The young man presently reappeared, making his way behind the long tier of upper boxes.

"Well, my boy, were you forgetting all about your mother and her elderly friends? I'd never figured on your meeting the younger daughter first. My son William, Miss Marshall. William, here's an awfully good girl; her father thinks as much of her as I do of you."

The young man bowed, but blushed and halted before this singular presentation.

"Well, I don't know," said Jane, filling up the breach in the first fashion that presented itself. "If pa had the same gift of language that you have, I should feel surer." She picked out her puffs, and then leaned back negligently with her hands crossed. She was too thoroughly grounded by this time to be discomposed by any youth seven or eight years her junior.

The youth shifted his feet.

"I saw you with my sister a minute ago," continued Jane. She knew, without looking round to see, that Mrs. Bates was smiling in the anxious, would-be-helpful way of parents who have put their offspring at a disadvantage.

"Yes—oh yes," the young man responded, with precipitation. "We had a very nice polka, indeed."

"Well," said Jane to herself, "I can talk about polkas and lots of other things." And she did. She held and entertained the young man for a full ten minutes. She found, after all, that he was in no degree constrained or backward, and she made him do himself justice.

"Well, my dear," said Mrs. Bates, as he withdrew, "you made my Billy quite brilliant. I don't know when I have heard so much real conversation!"

"That's all right," responded Jane; "I was young myself once. I haven't forgotten that."

"Only you mustn't fascinate him," protested the elder woman, with a burlesque of maternal anxiety. "I want somebody else to do that." She gave Jane a smile full of meaning.

"Aha!" thought Jane, and wondered if she were to see a certain little romance resumed after the lapse of so many lumbering years.

"But she didn't seem to mind Paston any. Well, why should she?" concluded Jane.

Presently Truesdale came along and asked his sister to waltz. "All right," she said; "just for a minute; but not out in the middle—yet." She wished to test herself first.

"You're awfully good to me, Dicky," she whispered, as he led her back.

"Cut it," said Truesdale; "I'm proud of you."

Jane got back to her lofty perch. "I'll do it once more—if anybody asks me; yes, I will."

In another ten minutes she was on the floor again. "Quite happy, I'm sure," she had said to Bingham.

"Only I'm no great dancer," this big and bearded bachelor had warned her.

"Neither am I," declared Jane. "I can just totter around and that's about all." She arose quickly, shook out her plumage, took his arm, and in less than a minute was waltzing again. "Lucky it is a waltz," she thought; "I don't want to be trying too many novelties."

Mrs. Bates moved to let them pass out. "Really," she said, "I don't want to sit here all alone. Oh, Mr. Brower, I rely upon you. Let me have your arm. I suppose"—with a resigned submission to the inevitable—"that I am expected to walk around once, at least."

Brower had returned to the box, after diverting himself for some time rather shyly in the foyer. He had given Jane a promenade earlier in the evening, and had hoped to pass the rest of the time as inconspicuously as might be. Jane had been much pleased by his efforts to do the right thing—to be correctly dressed, for example. She knew from her own experience how one thing led to another, and she was appreciative of the pains he had taken on her account. It was easy for her to fancy how dress-suits must lead to dress-shirts, and shirts to studs and collars and ties and shoes and boutonnieres—but Brower wore no boutonniere; there he drew the line. "Never mind," said Jane; "that isn't necessary, anyway. He has done quite enough as it is, and he's a good fellow to have done it." She knew how he regarded all this: as a sacrifice to Mammon, if not indeed to Moloch. "On my account, too," thought Jane—"every bit of it. Isn't it splendid of him!"

Brower was vastly disconcerted on receiving this command from Mrs. Bates—it was nothing less than a command, of course, and he must obey it. He had found it something of an ordeal to lead even Jane round the floor once; how much greater a one, then, to perform the like service for Mrs. Granger Bates, whose escort could not but expect to draw scrutiny and to provoke inquiry. He was a modest man with no pronounced social ambitions; he would immensely have preferred to pass the same length of time staring into a locomotive head-light.

Mrs. Bates presently effected a clearance, and with Brower as a convoy steered straight for the open sea. She carried a bunch of plumes aloft, showed a flashing brilliant on both the port and the starboard side, and left a long trail of rustling silk and lace behind her. And as she pursued her course, other craft, great and small, dipped their colors right and left.

"I want you to see both ends of the scale," she presently said to Brower. "You are trying to bring them closer together, they tell me."

"That is a part of our object," replied Brower.

"Well, you have one end in your Nineteenth Ward, and the other here. I want you to get the good side of this."

"I should be glad to; there is one, I'm sure."

"To begin with, don't encourage your associates to talk about the 'butterflies of fashion,' and that sort of thing. There are no butterflies in this town, except young girls under twenty, and you surely won't quarrel with them. Yes, we are all workers; what could Idleness herself do with her time in such a place as this? You've got to work in self-defence. Do you see that woman up aloft there?"

"Well?"

"She's the president and responsible manager of an orphan asylum. That one over across on the other side is an officer of the Civil Federation. Do you believe in that?"

"Devoutly."

"The woman just ahead of us—the purple velvet one—is a member of the Board of Education; she helps to place teachers and to audit coal bills. Why, even I myself have got a good many more things to look after than you could easily shake a stick at!"

"And the one you this instant bowed to?"

"You mean the one who bowed to me." For Mrs. Rhodes had leaned completely out of her box, and had then looked both right and left to observe whether her neighbors had done full justice to the episode. "Oh, she's a good little woman who is—climbing.

"The fact is," Mrs. Bates proceeded, "that there are not a dozen real grown-up butterflies in town. We're coming to one now." They were skirting one range of the lower boxes. "It's Mrs. Ingles; you must meet her."

"Some other time, please," implored Brower, as Mrs. Bates nodded to a sumptuous young creature not ten feet away.

"Very well." Mrs. Bates shrugged her shoulders "Yes," she proceeded, presently, "Cecilia Ingles and her immediate set are about the only real butterflies we have. However, I'm going to take her in hand pretty soon and make a good, earnest woman of her."

"There is work for them all," said Brower.

"But don't let's be too serious just now," rejoined Mrs. Bates in friendly caution.

"Who was that young man you had with you last night?" somebody demanded of her next day.

"Mr. Brower."

"Who is Mr. Brower, may I ask?"

"A friend of Jane Marshall's." This (save that he had a trusty face) was all that she knew of Theodore Brower; but she thought it enough.

"And who is Jane Marshall?"

Mrs. Bates gave her questioner one look. "Really, you surprise me," she observed, and said no word more. Within a week Jane was known throughout the inquirer's whole set.

Truesdale presently passed Mrs. Bates with a girl on his arm. "I wonder if that's another one of the tea-pourers?" she asked herself.

It was. Truesdale was escorting Gladys—Gladys McKenna, as her complete name had finally come to him. He had laughed on first hearing it. "There's a chaud-froid for you, sure enough!"

Gladys wore a flame-colored gown, and her eyes, curiously fringed with black above and beneath, had an outre and dishevelled appearance that lingered in the memory as wax-works do. She kept a strong clutch on his arm, and galloped alongside him with a persistent camaraderie which conveyed no hint of cessation.

"Why insist so strongly on a quadrille d'honneur?" he was asking her. "Wasn't a march good enough?"

"We always look for a quadrille at one of the best functions—at home."

"But why draw lines? You don't object if people meet for pleasure on terms free and equal?"

"Oh, of course if you have no celebrities here—no great figures—"

"Not one—not till you came. We are all plain people here. If any of us forget our plainness there are plenty who are glad enough to remind us of it."

"Are you plain, too?"

"The plainest of the lot."

"You don't seem so; you look awfully ornamental, with that ribbon and all." The "all" meant the wave in his hair, the lustre of his eyes, the upward flaunt of his mustache which hid in no degree the white, firm evenness of his teeth, the freshness of a second gardenia—even the sheen of his shapely shoes.

"The ribbon—you like it? Sorry I'm wearing only one. How would you have liked a second running the opposite way? Or a third pinned on behind?"

"Oh, you!—How about all these other young men; are they anybody?"

"What other young men?"

"The ones with these criss-cross red ribbons."

"Oh! Well, some few of them have what you might call position, and some are working for it, and some are not thinking anything about it; and some, after having served their purpose, will be dropped soon enough, I promise you."

"And you yourself—are you in, or out, or not thinking about it, or-"

"I?" returned Truesdale, carelessly. "I'm just a passer-by; I'm on my way to Japan."

"Oh no; not Japan!" said the girl, quickly.

"Japan, I assure you," he smiled.

She caught herself. "To escape my uncle, then?"

"Why that, in Heaven's name?"

"You have offended him."

"Dear me! How?"

"By what you said at the house the other night. About the costumes, you know."

"Nonsense. How could that have reached him?"

"Those things do get around. Do you know what he's going to do? He's going to cut your comb. My aunt—she cried like anything."

To Truesdale the girl's tone seemed preposterously confidential. "You were in the wrong," she seemed to imply; "but I am on your side for all that."

"Ouf!" said Truesdale; "this comes of trenching on Biblical ground. I'll never quote scripture again."

Truesdale had gone to the Belden house in pursuance of the invitation extended at his mother's own tea-table. Eliza Marshall had made a faint effort to dissuade him; despite Mrs. Belden's presence at her own function, his going seemed, in one way or another, too much like an excursion into the enemy's country. But the occasion was a fancy-dress ball, and Truesdale declared himself much too curious to remain away. "I must go," he said, and at once took steps to equip himself for this voyage of discovery.

