Bessie thought that a good wife must be chaste, of course; other matters of wifely duty were less distinct.

No! her husband did not care for her any more,—that was the real cause of their troubles. It was hard to wake up to such a fact after nine years of marriage with a man whom you loved!

There was a tragedy between, but not the one that Bessie suspected, nor the mere tragedy of extravagance. Each realized dimly that the other hindered rather than promoted that something within which each held tenaciously as most precious. Instead of giving mutually, they stole mutually, and the end of that sort of life must be concubinage or the divorce court—or a spiritual readjustment beyond the horizon of either Falkner or his wife.

* * * * *

"Did you know that the Falkners were going to give up their house?" Lane asked his wife.

"No, indeed. I saw Bessie at the symphony the other day, and she spoke of going out to Denver to visit her mother; but she didn't say anything about the house. Are you sure?"

"Yes; Falkner told Bainbridge he was selling it. And he wanted Bainbridge to see if there was an opening for him on the road in the East. I am afraid things haven't gone well with them."

"After all the trouble they had building, and such a pretty house! What a shame!"

Lane was in his outing clothes, about to go to the country club for an afternoon of golf with the Colonel. He looked very strong and handsome in his Scotch tweeds. Lately he had begun to take more exercise than he had found time for the first years of his marriage, had developed a taste for sport, and often found a day or two to fish or hunt when friends turned up from the East. Isabelle encouraged this taste, though she saw all the less of her husband; she had a feeling that it was good for him to relax, made him more of the gentleman, less of the hard-working clerk. The motor was at the door, but he dawdled.

"It is a pity about the Falkners,—I am afraid they are not getting on well together. He's a, peculiar fellow. Bainbridge tells me his work is only pretty good,—doesn't put his back into it the way a man must who means to get up in his profession these days. There is a lot doing in his line, too. It will be a shame if trouble comes to Bessie."

"The old difficulty, I suppose," Isabelle remarked; "not enough money—same story everywhere!"

It was the same story everywhere, even in these piping times of prosperity, with fortunes doubling, salaries going up, and the country pouring out its wealth. So few of her friends, even the wealthy ones, seemed to have enough money for their necessities or desires. If they had four servants, they needed six; if they had one motor, they must have two; and the new idea of country houses had simply doubled or trebled domestic budgets. It wasn't merely in the homes of ambitious middle-class folk that the cry went up,—"We must have more!" Isabelle herself had begun to feel that the Colonel might very well have given her a package of stocks and bonds at her wedding. Even with her skilful management, and John's excellent salary, there was so much they could not do that seemed highly desirable to do. "Everything costs so these days!" And to live meant to spend,—to live!



CHAPTER XXIV

Isabelle did not go to Vickers as she firmly intended to that summer. Lane offered a stubborn if silent opposition to the idea of her joining her brother,—"so long as that woman is with him." He could not understand Isabelle's passionate longing for her brother, nor the fact that his loyalty to his mistake endeared Vickers all the more to her. She divined the ashes in her brother's heart, the waste in which he dwelt, and the fact that he "had made a complete mess of life" did not subtract from her love. After all, did the others, their respectable acquaintance, often make much of living?

It was not John's opposition, however, that prevented the journey, but the alarming weakness of the Colonel. In spite of his activity and his exercise the old man had been growing perceptibly weaker, and his digestive trouble had developed until the doctors hinted at cancer. To leave the Colonel now and go to the son he had put out of his life would be mere brutality. Vickers might come back, but Mrs. Price felt that this would cause the Colonel more pain than pleasure.

During the spring Isabelle made many expeditions about the city in company with her father, who gave as an excuse for penetrating all sorts of new neighborhoods that he wished to look at his real estate, which was widely scattered. But this was merely an excuse, as Isabelle easily perceived; what he really cared about was to see the city itself, the building, the evidences of growth, of thriving.

"When your mother and I came to live in the city," he would say, laying a large white hand on his daughter's knee, "it was all swamp out this way,—we used to bring Ezra with us in the early spring and pick pussy-willows. Now look at it!" And what Isabelle saw, when she looked in the direction that the old man waved his hand, was a row of ugly brick apartment houses or little suburban cottages, or brick stores and tenements. There was nothing in the scene, for her, to inspire enthusiasm, and yet the Colonel would smile and gaze fondly out of those kindly blue eyes at the acres of human hive. It was not pride in his shrewd foresight in investing his money, so much as a generous sympathy for the growth of the city, the forthputting of a strong organism.

"I bought this tract in eighty-two," he said, pointing to a stretch of factories and grain elevators. "Had to borrow part of the money to do it. Parrott thought I was a fool, but I knew the time would come when it would be sold by the foot,—folks are born and must work and live," he mused. He made the man drive the car slowly through the rutty street while he looked keenly at the hands pouring from the mills, the elevators, the railroad yards. "Too many of those Polaks," he commented, "but they are better than niggers. It is a great country!"

In the old man's pride there was more than selfish satisfaction, more than flamboyant patriotism over his "big" country; there was an almost pathetic belief in the goodness of life, merely as life. These breeding millions, in this teeming country, were working out their destiny,—on the whole a better destiny than the world had yet seen. And the old man, who had lived his life and fought vitally, felt deep in the inner recesses of his being that all was good; the more chance for the human organism to be born and work out its day, the better. In the eyes of the woman of the newer generation this was a singular-pantheism,—incomprehensible. Unless one were born under favorable conditions, what good was there in the struggle? Mere life was not interesting.

They went, too, to see the site of the coming Exposition. The great trees were being cut down and uprooted to give space for the vast buildings. The Colonel lamented the loss of the trees. "Your mother and I used to come out here Sundays in summer," he said regretfully. "It was a great way from town then—there was only a steam road—and those oaks were grateful, after the heat. I used to lie on the ground and your mother would read to me. She had a very sweet voice, Isabelle!"

But he believed in the Exposition, even if the old trees must be sacrificed for it. He had contributed largely to the fund, and had been made a director, though the days of his leadership were over. "It is good for people to see how strong they are," he said. "These fairs are our Olympic games!"

* * * * *

At first he did not wish to leave the city, which was part of his bone and flesh; but as the summer drew on and he was unable to endure the motor his thoughts turned back to his Connecticut hills, to the old farm and the woods and the fields. Something deeper than all was calling to him to return to the land that was first in his blood. So they carried him—now a bony simulacrum of his vigorous self—to the old house at Grafton. For a few weeks he lay wrapped in rugs on the veranda, his eyes on Dog Mountain. At first he liked to talk with the farm-hands, who slouched past the veranda. But more and more his spirit withdrew even from this peaceful scene of his activity, and at last he died, as one who has no more concern about life....

To Isabelle, who had been with him constantly these last fading months, there was much that remained for a long time inexplicable in her father's attitude towards life. He seemed to regret nothing, not even the death of his elder son, nor his estrangement from Vickers, and he had little of the old man's pessimism. There were certain modern manifestations that she knew he disliked; but he seemed to have a fine tolerance even for them, as being of no special concern to him. He had lived his life, such as it was, without swerving, without doubts or hesitations, which beset the younger generation, and now that it was over he had neither regret nor desire to grasp more.

When the Colonel's will was opened, it caused surprise not only in his family, but in the city where he had lived. It was long talked about. In the first place his estate was much larger than even those nearest him had supposed; it mounted upwards from eight millions. The will apparently had been most carefully considered, largely rewritten after the departure of Vickers. His son was not mentioned in the document. Nor were there the large bequests, at least outright, to charities that had been expected of so public spirited a man. The will was a document in the trust field. To sum it all up, it seemed as if the old man had little faith in the immediate generation, even in his daughter and her successful husband. For he left Isabelle only the farm at Grafton and a few hundred thousand dollars. To be sure, after his wife's death the bulk of the estate would be held in trust for her child, or children, should her marriage prove more fruitful in the future. Failing heirs, he willed that the bulk of the estate should go to certain specified charities,—an Old Man's Home, The Home for Crippled Children, etc. And it was arranged that the business should be continued under the direction of the trustees. The name of Parrott and Price should still stand for another generation!

"A singular will!" Lane, who was one of the trustees, said to his wife.

Isabelle was more hurt than she cared to have known. She had always supposed that some day she would be a rich woman in her own right. But it was the silent comment, the mark of disapproval, that she read in the lines of the will which hurt. The Colonel had never criticised, never chided her; but she had felt at times that he did not like the kind of life she had elected to lead latterly.

"He thought we were extravagant, probably," she replied to her husband.

"I can't see why,—we never went to him for help!"

She knew that was not exactly the reason,—extravagance. The old man did not like the modern spirit—at least the spirit of so many of her friends—of spending for themselves. The Colonel did not trust the present generation; he preferred that his money should wait until possibly the passing of the years had brought wisdom.

"A selfish will!" the public said.



PART THREE



CHAPTER XXV

Fosdick had called Cornelia Woodyard the "Vampire,"—why, none of her admirers could say. She did not look the part this afternoon, standing before the fire in her library, negligently holding a cup of tea in one hand, while she nibbled gourmandizingly at a frosted cake. She had come in from an expedition with Cairy, and had not removed her hat and gloves, merely letting her furs slip off to the floor. While she had her tea, Cairy was looking through the diamond panes of a bank of windows at a strip of small park, which was dripping in the fog of a dubious December day. Conny, having finished her tea, examined lazily some notes, pushed them back into their envelopes with a disgusted curl of her long lips, and glancing over her shoulder at Cairy drawled in an exhausted voice:—

"Poke the fire, please, Tommy!"

