Of course so abject a surrender to the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune could not last indefinitely. Human nature's safety-valve is its extraordinary resilience. Hope springs eternal, etc. Nevertheless, it took a small shock or so to arouse these two women at the mill from their spiritless prostration. One night in early July, Carlisle came suddenly upon the name of Hugo Canning in the foreign tattle column of a London newspaper. She read, with intense fixity of gaze, that Hugo was in Europe: in short, that Hugo was enjoying himself at Trouville, where he was constantly seen in the company of the Honorable Kitty Belden, second daughter of So-and-So, and so forth....

All this time, Carlisle had been taking upon herself most of the blame for the quarrel and break. She had been distracted and unreasonable; she had never explained to Hugo sensibly how it had all happened; it was only natural that he should have misunderstood and misjudged, and in the end lost his temper and said hard things which he did not mean. And he was suffering by it no less than she: oh, be sure of that.... Now, as she sat alone in her bedroom, the newspaper crumpled on the floor beside her, there seemed to fall scales from her eyes, and she saw how bitterly she had deceived herself. Where was now the love pledged to last forever? Six weeks parted from her, and gaily gallivanting at the slipper-toes of happier girls, whom the breath of trouble had not touched.

Not even in this moment did Carlisle tax her once-betrothed with moral wrong in the matter of the "telling," for that whole episode had remained in her mind rather a flare-up of mysterious emotions than a case of religious "conviction of sin" and atonement. Probably Hugo had said and done what he thought was right then. But now it was clear to her, as by a flash, that he had done wrong in quite a different way, that he had committed the deadly sin of love. He had deserted her in the moment of her greatest need of him. At the first pinch his boasted mighty love had broken down; and, beneath all the disguises, it was such a contemptible little pinch at that, only that he was afraid of what people might say about her. Now he stepped the beaches of France, a squire of dames unconcerned. Should she wear her heart in mourning for a light-o'-love and a jilt? She would not. She would not....

Easier said than done, no doubt. Yet Cally's thoughts had at least received a powerful new twist, which is the beginning of reconstruction. And it was only a day or two later that mamma in her turn received an arousing blow, in that debasing of her by the Associated Charities which her niece-in-law, Henrietta Cooney, had mentioned to the Dabney House.

As it happened there came a letter from Hen Cooney by the same mail that brought mamma's death-dealing one from Mrs. McVey. For Hen, who had never dreamed of corresponding with Cally before, had started up this summer with a long and quite affectionate steamer-letter, and had since written regularly once a week, the newsiest and really the most interesting letters that the Heths got at all. This letter had a private postscript, written on a separate sheet, which said:

Cally, I don't know how you'll take it, but I think I ought to tell you frankly how matters stand. Of course there was plenty of talk, especially at first, and some of it was pretty strong. But whether you like it or not, most of the responsibility for what happened is being put on Aunt Isabel. Do you remember Mrs. John S. Adkins who was at the Beach the day it happened? She has told everybody it was Aunt Isabel who came downstairs and told her and others the story that they afterwards repeated. And then, besides, it seems to be generally understood that you were the one who wanted to straighten things out when you had no idea it was too late, and everybody whose opinion is worth having knows it's easy enough to slip into a mistake, but takes a lot of spunk to stand up and say so long afterwards. Good-bye again.

Hen.

Carlisle removed this postscript, tore it into small pieces, and put the pieces in the waste-basket under a newspaper. Later in the afternoon she had to go into her mother's bedroom to recover a novel which the older lady had abstracted for her own perusal. She found her mother lying on the bed, an open letter in her hand and on her face the marks of rare tears.

Carlisle, turning away with her book, hesitated. The two women had not spoken a word all that day.

"What's the matter, mamma?" she said constrainedly.

Mrs. Heth, stirring a little on the bed, said, with difficulty: "The Associated Charities met to elect new officers. I am—omitted from the board." She added, in a voice from which she could not keep the self-pity: "I should naturally—have been president this year."

Her crushed mildness touched Carlisle abruptly. For the first time in all this trouble, perhaps for the first time in her life, she had a considerate and sympathetic thought for her mother. It was mamma, it seemed, upon whom the reprisals of society were to fall most heavily, yet it was she, Cally, who had caused it all. Suppose she had been a good daughter, to begin with; suppose she had even been an obedient daughter, and had kept her own counsel, as mamma had commanded and implored. Ah, how different would have been this ghastly summer!...

She walked over to the bed, quite pale, put her hand on her mother's rumpled hair, and said with some agitation:

"I'm very sorry to have given you all this trouble, mamma."

Mrs. Heth looked up at her, her small eyes winking.

"Oh—I—I'm sure you meant to do what you thought was right. But—oh, Cally!..."

And then she was weeping in her daughter's arms.

Perhaps the stout little lady was ready now for a reconciliation. Perhaps the strain of silent censoriousness had worn out even her strong will. Perhaps, in some far cranny of her practical heart, there was a spark which secretly admired Cally for her suicidal madness. At any rate, drying her eyes presently, she said:

"How Mary Page will gloat over this.... Well, we can't go on this way, my child. We'll die if we don't have some diversion. Lord knows we'll need all our strength for the fall."

And still later, she suddenly cried: "LET'S GO TO PARIS!"

To Paris they went; and there, occupying more fashionable quarters, began to look about for pleasure. The looking required effort at first and was scantily rewarded; but of course it was not long before the women's spirits responded to the more hopeful atmosphere. Soon they fell in with some lively people from home, the Wintons, who, being a peg or two lower than the Heths in the gay world, made it almost indelicately plain that they were completely unaware of anything's having happened. To Paris also came J. Forsythe Avery.

And now, in the passage of the weeks, the mother and daughter were at home again, with Carlisle finding that memory still had power to stab, and Mrs. Heth stoutly girding herself for the great fight of her life, and almost happy....

If it had taken the violent break to reveal to Cally how deeply Hugo Canning had come into her life, it seemed to take this home-coming to impress upon her how definitely he had departed. There was hardly anything in the house that was not in some way associated with him, or with her thought of him. Outdoors it was hardly better: wherever she turned, she found, mementoes of his absence. Strange and sad to think that he and she would ride these familiar streets no more. He had left her alone, to find her feet again in a changed world as best she might. Where was he on this day and on this, with whom making merry, her false knight who could not love as he could fear the world's opinion?...

It was September, and people were beginning to troop back in numbers from the holiday places of their desire. Cally's first days at home were full of meetings, with those now seen for the first time under strangely altered conditions.

She was not wanting in spirit, but she lacked her mother's splendid pachydermousness. More than mamma, she had shrunk from this first painful plunge, and now that it had come she was receptive to impressions which quite escaped the older lady. Outwardly, indeed, as she perceived with some surprise, the greetings of friends and acquaintances were much as they had always been. But she was at once conscious of a certain new quality in people's looks, a certain hard exploring curiosity, not untouched with a fleeting and furtive air of triumph. This look seemed to confront her, with varying degrees of emphasis, on nearly every face. To her sensitiveness it was as if, beneath cordial speech, everybody was really saying: "Aha!... So you're the young lady who hounded that chap into killing himself and got jilted for your pains. Well, well! Perhaps you won't be quite so high-and-mighty after this...."

Even Carlisle's most intimate friends, try as they doubtless did, seemed unable to help showing that they considered her lot in the world sadly changed. So, indeed, it was. Mattie and Evey could not, for instance, begin naturally by asking, "Cally, did you have a lovely summer?"—when of course they knew very well that she had had a perfectly frightful summer. Mattie came in before eleven o'clock on the first morning, chirping affectionate greetings; but neither then nor later did she manage to convey any real sense of sympathy with Cally, or of understanding what she had been through, or even of wanting to understand. Cally would have liked to justify herself to Mattie, to talk her heart out to her, or to somebody; but Mattie's idea was clearly to keep Cally's mind off it, as you do with the near relatives of the deceased. And was it possible that even Mats's sweet girlishness showed a subtle trace of confirmation of the Frenchman's bitter maxim, that in the misfortunes of our friends there is something not altogether displeasing to us?...

If with Mats and Evey, so and much more so with others, less genuinely friendly. Nobody took the responsibility of open condemnation, as by "cutting" Mrs. B. Thornton Heth or her daughter. On the other hand, nobody forgot; nobody made allowances; nobody asked a single question. Judgment was obviously passed, and everybody seemed perfectly clear about the verdict. The Heths were people to be treated with respect as long as they kept their money, but between you and me, their social fortunes had received a stain which would not wear off. Hugo Canning had had it exactly right. Cally Heth would be pointed at to the longest day she lived....

Cally, after the first shrinking, was possessed by a sense of anti-climax. Life had a brassy ring. She had come home with at least something of her mother's military keenness for the "campaign" of vindication, but within a day or two she was thinking, rather cynically and cheaply, that the game was not worth the candle. What difference did it all make, in her actual life? People might whisper and nudge behind her back, but their invitations seemed to come in much the same as ever, poor mamma pouncing on each as it came, with a carefully appraising eye. Wasn't there a hollowness in all this, something wanting?...

Untrained for analysis as she was, she had not thought of herself, in the months in Europe, as "changed" exactly. It took this recontact with the familiar environment to reveal to her definitely that her experiences of the spring and summer had not rolled through her as through an iron tube. Here were the old stimuli (as scientific fellows term them); but they failed to bring the old reactions. She was aware that the elevation of the family position, or its rescue, no longer filled her whole horizon. Old values shifted. In particular, she found her soul revolting at the prospect of another season—her fifth—another winter of endless parties, now with a secret campaign thrown in.

