that tragic gesture, I say, and Isabelle's delightful dinner of ten courses,—champagne and terrapin!

* * * * *

But this tiresome chapter on the affairs of the Atlantic and Pacific railroad,—will it never be done! So sordid, so commonplace, so newspapery, so—just what everything in life is—when we might have expected for the dollar and a quarter expended on this pound of wood pulp and ink,—something less dull than a magazine article; something about a motor-car and a girl with a mischievous face whom a Russian baron seeks to carry away by force and is barely thwarted by the brave American college youth dashing in pursuit with a new eighty h. p., etc., etc. Or at least if one must have a railroad in a novel (when every one knows just what a railroad is), give us a private car and the lovely daughter of the President together with a cow-punching hero, as in Bessie's beloved story. But an entire chapter on graft and a common dinner-party with the champagne drunk so long ago—what a bore!

And yet in the infinite hues of this our human life, the methods by which our substantial hero, John Hamilton Lane, amassed his fortune, are worthy of contemplation. There is more, O yawning reader, in the tragic gesture of ragged-bearded Frank Simonds than in some tons of your favorite brand of "real American women"; more in the sublime complacency of Senator Alonzo Thomas, when he praised "that great and good man," and raised to his memory his glass of Pommery brut, triple sec, than in all the adventures of soldiers of fortune or yellow cars or mysterious yachts or hectic Russian baronesses; more—at least for the purpose of this history—in John's answer to Isabelle's random inquiry that Sunday afternoon than in all the "heart-interest" you have absorbed in a twelvemonth. For in the atmosphere of the ACTS here recorded, you and I, my reader, live and have our being, such as it is—and also poor Frank Simonds (who will never appear again to trouble us). And to the seeing eye, mystery and beauty lie in the hidden meaning of things seen but not known....

Patience! We move to something more intimate and domestic, if not more thrilling.



CHAPTER XI

The child was coming!

When Isabelle realized it, she had a shock, as if something quite outside her had suddenly interposed in her affairs. That cottage at Bedmouth for the summer would have to be given up and other plans as well. At first she had refused to heed the warning,—allowed John to go away to New York on business without confiding in him,—at last accepted it regretfully. Since the terrifying fear those first days in the Adirondack forest lest she might have conceived without her passionate consent, the thought of children had gradually slipped out of her mind. They had settled into a comfortable way of living, with their plans and their expectations. "That side of life," as she called it, was still distasteful to her,—she did not see why it had to be. Fortunately it did not play a large part in their life, and the other, the companionable thing, the being admired and petted, quite satisfied her. Children, of course, sometime; but "not just yet."

"It will be the wrong time,—September,—spoil everything!" she complained to Bessie.

"Oh, it's always the wrong time, no matter when it happens. But you'll get used to it. Rob had to keep me from going crazy at first. But in the end you like it."

"It settles Bedmouth this year!"

"It is a bore," Bessie agreed sympathetically, feeling sorry for herself, as she was to have spent six weeks with Isabelle. "It takes a year out of a woman's life, of course, no matter how she is situated. And I'm so fearfully ugly all the time. But you won't be,—your figure is better."

Bessie, like most childlike persons, took short views of immediate matters. She repeated her idea of child-bearing:—

"I hated it each time,—especially the last time. It did seem so unnecessary—for us.... And it spoils your love, being so afraid. But when it comes, why you like it, of course!"

John arrived from his hurried trip to New York, smiling with news. He did not notice his wife's dejected appearance when he kissed her, in his eagerness to tell something.

"There is going to be a shake-up in the road," he announced. "That's why they sent for me."

"Is there?" she asked listlessly.

"Well, I am slated for fourth Vice-president. They were pleased to say handsome things about what I have done at Torso. Guess they heard of that offer from the D. and O."

"What is fourth Vice-president?" Isabelle inquired.

"In charge of traffic west—headquarters at St. Louis!"

He expected that his wife would be elated at this fulfilment of her desires; but instead Isabelle's eyes unaccountably filled with tears. When he understood, he was still more mystified at her dejection. Very tenderly holding her in his arms, he whispered his delight into her ears. His face was radiant; it was far greater news than his promotion to the fourth vice-presidency of the A. and P.

"And you knew all this time!" he exclaimed reproachfully.

"I wasn't sure!"

He seemed to take the event as natural and joyful, which irritated her still more. As Bessie had said, "Whatever ties a woman to the home, makes her a piece of domestic furniture, the men seem to approve of!"

"What a fright I look already!" Isabelle complained, gazing at the dark circles under her eyes in the glass. She thought of Aline, whose complexion like a Jacqueminot rose had been roughened and marred. Something still virginal in her soul rebelled against it all.

