IV

"Well, well, Virgilia," said her aunt, as the door closed on Preciosa, "you see more in that girl than I do."

"I see her grandfather," whispered Virgilia, with the obscure brevity of an oracle. She drew down her brows and looked at the wondering Dill,—or rather, through him, past him.

"Oh," replied her aunt softly. It was impossible that she should misunderstand; McNulty and Hill and the rest of them had just been in her own thoughts, on her own tongue. "I shall be responsible, after all," she said within herself. Then she gave Virgilia a slight frown of disapproval: it was not precisely a maidenly part that her niece had chosen to play; neither did it show the degree of deference due to an elder, a chaperon and—if you came right at it—to a stock-holder. "If this thing must be engineered," thought Eudoxia, "I think I should prefer to engineer it myself." Heaven pardon her, though, for ever having brought Virgilia Jeffreys to Daffingdon Dill's studio!

She herself had come there full of Jeremiah McNulty and Andrew P. Hill and Roscoe Orlando Gibbons. "It's a big undertaking," she had told Dill. "They're struggling with it now, poor things. They need expert advice. If I were only one of the board of directors!"

Dill came up to the mark gingerly. "The air has been full of it for the last fortnight," he said, struggling between eagerness and professional dignity. "I know a number of fellows who have thought of going in for it."

"I suppose you haven't thought of going in?"

Dill drew himself up. "How can I?" He suggested the young physician who will starve but who will not infringe the Code by any practice that savours in the least of advertising, of soliciting. However, he was a thousand miles farther away from starvation than was Ignace Prochnow, for example; much better could he afford to await the arrival of an embassy.

Eudoxia Pence fumbled her boa. "Does Virgilia really want him? Does he want Virgilia? Do I want them to have each other? Shall I exert myself in his behalf?" Such were the questions she submitted to her own consideration as her eyes roved over the chatting, sipping throng. "Can he do for her all that a girl in her position would expect? Could such a fastidious, exacting young woman hope to find anybody she would like better—or as well?" Eudoxia had three or four swift successive visions of herself in a variety of circumstances and pleading or discouraging a variety of causes. Now, for example, she was saying to Virgilia, "Yes, he's a very nice fellow, I know; but he has only his wits and his brush, while you must always live as you always have lived—a rich girl to whom nothing has been denied." Again, she saw herself bent over the desk of Andrew P. Hill, with her forty-five shares clutched in her resolute hand, and saying, "I demand to be heard; I demand to have a voice in this momentous matter; I demand a fair and even chance for my nephew-in-law-to-be." Once more, she was wringing her hands and asking Virgilia in tones of piteous protest, "Why, oh why, didn't you take Richard Morrell when you could have got him?—a fine, promising, pushing fellow, with his million or more already, and barely thirty-five, just the right age for you!" Yet again, she was saying to that poor little vulgarian, Preciosa McNulty, "If Virgilia will, she will, and there's an end of it; therefore should you, dear child, promise me to use your influence with that loutish old peasant of a grandfather, you shall have the beatitude of actually pouring tea at one of my Thursday afternoons, and I'll even invite your mother to my next large reception——"

Eudoxia paused, struck suddenly by the earnest scrutiny of both Daffingdon and Virgilia. She saw that she had tied her boa into a double knot, and surmised that she had been doing the same with her features too.



V

By this time every "art circle" in the city knew from its centre to its circumference that the Grindstone National Bank was moving toward the elaborate decoration of its new building and that the board of directors was thinking of devoting some twenty thousand dollars or more to this purpose. The Temple of Art took on its reception smile; the Rabbit-Hutch began a nervous rummaging for ideas among cobwebs and dusty portfolios and forgotten canvases; decorators of drawing-rooms and libraries put on their thinking-caps and stood up their little lightning-rods; and one or two of the professors at the Art Academy began to overhaul their mythology and to sketch out broad but hazy schemes for a succession of thumping big masterpieces, and to wonder whether the directors would call on them or whether they should be summoned to meet the directors.

"Gee!" said Little O'Grady (whose forte was reliefs in plastina), as he hopped around Dill's studio on one leg; "but ain't it a godsend for us!"

Little O'Grady was celebrated for keeping the most untidy and harum-scarum quarters throughout the entire Rabbit-Hutch, and for being wholly beyond the reach of reproof or the range of intimidation. The stately sobriety of Dill's studio had no deterring effect upon him. Nothing could impress him; nobody could repress him. He said just what he thought to anybody and everybody, and acted just as he felt wherever he happened to be. Just now he felt like dancing a jig—and did so.

"But, dear me, where do you come in?" asked Dill, moving his easel a bit farther out of Little O'Grady's range.

"Where do I come in? Everywhere. I come in on the capitals of the columns round that court, which will all be modelled after special designs of me own——"

"I hadn't heard about them. I should suppose such things would follow established patterns."

"So does the architect. But I shall convince him yet that he's mistaken." O'Grady gave a pirouette in recognition of his own powers of persuasion.

"And I come in on the mantel-piece in the president's private parlour," he continued. "It will be a low relief in bronze: 'The Genius of the West Lighting the Way to Further Progress,' or else, 'Commerce and Finance Uniting to Do Something or Other'—don't know what just yet, but shall hit on some notion or other in due time——"

"You've seen the plans, then? You've been striking up an acquaintance with the architect himself?" Dill frowned repugnance upon such a bit of indelicacy, such an indifference to professional etiquette.

"Well, perhaps I have. Why not? But if there's a president—I s'pose there is?"

"I suppose so."

"Then there'll sure be a parlour. And where there's a parlour there's a fireplace—see? A large official cavern with never any fire in it. And I come in on the drinking-fountains at each side of the main entrance: bronze dolphins twisted upside down and spouting water into marble basins."

"They're included too, are they?"

"Well, I suggested them. Don't those old coupon-clippers ever get thirsty? Sure they do. Well, can't I wet their whistles for them? I guess yes—and I told 'em so."

"Them? Whom?"

"The directors."

"You've seen them?"

"I attended a meeting of the board, as I suppose I might as well tell you," said Little O'Grady grandly.

"You did, eh?" returned Dill, balanced between reprobation of Little O'Grady's push and admiration for his nerve.

"Yep. I spoke a good word for myself. And one for the others—Gowan and Giles and you and Stalinski and——"

"Um," said Dill, none too well pleased. The last thing he desired was co-operation from the Rabbit-Hutch and association with the band of erratic, happy-go-lucky Bohemians that peopled it. "You're laying out a good deal of work for yourself," he remarked coldly, dismissing the Bunnies.

"Work? That's what I'm here for," declared O'Grady brightly. "And if I slip up on any of these little notions, why I'll just take a hand in the painting itself—didn't I help on a panorama once? Sure thing. There was a time when I could kind o' swing a brush, and I guess I could do it yet. Let's see: 'The Goddess of Finance,' in robes of saffron and purple, 'Declaring a Quarterly Dividend.' Gold background. Stock-holders summoned by the Genius of Thrift blowing fit to kill on a silver trumpet. Scene takes place in an autumnal grove of oranges and pomegranates—trees loaded down with golden eagles and half-eagles. Marble pavement strewn with fallen coupons. Couldn't I do a fairy-scene like that? I should say!" Little O'Grady threw out his leg again with sudden vehemence and toppled over among Dill's heaped-up cushions.

Dill laughed. "How are the other fellows over your way feeling about it?"

"Same as me—hopeful. We may have to sleep on excelsior for a while yet, but we shall soon stop eating it. And the first thing we do with the coin will be to give old Warren heart-disease by going down in a body and paying up all our back rent. I'm figuring on pulling out about two thousand for my share. Then if I want pie I can have it, without stopping to feel in my pocket first."

Little O'Grady babbled along as he delineated the mental state of the other Bunnies. They all felt the situation in the air—they all felt it in their bones. They all wanted a hand in things—a finger in the pie. There was Festus Gowan, who did little beyond landscapes, but who thought he could make some headway with faces and draperies if pushed to it. There was Mordreth, who did little but portraits—and "deaders" at that—but who fancied he might come out reasonably strong on landscape and on architectural accessories if somebody would only give him a chance. There was Felix Stalinski, who had lately left "spot-knocking" for general designing and who thought that if a man was able to turn out a good, effective poster he might consider himself equal to almost anything. And there was Stephen Giles, who had recently been decorating reception halls and dining-rooms for the high and mighty and who saw no reason why he shouldn't take a higher flight still and adorn the palaces where the money was made instead of those where it was spent. "No use in my talking to you about him, though," broke off Little O'Grady. "He ain't one of us any more. He's one of you, now."

"I hope you fellows don't feel that way——" began Dill.