"I'm tired of the same old round, that's all," she said, moodily. "I want something new—something different."

"There's plenty that's new and different, Cally," said Henrietta Cooney, cheerfully, "if you really want to go in for it. And ten times as interesting as your old society...."

"And while I think of it," added Hen, "I want to book you now for Saturday afternoon, four-thirty—open meeting at the Woman's Club on What Can We Do to Help the Poor. Don't say no. This new man Pond's going to speak, Director of the Settlement. He'll give us something to take home and think about."

This conversation took place on the way home from a meeting of the Equal Suffrage League, to which Henrietta had borne off Cally, not so completely against the latter's will as you might have supposed. And oddly enough, Cally found that she could talk quite freely to her poor cousin, partly because of Hen's insignificance in the gay world, partly, perhaps, because of the way she had written during the summer.

"Aren't you going to the Settlement opening on Thursday?"

"Can't get away from the bookstore in time. Saturday's a short day," said Hen, her eyes on space.... "Look around you, Cally. You'll see lots more women than you who're sick of parties. I tell you this is the most interesting time to be alive in that ever was."

Cally smiled wearily at these enthusiasms. Nevertheless she could by now understand at least what Hen supposed she was talking about. It was as if the cataclysm in the May-time had chipped a peep-hole in the embracing sphere of her girlhood's round, and through this hole she began to discern novel proceedings afoot....

Strange talk was in the air of the old town in those days, strange things heard and seen. Not a few women of the happy classes had grown "sick of parties." They grew sick of years lived without serious purpose, waiting for husband and children which sometimes never came; sick of their dependence, of their idleness, of their careful segregation from the currents of life about them. They wearied, in short, of their position of inferior human worth, which some perceived, and others began dimly to suspect, under that glittering cover of fictions which looked so wholly noble till you stopped to think (which women should never do), and dared to glance sidewise at the seams underneath. And now lately some high-hearted spirits had begun to voice their sickness, courageously braving those penalties which society so well knows how to visit upon those who disturb the accepted prejudices; penalties, it might be, peculiarly trying to women, over which some of these supposedly masculated pioneers doubtless had more than one good cry in secret.

What could be more interesting than the revolt of woman against "chivalry" in chivalry's old home and seat? That curious phenomenon was going on in Cally's town now, though acuter social critics than she had quite failed to discover it....

Far rumors of her sex's strange activities reached Cally, and she listened, but with apathy. She marvelled at the freshness of interest with which Mattie and Evey McVey were preparing for the light routine which by now they knew like an old shoe. But her own mood was nothing more forceful than meaningless restlessness and discontent. Not even the unlooked-for arrival, one morning, of the dividend from the bank stock her father had given her in May, all her own, afforded her more than a flicker of the familiar joys. How employ fifteen hundred dollars so that it would bring her happiness now? Cally, after listless deliberation, took her wealth to her father that afternoon, offering it as a contribution toward mamma's Settlement donation. Her impulse was hardly sheer magnanimity; still, it was known that finance was a distinctly live issue in the House just now.

However, papa, after staring at her a moment, merely gathered her into his arms, check and all, remarking that she was a goose; and when she tried to argue about it a little, he ruled the situation with a strong paternal hand. She was to buy herself pretties with that money, he said; and there, there, he didn't want to hear any more foolishness about it. No more Alphonse and Gaspard, as the fellow said....

"And, Cally," he added, pinching her cheek, "I want you to have a good time this winter, remember. You can have anything you want. Go everywhere you're invited—enjoy yourself with your friends—have a good time. D'you hear me?"

She said that she did: and as she spoke, a bitter question rose at her. Who were her friends? She had always thought of herself as having many; "hosts of friends" had always figured prominently in her inventories of her blessings. But what was a friend? Among all these people she had spent her life with, there was not one, it seemed, who cared to understand the infinite shadings of thought and impulse that had brought her to where she now stood; much less one heart which saw intuitively

All the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb...

Papa was adding, with an unconscious frown:

"The cash is in the bank, if your mother must have it. I'd laid it by for something else, though—make some repairs at the Works. Come in.... I reckon I've staved off ..."

Considered from one angle, these fragmentary words might have been illuminating; but Cally did not even hear them. At that moment there happened the unexpected. The parlormaid Annie entered, announcing Mrs. Berkeley Page to see Miss Carlisle.

Surprise was expressed in the study. This was the lady who had said that the Heths were very improbable people. Papa opined, somewhat glumly, that she had come to beg funds for the confounded Settlement. Cally, having looked at herself in the mirror, trailed into the drawing-room with a somewhat cool and challenging civility.

But her coolness soon melted away, under the visitor's strange but seemingly genuine cordiality. It became clear that she had come in the vein of amity, and without sinister motives; though why, if not for Settlement funds, could not be imagined.

Mrs. Page was a tall, pleasant-faced woman, still on the right side of forty, a widow whose husband had left her too much of this world's goods for her ever to be classed as a poorhouse Tory; and despite the fact that she was a leader in the old-school, as opposed to the brass-band, set, many people considered her a very agreeable woman. She had amusing things to say, and she said them in the Heth drawing-room with no air of awkwardness. Carlisle, somewhat against her will, was soon thinking her extremely attractive. But the thawing out went further than that.

Talk turned by chance—or perhaps it was not chance exactly—on those growing currents of feminine activity which had nothing to do with dinners and dances: and here the visitor expressed ideas which did not seem old-school in the least. It appeared that she, Mary Page, in the period of her spinsterhood, for she hadn't been married till she was twenty-six, a thoroughgoing old maid in those days,—had also wearied of the gay round; she had desired to do something. But alas, she had suddenly discovered that she wasn't fitted to do one earthly thing, having been trained only to be a trimming. She said, smiling, that she had cried all one day about it....

"Why is it assumed, really," said she, "that women are such poor little butterflies that amusing and being amused should absorb all their energies? I don't think of myself as a pet, do you, Miss Heth? Give us something solid to do, and the world wouldn't be so full of discontented women. Do you know, if I had a daughter," said Mrs. Page, "and she wasn't married after three years 'out,' and hadn't developed any special talent, I should send her straight down to Hartman's Business College, and have her learn typewriting. Yes, I should!—and make her get a place in an office, too, at five dollars a week!..."

The distinguished visitor remained twenty minutes in the improbable drawing-room, and contrived to make herself interesting. When she rose to go, she mentioned that she was staying at her mother's place in the country till after Thanksgiving, and was only in town for the day. And then, as she held out her hand, smiling in a simple and friendly way, her expression changed, and she brought up her other hand and laid it over Carlisle's.

"My dear," she began, with some embarrassment, "I wonder if you will let a much older woman say how truly she has sympathized with you in—all this trouble—and how much she has admired you, too?..."

Cally's eyes wavered and fell. And suddenly she divined that this, and nothing else, was what Mrs. Page had come to say.

"All of us make mistakes in this world," went on the kind voice—"all that I know do wrong. But not all of us, I'm afraid, have the courage to go back and set right what we did, as bravely as you have done."

The girl stood dumb.... Strange, indeed, that the first word of understanding sympathy she had had since her home-coming—barring only Hen Cooney—should have come from this worse than stranger, whom at a distance she had long secretly envied and disliked. One touch of generous kindness, and the hostility of years seemed to fall away....

She raised her eyes, trying with indifferent success to smile. But perhaps her look showed something of what she felt: for Mrs. Page immediately took the girl's face between her hands and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

"May I?... I mean by it that I hope you'll let me know you better, when I'm home again.... Good-bye."

Cally caught the gloved hand upon her cheek, and said, with an impulsiveness far from her habit:

"I think you're the sweetest person I ever saw...."

* * * * *

And two days later, she said to her mother, though in a distinctly frivolous tone:

"What would you think of me as a Settlement worker, mamma?"

"Settlement worker?... Well, we'll see," said Mrs. Heth, absently. "It remains to be seen how far the best people are going in for it...."

Cally laughed. She was beautifully dressed, and felt perfectly poised. It was five o'clock in the afternoon, and she and her mother were in the new vindication limousine, en route to the old Dabney House.

"What difference does that make?"

"All the difference.... Now, Cally, don't pick up any of poor Henrietta's equality notions, just because you feel a little blue at present. This is going to come out all right. You may trust me."

"I do," said Cally, sincerely.

After a silence she added with a laugh: "Who are the best people, mamma?"

"I am, for one," said mamma; and unconsciously her grasp lightened on the little ornamental bag where snuggled her Settlement check for Ten Thousand Dollars, securely bagged at last.

"Don't let any poor nobodies pull you down to their level with their talk about merit," said mamma. "What's merit in society?"



XXIV

How the Best People came to the Old Hotel again; how Cally is Ornamental, maybe, but hardly a Useful Person; how she encounters Three Surprises from Three Various Men, all disagreeable but the Last.

To the Dabney House, it was like old times come back. Not in forty years had the ancient hostelry so resounded with the steps of the best people. Without, there stood lines of motor-cars in the shabby and unaccustomed street, ten times as many as there had been in May. Within—to prove at a stroke the tone of the gathering—J. Forsythe Avery himself stood conspicuously at the very door: not merely stood, but labored behind a deal table for the cause, distributing Settlement pamphlets, brochures or treatises, to all comers. He irresistibly reminded Carlisle of one of those lordly men in gold-lace outside a painless dentist's parlors. Many others of the conquering order there were observed also, almost in the first glance; chiefly congregating in the new assembly room, where the "opening reception" was under way, but also deploying in numbers all over the lower floor and the remodeled basement beneath.