Cairy did as he was told, then lighted a cigarette and stood expectantly. Conny seemed lost in a maze of dreary thoughts, and the man looked about the room for amusement. It was a pleasant little room, with sufficient color of flowers and personal disorderliness of letters and books and papers to soften the severity of the Empire furniture. Evidently the architect who had done over this small down-town house had been supplemented by the strong hand of its mistress. Outside and inside he had done his best to create something French out of the old-fashioned New York block house, but Cornelia Woodyard had Americanized his creation enough to make it intimate, livable.

"Can't you say something, Tommy?" Conny murmured in her childish treble.

"I have said a good deal first and last, haven't I?"

"Don't be cross, Tommy! I am down on my job to-day."

"Suppose you quit it! Shall we go to the Bahamas? Or Paris? Or Rio?"

"Do you think that you could manage the excursion, Tommy?" Although she smiled good-naturedly, the remark seemed to cut. The young man slumped into a chair and leaned his head on his hands.

"Besides, where would Percy come in?"

Cairy asked half humorously, "And where, may I ask, do I come in?"

"Oh, Tommy, don't look like that!" Conny complained. "You do come in, you know!"

Cairy brought his chair and placed himself near the fire; then leaned forward, looking intently into the woman's eyes.

"I think sometimes the women must be right about you, you know."

"What do they say?"

... "That you are a calculating machine,—one of those things they have in banks to do arithmetic stunts!"

"No, you don't, ... silly! Tell me what Gossom said about the place."

"He didn't say much about that; he talked about G. Lafayette Gossom and The People's Magazine chiefly.... The mess of pottage is three hundred a month. I am to be understudy to the great fount of ideas. When he has an inspiration he will push a bell, and I am to run and catch it as it flows red hot from his lips and put it into shape,—if I can."

Cairy nursed his injured leg with a disgusted air.

"Don't sniff, Tommy,—there are lots of men who would like to be in your shoes."

"I know.... Oh, I am not ungrateful for my daily bread. I kiss the hand that found it,—the hand of power!"

"Silly! Don't be literary with me. Perhaps I put the idea into old Noddy Gossom's head when he was here the other night. You'll have to humor him, listen to his pomposity. But he has made a success of that People's Magazine. It is an influence, and it pays!"

"Four hundred thousand a year, chiefly automobile and corset ads, I should say."

"Nearly half a million a year!" Conny cried with the air of 'See what I have done for you!'

"Yes!" the Southerner remarked with scornful emphasis ... "I shall harness myself once more to the car of triumphant prosperity, and stretch forth my hungry hands to catch the grains that dribble in the rear. Compromise! Compromise! All is Compromise!"

"Now you are literary again," Conny pronounced severely. "Your play wasn't a success,—there was no compromise about that! The managers don't want your new play. Gossom does want your little articles. You have to live, and you take the best you can get,—pretty good, too."

"Madam Materialist!"

Conny made a little face, and continued in the same lecturing tone.

"Had you rather go back to that cross-roads in the Virginia mountains—something Court-house—or go to London and write slop home to the papers, as Ted Stevens does?"

"You know why I don't go back to the something Courthouse and live on corn-bread and bacon!" Cairy sat down once more very near the blond woman and leaned forward slowly. Conny's mouth relaxed, and her eyes softened.

"You are dear," she said with a little laugh; "but you are silly about things." As the young man leaned still farther forward, his hand touching her arm, Conny's large brown eyes opened speculatively on him....

The other night he had kissed her for the first time, that is, really kissed her in unequivocal fashion, and she had been debating since whether she should mention the matter to Percy. The right moment for such a confidence had not yet come. She must tell him some day. She prided herself that her relation with her husband had always been honest and frank, and this seemed the kind of thing he ought to know about, if she were going to keep that relation what it had been. She had had tender intimacies—"emotional friendships," her phrase was—before this affair with Cairy. They had always been perfectly open: she had lunched and dined them, so to speak, in public as well as at the domestic table. Percy had rather liked her special friends, had been nice to them always.

But looking into the Southerner's eyes, she felt that there was something different in this case; it had troubled her from the time he kissed her, it troubled her now—what she could read in his eyes. He would not be content with that "emotional friendship" she had given the others. Perhaps, and this was the strangest thrill in her consciousness, she might not be content to have him satisfied so easily.... Little Wrexton Grant had sent her flowers and written notes—and kissed her strong fingers, once. Bertie Sollowell had dedicated one of his books to her (the author's copy was somewhere in Percy's study), and hinted that his life missed the guiding hand that she could have afforded him. He had since found a guiding hand that seemed satisfactory. Dear old Royal Salters had squired her, bought her silver in Europe, and Jevons had painted her portrait the year he opened his studio in New York, and kissed a very beautiful white shoulder,—purely by way of compliment to the shoulder. All these marks of gallantry had been duly reported to Percy, and laughed at together by husband and wife in that morning hour when Conny had her coffee in bed. Nevertheless, they had touched her vanity, as evidences that she was still attractive as a woman. No woman—few women at any rate—of thirty-one resents the fact that some man other than her husband can feel tenderly towards her. And "these friends"—the special ones—had all been respecters of the law; not one would have thought of coveting his neighbor's wife, any more than of looting his safe.

But with Tom Cairy it was different. Not merely because he was Southern and hence presumably ardent in temperament, nor because of his reputation for being "successful" with women; not wholly because he appealed to her on account of his physical disability,—that unfortunate slip by the negro nurse. But because there was in this man the strain of feminine understanding, of vibrating sentiment—the lyric chord of temperament—which made him lover first and last! That is why he had stirred most women he had known well,—women in whom the emotional life had been dormant, or unappeased, or petrified.

"You are such a dear!" Conny murmured, looking at him with her full soft eyes, realizing in her own way that in this fragile body there was the soul of the lover,—born to love, to burn in some fashion before some altar, always.

The special aroma that Cairy brought to his love-making was this sense that for the time it was all there was in life, that it shut out past and future. The special woman enveloped by his sentiment did not hear the steps of other women echoing through outer rooms. She was, for the moment, first and last. He was able to create this emotional delusion genuinely; for into each new love he poured himself, like a fiery liquor, that swept the heart clean.

"Dearest," he had murmured that night to Conny, "you are wonderful,—woman and man,—the soul of a woman, the mind of a man! To love you is to love life."

And Conny, in whose ears the style of lover's sighs was immaterial, was stirred with an unaccountable feeling. When Cairy put his hand on hers, and his lips quivered beneath his mustache, her face inevitably softened and her eyes widened like a child's eyes. For Conny, even Conny, with her robust intelligence and strong will to grasp that out of life which seemed good to her, wanted to love—in a way she had never loved before. Like many women she had passed thirty with a husband of her choice, two children, and an establishment entirely of her making before she became aware that she had missed something on the way,—a something that other women had. She had seen Severine Wilson go white when a certain man entered the room—then light brilliantly with joy when his eyes sought her.... That must be worth having, too! ...

Her relations with her husband were perfect,—she had said so for years and every one said the same thing about the Woodyards. They were very intimate friends, close comrades. She knew that Percy respected and admired her more than any woman in the world, and paid her the last flattery of conceding to her will, respecting her intelligence. But there was something that he had not done, could not do, and that was a something that Cairy seemed able to do,—give her a sensation partly physical, wholly emotional, like the effect of stimulant, touching every nerve. Conny, with her sure grasp of herself, however, had no mind to submit blindly to this intoxication; she would examine it, like other matters,—was testing it now in her capacious intelligence, as the man bent his eyes upon her, so close to her lips.

Had she only been the "other sort," the conventional ordinary sort, she would have either gulped her sensation blindly,—"let herself go,"—or trembled with horror and run away as from some evil thing. Being as she was, modern, intellectual, proudly questioning all maxims, she kept this new phenomenon in her hand, saying, "What does it mean for me?" The note of the Intellectuals!



CHAPTER XXVI

There was the soft sound of a footstep on the padded stairs, and Percy Woodyard glanced into the room.

"Hello, Tom!" he said briskly, and crossed to Conny, whose smooth brow he touched softly with the tips of his fingers. "How goes it, Tom?"

"You are home early," Conny complained in her treble drawl.

"Must go to Albany to-night," Percy explained, a weary note in his voice. "Not dining out to-night, Tom?"

It was a little joke they had, that when Cairy was not with them he was "dining out."...

When Cairy had left, Conny rose from her lounging position as if to resume the burden of life.

"It's the Commission?" she inquired.

"Yes! I sent you the governor's letter."

For a time they discussed the political situation in the new Commission, to which Woodyard had recently been appointed, his first conspicuous public position. Then his wife observed wearily: "I was at Potts's this morning and saw Isabelle Lane there. She was in mourning."

"Her father died,—you know we saw it in the papers."

"She must be awfully rich."

"He left considerable property,—I don't know to whom."

"Well, they are in New York. Her husband has been made something or other in the railroad, so they are going to live here."

"He is a very able man, I am told."

