The Second Generation by David Graham Phillips (page 4)

“After all, I’m not really a common workman,” reflected he. “It’s like mother helping Mary.” And he felt still better when, passing the little millinery shop of “Wilmot & Company” arm in arm with the great woolen manufacturer, he saw Estelle Wilmot–sweeping out. Estelle would have looked like a storybook princess about royal business, had she been down on her knees scrubbing a sidewalk. He was glad she didn’t happen to see him, but he was gladder that he had seen her. Clearly, toil was beginning to take on the appearance of “good form.”

He thought pretty well of himself all that day. Howells treated him like the proprietor’s son; Pat Waugh, foreman of the cooperage, put “Mr. Arthur” or “Mr. Ranger” into every sentence; the workingmen addressed him as “sir,” and seemed to appreciate his talking as affably with them as if he were unaware of the precipice of caste which stretched from him down to them. He was in a pleasant frame of mind as he went home and bathed and dressed for dinner. And, while he knew he had really been in the way at the cooperage and had earned nothing, yet–his ease about his social status permitting–he felt a sense of self-respect which was of an entirely new kind, and had the taste of the fresh air of a keen, clear winter day.

This, however, could not last. The estate was settled up; the fiction that he was of the proprietorship slowly yielded to the reality; the men, not only those over him but also those on whose level he was supposed to be, began to judge him as a man. “The boys say,” growled Waugh to Howells, “that he acts like one of them damn spying dude sons proprietors sometimes puts in among the men to learn how to work ’em harder for less. He don’t seem to catch on that he’s got to get his money out of his own hands.”

“Touch him up a bit,” said Howells, who had worshiped Hiram Ranger and in a measure understood what had been in his mind when he dedicated his son to a life of labor. “If it becomes absolutely necessary I’ll talk to him. But maybe you can do the trick.”

Waugh, who had the useful man’s disdain of deliberately useless men and the rough man’s way of feeling it and showing it, was not slow to act on Howells’s license. That very day he found Arthur unconsciously and even patronizingly shirking the tending of a planer so that his teacher, Bud Rollins, had to do double work. Waugh watched this until it had “riled” him sufficiently to loosen his temper and his language. “Hi, there, Ranger!” he shouted. “What the hell! You’ve been here goin’ on six months now, and you’re more in the way than you was the first day.”

Arthur flushed, flashed, clenched his fists; but the planer was between him and Waugh, and that gave Waugh’s tremendous shoulders and fists a chance to produce a subduing visual impression. A man, even a young man, who is nervous on the subject of his dignity, will, no matter how brave and physically competent, shrink from avoidable encounter that means doubtful battle. And dignity was a grave matter with young Ranger in those days.

“Don’t hoist your dander up at me,” said Waugh. “Get it up agin’ yourself. Bud, next time he soldiers on you, send him to me.”

“All right, sir,” replied Bud, with a soothing grin. And when Waugh was gone, he said to Arthur, “Don’t mind him. Just keep pegging along, and you’ll learn all right.”

Bud’s was the tone a teacher uses to encourage a defective child. It stung Arthur more fiercely than had Waugh’s. It flashed on him that the men–well, they certainly hadn’t been looking up to him as he had been fondly imagining. He went at his work resolutely, but blunderingly; he spoiled a plank and all but clogged the machine. His temper got clean away from him, and he shook with a rage hard to restrain from venting itself against the inanimate objects whose possessing devils he could hear jeering at him through the roar of the machinery.

“Steady! Steady!” warned good-natured Rollins. “You’ll drop a hand under that knife.”

The words had just reached Arthur when he gave a sharp cry. With a cut as clean as the edge that made it, off came the little finger of his left hand, and he was staring at it as it lay upon the bed of the planer, twitching, seeming to breathe as its blood pulsed out, while the blood spurted from his maimed hand. In an instant Lorry Tague had the machine still.

“A bucket of clean water,” he yelled to the man at the next planer.

He grabbed dazed Arthur’s hand, and pressed hard with his powerful thumb and forefinger upon the edges of the wound.

“A doctor!” he shouted at the men crowding round.

Arthur did not realize what had happened until he found himself forced to his knees, his hand submerged in the ice-cold water, Lorry still holding shut the severed veins and arteries.

“Another bucket of water, you, Bill,” cried Lorry.

When it came he had Bill Johnstone throw the severed finger into it. Bud Rollins, who had jumped through the window into the street in a dash for a physician, saw Doctor Schulze’s buggy just turning out of High Street. He gave chase, had Schulze beside Arthur within two minutes. More water, both hot and cold, was brought, and a cleared work bench; with swift, sure fingers the doctor cleaned the stump, cleaned the severed finger, joined and sewed them, bandaged the hand.

“Now, I’ll take you home,” he said. “I guess you’ve distinguished yourself enough for the day.”

Arthur followed him, silent and meek as a humbled dog. As they were driving along Schulze misread a mournful look which Arthur cast at his bandaged hand. “It’s nothing–nothing at all,” he said gruffly. “In a week or less you could be back at work.” The accompanying sardonic grin said plain as print, “But this dainty dandy is done with work.”

Weak and done though Arthur was, some blood came into his pale face and he bit his lip with anger.

Schulze saw these signs.

“Several men are _killed_ every year in those works–and not through their carelessness, either,” he went on in a milder, friendlier tone. “And forty or fifty are maimed–not like that little pin scratch of yours, my dear Mr. Ranger, but hands lost, legs lost–accidents that make cripples for life. That means tragedy–not the wolf at the door, but with his snout right in the platter.”

“I’ve seen that,” said Arthur. “But I never thought much about it–until now.”

“Naturally,” commented Schulze, with sarcasm. Then he added philosophically, “And it’s just as well not to bother about it. Mankind found this world a hell, and is trying to make it over into a heaven. And a hell it still is, even more of a hell than at first, and it’ll be still more of a hell–for these machines and these slave-driving capitalists with their luxury-crazy families are worse than wars and aristocrats. They make the men work, and the women and the children–make ’em all work as the Pharaohs never sweated the wretches they set at building the pyramids. The nearer the structure gets toward completion, the worse the driving and the madder the haste. Some day the world’ll be worth living in–probably just about the time it’s going to drop into the sun. Meanwhile, it’s a hell of a place. We’re a race of slaves, toiling for the benefit of the race of gods that’ll some day be born into a habitable world and live happily ever afterwards. Science will give them happiness–and immortality, if they lose the taste for the adventure into the Beyond.”

Arthur’s brain heard clearly enough to remember afterwards; but Schulze’s voice seemed to be coming through a thick wall. When they reached the Ranger house, Schulze had to lift him from the buggy and support his weight and guide his staggering steps. Out ran Mrs. Ranger, with _the_ terror in her eyes.

“Don’t lose your head, ma’am,” said Schulze. “It’s only a cut finger. The young fool forgot he was steering a machine, and had a sharp but slight reminder.”

Schulze was heavily down on the “interesting-invalid” habit. He held that the world’s supply of sympathy was so small that there wasn’t enough to provide encouragement for those working hard and well; that those who fell into the traps of illness set in folly by themselves should get, at most, toleration in the misfortunes in which others were compelled to share. “The world discourages strength and encourages weakness,” he used to declaim. “That injustice and cruelty must be reversed!”

“Doctor Schulze is right,” Arthur was saying to his mother, with an attempt at a smile. But he was glad of the softness and ease of the big divan in the back parlor, of the sense of hovering and protecting love he got from his mother’s and Adelaide’s anxious faces. Sorer than the really trifling wound was the deep cut into his vanity. How his fellow-workmen were pitying him!–a poor blockhead of a bungler who had thus brought to a pitiful climax his failure to learn a simple trade. And how the whole town would talk and laugh! “Hiram Ranger, he begat a fool!”

Schulze, with proper equipment, redressed and rebandaged the wound, and left, after cautioning the young man not to move the sick arm. “You’ll be all right to strum the guitar and sport a diamond ring in a fortnight at the outside,” said he. At the door he lectured Adelaide: “For God’s sake, Miss Ranger, don’t let his mother coddle him. He’s got the makings of a man like his father–not as big, perhaps, but still a lot of a man. Give him a chance! Give him a chance! If this had happened in a football game or a fox-hunt, nobody would have thought anything of it. But just because it was done at useful work, you’ve got yourself all fixed to make a fearful to-do.”

How absurdly does practice limp along, far behind firm-striding theory! Schulze came twice that day, looked in twice the next day, and fussed like a disturbed setting-hen when his patient forestalled the next day’s visit by appearing at his office for treatment. “I want to see if I can’t heal that cut without a scar,” was his explanation–but it was a mere excuse.

When Arthur called on the fifth day, Schulze’s elder daughter, Madelene, opened the door. “Will you please tell the doctor,” said he, “that the workman who cut his finger at the cooperage wishes to see him?”

Madelene’s dark gray eyes twinkled. She was a tall and, so he thought, rather severe-looking young woman; her jet black hair was simply, yet not without a suspicion of coquetry, drawn back over her ears from a central part–or what would have been a part had her hair been less thick. She was studying medicine under her father. It was the first time he had seen her, it so happened, since she was in knee dresses at public school. As he looked he thought: “A splendid advertisement for the old man’s business.” Just why she seemed so much healthier than even the healthiest, he found it hard to understand. She was neither robust nor radiant. Perhaps it was the singular clearness of her dead-white skin and of the whites of her eyes; again it might have been the deep crimson of her lips and of the inside of her mouth–a wide mouth with two perfect rows of small, strong teeth of the kind that go with intense vitality.

“Just wait here,” said she, in a businesslike tone, as she indicated the reception room.

“You don’t remember me?” said Arthur, to detain her.

“No, I don’t _remember_ you,” replied Madelene. “But I know who you are.”

“Who I _was_,” thought Arthur, his fall never far from the foreground of his mind. “You used to be very serious, and always perfect in your lessons,” he continued aloud, “and–most superior.”

Madelene laughed. “I was a silly little prig,” said she. Then, not without a subtle hint of sarcasm, “But I suppose we all go through that period–some of us in childhood, others further along.”

Arthur smiled, with embarrassment. So he had the reputation of being a prig.

Madelene was in the doorway. “Father will be free–presently,” said she. “He has another patient with him. If you don’t care to wait, perhaps I can look after the cut. Father said it was a trifle.”

Arthur slipped his arm out of the sling.

“In here,” said Madelene, opening the door of a small room to the left of her father’s consultation room.

Arthur entered. “This is your office?” he asked, looking round curiously, admiringly. It certainly was an interesting room, as the habitat of an interesting personality is bound to be.

“Yes,” she replied. “Sit here, please.”

Arthur seated himself in the chair by the window and rested his arm on the table. He thought he had never seen fingers so long as hers, or so graceful. Evidently she had inherited from her father that sure, firm touch which is perhaps the highest talent of the surgeon. “It seems such an–an–such a _hard_ profession for a woman,” said he, to induce those fascinating lips of hers to move.

