Complete March Family Trilogy eBook (2024)

Complete March Family Trilogy by William Dean Howells

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Table of Contents
Section	Page
Start of eBook	1
THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY	1
I. THE OUTSET	1
II. MIDSUMMER-DAY’S DREAM.	15
III. THE NIGHT BOAT.	23
IV. A DAY’S RAILROADING	33
V. THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND.	40
VI. NIAGARA.	49
Part of their business also was to buy the tickets for their return to	67
DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE.	72
THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL.	82
IX. QUEBEC.	97
X. HOMEWARD AND HOME.	119
Part of the burlesque troupe rode down in the omnibus to the Grand Trunk	121
NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.	123
PG EDITORS BOOKMARKS:	138
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL	139
PART FIRST	141
II.	147
III.	149
IV	151
V.	156
VI.	159
VII.	162
VIII.	169
IX.	176
X.	179
XI.	185
XII.	194
PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:	202
PART SECOND	202
I.	202
II.	208
III.	212
IV	217
V.	220
VI.	222
VII.	227
VII.	231
IX.	239
X	242
XI.	247
XII.	255
XIII.	258
XIV.	262
PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:	269
PART THIRD	269
I.	269
II.	274
III.	278
IV	283
V.	287
VI.	294
VII	296
VIII.	298
IX.	303
PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:	312
PART FOURTH	312
I.	312
II.	321
III.	328
IV	332
V.	338
VI.	344
VII.	354
VIII.	359
IX.	365
PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:	375
PART FIFTH	375
I.	375
II.	383
III.	392
IV	397
V.	401
VI.	403
VII.	406
VIII.	409
IX.	413
X.	415
XI.	418
XII.	421
XIII.	423
XIV.	427
XV.	432
XVI.	435
XVII.	442
XVIII.	444
PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:	447
Part I.	447
I.	447
II.	450
III.	451
IV.	453
V.	456
VI.	457
VII.	462
VIII.	466
IX.	468
X.	472
XI.	475
XII.	477
XIII.	480
XIV.	485
XV.	490
XVI.	494
XVII.	498
XVIII.	500
XIX.	503
XX.	505
XXI.	507
XXII.	510
XXIII.	513
XXV.	520
PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:	523
PART II.	523
XXVI.	523
XXVII.	527
XXVIII.	531
XXIX.	535
XXX.	541
XXXI.	543
XXXII.	549
XXXIII.	554
XXXIV.	558
XXXV.	560
XXXVI.	563
XXXVII.	567
XXXVIII.	571
XXXIX.	574
XL.	578
XLI.	580
XLII.	583
XLIII.	586
XLIV.	588
XLV.	594
XLVI.	596
XLVII.	600
PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:	604
PART III.	605
XLVIII.	605
XLIX.	612
L.	615
LI.	618
LII.	621
LIII.	625
LIV.	630
LV.	633
LVI.	639
LVII.	643
LVIII.	646
LIX.	651
LX.	655
LXI.	659
LXII.	662
LXIII.	665
LXIV.	670
LXV.	673
LXVI.	676
LXVII.	680
LXVIII.	685
LXIX.	689
LXX.	693
LXXI.	697
LXXII.	704
LXXIII.	710
LXXVI.	715
LXXV.	722
PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:	726

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY

By William Dean Howells

1871

I. THE OUTSET

They first met in Boston, but the match was made inEurope, where they afterwards saw each other; whither,indeed, he followed her; and there the match was alsobroken off. Why it was broken off, and why itwas renewed after a lapse of years, is part of quitea long love-story, which I do not think myself qualifiedto rehearse, distrusting my fitness for a sustainedor involved narration; though I am persuaded that askillful romancer could turn the courtship of Basiland Isabel March to excellent account. Fortunatelyfor me, however, in attempting to tell the reader ofthe wedding-journey of a newly married couple, no longervery young, to be sure, but still fresh in the lightof their love, I shall have nothing to do but to talkof some ordinary traits of American life as theseappeared to them, to speak a little of well-known andeasily accessible places, to present now a bit oflandscape and now a sketch of character.

They had agreed to make their wedding-journey in thesimplest and quietest way, and as it did not takeplace at once after their marriage, but some weekslater, it had all the desired charm of privacy fromthe outset.

“How much better,” said Isabel, “togo now, when nobody cares whether you go or stay,than to have started off upon a wretched wedding-breakfast,all tears and trousseau, and had people wanting tosee you aboard the cars. Now there will not bea suspicion of honey-moonshine about us; we shallgo just like anybody else,—­with a difference,dear, with a difference!” and she took Basil’scheeks between her hands. In order to do this,she had to ran round the table; for they were at dinner,and Isabel’s aunt, with whom they had begunmarried life, sat substantial between them. Itwas rather a girlish thing for Isabel, and she added,with a conscious blush, “We are past our firstyouth, you know; and we shall not strike the publicas bridal, shall we? My one horror in life isan evident bride.”

Basil looked at her fondly, as if he did not thinkher at all too old to be taken for a bride; and formy part I do not object to a woman’s being ofIsabel’s age, if she is of a good heart and temper.Life must have been very unkind to her if at thatage she have not won more than she has lost.It seemed to Basil that his wife was quite as fairas when they met first, eight years before; but hecould not help recurring with an inextinguishableregret to the long interval of their broken engagement,which but for that fatality they might have spent together,he imagined, in just such rapture as this. Theregret always haunted him, more or less; it was partof his love; the loss accounted irreparable reallyenriched the final gain.

“I don’t know,” he said presently,with as much gravity as a man can whose cheeks areclasped between a lady’s hands, “you don’tbegin very well for a bride who wishes to keep hersecret. If you behave in this way, they willput us into the ‘bridal chambers’ at allthe hotels. And the cars—­they’rebeginning to have them on the palace-cars.”

Just then a shadow fell into the room.

“Wasn’t that thunder, Isabel?” askedher aunt, who had been contentedly surveying the tenderspectacle before her. “O dear! you’llnever be able to go by the boat to-night, if it storms.It ’s actually raining now!”

In fact, it was the beginning of that terrible stormof June, 1870. All in a moment, out of the hotsunshine of the day it burst upon us before we quiteknew that it threatened, even before we had fairlynoticed the clouds, and it went on from passion topassion with an inexhaustible violence. In thesquare upon which our friends looked out of theirdining-room windows the trees whitened in the gusts,and darkened in the driving floods of the rainfall,and in some paroxysms of the tempest bent themselvesin desperate submission, and then with a great shudderrent away whole branches and flung them far off uponthe ground. Hail mingled with the rain, and nowthe few umbrellas that had braved the storm vanished,and the hurtling ice crackled upon the pavement, wherethe lightning played like flames burning from theearth, while the thunder roared overhead without ceasing.There was something splendidly theatrical about itall; and when a street-car, laden to the last inchof its capacity, came by, with horses that prancedand leaped under the stinging blows of the hailstones,our friends felt as if it were an effective and verynaturalistic bit of pantomime contrived for theiradmiration. Yet as to themselves they were verysensible of a potent reality in the affair, and atintervals during the storm they debated about goingat all that day, and decided to go and not to go, accordingto the changing complexion of the elements. Basilhad said that as this was their first journey togetherin America, he wished to give it at the beginningas pungent a national character as possible, and thatas he could imagine nothing more peculiarly Americanthan a voyage to New York by a Fall River boat, theyought to take that route thither. So much upholstery,so much music, such variety cf company, he understood,could not be got in any other way, and it might bethat they would even catch a glimpse of the inventorof the combination, who represented the very excessand extremity of a certain kind of Americanism.Isabel had eagerly consented; but these aestheticmotives were paralyzed for her by the thought of passingPoint Judith in a storm, and she descended from herhigh intents first to the Inside Boats, without themagnificence and the orchestra, and then to the ideaof going by land in a sleeping-car. Having comfortablyaccomplished this feat, she treated Basil’s consentas a matter of course, not because she did not regardhim, but because as a woman she could not conceiveof the steps to her conclusion as unknown to him,and always treated her own decisions as the productof their common reasoning. But her husband heldout for the boat, and insisted that if the storm fell

before seven o’clock, they could reach it atNewport by the last express; and it was this obstinacythat, in proof of Isabel’s wisdom, obliged themto wait two hours in the station before going by theland route. The storm abated at five o’clock,and though the rain continued, it seemed well by aquarter of seven to set out for the Old Colony Depot,in sight of which a sudden and vivid flash of lightningcaused Isabel to seize her husband’s arm, andto implore him, “O don’t go by the boat!”On this, Basil had the incredible weakness to yield;and bade the driver take them to the Worcester Depot.It was the first swerving from the ideal in theirwedding journey, but it was by no means the last;though it must be confessed that it was early to begin.

They both felt more tranquil when they were irretrievablycommitted by the purchase of their tickets, and whenthey sat down in the waiting. room of the station,with all the time between seven and nine o’clockbefore them. Basil would have eked out the businessof checking the trunks into an affair of some length,but the baggage-master did his duty with pitilesscelerity; and so Basil, in the mere excess of hisdisoccupation, bought an accident-insurance ticket.This employed him half a minute, and then he gaveup the unequal contest, and went and took his placebeside Isabel, who sat prettily wrapped in her shawl,perfectly content.

“Isn’t it charming,” she said gayly,“having to wait so long? It puts me inmind of some of those other journeys we took together.But I can’t think of those times with any patience,when we might really have had each other, and didn’t!Do you remember how long we had to wait at Chambery?and the numbers of military gentlemen that waited too,with their little waists, and their kisses when theymet? and that poor married military gentleman, withthe plain wife and the two children, and a tarnisheduniform? He seemed to be somehow in misfortune,and his mustache hung down in such a spiritless way,while all the other military mustaches about curledand bristled with so much boldness. I think ‘sallesd’attente’ everywhere are delightful, andthere is such a community of interest in them all,that when I come here only to go out to Brookline,I feel myself a traveller once more,—­a blessedstranger in a strange land. O dear, Basil, thosewere happy times after all, when we might have hadeach other and didn’t! And now we’rethe more precious for having been so long lost.”

She drew closer and closer to him, and looked at himin a way that threatened betrayal of her bridal character.

“Isabel, you will be having your head on myshoulder, next,” said he.

“Never!” she answered fiercely, recoveringher distance with a start. “But, dearest,if you do see me going to—­act absurdly,you know, do stop me.”

“I’m very sorry, but I’ve got myselfto stop. Besides, I didn’t undertake topreserve the incognito of this bridal party.”

If any accident of the sort dreaded had really happened,it would not have mattered so much, for as yet theywere the sole occupants of the waiting room.To be sure, the ticket-seller was there, and the ladywho checked packages left in her charge, but thesemust have seen so many endearments pass between passengers,—­thata fleeting caress or so would scarcely have drawntheir notice to our pair. Yet Isabel did not somuch even as put her hand into her husband’s;and as Basil afterwards said, it was very good practice.

Our temporary state, whatever it is, is often mirroredin all that come near us, and our friends were fatedto meet frequent parodies of their happiness fromfirst to last on this journey. The travesty beganwith the very first people who entered the waiting-roomafter themselves, and who were a very young couplestarting like themselves upon a pleasure tour, whichalso was evidently one of the first tours of any kindthat they had made. It was of modest extent,and comprised going to New York and back; but theytalked of it with a fluttered and joyful expectationas if it were a voyage to Europe. Presently thereappeared a burlesque of their happiness (but witha touch of tragedy) in that kind of young man who iscalled by the females of his class a fellow, and twoyoung women of that kind known to him as girls.He took a place between these, and presently begana robust flirtation with one of them. He possessedhimself, after a brief struggle, of her parasol, andtwirled it about, as he uttered, with a sort of tenderrudeness inconceivable vapidities, such as you wouldexpect from none but a man of the highest fashion.The girl thus courted became selfishly unconsciousof everything but her own joy, and made no attemptto bring the other girl within its warmth, but lefther to languish forgotten on the other side.The latter sometimes leaned forward, and tried todivert a little of the flirtation to herself, butthe flirters snubbed her with short answers, and presentlyshe gave up and sat still in the sad patience of uncourtedwomen. In this attitude she became a burden toIsabel, who was glad when the three took themselvesaway, and were succeeded by a very stylish couple—­fromNew York, she knew as well as if they had given hertheir address on West 999th Street. The ladywas not pretty, and she was not, Isabel thought, dressedin the perfect taste of Boston; but she owned franklyto herself that the New-Yorkeress was stylish, undeniablyeffective. The gentleman bought a ticket forNew York, and remained at the window of the officetalking quite easily with the seller.

“You couldn’t do that, my poor Basil,”said Isabel, “you’d be afraid.”

“O dear, yes; I’m only too glad to getoff without browbeating; though I must say that thisofficer looks affable enough. Really,” headded, as an acquaintance of the ticket-seller camein and nodded to him and said “Hot, to-day!”“this is very strange. I always felt asif these men had no private life, no friendships likethe rest of us. On duty they seem so like sovereigns,set apart from mankind, and above us all, that it’squite incredible they should have the common personalrelations.”

At intervals of their talk and silence there camevivid flashes of lightning and quite heavy shocksof thunder, very consoling to our friends, who tookthem as so many compliments to their prudence in notgoing by the boat, and who had secret doubts of theirwisdom whenever these acknowledgments were withheld.Isabel went so far as to say that she hoped nothingwould happen to the boat, but I think she would cheerfullyhave learnt that the vessel had been obliged to putback to Newport, on account of the storm, or eventhat it had been driven ashore at a perfectly safeplace.

People constantly came and went in the waiting-room,which was sometimes quite full, and again empty ofall but themselves. In the course of their observationsthey formed many cordial friendships and bitter enmitiesupon the ground of personal appearance, or particularsof dress, with people whom they saw for half a minuteupon an average; and they took such a keen interestin every one, that it would be hard to say whetherthey were more concerned in an old gentleman with vigorouslyupright iron-gray hair, who sat fronting them, andreading all the evening papers, or a young man whohurled himself through the door, bought a ticket withterrific precipitation, burst out again, and then randown a departing train before it got out of the station:they loved the old gentleman for a certain stubbornbenevolence of expression, and if they had been friendsof the young man and his family for generations andfelt bound if any harm befell him to go and breakthe news gently to his parents, their nerves couldnot have been more intimately wrought upon by hishazardous behavior. Still, as they had their ticketsfor New York, and he was going out on a merely localtrain,—­to Brookline, I believe, they couldnot, even in their anxiety, repress a feeling of contemptfor his unambitious destination.

They were already as completely cut off from localassociations and sympathies as if they were a thousandmiles and many months away from Boston. Theyenjoyed the lonely flaring of the gas-jets as a gustof wind drew through the station; they shared thegloom and isolation of a man who took a seat in thedarkest corner of the room, and sat there with foldedarms, the genius of absence. In the patronizingspirit of travellers in a foreign country they notedand approved the vases of cut-flowers in the boothof the lady who checked packages, and the pots ofivy in her windows. “These poor Bostonians,”they said; “have some love of the beautifulin their rugged natures.”

But after all was said and thought, it was only eighto’clock, and they still had an hour to wait.

Basil grew restless, and Isabel said, with a subtileinterpretation of his uneasiness, “I don’twant anything to eat, Basil, but I think I know theweaknesses of men; and you had better go and pass thenext half-hour over a plate of something indigestible.”

This was said ‘con stizza’, the leastlittle suggestion of it; but Basil rose with shamefulalacrity. “Darling, if it’s your wish—­”

“It’s my fate, Basil,” said Isabel.

“I’ll go,” he exclaimed, “becauseit isn’t bridal, and will help us to pass forold married people.”

“No, no, Basil, be honest; fibbing isn’tyour forte: I wonder you went into the insurancebusiness; you ought to have been a lawyer. Gobecause you like eating, and are hungry, perhaps,or think you may be so before we get to New York.

“I shall amuse myself well enough here!”

I suppose it is always a little shocking and grievousto a wife when she recognizes a rival in butchers’-meatand the vegetables of the season. With her slenderrelishes for pastry and confectionery and her daintyhabits of lunching, she cannot reconcile with the idea(of) her husband’s capacity for breakfasting,dining, supping, and hot meals at all hours of theday and night—­as they write it on the sign-boardsof barbaric eating-houses. But isabel would haveonly herself to blame if she had not perceived thistrait of Basil’s before marriage. She recurrednow, as his figure disappeared down the station, tomemorable instances of his appetite in their Europeantravels during their first engagement. “Yes,he ate terribly at Susa, when I was too full of thenotion of getting into Italy to care for bouillonand cold roast chicken. At Rome I thought I mustbreak with him on account of the wild-boar; and atHeidelberg, the sausage and the ham!—­howcould he, in my presence? But I took him withall his faults,—­and was glad to get him,”she added, ending her meditation with a little burstof candor; and she did not even think of Basil’sappetite when he reappeared.

With the thronging of many sorts of people, in partiesand singly, into the waiting room, they became onceagain mere observers of their kind, more or less criticalin temper, until the crowd grew so that individualtraits were merged in the character of multitude.Even then, they could catch glimpses of faces so sweetor fine that they made themselves felt like momentsof repose in the tumult, and here and there was somethingso grotesque in dress of manner that it showed distinctfrom the rest. The ticket-seller’s stampclicked incessantly as he sold tickets to all pointsSouth and West: to New York, Philadelphia, Charleston;to New Orleans, Chicago, Omaha; to St. Paul, Duluth,St. Louis; and it would not have been hard to findin that anxious bustle, that unsmiling eagerness,an image of the whole busy affair of life. Itwas not a particularly sane spectacle, that impatienceto be off to some place that lay not only in the distance,but also in the future—­to which no lineof road carries you with absolute certainty acrossan interval of time full of every imaginable chanceand influence. It is easy enough to buy a ticketto Cincinnati, but it is somewhat harder to arrivethere. Say that all goes well, is it exactlyyou who arrive?

In the midst of the disquiet there entered at lastan old woman, so very infirm that she had to be upheldon either hand by her husband and the hackman whohad brought them, while a young girl went before withshawls and pillows which she arranged upon the seat.There the invalid lay down, and turned towards thecrowd a white, suffering face, which was yet so heavenlymeek and peaceful that it comforted whoever lookedat it.

In spirit our happy friends bowed themselves beforeit and owned that there was something better thanhappiness in it.

“What is it like, Isabel?”

“O, I don’t know, darling,” shesaid; but she thought, “Perhaps it is like someblessed sorrow that takes us out of this prison ofa world, and sets us free of our every-day hates anddesires, our aims, our fears. ourselves. Maybea long and mortal sickness might come to wear sucha face in one of us two, and the other could see it,and not regret the poor mask of youth and pretty looksthat had fallen away.”

She rose and went over to the sick woman, on whoseface beamed a tender smile, as Isabel spoke to her.A chord thrilled in two lives hitherto unknown toeach other; but what was said Basil would not ask whenthe invalid had taken Isabel’s hand betweenher own, as for adieu, and she came back to his sidewith swimming eyes. Perhaps his wife could havegiven no good reason for her emotion, if he had askedit. But it made her very sweet and dear to him;and I suppose that when a tolerably unselfish manis once secure of a woman’s love, he is ordinarilymore affected by her compassion and tenderness forother objects than by her feelings towards himself.He likes well enough to think, “She loves me,”but still better, “How kind and good she is!”

They lost sight of the invalid in the hurry of gettingplaces on the cars, and they never saw her again.The man at the wicket-gate leading to the train hadthrown it up, and the people were pressing furiouslythrough as if their lives hung upon the chance of instantpassage. Basil had secured his ticket for thesleeping-car, and so he and Isabel stood aside andwatched the tumult. When the rash was over theypassed through, and as they walked up and down theplatform beside the train, “I was thinking,”said Isabel, “after I spoke to that poor oldlady, of what Clara Williams says: that she wondersthe happiest women in the world can look each otherin the face without bursting into tears, their happinessis so unreasonable, and so built upon and hedged aboutwith misery. She declares that there’snothing so sad to her as a bride, unless it’sa young mother, or a little girl growing up in theinnocent gayety of her heart. She wonders theycan live through it.”

“Clara is very much of a reformer, and wouldmake an end of all of us men, I suppose,—­excepther father, who supports her in the leisure that enablesher to do her deep thinking. She little knowswhat we poor fellows have to suffer, and how oftenwe break down in business hours, and sob upon oneanother’s necks. Did that old lady talkto you in the same strain?”

“O no! she spoke very calmly of her sickness,and said she had lived a blessed life. Perhapsit was that made me shed those few small tears.She seemed a very religious person.”

“Yes,” said Basil, “it is almosta pity that religion is going out. But then youare to have the franchise.”

“All aboard!”

This warning cry saved him from whatever heresy hemight have been about to utter; and presently thetrain carried them out into the gas-sprinkled darkness,with an ever-growing speed that soon left the citylamps far behind. It is a phenomenon whose commonnessalone prevents it from being most impressive, thatdeparture of the night-express. The two hundredmiles it is to travel stretch before it, traced bythose slender clews, to lose which is ruin, and aboutwhich hang so many dangers. The draw bridgesthat gape upon the way, the trains that stand smokingand steaming on the track, the rail that has bornethe wear so long that it must soon snap under it,the deep cut where the overhanging mass of rock tremblesto its fall, the obstruction that a pitiless malicemay have placed in your path,—­you thinkof these after the journey is done, but they seldomhaunt your fancy while it lasts. The knowledgeof your helplessness in any circ*mstances is so perfectthat it begets a sense of irresponsibility, almostof security; and as you drowse upon the pallet ofthe sleeping car, and feel yourself hurled forwardthrough the obscurity, you are almost thankful thatyou can do nothing, for it is upon this conditiononly that you can endure it; and some such conditionas this, I suppose, accounts for many heroic factsin the world. To the fantastic mood which possessesyou equally, sleeping or waking, the stoppages ofthe train have a weird character; and Worcester, Springfield,New Haven, and Stamford are rather points in dream-landthan well-known towns of New England. As thetrain stops you drowse if you have been waking, andwake if you have been in a doze; but in any case youare aware of the locomotive hissing and coughing beyondthe station, of flaring gas-jets, of clattering feetof passengers getting on and off; then of some one,conductor or station-master, walking the whole lengthof the train; and then you are aware of an insane satisfactionin renewed flight through the darkness. You thinkhazily of the folk in their beds in the town leftbehind, who stir uneasily at the sound of your train’sdeparting whistle; and so all is a blank vigil or ablank slumber.

By daylight Basil and Isabel found themselves at oppositeends of the car, struggling severally with the problemof the morning’s toilet. When the combatwas ended, they were surprised at the decency of theirappearance, and Isabel said, “I think I’mpresentable to an early Broadway public, and I’vea fancy for not going to a hotel. Lucy will beexpecting us out there before noon; and we can passthe time pleasantly enough for a few hours just wanderingabout.”

She was a woman who loved any cheap defiance of custom,and she had an agreeable sense of adventure in whatshe proposed. Besides, she felt that nothingcould be more in the unconventional spirit in whichthey meant to make their whole journey than a strollabout New York at half-past six in the morning.

“Delightful!” answered Basil, who wasalways charmed with these small originalities.“You look well enough for an evening party; andbesides, you won’t meet one of your own criticalclass on Broadway at this hour. We will breakfastat one of those gilded metropolitan restaurants, andthen go round to Leonard’s, who will be ableto give us just three unhurried seconds. Afterthat we’ll push on out to his place.”

At that early hour there were not many people astiron the wide avenue down which our friends strolledwhen they left the station; but in the aspect of thosethey saw there was something that told of a greaterheat than they had yet known in Boston, and they weresensible of having reached a more southern latitude.The air, though freshened by the over-night’sstorm, still wanted the briskness and sparkle and pungencyof the Boston air, which is as delicious in summeras it is terrible in winter; and the faces that showedthemselves were sodden from the yesterday’sheat and perspiration. A corner-grocer, seatedin a sort of fierce despondency upon a keg near hisshop door, had lightly equipped himself for the struggleof the day in the battered armor of the day before,and in a pair of roomy pantaloons, and a baggy shirtof neutral tint—­perhaps he had made a vownot to change it whilst the siege of the hot weatherlasted,—­now confronted the advancing sunlight,before which the long shadows of the buildings wereslowly retiring. A marketing mother of a familypaused at a provision-store, and looking weakly inat the white-aproned butcher among his meats and flies,passes without an effort to purchase. Hurriedand wearied shop-girls tripped by in the draperiesthat betrayed their sad necessity to be both fine andshabby; from a boarding-house door issued brisklyone of those cool young New Yorkers whom no circ*mstancescan oppress: breezy-coated, white-livened, clean,with a good cigar in the mouth, a light cane caughtupon the elbow of one of the arms holding up the paperfrom which the morning’s news is snatched, whilstthe person sways lightly with the walk; in the street-carsthat slowly tinkled up and down were rows of peoplewith baskets between their legs and papers beforetheir faces; and all showed by some peculiarity ofair or dress the excess of heat which they had alreadyborne, and to which they seemed to look forward, andgave by the scantiness of their number a vivid impressionof the uncounted thousands within doors prolonging,before the day’s terror began, the oblivion ofsleep.

As they turned into one of the numerical streets tocross to Broadway, and found themselves in a yet deeperseclusion, Basil-began to utter in a musing tone:

“Acity against the world’s gray Prime,
Lostin some desert, far from Time,
Wherenoiseless Ages gliding through,
Haveonly sifted sands and dew,
Yetstill a marble head of man
Lying

on all the haunted plan;
Thepassions of the human heart
Beatingthe marble breast of Art,
Werenot more lone to one who first
Uponits giant silence burst,
Thanthis strange quiet, where the tide
Oflife, upheaved on either aide,
Hangstrembling, ready soon to beat
Withhuman waves the Morning Street.”

“How lovely!” said Isabel, swiftly catchingat her skirt, and deftly escaping contact with oneof a long row of ash-barrels posted sentinel-likeon the edge of the pavement. “Whose is it,Basil?”

“Ah! a poet’s,” answered her husband,“a man of whom we shall one day any of us beglad to say that we liked him before he was famous.What a nebulous sweetness the first lines have, andwhat a clear, cool light of day-break in the last!”