"Oh, not so bad," Lane protested. "You are just a little pinched. You'll be fitter than ever when it's over!"

The man doesn't care, she thought mutinously. It seems to him the proper thing,—what woman is made for. Isabelle was conscious that she was made for much more, for her own joy and her own activity, and she hated to part with even a little of it!

He could not understand her attitude. As a man he had retained the primitive joy in the coming of the child, any child,—but his child and the first one above all! Compared with that nothing was of the least importance. Seeing her pouting into the glass, he said reproachfully:—

"But you like children, Belle!"

And taking her again into his arms and kissing her, he added, "We'll give the little beggar a royal welcome, girl!"

His grave face took on a special look of content with the world and his share in it, while Isabelle continued to stare at herself in the glass and think of the change a child would make in her life. Thus the woman of the new generation, with her eagerness for a "large, full life," feels towards that process of nature for which the institution of marriage was primarily designed.

* * * * *

So for a time longer Isabelle tried to ignore the coming fact, to put it out of her mind, and grasp as much of her own life as she could before the life within her should deprive her of freedom. As Lane's new duties would not begin until the summer, it was arranged that Isabelle should spend the hot weeks at the Grafton farm with her mother, and then return to St. Louis for her confinement in her old home. Later they would settle themselves in the city at their leisure.... It was all so provoking, Isabelle persisted in thinking. They might have had at least a year of freedom in which to settle themselves in the new home. And she had had visions of a few months in Europe with Vickers, who was now in Rome. John might have come over after her. To give up all this for what any woman could do at any time!

As the months passed she could not evade the issue. By the time she was settled in her old room at the Farm she had grown anaemic, nervous. The coming of the child had sapped rather than created strength as it properly should have done. White and wasted she lay for long hours on the lounge near the window where she could see the gentle green hills. Here her cousin Alice Johnston found her, when she arrived with her children to make Mrs. Price a visit. The large, placid woman knelt by Isabelle's side and gathered her in her arms.

"I'm so glad, dear! When is it to be?"

"Oh, sometime in the fall," Isabelle replied vaguely, bored that her condition already revealed itself. "Did you want the first one?" she asked after a time.

"Well, not at the very first. You see it was just so much more of a risk. And our marriage was a risk without that.... I hated the idea of becoming a burden for Steve. But with you it will be so different, from the start. And then it always makes its own place, you see. When it comes, you will think you always wanted it!"

She smiled in her large human way, as if she had tested the trials of life and found that all held some sweet. Isabelle looked down at her thin arms. The Johnstons had four, and they were so poor! As if divining her thought, Alice said:—

"Every time I wondered how we were going to survive, but somehow we did. And now it will all be well, with Steve's new position—"

"What is that?"

"Hasn't John told you? It has just been settled; Steve is going into the A. and P.,—John's assistant in St. Louis."

"I'm so glad for you," Isabelle responded listlessly. She recalled now something that her husband had said about Johnston being a good man, who hadn't had his chance, and that he hoped to do something for him.

"Tremendous rise in salary,—four thousand," Alice continued buoyantly. "We shan't know what to do with all that money! We can give the children the best education."

Isabelle reflected that John's salary had been five thousand at Torso, and as fourth Vice-president would be ten thousand. And she still had her twenty-five hundred dollars of allowance from her father. Alice's elation over Steve's rise gave her a sudden appreciation of her husband's growing power,—his ability to offer a struggling man his chance. Perhaps he could do something for the Falkners also. The thought took her out of herself for a little while. Men were free to work out their destiny in life, to go hither and thither, to alter fate. But a woman had to bear children. John was growing all this time, and she was separated from him. She tried to believe that this was the reason for her discontent, this separation from her husband; but she knew that when she had been perfectly free, she had not shared largely in his activity....

"You must tell me all about the St. Mary's girls," Alice said. "Have you seen Aline?"

"Yes,—she has grown very faddy, I should think,—arts and crafts and all that. Isn't it queer? I asked her to visit us, but she has another one coming,—the third!"

Isabelle made a little grimace.

"And Margaret?"

"She has suddenly gone abroad with her husband—to Munich. He's given up his business. Didn't her marriage surprise you?"

"Yes, I thought she was going to marry that Englishman who was at your wedding."

"Mr. Hollenby? Yes, every one did. Something happened. Suddenly she became engaged to this Pole,—a New York man. Very well connected, and has money, I hear. Conny wrote me about him." ...

So they gossiped on. When Alice rose to leave her, Isabelle held her large cool hand in hers. The older woman, whose experience had been so unlike hers, so difficult, soothed her, gave her a suggestion of other kinds of living than her own little life.

"I'm glad you are here," she said. "Come in often, won't you?"