"He's a renegade," declared Little O'Grady. "But never mind; we like him all the same. Some day he may be glad to leave the Temple and come back to us again at the Warren. That'll be all right. We'll welcome him; we'll share our last mouthful of excelsior with him." Little O'Grady gave another joyful kick into the air. "Well, his room didn't stay empty long; Gowan moved down right away, and a new man took Gowan's room only day before yesterday—so old Ezekiel won't lose more'n about fourteen dollars' rent, after all. Chap's got his name out already: Ignace Pr—Pr——Well, anyway, it begins with a P. He makes rattling strong coffee, by the smell, and tinkles now and then on the thing-a-ma-jig. They say he's terrible smart—full of the real old stuff."

"Has Gowan been thinking up anything in particular?"

"Well, he's thinking he sees that money piled up in the bank vaults. We all do. And we want to get at it. Say, great thing to be working for a bank, eh? No flighty, shilly-shallying, notional women, but a lot of steady, sober business-men who'll make a good straight contract and keep it. No saying, 'Well, my daughter doesn't altogether fancy this,' or, 'I will take your sketches home to my husband and we will think about them,'—and then never telling us what they think. Sure pay, too. And prompt, as well. Quarter down, let us say, on submitting the general scheme of decoration; another quarter as soon as we begin actual work——Yes, sir, I almost feel as if I saw my way to meat once a day right through the week!"



VI

"Then I don't see but that he is about the man for us," said Roscoe Orlando Gibbons;—"at least he seems to provide a point for us to start from."

Jeremiah McNulty rescued some loose memoranda from the absent-minded pokings of his caller's plump forefinger and scratched his chin.

"You were pretty favourably impressed, weren't you?" asked Roscoe Orlando, leaning forward across the corner of the other's desk. "I was. I thought he had something in him, and something behind him. Seemed to me like a very dependable chap—for one in that line. These artists, you know,—erratic, notional, irresponsible. You never feel sure how you have them; you can't treat with them as you can with a downright, sensible, methodical business-man. I assure you I've heard the most astonishing tales about them. There's Whistley, for example—sort of sharp, perverse spoiled child, I should say. And the time my own brother-in-law had over the portrait painted by that man from Sweden! We've got to make up our minds to be patient with them, to humour them. But Dill, now——" Roscoe Orlando Gibbons ran his fingers through his graying whiskers and waited for Jeremiah's belated observation.

Jeremiah took his time in making it. He had accompanied his granddaughter to Daffingdon Dill's studio, but he was in no haste to formulate his impressions. His eyes were still blinking at the duskiness of the place, his nose was still sniffing the curious odour of burning pastilles, his ears were still full of the low-voiced chatter of a swarm of idle fashionables, and his feet (that humpy tiger-rug once passed) still had a lingering sense of the shining slipperiness of the brown polished floor. That floor!—poor Jeremiah had stood upon it as helpless as a cripple on a wide glare of ice, at a cruelly embarrassing disadvantage and wholly at the mercy of that original and anomalous person in the brown Van Dyck beard. Vainly had he cast about for something to lay hold of. None of the people there had he ever seen before; none of the topics bandied about so lightly and carelessly had he ever heard broached before. The sole prop upon which he had tried to repose his sinking spirit had looked indeed like an oak, but had turned out to be merely a broken reed. "That's the only man here," he had muttered, on looking across toward a stalwart, broad-shouldered figure standing half in the shadow of some frayed and discoloured drapery. "He's sort o' like one of those 'swells,' in that slick new coat and all, but I'll risk him." However, this robust young man had shown himself as prompt as any in his use of the teasing jargon of the place; he assumed on Jeremiah's part some interest and some knowledge and dogmatized as readily and energetically on the general concerns of culture as any of the others. Jeremiah, prostrate, soon moved away.

"Who is he—that tall young fellow over by that curtain?" he could not refrain from asking his granddaughter. How, he was thinking to himself,—how could such a big, vigorous young man betray such a range of trivial interests?

"Why, grandpa," Preciosa had returned reproachfully, "that's Mr. Joyce—Abner Joyce, the great writer. You've heard of him, surely?"

"H'm," said Jeremiah. He hadn't.

"And that lovely creature in the long, bottle-green coat," Preciosa went on, "is his wife. Isn't it stylish, though?—they're just back from London. Aren't they a splendid couple? And isn't she just the ideal type of the young matron——?"

Jeremiah touched bottom. It was all of a piece—everything was growing worse and worse. "Young matron," indeed!—where had his grandchild picked up that precious phrase? She was growing all too worldly-wise for his simple old mind. His abashed eyes turned away from her and began to blink at the twinkling candles on the tea-table; it stood there like an altar raised for the celebration of some strange, fearsome ritual—an incident in the dubious life toward which a heartless and ambitious daughter-in-law was pushing his poor little Preciosa. He almost felt like grasping her by the arm and bolting with her from the place.

But most uncertain of all these uncertainties had been the young painter himself. He could not be brought down to business. He dodged; he slipped away; he procrastinated. He wouldn't show his work; he wouldn't talk in figures; he wouldn't come within a mile of a contract. Instead, he slid about, asking people if they wouldn't have another biscuit, dropping a word to a lady here and there about Pater or Morelli (who were probably somewhere over there in the dark), confabulating determinedly with people who were pointed out as authors (more of them!), urging other people, who were musical, in the direction of the piano....

Some of these considerations Jeremiah haltingly placed before Roscoe Orlando.

"Oh, well," returned Roscoe, twiddling his fingers vaguely in the air, "you can't expect anything different on an 'afternoon.' There are occasions when a man must let down, must expand, must cultivate society a little. It was very much like that the first time I went there myself."

Roscoe Orlando's "first time" had been but a week before. Preciosa McNulty had communicated her novel impressions to his daughters, who, in turn, had commented on Preciosa's naivete in their father's hearing; then Roscoe Orlando, who had never hurt himself by overwork and who was developing a growing willingness to leave his maps and his plats and his subdivisions a little earlier in the afternoon, had determined to step round and patronize the new man.

"That we should never have met before!" said Roscoe Orlando to Daffingdon; "I can hardly credit it. Certainly it is no great thing in my own favour, for I really claim to know what is going on and to keep in touch with the better things. In my own defence I must say that I am an annual member of the Art Academy and that people who have etchings to sell invariably send me a copy of the catalogue. Your atelier is charming—most charming."

Roscoe Orlando was fat, florid and forty-eight, and as he began to expand he promised to take up a good deal of room. But Dill did not grudge the space when he learned that Roscoe Orlando was one of the directors of the Grindstone. Roscoe Orlando declared this with a broad, benevolent smile, accompanied by a confidential little gesture to indicate that a golden shower might soon descend and that it was by no means out of his power to help determine the favoured quarter.

"But this is no time to talk about that," declared Roscoe Orlando, casting an eye over the other visitors present. "I may drift in again before long and look at some of your things more seriously and have a little chat with you about our project."

Roscoe Orlando had somehow failed to drift in again, but he was now having the little chat—or trying to have it—with Jeremiah McNulty.

He looked across at the old man once more. "Yes, I rather think, after all, that if we were to try to arrange things with Dill we shouldn't be going much amiss."

Jeremiah scratched his chin slowly, and worked the tip of a square-toed boot against his waste-paper basket. "I dunno. It's a good deal of an undertaking," he declared.

"Surely," assented Roscoe Orlando. "Do we want it to be anything less? Don't we want to do something—a big thing, too—that will be a credit to ourselves and a real adornment to our city?"

Jeremiah puckered up his mouth and slowly blinked his little red eyes. "I've had one or two of those young painter fellows after me lately," he said in ruminative tone, as he picked at the green baize of his desk-top. He spoke with a slight querulousness, as if these wily and hardy adventurers had wilfully hit upon him as the weak spot in the defences, as the vulnerable point of the Grindstone. In particular he saw a pair of burning black eyes, a pair of eager, sinewy hands strewing drawings over the pink and gold brocades of his front parlour suite, and a shock of dark hair that swished about over a high square forehead as the work of hurried exposition raged along against a pitiless ticking of the marble-and-gilt clock and Preciosa's hasty adjustment of the green velvet toque.

"Haven't I had them after me!" cried Roscoe Orlando, jealous of his standing as an enlightened and sympathetic amateur. "But we ought to deal—really, we ought to—with painters of standing and responsibility, and no others. We must keep in mind such things as position, reputation, clientele. My partner, for example, once contracted—or tried to—for a large landscape of his stock-farm out beyond Glenwood Park; and the artist, sir——Well, you wouldn't believe the trouble we had before we got through. Our lawyer himself said that never in the whole course of his professional career had he——"

Jeremiah blinked and puckered a little more, and sighed as he abstractedly prodded among his pigeonholes. That slippery floor typified it all,—that dim room full of dusky corners! Ah, if he could only get that slim young man with the long coat and the pointed beard out on the black-and-white chequered pavement of the Grindstone, fair and square in the honest light of day! In such a situation a downright, straightforward old contractor could do himself something like justice. It would be playing a return match on his own ground.