It was the Heths' first public appearance since their home-coming, and perhaps even mamma felt a little bit self-conscious. But Carlisle had come with serious intentions, and a manner of determined vivacity. Let people find anything to gloat over in her appearance, if they could. Glancing about as they left Mr. Avery, she saw that the old court or lobby, where she had stood and talked once on a rainy May day, had been left intact, only renovated somewhat as to floor and walls. On one side of it now ran down a row of offices with new glass doors, the first of them, marked "Mr. Pond." On the other side, a great arched doorway led into the large meeting-room, formed by the demolition of many partitions. Changed indeed it all was: yet Cally found it quite disturbingly familiar too....

Beyond the arched doorway stood a little group of the best men and women: a reception committee clearly, and Mrs. Heth had not been asked to serve upon it, as she was instantly and indignantly conscious. However, she was one to bear martyrdom nobly, knowing that truth would prevail in the end; and accordingly she greeted Byrds, Daynes, and others with marked and lingering cordiality. Carlisle, passing down the receiving line more quickly, soon found herself introduced to Pond, the imported Director, according to her plan. The phrase is accurate, for Mr. Pond appeared to be panjandrum here, and people of all degree were presented to him, as to royalty. Frequent hearing of the man's name in the last few days had suggested nothing to Carlisle, but the moment she caught sight of his keen face with the powerful blue-tinged jaw, she recalled that she had seen Mr. Pond in the Dabney House before now.

The Director had turned with businesslike indifference as Mr. Dayne spoke her name, but his expression as he looked at her took on a sudden half-surprised intentness which Carlisle had seen upon the faces of strangers before now. His reply to her commonplaces of greeting was:

"Where have I met you before?"

"Nowhere, I think."

Bored with the tenor of his speech, she looked at him steadily yet negligently for a moment; and then, releasing her gaze, continued: "This is the assembly room, isn't it? What sort of meetings are to held here?"

A faintly quizzical look came into the man's incisive stare. "Do you really think it worth while for me to explain, when—"

He left this beginning hanging in midair, while he turned, without apology, to accept the humble duties of three new arrivals. Cally waited patiently. Mrs. Berkeley Page had left her possessed of an impulse, which she took to be almost tantamount to a resolution. She would give at least part of her time to doing something solid....

Director Pond, turning back to her, concluded:

"When we are both well aware that you don't care a continental what sort of meetings are going to be held here?"

"Oh, but I do, you see," replied Cally, distinctly irritated. "I'm very much interested. One of the reasons I'm here this afternoon," she explained, not without an under-feeling of sad nobility, "is that I am thinking of offering myself as—as a worker."

"Oh!—As a worker."

"Yes."

"A worker. You mean it?"

She said, glancing indifferently away: "But probably Mr. Dayne is the person I should speak to about it.... Or—perhaps Dr. Vivian...."

"What's Dayne or Vivian got to do with it? Walk a little away from the door with me—there! Thank the Lord when this mob clears out.... So you want to offer as a worker," said Director Pond, his face gravely authoritative. "Good. We need workers more than money now, which is putting it somewhat strongly. I am pleased that you will join us. When can you move in?"

"Move in?"

"You understand, of course, that resident workers are the only ones good for anything. You will want to live here, for a year or so at least. Naturally the sooner you can come the better."

"Live here? Here in the Dabney House? Well, no," said Carlisle, with open amusement, "I could hardly do that."

"Ah?" said he, without the slightest change of expression. "Well, that's a pity.... Allow me to raise my hand and point at this wall, so; and now people will understand that I'm explaining important points to a worker, and will not interrupt. Of course there is something for the non-residents to do, too. Let us see now. You can sew, I suppose?"

"Sew?... Well—not really well at all."

"Too bad," said he, keeping his broad back to the lively groups about them and pointing steadily at the wall. "However—I'm thinking of putting in a woman's infirmary. Can you recommend yourself as reasonably fitted for an assistant amateur nurse?"

"Oh, no! No, I couldn't do that, I'm afraid. I can't bear sickness."

"Indeed? A great many people enjoy it.... Well!—district visitor it is, then, while we're getting acquainted with the neighborhood. But it means business, you know—six days a week visiting in the homes of the poorest, dirtiest and meanest, investigating, collecting facts under instructions you will get from me—"

"Oh! Well, no—not that. I—I'm afraid my mother wouldn't care to have me do that."

The man's pointing hand, which was large and strong-looking, fell at his side, and he gazed at her with a sarcasm which he no longer troubled to conceal.

"May I ask what under the sun you can do?"

"What I can do?..."

Under his hard and frankly belittling stare, Carlisle began to feel rather small, despite her firm resolves to feel nothing of the sort. She had heard something of this Mr. Pond in the past week: a person of some consequence in the world, it was said, several kinds of Doctor, and the author of a work on The Settlement which was considered "standard" and which Cally had meant (since last night) to purchase at Saltman's bookstore. Report made him also a man of some independent means and position, and certainly he had come with excellent letters and credentials. But Cally did not consider that these things justified anybody in being so thoroughly hateful, particularly when you could see that it was only an eccentric pose....

"That," said she, with dignity, "is what I am now considering—"

"But you've already offered to help! I merely request you, in a polite manner, to state how you can help me, in my big, serious and important work.... Doesn't it occur to you, in fact, that you are somewhat helpless?"

"Does it occur to you that you are being somewhat rude?"

"Does it occur to you that what you call rudeness may be exactly the sort of wholesome irritant needed by people of your class?"

"What do you mean by people of my class?"

Cally raised a white-gloved hand and put back a tendril of her gay hair. She looked at him level-eyed. The man's constant and cocksure "I," "me," "mine," rubbed her strongly the wrong way. This was Dr. Vivian's Settlement, and nobody else's. She was convinced that Vivian would have made a far better Director anyway....

Mr. Pond, however, smiled suddenly. The smile largely transformed his dark face, making it look for the first time quite agreeable, and even kind.

"I mean," said he, "those who are highly ornamental, but cannot candidly be described as generally useful."

The reply, for some reason, silenced her. She thought of Mrs. Page. The man's smile faded.

"Not," said he, "that I don't consider ornaments of use. I do, in their place. Now I must get back to the firing-line. I can only add that if you are serious about wanting to help me, Miss—I'm afraid I didn't catch your name—you will lose no time in qualifying yourself to be of service. Obviously you are not so qualified at present."

He nodded curtly, and turned away. The admiring populace swallowed him up....

Cally felt as if she had received a severe drubbing. She felt rebuffed, defeated, depressed, and at the same time vaguely stimulated. However, the moment for introspective analysis was not now....

"Well, Cally," said motherly Mrs. McVey, drifting by, "you must feel sort of lonesome—such a turn-out of old folks I never saw. I wanted Evey to come, but she said she 'd as soon go to a tea at the Needy Ladies' Home."

On the heels of Evey's mother came Cally's own, whose watchful eye had been felt from a distance before now. Possibly mamma had not forgotten what happened the last time Cally came to the Dabney House....

"I saw you talking with Mr. Pond," said Mrs. Heth, a little aside. "How did he impress you?"

"He's the most conceited human being I ever saw," said Cally. "I believe he said one or two fairly interesting things."

"Well—that's not a bad recommendation. I like an important man to think well of himself. I'll ask him for my Settlement dinner Saturday, when those Cheritons stop nagging at him."

Mamma looked slightly flushed beneath her fixed smile; a look which her daughter had no difficulty in understanding. More than once this afternoon, Cally had encountered significant stares upon herself, instantly removed, which showed with amusing candour that she was the subject of conversation in those quarters. No more could she assume that this conversation and those stares were but the involuntary offerings of the multitude to beauty and brilliant success. And yet she did not seem to mind so very much....

"I just gave my Settlement check to Mr. Byrd," added mamma. "He was very grateful, but not as grateful as he ought to have been."

She glided back to her position near the door. Mrs. McVey, chatting on, observed that the Pond man hadn't seemed impatient to make her acquaintance, though she had waited round some time to give him the pleasure; also that there were no refreshments but ice-water from the new ten-gallon cooler in the hall. Then she, in her turn, passed on, as J. Forsythe Avery was discerned steering in a fixed direction through the crowd.

"Are your labors ended so soon?"

Mr. Avery bowed pluperfectly, and Cally smiled suddenly. He was a pink, slightly bald young man, and had once been described by Mr. Berkeley Page as very gentlemanly.

"What are you laughing at?" inquired he, somewhat lugubriously.

"Only at something funny Mrs. McVey just said. You know how witty she is.... Have you handed them all out?"

"I appointed a deputy," confessed Mr. Avery, "but I labored hard for a time. Am I not entitled to—er—the rewards of labor now?"

Cally glanced away, with no more desire to smile. The look in his pink eyes had arrested her attention, and she wondered whether she could possibly bring herself to take him. She was not wanted as a Settlement worker; and he would be colossally wealthy some day. Perhaps he lacked an indefinable something that comes from grandfathers, but he had never committed a social fault in his life, unless you would hold up against him an incurable fondness for just one tiny little drop of cologne on a pure linen handkerchief. Mamma would be rather pleased, poor dear.

Then her mind's eye gave her a flashing memory-picture of Canning, the matchless, and Mr. Avery became unimaginable....

"Such as what?" said she, listlessly, to his roguish hints of reward.