After a time Conny drawled: "I suppose we must have 'em here to dinner,—they are at a hotel up town. Whom shall we have?"

Evidently after due consideration Conny had concluded that the Lanes must come under her cognizance. She ran over half a dozen names from her best dinner list, and added, "And Tom."

"Why Tom this time?" Percy demanded.

"He's met Isabelle—and we always have Tommy! You aren't jealous, are you, Percy?" She glanced at him in amusement.

"I must dress," Percy observed negligently, setting down his cup of tea.

"Come here and tell me you are not jealous," Conny commanded. As her husband smiled and brushed her fair hair with his lips, she muttered, "You silly!" just as she had to Cairy's unreasonableness. Why! She was Percy's destiny and he knew it.... She had a contempt for people who ruffled themselves over petty emotions. This sex matter had been exaggerated by Poets and Prudes, and their hysterical utterances should not inhibit her impulses.

Nevertheless she did not consider it a suitable opportunity to tell Percy about the kiss.

* * * * *

Percy Woodyard and Cornelia Pallanton had married on a new, radical basis. They had first met in the house of an intellectual woman, the wife of a university professor, where clever young persons were drawn in and taught to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Ibsen and George Moore, and to engage gracefully in perilous topics. They had been rather conscious that they were radicals,—"did their own thinking," as they phrased it, these young persons. They were not willing to accept the current morality, not even that part of it engraved in law; but so far as regarded all of morality that lay outside the domain of sex their actions were not in conflict with society, though they were Idealists, and in most cases Sentimentalists. But in the matter of sex relation, which is the knot of the tangle for youth, they believed in the "development of the individual." It must be determined by him, or her, whether this development could be obtained best through regular or irregular relations. The end of all this individual development? "The fullest activity, the largest experience, the most complete presentation of personality," etc. Or as Fosdick railed, "Suck all and spit out what you don't like!"

So when these two young souls had felt sufficiently moved, one to the other, to contemplate marriage, they had had an "understanding": they would go through with the customary formula and oaths of marriage, to please their relatives and a foolish world; but neither was to be "bound" by any such piece of silly archaism as the marriage contract. Both recognized that both had diversified natures, which might require in either case more varied experience than the other could give. In their enlightened affection for each other, neither would stand in the light of the other's best good.... There are many such young people, in whom intellectual pride has erased deeper human instincts. But as middle life draws on, they conform—or seek refuge in the divorce court.

Neither Percy nor Cornelia had any intention of practising adultery as a habit: they merely wished to be honest with themselves, and felt superior to the herd in recognizing the errant or variant possibilities in themselves. Conny took pleasure in throwing temptation in Percy's way, in encouraging him to know other women,—secretly gratified that he proved hopelessly domestic. And on her side we have seen the innocent lengths to which she had hitherto gone.

For it proved as life began in earnest for these two that much of their clear philosophy crumbled. Instead of the vision of feminine Idealism that the young lawyer had worshipped, Conny developed a neat, practical nature, immensely capable of "making things go." As her husband was the most obvious channel through which things could move, her husband became her chief care. She had no theory of exploiting him,—she had no theories at all. She saw him as so much capacity to be utilized. Just as she never was entrapped into a useless acquaintance, never had a "wrong person" at her house, never wasted her energies on the mere ebullition of good feeling, so she never allowed Percy to waste his energies on fruitless works. Everything must count. Their life was a pattern of simple and pronounced design, from the situation of their house to the footing on which it was established and the people who were encouraged to attach themselves there.

Woodyard had been interested in social good works, and as a young man had served the Legal Aid Society. A merely worldly woman would have discouraged this mild weakness for philanthropy. But Conny knew her material; out of such as Percy, corporation lawyers—those gross feeders at the public trough—were not made. Woodyard was a man of fine fibre, rather unaggressive. He must either be steered into a shady pool of legal sinecure, or take the more dangerous course through the rapids of public life. It was the moment of Reform. Conny realized the capabilities of Reform, and Percy's especial fitness for it; Reform, if not remunerative, was fashionable and prominent.

So Conny had steered their little bark, hoisting sail to every favorable wind, no matter how slight the puff, until Woodyard now was a minor figure in the political world. When his name occurred in the newspapers, a good many people knew who he was, and his remarks at dinners and his occasional speeches were quoted from, if there was not more valuable matter. He had been spoken of for Congress. (Conny, of course, would never permit him to engulf himself in that hopeless sea.) Just what Conny designed as the ultimate end, she herself did not know; like all great generals, she was an opportunist and took what seemed to her worth taking from the fortunes of the day. The last good thing which had floated up on her shore was this Commissionership. She had fished that up with the aid of the amiable Senator, who had spoken a word here and a word there in behalf of young Woodyard.

Conny was very well pleased with herself as a wife, and she knew that her husband was pleased with her. Moreover, she had not the slightest intention of permitting anything to interfere with her wifely duties as she saw them....

Percy had gone upstairs to that roof story where in New York children are housed, to see his boy and girl. He was very fond of his children. When he came down, his thoughtful face was worried.

"The kids seem always to have colds," he remarked.

"I know it," Conny admitted. "I must take them to Dr. Snow to-morrow." (They had their own doctor, and also their own throat specialist.)

"I wonder if it is good for them here, so far down in the city,—they have only that scrap of park to play in."

Conny, who had been over this question a good many times, answered irrefutably,—

"There seem to be a good many children growing up all right in the same conditions."

She knew that Percy would like some excuse to escape into the country. Conny had no liking for suburban life, and with her husband's career at the critical point the real country was out of the question.

"I suppose Jack will have to go to boarding school another year," Percy said with a sigh.

He was not a strong man himself, though of solid build and barely thirty. He had that bloodless whiteness of skin so often found among young American men, which contrasted with his dark mustache, and after a long day's work like this his step dragged. He wore glasses over his blue eyes, and when he removed them the dark circles could be seen. Conny knew the limits of his strength and looked carefully to his physical exercise.

"You didn't get your squash this afternoon?"

When Percy was worried about anything, she immediately searched for a physical cause.

"No! I had to finish up things at the office so that I could get away to-night."

Then husband and wife went to their dinner, and Woodyard gave Conny a short-hand account of his doings, the people he had seen, what they had said, the events at the office. Conny required this account each day, either in the morning or in the evening. And Woodyard yielded quite unconsciously to his wife's strong will, to her singularly definite idea of "what is best." He admired her deeply, was grateful to her for that complete mastery of the detail of life which she had shown, aware that if it were not for the dominating personality of this woman he had somehow had the good fortune to marry, life would have been a smaller matter for him.

"Con," he said when they had gone back to the library for their coffee, "I am afraid this Commission is going to be ticklish business."

"Why?" she demanded alertly.

"There are some dreadful grafters on it,—I suspect that the chairman is a wolf. I suspect further that it has been arranged to whitewash certain rank deals."

"But why should the governor have appointed you?"

"Possibly to hold the whitewash brush."

"You think that the Senator knows that?"

"You can't tell where the Senator's tracks lead."

"Well, don't worry! Keep your eyes open. You can always resign, you know."

Woodyard went off to his train after kissing his wife affectionately. Conny called out as he was getting into his coat:—

"Will you be back Sunday? Shall I have the Lanes then?"

"Yes,—and you will go to the Hillyers to-morrow?"

"I think so,—Tom will take me."

After the door closed Conny went to her desk and wrote the note to Isabelle. Then after meditating a few moments, more notes of invitation. She had decided on her combination,—Gossom, the Silvers, the Hillyers (to get them off her mind), Senator Thomas, and Cairy. She did not take Percy's objection to Tom seriously.

She had decided to present a variety of people to the Lanes. Isabelle and she had never been intimate, and Conny had a woman's desire to show an accomplished superiority to the rich friend, who had been inclined to snub her in boarding school. Conny was eminently skilful in "combinations." Every one that composed her circle or even entered it might some day be of use in creating what is called "publicity." That, as Cornelia Woodyard felt, was the note of the day. "You must be talked about by the right people, if you want to be heard, if you want your show!" she had said to Cairy. Thanks to Lane's rapid rise in the railroad corporation, Isabelle had come legitimately within the zone of interest.

After she had settled this matter to her satisfaction, she turned to some house accounts and made various calculations. It was a wonder to every one who knew them how the Woodyards "could do so much on what they had." As a matter of fact, with the rising scale of living, it required all Conny's practical adroitness to make the household come out nearly even. Thanks to a great-aunt who admired Percy, they had been able to buy this house and alter it over, and with good business judgment it had been done so that the property was now worth nearly a third more than when they took it. But a second man-servant had been added, and Conny felt that she must have a motor; she pushed away the papers and glanced up, thinking, planning.

The Senator and she had talked investments the last time they had met. She had a little money of her own. If the old fox would only take it and roll it up into a big snowball! Isabelle, now, with all that wealth! Conny pursed her lips in disgust to think that so much of the ammunition of war had fallen into such incompetent hands. "Yes," she said to herself, "the Senator must show me how to do it." Perhaps it flitted vaguely through her mind that Percy might object to using stock market tips from the Senator. But Percy must accept her judgment on this matter. They could not go on any longer with only twenty thousand a year.