“It isn’t soft,” she replied. “But then father hasn’t brought us up soft.”

This was discouraging, but Arthur tried again. “You like it?”

“I love it,” said she, and now her eyes were a delight. “It makes me hate to go to bed at night, and eager to get up in the morning. And that means really living, doesn’t it?”

“A man like me must seem to you a petty sort of creature.”

“Oh, I haven’t any professional haughtiness,” was her laughing reply. “One kind of work seems to me just as good as another. It’s the spirit of the workman that makes the only differences.”

“That’s it,” said Arthur, with a humility which he thought genuine and which was perhaps not wholly false. “I don’t seem to be able to give my heart to my work.”

“I fancy you’ll give it _attention_ hereafter,” suggested Madelene. She had dressed the almost healed finger and was dexterously rebandaging it. She was necessarily very near to him, and from her skin there seemed to issue a perfumed energy that stimulated his nerves. Their eyes met. Both smiled and flushed.

“That wasn’t very kind–that remark,” said he.

“What’s all this?” broke in the sharp voice of the doctor.

Arthur started guiltily, but Madelene, without lifting her eyes from her task, answered: “Mr. Ranger didn’t want to be kept waiting.”

“She’s trying to steal my practice away from me!” cried Schulze. He looked utterly unlike his daughter at first glance, but on closer inspection there was an intimate resemblance, like that between the nut and its rough, needle-armored shell. “Well, I guess she hasn’t botched it.” This in a pleased voice, after an admiring inspection of the workmanlike bandage. “Come again to-morrow, young man.”

Arthur bowed to Madelene and somehow got out into the street. He was astonished at himself and at the world. He had gone drearily into that office out of a dreary world; he had issued forth light of heart and delighted with the fresh, smiling, interesting look of the shaded streets and the green hedges and lawns and flower beds. “A fine old town,” he said to himself. “Nice, friendly people–and the really right sort. As soon as I’m done with the rough stretch I’ve got just ahead of me, I’m going to like it. Let me see–one of those girls was named Walpurga and one was named–Madelene–this one, I’m sure–Yes!” And he could hear the teacher calling the roll, could hear the alto voice from the serious face answer to “Madelene Schulze,” could hear the light voice from the face that was always ready to burst into smiles answer to “Walpurga Schulze.”

But though it was quite unnecessary he, with a quite unnecessary show of carelessness, asked Del which was which. “The black one is Madelene,” replied she, and her ability to speak in such an indifferent tone of such an important person surprised him. “The blonde is Walpurga. I used to detest Madelene. She always treated me as if I hadn’t any sense.”

“Well, you can’t blame her for that, Del,” said Arthur. “You’ve been a great deal of a fool in your day–before you blossomed out. Do you remember the time Dory called you down for learning things to show off, and how furious you got?”

Adelaide looked suddenly warm, though she laughed too. “Why did you ask about Dr. Schulze’s daughters?” she asked.

“I saw one of them this morning–a beauty, a tip-topper. And no nonsense about her. As she’s ‘black,’ I suppose her name is Madelene.”

“Oh, I remember now!” exclaimed Adelaide. “Madelene is going to be a doctor. They say she’s got nerves of iron–can cut and slash like her father.”

Arthur was furious, just why he didn’t know. No doubt what Del said was true, but there were ways and ways of saying things. “I suppose there is some sneering at her,” said he, “among the girls who couldn’t do anything if they tried. It seems to me, if there is any profession a woman could follow without losing her womanliness, it is that of doctor. Every woman ought to be a doctor, whether she ever tries to make a living out of it or not.”

Adelaide was not a little astonished by this outburst.

“You’ll be coming round to Dory’s views of women, if you aren’t careful,” said she.

“There’s a lot of sense in what Dory says about a lot of things,” replied Arthur.

Del sheered off. “How did the doctor say your hand is?”

“Oh–all right,” said Arthur. “I’m going to work on Monday.”

“Did he say you could?”

“No, but I’m tired of doing nothing. I’ve got to ‘get busy’ if I’m to pull out of this mess.”

His look, his tone made his words sound revolutionary. And, in fact, his mood was revolutionary. He was puzzled at his own change of attitude. His sky had cleared of black clouds; the air was no longer heavy and oppressive. He wanted to work; he felt that by working he could accomplish something, could deserve and win the approval of people who were worthwhile–people like Madelene Schulze, for instance.

Next day he lurked round the corner below the doctor’s house until he saw him drive away; then he went up and rang the bell. This time it was the “blonde” that answered–small and sweet, pink and white, with tawny hair. This was disconcerting. “I couldn’t get here earlier,” he explained. “I saw the doctor just driving away. But, as these bandages feel uncomfortable, I thought perhaps his daughter–your sister, is she not?–might–might fix them.”

Walpurga looked doubtful. “I think she’s busy,” she said. “I don’t like to disturb her.”

Just then Madelene crossed the hall. Her masses of black hair were rolled into a huge knot on top of her head; she was wearing a white work slip and her arms were bare to the elbows–the finest arms he had ever seen, Arthur thought. She seemed in a hurry and her face was flushed–she would have looked no differently if she had heard his voice and had come forth to prevent his getting away without having seen him. “Meg!” called her sister. “Can you–“

Madelene apparently saw her sister and Arthur for the first time. “Good morning, Mr. Ranger. You’ve come too late. Father’s out.”

Arthur repeated his doleful tale, convincingly now, for his hand did feel queer–as what hand would not, remembering such a touch as Madelene’s, and longing to experience it again?

“Certainly,” said Madelene. “I’ll do the best I can. Come in.”

And once more he was in her office, with her bending over him. And presently her hair came unrolled, came showering down on his arm, on his face; and he shook like a leaf and felt as if he were going to faint, into such an ecstasy did the soft rain of these tresses throw him. As for Madelene, she was almost hysterical in her confusion. She darted from the room.

When she returned she seemed calm, but that was because she did not lift those tell-tale gray eyes. Neither spoke as she finished her work. If Arthur had opened his lips it would have been to say words which he thought she would resent, and he repent. Not until his last chance had almost ebbed did he get himself sufficiently in hand to speak. “It wasn’t true–what I said,” he began. “I waited until your father was gone. Then I came–to see you. As you probably know, I’m only a workman, hardly even that, at the cooperage, but–I want to come to see you. May I?”

She hesitated.

“I know the people in this town have a very poor opinion of me,” he went on, “and I deserve it, no doubt. You see, the bottom dropped out of my life not long ago, and I haven’t found myself yet. But you did more for me in ten minutes the other day than everything and everybody, including myself, have been able to do since my father died.”

“I don’t remember that I said anything,” she murmured.

“I didn’t say that what you said helped me. I said what you _did_–and looked. And–I’d like to come.”

“We never have any callers,” she explained. “You see, father’s–our–views–People don’t understand us. And, too, we’ve found ourselves very congenial and sufficient unto one another. So–I–I–don’t know what to say.”

He looked so cast down that she hastened on: “Yes–come whenever you like. We’re always at home. But we work all day.”

“So do I,” said Arthur. “Thank you. I’ll come–some evening next week.”

Suddenly he felt peculiarly at ease with her, as if he had always known her, as if she and he understood each other perfectly. “I’m afraid you’ll find me stupid,” he went on. “I don’t know much about any of the things you’re interested in.”

“Perhaps I’m interested in more things than you imagine,” said she. “My sister says I’m a fraud–that I really have a frivolous mind and that my serious look is a hollow pretense.”

And so they talked on, not getting better acquainted but enjoying the realization of how extremely well acquainted they were. When he was gone, Madelene found that her father had been in for some time. “Didn’t he ask for me?” she said to Walpurga.

“Yes,” answered Walpurga. “And I told him you were flirting with Arthur Ranger.”

Madelene colored violently. “I never heard that word in this house before,” she said stiffly.

“Nor I,” replied Walpurga, the pink and white. “And I think it’s high time–with you nearly twenty-two and me nearly twenty.”

At dinner her father said: “Well, Lena, so you’ve got a beau at last. I’d given up hope.”

“For Heaven’s sake don’t scare him away, father!” cried Walpurga.

“A pretty poor excuse,” pursued the doctor. “I doubt if Arthur Ranger can make enough to pay his own board in a River Street lodging house.”

“It took courage–real courage–to go to work as he did,” replied Madelene, her color high.

“Yes,” admitted her father, “_if_ he sticks to it.”

“He will stick to it,” affirmed Madelene.

“I think so,” assented her father, dropping his teasing pretense and coming out frankly for Arthur. “When a man shows that he has the courage to cross the Rubicon, there’s no need to worry about whether he’ll go on or turn back.”

“You mustn’t let him know he’s the only beau you’ve ever had, Meg,” cautioned her sister.

“And why not?” demanded Madelene. “If I ever did care especially for a man, I’d not care for him because other women had. And I shouldn’t want a man to be so weak and vain as to feel that way about me.”

It was a temptation to that aloof and isolated, yet anything but lonely or lonesome, household to discuss this new and strange phenomenon–the intrusion of an outsider, and he a young man. But the earnestness in Madelene’s voice made her father and her sister feel that to tease her further would be impertinent.

Arthur had said he would not call until the next week because then he would be at work again. He went once more to Dr. Schulze’s, but was careful to go in office hours. He did not see Madelene–though she, behind the white sash curtains of her own office, saw him come, watched him go until he was out of sight far down the street. On Monday he went to work, really to work. No more shame; no more shirking or shrinking; no more lingering on the irrevocable. He squarely faced the future, and, with his will like his father’s, set dogged and unconquerable energy to battering at the obstacles before him. “All a man needs,” said he to himself, at the end of the first day of real work, “is a purpose. He never knows where he’s at until he gets one. And once he gets it, he can’t rest till he has accomplished it.”

What was his purpose? He didn’t know–beyond a feeling that he must lift himself from his present position of being an object of pity to all Saint X and the sort of man that hasn’t the right to ask any woman to be his wife.

CHAPTER XVI

A CAST-OFF SLIPPER

A large sum would soon be available; so the carrying out of the plans to extend, or, rather, to construct Tecumseh, must be begun. The trustees commissioned young Hargrave to go abroad at once in search of educational and architectural ideas, and to get apparatus that would make the laboratories the best in America. Chemistry and its most closely related sciences were to be the foundation of the new university, as they are at the foundation of life. “We’ll model our school, not upon what the ignorant wise of the Middle Ages thought ought to be life, but upon life itself,” said Dr. Hargrave. “We’ll build not from the clouds down, but from the ground up.” He knew in the broad outline what was wanted for the Tecumseh of his dream; but he felt that he was too old, perhaps too rusted in old-fashioned ways and ideas, himself to realize the dream; so he put the whole practical task upon Dory, whom he had trained from infancy to just that end.

When it was settled that Dory was to go, would be away a year at the least, perhaps two years, he explained to Adelaide. “They expect me to leave within a fortnight,” he ended. And she knew what was in his mind–what he was hoping she would say.