"I dunno," said Jeremiah. "I'd 'most as soon not have anything to do with such matters and with that sort of people——"

He saw Dill as a dog might view a lizard, or a goat a swan; after all, there was no common ground for them—no way of coming together.

"But if it's got to be done," he concluded, "perhaps he would do as well to start with as anybody else."

"I think so," said Roscoe Orlando. "I'll speak about it in a day or so to Hill."



VII

Preciosa McNulty, after all, lost nothing of The Princess Pattie except half of the overture—a loss that, as operettas go, might indeed be counted a gain; but the succeeding activities of the prima donna, the ponderous basso and the brace of "comedians" were subject to a series of very sensible impediments and interruptions. Several times—and often at the most inopportune of moments—a swarthy, earnest young man walked across the stage, throwing out big sheets of brown paper right and left and looking at her and her alone. He wore one unvarying expression—a mingling of reproach and of admiration. His eyes said across the footlights: "You are a heartless, cruel little creature, but that green velvet hat looks amazingly well on your chestnut hair—so amazingly well that I almost forgive you. Yet an hour lost by you from the theatre is nothing, while an hour gained by me here in your home almost makes the difference between life and death." Yes, there the young man was, fifty feet away from her, yet she could plainly see the blood pulsing through his veined hands and could almost hear the ideas ticking in his brain. How they had ticked, to be sure, and clicked and clanked and jarred and rattled and rumbled—a perfect factory, a perfect foundry of ideas! Preciosa, who had never had a dozen ideas in her life, and had seldom encountered a human brain running full force and full time, was a good deal impressed. "I shouldn't wonder but what he was a pretty smart fellow, after all. It was rather sudden, the way I brought him up. Yes, I'm afraid I'm a real cruel girl," said Preciosa complacently, and reverted to the deplorable antics of the "comedians."

Within a day or two Preciosa began to notice the railway trains. Whenever she was detained at a "grade crossing" she caught herself looking at the locomotive to find a lady in a blue himation. Then the telegraph poles began to trouble her; she got into the habit of glancing aloft for nests of Cupids, and once or twice she thought she saw them. Then her father's letter-heads began to affect her. They sometimes lay carelessly about the house, and whenever she saw the tall chimney of his sash-and-blind factory looming above the blank date-line she always looked for a female in Greek drapery seated on a cogged wheel at the base of it.

"This won't do," she told herself. "Dear me, I don't even know his name. Why, for heaven's sake, didn't I pay better attention?"

Not knowing his name did not prevent her from thinking about him, nor even from talking about him. When Virgilia Jeffreys started her up, she went on because she couldn't stop and because she didn't want to, anyway. She would not deny herself that small comfort.

Preciosa was the pride and the hope of the McNultys—especially of her mother. This ambitious lady had lived long in obscurity—a prosperous, well-fed obscurity, but an obscurity all the same—and now she was tired of it and was rebelling against it and was meaning to emerge from it. Every inch of her tall, meagre figure was straining with the wish to attract attention; every feature of her thin, eager, big-eyed face showed forth the tense desire to shine. She realized that Preciosa was the only one of them who could raise the family to a higher level and bring it within range of the glamouring illumination of "society." The child's grandfather doted on her, true, but had never been quite able to leave behind him the lusty young peasant of the bogs. He had a regrettable taste in foot-gear, a teasingly uncertain fashion of lapsing back into his shirtsleeves at table, and a slight brogue that had stood a good deal of smothering without ever reaching the point of actually giving up the ghost. The girl's father lived and thought in terms of blinds and frames and panellings; he could never bring himself into sympathy with his wife's social yearnings or even realize the verity of their existence. Their boy was too young; besides, what can be done with a boy, anyway? As for herself, she had begun too late; she was a little too stiff, too diffident; society slightly intimidated her; she felt sure she could never hope to associate in easy, intimate fashion—even should the most abundant opportunity present—with the ladies whose names were so often printed in the papers. She might serve as a chaperon, a supernumerary, perhaps, but as a leading figure, no.

There remained only Preciosa. But Preciosa would suffice. So the child was bundled out at the earliest moment. She was made to fence at the Young Ladies' Athletic League, where the Gibbons girls went, and rather enjoyed it. She was made to study and discuss at the Philomathian Club, of which Virgilia Jeffreys was a shining light, and enjoyed it not at all. Then she began to go to musicales and dramatic matinees at the Temple of Art, finding a wide range of novel diversion at these little functions and making some acquaintances worth while. "And as soon as spring is fairly here," said her indefatigable mother, "she shall join a good golf club; and then things will really have begun to move."

But things had begun to move already. The fairest, topmost blossom on the family tree had set itself to swaying in the gentle breezes of sentiment, regardless of the dotings of the gnarled old root, of the indifference of the sturdy trunk, of the solicitous rustlings of the foliage. The blossom began to peer over and to look down, as if conscious of the honest, earthy odour of the dear lowly soil itself—though not, perhaps, the soil of the links. Preciosa was preparing to revert.

"No," she said again, "I don't even know his name."



VIII

When Ignace Prochnow found himself able to move into the Rabbit-Hutch, he congratulated himself on having made a marked advance in fortune.

"Oh, Lord!" thought Little O'Grady, upon Prochnow's venturing this disclosure, which he made in all sincerity and simplicity and with a complete absence of false shame; "how must he have lived before!"

The Rabbit-Hutch, the Warren, the Burrow—it went by all of these names—was a hapless property that was trying to pay taxes on itself between the ebbing of one tide of prosperity and the hoped-for flood of another. Centres were shifting, values were see-sawing, and old Ezekiel Warren was waiting for the nature of the neighbourhood to declare itself with something like distinctness. Meanwhile,—as regarded its upper floors, at least,—broken panes of glass were seldom mended, sagging doors seldom rehung, smoky ceilings seldom whitewashed, and the corridors rarely swept, save when the tenants formed themselves into a street-cleaning brigade, as Little O'Grady called it, and co-operated to make an immense but futile dust and stir.

"You're in a palace, sure," declared Little O'Grady, on the occasion of his first call upon the newcomer. This took place the third day of Prochnow's tenancy—he had scarcely got his poor belongings into shape and had barely affixed his name to the door. But Little O'Grady cared nothing for conventions; he was ready to overstep any boundary, to break through any barrier. "How did it occur to you to come among us?" he asked, sitting down on the bed. "What made you want to be a Bunny?"

"I found I must be where I could reach people, and where I could give them a chance to reach me."

Prochnow spoke with a slight accent—slight, but quaint and pungent. To have come among the Anglo-Saxons three or four years sooner would have been an advantage; to have deferred coming three or four years longer, a calamity.

"Yep, they 'reach' us good and hard," said O'Grady; "processions of millionairesses and peeresses marching through the halls with gold crowns on their heads and bags of double-eagles in both hands—nit. We did have a real swell, though—once. She called when Giles was here—it convulsed the premises. We all lost our sleep and appetite and thought of nothing else for a month. It was Mrs. Pence—expect you haven't heard of her. Money to burn—husband head of some tremendous trust or other—house as big as a hotel—handsomest profile in six states. 'Stevy,' says I to Giles, 'Stevy, for the love of heaven, introjooce me. Take a quart of me heart's blood, but only give me a chance to do her lovely head.' He wouldn't. She came when he had one of those good big rooms lower down—very fair, nothing like these of ours up here. He did wonders about fixing it up, too. But now we've lost him; he's gone, and taken my best chance with him." Little O'Grady rocked to and fro in melancholy mood and the cot creaked and swayed in unison.

"Show me something," he said suddenly, jerking himself back to his own bright humour. "I've smelt your coffee and I've heard your mandolin, and now I want to see your pictures."

"I've just sold one or two of my best ones," said Prochnow. "That's why I was able to come here."

"Sold a picture!" cried Little O'Grady, with staring eyes. "Sold a——Have you spent the money?"

"Most of it."

"Well, let it pass. Only we generally look for a supper after the sale of a picture. We had one six months ago. We're getting hungry again. But let that pass too. Show me something."

Prochnow looked at Little O'Grady, openly and unaffectedly appraising him. Little O'Grady jovially blinked his gray-green eyes and tossed his fluffy, sandy hair. "Don't make any mistake about me; I can appreciate a good thing. What's that big roll of brown paper behind the washstand?"

Prochnow reached for it. "Just a scheme for decoration I got up two or three years ago. It didn't quite—how do you say?—come off."

"Such things seldom do," said the other. "That's the trouble. Let's look."

"It isn't much," said Prochnow, undoing the roll. "It isn't quite what I would do now. It's the sort of thing I show to ordinary people."

"It will do to begin on. H'm, I see; just a lot of ladies playing at Commerce and Education and Industry and so on. Still, those cherubs up in the air are well done." He glanced over behind the wood-box. "Bust open that portfolio."

Prochnow looked at his visitor again—longer, more studiously.