“You could have been as good a poet as that,Basil,” said the ever-personal and concretely-speakingIsabel, who could not look at a mountain without thinkingwhat Basil might have done in that way, if he hadtried.

“O no, I couldn’t, dear. It’svery difficult being any poet at all, though it’seasy to be like one. But I’ve done withit; I broke with the Muse the day you accepted me.She came into my office, looking so shabby,—­notunlike one of those poor shop-girls; and as I was verywell dressed from having just been to see you, why,you know, I felt the difference. ‘Well,my dear?’ said I, not quite liking the look ofreproach she was giving me. ‘You are groinsto leave me,’ she answered sadly. ’Well,yes; I suppose I must. You see the insurance businessis very absorbing; and besides, it has a bad appearance,your coming about so in office hours, and in thoseclothes.’ ‘O,’ she moaned out,’you used to welcome me at all times, out inthe country, and thought me prettily dressed.’’Yes, yes; but this is Boston; and Boston makesa great difference in one’s ideas; and I’mgoing to be married, too. Come, I don’twant to seem ungrateful; we have had many pleasanttimes together, I own it; and I’ve no objectionsto your being present at Christmas and Thanksgivingand birthdays, but really I must draw the line there.’She gave me a look that made my heart ache, and wentstraight to my desk and took out of a pigeon holea lot of papers,—­odes upon your cruelty,Isabel; songs to you; sonnets,—­the sonnet,a mighty poor one, I’d made the day before,—­andthrew them all into the grate. Then she turnedto me again, signed adieu with mute lips, and passedout. I could hear the bottom wire of the poorthing’s hoop-skirt clicking against each stepof the stairway, as she went slowly and heavily downto the street.” “O don’t—­don’t,Basil,” said his wife, “it seems like somethingwrong. I think you ought to have been ashamed.”

“Ashamed! I was heart broken. Butit had to come to that. As I got hopeful aboutyou, the Muse became a sad bore; and more than onceI found myself smiling at her when her back was turned.The Muse doesn’t like being laughed at any morethan another woman would, and she would have leftme shortly. No, I couldn’t be a poet likeour Morning-Street friend. But see! the humanwave is beginning to sprinkle the pavement with cooksand second-girls.”

They were frowzy serving-maids and silent; each sweptdown her own door steps and the pavement in frontof her own house, and then knocked her broom on thecurbstone and vanished into the house, on which thehand of change had already fallen. It was nolonger a street solely devoted to the domestic gods,but had been invaded at more than one point by thebustling deities of business in such streets the irregular,inspired doctors and doctresses come first with inordinatedoor-plates, then a milliner filling the parlor windowwith new bonnets; here even a publisher had hung hissign beside a door, through which the feet of youngladies used to trip, and the feet of little childrento patter. Here and there stood groups of dwellingsunmolested as yet outwardly; but even these had acertain careworn and guilty air, as if they knew themselvesto be cheapish boarding-houses or furnished lodgingsfor gentlemen, and were trying to hide it. Tothese belonged the frowzy serving-women; to thesethe rows of ash-barrels, in which the decrepit childrenand mothers of the streets were clawing for bits ofcoal.

By the time Basil and Isabel reached Broadway therewere already some omnibuses beginning their long day’stravel up and down the handsome, tiresome length ofthat avenue; but for the most part it was empty.There was, of course, a hurry of foot-passengers uponthe sidewalks, but these were sparse and uncharacteristic,for New York proper was still fast asleep. Thewaiter at the restaurant into which our friends steppedwas so well aware of this, and so perfectly assuredthey were not of the city, that he could not forbeara little patronage of them, which they did not resent.He brought Basil what he had ordered in barbaric abundance,and charged for it with barbaric splendor. Itis all but impossible not to wish to stand well withyour waiter: I have myself been often treatedwith conspicuous rudeness by the tribe, yet I havenever been able to withhold the ‘douceur’that marked me for a gentleman in their eyes, andentitled me to their dishonorable esteem. Basilwas not superior to this folly, and left the wasterwith the conviction that, if he was not a New Yorker,he was a high-bred man of the world at any rate.

Vexed by a sense of his own pitifulness, this manof the world continued his pilgrimage down Broadway,which even in that desert state was full of a certaininterest. Troops of laborers straggled along thepavements, each with his dinner-pail in hand; andin many places the eternal building up and pullingdown was already going on; carts were struggling upthe slopes of vast cellars, with loads of distractingrubbish; here stood the half-demolished walls of ahouse, with a sad variety of wall-paper showing inthe different rooms; there clinked the trowel uponthe brick, yonder the hammer on the stone; overheadswung and threatened the marble block that the derrickwas lifting to its place. As yet these forcesof demolition and construction had the business ofthe street almost to themselves.

“Why, how shabby the street is!” saidIsabel, at last. When I landed, after beingabroad, I remember that Broadway impressed me withits splendor.”

“Ah I but you were merely coming from Europethen; and now you arrive from Burton, and are contrastingthis poor Broadway with Washington Street. Don’tbe hard upon it, Isabel; every street can’t bea Boston street, you know,” said Basil.Isabel, herself a Bostonian of great intensity bothby birth and conviction, believed her husband the onlyman able to have thoroughly baffled the malignityof the stars in causing him to be born out of Boston;yet he sometimes trifled with his hardly achievedtriumph, and even showed an indifference to it, withan insincerity of which there can be no doubt whatever.

“O stuff!” she retorted, “as ifI had any of that silly local pride! Though youknow well enough that Boston is the best place in theworld. But Basil! I suppose Broadway strikesus as so fine, on coming ashore from Europe, becausewe hardly expect anything of America then.”

“Well, I don’t know. Perhaps thestreet has some positive grandeur of its own, thoughit needs a multitude of people in it to bring out itsbest effects. I’ll allow its dishearteningshabbiness and meanness in many ways; but to standin front of Grace Church, on a clear day,—­aday of late September, say,—­and look downthe swarming length of Broadway, on the movement andthe numbers, while the Niagara roar swelled and swelledfrom those human rapids, was always like strong newwine to me. I don’t think the world affordssuch another sight; and for one moment, at such times,I’d have been willing to be an Irish councilman,that I might have some right to the pride I felt inthe capital of the Irish Republic. What a finething it must be for each victim of six centuries ofoppression to reflect that he owns at least a dozenAmericans, and that, with his fellows, he rules ahundred helpless millionaires!”

Like all daughters of a free country, Isabel knewnothing about politics, and she felt that she wasgetting into deep water; she answered buoyantly, butshe was glad to make her weariness the occasion ofhailing a stage, and changing the conversation.The farther down town they went the busier the streetgrew; and about the Astor House, where they alighted,there was already a bustle that nothing but a firecould have created at the same hour in Boston.A little farther on the steeple of Trinity rose highinto the scorching sunlight, while below, in the shadowthat was darker than it was cool, slumbered the oldgraves among their flowers.

“How still they lie!” mused the happywife, peering through the iron fence in passing.

“Yes, their wedding-journeys are ended, poorthings!” said Basil; and through both theirminds flashed the wonder if they should ever come tosomething like that; but it appeared so impossiblethat they both smiled at the absurdity.

“It’s too early yet for Leonard,”continued Basil; “what a pity the church-yardis locked up. We could spend the time so delightfullyin it. But, never mind; let us go down to theBattery,—­it ’s not a very pleasantplace, but it’s near, and it’s historical,and it’s open,—­where these drowsyfriends of ours used to take the air when they werein the fashion, and had some occasion for the elementin its freshness. You can imagine—­it’scheap—­how they used to see Mr. Burr andMr. Hamilton down there.”

All places that fashion has once loved and abandonedare very melancholy; but of all such places, I thinkthe Battery is the most forlorn. Are there somesickly locust-trees there that cast a tremulous anddecrepit shade upon the mangy grass-plots? Ibelieve so, but I do not make sure; I am certain onlyof the mangy grass-plots, or rather the spaces betweenthe paths, thinly overgrown with some kind of refuseand opprobrious weed, a stunted and pauper vegetationproper solely to the New York Battery. At thathour of the summer morning when our friends, with theaimlessness of strangers who are waiting to do somethingelse, saw the ancient promenade, a few scant and hungry-eyedlittle boys and girls were wandering over this weedygrowth, not playing, but moving listlessly to andfro, fantastic in the wild inaptness of their costumes.One of these little creatures wore, with an odd involuntaryjauntiness, the cast-off best drew of some happierchild, a gay little garment cut low in the neck andshort in the sleeves, which gave her the grotesqueeffect of having been at a party the night before.Presently came two jaded women, a mother and a grandmother,that appeared, when they had crawled out of theirbeds, to have put on only so much clothing as the lawcompelled. They abandoned themselves upon thegreen stuff, whatever it was, and, with their leanhands clasped outside their knees, sat and stared,silent and hopeless, at the eastern sky, at the heartof the terrible furnace, into which in those daysthe world seemed cast to be burnt up, while the childwhich the younger woman had brought with her feeblywailed unheeded at her side. On one side of thesewomen were the shameless houses out of which theymight have crept, and which somehow suggested riotousmaritime dissipation; on the other side were thosehouses in which had once dwelt rich and famous folk,but which were now dropping down the boarding-housescale through various un-homelike occupations to finaldishonor and despair. Down nearer the water,and not far from the castle that was once a playhouseand is now the depot of emigration, stood certainexpress-wagons, and about these lounged a few hard-lookingmen. Beyond laughed and danced the fresh bluewater of the bay, dotted with sails and smokestacks.

“Well,” said Basil, “I think ifI could choose, I should like to be a friendless Germanboy, setting foot for the first time on this happycontinent. Fancy his rapture on beholding thislovely spot, and these charming American faces!What a smiling aspect life in the New World must wearto his young eyes, and how his heart must leap withinhim!”

“Yes, Basil; it’s all very pleasing, andthank you for bringing me. But if you don’tthink of any other New York delights to show me, dolet us go and sit in Leonard’s office till hecomes, and then get out into the country as soon aspossible.”

Basil defended himself against the imputation thathe had been trying to show New York to his wife, orthat he had any thought but of whiling away the longmorning hours, until it should be time to go to Leonard.He protested that a knowledge of Europe made New Yorkthe most uninteresting town in America, and that itwas the last place in the world where he should thinkof amusing himself or any one else; and then they bothupbraided the city’s bigness and dullness withan enjoyment that none but Bostonians can know.They particularly derided the notion of New York’sbeing loved by any one. It was immense, it wasgrand in some ways, parts of it were exceedingly handsome;but it was too vast, too coarse, too restless.They could imagine its being liked by a successfulyoung man of business, or by a rich young girl, ignorantof life and with not too nice a taste in her pleasures;but that it should be dear to any poet or scholar,or any woman of wisdom and refinement, that they couldnot imagine. They could not think of any one’sloving New York as Dante loved Florence, or as Madamede Stael loved Paris, or as Johnson loved black, homely,home-like London. And as they twittered theirlittle dispraises, the giant Mother of Commerce wasgrowing more and more conscious of herself, wakingfrom her night’s sleep and becoming aware ofher fleets and trains, and the myriad hands and wheelsthat throughout the whole sea and land move for her,and do her will even while she sleeps. All aboutthe wedding-journeyers swelled the deep tide of lifeback from its night-long ebb. Broadway had filledher length with people; not yet the most characteristicNew York crowd, but the not less interesting multitudeof strangers arrived by the early boats and trams,and that easily distinguishable class of lately New-Yorkizedpeople from other places, about whom in the metropolisstill hung the provincial traditions of early rising;and over all, from moment to moment, the eager, audacious,well-dressed, proper life of the mighty city was beginningto prevail,—­though this was not so notablewhere Basil and Isabel had paused at a certain window.It was the office of one of the English steamers,and he was saying, “It was by this line I sailed,you know,”—­and she was interruptinghim with, “When who could have dreamed thatyou would ever be telling me of it here?” Sothe old marvel was wondered over anew, till it filledthe world in which there was room for nothing butthe strangeness that they should have loved each otherso long and not made it known, that they should everhave uttered it, and that, being uttered, it shouldbe so much more and better than ever could have beendreamed. The broken engagement was a fable of

disaster that only made their present fortune moreprosperous. The city ceased about them, and theywalked on up the street, the first man and first womanin the garden of the new-made earth. As theywere both very conscious people, they recognized inthemselves some sense of this, and presently drolledit away, in the opulence of a time when every momentbrought some beautiful dream, and the soul could beprodigal of its bliss.

“I think if I had the naming of the animalsover again, this morning, I shouldn’t call snakes‘snakes’; should you, Eve?” laughedBasil in intricate acknowledgment of his happiness.

“O no, Adam; we’d look out all the mostgraceful euphemisms in the newspapers, and we wouldn’thurt the feelings of a spider.”

II. MIDSUMMER-DAY’S DREAM.

They had waited to see Leonard, in order that theymight learn better how to find his house in the country;and now, when they came in upon him at nine o’clock,he welcomed them with all his friendly heart.He rose from the pile of morning’s letters towhich he had but just sat down; he placed them theeasiest chairs; he made a feint of its not being abusy hour with him, and would have had them look uponhis office, which was still damp and odorous fromthe porter’s broom, as a kind of down-town parlor;but after they had briefly accounted to his amazementfor their appearance then and there, and Isabel hadboasted of the original fashion in which they hadthat morning seen New York, they took pity on him,and bade him adieu till evening.

They crossed from Broadway to the noisome street bythe ferry, and in a little while had taken their placesin the train on the other side of the water.

“Don’t tell me, Basil,” said Isabel,“that Leonard travels fifty miles every dayby rail going to and from his work!”

“I must, dearest, if I would be truthful.”

“Then, darling, there are worse things in thisworld than living up at the South End, aren’tthere?” And in agreement upon Boston as a placeof the greatest natural advantages, as well as allacquirable merits, with after talk that need not berecorded, they arrived in the best humor at the littlecountry station near which the Leonards dwelt.

I must inevitably follow Mrs. Isabel thither, thoughI do it at the cost of the reader, who suspects theexcitements which a long description of the movementwould delay. The ladies were very old friends,and they had not met since Isabel’s return fromEurope and renewal of her engagement. Upon thenews of this, Mrs. Leonard had swallowed with surprisingease all that she had said in blame of Basil’sconduct during the rupture, and exacted a promisefrom her friend that she should pay her the first visitafter their marriage. And now that they had cometogether, their only talk; was of husbands, whom theyviewed in every light to which husbands could be turned,

and still found an inexhaustible novelty in the theme.Mrs. Leonard beheld in her friend’s joy the sweetreflection of her own honeymoon, and Isabel was pleasedto look upon the prosperous marriage of the formeras the image of her future. Thus, with immenseprofit and comfort, they reassured one another byevery question and answer, and in their weak contentlapsed far behind the representative women of our age,when husbands are at best a necessary evil, and therelation of wives to them is known to be one of pitiablesubjection. When these two pretty, fogies puttheir heads of false hair together, they were as sillyand benighted as their great-grandmothers could havebeen in the same circ*mstances, and, as I say, shamefullyencouraged each other, in their absurdity. Theabsurdity appeared too good and blessed to be true.“Do you really suppose, Basil,” Isabelwould say to her oppressor, after having given himsome elegant extract from the last conversation uponhusbands, “that we shall get on as smoothly asthe Leonards when we have been married ten years?Lucy says that things go more hitchily the first yearthan ever they do afterwards, and that people loveeach other better and better just because they’vegot used to it. Well, our bliss does seem a littlecrude and garish compared with their happiness; andyet”—­she put up both her palms againsthis, and gave a vehement little push—­“thereis something agreeable about it, even at this stageof the proceedings.”

“Isabel,” said her husband, with severity,“this is bridal!”

“No matter! I only want to seem an oldmarried woman to the general public. But theapplication of it is that you must be careful not tocontradict me, or cross me in anything, so that wecan be like the Leonards very much sooner than theybecame so. The great object is not to have anyhitchiness; and you know you are provoking—­attimes.”

They both educated themselves for continued and tranquilhappiness by the example and precept of their friends;and the time passed swiftly in the pleasant learning,and in the novelty of the life led by the Leonards.This indeed merits a closer study than can be givenhere, for it is the life led by vast numbers of prosperousNew Yorkers who love both the excitement of the cityand the repose of the country, and who aspire to unitethe enjoyment of both in their daily existence.The suburbs of the metropolis stretch landward fiftymiles in every direction; and everywhere are handsomevillas like Leonard’s, inhabited by men likehimself, whom strict study of the time-table enablesto spend all their working hours in the city and alltheir smoking and sleeping hours in the country.

The home and the neighborhood of the Leonards puton their best looks for our bridal pair, and theywere charmed. They all enjoyed the visit, saidguests and hosts, they were all sorry to have it cometo an end; yet they all resigned themselves to thisconclusion. Practically, it had no other resultthan to detain the travellers into the very heart ofthe hot weather. In that weather it was easyto do anything that did not require an active effort,and resignation was so natural with the mercury atninety, that I aan not sure but there was somethingsinful in it.

They had given up their cherished purpose of goingto Albany by the day boat, which was represented tothem in every impossible phase. It would be dreadfullycrowded, and whenever it stopped the heat would beinsupportable. Besides it would bring them toAlbany at an hour when they must either spend thenight there, or push on to Niagara by the night train.“You had better go by the evening boat.It will be light almost till you reach West Point,and you’ll see all the best scenery. Thenyou can get a good night’s rest, and start freshin the morning.” So they were counseled,and they assented, as they would have done if theyhad been advised: “You had better go bythe morning boat. It’s deliciously cool,travelling; you see the whole of the river, you reachAlbany for supper, and you push through to Niagarathat night and are done with it.”

They took leave of Leonard at breakfast and of hiswife at noon, and fifteen minutes later they wererushing from the heat of the country into the heatof the city, where some affairs and pleasures wereto employ them till the evening boat should start.

Their spirits were low, for the terrible spell ofthe great heat brooded upon them. All abroadburned the fierce white light of the sun, in whichnot only the earth seemed to parch and thirst, butthe very air withered, and was faint and thin to thetroubled respiration. Their train was full ofpeople who had come long journeys from broiling citiesof the West, and who were dusty and ashen and reekingin the slumbers at which some of them still vainlycaught. On every one lay an awful languor.Here and there stirred a fan, like the broken wingof a dying bird; now and then a sweltering young mothershifted her hot baby from one arm to another; afterevery station the desperate conductor swung throughthe long aisle and punched the ticket, which eachpassenger seemed to yield him with a tacit malediction;a suffering child hung about the empty tank, whichcould only gasp out a cindery drop or two of ice-water.The wind buffeted faintly at the windows; when thedoor was opened, the clatter of the rails struck throughand through the car like a demoniac yell.

Yet when they arrived at the station by the ferry-side,they seemed to have entered its stifling darknessfrom fresh and vigorous atmosphere, so close and deadand mined with the carbonic breath of the locomotiveswas the air of the place. The thin old woodenwalls that shut out the glare of the sun transmittedan intensified warmth; the roof seemed to hover lowerand lower, and in its coal-smoked, raftery hollow togenerate a heat deadlier than that poured upon itfrom the skies.

In a convenient place in the station hung a thermometer,before which every passenger, on going aboard theferry-boat, paused as at a shrine, and mutely paidhis devotions. At the altar of this fetich ourfriends also paused, and saw that the mercury wasabove ninety, and exulting with the pride that savagestake in the cruel might of their idols, bowed theirsouls to the great god Heat.

On the boat they found a place where the breath ofthe sea struck cool across their faces, and made themforget the thermometer for the brief time of the transit.But presently they drew near that strange, irregularrow of wooden buildings and jutting piers which skirtsthe river on the New York aide, and before the boat’smotion ceased the air grew thick and warm again, andtainted with the foulness of the street on which thebuildings front. Upon this the boat’s passengersissued, passing up through a gangway, on one sideof which a throng of return-passengers was pent bya gate of iron barn, like a herd of wild animals.They were streaming with perspiration, and, accordingto their different temperaments, had faces of deepcrimson or deadly pallor.

“Now the question is, my dear,” said Basilwhen, free of the press, they lingered for a momentin the shade outside, “whether we had betterwalk up to Broadway, at an immediate sacrifice offibre, and get a stage there, or take one of thesecars here, and be landed a little nearer, with halfthe exertion. By this route we shall have sightsend smells which the other can’t offer us, butwhichever we take we shall be sorry.”

“Then I say take this,” decided Isabel.“I want to be sorry upon the easiest possibleterms, this weather.”

They hailed the first car that passed, and got intoit. Well for them both if she could have exercisedthis philosophy with regard to the whole day’sbusiness, or if she could have given up her plans forit, with the same resignation she had practiced inregard to the day boat! It seems to me a proofof the small advance our race has made in true wisdom,that we find it so hard to give up doing anythingwe have meant to do. It matters very little whetherthe affair is one of enjoyment or of business, wefeel the same bitter need of pursuing it to the end.The mere fact of intention gives it a flavor of duty,and dutiolatry, as one may call the devotion, haspassed so deeply into our life that we have scarcelya sense any more of the sweetness of even a neglectedpleasure. We will not taste the fine, guiltyrapture of a deliberate dereliction; the gentle sinof omission is all but blotted from the calendar ofour crimes. If I had been Columbus, I shouldhave thought twice before setting sail, when I wasquite ready to do so; and as for Plymouth Rock, I shouldhave sternly resisted the blandishments of those twinsirens, Starvation and Cold, who beckoned the Puritansshoreward, and as soon as ever I came in sight oftheir granite perch should have turned back to England.But it is now too late to repair these errors, andso, on one of the hottest days of last year, beholdmy obdurate bridal pair, in a Tenth or Twentieth Avenuehorse-car, setting forth upon the fulfillment of aseries of intentions, any of which had wiselier beenleft unaccomplished. Isabel had said they wouldcall upon certain people in Fiftieth Street, and then

shop slowly down, ice-creaming and staging and variouslycooling and calming by the way, until they reachedthe ticket-office on Broadway, whence they could indefinitelybetake themselves to the steamboat an hour or twobefore her departure. She felt that they had yieldedsufficiently to circ*mstances and conditions alreadyon this journey, and she was resolved that the presenthalf-day in New York should be the half-day of heroriginal design.

It was not the most advisable thing, as I have allowed,but it was inevitable, and it afforded them a spectaclewhich is by no means wanting in sublimity, and whichis certainly unique,—­the spectacle of thatgreat city on a hot day, defiant of the elements,and prospering on with every form of labor, and ata terrible cost of life. The man carrying thehod to the top of the walls that rankly grow and growas from his life’s blood, will only lay downhis load when he feels the mortal glare of the sunblaze in upon heart and brain; the plethoric millionairefor whom he toils will plot and plan in his officetill he swoons at the desk; the trembling beast muststagger forward while the flame-faced tormentor onthe box has strength to lash him on; in all those vastpalaces of commerce there are ceaseless sale and purchase,packing and unpacking, lifting up and laying down,arriving and departing loads; in thousands of shopsis the unspared and unsparing weariness of selling;in the street, filled by the hurry and suffering oftens of thousands, is the weariness of buying.

Their afternoon’s experience was something thatBasil and Isabel could, when it was past, look upononly as a kind of vision, magnificent at times, andat other times full of indignity and pain. Theyseemed to have dreamed of a long horse-car pilgrimagethrough that squalid street by the river-side, wherepresently they came to a market, opening upon the viewhideous vistas of carnage, and then into a wide avenue,with processions of cars like their own coming andgoing up and down the centre of a foolish and uselessbreadth, which made even the tall buildings (risinggauntly up among the older houses of one or two stories)on either hand look low, and let in the sun to bakethe dust that the hot breaths of wind caught up andgent swirling into the shabby shops. Here theydreamed of the eternal demolition and constructionof the city, and farther on of vacant lots full ofgranite boulders, clambered over by goats. Intheir dream they had fellow-passengers, whose sufferingsmade them odious and whom they were glad to leavebehind when they alighted from the car, and runningout of the blaze of the avenue, quenched themselvesin the shade of the cross-street. A little stripof shadow lay along the row of brown-stone fronts,but there were intervals where the vacant lots castno shadow. With great bestowal of thought theystudied hopelessly how to avoid these spaces as ifthey had been difficult torrents or vast expansesof desert sand; they crept slowly along till they cameto such a place, and dashed swiftly across it, andthen, fainter than before, moved on. They seemednow and then to stand at doors, and to be told thatpeople were out and again that they were in; and theyhad a sense of cool dark parlors, and the airy rustlingof light-muslined ladies, of chat and of fans andice-water, and then they came forth again; and evermore

“The day increasedfrom heat to heat.”

At last they were aware of an end of their visits,and of a purpose to go down town again, and of seekingthe nearest car by endless blocks of brown-stone fronts,which with their eternal brownstone flights of steps,and their handsome, intolerable uniformity, oppressedthem like a procession of houses trying to pass agiven point and never getting by. Upon thesestreets there was, seldom a soul to be seen, so thatwhen their ringing at a door had evoked answer, ithad startled them with a vague, sad surprise.In the distance on either hand they could see carsand carts and wagons toiling up and down the avenues,and on the next intersecting pavement sometimes alaborer with his jacket slung across his shoulder,or a dog that had plainly made up his mind to go mad.Up to the time of their getting into one of thosephantasmal cars for the return down-townwards theyhad kept up a show of talk in their wretched dream;they had spoken of other hot days that they had knownelsewhere; and they had wondered that the tragicalcharacter of heat had been so little recognized.They said that the daily New York murder might evenat that moment be somewhere taking place; and thatno murder of the whole homicidal year could have suchproper circ*mstance; they morbidly wondered what thatday’s murder would be, and in what swarmingtenement-house, or den of the assassin streets by theriver-sides,—­if indeed it did not befallin some such high, close-shuttered, handsome dwellingas those they passed, in whose twilight it would beso easy to strike down the master and leave him undiscoveredand unmourned by the family ignorantly absent at themountains or the seaside. They conjectured ofthe horror of midsummer battles, and pictured the anguishof shipwrecked men upon a tropical coast, and the grimymisery of stevedores unloading shiny cargoes of anthracitecoal at city docks. But now at last, as theytook seats opposite one another in the crowded car,they seemed to have drifted infinite distances andlong epochs asunder. They looked hopelessly acrossthe intervening gulf, and mutely questioned when itwas and from what far city they or some remote ancestorsof theirs had set forth upon a wedding journey.They bade each other a tacit farewell, and with patient,pathetic faces awaited the end of the world.