It so happened that, in the months since their engagement, an immense amount of work had been thrust upon Dory. Part of it was a study of the great American universities, and that meant long absences from home. All of it was of the kind that must be done at once or not at all–and Work is the one mistress who, if she be enamored enough of a man to resolve to have him and no other, can compel him, whether he be enamored of her or not. However, for the beginning of the artificial relation between this engaged couple, the chief cause was not his work but his attitude toward her, his not unnatural but highly unwise regard for the peculiar circumstances in which they had become engaged. Respect for the real feelings of others is all very well, if not carried too far; but respect for the purely imaginary feelings of others simply encourages them to plunge deeper into the fogs and bogs of folly. There was excuse for Dory’s withholding from his love affair the strong and firm hand he laid upon all his other affairs; but it cannot be denied that he deserved what he got, or, rather, that he failed to deserve what he did not get. And the irony of it was that his unselfishness was chiefly to blame; for a selfish man would have gone straight at Del and, with Dory’s advantages, would have captured her forthwith.

As it was, she drifted aimlessly through day after day, keeping close at home, interested in nothing. She answered briefly or not at all the letters from her old friends, and she noted with a certain blunted bitterness how their importunities fainted and died away, as the news of the change in her fortunes got round. If she had been seeing them face to face every day, or if she had been persistent and tenacious, they would have extricated themselves less abruptly; for not the least important among the sacred “appearances” of conventionality is the “appearance” of good-heartedness; it is the graceful cloak for that icy selfishness which is as inevitable among the sheltered and pampered as sympathy and helpfulness are among those naked to the joys and sorrows of real life. Adelaide was far from her friends, and she deliberately gave them every opportunity to abandon and to forget her without qualms or fears of “appearing” mean and snobbish. There were two girls from whom she rather hoped for signs of real friendship. She had sought them in the first place because they were “of the right sort,” but she had come to like them for themselves and she believed they liked her for herself. And so they did; but their time was filled with the relentless routine of the fashionable life, and they had not a moment to spare for their own personal lives; besides, Adelaide wouldn’t have “fitted in” comfortably. The men of their set would be shy of her now; the women would regard her as a waste of time.

Her beauty and her cleverness might have saved her, had she been of one of those “good families” whom fashionables the world over recognize, regardless of their wealth or poverty, because recognition of them gives an elegant plausibility to the pretense that Mammon is not the supreme god in the Olympus of aristocracy. But–who were the Rangers? They might be “all right” in Saint X, but where was Saint X? Certainly, not on any map in the geography of fashion.

So Adelaide, sore but too lethargic to suffer, drifted drearily along, feeling that if Dory Hargrave were not under the influence of that brilliant, vanished past of hers, even he would abandon her as had the rest, or, at least, wouldn’t care for her. Not that she doubted his sincerity in the ideals he professed; but people deceived themselves so completely. There was her own case; had she for an instant suspected how flimsily based was her own idea of herself and of her place in the world?–the “world” meaning, of course, “the set.” As is the rule in “sets,” her self-esteem’s sole foundation had been what she had, or, rather, what the family had, and now that that was gone, she held what was left cheap indeed–and held herself the cheaper that she could feel thus. At the outset, Arthur, after the familiar male fashion, was apparently the weaker of the two. But when the test came, when the time for courageous words was succeeded by the time for deeds, the shrinking from action that, since the nation grew rich, has become part of the education of the women of the classes which shelter and coddle their women, caused Adelaide to seem feeble indeed beside her brother. Also–and this should never be forgotten in judging such a woman–Arthur had the advantage of the man’s compulsion to act, while Adelaide had the disadvantage of being under no material necessity to act–and what necessity but the material is there?

Dory–his love misleading his passion, as it usually does when it has much influence before marriage–reasoned that, in the interest of the Adelaide that was to be, after they were married, and in his own interest with her as well, the wise course for him to pursue was to wait until time and the compulsion of new circumstances should drive away her mood, should give her mind and her real character a chance to assert themselves. In the commission to go abroad, he saw the external force for which he had been waiting and hoping. And it seemed to him most timely–for Ross’s wedding invitations were out.

“Two weeks,” said Adelaide absently. “You will sail in two weeks.” Then in two weeks she could be out of it all, could be far away in new surroundings, among new ideas, among strangers. She could make the new start; she could submerge, drown her old self in the new interests.

“Will you come?” he said, when he could endure the suspense no longer. “Won’t you come?”

She temporized. “I’m afraid I couldn’t–oughtn’t to leave–mother and Arthur just now.”

He smiled sadly. She might need her mother and her brother; but in the mood in which she had been for the last few months, they certainly did not need her. “Adelaide,” said he, with that firmness which he knew so well how to combine with gentleness, without weakening it, “our whole future depends on this. If our lives are to grow together, we must begin. This is _our_ opportunity.”

She knew that Dory was not a man she could play fast and loose with, even had she been so disposed. Clearly, she must decide whether she intended to marry him, to make his life hers and her life his. She looked helplessly round. What but him was there to build on? Without him–She broke the long silence with, “That is true. We must begin.” Then, after a pause during which she tried to think and found she couldn’t, “Make up my mind for me.”

“Let us be married day after to-morrow,” said he. “We can leave for New York on the one o’clock train and sail on Thursday.”

“You had it planned!”

“I had several plans,” he answered. “That’s the best one.”

What should she do? Impulsively–why, she did not know–she gave Dory her answer: “Yes, that _is_ the best plan. I must begin–at once.” And she started up, in a fever to be doing.

Dory, dazed by his unexpected, complete victory, went immediately, lest he should say or do something that would break or weaken the current of her aroused energy. He went without as much as touching her hand. Certainly, if ever man tempted fate to snatch from him the woman he loved, Dory did then; and at that time Del must, indeed, have been strongly drawn to him, or she would have been unable to persist.

The problem of the trousseau was almost as simple for her as for him. She had been extravagant and luxurious, had accumulated really unmanageable quantities of clothing of all kinds, far, far more than any woman without a maid could take care of. The fact that she had not had a maid was in part responsible for this superfluity. She had neither the time nor the patience for making or for directing the thousand exasperating little repairs that are necessary if a woman with a small wardrobe is always to look well. So, whenever repairs were necessary, she bought instead; and as she always kept herself fresh and perfect to the smallest detail she had to buy profusely. As soon as a dress or a hat or a blouse or a parasol, a pair of boots, slippers, stockings, or any of the costly, flimsy, all but unlaunderable underwear she affected, became not quite perfect, she put it aside against that vague day when she should have leisure or inclination for superintending a seamstress. Within two hours of her decision she had a seamstress in the house, and they and her mother were at work. There was no necessity to bother about new dresses. She would soon be putting off black, and she could get in Paris what she would then need.

In the whirlwind of those thirty-six hours, she had not a moment to think of anything but the material side of the wedding–the preparations for the journey and for the long absence. She was half an hour late in getting down to the front parlor for the ceremony, and she looked so tired from toil and lack of sleep that Dory in his anxiety about her was all but unconscious that they were going through the supposedly solemn marriage rite. Looking back on it afterwards, they could remember little about it–perhaps even less than can the average couple, under our social system which makes a wedding a social function, not a personal rite. They had once in jesting earnest agreed that they would have the word “obey” left out of the vows; but they forgot this, and neither was conscious of repeating “obey” after the preacher. Adelaide was thinking of her trunks, was trying to recall the things she felt she must have neglected in the rush; Dory was worrying over her paleness and the heavy circles under her eyes, was fretting about the train–Del’s tardiness had not been in the calculations. Even the preacher, infected by the atmosphere of haste, ran over the sentences, hardly waiting for the responses. Adelaide’s mother was hearing the trunks going down to the van, and was impatient to be where she could superintend–there was a very important small trunk, full of underclothes, which she was sure they were overlooking. Arthur was gloomily abstracted, was in fierce combat with the bitter and melancholy thoughts which arose from the contrast he could not but make–this simple wedding, with Dory Hargrave as her groom, when in other circumstances there would have been such pomp and grandeur. He and Mary the cook and Ellen the upstairs girl and old Miss Skeffington, generalissimo of the Hargrave household, were the only persons present keenly conscious that there was in progress a wedding, a supposedly irrevocable union of a man and woman for life and for death and for posterity. Even old Dr. Hargrave was thinking of what Dory was to do on the other side, was mentally going over the elaborate scheme for his son’s guidance which he had drawn up and committed to paper. Judge Torrey, the only outsider, was putting into form the speech he intended to make at the wedding breakfast.

But there was no wedding breakfast–at least, none for bride and groom. The instant the ceremony was over, Mary the cook whispered to Mrs. Ranger: “Mike says they’ve just got time to miss the train.”

“Good gracious!” cried Mrs. Ranger. And she darted out to halt the van and count the trunks. Then she rushed in and was at Adelaide’s arm. “Hurry, child!” she exclaimed. “Here is my present for you.”

And she thrust into her hand a small black leather case, the cover of a letter of credit. Seeing that Del was too dazed to realize what was going on, she snatched it away and put it into the traveling case which Mary was carrying. Amid much shaking hands and kissing and nervous crying, amid flooding commonplaces and hysterical repetitions of “Good-by! Good luck!” the young people were got off. There was no time for Mary to bring the rice from the kitchen table, but Ellen had sequestered one of Adelaide’s old dancing slippers under the front stair. She contrived to get it out and into action, and to land it full in Adelaide’s lap by a lucky carom against the upright of the coach window.

Adelaide looked down at it vaguely. It was one of a pair of slippers she had got for the biggest and most fashionable ball she had ever attended. She remembered it all–the gorgeousness of the rooms, the flowers, the dresses, the favors, her own ecstasy in being where it was supposed to be so difficult to get; how her happiness had been marred in the early part of the evening by Ross’s attendance on Helen Galloway in whose honor the ball was given; how he made her happy again by staying beside her the whole latter part of the evening, he and more young men than any other girl had. And here was the slipper, with its handsome buckle torn off, stained, out of shape from having been so long cast aside. Where did it come from? How did it get here? Why had this ghost suddenly appeared to her? On the opposite seat, beside her traveling case, fashionable, obviously expensive, with her initials in gold, was a bag marked “T.H.”–of an unfashionable appearance, obviously inexpensive, painfully new. She could not take her fascinated eyes from it; and the hammering of her blood upon her brain, as the carriage flew toward the station, seemed to be a voice monotonously repeating, “Married–married–” She shuddered. “My fate is settled for life,” she said to herself. “I am _married_!”

She dared not look at her husband–Husband! In that moment of cruel memory, of ghastly chopfallen vanity, it was all she could do not visibly to shrink from him. She forgot that he was her best friend, her friend from babyhood almost, Theodore Hargrave. She felt only that he was her husband, her jailer, the representative of all that divided her forever from the life of luxury and show which had so permeated her young blood with its sweet, lingering poison. She descended from the carriage, passed the crowd of gaping, grinning loungers, and entered the train, with cheeks burning and eyes downcast, an ideal bride in appearance of shy and refined modesty. And none who saw her delicate, aristocratic beauty of face and figure and dress could have attributed to her the angry, ugly, snobbish thoughts, like a black core hidden deep in the heart of a bewitching flower.

