The Entire March Family Trilogy by William Dean Howells (page 11)

“Oh, I thoat you said me!”

“Yes; I want you to help me with your father. I suppose I ought to go to him at once, but I’m a little afraid of him.”

“And you awe not afraid of me? I don’t think that’s very flattering, Mr. Fulkerson. You ought to think Ah’m twahce as awful as papa.”

“Oh, I do! You see, I’m quite paralyzed before you, and so I don’t feel anything.”

“Well, it’s a pretty lahvely kyand of paralysis. But–go on.”

“I will–I will. If I can only begin.”

“Pohaps Ah maght begin fo’ you.”

“No, you can’t. Lord knows, I’d like to let you. Well, it’s like this.”

Fulkerson made a clutch at his hair, and then, after another hesitation, he abruptly laid the whole affair before her. He did not think it necessary to state the exact nature of the offence Lindau had given Dryfoos, for he doubted if she could grasp it, and he was profuse of his excuses for troubling her with the matter, and of wonder at himself for having done so. In the rapture of his concern at having perhaps made a fool of himself, he forgot why he had told her; but she seemed to like having been confided in, and she said, “Well, Ah don’t see what you can do with you’ ahdeals of friendship except stand bah Mr. Mawch.”

“My ideals of friendship? What do you mean?”

“Oh, don’t you suppose we know? Mr. Beaton said you we’ a pofect Bahyard in friendship, and you would sacrifice anything to it.”

“Is that so?” said Fulkerson, thinking how easily he could sacrifice Lindau in this case. He had never supposed before that he was chivalrous in such matters, but he now began to see it in that light, and he wondered that he could ever have entertained for a moment the idea of throwing March over.

“But Ah most say,” Miss Woodburn went on, “Ah don’t envy you you’ next interview with Mr. Dryfoos. Ah suppose you’ll have to see him at once aboat it.”

The conjecture recalled Fulkerson to the object of his confidences. “Ah, there’s where your help comes in. I’ve exhausted all the influence I have with Dryfoos–“

“Good gracious, you don’t expect Ah could have any!”

They both laughed at the comic dismay with which she conveyed the preposterous notion; and Fulkerson said, “If I judged from myself, I should expect you to bring him round instantly.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Fulkerson,” she said, with mock meekness.

“Not at all. But it isn’t Dryfoos I want you to help me with; it’s your father. I want your father to interview Dryfoos for me, and I-I’m afraid to ask him.”

“Poo’ Mr. Fulkerson!” she said, and she insinuated something through her burlesque compassion that lifted him to the skies. He swore in his heart that the woman never lived who was so witty, so wise, so beautiful, and so good. “Come raght with me this minute, if the cyoast’s clea’.” She went to the door of the diningroom and looked in across its gloom to the little gallery where her father sat beside a lamp reading his evening paper; Mrs. Leighton could be heard in colloquy with the cook below, and Alma had gone to her room. She beckoned Fulkerson with the hand outstretched behind her, and said, “Go and ask him.”

“Alone!” he palpitated.

“Oh, what a cyowahd!” she cried, and went with him. “Ah suppose you’ll want me to tell him aboat it.”

“Well, I wish you’d begin, Miss Woodburn,” he said. “The fact is, you know, I’ve been over it so much I’m kind of sick of the thing.”

Miss Woodburn advanced and put her hand on her father’s shoulder. “Look heah, papa! Mr. Fulkerson wants to ask you something, and he wants me to do it fo’ him.”

The colonel looked up through his glasses with the sort of ferocity elderly men sometimes have to put on in order to keep their glasses from falling off. His daughter continued: “He’s got into an awful difficulty with his edito’ and his proprieto’, and he wants you to pacify them.”

“I do not know whethah I understand the case exactly,” said the colonel, “but Mr. Fulkerson may command me to the extent of my ability.”

“You don’t understand it aftah what Ah’ve said?” cried the girl. “Then Ah don’t see but what you’ll have to explain it you’self, Mr. Fulkerson.”

“Well, Miss Woodburn has been so luminous about it, colonel,” said Fulkerson, glad of the joking shape she had given the affair, “that I can only throw in a little side-light here and there.”

The colonel listened as Fulkerson went on, with a grave diplomatic satisfaction. He felt gratified, honored, even, he said, by Mr. Fulkerson’s appeal to him; and probably it gave him something of the high joy that an affair of honor would have brought him in the days when he had arranged for meetings between gentlemen. Next to bearing a challenge, this work of composing a difficulty must have been grateful. But he gave no outward sign of his satisfaction in making a resume of the case so as to get the points clearly in his mind.

“I was afraid, sir,” he said, with the state due to the serious nature of the facts, “that Mr. Lindau had given Mr. Dryfoos offence by some of his questions at the dinner-table last night.”

“Perfect red rag to a bull,” Fulkerson put in; and then he wanted to withdraw his words at the colonel’s look of displeasure.

“I have no reflections to make upon Mr. Landau,” Colonel Woodburn continued, and Fulkerson felt grateful to him for going on; “I do not agree with Mr. Lindau; I totally disagree with him on sociological points; but the course of the conversation had invited him to the expression of his convictions, and he had a right to express them, so far as they had no personal bearing.”

“Of course,” said Fulkerson, while Miss Woodburn perched on the arm of her father’s chair.

“At the same time, sir, I think that if Mr. Dryfoos felt a personal censure in Mr. Lindau’s questions concerning his suppression of the strike among his workmen, he had a right to resent it.”

“Exactly,” Fulkerson assented.

“But it must be evident to you, sir, that a high-spirited gentleman like Mr. March–I confess that my feelings are with him very warmly in the matter–could not submit to dictation of the nature you describe.”

“Yes, I see,” said Fulkerson; and, with that strange duplex action of the human mind, he wished that it was his hair, and not her father’s, that Miss Woodburn was poking apart with the corner of her fan.

“Mr. Lindau,” the colonel concluded, “was right from his point of view, and Mr. Dryfoos was equally right. The position of Mr. March is perfectly correct–“

His daughter dropped to her feet from his chair-arm. “Mah goodness! If nobody’s in the wrong, ho’ awe you evah going to get the mattah straight?”

“Yes, you see,” Fulkerson added, “nobody can give in.”

“Pardon me,” said the colonel, “the case is one in which all can give in.”

“I don’t know which ‘ll begin,” said Fulkerson.

The colonel rose. “Mr. Lindau must begin, sir. We must begin by seeing Mr. Lindau, and securing from him the assurance that in the expression of his peculiar views he had no intention of offering any personal offence to Mr. Dryfoos. If I have formed a correct estimate of Mr. Lindau, this will be perfectly simple.”

Fulkerson shook his head. “But it wouldn’t help. Dryfoos don’t care a rap whether Lindau meant any personal offence or not. As far as that is concerned, he’s got a hide like a hippopotamus. But what he hates is Lindau’s opinions, and what he says is that no man who holds such opinions shall have any work from him. And what March says is that no man shall be punished through him for his opinions, he don’t care what they are.”

The colonel stood a moment in silence. “And what do you expect me to do under the circumstances?”

“I came to you for advice–I thought you might suggest—-?”

“Do you wish me to see Mr. Dryfoos?”

“Well, that’s about the size of it,” Fulkerson admitted. “You see, colonel,” he hastened on, “I know that you have a great deal of influence with him; that article of yours is about the only thing he’s ever read in ‘Every Other Week,’ and he’s proud of your acquaintance. Well, you know” –and here Fulkerson brought in the figure that struck him so much in Beaton’s phrase and had been on his tongue ever since–” you’re the man on horseback to him; and he’d be more apt to do what you say than if anybody else said it.”

“You are very good, sir,” said the colonel, trying to be proof against the flattery, “but I am afraid you overrate my influence.” Fulkerson let him ponder it silently, and his daughter governed her impatience by holding her fan against her lips. Whatever the process was in the colonel’s mind, he said at last: “I see no good reason for declining to act for you, Mr. Fulkerson, and I shall be very happy if I can be of service to you. But”–he stopped Fulkerson from cutting in with precipitate thanks–“I think I have a right, sir, to ask what your course will be in the event of failure?”

“Failure?” Fulkerson repeated, in dismay.

“Yes, sir. I will not conceal from you that this mission is one not wholly agreeable to my feelings.”

“Oh, I understand that, colonel, and I assure you that I appreciate, I–“

“There is no use trying to blink the fact, sir, that there are certain aspects of Mr. Dryfoos’s character in which he is not a gentleman. We have alluded to this fact before, and I need not dwell upon it now: I may say, however, that my misgivings were not wholly removed last night.”

“No,” Fulkerson assented; though in his heart he thought the old man had behaved very well.

“What I wish to say now is that I cannot consent to act for you, in this matter, merely as an intermediary whose failure would leave the affair in state quo.”

“I see,” said Fulkerson.

“And I should like some intimation, some assurance, as to which party your own feelings are with in the difference.”

The colonel bent his eyes sharply on Fulkerson; Miss Woodburn let hers fall; Fulkerson felt that he was being tested, and he said, to gain time, “As between Lindau and Dryfoos?” though he knew this was not the point.

“As between Mr. Dryfoos and Mr. March,” said the colonel.

Fulkerson drew a long breath and took his courage in both hands. “There can’t be any choice for me in such a case. I’m for March, every time.”

The colonel seized his hand, and Miss Woodburn said, “If there had been any choice fo’ you in such a case, I should never have let papa stir a step with you.”

“Why, in regard to that,” said the colonel, with a, literal application of the idea, “was it your intention that we should both go?”

“Well, I don’t know; I suppose it was.”

“I think it will be better for me to go alone,” said the colonel; and, with a color from his experience in affairs of honor, he added: “In these matters a principal cannot appear without compromising his dignity. I believe I have all the points clearly in mind, and I think I should act more freely in meeting Mr. Dryfoos alone.”

Fulkerson tried to hide the eagerness with which he met these agreeable views. He felt himself exalted in some sort to the level of the colonel’s sentiments, though it would not be easy to say whether this was through the desperation bred of having committed himself to March’s side, or through the buoyant hope he had that the colonel would succeed in his mission.