When they alighted, they took their way up throughone of the streets of the great wholesale businesses,to Broadway. On this street was a throng of trucksand wagons lading and unlading; bales and boxes roseand sank by pulleys overhead; the footway was a labyrinthof packages of every shape and size: there wasno flagging of the pitiless energy that moved allforward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on it, savein the reeking faces of its helpless instruments.But when the wedding-journeyers emerged upon Broadway,the other passages and incidents of their dream fadedbefore the superior fantasticality of the spectacle.

It was four o’clock, the deadliest hour of thedeadly summer day. The spiritless air seemedto have a quality of blackness in it, as if filledwith the gloom of low-hovering wings. One halfthe street lay in shadow, and one half in sun; butthe sunshine itself was dim, as if a heat greater thanits own had smitten it with languor. Little gustsof sick, warm wind blew across the great avenue atthe corners of the intersecting streets. In theupward distance, at which the journeyers looked, theloftier roofs and steeples lifted themselves dim outof the livid atmosphere, and far up and down the lengthof the street swept a stream of tormented life.All sorts of wheeled things thronged it, conspicuousamong which rolled and jarred the gaudily paintedStages, with quivering horses driven each by a manwho sat in the shade of a branching white umbrella,and suffered with a moody truculence of aspect, andas if he harbored the bitterness of death in his heartfor the crowding passengers within, when one of thempulled the strap about his legs, and summoned him tohalt. Most of the foot-passengers kept to theshady side, and to the unaccustomed eyes of the strangersthey were not less in number than at any other time,though there were fewer women among them. Indomitablyresolute of soul, they held their course with theswift pace of custom, and only here and there theyshowed the effect of the heat. One man, collarless,with waistcoat unbuttoned, and hat set far back fromhis forehead, waved a fan before his death-white flabbyface, and set down one foot after the other with theheaviness of a somnambulist. Another, as theypassed him, was saying huskily to the friend at hisside, “I can’t stand this much longer.My hands tingle as if they had gone to sleep; my heart—­”But still the multitude hurried on, passing, repassing,encountering, evading, vanishing into shop-doors andemerging from them, dispersing down the side streets,and swarming out of them. It was a scene thatpossessed the beholder with singular fascination,and in its effect of universal lunacy, it might wellhave seemed the last phase of a world presently tobe destroyed. They who were in it but not of it,as they fancied, though there was no reason for this,—­lookedon it amazed, and at last their own errands beingaccomplished, and themselves so far cured of the madnessof purpose, they cried with one voice, that it wasa hideous sight, and strove to take refuge from itin the nearest place where the soda-fountain sparkled.

It was a vain desire. At the front door of theapothecary’s hung a thermometer, and as theyentered they heard the next comer cry out with a maniacalpride in the affliction laid upon mankind, “Ninety-sevendegrees!” Behind them at the door there pouredin a ceaseless stream of people, each pausing at theshrine of heat; before he tossed off the hissing draughtthat two pale, close-clipped boys served them fromeither side of the fountain. Then in the order

of their coming they issued through another door uponthe side street, each, as he disappeared, turninghis face half round, and casting a casual glance upona little group near another counter. The groupwas of a very patient, half-frightened, half-puzzledlooking gentleman who sat perfectly still on a stool,and of a lady who stood beside him, rubbing all overhis head a handkerchief full of pounded ice, and easingone hand with the other when the first became tired.Basil drank his soda and paused to look upon thisgroup, which he felt would commend itself to realisticsculpture as eminently characteristic of the locallife, and as “The Sunstroke” would sellenormously in the hot season. “Better takea little more of that,” the apothecary said,looking up from his prescription, and, as the organizedsympathy of the seemingly indifferent crowd, smilingvery kindly at his patient, who thereupon tasted somethingin the glass he held. “Do you still feellike fainting?” asked the humane authority.“Slightly, now and then,” answered theother, “but I’m hanging on hard to thebottom curve of that icicled S on your soda-fountain,and I feel that I’m all right as long as I cansee that. The people get rather hazy, occasionally,and have no features to speak of. But I don’tknow that I look very impressive myself,” headded in the jesting mood which seems the naturalcondition of Americans in the face of all embarrassments.

“O, you’ll do!” the apothecary answered,with a laugh; but he said, in answer to an anxiousquestion from the lady, “He mustn’t bemoved for an hour yet,” and gayly pestled awayat a prescription, while she resumed her office ofgrinding the pounded ice round and round upon her husband’sskull. Isabel offered her the commiseration offriendly words, and of looks kinder yet, and thenseeing that they could do nothing, she and Basil fellinto the endless procession, and passed out of theside door. “What a shocking thing!”she whispered. “Did you see how all thepeople looked, one after another, so indifferentlyat that couple, and evidently forgot them the nextinstant? It was dreadful. I shouldn’tlike to have you sun-struck in New York.”

“That’s very considerate of you; but placefor place, if any accident must happen to me amongstrangers, I think I should prefer to have it in NewYork. The biggest place is always the kindestas well as the cruelest place. Amongst the thousandsof spectators the good Samaritan as well as the Levitewould be sure to be. As for a sun-stroke, it requirespeculiar gifts. But if you compel me to a choicein the matter, then I say, give me the busiest partof Broadway for a sun-stroke. There is such experienceof calamity there that you could hardly fall the firstvictim to any misfortune. Probably the gentlemanat the apothecary’s was merely exhausted bythe heat, and ran in there for revival. The apothecaryhas a case of the kind on his hands every blazingafternoon, and knows just what to do. The crowd

may be a little ‘ennuye’ of sun-strokes,and to that degree indifferent, but they most likelyknow that they can only do harm by an expression ofsympathy, and so they delegate their pity as theyhave delegated their helpfulness to the proper authority,and go about their business. If a man was overcomein the middle of a village street, the blunderingcountry druggist wouldn’t know what to do, andthe tender-hearted people would crowd about so thatno breath of air could reach the victim.”

“May be so, dear,” said the wife, pensively;but if anything did happen to you in New York, I shouldlike to have the spectators look as if they saw ahuman being in trouble. Perhaps I’m a littleexacting.”

“I think you are. Nothing is so hard asto understand that there are human beings in thisworld besides one’s self and one’s set.But let us be selfishly thankful that it isn’tyou and I there in the apothecary’s shop, asit might very well be; and let us get to the boat assoon as we can, and end this horrible midsummer-day’sdream. We must have a carriage,” he addedwith tardy wisdom, hailing an empty hack, “aswe ought to have had all day; though I’m notsorry, now the worst’s over, to have seen theworst.”

III. THE NIGHT BOAT.

There is little proportion about either pain or pleasure:a headache darkens the universe while it lasts, acup of tea really lightens the spirit bereft of allreasonable consolations. Therefore I do not thinkit trivial or untrue to say that there is for themoment nothing more satisfactory in life than to havebought your ticket on the night boat up the Hudsonand secured your state-room key an hour or two beforedeparture, and some time even before the pressure atthe clerk’s office has begun. In the transactionwith this castellated baron, you have of course beentreated with haughtiness, but not with ferocity, andyour self-respect swells with a sense of having escapedpositive insult; your key clicks cheerfully in yourpocket against its gutta-percha number, and you walkup and down the gorgeously carpeted, single-columned,two-story cabin, amid a multitude of plush sofas andchairs, a glitter of glass, and a tinkle of prismaticchandeliers overhead, unawed even by the aristocraticgloom of the yellow waiters. Your own stateroomas you enter it from time to time is an ever-new surpriseof splendors, a magnificent effect of amplitude, ofmahogany bedstead, of lace curtains, and of marbletopped wash-stand. In the mere wantonness of anunalloyed prosperity you say to the saffron noblemannearest your door, “Bring me a pitcher of ice-water,quick, please!” and you do not find the half-hourthat he is gone very long.

If the ordinary wayfarer experiences so much pleasurefrom these things, then imagine the infinite comfortof our wedding-journeyers, transported from Broadwayon that pitiless afternoon to the shelter and the quietof that absurdly palatial steamboat. It was notyet crowded, and by the river-side there was almosta freshness in the air. They disposed of theirtroubling bags and packages; they complimented theridiculous princeliness of their stateroom, and thenthey betook themselves to the sheltered space aftof the saloon, where they sat down for the tranquillerobservance of the wharf and whatever should come tobe seen by them. Like all people who have justescaped with their lives from some menacing calamity,they were very philosophical in spirit; and havinggot aboard of their own motion, and being neitherof them apparently the worse for the ordeal they hadpassed through, were of a light, conversational temper.

“What an amusingly superb affair!” Basilcried as they glanced through an open window downthe long vista of the saloon. “Good heavens!Isabel, does it take all this to get us plain republicansto Albany in comfort and safety, or are we reallya nation of princes in disguise? Well, I shallnever be satisfied with less hereafter,” he added.“I am spoilt for ordinary paint and upholsteryfrom this hour; I am a ruinous spendthrift, and ahumble three-story swell-front up at the South Endis no longer the place for me. Dearest,

‘Let us swearan oath, and keep it with an equal mind,’

never to leave this Aladdin’s-palace-like steamboat,but spend our lives in perpetual trips up and downthe Hudson.”

To which not very costly banter Isabel responded inkind, and rapidly sketched the life they could leadaboard. Since they could not help it, they mockedthe public provision which, leaving no interval betweendisgraceful squalor and ludicrous splendor, accommodatesour democratic ‘menage’ to the taste ofthe richest and most extravagant plebeian amongstus. He, unhappily, minds danger and oppressionas little as he minds money, so long as he has a spectacleand a sensation, and it is this ruthless imbecilewho will have lace curtains to the steamboat berthinto which he gets with his pantaloons on, and outof which he may be blown by an exploding boiler atany moment; it is he who will have for supper thatovergrown and shapeless dinner in the lower saloon,and will not let any one else buy tea or toast fora less sum than he pays for his surfeit; it is hewho perpetuates the insolence of the clerk and thereluctance of the waiters; it is he, in fact, who nowcomes out of the saloon, with his womenkind, and takeschairs under the awning where Basil and Isabel sit.Personally, he is not so bad; he is good-looking, likeall of us; he is better dressed than most of us; hebehaves himself quietly, if not easily; and no lordso loathes a scene. Next year he is going toEurope, where he will not show to so much advantageas here; but for the present it would be hard to sayin what way he is vulgar, and perhaps vulgarity isnot so common a thing after all.

It was something besides the river that made the airso much more sufferable than it had been. Overthe city, since our friends had come aboard the boat,a black cloud had gathered and now hung low upon it,while the wind from the face of the water took thedust in the neighboring streets, and frolicked itabout the house-tops, and in the faces of the arrivingpassengers, who, as the moment of departure drew near,appeared in constantly increasing numbers and in greatervariety, with not only the trepidation of going uponthem, but also with the electrical excitement peoplefeel before a tempest.

The breast of the black cloud was now zigzagged frommoment to moment by lightning, and claps of deafeningthunder broke from it. At last the long enduranceof the day was spent, and out of its convulsion burstfloods of rain, again and again sweeping the promenade-deckwhere the people sat, and driving them disconsolateinto the saloon. The air was darkened as by night,and with many regrets for the vanishing prospect, mingledwith a sense of relief from the heat, our friendsfelt the boat tremble away from her moorings and setforth upon her trip.

“Ah! if we had only taken the day boat!”moaned Isabel. “Now, we shall see nothingof the river landscape, and we shall never be ableto put ourselves down when we long for Europe, bydeclaring that the scenery of the Hudson is much finerthan that of the Rhine.”

Yet they resolved, this indomitably good-natured couple,that they would be just even to the elements, whichhad by no means been generous to them; and they ownedthat if so noble a storm had celebrated their departureupon some storied river from some more romantic portthan New York, they would have thought it an admirablething. Even whilst they contented themselves,the storm passed, and left a veiled and humid skyoverhead, that gave a charming softness to the sceneon which their eyes fell when they came out of thesaloon again, and took their places with a largelyincreased companionship on the deck.

They had already reached that part of the river wherethe uplands begin, and their course was between statelywalls of rocky steepness, or wooded slopes, or grassyhollows, the scene forever losing and taking grandand lovely shape. Wreaths of mist hung aboutthe tops of the loftier headlands, and long shadowsdraped their sides. As the night grew, lightstwinkled from a lonely house here and there in thevalleys; a swarm of lamps showed a town where it layupon the lap or at the foot of the hills. Behindthem stretched the great gray river, haunted with manysails; now a group of canal-boats grappled together,and having an air of coziness in their adventure uponthis strange current out of their own sluggish waters,drifted out of sight; and now a smaller and slowersteamer, making a laborious show of keeping up waspassed, and reluctantly fell behind; along the water’sedge rattled and hooted the frequent trains.

They could not tell at any time what part of the riverthey were on, and they could not, if they would, havemade its beauty a matter of conscientious observation;but all the more, therefore, they deeply enjoyed itwithout reference to time or place. They feltsome natural pain when they thought that they mightunwittingly pass the scenes that Irving has made partof the common dream-land, and they would fair haveseen the lighted windows of the house out of whicha cheerful ray has penetrated to so many hearts; butbeing sure of nothing, as they were, they had thecomfort of finding the Tappan Zee in every expanseof the river, and of discovering Sunny-Side on everypleasant slope. By virtue of this helplessness,the Hudson, without ceasing to be the Hudson, becamefrom moment to moment all fair and stately streamsupon which they had voyaged or read of voyaging, fromthe Nile to the Mississippi. There is no othertravel like river travel; it is the perfection ofmovement, and one might well desire never to arriveat one’s destination. The abundance ofroom, the free, pure air, the constant delight ofthe eyes in the changing landscape, the soft tremorof the boat, so steady upon her keel, the variety ofthe little world on board,—­all form a charmwhich no good heart in a sound body can resist.So, whilst the twilight held, well content, in contiguouschairs, they purred in flattery of their kindly fate,imagining different pleasures, certainly, but nonegreater, and tasting to its subtlest flavor the happinessconscious of itself.

Their own satisfaction, indeed, was so interestingto them in this objective light, that they had littledesire to turn from its contemplation to the peoplearound them; and when at last they did so, it wasstill with lingering glances of self-recognition andenjoyment. They divined rightly that one of themain conditions of their present felicity was thefact that they had seen so much of time and of theworld, that they had no longer any desire to takebeholding eyes, or to make any sort of impressivefigure, and they understood that their prosperous loveaccounted as much as years and travel for this result.If they had had a loftier opinion of themselves, theirindifference to others might have made them offensive;but with their modest estimate of their own value inthe world, they could have all the comfort of self-sufficiency,without its vulgarity.

“O yes!” said Basil, in answer to someapostrophe to their bliss from Isabel, “it’sthe greatest imaginable satisfaction to have livedpast certain things. I always knew that I wasnot a very handsome or otherwise captivating person,but I can remember years—­now blessedly remote—­whenI never could see a young girl without hoping she wouldmistake me for something of that sort. I couldn’thelp desiring that some fascination of mine, whichhad escaped my own analysis, would have an effect uponher. I dare say all young men are so. I

used to live for the possible interest I might inspirein your sex, Isabel. They controlled my movements,my attitudes; they forbade me repose; and yet I believeI was no ass, but a tolerably sensible fellow.Blessed be marriage, I am free at last! All theloveliness that exists outside of you, dearest,—­andit ’s mighty little,—­is mere pageantto me; and I thank Heaven that I can meet the moststylish girl now upon the broad level of our commonhumanity. Besides, it seems to me that our experienceof life has quieted us in many other ways. Whata luxury it is to sit here, and reflect that we donot want any of these people to suppose us rich, ordistinguished, or beautiful, or well dressed, anddo not care to show off in any sort of way beforethem!”

This content was heightened, no doubt, by a just senseof their contrast to the group of people nearest there,—­ayoung man of the second or third quality—­andtwo young girls. The eldest of these was carryingon a vivacious flirtation with the young man, whowas apparently an acquaintance of brief standing;the other was scarcely more than a child, and satsomewhat abashed at the sparkle of the colloquy.They were conjecturally sisters going home from somevisit, and not skilled in the world, but of a certainrepute in their country neighborhood for beauty andwit. The young man presently gave himself outas one who, in pursuit of trade for the dry-goodshouse he represented, had travelled many thousandsof miles in all parts of the country. The encounterwas visibly that kind of adventure which both wouldtreasure up for future celebration to their differentfriends; and it had a brilliancy and interest whichthey could not even now consent to keep to themselves.They talked to each other and at all the company withinhearing, and exchanged curt speeches which had forthem all the sensation of repartee.

Young Man. They say that beauty unadorned isadorned the most.

Young Woman (bridling, and twitching her head fromside to side, in the high excitement of the dialogue).Flattery is out of place.

Young Man. Well, never mind. If you don’tbelieve me, you ask your mother when you get home.

(Titter from the younger sister.)

Young Woman (scornfully). Umph! my mother hasno control over me!

Young Man. Nobody else has, either, I shouldgay. (Admiringly.)

Young Woman. Yes, you’ve told the truthfor once, for a wonder. I’m able to takecare of myself,—­perfectly. (Almost hoarsewith a sense of sarcastic performance.)

Young Man. “Whole team and big dog underthe wagon,” as they say out
West.

Young Woman. Better a big dog than a puppy, anyday.

Giggles and horror from the younger sister, sensationin the young man, and so much rapture in the youngwoman that she drops the key of her state-room fromher hand. They both stoop, and a jocose scufflefor it ensues, after which the talk takes an autobiographicalturn on the part of the young man, and drops intoan unintelligible murmur. “Ah! poor RealLife, which I love, can I make others share the delightI find in thy foolish and insipid face?”

Not far from this group sat two Hebrews, one youngand the other old, talking of some business out ofwhich the latter had retired. The younger hadbeen asked his opinion upon some point, and he wasexpanding with a flattered consciousness of the elder’sperception of his importance, and toadying to himwith the pleasure which all young men feel in winningthe favor of seniors in their vocation. “Well,as I was a-say’n’, Isaac don’t seemto haf no natcheral pent for the glothing business.Man gomes in and wands a goat,”—­heseemed to be speaking of a garment and not a domesticanimal,—­“Isaac’ll zell him thegoat he wands him to puy, and he’ll make himbelieve it ‘a the goat he was a lookin’for. Well, now, that’s well enough as faras it goes; but you know and I know, Mr. Rosenthal,that that ’s no way to do business. A mangan’t zugzeed that goes upon that brincible.Id’s wrong. Id’s easy enough to makea man puy the goat you want him to, if he wands agoat, but the thing is to make him puy the goat thatyou wand to zell when he don’t wand no goat atall. You’ve asked me what I thought andI’ve dold you. Isaac’ll never zugzeedin the redail glothing-business in the world!”

“Well,” sighed the elder, who filled hisarmchair quite full, and quivered with a comfortablejelly-like tremor in it, at every pulsation of theengine, “I was afraid of something of the kind.As you say, Benjamin, he don’t seem to haveno pent for it. And yet I proughd him up to thebusiness; I drained him to it, myself.”

Besides these talkers, there were scattered singly,or grouped about in twos and threes and fours, thevarious people one encounters on a Hudson River boat,who are on the whole different from the passengerson other rivers, though they all have features incommon. There was that man of the sudden gains,who has already been typified; and there was also thesmoother rich man of inherited wealth, from whom youcan somehow know the former so readily. Theywere each attended by their several retinues of womankind,the daughters all much alike, but the mothers somewhatdifferent. They were going to Saratoga, whereperhaps the exigencies of fashion would bring themacquainted, and where the blue blood of a quarterof a century would be kind to the yesterday’sfluid of warmer hue. There was something pleasanterin the face of the hereditary aristocrat, but notso strong, nor, altogether, so admirable; particularlyif you reflected that he really represented nothingin the world, no great culture, no political influence,no civic aspiration, not even a pecuniary force, nothingbut a social set, an alien club-life, a traditionof dining. We live in a true fairy land afterall, where the hoarded treasure turns to a heap ofdry leaves. The almighty dollar defeats itself,and finally buys nothing that a man cares to have.The very highest pleasure that such an American’smoney can purchase is exile, and to this rich mandoubtless Europe is a twice-told tale. Let usclap our empty pockets, dearest reader, and be glad.

We can be as glad, apparently, and with the same reasonas the poorly dressed young man standing near besidethe guard, whose face Basil and Isabel chose to fancythat of a poet, and concerning whom, they romancedthat he was going home, wherever his home was, withthe manuscript of a rejected book in his pocket.They imagined him no great things of a poet, to besure, but his pensive face claimed delicate feelingfor him, and a graceful, sombre fancy, and they conjecturedunconsciously caught flavors of Tennyson and Browningin his verse, with a moderner tint from Morris:for was it not a story out of mythology, with godsand heroes of the nineteenth century, that he wasnow carrying back from New York with him? Basilsketched from the colors of his own long-accepted disappointmentsa moving little picture of this poor imagined poet’sadventures; with what kindness and unkindness he hadbeen put to shame by publishers, and how, descendingfrom his high, hopes of a book, he had tried to sellto the magazines some of the shorter pieces out ofthe “And other Poems” which were to havefilled up the volume. “He’s goingback rather stunned and bewildered; but it’ssomething to have tasted the city, and its bittermay turn to sweet on his palate, at last, till he findshimself longing for the tumult that he abhors now.Poor fellow! one compassionate cut-throat of a publishereven asked him to lunch, being struck, as we are,with something fine in his face. I hope he’sgot somebody who believes in him, at home. Otherwisehe’d be more comfortable, for the present, ifhe went over the railing there.”

So the play of which they were both actors and spectatorswent on about them. Like all passages of life,it seemed now a grotesque mystery, with a bluntlyenforced moral, now a farce of the broadest, now alatent tragedy folded in the disguises of comedy.All the elements, indeed, of either were at work there,and this was but one brief scene of the immense complexdrama which was to proceed so variously in such differenttimes and places, and to have its denouement only ineternity. The contrasts were sharp: eachgroup had its travesty in some other; the talk ofone seemed the rude burlesque, the bitter satire ofthe next; but of all these parodies none was so terriblyeffective as the two women, who sat in the midst ofthe company, yet were somehow distinct from the rest.One wore the deepest black of widowhood, the otherwas dressed in bridal white, and they were both alikeawful in their mockery of guiltless sorrow and guiltlessjoy. They were not old, but the soul of youthwas dead in their pretty, lamentable faces, and ruinancient as sin looked from their eyes; their talkand laughter seemed the echo of an innumerable multitudeof the lost haunting the world in every land and time,each solitary forever, yet all bound together in theunity of an imperishable slavery and shame.

What a stale effect! What hackneyed characters!Let us be glad the night drops her curtain upon thecheap spectacle, and shuts these with the other actorsfrom our view.

Within the cabin, through which Basil and Isabel nowslowly moved, there were numbers of people loungingabout on the sofas, in various attitudes of talk orvacancy; and at the tables there were others reading“Lothair,” a new book in the remote epochof which I write, and a very fashionable book indeed.There was in the air that odor of paint and carpetwhich prevails on steamboats; the glass drops of thechandeliers ticked softly against each other, as thevessel shook with her respiration, like a comfortablesleeper, and imparted a delicious feeling of cozinessand security to our travellers.

A few hours later they struggled awake at the sharpsound of the pilot’s bell signaling the engineerto slow the boat. There was a moment of perfectsilence; then all the drops of the chandeliers in thesaloon clashed musically together; then fell anothersilence; and at last came wild cries for help, stronglyqualified with blasphemies and curses. “Sendout a boat!” “There was a woman aboardthat steamboat!” “Lower your boats!”“Run a craft right down, with your big boat!”“Send out a boat and pick up the crew!”The cries rose and sank, and finally ceased; throughthe lattice of the state-room window some lights shonefaintly on the water at a distance.

“Wait here, Isabel!” said her husband.“We’ve run down a boat. We don’tseem hurt; but I’ll go see. I’ll beback in a minute.”

Isabel had emerged into a world of dishabille, a worldwildly unbuttoned and unlaced, where it was the fashionfor ladies to wear their hair down their backs, andto walk about in their stockings, and to speak to eachother without introduction. The place with whichshe had felt so familiar a little while before wasnow utterly estranged. There was no motion ofthe boat, and in the momentary suspense a quiet prevailed,in which those grotesque shapes of disarray creptnoiselessly round whispering panic-stricken conjectures.There was no rushing to and fro, nor tumult of anykind, and there was not a man to be seen, for apparentlythey had all gone like Basil to learn the extent ofthe calamity. A mist of sleep involved the whole,and it was such a topsy-turvy world that it wouldhave seemed only another dream-land, but that it wasmarked for reality by one signal fact. With therest appeared the woman in bridal white and the womanin widow’s black, and there, amidst the frightthat made all others friends, and for aught that mostknew, in the presence of death itself, these two movedtogether shunned and friendless.

Somehow, even before Basil returned, it had becomeknown to Isabel and the rest that their own steamerhad suffered no harm, but that she had struck andsunk another convoying a flotilla of canal boats, fromwhich those alarming cries and curses had come.The steamer was now lying by for the small boats shehad sent out to pick up the crew of the sunken vessel.

“Why, I only heard a little tinkling of thechandeliers,” said one of the ladies. “Isit such a very alight matter to run down another boatand sink it?”

She appealed indirectly to Basil, who answered lightly,“I don’t think you ladies ought to havebeen disturbed at all. In running over a commontow-boat on a perfectly clear night like this thereshould have been no noise and no perceptible jar.They manage better on the Mississippi, and both boatsoften go down without waking the lightest sleeper onboard.”

The ladies, perhaps from a deficient sense of humor,listened with undisguised displeasure to this speech.It dispersed them, in fact; some turned away to bivouacfor the rest of the night upon the arm-chairs andsofas, while others returned to their rooms. Withthe latter went Isabel. “Lock me in, Basil,”she said, with a bold meekness, “and if anythingmore happens don’t wake me till the last moment.”It was hard to part from him, but she felt that hisvigil would somehow be useful to the boat, and sheconfidingly fell into a sleep that lasted till daylight.