As he sat opposite her in the compartment, she was exaggerating into glaring faults the many little signs of indifference to fashion in his dress. She had never especially noted before, but now she was noting as a shuddering exhibition of “commonness,” that he wore detachable cuffs–and upon this detail her distraught mind fixed as typical. She could not take her eyes off his wrists; every time he moved his arms so that she could see the wristband within his cuff, she felt as if a piece of sandpaper were scraping her skin. He laid his hand on her two gloved hands, folded loosely in her lap. Every muscle, every nerve of her body grew tense; she only just fought down the impulse to snatch her hands away and shriek at him.

She sat rigid, her teeth set, her eyes closed, until her real self got some control over the monstrous, crazy creature raving within her. Then she said: “Please don’t–touch me–just now. I’ve been on such a strain–and I’m almost breaking down.”

He drew his hand away. “I ought to have understood,” he said. “Would you like to be left alone for a while?”

Without waiting for her answer, he left the compartment to her. She locked the door and let herself loose. When she had had her cry “out,” she felt calm; but oh, so utterly depressed. “This is only a mood,” she said to herself. “I don’t really feel that way toward him. Still–I’ve made a miserable mistake. I ought not to have married him. I must hide it. I mustn’t make him suffer for what’s altogether my own fault. I must make the best of it.”

When he came back, she proceeded to put her programme into action. All the afternoon he strove with her sweet gentleness and exaggerated consideration for him; he tried to make her see that there was no necessity for this elaborate pose and pretense. But she was too absorbed in her part to heed him. In the evening, soon after they returned to the compartment from the dining car, he rose. “I am going out to smoke,” he said. “I’ll tell the porter to make up your berth. You must be very tired. I have taken another–out in the car–so that you will not be disturbed.”

She grew white, and a timid, terrified look came into her eyes.

He touched her shoulder–gently. “Don’t–please!” he said quietly. “In all the years we’ve known each other, have you ever seen anything in me to make you feel–like–that?”

Her head drooped still lower, and her face became crimson.

“Adelaide, look at me!”

She lifted her eyes until they met his uncertainly.

He put out his hand. “We are friends, aren’t we?”

She instantly laid her hand in his.

“Friends,” he repeated. “Let us hold fast to that–and let the rest take care of itself.”

“I’m ashamed of myself,” said she. And in her swift revulsion of feeling there was again opportunity for him. But he was not in the mood to see it.

“You certainly ought to be,” replied he, with his frank smile that was so full of the suggestions of health and sanity and good humor. “You’ll never get a martyr’s crown at _my_ expense.”

At New York he rearranged their steamer accommodations. It was no longer diffidence and misplaced consideration that moved him permanently to establish the most difficult of barriers between them; it was pride now, for in her first stormy, moments in the train he had seen farther into her thoughts than he dared let himself realize.

CHAPTER XVII

POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE

The day after the wedding, as Arthur was going home from work, he saw Ross on the lofty seat of a dogcart, driving toward him along lower Monroe Street. His anger instantly flamed and flared; he crushed an oath between his teeth and glanced about for some way to avoid the humiliating meeting. But there was no cross street between him and the on-coming cart. Pride, or vanity, came to his support, as soon as he was convinced that escape was impossible. With an air that was too near to defiance to create the intended impression of indifference, he swung along and, just as the cart was passing, glanced at his high-enthroned former friend.

Ross had not seen him until their eyes met. He drew his horse in so sharply that it reared and pawed in amazement and indignation at the bit’s coarse insult to thoroughbred instincts for courteous treatment. He knew Arthur was at work in the factory; but he did not expect to see him in workman’s dress, with a dinner pail in his hand. And from his height, he, clad in the carefully careless, ostentatiously unostentatious garments of the “perfect gentleman,” gazed speechless at the spectacle. Arthur reddened violently. Not all the daily contrasts thrust upon him in those months at the cooperage had so brought home to his soul the differences of caste. And there came to him for the first time that hatred of inequalities which, repulsive though it is in theory, is yet the true nerver of the strong right arm of progress. It is as characteristic of the homely, human countenance of Democracy as the supercilious smirk is of the homely, inhuman countenance of caste. Arthur did not want to get up where Ross was seated in such elegant state; he wanted to tear Ross, all the Rosses down. “The damn fool!” he fumed. “He goes lounging about, wasting the money _we_ make. It’s all wrong. And if we weren’t a herd of tame asses, we wouldn’t permit it.”

And now he began to feel that he was the superior of this showy idler, that his own garments and dinner pail and used hands were the titles to a nobility which could justly look down upon those who filched from the treasury of the toiler the means to buzz and flit and glitter in dronelike ease. “As for these Whitneys,” he thought, “mother’s right about them.” Then he called out in a tone of good-natured contempt, which his stature and his powerful frame and strong, handsome face made effective: “Hello, Ross! When did _you_ come to town?”

“This morning,” replied Ross. “I heard you were working, but I had no idea it was–I’ve just been to your house, looking for you, and was on the way to the factory. Father told me to see that you get a suitable position. I’m going to Howells and arrange it. You know, father’s been in the East and very busy.”

“Don’t bother,” said Arthur, and there was no pretense in his air of ease. “I’ve got just what I want. I am carrying out father’s plan, and I’m far enough into it to see that he was right.”

In unbelieving silence Ross looked down at his former equal with condescending sympathy; how well Arthur knew that look! And he remembered that he had once, so short a time before, regarded it as kindly, and the thoughts behind it as generous!

“I like my job,” he continued. “It gives me a sense of doing something useful–of getting valuable education. Already I’ve had a thousand damn-fool ideas knocked out of my head.”

“I suppose it _is_ interesting,” said Ross, with gracious encouragement. “The associations must be rather trying.”

“They _were_ rather trying,” replied Arthur with a smile. “Trying to the other men, until I got my bearings and lost the silliest of the silly ideas put in my head by college and that sort of thing. But, now that I realize I’m an apprentice and not a gentleman deigning to associate with the common herd, I think I’m less despicable–and less ridiculous. Still, I’m finding it hard to get it through my head that practically everything I learned is false and must be unlearned.”

“Don’t let your bitterness over the injustice to you swing you too far the other way, Artie,” said Ross with a faint smile in his eyes and a suspicious, irritating friendliness in his voice. “You’ll soon work out of that class and back where you belong.”

Arthur was both angry and amused. No doubt Ross was right as to the origin of this new breadth of his; but a wrong motive may start a man right just as readily as a right motive may start him wrong. Arthur would have admitted frankly his first feelings about his changed position, would have admitted that those feelings still lingered, still seemed to influence him, as grown people often catch themselves thinking in terms of beliefs impressed on them in childhood, but exploded and abandoned at the very threshold of youth. But he knew, also, that his present beliefs and resolves and aspirations were sincere, were sane, were final–the expression of the mind and heart that were really himself. Of what use, however, to argue with Ross? “I could no more convince him,” thought Arthur, “than I could myself have been convinced less than a year ago.” Besides, of what importance were Ross’s beliefs about him or about his views? So he said to him, and his tone and manner were now convincing: “Well, we’ll see. However, as long as I’m a workman, I’ll stand with my class–just as you stand with your class. And while you are pretending to be generous to us, we’ll pretend to be contemptuous of you. You’ll think we are living off of your money; we’ll think you are living off of our work. You’ll say we’re earning less than half what we get; we’ll say you’re stealing more than half what you get. It may amuse you to hear that I am one of the organizers of the trades union that’s starting. I’m on the committee on wages. So some day you and I are likely to meet.”

“I don’t know much about those things,” said Ross politely. “I can see that you’re right to ingratiate yourself with those working chaps. It will stand you in good stead when you get on top and have to manage them.”

Arthur laughed, and so did Ross. They eyed each the other with covert hostility. “Poor creature!” thought Ross. And “Pup!” thought Arthur. “How could I have wanted Del to marry _him_?” He wished to pass on, but was detained by some suggestion in Ross’s manner that he had not yet discharged his mind of its real burden.

“I was glad to see your mother so well,” said Ross.

“I wish she were,” replied Arthur. “She seemed to be better while the excitement about Del’s wedding was on; but as soon as Del and Dory went, she dropped back again. I think the only thing that keeps her from–from joining father is the feeling that, if she were to go, the family income would stop. I feel sure we’d not have her, if father had left us well provided for, as they call it.”

“That is true,” said Ross, the decent side of his nature now full to the fore. “I can’t tell you what a sense of loss I had when your father died. Artie, he was a splendid gentleman. And there is a quality in your mother that makes me feel very humble indeed before her.”

Arthur passed, though he noted, the unconscious superciliousness in this tribute; he felt that it was a genuine tribute, that, for all its discoloration in its passage through the tainted outer part of Ross’s nature, it had come from the unspoiled, untainted, deepest part. Fortunately for us all, the gold in human nature remains gold, whatever its alloys from base contacts; and it is worth the mining, though there be but a grain of it to the ton of dross. As Ross spoke Arthur warmed to him. “You must come to see us,” he said cordially.

Ross became embarrassed, so embarrassed that all his ability to command his feelings went for nothing. “Thank you,” said he hurriedly, “but I’m here only for a few hours. I go away to-night. I came about a matter that–that–I want to get back as soon as possible.”

Arthur was mystified by the complete transformation of the self-complacent, superior Ross of a few minutes before. He now noted that Ross was looking almost ill, his eyes sunken, the lids red at the edges, as if from loss of sleep. Under Arthur’s scrutiny his embarrassment increased to panic. He nervously shifted the reins, made the horse restless, shook hands with Arthur, reined in, tried to speak, said only, “I must be off–my horse is getting nervous,” and was gone.

Arthur looked after him. “That’s the sort of chap I was on the way to being when father pulled me up,” he reflected. “I wonder if I’ll ever get sense enough not to have a sneaking envy of him–and regret?”

If he could have looked in upon Ross’s mind, he might have been abruptly thrust far along the toilsome road toward his goal. In this world, roses and thorns have a startling, preposterous way of suddenly exchanging natures so that what was thorn becomes fairest rose, and what was rose becomes most poisonous of thorns. Ross had just fallen an amazed and incredulous victim to this alchemy. Though somewhat uncomfortable and downright unhappy at times, he had been, on the whole, well pleased with himself and his prospects until he heard that Adelaide was actually about to marry Dory. His content collapsed with the foundation on which it was built–the feeling that Adelaide was for no other man, that if at any time he should change his mind he would find her waiting to welcome him gratefully. He took train for Saint X, telling himself that after he got there he could decide what to do. In fact, when he had heard that the wedding was about to be, it was over and Adelaide and Dory were off for New York and Europe; but he did not find this out until he reached Saint X. The man who gave him that final and overwhelming news noticed no change in his face, though looking for signs of emotion; nor did Ross leave him until he had confirmed the impression of a heart at ease. Far along the path between the Country Club and Point Helen he struck into the woods and, with only the birds and the squirrels as witnesses, gave way to his feelings.