“I’m not afraid to talk with Dryfoos about it,” he said.

“There is no question of courage,” said the colonel. “It is a question of dignity–of personal dignity.”

“Well, don’t let that delay you, papa,” said his daughter, following him to the door, where she found him his hat, and Fulkerson helped him on with his overcoat. “Ah shall be jost wald to know ho’ it’s toned oat.”

“Won’t you let me go up to the house with you?” Fulkerson began. “I needn’t go in–“

“I prefer to go alone,” said the colonel. “I wish to turn the points over in my mind, and I am afraid you would find me rather dull company.”

He went out, and Fulkerson returned with Miss Woodburn to the drawing- room, where she said the Leightons were. They, were not there, but she did not seem disappointed.

“Well, Mr. Fulkerson,” she said, “you have got an ahdeal of friendship, sure enough.”

“Me?” said Fulkerson. “Oh, my Lord! Don’t you see I couldn’t do anything else? And I’m scared half to death, anyway. If the colonel don’t bring the old man round, I reckon it’s all up with me. But he’ll fetch him. And I’m just prostrated with gratitude to you, Miss Woodburn.”

She waved his thanks aside with her fan. “What do you mean by its being all up with you?”

“Why, if the old man sticks to his position, and I stick to March, we’ve both got to go overboard together. Dryfoos owns the magazine; he can stop it, or he can stop us, which amounts to the same thing, as far as we’re concerned.”

“And then what?” the girl pursued.

“And then, nothing–till we pick ourselves up.”

“Do you mean that Mr. Dryfoos will put you both oat of your places?”

“He may.”

“And Mr. Mawch takes the risk of that jost fo’ a principle?”

“I reckon.”

“And you do it jost fo’ an ahdeal?”

“It won’t do to own it. I must have my little axe to grind, somewhere.”

“Well, men awe splendid,” sighed the girl. “Ah will say it.”

“Oh, they’re not so much better than women,” said Fulkerson, with a nervous jocosity. “I guess March would have backed down if it hadn’t been for his wife. She was as hot as pepper about it, and you could see that she would have sacrificed all her husband’s relations sooner than let him back down an inch from the stand he had taken. It’s pretty easy for a man to stick to a principle if he has a woman to stand by him. But when you come to play it alone–“

“Mr. Fulkerson,” said the girl, solemnly, “Ah will stand bah you in this, if all the woald tones against you.” The tears came into her eyes, and she put out her hand to him.

“You will?” he shouted, in a rapture. “In every way–and always–as long as you live? Do you mean it?” He had caught her hand to his breast and was grappling it tight there and drawing her to him.

The changing emotions chased one another through her heart and over her face: dismay, shame, pride, tenderness. “You don’t believe,” she said, hoarsely, “that Ah meant that?”

“No, but I hope you do mean it; for if you don’t, nothing else means anything.”

There was no space, there was only a point of wavering. “Ah do mean it.”

When they lifted their eyes from each other again it was half-past ten. “No’ you most go,” she said.

“But the colonel–our fate?”

“The co’nel is often oat late, and Ah’m not afraid of ouah fate, no’ that we’ve taken it into ouah own hands.” She looked at him with dewy eyes of trust, of inspiration.

“Oh, it’s going to come out all right,” he said. “It can’t come out wrong now, no matter what happens. But who’d have thought it, when I came into this house, in such a state of sin and misery, half an hour ago–“

“Three houahs and a half ago!” she said. “No! you most jost go. Ah’m tahed to death. Good-night. You can come in the mawning to see-papa.” She opened the door and pushed him out with enrapturing violence, and he ran laughing down the steps into her father’s arms.

“Why, colonel! I was just going up to meet you.” He had really thought he would walk off his exultation in that direction.

“I am very sorry to say, Mr. Fulkerson,” the colonel began, gravely, “that Mr. Dryfoos adheres to his position.”

“Oh, all right,” said Fulkerson, with unabated joy. “It’s what I expected. Well, my course is clear; I shall stand by March, and I guess the world won’t come to an end if he bounces us both. But I’m everlastingly obliged to you, Colonel Woodburn, and I don’t know what to say to you. I–I won’t detain you now; it’s so late. I’ll see you in the morning. Good-ni–“

Fulkerson did not realize that it takes two to part. The colonel laid hold of his arm and turned away with him. “I will walk toward your place with you. I can understand why you should be anxious to know the particulars of my interview with Mr. Dryfoos”; and in the statement which followed he did not spare him the smallest. It outlasted their walk and detained them long on the steps of the ‘Every Other Week’ building. But at the end Fulkerson let himself in with his key as light of heart as if he had been listening to the gayest promises that fortune could make.

By the tune he met March at the office next morning, a little, but only a very little, misgiving saddened his golden heaven. He took March’s hand with high courage, and said, “Well, the old man sticks to his point, March.” He added, with the sense of saying it before Miss Woodburn: “And I stick by you. I’ve thought it all over, and I’d rather be right with you than wrong with him.”

“Well, I appreciate your motive, Fulkerson,” said March. “But perhaps– perhaps we can save over our heroics for another occasion. Lindau seems to have got in with his, for the present.”

He told him of Lindau’s last visit, and they stood a moment looking at each other rather queerly. Fulkerson was the first to recover his spirits. “Well,” he said, cheerily, “that let’s us out.”

“Does it? I’m not sure it lets me out,” said March; but he said this in tribute to his crippled self-respect rather than as a forecast of any action in the matter.

“Why, what are you going to do?” Fulkerson asked. “If Lindau won’t work for Dryfoos, you can’t make him.”

March sighed. “What are you going to do with this money?” He glanced at the heap of bills he had flung on the table between them.

Fulkerson scratched his head. “Ah, dogged if I know: Can’t we give it to the deserving poor, somehow, if we can find ’em?”

“I suppose we’ve no right to use it in any way. You must give it to Dryfoos.”

“To the deserving rich? Well, you can always find them. I reckon you don’t want to appear in the transaction! I don’t, either; but I guess I must.” Fulkerson gathered up the money and carried it to Conrad. He directed him to account for it in his books as conscience-money, and he enjoyed the joke more than Conrad seemed to do when he was told where it came from.

Fulkerson was able to wear off the disagreeable impression the affair left during the course of the fore-noon, and he met Miss Woodburn with all a lover’s buoyancy when he went to lunch. She was as happy as he when he told her how fortunately the whole thing had ended, and he took her view that it was a reward of his courage in having dared the worst. They both felt, as the newly plighted always do, that they were in the best relations with the beneficent powers, and that their felicity had been especially looked to in the disposition of events. They were in a glow of rapturous content with themselves and radiant worship of each other; she was sure that he merited the bright future opening to them both, as much as if he owed it directly to some noble action of his own; he felt that he was indebted for the favor of Heaven entirely to the still incredible accident of her preference of him over other men.

Colonel Woodburn, who was not yet in the secret of their love, perhaps failed for this reason to share their satisfaction with a result so unexpectedly brought about. The blessing on their hopes seemed to his ignorance to involve certain sacrifices of personal feeling at which he hinted in suggesting that Dryfoos should now be asked to make some abstract concessions and acknowledgments; his daughter hastened to deny that these were at all necessary; and Fulkerson easily explained why. The thing was over; what was the use of opening it up again?

“Perhaps none,” the colonel admitted. But he added, “I should like the opportunity of taking Mr. Lindau’s hand in the presence of Mr. Dryfoos and assuring him that I considered him a man of principle and a man of honor–a gentleman, sir, whom I was proud and happy to have known.”

“Well, Ah’ve no doabt,” said his daughter, demurely, “that you’ll have the chance some day; and we would all lahke to join you. But at the same tahme, Ah think Mr. Fulkerson is well oat of it fo’ the present.”

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

Anticipative reprisal
Buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience Courtship
Got their laugh out of too many things in life Had learned not to censure the irretrievable Had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance Ignorant of her ignorance
It don’t do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time Justice must be paid for at every step in fees and costs Life has taught him to truckle and trick Man’s willingness to abide in the present No longer the gross appetite for novelty No right to burden our friends with our decisions Travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues Typical anything else, is pretty difficult to find

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

By William Dean Howells

PART FIFTH

I.

Superficially, the affairs of ‘Every Other Week’ settled into their wonted form again, and for Fulkerson they seemed thoroughly reinstated. But March had a feeling of impermanency from what had happened, mixed with a fantastic sense of shame toward Lindau. He did not sympathize with Lindau’s opinions; he thought his remedy for existing evils as wildly impracticable as Colonel Woodburn’s. But while he thought this, and while he could justly blame Fulkerson for Lindau’s presence at Dryfoos’s dinner, which his zeal had brought about in spite of March’s protests, still he could not rid himself of the reproach of uncandor with Lindau. He ought to have told him frankly about the ownership of the magazine, and what manner of man the man was whose money he was taking. But he said that he never could have imagined that he was serious in his preposterous attitude in regard to a class of men who embody half the prosperity of the country; and he had moments of revolt against his own humiliation before Lindau, in which he found it monstrous that he should return Dryfoos’s money as if it had been the spoil of a robber. His wife agreed with him in these moments, and said it was a great relief not to have that tiresome old German coming about. They had to account for his absence evasively to the children, whom they could not very well tell that their father was living on money that Lindau disdained to take, even though Lindau was wrong and their father was right. This heightened Mrs. March’s resentment toward both Lindau and Dryfoos, who between them had placed her husband in a false position. If anything, she resented Dryfoos’s conduct more than Lindau’s. He had never spoken to March about the affair since Lindau had renounced his work, or added to the apologetic messages he had sent by Fulkerson. So far as March knew, Dryfoos had been left to suppose that Lindau had simply stopped for some reason that did not personally affect him. They never spoke of him, and March was too proud to ask either Fulkerson or Conrad whether the old man knew that Lindau had returned his money. He avoided talking to Conrad, from a feeling that if be did he should involuntarily lead him on to speak of his differences with his father. Between himself and Fulkerson, even, he was uneasily aware of a want of their old perfect friendliness. Fulkerson had finally behaved with honor and courage; but his provisional reluctance had given March the measure of Fulkerson’s character in one direction, and he could not ignore the fact that it was smaller than he could have wished.