"I should offer my escortage for—er—a small tour over the premises, and so forth. Why not?"

"No reason in the world, except that I may not go over the prem ..."

That word the speaker left forever unfinished. And her next remark was:

"What did you say?"

Obviously there was an interlude here; and in it Cally Heth had seen, and recovered from the sudden sight of, the strange young man Mr. V.V., upon whom her eyes had not fallen since a sunny May morning when she had sat and wept before him. He stood quite near, the founder of the Settlement, though in an obscure corner: backed there, it seemed, by a fat conversationalist in a purple bonnet. But there must have been telepathy in Cally's gaze for her one confidant; for she had no sooner descried his tall figure through the fuss and feathers than he turned his eyes and looked at her.

She had considered with mingled feelings the prospect of meeting this man again to-day; and now the sight of his face and lucid gaze brought something of that sense of shock which had attended these encounters in other days. Only now, twined with the painfulness of many associations which his look aroused, there was a sort of welcome, odd and unexpected; she felt a little start of gladness, as at the unlooked-for appearance of something trusted and familiar. How was it that she had thought so little of him in these months, through which it had seemed that there was nobody who understood?...

She bowed, in quite a bright and friendly way, putting down her inward disquiet; and then it was that, turning hastily again to the faithful Avery, Cally inquired:

"What did you say?"

"I suggested," said the pink and pluperfect one, "that you ought to see the gymnasium and swimming-pool at any rate. I'm informed that the pool is the largest in the State, and ..."

But Cally had seen that the man from another world was stepping out from his obscurity; and now there sounded above the Avery periods the vivid voice first heard in the summer-house.

"Miss Heth!—may I say how-do-you-do?... I hadn't seen you till that moment. In fact, I had no idea you were here ..."

"Oh, yes, indeed. I'm a Life Member, if you please," said Cally turning, looking again at the owner of that voice. "How do you do? Do you know Mr. Avery, Dr. Vivian?"

The two men bowed. Young Mr. V.V. had not long retained the slim hand which—such was his lot—had been offered to him for the first time in his life.

"Oh, Miss Kemper!" added Cally. "Do forgive me—I didn't recognize your back at all. May I introduce Mr. Avery?..."

And then, while Mr. Avery paid reluctant devoirs to the lady in the purple bonnet, Cally said quite easily to Dr. Vivian:

"I was just debating whether or not to make an exploring expedition over the whole Settlement. Is there much to see?—or is it mostly rooms?"

"Oh, mostly rooms," said Mr. V.V.

He seemed to begin a smile at this point, and then to change his mind about it. The smile, if such it was, ended short, as if clipped off.

"This door," he added turning to the fresh-painted portal at his elbow, "leads to one of them.... A fair sample, I imagine. This one happens to be a—ah—a sort of sewing-class room, I believe...."

"Oh, a sewing-class room! That must be where I was offered a position."

"Will you look at it?"

"I'd like to. Only I can't sew a bit, you see...."

She stepped exploringly through the open door, into the sort of sewing-class room. V. Vivian walked after her; and behind him he distinctly heard the surprised and somewhat offended voice of the Kemper:

"Funny! I thought that was Mr. Pond I was talking to all the time."

"It's—it's a very nice place," said Cally, glancing about her as she advanced.

Not that it mattered, but it really was not a particularly nice place, only a rather dark and small chamber, smelling of paint and entirely empty save for one bench.

"Not a great deal to see, as you notice," said the summer-house voice behind her, sounding somehow changed since last year.... "Not much of a class could sit on the bench, I fear. Or perhaps it's this next room that's for sewing."

"Oh, I don't mind," said Cally.

And then she turned suddenly upon Mr. V.V., facing him, looking up with a sweet, half-wistful smile such as her face had never worn before for him.

"But tell me something about yourself.... What sort of summer have you had?"

So he was brought to a halt, confronting in one of his donated rooms the loveliest of the Huns; confronting, but not looking at her exactly....

"Well, it's been hot, as you know—in fact, the hottest summer since the Weather Bureau began. That wasn't comfortable, of course. There was a good deal of suffering, where people couldn't afford ice.... Personally, I've happened to be so busy that the weather didn't matter—"

"That's quite ominous, isn't it, in a doctor? Has there been so much sickness in this neighborhood?"

"Yes, there's been a lot of it. We had rather a bad typhoid epidemic, beginning in July—not easy to check in this old district, standing pretty much as it was before the war. I sometimes think there's no hope of ever cleaning it out, short of a London fire.... I—I hope you've been well?"

"Oh, yes, quite well, thank you. But is this district so bad—from a health point of view?"

"You should see it," said he, rather drily. "Or rather, of course, you shouldn't. It's more or less disturbing to one's peace of mind at times...."

She was looking at him with an interested intentness of which she was quite unconscious. Never before had she seen this man free of the knowledge of menacing discussion ever pressing in the foreground; so now it was a little as if she met for the first time some one whom she had heard a great deal about from others. Her eye for externals had observed his new suit at once; in this deceptive light she considered that it looked quite nice, not suspecting that it was only the Prince, reduced; and she was thinking, with a sense of discovery, that Mr. V.V. was undoubtedly a good-looking man. A certain change in his manner she had also noted; a new touch of force, it seemed, a somewhat stiffened masculinity. What had become of that rather engaging hopeful look of his, which was the second thing she had ever noticed about him?...

"Perhaps I shall see it some day," she answered. "If I ever become one of your Mr. Pond's district visitors and investigators."

"Are you thinking of doing that?"

"Oh, I offered to try to do something, but Mr. Pond declined me, without thanks. He said I was perfectly useless to him—in his big and serious work. The worst of it was," she said, smiling rather ruefully, "he proved it."

She was glancing toward the door, with the moving and humming groups beyond, and so missed the sudden eagerness that briefly lit his face.

"What part of the work—if I might ask—were you—specially interested in?"

"I suppose I'm not really interested in any part. That must be the trouble. Probably it's just the usual dissatisfied feeling—when one is a little tired of parties...."

Was that not yet another confidence, clearly calling for an understanding listener, for sympathetic reassurance? Nothing of the sort came to Cally; nothing of any sort. The brief pause, sharpened as it was by Mr. V.V.'s oddly formal bearing, was rather like a cold douche. And now it seemed that she must have been counting on this man somehow all along, though it was not clear as to what....

"So you see my peace of mind is quite safe. Mr. Pond is right, of course...." And then, thinking that this cool distance was rather absurd under the circumstances, she added in a friendlier way: "But why aren't you the Director here, instead of Mr. Pond? I should think you would be, since it's your Settlement."

But the result of that was only to bring new stiffness into the strange young man's manner.

"My Settlement!... Oh, I beg that you won't speak or think of it in that way. I assure you I've nothing at all to do with it, other than as one worker out of many."

Her unwarlike reply was: "Well, I haven't told anybody."

She glanced at him with a touch of bewilderment, and glanced away again, turning toward the door. Surely he had not always been like this....

"Mr. Avery will think I'm lost," said Cally.

However, Mr. V.V. successfully checked her departure, saying:

"I'm sure you can be of the realest help to the Settlement, Miss Heth, if you care to be." And, then, veering abruptly, he said with his air of making a plunge: "But I must take this opportunity to speak to you of another matter. A matter which, I fear, will be disagreeable to you."

That sufficiently arrested her; she stood looking at him, with a conflict of sensations within. Faces of Settlementers appeared in the door, looked in at the bare room, passed from view again. The tall young man in the new suit pushed back his hair, with the quaint gesture he had.

"You once said," he continued, in a voice of light hardness, "that I brought you nothing but trouble. That seems to continue true, though perhaps you won't regard this as so—so serious...."

Trouble? More trouble for Cally Heth?

"Why—what do you mean?"

"The question of the Heth Works—has come up again. That, at least, is the particular application. Of course many other factories are involved."

The girl was completely taken aback. "Why, I don't understand. What has come up?"

He then explained himself, in well-ordered sentences:

"The State Labor Commission feels strongly that the public good demands a new factory law at this time, requiring all owners to conform to a certain higher standard of comfort and safety for their employees. I must add that I fully share the Commission's feeling. It is considered that some publicity in the press is needed, preparing the public mind for a progressive law by showing what present conditions are. A series of articles has been decided upon, to begin about the first of November and continue daily till the legislature meets in January. I have agreed to write these articles. I thought it only fair," he ended short, "to tell you this."

The girl heard him with startled astonishment. She had never, of course, been interested in her father's factory other than as a family symbol; and that factitious interest which she had felt at times last year, born of this man's hostility, was gone long since, effaced by a tide of stronger feelings. So his sudden exhumation of the topic as a cause of war now came upon her with the harshest discordance. It seemed almost like a wanton wounding of her, somehow like sheer disloyalty in him. Surely if there were need of articles, this man might leave them to somebody else to write....

Her young gaze was full of an unconscious reproachfulness.

"All that means that you are going to put some more letters in the paper attacking my father?"

"I'm afraid it's inevitable it will seem so to you."

"Oh,"' said she, it seemed involuntarily, "I don't see how you can!"

The young man Mr. V.V. made no reply. It may be that he didn't see how he could either....

He looked away from the reproachful eyes, slate-blue to match the plumes in the hat: and there were phrases from his articles singing and kicking in his head, phrases which would cry in the penny newspaper as no voice could cry from the wilderness. Ten thousand words he had ready now, in the old secretary upstairs; hard words all, that broke heads or hearts, faiths implied too, it might be, and did not care; or didn't mean to show it if they did. And he thought, too, of a little friend he had, just pulled back from death's door, and hardly ready for her Trip now, after ten weeks. So of course there could be no flinching now....