Turning out the lights, she went to her bedroom. It was very plain and bare, with none of the little toilette elegances or chamber comforts that women usually love. Conny never spent except where it showed saliently. Her evening gowns were sometimes almost splendid, but her dressing gowns were dowdy, and poor little Bessie Falkner spent twice as much on lingerie.

Having discharged the duties of her day, her mind returned to Cairy, to his work for Gossom, to his appealing self, and her lips relaxed in a gentle smile. Hers was a simple nature, the cue once caught. She had come of rather plain people, who knew the worth of a dollar, and had spent their lives saving or investing money. The energy of the proletariat had been handed to her undiminished. The blood was evident in the large bones, the solid figure, and tenacious fingers, as well as in the shrewdness with which she had created this household. It was her instinct to push out into the troubled waters of the material world. She never weakened herself by questioning values. She knew—what she wanted.

Nevertheless, as she reached up her hand to turn out the night light, she was smiling with dreamy eyes, and her thoughts were no longer practical!



CHAPTER XXVII

When Isabelle emerged from the great hotel and turned down the avenue to walk to the office of Dr. Potts, as he required her to do every day, she had a momentary thrill of exultation. Descending the gentle incline, she could see a good part of the city extending into a distant blue horizon before her. The vast buildings rose like islands in the morning mist. It reminded her, this general panorama, of the awe-compelling spaces of the Arizona canon into which she had once descended. Here were the same irregular, beetling cliffs, the same isolated crags, with sharply outlined lower and minor levels of building. The delicate blue, the many grays of storm and mist gave it color, also. But in place of the canon's eternal quiet,—the solitude of the remote gods,—this city boiled and hummed. That, too,—the realization of multitudinous humanity,—made Isabelle's pulses leap.

In spite of her poor health, she had the satisfaction of at last being here, in the big hive, where she had wished to be so long. She was a part of it, a painfully insignificant mite as yet, but still a part of it. Hitherto New York had been a sort of varied hotel, an entertainment. Now it was to be her scene, and she had begun already to take possession. It had all come about very naturally, shortly after her father's death. While she was dreading the return to St. Louis, which must be emptier than ever without the Colonel, and she and her mother were discussing the possibility of Europe, John's new position had come. A Western road had made him an offer; for he had a splendid record as a "traffic getter." The Atlantic and Pacific could not lose him; they gave him the third vice-presidency with headquarters in New York and general charge of traffic. Thus the Lanes' horizon shifted, and it was decided that the first year in the city they should spend in a hotel with Mrs. Price. Isabelle's health was again miserable; there had been the delayed operation; and now she was in the care of the famous Potts, trying to recover from the operation, from the old fatigue and the recent strains, "to be made fit."

The move to New York had not meant much to Lane. He had spent a great deal of his time there these last years, as well as in Washington, Pittsburg,—in this city and that,—as business called him. His was what is usually regarded as a cosmopolitan view of life,—it might better be called a hotel-view. Home still meant to him the city where his wife and child were temporarily housed, but he was equally familiar with half a dozen cities. Isabelle, too, had the same rootless feeling. She had spent but a short time in any one place since she had left her father's house to go to St. Mary's. That is the privilege or the curse of the prosperous American. Life thus becomes a shifting panorama of surfaces. Even in the same city there are a dozen spots where the family ark has rested, which for the sake of a better term may be called "homes." That sense of rooted attachment which comes from long habituation to one set of physical images is practically a lost emotion to Americans....

There were days when New York roared too loudly for Isabelle's nerves, when the jammed streets, the buzzing shops, the overflowing hotels and theatres, made her long for quiet. Then she thought of the Farm as the most stable memory of a fixed condition, and she had an unformed plan of "doing over" the old place, which was now her own, and making it the centre of the family's centrifugal energy. Meantime there was the great Potts, who promised her health, and the flashing charm of the city.

Occasionally she felt lonely in this packed procession, this hotel existence, with its multitude of strange faces, and longed for something familiar, even Torso! At such times when she saw the face of an old acquaintance, perhaps in a cab at a standstill in the press of the avenue, her heart warmed. Even a fleeting glimpse of something known was a relief. Clearly she must settle herself into this whirlpool, put out her tentacles, and grasp an anchorage. But where? What?

One morning as she and her mother were making slow progress down the avenue, she caught sight of Margaret Pole on the sidewalk, waiting to cross the stream, a little boy's hand in hers. Isabelle waved to her frantically, and then leaped from the cab, dodged between the pushing motors, and grasped Margaret.

"You here!" she gasped.

"We came back some months ago," Margaret explained.

She was thin, Isabelle thought, and her face seemed much older than the years warranted. Margaret, raising her voice above the roar, explained that they were living out of town, "in the country, in Westchester," and promised to come to lunch the next time she was in the city. Then with a nod and a smile she slipped into the stream again as if anxious to be lost, and Isabelle rejoined her mother.

"She looks as if she were saving her clothes," Mrs. Price announced with her precise view of what she observed. Isabelle, while she waited for the doctor, mused on the momentary vision of her old friend at the street corner. Margaret turned up in the noise and mist of the city, as everybody might turn up; but Margaret old, worn, and almost shabby! Then the nurse came for her and she went into the doctor's room, with a depressing sensation compounded of a bad night, the city roar, the vision of Margaret.

"Well, my lady, what's the story to-day?"

Dr. Potts looked up from his desk, and scrutinized the new patient out of his shaggy eyebrows. Isabelle began at once the neurasthenic's involved and particularized tale of woe, breaking at the end with almost a sob:—

"I am so useless! I am never going to be well,—what is the matter with me?"

"So it's a bad world this morning, eh?" the doctor quizzed in an indulgent voice. "We'll try to make it better,—shake up the combination." He broke off suddenly and remarked in an ordinary, conversational voice: "Your friend Mrs. Woodyard was in here this morning,—a clever woman! My, but she is clever!"

"What is the matter with her?"

"Same thing,—Americanitis; but she'll pull out if she will give herself half a chance."

Then he returned to Isabelle, wrote her a prescription, talked to her for ten minutes, and when she left the office she felt better, was sure it would "all come out right."

The great Dr. Potts! He served as God to several hundred neurasthenic women. Born in a back street of a small town, he had emerged into the fashionable light after prodigious labor and exercise of will. Physically he stood six feet, with a heavy head covered with thick black hair, and deep-set black eyes. He had been well educated professionally, but his training, his medical attainments, had little to do with his success. He had the power to look through the small souls of his women patients, and he found generally Fear, and sometimes Hypocrisy,—a desire to evade, to get pleasure and escape the bill. These he bullied. Others he found struggling, feeble of purpose, desiring light, willingly confessing their weakness, and begging for strength. These he despised; he gave them drugs and flattered them. There were some, like Conny, who were perfectly poised, with a plain philosophy of selfishness. These he understood, being of fellow clay, and plotted with them how to entrap what they desired.

Power! That was Potts's keynote,—power, effectiveness, accomplishment, at any and all cost. He was the spirit of the city, nay of the country itself! "Results—get results at all costs," that was the one lesson of life which he had learned from the back street, where luckier men had shouldered him.... "I must supply backbone," he would say to his patients. "I am your temporary dynamo!"

To Isabelle this mass of energy, Dr. Alexander Potts, seemed like the incarnate will to live of the great city. After her visit at his office she came out into the sharp air, the shrill discords of the busy streets, attuned—with purpose,—"I am going to be well now! I am going to do this. Life will arrange itself, and at last I shall be able to live as others live." This borrowed purpose might last the day out, and she would plunge into a dozen matters; or it might wear off in an hour or two. Then back she went the next day to be keyed up once more.

"Do something! Deliver the goods, no matter what goods or how you get them into the premises!" Potts thundered, beating the desk in the energy of his lecture. "Live! That's what we must all do. Never mind how you live,—don't waste good tissue worrying over that. Live!"

Dr. Potts was an education to Isabelle. His moods of brutality and of sympathy came like the shifting shadows of a gusty day. His perfectly material philosophy frightened her and allured her. He was Mephistopheles,—one hand on the medicine chest of life, the other pointing satirically towards the towered city.

"See, my child," he purred; "I will tinker this little toy of your body for you; then run along down there and play with your brothers and sisters."

In the mood of reaction that the neurasthenic must meet, the trough of the wave, Isabelle doubted. Potts had not yet found the key to her mechanism; the old listless cloud befogged her still. After a sleepless night she would sit by her window, high up in the mountain of stone, and look out over the city, its voice dull at this hour of dawn,—a dozing monster. Something like terror filled her at these times, fear of herself, of the slumbering monster, so soon to wake and roar. "Act, do!" thundered Potts; "don't think! Live and get what you want...." Was that all? The peaceful pastures at Grafton, the still September afternoon when the Colonel died, the old man himself,—there was something in them beyond mere energy, quite outside the Potts philosophy.

Once she ventured to suggest this doubt to Cornelia Woodyard, who, being temporarily in need of a bracer, had resorted to "old Pot." She had planned to go to the opera that night and wanted to "be herself."

"I wonder if he's right about it all," said Isabelle; "if we are just machines, with a need to be oiled now and then,—to take this drug or that? Is it all as simple as he makes out? All just autointoxication, chemistry, and delusion?"