"Oh, come now," said Little O'Grady, "you'll have me red-headed in a minute. I'm no chump; I know a good thing when I see it."

Prochnow opened the portfolio and handed out several sketches one after another. "These are more recent," he said;—"all within the last few months."

Little O'Grady snatched them, devoured them, immediately took fire. Prochnow caught the flame and burned and blazed in return. "Whew! this is warm stuff!" cried Little O'Grady, who had not an envious bone in his body; "and you—you're a wonder!" Little O'Grady made a last sudden grab. "Oh, this, this!" He dropped the sheet and threw up both hands. Then, being still seated on the cot, he threw up both feet. Then he placed his feet upon the floor and rose on them and gave Ignace Prochnow a set oratorical appreciation of his qualities as a thinker and a draughtsman, and then, swept away by a sudden impulse to spread the news of this magnificent new "find" right under their own roof, he rushed downstairs to communicate his discovery to Festus Gowan.

"Will return in half an hour," said the card on Gowan's door; so Little O'Grady sped back upstairs and burst in on Mordreth.

Mordreth was sitting composedly before a half-finished portrait of an elderly man of rustic mien. About him were disposed a number of helps and accessories: a pair of old-fashioned gold spectacles, an envelope containing a lock of gray hair, two or three faded photographs, and a steel engraving extracted from the Early Settlers of Illinois. With these aids he was hoping to hit the taste and satisfy the memory of certain surviving grandchildren.

Little O'Grady ignored the presence of any third person and let himself out. "He's a genius, Mark; he's full of the real stuff. He can draw to beat the band, and he's got ideas to burn—throws them out as a volcano does hot stones. And I expect he can paint too, from what little I saw—says he's just sold off all his best things. Yes, sir, he's an out-and-out genius and we've got to treat him right; we must let him in on this bank scheme of ours—that's all there is about it!"



IX

"Well, it comes to this, then," said Virgilia. "We must give them something definite—a fully outlined—projet; and we must give it to them as soon as possible." She cleared away the ruck of evening papers from the library table, sent her younger sister off with arithmetic and geography to the dining-room, extracted a few sheets of monogrammed paper from the silver stationery-rack close by, and turned on two or three more lights in the electrolier overhead. "Now, then. We'll choke off that foolish notion of theirs; we'll smother it before it has a chance to mature."

She put a pen into Daffingdon's hand, with the open expectation of immediate results. She herself always thought better with a pen in her hand and a writing-pad under it; no doubt a painter would respond to the same stimulus.

Daffingdon bit at the end of the penholder and made a dog-ear on the topmost of the steel-gray sheets.

"Come," said Virgilia. "Whatever follies may have begun to churn in their poor weak noddles, we will not draw upon the early pages of the local annals, we will not attempt to reconstruct the odious architecture of the primitive prairie town. Come; there are twelve large lunettes, you say?"

"Yes."

"Well, now, just how shall we handle them?"

"I had thought of a general colour-scheme in umber and sienna; though Giles's idea of shading the six on the left into purple and olive and the six on the right into——"

"Dear me! Can we hope to impress Andrew P. Hill with any such idea as that? No; we must have our theme, our subject—our series of subjects."

"I don't want to be simply pictorial," said Daffingdon reluctantly; "and surely you can't expect me to let my work run into mere literature."

"They're business-men," returned Virgilia. "For our own credit—for our own salvation, indeed—we must be clear-cut and definite. Even if we are artists we mustn't give those hard-headed old fellows any chance to accuse us of wabbling, of shilly-shallying. We must try to be as business-like as they are. So let's get in our work—and get it in first."

Daffingdon's eyes roamed the rugs, the hangings, the furniture. "'The Genius of the City,'" he murmured vaguely, "'Encouraging—Encouraging'—"

"Yes, yes," spoke Virgilia, doing a little encouraging herself.

"Or, 'The—The Westward Star of Empire Illuminating the'——" proceeded Daffingdon mistily, raising his eyes toward the electrolier.

"Yes, yes," responded Virgilia quickly, by way of further encouragement.

"Or—or—'The Triumphal March of Progress through Our'——" Daffingdon confusedly dipped the wrong end of the penholder into the big sprawling inkstand.

Virgilia's teeth began to feel for her lips, and her eyebrows to draw themselves down in an impatient little frown of disappointment. Not through "Our Midst," she hoped. What was the matter with her idol? What had he done with all his fund of information? What had become of his ideas, his imagination? She felt that if she were to approach a bit closer to his pedestal and sound him with her knuckles he would be found hollow. What a calamity in such a discovery! She put her hand behind her back and kept her distance.

"'The Genius of the City,'" she mused; "'The Star of Empire.' Those might do for single subjects but not for a general scheme. 'The March of Progress '—that might be better as a broad working basis, although——" She saw the "lady" seated on the cogged wheel beneath the factory chimney and stopped.

"'The Prairie-Schooner'—'The Bridging of the Mississippi'—'The Last of the Buffaloes'—' The Corner-Stones of New Capitols'——" pursued Daffingdon brokenly.

"Would you care very much for that sort of thing?" asked Virgilia.

"No."

"Nor I. Come, let me tell you; I have it: 'The History of Banking in all Ages'! There, what do you think of that?" she asked, rising with an air of triumph.

Dill hesitated. "I don't believe I know so very much about the history of banking."

"Don't you? But I do—enough and more than enough for the present purpose. Come, tell me, isn't that a promising idea? What a series it would make!—so picturesque, so varied, so magnificent!"

Daffingdon looked up at his Egeria; her visible inspiration almost cowed him. "Isn't that a pretty large theme?" he questioned. "Wouldn't it require a good deal of thought and study——?"

"Thought? Study? Surely it would. But I think and study all the time! Let me see; where shall we begin? With the Jews and Lombards in England, Think what you have!—contrast, costumes, situations, everything. Then take the 'Lombards' in Italy itself; the founding of the earliest banks in Venice, Lucca, Genoa, Florence; the glamour of it, the spectacularity of it, the dealings with popes and with foreign kings! And there were the Fuggers at Augsburg who trafficked with emperors: houses with those step-ladder gables, and people with puffed elbows and slashed sleeves and feathers of all colours in those wide hats. And then the way that kings and emperors treated the bankers: Edward the Second refusing to repay his Florentine loans and bringing the whole city to ruin; Charles the First sallying out to the Mint and boldly appropriating every penny stored there—plain, barefaced robbery. Then, later, the armies of Revolutionary France pillaging banks everywhere—grenadiers, musketeers and cuirassiers in full activity. Among others, the Bank of Amsterdam—the one that loaned all those millions of florins to the East India Company. And that brings in, you see, turbans, temples, jewels, palm-trees, and what not besides——"

"So much trouble," breathed Daffingdon; "so much effort; such an expense for costumes."

"And if you want to enlarge the scheme," pursued Virgilia, waiving all considerations of trouble, effort and expense, "so as to include coining, money-changing and all that, why, think what you have then! The brokers at Corinth, the mensarii in the Roman Forum. And think of the ducats designed by Da Vinci and by Cellini! And all the Byzantine coins in Gibbon—the student's edition is full of them! Why, there are even the Assyrian tablets—you must have heard about the discovery of the records of that old Babylonian bank. Think of the costumes, the architecture, the square curled beards, the flat winged lions, and all. Why, dear me, I see the whole series of lunettes as good as arranged for, and work laid out for a dozen of you, or more!" cried Virgilia, as she pounced upon a sheet of paper and snatched the pen from Dill.

"A dozen?" he murmured. "A hundred!"

"Nonsense!" she returned. "Four or five of you could manage it very handily. You, and Giles, and——"

"The Academy would expect recognition," said Dill. "One of the professors for a third. And somebody or other from the Warren, I suppose, for a fourth."

"Three subjects apiece, then," said Virgilia. "Go in and win!—By the way, did I mention Phidion of Argos? He was one of the primitive coiners. And then there was Athelstane, who regulated minting among the early Saxons...."



X

Dill passed out into the cool starry night to recover his breath and to regain his composure. It was as if he had struggled through a whirlpool or had wrenched himself away from the downpour of a cataract. Virgilia's interest, her enthusiasm, her co-operation had reared itself above him and toppled over on him just like a high, ponderous wall; the bricks bruised him, the dust of scattered mortar filled his lungs and his eyes. "Such a mind!" he thought; "such readiness; such a fund of information!" Never before had anybody offered so panting, so militant a participation in his doings. He doubted too whether Virgilia could ever have felt so extreme an interest in the doings of any other man whomsoever. Certainly it was a fair surmise that Richard Morrell, during the formative period of the Pin-and-Needle Combine, had never so succeeded in enlisting her sympathy and support,—otherwise she would not have turned him off in the summary fashion that had kept society smiling and gossiping for a fortnight.