He could not make out whether Fulkerson shared his discomfort or not. It certainly wore away, even with March, as time passed, and with Fulkerson, in the bliss of his fortunate love, it was probably far more transient, if it existed at all. He advanced into the winter as radiantly as if to meet the spring, and he said that if there were any pleasanter month of the year than November, it was December, especially when the weather was good and wet and muddy most of the time, so that you had to keep indoors a long while after you called anywhere.

Colonel Woodburn had the anxiety, in view of his daughter’s engagement, when she asked his consent to it, that such a dreamer must have in regard to any reality that threatens to affect the course of his reveries. He had not perhaps taken her marriage into account, except as a remote contingency; and certainly Fulkerson was not the kind of son-in-law that he had imagined in dealing with that abstraction. But because he had nothing of the sort definitely in mind, he could not oppose the selection of Fulkerson with success; he really knew nothing against him, and he knew, many things in his favor; Fulkerson inspired him with the liking that every one felt for him in a measure; he amused him, he cheered him; and the colonel had been so much used to leaving action of all kinds to his daughter that when he came to close quarters with the question of a son-in-law he felt helpless to decide it, and he let her decide it, as if it were still to be decided when it was submitted to him. She was competent to treat it in all its phases: not merely those of personal interest, but those of duty to the broken Southern past, sentimentally dear to him, and practically absurd to her. No such South as he remembered had ever existed to her knowledge, and no such civilization as he imagined would ever exist, to her belief, anywhere. She took the world as she found it, and made the best of it. She trusted in Fulkerson; she had proved his magnanimity in a serious emergency; and in small things she was willing fearlessly to chance it with him. She was not a sentimentalist, and there was nothing fantastic in her expectations; she was a girl of good sense and right mind, and she liked the immediate practicality as well as the final honor of Fulkerson. She did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him; she did him justice, and she would not have believed that she did him more than justice if she had sometimes known him to do himself less.

Their engagement was a fact to which the Leighton household adjusted itself almost as simply as the lovers themselves; Miss Woodburn told the ladies at once, and it was not a thing that Fulkerson could keep from March very long. He sent word of it to Mrs. March by her husband; and his engagement perhaps did more than anything else to confirm the confidence in him which had been shaken by his early behavior in the Lindau episode, and not wholly restored by his tardy fidelity to March. But now she felt that a man who wished to get married so obviously and entirely for love was full of all kinds of the best instincts, and only needed the guidance of a wife, to become very noble. She interested herself intensely in balancing the respective merits of the engaged couple, and after her call upon Miss Woodburn in her new character she prided herself upon recognizing the worth of some strictly Southern qualities in her, while maintaining the general average of New England superiority. She could not reconcile herself to the Virginian custom illustrated in her having been christened with the surname of Madison; and she said that its pet form of Mad, which Fulkerson promptly invented, only made it more ridiculous.

Fulkerson was slower in telling Beaton. He was afraid, somehow, of Beaton’s taking the matter in the cynical way; Miss Woodburn said she would break off the engagement if Beaton was left to guess it or find it out by accident, and then Fulkerson plucked up his courage. Beaton received the news with gravity, and with a sort of melancholy meekness that strongly moved Fulkerson’s sympathy, and made him wish that Beaton was engaged, too.

It made Beaton feel very old; it somehow left him behind and forgotten; in a manner, it made him feel trifled with. Something of the unfriendliness of fate seemed to overcast his resentment, and he allowed the sadness of his conviction that he had not the means to marry on to tinge his recognition of the fact that Alma Leighton would not have wanted him to marry her if he had. He was now often in that martyr mood in which he wished to help his father; not only to deny himself Chianti, but to forego a fur-lined overcoat which he intended to get for the winter, He postponed the moment of actual sacrifice as regarded the Chianti, and he bought the overcoat in an anguish of self-reproach. He wore it the first evening after he got it in going to call upon the Leightons, and it seemed to him a piece of ghastly irony when Alma complimented his picturesqueness in it and asked him to let her sketch him.

“Oh, you can sketch me,” he said, with so much gloom that it made her laugh.

“If you think it’s so serious, I’d rather not.”

“No, no! Go ahead! How do you want me?”

Oh, fling yourself down on a chair in one of your attitudes of studied negligence; and twist one corner of your mustache with affected absence of mind.”

“And you think I’m always studied, always affected?”

“I didn’t say so.”

“I didn’t ask you what you said.”

“And I won’t tell you what I think.”

“Ah, I know what you think.”

“What made you ask, then?” The girl laughed again with the satisfaction of her sex in cornering a man.

Beaton made a show of not deigning to reply, and put himself in the pose she suggested, frowning.

“Ah, that’s it. But a little more animation–

“‘As when a great thought strikes along the brain, And flushes all the cheek.'”

She put her forehead down on the back of her hand and laughed again. “You ought to be photographed. You look as if you were sitting for it.”

Beaton said: “That’s because I know I am being photographed, in one way. I don’t think you ought to call me affected. I never am so with you; I know it wouldn’t be of any use.”

“Oh, Mr. Beaton, you flatter.”

“No, I never flatter you.”

“I meant you flattered yourself.”

“How?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Imagine.”

“I know what you mean. You think I can’t be sincere with anybody.”

“Oh no, I don’t.”

“What do you think?”

“That you can’t–try.” Alma gave another victorious laugh.

Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson would once have both feigned a great interest in Alma’s sketching Beaton, and made it the subject of talk, in which they approached as nearly as possible the real interest of their lives. Now they frankly remained away in the dining-room, which was very cozy after the dinner had disappeared; the colonel sat with his lamp and paper in the gallery beyond; Mrs. Leighton was about her housekeeping affairs, in the content she always felt when Alma was with Beaton.

“They seem to be having a pretty good time in there,” said Fulkerson, detaching himself from his own absolute good time as well as he could.

“At least Alma does,” said Miss Woodburn.

“Do you think she cares for him?”

“Quahte as moch as he desoves.”

“What makes you all down on Beaton around here? He’s not such a bad fellow.”

“We awe not all doan on him. Mrs. Leighton isn’t doan on him.”

“Oh, I guess if it was the old lady, there wouldn’t be much question about it.”

They both laughed, and Alma said, “They seem to be greatly amused with something in there.”

“Me, probably,” said Beaton. “I seem to amuse everybody to-night.”

“Don’t you always?”

“I always amuse you, I’m afraid, Alma.”

She looked at him as if she were going to snub him openly for using her name; but apparently she decided to do it covertly. “You didn’t at first. I really used to believe you could be serious, once.”

“Couldn’t you believe it again? Now?”

“Not when you put on that wind-harp stop.”

“Wetmore has been talking to you about me. He would sacrifice his best friend to a phrase. He spends his time making them.”

“He’s made some very pretty ones about you.”

“Like the one you just quoted?”

“No, not exactly. He admires you ever so much. He says” She stopped, teasingly.

“What?”

“He says you could be almost anything you wished, if you didn’t wish to be everything.”

“That sounds more like the school of Wetmore. That’s what you say, Alma. Well, if there were something you wished me to be, I could be it.”

“We might adapt Kingsley: ‘Be good, sweet man, and let who will be clever.'” He could not help laughing. She went on: “I always thought that was the most patronizing and exasperating thing ever addressed to a human girl; and we’ve had to stand a good deal in our time. I should like to have it applied to the other ‘sect’ a while. As if any girl that was a girl would be good if she had the remotest chance of being clever.”

“Then you wouldn’t wish me to be good?” Beaton asked.

“Not if you were a girl.”

“You want to shock me. Well, I suppose I deserve it. But if I were one- tenth part as good as you are, Alma, I should have a lighter heart than I have now. I know that I’m fickle, but I’m not false, as you think I am.”

“Who said I thought you were false?”

“No one,” said Beaton. “It isn’t necessary, when you look it–live it.”

“Oh, dear! I didn’t know I devoted my whole time to the subject.”

“I know I’m despicable. I could tell you something–the history of this day, even–that would make you despise me.” Beaton had in mind his purchase of the overcoat, which Alma was getting in so effectively, with the money he ought to have sent his father. “But,” he went on, darkly, with a sense that what he was that moment suffering for his selfishness must somehow be a kind of atonement, which would finally leave him to the guiltless enjoyment of the overcoat, “you wouldn’t believe the depths of baseness I could descend to.”

“I would try,” said Alma, rapidly shading the collar, “if you’d give me some hint.”

Beaton had a sudden wish to pour out his remorse to her, but he was afraid of her laughing at him. He said to himself that this was a very wholesome fear, and that if he could always have her at hand he should not make a fool of himself so often. A man conceives of such an office as the very noblest for a woman; he worships her for it if he is magnanimous. But Beaton was silent, and Alma put back her head for the right distance on her sketch. “Mr. Fulkerson thinks you are the sublimest of human beings for advising him to get Colonel Woodburn to interview Mr. Dryfoos about Lindau. What have you ever done with your Judas?”

“I haven’t done anything with it. Nadel thought he would take hold of it at one time, but he dropped it again. After all, I don’t suppose it could be popularized. Fulkerson wanted to offer it as a premium to subscribers for ‘Every Other Week,’ but I sat down on that.”

Alma could not feel the absurdity of this, and she merely said, “‘Every Other Week’ seems to be going on just the same as ever.”

“Yes, the trouble has all blown over, I believe. Fulkerson,” said Beaton, with a return to what they were saying, “has managed the whole business very well. But he exaggerates the value of my advice.”

“Very likely,” Alma suggested, vaguely. “Or, no! Excuse me! He couldn’t, he couldn’t!” She laughed delightedly at Beaton’s foolish look of embarrassment.

He tried to recover his dignity in saying, “He’s ‘a very good fellow, and he deserves his happiness.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Alma, perversely. “Does any one deserve happiness?”

“I know I don’t,” sighed Beaton.

“You mean you don’t get it.”

“I certainly don’t get it.”

“Ah, but that isn’t the reason.”

“What is?”

“That’s the secret of the universe,” She bit in her lower lip, and looked at him with eyes, of gleaming fun.