Now, now that she was irrevocably gone, he knew. He had made a hideous mistake; he had been led on by his vanity, led on and on until the trap was closed and sprung; and it was too late. He sat there on a fallen tree with his head aching as if about to explode, with eyes, dry and burning and a great horror of heart-hunger sitting before him and staring at him. In their sufferings from defeated desire the selfish expiate their sins.

He had forgotten his engagement to Theresa Howland, the wedding only two weeks away. It suddenly burst in upon his despair like a shout of derisive laughter. “I’ll _not_ marry her!” he cried aloud. “I _can’t_ do it!”

But even as he spoke he knew that he could, and would, and must. He had been a miserable excuse for a lover to Theresa; but Theresa had never had love. All the men who had approached her with “intentions” had been fighting hard against their own contempt of themselves for seeking a wife for the sake of her money, and their efforts at love-making had been tame and lame; but Theresa, knowing no better, simply thought men not up to the expectations falsely raised by the romances and the songs. She believed _she_ could not but get as good a quality of love as there was going; and Ross, with his delightful, aristocratic indifference, was perfectly satisfactory. Theresa had that thrice-armored self-complacence which nature so often relentingly gives, to more than supply the lack of the charms withheld. She thought she was fascinating beyond any woman of her acquaintance, indeed, of her time. She spent hours in admiring herself, in studying out poses for her head and body and arms, especially her arms, which she regarded as nature’s last word on that kind of beauty–a not wholly fanciful notion, as they were not bad, if a bit too short between elbow and wrist, and rather fat at the shoulders. She always thought and, on several occasions in bursts of confidence, had imparted to girl friends that “no man who has once cared for me can ever care for another woman.” Several of her confidantes had precisely the same modest opinion of their own powers; but they laughed at Theresa–behind her back.

Ross knew how vain she was. To break with her, he would have to tell her flatly that he would not marry her. “I’d be doing her no injury,” thought he. “Her vanity would root out some explanation which would satisfy her that, whatever might be the cause, it wasn’t lack of love for her on my part.” But–To break off was unthinkable. The invitations out; the arrangements for the wedding all made; quantities of presents arrived–“I’ve got to go through with it. I’ve got to marry her,” said Ross. “But God help me, how I shall hate her!”

And, stripped clean of the glamour of her wealth, she rose before him–her nose that was red and queer in the mornings; her little personal habits that got on the nerves, especially a covert self-infatuated smile that flitted over her face at any compliment, however obviously perfunctory; her way of talking about every trivial thing she did–and what did she do that was not trivial?–as if some diarist ought to take it down for the delight of ages to come. As Ross looked at the new-created realistic image of her, he was amazed. “Why, I’ve always disliked her!” he cried. “I’ve been lying to myself. I am too low for words,” he groaned. “Was there ever such a sneaking cur?” Yes, many a one, full as unconscious of his own qualities as he himself had been until that moment; nor could he find consolation in the fact that he had company, plenty of company, and it of the world’s most “gentlemanly” and most “ladylike.”

The young man who left that wood, the young man whom Arthur saw that day, had in his heart a consciousness, an ache, of lonely poverty that dress and dogcarts and social position could do little–something, but little–to ease.

* * * * *

He stopped at Chicago and sent word to Windrift that he was ill–not seriously ill, but in such a state that he thought it best to take care of himself, with the wedding so near. Theresa was just as well pleased to have him away, as it gave her absolute freedom to plan and to superintend her triumph. For the wedding was to be her individual and exclusive triumph, with even Ross as part of the background–the most conspicuous part, but still simply background for her personal splendor.

Old Howland–called Bill until his early career as a pedlar and keeper of a Cheap Jack bazaar was forgotten and who, after the great fire, which wiped out so many pasts and purified and pedigreed Chicago’s present aristocracy, called himself William G. Howland, merchant prince, had, in his ideal character for a wealth-chaser, one weakness–a doting fondness for his daughter. When she came into the world, the doctors told him his wife would have no more children; thereafter his manner was always insulting, and usually his tone and words, whenever and of whatever he spoke to her. Women were made by the Almighty solely to bear children to men; his woman had been made to bear him a son. Now that she would never have a son, she was of no use, and it galled him that he could find no plausibly respectable excuse for casting her off, as he cast off worn-out servants in his business. But as the years passed and he saw the various varieties of thorns into which the sons of so many of his fellow-princes developed, he became reconciled to Theresa–_not_ to his wife. That unfortunate woman, the daughter of a drunkard and partially deranged by illness and by grief over her husband’s brutality toward her, became–or rather, was made by her insistent doctor–what would have been called a drunkard, had she not been the wife of a prince. Her “dipsomania” took an unaggressive form, as she was by nature gentle and sweet; she simply used to shut herself in and drink until she would cry herself into a timid, suppressed hysteria. So secret was she that Theresa never knew the truth about these “spells.”

Howland did not like Ross; but when Theresa told him she was going to marry him she had only to cry a little and sit in the old man’s lap and tease. “Very well, then,” said her father, “you can have him. But he’s a gambler, like his father. They call it finance, but changing the name of a thing only changes the smell of it, not the thing itself. I’m going to tie my money up so that he can’t get at it.”

“I want you to, papa,” replied Theresa, giving him a kiss and a great hug for emphasis. “I don’t want anybody to be able to touch _my_ property.”

For the wedding, Howland gave Theresa a free hand. “I’ll pay the bills, no matter what they are,” said he. “Give yourself a good time.” And Theresa, who had been brought up to be selfish, and was prudent about her impulses only where she suspected them of being generous, proceeded to arrange for herself the wedding that is still talked about in Chicago “society” and throughout the Middle West. A dressmaker from the Rue de la Paix came over with models and samples, and carried back a huge order and a plaster reproduction of Theresa’s figure, and elaborate notes on the color of her skin, hair, eyes, and her preferences in shapes of hats. A jeweler, also of the Rue de la Paix, came with jewels–nearly a million dollars’ worth–for her to make selections. Her boots and shoes and slippers she got from Rowney, in Fifth Avenue, who, as everybody knows, makes nothing for less than thirty-five dollars, and can put a hundred dollars worth of price, if not of value, into a pair of evening slippers. Theresa was proud of her feet; they were short and plump, and had those abrupt, towering insteps that are regarded by the people who have them as unfailing indications of haughty lineage, just as the people who have flat feet dwell fondly upon the flat feet of the Wittlesbachs, kings in Bavaria. She was not easy to please in the matter of casements for those feet; also, as she was very short in stature, she had to get three and a half extra inches of height out of her heels; and to make that sort of heel so that it can even be hobbled upon is not easy or cheap. Once Theresa, fretting about her red-ended nose and muddy skin, had gone to a specialist. “Let me see your foot,” said he; and when he saw the heel, he exclaimed: “Cut that tight, high-heeled thing out or you’ll never get a decent skin, and your eyes will trouble you by the time you are thirty.” But Theresa, before adopting such drastic measures, went to a beauty doctor. He assured her that she could be cured without the sacrifice of the heel, and that the weakness of her eyes would disappear a year or so after marriage. And he was soon going into ecstasies over her improvement, over the radiance of her beauty. She saw with his eyes and ceased to bother about nose or skin–they were the least beautiful of her beauties, but–“One can’t expect to be absolutely perfect. Besides, the absolutely perfect kind of beauty might be monotonous.”

The two weeks before the wedding were the happiest of her life. All day long, each day, vans were thundering up to the rear doors of Windrift, each van loaded to bursting with new and magnificent, if not beautiful costliness. The house was full of the employees of florists, dressmakers, decorators, each one striving to outdo the other in servility. Theresa was like an autocratic sovereign, queening it over these menials and fancying herself adored. They showed _so_ plainly that they were awed by her and were in ecstasies of admiration over her taste. And, as the grounds and the house were transformed, Theresa’s exaltation grew until she went about fairly dizzy with delight in herself.

The bridesmaids and ushers came. They were wealth-worshipers all, and their homage lifted Theresa still higher. They marched and swept about in her train, lording it over the menials and feeling that they were not a whit behind the grand ladies and gentlemen of the French courts of the eighteenth century. They had read the memoirs of that idyllic period diligently, had read with minds only for the flimsy glitter which hid the vulgarity and silliness and shame as a gorgeous robe hastily donned by a dirty chambermaid might conceal from a casual glance the sardonic and repulsive contrast. The wedding day approached all too swiftly for Theresa and her court. True, that would be the magnificent climax; but they knew it would also dissipate the spell–after the wedding, life in twentieth century America again.

“If only it don’t rain!” said Harry Legendre.

“It won’t,” replied Theresa with conviction–and her look of command toward the heavens made the courtiers exchange winks and smiles behind her back. They were courtiers to wealth, not to Theresa, just as their European prototypes are awed before a “king’s most excellent Majesty,” not before his swollen body and shrunken brain.

And it did not rain. Ross arrived in the red sunset of the wedding eve, Tom Glenning, his best man, coming with him. They were put, with the ushers, in rooms at the pavilion where were the squash courts and winter tennis courts and the swimming baths. Theresa and Ross stood on the front porch alone in the moonlight, looking out over the enchantment-like scene into which the florists and decorators had transformed the terraces and gardens. She was a little alarmed by his white face and sunken eyes; but she accepted his reassurances without question–she would have disbelieved anything which did not fit in with her plans. And now, as they gazed out upon that beauty under the soft shimmer of the moonlight, her heart suddenly expanded in tenderness. “I am _so_ happy,” she murmured, slipping an arm through his.

Her act called for a return pressure. He gave it, much as a woman’s salutation would have made him unconsciously move to lift his hat.

“While Adele was dressing me for dinner–” she began.

At that name, he moved so that her arm dropped from his; but she did not connect her maid with her former bosom friend.

“I got to thinking about those who are not so well off as we,” she went on; “about the poor. And so, I’ve asked papa to give all his employees and the servants nice presents, and I’ve sent five thousand dollars to be divided among the churches in the town, down there–for the poor. Do you think I did wrong? I’m always afraid of encouraging those kind of people to expect too much of us.”

She had asked that he might echo the eulogies she had been bestowing upon herself. But he disappointed her. “Oh, I guess it was well enough,” he replied. “I must go down to the pavilion. I’m fagged, and you must be, too.”

The suggestion that he might not be looking his best on the morrow was enough to change the current of her thoughts. “Yes, _do_, dear!” she urged. “And don’t let Tom and Harry and the rest keep you up.”

They did not even see him. He sat in the shed at the end of the boat-landing, staring out over the lake until the moon set. Then he went to the pavilion. It was all dark; he stole in, and to bed, but not to sleep. Before his closed but seeing eyes floated a vision of two women–Adelaide as he had last seen her, Theresa as she looked in the mornings, as she had looked that afternoon.