He wore the dress of a Spanish grandee of the early seventeenth century—he recalled the Spaniards as famous explorers. He was in black throughout, save for the white lace of his wide collar and cuffs, and for the dark purple lining of his mantle. If the Beldens, for their part, had costumed themselves half so discreetly, he would never have fallen from their good graces. But Statira Belden (keeping her own given name in view) had based her costume upon one of the old French tapestries—the Family of Darius at the Feet of Alexander; you may see the original, a Veronese, in the National Gallery. She had counterfeited the distresssed queen by flowing robes and pearls strung through her yellow hair. She had revivified and heightened the faded ideal of the oldtime artist, and incidentally she had extinguished every other woman in the room.

But the difficulty would still have been avoided had not Belden himself so far lapsed from discretion as to put himself forward in the guise of Shylock. It mended matters little that he had abandoned the costume within half an hour after donning it. Thus it was that Truesdale saw him for the first time in four or five years; the young man had completely disdained, thus far, to visit the store. With eyes freshened by long absence, and wits sharpened by contact with the world, he saw his father's partner in a dress which seemed to throw into greater prominence every lineament of his face and every trait of his character. The young man instantly doubted, mistrusted him. His Hebraic garments suggested another character held in still lower esteem. Truesdale, at a certain stage of the entertainment, observed his host and hostess in momentary conjunction on the threshold of the drawing-room; it was then that he uttered his little jest, whimsically careless of accuracy and loftily indifferent to outlying ears.

"Ananias and Statira," he said, and his words travelled through the house like escaping gas.

"They're awfully offended," said Gladys, continuing her confidential tone. "You can't come there any more—I don't believe. I'm so glad to have seen you here—who knows where I shall ever see you again? Why wouldn't you talk to me any, that first time? Why were you so long in asking me to dance to-night?"

She seemed to be pushing the claim of proprietorship first advanced at the Belden ball.

"Well, I hope I've talked enough since."

"But where shall we talk together next time? I don't believe you can come to the house," she repeated.

She seemed to be drawing attention romantically to obstacles in the way—in their way—and to be calling on him to remove them.

"Perhaps they won't let me see you again. Perhaps they're offended by my having danced with you here." She was adding to the barricade, but he was bold and resourceful enough to level it.

"Ouf!" thought Truesdale. "Girls—they're alike, every one of 'em, after all!"



XII

It was two o'clock in the morning when Jane said good-bye to Theodore Brower in the vestibule and burst into the house. There was a light burning in the library, and thitherward Jane swept in high feather. Her father was sitting there; as she entered he took up a newspaper that he had completely read out three hours before.

"Why, poppy!" she cried; "isn't this pretty late for you? But I know what you've been sitting up for so long: to have me tell you all about the party. Now, haven't you?"

Her father looked up at her in some wonder. Jane was distinctly in a state of exhilaration. She seemed conscious of having played well her part—no mean part, either—in a large performance; one might have fancied indeed that the splendor and success of the occasion was in some degree due to her own participation. She was decidedly gay, bright, sparkling; her father felt that here at last was his daughter almost pretty.

"Maybe I was," he answered. He threw down the newspaper so as to make it cover several loose sheets full of figures. "Did you enjoy yourself?"

"I should say I did!" She seated herself on the arm of his chair; one of her big puffed sleeves almost covered his face. "Don't think I was a wallflower, either; I wasn't. I went out on the floor three times. Mr. Brower walked me around once, and Mr. Bingham waltzed with me once. And so did Truedy. Oh, poppy, he was so good to me! And he was the only young man there with violet eyes—I didn't see another one."

Her father gave vent to a low, inarticulate monosyllable; it seemed to convey little appreciation of his son's eyes.

Jane had met Truesdale for a moment just before she came away. "How's the handkerchief?" she had asked. "All right," he responded, cheerfully. He took it folded and crumpled from his coat-pocket and showed it to her. He had carried it in his trousers pocket until a moment before; but Jane never knew.

"And I went to supper with Mrs. Bates and Theo—Mr. Brower," she continued. "And the oldest Bates boy took Rosy. We all went up in the elevator together and had a table quite to ourselves. I saw Mr. Bates there too. And lots of other elderly gentlemen. I wish you had been there. Several of them made themselves prominent enough—no younger than you, no richer, no more deserving of notice. Poppy, you must get out that coat some time and brush it up, and go somewhere with me."

Marshall thrust a finger under the edge of the newspaper. "I don't know, Jennie. There are lots of other things to think about."

Rosy came home at four. Mrs. Rhodes dropped her on her own way southward. Bertie Patterson nodded sleepily in one corner of the carriage. She was unused to late hours, and had been ready to go long before. But Rosy made it plain to all involved that she regarded herself as the first to be considered; she did not design leaving a minute sooner or a minute later than her own good pleasure should will. Her card was filled to the last line, and she danced it out—with William Bates, with Arthur Paston, and with a score of other young men for whose names the present pages have no need.

In the course of a week Arthur Paston called. Truesdale, who happened to be at home, found himself regarding Paston's presence with something the reverse of complacency, and his bearing with something that distinctly approached disapproval. He recalled to mind many of the diversions in which they had participated together, and he felt offended that Paston should bring here the same jaunty, familiar, off-hand ways that he had displayed in other scenes but slightly approved by Propriety. He would have preferred a line of conduct suggestive, in some small degree at least, of the penitent, the chastened, the abashed; a laugh less ready; a smile less confident; a bearing less self-assured, less divested of any sense of his need of tolerance, charity, forbearance. "I don't precisely like his acting in that free fashion here with Rosy," thought Truesdale; "there are times and times, and there are places and places."

His thought presently turned towards himself. He had no less need, truly, of charity and forbearance than Paston, yet he was not in the habit, to any great degree, of adjusting his own manner to varying conditions. He treated other fellows' sisters just as Paston was treating his. The idealizing gaze of little Bertie Patterson was upon him; it was not precisely with reverence, certainly, that he was in the habit of treating her, for example. And the other girl with the red gown and the wax-work eyes—her he had treated almost with open derision. But that was different.

Paston's cheery laugh rang out from the parlor. Truesdale stood in the library before the bookcase, reading the tarnished titles of the few spare volumes, as he shifted his weight from one foot to another, uncertain whether to advance or to retire. Paston knew him for what he was; but Bertie Patterson, he felt sure, would never acknowledge that he could be guilty of any wrong. "Hideous thing to be poetized," thought Truesdale; "but they all do it in one way or another." He thought of the faithful little hearts that beat in the German garrison towns. "'Byron's Poems'—I could easily be better than I am—'Lossing's History of the American Revolution,' volume one, volume two—and I must try to be. 'The Lamplighter'; 'The Wide, Wide World';—oh, curse that fellow's funny stories!" as Rosy's ready laugh came from the next room. Truesdale blushed as he thought of some of the stories that Paston could tell, when so minded; and he stamped his foot that such a—such a—(he found no word)—should be telling his sister any story at all. "But he's as good as I am," Truesdale was forced to avow, as he passed through the hallway and ascended to his room. "And better than lots of others. What can I say or do?"

Rosy herself, however, would have asked for no change in Paston's manner. She found him charming, fascinating; compared with him, William Bates was far from entertaining. If Paston had attempted the chastened, the deprecatory, she would have feared that he was not enjoying himself. She would have taken but little satisfaction in deference pushed to humility. She was beginning to idealize him, as Bertie Patterson had begun to idealize her brother; but Rosy's idealization was not half so generous.

While walking on his arm a week ago, she had not felt her self in a public hall within a few hundred yards of her own home; no, she was at Buckingham Palace or at St. James's—she was not sure which. There were moments, indeed, when it was not a palace at all: it was the terrace of some Tudor house, with stone balls on all the posts, or it was the trim path of some village church-yard, bordered by yew-trees and by tombstones with cherubs' heads and hour-glasses. She was the bride of a month, and this was her first service in England. The people around them figured no longer as the swell crush of London, but as a respectful, lock-tugging, courtesy-dropping tenantry who fell off on either side as she passed out to her carriage on her husband's arm. There were side-long glimpses, too, of forgeries and murders and lost wills and stolen jewels and people drowned in wells; in one book there had been a maniac girl shut up in a room—but she should try to avoid all these superfluities; a duchess in possession of her senses would be decidedly preferable. A week later and she was deeper in Burke and Debrett than ever.

"Well, here it is finally—Saltonstall, Scamperdown, Scodd-Paston." Rosy bent her head and studied the large gilt volume with redoubled vigor. "It's pretty near the end, after all."

Rosy sat at a desk in a big new granite building to one side of a small park. Above the window-ledge appeared the tops of trees, the towers and gables of a pair of churches, the dark and dignified facade of a club-house, and the various elements that make up one of the half-dozen local views which bear in any great degree the stamp of civilization. Around her people fluttered leaves, or put books back on their shelves, or carried on the cataloguing of a large and but half-arranged library. But Rosy gave heed to none of this. "Scodd-Paston," she said; "here's a whole paragraph." And she buried herself in it at once.

She had begun with the Queen and the royal family and the order of precedence. Then she had gone through the dukes, very carefully; then through the marquesses, not so carefully; then through the earls, somewhat cursorily: "Here's one with eight daughters, the Honourable Gertrude-Adeline, and seven more." Then she had bolted through the viscounts and barons: "This one's awfully new—only from 1810." Then she slid lightly over the baronets. Then she passed on to the knights. "I don't suppose it's here." But it was.