“Are you never serious?” he asked.

“With serious people always.”

“I am serious; and you have the secret of my happiness–” He threw himself impulsively forward in his chair.

“Oh, pose, pose!” she cried.

“I won’t pose,” he answered, “and you have got to listen to me. You know I’m in love with you; and I know that once you cared for me. Can’t that time–won’t it–come back again? Try to think so, Alma!”

“No,” she said, briefly and seriously enough.

“But that seems impossible. What is it I’ve done what have you against me?”

“Nothing. But that time is past. I couldn’t recall it if I wished. Why did you bring it up? You’ve broken your word. You know I wouldn’t have let you keep coming here if you hadn’t promised never to refer to it.”

“How could I help it? With that happiness near us–Fulkerson–“

“Oh, it’s that? I might have known it!”

“No, it isn’t that–it’s something far deeper. But if it’s nothing you have against me, what is it, Alma, that keeps you from caring for me now as you did then? I haven’t changed.”

“But I have. I shall never care for you again, Mr. Beaton; you might as well understand it once for all. Don’t think it’s anything in yourself, or that I think you unworthy of me. I’m not so self-satisfied as that; I know very well that I’m not a perfect character, and that I’ve no claim on perfection in anybody else. I think women who want that are fools; they won’t get it, and they don’t deserve it. But I’ve learned a good. deal more about myself than I knew in St. Barnaby, and a life of work, of art, and of art alone that’s what I’ve made up my mind to.”

“A woman that’s made up her mind to that has no heart to hinder her!”

“Would a man have that had done so?”

“But I don’t believe you, Alma. You’re merely laughing at me. And, besides, with me you needn’t give up art. We could work together. You know how much I admire your talent. I believe I could help it–serve it; I would be its willing slave, and yours, Heaven knows!”

“I don’t want any slave–nor any slavery. I want to be free always. Now do you see? I don’t care for you, and I never could in the old way; but I should have to care for some one more than I believe I ever shall to give up my work. Shall we go on?” She looked at her sketch.

“No, we shall not go on,” he said, gloomily, as he rose.

“I suppose you blame me,” she said, rising too.

“Oh no! I blame no one–or only myself. I threw my chance away.”

“I’m glad you see that; and I’m glad you did it. You don’t believe me, of course. Why do men think life can be only the one thing to women? And if you come to the selfish view, who are the happy women? I’m sure that if work doesn’t fail me, health won’t, and happiness won’t.”

“But you could work on with me–“

“Second fiddle. Do you suppose I shouldn’t be woman enough to wish my work always less and lower than yours? At least I’ve heart enough for that!”

“You’ve heart enough for anything, Alma. I was a fool to say you hadn’t.”

“I think the women who keep their hearts have an even chance, at least, of having heart–“

“Ah, there’s where you’re wrong!”

“But mine isn’t mine to give you, anyhow. And now I don’t want you ever to speak to me about this again.”

“Oh, there’s no danger!” he cried, bitterly. “I shall never willingly see you again.”

“That’s as you like, Mr. Beaton. We’ve had to be very frank, but I don’t see why we shouldn’t be friends. Still, we needn’t, if you don’t like.”

“And I may come–I may come here–as–as usual?”

“Why, if you can consistently,” she said, with a smile, and she held out her hand to him.

He went home dazed, and feeling as if it were a bad joke that had been put upon him. At least the affair went so deep that it estranged the aspect of his familiar studio. Some of the things in it were not very familiar; he had spent lately a great deal on rugs, on stuffs, on Japanese bric-a-brac. When he saw these things in the shops he had felt that he must have them; that they were necessary to him; and he was partly in debt for them, still without having sent any of his earnings to pay his father. As he looked at them now he liked to fancy something weird and conscious in them as the silent witnesses of a broken life. He felt about among some of the smaller objects on the mantel for his pipe. Before he slept he was aware, in the luxury of his despair, of a remote relief, an escape; and, after all, the understanding he had come to with Alma was only the explicit formulation of terms long tacit between them. Beaton would have been puzzled more than he knew if she had taken him seriously. It was inevitable that he should declare himself in love with her; but he was not disappointed at her rejection of his love; perhaps not so much as he would have been at its acceptance, though he tried to think otherwise, and to give himself airs of tragedy. He did not really feel that the result was worse than what had gone before, and it left him free.

But he did not go to the Leightons again for so long a time that Mrs. Leighton asked Alma what had happened. Alma told her.

“And he won’t come any more?” her mother sighed, with reserved censure.

“Oh, I think he will. He couldn’t very well come the next night. But he has the habit of coming, and with Mr. Beaton habit is everything–even the habit of thinking he’s in love with some one.”

“Alma,” said her mother, “I don’t think it’s very nice for a girl to let a young man keep coming to see her after she’s refused him.”

“Why not, if it amuses him and doesn’t hurt the girl?”

“But it does hurt her, Alma. It–it’s indelicate. It isn’t fair to him; it gives him hopes.”

“Well, mamma, it hasn’t happened in the given case yet. If Mr. Beaton comes again, I won’t see him, and you can forbid him the house.”

“If I could only feel sure, Alma,” said her mother, taking up another branch of the inquiry, “that you really knew your own mind, I should be easier about it.”

“Then you can rest perfectly quiet, mamma. I do know my own mind; and, what’s worse, I know Mr. Beaton’s mind.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that he spoke to me the other night simply because Mr. Fulkerson’s engagement had broken him all up.”

“What expressions!” Mrs. Leighton lamented.

“He let it out himself,” Alma went on. “And you wouldn’t have thought it was very flattering yourself. When I’m made love to, after this, I prefer to be made love to in an off-year, when there isn’t another engaged couple anywhere about.”

“Did you tell him that, Alma?”

“Tell him that! What do you mean, mamma? I may be indelicate, but I’m not quite so indelicate as that.”

“I didn’t mean you were indelicate, really, Alma, but I wanted to warn you. I think Mr. Beaton was very much in earnest.”

“Oh, so did he!”

“And you didn’t?”

“Oh yes, for the time being. I suppose he’s very much in earnest with Miss Vance at times, and with Miss Dryfoos at others. Sometimes he’s a painter, and sometimes he’s an architect, and sometimes he’s a sculptor. He has too many gifts–too many tastes.”

“And if Miss Vance and Miss Dryfoos–“

“Oh, do say Sculpture and Architecture, mamma! It’s getting so dreadfully personal!”

“Alma, you know that I only wish to get at your real feeling in the matter.”

“And you know that I don’t want to let you–especially when I haven’t got any real feeling in the matter. But I should think–speaking in the abstract entirely–that if either of those arts was ever going to be in earnest about him, it would want his exclusive devotion for a week at least.”

“I didn’t know,” said Mrs. Leighton, “that he was doing anything now at the others. I thought he was entirely taken up with his work on ‘Every Other Week.'”

“Oh, he is! he is!”

“And you certainly can’t say, my dear, that he hasn’t been very kind– very useful to you, in that matter.”

“And so I ought to have said yes out of gratitude? Thank you, mamma! I didn’t know you held me so cheap.”

“You know whether I hold you cheap or not, Alma. I don’t want you to cheapen yourself. I don’t want you to trifle with any one. I want you to be honest with yourself.”

“Well, come now, mamma! Suppose you begin. I’ve been perfectly honest with myself, and I’ve been honest with Mr. Beaton. I don’t care for him, and I’ve told him I didn’t; so he may be supposed to know it. If he comes here after this, he’ll come as a plain, unostentatious friend of the family, and it’s for you to say whether he shall come in that capacity or not. I hope you won’t trifle with him, and let him get the notion that he’s coming on any other basis.”

Mrs. Leighton felt the comfort of the critical attitude far too keenly to abandon it for anything constructive. She only said, “You know very well, Alma, that’s a matter I can have nothing to do with.”

“Then you leave him entirely to me?”

“I hope you will regard his right to candid and open treatment.”

“He’s had nothing but the most open and candid treatment from me, mamma. It’s you that wants to play fast and loose with him. And, to tell you the truth, I believe he would like that a good deal better; I believe that, if there’s anything he hates, it’s openness and candor.” Alma laughed, and put her arms round her mother, who could not help laughing a little, too.

II.

The winter did not renew for Christine and Mela the social opportunity which the spring had offered. After the musicale at Mrs. Horn’s, they both made their party-call, as Mela said, in due season; but they did not find Mrs. Horn at home, and neither she nor Miss Vance came to see them after people returned to town in the fall. They tried to believe for a time that Mrs. Horn had not got their cards; this pretence failed them, and they fell back upon their pride, or rather Christine’s pride. Mela had little but her good-nature to avail her in any exigency, and if Mrs. Horn or Miss Vance had come to call after a year of neglect, she would have received them as amiably as if they had not lost a day in coming. But Christine had drawn a line beyond which they would not have been forgiven; and she had planned the words and the behavior with which she would have punished them if they had appeared then. Neither sister imagined herself in anywise inferior to them; but Christine was suspicious, at least, and it was Mela who invented the hypothesis of the lost cards. As nothing happened to prove or to disprove the fact, she said, “I move we put Coonrod up to gittun’ it out of Miss Vance, at some of their meetun’s.”

“If you do,” said Christine, “I’ll kill you.”

Christine, however, had the visits of Beaton to console her, and, if these seemed to have no definite aim, she was willing to rest in the pleasure they gave her vanity; but Mela had nothing. Sometimes she even wished they were all back on the farm.

“It would be the best thing for both of you,” said Mrs. Dryfoos, in answer to such a burst of desperation. “I don’t think New York is any place for girls.”

“Well, what I hate, mother,” said Mela, “is, it don’t seem to be any place for young men, either.” She found this so good when she had said it that she laughed over it till Christine was angry.

“A body would think there had never been any joke before.”

“I don’t see as it’s a joke,” said Mrs. Dryfoos. “It’s the plain truth.”

“Oh, don’t mind her, mother,” said Mela. “She’s put out because her old Mr. Beaton ha’r’t been round for a couple o’ weeks. If you don’t watch out, that fellow ‘ll give you the slip yit, Christine, after all your pains.”