He was haggard next day. But it was becoming to him, gave the finishing touch to his customary bored, distinguished air; and he was dressed in a way that made every man there envy him. As Theresa, on insignificant-looking little Bill Howland’s arm, advanced to meet him at the altar erected under a canopy of silk and flowers in the bower of lilies and roses into which the big drawing-room had been transformed, she thrilled with pride. _There_ was a man one could look at with delight, as one said, “My husband!”

It was a perfect day–perfect weather, everything going forward without hitch, everybody looking his and her best, and “Mama” providentially compelled by one of her “spells” to keep to her room. Those absences of hers were so frequent and so much the matter of course that no one gave them a second thought. Theresa had studied up the customs at fashionable English and French weddings, and had combined the most aristocratic features of both. Perhaps the most successful feature was when she and Ross, dressed for the going away, walked, she leaning upon his arm, across the lawns to the silk marquee where the wedding breakfast was served. Before them, walking backward, were a dozen little girls from the village school, all in white, strewing roses from beribboned baskets, and singing, “Behold! The bride in beauty comes!”

“Well, I’m glad it’s all over,” said Theresa as she settled back in a chair in the private car that was to take them to Wilderness Lodge, in northern Wisconsin for the honeymoon.

“So am I,” Ross disappointed her by saying. “I’ve felt like a damn fool ever since I began to face that gaping gang.”

“But you must admit it was beautiful,” objected Theresa pouting.

Ross shut his teeth together to keep back a rude reply. He was understanding how men can be brutal to women. To look at her was to have an all but uncontrollable impulse to rise up and in a series of noisy and profane explosions reveal to her the truth that was poisoning him. After a while, a sound from her direction made him glance at her. She was sobbing. He did not then know that, to her, tears were simply the means to getting what she wanted; so his heart softened. While she was thinking that she was looking particularly well and femininely attractive, he was pitying her as a forlorn creature, who could never inspire love and ought to be treated with consideration, much as one tries to hide by an effusive show of courtesy the repulsion deformity inspires.

“Don’t cry, Theresa,” he said gently, trying to make up his mind to touch her. But he groaned to himself, “I can’t! I must wait until I can’t see her.” And he ordered the porter to bring him whisky and soda.

“Won’t you join me?” he said.

“You know, I never touch anything to drink,” she replied. “Papa and Dr. Massey both made me promise not to.”

Ross’s hand, reaching out for the bottle of whisky, drew slowly back. He averted his face that she might not see. He knew about her mother–and knew Theresa did not. It had never entered his head that the weakness of the mother might be transmitted to the daughter. Now–Just before they left, Dr. Massey had taken him aside and, in a manner that would have impressed him instantly but for his mood, had said: “Mr. Whitney, I want you never to forget that Theresa must not be depressed. You must take the greatest care of her. We must talk about it again–when you return.”

And _this_ was what he meant!

He almost leaped to his feet at Theresa’s softly interrupting voice, “Are you ill, dear?”

“A little–the strain–I’ll be all right–” And leaving the whisky untouched, he went into his own compartment. As he was closing the door, he gave a gasp of dismay. “She might begin now!” he muttered. He rang for the porter. “Bring that bottle,” he said. Then, as an afterthought of “appearances,” “And the soda and a glass.”

“I can get you another, sir,” said the porter.

“No–that one,” ordered Ross.

Behind the returning porter came Theresa. “Can’t I do something for you, dear? Rub your head, or fix the pillows?”

Ross did not look at her. “Do, please–fix the pillows,” he said. “Then if I can sleep a little, I’ll be all right, and will soon rejoin you.”

“Can’t I fix your drink for you?” she asked, putting her hand on the bottle.

Ross restrained an impulse to snatch it away from her. “Thanks, no–dear,” he answered. “I’ve decided to swear off–with you. Is it a go?”

She laughed. “Silly!” she murmured, bending and kissing him. “If you wish.”

“That settles it,” said Ross, with a forced, pained smile. “We’ll neither of us touch it. I was getting into the habit of taking too much–not really too much–but–Oh, you understand.”

“That’s the way father feels about it,” said Theresa, laughing. “We never drink at home–except mother when she has a spell, and has to be kept up on brandy.”

Ross threw his arm up to hide his face. “Let me sleep, do,” he said gently.

CHAPTER XVIII

LOVE, THE BLUNDERER

As Dory had several months’ work before him at Paris, he and Del took a furnished apartment in the Rue de Rivoli, high up, attractive within, before its balconied windows the stately trees, the fountains, the bright flower beds, the thronged playgrounds of the Tuileries. But they were not long left to themselves; in their second week, the _concierge’s_ little girl late one afternoon brought Janet’s card up to Adelaide. As Janet entered, Del regretted having yielded to impulse and admitted her. For, the granddaughter of “blue-jeans Jones,” the tavern keeper, was looking the elegant and idle aristocrat from the tip of the tall, graceful plume in her most Parisian of hats to the buckles of shoes which matched her dress, parasol, and jewels. A lovely Janet, a marvelous Janet; a toilette it must have taken her two hours to make, and spiritual hazel eyes that forbade the idea of her giving so much as a moment’s thought to any material thing, even to dress. Adelaide had spent with the dressmakers a good part of the letter of credit her mother slipped into her traveling bag at the parting; she herself was in a negligee which had as much style as Janet’s costume and, in addition, individual taste, whereof Janet had but little; and besides, while her beauty had the same American delicateness, as of the finest, least florid Sevres or Dresden, it also had a look of durability which Janet’s beauty lacked–for Janet’s beauty depended upon those fragilities, coloring and contour. Adelaide was not notably vain, had a clear sense of her defects, tended to exaggerate them, rather than her many and decisive good points. It was not Janet’s appearance that unsettled Del; she brought into the room the atmosphere Del had breathed during all those important years of girlhood, and had not yet lost her fondness for. It depressed her at once about herself to note how this vision of the life that had been but would never be again affected her.

“You are sad, dear,” said Janet, as she kissed her on both cheeks with a diffusing of perfume that gave her a sense of a bouquet of priceless exotics waving before her face.

“You are sad, dear,” she repeated, with that air of tenderest sympathy which can be the safest cover for subtle malice.

Adelaide shrank.

“I’m so glad I’ve come when I may be able to do some good.”

Adelaide winced.

“How cozy these rooms are–“

At “cozy” Adelaide shuddered. No one ever used, except apologetically, that word, which is the desperate last resort of compliment.

“And what a beautiful view from the windows–so much better than ours at the pompous old Bristol, looking out on that bare square!”

Adelaide laughed. Not by chance, she knew, did Miss Janet, with her softly sheathed but swift and sharp cat claws, drag in the delicate hint that while Adelaide was “cozy” in an unaristocratic _maison meublee_, she herself was ensconced in the haunts of royalty; and it suddenly came back to Del how essentially cheap was “aristocracy.”

“But I mustn’t look at those adorable gardens,” continued Janet. “They fill me with longing for the country, for the pure, simple things. I am so sick of the life mamma and I lead. And you are married to dear Dory–how romantic! And I hear that Arthur is to marry Margaret Schultz–or whatever her name was–that splendid creature! She was a _dear_ friend of the trained nurse I had last spring, and what the nurse told me about her made me positively love her. Such character! And getting ready to lead _such_ a useful life.” This without the least suggestion of struggle with a difficult subject. “Arthur is a noble fellow, too. If we had been in spiritual accord, I’d have loved to go and lead his life with him.”

Adelaide was in high good humor now–Janet was too preposterous to be taken seriously. “What do you want me to do for you, Jen?” said she.

“Why, nothing!” exclaimed Janet, looking a little wonder and much reproach.

Del laughed. “Now, really, Jen,” said she. “You know you never in the world went to all the trouble of getting my address, and then left royalty at the Bristol for a _maison meublee_, four flights up and no elevator, just to _see_ me!”

“I had thought of something I was sure would give you pleasure,” said Janet, injured.

“What do you want me to do for you?” repeated Adelaide, with smiling persistence.

“Mamma and I have an invitation to spend a week at Besancon–you know, it’s the splendid old chateau Louis Treize used to love to visit. It’s still the seat of the Saint Berthe family, and the present Marquis, a _dear_ friend of ours, is such a wonderful, fine old nobleman–so simple and gracious and full of epigrams. He really ought to wear lace and ruffles and a beautiful peruke. At any rate, as I was saying, he has asked us down. But mamma has to go to England to see papa before he sails, and I thought you’d love to visit the chateau–you and Dory. It’s so poetic–and historic, too.”

“Your mother is going away and you’ll be unable to make this visit unless you get a chaperon, and you want me to chaperon you,” said Adelaide, who was not minded to be put in the attitude of being the recipient of a favor from this particular young woman at this particular time, when in truth she was being asked to confer a favor. “Adversity” had already sharpened her wits to the extent of making her alert to the selfishness disguised as generosity which the prosperous love to shower upon their little brothers and sisters of the poor. She knew at once that Janet must have been desperately off for a chaperon to come to her.

A look of irritation marred Janet’s spiritual countenance for an instant. But she never permitted anything whatsoever to stand between her and what she wished. She masked herself and said sweetly: “Won’t you go, dear? I know you’ll enjoy it–you and Dory. And it would be a great favor to me. I don’t see how I can go unless you consent. You know, I mayn’t go with just anyone.”

Adelaide’s first impulse was to refuse; but she did not. She put off decision by saying, “I’ll ask Dory to-night, and let you know in the morning. Will that do?”

“Perfectly,” said Janet, rising to go. “I’ll count on you, for I know Dory will want to see the chateau and get a glimpse of life in the old aristocracy. It will be _so_ educational.”

Dory felt the change in Del the instant he entered their little _salon_–felt that during the day some new element had intruded into their friendly life together, to interrupt, to unsettle, and to cloud the brightening vistas ahead. At the mention of Janet he began to understand. He saw it all when she said with a show of indifference that deceived only herself, “Wouldn’t you like to go down to Besancon?”

“Not I,” replied he coldly. “Europe is full of that kind of places. You can’t glance outdoors without seeing a house or a ruin where the sweat and blood of peasants were squandered.”

“Janet thought you’d be interested in it as history,” persisted Adelaide, beginning to feel irritated.

“That’s amusing,” said Dory. “You might have told her that scandal isn’t history, that history never was made in such places. As for the people who live there now, they’re certainly not worth while–the same pretentious ignoramuses that used to live there, except they no longer have fangs.”

“You ought not to be so prejudiced,” said Adelaide, who in those days often found common sense irritating. She had the all but universal habit of setting down to “prejudice” such views as are out of accord with the set of views held by one’s business or professional or social associates.

Her irritation confirmed Dory’s suspicions. “I spoke only for myself,” said he. “Of course, you’ll accept Janet’s invitation. She included me only as a matter of form.”

“I couldn’t, without you.”

“Why not?”

“Well–wouldn’t, then.”

“But I urge you to go–want you to go! I can’t possibly leave Paris, not for a day–at present.”

“I shan’t go without you,” said Adelaide, trying hard to make her tone firm and final.