Meantime, her husband, on whom she had tacitly devolvedso great a responsibility, went forward to the promenadein front of the saloon, in hopes of learning somethingmore of the catastrophe from the people whom he hadalready found gathered there.

A large part of the passengers were still there, seatedor standing about in earnest colloquy. They werein that mood which follows great excitement, and inwhich the feeblest-minded are sure to lead the talk.At such times one feels that a sensible frame of mindis unsympathetic, and if expressed, unpopular, orperhaps not quite safe; and Basil, warned by his fatewith the ladies, listened gravely to the voice of thecommon imbecility and incoherence.

The principal speaker was a tall person, wearing asilk travelling-cap. He had a face of stupidbenignity and a self-satisfied smirk; and he was formallytrying to put at his ease, and hopelessly confusingthe loutish youth before him. “You sayyou saw the whole accident, and you’re probablythe only passenger that did see it. You’llbe the most important witness at the trial,”he added, as if there would ever be any trial aboutit. “Now, how did the tow-boat hit us?”

“Well, she came bows on.”

“Ah! bows on,” repeated the other, withgreat satisfaction; and a little murmur of “Bowson!” ran round the listening circle.

“That is,” added the witness, “itseemed as if we struck her amidships, and cut herin two, and sunk her.”

“Just so,” continued the examiner, acceptingthe explanation, “bows on. Now I want toask if you saw our captain or any of the crew about?”

“Not a soul,” said the witness, with thesolemnity of a man already on oath.

“That’ll do,” exclaimed the other.“This gentleman’s experience coincidesexactly with my own. I didn’t see the collision,but I did see the cloud of steam from the sinkingboat, and I saw her go down. There wasn’tan officer to be found anywhere on board our boat.I looked about for the captain and the mate myself,and couldn’t find either of them high or low.”

“The officers ought all to have been sittinghere on the promenade deck,” suggested one ironicalspirit in the crowd, but no one noticed him.

The gentleman in the silk travelling-cap now tooka chair, and a number of sympathetic listeners drewtheir chairs about him, and then began an interchangeof experience, in which each related to the last particularall that he felt, thought, and said, and, if married,what his wife felt, thought, and said, at the momentof the calamity. They turned the disaster overand over in their talk, and rolled it under their tongues.Then they reverted to former accidents in which theyhad been concerned; and the silk-capped gentlemantold, to the common admiration, of a fearful escapeof his, on the Erie Road, from being thrown down asteep embankment fifty feet high by a piece of rockthat had fallen on the track. “Now justsee, gentlemen, what a little thing, humanly speaking,life depends upon. If that old woman had beenable to sleep, and hadn’t sent that boy downto warn the train, we should have run into the rockand been dashed to pieces. The passengers madeup a purse for the boy, and I wrote a full accountof it to the papers.”

“Well,” said one of the group, a man ina hard hat, “I never lie down on a steamboator a railroad train. I want to be ready for whateverhappens.”

The others looked at this speaker with interest, asone who had invented a safe method of travel.

“I happened to be up to-night, but I almostalways undress and go to bed, just as if I were inmy own house,” said the gentleman of the silkcap.

“I don’t say your way isn’t thebest, but that’s my way.”

The champions of the rival systems debated their meritswith suavity and mutual respect, but they met withscornful silence a compromising spirit who held thatit was better to throw off your coat and boots, butkeep your pantaloons on. Meanwhile, the steamerwas hanging idle upon the current, against which itnow and then stirred a careless wheel, still waitingfor the return of the small boats. Thin gray clouds,through rifts of which a star sparkled keenly hereand there, veiled the heavens; shadowy bluffs loomedup on either hand; in a hollow on the left twinkleda drowsy little town; a beautiful stillness lay onall.

After an hour’s interval a shout was heard fromfar down the river; then later the plash of oars;then a cry hailing the approaching boats, and theanswer, “All safe!” Presently the boatshad come alongside, and the passengers crowded downto the guard to learn the details of the search.Basil heard a hollow, moaning, gurgling sound, regularas that of the machinery, for some note of which hemistook it. “Clear the gangway there!”shouted a gruff voice; “man scalded here!”And a burden was carried by from which fluttered,with its terrible regularity, that utterance of mortalanguish.

Basil went again to the forward promenade, and satdown to see the morning come.

The boat swiftly ascended the current, and presentlythe steeper shores were left behind and the banksfell away in long upward sloping fields, with farm-housesand with stacks of harvest dimly visible in the generousexpanses. By and by they passed a fisherman drawinghis nets, and bending from his boat, there near Albany,N. Y., in the picturesque immortal attitudes of Raphael’sGalilean fisherman; and now a flush mounted the paleface of the east, and through the dewy coolness ofthe dawn there came, more to the sight than any othersense, a vague menace of heat. But as yet theair was deliciously fresh and sweet, and Basil bathedhis weariness in it, thinking with a certain luxuriouscompassion of the scalded man, and how he was to farethat day. This poor wretch seemed of anotherorder of beings, as the calamitous always seem to thehappy, and Basil’s pity was quite an abstraction;which, again, amused and shocked him, and he askedhis heart of bliss to consider of sorrow a little moreearnestly as the lot of all men, and not merely ofan alien creature here and there. He dutifullytried to imagine another issue to the disaster ofthe night, and to realize himself suddenly bereft ofher who so filled his life. He bade his soulremember that, in the security of sleep, Death hadpassed them both so close that his presence might wellhave chilled their dreams, as the iceberg that grazesthe ship in the night freezes all the air about it.But it was quite idle: where love was, life onlywas; and sense and spirit alike put aside the burdenthat he would have laid upon them; his revery reflectedwith delicious caprice the looks, the tones, the movementsthat he loved, and bore him far away from the sadimages that he had invited to mirror themselves init.

IV. A DAY’S RAILROADING

Happiness has commonly a good appetite; and the thoughtof the fortunately ended adventures of the night,the fresh morning air, and the content of their ownhearts, gifted our friends, by the time the boat reachedAlbany, with a wholesome hunger, so that they debatedwith spirit the question of breakfast and the bestplace of breakfasting in a city which neither of themknew, save in the most fugitive and sketchy way.

They decided at last, in view of the early departureof the train, and the probability that they wouldbe more hurried at a hotel, to breakfast at the station,and thither they went and took places at one of themany tables within, where they seemed to have beenexpected only by the flies. The waitress plainlyhad not looked for them, and for a time found theirpresence so incredible that she would not acknowledgethe rattling that Basil was obliged to make on hisglass. Then it appeared that the cook would notbelieve in them, and he did not send them, till theywere quite faint, the peppery and muddy draught whichimpudently affected to be coffee, the oily slicesof fugacious potatoes slipping about in their shallowdish and skillfully evading pursuit, the pieces ofbeef that simulated steak, the hot, greasy biscuit,steaming evilly up into the face when opened, andthen soddening into masses of condensed dyspepsia.

The wedding-journeyers looked at each other with eyesof sad amaze. They bowed themselves for a momentto the viands, and then by an equal impulse refrained.They were sufficiently young, they were happy, theywere hungry; nature is great and strong, but art isgreater, and before these triumphs of the cook atthe Albany depot appetite succumbed. By a terribletour de force they swallowed the fierce and turbidliquor in their cups, and then speculated fantasticallyupon the character and history of the materials ofthat breakfast.

Presently Isabel paused, played a little with herknife, and, after a moment looked up at her husbandwith an arch regard and said: “I was justthinking of a small station somewhere in the Southof France where our train once stopped for breakfast.I remember the freshness and brightness of everythingon the little tables,—­the plates, the napkins,the gleaming half-bottles of wine. They seemedto have been preparing that breakfast for us fromthe beginning of time, and we were hardly seated beforethey served us with great cups of ‘cafe-au-lait’,and the sweetest rolls and butter; then a delicatecutlet, with an unspeakable gravy, and potatoes,—­suchpotatoes! Dear me, how little I ate of it!I wish, for once, I’d had your appetite, Basil;I do indeed.”

She ended with a heartless laugh, in which, despitethe tragical contrast her words had suggested, Basilfinally joined. So much amazement had probablynever been got before out of the misery inflicted inthat place; but their lightness did not at all commendthem. The waitress had not liked it from thefirst, and had served them with reluctance; and theproprietor did not like it, and kept his eye upon themas if he believed them about to escape without payment.Here, then, they had enforced a great fact of travelling,—­thatpeople who serve the public are kindly and pleasantin proportion as they serve it well. The unjustand the inefficient have always that consciousnessof evil which will not let a man forgive his victim,or like him to be cheerful.

Our friends, however, did not heat themselves overthe fact. There was already such heat from without,even at eight o’clock in the morning, that theychose to be as cool as possible in mind, and they placidlytook their places in the train, which had been madeup for departure. They had deliberately rejectedthe notion of a drawing-room car as affording a lessvaried prospect of humanity, and as being less in thespirit of ordinary American travel. Now, in reward,they found themselves quite comfortable in the commonpassenger-car, and disposed to view the scenery, intowhich they struck an hour after leaving the city, withmuch complacency. There was sufficient draughtthrough the open window to make the heat tolerable,and the great brooding warmth gave to the landscapethe charm which it alone can impart. It is a landscapethat I greatly love for its mild beauty and tranquil

picturesqueness, and it is in honor of our friendsthat I say they enjoyed it. There are nowhereany considerable hills, but everywhere generous slopesand pleasant hollows and the wide meadows of a grazingcountry, with the pretty brown Mohawk River ripplingdown through all, and at frequent intervals the lifeof the canal, now near, now far away, with the lazyboats that seem not to stir, and the horses that thetrain passes with a whirl, and, leaves slowly steppingforward and swiftly slipping backward. There arefarms that had once, or still have, the romance tothem of being Dutch farms,—­if there isany romance in that,—­and one conjecturesa Dutch thrift in their waving grass and grain.Spaces of woodland here and there dapple the slopes,and the cozy red farm-houses repose by the side oftheir capacious red barns. Truly, there is noground on which to defend the idleness, and yet asthe train strives furiously onward amid these scenesof fertility and abundance, I like in fancy to loiterbehind it, and to saunter at will up and down thelandscape. I stop at the farm-yard gates, andsit upon the porches or thresholds, and am served withcups of buttermilk by old Dutch ladies who have donetheir morning’s work and have leisure to beknitting or sewing; or if there are no old ladies,with decent caps upon their gray hair, then I do notcomplain if the drink is brought me by some red-cheeked,comely young girl, out of Washington Irving’spages, with no cap on her golden braids, who mirrorsmy diffidence, and takes an attitude of pretty awkwardnesswhile she waits till I have done drinking. Inthe same easily contented spirit as I lounge throughthe barn-yard, if I find the old hens gone about theirfamily affairs, I do not mind a meadow-lark’ssinging in the top of the elm-tree beside the pump.In these excursions the watch-dogs know me for a harmlessperson, and will not open their eyes as they lie coiledup in the sun before the gate. At all the places,I have the people keep bees, and, in the garden fullof worthy pot-herbs, such idlers in the vegetableworld as hollyhocks and larkspurs and four-o’clocks,near a great bed in which the asparagus has gone tosleep for the season with a dream of delicate sprayhanging over it. I walk unmolested through thefarmer’s tall grass, and ride with him uponthe perilous seat of his voluble mowing-machine, andlearn to my heart’s content that his name beginswith Van, and that his family has owned that farmever since the days of the Patroon; which I dare sayis not true. Then I fall asleep in a corner ofthe hayfield, and wake up on the tow-path of the canalbeside that wonderfully lean horse, whose bones youcannot count only, because they are so many.He never wakes up, but, with a faltering under-lipand half-shut eyes, hobbles stiffly on, unconsciousof his anatomical interest. The captain hospitablyasks me on board, with a twist of the rudder swingingthe stern of the boat up to the path, so that I canstep on. She is laden with flour from the valleyof the Genesee, and may have started on her voyageshortly after the canal was made. She is succinctlymanned by the captain, the driver, and the cook, afiery-haired lady of imperfect temper; and the cabin,which I explore, is plainly furnished with a cook-stoveand a flask of whiskey. Nothing but profane languageis allowed on board; and so, in a life of wicked jollityand ease, we glide imperceptibly down the canal, unvexedby the far-off future of arrival.

Such, I say, are my own unambitious mental pastimes,but I am aware that less superficial spirits couldnot be satisfied with them, and I can not pretendthat my wedding-journeyers were so.

They cast an absurd poetry over the landscape; theyinvited themselves to be reminded of passages of Europeantravel by it; and they placed villas and castles andpalaces upon all the eligible building-sites.Ashamed of these devices, presently, Basil patrioticallytried to reconstruct the Dutch and Indian past ofthe Mohawk Valley, but here he was foiled by the immenseignorance of his wife, who, as a true American woman,knew nothing of the history of her own country, andless than nothing of the barbarous regions beyondthe borders of her native province. She proveda bewildering labyrinth of error concerning the eventswhich Basil mentioned; and she had never even heardof the massacres by the French and Indians at Schenectady,which he in his boyhood had known so vividly thathe was scalped every night in his dreams, and wokeup in the morning expecting to see marks of the tomahawkon the head-board. So, failing at last to extractany sentiment from the scenes without, they turnedtheir faces from the window, and looked about themfor amusem*nt within the car.

It was in all respects an ordinary carful of humanbeings, and it was perhaps the more worthy to be studiedon that account. As in literature the true artistwill shun the use even of real events if they are ofan improbable character, so the sincere observer ofman will not desire to look upon the heroic or occasionalphases, but will seek him in his habitual moods ofvacancy and tiresomeness. To me, at any rate,he is at such times very precious; and I never perceivehim to be so much a man and a brother as when I feelthe pressure of his vast, natural, unaffected dullness.Then I am able to enter confidently into his lifeand inhabit there, to think his shallow and feeblethoughts, to be moved by his dumb, stupid desires,to be dimly illumined by his stinted inspirations,to share his foolish prejudices, to practice his obtuseselfishness. Yes, it is a very amusing world,if you do not refuse to be amused; and our friendswere very willing to be entertained. They delightedin the precise, thick-fingered old ladies who boughtsweet apples of the boys come aboard with baskets,and who were so long in finding the right change,that our travellers, leaping in thought with the boys

from the moving train, felt that they did so at theperil of their lives. Then they were interestedin people who went out and found their friends waitingfor them, or else did not find them, and wandereddisconsolately up and down before the country stations,carpet-bag in hand; in women who came aboard, andwere awkwardly shaken hands with or sheepishly kissedby those who hastily got seats for them, and placedtheir bags or their babies in their laps, and turnedfor a nod at the door; in young ladies who were seento places by young men the latter seemed not to careif the train did go off with them, and then threw uptheir windows and talked with girl-friends, on theplatform without, till the train began to move, andat last turned with gleaming eyes and moist red lips,and panted hard in the excitement of thinking aboutit, and could not calm themselves to the dull levelof the travel around them; in the conductor, coldlyand inaccessibly vigilant, as he went his rounds,reaching blindly for the tickets with one hand whilehe bent his head from time, to time, and listenedwith a faint, sarcastic smile to the questions ofpassengers who supposed they were going to get someinformation out of him; in the trainboy, who passedthrough on his many errands with prize candies, gum-drops,pop-corn, papers and magazines, and distributed booksand the police journals with a blind impartiality,or a prodigious ignorance, or a supernatural perceptionof character in those who received them.

A through train from East to West presents some peculiarfeatures as well as the traits common to all railwaytravel; and our friends decided that this was nota very well-dressed company, and would contrast withthe people on an express-train between Boston andNew York to no better advantage than these would showbeside the average passengers between London and Paris.And it seems true that on a westering’ line,the blacking fades gradually from the boots, the hatsoftens and sinks, the coat loses its rigor of cut,and the whole person lounges into increasing informalityof costume. I speak of the undressful sex alone:woman, wherever she is, appears in the last attainableeffects of fashion, which are now all but telegraphicand universal. But most of the passengers herewere men, and they mere plainly of the free-and easyWest rather than the dapper East. They wore facesthoughtful with the problem of buying cheap and sellingdear, and they could be known by their silence fromthe loquacious, acquaintance-making way-travellers.In these, the mere coming aboard seemed to beget anaggressively confidential mood. Perhaps theyclutched recklessly at any means of relieving theirennui; or they felt that they might here indulge safelyin the pleasures of autobiography, so dear to allof us; or else, in view of the many possible catastrophes,they desired to leave some little memory of themselvesbehind. At any rate, whenever the train stopped,the wedding-journeyers caught fragments of the personal

histories of their fellow-passengers which had beenrehearsing to those that sat next the narrators.It was no more than fair that these should somewhatmagnify themselves, and put the best complexion ontheir actions and the worst upon their sufferings;that they should all appear the luckiest or the unluckiest,the healthiest or the sickest, people that ever were,and should all have made or lost the most money.There was a prevailing desire among them to make outthat they came from or were going to same very largeplace; and our friends fancied an actual mortificationin the face of a modest gentleman who got out at Penelope(or some other insignificant classical station, inthe ancient Greek and Roman part of New York State),after having listened to the life of a somewhat rustic-lookingperson who had described himself as belonging nearNew York City.

Basil also found diversion in the tender couples,who publicly comported themselves as if in a sylvansolitude, and, as it had been on the bank of someumbrageous stream, far from the ken of envious or unsympatheticeyes, reclined upon each other’s shoulders andslept; but Isabel declared that this behavior wasperfectly indecent. She granted, of course, thatthey were foolish, innocent people, who meant no offense,and did not feel guilty of an impropriety, but shesaid that this sort of thing was a national reproach.If it were merely rustic lovers, she should not careso much; but you saw people who ought to know better,well-dressed, stylish people, flaunting their devotionin the face of the world, and going to sleep on eachother’s shoulders on every railroad train.It was outrageous, it was scandalous, it was reallyinfamous. Before she would allow herself to dosuch a thing she would—­well, she hardlyknew what she would not do; she would have a divorce,at any rate. She wondered that Basil could laughat it; and he would make her hate him if he kept on.

From the seat behind their own they were now madelisteners to the history of a ten weeks’ typhoidfever, from the moment when the narrator noticed thathe had not felt very well for a day or two back, andall at once a kind of shiver took him, till he layfourteen days perfectly insensible, and could eatnothing but a little pounded ice—­and hiswife—­a small woman, too—­usedto lift him back and forth between the bed and sofalike a feather, and the neighbors did not know halfthe time whether he was dead or alive. This history,from which not the smallest particular or the leastsignificant symptom of the case was omitted, occupiedan hour in recital, and was told, as it seemed, forthe entertainment of one who had been five minutesbefore it began a stranger to the historian.

At last the train came to a stand, and Isabel wailedforth in accents of desperation the words, “O,disgusting!” The monotony of the narrative inthe seat behind, fatally combining with the heat ofthe day, had lulled her into slumbers from which sheawoke at the stopping of the train, to find her headresting tenderly upon her husband’s shoulder.

She confronted his merriment with eyes of mournfulrebuke; but as she could not find him, or the harshestconstruction, in the least to blame, she was silent.

“Never mind, dear, never mind,” he coaxed,“you were really not responsible. It wasfatigue, destiny, the spite of fortune,—­whateveryou like. In the case of the others, whom youdespise so justly, I dare say it is sheer, disgracefulaffection. But see that ravishing placard, swingingfrom the roof: ’This train stops twentyminutes for dinner at Utica.’ In a fewminutes more we shall be at Utica. If they haveanything edible there, it shall never contract mypowers. I could dine at the Albany station, even.”

In a little while they found themselves in an airy,comfortable dining-room, eating a dinner, which itseemed to them France in the flush of her prosperityneed not have blushed to serve; for if it wanted alittle in the last graces of art, it redeemed itselfin abundance, variety, and wholesomeness. Atthe elbow of every famishing passenger stood a beneficentcoal-black glossy fairy, in a white linen apron andjacket, serving him with that alacrity and kindlinessand grace which make the negro waiter the master,not the slave of his calling, which disenthrall itof servility, and constitute him your eager host, notyour menial, for the moment. From table to tablepassed a calming influence in the person of the proprietor,who, as he took his richly earned money, checked therising fears of the guests by repeated proclamationsthat there was plenty of time, and that he would givethem due warning before the train started. Thosewho had flocked out of the cars, to prey with beakand claw, as the vulture-like fashion is, upon everythingin reach, remained to eat like Christians; and evena poor, scantily-Englished Frenchman, who wasted halfhis time in trying to ask how long the cars stoppedand in looking at his watch, made a good dinner inspite of himself.

“O Basil, Basil!” cried Isabel, when thetrain was again in motion, “have we really dinedonce more? It seems too good to be true.Cleanliness, plenty, wholesomeness, civility!Yes, as you say, they cannot be civil where they arenot just; honesty and courtesy go together; and whereverthey give you outrageous things to eat, they add indigestibleinsults. Basil, dear, don’t be jealous;I shall never meet him again; but I’m in lovewith that black waiter at our table. I never sawsuch perfect manners, such a winning and affectionatepoliteness. He made me feel that every mouthfulI ate was a personal favor to him. What a completegentleman. There ought never to be a white waiter.None but negroes are able to render their servicea pleasure and distinction to you.”

So they prattled on, doing, in their eagerness tobe satisfied, a homage perhaps beyond its desert tothe good dinner and the decent service of it.But here they erred in the right direction, and I findnothing more admirable in their behavior throughouta wedding journey which certainly had its trials,than their willingness to make the very heat of whateverwould suffer itself to be made anything at all of.They celebrated its pleasures with magnanimous excess,they passed over its griefs with a wise forbearance.That which they found the most difficult of managementwas the want of incident for the most part of the time;and I who write their history might also sink underit, but that I am supported by the fact that it isso typical, in this respect. I even imagine thatideal reader for whom one writes as yawning over thesebarren details with the life-like weariness of anactual travelling companion of theirs. Theirown silence often sufficed my wedded lovers, or then,when there was absolutely nothing to engage them,they fell back upon the story of their love, whichthey were never tired of hearing as they severallyknew it. Let it not be a reproach to human natureor to me if I say that there was something in thecomfort of having well dined which now touched thesprings of sentiment with magical effect, and thatthey had never so rejoiced in these tender reminiscences.

They had planned to stop over at Rochester till themorrow, that they might arrive at Niagara by daylight,and at Utica they had suddenly resolved to make therest of the day’s journey in a drawing-room car.The change gave them an added reason for content;and they realized how much they had previously sacrificedto the idea of travelling in the most American manner,without achieving it after all, for this seemed a touchof Americanism beyond the old-fashioned car. Theyreclined in luxury upon the easy-cushioned, revolvingchairs; they surveyed with infinite satisfaction theelegance of the flying-parlor in which they sat, orturned their contented regard through the broad plate-glasswindows upon the landscape without. They saidthat none but Americans or enchanted princes in the“Arabian Nights” ever travelled in suchstate; and when the stewards of the car came roundsuccessively with tropical fruits, ice-creams, andclaret-punches, they felt a heightened assurance thatthey were either enchanted princes—­or Americans.There were more ladies and more fashion than in theother cars; and prettily dressed children played abouton the carpet; but the general appearance of the passengershardly suggested greater wealth than elsewhere; andthey were plainly in that car because they were ofthe American race, which finds nothing too good forit that its money can buy.

V. THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND.

They knew none of the hotels in Rochester, and theyhad chosen a certain one in reliance upon their handbook.When they named it, there stepped forth a porter ofan incredibly cordial and pleasant countenance, whotook their travelling-bags, and led them to the omnibus.As they were his only passengers, the porter got insidewith them, and seeing their interest in the streetsthrough which they rode, he descanted in a strainof cheerful pride upon the city’s prosperityand character, and gave the names of the people wholived in the finer houses, just as if it had beenan Old-World town, and he some eager historian expectingreward for his comment upon it. He cast quitea glamour over Rochester, so that in passing a bodyof water, bordered by houses, and overlooked by oddbalconies and galleries, and crossed in the distanceby a bridge upon which other houses were built, theyboldly declared, being at their wit’s end fora comparison, and taken with the unhoped-for picturesqueness,that it put them in mind of Verona. Thus theyreached their hotel in almost a spirit of foreigntravel, and very willing to verify the pleasant porter’sassurance that they would like it, for everybody likedit; and it was with a sudden sinking of the heart thatBasil beheld presiding over the register the conventionalAmerican hotel clerk. He was young, he had aneat mustache and well-brushed hair; jeweled studssparkled in his shirt-front, and rings on his whitehands; a gentle disdain of the travelling public breathedfrom his person in the mystical odors of Ihlang ihlang.He did not lift his haughty head to look at the wayfarerwho meekly wrote his name in the register; he did notanswer him when he begged for a cool room; he turnedto the board on which the keys hung, and, pluckingone from it, slid it towards Basil on the marble counter,touched a bell for a call-boy, whistled a bar of Offenbach,and as he wrote the number of the room against Basil’sname, said to a friend lounging near him, as if resuminga conversation, “Well, she’s a mightypooty gul, any way, Chawley!”

When I reflect that this was a type of the hotel clerkthroughout the United States, that behind unnumberedregisters at this moment he is snubbing travellersinto the dust, and that they are suffering and perpetuatinghim, I am lost in wonder at the national meekness.Not that I am one to refuse the humble pie his jeweledfingers offer me. Abjectly I take my key, andcreep off up stairs after the call-boy, and try togive myself the genteel air of one who has not beenstepped upon. But I think homicidal things allthe same, and I rejoice that in the safety of printI can cry out against the despot, whom I have not thepresence to defy. “You vulgar and cruellittle soul,” I say, and I imagine myself breathingthe words to his teeth, “why do you treat a wearystranger with this ignominy? I am to pay wellfor what I get, and I shall not complain of that.But look at me, and own my humanity; confess by somecivil action, by some decent phrase, that I have rightsand that they shall be respected. Answer my properquestions; respond to my fair demands. Do notslide my key at me; do not deny me the poor politenessof a nod as you give it in my hand. I am notyour equal; few men are; but I shall not presume uponyour clemency. Come, I also am human!”

Basil found that, for his sin in asking for a coolroom, the clerk had given them a chamber into whichthe sun had been shining the whole afternoon; butwhen his luggage had been put in it seemed uselessto protest, and like a true American, like you, likeme, he shrank from asserting himself. When thesun went down it would be cool enough; and they turnedtheir thoughts to supper, not venturing to hope that,as it proved, the handsome clerk was the sole blemishof the house.