“Well, there ain’t anybody to give you the slip, Mela,” Christine clawed back.

“No; I ha’n’t ever set my traps for anybody.” This was what Mela said for want of a better retort; but it was not quite true. When Kendricks came with Beaton to call after her father’s dinner, she used all her cunning to ensnare him, and she had him to herself as long as Beaton stayed; Dryfoos sent down word that he was not very well and had gone to bed. The novelty of Mela had worn off for Kendricks, and she found him, as she frankly told him, not half as entertaining as he was at Mrs. Horn’s; but she did her best with him as the only flirtable material which had yet come to her hand. It would have been her ideal to have the young men stay till past midnight, and her father come down-stairs in his stocking-feet and tell them it was time to go. But they made a visit of decorous brevity, and Kendricks did not come again. She met him afterward, once, as she was crossing the pavement in Union Square to get into her coupe, and made the most of him; but it was necessarily very little, and so he passed out of her life without having left any trace in her heart, though Mela had a heart that she would have put at the disposition of almost any young man that wanted it. Kendricks himself, Manhattan cockney as he was, with scarcely more out look into the average American nature than if he had been kept a prisoner in New York society all his days, perceived a property in her which forbade him as a man of conscience to trifle with her; something earthly good and kind, if it was simple and vulgar. In revising his impressions of her, it seemed to him that she would come even to better literary effect if this were recognized in her; and it made her sacred, in spite of her willingness to fool and to be fooled, in her merely human quality. After all, he saw that she wished honestly to love and to be loved, and the lures she threw out to that end seemed to him pathetic rather than ridiculous; he could not join Beaton in laughing at her; and he did not like Beaton’s laughing at the other girl, either. It seemed to Kendricks, with the code of honor which he mostly kept to himself because he was a little ashamed to find there were so few others like it, that if Beaton cared nothing for the other girl–and Christine appeared simply detestable to Kendricks– he had better keep away from her, and not give her the impression he was in love with her. He rather fancied that this was the part of a gentleman, and he could not have penetrated to that aesthetic and moral complexity which formed the consciousness of a nature like Beaton’s and was chiefly a torment to itself; he could not have conceived of the wayward impulses indulged at every moment in little things till the straight highway was traversed and well-nigh lost under their tangle. To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes, even though one continues to do what one will; but Kendricks, though a sage of twenty-seven, was still too young to understand this.

Beaton scarcely understood it himself, perhaps because he was not yet twenty-seven. He only knew that his will was somehow sick; that it spent itself in caprices, and brought him no happiness from the fulfilment of the most vehement wish. But he was aware that his wishes grew less and less vehement; he began to have a fear that some time he might have none at all. It seemed to him that if he could once do something that was thoroughly distasteful to himself, he might make a beginning in the right direction; but when he tried this on a small scale, it failed, and it seemed stupid. Some sort of expiation was the thing he needed, he was sure; but he could not think of anything in particular to expiate; a man could not expiate his temperament, and his temperament was what Beaton decided to be at fault. He perceived that it went deeper than even fate would have gone; he could have fulfilled an evil destiny and had done with it, however terrible. His trouble was that he could not escape from himself; and, for the most part, he justified himself in refusing to try. After he had come to that distinct understanding with Alma Leighton, and experienced the relief it really gave him, he thought for a while that if it had fallen out otherwise, and she had put him in charge of her destiny, he might have been better able to manage his own. But as it was, he could only drift, and let all other things take their course. It was necessary that he should go to see her afterward, to show her that he was equal to the event; but he did not go so often, and he went rather oftener to the Dryfooses; it was not easy to see Margaret Vance, except on the society terms. With much sneering and scorning, he fulfilled the duties to Mrs. Horn without which he knew he should be dropped from her list; but one might go to many of her Thursdays without getting many words with her niece. Beaton hardly knew whether he wanted many; the girl kept the charm of her innocent stylishness; but latterly she wanted to talk more about social questions than about the psychical problems that young people usually debate so personally. Son of the working- people as he was, Beaton had never cared anything about such matters; he did not know about them or wish to know; he was perhaps too near them. Besides, there was an embarrassment, at least on her part, concerning the Dryfooses. She was too high-minded to blame him for having tempted her to her failure with them by his talk about them; but she was conscious of avoiding them in her talk. She had decided not to renew the effort she had made in the spring; because she could not do them good as fellow- creatures needing food and warmth and work, and she would not try to befriend them socially; she had a horror of any such futile sentimentality. She would have liked to account to Beaton in this way for a course which she suspected he must have heard their comments upon, but she did not quite know how to do it; she could not be sure how much or how little he cared for them. Some tentative approaches which she made toward explanation were met with such eager disclaim of personal interest that she knew less than before what to think; and she turned the talk from the sisters to the brother, whom it seemed she still continued to meet in their common work among the poor.

“He seems very different,” she ventured.

“Oh, quite,” said Beaton. “He’s the kind of person that you might suppose gave the Catholics a hint for the cloistral life; he’s a cloistered nature–the nature that atones and suffers for. But he’s awfully dull company, don’t you think? I never can get anything out of him.”

“He’s very much in earnest.”

“Remorselessly. We’ve got a profane and mundane creature there at the office who runs us all, and it’s shocking merely to see the contact of the tyro natures. When Fulkerson gets to joking Dryfoos–he likes to put his joke in the form of a pretence that Dryfoos is actuated by a selfish motive, that he has an eye to office, and is working up a political interest for himself on the East Side–it’s something inexpressible.”

“I should think so,” said Miss Vance, with such lofty disapproval that Beaton felt himself included in it for having merely told what caused it. He could not help saying, in natural rebellion, “Well, the man of one idea is always a little ridiculous.”

“When his idea is right?” she demanded. “A right idea can’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh, I only said the man that held it was. He’s flat; he has no relief, no projection.”

She seemed unable to answer, and he perceived that he had silenced her to his own, disadvantage. It appeared to Beaton that she was becoming a little too exacting for comfort in her idealism. He put down the cup of tea he had been tasting, and said, in his solemn staccato: “I must go. Good-bye!” and got instantly away from her, with an effect he had of having suddenly thought of something imperative.

He went up to Mrs. Horn for a moment’s hail and farewell, and felt himself subtly detained by her through fugitive passages of conversation with half a dozen other people. He fancied that at crises of this strange interview Mrs. Horn was about to become confidential with him, and confidential, of all things, about her niece. She ended by not having palpably been so. In fact, the concern in her mind would have been difficult to impart to a young man, and after several experiments Mrs. Horn found it impossible to say that she wished Margaret could somehow be interested in lower things than those which occupied her. She had watched with growing anxiety the girl’s tendency to various kinds of self-devotion. She had dark hours in which she even feared her entire withdrawal from the world in a life of good works. Before now, girls had entered the Protestant sisterhoods, which appeal so potently to the young and generous imagination, and Margaret was of just the temperament to be influenced by them. During the past summer she had been unhappy at her separation from the cares that had engrossed her more and more as their stay in the city drew to an end in the spring, and she had hurried her aunt back to town earlier in the fall than she would have chosen to come. Margaret had her correspondents among the working-women whom she befriended. Mrs. Horn was at one time alarmed to find that Margaret was actually promoting a strike of the button-hole workers. This, of course, had its ludicrous side, in connection with a young lady in good society, and a person of even so little humor as Mrs. Horn could not help seeing it. At the same time, she could not help foreboding the worst from it; she was afraid that Margaret’s health would give way under the strain, and that if she did not go into a sisterhood she would at least go into a decline. She began the winter with all such counteractive measures as she could employ. At an age when such things weary, she threw herself into the pleasures of society with the hope of dragging Margaret after her; and a sympathetic witness must have followed with compassion her course from ball to ball, from reception to reception, from parlor- reading to parlor-reading, from musicale to musicale, from play to play, from opera to opera. She tasted, after she had practically renounced them, the bitter and the insipid flavors of fashionable amusement, in the hope that Margaret might find them sweet, and now at the end she had to own to herself that she had failed. It was coming Lent again, and the girl had only grown thinner and more serious with the diversions that did not divert her from the baleful works of beneficence on which Mrs. Horn felt that she was throwing her youth away. Margaret could have borne either alone, but together they were wearing her out. She felt it a duty to undergo the pleasures her aunt appointed for her, but she could not forego the other duties in which she found her only pleasure.

She kept up her music still because she could employ it at the meetings for the entertainment, and, as she hoped, the elevation of her working- women; but she neglected the other aesthetic interests which once occupied her; and, at sight of Beaton talking with her, Mrs. Horn caught at the hope that he might somehow be turned to account in reviving Margaret’s former interest in art. She asked him if Mr. Wetmore had his classes that winter as usual; and she said she wished Margaret could be induced to go again: Mr. Wetmore always said that she did not draw very well, but that she had a great deal of feeling for it, and her work was interesting. She asked, were the Leightons in town again; and she murmured a regret that she had not been able to see anything of them, without explaining why; she said she had a fancy that if Margaret knew Miss Leighton, and what she was doing, it might stimulate her, perhaps. She supposed Miss Leighton was still going on with her art? Beaton said, Oh yes, he believed so.

But his manner did not encourage Mrs. Horn to pursue her aims in that direction, and she said, with a sigh, she wished he still had a class; she always fancied that Margaret got more good from his instruction than from any one else’s.

He said that she was very good; but there was really nobody who knew half as much as Wetmore, or could make any one understand half as much. Mrs. Horn was afraid, she said, that Mr. Wetmore’s terrible sincerity discouraged Margaret; he would not let her have any illusions about the outcome of what she was doing; and did not Mr. Beaton think that some illusion was necessary with young people? Of course, it was very nice of Mr. Wetmore to be so honest, but it did not always seem to be the wisest thing. She begged Mr. Beaton to try to think of some one who would be a little less severe. Her tone assumed a deeper interest in the people who were coming up and going away, and Beaton perceived that he was dismissed.