Dory leaned across the table toward her–they were in the garden of a cafe in the Latin Quarter. “If you don’t go, Del,” said he, “you’ll make me feel that I am restraining you in a way far meaner than a direct request not to go. You want to go. I want you to go. There is _no_ reason why you shouldn’t.”

Adelaide smiled shamefacedly. “You honestly want to get rid of me?”

“Honestly. I’d feel like a jailer, if you didn’t go.”

“What’ll you do in the evenings?”

“Work later, dine later, go to bed and get up earlier.”

“Work–always work,” she said. She sighed, not wholly insincerely. “I wish I weren’t so idle and aimless. If I were the woman I ought to be–“

“None of that–none of that!” he cried, in mock sternness.

“I ought to be interested in your work.”

“Why, I thought you were!” he exclaimed, in smiling astonishment.

“Oh, of course, in a way–in an ‘entertainment’ sort of way. I like to hear you talk about it–who wouldn’t? But I don’t give the kind of interest I should–the interest that thinks and suggests and stimulates.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” said Dory. “The ‘helpful’ sort of people are usually a nuisance.”

But she knew the truth, though passion might still be veiling it from him. Life, before her father’s will forced an abrupt change, had been to her a showman, submitting his exhibits for her gracious approval, shifting them as soon as she looked as if she were about to be bored; and the change had come before she had lived long enough to exhaust and weary of the few things he has for the well-paying passive spectator, but not before she had formed the habit of making only the passive spectator’s slight mental exertion.

“Dory is so generous,” she thought, with the not acutely painful kind of remorse we lay upon the penitential altar for our own shortcomings, “that he doesn’t realize how I’m shirking and letting him do all the pulling.” And to him she said, “If you could have seen into my mind while Janet was here, you’d give me up as hopeless.”

Dory laughed. “I had a glimpse of it just now–when you didn’t like it because I couldn’t see my way clear to taking certain people so seriously as you think they deserve.”

“But you _are_ prejudiced on that subject,” she maintained.

“And ever shall be,” admitted he, so good-humoredly that she could not but respond. “It’s impossible for me to forget that every luxurious idler means scores who have to work long hours for almost nothing in order that he may be of no use to the world or to himself.”

“You’d have the whole race on a dead level,” said Adelaide.

“Of material prosperity–yes,” replied Dory. “A high dead level. I’d abolish the coarse, brutal contrasts between waste and want. Then there’d be a chance for the really interesting contrasts–the infinite varieties of thought and taste and character and individuality.”

“I see,” said Adelaide, as if struck by a new idea. “You’d have the contrasts, differences among flowers, not merely between flower and weed. You’d abolish the weeds.”

“Root and stalk,” answered Dory, admiring her way of putting it. “My objection to these aristocratic ideals is that they are so vulgar–and so dishonest. Is that prejudice?”

“No–oh, no!” replied Del sincerely. “Now, it seems to me, I don’t care to go with Janet.”

“Not to oblige me–very particularly? I want you to go. I want you to see for yourself, Del.”

She laughed. “Then I’ll go–but only because you ask it.”

* * * * *

That was indeed an elegant company at Besancon–elegant in dress, elegant in graceful carelessness of manners, elegant in graceful sinuosities of cleverly turned phrases. But after the passing of the first and second days’ sensations, Hiram and Ellen Ranger’s daughter began to have somewhat the same feeling she remembered having as a little girl, when she went to both the afternoon and the evening performances of the circus. These people, going through always the same tricks in the same old narrow ring of class ideas, lost much of their charm after a few repetitions of their undoubtedly clever and attractive performance; she even began to see how they would become drearily monotonous. “No wonder they look bored,” she thought. “They are.” What enormous importance they attached to trifles! What ludicrous tenacity in exploded delusions! And what self-complacent claiming of remote, powerful ancestors who had founded their families, when those ancestors would have disclaimed them as puny nonentities. Their ideas were wholly provided for them, precisely as were their clothes and every artistic thing that gave them “background.” They would have made as absurd a failure of trying to evolve the one as the other. Yet they posed–and were widely accepted–as the superiors of those who made their clothes and furniture and of those who made their ideas. And she had thought Dory partly insincere, partly prejudiced when he had laughed at them. Why, he had only shown the plainest kind of American good sense. As for snobbishness, was not the silly-child American brand of it less ridiculous than this unblushing and unconcealed self-reverence, without any physical, mental or material justification whatsoever? They hadn’t good manners even, because–as Dory had once said–no one could have really good manners who believed, and acted upon the belief, that he was the superior of most of the members of his own family–the human race.

“I suppose I could compress myself back into being satisfied with this sort of people and things,” she thought, as she looked round the ballroom from which pose and self-consciousness and rigid conventionality had banished spontaneous gayety. “I suppose I could even again come to fancying this the only life. But I certainly don’t care for it now.”

But, although Adelaide was thus using her eyes and her mind–her own eyes and her own mind–in observing what was going on around her, she did not disconcert the others, not even Janet, by expressing her thoughts. Common sense–absolute common sense–always sounds incongruous in a conventional atmosphere. In its milder forms it produces the effect of wit; in stronger doses it is a violent irritant; in large quantity, it causes those to whom it is administered to regard the person administering it as insane. Perhaps Adelaide might have talked more or less frankly to Janet had Janet not been so obviously in the highest of her own kind of heavens. She was raised to this pinnacle by the devoted attentions of the Viscount Brunais, eldest son of Saint Berthe and the most agreeable and adaptable of men, if the smallest and homeliest. Adelaide spoke of his intelligence to Janet, when they were alone before dinner on the fourth day, and Janet at once responded.

“And such a soul!” she exclaimed. “He inherits all the splendid, noble traditions of their old, _old_ family. You see in his face that he is descended from generations of refinement and–and–freedom from contact with vulgarizing work, don’t you?”

“That hadn’t struck me,” said Adelaide amiably. “But he’s a well-meaning, good-hearted little man, and, of course, he feels as at home in the surroundings he’s had all his life as a bird on a bough. Who doesn’t?”

“But when you know him better, when you know him as I know him–” Janet’s expression disclosed the secret.

“But won’t you be lonely–away off here–among–foreign people?” said Adelaide.

“Oh, I should _love_ it here!” exclaimed Janet. “It seems to me I–he and I–must have lived in this very chateau in a former existence. We have talked about it, and he agrees with me. We are _so_ harmonious.”

“You’ve really made up your mind to–to marry him?” Adelaide had almost said “to buy him”; she had a sense that it was her duty to disregard Janet’s pretenses, and “buy” was so exactly the word to use with these people to whom money was the paramount consideration, the thought behind every other thought, the feeling behind every other feeling, the mainspring of their lives, the mainstay of all the fictions of their aristocracy.

“That depends on father,” replied Janet. “Mother has gone to talk to him about it.”

“I’m sure your father won’t stand between you and happiness,” said Adelaide.

“But he doesn’t understand these aristocratic people,” replied she. “Of course, if it depended upon Aristide and me, we should be married without consulting anybody. But he can’t legally marry without his father’s consent, and his father naturally wants proper settlements. It’s a cruel law, don’t you think?”

Adelaide thought not; she thought it, on the contrary, an admirable device to “save the face” of a mercenary lover posing as a sentimentalist and money-spurner. But she merely said, “I think it’s most characteristic, most aristocratic.” She knew Janet, how shrewd she was, how thoroughly she understood the “coarse side of life.” She added, “And your father’ll come round.”

“I wish I could believe it,” sighed Janet. “The Saint Berthes have an exaggerated notion of papa’s wealth. Besides, they need a good deal. They were robbed horribly by those dreadful revolutionists. They used to own all this part of the country. All these people round here with their little farms were once the peasants of Aristide’s ancestors. Now–even this chateau has a mortgage on it. I couldn’t keep back the tears, while Aristide was telling me.”

Adelaide thought of Charles Whitney listening to that same recital, and almost laughed. “Well, I feel sure it will turn out all right,” she said. “Your mother’ll see to that. And I believe you’ll be very, very happy.” Theatricals in private life was Janet’s passion–why should she not be happy? Frenchmen were famous for their politeness and consideration to their wives; Aristide would never let her see or feel that she bored him, that her reverence for the things he was too intelligent and modern not to despise appealed to him only through his sense of humor. Janet would push her shrewd, soulful way into social leadership, would bring her children up to be more aristocratic than the children of the oldest aristocrats.

Adelaide smiled as she pictured it all–smiled, yet sighed. She was not under Janet’s fixed and unshakable delusions. She saw that high-sounding titles were no more part of the personalities bearing them than the mass of frankly false hair so grandly worn by Aristide’s grand-aunt was part of the wisp-like remnant of natural head covering. But that other self of hers, so reluctant to be laughed or frowned down and out by the self that was Hiram Ranger’s daughter, still forced her to share in the ancient, ignorant allegiance to “appearances.” She did not appreciate how bored she was, how impatient to be back with Dory, the never monotonous, the always interesting, until she discovered that Janet, with her usual subtlety, had arranged for them to stay another week, had made it impossible for her to refuse without seeming to be disobliging and even downright rude. They were to have returned to Paris on a Monday. On Sunday she wrote Dory to telegraph for her on Tuesday.

“I’d hate to be looking forward to that life of dull foolery,” thought she, as the mossy bastions of Besancon drifted from her horizon–she was journeying up alone, Janet staying on with one of the Saint Berthe women as chaperone. “It is foolery and it is dull. I don’t see how grown-up people endure it, unless they’ve never known any better. Yet I seem unable to content myself with the life father stands for–and Dory.” She appreciated the meaning of the legend of the creature with the two bodies and the two wills, each always opposed to the other, with the result that all motion was in a dazing circle in which neither wished to go. “Still,” she concluded, “I _am_ learning”–which was the truth; indeed, she was learning with astonishing rapidity for a girl who had had such an insidiously wrong start and was getting but slight encouragement.

Dory, of course, was helping her, but not as he might. Instead of bringing to bear that most powerful of influences, the influence of passionate love, he held to his stupid compact with his supersensitive self–the compact that he would never intrude his longings upon her. He constantly reminded himself how often woman gives through a sense of duty or through fear of alienating or wounding one she respects and likes; and, so he saw in each impulse to enter Eden boldly a temptation to him to trespass, a temptation to her to mask her real feelings and suffer it. The mystery in which respectable womanhood is kept veiled from the male, has bred in him an awe of the female that she does not fully realize or altogether approve–though she is not slow to advantage herself of it. In the smaller cities and towns of the West, this awe of respectable womanhood exists in a degree difficult for the sophisticated to believe possible, unless they have had experience of it. Dory had never had that familiarity with women which breeds knowledge of their absolute and unmysterious humanness. Thus, not only did he not have the key which enables its possessor to unlock them; he did not even know how to use it when Del offered it to him, all but thrust it into his hand. Poor Dory, indeed–but let only those who have not loved too well to love wisely strut at his expense by pitying him; for, in matters of the heart, sophisticated and unsophisticated act much alike. “Men would dare much more, if they knew what women think,” says George Sand. It is also true that the men who dare most, who win most, are those who do not stop to bother about what the women think. Thought does not yet govern the world, but appetite and action–bold appetite and the courage of it.