Through the door there came the continuous sounds of the nearness of the multitude, but these two seemed almost as alone in his old hotel as they had been on another afternoon long ago.

"Don't you think," said the pretty voice, still not angry—and surely anger would have been easier to meet than this—"that before doing anything so—so radical as that, you might wait a little while, believing that my father would—do what is right?"

The lame doctor brought his eyes back to her and said, slowly: "You see, I've been worried by the feeling—that I've waited too long already."

"Too long for what? That's just what I mean. What do you think could possibly happen?"

"For one thing, Miss Heth," he said, with a faint dry smile, "the building might fall down some day."

Color came into Cally's cheek. Her feeling now was that she had made advances, spontaneous and friendly, and been smartly rebuffed. What cared he for the troubles of the Heths?...

"You really think my father would risk the lives of his employees, just to make a little more money for himself?"

He answered, almost brusquely: "I don't mean to judge your father. People take their views of life from the atmosphere in which they live. You appreciate that. I, of course, concede your father's point of view. I fully understand it. I—wish it were possible for you to do as much for mine."

She looked at him fixedly a moment, said, "I'm sorry you think this necessary," and turned away to the door. But once again his voice arrested her.

"Miss Heth!... You feel an interest in the Settlement. You've felt a wish to help in the work—to lend a hand in some way to those less fortunate than yourself. You—you haven't as yet decided just what you want to do...."

She had paused at the door, half-turning; their eyes met once more. And now the whole look of the strange young man seemed to change, and he said with sudden gentleness:

"Why don't you go to the Works some day?"

But it was late in the day to seek to improve matters with looks and tones, with efforts to put responsibilities upon her. Cally answered as she had answered him once before: only it was a mark of some change in her—toward him, perhaps toward life itself—that she spoke with a dignity which had never been hers last year.

"I don't think I need do that to learn that my father isn't a homicide."

* * * * *

For the second time also, Cally went away from the Dabney House without the company of her staunch little mother: who would remain in this place till among the last, contending among the best people for the thing she held dearest in the world.

Cally, however, was well looked after by Mr. Avery, who welcomed her upon the threshold of the sewing-class room (if that is what it was), removing himself firmly from the Kemper. His proposal was to continue the tour of the premises, but she replied that she found Settlementing dreadfully boring, and was of a mind to steal away for home. The disappointed pink one then proposed to accompany her, and pay a little call, as he put it. However, she professed an incurable dulness after her slumming, and countered with an offer to set him down at his club, if he liked.

It was so arranged, with the gallant, and also with mamma. William Banks, detached by a nod from the procession of waiting vehicles over the dingy street, wheeled up to the entrance; halted with a whir; electrically self-started himself once more. Carlisle bowled off with J. Forsythe Avery, who was well pleased with this token of her regard, and resolved to make the most of it. But soon the time came when he was debarked from her conveyance; she was rid of his ponderous ardors; and Cally rolled through the twilight streets alone....

There had settled down upon her a deep and singular depression. Her spirit ached, as if from a whipping. She thought a little of the Works; she had remembered that moment of somewhat painful revelation last year; but no reflection brought any doubt of her father. Long since she had reached the sound conclusion that that was the way business was; and if this fixed belief had been shaken a little now, she was hardly conscious of it. Papa, of course, did all that was reasonable and right for his work-people; it was perfectly outrageous that he should be subjected to abuse in the newspapers. Dr. Vivian, for his part, was conceded a religious fellow's strange sense of duty, though it required an effort to concede him that. Still Cally was not thinking of it from these points of view exactly. It all seemed to be quite personal, somehow....

She gazed through the car-window at the familiar panorama, streets, houses, and people which she now did not see. It had been, indeed, an afternoon of snubs, such as she was hardly accustomed to receiving; and she seemed to have lost something of that wholesome defensive power she had possessed last year, the power of being righteously indignant. Time's whirligig had brought her to this,—that she had all but offered her friendship to Jack Dalhousie's friend, and he had more than repulsed her. She did feel indignant, a little; but, deeper than that, she felt wounded, she hardly knew why. After that moment of barrier-less intimacy in the drawing-room, how could he bear to be so hard?

Her vesper thoughts veered a little, moved from Vivian to Director Pond, who had also brusquely rebuffed her. It was Mrs. Page's experience that Cally had had this afternoon, and she too found it humiliating. She had lately caught a distant glimpse of "work" in terms different from those which the dull word had worn heretofore: vaguely discerned activities in which the best women were cooeperating usefully with men—cooeperating equally as human beings, and no nonsense; not as women at all. There was something mysteriously inviting in this. She had felt a bracing absence of sex in Pond's hectoring catechism and blunt rejection of her. Yes, and in the cool declaration of war from Dr. Vivian, who had grown so hard since May. Busy and serious beings these, who would not be deterred by the flutterings of the doubtless ornamental but completely useless....

"You're to go back for Mrs. Heth, William."

"Yas'm," said William, and clicked the little door behind her.

Yes, and where there was no sex, there she, Cally Heth, wasn't wanted. Hard words these, but they seemed to have the ring of truth. She was wanted as a woman, she was wanted as an ornament, but she appeared to have no particular purpose as a human being. And the best prospect that life held out to her to-night was to settle down in a weary world as Mrs. J. Forsythe Avery.

Cally opened the front door, which was hospitably kept on the latch during the daytime, and stepped into the dim hall of home. Rarely in her life had she felt more dispirited. Nevertheless, when she heard a footfall from the direction of the drawing-room, and was reminded that papa had already come in, her combative blood plucked up at once. She wanted to tell her father immediately that he was going to be attacked in the papers; never fear but he would know what to do about it.

"Papa!" she called. "Where are you? I ..."

Speaking, she had put her head through the drawing-room portieres, rehung that very day: and so it was that her sentence was never ended in this world. For it was not papa who turned so quickly at the sound of her voice, and came walking so straight and sure towards her. Not papa, this splendid and once well-admired figure, now confronting her with such unmistakable feeling. No, the wonder of all wonders had happened; and the universe seemed to hang in momentary suspense as Cally Heth looked again into the eyes of her prince of lovers.

"Carlisle," said Hugo's remembered voice, "I've come back."

She stood unmoving in the doorway, her fingers tightening on the silken hanging. Her breast was in a tumult of emotions, in which a leaping exultation was not wanting. But stronger than anything else in this moment was the uprushing feeling that here was one whom she had well trusted once, and who had failed her in her direst need.

"So I see," said she.

And continuing to look fixedly at him as he advanced upon her, beginning to speak, she was shot through with a bitter thought:

"He's found I'm not so badly damaged after all."



XXV

In which the Name of Heth is lifted beyond the Reach of Hateful Malice, and Mamma wishes that she had the Ten Thousand back again.

Mrs. Heth returned from the Settlement "opening" a full hour behind Carlisle, and in a victorious glow such as she had not known since May. Doing good for cause, she was not one to blush too much to find it fame. Having notified Mr. Byrd of her ten thousand dollar gift to the Foundation Fund, she had proceeded with her tidings to others of the authorities, and presently met with appreciation in proportion to the funds involved. Director Pond, a decisive and forthright man, had stood upon a chair and cried the splendid donation to the assembled company, his obvious moral being that others similarly prospered by the Lord should go and do likewise. So had come vindicatory advertisement gorgeous beyond the little lady's dreams.

It was well that the world should mark this gift, for it had not been made by the mere scratching of a signature. And the colloquies preceding it had been of a thoroughly typical sort, compressing in a nutshell a whole history, in fact the whole history, of the domestico-commerical relationships of rising Houses. Settlementers might have applauded more heartily had they understood just what a deep-cutting business they were witnessing. However, they did not understand this, and Mrs. Heth, for her part, was the last person in the world to moralize upon the non-essential. Returning homeward through the night, rolling eclat beneath her tongue, she frankly reflected that it was worth the money. The envious would hardly be able to conceive that people who gave so magnificently to charity could have done anything really deserving of censure; no, no. Or, if such people imaginably had, then certainly the only thing to do was to forget all about it as quickly as possible....

So agreeably musing, Mrs. Heth arrived at the door of the House, and received upon the threshold the great surprise of her life.

It was almost seven o'clock, so long had she lingered to enjoy and capitalize the reverberations of her triumph. Yet Carlisle, singularly enough, was discovered standing in the hall, still in her hat and gloves, just as she had left the reception an hour earlier.

Full as Mrs. Heth was of her own engrossing thoughts, her daughter's expression at once notified her that she, too, had news of some sort to communicate.

"Well, Carlisle? What're you.... Why, what's happened?"

"You've just missed Hugo, mamma."

"Hugo!" said mamma, paling and almost falling backward. "He's been here?"

In her daughter's blue eyes there lingered that gleaming exultation, not completely softened as yet by the sweeter and now due love-light.

"He wants me to marry him next month."

"Oh, Cally!..."

Fairly tumbling forward from the door, Mrs. Heth gathered her daughter in a convulsive bear-hug, murmuring ecstatic nothings. Little she thought of Settlements or picayunish donations now.

"Oh, Cally!... Mamma's so happy for you, dear child!... And me never dreaming he was within a thousand miles! All's well that ends well, I say!... When'd he come? I'm wild to see him. Where's he staying? Will he be back this evening?"