"You're ill,—that's why you doubt," Conny replied with tranquil positiveness. "When you've got the poison out of your system, you'll see, or rather you won't see crooked,—won't have ideas."

"It's all a formula?"

Conny nodded, shutting her large mouth firmly.

"And he has the key. You are merely an organ, and he pulls out this stop or that; gives you one thing to take and then another. You tell him this dotty idea you've got in your head and he'll pull the right stop to shake it out."

"I wonder! Some days I feel that I must go away by myself, get out of all the noise, and live up among the mountains far off—"

She stopped. For Conny was not one to whom to confide a longing for the stars and the winds in the pines and the scent of the earth. Such vaporing would be merely another symptom!

"What would you go mooning off by yourself for? You'd be crazy, for a fact. Better come down to Palm Beach with me next month."

The great Potts had the unfortunate habit of gossiping about his patients with one another. He had said to Conny: "Your friend Isabelle interests me. I should say that she had a case of festering conscience." He crossed his legs and gazed wisely up at the ceiling. "A rudimentary organ left over from her hard-working ancestors. She is inhibited, tied, thinks she can't do this and that. What she needs"—Potts had found the answer to his riddle and brought his eyes from the ceiling—"is a lover! Can't you find her one?"

"Women usually prefer to select that for themselves."

"Oh, no,—one is as good as another. What she needs is a counter-irritant. That husband of hers, what is he like?"

"Just husband, very successful, good-natured, gives her what she wants,—I should say they pull well together."

"That's it! He's one of the smooth, get-everything-the-dear-woman-wants kind, eh? And then busies himself about his old railroad? Well, it is the worst sort for her. She needs a man who will beat her."

"Is that what the lover would do?"

"Bless you, no! He would make her stop thinking she had an ache." When Conny went, the doctor came to the door with her and as he held her hand cried breezily: "Remember what I said about your friend. Look up some nice young man, who will hang around and make her think she's got a soul." He pressed Conny's hand and smiled.



CHAPTER XXVIII

When the Lanes went to Sunday luncheon at the Woodyards', the impression on Isabelle was exactly what Conny wished it to be. The little house had a distinct "atmosphere," Conny herself had an "atmosphere," and the people, who seemed much at home there and very gay, were what is termed "interesting." That is, each person had his ticket of "distinction," as Isabelle quickly found out. One was a lawyer whose name often appeared in the newspapers as counsel for powerful interests; another was a woman novelist, whose last book was then running serially in a magazine and causing discussion; a third—a small man with a boyish open face—Isabelle discovered with a thrill of delight was the Ned Silver whose clever little articles on the current drama she had read in a fashionable weekly paper.

Isabelle found her hostess leaning against the mantelpiece with the air of having just come in and discovered her guests.

"How are you, dearie?" she drawled in greeting. "This is Mr. Thomas Randall Cairy, Margaret's cousin,—do you remember? He says he has met you before, but Thomas usually believes he has met ladies whom he wants to know!" Then Conny turned away, and thereafter paid little attention to the Lanes, as though she wished them to understand that the luncheon was not given for them.

"In this case," Cairy remarked, "Mrs. Woodyard's gibe happens to miss. I haven't forgotten the Virginian hills, and I hope you haven't."

It was Cairy who explained the people to Isabelle:—

"There is Gossom, the little moth-eaten, fat man at the door. He is the mouthpiece of the People's, but he doesn't dislike to feast with the classes. He is probably telling Woodyard at this moment what the President said to him last week about Princhard's articles on the distillery trust!"

Among the Colonel's friends the magazine reporter Princhard had been considered an ignorant and malicious liar. Isabelle looked eagerly as Cairy pointed him out,—a short, bespectacled man with a thin beard, who was talking to Silver.

"There is the only representative of the fashionable world present, Mrs. George Bertram, just coming in the door. We do not go in for the purely fashionable—yet," he remarked mockingly. "Mrs. Bertram is interested in music,—she has a history, too."...

By the time the company were ready to lunch, Isabelle's pulse had risen with excitement. She had known, hitherto, but two methods of assimilating friends and acquaintances,—pure friendship, a good-natured acceptance of those likable or endurable people fate threw in one's way; and fashion,—the desire to know people who were generally supposed to be the people best worth knowing. But here she perceived quickly there was a third principle of selection—"interest." And as she glanced about the appointments of Conny's smart little house, her admiration for her old schoolmate rose. Conny evidently had a definite purpose in life, and had the power and intelligence to pursue it. To the purposeless person, such as Isabelle had been, the evidences of this power were almost mysterious.

At first the talk at the table went quite over Isabelle's head. It consisted of light gibe and allusion to persons and things she had never heard of,—a new actress whom the serious Percy was supposed to be in love with, Princhard's adventure with a political notability, a new very "American" play. Isabelle glanced apprehensively at her husband, who was at Conny's end of the table. Lane was listening appreciatively, now and then exchanging a remark with the lawyer across the table. John Lane had that solid acquaintance with life which made him at home in almost all circumstances. If he felt as she did, hopelessly countrified, he would never betray it. Presently the conversation got to politics, the President, the situation at Albany. Conny, with her negligent manner and her childish treble voice, gave the talk a poke here and there and steered it skilfully, never allowing it to get into serious pools or become mere noise. In one of the shifts Cairy asked Isabelle, "Have you seen Margaret since her return?"

"Yes; tell me why they came back!"

Cairy raised his eyebrows. "Too much husband, I should say,—shouldn't you?"

"I don't know him. Margaret seemed older, not strong,—what is the matter with us all!"

"You'll understand what is the matter with Margaret when you see Larry! And then she has three children,—an indecent excess, with her health and that husband."...

The company broke up after the prolonged luncheon almost at once, to Isabelle's regret; for she wished to see more of these people. As they strolled upstairs to the library Cairy followed her and said:—

"Are you going to Mrs. Bertram's with us? She has some music and people Sundays—I'll tell Mrs. Woodyard," and before she could reply he had slipped over to Conny. That lady glanced at Isabelle, smiled on Cairy, and nodded. What she said to Cairy was: "So you've got a new interest. Take care, Tommy,—you'll complicate your life!" But apparently she did not regard Isabelle seriously; for presently she was saying to her, "Mrs. Bertram wants me to bring you around with us this afternoon,—you'll like it."

Lane begged off and walked back to the hotel in company with the lawyer. After a time which was filled with the flutter of amiable little speeches, appointments, and good-bys, Isabelle found herself in company with the Silvers and Gossom, Cornelia and Cairy on her way to Mrs. Bertram's, which was "just around the corner,"—that is, half a dozen blocks farther up town on Madison Avenue. Mrs. Silver was a pretty, girlish woman with a troubled face, who seemed to be making great efforts to be gay. She and Cornelia called each other by first names, and when Isabelle asked about her later, Conny replied with a preoccupied drawl:—

"Yes, Annie Silver is a nice little thing,—an awful drag on him, you know. They haven't a dollar, and she is going to have a baby; she is in fits about it."

As a matter of fact Silver managed to earn by his swiftly flowing pen over four thousand dollars a year, without any more application than the average clerk.

"But in New York, you know!" as Conny explained. "They have lived in a little apartment, very comfortably, and know nice people. Their friends are good to them. But if they take to having children!" It meant, according to Conny's expressive gesture, suburban life, or something "way up town," "no friends." Small wonder that Annie Silver's face was drawn, and that she was making nervous efforts to keep up to the last. Isabelle felt that it must be a tragedy, and as Conny said, "Such a clever man, too!"

* * * * *

Mrs. Bertram's deep rooms were well filled, and Cairy, who still served as her monitor, told Isabelle that most of the women were merely fashionable. The men—and there was a good sprinkling of them—counted; they all had tickets of one sort or another, and he told them off with a keen phrase for each. When the music began, Isabelle found herself in a recess of the farther room with several people whom she did not know. Cairy had disappeared, and Isabelle settled back to enjoy the music and study the company. In the kaleidoscope of the day, however, another change was to come,—one that at the time made no special impression on her, but one that she was to remember years afterward.

A young man had been singing some songs. When he rose from the piano, the people near Isabelle began to chatter:—

"Isn't he good looking! ... That was his own music,—the Granite City ... Can't you see the tall buildings, hear the wind sweeping from the sea and rushing through the streets!" etc. Presently there was a piece of music for a quartette. At its conclusion a voice said to Isabelle from behind her chair:—

"Pardon me, but do you know what that was?"

She looked over her shoulder expecting to see an acquaintance. The man who had spoken was leaning forwards, resting one elbow on her chair, his hand carelessly plucking his gray hair. He had deep piercing black eyes, and an odd bony face. In spite of his gray hair and lined face she saw that he was not old.

"Something Russian, I heard some one say," Isabelle replied.

"I don't like to sit through music and not know anything about it," the stranger continued with a delicate, deliberate enunciation. "I don't believe that I should be any wiser if I heard the name of the piece; but it flatters your vanity, I suppose, to know it. There is Carova standing beside Mrs. Bertram; he's going to sing."

"Who is Carova?" Isabelle demanded eagerly.

"The new tenor at the Manhattan,—you haven't heard him?"

"No," Isabelle faltered and felt ashamed as she added, "You see I am almost a stranger in New York."

"Mrs. Bertram knows a lot of these musical chaps."