"'General Sir John-George-Alexander Scodd-Paston,'—that's a pretty good name," thought the girl—"'born in 1835; entered Life Guards in 1855; married in 1857 to Mary-Victoria, dau. of James, Lord Lyndhurst'—I wonder if she was of higher rank than he. Oh, here we come to his own. 'Attained rank of colonel, 1869; general, 1877; served in Egyptian campaign of 1882; appointed Groom-in-Waiting to Her Majesty in 1883'—ever so many capital letters. 'C.B., 1882; K.C.B., 1885'—a lot more. Whatever do they mean? Does he wear stars and things? And here's where he lives: 'Boxton Park, Witham, Essex.' And somewhere else, too: '10, King's-gate Gardens, S. Kensington'—that's in London, I suppose. And here are his clubs: 'Whitehall and United Service.' Only two; why, lots of the others have five or six. But papa hasn't got one, even. Besides, think of our ever being in a book!"

She paused a moment in perplexity. "But where are his children—all the sons and daughters, and when they were born, and who they married, and everything? It tells in the dukes and earls. Never mind, though; I don't need a book for that. Boxton Park, Witham, Essex," she mused. The posts came back again with the stone balls on top of them; and a few oriel-windows; and a peacock or two strutting on a terrace. The prospect widened; ditches and hedge-rows under a low, gray sky, packs of yelping hounds, hunters following in red coats....

Rosamund went home in a thoughtful mood. It was within a fortnight of this that she was taking hurdles at her riding-school.

This involved still another horse, and a habit, and a saddle. Rosamund was teaching her father how to spend money; no other member of the family, save Truesdale, had ever attempted as much.

"Are we going on forever living in this same old place?" Rosy asked her mother one day. She had fallen into the way of making comparisons between Boxton Park and No. two hundred and whatever-it-may-have-been Michigan Avenue—just as she had made comparisons with the many fine houses where she had lately been entertained.

"I don't expect to live anywhere forever," replied her mother, tartly.

"It's so old and dismal," Rosy went on. "I declare, I hate almost to ask anybody here. And it's getting so noisy and dirty—and all those awful people over there on those streets behind us."

Eliza Marshall's thought flew swiftly towards the second-hand dealer of those purlieus who had carried away so much good, solid furniture, and then had declined to pay for it. But this did not prevent her from looking on her child now as if a viper, warmed at her hearth, had roused to life and stung her.

"Why can't we change?" Rosy proceeded; "why can't we move? Why can't we build somewhere—where we can have neighbors, and a house to invite them to?"

"What do you call the Blackburns and the Freemans?" asked her mother, severely. "Where can you find nicer folks? Why do we want to chase after a lot of new people that we don't know anything about?"

"The Blackburns and the Freemans are no company for me," Rosy declared. "All the people I know are up on the North side or down on Prairie Avenue."

"The North side!" repeated her mother, out of all patience. "I see myself moving to the North side at my time of life, after living on this side for more than forty years. I should feel as much at home in Milwaukee. And don't talk to me about Prairie, either; as long as I live, I live on Michigan, and nowhere else. I don't want to hear any more about it—no, not a word."

While Rosy assailed her mother about the house, Jane attacked her father about himself. Her social triumphs (so she regarded them) had made her more ambitious and more aggressive than ever. She was less solicitous about the family in general, which seemed to be moving on satisfactorily enough, than she was about the head of it himself, who appeared distinctly to be lagging behind.

Marshall now listened to his daughter's urgings with a more serious consideration; she was only saying to him what older and more experienced people had said already—Susan Bates, for example, and Tom Bingham. Susan Bates, in fact, had renewed the attack, and she prosecuted it whenever occasion offered. She had not scrupled, indeed, to pursue the theme within the precincts of her own house.

Mrs. Bates had not yet achieved the peculiar aboriginal function which she had outlined to Jane in the course of their first talk—the reel, the old settlers, and the young squaws to pour firewater were still in the future; but she had entertained the Marshalls at dinner, en famille, and she had pushed the subject with still greater insistency in her own house than at David Marshall's office.

For the occasion of the Marshall dinner Mrs. Bates put her household on a peace footing. She banished, as far as possible, all traces of social war-paint. She determined to dispense with as many of the men-servants as might be, and to have those who were left over wear their plainest liveries; she even thought of arranging to have the Marshalls' ring answered by a maid instead of a footman. So when David Marshall came, in the dress-coat that had not seen the light for over a year, and Eliza Marshall, in the plum-colored silk whose only recent airing had been at Rosy's coming-out, they had little to contend against save the house itself and its furnishings.

Jane accompanied them. "Tom Bingham is going to take you out," Mrs. Bates announced. "He is very much interested in you. He thinks you are quite a clever girl."

"All right," replied Jane. "I'm interested in him, too. I think him a person of great discernment."

"I had some notion of asking Rosy at first; Billy was so taken with her. But this is really an old folks' party, after all. Besides, Billy had a theatre engagement."

"Sorry," said Jane; "I'm sure pa and ma would have liked to meet him." Whatever little plan Mrs. Bates may have been revolving in her mind, Jane was too loyal to throw cold water on it. "So should I myself."

Susan Bates gave the Marshalls a short, plain dinner; she had no desire to glorify herself or to embarrass her guests. But Eliza Marshall learned more of contemporanics in that one evening than she had picked up in the previous decade. She learned how people received, how they set their tables and served them, how they built their houses and furnished them. She learned not only the possibilities but the actualities of splendor and luxury in the town where she had led a retired and humdrum existence for nearly a lifetime. She now thrust her head forth from her dim old cavern, and fed her eyes on the flowers and fields and skies and goodly streams of the great world outside.

While Jane supported her mother against the lumbering charges of Granger Bates's conversational cavalry, his wife engrossed Marshall's attention for her dormitory. Her plans had taken shape in her own mind, and were now beginning to take shape on paper.

"It's more than a mere dormitory, of course." She cleared a space between them, and took up a dessert-spoon. "Here's the vestibule and entrance-hall," she began, drawing with the spoon on the table-cloth; "and here's where the stairs run up. Off to this side—John, do take some of these glasses away—off to this side"—with a wider sweep of the spoon—"is a sort of parlor and reception-room—quite a good size, you see. Right next to it is the dining-room—so that they can be thrown together, when the girls receive."

"Good," said Bingham; "nothing more civilizing than receptions."

"On this side of the dining-room," pursued Mrs. Bates, "is going to be a sort of alcove—Jane, dear, just push me over that salt and pepper. There!" She planted the two bottles in her alcove; "that's the tank for tea, and this is the tank for coffee. Practical, don't you think?"—to Bingham.

"First-rate. And I suppose you have a screen that you can put in front."

"Precisely." She laid a tiny spoon across her alcove. "Hardwood floors down-stairs, throughout. Up-stairs, bedrooms for fifty girls, and each one shall have a closet, if possible. We begin the foundations in five or six weeks—as soon as the frost is out."

Susan Bates cleared a larger space, and appropriated more knives and forks and spoons, and went on in a lower tone for Marshall's ear alone. Jane strained to catch her words. She, saw her father blush once, slightly, and then smile, as if partly flustered—as Jane herself phrased it.

"What a dear good old sentimental soul she is!" thought the girl. "I'll bet a cent she is asking pa to put up a dormitory for boys on the other side of the campus!"

Mrs. Bates presently carried Jane and her mother into the library, leaving the men behind to contemplate a litter of disordered wineglasses and dishevelled napkins, and to smoke themselves out, in the course of half an hour, to the women.

Mrs. Bates's talk, here as heretofore, was frankly personal. On a previous occasion she had talked to Rosy's mother about Rosy; now she exacted that Rosy's mother should talk to her about her own boy Billy.

"The best boy in the world; his father says he's making a splendid business man." She took a cabinet photograph from over the fireplace. "There; this is the latest, but it doesn't do him any kind of justice."

"Well, he's got a real good face," said Eliza Marshall.

"And a real good-looking face, too," rejoined his mother, quickly. "Jane, dear, run up to my room and get the one before this—that's something like; second drawer on the left. And stop eying those books; you can't get at them with anything less than a cold-chisel!

"But why should you depend on pictures?" Mrs. Bates observed, presently. "See the boy yourself. Go down-stairs next time he calls. Oh, he will call again, I assure you," concluded Susan Bates, archly.

"Tell him to inquire for ma, and send in a card for her, too," whispered Jane. "Rosy's getting awfully sticky."

"'Sticky'?"

"Yes; fussy, stiff, critical—that's what it means, as near as I can make out. It's a word Dick brought home from London."

"H'm," said Susan Bates, "I'll remember it."

The men, meanwhile, sat round the dining-room table. Marshall smoked with the others and tried to forget his boutonniere—the first he had ever worn.

"I shall make them very small and unobtrusive," Susan Bates had said; "only a dozen violets." Marshall noticed that Bates had put his flowers into his right-hand button-hole, and Bingham his into his left. Jane saw her father hesitate; finally he imitated Bates. "Well, that's cutting it pretty fine," thought the girl; "I wonder if there is a right or wrong way. But think of pa with any button-hole bouquet at all! We shall budge him yet!" She smiled; she knew the forces were all arrayed against him to-night.

"What this town needs more than anything else," Bingham was saying, "is a big assembly hall—one with a capacity of ten thousand, say. Something not too fine—we've got that already; and something not too rough—we've had that in plenty. A hall suitable for conventions, for promenade concerts, for mass-meetings, for horse shows—in short, something after the fashion of that magnificent thing in New York."

"The Madison Square Garden?" asked Bates. "You're perfectly right."