As Daffingdon walked thoughtfully down the quiet street a deep sense of gratitude stirred within him—he felt himself prompted to the most chivalrous of acknowledgments. He saw himself taking her hand—with such deliberation as to preclude any shock of surprise, and looking into her eyes as ardently and earnestly as good taste would permit; and heard himself saying, in a voice as tremulous with passion as the voice of a well-bred gentleman could be allowed to become, such things as should make quite unmistakable his appreciation of her qualities both as an amateur and a woman. Certainly if this great undertaking went through he should be able to say all that was in him and to maintain it to the last word. She had turned a deaf ear to others, but there was reason to think she might listen to him.

Then all at once the magnitude of the scheme rose before him; such a vast expenditure of time on books of plates in libraries—and weeks and months to be devoted to sketches, to compositions, to colour-schemes of this sort and that; such a tremendous outlay for models, for costumes, for multifarious accessories! But as Daffingdon gradually pulled himself together, a comforting little sense of flattery came to soothe his bruises and to clear his eyes. Yes, she believed in him. This brilliant and learned young woman had impetuously placed her boundless stores of erudition at his disposal; she had loaded the work of twenty men on his shoulders and was confidently expecting him to carry off the whole vast undertaking with jaunty ease. He must not fail. Fortunately, she was willing to admit the co-operation of a few of his brother artists.

Dill laid her plan—their plan—before two or three of his own guild, experimentally. They gaped at it as a plainsman would gape at the Himalayas. Nor was it, as has been said, the smallest of mouthfuls to himself. However, the distinguished assistance of a young woman of fashion, means and cultivation was not a matter to hide under a bushel; besides, some firm, concrete scheme must be put promptly before the Nine Old Men of the Bank before they should have glued their desires undetachably upon some crude, preposterous plan of their own.

"It would cost like smoke," said Giles, "but it's an idea."

"Let's try it on," said the Academy professor. "It would show us as on deck and would help us to take their measure. Who knows but it might be the means of staving off a series of medallion portraits of the board themselves!"

"An idea, yes," reiterated Giles. "But it lays out a terrible lot of work for us. Such a job would be enormous."

"Tackle it," said Abner Joyce. He claimed as a matter of course the right to be present at such conferences. Joyce himself had the strength and the pluck to tackle anything.

"Well, let's try it on," assented Giles. "We've got to cut in first, that's sure—if we can. Come, let's put out our feelers."

This was more or less in harmony with Virgilia's parting advice. "Show them to themselves in historical perspective," she had suggested to Dill in bidding him good-night at the front door,—"the last link in one long, glittering chain. Flatter them; associate them with the Romans and Venetians—bring in the Assyrians if need be. Tell them how the Bardi and the Peruzzi ruled the roost in old Florence. Work in Sir Thomas Gresham and the Royal Exchange—ruffs, rapiers, farthingales, Drake, Shakespeare and the whole 'spacious' time of Elizabeth. Make them a part of the poetry of it—make them a part of the picturesqueness of it. That will bring Mr. Gibbons around easily enough, and ought to budge two or three of the others."

Daffingdon took his great scheme to the bank, but it failed to charm. Andrew P. Hill poked at Daffingdon's neatly drawn-up memorandum with a callous finger and blighted it with an indifferent look out of a lack-lustre eye. The mensarii of Rome and the trapezites of Athens seemed a long way off. The picturesque beginnings of the Bank of Genoa left him cold. The raid of the Stuart king on the Tower mint appeared to have very little to do with the case. And Jeremiah McNulty, who happened to be about the premises, showed himself but slightly disposed to fan Hill's feeble interest to a flame.

"This is not just what we want," said Hill. "It is not at all what any of us had in mind. It is very little in accord, I must say, with the ideas I gave you last week. I don't think it will do. Still, if you want to get up some drawings to show about how it would come out, and bring them around in a week or so...."

Daffingdon groaned inwardly; after all, they were wedded to their own notion. He explained to them the unfairness of their proposal—detailing the cost of models, the matter of draperies, the time required for study, the labours and difficulties of composition. To do experimentally what they were asking him to do would be to execute half the entire work on a mere chance.

"Well, we won't buy a pig in a poke," said old Jeremiah sturdily. He was now on the familiar chequered pavement of black and white and felt a good deal at home. "We've got to see what we're going to pay for. That's business."

"Never mind," said Andrew. "After all, we want something nearer to our own time and closer to our own town. We want to show ourselves loyal to the place where we've made our money. We want to put on record the humble beginnings of this great metropolis. The early days of our own city are plenty good enough for us."

"That's right," said Jeremiah. He saw himself a lusty young fellow of twenty-five, the proud new head of a contractor's shop, with his own lumber pile, a dozen lengths of sewer pipe, a mortar bed, a wheelbarrow or two and a horse and cart. No need of going farther back than that. Those early days were glorious and fully worthy to be immortalized.

"We want to make our new building talked about," said Hill. "We want every daily paper in town, and throughout the whole country, to be full of it. We want to make it an object of interest to every man, woman and child in our own community. When the little boys and girls come down Saturday morning to deposit their pennies—for we shall open a savings department that will welcome the humblest—we want them to learn from our walls the story of the struggles and the triumphs of their fathers' early days——"

"That's right," said Jeremiah again. "If you had lived here as long as I have, young man, you would understand that there's no need of going outside our own bor-r-ders for anything we may require."

"Yes, a great deal of history has been transacted on this site," said Hill,—"more than enough to meet the requirements of our present purpose. I have here"—he opened a drawer in one side of his desk and drew out a paper—"I have here a list of subjects that I think would do. Mr. McNulty and I drew it up together. Take it and look it over; it might be an——"

A shadow darkened the door. It was another interruption from the Morrell Twins. This time it was not Richard Morrell, but Robin, his brother. His pocket bulged with what seemed to be papers of importance, and his face signalled to Andrew P. Hill to clear the deck of lesser matters.

"—it might be an advantage to you," Andrew concluded. "This about represents our ideas; see what you can do with it."

Andrew passed the paper over to Jeremiah, and Jeremiah passed it on to Daffingdon with an expression of unalterable firmness and decision. "You must do something with this, if you are going to do anything for us at all," his air said. "It's this or nothing. It is our own idea; we're proud of it, and we insist upon it. Go."



XI

The Morrell Twins were among the newer powers. They had rolled up a surprisingly big fortune—if it was a fortune—in a surprisingly short time, and were looked up to as very perfect gentle knights by all the ambitious young fry of the "street." They were the head and front of the Pin-and-Needle Combine. They did not deal with the Grindstone only; they had made their business the business of half the banks of the town,—for how could these institutions be expected to stand out when all the investors and speculators of the street were pressing forward eager to add to their collections a few good specimens of the admirably engraved and printed certificates of the Combine, and more than willing to pay any price that anybody might ask? Some of the banks—the more fortunate among them—were attending to this business during business hours; others of them worked on it overtime, and one or two were beginning to work on it all night as well as all day. They worried. The Twins were not worrying nearly so much,—they knew they must be seen through.

The Twins had been grinding pins and needles for a year or two with striking acumen and dexterity. Sometimes Richard would turn the handle and Robin would hold the poor dull pins to the stone; and then again they would change places. Whichever arrangement happened to be in force, people said the work had never been done more neatly, more precisely. And now the Twins had enlarged their field and had begun to grind noses. They were showing themselves past masters in the art. They had all the legislation of nose-grinding at their fingers' ends; the lack of legislation, too, as well as the probabilities of legislation yet to come. They knew just how fast the wheel might be turned in this State, and just how close the nose might be held in that, and just how loud the victim must cry out before the Rescue Band might be moved to issue from some Committee Room to stop the treatment. They knew where nose-grinding was prohibited altogether, and they knew where enactments against it had thus far completely failed. They knew where the penalty was likely to be enforced, and they knew where it might be evaded. "Learn familiarly the whole body of legislative enactment, state by state, and then keep a little in advance of it,"—such was their simple rule.

No man is to be denied the right to profit by his own discovery, and so, though the glory of the Twins was envied, their right to luxuriate in it was seldom questioned. They were seen in all sorts of prominent and expensive places—at the opera, at the horse-show, on the golf links, and were very much envied and admired,—envied by other young men that were trying to do as they had done, but not succeeding; admired by multitudes of young women who felt pretty sure that to "have things," and to have them with great abundance and promptness and conspicuousness, was all that made life worth living. In this environment Richard Morrell could hardly fail to be fairly well satisfied with himself. To ask and to receive would come to the same thing. And so he spoke to Virgilia one crisp October morning, between the fifth and sixth holes in Smoky Hollow, and awaited in all confidence her reply. But Virgilia quickly made it plain that he would not do—not for her, at least. She was by no means one of the kind to be impressed by tally-ho coaches, however loudly and discordantly the grooms might trumpet, nor to be brought round by country-club dinners, however deafening the chatter or however preponderant the phalanx of long-necked bottles. So his raw, red face turned a shade redder still; and as he sat, later, on the club veranda, hectoring the waiter and scowling into his empty glass, he growled to himself in a thick undertone:

"What's the matter with the girl, anyway? If she doesn't want me, who does she want?"