And her cousin, leaning over to kiss her as she might a fretful child who had much to learn, murmured, "Of course, dear. It will be all right!"



CHAPTER XII

The Steve Johnstons had had a hard time, as Isabelle would have phrased it.

He had been a faithful, somewhat dull and plodding student at the technical school, where he took the civil engineering degree, and had gone forth to lay track in Montana. He laid it well; but this job finished, there seemed no permanent place for him. He was heavy and rather tongue-tied, and made no impression on his superiors except that of commonplace efficiency. He drifted into Canada, then back to the States, and finally found a place in Detroit.

Here, while working for thirty dollars a week, he met Alice Johnston,—she also was earning her living, being unwilling to accept from the Colonel more than the means for her education,—and from the first he wished to marry her, attracted by her gentle, calm beauty, her sincerity, and buoyant, healthy enjoyment of life. She was teaching in a girls' school, and was very happy. Other women had always left the heavy man on the road, so to speak, marking him as stupid. But Alice Johnston was keener or kinder than most young women: she perceived beneath the large body a will, an intelligence, a character, merely inhibited in their envelope of large bones and solid flesh, with an entire absence of nervous system. He was silent before the world, but not foolish, and with her he was not long silent. She loved him, and she consented to marry him on forty dollars a week, hopefully planning to add something from her teaching to the budget, until Steve's slow power might gain recognition.

"So we married," she said to Isabelle, recounting her little life history in the drowsy summer afternoon. "And we were so happy on what we had! It was real love. We took a little flat a long way out of the city, and when I came home afternoons from the school, I got the dinner and Steve cooked the breakfasts,—he's a splendid cook, learned on the plains. It all went merrily the first months, though Aunt Harmony thought I was such a fool to marry, you remember?" She laughed, and Isabella smiled at the memory of the caustic comments which Mrs. Price had made when Alice Vance, a poor niece, had dared to marry a poor man,—"They'll be coming to your father for help before the year is out," she had said. But they hadn't gone to the Colonel yet.

"Then little Steve came, and I had to leave the school and stay at home. That was hard, but I had saved enough to pay for the doctor and the nurse. Then that piece of track elevation was finished and Steve was out of work for a couple of months. He tried so hard, poor boy! But he was never meant to be an engineer. I knew that, of course, all along.... Well, the baby came, and if it hadn't been for my savings,—why, I should have gone to the hospital!

"Just then Steve met a man he had known at the Tech, and was given that place on a railroad as clerk in the traffic department. He was doubtful about taking it, but I wasn't. I was sure it would open up, and even twenty-five dollars a week is something. So he left for Cleveland a week after the baby was born, and somehow I packed up and followed with the baby when I could.

"That wasn't the end of hard times by any means. You see Ned came the next year,—we're such healthy, normal specimens!" She laughed heartily at this admission of her powers of maternity. "And it wasn't eighteen months before Alice was coming.... Oh, I know that we belong to the thriftless pauper class that's always having children,—more than it can properly care for. We ought to be discouraged! But somehow we have fed and clothed 'em all, and we couldn't spare one o' the kiddies. There's James, too, you know. He came last winter, just after Steve had the grippe and pneumonia; that was a pull. But it doesn't seem right to—to keep them from coming—and when you love each other—"

Her eyes shone with a certain joy as she frankly stated the woman's problem, while Isabelle looked away, embarrassed. Mrs. Johnston continued in her simple manner:—

"If Nature doesn't want us to have them, why does she give us the power? ... I know that is wretched political economy and that Nature really has nothing to do with the modern civilized family. But as I see other women, the families about me, those that are always worrying over having children, trying to keep out of it,—why, they don't seem to be any better off. And it is—well, undignified,—not nice, you know.... We can't spare 'em, nor any more that may come! ... As I said, I believed all along that Steve had it in him, that his mind and character must tell, and though it was discouraging to have men put over him, younger men too, at last the railroad found out what he could do."

Her face beamed with pride.

"You see Steve has a remarkable power of storing things up in that big head of his. Remembers a lot of pesky little detail when he's once fixed his mind on it,—the prices of things, figures, and distances, and rates and differentials. Mr. Mason—that was the traffic manager of our road— happened to take Steve to Buffalo with him about some rate-making business. Steve, it turned out, knew the situation better than all the traffic managers. He coached Mr. Mason, and so our road got something it wanted. It was about the lumber rate, in competition with Canadian roads. Mr. Mason made Steve his assistant—did you ever think what an awful lot the rate on lumber might mean to you and yours? It's a funny world. Because Steve happened to be there and knew that with a rate of so much a thousand feet our road could make money,—why, we had a house to live in for the first time!