"Now that Garden," pursued Bingham, "is not exactly a paying investment—wasn't meant to be. The last time I was down East—"

"Yes—"

—"some fellows there quoted it to me as an evidence of public spirit—the spirit that we here suppose not to exist in New York at all. The men who put it up could easily have got more on their money; but there it stands, one of the most useful and beneficent features of the whole city."

"We ought to have one here," declared Bates.

"And I should like to build it," declared Bingham. "The man who would give such a thing to Chicago, or who would even take the headship of it and make a suitable contribution, would be doing as much for himself and for the town as any one man well could."

"But don't look at me," said Bates. "My wife has drained me: dry—you know about her dormitory and all her other schemes. Look at—well, look at Marshall. What is Marshall doing for the good of the city?"

Marshall lowered his eyes and fingered the broad foot of an empty wineglass. He sat between two of the great powers of the town, and he had never felt smaller. He wondered whether he had deserved his success; he wondered if he himself had really made it. After all, he had come on the ground before competition had fairly set in. He had done nothing by force or by audacity; he had been slow, cautious, even timorous, and he confessed inwardly that there were men in his own employ—men on a mere salary—who were cleverer, readier, more resourceful than he—men who, in a fair field and on even terms, could have distanced him completely. He gave the wineglass another turn or two, and did not lift his eyes.

He heard Bingham's voice again. It was declaring that in the history of every great mercantile city there was a single short period—a passing moment, almost—on which the citizen who wished to impress himself upon the community and to imbed himself in the local annals must seize. Marshall heard him instancing the Fuggers, of Augsburg, and the Loredani and Morosini, of Venice, and the Medici and Tornabuoni, of Florence, and many other names alien and all unfamiliar—merchants, most of them, it seemed, who had perpetuated their name and fame by improving the precise moment when their town, like plaster-of-Paris, was taking its "set."

"Make your impression while you may," concluded Bingham. "This is the time—this very year. The man who makes his mark here to-day will enjoy a fame which will spread as the fame of the city spreads and its power and prosperity increases. You know what we are destined to be—a hundred times greater than we are to-day. Fasten your name on the town, and your name will grow as the town itself does."

Marshall drove home thoughtfully in the new carriage, with the new horses, and August in his new cape-coat. Eliza Marshall, who had sat gingerly upon the edge of her seat in driving out, now leaned back at her ease when returning; it seemed that, with a little practice, she might easily become habituated to luxury. As she re-entered her old familiar parlor, she almost gave a gulp of mortification over its plainness and shabbiness; for the first time in years she had given herself a chance to know it for what it was.

"There, now," Jane declared loudly, "you've both seen what money and brains can do. Well, haven't we got money? Haven't we got brains? Is there any reason why we shouldn't be known, and looked up to, and respected?" And at breakfast next morning she opened out upon her father once more. Her lunch-room was now, thanks to her solicitings and her concert, in full running order, and moving on to a marked success. To-day she was rising to a more ambitious plane. Not a college building, not an assembly-hall; no, during the watches of the night she had risen to the conception of a working-girls' home. Her father had been listening to the mellow and flowing hautboy of Susan Bates, and to the deep diapason of Tom Bingham; but his daughter had now pulled out the coupler and was screaming shrilly above all the other voices of the organ. He felt almost deafened, stunned.

The "second girl" came in, frightened. "What is it?" asked Eliza Marshall.

"August is in the kitchen, with his face all cut and bleeding." Jane left her father. "Let me go out and see what it is." It was another chapter in the Van Horn matter. Roger, having become more familiar with police-court methods, had been pushing things with greater vigor and effect. During the past night two or three ruffians had broken into the stable, had shattered the windows of the new carriage and defaced its panels, and had beaten the coachman.

"There!" cried Rosy. "How much longer have we got to live down here among all these savages and hoodlums?"

Eliza Marshall made no reply, and Rosy felt that this in itself was to have gained a point.



XIII

Eliza Marshall meditated on the Bates dinner for several days succeeding, and when the following Saturday morning came round she was still busy with it. Saturday was her day for going over the antiquated accumulations of her parlor; no hands ever dusted and replaced the ornaments on her what-not save her own. She had been very chary of expressing herself about Susan Bates's entertainment, even to Jane. But now she felt that the time had come when she might trust herself to speak.

"I can't say I see the need of so many kinds of spoons," she said, as she transferred one of her gilt candelabra from the what-not to the contorted old rosewood centre-table: the candelabra were of an operatic cast—the one under removal represented (though all unknown to Eliza Marshall) Manrico and Leonora clasped in each other's arms beneath a bower-like tree. "Cut right through the middle, too—so that you could hardly tell whether they were spoons or forks."

"What could be better for ice-cream or salad?" asked Jane, who was blooming forth as an authority on matters social. She sometimes assisted her mother on these Saturday mornings—under close supervision.

"And three kinds of wineglasses," observed her mother, with some disapproval. "Sort of showy, I thought. Kind of as if they wanted to impress us, and let us see what—No!" she cried, as a figure came up the front walk, carrying a tray fastened in front. "No! 'Melia, tell him we don't want any suspenders or collar-buttons; we don't wear them."

"Showy!" called Jane. "My sakes! it was the plainest thing, I ever saw at their house. If you could see some of their doings!"

Eliza Marshall set back the candelabrum and transferred her attention to a Rock of Ages in Parian marble. "I believe things get dirtier here every year. I'm sure more dust comes in at that window than goes out." Then: "Well, I don't see but what we're as good as anybody else; I don't see but what we are as well worth taking pains for." She ran her cloth resentfully between the arms of Faith and the arms of the cross.

"Oh, dear me suz!" cried Jane; "are you trying to get the poor woman both ways? Her dinner was just right, and I am sure she took every possible pains to have it so."

"What?" called her mother, craning her neck and contorting her features. A locomotive was letting off steam opposite the house, and the noise and the vapor came across the hundred yards of dead grass together.

"I say it was all right," shouted Jane. "Don't you suppose she knows how to—Dear me! what's the use of trying to talk here?" She fell on the mantel-piece and dusted its vases in silent desperation.

Her mother accepted this dictum as final—a proof of Jane's altered status, and of the discretion with which she was carrying herself. "Of course I am not a society girl," was the way Jane turned the matter over in her own head; "I am a benevolent old maid, with a capacity for society when occasion offers." Jane had kept this point distinctly in view, and had now extricated herself from the squeezed and anomalous position which, for the last few years, she had occupied between her two sisters. "Alice thinks she knows everything, just because she's married," Jane had said to herself a year back; "and Rosy thinks she knows everything just because—well, I'm sure I can't exactly tell why.

"But anyhow, between the two, I'm being pretty well flattened out. I've got to do something." And she had.

Jane, running on the new track she had laid down for herself, had regained the consideration of Alice, and had even conquered the respect of Rosy. Indeed, so far had she triumphed with her younger sister that Rosy was even showing civility and goodwill to Theodore Brower, whose regard for Jane had brought about his social rehabilitation. "I wonder why he never cut his beard to a point before," Rosy said one day; "he looks ever so much better. And I see that he has finally provided himself with calling-cards. Well, if he leaves one behind every time he comes, we shall soon have a fine litter."

"He won't, though," said Jane, "except when he calls on you."

"Well, he may call on me if he chooses," responded Rosy, with a gracious condescension. "I'm sure he talks very sensibly."

"Never fear," retorted Jane; "he isn't competing with the British aristocracy!"

Then Rosy would go up-stairs for a bit of pen-and-ink practice—to cover a sheet with such words as these: Lady Rosamund This-or-that; Rosamund, Countess of Thus-and-so; the Honourable Rosamund Such-a-one. She lingered fondly over the baptismal "Rosamund"; what word could match more fitly with a title, or harmonize more completely with the grand old names of the peerage? Once she wrote on the extreme lower corner of the sheet: Mrs. W. F. Bates. "Oh, pshaw!" she exclaimed, and tore the corner off and threw it into the fire.

The locomotive had relieved itself, and no noise remained save the jangling of a long line of freight-cars on another track. "Those people who repaired the carriage," resumed Eliza Marshall, now beginning on one of her Dresden figures—"those people who repaired the carriage spoke to your father about—'Melia, shoo that tramp out of the side yard; of course we haven't got anything for him this time of day. They spoke to your father about—"

She paused, and began to bestow an exaggerated care upon the figure now under her hands—a dancing-girl of Seville. Jane paused in her own work and waited for the rest. "Well?" she asked, presently.

Her mother wiped the head of the dancing-girl very carefully. The girl had black hair parted in the middle and laid in two wide scallops over her ears. "They told your father they were looking for a site to build a new warehouse on."

Jane's heart gave a throb. "Well?"

Her mother applied herself painstakingly to the apron and petticoat of the dancer—a petticoat striped in purple and green, and sprigged over with some species of flower wholly non-botanical. She drew her cloth down every stripe.

"They said they were hoping to find something just about in—in this neighborhood."

Jane shrank and trembled as if before a knife. "Well?"

Her mother passed on to the girl's slippers. She wiped the worn gilt of one stubby foot and then of the other. "They asked him to put a price on—on—"

"On our home!" cried Jane. There was a tear in each eye as she bowed her head over the mantel-piece.

Her mother returned to the Rock of Ages, and began to dust it again—as carefully as before.

"Well," she said, slowly, without turning round, "there's a building of that same sort a block or two south of us, already." She lingered on the short arm of the cross. "The Blackburns are talking of going, you know."