She drew away from her unwonted demonstration, leaving her hands on Cally's shoulders, and the two women looked at each other, both a little flushed with excitement.

"He's at the Arlington, to stay only till to-morrow," said she, "and he's coming in after dinner to see you and papa."

"Oh!... He insists on not seeing you, I suppose?" fleered mamma, with enormous archness.

"I won't be here, you see. I'm going to the theatre—Mr. Avery's getting up a party."

Mrs. Heth showed as much surprise as the jubilation of her countenance could accommodate.

"Why, my dear child! Break it, of course! I'll telephone him myself—a friend from out of town—"

"But I don't want to break it, you see!" said Carlisle, laughing brightly. "He can't expect to drop in after months and months and find us all twirling our thumbs on the doorstep, you know!"

"But you're engaged to him.'"

"I should hope not!... Why, mamma! You must think I'm frightfully—die-away!... I'm disciplining him, don't you see? I'm not going to make it too easy for him!"

"Oh!... I see!"

Perhaps she did not see exactly, and certainly she did not believe in manufacturing sporting chances in the most momentous matter in the world. But then neither did Cally, she well knew; and of her daughter's victorious skill in the matter of managing men, she had had many proofs, and now this crowning one. Lovers' coynesses mattered little in the face of the supreme fact of Canning's return.

"Well! You'll give him the whole day to-morrow, of course!... And don't you be too hard on the dear fellow, Cally. His coming back shows he's been disciplined.... How the cats will open their eyes!"

"Probably.... But don't worry about Hugo, mamma. He'll do just what I say after this."

Mamma laughed delightedly. She was of course in the woman's league for the general putting down of the enemy, Man. The two women stood staring at each other in the stately hall.

"Next month!" said mamma. "We can't do it, Cally! November would be better—much better—just before Thanksgiving, don't you think?"

Cally laughed merrily, and extricated herself.

"We'll have plenty of time to decide about that.... Now, I must fly and dress. I shan't have time for dinner, mamma. Will you send me up something—just some soup and coffee?"

"Certainly, darling," said mamma.

Already there had crept a certain absentness into the campaigner's voice. Her strong, constructive mind was slipping away from this present, measuring over the triumphs that lay ahead. After her darling vanished upstairs, she remained standing motionless by the newel-post, in her fixed eyes the gleam of a brigadier-general who has pulled out brilliant victory over overwhelming obstacles. The god in the machine had, indeed, forever put the name of Heth beyond the reach of hateful malice....

Suddenly mamma said aloud, rather indignantly: "I wish I had that ten thousand back!"

In her own room, Cally bathed, dressed at some speed, and dined lightly between whiles. She was in a state of inner exaltation, contrasting oddly with her depression two hours earlier. Obliterated now was her conviction of her own human uselessness in a world of sexes, though it couldn't be said that anything had happened to disprove that conviction, exactly. In this moment she was continuously elated by all that was signified in the fact that Hugo Canning was to spend the evening downstairs talking decorously with mamma and papa while she, Cally, loved of him, was to go off to the theatre with J. Forsythe Avery....

If Canning had failed her in her greatest need, time, indeed, had exquisitely avenged her. The Lord of the righteous had delivered the prince of lovers into her hand. With his very first words in the dim drawing-room, Hugo had admitted, for the second time in their somewhat stormy courtship, his unconditional surrender. He made no mistake this time about the nature of a woman's heart; he was not logical or controversial or just; but advancing straight upon her over her decidedly forbidding greeting, he had spoken out with evident emotion:

"Don't look at me that way—I can't bear it.... Don't you know now that I love you? I love you so that I won't live without you."

Yes, Cally did know it now. She had clearly wronged both Hugo and herself in ever thinking of him as a male flirt, a light-loving jilt who too easily found balm for a heart not made for deep hurts. Busy and gay with her dressing, Carlisle thought of the Honorable Kitty Belden, and laughed musically to herself.

Yet how was it that, under so manly and sweet an appeal straight to her woman's heart, she had not instantly subsided on the shoulder of her contrite lover, with grateful tears? Cally herself hardly understood. She was, truth to tell, secretly surprised and thrilled by her own high-handedness. To what degree she and her former betrothed had remet under permanently changed conditions, it was beyond her thought to try to analyse now. Perhaps it was only the completeness of her triumph that had so fired her feminine independence. Had she met Hugo by chance, and found him lukewarm, doubt not that she would have striven to fan the embers....

She had followed her intuitions, which never reason, and when she said that she was now disciplining her prodigal, she spoke out her actual feelings as far as she herself understood them; feelings, they were, which had a deep root far back in all the summer's unhappiness. There was a sentence of Hugo's last May: "I asked one girl to be my wife; have you the right to offer me another?" She would make Hugo pay a little more for that remark, now that she could just as easily as not.

Like Aaron's rod, the return of Canning had swallowed up all other facts of the girl's existence, or nearly all. She was lifted, as on wings, out of the slough of her despond. Nevertheless, the news heard at the Settlement recurred even now; and when Mrs. Heth appeared in the bedroom, just after eight, Carlisle greeted her with:

"Has papa gone out, mamma?"

Mamma said no, papa was in the study, though Mr. MacQueen was with him just at the moment. Something about installing some new machines at the Works, she believed....

"That will do, Flora—Miss Carlisle has everything she needs...." And then the good lady said, with a smile so knowing as to amount to a tremendous wink: "You are going to tell your father to-night.... That's right, my dear—"

Cally gave a burst of gay laughter, declaring that there was not one earthly thing to tell.

"Of course, darling, mamma understands," said that lady, promptly, with her unconquerable beam.

And a few moments later she added:

"Cally, I was just thinking—no harm in being forehanded, as I always say!... Considering all the circumstances, what would you say to a small, dignified home-wedding, with two or four bridesmaids, and a large breakfast to the most intimate friends?"

Cally was even more amused....

There hovered over her in this moment, however clearly she knew it, an immense pressure, born both within and without—pressure of her own lifelong mental habits and ideals, of her parents' wishes, strengthened by the family's late loss of prestige, pressure of public opinion, of orthodox standards, of manifest destiny, of the whole air she breathed—driving her, quite irrespective of the heart question, straight to brilliant success in Hugo's waiting arms. The wing of this vast body brushed Cally's cheek now, in mamma's cooing notes. She felt it, but only smiled. A new strength possessed her; she was her own girl now as never before.

"I'll give the suggestion due thought, mamma dear ... I've an engagement now."

Annie knocked, announcing Mr. Avery. Cally was now fully accoutred, in a small, queer hat, and a short queer wrap, draping in fantastically above the knee and made of a strange filmy material which might have been stamped chiffon. She turned, laughing, at the bedroom door, and her mother, no sentimentalist, thought that she looked extraordinarily pretty....

"Good-night, mamma.... Be sure to remember me to Hugo."

She went off to a merry evening in which her high spirits became a matter of remark, and her friend Evey McVey considered that they were the least bit out of taste—"so soon, you know." So Hugo Canning spent the evening of his return formally reinstating himself in the good graces of papa, who did not forget his daughter's unhappiness of the summer quite so easily as mamma....

But next day Hugo had his innings, according to Mrs. Heth's desire.

He had been in Washington, and had come to Carlisle upon an irresistible impulse. Steadily magnetized by the spirit of the "wild, sweet thing" who had withstood him at the price of his hand, yearning had once more conquered pride, and again he had returned, again an astonishment to himself. In view of such abasement of his self-love, he had, truth to tell, expected to find Carlisle fully ready for the immediate rejoining of their lives. But perhaps there had lingered in him a doubt of the quality of his reception, born of the manner of their parting; and her hesitation, while it shook his vanity, by no means bade him despair. After the first small shock, he had not failed to perceive the coyness of her; and why not? If her maiden's whim demanded a brief ritual of probationary wooing before verbally admitting him to her heart again, never fear but he would go through his paces with a gallant's air....

The day was what photographers call cloudy-bright, turning toward mid-afternoon into fitful sunshine. The young pair lunched a deux at the Country Club, nearly deserted at this hour on a week-day. Hugo had stoutened the least bit under his sorrows; he was more masculine, handsomer than ever; his manner did not want his old lordliness, even now. He was not one to discuss business with a woman, but she learned of the affair which was hurrying him back to Washington, nothing less than rate-hearings before the Interstate Commerce Commission, if you please. The able young man was now assistant counsel for his father's railway. However, he was to pass this way soon again, probably next week.

They sat for an hour on the club piazza looking out over smooth rolling hills, now green, now wooded, all fair in the late September sunshine. Away to the left there was the faint gleam of the river. All day Canning, in his subtle way, made love to Cally, but he was too wise to press hard upon her girlish hesitancy.

"I don't believe you've missed me much," he remarked, once, on the wooing note. "Have you?"

Cally smiled into space and answered: "At times."

"That's cheerful ... When there's not been an hour for me, all summer, I swear it, that hasn't been singing with thoughts of you."

"You might have run up from Trouville, in July, and called on us in Paris."

His reply indicated that running, whether up or down, involved a considerable conquest of pride. And Cally understood that.

"I," said she, tranquilly, "have been growing weary of society. Perhaps that is your doing...."

She told him of her experience at the Settlement yesterday, of her rebuff at the hands of Mr. Pond. Canning thanked heaven that she need not bother herself with such dreary faddisms of the day.

"You can safely leave all that," said he, "to the women who have failed in their own careers."

"And what career is that?"

"The career of being a woman. Need you ask?"