Virgilia wanted, in a general way, an intimate and equal companionship, a trafficking in the things that interested her—the higher things, she sometimes called them to herself. She wanted a gentleman; she wanted cultivation, refinement—even to its last debilitating excess. What she wanted least of all was a "provider," a steward, an agent, a business machine. "We must live," she would say, looking forward toward her matrimonial ideal; "we mustn't let our whole life run out in a mere stupid endeavour to accumulate the means of living, and then find ourselves only beginning when at the finish:"—an idea held substantially by so different a young person as Preciosa McNulty, who was preparing to set aside her mother's careful ambitions and to take a step forward on her own account. Only, Preciosa was looking less for cultivation and gentility than for "temperament." Less the dry specialist, however successful in the accumulation of this world's goods, than the resonant adventurer that would bring her full chance at all the manifold haps and mishaps of life as it runs.

"Nothing more tedious than a set programme," declared Preciosa. "If my whole future were to be arranged for me to-morrow, I should want to die the day after. A whole play"—Preciosa was a most persevering little theatre-goer—"carried through with one stage-setting—how tiresome that would be!"



XII

"Come, now," said Little O'Grady; "help the lame duck over the stile. Be a good Gowan—give the poor fellow the use of your studio. Mordreth's isn't enough better to be worth asking for, and Stalinski is working from the model. Come,—as a personal favour to me. It was I let you in on the bank scheme and gave you a chance to make big money; and now you must just let Ignace have the use of your place for a few hours—he can't paint the girl's picture in that little hole upstairs."

"Much you let me in!" retorted Gowan with a grin. "Tell me who is in, anyway, and how far, and for how much, and I'll give you half I get."

"Haven't I seen them?" returned Little O'Grady. "Didn't I address the whole board? Didn't I go for them with the architect himself to help me? Haven't I got the mantel-piece in the president's parlour? And now if Ignace can only get a chance to paint the fav'rite grandchild of one of the——Yes, sir; I talked to them as a business-man to business-men, and it went. They're square; they're solid; they'll treat us right. Never you fear. In a year from now you'll be wearing diamonds and saying: 'O'Grady, you're the wan that hung them on me.' Now will you give Ignace your room?"

"Why, he's no portrait painter, is he?"

"She thinks he is. And it's what the girls think of us that makes us what we are. As for me, I believe he can do anything. Come, give the poor lad a show."

"What could he do in an hour or two?"

"He could get acquainted with her," said Little O'Grady.

Preciosa, thanks to O'Grady's chatterings through the Temple of Art—he blew in and out with great freedom and was as much at home there as in the humbler establishment—had come to some knowledge of Ignace Prochnow. She learned his name—in itself an immense advance, and the location of his studio; and she arranged with the Gibbons girls, who, by reason of their fencing, were developing great self-reliance and a high capacity for initiative, to search him out in his private haunts.

"Set the day," chirped Little O'Grady, "and we'll be ready for you."

Preciosa set the day; Little O'Grady traced Prochnow's name in elaborate letterings and clapped this new placard over Gowan's own; and all waited intent to see just what of interest would develop in the countenance of the daughter of the McNultys, and just what Ignace Prochnow would be able to make of it.

Preciosa wore her green velvet toque, and let her chestnut hair stray and ramble whithersoever it would, and sat in Gowan's best high-backed mahogany chair with the brass rosettes, and tried to view with kindly indulgence his flimsy knick-knacks and shabby hangings (they came nowhere near Dill's) on account of her interest in their supposed proprietor. Nor did she find in her painter any of Dill's soft suavity. Prochnow was direct and downright almost to brusqueness, seeming to see no need of such graduated preliminaries as even O'Grady found place and reason for. He admired her, and admired her extremely, as she perceived at once; but he offered none of the appropriate deferences that she had received on occasion from obscure young men of less than modest fortune. He was intent, he was earnest, he was even a bit peremptory; but she felt perfectly certain that he was not treating her as a subject and a subject merely. His black eyes looked at her with a sort of sharp severity across the leg of the easel, and his rasping crayon promptly scratched down his impressions upon the promising blank of his canvas. Preciosa was slightly puzzled, but on the whole pleased. She knew she was worth looking at, and felt herself fit to stand the keenest scrutiny. She leaned back easily in her chair. Let time attend to the rest.

"Doesn't she compose!" said Little O'Grady in a poignant whisper to Elizabeth Gibbons, as he thrust out his arms akimbo and squinted learnedly at Preciosa through his fingers. "And hasn't the lad got line!" he presently added in a rapturous undertone, as the black and white tracing began to take shape. Prochnow was drawing with immense freedom, decision, confidence; every stroke told, and told the first time. "He knows how! He knows how!" moaned Little O'Grady, locking his hands and forearms in a strange twist and rocking to and fro with emotion. "He's got the wrist!—the wrist!" he exclaimed further, liberating his hands and fanning the air with long pendulous fingers. "There, he's caught her already!" he cried, leaning forward,—"inside of five minutes. Not a line more, Ignace; not a line more!"

Prochnow turned on him with a grim tight smile—a smile that slightly dilated the nostrils of his good firm nose and shifted in ever so small a degree the smutch of black beneath that was slowly advancing to the status of a moustache. It was an acknowledgment from one who could to one who knew. "Ah, si jeunesse...!" ejaculates the poet; but here jeunesse, by a doubling of forces, both pouvait and savait.

Then Prochnow turned the canvas itself round toward Preciosa. "Does Mademoiselle recognise herself?"

"It's you, Preciosa, to the life," said the daughter of Roscoe Orlando Gibbons.

"Oh, Ig!" cried Little O'Grady, much moved, "you're the king-pin sure. People shall know you; people must know you!" He faced about toward Preciosa. "Ah, my fair young thing, he's got you dead. Why, Daff himself couldn't have reached this in an hour!"

Preciosa was like most of the rest of us—inclined to take good workmanship for granted; where there was nothing to criticise there was nothing to take hold of. But the words and actions of Little O'Grady—he was now hopping about on one leg, holding the other in his hand—made the matter perfectly certain. Her painter had done a notable thing, and done it easily, promptly, without revisions, without fumblings. His own face and attitude expressed his consciousness of this. "Nobody could have done it better," she read in his eyes; "and you, you blooming young creature, have been the inspiration." He had called her "Mademoiselle" too; could anything be more charming? Nothing save his accent itself,—a trick of the tongue, an intonation ever so slightly alien that addressed her ear just as some perfume's rich but smothered pungency might address the nose. Yes, the first stage in her apotheosis was an undoubted success. All that was needed now was her translation from black and white to colour. Well, the chariot was ready to take her up still higher.

"I have found you very easily, Mademoiselle,"—Preciosa felt a sugary little shudder at this repetition of the word,—"I have found you very easily," said Prochnow, casting about for his palette and brushes; "and now I may just as easily lose you."

"Oh no," said Elizabeth Gibbons, with great earnestness.

"Never fear," said Little O'Grady confidently. "Though the likeness generally gets submerged at first, it comes to the surface again in the end."

"Don't risk it," continued Elizabeth Gibbons.

"What has been done once," said Prochnow, motioning with a brush-handle toward the charcoal sketch, "can be done once more."

Prochnow handled his brushes with the same firmness and confidence that he had shown in handling his crayon. The "resemblance" soon sank beneath the waves, as prophesied, but Little O'Grady continued to ride on the topmost crest with unabated enthusiasm. "Whee! hasn't he got the nerve! hasn't he got the stroke! Doesn't he just more than slather it on!" he cried. "Catch the shadows in that green velvet! R-r-rip!—and the high light on that tan jacket!" he proceeded in a smothered shout, as he nudged Elizabeth Gibbons in the side. Elizabeth had never been nudged before, and moved farther down the settle, after giving him a look. Little O'Grady, who never knew when he was squelched—he never, as a fact, had been squelched by anybody whomsoever—moved along after her. "Oh, my! Can't he paint! Can't he more than lay it on! Did you get that last one, now?"

Buoyed up by such support as this, Prochnow forged ahead with quadrupled brio, and Preciosa felt the chariot rising heavenward cloud by cloud. Little O'Grady continued to lead the performance, prompting Preciosa to look her prettiest and Prochnow to do his best. "Ah, my sweet child," he declared, "you've fallen into good hands. You're trying to get away, true: you've nearly lost those bright eyes, and I wouldn't want to swear to your ears or your chin, just yet; but your blessed old-gold hair is there all right, and it's put on to stay. The rest of you will be coming back tomorrow, or next day, or the day after. And then you'll be all on deck, jew'l. You'll see; you'll hear; you'll speak, by heaven! Won't she, Lizzie?"