Jane bowed her head again and picked at the fringe of the mantel-covering—a foolish thing that she herself had embroidered and draped. Now, for the first time, she formulated her mother. "I've half known it all along," she thought, "and now I know it for sure." In this moment she definitely saw her mother, not as a creature of the affections, but as a creature of, mere habit. "And it's been so for the last twenty years," thought the poor girl.

Eliza Marshall passed back to one of the candelabra; its cracked prisms tinkled as her broken talk went on. "Well, I don't know, I'm sure. Our last neighbors are leaving us. Business and boarding-houses all around. And Rosy wants to change. And there's so much noise and dirt, and so many peddlers and beggars. And—and—" She was thinking of Susan Bates's library, but would not permit herself a spoken reference to it. "And so much work to keep things tidy. And those miserable fellows breaking into our barn. I don't know, I'm sure."

Marshall himself, meanwhile, talked the matter over with Belden and with Roger, when Roger came in to consider the assault on the stable and the policy of employing the police. "I don't know that I should depend too much on the city's detectives," he had observed; "but I will have them go down to the house, if you say."

Accordingly, one morning a brace of young Irishmen modestly traversed the sidewalk which led around the house, and knocked with some show of decorum at the kitchen door. Each had the fresh complexion of a recent arrival, chestnut hair plastered in a scallop on his forehead, room under his nose for a large red mustache, and room under his finger-nails for a noticeable quantity of "matter misplaced." Presently they put on their derby hats again and went out to visit the stable. Then they took their departure and were never heard of more.

The next detective rang at the front door. He wore gloves and a high silk hat. He was a tough and determined-looking person, whose progress rearward the family attended with a close watch on their portable property: he seemed much more corrupt and knowing than any mere barn-breaker could be. He was more efficacious, too, than the duo that had preceded him. Even in the stable he gave much less heed to August than to August's mistress, and in the course of a few days he put his hands on the offenders. Ten to one he could have done that without having visited the premises at all.

Roger was the family counsellor in matters of investment as well as matters of law. He had early made the observation that few lawyers amassed a fortune in the strict practice of their profession; and he had accordingly turned a prompt attention to building and to land, operating largely for himself and for his father, and to the advantage of both. Indeed, manipulations in real estate had done more for David Marshall's fortune than had the pursuit of the grocery business—just as they had done more for his son than the pursuit of the law.

"Your mother won't live anywhere but on Michigan, though," he declared to Roger.

"She needn't," the other rejoined. "Move south three miles—if you mean to make any change at all. The best houses in town are going up along that stretch—just within the old limits. And a house there could be turned into money at any time."

Roger, as a practical real-estate man, naturally put convertibility before domesticity.

Marshall also canvassed the matter with Belden. Belden listened to him somewhat coldly and impassively—with less interest, the old man thought, than one's partner rightly should. But Belden took the idea of a new house as another step in the social advance of the Marshalls. It seemed to him almost like the challenge of a rival; and a rivalry like this nettled him none the less from being so sudden, so unexpected; so impracticable, as—six months back—he would have considered it. He felt himself and his family outdone at every point. Rosamund Marshall had eclipsed his own daughter at a dozen dances; Truesdale Marshall, thanks to the half-jocular patronage of the press, was becoming in his way a celebrity, while his own son merely led a dubious existence which oscillated between the bar of the Metropole and the billiard-room of the Lexington, and conferred little distinction upon himself of anybody else; and even dusty old Eliza Marshall, almost despite herself, was being dragged up into a circle to which his own wife, notwithstanding all her lavish and industrious endeavor, remained as alien as at the beginning.

And, to crown all, Marshall himself had finally come forth as a public figure. Belden had actually been obliged to sit at a banquet-board and to hear this old man, usually so quiet and inexpressive, loudly applauded by a hundred hard-headed businessmen, who, a month before, had received an effort of his own with mere civil toleration.

This new advance of Marshall's was made partly by Jane's help, partly in spite of it. "Speak?" she had said, when her father broached the subject one evening; "of course you'll speak. You know all about the topic, if anybody does; and here's an opportunity right at your hand. I'll help you get up your speech, myself."

She did. She prepared a long address after the most approved rhetorical models: a flowing introduction which walked all around the subject before going into it; a telling peroration whose emphatic periods seemed to render any subsequent consideration of the matter a mere piece of futility; and in between, briefly and cursorily, the one or two vital points of the whole discourse. Thus equipped, David Marshall was to rise at half an hour before midnight, the last but one of a long line of speakers, to claim the attention of a great roomful of men sated with meat and drink and sodden with oratory.

But in the cloak-room the manuscript had slipped from his pocket, and at the table all its overwrought periods had slipped from his mind. And at midnight he rose to confront an expanse of disordered table-cloths and an array of wearied faces, his own ace full of uncertainty, and nothing to nerve his inexperience save a desperate determination not to disappoint his daughter.

"Another old bore getting up"—from a distant corner of the smoky room. "Any idea who he is?"

"Not the slightest." A yawn. "Take another regalia."

David Marshall had forgotten everything but his main points and the facts that supported them. He began in the very midst of things. He spoke a minute and a quarter—plainly, simply; and sat down the instant he had finished.

He had spoken in his usual husky and sibilant voice. Nobody had called "Louder!" however—because nobody had really wished to hear.

On his ending, the room rang with applause—the applause of gratitude, largely.

"Well, the old fellow can say his say, after all, eh? And no blooming oratory, either."

"And sense enough to cut it short—the last man usually shows the least mercy."

As Marshall sat down his neighbor on the right shook his hand warmly. "Why haven't you been doing this for us before?"

As he was leaving the hall, the secretary of another club, present by accident, solicited an address on a cognate subject for a coming meeting of his own organization. "Why didn't you give yourself a little more time?" he asked.

Jane was wild with pride and pleasure; her father had given her the results and not the process. "I knew you could, poppy; I just knew you could. We'll start in on the other speech right away, and make it even better than this. We'll show 'em, yet!"

But it was not Marshall himself, for all the inexplicable ease of this success, who chiefly angered Belden. Nor had he any great feeling against Rosamund, having no undue interest in the social rivalries of young girls. Nor was he particularly incensed against her mother, being offended chiefly by the ostentatious and invidious go'od-will shown her by Mrs. Bates. But against Truesdale Marshall he nourished a hot and rancorous grievance. He did not apprehend Truesdale's attitude towards the town at large, and the young man's manner in his own house (regardless of his insolent utterance) seemed to have carried a half-contemptuous curiosity beyond all decent bounds. "That young cockerel—I'll soon find a way to quiet his crowing. What does all his singing and painting and fencing amount to, after all? He couldn't post an item into a ledger; he couldn't even tie up a pound of tea. He can't work off any of his foreign smartness on me!"

Truesdale, readily figured himself the reverse of persona grata to the Beldens, and stayed away; but this did not prevent his reception of advices more or less regular from the heart of the Belden household. "What's that absurd girl up to this time?" he asked one morning, as an envelope, directed in a hand already too familiar, came to the door. He recognized readily enough the sprawling, half-masculine penmanship of Gladys McKenna, as readily as he divined the role which she must imagine herself to be playing. She was pretending herself to be a prisoner in some hostile camp—a hostage in some dismal dungeon; and, despite the close and suspicious watchfulness of those surrounding her, she was still sending her little messages, all the same, to her preux chevalier on the opposing side. In the end her reward would come; she and her knight....

"Ouf!" cried Truesdale, who scented all this crass and forward romanticism between the trivial lines of her communications; "why does she write, when she hasn't got anything to say?"

Sometimes she did have something to say—a little. To her statements of the disposition of the Belden family towards her correspondent, and to her general recommendation to "beware," would be tagged indications of her own individual movements. "Poor auntie is laid up with the neuralgia, and Ethel has gone visiting in Kenwood, so I am the only one to be sent to Field's for those gloves. Auntie says the best time for the glove counter is about twelve-thirty, when the crowd is smallest."—"Yes," mumbled Truesdale, irritably; "and lunch at one."

Or: "They are going to let me go alone to Modjeska tomorrow afternoon—in the street-car; just think of it! I think I shall ask for a seat in the last row—I am so timid about fires." Sometimes she would add "destroy this," or, "burn this." "Most willingly!" Truesdale would exclaim, and throw "this" in the fire at once.

Or, again "Imagine; I am to have a tooth filled. Auntie says I needn't trouble to go away down-town—there is a very good man right on Twenty-second Street. 'Go early,' she says; 'and try to be over with it by eleven, so that you can enjoy your lunch.' Did you ever know of such thoughtfulness?"

"No, I never did," acknowledged Truesdale, grimly.

By these and other such subterfuges did Gladys keep her epistolary hand in, until the time came when she really had something of consequence to communicate.

Once or twice she also regaled him with the comments of the Beldens on the building projects of the Marshalls. Truesdale had the same tepid interest for these advices as for her other notes and comments. He did not consider himself as particularly concerned. At best he was but a bird of passage. And it seemed to him a sad error to load one's self down with so dense and stationary a thing as a house.

The conferences over this matter went on, however, regardless of Truesdale's non-participation. Jane discussed it with her father and mother; and Rosy handled it, and Roger; and Alice came in from Riverdale Park to stay overnight, and to contend with Jane and Rosy through the steak and the griddle-cakes in the morning, as well as to intimate to her father that if he would build out a little library from her parlor, her husband could pay for the carpet and furniture; and Aunt Lydia Rhodes came now and then and fluttered around the question, unsettling points that had been looked on as settled for good and all, and raising other points of her own that needed no consideration whatever. And, at the end of a wearisome and contentious month, the matter—with what seemed to everybody an extraordinary and reckless precipitation, the end once reached—was finally arranged. Tom Bingham was to build them a house in the neighborhood favored by Roger, and was to find an architect for them—a reversal of the usual procedure which afflicted Jane with grave doubts. And on the morning of the earliest day of spring, when the piano-organs were trilling through the side streets, and the flower-men were offering hurried shoppers their earliest verbenas and fuchsias from the tail ends of their carts, Jane walked down to the store to look at the signatures on the contracts for the new house.