Carlisle, drawing on her gloves, observed: "That would bring up the question, wouldn't it, of what your ideal of a woman is."

"For five cents," said Hugo, "I will tell you her name."

She was pleased with the evidences of her mastery over him. The day of intimacy brought its reactions, automatically creating romantic airs. When the time came for him to go, she was sorry; and perhaps just a little uncertain in her own mind. For the re-engagement had still not taken place. The most that could be said was that an "understanding" existed, to the effect that it would take place on his return. And Canning, for his part, was not dissatisfied with this arrangement. In ten days he would come again, and take the wavering outposts by storm.

They said good-bye in the drawing-room at home, at quarter before five. Cally held out her slender little hand. Hugo smiled down at it: surely, between him and her, an odd farewell. But then, as his clasp tightened, the man's smile became a little twisted on his handsome lip.

"When I part from you again, my dear," said he, with sudden huskiness, "I swear it won't be like this."

The girl looked up at him. He raised the hand, palm-upward, with a sort of jerk, kissed it, dropped it abruptly, and was gone.

Cally remained standing where he had left her; this time she did not run to the window. She glanced at the hand which her lover had just saluted, and was conscious of a subtle want in their reunion....

Hugo's presence in the body had brought up vividly that matter upon which they had broken in May. Of that matter he had said nothing, either yesterday or to-day. His manner and bearing took the clear position that he and she had simply had a lovers' quarrel, in which both had said and done things that they did not mean. But Jack Dalhousie had stood in the background of Carlisle's mind all day, and her feeling was that something rather definite should have been said about him. Possibly Mrs. Berkeley Page had something to do with this; that lady had left behind her an indefinable suggestion of invisible standards, of appraisements differing from mamma's, say. Measuring herself unconsciously with Hugo to-day, Cally had become aware that in carrying out her will in opposition to his last year, she had derived, not merely strategic, but in some way personal, strength. The old inequality had mysteriously disappeared....

Mrs. Heth came gliding through the portieres from the hall. Her face was one vast inquiry, lit by beams; it made an uproarious demand such as a child of three could have understood. Still, to avoid any possibility of misunderstanding, mamma briefly gave voice:

"Well?"

Cally laughed, and held up her betrothal finger, which was unadorned.

"I'm not," said she.

Mamma's face fell.

"Don't look so blank!" said the daughter, with a little laugh and shrug. "It's all going to happen next week, by the book.... Don't you know I'm perfectly safe?"

* * * * *

Mr. Heth heard Cally's business news with open indignation. She made her report to him that night, just after dinner; and she saw her father's business manner emerge sharply from beneath his genial domesticity.

The "new law" was an old story to the owner of the Cheroot Works. He kept apprised of the signs of the times; and he happened to know in some detail the provisions of the pernicious legislation the Labor Commissioner was cooking up in secret,—"that'd confiscate two years' profits from every near mill in town," said MacQueen. But the rest was news, and highly unwelcome news. To fight blackmail legislation against progressive business was comparatively simple; but a string of lies in the newspapers made a more insidious assault, injuring a man's credit, his standing as a conservative financier, his ability to inspire "confidence": valuable possessions to the President of the Fourth National Bank, and already indefinably impaired by the sensational family matter last spring....

"Vivian!—That fellow!" he exclaimed, recalling not only the Severe Arraignment, but the cataclysm in the House....

"Why, Cally! I thought you considered him sort of a friend of yours!"

"Not that, exactly," said Cally, at a considerable loss. "Still, I was very much surprised.... Do you mind about the—the articles, particularly, papa?"

"I do."

"Isn't there something you can do—to have it all stopped? Couldn't you have a suit—or—?"

Her father exploded. She had touched a sore point.

"Sue! Sue a lot of paupers that haven't got a shirt to their backs! Put 'em in prison?—likely with a lot more paupers on the jury, thinkin' a successful business man's anybody's meat. Sue!—and what'll you get? I'll tell you! An impudent—offensive—malicious muckraking of your own private business...."

Cally, looking at papa's indignant face, felt much drawn to him. However, the business conversation was here interrupted, Cally being called away to the telephone. She went, wondering intently if she could not somehow help in this threatened trouble. She had felt an impulse toward doing something useful. What more useful than assisting to shield her father from undeserved abuse?...

"It's only me, Cally," said Henrietta Cooney's voice, "or I, as they've got it in the grammars. I just called up to tell you not to forget the meeting to-morrow."

"What meeting, Hen?"

"I see I did well to call," came over the wire, on the wings of the Cooney laugh. "The Saturday meeting at the Woman's Club, cousin, that I engaged you for the other day. I've just heard that V.V.'s going to speak, too, which made me want you specially. Don't say no."

"Of course not. I want to go, very much."

The two girls lingered a moment to chat. Henrietta appeared characteristically cheerful, though reporting half the family sick, and Cousin Martha Heth quite low in mind with her flatfoot. And Cally's manner to her poor relation was quite friendly to-night, without any special effort. Her summer-time suspicion that Hen was actually trying to "cheer her up" had by now become a certainty (Hen did not know about Hugo, of course); and which of her own girlhood intimates had done as much? Further, the words of comfort that the hard-worked stenographer had said to her, the day she got home from Europe, had recently been endorsed, as it were, in a most distinguished quarter. A strange thought this, that there was a point of similarity between Hen Cooney and Mrs. Berkeley Page....

But when Cally left the telephone she was not thinking of these things at all. She was thinking that to-morrow she would both hear and see Dr. Vivian, her father's enemy, the hard religious fellow who could so easily forget the troubles of others. Her duty on the occasion seemed to become quite clear to her. She must speak to him, try to induce him to give up his newspaper articles, or at least to leave her father's name out of them.

The day of lovers' reunion was somewhat blurred by ending with thoughts such as these. Hugo, as Carlisle had said, could not pop back after months, and repossess her mind and heart at a bound. He did it pretty successfully during the evening, while she entertained Robert Tellford and James Bogue, 2d, who cordially hated each other, in the drawing-room. But before she fell asleep that night, Cally's thoughts had turned more than once to, V. Vivian, of the old hotel which was now a Settlement. Why had he asked her to go to the Works some day, and why had he done it with that strange look?



XXVI

Concerning Women who won't remember their Place, and a Speech to Two Hundred of them, by Mr. V.V., no less; also revealing why Hen Cooney never found V.V. in the Crowd around the Platform.

It was an interesting time to be alive, as Hen Cooney remarked again next day. Absorbing matters were afoot in the old town, provided that you had an eye in your head to see them. One thing led to another with startling rapidity. Only the other day, it seemed, some one had risen and flung against the ideals of generations the discordant cry of Votes for Women. Rebukes for the unseemliness were copious and stern enough. Many spoke acidly of the lengths to which childless females would go for lack of occupation. Droll fellows of a pretty wit giggled and asked who would mind the baby while the madam went out to vote. Serious-minded persons of both sexes disposed of the whole foolishness forever by saying (and wondering why nobody had ever thought of it before) that woman's place was the home. But few there were who perceived a symptom here; not even when the League grew with unintelligible rapidity, and croaking diagnosticians here or there professed to see other manifestations not unrelated.

Cassandras remarked that women wearied of thinking "through their husbands." The census revealed to the close student that some women even had no husbands. It was a fact that year before last women had appeared at legislative "hearings" for the first time in the history of the State. These women, plague on them, failed to fortify the wags by powdering their noses in front of pocket mirrors while they talked, or making sweet-eyes at the chairmen of committees. They appeared, to tell the honest truth, with late reference-books under their arms, and in their heads the faculty for asking the most annoying sort of questions. More than one honest Solon was seen to stammer and turn red under their interrogations, so often stiffened by a date and a little figure or so.

And these troublesome "thinking women" had not retired when the legislature did. Editors nowadays were often surprised in their sanctums by committees of three from some pestiferous unwomanly club or other, and they had not come, alackaday, to have their handkerchiefs picked up with courtly speeches, graced with an apt quotation from "Maud." The Civic Improvement League, with a woman president, was taking a continuous interest in matters of playgrounds and parks, clean streets and city planning. The Society for Social Progress, almost exclusively feminine, was continuously astir about pure milk and factory laws, birth-rates and infant mortality, sociology and eugenics. And now here was the conservative Woman's Club, which had been purely literary and social for a quarter of a century, holding a largely attended symposium on How Shall We Help the Poor?

This latter meeting, attended by Carlisle Heth and her cousin Henrietta the day after Canning left, was no doubt a trivial and obscure occurrence. Not an earthly thing could be said for it, except that it was a bubble on the surface of an unrest which would one day change the face of human society....

The two cousins, having come a little tardy, were content with seats in the next to the last row. The Woman's Club inhabited an old family mansion on Washington Street,—bought in the legendary age when land was not computed by the square foot,—and its assembly-rooms were the one-time parlors, with the dining-room thrown in by an architectural dexterity. Perhaps two hundred women could be seated here, and all seemed to be present to-day. Cally regarded serried rows of feminine backs, some of which she recognized. The little platform at the farther end of the rooms remained empty, and the place was abuzz with murmured talk. Not a back was silent, not even Henrietta's. Hen was saying enthusiastically that nothing like this could have been seen ten years ago....

Cally caught widening glimpses of the Cooney meanings. She had been like a rider thrown from a gay fixed steed in a merry-go-round, who, having picked himself up and mended his wounds, looks about, and gets his first view of the carousel as part of a larger moving scene. Cally, for the first time in her life, had been glancing over the fair-grounds. Not even the knowledge of Hugo's love could now wholly turn her gaze backward.