Miss Gibbons gave Little O'Grady another look. Preciosa paused in her heavenward ascent, and seemed to be wondering with a questioning little glance just how far along, after all, she had got. When she finally left her high-backed chair—"That's as far as we will go to-day," Prochnow had said—she felt herself very close to earth again: the cherished "resemblance" had vanished altogether. But Prochnow seemed satisfied with the result, and Little O'Grady was rapturously fluent over the brushwork. "Ignace is a wunder-kind," he declared to the doubting girl. "I never saw such swing, such certainty. He'll fish you back, and he'll have you to the life in less than a week. Or I'll eat my hat."

There was a knock at the door. O'Grady rushed to open it. "Go right away," Miss Gibbons thought she heard him say, in a tense undertone.

The face of Kitty Gowan showed in the doorway, puzzled, protesting. Medora Joyce was behind, her hands full of parcels.

"Go away?" repeated Mrs. Gowan. "What does this mean? Let me in at once."

"Depart!" hissed Little O'Grady. "This is not Mr. Prochnow's day. Come to-morrow."

"Step aside, O'Grady," said Kitty Gowan spunkily. "Let me pass." An afternoon of shopping had tired her and shortened her temper.

"Well, as a visitor, possibly," said O'Grady condescendingly. "Ignace, do you feel disposed to——" He glanced back and forth between Prochnow and the petitioners.

Prochnow took down the canvas and set its face against the wall.

Kitty Gowan strode in holding her head high. "How do?" she said carelessly, by way of general salute. "Sit there, Medora," she directed Mrs. Joyce, indicating a chair.

"Sit here, Medora," said O'Grady firmly, placing another. "Prochnow, Preciosa dear, allow me to present——" and so on. "And you sit here," he said to Kitty Gowan, placing a third chair. "You're a visitor, remember," he whispered to her fiercely; "so behave like one. Stay where you're put and don't own the earth. We have loaned the shop for the day. Understand?"

Preciosa passed lightly over Kitty Gowan, whom she found brusque in her manners and plain in her looks; but she fixed her best attention on Medora, with whom she was as much charmed as at the first. Idealist and heroine-worshipper, she was always ready to prostrate herself before a young married woman of Medora's gracious and fashionable cast.

O'Grady lingered over Medora's chair. "We've had a wonderful session," he said, laying his hand affectionately on her shoulder. "You ought to have come a bit sooner, my dear."

Preciosa shivered. It was like the profanation of an idol.

Medora unconcernedly pushed away his hand. Preciosa envied such serenity and self-poise.

"Why, how's this?" asked O'Grady, studying his hand curiously, as some detached thing, some superfluity rejected and returned. "Ain't we friends? Ain't we old pals? You can't mean to stand me off with your London clothes and your London manners? Don't say you're trying to do that, Dodie!"

Preciosa shuddered. Medora laughed carelessly—oh, how could she! Kitty Gowan jumped up and boxed O'Grady's ear with one of Medora's long, flat parcels. "Get away, you saucy child!" she said.

O'Grady grimaced and nursed his ear. "It serves you right!" said Elizabeth Gibbons tartly.

Preciosa was placated; the great retribution had fallen. She banished the wish that she herself might have had the daring to be a third avenging fury, and fell to studying the folds of Medora's bottle-green cloak. She wondered if she herself were not as pretty as Mrs. Joyce—oh, in an entirely different way!—and if she were glad or sorry that Medora and her companion had come a little late for seeing the picture. Would it be a success—this portrait? Was it all that Mr. Prochnow's lively little friend seemed to think?

Prochnow, putting away his palette and brushes, grandly overlooked the late irruption of trivialities. He glanced across to Preciosa, and she felt that he was thanking her for having held herself quite aloof from them.

Preciosa went away not completely reassured, yet on the whole pretty well pleased. She felt that she had been taken hold of by a strong, decided hand. She had made an excursion into a new land where feeble compliments were dispensed with and where meek-eyed ingratiation seemed not to exist. Yes, he was a forcible, clever fellow. That Virgilia Jeffreys should have tried to make her think anything else, and that she should have permitted Virgilia to make the attempt! She should see Virgilia soon, somewhere, and should regain the lost ground; she should not allow herself to be walked over a second time. She should probably say something very cutting, too—if she could but find the right words. Suppose she were younger than Virgilia and less expert? Was that any reason why she should be played with, be cajoled into making fun of a——Yes, Ignace Prochnow was a fine clever fellow; good-looking too, in a way; and masterful, beyond a doubt. Had she been kind enough to him to cancel her cruelty at their first meeting? She was afraid not. Should she have been kinder but for the abundance of company and the absorbing nature of the work? Probably so. Should she be kinder next time? That would depend on him;—yes, if he became a little less professional and a little more personal. Would he become so? She hoped he might. And if he didn't? Then he might be encouraged to. How? Preciosa opened her purse for her fare and postponed an answer.

At that same moment, Prochnow, banished along with the canvas to his own room by the return of Gowan, sat staring at the portrait as it stood propped against his trunk. Little O'Grady, if he had been present, instead of being occupied on the other side of the partition in sweeping up the dried plaster that littered his floor, would have decided that the personal interest was in fair proportion to the professional, and would have rated Prochnow no higher as an artist than as a man.



XIII

Virgilia, after dismissing Daffingdon with the detailed memoranda of her great decorative scheme, went through the vain forms of going upstairs and getting to bed. But sleep was out of the question. Her brain still kept at work, elaborating the ideas already proposed and adding still others to the plan. Why hadn't she laid more stress on the Medici? How had she contrived to overlook John Law and the South Sea Bubble, with all its attendant wigs, hooped petticoats and shoe-buckles? Then the Pine-Tree Shilling jumped to her eyes, and Virginia's use of tobacco as a currency;—possibly the entire scheme might be arranged on a purely American basis, in case sympathy for her wider outlook were to fail.

Virgilia ate her breakfast soberly enough; she checked all tendency toward expansiveness with her own people, who were sadly earth-bound and utilitarian. But immediately after breakfast she put on her things and stepped round the corner to have a confab with her aunt. She found Eudoxia upstairs, clad in a voluminous dressing-gown and struggling with her over-plump arms against the rebelliousness of her all but inaccessible back hair. Virgilia was very vivid and sprightly in her report on the evening's conference, and Eudoxia, studying her with some closeness, was barely able to apply the check when she found herself asking:

"Has he—has he——?"

Virgilia dropped her eyes. No, he hadn't.

But the acceptance of these magnificent proposals might easily make another proposal possible, and again Eudoxia Pence asked herself:

"Do I want it, or don't I? Certainly only the bank's acceptance of Daff's scheme will make possible Virgilia's acceptance of Daff himself."

That evening Dill called again on Virgilia, bringing the Hill-McNulty plan.

"So this is the sort of thing they want?" she cried. "They insist on it, after all, do they?" She cast her eye over the paper and hardly knew whether to laugh or to weep. "'The First Fire-Engine House,'" she read. '"Old Fort Kinzie'; 'The Grape-Vine Ferry'; 'The Early Water-Works'—oh, this is terrible!" she exclaimed.

"Read on," said Dill plaintively.

"'The Wigwam'——"

"What in heaven's name is that?"

"A place where they used to hold conventions, I believe. 'The Succotash Tavern'——"

"What does that mean?"

"I've heard it spoken of, I think," said Virgilia faintly. "It was built of cottonwood logs and stood at the fork in the river. 'The Hard-Shell Baptist Church,'——" she read on.

"Do you know anything about that?"

"I think I've seen it in old photographs. It stood on one side of Court-House Square."

"Did it have a steeple?" asked Dill droopingly.

"I believe it did—quite a tall one."

"Of course it did!" he groaned. "And so it goes. One building hugs the ground and the next cleaves the sky. Yet they've all got to be used for the decorative filling of a lot of spaces precisely alike."

"What does Giles think of this?" asked Virgilia.

"He's crazy."

"And Adams, at the Academy?"

"He's gone out to buy a rope."

"And Little O'Grady?"

"He fell over in a dead faint. He's lying in it yet. But before he lost consciousness he made one suggestion——"

"What was it?"

Dill paused. "Have you ever heard of a painter named Proch—Prochnow?" he presently asked, with some disrelish. "A newcomer, I believe."

"I don't think I have."

"He has lately taken a studio in the Warren. O'Grady has seen his work and speaks well of it."

"What particular kind of work?"

"Decorative. Portraits too, I understand. He has been doing one of that little Miss McNulty."

Virgilia frowned. "What!" she was thinking to herself, "have I been taken in by that viper, that traitress?—by a child who looked like an innocent flower and is turning out to be the serpent under it? Prochnow!—the hard name that nobody could pronounce! It's easy enough: Prochnow; Prochnow. She could have pronounced it fast enough if she had wanted to! And now she has gone over to the other side and taken O'Grady with her—and her grandfather too!" Then, aloud:

"Well?"