"Ah!" she said to herself, thoughtfully; "we are moving—faster than I anticipated, and not precisely in the direction I had fancied."

She was in no degree elated; she experienced, on the contrary, a distinct feeling of depression.



XIV

During those active weeks which followed the decision of the family to surrender their old home to business and to contrive another one in a new neighborhood towards the south, Jane had taken her full share in all the debates and consultations. Hers, indeed, was the personality which impressed itself most strongly upon the young architect whom Bingham brought forward to evolve the plans, elevations, and specifications upon which he himself was to work. In matters architectural Jane was a purist of the purists, a theorist of the theorists; she fought this young man steadily on points of style, and never abandoned her ground until the exigencies of practicalities, reinforced by the prejudices of her mother and the unillumined indifference of her father, proved too strong to be withstood. "Well," she would say, "if we have got to sacrifice Art to steam-heat and speaking-tubes...." The young man was both amazed and exasperated by her spirit and her pertinacity; he could only be kept in trim and in temper by Bingham's frequent assurances that she was a very clever girl—and a very well-meaning one, after all.

Jane saw the plans composed, discomposed, recomposed, and, finally, accepted as a working basis; then, in the interval between this and the actual commencement of construction, she turned back a diverted attention to her lunch-club.

This institution, at the start, had required her attendance and ministrations but once a week. At present she was on hand twice a week, and in the near future she was to be there still more frequently. Every kind of co-operative endeavor, whether it involves the politics of a ward, the finances of a bank, or the refreshment-table of a church social, falls in the end on the shoulders of two or three people, and Jane's undertaking was no exception. And as it became more a matter of personal endeavor, it became, at the same time, more a matter of personal pride. She frequently asked people to call and inspect it, and she was coming more and more to feel that if the line of natural evolution were followed out, then her own lunch-room for girls would be developed into a home for working-girls by her father.

"There, poppy," she said to him one evening, as she put several sheets of paper into his hands; "that's my notion of what could be done on a hundred-foot lot. I haven't drawn the front yet, but here's the plan for down-stairs, and another for one of the upper floors."

The germ of Jane's unexpected architectural facility was to be found, perhaps, in Susan Bates's table-cloth drawings; and it had developed during her long labors on those big brown sheets which Bingham's young man had brought so many times both to house and store.

"But if you really want some notion of the front," she went on, "I can give it to you fast enough." She turned over one of her sheets and began to draw on the back of it. "Pooh! architecture's easy enough! It'll be about five stories high." She sketched the five stories with five or six lines. "In red brick—Romanesque style like this." She gave a broad sweep with the pencil, grouping several rapidly evolved windows under a wide, round arch. "And the cornice will be brick and terra-cotta; no galvanized iron—that I will not have. And a good-sized terracotta panel here over the doorway, to tell who we are—like that."

She outlined a large oblong, and filled it with an indefinite jumble of curly-cues.

Her father looked at the drawing, and laid it back on the table with a wan and patient smile. "Some other time, Jennie; we'll think about it when we haven't got so many other things on hand. Isn't the new house enough for now?"

Jane studied her father's face for a moment, and then thrust the drawings aside with a sudden and remorseful sweep. For he looked tired and worn, and in the slight pallor of his face she noted the deepening of old wrinkles and the appearance of new ones. "You poor old pa!" she cried, "I didn't mean to worry you. It can wait, of course; and the more we learn about building in the meanwhile the better we shall be prepared for this when the time comes round."

She looked into his eyes; they seemed to her both haggard and appealing. "I declare, you look just dragged out. Poor pal—just bother, bother, bother. Something at the store?"

"There's always something at the store," he said, looking away. "I haven't been feeling very well all day. I guess I didn't get my full share of sleep last night."

Yes, there was always something at the store, and this time it was an affair between Belden and the South town assessor. Belden—largely on his own account, certainly without anything like a consultation—had undertaken to secure a revaluation of the warehouse property; and he had been so successful (through the use of arguments by which an assessor may be moved) as to get a figure even lower than that of the previous year, despite the increased value of the building. Unfortunately, he had selected the very time when the scandalous inequality in assessments was engaging the attention of an ambitious evening paper; and this paper had just printed a cut of the enlarged building in juxtaposition to some small retail grocery in a remote ward and precinct, which was assessed in a ratio ten times as great—a vivid illustration of the manner in which the rich were favored at the expense of the poor. Marshall felt himself put forward as a criminal—a malefactor; he was assured, furthermore, that a man who offered a bribe was worse than the man who accepted it.

He might have added too, that Belden was showing some disposition to divert the house from its old conservative paths into the wild courses of speculation. His dash and daring found an outlet in an endeavor to manipulate the tea market, with less eye, perhaps, to profit than to prestige—to primacy in the trade. The old man had given but a half-hearted assent; he felt the credit, if any were involved, would outrun the profit, and that the promise of profit was too little to justify all the worry and care.

Nor was Jane's own enterprise, meanwhile, wholly free from difficulties. There were distinctly days when the postponement of the millennium seemed indefinite—when there appeared to be enough human nature remaining in the world to secure the present state of things for many years to come.

"It's a good deal more complicated than I thought," she confessed to her aunt Lydia, upon calling, one day, to invite her to visit the institution and to inspect its workings. "Now, Miss Casey and Miss Erlanger, for example, get along together all right, because Miss Casey is the cashier in an insurance office, and Miss Erlanger is the stenographer for a railroad president. Both of them kind of edge off from some of the salesladies; and the salesladies are pretty nearly as bad among themselves. Miss Maddox, who sells gloves on the first floor of Bernstein's Bazaar, never quite wants to sit at the same table with Miss Slopinka, who sells bolts and padlocks in the basement. So we have to trim and fuss and compromise all the time; in fact, we've been obliged to take in another room or two. However, that makes all the more to see."

Jane then added a few words to cover what she conceived to be the etiquette of such a call. Aunt Lydia was not one of the kind to find any force in a delicate intimation; so Jane said what she had to say as plainly and pointedly as possible.

"Don't call during the rush; you'd only be in the way. And don't look at the girls as if they were natural history specimens in glass cases. And don't whatever else you do, be flip—"

"Flip? What a word! Where did you get it—there?"

—"and gushing, and effusive, and as condescending as if you had come down sixteen pairs of stairs. I lost three girls the day after Mrs. Bates brought Cecilia Ingles up. 'Why did you do it?' I asked her. 'I want her to see things,' she told me; 'I want to make a good earnest woman of her.' I hope she won't do it again. I sha'nt encourage many visitors after this. I don't think it helps a place like that to be made into a show."

"Well, I don't know," returned her aunt. "Wouldn't it be a good idea to have entertainments and things, to bring the different sections of society together? I should be very glad to help," she added, as she debated the probable participation of Susan Bates and Cecilia Ingles.

"No, I'm not going to have any picnic business," returned Jane. "That's all nonsense. I'm going to keep this thing within its own lines."

"I suppose I could bring Bertie with me," suggested the chastened Lydia. "She thinks you're a perfect little tin thing-a-ma-jig on wheels."

"Yes," said Jane, "she can come; only don't bring a whole raft with her."

"I won't," Mrs. Rhodes reassured her; "only one more besides. You wouldn't mind a third?"

"No, I shouldn't mind just one."

Then Lydia Rhodes made an immediate request of Truesdale to act as escort; he was her third. She took, in this malapropos manoeuvre, the same delight that a child experiences through the consciousness of being engaged in some mischievous wrong.

"Lunch with us at Fields," she directed him, "and then we shall get around in time to see Jane wiping off her tables and putting away her crockery. We go very simply—we wear sackcloth and ashes. As for the portrait—that can wait a day or two."

Then she told Bertie very solemnly that they were to begin a study of the philanthropies of a great city. But Bertie took her own view of the expedition; Truesdale's participation made it seem rather like an excursion into fairy-land. Now, more than ever, was she under the glamour of this young man's accomplishments; now, more than ever, did she feel the embellishing and decorative qualities of his presence. Not only had she heard the composer sing his own songs; she had lately seen him paint his own picture—and hers. "Why can't you do a little water-color or something of Bertie?" his aunt had suggested to him one day, upon encountering him in an attitude of graceful negligence before the exposition of his own pictures. "It would please her so much. Do you know"—lowering her voice as she looked towards the girl over her shoulder—"the dear child has been down here eight or ten times to see these things? Fancy how much it would please her to watch you actually at work—on a portrait of herself, too."

Truesdale glanced sidewise towards Bertie, who stood in painstaking scrutiny before one of the outlying pictures of his group. A pair of art students in their careless working clothes, stood a little apart with their eyes on the same work.

"Terrible knowing, ain't it?" remarked one.

"Yep," rejoined the other; "awful lot of snap."

"Just knocks it right out, doesn't it?"

"Fearfully up to date, ain't it? Doesn't need any '1893' on it!"

"Full of jump! Why can't we fellows here at home get more of that sort of thing?"

Bertie's heart swelled proudly as she heard this jargon. It was quite unintelligible to her, but she felt sure it conveyed extreme approval. She turned to look at Truesdale just as he turned to look at her.