He went away with vanity flattered by the sense of having been appealed to concerning Margaret, and then he began to chafe at what she had said of Wetmore’s honesty, apropos of her wish that he still had a class himself. Did she mean, confound her? that he was insincere, and would let Miss Vance suppose she had more talent than she really had? The more Beaton thought of this, the more furious he became, and the more he was convinced that something like it had been unconsciously if not consciously in her mind. He framed some keen retorts, to the general effect that with the atmosphere of illusion preserved so completely at home, Miss Vance hardly needed it in her art studies. Having just determined never to go near Mrs. Horn’s Thursdays again, he decided to go once more, in order to plant this sting in her capacious but somewhat callous bosom; and he planned how he would lead the talk up to the point from which he should launch it.

In the mean time he felt the need of some present solace, such as only unqualified worship could give him; a cruel wish to feel his power in some direction where, even if it were resisted, it could not be overcome, drove him on. That a woman who was to Beaton the embodiment of artificiality should intimate, however innocently–the innocence made it all the worse–that he was less honest than Wetmore, whom he knew to be so much more honest, was something that must be retaliated somewhere before his self-respect could be restored. It was only five o’clock, and he went on up-town to the Dryfooses’, though he had been there only the night before last. He asked for the ladies, and Mrs. Mandel received him.

“The young ladies are down-town shopping,” she said, “but I am very glad of the opportunity of seeing you alone, Mr. Beaton. You know I lived several years in Europe.”

“Yes,” said Beaton, wondering what that could have to do with her pleasure in seeing him alone. “I believe so?” He involuntarily gave his words the questioning inflection.

“You have lived abroad, too, and so you won’t find what I am going to ask so strange. Mr. Beaton, why do you come so much to this house?” Mrs. Mandel bent forward with an aspect of ladylike interest and smiled.

Beaton frowned. “Why do I come so much?”

“Yes.”

“Why do I–Excuse me, Mrs. Mandel, but will you allow me to ask why you ask?”

“Oh, certainly. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t say, for I wish you to be very frank with me. I ask because there are two young ladies in this house; and, in a certain way, I have to take the place of a mother to them. I needn’t explain why; you know all the people here, and you understand. I have nothing to say about them, but I should not be speaking to you now if they were not all rather helpless people. They do not know the world they have come to live in here, and they cannot help themselves or one another. But you do know it, Mr. Beaton, and I am sure you know just how much or how little you mean by coming here. You are either interested in one of these young girls or you are not. If you are, I have nothing more to say. If you are not–” Mrs. Mandel continued to smile, but the smile had grown more perfunctory, and it had an icy gleam.

Beaton looked at her with surprise that he gravely kept to himself. He had always regarded her as a social nullity, with a kind of pity, to be sure, as a civilized person living among such people as the Dryfooses, but not without a humorous contempt; he had thought of her as Mandel, and sometimes as Old Mandel, though she was not half a score of years his senior, and was still well on the sunny side of forty. He reddened, and then turned an angry pallor. “Excuse me again, Mrs. Mandel. Do you ask this from the young ladies?”

“Certainly not,” she said, with the best temper, and with something in her tone that convicted Beaton of vulgarity, in putting his question of her authority in the form of a sneer. “As I have suggested, they would hardly know how to help themselves at all in such a matter. I have no objection to saying that I ask it from the father of the young ladies. Of course, in and for myself I should have no right to know anything about your affairs. I assure you the duty of knowing isn’t very pleasant.” The little tremor in her clear voice struck Beaton as something rather nice.

“I can very well believe that, Mrs. Mandel,” he said, with a dreamy sadness in his own. He lifted his eyes and looked into hers. “If I told you that I cared nothing about them in the way you intimate?”

“Then I should prefer to let you characterize your own conduct in continuing to come here for the year past, as you have done, and tacitly leading them on to infer differently.” They both mechanically kept up the fiction of plurality in speaking of Christine, but there was no doubt in the mind of either which of the young ladies the other meant. A good many thoughts went through Beaton’s mind, and none of them were flattering. He had not been unconscious that the part he had played toward this girl was ignoble, and that it had grown meaner as the fancy which her beauty had at first kindled in him had grown cooler. He was aware that of late he had been amusing himself with her passion in a way that was not less than cruel, not because he wished to do so, but because he was listless and wished nothing. He rose in saying: “I might be a little more lenient than you think, Mrs. Mandel; but I won’t trouble you with any palliating theory. I will not come any more.”

He bowed, and Mrs. Mandel said, “Of course, it’s only your action that I am concerned with.”

She seemed to him merely triumphant, and he could not conceive what it had cost her to nerve herself up to her too easy victory. He left Mrs. Mandel to a far harder lot than had fallen to him, and he went away hating her as an enemy who had humiliated him at a moment when he particularly needed exalting. It was really very simple for him to stop going to see Christine Dryfoos, but it was not at all simple for Mrs. Mandel to deal with the consequences of his not coming. He only thought how lightly she had stopped him, and the poor woman whom he had left trembling for what she had been obliged to do embodied for him the conscience that accused him of unpleasant things.

“By heavens! this is piling it up,” he said to himself through his set teeth, realizing how it had happened right on top of that stupid insult from Mrs. Horn. Now he should have to give up his place on ‘Every Other Week; he could not keep that, under the circumstances, even if some pretence were not made to get rid of him; he must hurry and anticipate any such pretence; he must see Fulkerson at once; he wondered where he should find him at that hour. He thought, with bitterness so real that it gave him a kind of tragical satisfaction, how certainly he could find him a little later at Mrs. Leighton’s; and Fulkerson’s happiness became an added injury.

The thing had, of course, come about just at the wrong time. There never had been a time when Beaton needed money more, when he had spent what he had and what he expected to have so recklessly. He was in debt to Fulkerson personally and officially for advance payments of salary. The thought of sending money home made him break into a scoffing laugh, which he turned into a cough in order to deceive the passers. What sort of face should he go with to Fulkerson and tell him that he renounced his employment on ‘Every Other Week;’ and what should he do when he had renounced it? Take pupils, perhaps; open a class? A lurid conception of a class conducted on those principles of shameless flattery at which Mrs. Horn had hinted–he believed now she had meant to insult him–presented itself. Why should not he act upon the suggestion? He thought with loathing for the whole race of women–dabblers in art. How easy the thing would be: as easy as to turn back now and tell that old fool’s girl that he loved her, and rake in half his millions. Why should not he do that? No one else cared for him; and at a year’s end, probably, one woman would be like another as far as the love was concerned, and probably he should not be more tired if the woman were Christine Dryfoos than if she were Margaret Vance. He kept Alma Leighton out of the question, because at the bottom of his heart he believed that she must be forever unlike every other woman to him.

The tide of his confused and aimless reverie had carried him far down- town, he thought; but when he looked up from it to see where he was he found himself on Sixth Avenue, only a little below Thirty-ninth Street, very hot and blown; that idiotic fur overcoat was stifling. He could not possibly walk down to Eleventh; he did not want to walk even to the Elevated station at Thirty-fourth; he stopped at the corner to wait for a surface-car, and fell again into his bitter fancies. After a while he roused himself and looked up the track, but there was no car coming. He found himself beside a policeman, who was lazily swinging his club by its thong from his wrist.

“When do you suppose a car will be along?” he asked, rather in a general sarcasm of the absence of the cars than in any special belief that the policeman could tell him.

The policeman waited to discharge his tobacco-juice into the gutter. “In about a week,” he said, nonchalantly.

“What’s the matter?” asked Beaton, wondering what the joke could be.

“Strike,” said the policeman. His interest in Beaton’s ignorance seemed to overcome his contempt of it. “Knocked off everywhere this morning except Third Avenue and one or two cross-town lines.” He spat again and kept his bulk at its incline over the gutter to glance at a group of men on the corner below: They were neatly dressed, and looked like something better than workingmen, and they had a holiday air of being in their best clothes.

“Some of the strikers?” asked Beaton.

The policeman nodded.

“Any trouble yet?”

“There won’t be any trouble till we begin to move the cars,” said the policeman.

Beaton felt a sudden turn of his rage toward the men whose action would now force him to walk five blocks and mount the stairs of the Elevated station. “If you’d take out eight or ten of those fellows,” he said, ferociously, “and set them up against a wall and shoot them, you’d save a great deal of bother.”

“I guess we sha’n’t have to shoot much,” said the policeman, still swinging his locust. “Anyway, we shant begin it. If it comes to a fight, though,” he said, with a look at the men under the scooping rim of his helmet, “we can drive the whole six thousand of ’em into the East River without pullin’ a trigger.”

“Are there six thousand in it?”

“About.”

“What do the infernal fools expect to live on?”

“The interest of their money, I suppose,” said the officer, with a grin of satisfaction in his irony. “It’s got to run its course. Then they’ll come back with their heads tied up and their tails between their legs, and plead to be taken on again.”

“If I was a manager of the roads,” said Beaton, thinking of how much he was already inconvenienced by the strike, and obscurely connecting it as one of the series with the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of Mrs. Horn and Mrs. Mandel, “I would see them starve before I’d take them back –every one of them.”

“Well,” said the policeman, impartially, as a man might whom the companies allowed to ride free, but who had made friends with a good many drivers and conductors in the course of his free riding, “I guess that’s what the roads would like to do if they could; but the men are too many for them, and there ain’t enough other men to take their places.”

“No matter,” said Beaton, severely. “They can bring in men from other places.”

“Oh, they’ll do that fast enough,” said the policeman.

A man came out of the saloon on the corner where the strikers were standing, noisy drunk, and they began, as they would have said, to have some fun with him. The policeman left Beaton, and sauntered slowly down toward the group as if in the natural course of an afternoon ramble. On the other side of the street Beaton could see another officer sauntering up from the block below. Looking up and down the avenue, so silent of its horse-car bells, he saw a policeman at every corner. It was rather impressive.

III.