Pending the beginning of the oratory, clubbers and guests talked to the contentment of their hearts. Cally said suddenly:

"Hen, why is it that men are so opposed to this sort of thing?"

"It's human," said Hen, "if you have the upper hand, not to want to give it up."

"You mean that men have the upper hand now?"

"Haven't they?"

A tiny little woman in the row ahead of them turned round and smiled faintly at Henrietta. She had a face like a small doll's, a button of a nose and the palest little china-blue eyes imaginable. Nevertheless, this woman was Mrs. Slicer, president of the Federation of Women's Clubs, and those weak eyes had once stared a Governor of a State out of countenance.

"Hen, they have," said she, in a fairy voice; and so turned back to her own affairs, dropping from these pages.

Henrietta presently said: "But why should they oppose it, really, Cally? If you were a man, would you insist on the privilege of marrying a helpless dependent, your mental and moral inferior? Seems to me I'd rather have an intelligent comrade, my superior for choice—"

But Hen discovered that her voice all at once sounded very loud. There was a sudden lull in the conversational hum, and then a burst of hand-clapping. The lady president of the Woman's Club had entered at the head of the rooms, followed by the orators. They ascended the platform; and when Cally saw but the Mayor of the city and Mr. Pond of the Settlement, she said at once to Henrietta:

"Why, where's your friend V.V.?"

"Somewhere up at the front,—I hope!... He wasn't one of the regular speakers, you know...."

Hen added in a faint whisper: "I doubt if he knows he's going to be called on—"

Being duly presented to the expectant women, his Honor the Mayor spoke first. He was a middle-aged, mustachioed Mayor, who had achieved a considerable success by being all things to a few men, but those the right ones. His reputation as an orator was well deserved, but his ability to make one speech serve many occasions had been commented upon by carpers here and there. See the files of the "Post," passim. To-day his thesis was organized charity, lauded by him, between paragraphs of the set piece, as philanthropy's great rebuke to Socialism. And thrice his Honor spoke of the glorious capital of this grand old commonwealth; twice his arm swept from the stormy Atlantic to the sun-kissed Pacific; five times did he exalt, with the tremolo stop, the fair women of the Southland....

"The dinner-bell of the house!" said Hen, sotto voce, as the orator sat down, smiling tiredly amid familiar applause. "Don't be discouraged yet, Cally."

Director Pond, having been most flatteringly introduced, received an ovation, half for the man and his work, half from the wish of a kindly people to bid the stranger welcome. He spoke half as long as the Mayor, and said four times as much: so much space did he save by saying nothing whatever about the fair women of the Southland, and by absolutely avoiding all metaphors, tropes, synecdoches, or anacolutha. Mr. Pond assaulted the Mayor's apotheosis of charity, particularly as applied to his own institution. He described the Settlement, not as a dispensary for old clothes, but as a cultivated personality, an enlightened elder brother gone to live with the poor. It aspired to enrich life through living, said he, to bring light to the disinherited and the gift of a wider horizon....

Mr. Pond followed his thought with more imagination than one might have thought him to possess, and with a glow on his dark face such as had not been observed there the other day. Cally, from the next to the last row, listened attentively enough; she recalled that she would see Mr. Pond this evening, perhaps sit next to him, at mamma's Settlement dinner. However, she reserved her chief interest for Hen's friend V.V., who was so merciless in his attitude toward those who were not poor. Mr. Pond spoke straightforwardly, not to say bluntly. But she pictured Vivian as shaking the rafters with his shameless homicides and God-pity-yous....

"Once the bread and meat question's settled, money is of secondary importance," said the Director's deep voice. "Let's get that well into our heads. What the poor ask is that they shall not be born under disadvantages which the labor of their lifetimes can never remove...."

Only these two speakers had been announced. When Pond sat down the formal exercises were over. But as his applause died away, the president of the club rose again, sure enough,—while Henrietta excitedly nudged Carlisle,—and announced an added speaker, a guest of the club to-day, whom she described as the young father of the Settlement. The president—a tall, placid-faced woman, with a finely cut chin and a magnificent crown of silver hair—had something to say about the spirit of pure idealism; and was sure that the members would be glad to hear remarks on the subject of the day from young Dr. Vivian, the missionary doctor of the Dabney House....

The few kind words elicited somewhat perfunctory plaudits, despite Hen Cooney's single-handed attempt to stampede them into a triumph. The Clubbers, truth to tell, were by now disposed to leave oratory and the uplift for small-talk and tea.

"There he is!" said Hen, clapping splendidly.

V. Vivian stood on the platform, beside a tall oak-stand and a water-pitcher, gazing out over phalanxes of women. His youthfulness was a matter of general notice. By contrast with the Mayor's seamy rotundity and Pond's powerful darkness, he looked, indeed, singularly boyish and fair. He was undoubtedly pale, and his face wore an odd look, a little confused and slightly pained. This, combined with his continuing silence, gave rise to a general suspicion that the young man had fallen a victim to stage-fright. However, the odd struggle going on in him at his unexpected opportunity was not against fear....

Carlisle regarded Vivian intently, over and through scores of women's hats. She was inwardly braced for epithets. Somewhere in the air she heard the word "anarchist"; but a woman sitting near her said, quite audibly,—"Looks more like a poet," ... meaning, let us hope, like a poet as we like to think that poets look; and not as they so often actually look, by their pictures in the magazines....

"I suppose the beginning of helping the poor," suddenly spoke up the young man on the stand, in a voice so natural and simple as to come as a small shock, "is to stop thinking of them as the poor. There are useful people in the world, and useless people; good people and bad people. But when we speak of poor people and rich people, we only make divisions where our Maker never saw any, and raise barriers on the common which must some day all come down."

The speaker pushed back his blond hair with a gesture which Cally Heth had seen before. However, all else about him, from the first sight, had seemed to come to her in the nature of a surprise....

"The things in which we are all alike," said the tall youth, with none of the Mayor's oratorial thunder, "are so much bigger than the things in which we are different. What's rich and poor, to a common beginning and a common end, common sufferings, common dreams? We look at these big freeholds, and money in bank is a little thing. On Washington Street, and down behind the Dabney House—don't we each alike seek the same thing? We want life, and more life. We want to be happy, and we want to be free. Well—we know it's hard to win these prizes when we're poor, but is it so easy when we're rich? To live shut off on a little island, calling the rest common and unclean—is that being happy and free, is it having life abundantly? I look around, and don't find it so. And that's sad, isn't it?—double frustration, the poor disinherited by their poverty, the rich in their riches.... Don't you think we shall find a common meeting-place some day, where these two will cancel out?... when reality will touch hands with the poet's ideal—

"And the stranger hath seen in the stranger his brother at last, And his sister in eyes that were strange..."

The slum doctor paused. The confused appearance was gone from his face; he looked now introspective, quite without consciousness of himself; rather like a man listening with somewhat dreamy approbation to the words of another. And Cally, having felt her antagonism mysteriously slipping away from the moment her eyes rested upon his face, now knew, quite suddenly and definitely, that she wasn't going to speak to him about the articles.

The knowledge, the whole matter, was curiously disturbing to her. Where was the hostile hardness of the religious fellow, justifying distrust and dislike? Why should her father's attacker make her think now, of all times, of that night in Hen's parlor, the morning on Mr. Beirne's doorstep, that rainy May-day in his Dabney House when he had overwhelmed her with the knowledge of his superiority?...

"And—and—I think women should be especially interested in all that makes for a new common freedom," observed the youthful speaker, "for they have suffered somewhat in that way—haven't they?... [Applause, led by Miss Cooney.] You know the processes of history—how men, first of all by superior muscle, have made it a man's world.... Till to-day, large groups of women find themselves cribbed and cabined to a single pursuit, marriage: surely the noblest of all callings, but—perhaps you will agree with me—the meanest of all professions. I, for one, am glad to see women revolting from this condition, asking something truer, something commoner, than chivalry. For that, I say, steps the march to the great goal, a boundless commonwealth, a universal republic of the human spirit. It seems to me we need to socialize, not industry, but the heart of Man to his brother. Rich and poor, men and women—God, I am sure of it, meant us all to be citizens of the world...."

A certain self-consciousness seemed here to descend upon the tall orator. He ceased abruptly, and disappeared from the platform, having neglected to make his bow to the chairman.

Then the moment's dead silence was suddenly exploded with a burst of clapping, quite as hearty as Mr. Pond had received, and really something like the "storm" we read about. And in the din, Henrietta Cooney was heard crying, with a passion of pride:

"Well, it's about time!... It's the first thing V.V.'s ever got—the first tribute.... A boy like that—"

Hen, curiously, was winking a little as the two girls rose. And she added in a moved voice, as if seeking to explain herself:

"Well, think of the hard life he has down there, Cally,—no pleasure, no fun, no companionship.... And this is the first notice of any kind ..."

The meeting was over. The crowded parlors were in a hubbub. Colored servants entered, taking away the camp-chairs. A general drift toward the platform was in evidence. And Cally, standing with the others and ready to go, seemed to see no clear course at all among the disturbing cross-currents which she suddenly felt within her, impelling her now this way, now that. If she could not think of V. Vivian as hard now, exactly, a new "attitude" was obviously needed, consistent with her duty to papa. It must be that the strange young man was obsessed by beautiful but impossible ideas about the equality of the poor and so on. Carried away by excessive sympathies, he took wild extreme views....