He shook his head in burlesque deprecation of her too obvious appreciation, and then brought his attention back to his aunt.

"All right," he said; "I'll do it. I'll come down some day and paint her, or you, or the front doors, or anything else you say." He pondered for a moment, as he edged away a little from Bertie, and tried to carry his aunt with him. "I suppose I shall be expected to look the part?"

"Yes," she responded, sympathetically. "Bertie has never seen an artist, of course, but she has her ideas of how one would look. If it wouldn't be too much trouble for you to...."

"Oh, I don't mind the trouble so very much," replied Truesdale, magnanimously. "I hope I can put myself out a little. She might look for a loose red tie, perhaps, and a Tam O'Shanter, eh?"

"And a velvet coat," suggested his aunt, ardently.

"Oh, bother a velvet coat; that's going a little too far. She would be more likely to look for a palette and a maul-stick."

"Why, certainly."

"Yes, they use those things sometimes. I wonder if she would insist upon an easel?"

"I think I could arrange that," replied his aunt. She drew on an expression of decorous and pensive sadness, and Truesdale knew that she was mentally detaching her crayon of the dear departed from that elaborate white and gold apparatus in her parlor. "And if you should care for a few Persian rugs hung up around...."

"By all means!" cried Truesdale. "And a few Bedouin rifles; and a few bits of brasswork from Cairo; and a few scraps of drapery from Bombay or Trebizond; and one of those inlaid Turkish tables; and one or two stacks of old French armor. I think with all that help I could do a water-color or so."

"You're going to do her in oil," declared his aunt, stoutly.

"I am? Then I must have that table, sure. And a nargileh. And a dozen Japanese swords, if you happen to have them about the place. And what else?—oh yes; a small bit of canvas, now I think of it."

Bertie looked round once more, and divined herself under discussion. She sidled away, past a long row of landscapes and marines, and drifted out into the hall, where she leaned over the balustrade and studied the mosaics of the vestibule below.

"Good little subject," said one of the students, looking after her. He ran a sudden hand upward through his hair, which had lately fallen from its high estate and had come to look like the hair of anybody else. "Get that profile against a red plush curtain—"

"And drape her in a red silk kimono or something."

"And have a vase of Jacqueminots to one side—a study in reds, you know."

"Yes, I know, you know." He turned on his heel. "Well, this ain't work, or anything like it. Come along up-stairs."

And up-stairs they went—through the main hallway.

Lydia Rhodes followed her protegee with a fond eye. "You know, Truesdale, that she's just the sweetest little thing in the world."

"Oh, yes, I know."

"Why don't you go into the business?" asked his aunt, impulsively, as she placed a cajoling hand upon his arm.

"The business? So I might. Well, you may pay me a hundred dollars for this commission, if you like!"

"You know what I mean—your father's business. Now that they are making it all over, they might easily find a place for you."

"Um," observed Truesdale, falling into a gloomy and chilling reserve.

His aunt saw the necessity of abandoning this new ground at once. "You'll take pains, won't you?" she said, struggling back to her former position. "You'll make it as nice as you can?"

"Well, it will be a sort of sketch, of course," said Truesdale, still rather coldly.

"It won't, either," insisted his aunt; "it will be a real, regular picture."

"She'd get tired of it. Do you think it's any fun to pose?"

"Tired!" said his aunt, scornfully. She thrust the supposition into the outer darkness and slammed the door behind it. "How are you going to dress her?" she asked, passing on with a resolute swiftness to detail. "If you want anything of mine ... I've got a lovely breadth of old gold satin; and then there are those Roman pearls you brought me."

"Dress her? I sha'nt dress her at all. I don't believe I shall want any of your rugs, either. If they are on the floor, keep them there; that's where they belong. No; I shall just put her before a plain wall in her every-day clothes—the black hat and jacket she's wearing now. Won't that do well enough?"

"We—ell," said his aunt, doubtfully.

Truesdale had juggled enough in his time with draperies and accessories to know how to employ them here, if so minded; but he felt instinctively that any such manipulations would now be quite out of place. "She's a good, sincere, simple little thing," he said to himself, "and she will speak better for herself than all those things could speak for her. I shall make just a sketch—but a careful one. I shall do the best I can; I shall make a very lady-like thing of it." Suddenly he flushed. "I shall tear those old things up to-morrow—they've got to go sometime." He was thinking of certain studies at the back of one of his portfolios; they were not ladylike. "Those models!" he muttered, in a tone at once of objurgation and of self-reproach.

Truesdale came for the first sitting in a costume discreetly picturesque, and his aunt frisked through all the preliminary preparations in a state of great glee. Bertie surrendered herself to the process with an expression of wondering self-depreciation; her large dark eyes shone with a kind of surprised humility.

"If she wouldn't look quite so much like one of Murillo's Madonnas," thought Truesdale. "This isn't really the most important thing that has ever happened in the universe, after all." Then he sighed lightly. "Still, I suppose she is a good deal nearer to a Madonna than I am to a Murillo."

Mrs. Rhodes seemed to feel the necessity of upsetting the whole apartment. She had the inside man bring up the stepladder. "What's this for?" Truesdale asked.

"To fix the curtains right. I can have them taken down, if you say. How far up do you want the shades? Are those lambrequins in the way?"

"Good heavens!" cried Truesdale, "do you want to tear the house down? Do you think I am Raphael painting the Pope?" But all this was only his aunt's way of flattering him into a good-humor, and of making him share her sense of the importance of the occasion.

As the work went on, however, his aunt's song changed imperceptibly from allegretto to adagio, and from the major mode to the minor.

The change first appeared as she studied his charcoal outline. "Well," she observed, "I think you might have put Bertie somewhere near the middle of the picture, instead of away off to the left, like that."

"They put them in the middle sometimes—yes," admitted Truesdale, cheerily waving his aunt back. "I'm leaving the other side for you," he added, with a genial impudence.

"Oh, that's it, is it?" And she half believed it true.

On the day following she was distinctly mournful. "Do you mean to tell me that you can ever work over that mass of red and blue and yellow freckles into anything resembling Bertie's complexion?—such a beautiful one, too!" Bertie blushed. "There! look at it now!" cried his aunt, with a mounting enthusiasm; and Bertie blushed still more violently. Truesdale gave her a brief glance, which he at once transferred to his palette. This was the first time in his life that he had ever lowered his eyes from a woman's face, merely because there happened to be a blush upon it.

"Work it over?" he presently inquired, as he looked up to his aunt across his shoulder. "I never work anything over."

"Is it going to stay that way?" demanded his aunt, peremptorily. Bertie's own face was overcast, with an expression of plaintive distrust.

"Of course it is. I work in the primary colors. If you should prefer something a little less advanced...." He waved his maulstick vaguely, as if in reference to the professorial practice of Munich, or to the antediluvian school of England.

"Well, if that's the way it's going to stay...." commented his aunt, with her face close to the canvas.

"My dear aunt," protested Truesdale, "we don't look at a painting with our noses, but with our eyes. I decompose what is before me into the primary colors. Now the thing for you to do is to step back ten or twelve feet and recompose them. That armchair over there is just about your point of view precisely—and so inviting and comfortable! Try it."

His aunt removed herself to the point suggested. "Well, perhaps it does look a little better from here." And Bertie Patterson breathed a tiny sigh of relief; for the last thing in the world she wished to be was a witness to her young artist's failure.

"Of course," responded Truesdale. He gave an invocatory sweep with his brush, and the spirit of complete modernity descended and perched upon the top of his easel. "Just wait; it will be so naive; it will seem so improvised, so spontaneous—a regular little impromptu. Of course."

But the next day his aunt accompanied him to the front door when he took his leave. Her tone to-day was one of out-and-out protest.

"Now, Truesdale, this has gone far enough. You may muss up the house as much as you like, but I can't let you make a laughing-stock of Bertie. When it comes to streaks of green under her chin, and purple shadows under her hair, I—I don't think it is right. And she—she admires you so much." His aunt's voice broke, and she seemed at no great remove from tears.

"Dear Aunt Lyddy," returned Truesdale, with an unruffled imperturbability and an exhaustless and patronizing patience, "you have never learned to use your eyes; you don't know how to see. Did you ever try looking at things from under your elbow?" He raised his own, as he fastened the last button of his glove, and gave her a teasing glance from beneath his arm. "You are quite transfigured," he declared; "it makes all the difference in the world. Try it some time. Well, good-bye." He gave her his hand without lowering his elbow, and then sauntered complacently down the front steps.

Bertie watched him from behind the curtains of the front window. He wore a black cape-overcoat, which swung gracefully as he moved along, and a soft Fedora hat with a brave dent in the crown. "The most becoming thing he could possibly have picked out," she thought.

Mrs. Rhodes came back to take one more look at the canvas. "It's a perfect living picture of you, Bertie, except for the color. I can't get around that." She leaned forward and twisted her neck round and looked at Bertie from under her elbow, and then looked again at the canvas and shook her head. "And as for naivete from Truesdale...." she murmured. She would as soon have looked for sunbeams from cucumbers.

Bertie, intent upon the painting, saw nothing of these manoeuvres. "I guess it will come out all right," she said, with a reviving trust.



XV

When Jane looked up at the stroke of one and saw her aunt Lydia and Bertie Patterson enter under the escort of Truesdale, she was not completely pleased. Her rooms were no place for men, anyway—especially young ones; and she had often wished that Truesdale, however worthy her admiration and the world's, were a little less ready as to bringing his fascinations into play. "If ever he comes down here," she thought, "he'll wear something too striking, and he'll want to talk to the girls about the continued stones in the magazines, or play the piano, or something; and they'll think he's trying to flirt with them. I hate anything of that kind—here," said Jane, virtuously.