Isabel viewed with innocent surprise the evidencesof luxury afforded by all the appointments of a hotelso far west of Boston, and they both began to feelthat natural ease and superiority which an inn alwaysinspires in its guests, and which our great hotels,far from impairing, enhance in flattering degree;in fact, the clerk once forgotten, I protest, formy own part, I am never more conscious of my meritsand riches in any other place. One has therethe romance of being a stranger and a mystery to everyone else, and lives in the alluring possibility ofnot being found out a most ordinary person.

They were so late in coming to the supper-room, thatthey found themselves alone in it. At the doorthey had a bow from the head-waiter, who ran beforethem and drew out chairs for them at a table, and signaledwaiters to serve them, first laying before them witha gracious flourish the bill of fare.

A force of servants flocked about them, as if to contestthe honor of ordering their supper; one set upon thetable a heaping vase of strawberries, another flankedit with flagons of cream, a third accompanied it withGates of varied flavor and device; a fourth obsequiouslysmoothed the table-cloth; a fifth, the youngest ofthe five, with folded arms stood by and admired thesatisfaction the rest were giving. When thesehad been dispatched for steak, for broiled white-fishof the lakes,—­noblest and delicatest ofthe fish that swim,—­for broiled chicken,for fried potatoes, for mums, for whatever the lawlessfancy, and ravening appetites of the wayfarers couldsuggest, this fifth waiter remained to tempt themto further excess, and vainly proposed some kind ofeggs,—­fried eggs, poached eggs, scrambledeggs, boiled eggs, or omelette.

“O, you’re sure, dearest, that this isn’ta vision of fairy-land, which will vanish presently,and leave us empty and forlorn?” plaintivelymurmured Isabel, as the menial train reappeared, bearingthe supper they had ordered and set it smoking down.

Suddenly a look of apprehension dawned upon her face,and she let fall her knife and fork. “Youdon’t think, Basil,” she faltered, “thatthey could have found out we’re a bridal party,and that they’re serving us so magnificentlybecause—­because—­O, I shall bemiserable every moment we’re here!” sheconcluded desperately.

She looked, indeed, extremely wretched for a womanwith so much broiled white-fish on her plate, andsuch a banquet array about her; and her husband madehaste to reassure her. “You’re stilldemoralized, Isabel, by our sufferings at the Albanydepot, and you exaggerate the blessings we enjoy,though I should be sorry to undervalue them. Isuspect it’s the custom to use people well atthis hotel; or if we are singled out for uncommonfavor, I think: I can explain the cause.It has been discovered by the register that we arefrom Boston, and we are merely meeting the reverence,affection, and homage which the name everywhere commands!

“It ’s our fortune to represent for thetime being the intellectual and moral virtue of Boston.This supper is not a tribute to you as a bride, butas a Bostonian.”

It was a cheap kind of raillery, to be sure, but itserved. It kindled the local pride of Isabelto self-defense, and in the distraction of the effortshe forgot her fears; she returned with renewed appetiteto the supper, and in its excellence they both letfall their dispute,—­which ended, of course,in Basil’s abject confession that Boston wasthe best place in the world, and nothing but banishmentcould make him live elsewhere,—­and gavethemselves up, as usual, to the delight of being justwhat and where they were. At last, the naturalcourse brought them to the strawberries, and whenthe fifth waiter approached from the corner of thetable at which he stood, to place the vase near them,he did not retire at once, but presently asked ifthey were from the West.

Isabel smiled, and Basil answered that they were fromthe East.

He faltered at this, as if doubtful of the resultif he went further, but took heart, then, and asked,“Don’t you think this is a pretty nicehotel”—­hastily adding as a concessionof the probable existence of much finer things atthe East—­“for a small hotel?”

They imagined this waiter as new to his station inlife, as perhaps just risen to it from some countrytavern, and unable to repress his exultation in whatseemed their sympathetic presence. They were charmedto have invited his guileless confidence, to have evokedpossibly all the simple poetry of his soul; it waswhat might have happened in Italy, only there so muchnaivete would have meant money; they looked at eachother with rapture and Basil answered warmly whilethe waiter flushed as at a personal compliment:“Yes, it ’s a nice hotel; one of the bestI ever saw, East or West, in Europe or America.”

They rose and left the room, and were bowed out bythe head-waiter.

“How perfectly idyllic!” cried Isabel.“Is this Rochester, New York, or is it somevale of Arcady? Let’s go out and see.”

They walked out into the moonlit city, up and downstreets that seemed very stately and fine, amidsta glitter of shop-window lights; and then, Less oftheir own motion than of mere error, they quitted thebusiness quarter, and found themselves in a quietavenue of handsome residences,—­the BeaconStreet of Rochester, whatever it was called. Theysaid it was a night and a place for lovers, for nonebut lovers, for lovers newly plighted, and they madebelieve to bemoan themselves that, hold each otherdear as they would, the exaltation, the thrill, theglory of their younger love was gone. Some ofthe houses had gardened spaces about them, from whichstole, like breaths of sweetest and saddest regret,the perfume of midsummer flowers,—­the despairof the rose for the bud. As they passed a certainhouse, a song fluttered out of the open window andceased, the piano warbled at the final rush of fingersover its chords, and they saw her with her fingersresting lightly on the keys, and her graceful headlifted to look into his; they saw him with his armyet stretched across to the leaves of music he hadbeen turning, and his face lowered to meet her gaze.

“Ah, Basil, I wish it was we, there!”

And if they knew that we, on our wedding journey,stood outside, would not they wish it was they, here?”

“I suppose so, dearest, and yet, once-upon-a-timewas sweet. Pass on; and let us see what charmwe shall find next in this enchanted city.”

“Yes, it is an enchanted city to us,”mused Basil, aloud, as they wandered on, “andall strange cities are enchanted. What is Rochesterto the Rochesterese? A place of a hundred thousandpeople, as we read in our guide, an immense flourinterest, a great railroad entrepot, an unrivalednursery trade, a university, two commercial colleges,three collegiate institutes, eight or ten newspapers,and a free library. I dare say any respectableresident would laugh at us sentimentalizing over hiscity. But Rochester is for us, who don’tknow it at all, a city of any time or country, moonlit,filled with lovers hovering over piano-fortes, of apalatial hotel with pastoral waiters and porter,—­acity of handsome streets wrapt in beautiful quietand dreaming of the golden age. The only definiteassociation with it in our minds is the tragicallyromantic thought that here Sam Patch met his fate.”

“And who in the world was Sam Patch?

“Isabel, your ignorance of all that an Americanwoman should be proud of distresses me. Haveyou really, then, never heard of the man who inventedthe saying, ‘Some things can be done as wellas others,’ and proved it by jumping over NiagaraFalls twice? Spurred on by this belief, he attemptedthe leap of the Genesee Falls. The leap was easyenough, but the coming up again was another matter.He failed in that. It was the one thing thatcould not be done as well as others.”

“Dreadful!” said Isabel, with the cheerfullestsatisfaction. “But what has all that todo with Rochester?”

“Now, my dear, You don’t mean to say youdidn’t know that the Genesee Falls were at Rochester?Upon my word, I’m ashamed. Why, we’rewithin ten minutes’ walk of them now.”

“Then walk to them at once!” cried Isabel,wholly unabashed, and in fact unable to see what hehad to be ashamed of. “Actually, I believeyou would have allowed me to leave Rochester withouttelling me the falls were here, if you hadn’thappened to think of Sam Patch.”

Saying this, she persuaded herself that a chief objectof their journey had been to visit the scene of SamPatch’s fatal exploit, and she drew Basil witha nervous swiftness in the direction of the railroadstation, beyond which he said were the falls.Presently, after threading their way among a multitudeof locomotives, with and without trains attached, thatbacked and advanced, or stood still, hissing impatientlyon every side, they passed through the station toa broad planking above the river on the other side,and thence, after encounter of more locomotives, theyfound, by dint of much asking, a street winding upthe hill-side to the left, and leading to the GermanBierhaus that gives access to the best view of thecataract.

The Americans have characteristically bordered theriver with manufactures, making every drop work itspassage to the brink; while the Germans have as characteristicallymade use of the beauty left over, and have built aBierhaus where they may regale both soul and sensein the presence of the cataract. Our travellersmight, in another mood and place, have thought itdroll to arrive at that sublime spectacle througha Bierhaus, but in this enchanted city it seemed tohave a peculiar fitness.

A narrow corridor gave into a wide festival spaceoccupied by many tables, each of which was surroundedby a group of clamorous Germans of either sex andevery age, with tall beakers of beaded lager beforethem, and slim flasks of Rhenish; overhead flamedthe gas in globes of varicolored glass; the wallswere painted like those of such haunts in the fatherland;and the wedding-journeyers were fair to linger on theirway, to dwell upon that scene of honest enjoyment,to inhale the mingling odors of beer and of pipes,and of the pungent cheeses in which the children ofthe fatherland delight. Amidst the inspiritingclash of plates and glasses, the rattle of knivesand forks, and the hoarse rush of gutturals, theycould catch the words Franzosen, Kaiser, Konig, andSchlacht, and they knew that festive company to beexulting in the first German triumphs of the war,which were then the day’s news; they saw fistsshaken at noses in fierce exchange of joy, arms tossedabroad in wild congratulation, and health-pouringgoblets of beer lifted in air. Then they steppedinto the moonlight again, and heard only the solemnorgan stops of the cataract. Through garden-groundthey were led by the little maid, their guide, toa small pavilion that stood on the edge of the precipitous

shore, and commanded a perfect view of the falls.As they entered this pavilion, a youth and maiden,clearly lovers, passed out, and they were left alonewith that sublime presence. Something of definitenesswas to be desired in the spectacle, but there was amplecompensation in the mystery with which the broad effulgenceand the dense unluminous shadows of the moonshineinvested it. The light touched all the tops ofthe rapids, that seemed to writhe sway from the brinkof the cataract, and then desperately breaking andperishing to fall, the white disembodied ghosts ofrapids, down to the bottom of the vast and deep ravinethrough which the river rushed away. Now the watersseemed to mass themselves a hundred feet high in awall of snowy compactness, now to disperse into theirmultitudinous particles and hang like some vaporouscloud from the cliff. Every moment renewed thevision of beauty in some rare and fantastic shape;and its loveliness isolated it, in spite of the greattown on the other shore, the station with its bridgeand its trains, the mills that supplied their feeblelittle needs from the cataract’s strength.

At last Basil pointed out the table-rock in the middleof the fall, from which Sam Patch had made his fatalleap; but Isabel refused to admit that tragical figureto the honors of her emotions. “I don’tcare for him!” she said fiercely. “Patch!What a name to be linked in our thoughts with thissuperb cataract.”

“Well, Isabel, I think you are very unjust.It’s as good a name as Leander, to my thinking,and it was immortalized in support of a great idea,the feasibility of all things; while Leander’shas come down to us as that of the weak victim ofa passion. We shall never have a poetry of ourown till we get over this absurd reluctance from facts,till we make the ideal embrace and include the real,till we consent to face the music in our simple commonnames, and put Smith into a lyric and Jones into atragedy. The Germans are braver than we, and inthem you find facts and dreams continually blendedand confronted. Here is a fortunate illustration.The people we met coming out of this pavilion werelovers, and they had been here sentimentalizing onthis superb cataract, as you call it, with which myheroic Patch is not worthy to be named. No doubtthey had been quoting Uhland or some other of theirromantic poets, perhaps singing some of their tenderGerman love-songs,—­the tenderest, unearthliestlove-songs in the world. At the same time theydid not disdain the matter-of-fact corporeity in whichtheir sentiment was enshrined; they fed it heartilyand abundantly with the banquet whose relics we seehere.”

On a table before them stood a pair of beer-glasses,in the bottoms of which lurked scarce the foam ofthe generous liquor lately brimming them; some shredsof sausage, some rinds of Swiss cheese, bits of coldham, crusts of bread, and the ashes of a pipe.

Isabel shuddered at the spectacle, but made no comment,and Basil went on: “Do you suppose theyscorned the idea of Sam Patch as they gazed upon thefalls? On the contrary, I’ve no doubt thathe recalled to her the ballad which a poet of theirlanguage made about him. It used to go the roundsof the German newspapers, and I translated it, a longwhile ago, when I thought that I too was in ‘Arkadiengeboren’.

’Inthe Bierhauagarten I linger
Bythe Falls of the Geneses:
Fromthe Table-Rock in the middle
Leapsa figure bold and free.

Aloofin the air it rises
O’erthe rush, the plunge, the death;
Onthe thronging banks of the river
Thereis neither pulse nor breath.

Foreverit hovers and poises
Aloofin the moonlit air;
Aslight as mist from the rapids,
Asheavy as nightmare.

Inanguish I cry to the people,
Thelong-since vanished hosts;
Isee them stretch forth in answer,
Thehelpless hands of ghosts.’”

“I once met the poet who wrote this. Hedrank too much beer.”

“I don’t see that he got in the name ofSam Patch, after all,” said Isabel.

“O yes; he did; but I had to yield to our taste,and where he said, I ‘Springt der Sam Patschkuhn and frei’,’ I made it ’Leapsa figure bold and free.’”

As they passed through the house on their way out,they saw the youth and maiden they had met at thepavilion door. They were seated at a table; twoglasses of beer towered before them; on their plateswere odorous crumbs of Limburger cheese. Theyboth wore a pensive air.

The next morning the illusion that had wrapt the wholeearth was gone with the moonlight. By nine o’clock,when the wedding-journeyers resumed their way towardNiagara, the heat had already set in with the effectof ordinary midsummer’s heat at high noon.The car into which they got had come the past nightfrom Albany, and had an air of almost conscious shabbiness,griminess, and over-use. The seats were coveredwith cinders, which also crackled under foot.Dust was on everything, especially the persons ofthe crumpled and weary passengers of overnight.Those who came aboard at Rochester failed to lightenthe spiritual gloom, and presently they sank intothe common bodily wretchedness. The train wassomewhat belated, and as it drew nearer Buffalo theyknew the conductor to have abandoned himself to thatblackest of the arts, making time. The long irregularjolt of the ordinary progress was reduced to an incessantshudder and a quick lateral motion. The air withinthe cars was deadly; if a window was raised, a stormof dust and cinders blew in and quick gusts caughtaway the breath. So they sat with closed windows,sweltering and stifling, and all the faces on whicha lively horror was not painted were dull and dampwith apathetic misery.

The incidents were in harmony with the abject physicaltone of the company. There was a quarrel betweena thin, shrill-voiced, highly dressed, much-bedizenedJewess, on the one side, and a fat, greedy old woman,half asleep, and a boy with large pink transparentears that stood out from his head like the handlesof a jar, on the other side, about a seat which theHebrew wanted, and which the others had kept filledwith packages on the pretense that it was engaged.It was a loud and fierce quarrel enough, but it wonno sort of favor; and when the Jewess had given afinal opinion that the greedy old woman was no lady,and the boy, who disputed in an ironical temper, replied,“Highly complimentary, I must say,” therewas no sign of relief or other acknowledgment in anyof the spectators, that there had been a quarrel.

There was a little more interest taken in the misfortuneof an old purblind German and his son, who were foundby the conductor to be a few hundred miles out ofthe direct course to their destination, and were withsome trouble and the aid of an Americanized fellow-countrymanmade aware of the fact. The old man then fellback in the prevailing apathy, and the child naturallycared nothing. By and by came the unsparing train-boyon his rounds, bestrewing the passengers successivelywith papers, magazines, fine-cut tobacco, and packagesof candy. He gave the old man a package of candy,and passed on. The German took it as the bountyof the American people, oddly manifested in a situationwhere he could otherwise have had little proof oftheir care. He opened it and was sharing it withhis son when the train-boy came back, and metallically,like a part of the machinery, demanded, “Tencents!” The German stared helplessly, and theboy repeated, “Ten cents! ten cents!” withtiresome patience, while the other passengers smiled.When it had passed through the alien’s headthat he was to pay for this national gift and he tookwith his tremulous fingers from the recesses of hispocket-book a ten-cent note and handed it to his tormentor,some of the people laughed. Among the rest, Basiland Isabel laughed, and then looked at each otherwith eyes of mutual reproach.

“Well, upon my word, my dear,” he said,“I think we’ve fallen pretty low.I’ve never felt such a poor, shabby ruffian before.Good heavens! To think of our immortal soulsbeing moved to mirth by such a thing as this,—­sostupid, so barren of all reason of laughter. Andthen the cruelty of it! What ferocious imbecileswe are! Whom have I married? A woman withneither heart nor brain!”

“O Basil, dear, pay him back the money-do.”

“I can’t. That’s the worstof it. He ’s money enough, and might justlytake offense. What breaks my heart is that wecould have the depravity to smile at the mistake ofa friendless stranger, who supposed he had at lastmet with an act of pure kindness. It’s athing to weep over. Look at these grinning wretches!What a fiendish effect their smiles have, throughtheir cinders and sweat! O, it’s the terribleweather; the despotism of the dust and heat; the wickednessof the infernal air. What a squalid and loathsomecompany!”

At Buffalo, where they arrived late, they found themselveswith several hours’ time on their hands beforethe train started for Niagara, and in the first momentsof tedium, Isabel forgot herself into saying, “Don’tyou think we’d have done better to go directlyfrom Rochester to the Falls, instead of coming thisway?”

“Why certainly. I didn’t proposecoming this way.”

“I know it, dear. I was only asking,”said Isabel, meekly. “But I should thinkyou’d have generosity enough to take a littleof the blame, when I wanted to come out of a romanticfeeling for you.”

This romantic feeling referred to the fact that, manyyears before, when Basil made his first visit to Niagara,he had approached from the west by way of Buffalo;and Isabel, who tenderly begrudged his having existedbefore she knew him, and longed to ally herself retrospectivelywith his past, was resolved to draw near the greatcataract by no other route.

She fetched a little sigh which might mean the weatheror his hard-heartedness. The sigh touched him,and he suggested a carriage-ride through the city;she assented with eagerness, for it was what she hadbeen thinking of. She had never seen a lakesidecity before, and she was taken by surprise. “Ifever we leave Boston,” she said, “we willnot live at Rochester, as I thought last night; we’llcome to Buffalo.” She found that the placehad all the picturesqueness of a sea-port, withoutthe ugliness that attends the rising and falling tides.A delicious freshness breathed from the lake, whichlying so smooth, faded into the sky at last, withno line between sharper than that which divides drowsingfrom dreaming. But the color was the most charmingthing, that delicate blue of the lake, without thedepth of the sea-blue, but infinitely softer and lovelier.The nearer expanses rippled with dainty waves, silverand lucent; the further levels made, with the sun-dimmedsummer sky, a vague horizon of turquoise and amethyst,lit by the white sails of ships, and stained by thesmoke of steamers.

“Take me away now,” said Isabel, whenher eyes had feasted upon all this, “and don’tlet me see another thing till I get to Niagara.Nothing less sublime is worthy the eyes that havebeheld such beauty.”

However, on the way to Niagara she consented to glimpsesof the river which carries the waters of the lakefor their mighty plunge, and which shows itself verynobly from time to time as you draw toward the cataract,with wooded or cultivated islands, and rich farms alongits low shores, and at last flashes upon the eye theshining white of the rapids,—­a hint, nomore, of the splendor and awfulness to be revealed.

VI. NIAGARA.

As the train stopped, Isabel’s heart beat witha child-like exultation, as I believe every one’sheart must who is worthy to arrive at Niagara.She had been trying to fancy, from time to time, thatshe heard the roar of the cataract, and now, whenshe alighted from the car, she was sure she shouldhave heard it but for the vulgar little noises thatattend the arrival of trains at Niagara as well aseverywhere else. “Never mind, dearest;you shall be stunned with it before you leave,”promised her husband; and, not wholly disconsolate,she rode through the quaint streets of the village,where it remains a question whether the lowlinessof the shops and private houses makes the hotels lookso vast, or the bigness of the hotels dwarfs all theother buildings. The immense caravansaries swelling

up from among the little bazaars (where they sellfeather fans, and miniature bark canoes, and jars andvases and bracelets and brooches carved out of thelocal rocks), made our friends with their trunks veryconscious of their disproportion to the accommodationsof the smallest. They were the sole occupantsof the omnibus, and they were embarrassed to be receivedat their hotel with a burst of minstrelsy from a wholeband of music. Isabel felt that a single stringedinstrument of some timid note would have been enough;and Basil was going to express his own modest preferencefor a jew’s-harp, when the music ceased witha sudden clash of the cymbals. But the next momentit burst out with fresh sweetness, and in alightingthey perceived that another omnibus had turned thecorner and was drawing up to the pillared portico ofthe hotel. A small family dismounted, and thefeet of the last had hardly touched the pavement whenthe music again ended as abruptly as those flourishesof trumpets that usher player-kings upon the stage.Isabel could not help laughing at this melodious parsimony.“I hope they don’t let on the cataractand shut it off in this frugal style; do they, Basil?”she asked, and passed jesting through a pomp of unoccupiedporters and tallboys. Apparently there were notmany people stopping at this hotel, or else they wereall out looking at the Falls or confined to theirrooms. However, our travellers took in the almostweird emptiness of the place with their usual gratitudeto fortune for all queerness in life, and followedto the pleasant quarters assigned them. Therewas time before supper for a glance at the cataract,and after a brief toilet they sallied out again uponthe holiday street, with its parade of gay littleshops, and thence passed into the grove beside theFalls, enjoying at every instant their feeling ofarrival at a sublime destination.

In this sense Niagara deserves almost to rank withRome, the metropolis of history and religion; withVenice, the chief city of sentiment and fantasy.In either you are at once made at home by a perceptionof its greatness, in which there is no quality ofa*ggression, as there always seems to be in minor placesas well as in minor men, and you gratefully acceptit* sublimity as a fact in no way contrasting withyour own insignificance.

Our friends were beset of course by many carriage-drivers,whom they repelled with the kindly firmness of experiencedtravel. Isabel even felt a compassion for thesepoor fellows who had seen Niagara so much as to haveforgotten that the first time one must see it aloneor only with the next of friendship. She wasvoluble in her pity of Basil that it was not as newto him as to her, till between the trees they saw awhite cloud of spray, shot through and through withsunset, rising, rising, and she felt her voice softlyand steadily beaten down by the diapason of the cataract.

I am not sure but the first emotion on viewing Niagarais that of familiarity. Ever after, its strangenessincreases; but in that earliest moment when you standby the side of the American fall, and take in so muchof the whole as your giants can compass, an impressionof having seen it often before is certainly very vivid.This may be an effect of that grandeur which putsyou at your ease in its presence; but it also undoubtedlyresults in part from lifelong acquaintance with everyvariety of futile picture of the scene. You haveits outward form clearly in your memory; the shores,the rapids, the islands, the curve of the Falls, andthe stout rainbow with one end resting on their topand the other lost in the mists that rise from thegulf beneath. On the whole I do not account thissort of familiarity a misfortune. The surpriseis none the less a surprise because it is kept tillthe last, and the marvel, making itself finally feltin every nerve, and not at once through a single sense,all the more fully possesses you. It is as ifNiagara reserved her magnificence, and preferred towin your heart with her beauty; and so Isabel, whowas instinctively prepared for the reverse, suffereda vague disappointment, for a little instant, as shelooked along the verge from the water that caressedthe shore at her feet before it flung itself down,to the wooded point that divides the American fromthe Canadian Fall, beyond which showed dimly throughits veil of golden and silver mists the emerald wallof the great Horse-Shoe. “How still it is!”she said, amidst the roar that shook the ground undertheir feet and made the leaves tremble overhead, and“How lonesome!” amidst the people loungingand sauntering about in every direction among the trees.In fact that prodigious presence does make a solitudeand silence round every spirit worthy to perceiveit, and it gives a kind of dignity to all its belongings,so that the rocks and pebbles in the water’sedge, and the weeds and grasses that nod above it,have a value far beyond that of such common thingselsewhere. In all the aspects of Niagara thereseems a grave simplicity, which is perhaps a reflectionof the spectator’s soul for once utterly dismantledof affectation and convention. In the vulgarreaction from this, you are of course as trivial, ifyou like, at Niagara, as anywhere.

Slowly Isabel became aware that the sacred grove besidethe fall was profaned by some very common presencesindeed, that tossed bits of stone and sticks intothe consecrated waters, and struggled for handkerchiefsand fans, and here and there put their arms about eachother’s waists, and made a show of laughingand joking. They were a picnic party of rude,silly folks of the neighborhood, and she stood ponderingthem in sad wonder if anything could be worse, whenshe heard a voice saying to Basil, “Take younext, Sir? Plenty of light yet, and the wind’sdown the river, so the spray won’t interfere.

Make a capital picture of you; falls in the background.”It was the local photographer urging them to succeedthe young couple he had just posed at the brink:the gentleman was sitting down, with his legs crossedand his hands elegantly disposed; the lady was standingat his side, with one arm thrown lightly across hisshoulder, while with the other hand she thrust hiscane into the ground; you could see it was going tobe a splendid photograph.