Then the tenor sang, and after the applause had given way to another rustle of talk, the gray-haired man continued as if there had been no interruption:—

"So you don't live in New York?—lucky woman!"

Isabelle moved her chair to look at this person, who wanted to talk. She thought him unusual in appearance, and liked his friendliness. His face was lined and thin, and the long, thin hand on his knee was muscular. Isabelle decided that he must be Somebody.

"I am here for my health, but I expect to live in New York," she explained.

"In New York for your health?" he asked in a puzzled tone. "You see, I am a doctor."

"Yes—I came to consult Dr. Potts. I gave out,—am always giving out," Isabelle continued with that confiding frankness that always pleased men. "I'm like so many women these days,—no good, nerves! If you are a doctor, please tell me why we should all go to pieces in this foolish fashion?"

"If I could do that satisfactorily and also tell you how not to go to pieces, I should be a very famous man," he replied pleasantly.

"Perhaps you are!"

"Perhaps. But I haven't discovered that secret, yet."

"Dr. Potts says it's all the chemistry inside us—autointoxication, poison!"

"Yes, that is the latest theory."

"It seems reasonable; but why didn't our grandmothers get poisoned?"

"Perhaps they did,—but they didn't know what to call it."

"You think that is so,—that we are poor little chemical retorts? It sounds—horrid."

"It sounds sensible, but it isn't the whole of it."

"Tell me what you think!"

"I don't like to interfere with Dr. Potts," he suggested.

"I shouldn't talk to you professionally, I know; but it is in my mind most of the time. What is the matter? What is wrong?"

"I, too, have thought about it a great deal." He smiled and his black eyes had a kindly gleam.

"Do you believe as Dr. Potts does that it is all what you eat, just matter? If your mind is so much troubled, if you have these queer ideas, it can't be altogether the chemistry?"

"It might be the soul."

"Don't laugh—"

"But I really think it might be the soul."

The music burst upon them, and when there was another interval, Isabelle persisted with the topic which filled her mind.

"Will you tell me what you mean by the soul?"

"Can you answer the question? ... Well, since we are both in doubt, let us drop the term for a while and get back to the body."

"Only we must not end with it, as Potts does!"

"No, we must not end with the body."

"First, what causes it,—hysterics, nerves, no-goodness,—the whole thing?"

"Improper food, bad education, steam heat, variable climate, inbreeding, lack of children,—shall I stop?"

"No! I can't find a reasonable cause yet."

"I haven't really begun.... The brain is a delicate instrument. It can do a good deal of work in its own way, if you don't abuse it—"

"Overwork it?" suggested Isabelle.

"I never knew an American woman who overworked her brain," he retorted impatiently. "I mean abuse it. It's grossly abused."

"Wrong ideas?"

"No ideas at all, in the proper sense,—it's stuffed with all sorts of things,—sensations, emotions.... Where are you living?"

"At the Metropole."

"And where were you last month?"

"In St. Louis."

"And the month before?"

"I went to Washington with my husband and—"

"Precisely—that's enough!" he waved his thin hand.

"But it rests me to travel," Isabelle protested.

"It seems to rest you. Did you ever think what all those whisking changes in your environment mean to the brain cells? And it isn't just travelling, with new scenes, new people; it is everything in your life,—every act from the time you get up to the time you go to bed. You are cramming those brain cells all the time, giving them new records to make,—even when you lie down with an illustrated paper. Why, the merest backwoodsman in Iowa is living faster in a sense than Cicero or Webster.... The gray matter cannot stand the strain. It isn't the quality of what it has to do; it is the mere amount! Understand?"

"I see! I never thought before what it means to be tired. I have worked the machine foolishly. But one must travel fast—be geared up, as you say—or fall behind and become dull and uninteresting. What is living if we can't keep the pace others do?"

"Must we? Is that living?" he asked ironically. "I have a diary kept by an old great-aunt of mine. She was a country clergyman's wife, away back in a little village. She brought up four sons, helped her husband fit them for college as well as pupils he took in, and baked and washed and sewed. And learned German for amusement when she was fifty! I think she lived somewhat, but she probably never lived at the pressure you have the past month."

"One can't repeat—can't go back to old conditions. Each generation has its own lesson, its own way."

"But is our way living? Are we living now this very minute, listening to music we don't apparently care for, that means nothing to us, with our mind crammed full of distracting purposes and reflections? When I read my aunt Merelda's journal of the silent winter days on the snowy farm, I think she lived, as much as one should live. Living doesn't consist in the number of muscular or nervous reactions that you undergo."

"What is your formula?"

"We haven't yet mentioned the most formidable reason for the American plague," he continued, ignoring her question. "It has to do with that troublesome term we evaded,—the Soul."

"The Soul?"...

The music had come to an end, and the people were moving about them. Cornelia came up and drawled:—

"Tom and I are going on,—will you go with us?"

When Isabelle reached her hostess, she had but one idea in her mind, and exclaimed impulsively to that somewhat bored lady:—

"Who is that man just going out? With gray hair? The tall, thin man?"

"Dr. Renault? He's a surgeon, operates on children,—has done something or other lately."...

She smiled at Isabelle's impulsiveness, and turned to another.

'A surgeon,' Isabelle thought. 'What has he to do with the soul?'

In a few moments she had a chance to repeat her question aloud to Dr. Renault when they left the house together.

"Did you ever hear," he replied directly, "that a house divided against itself will fall?"

"Of course."

"I should say that this national disease, which we have been discussing, is one of the results of trying to live with divided souls,—souls torn, distraught!"

"And we need—?"

"A religion."

The doctor raised his hat and sauntered down the avenue.

"A religion!" Isabelle murmured,—a queer word, here at the close of Mrs. Bertram's pleasantly pagan Sunday afternoon, with ladies of undoubted social position getting into their motors, and men lighting cigarettes and cigars to solace them on the way to their clubs. Religion! and the need of it suggested by a surgeon, a man of science....

When the three reached the Woodyards' house, Conny paused with, "When shall I see you again?" which Isabelle understood as a polite dismissal. Cairy to her surprise proposed to walk to the hotel with her. Isabelle felt that this arrangement was not in the plan, but Conny merely waved her hand with a smile,—"By-by, children."

They sauntered up the avenue, at the pace required by Cairy's disability. The city, although filled with people loitering in holiday ease, had a strange air of subdued life, of Sunday peace, not disturbed even by the dashing motors. Isabelle, bubbling with the day's impressions, was eager to talk, and Cairy, as she had found him before at the Virginia Springs, was a sympathetic man to be with. He told her the little semi-scandalous story of her recent hostess.... "And now they have settled down to bring up the children like any good couple, and it threatens to end on the 'live happy ever after' note. Sam Bertram is really domestic,—you can see he admires her tremendously. He sits and listens to the music and nods his sleepy old head."

"And the—other one?" Isabelle asked, laughing in spite of the fact that she felt a little shocked.

"Who knows? ... The lady disappears at rare intervals, and there are rumors. But she is a good sort, and you see Sam admires her, needs her."

"But it is rather awful when you stop to think of it!"

"Why more awful than if Sam had stuck a knife into the other's ribs or punctured him with a bullet? ... I think it is rather more intelligent."

Cairy did not know Renault. "Mrs. Bertram gets everybody," he said. Isabelle felt no inclination to discuss with Cairy her talk about neurasthenia and religion. So their chatter drifted from the people they had seen to Cairy himself, his last play, "which was a rank fizzle," and the plan of the new one. One got on fast and far with Cairy, if one were a woman and felt his charm. By the time they had reached the hotel, he was counselling Isabelle most wisely how she should settle herself in New York. "But why don't you live in the country? in that old village Mrs. Woodyard told me about? The city is nothing but a club, a way-station these days, a sort of Fair, you know, where you come two or three times a year to see your dressmaker and hear the gossip."

"But there's my husband!" Isabelle suggested. "You see his business is here."

"I forgot the husband,—make him change his business. Besides, men like country life."

* * * * *

Isabelle found her husband comfortably settled near a hot radiator, reading a novel. Lane occasionally read novels on a Sunday when there was absolutely nothing else to do. He read them slowly, with a curious interest in the world they depicted, the same kind of interest that he would take in a strange civilization, like that of the Esquimaux, where phenomena would have only an amusing significance. He dropped his glasses when his wife appeared and helped himself to a fresh cigar from the box beside him.

"Have a good time?"

It was the formula that he used for almost every occupation pursued by women. Isabelle, throbbing with her new impressions and ideas, found the question depressing. John was not the person to pour out one's mind to when that mind was in a tumult. He would listen kindly, assent at the wrong place, and yawn at the end. Undoubtedly his life was exciting, but it had no fine shades. He was growing stout, Isabelle perceived, and a little heavy. New York life was not good for him.

"I thought Conny's house and the people so—interesting,"—she used the universal term for a new sensation,—"didn't you?"

"Yes,—very pleasant," he assented as he would have if it had been the Falkners or the Lawtons or the Frasers.

In the same undiscriminating manner he agreed with her other remarks about the Woodyards. People were people to him, and life was life,—more or less the same thing everywhere; while Isabelle felt the fine shades.

"I think it would be delightful to know people worth while," she observed almost childishly, "people who do something."

"You mean writers and artists and that kind? I guess it isn't very difficult," Lane replied indulgently.