Truesdale, however, conducted himself with an immense discretion, and wore nothing out of the ordinary. His hats and shoes were now quite like those of other people. His Florentine stivaletti had drawn so much attention in the street-cars that he had been obliged to give them up; and as for the flat-brimmed high silk hat which he had brought home from the Boulevard St. Michel, that he had had to leave off after a second trial: there were some things, he found, that people would not stand. And his manner to-day was utterly stripped of gallantry; it was gauged with the precise idea of meeting the approval of Bertie Patterson. "I expect I shall seem awfully insipid," he said to himself.

Jane came to meet them from a room beyond, where she left a doughnut and a half cup of coffee standing on a round-topped oak table. The regular noon hour enjoyed by most of the girls was done; two or three remained finishing their lunch or looking over the picture papers, and a couple of them, in the little parlor, were trying duets on the piano.

"I'm the only one of the board on hand to-day," Jane explained. "So I've been doing a little book-keeping and a little waiting and a little everything. This is Miss Casey," she said, introducing one of the piano-players; "and this is Miss O'Brien," introducing the other.

Miss Casey and Miss O'Brien bowed and smiled, and made a dexterous remark apiece without too apparent an effort, and presently took an adroit departure. They had already overrun their time, they explained.

"Walk around and look at things," suggested Jane. "We're pretty high up, you see, but we don't save any rent, because the elevators make one floor worth as much as another. Still, the light's good, and the air; and there's a great deal less noise."

The others followed Jane's lead with much docility. Truesdale was profoundly impressed by his sister's aspect under these novel conditions; Bertie Patterson seemed to find in her the incarnation of all the town's philanthropy; even Aunt Lydia was almost too deeply affected to chirp and chatter with her wonted volubility.

"Here's the office," said Jane, leading them into a small, lighted closet to one side. "This book is for our account with the butcher, and that one is for our account with the baker. Our supplies are brought up on the freight elevator every morning. Come and see the gas-stove, where we cook eggs."

As they passed through the adjoining room a girl sat at one of the tables with a piece of pie and a cup of tea. She was turning the leaves of one of the comic weeklies, and a slight frown of intentness upon her face indicated either a limited sense of humor or some unfamiliarity with the subjects under review. The latter, perhaps; her face and air were distinctly foreign.

"Poor Sophie!" said Jane, indulgently; "she's trying her English on those jokes. She's improving, however; and she can speak French and German like a fire-engine. I guess she's smart enough; anyway, she looks so."

The girl seemed of a type that might have come from Baden, or Alsace, or the Franco-Swiss frontier. She had a high color and an abundance of black hair. Her eyes, as she lifted them to Bertie Patterson, were dark and narrow and full of sparkle and decision, and the half-frown, which still survived from her study of the comic paper, helped to give her a look of some force and determination.

Truesdale, on seeing her, gave a sudden start, and turned his eyes and his face away at once. Then, with a quickened pace, he followed his sister's lead towards the kitchen and pantry. He smiled half grimly. "Such a thing may happen anywhere, of course," he said to himself; "but I shouldn't have chosen it to happen right here. No—not exactly."

Bertie and Mrs. Rhodes followed after, to see the gas-stove that cooked eggs. As they crossed the threshold, Truesdale looked back between them towards the subject of his speculation. She had grasped her paper firmly with both fists, and now sat with an intent stare fixed on its pages. She neither raised nor lowered her head, nor could he observe that she looked either to the right or to the left. "Ouf!" said Truesdale, as Jane lit up the stove, "you never know when a thing is at an end."

Jane presently turned off her gas-stove. "You can go back through the other room. It isn't quite so swell," she expounded, as she moved along; "but we have several grades of girls, and each one finds her own level and her own society for herself." She led the way back into the parlor, and drew a finger along the key-board of the piano as she passed by. "Anybody who wants to send a few new pieces of lively music may do so."

Two or three late lunchers had come in and were clattering their knives and forks at the table opposite the girl whom Jane had called Sophie. Sophie still sat in her place; she held her paper with a firm hand, and turned the leaves at intervals. She looked up once—as the party was passing out. Truesdale stepped over the door-mat rapidly, on the far side of Jane and Bertie and Mrs. Rhodes. He dropped his glove that he might stoop for it, and as he stooped he shot a rapid glance through the narrow door of the other room. The girl still held her paper before her face, but she sent a single look after the party athwart its side.

Truesdale stepped into the hall and pressed the button of the elevator. "It's Sophie, true enough—not a bit of doubt about it. If she didn't recognize me just now, she'll never have I another chance to—here."

He handed his charges into the elevator. "Well, what do you think of Jane and her doings now?" he asked, briskly, as he stepped in after them. "Can you think of any better opening for the investment of your idle funds? Isn't she an able financier? Hasn't she got a great administrative capacity? Isn't she one of the rising young men of the day?" As he flung off this string of stock phrases from the newspapers, his eyes flashed brightly, a mounting color came into his cheeks, and a triumphant smile to his lips, and a caressing and ringing vibration into his voice. He seemed to coruscate with all the conquering insolence of youth; Bertie Patterson had never seen him quite so handsome.

"Down we go!" he cried to his aunt, as the cab resumed its course with a sudden, breath-taking drop. "No; don't catch hold of me—I'm only a broken reed. Yes; try the door-jamb—much more satisfactory. But look out for your fingers—never get your fingers caught." Then, as they arrived at the street level: "Wait a second; don't hurry. Be sure of your footing; don't stumble and break your neck at the last minute—one poor last little chance, after so many glorious opportunities have gone by!"

"'Sh, Truesdale!" whispered his aunt.

For there were other people in the elevator, and they looked askance at this smart volley of verbal superfluities.

He led them out to the carriage. "Here we are on solid ground once more," he continued; "best place in the world to be. No; don't ask me to get in—I'll walk on a bit. I wouldn't leave terra firma now for anything." He handed his aunt in, and then Bertie. He exacted from Bertie a perfectly superfluous shake of the hand, bowed over that hand with a sudden access of gravity, and lost himself in an abysmal reverie before he had traversed a hundred yards.

He saw before him a high-heaped assemblage of red-tiled roofs, and above them rose the fretwork of a soaring Gothic spire. A narrow river half encircled the town, and a battered old bridge, guarded by a round-towered gateway, led out into the open country towards a horizon bounded by a low range of blue hills. Trumpet-calls rang out from distant barrack-yards, and troops of dragoons clattered noisily over the rough pavement of the great square. The dragoons passed, and a colony of awnings and umbrellas sprang up in their place, and bands of stocky peasantry chattered and chaffered, and left the pavement strewn with the loose leaves of cabbages and carrot-tops. Then night came and blotted these out, and the moon rose and music played, and throngs of officers and students and towns-people sat through a long-drawn evening before the coffee-houses round-about. High towards the stars towered the columns and pediments of a vast official structure, whose broken sky-line sawed the heavens, and whose varied cornices and ledges were disjointed by deep and perplexing shadows. On each side of the great portal which opened through the pillared arcade there was stationed a mounted cuirassier, and above it there appeared in large letters—

"Marshall & Belden," said Truesdale, suddenly emerging from his reverie. He sprang lightly over the muddy gutter and found a foothold on the damp flagging. "Pshaw!" he said, rather ruefully; "in a moment more she would have come to meet me."

He looked up at the building before him. "Well, really, they've made quite a decent affair of it. But what are they doing to the sign? Oh, I see: putting 'The' to the front of it, and 'Co.' to the back. That ladder looks rather shaky. The Marshall & Belden Co.' Perhaps it would be civil of me to call on the new concern—seeing that I have chanced their way."

Truesdale picked his way choicely through the office, with the urbane affectation of never having seen the place before. One or two of the clerks recognized him, and a hurried word, passed from desk to desk, effected an immediate establishment of his identity throughout the room. Those who had never seen him had at least heard about him. Some of them had visited his pictures at the Art Institute, and, as devotees of the old school, if of any, had mildly guyed them. Others had read paragraphs in the "Chappie Chat" of the newspapers about his trousers and cravats—those genial paragraphs which may so easily endow a young man of parts and peculiarities with a quasi-celebrity. One of them now smiled broadly, and another so far forgot himself and his dignity as to wink; but all the rest, as American freemen by birth or adoption, united in a stolid determination to refrain from seeing, or at least from acknowledging, any distinguishing peculiarity, any differentiation—above all, any savor of superiority. The one of whom Truesdale inquired for his father was so Spartan in his brusqueness that Truesdale, despite himself, smiled in his face.

In the private office he found his father closeted with Roger. Crumpled and trampled on the floor, and with the effect of a matter abandoned or at least superseded, lay a large sheet of paper printed with the outlines of a real-estate subdivision, while a hundred similar sheets rested in a roll on the end of the old man's desk. Marshall himself lay back in his chair, with marks of the exhaustion that follows intense indignation and exasperation, while Roger paced the floor with all the vehemence and choler of younger blood.

"Yes," Roger was saying, explosively, "the bond was opened, and all they found was a blank paper—the alderman's name, and nothing more. Why do you blame me? What more can I do? What more could you do? What more could any decent man do? And if you wanted to find out how things are run here, you're doing it."

"What's the trouble?" asked Truesdale. He sat down with an engaging disposition to show himself interested.

Marshall passed his hand feebly over his forehead. "It's that police affair of your mother's," he said, in a tired voice.