"O'Grady says he's full of—ideas——"

"And what has O'Grady got to do with it?" asked Virgilia tartly. "Has anybody asked his help? Why is he mixing up in the matter, anyway? And if he wants to suggest, let him stop suggesting painters and suggest a few sculptors. I haven't heard of his doing anything like that!"

Dill sighed wearily. "You can't keep O'Grady out if he wants to get in. But I must say I hadn't expected to be loaded down with any more of the Warren people. Gowan is more a drag than a help, and O'Grady is doing all he can to bring us under a cloud. The directors can't understand such freedom, such language, such shabbiness, such Bohemianism. Take it all around, they are making it a heavier load than I can carry through."

"And now they want to add another of their miserable crowd to it. Well, there will be no room for Prochnows and their ideas," declared Virgilia, wounded in her tenderest point. "We will attend to the ideas. Let us take Hill's absurd notion, if we must, and rush in and wrench victory from defeat. Let us take his cabins and taverns and towers and steeples and use them in the background——"

"That would be the only way."

"—and then put in people—Hill and McNulty can't be insisting upon mere 'views.' Fill up your foregrounds with traders and hunters and Indians and 'early settlers' and 'prairie-schooners'——"

"Giles has gone out to bring them round to something like that."

"They really won't have the Bank of Genoa? They won't listen to Phidion of Argos?"

"I couldn't bring them within hailing distance of him."

"Where is Roscoe Orlando Gibbons in such an hour as this?"

"I haven't been able to find him."

"I shall find him. Aunt Eudoxia is a large stock-holder in that wretched bank, and he's the only man of taste and refinement on the board. If we have lost Jeremiah, that's all the more reason why we should have Roscoe Orlando. I shall get her and go to his office at once. He can't refuse support to our plan; he won't let this barbarous notion of Hill's make any headway."

Dill looked at Virgilia with mounting appreciation. Where was her equal for resource, for elasticity, for devotion, for erudition? She was at home in Grote and Sismondi, and she was just as much at home in the early local annals of the town itself. She knew about the Parthenon and Giotto's Tower, and she knew about the Succotash Tavern and the Hard-Shell Baptist Meeting-House too. With matchless promptitude and resiliency she began the broad sketching out of an entirely new scheme—a thoroughly local one. Was there not Pere Marquette and the Sieur Joliet and La Salle and Governor D'Artaguette? Was there not the Fort Kinzie Massacre and the Last War-Dance of the Pottawatomies? Was there not the prairie mail-coach and the arrival of the first vessel in the harbour? Were there not traders and treaties and Indian commissioners? "There!" she cried, "you and Stephen Giles just sharpen your teeth on such matters as those! We have almost got the Nine Old Ogres on the run, and we mustn't slow up on them for a single minute!"

Dill stared at her with dazzled eyes. Such vim, such spirit, such knowledge, such loyalty!—and all for him, all in his service! He felt confusedly that he was upon the verge of taking her hand and saying in broken trembling tones that she was his guiding star, his ruling spirit, his steadfast hope—what lesser expressions could fitly voice his gratitude, his admiration, his devotion? Then he caught himself: things were still in the air. His fortune was yet to be made, and who could say but that its making might yet be marred? Let him once come to an understanding with those trying old fellows, let him but have a hard-and-fast agreement with them in downright black and white, and then—who could tell what might be said and done?



XIV

Dill and his coadjutors had two or three more conferences, and a second detailed scheme was sent over to the bank. History in general was decisively thrust aside,—the only history worth recording was the history the Nine themselves had helped to make. "We will go to the libraries for 'ana,'" said Gowan; "they will help us with the earlier years of the last century."

"And to the Historical Association for more," said Giles. "Old Oliver Dowd is an ex-secretary of it, and him at least we can capture beyond a doubt."

"Hurray!" cried Little O'Grady, who had insisted on being present. That very afternoon he threw his "First Coinage of Venetian Sequins" back into the clay-box and started in on a relief of "The Earliest Issue of Wild-Cat Currency."

"We've got a good thing this time," said Adams. "It's homogeneous; it's picturesque; it's local. It gives all they want and a great deal more. I think we can tussle with it successfully and not be ashamed of the outcome."

"As business-men they ought to appreciate the completeness of our new scheme," said Giles, "and our promptness in furnishing it."

"They will," said Joyce. "This beats the other idea all hollow. Go in and win."

Each one of them spoke in terms of unwonted confidence. Little O'Grady himself was in such a state of irrepressible buoyancy that he left the earth and fairly sailed among the clouds. All this reacted on Dill. For the first time he felt the great commission fully within his grasp and the net profits as safely to be counted upon. He began to warm to his subjects. To him, who had learned a good deal in regard to shipping and the handling of water from lounging about the ports of Marseilles and Leghorn, had fallen the arrival of the first vessel: he would reconstruct the primitive lighthouse that Mr. Hill had set his heart on, and would eke out the angular emptiness of the subject by a varied group of expectant pioneers big in the foreground. He had also taken the Baptist church, of whose Bible-class Andrew P. Hill had been a member. He would suppress the spire, and would show the pillared front on some Sunday morning in midsummer, with an abundance of wide petticoats and deep bonnets of the period of 1845, or thereabouts, displayed upon its front steps. And finally, as he was fairly strong on figures in action, he had intrepidly undertaken the Pottawatomie war-dance; and as soon as the conference in Giles's studio broke up, he took the express-train out to the Memorial Museum to see what the ethnological department there could do for him in the way of moccasins, tomahawks and war-bonnets.

He made his way through several halls filled with tall glass cases, skirting the Polynesians, bearing away from the Eskimos and finally reaching the North Americans. Their room was empty, save for a slender girl in brown who was making notes on a collection of war-bonnets in a morocco memorandum-book. It was Virgilia.

"Why, what are you doing out here?" he asked.

"Turning the odd moments to account. Collecting data for you on the aborigines,—I am sure we can put them to use. I ran out to hear the lecture on Earthquakes in Japan—you know I have a chance to go there with the Knotts in April—and I thought I might incidentally pick up a few notions for the War-Dance."

So authentic and thoroughgoing a piece of loyalty as this affected Dill tremendously; the hint of an Oriental exodus scarcely less so. Never should she go to Japan with the Knotts; she should go with him. His share in the work at the Grindstone would make this the easiest as well as the most delightful of possibilities. Now was the time; no matter about waiting for the contract. He felt the flood rising within him. Here at last was the moment for taking her hand (she had put the memorandum-book back into her pocket), and for looking earnestly into her eyes with all the ardour perfect good taste would permit, and for saying in a voice tremulous with well-bred passion the words that would make her his loyal coadjutor through life. These different things he now said and did with a flawless technique (Virgilia recalled how sadly the young real-estate dealer had boggled), and a row of gaudy Buddhistic idols that looked in through the wide door leading to the Chinese section stood witnesses to her unaffected surrender. The pair passed back through the Aztecs and the South Sea Islanders in a maze of happy murmurs and whisperings, and when next Eudoxia Pence asked her niece:

"Has he—has he——?"

Virgilia, as she again dropped her eyes, was able to reply, this time:

"He has."

Daffingdon and Virgilia passed out through the great row of Ionic columns and down the wide flight of steps into the bare, brown wind-swept landscapes of the park.

"And about Japan?" asked Dill. "You can wait a year longer for that, can't you? We shall find the earthquakes just the same."

Virgilia laughed happily. "Of course I can. What will such a year count for as a mere delay?—a year so short, so full, so busy, so happy, so successful! By next February we shall be famous, we shall be rich, the whole country will be ringing with our pictures——"

Dill found it easy to fall in with her mood. He foresaw the immediate acceptance of a scheme so complete and so well-considered; the early signing of a binding contract; the receipt, without undue delay, of his honorarium—a business-like tribute from a methodical and trustworthy body of business-men; growing fame, increasing prosperity——After all, why dwell on Japan? The world was beautiful everywhere, even in the bare, flat rawness of the suburbs.



XV

A few days later, and his bold step seemed justified. The directors were an elusive body, and even when got together they found it hard to act with anything like unanimity and despatch; but one afternoon Stephen Giles encountered Mr. Holbrook in the office of one of the hotels and was told that the plan was receiving favourable consideration and was not unlikely to be accepted. As Mr. Holbrook was the most passive member of the directorate, drifting quietly along with the general current, it seemed safe to accept him as representing the feeling of that body.

Giles carried the good news to Adams, at the Academy. Adams hurried home with it to his wife and little Frankie.

A few days more, and it laboriously transpired that old Jeremiah McNulty was readjusting himself to the plan as modified and elaborated by Dill and his associates. Old Jeremiah was particularly taken by the idea of the First Ferry—suggesting only that the scene be slightly enlarged, so as to take in the site of his early "yard."