Basil thanked the artist, and Isabel said, trustingas usual to his sympathy for perception of her trainof thought, “Well, I’ll never try to behigh-strung again. But shouldn’t you havethought, dearest, that I might expect to be high-strungwith success at Niagara if anywhere?” She passivelyfollowed him into the long, queer, downward-slopingedifice on the border of the grove, unflinchinglymounted the car that stood ready, and descended theincline. Emerging into the light again, she foundherself at the foot of the fall by whose top she hadjust stood. At first she was glad there wereother people down there, as if she and Basil werenot enough to bear it alone, and she could almost havespoken to the two hopelessly pretty brides, with parasolsand impertinent little boots, whom their attendanthusbands were helping over the sharp and slipperyrocks, so bare beyond the spray, so green and mossywithin the fall of mist. But in another breathshe forgot them; as she looked on that dizzied sea,hurling itself from the high summit in huge white knots,and breaks and masses, and plunging into the gulfbeside her, while it sent continually up a strongvoice of lamentation, and crawled away in vast eddies,with somehow a look of human terror, bewilderment,and pain. It was bathed in snowy vapor to itscrest, but now and then heavy currents of air drewthis aside, and they saw the outline of the Falls almostas far as the Canada side. They remembered afterwardshow they were able to make use of but one sense ata time, and how when they strove to take in the formsof the descending flood, they ceased to hear it; butas soon as they released their eyes from this service,every fibre in them vibrated to the sound, and thespectacle dissolved away in it. They were aware,too, of a strange capriciousness in their senses, andof a tendency of each to palter with the things perceived.The eye could no longer take truthful note of quality,and now beheld the tumbling deluge as a Gothic wallof careen marble, white, motionless, and now as a fallof lightest snow, with movement in all its atoms,and scarce so much cohesion as would hold them together;and again they could not discern if this course werefrom above or from beneath, whether the water rosefrom the abyss or dropped from the height. Theear could give the brain no assurance of the soundthat felled it, and whether it were great or little;the prevailing softness of the cataract’s toneseemed so much opposed to ideas of prodigious forceor of prodigious volume. It was only when thesight, so idle in its own behalf, came to the aidof the other sense, and showed them the mute movementof each other’s lips, that they dimly appreciatedthe depth of sound that involved them.

“I think you might have been high-strung there,for a second or two,” said Basil, when, ascendingthe incline; he could make himself heard. “Wewill try the bridge next.”

Over the river, so still with its oily eddies anddelicate wreaths of foam, just below the Falls theyhave in late years woven a web of wire high in air,and hung a bridge from precipice to precipice.Of all the bridges made with hands it seems the lightest,most ethereal; it is ideally graceful, and droopsfrom its slight towers like a garland. It isworthy to command, as it does, the whole grandeur ofNiagara, and to show the traveller the vast spectacle,from the beginning of the American Fall to the farthestlimit of the Horse-Shoe, with all the awful pomp ofthe rapids, the solemn darkness of the wooded islands,the mystery of the vaporous gulf, the indomitablewildness of the shores, as far as the eye can reachup or down the fatal stream.

To this bridge our friends now repaired, by a paththat led through another of those groves which keepthe village back from the shores of the river on theAmerican side, and greatly help the sight-seer’spleasure in the place. The exquisite structure,which sways so tremulously from its towers, and seemsto lay so slight a hold on earth where its cablessink into the ground, is to other bridges what theblood horse is to the common breed of roadsters; antnow they felt its sensitive nerves quiver under themand sympathetically through them as they advancedfarther and farther toward the centre. Perhapstheir sympathy with the bridge’s trepidationwas too great for unalloyed delight, and yet the thrillwas a glorious one, to be known only there; and afterwards,at least, they would not have had their airy path seemmore secure.

The last hues of sunset lingered in the mists thatsprung from the base of the Falls with a mournful,tremulous grace, and a movement weird as the playof the northern lights. They were touched withthe most delicate purples and crimsons, that darkenedto deep red, and then faded from them at a secondlook, and they flew upward, swiftly upward, like troopsof pale, transparent ghosts; while a perfectly clearradiance, better than any other for local color, dweltupon the scene. Far under the bridge the riversmoothly swam, the undercurrents forever unfoldingthemselves upon the surface with a vast rose-likeevolution, edged all round with faint lines of white,where the air that filled the water freed itself infoam. What had been clear green on the face ofthe cataract was here more like rich verd-antique,and had a look of firmness almost like that of thestone itself. So it showed beneath the bridge,and down the river till the curving shores hid it.These, springing abruptly prom the water’s brink,and shagged with pine and cedar, displayed the tenderverdure of grass and bushes intermingled with thedark evergreens that comb from ledge to ledge, tillthey point their speary tops above the crest of bluffs.

In front, where tumbled rocks and expanses of cakedclay varied the gloomier and gayer green, sprung thosespectral mists; and through them loomed out, in itsmanifold majesty, Niagara, with the seemingly immovablewhite Gothic screen of the American Fall, and the greenmassive curve of the Horseshoe, solid and simple andcalm as an Egyptian wall; while behind this, withtheir white and black expanses broken by dark foliagedlittle isles, the steep Canadian rapids billowed downbetween their heavily wooded shores.

The wedding-journeyers hung, they knew not how long,in rapture on the sight; and then, looking back fromthe shore to the spot where they had stood, they feltrelieved that unreality should possess itself of all,and that the bridge should swing there in mid-air likea filmy web, scarce more passable than the rainbowthat flings its arch above the mists.

On the portico of the hotel they found half a scoreof gentlemen smoking, and creating together that collectivesilence which passes for sociality on our continent.Some carriages stood before the door, and within,around the base of a pillar, sat a circle of idle call-boys.There were a few trunks heaped together in one place,with a porter standing guard over them; a solitaryguest was buying a cigar at the newspaper stand inone corner; another friendless creature was writinga letter in the reading-room; the clerk, in a seersuckercoat and a lavish shirt-bosom, tried to give the wholean effect of watering-place gayety and bustle, ashe provided a newly arrived guest with a room.

Our pair took in these traits of solitude and reposewith indifference. If the hotel had been throngedwith brilliant company, they would have been no moreand no less pleased; and when, after supper, they cameinto the grand parlor, and found nothing there buta marble-topped centre. table, with a silver-platedice-pitcher and a small company of goblets, they satdown perfectly content in a secluded window-seat.They were not seen by the three people who enteredsoon after, and halted in the centre of the room.

“Why, Kitty!” said one of the two ladieswho must; be in any travelling-party of three, “thisis more inappropriate to your gorgeous array thanthe supper-room, even.”

She who was called Kitty was armed, as for socialconquest, in some kind of airy evening-dress, andwas looking round with bewilderment upon that forlornwaste of carpeting and upholstery. She owned,with a smile, that she had not seen so much of theworld yet as she had been promised; but she likedNiagara very much, and perhaps they should find theworld at breakfast.

“No,” said the other lady, who was asunquiet as Kitty was calm, and who seemed resolvedto make the most of the worst, “it isn’tprobable that the hotel will fill up overnight; andI feel personally responsible for this state of things.Who would ever have supposed that Niagara would beso empty? I thought the place was thronged thewhole summer long. How do you account for it,Richard?”

The gentleman looked fatigued, as from a long-continueddiscussion elsewhere of the matter in hand, and hesaid that he had not been trying to account for it.

“Then you don’t care for Kitty’spleasure at all, and you don’t want her to enjoyherself. Why don’t you take some interestin the matter?”

“Why, if I accounted for the emptiness of Niagarain the most satisfactory way, it wouldn’t adda soul to the floating population. Under thecirc*mstances I prefer to leave it unexplained.”

“Do you think it’s because it’ssuch a hot summer? Do you suppose it’snot exactly the season? Didn’t you expectthere’d be more people? Perhaps Niagaraisn’t as fashionable as it used to be.”

“It looks something like that.”

“Well, what under the sun do you think is thereason?”

“I don’t know.”

“Perhaps,” interposed Kitty, placidly,“most of the visitors go to the other hotel,now.”

“It ’s altogether likely,” saidthe other lady, eagerly. “There are justsuch caprices.”

“Well,” said Richard, “I wantedyou to go there.”

“But you said that you always heard this wasthe a most fashionable.”

“I know it. I didn’t want to comehere for that reason. But fortune favors thebrave.”

“Well, it’s too bad! Here we’veasked Kitty to come to Niagara with us, just to giveher a little peep into the world, and you’vebrought us to a hotel where we’re—­”

“Monarchs of all we survey,” suggestedKitty.

“Yes, and start at the sound of our own,”added the other lady, helplessly.

“Come now, Fanny,” said the gentleman,who was but too clearly the husband of the last speaker.“You know you insisted, against all I couldsay or do, upon coming to this house; I implored youto go to the other, and now you blame me for bringingyou here.”

“So I do. If you’d let me have myown way without opposition about coming here, I daremy I should have gone to the other place. Butnever mind. Kitty knows whom to blame, I hope.She ’s your cousin.”

Kitty was sitting with her hands quiescently foldedin her lap. She now rose and said that she didnot know anything about the other hotel, and perhapsit was just as empty as this.

“It can’t be. There can’t betwo hotels so empty,” said Fanny. “Itdon’t stand to reason.”

“If you wish Kitty to see the world so much,”said the gentleman, “why don’t you takeher on to Quebec, with us?”

Kitty had left her seat beside Fanny, and was movingwith a listless content about the parlor.

“I wonder you ask, Richard, when you know she’sonly come for the night, and has nothing with herbut a few cuffs and collars! I certainly neverheard of anything so absurd before!”

The absurdity of the idea then seemed to cast itscharm upon her, for, after a silence, “I couldlend her some things,” she said musingly.“But don’t speak of it to-night, please.It’s too ridiculous. Kitty!” shecalled out, and, as the young lady drew near, she continued,“How would you like to go to Quebec, with us?”

“O Fanny!” cried Kitty, with rapture;and then, with dismay, “How can I?”

“Why, very well, I think. You’vegot this dress, and your travelling-suit; and I canlend you whatever you want. Come!” she addedjoyously, “let’s go up to your room, andtalk it over!”

The two ladies vanished upon this impulse, and thegentleman followed. To their own relief the guiltlesseaves-droppers, who found no moment favorable forrevealing themselves after the comedy began, issuedfrom their retiracy.

“What a remarkable little lady!” saidBasil, eagerly turning to Isabel for sympathy in hisenjoyment of her inconsequence.

“Yes, poor thing!” returned his wife;“it’s no light matter to invite a younglady to take a journey with you, and promise her allsorts of gayety, and perhaps beaux and flirtations,and then find her on your hands in a desolation likethis. It’s dreadful, I think.”

Basil stared. “O, certainly,” hesaid. “But what an amusingly illogicallittle body!”

“I don’t understand what you mean, Basil.It was the only thing that she could do, to invitethe young lady to go on with them. I wonder herhusband had the sense to think of it first. Ofcourse she’ll have to lend her things.”

“And you didn’t observe anything peculiarin her way of reaching her conclusions?”

“Peculiar? What do you mean?”

“Why, her blaming her husband for letting herhave her own way about the hotel; and her tellinghim not to mention his proposal to Kitty, and thendoing it herself, just—­after she’dpronounced it absurd and impossible.” Hespoke with heat at being forced to make what he thoughta needless explanation.

“O!” said Isabel, after a moment’sreflection. “That! Did you think itso very odd?”

Her husband looked at her with the gravity a man mustfeel when he begins to perceive that he has marriedthe whole mystifying world of womankind in the womanof his choice, and made no answer. But to hisown soul he said: “I supposed I had thepleasure of my wife’s acquaintance. It seemsI have been flattering myself.”

The next morning they went out as they had planned,for an exploration of Goat Island, after an earlybreakfast. As they sauntered through the village’scontrasts of pigmy and colossal in architecture, theypraisefully took in the unalloyed holiday characterof the place, enjoying equally the lounging touristsat the hotel doors, the drivers and their carriagesto let, and the little shops, with nothing but mementosof Niagara, and Indian beadwork, and other trumpery,to sell. Shops so useless, they agreed, couldnot be found outside the Palms Royale, or the Squareof St. Mark, or anywhere else in the world but here.They felt themselves once more a part of the tide ofmere sight-seeing pleasure-travel, on which they haddrifted in other days, and in an eddy of which theirlove itself had opened its white blossom, and lily-likedreamed upon the wave.

They were now also part of the great circle of newlywedded bliss, which, involving the whole land duringthe season of bridal-tours, may be said to show richestand fairest at Niagara, like the costly jewel of aprecious ring. The place is, in fact, almost abandonedto bridal couples, and any one out of his honey-moonis in some degree an alien there, and must discerna certain immodesty in him intrusion. Is it forhis profane eyes to look upon all that blushing andtrembling joy? A man of any sensibility mustdesire to veil his face, and, bowing his excuses tothe collective rapture, take the first train for thewicked outside world to which he belongs. Everywhere,he sees brides and brides. Three or four withthe benediction still on them, come down in the samecar with him; he hands her travelling-shawl afterone as she springs from the omnibus into her husband’sarms; there are two or three walking back and forthwith their new lords upon the porch of the hotel; atsupper they are on every side of him, and he feelshimself suffused, as it were, by a roseate atmosphereof youth and love and hope. At breakfast it isthe same, and then, in his wanderings about the placehe constantly meets them. They are of all mannersof beauty, fair and dark, slender and plump, talland short; but they are all beautiful with the radianceof loving and being loved. Now, if ever in theirlives, they are charmingly dressed, and ravishingtoilets take the willing eye from the objects of interest.How high the heels of the pretty boots, how small thetender. tinted gloves, how electrical the flutterof the snowy skirts! What is Niagara to thesethings?

Isabel was not willing to own her bridal sisterhoodto these blessed souls; but she secretly rejoicedin it, even while she joined Basil in noting theirnumber and smiling at their innocent abandon.She dropped his arm at encounter of the first couple,and walked carelessly at his side; she made a solemnvow never to take hold of his watch-chain in speakingto him; she trusted that she might be preserved fromputting her face very close to his at dinner in studyingthe bill of fare; getting out of carriages, she forbadehim ever to take her by the waist. All asceticresolutions are modified by experiment; but if Isabeldid not rigorously keep these, she is not the lessto be praised for having formed them.

Just before they reached the bridge to Goat Island,they passed a little group of the Indians still lingeringabout Niagara, who make the barbaric wares in whichthe shops abound, and, like the woods and the wildfaces of the cliffs and precipices, help to keep thecataract remote, and to invest it with the charm ofprimeval loneliness. This group were women, andthey sat motionless on the ground, smiling sphinx-likeover their laps full of bead-work, and turning theirdark liquid eyes of invitation upon the passers.They wore bright kirtles, and red shawls fell fromtheir heads over their plump brown cheeks and down

their comfortable persons. A little girl withthem was attired in like gayety of color. “Whatis her name?” asked Isabel, paying for a beadpincushion. “Daisy Smith,” said hermother, in distressingly good English. “Buther Indian name?” “She has none,”answered the woman, who told Basil that her villagenumbered five hundred people, and that they were Protestants.While they talked they were joined by an Indian, whomthe women saluted musically in their native tongue.This was somewhat consoling; but he wore trousersand a waistcoat, and it could have been wished thathe had not a silk hat on.

“Still,” said Isabel, as they turned away,“I’m glad he hasn’t Lisle-threadgloves, like that chieftain we saw putting his forestqueen on board the train at Oneida. But how shockingthat they should be Christians, and Protestants!It would have been bad enough to have them Catholics.And that woman said that they were increasing.They ought to be fading away.”

On the bridge, they paused and looked up and downthe rapids rushing down the slope in all their wildvariety, with the white crests of breaking surf, thedark massiveness of heavy-climbing waves, the fleet,smooth sweep of currents over broad shelves of sunkenrock, the dizzy swirl and suck of whirlpools.

Spell-bound, the journeyers pored upon the deathfulcourse beneath their feet, gave a shudder to the horrorof being cast upon it, and then hurried over the bridgeto the island, in the shadow of whose wildness theysought refuge from the sight and sound.

There had been rain in the night; the air war fullof forest fragrance, and the low, sweet voice of twitteringbirds. Presently they came to a bench set ina corner of the path, and commanding a pleasant vistaof sunlit foliage, with a mere gleam of the foamingriver beyond. As they sat down here loverwise,Basil, as in the early days of their courtship, beganto recite a poem. It was one which had been hauntinghim since his first sight of the rapids, one of manythat he used to learn by heart in his youth—­therhyme of some poor newspaper poet, whom the third orfourth editor copying his verses consigned to oblivionby carelessly clipping his name from the bottom.It had always lingered in Basil’s memory, ratherfrom the interest of the awful fact it recorded, thanfrom any merit of its own; and now he recalled itwith a distinctness that surprised him.

Avery.

I.
All night long they heard in the houses beside theshore,
Heard, or seemed to hear, through the multitudinousroar,
Out of the hell of the rapids as ’twere a lostsoul’s cries
Heard and could not believe; and the morning mockedtheir eyes,
Showing where wildest and fiercest the waters leapedup and ran
Raving round him and past, the visage of a man
Clinging, or seeming to cling, to the trunk of a treethat, caught
Fast in the rocks below, scarce out of the surgesraught.
Was it a life, could it be, to yon slender hope thatclung
Shrill, above all the tumult the answering terrorrang.

II.
Under the weltering rapids a boat from the bridgeis drowned,
Over the rocks the lines of another are tangled andwound,
And the long, fateful hours of the morning have wastedsoon,
As it had been in some blessed trance, and now itis noon.
Hurry, now with the raft! But O, build it strongand stanch,
And to the lines and the treacherous rocks look wellas you launch
Over the foamy tops of the waves, and their foam-sprentsides,
Over the hidden reefs, and through the embattled tides,
Onward rushes the raft, with many a lurch and leap,—­
Lord! if it strike him loose from the hold he scarcecan keep!
No! through all peril unharmed, it reaches him harmlessat least,
And to its proven strength he lashes his weaknessfast.
Now, for the shore! But steady, steady, my men,and slow;
Taut, now, the quivering lines; now slack; and so,let her go!
Thronging the shores around stands the pitying multitude;
Wan as his own are their looks, and a nightmare seemsto brood
Heavy upon them, and heavy the silence hangs on all,
Save for the rapids’ plunge, and the thunderof the fall.
But on a sudden thrills from the people still andpale,
Chorussing his unheard despair, a desperate wail
Caught on a lurking point of rock it sways and swings,
Sport of the pitiless waters, the raft to which heclings.

III.
All the long afternoon it idly swings and sways;
And on the shore the crowd lifts up its hands andprays:
Lifts to heaven and wrings the hands so helpless tosave,
Prays for the mercy of God on him whom the rock andthe ways
Battle for, fettered betwixt them, and who amidsttheir strife
Straggles to help his helpers, and fights so hardfor his life,
Tugging at rope and at reef, while men weep and womenswoon.
Priceless second by second, so wastes the afternoon.
And it is sunset now; and another boat and the last
Down to him from the bridge through the rapids hassafely passed.

IV.
Wild through the crowd comes flying a man that nothingcan stay
Maddening against the gate that is locked athwarthis way.
“No! we keep the bridge for them that can helphim. You,
Tell us, who are you?” “His brother!”“God help you both! Pass through.”
Wild, with wide arms of imploring he calls aloud tohim,
Unto the face of his brother, scarce seen in the distancedim;
But in the roar of the rapids his fluttering wordsare lost
As in a wind of autumn the leaves of autumn are tossed.
And from the bridge he sees his brother sever therope
Holding him to the raft, and rise secure in his hope;
Sees all as in a dream the terrible pageantry,
Populous shores, the woods, the sky, the birds flyingfree;
Sees, then, the form—­that, spent with effortand fasting and fear,
Flings itself feebly and fails of the boat that islying so near,
Caught in the long-baffled clutch of the rapids, androlled and hurled
Headlong on to the cataract’s brink, and outof the world.

“O Basil!” said Isabel, with a long sighbreaking the hush that best praised the unknown poet’sskill, “it isn’t true, is it?”

“Every word, almost, even to the brother’scoming at the last moment. It’s a verywell-known incident,” he added, and I am surethe reader whose memory runs back twenty years cannothave forgotten it.

Niagara, indeed, is an awful homicide; nearly everypoint of interest about the place has killed its man,and there might well be a deeper stain of crimsonthan it ever wears in that pretty bow overarching thefalls. Its beauty is relieved against an historicalbackground as gloomy as the lightest-hearted touristcould desire. The abominable savages, reveringthe cataract as a kind of august devil, and leadinga life of demoniacal misery and wickedness, whom thefirst Jesuits found here two hundred years ago; theferocious Iroquois bloodily driving out these squaliddevil-worshippers; the French planting the fort thatyet guards the mouth of the river, and therewith theseeds of war that fruited afterwards in murderousstrifes throughout the whole Niagara country; thestruggle for the military posts on the river, duringthe wars of France and England; the awful scene inthe conspiracy of Pontiac, where a detachment of Englishtroops was driven by the Indians over the precipicenear the great Whirlpool; the sorrow and havoc visitedupon the American settlements in the Revolution bythe savages who prepared their attacks in the shadowof Fort Niagara; the battles of Chippewa and of Lundy’sLane, that mixed the roar of their cannon with thatof the fall; the savage forays with tomahawk and scalping-knife,and the blazing villages on either shore in the Warof 1812,—­these are the memories of the place,the links in a chain of tragical interest scarcelybroken before our time since the white man first beheldthe mist-veiled face of Niagara. The facts lostnothing of their due effect as Basil, in the rambleacross Goat Island, touched them with the reflectedlight of Mr. Parkman’s histories,—­thoseprecious books that make our meagre past wear somethingof the rich romance of old European days, and illumineits savage solitudes with the splendor of mediaevalchivalry, and the glory of mediaeval martyrdom,—­andthen, lacking this light, turned upon them the feebleglimmer of the guide-books. He and Isabel enjoyedthe lurid picture with all the zest of sentimentalistsdwelling upon the troubles of other times from theshelter of the safe and peaceful present. Theywere both poets in their quality of bridal couple,and so long as their own nerves were unshaken theycould transmute all facts to entertaining fables.They pleasantly exercised their sympathies upon thosewho every year perish at Niagara in the traditionof its awful power; only they refused their cheapand selfish compassion to the Hermit of Goat Island,who dwelt so many years in its conspicuous seclusion,and was finally carried over the cataract. This

public character they suspected of design in his deathas in his life, and they would not be moved by hismemory; though they gave a sigh to that dream, halfpathetic, half ludicrous, yet not ignoble, of MordecaiNoah, who thought to assemble all the Jews of theworld, and all the Indians, as remnants of the losttribes, upon Grand Island, there to rebuild Jerusalem,and who actually laid the corner-stone of the newtemple there.

Goat Island is marvelously wild for a place visitedby so many thousands every year. The shrubberyand undergrowth remain unravaged, and form a deceitfulprivacy, in which, even at that early hour of the day,they met many other pairs. It seemed incrediblethat the village and the hotels should be so full,and that the wilderness should also abound in them;yet on every embowered seat, and going to and fromall points of interest and danger, were these new-weddedlovers with their interlacing arms and their fondattitudes, in which each seemed to support and leanupon the other. Such a pair stood prominent beforethem when Basil and Isabel emerged at last from thecover of the woods at the head of the island, andglanced up the broad swift stream to the point whereit ran smooth before breaking into the rapids; andas a soft pastoral feature in the foreground of thatmagnificent landscape, they found them far from unpleasing.Some such pair is in the foreground of every famousAmerican landscape; and when I think of the amountof public love-making in the season of pleasure-travel,from Mount Desert to the Yosemite, and from the parksof Colorado to the Keys of Florida, I feel that ourcontinent is but a larger Arcady, that the middleof the nineteenth century is the golden age, and thatwe want very little of being a nation of shepherdsand shepherdesses.

Our friends returned by the shore of the Canadianrapids, having traversed the island by a path throughthe heart of the woods, and now drew slowly near theFalls again. All parts of the prodigious pageanthave an eternal novelty, and they beheld the ever-varyingeffect of that constant sublimity with the sense ofdiscoverers, or rather of people whose great fortuneit is to see the marvel in its beginning, and newfrom the creating hand. The morning hour lentit* sunny charm to this illusion, while in the cavernousprecipices of the shores, dark with evergreens, amystery as of primeval night seemed to linger.There was a wild fluttering of their nerves, a rapturewith an under-consciousness of pain, the exaltationof peril and escape, when they came to the three littleisles that extend from Goat Island, one beyond anotherfar out into the furious channel. Three prettysuspension-bridges connect them now with the largerisland, and under each of these flounders a huge rapid,and hurls itself away to mingle with the ruin of thefall. The Three Sisters are mere fragments ofwilderness, clumps of vine-tangled woods, plantedupon masses of rock; but they are part of the fascination

of Niagara which no one resists; nor could Isabel havebeen persuaded from exploring them. It wantsno courage to do this, but merely submission to thelocal sorcery, and the adventurer has no other rewardthan the consciousness of having been where but a fewyears before no human being had perhaps set foot.She grossed from bridge to bridge with a quaking heart,and at last stood upon the outermost isle, whence,through the screen of vines and boughs, she gave fearfulglances at the heaving and tossing flood beyond, fromevery wave of which at every instant she rescued herselfwith a desperate struggle. The exertion toldheavily upon her strength unawares, and she suddenlymade Basil another revelation of character. Withoutthe slightest warning she sank down at the root ofa tree, and said, with serious composure, that shecould never go back on those bridges; they were notsafe. He stared at her cowering form in blankamaze, and put his hands in his pockets. Thenit occurred to his dull masculine sense that it mustbe a joke; and he said, “Well, I’ll haveyou taken off in a boat.”

“O do, Basil, do, have me taken off in a boat!”implored Isabel. “You see yourself theMidges are not safe. Do get a boat.”

“Or a balloon,” he suggested, humoringthe pleasantry.

Isabel burst into tears; and now he went on his kneesat her side, and took her hands in his. “Isabel!Isabel! Are you crazy?” he cried, as ifhe meant to go mad himself. She moaned and shudderedin reply; he said, to mend matters, that it was ajest, about the boat; and he was driven to despairwhen Isabel repeated, “I never can go back bythe bridges, never.”

“But what do you propose to do?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know!”

He would try sarcasm. “Do you intend toset up a hermitage here, and have your meals sentout from the hotel? It’s a charming spot,and visited pretty constantly; but it’s small,even for a hermitage.”

Isabel moaned again with her hands still on her eyes,and wondered that he was not ashamed to make fun ofher.

He would try kindness. “Perhaps, darling,you’ll let me carry you ashore.”

“No, that will bring double the weight on thebridge at once.”

“Couldn’t you shut your eyes, and letme lead you?”

“Why, it isn’t the sight of the rapids,”she said, looking up fiercely. “The bridgesare not safe. I’m not a child, Basil.O, what shall we do?”

“I don’t know,” said Basil, gloomily.“It’s an exigency for which I wasn’tprepared.” Then he silently gave himselfto the Evil One, for having probably overwrought Isabel’snerves by repeating that poem about Avery, and bythe ensuing talk about Niagara, which she had seemedto enjoy so much. He asked her if that was it;and she answered, “O no, it’s nothingbut the bridges.” He proved to her thatthe bridges, upon all known principles, were perfectlysafe, and that they could not give way. She shookher head, but made no answer, and he lost his patience.