The strike made a good deal of talk in it he office of ‘Every Other Week’ that is, it made Fulkerson talk a good deal. He congratulated himself that he was not personally incommoded by it, like some of the fellows who lived uptown, and had not everything under one roof, as it were. He enjoyed the excitement of it, and he kept the office boy running out to buy the extras which the newsmen came crying through the street almost every hour with a lamentable, unintelligible noise. He read not only the latest intelligence of the strike, but the editorial comments on it, which praised the firm attitude of both parties, and the admirable measures taken by the police to preserve order. Fulkerson enjoyed the interviews with the police captains and the leaders of the strike; he equally enjoyed the attempts of the reporters to interview the road managers, which were so graphically detailed, and with such a fine feeling for the right use of scare-heads as to have almost the value of direct expression from them, though it seemed that they had resolutely refused to speak. He said, at second-hand from the papers, that if the men behaved themselves and respected the rights of property, they would have public sympathy with them every time; but just as soon as they began to interfere with the roads’ right to manage their own affairs in their own way, they must be put down with an iron hand; the phrase “iron hand” did Fulkerson almost as much good as if it had never been used before. News began to come of fighting between the police and the strikers when the roads tried to move their cars with men imported from Philadelphia, and then Fulkerson rejoiced at the splendid courage of the police. At the same time, he believed what the strikers said, and that the trouble was not made by them, but by gangs of roughs acting without their approval. In this juncture he was relieved by the arrival of the State Board of Arbitration, which took up its quarters, with a great many scare-heads, at one of the principal hotels, and invited the roads and the strikers to lay the matter in dispute before them; he said that now we should see the working of the greatest piece of social machinery in modern times. But it appeared to work only in the alacrity of the strikers to submit their grievance. The road; were as one road in declaring that there was nothing to arbitrate, and that they were merely asserting their right to manage their own affairs in their own way. One of the presidents was reported to have told a member of the Board, who personally summoned him, to get out and to go about his business. Then, to Fulkerson’s extreme disappointment, the august tribunal, acting on behalf of the sovereign people in the interest of peace, declared itself powerless, and got out, and would, no doubt, have gone about its business if it had had any. Fulkerson did not know what to say, perhaps because the extras did not; but March laughed at this result.

“It’s a good deal like the military manoeuvre of the King of France and his forty thousand men. I suppose somebody told him at the top of the hill that there was nothing to arbitrate, and to get out and go about his business, and that was the reason he marched down after he had marched up with all that ceremony. What amuses me is to find that in an affair of this kind the roads have rights and the strikers have rights, but the public has no rights at all. The roads and the strikers are allowed to fight out a private war in our midst as thoroughly and precisely a private war as any we despise the Middle Ages for having tolerated– as any street war in Florence or Verona–and to fight it out at our pains and expense, and we stand by like sheep and wait till they get tired. It’s a funny attitude for a city of fifteen hundred thousand inhabitants.”

“What would you do?” asked Fulkerson, a good deal daunted by this view of the case.

“Do? Nothing. Hasn’t the State Board of Arbitration declared itself powerless? We have no hold upon the strikers; and we’re so used to being snubbed and disobliged by common carriers that we have forgotten our hold on the roads and always allow them to manage their own affairs in their own way, quite as if we had nothing to do with them and they owed us no services in return for their privileges.”

“That’s a good deal so,” said Fulkerson, disordering his hair. “Well, it’s nuts for the colonel nowadays. He says if he was boss of this town he would seize the roads on behalf of the people, and man ’em with policemen, and run ’em till the managers had come to terms with the strikers; and he’d do that every time there was a strike.”

“Doesn’t that rather savor of the paternalism he condemned in Lindau?” asked March.

“I don’t know. It savors of horse sense.”

“You are pretty far gone, Fulkerson. I thought you were the most engaged man I ever saw; but I guess you’re more father-in-lawed. And before you’re married, too.”

“Well, the colonel’s a glorious old fellow, March. I wish he had the power to do that thing, just for the fun of looking on while he waltzed in. He’s on the keen jump from morning till night, and he’s up late and early to see the row. I’m afraid he’ll get shot at some of the fights; he sees them all; I can’t get any show at them: haven’t seen a brickbat shied or a club swung yet. Have you?”

“No, I find I can philosophize the situation about as well from the papers, and that’s what I really want to do, I suppose. Besides, I’m solemnly pledged by Mrs. March not to go near any sort of crowd, under penalty of having her bring the children and go with me. Her theory is that we must all die together; the children haven’t been at school since the strike began. There’s no precaution that Mrs. March hasn’t used. She watches me whenever I go out, and sees that I start straight for this office.”

Fulkerson laughed and said: “Well, it’s probably the only thing that’s saved your life. Have you seen anything of Beaton lately?”

“No. You don’t mean to say he’s killed!”

“Not if he knows it. But I don’t know–What do you say, March? What’s the reason you couldn’t get us up a paper on the strike?”

“I knew it would fetch round to ‘Every Other Week,’ somehow.”

“No, but seriously. There ‘ll be plenty of news paper accounts. But you could treat it in the historical spirit–like something that happened several centuries ago; De Foe’s Plague of London style. Heigh? What made me think of it was Beaton. If I could get hold of him, you two could go round together and take down its aesthetic aspects. It’s a big thing, March, this strike is. I tell you it’s imposing to have a private war, as you say, fought out this way, in the heart of New York, and New York not minding, it a bit. See? Might take that view of it. With your descriptions and Beaton’s sketches–well, it would just be the greatest card! Come! What do you say?”

“Will you undertake to make it right with Mrs. March if I’m killed and she and the children are not killed with me?”

“Well, it would be difficult. I wonder how it would do to get Kendricks to do the literary part?”

“I’ve no doubt he’d jump at the chance. I’ve yet to see the form of literature that Kendricks wouldn’t lay down his life for.”

“Say!” March perceived that Fulkerson was about to vent another inspiration, and smiled patiently. “Look here! What’s the reason we couldn’t get one of the strikers to write it up for us?”

“Might have a symposium of strikers and presidents,” March suggested.

“No; I’m in earnest. They say some of those fellows-especially the foreigners–are educated men. I know one fellow–a Bohemian–that used to edit a Bohemian newspaper here. He could write it out in his kind of Dutch, and we could get Lindau to translate it.”

“I guess not,” said March, dryly.

“Why not? He’d do it for the cause, wouldn’t he? Suppose you put it up on him the next time you see him.”

“I don’t see Lindau any more,” said March. He added, “I guess he’s renounced me along with Mr. Dryfoos’s money.”

“Pshaw! You don’t mean he hasn’t been round since?”

“He came for a while, but he’s left off coming now. I don’t feel particularly gay about it,” March said, with some resentment of Fulkerson’s grin. “He’s left me in debt to him for lessons to the children.”

Fulkerson laughed out. “Well, he is the greatest old fool! Who’d ‘a’ thought he’d ‘a’ been in earnest with those ‘brincibles’ of his? But I suppose there have to be just such cranks; it takes all kinds to make a world.”

“There has to be one such crank, it seems,” March partially assented. “One’s enough for me.”

“I reckon this thing is nuts for Lindau, too,” said Fulkerson. “Why, it must act like a schooner of beer on him all the while, to see ‘gabidal’ embarrassed like it is by this strike. It must make old Lindau feel like he was back behind those barricades at Berlin. Well, he’s a splendid old fellow; pity he drinks, as I remarked once before.”

When March left the office he did not go home so directly as he came, perhaps because Mrs. March’s eye was not on him. He was very curious about some aspects of the strike, whose importance, as a great social convulsion, he felt people did not recognize; and, with his temperance in everything, he found its negative expressions as significant as its more violent phases. He had promised his wife solemnly that he would keep away from these, and he had a natural inclination to keep his promise; he had no wish to be that peaceful spectator who always gets shot when there is any firing on a mob. He interested himself in the apparent indifference of the mighty city, which kept on about its business as tranquilly as if the private war being fought out in its midst were a vague rumor of Indian troubles on the frontier; and he realized how there might once have been a street feud of forty years in Florence without interfering materially with the industry and prosperity of the city. On Broadway there was a silence where a jangle and clatter of horse-car bells and hoofs had been, but it was not very noticeable; and on the avenues, roofed by the elevated roads, this silence of the surface tracks was not noticeable at all in the roar of the trains overhead. Some of the cross-town cars were beginning to run again, with a policeman on the rear of each; on the Third Avenge line, operated by non-union men, who had not struck, there were two policemen beside the driver of every car, and two beside the conductor, to protect them from the strikers. But there were no strikers in sight, and on Second Avenue they stood quietly about in groups on the corners. While March watched them at a safe distance, a car laden with policemen came down the track, but none of the strikers offered to molest it. In their simple Sunday best, March thought them very quiet, decent-looking people, and he could well believe that they had nothing to do with the riotous outbreaks in other parts of the city. He could hardly believe that there were any such outbreaks; he began more and more to think them mere newspaper exaggerations in the absence of any disturbance, or the disposition to it, that he could see. He walked on to the East River

Avenues A, B, and C presented the same quiet aspect as Second Avenue; groups of men stood on the corners, and now and then a police-laden car was brought unmolested down the tracks before them; they looked at it and talked together, and some laughed, but there was no trouble.

March got a cross-town car, and came back to the West Side. A policeman, looking very sleepy and tired, lounged on the platform.

“I suppose you’ll be glad when this cruel war is over,” March suggested, as he got in.

The officer gave him a surly glance and made him no answer.

His behavior, from a man born to the joking give and take of our life, impressed March. It gave him a fine sense of the ferocity which he had read of the French troops putting on toward the populace just before the coup d’etat; he began to feel like the populace; but he struggled with himself and regained his character of philosophical observer. In this character he remained in the car and let it carry him by the corner where he ought to have got out and gone home, and let it keep on with him to one of the farthermost tracks westward, where so much of the fighting was reported to have taken place. But everything on the way was as quiet as on the East Side.

Suddenly the car stopped with so quick a turn of the brake that he was half thrown from his seat, and the policeman jumped down from the platform and ran forward.

IV

Dryfoos sat at breakfast that morning with Mrs. Mandel as usual to pour out his coffee. Conrad had gone down-town; the two girls lay abed much later than their father breakfasted, and their mother had gradually grown too feeble to come down till lunch. Suddenly Christine appeared at the door. Her face was white to the edges of her lips, and her eyes were blazing.

“Look here, father! Have you been saying anything to Mr. Beaton?”

The old man looked up at her across his coffee-cup through his frowning brows. “No.”

Mrs. Mandel dropped her eyes, and the spoon shook in her hand.