CHAPTER XIX

MADELENE

To give himself, journeyman cooper, the feeling of ease and equality, Arthur dressed, with long-discontinued attention to detail, from his extensive wardrobe which the eighteen months since its last accessions had not impaired or antiquated. And, in the twilight of an early September evening, he went forth to settle the matter that had become the most momentous.

There is in dress a something independent of material and cut and even of the individuality of the wearer; there is a spirit of caste. If the lady dons her maid’s dress, some subtle essence of the menial permeates her, even to her blood, her mind, and heart. The maid, in madame’s dress, putting on “airs,” is merely giving an outlet to that which has entered into her from her clothes. Thus, Arthur assumed again with his “_grande toilette_” the feeling of the caste from which he had been ejected. Madelene, come herself to open the door for him, was in a summer dress of no pretentions to style other than that which her figure, with its large, free, splendid lines, gave whatever she happened to wear. His nerves, his blood, responded to her beauty, as always; her hair, her features, the grace of the movements of that strong, slender, supple form, gave him the sense of her kinship with freedom and force and fire and all things keen and bright. But stealthily and subtly it came to him, in this mood superinduced by his raiment, that in marrying her he was, after all, making sacrifices–she was ascending socially, he descending, condescending. The feeling was far too vague to be at all conscious; it is, however, just those hazy, stealthy feelings that exert the most potent influence upon us. When the strong are conquered is it not always by feeble forces from the dark and from behind?

“You have had good news,” said Madelene, when they were in the dim daylight on the creeper-screened back porch. For such was her generous interpretation of his expression of self-confidence and self-satisfaction.

“Not yet,” he replied, looking away reflectively. “But I hope for it.”

There wasn’t any mistaking the meaning of that tone; she knew what was coming. She folded her hands in her lap, and there softly entered and pervaded her a quiet, enormous content that made her seem the crown of the quiet beauty of that evening sky whose ocean of purple-tinted crystal stretched away toward the shores of the infinite.

“Madelene,” he began in a self-conscious voice, “you know what my position is, and what I get, and my prospects. But you know what I was, too; and so, I feel I’ve the right to ask you to marry me–to wait until I get back to the place from which I had to come down.”

The light was fading from the sky, from her eyes, from her heart. A moment before he had been there, so near her, so at one with her; now he was far away, and this voice she heard wasn’t his at all. And his words–She felt alone in the dark and the cold, the victim of a cheat upon her deepest feelings.

“I was bitter against my father at first,” he went on. “But since I have come to know you I have forgiven him. I am grateful to him. If it hadn’t been for what he did I might never have learned to appreciate you, to–“

“Don’t–_please_!” she said in the tone that is from an aching heart. “Don’t say any more.”

Arthur was astounded. He looked at her for the first time since he began; instantly fear was shaking his self-confidence at its foundations. “Madelene!” he exclaimed. “I know that you love me!”

She hid her face in her hands–the sight of them, long and narrow and strong, filled him with the longing to seize them, to feel the throb of their life thrill from them into him, troop through and through him like victory-bringing legions into a besieged city. But her broken voice stopped him. “And I thought you loved me,” she said.

“You know I do!” he cried.

She was silent.

“What is it, Madelene?” he implored. “What has come between us? Does your father object because I am–am not well enough off?”

She dropped her hands from before her face and looked at him. The first time he saw her he had thought she was severe; ever since he had wondered how he could have imagined severity into a countenance so gentle and sweet. Now he knew that his first impression was not imaginary; for she had again the expression with which she had faced the hostile world of Saint X until he, his love, came into her life. “It is I that must ask you what has changed you, Arthur,” she said, more in sadness than in bitterness, though in both. “I don’t seem to know you this evening.”

Arthur lost the last remnant of his self-consciousness. He saw he was about to lose, if indeed he had not already lost, that which had come to mean life to him–the happiness from this woman’s beauty, the strength from her character, the sympathy from her mind and heart. It was in terror that he asked: “Why, Madelene? What is it? What have I done?” And in dread he studied her firm, regular profile, a graceful strength that was Greek, and so wonderfully completed by her hair, blue black and thick and wavy about the temple and ear and the nape of the neck.

The girl did not answer immediately; he thought she was refusing to hear, yet he could find no words with which to try to stem the current of those ominous thoughts. At last she said: “You talk about the position you have ‘come down from’ and the position you are going back to–and that you are grateful to your father for having brought you down where you were humble enough to find me.”

“Madelene!”

“Wait!” she commanded. “You wish to know what is the matter with me. Let me tell you. We didn’t receive you here because you are a cooper or because you had been rich. I never thought about your position or your prospects. A woman–at least a woman like me–doesn’t love a man for his position, doesn’t love him for his prospects. I’ve been taking you at just what you were–or seemed to be. And you–you haven’t come, asking me to marry you. You treat me like one of those silly women in what they call ‘society’ here in Saint X. You ask me to wait until you can support me fashionably–I who am not fashionable–and who will always support myself. What you talked isn’t what I call love, Arthur. I don’t want to hear any more about it–or, we might not be able to be even friends.”

She paused; but Arthur could not reply. To deny was impossible, and he had no wish to attempt to make excuses. She had shown him to himself, and he could only echo her just scorn.

“As for waiting,” she went on, “I am sure, from what you say, that if you ever got back in the lofty place of a parasite living idly and foolishly on what you abstracted from the labor of others, you’d forget me–just as your rich friends have forgotten you.” She laughed bitterly. “O Arthur, Arthur, what a fraud you are! Here, I’ve been admiring your fine talk about your being a laborer, about what you’d do if you ever got the power. And it was all simply envy and jealousy and trying to make yourself believe you weren’t so low down in the social scale as you thought you were. You’re too fine a gentleman for Madelene Schulze, Arthur. Wait till you get back your lost paradise; then take a wife who gives her heart only where her vanity permits. You don’t want _me_, and I–don’t want you!”

Her voice broke there. With a cry that might have been her name or just an inarticulate call from his heart to hers, he caught her in his arms, and she was sobbing against his shoulder. “You can’t mean it, Madelene,” he murmured, holding her tight and kissing her cheek, her hair, her ear. “You don’t mean it.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” she sobbed. “But–I love you, too.”

“Then everything else will straighten out of itself. Help me, Madelene. Help me to be what we both wish me to be–what I can’t help being, with you by my side.”

When a vanity of superiority rests on what used to be, it dies much harder than when it rests upon what is. But Arthur’s self-infatuation, based though it was on the “used-to-be,” then and there crumbled and vanished forever. Love cleared his sight in an instant, where reason would have striven in vain against the stubborn prejudices of snobbism. Madelene’s instinct had searched out the false ring in his voice and manner; it was again instinct that assured her all was now well. And she straightway, and without hesitation from coquetry or doubt, gave herself frankly to the happiness of the love that knows it is returned in kind and in degree.

“Yes, everything else will come right,” she said. “For you _are_ strong, Arthur.”

“I shall be,” was his reply, as he held her closer. “Do I not love a woman who believes in me?”

“And who believes because she knows.” She drew away to look at him. “You _are_ like your father!” she exclaimed. “Oh, my dear, my love, how rich he made you–and me!”

* * * * *

At breakfast, the next morning, he broke the news to his mother. Instead of returning his serene and delighted look she kept her eyes on her plate and was ominously silent. “When you are well acquainted with her, mother, you’ll love her,” he said. He knew what she was thinking–Dr. Schulze’s “unorthodox” views, to put it gently; the notorious fact that his daughters did not frown on them; the family’s absolute lack of standing from the point of view of reputable Saint X.

“Well,” said his mother finally, and without looking at her big, handsome son, “I suppose you’re set on it.”

“Set–that’s precisely the word,” replied Arthur. “We’re only waiting for your consent and her father’s.”

“_I_ ain’t got anything to do with it,” said she, with a pathetic attempt at a smile. “Nor the old doctor, either, judging by the look of the young lady’s eyes and chin. I never thought you’d take to a strong-minded woman.”

“You wouldn’t have her _weak_-minded, would you, mother?”

“There’s something between.”

“Yes,” said he. “There’s the woman whose mind is weak when it ought to be strong, and strong when it ought to be weak. I decided for one like you, mother dear–one that would cure me of foolishness and keep me cured.”

“A female doctor!”

Arthur laughed. “And she’s going to practice, mother. We shouldn’t have enough to live on with only what I’d make–or am likely to make anyway soon.”

Mrs. Ranger lifted her drooping head in sudden panic.

“Why, you’ll live _here_, won’t you?”

“Of course,” replied Arthur, though, as a matter of fact, he hadn’t thought where they would live. He hastened to add, “Only we’ve got to pay board.”

“I guess we won’t quarrel about that,” said the old woman, so immensely relieved that she was almost resigned to the prospect of a Schulze, a strong-minded Schulze and a practicing female doctor, as a daughter-in-law.

“Madelene is coming up to see you this morning,” continued Arthur. “I know you’ll make her–welcome.” This wistfully, for he was now awake to the prejudices his mother must be fighting.

“I’ll have the horses hitched up, and go and see her,” said Ellen, promptly. “She’s a good girl. Nobody could ever say a word against her character, and that’s the main thing.” She began to contrast Madelene and Janet, and the situation brightened. At least, she was getting a daughter-in-law whom she could feel at ease with, and for whom she could have respect, possibly even liking of a certain reserved kind.

“I suggested that you’d come,” Arthur was replying. “But Madelene said she’d prefer to come to you. She thinks it’s her place, whether it’s etiquette or not. We’re not going to go in for etiquette–Madelene and I.”

Mrs. Ranger looked amused. This from the young man who had for years been “picking” at her because she was unconventional! “People will misunderstand you, mother,” had been his oft-repeated polite phrase. She couldn’t resist a mild revenge. “People’ll misunderstand, if she comes. They’ll think she’s running after me.”

Like all renegades, the renegades from the religion of conventionality are happiest when they are showing their contempt for that before which they once knelt. “Let ’em think,” retorted Arthur cheerfully. “I’ll telephone her it’s all right,” he said, as he rose from the table, “and she’ll be up here about eleven.”

And exactly at eleven she came, not a bit self-conscious or confused. Mrs. Ranger looked up at her–she was more than a head the taller–and found a pair of eyes she thought finest of all for their honesty looking down into hers. “I reckon we’ve got–to kiss,” said she, with a nervous laugh.

“I reckon so,” said Madelene, kissing her, and then, after a glance and an irresistible smile, kissing her again. “You were awfully put out when Arthur told you, weren’t you?”

“Well, you know, the saying is ‘A bad beginning makes a good ending,'” said Ellen. “Since there was only Arthur left to me, I hadn’t been calculating on a daughter-in-law to come and take him away.”