Isabelle sighed. Such a remark betrayed his remoteness from her idea; she would have it all to do for herself, when she started her life in New York.

"I think I shall make over the place at Grafton," she said after a time. Her husband looked at her with some surprise. She was standing at the window, gazing down into the cavernous city in the twilight. He could not possibly follow the erratic course of ideas through her brain, the tissue of impression and suggestion, that resulted in such a conclusion.

"Why? what do you want to do with it? I thought you didn't care for the country."

"One must have a background," she replied vaguely, and continued to stare at the city. This was the sum of her new experience, with all its elements. The man calmly smoking there did not realize that his life, their life, was to be affected profoundly by such trivial matters as a Sunday luncheon, a remark by Tom Cairy, the savage aspect of the great city seen through April mist, and the low vitality of a nervous organism. But everything plays its part with an impressionable character in which the equilibrium is not found and fixed. As the woman stared down into the twilight, she seemed to see afar off what she had longed for, held out her hands towards,—life.

Pictures, music, the play of interesting personalities, books, plays,—ideas,—that was the note of the higher civilization that Conny had caught. If Conny had absorbed all this so quickly, why could not she? Cornelia Woodyard—that somewhat ordinary schoolmate of her youth—was becoming for Isabelle a powerful source of suggestion, just as Isabelle had been for Bessie Falkner in the Torso days.



CHAPTER XXIX

When Mrs. Woodyard returned to her house at nine o'clock in the evening and found it dark, no lights in the drawing-room or the library, no fire lighted in either room, she pushed the button disgustedly and flung her cloak into a chair.

"Why is the house like a tomb?" she demanded sharply of the servant, who appeared tardily.

"Mrs. Woodyard was not expected until later."

"That should make no difference," she observed curtly, and the flustered servant hastened to pull curtains, light lamps, and build up the fire.

Conny disliked entering a gloomy house. Moreover, she disliked explaining things to servants. Her attitude was that of the grand marshal of life, who once having expressed an idea or wish expects that it will be properly fulfilled. This attitude worked perfectly with Percy and the children, and usually with servants. No one "got more results" in her establishment with less worry and thought than Mrs. Woodyard. The resolutely expectant attitude is a large part of efficiency.

After the servant had gathered up her wrap and gloves, Conny looked over the room, gave another curve to the dark curtains, and ordered whiskey and cigarettes. It was plain that she was expecting some one. She had gone to the Hillyers' to dinner as she had promised Percy, and just as the party was about to leave for the opera had pleaded a headache and returned home. It was true that she was not well; the winter had taxed her strength, and she lived quite up to the margin of her vitality. That was her plan, also. Moreover, the day had contained rather more than its share of problems....

When Cairy's light step pressed the stair, she turned quickly from the fire.

"Ah, Tommy,—so you got my message?" She greeted him with a slow smile. "Where were you dining?"

"With the Lanes. Mrs. Lane and I saw The Doll's House this afternoon." As Conny did not look pleased, he added, "It is amusing to show Ibsen to a child."

"Isabelle Lane is no child."

"She takes Shaw and Ibsen with that childlike earnestness which has given those two great fakirs a posthumous vogue," Cairy remarked with a yawn. "If it were not for America,—for the Mississippi Valley of America, one might say,—Ibsen would have had a quiet grave, and Shaw might remain the Celtic buffoon. But the women of the Mississippi Valley have made a gospel out of them.... It is as interesting to hear them discuss the new dogmas on marriage as it is to see a child eat candy."

"You seem to find it so—with Isabelle."

"She is very intelligent—she will get over the Shaw-measles quickly."

"You think so?" Conny queried. "Well, with all that money she might do something, if she had it in her.... But she is middle class, in ideas,—always was."

That afternoon Isabelle had confided her schoolgirl opinion of Mrs. Woodyard to Cairy. The young man balancing the two judgments smiled.

"She is good to behold," he observed, helping himself to whiskey.

"Not your kind, Tommy!" Conny warned with a laugh. "The Prices are very good people. You'll find that Isabelle will keep you at the proper distance."

Cairy yawned as if the topic did not touch him. "I thought you were going to Manon with the Hillyers."

"I was,—but I came home instead!" Conny replied softly, and their eyes met.

"That was kind of you," he murmured, and they were silent a long time.

It had come over her suddenly in the afternoon that she must see Cairy, must drink again the peculiar and potent draught which he alone of men seemed to be able to offer her. So she had written the note and made the excuse. She would not have given up the Hillyers altogether. They were important to Percy just now, and she expected to see the Senator there and accomplish something with him. It was clearly her duty, her plan of life as she saw it, for her to go to the Hillyers'. But having put in an appearance, flattered the old lawyer, and had her little talk with Senator Thomas before dinner, she felt that she had earned her right to a few hours of sentimental indulgence....

Conny, sitting there before the fire, looking her most seductive best, had the clear conscience of a child. Her life, she thought, was arduous, and she met its demands admirably, she also thought. The subtleties of feeling and perception never troubled her. She felt entitled to her sentimental repose with Cairy as she felt entitled to her well-ordered house. She did not see that her "affair" interfered with her duties, or with Percy, or with the children. If it should,—then it would be time to consider....

"Tommy," she murmured plaintively, "I am so tired! You are the only person who rests me."

She meant it quite literally, that he always rested and soothed her, and that she was grateful to him for it. But the Southerner's pulses leaped at the purring words. To him they meant more, oh, much more! He gave her strength; his love was the one vital thing she had missed in life. The sentimentalist must believe that; must believe that he is giving, and that some generous issue justifies his passion. Cairy leaning forward caressingly said:—

"You make me feel your love to-night! ... Wonderful one! ... It is all ours to-night, in this still room."

She did not always make him feel that she loved him, far from it. And it hurt his sentimental soul, and injured his vanity. He would be capable of a great folly with sufficient delusion, but he was not capable of loving intensely a woman who did not love him. To-night they seemed in harmony, and as their lips met at last, the man had the desired illusion—she was his!

They are not coarsely physiological,—these Cairys, the born lovers. They look abhorrently on mere flesh. With them it must always be the spirit that leads to the flesh, and that is their peculiar danger. Society can always take care of the simply licentious males; women know them and for the most part hate them. But the poet lovers—the men of "temperament"—are fatal to its prosaic peace. These must "love" before they can desire, must gratify that emotional longing first, pour themselves out, and have the ecstasy before the union. That is their fatal nature. The state of love is their opiate, and each time they dream, it is the only dream. Each woman who can give them the dream is the only woman,—she calls to them with a single voice. And they divine afar off those women whose voices will call....

What would come after? ... The woman looked up at the man with a peculiar light in her eyes, a gentleness which never appeared except for him, and held him from her, dreaming intangible things.... She, too, could dream with him,—that was the wonder of it all to her! This was the force that had taken her out of her ordinary self. She slipped into nothing—never drifted—looked blind fate between the eyes. But now she dreamed! ... And as the man spoke to her, covered her with his warm terms of endearment, she listened—and forgot her little world.

Even the most selfish woman has something of the large mother, the giving quality, when a man's arms hold her. She reads the man's need and would supply it. She would comfort the inner sore, supply the lack. And for this moment, Conny was not selfish: she was thinking of her lover's needs, and how she could meet them.

Thus the hour sped.

"You love—you love!" the man said again and again,—to convince himself.

Conny smiled disdainfully, as at the childish iteration of a child, but said nothing. Finally with a long sigh, coming back from her dream, she rose and stood thoughtfully before the fire, looking down at Cairy reflectively. He had the bewildered feeling of not understanding what was in her mind.

"I will dine with you to-morrow," she remarked at last.

Cairy laughed ironically. It was the perfect anti-climax,—after all this unfathomable silence, after resting in his arms,—"I will dine with you to-morrow!"

But Conny never wasted words,—the commonest had a meaning. While he was searching for the meaning under this commonplace, there was the noise of some one entering the hall below. Conny frowned. Another interruption in her ordered household! Some servant was coming in at the front door. Or a burglar?

If it were a burglar, it was a very well assured one that closed the door carefully, took time to lay down hat and coat, and then with well-bred quiet ascended the stairs.

"It must be Percy," Conny observed, with a puzzled frown. "Something must have happened to bring him back to-night."

Woodyard, seeing a light in the library, looked in, the traveller's weary smile on his face.

"Hello, Percy!" Conny drawled. "What brings you back at this time?"

Woodyard came into the room draggingly, nodded to Cairy, and drew a chair up to the fire. His manner showed no surprise at the situation.

"Some things came up at Albany," he replied vaguely. "I shall have to go back to-morrow."

"What is it?" his wife demanded quickly.

"Will you give me a cigarette, Tom?" he asked equably, indicating that he preferred not to mention his business, whatever it might be. Cairy handed him his cigarette case.

"These are so much better than the brand Con supplies me with," he observed lightly.

He examined the cigarette closely, then lit it, and remarked:—

"The train was beastly hot. You seem very comfortable here."

Cairy threw away his cigarette and said good-by.

"Tom," Conny called from the door, as he descended, "don't forget the dinner." She turned to Percy,—"Tom is taking me to dinner to-morrow."

There was silence between husband and wife until the door below clicked, and then Conny murmured interrogatively, "Well?"