“Then what’s the reason he don’t come here any more?” demanded the girl; and her glance darted from her father to Mrs. Mandel. “Oh, it’s you, is it? I’d like to know who told you to meddle in other people’s business?”

“I did,” said Dryfoos, savagely. “I told her to ask him what he wanted here, and he said he didn’t want anything, and he stopped coming. That’s all. I did it myself.”

“Oh, you did, did you?” said the girl, scarcely less insolently than she had spoken to Mrs. Mandel. “I should like to know what you did it for? I’d like to know what made you think I wasn’t able to take care of myself. I just knew somebody had been meddling, but I didn’t suppose it was you. I can manage my own affairs in my own way, if you please, and I’ll thank you after this to leave me to myself in what don’t concern you.”

“Don’t concern me? You impudent jade!” her father began.

Christine advanced from the doorway toward the table; she had her hands closed upon what seemed trinkets, some of which glittered and dangled from them. She said, “Will you go to him and tell him that this meddlesome minx, here, had no business to say anything about me to him, and you take it all back?”

“No!” shouted the old man. “And if–“

“That’s all I want of you!” the girl shouted in her turn. “Here are your presents.” With both hands she flung the jewels-pins and rings and earrings and bracelets–among the breakfast-dishes, from which some of them sprang to the floor. She stood a moment to pull the intaglio ring from the finger where Beaton put it a year ago, and dashed that at her father’s plate. Then she whirled out of the room, and they heard her running up-stairs.

The old man made a start toward her, but he fell back in his chair before she was gone, and, with a fierce, grinding movement of his jaws, controlled himself. “Take-take those things up,” he gasped to Mrs. Mandel. He seemed unable to rise again from his chair; but when she asked him if he were unwell, he said no, with an air of offence, and got quickly to his feet. He mechanically picked up the intaglio ring from the table while he stood there, and put it on his little finger; his hand was not much bigger than Christine’s. “How do you suppose she found it out?” he asked, after a moment.

“She seems to have merely suspected it,” said Mrs. Mandel, in a tremor, and with the fright in her eyes which Christine’s violence had brought there.

“Well, it don’t make any difference. She had to know, somehow, and now she knows.” He started toward the door of the library, as if to go into the hall, where his hat and coat hung.

“Mr. Dryfoos,” palpitated Mrs. Mandel, “I can’t remain here, after the language your daughter has used to me–I can’t let you leave me–I–I’m afraid of her–“

“Lock yourself up, then,” said the old man, rudely. He added, from the hall before lie went out, “I reckon she’ll quiet down now.”

He took the Elevated road. The strike seemed a vary far-off thing, though the paper he bought to look up the stockmarket was full of noisy typography about yesterday’s troubles on the surface lines. Among the millions in Wall Street there was some joking and some swearing, but not much thinking, about the six thousand men who had taken such chances in their attempt to better their condition. Dryfoos heard nothing of the strike in the lobby of the Stock Exchange, where he spent two or three hours watching a favorite stock of his go up and go down under the betting. By the time the Exchange closed it had risen eight points, and on this and some other investments he was five thousand dollars richer than he had been in the morning. But he had expected to be richer still, and he was by no means satisfied with his luck. All through the excitement of his winning and losing had played the dull, murderous rage he felt toward they child who had defied him, and when the game was over and he started home his rage mounted into a sort of frenzy; he would teach her, he would break her. He walked a long way without thinking, and then waited for a car. None came, and he hailed a passing coupe.

“What has got all the cars?” he demanded of the driver, who jumped down from his box to open the door for him and get his direction.

“Been away?” asked the driver. “Hasn’t been any car along for a week. Strike.”

“Oh yes,” said Dryfoos. He felt suddenly giddy, and he remained staring at the driver after he had taken his seat.

The man asked, “Where to?”

Dryfoos could not think of his street or number, and he said, with uncontrollable fury: “I told you once! Go up to West Eleventh, and drive along slow on the south side; I’ll show you the place.”

He could not remember the number of ‘Every Other Week’ office, where he suddenly decided to stop before he went home. He wished to see Fulkerson, and ask him something about Beaton: whether he had been about lately, and whether he had dropped any hint of what had happened concerning Christine; Dryfoos believed that Fulkerson was in the fellow’s confidence.

There was nobody but Conrad in the counting-room, whither Dryfoos returned after glancing into Fulkerson’s empty office. “Where’s Fulkerson?” he asked, sitting down with his hat on.

“He went out a few moments ago,” said Conrad, glancing at the clock. “I’m afraid he isn’t coming back again today, if you wanted to see him.”

Dryfoos twisted his head sidewise and upward to indicate March’s room. “That other fellow out, too?”

“He went just before Mr. Fulkerson,” answered Conrad.

“Do you generally knock off here in the middle of the afternoon ?” asked the old man.

“No,” said Conrad, as patiently as if his father had not been there a score of times and found the whole staff of Every Other leek at work between four and five. “Mr. March, you know, always takes a good deal of his work home with him, and I suppose Mr. Fulkerson went out so early because there isn’t much doing to-day. Perhaps it’s the strike that makes it dull.”

“The strike-yes! It’s a pretty piece of business to have everything thrown out because a parcel of lazy hounds want a chance to lay off and get drunk.” Dryfoos seemed to think Conrad would make some answer to this, but the young man’s mild face merely saddened, and he said nothing. “I’ve got a coupe out there now that I had to take because I couldn’t get a car. If I had my way I’d have a lot of those vagabonds hung. They’re waiting to get the city into a snarl, and then rob the houses–pack of dirty, worthless whelps. They ought to call out the militia, and fire into ’em. Clubbing is too good for them.” Conrad was still silent, and his father sneered, “But I reckon you don’t think so.”

“I think the strike is useless,” said Conrad.

“Oh, you do, do you? Comin’ to your senses a little. Gettin’ tired walkin’ so much. I should like to know what your gentlemen over there on the East Side think about the strike, anyway.”

The young fellow dropped his eyes. “I am not authorized to speak for them.”

“Oh, indeed! And perhaps you’re not authorized to speak for yourself?”

“Father, you know we don’t agree about these things. I’d rather not talk–“

“But I’m goin’ to make you talk this time!” cried Dryfoos, striking the arm of the chair he sat in with the side of his fist. A maddening thought of Christine came over him. “As long as you eat my bread, you have got to do as I say. I won’t have my children telling me what I shall do and sha’n’t do, or take on airs of being holier than me. Now, you just speak up! Do you think those loafers are right, or don’t you? Come!”

Conrad apparently judged it best to speak. “I think they were very foolish to strike–at this time, when the Elevated roads can do the work.”

“Oh, at this time, heigh! And I suppose they think over there on the East Side that it ‘d been wise to strike before we got the Elevated.” Conrad again refused to answer, and his father roared, “What do you think?”

“I think a strike is always bad business. It’s war; but sometimes there don’t seem any other way for the workingmen to get justice. They say that sometimes strikes do raise the wages, after a while.”

“Those lazy devils were paid enough already,” shrieked the old man.

“They got two dollars a day. How much do you think they ought to ‘a’ got? Twenty?”

Conrad hesitated, with a beseeching look at his father. But he decided to answer. “The men say that with partial work, and fines, and other things, they get sometimes a dollar, and sometimes ninety cents a day.”

“They lie, and you know they lie,” said his father, rising and coming toward him. “And what do you think the upshot of it all will be, after they’ve ruined business for another week, and made people hire hacks, and stolen the money of honest men? How is it going to end?”

“They will have to give in.”

“Oh, give in, heigh! And what will you say then, I should like to know? How will you feel about it then? Speak!”

“I shall feel as I do now. I know you don’t think that way, and I don’t blame you–or anybody. But if I have got to say how I shall feel, why, I shall feel sorry they didn’t succeed, for I believe they have a righteous cause, though they go the wrong way to help themselves.”

His father came close to him, his eyes blazing, his teeth set. “Do you dare so say that to me?”

“Yes. I can’t help it. I pity them; my whole heart is with those poor men.”

“You impudent puppy!” shouted the old man. He lifted his hand and struck his son in the face. Conrad caught his hand with his own left, and, while the blood began to trickle from a wound that Christine’s intaglio ring had made in his temple, he looked at him with a kind of grieving wonder, and said, “Father!”

The old man wrenched his fist away and ran out of the house. He remembered his address now, and he gave it as he plunged into the coupe. He trembled with his evil passion, and glared out of the windows at the passers as he drove home; he only saw Conrad’s mild, grieving, wondering eyes, and the blood slowly trickling from the wound in his temple.

Conrad went to the neat-set bowl in Fulkerson’s comfortable room and washed the blood away, and kept bathing the wound with the cold water till it stopped bleeding. The cut was not deep, and he thought he would not put anything on it. After a while he locked up the office and started out, be hardly knew where. But he walked on, in the direction he had taken, till he found himself in Union Square, on the pavement in front of Brentano’s. It seemed to him that he heard some one calling gently to him, “Mr. Dryfoos!”

V.

Conrad looked confusedly around, and the same voice said again, “Mr. Dryfoos!” and he saw that it was a lady speaking to him from a coupe beside the curbing, and then he saw that it was Miss Vance.

She smiled when, he gave signs of having discovered her, and came up to the door of her carriage. “I am so glad to meet you. I have been longing to talk to somebody; nobody seems to feel about it as I do. Oh, isn’t it horrible? Must they fail? I saw cars running on all the lines as I came across; it made me sick at heart. Must those brave fellows give in? And everybody seems to hate them so–I can’t bear it.” Her face was estranged with excitement, and there were traces of tears on it. “You must think me almost crazy to stop you in the street this way; but when I caught sight of you I had to speak. I knew you would sympathize– I knew you would feel as I do. Oh, how can anybody help honoring those poor men for standing by one another as they do? They are risking all they have in the world for the sake of justice! Oh, they are true heroes! They are staking the bread of their wives and children on the dreadful chance they’ve taken! But no one seems to understand it. No one seems to see that they are willing to suffer more now that other poor men may suffer less hereafter. And those wretched creatures that are coming in to take their places–those traitors–“