“Isabel,” he cried, “I’m ashamedof you!”

“Don’t say anything you’ll be sorryfor afterwards, Basil,” she replied, with theforbearance of those who have reason and justice ontheir side.

The rapids beat and shouted round their little prison-isle,each billow leaping as if possessed by a separatedemon. The absurd horror of the situation overwhelmedhim. He dared not attempt to carry her ashore,for she might spring from his grasp into the flood.He could not leave her to call for help; and whatif nobody came till she lost her mind from terror?Or, what if somebody should come and find them in thatridiculous affliction?

Somebody was coming!

“Isabel!” he shouted in her ear, “herecome those people we saw in the parlor last night.”

Isabel dashed her veil over her face, clutched Basil’swith her icy hand, rose, drew her arm convulsivelythrough his, and walked ashore without a word.

In a sheltered nook they sat down, and she quickly“repaired her drooping head and tricked herbeams” again. He could see her tearfullysmiling through her veil. “My dear,”he said, “I don’t ask an explanation ofyour fright, for I don’t suppose you could giveit. But should you mind telling me why thosepeople were so sovereign against it?”

“Why, dearest! Don’t you understand?That Mrs. Richard—­whoever she is—­isso much like me.”

She looked at him as if she had made the most satisfyingstatement, and he thought he had better not ask furtherthen, but wait in hope that the meaning would cometo him. They walked on in silence till they cameto the Biddle Stairs, at the head of which is a noticethat persons have been killed by pieces of rock fromthe precipice overhanging the shore below, and warningpeople that they descend at their peril. Isabeldeclined to visit the Cave of the Winds, to which thesestairs lead, but was willing to risk the ascent ofTerrapin Tower. “Thanks; no,” saidher husband. “You might find it unsafeto come back the way you went up. We can’tcount certainly upon the appearance of the lady whois so much like you; and I’ve no fancy for spendingmy life on Terrapin Tower.” So he foundher a seat, and went alone to the top of the audaciouslittle structure standing on the verge of the cataract,between the smooth curve of the Horse-Shoe and thesculptured front of the Central Fall, with the stormysea of the Rapids behind, and the river, dim seen throughthe mists, crawling away between its lofty bluffsbefore. He knew again the awful delight withwhich so long ago he had watched the changes in thebeauty of the Canadian Fall as it hung a mass of translucentgreen from the brink, and a pearly white seemed tocrawl up from the abyss, and penetrate all its substanceto the very crest, and then suddenly vanished fromit, and perpetually renewed the same effect. Themystery of the rising vapors veiled the gulf intowhich the cataract swooped; the sun shone, and a rainbowdreamed upon them.

Near the foot of the tower, some loose rocks extendquite to the verge, and here Basil saw an elderlygentleman skipping from one slippery stone to another,and looking down from time to time into the abyss,who, when he had amused himself long enough in thisway, clambered up on the plank bridge. Basil,who had descended by this time, made bold to say thathe thought the diversion an odd one and rather dangerous.The gentleman took this in good part, and owned itmight seem so, but added that a distinguished phrenologisthad examined his head, and told him he had equilibriumso large that he could go anywhere.

“On your bridal tour, I presume,” he continued,as they approached the bench where Basil had leftIsabel. She had now the company of a plain, middle-agedwoman, whose attire hesitatingly expressed some inwardfestivity, and had a certain reluctant fashionableness.“Well, this is my third bridal tour to Niagara,and my wife ’s been here once before on thesame business. We see a good many changes.I used to stand on Table Rock with the others.Now that’s all gone. Well, old lady, shallwe move on?” he asked; and this bridal pairpassed up the path, attended, haply, by the guardianspirits of those who gave the place so many sad yetpleasing associations.

At dinner, Mr. Richard’s party sat at the tablenext Basil’s, and they were all now talkingcheerfully over the emptiness of the spacious dining-hall.

“Well, Kitty,” the married lady was saying,you can tell the girls what you please about the gayetiesof Niagara, when you get home. They’llbelieve anything sooner than the truth.”

“O yes, indeed,” said Kitty, “I’vegot a good deal of it made up already. I’lldescribe a grand hop at the hotel, with fashionablepeople from all parts of the country, and the gentlemenI danced with the most. I’m going to havehad quite a flirtation with the gentleman of the longblond mustache, whom we met on the bridge this morningand he’s got to do duty in accounting for mymissing glove. It’ll never do to tell thegirls I dropped it from the top of Terrapin Tower.Then you know, Fanny, I really can say something aboutdining with aristocratic Southerners, waited uponby their black servants.”

This referred to the sad-faced patrician whom Basiland Isabel had noted in the cars from Buffalo as aSoutherner probably coming North for the first timesince the war. He had an air at once fierce andsad, and a half-barbaric, homicidal gentility of mannerfascinating enough in its way. He sat with hiswife at a table farther down the room, and their childwas served in part by a little tan-colored nurse-maid.The fact did not quite answer to the young lady’sdescription of it, and get it certainly afforded hera ground-work. Basil fancied a sort of bewildermentin the Southerner, and explained it upon the theorythat he used to come every year to Niagara beforethe war, and was now puzzled to find it so changed.

“Yes,” he said, “I can’t accountfor him except as the ghost of Southern travel, andI can’t help feeling a little sorry for him.I suppose that almost any evil commends itself byits ruin; the wrecks of slavery are fast growing afungus crop of sentiment, and they may yet outflourishthe remains of the feudal system in the kind of poetrythey produce. The impoverished slave-holder isa pathetic figure, in spite of all justice and reason,the beaten rebel does move us to compassion, and itis of no use to think of Andersonville in his presence.This gentleman, and others like him, used to be thelords of our summer resorts. They spent the moneythey did not earn like princes; they held their headshigh; they trampled upon the Abolitionist in his lair;they received the homage of the doughface in his home.They came up here from their rice-swamps and cotton-fields,and bullied the whole busy civilization of the North.Everybody who had merchandise or principles to selltruckled to them, and travel amongst us was a triumphalprogress. Now they’re moneyless and subjugated(as they call it), there’s none so poor to dothem reverence, and it’s left for me, an Abolitionistfrom the cradle, to sigh over their fate. Afterall, they had noble traits, and it was no great wonderthey got, to despise us, seeing what most of us were.It seems to me I should like to know our friend.I can’t help feeling towards him as towards afallen prince, heaven help my craven spirit! Iwonder how our colored waiter feels towards him.I dare say he admires him immensely.”

There were not above a dozen other people in the room,and Basil contrasted the scene with that which thesame place formerly presented. “In theold time,” he said, “every table was full,and we dined to the music of a brass band. Ican’t say I liked the band, but I miss it.I wonder if our Southern friend misses it? Theygave us a very small allowance of brass band whenwe arrived, Isabel. Upon my word, I wonder what’scome over the place,” he said, as the Southernparty, rising from the table, walked out of the dining-room,attended by many treacherous echoes in spite of anostentatious clatter of dishes that the waiters made.

After dinner they drove on the Canada shore up pastthe Clifton House, towards the Burning Spring, whichis not the least wonder of Niagara. As each bubblebreaks upon the troubled surface, and yields its flashof infernal flame and its whiff of sulphurous stench,it seems hardly strange that the Neutral Nation shouldhave revered the cataract as a demon; and anothersubtle spell (not to be broken even by the business-likecomposure of the man who shows off the hell-broth)is added to those successive sorceries by which Niagaragradually changes from a thing of beauty to a thingof terror. By all odds, too, the most tremendousview of the Falls is afforded by the point on the drivewhence you look down upon the Horse-Shoe, and beholdits three massive walls of sea rounding and sweepinginto the gulf together, the color gone, and the smoothbrink showing black and ridgy.

Would they not go to the battle-field of Lundy’sLane? asked the driver at a certain point on theirreturn; but Isabel did not care for battle-fields,and Basil preferred to keep intact the reminiscenceof his former visit. “They have a sortof tower of observation built on the battle-ground,”he said, as they drove on down by the river, “andit was in charge of an old Canadian militia-man, whohad helped his countrymen to be beaten in the fight.This hero gave me a simple and unintelligible accountof the battle, asking me first if I had ever heardof General Scott, and adding without flinching thathere he got his earliest laurels. He seemed togo just so long to every listener, and nothing couldstop him short, so I fell into a revery until he cameto an end. It was hard to remember, that sweetsummer morning, when the sun shone, and the birdssang, and the music of a piano and a girl’s voicerose from a bowery cottage near, that all the pureair had once been tainted with battle-smoke, thatthe peaceful fields had been planted with cannon,instead of potatoes and corn, and that where the cowscame down the farmer’s lane, with tinkling bells,the shock of armed men had befallen. The blueand tranquil Ontario gleamed far away, and far awayrolled the beautiful land, with farm-houses, fields,and woods, and at the foot of the tower lay the prettyvillage. The battle of the past seemed only avagary of mine; yet how could I doubt the warrior atmy elbow?—­grieved though I was to findthat a habit of strong drink had the better of hisutterance that morning. My driver explained afterwards,that persons visiting the field were commonly so muchpleased with the captain’s eloquence, that theykept the noble old soldier in a brandy and-water rapturethroughout the season, thereby greatly refreshing hismemory, and making the battle bloodier and bloodieras the season advanced and the number of visitorsincreased. There my dear,” he suddenly brokeoff, as they came in sight of a slender stream ofwater that escaped from the brow of a cliff on theAmerican side below the Falls, and spun itself intoa gauze of silvery mist, “that’s the BridalVeil; and I suppose you think the stream, which ismaking such a fine display, yonder, is some idle brooklet,ending a long course of error and worthlessness bythat spectacular plunge. It’s nothing ofthe kind; it’s an honest hydraulio canal, ofthe most straightforward character, a poor but respectablemill-race which has devoted itself strictly to business,and has turned mill-wheels instead of fooling roundwater-lilies. It can afford that ultimate finery.What you behold in the Bridal Veil, my love, is theapotheosis of industry.”

“What I can’t help thinking of,”said Isabel, who had not paid the smallest attentionto the Bridal Veil, or anything about it, “isthe awfulness of stepping off these places in thenight-time.” She referred to the road which,next the precipice, is unguarded by any sort of parapet.In Europe a strong wall would secure it, but we managethings differently on our continent, and carriagesgo running over the brink from time to time.

“If your thoughts have that direction,”answered her husband, “we had better go backto the hotel, and leave the Whirlpool for to-morrowmorning. It’s late for it to-day, at anyrate.” He had treated Isabel since theadventure on the Three Sisters with a superiority whichhe felt himself to be very odious, but which he couldnot disuse.

“I’m not afraid,” she sighed, “butin the words of the retreating soldier, I—­I’mawfully demoralized;” and added, “You knowwe must reserve some of the vital forces for shoppingthis evening.”

Part of their business also was to buy the tickets for their return to

Boston by way of Montreal and Quebec, and it was partof their pleasure to get these of the heartiest imaginableticket-agent. He was a colonel or at least amajor, and he made a polite feint of calling Basilby some military title. He commended the tripthey were about to make as the most magnificent andbeautiful on the whole continent, and he commendedthem for intending to make it. He said that wasMrs. General Bowdur of Philadelphia who just wentout; did they know her? Somehow, the titles affectedBasil as of older date than the late war, and as belongingto the militia period; and he imagined for the agentthe romance of a life spent at a watering-place, incontact with rich money-spending, pleasure-takingpeople, who formed his whole jovial world. TheColonel, who included them in this world, and therebybrevetted them rich and fashionable, could not securea state-room for them on the boat,—­a perfectlysplendid Lake steamer, which would take them down therapids of the St. Lawrence, and on to Montreal withoutchange,—­but he would give them a letterto the captain, who was a very particular friend ofhis, and would be happy to show them as his friendsevery attention; and so he wrote a note ascribingpeculiar merits to Basil, and in spite of all reasonmaking him feel for the moment that he was privilegedby a document which was no doubt part of every suchtransaction. He spoke in a loud cheerful voice;he laughed jollily at no apparent joke; he bowed verylow and said, “Good-evening!” at parting,and they went away as if he had blessed them.

The rest of the evening they spent in wandering throughthe village, charmed with its bizarre mixture of quaintnessand commonplaceness; in hanging about the shop-Windowswith their monotonous variety of feather fans,—­eachwith a violently red or yellow bird painfully sacrificedin its centre,—­moccasons, bead-wroughtwork-bags, tobacco-pouches, bows and arrows, and whateverelse the savage art of the neighboring squaws caninvent; in sauntering through these gay booths, pricingmany things, and in hanging long and undecidedly overcases full of feldspar crosses, quartz bracelets andnecklaces, and every manner of vase, inoperative pitcher,and other vessel that can be fashioned out of the geological

formations at Niagara, tormented meantime by the heatof the gas-lights and the persistence of the mosquitoes.There were very few people besides themselves in theshops, and Isabel’s purchases were not lavish.Her husband had made up his mind to get her some littlekeepsake; and when he had taken her to the hotel heran back to one of the shops, and hastily bought hera feather fan,—­a magnificent thing of deepmagenta dye shading into blue, with a whole yellow-birdtransfixed in the centre. When he triumphantlydisplayed it in their room, “Who’s thatfor, Basil?” demanded his wife; “the cook?”But seeing his ghastly look at this, she fell uponhis neck, crying, “O you poor old tasteless darling!You’ve got it for me!” and seemed aboutto die of laughter.

“Didn’t you start and throw up your hands,”he stammered, “when you came to that case offans?”

“Yes,—­in horror! Did you thinkI liked the cruel things, with their dead birds andtheir hideous colors? O Basil, dearest! Youare incorrigible. Can’t you learn thatmagenta is the vilest of all the hues that the perversenessof man has invented in defiance of nature? Now,my love, just promise me one thing,” she saidpathetically. “We’re going to do alittle shopping in Montreal, you know; and perhapsyou’ll be wanting to surprise me with somethingthere. Don’t do it. Or if you must,do tell me all about it beforehand, and what the colorof it’s to be; and I can say whether to getit or not, and then there’ll be some taste aboutit, and I shall be truly surprised and pleased.”

She turned to put the fan into her trunk, and he murmuredsomething about exchanging it. “No,”she said, “we’ll keep it as a—­a—­monument.”And she deposed him, with another peal of laughter,from the proud height to which he had climbed in pityof her nervous fears of the day. So completelywere their places changed, that he doubted if it werenot he who had made that scene on the Third Sister;and when Isabel said, “O, why won’t menuse their reasoning faculties?” he could notfor himself have claimed any, and he could not urgethe truth: that he had bought the fan more forits barbaric brightness than for its beauty. Shewould not let him get angry, and he could say nothingagainst the half-ironical petting with which she soothedhis mortification.

But all troubles passed with the night, and the nextmorning they spent a charming hour about ProspectPoint, and in sauntering over Goat Island, somewhatdaintily tasting the flavors of the place on whosewonders they had so hungrily and indiscriminatelyfeasted at first. They had already the feelingof veteran visitors, and they loftily marveled at thegreed with which newer-comers plunged at the sensations.They could not conceive why people should want todescend the inclined railway to the foot of the AmericanFall; they smiled at the idea of going up TerrapinTower; they derided the vulgar daring of those whowent out upon the Three Weird Sisters; for some whomthey saw about to go down the Biddle Stairs to theCave of the Winds, they had no words to express theircontempt.

Then they made their excursion to the Whirlpool, mistakenlygoing down on the American side, for it is much betterseen from the other, though seen from any point itis the most impressive feature of the whole prodigiousspectacle of Niagara.

Here within the compass of a mile, those inland seasof the North, Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, andthe multitude of smaller lakes, all pour their floods,where they swirl in dreadful vortices, with resistlessunder-currents boiling beneath the surface of thatmighty eddy. Abruptly from this scene of secretpower, so different from the thunderous splendorsof the cataract itself, rise lofty cliffs on everyside, to a height of two hundred feet, clothed fromthe water’s edge almost to their create withdark cedars. Noiselessly, so far as your sensesperceive, the lakes steal out of the whirlpool, then,drunk and wild, with brawling rapids roar away toOntario through the narrow channel of the river.Awful as the scene is, you stand so far above it thatyou do not know the half of its terribleness; forthose waters that look so smooth are great ridgesand rings, forced, by the impulse of the currents,twelve feet higher in the centre than at the margin.Nothing can live there, and with what is caught inits hold, the maelstrom plays for days, and whirlsand tosses round and round in its toils, with a sad,maniacal patience. The guides tell ghastly stories,which even their telling does not wholly rob of ghastliness,about the bodies of drowned men carried into the whirlpooland made to enact upon its dizzy surges a travestyof life, apparently floating there at their pleasure,diving and frolicking amid the waves, or franticallystruggling to escape from the death that has longsince befallen them.

On the American side, not far below the railway suspensionbridge, is an elevator more than a hundred and eightyfeet high, which is meant to let people down to theshore below, and to give a view of the rapids on theirown level. From the cliff opposite, it looks aterribly frail structure of pine sticks, but is doubtlessstronger than it looks; and at any rate, as it hasnever yet fallen to pieces, it may be pronounced perfectlysafe.

In the waiting-room at the top, Basil and Isabel foundMr. Richard and his ladies again, who got into themovable chamber with them, and they all silently descendedtogether. It was not a time for talk of any kind,either when they were slowly and not quite smoothlydropping through the lugubrious upper part of thestructure, where it was darkened by a rough weatherboarding,or lower down, where the unobstructed light showedthe grim tearful face of the cliff, bedrabbled withoozy springs, and the audacious slightness of theelevator.

An abiding distrust of the machinery overhead mingledin Isabel’s heart with a doubt of the valueof the scene below, and she could not look forwardto escape from her present perils by the conveyancewhich had brought her into them, with any satisfaction.She wanly smiled, and shrank closer to Basil; whilethe other matron made nothing of seizing her husbandviolently by the arm and imploring him to stop it wheneverthey experienced a rougher jolt than usual.

At the bottom of the cliff they were helped out oftheir prison by a humid young Englishman, with muchclay on him, whose face was red and bathed in perspiration,for it was very hot down there in his little inclosureof baking pine boards, and it was not much cooler outon the rocks upon which the party issued, descendingand descending by repeated and desultory flights ofsteps, till at last they stood upon a huge fragmentof stone right abreast of the rapids. Yet it wasa magnificent sight, and for a moment none of themwere sorry to have come. The surges did not looklike the gigantic ripples on a river’s courseas they were, but like a procession of ocean billows;they arose far aloft in vast bulks of clear green,and broke heavily into foam at the crest. Greatblocks and shapeless fragments of rock strewed themargin of the awful torrent; gloomy walls of darkstone rose naked from these, bearded here and therewith cedar, and everywhere frowning with shaggy browsof evergreen. The place is inexpressibly lonelyand dreadful, and one feels like an alien presencethere, or as if he had intruded upon some mood orhaunt of Nature in which she had a right to be foreveralone. The slight, impudent structure of theelevator rises through the solitude, like a thingthat merits ruin, yet it is better than something moreelaborate, for it looks temporary, and since theremust be an elevator, it is well to have it of themost transitory aspect. Some such quality of rudeimpermanence consoles you for the presence of mostimprovements by which you enjoy Niagara; the suspensionbridges for their part being saved from offensivenessby their beauty and unreality.

Ascending, none of the party spoke; Isabel and theother matron blanched in each other’s faces;their husbands maintained a stolid resignation.When they stepped out of their trap into the waitingroom at the top, “What I like about these littleadventures,” said Mr. Richard to Basil, abruptly,“is getting safely out of them. Good-morning,sir.” He bowed slightly to Isabel, whor*turned his politeness, and exchanged faint nods,or glances, with the ladies. They got into theirseparate carriages, and at that safe distance madeeach other more decided obeisances.

“Well,” observed Basil, “I supposewe’re introduced now. We shall be meetingthem from time to time throughout our journey.You know how the same faces and the same trunks usedto keep turning up in our travels on the other side.Once meet people in travelling, and you can’tget rid of them.”

“Yes,” said Isabel, as if continuing histrain of thought, “I’m glad we’regoing to-day.”

“O dearest!”

“Truly. When we first arrived I felt onlythe loveliness of the place. It seemed more familiar,too, then; but ever since, it’s been growingstranger and dreadfuller. Somehow it’s begunto pervade me and possess me in a very uncomfortableway; I’m tossed upon rapids, and flung fromcataract brinks, and dizzied in whirlpools; I’mno longer yours, Basil; I’m most unhappily marriedto Niagara. Fly with me, save me from my awfullord!”

She lightly burlesqued the woes of a prima donna,with clasped hands and uplifted eyes.

“That’ll do very well,” Basil commented,“and it implies a reality that can’t bequite definitely spoken. We come to Niagara inthe patronizing spirit in which we approach everythingnowadays, and for a few hours we have it our own way,and pay our little tributes of admiration with asmuch complacency as we feel in acknowledging the existenceof the Supreme Being. But after a while we areaware of some potent influence undermining our self-satisfaction;we begin to conjecture that the great cataract doesnot exist by virtue of our approval, and to feel thatit will not cease when we go away. The secondday makes us its abject slaves, and on the third wewant to fly from it in terror. I believe somepeople stay for weeks, however, and hordes of themhave written odes to Niagara.”

“I can’t understand it, at all,”said Isabel. “I don’t wonder now thatthe town should be so empty this season, but that itshould ever be full. I wish we’d gone afterour first look at the Falls from the suspension bridge.How beautiful that was! I rejoice in everythingthat I haven’t done. I’m so gladI haven’t been in the Cave of the Winds; I’mso happy that Table Rock fell twenty years ago!Basil, I couldn’t stand another rainbow today.I’m sorry we went out on the Three Weird Sisters.O, I shall dream about it! and the rush, and the whirl,and the dampness in one’s face, and the everlastingchirr-r-r-r of everything!”

She dipped suddenly upon his shoulder for a moment’soblivion, and then rose radiant with a question:“Why in the world, if Niagara is really whatit seems to us now, do so many bridal parties comehere?”

“Perhaps they’re the only people who’vethe strength to bear up against it, and are not easilydispersed and subjected by it.”

“But we’re dispersed and subjected.”

“Ah, my dear, we married a little late.Who knows how it would be if you were nineteen insteadof twenty-seven, and I twenty-five and not turnedof thirty?”

“Basil, you’re very cruel.”

“No, no. But don’t you see how itis? We’ve known too much of life to desireany gloomy background for our happiness. We’requite contented to have things gay and bright aboutus. Once we couldn’t have made the circledark enough. Well, my dear, that’s the effectof age. We’re superannuated.”

“I used to think I was before we were married,”answered Isabel simply; “but now,” sheadded triumphantly, “I’m rescued from allthat. I shall never be old again, dearest; never,as long as you love me!”

They were about to enter the village, and he couldnot make any open acknowledgment of her tenderness;but her silken mantle (or whatever) slipped from hershoulder, and he embracingly replaced it, flatteringhimself that he had delicately seized this chance ofan unavowed caress and not allowing (O such is theblindness of our sex!) that the opportunity had beenyet more subtly afforded him, with the art which womennever disuse in this world, and which I hope they willnot forget in the next.

They had an early dinner, and looked their last uponthe nuptial gayety of the otherwise forlorn hotel.Three brides sat down with them in travelling-dress;two occupied the parlor as they passed out; half adozen happy pairs arrived (to the music of the band)in the omnibus that was to carry our friends backto the station; they caught sight of several aboutthe shop windows, as that drove through the streets.Thus the place perpetually renews itself in the glowof love as long as the summer lasts. The moonwhich is elsewhere so often of wormwood, or of theordinary green cheese at the best, is of lucent honeythere from the first of June to the last of October;and this is a great charm in Niagara. I thinkwith tenderness of all the lives that have opened sofairly there; the hopes that have reigned in the gladyoung hearts; the measureless tide of joy that ebbsand flows with the arriving and departing trains.Elsewhere there are carking cares of business and offashion, there are age, and sorrow, and heartbreak:but here only youth, faith, rapture. I kiss myhand to Niagara for that reason, and would I werea poet for a quarter of an hour.

Isabel departed in almost a forgiving mood towardsthe weak sisterhood of evident brides, and both ourfriends felt a lurking fondness for Niagara at thelast moment. I do not know how much of their contentwas due to the fact that they had suffered no sortof wrong there, from those who are apt to prey upontravellers. In the hotel a placard warned themto have nothing to do with the miscreant hackmen onthe streets, but always to order their carriage atthe office; on the street the hackmen whispered tothem not to trust the exorbitant drivers in leaguewith the landlords; yet their actual experience wasgreat reasonableness and facile contentment with thesum agreed upon.

This may have been because the hackmen so far outnumberedthe visitors, that the latter could dictate terms;but they chose to believe it a triumph of civilization;and I will never be the cynic to sneer at their faith.Only at the station was the virtue of the Niagaransput in doubt, by the hotel porter who professed tofind Basil’s trunk enfeebled by travel, andadvised a strap for it, which a friend of his wouldsell for a dollar and a half. Yet even he mayhave been a benevolent nature unjustly suspected.

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE.

They were to take the Canadian steamer at Charlotte,the port of Rochester, and they rattled uneventfullydown from Niagara by rail. At the broad, low-bankedriver-mouth the steamer lay beside the railroad station;and while Isabel disposed of herself on board, Basillooked to the transfer of the baggage, novelly comfortedin the business by the respectfulness of the youngCanadian who took charge of the trunks for the boat.He was slow, and his system was not good,—­hedid not give checks for the pieces, but marked them

with the name of their destination; and there wasthat indefinable something in his manner which hintedhis hope that you would remember the porter; but hewas so civil that he did not snub the meekest andmost vexatious of the passengers, and Basil mutelyblessed his servile soul. Few white Americans,he said to himself, would behave so decently in hisplace; and he could not conceive of the American steamboatclerk who would use the politeness towards a waitingcrowd that the Canadian purser showed when they allwedged themselves in about his window to receive theirstateroom keys. He was somewhat awkward, likethe porter, but he was patient, and he did not losehis temper even when some of the crowd, finding hewould not bully them, made bold to bully him.He was three times as long in serving them as an Americanwould have been, but their time was of no value there,and he served them well. Basil made a point ofspeaking him fair, when his turn came, and the purserdid not trample on him for a base truckler, as anAmerican jack-in-office would have done.