"I came back," Percy remarked calmly, "because I made up my mind that there is something rotten on in that Commission."

Conny, after her talk with the Senator, knew rather more about the Commission than her husband; but she merely asked, "What do you mean?"

"I mean that I want to find just who is interested in this up-state water-power grant before I go any farther. That is why I came down,—to see one or two men, especially Princhard."

While Cornelia was thinking of certain remarks that the Senator had made, Percy added, "I am not the Senator's hired man."

"Of course not!"

Her husband's next remark was startling,—"I have almost made up my mind to get out, Con,—to take Jackson's offer of a partnership and stick to the law."

Here, Conny recognized, was a crisis, and like most crises it came unexpectedly. Conny rose to meet it. Husband and wife discussed the situation, personal and political, of Percy's fortunes for a long time, and it was not settled when it was time for bed.

"Con," her husband said, still sitting before the fire as she turned out the lights and selected a book for night reading, "aren't you going pretty far with Tom?"

Conny paused and looked at him questioningly.

"Yes," she admitted in an even voice. "I have gone pretty far.... I wanted to tell you about it. But this political business has worried you so much lately that I didn't like to add anything."

As Percy made no reply, she said tentatively:—

"I may go farther, Percy.... Tom loves me—very much!"

"It means that—you care for him—the same way?"

"He's given me something," Conny replied evasively, "something I never felt—just that way—before."

"Yes, Tom is of an emotional nature," Woodyard remarked dryly.

"You don't like Tom. Men wouldn't, I can understand. He isn't like most men.... But women like him!"

Then for a while they waited, until he spoke, a little wearily, dispassionately.

"You know, Con, I always want you to have everything that is best for you—that you feel you need to complete your life. We have been the best sort of partners, trying not to limit each other in any way.... I know I have never been enough for you, given you all that you ought to have, in some ways. I am not emotional, as Tom is! And you have done everything for me. I shall never forget that. So if another can do something for you, make your life happier, fuller,—you must do it, take it. I should be a beastly pig to interfere!"

He spoke evenly, and at the end he smiled rather wanly.

"I know you mean it, Percy,—every word. But I shouldn't want you to be unhappy," replied Conny, in a subdued voice.

"You need not think of me—if you feel sure that this is best for you."

"You know that I could not do anything that might hurt our life,—that is the most important!"

Her husband nodded.

"The trouble is that I want both!" she analyzed gravely; "both in different ways."

A slight smile crept under her husband's mustache, but he made no comment.

"I shall always be honest with you, Percy, and if at any time it becomes—"

"You needn't explain," Percy interrupted hurriedly. "I don't ask! I don't want to know what is peculiarly your own affair, as this.... As I said, you must live your life as you choose, not hampered by me. We have always believed that was the best way, and meant it, too, haven't we?"

"But you have never wanted your own life," Conny remarked reflectively.

"No, not that way!" The look on Percy's face made Conny frown. She was afraid that he was keeping something back.

"I suppose it is different with a man."

"No, not always," and the smile reappeared under the mustache, a painful smile. "But you see in my case I never wanted—more."

"Oh!" murmured Conny, more troubled than ever.

"You won't do it lightly, whatever you do, I know! ... And I'll manage—I shall be away a good deal this winter."

There was another long silence, and when Conny sighed and prepared to leave the room, Percy spoke:—

"There's one thing, Conny.... This mustn't affect the children."

"Oh, Percy!" she protested. "Of course not."

"You must be careful that it won't—in any way, you understand. That would be very—wrong."

"Of course," Conny admitted in the same slightly injured tone, as if he were undervaluing her character. "Whatever I do," she added, "I shall not sacrifice you or the children, naturally."

"We needn't talk more about it, then, need we?"

Conny slowly crossed the room to her husband, and putting one hand on his shoulder she leaned down and pushed up the hair from his forehead, murmuring:—

"You know I love you, Percy!"

"I know it, dear," he answered, caressing her face with his fingers. "If I don't happen to be enough for you, it is my fault—not yours."

"It isn't that!" she protested. But she could not explain what else it was that drew her to Cairy so strongly. "It mustn't make any difference between us. It won't, will it?"

Percy hesitated a moment, still caressing the lovely face.

"I don't think so, Con.... But you can't tell that now—do you think?"

"It mustn't!" she said decisively, as if the matter was wholly in her own hands. And leaning still closer towards him, she whispered: "You are wonderful to me. A man who can take things as you do is really—big!" She meant him to understand that she admired him more than ever, that in respect to character she recognized that he was larger and finer than the other man.

Percy kissed the cheek so close to his lips. Conny shrank back perceptibly. Some elemental instinct of the female pushed its way through her broad-minded modern philosophy and made her shudder at the double embrace. She controlled herself at once and again bowed her beautiful head to his. But Percy did not offer to kiss her.

"There are other things in life than passion," she remarked slowly.

Percy looking directly into her eyes observed dryly: "Oh, many more.... But passion plays the deuce with the rest sometimes!"

And he held open the door for his wife to leave the room.



CHAPTER XXX

"That snipe!" Conny called Margaret's husband, Mr. Lawrence Pole. Larry, as he was known in his flourishing days when he loafed in brokers' offices, and idiotically dribbled away his own fortune and most of his wife's, rarely earned a better word than this epithet. "She ought to leave him—divorce him—get rid of such rubbish somehow," Conny continued with unwonted heat, as the tired motor chugged up the steep Westchester hillside on its way to Dudley Farms where the Poles lived.

"Perhaps Margaret has prejudices," Isabella suggested. "You know she used to be religious, and there's her father, the Bishop."

"It would take a good many bishops to keep me tied to Larry!"

Conny was enjoying the early spring air, the virginal complexion of the April landscape. She surveyed the scene from Isabelle's motor with complacent superiority. How much better she had arranged her life than either Margaret or Isabelle! After the talk with Percy the previous evening, she felt a new sense of power and competency, with a touch of gratitude for that husband who had so frankly and unselfishly "accepted her point of view" and allowed her "to have her own life" without a distressing sense of wrecking anything. Conny's conscience was simple, almost rudimentary; but it had to be satisfied, such as it was. To-day it was completely satisfied, and she took an ample pleasure in realizing how well she had managed a difficult situation,—and also in the prospect of dinner with her lover in the evening.

That morning before the motor had come for her, she had gone over with Percy the complicated situation that had developed at Albany. It was her way in a crisis to let him talk it all out first, and then later, preferably when he came to her room in the morning after his breakfast with the children, to suggest those points which she wished to determine his action. Thus her husband absorbed her views when they would make most impression and in time came to believe that they were all evolved from his inner being.... To-day when he appeared shortly before her coffee, she had glanced at him apprehensively out of her sleepy eyes. But he betrayed no sign of travail of spirit. Though naturally weary after his brief rest, he had the same calm, friendly manner that was habitual with him. So they got at once to the political situation.

She was content with the way in which she had led him, for the time at least, to resolve his doubts and suspicions. They had no reason to suspect the Senator,—he had always encouraged Woodyard's independent position in politics and pushed him. There was not yet sufficient evidence of fraud in the hearings before the Commission to warrant aggressive action. It would be a pity to fire too soon, or to resign and lose an opportunity later. It would mean not only political oblivion, but also put him in a ridiculous light in the press, and suggest cowardice, etc. So he had gone away to attend to some matters at his office, and take an afternoon train back to Albany, with the conviction that "he must do nothing hurriedly, before the situation had cleared up." Those were his own phrases; Conny always preferred to have Percy use his own words to express his resolves.

There was only one small matter on her mind: she must see the Senator and find out—well, as much as she could discreetly, and be prepared for the next crisis....

"I don't see why Margaret buries herself like this," Conny remarked, coming back to the present foreground, with a disgusted glance at the little settlement of Dudley Farms, a sorry combination of the suburb and the village, which they were approaching. "She might at least have a flat in the city somewhere, like others."

"Margaret wants the children to be in the country. Probably she gets less of Larry out here,—that may compensate!"

"As for the children," Conny pronounced with lazy dogmatism, "I don't believe in fussing. Children must camp where it's best for the parents. They can get fresh air in the Park."

The motor turned in at a neglected driveway, forbidding with black tree-trunks, and whirled up to the piazza of a brick house, an ugly survival of the early country mansion. Mrs. Pole, who was bending over a baby carriage within a sun parlor, came forward, a smile of welcome on her pale face. She seemed very small and fragile as she stood above them on the steps, and her thin, delicate face had the marked lines of a woman of forty. She said in her slow, Southern voice, which had a pleasant human quality:—

"I hope you weren't mired. The roads are something awful about here. I am so glad to see you both."

When she spoke her face lost some of the years.

"It is a long way out,—one can't exactly run in on you, Margaret! If it hadn't been for Isabelle's magnificent car, you might have died without seeing me!" Conny poured forth.

"It is a journey; but you see people don't run in on us often."

"You've got a landscape," Conny continued, turning to look across the bare treetops towards the Sound. It would have been a pleasant prospect except for the eruption of small houses on every side. "But how can you stand it the whole year round? Are there any civilized people—in those houses?" She indicated vaguely the patch of wooden villas below.

"Very few, I suppose, according to your standard, Cornelia. But we don't know them. I pulled up the drawbridge when we first came."