Our tourists felt at home directly on this steamer,which was very comfortable, and in every way sufficientfor its purpose, with a visible captain, who answeredtwo or three questions very pleasantly, and bore himselftowards his passengers in some sort like a host.

In the saloon Isabel had found among the passengersher semi-acquaintances of the hotel parlor and theRapids-elevator, and had glanced tentatively towardsthem. Whereupon the matron of the party had madeadvances that ended in their all sitting down togetherand wondering when the boat would start, and whattime they would get to Montreal next evening, withother matters that strangers going upon the same journeymay properly marvel over in company. The introductionhaving thus accomplished itself, they exchanged addresses,and it appeared that Richard was Colonel Ellison,of Milwaukee, and that Fanny was his wife. MissKitty Ellison was of Western New York, not far fromErie. There was a diversion presently towardsthe different state-rooms; but the new acquaintancessat vis-a-vis at the table, and after supper the ladiesdrew their chairs together on the promenade deck, andenjoyed the fresh evening breeze. The sun setmagnificent upon the low western shore which theyhad now left an hour away, and a broad stripe of colorstretched behind the steamer. A few thin, luminousclouds darkened momently along the horizon, and thenmixed with the land. The stars came out in a clearsky, and a light wind softly buffeted the cheeks, andbreathed life into nerves that the day’s heathad wasted. It scarcely wrinkled the tranquilexpanse of the lake, on which loomed, far or near,a full-sailed schooner, and presently melted intothe twilight, and left the steamer solitary upon thewaters. The company was small, and not remarkableenough in any way to take the thoughts of any one offhis own comfort. A deep sense of the coziness

of the situation possessed them all which was if possibleintensified by the spectacle of the captain, seatedon the upper deck, and smoking a cigar that flashedand fainted like a stationary fire-fly in the gatheringdusk. How very distant, in this mood, were themost recent events! Niagara seemed a fable ofantiquity; the ride from Rochester a myth of the MiddleAges. In this pool, happy world of quiet lake,of starry skies, of air that the soul itself seemedto breathe, there was such consciousness of reposeas if one were steeped in rest and soaked throughand through with calm.

The points of likeness between Isabel and Mrs. Ellisonshortly made them mutually uninteresting, and, leavingher husband to the others, Isabel frankly sought thecompanionship of Miss Kitty, in whom she found a charmof manner which puzzled at first, but which she presentlyfancied must be perfect trust of others mingling witha peculiar self-reliance.

“Can’t you see, Basil, what a very flatteringway it is?” she asked of her husband, when,after parting with their friends for the night, shetried to explain the character to him. “Ofcourse no art could equal such a natural gift; forthat kind of belief in your good-nature and sympathymakes you feel worthy of it, don’t you know;and so you can’t help being good-natured andsympathetic. This Miss Ellison, why, I can tellyou, I shouldn’t be ashamed of her anywhere.”By anywhere Isabel meant Boston, and she went on topraise the young lady’s intelligence and refinement,with those expressions of surprise at the existenceof civilization in a westerner which westerners findit so hard to receive graciously. Happily, MissEllison had not to hear them. “The reasonshe happened to come with only two dresses is, shelives so near Niagara that she could come for oneday, and go back the next. The colonel’sher cousin, and he and his wife go East every year,and they asked her this time to see Niagara with them.She told me all over again what we eavesdropped soshamefully in the hotel parlor;—­and I don’tknow whether she was better pleased with the prospectof what’s before her, or with the notion ofmaking the journey in this original way. She didn’tforce her confidence upon me, any more than she triedto withhold it. We got to talking in the mostnatural manner; and she seemed to tell these thingsabout herself because they amused her and she likedme. I had been saying how my trunk got left behindonce on the French side of Mont Cenis, and I had towear aunt’s things at Turin till it could besent for.”

“Well, I don’t see but Miss Ellison coulddescribe you to her friends very much as you’vedescribed her to me,” said Basil. “Howdid these mutual confidences begin? Whose trustfulnessfirst flattered the other’s? What elsedid you tell about yourself?”

“I said we were on our wedding journey,”guiltily admitted Isabel.

“O, you did!”

“Why, dearest! I wanted to know, for once,you see, whether we seemed honeymoon-struck.”

“And do we?”

“No,” came the answer, somewhat ruefully.“Perhaps, Basil,” she added, “we’vebeen a little too successful in disguising our bridalcharacter. Do you know,” she continued,looking him anxiously in the face, “this MissEllison took me at first for—­your sister!”

Basil broke forth in outrageous laughter. “Onemore such victory,” he said, “and we areundone;” and he laughed again, immoderately.“How sad is the fruition of human wishes!There ’s nothing, after all, like a good thoroughfailure for making people happy.”

Isabel did not listen to him. Safe in a dim cornerof the deserted saloon, she seized him in a vindictiveembrace; then, as if it had been he who suggestedthe idea of such a loathsome relation, hissed out thehated words, “Your sister!” and releasedhim with a disdainful repulse.

A little after daybreak the steamer stopped at theCanadian city of Kingston, a handsome place, substantialto the water’s edge, and giving a sense of Englishsolidity by the stone of which it is largely built.There was an accession of many passengers here, andthey and the people on the wharf were as little likeAmericans as possible. They were English or Irishor Scotch, with the healthful bloom of the Old Worldstill upon their faces, or if Canadians they lookednot less hearty; so that one must wonder if the linebetween the Dominion and the United States did notalso sharply separate good digestion and dyspepsia.These provincials had not our regularity of features,nor the best of them our careworn sensibility of expression;but neither had they our complexions of adobe; andeven Isabel was forced to allow that the men were,on the whole, better dressed than the same numberof average Americans would have been in a city ofthat size and remoteness. The stevedores who wereputting the freight aboard were men of leisure; theyjoked in a kindly way with the orange-women and theold women picking up chips on the pier; and our landof hurry seemed beyond the ocean rather than beyondthe lake.

Kingston has romantic memories of being Fort Frontenactwo hundred years ago; of Count Frontenac’ssplendid advent among the Indians; of the brave LaSalle, who turned its wooden walls to stone; of warswith the savages and then with the New York colonists,whom the French and their allies harried from thispoint; of the destruction of La Salle’s fortin the Old French War; and of final surrender a fewyears later to the English. It is as picturesqueas it is historical. All about the city, the shoresare beautifully wooded, and there are many lovelyislands,—­the first indeed of those ThousandIslands with which the head of the St. Lawrence isfilled, and among which the steamer was presently threadingher way. They are still as charming and stillalmost as wild as when, in 1673, Frontenac’sflotilla of canoes passed through their labyrinth andissued upon the lake. Save for a light-house

upon one of them, there is almost nothing to showthat the foot of man has ever pressed the thin grassclinging to their rocky surfaces, and keeping its greenin the eternal shadow of their pines and cedars.In the warm morning light they gathered or dispersedbefore the advancing vessel, which some of them almosttouched with the plumage of their evergreens; and wherenone of them were large, some were so small that itwould not have been too bold to figure them as a vasterrace of water-birds assembling and separating in hercourse. It is curiously affecting to find themso unclaimed yet from the solitude of the vanishedwilderness, and scarcely touched even by tradition.But for the interest left them by the French, thesetiny islands have scarcely any associations, and mustbe enjoyed for their beauty alone. There is indeedabout them a faint light of legend concerning theCanadian rebellion of 1837, for several patriots aresaid to have taken refuge amidst their lovely multitude;but this episode of modern history is difficult forthe imagination to manage, and somehow one does nottake sentimentally even to that daughter of a lurkingpatriot, who long baffled her father’s pursuersby rowing him from one island to another, and supplyinghim with food by night.

Either the reluctance is from the natural desire thatso recent a heroine should be founded on fact, orit is mere perverseness. Perhaps I ought to say;in justice to her, that it was one of her own sex whor*fused to be interested in her, and forbade Basilto care for her. When he had read of her exploitfrom the guide-book, Isabel asked him if he had noticedthat handsome girl in the blue and white striped Garibaldiand Swiss hat, who had come aboard at Kingston.She pointed her out, and courageously made him admireher beauty, which was of the most bewitching Canadiantype. The young girl was redeemed by her NewWorld birth from the English heaviness; a more delicatebloom lighted her cheeks; a softer grace dwelt inher movement; yet she was round and full, and she wasin the perfect flower of youth. She was not soethereal in her loveliness as an American girl, butshe was not so nervous and had none of the painfulfragility of the latter. Her expression was justa little vacant, it must be owned; but so far as shewent she was faultless. She looked like the mosttractable of daughters, and as if she would be themost obedient of wives. She had a blameless tastein dress, Isabel declared; her costume of blue andwhite striped Garibaldi and Swiss hat (set upon heavymasses of dark brown hair) being completed by a blacksilk skirt. “And you can see,” sheadded, “that it’s an old skirt made over,and that she’s dressed as cheaply as she isprettily.” This surprised Basil, who hadimputed the young lady’s personal sumptuousnessto her dress, and had thought it enormously rich.When she got off with her chaperone at one of thepoorest-looking country landings, she left them in

hopeless conjecture about her. Was she visitingthere, or was the interior of Canada full of suchstylish and exquisite creatures? Where did sheget her taste, her fashions, her manners? Asshe passed from sight towards the shadow of the woods,they felt the poorer for her going; yet they wereglad to have seen her, and on second thoughts theyfelt that they could not justly ask more of her thanto have merely existed for a few hours in their presence.They perceived that beauty was not only its own excusefor being, but that it flattered and favored and profitedthe world by consenting to be.

At Prescott, the boat on which they had come fromCharlotte, and on which they had been promised a passagewithout change to Montreal, stopped, and they weretransferred to a smaller steamer with the uncomfortablename of Banshee. She was very old, and very infirmand dirty, and in every way bore out the characterof a squalid Irish goblin. Besides, she was alreadyheavily laden with passengers, and, with the additionof the other steamer’s people had now doubleher complement; and our friends doubted if they werenot to pass the Rapids in as much danger as discomfort.Their fellow-passengers were in great variety, however,and thus partly atoned for their numbers. Amongthem of course there was a full force of brides fromNiagara and elsewhere, and some curious forms of theprevailing infatuation appeared. It is well enough,if she likes, and it may even be very noble for apassably good-looking young lady to marry a gentlemanof venerable age; but to intensify the idea of self-devotionby furtively caressing his wrinkled front seems tooreproachful of the general public; while, on the otherhand, if the bride is very young and pretty, it enlistsin behalf of the white-haired husband the unwillingsympathies of the spectator to see her the centreof a group of young people, and him only acknowledgedfrom time to time by a Parthian snub. Nothing,however, could have been more satisfactory than thesisterly surrounding of this latter bride. Theywere of a better class of Irish people; and if ithad been any sacrifice for her to marry so old a man,they were doing their best to give the affair at leastthe liveliness of a wake. There were five orsix of those great handsome girls, with their generouscurves and wholesome colors, and they were every oneattended by a good-looking colonial lover, with whomthey joked in slightly brogued voices, and laughedwith careless Celtic laughter. One of the youngfellows presently lost his hat overboard, and had towear the handkerchief of his lady about his head; andthis appeared to be really one of the best thingsin the world, and led to endless banter. Theywere well dressed, and it could be imagined that theancient bridegroom had come in for the support ofthe whole good-looking, healthy, light-hearted family.In some degree he looked it, and wore but a ruefulcountenance for a bridegroom; so that a very youngnewly married couple, who sat next the jolly sister-and-loverhoodcould not keep their pitying eyes off his downcastface. “What if he, too, were young at heart!”the kind little wife’s regard seemed to say.

For the sake of the slight air that was stirring,and to have the best view of the Rapids, the Banshee’swhole company was gathered upon the forward promenade,and the throng was almost as dense as in a six-o’clockhorse-car out from Boston. The standing and sittinggroups were closely packed together, and the expandedparasols and umbrellas formed a nearly unbroken roof.Under this Isabel chatted at intervals with the Ellisons,who sat near; but it was not an atmosphere that provokedsocial feeling, and she was secretly glad when aftera while they shifted their position.

It was deadly hot, and most of the people saddenedand silenced in the heat. From time to time theclouds idling about overhead met and sprinkled downa cruel little shower of rain that seemed to make theair less breathable than before. The lonely shoreswere yellow with drought; the islands grew wilderand barrener; the course of the river was for milesat a stretch through country which gave no signs ofhuman life. The St. Lawrence has none of thebold picturesqueness of the Hudson, and is far morelike its far-off cousin the Mississippi. Its banksare low like the Mississippi’s, its current,swift, its way through solitary lands. The samesentiment of early adventure hangs about each:both are haunted by visions of the Jesuit in his priestlyrobe, and the soldier in his mediaeval steel; thesame gay, devout, and dauntless race has touched themboth with immortal romance. If the water wereof a dusky golden color, instead of translucent green,and the shores and islands were covered with cottonwoodsand willows instead of dark cedars, one could withno great effort believe one’s self on the Mississippibetween Cairo and St. Louis, so much do the greatrivers strike one as kindred in the chief featuresof their landscape. Only, in tracing this resemblanceyou do not know just what to do with the purple mountainsof Vermont, seen vague against the horizon from theSt. Lawrence, or with the quaint little French villagesthat begin to show themselves as you penetrate fartherdown into Lower Canada. These look so peaceful,with their dormer-windowed cottages clustering abouttheir church-spires, that it seems impossible theycould once have been the homes of the savages andthe cruel peasants who, with fire-brand and scalping-knifeand tomahawk, harassed the borders of New Englandfor a hundred years. But just after you descendthe Long Sault you pass the hamlet of St. Regis, inwhich was kindled the torch that wrapt Deerfield inflames, waking her people from their sleep to meetinstant death or taste the bitterness of a captivity.The bell which was sent out from France for the Indianconverts of the Jesuits, and was captured by an Englishship and carried into Salem, and thence sold to Deerfield,where it called the Puritans to prayer, till at lastit also summoned the priest-led Indians and ‘habitans’across hundreds of miles of winter and of wilderness

to reclaim it from that desecration,—­thisfateful bell still hangs in the church-tower of St.Regis, and has invited to matins and vespers for nearlytwo centuries the children of those who fought sopitilessly and dared and endured so much for it.Our friends would fair have heard it as they passed,hoping for some mournful note of history in its sound;but it hung silent over the silent hamlet, which,as it lay in the hot afternoon sun by the river’sside, seemed as lifeless as the Deerfield burnt longago.

They turned from it to look at a gentleman who hadjust appeared in a mustard-colored linen duster, andBasil asked, “Shouldn’t you like to knowthe origin, personal history, and secret feelings ofa gentleman who goes about in a duster of that particulartint? Or, that gentleman yonder with his eyetied up in a wet handkerchief, do you suppose he’stravelling for pleasure? Look at those young peoplefrom Omaha: they haven’t ceased flirtingor cackling since we left Kingston. Do you thinkeverybody has such spirits out at Omaha? But beholda yet more surprising figure than any we have yetseen among this boat-load of nondescripts.”

This was a tall, handsome young man, with a face ofsomewhat foreign cast, and well dressed, with a certainimpressive difference from the rest in the cut ofhis clothes. But what most drew the eye to himwas a large cross, set with brilliants, and surmountedby a heavy double-headed eagle in gold. Thisornament dazzled from a conspicuous place on the leftlappet of his coat; on his hand shone a magnificentdiamond ring, and he bore a stately opera-glass, withwhich, from time to time, he imperiously, as one maysay, surveyed the landscape. As the imposingapparition grew upon Isa-bel, “O here,”she thought, “is something truly distinguished.Of course, dear,” she added aloud to Basil, “he’ssome foreign nobleman travelling here”; andshe ran over in her mind the newspaper announcementsof patrician visitors from abroad and tried to identifyhim with some one of them. The cross must be thedecoration of a foreign order, and Basil suggestedthat he was perhaps a member of some legation at Washington,who had ran up there for his summer vacation.The cross puzzled him, but the double-headed eagle,he said, meant either Austria or Russia; probablyAustria, for the wearer looked a trifle too civilizedfor a Russian.

“Yes, indeed! What an air he has.Never tell me. Basil, that there’s nothingin blood!” cried Isabel, who was a bitter aristocratat heart, like all her sex, though in principle shewas democratic enough. As she spoke, the objectof her regard looked about him on the different groups,not with pride, not with hauteur, but with a glanceof unconscious, unmistakable superiority. “O,that stare!” she added; nothing but high birthand long descent can give it! Dearest, he’sbecoming a great affliction to me. I want toknow who he is. Couldn’t you invent somepretext for speaking to him?”

“No, I couldn’t do it decently; and nodoubt he’d snub me as I deserved if I intrudedupon him. Let’s wait for fortune to revealhim.”

“Well, I suppose I must, but it’s dreadful;it’s really dreadful. You can easily seethat’s distinction,” she continued, asher hero moved about the promenade and gently butloftily made a way for himself among the other passengersand favored the scenery through his opera-glass fromone point and another. He spoke to no one, andshe reasonably supposed that he did not know English.

In the mean time it was drawing near the hour of dinner,but no dinner appeared. Twelve, one, two cameand went, and then at last came the dinner, whichhad been delayed, it seemed, till the cook could recruithis energies sufficiently to meet the wants of doublethe number he had expected to provide for. Itwas observable of the officers and crew of the Banshee,that while they did not hold themselves aloof fromthe passengers in the disdainful American manner,they were of feeble mind, and not only did everythingvery slowly (in the usual Canadian fashion), but withan inefficiency that among us would have justifiedthem in being insolent. The people sat down atseveral successive tables to the worst dinner thatever was cooked; the ladies first, and the gentlemenafterwards, as they made conquest of places. Atthe second table, to Basil’s great satisfaction,he found a seat, and on his right hand the distinguishedforeigner.

“Naturally, I was somewhat abashed,” hesaid in the account he was presently called to giveIsabel of the interview, “but I remembered thatI was an American citizen, and tried to maintain adecent composure. For several minutes we satsilent behind a dish of flabby cucumbers, expectingthe dinner, and I was wondering whether I should addresshim in French or German,—­for I knew you’dnever forgive me if I let slip such a chance,—­whenhe turned and spoke himself.”

“O what did he say, dearest?”

He said, “Pretty tejious waitin,’ ain’tit? in she best New York State accent.”

“You don’t mean it!” gasped Isabel.

“But I do. After that I took courage toask what his cross and double-headed eagle meant.He showed the condescension of a true nobleman.‘O,’ says he, ’I ’m glad youlike it, and it ’s not the least offense toask,’ and he told me. Can you imagine whatit is? It ’s the emblem of the fifty-fourthdegree in the secret society he belongs to!”

“I don’t believe it!”

“Well, ask him yourself, then,” returnedBasil; “he ’s a very good fellow.’O, that stare! nothing but high birth and longdescent could give it!’” he repeated,abominably implying that he had himself had no sharein their common error.

What retort Isabel might have made cannot now be known,for she was arrested at this moment by a rumor amongstthe passengers that they were coming to the Long SaultRapids. Looking forward she saw the tossing andflashing of surges that, to the eye, are certainlyas threatening as the rapids above Niagara. Thesteamer had already passed the Deplau and the Galopes,and they had thus had a foretaste of whatever pleasureor terror there is in the descent of these nine milesof stormy sea. It is purely a matter of taste,about shooting the rapids of the St. Lawrence.The passengers like it better than the captain andthe pilot, to guesses by their looks, and the womenand children like it better than the men. Itis no doubt very thrilling and picturesque and wildlybeautiful: the children crow and laugh, the womenshout forth their delight, as the boat enters theseething current; great foaming waves strike her bows,and brawl away to the stern, while she dips, and rolls,and shoots onward, light as a bird blown by the wind;the wild shores and islands whirl out of sight; youfeel in every fibre the career of the vessel.But the captain sits in front of the pilothouse smokingwith a grave face, the pilots tug hard at the wheel;the hoarse roar of the waters fills the air; beneaththe smoother sweeps of the current you can see thebrown rocks; as you sink from ledge to ledge in thewrithing and twisting steamer, you have a vague sensethat all this is perhaps an achievement rather thanan enjoyment. When, descending the Long Sault,you look back up hill, and behold those billows leapingdown the steep slope after you, “No doubt,”you confide to your soul, “it is magnificent;but it is not pleasure.” You greet withsilent satisfaction the level river, stretching betweenthe Long Sault and the Coteau, and you admire the delightfultranquillity of that beautiful Lake St. Francis intowhich it expands. Then the boat shudders intothe Coteau Rapids, and down through the Cedars andCascades. On the rocks of the last lies the skeletonof a steamer wrecked upon them, and gnawed at stillby the white-tusked wolfish rapids. No one, theysay, was lost from her. “But how,”Basil thought, “would it fare with all thesepeople packed here upon her bow, if the Banshee shouldswing round upon a ledge?” As to Isabel, shelooked upon the wrecked steamer with indifference,as did all the women; but then they could not swim,and would not have to save themselves. “TheLa Chine’s to come yet,” they exulted,“and that ’s the awfullest of all!”

They passed the Lake St. Louis; the La Chin; rapidsflashed into sight. The captain rose up fromhis seat, took his pipe from his mouth, and waveda silence with it. “Ladies and gentlemen,”said he, “it’s very important in passingthese rapids to keep the boat perfectly trim.Please to remain just as you are.”

It was twilight, for the boat was late. Fromthe Indian village on the shore they signaled to knowif he wanted the local pilot; the captain refused;and then the steamer plunged into the leaping waves.From rock to rock she swerved and sank; on the lastledge she scraped with a deadly touch that went tothe heart.

Then the danger was passed, and the noble city ofMontreal was in full sight, lying at the foot of herdark green mountain, and lifting her many spires intothe rosy twilight air: massive and grand showedthe sister towers of the French cathedral.

Basil had hoped to approach this famous city withjust associations. He had meant to conjure upfor Isabel’s sake some reflex, however faint,of that beautiful picture Mr. Parkman has paintedof Maisonneuve founding and consecrating Montreal.He flushed with the recollection of the historian’sphrase; but in that moment there came forth from thecabin a pretty young person who gave every token ofbeing a pretty young actress, even to the duenna-like,elderly female companion, to be detected in the remotebackground of every young actress. She had flirtedaudaciously during the day with some young Englishmenand Canadians of her acquaintance, and after passingthe La Chine Rapids she had taken the hearts of allthe men by springing suddenly to her feet, apostrophizingthe tumult with a charming attitude, and warbling adelicious bit of song. Now as they drew nearthe city the Victoria Bridge stretched its long tubeathwart the river, and looked so low because of itsgreat length that it seemed to bar the steamer’spassage.

“I wonder,” said one of the actress’sadorers, a Canadian, whose face was exactly that ofthe beaver on the escutcheon of his native province,and whose heavy gallantries she had constantly receivedwith a gay, impertinent nonchalance,—­“Iwonder if we can be going right under that bridge?”

“No, sir!” answered the pretty young actresswith shocking promptness, “we’re goingright over it!”

“’Threegroans and a guggle,
Andan awful struggle,
Andover we go!’”

At this witless, sweet impudence the Canadian lookedvery sheepish—­for a beaver; and all theother people laughed; but the noble historical shadesof Basil’s thought vanished in wounded dignitybeyond recall, and left him feeling rather ashamed,—­forhe had laughed too.

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL.

The feeling of foreign travel for which our touristshad striven throughout their journey, and which theyhad known in some degree at Kingston and all the waydown the river, was intensified from the first momentin Montreal; and it was so welcome that they were almostglad to lose money on their greenbacks, which theconductor of the omnibus would take only at a discountof twenty cents. At breakfast next morning theycould hardly tell on what country they had fallen.The waiters had but a thin varnish of English speechupon their native French, and they spoke their owntongue with each other; but most of the meats werecooked to the English taste, and the whole was a poorimitation of an American hotel. During theirstay the same commingling of usages and races bewildered

them; the shops were English and the clerks were commonlyFrench; the carriage-drivers were often Irish, andup and down the streets with their pious old-fashionednames, tinkled American horse-cars. Everywherewere churches and convents that recalled the ecclesiasticaland feudal origin of the city; the great tubular bridge,the superb water-front with its long array of docksonly surpassed by those of Liverpool, the solid blocksof business houses, and the substantial mansions onthe quieter streets, proclaimed the succession ofProtestant thrift and energy.

Our friends cared far less for the modern splendorof Montreal than for the remnants of its past, andfor the features that identified it with another faithand another people than their own. Isabel wouldalmost have confessed to any one of the black-robedpriests upon the street; Basil could easily have gonedown upon his knees to the white-hooded, pale-facednuns gliding among the crowd. It was rapture totake a carriage, and drive, not to the cemetery, notto the public library, not to the rooms of the YoungMen’s Christian Association, or the grain elevators,or the new park just tricked out with rockwork andsprigs of evergreen,—­not to any of thecharming resorts of our own cities, but as in Europeto the churches, the churches of a pitiless superstition,the churches with their atrocious pictures and statues,their lingering smell of the morning’s incense,their confessionals, their fee-taking sacristans,their worshippers dropped here and there upon theirknees about the aisles and saying their prayers withshut or wandering eyes according as they were oldwomen or young! I do not defend the feeble sentimentality,—­callit wickedness if you like,—­but I understandit, and I forgive it from my soul.

They went first, of course, to the French cathedral,pausing on their way to alight and walk through theBonsecours Market, where the habitans have all comein their carts, with their various stores of poultry,fruit, and vegetables, and where every cart is a study.Here is a simple-faced young peasant-couple with butterand eggs and chickens ravishingly displayed; hereis a smooth-checked, blackeyed, black-haired younggirl, looking as if an infusion of Indian blood haddarkened the red of her cheeks, presiding over a stockof onions, potatoes, beets, and turnips; there anold woman with a face carven like a walnut, behinda flattering array of cherries and pears; yonder awhole family trafficking in loaves of brown-breadand maple-sugar in many shapes of pious and grotesquedevice. There are gay shows of bright scarfsand kerchiefs and vari-colored yarns, and sad showsof old clothes and second-hand merchandise of othersorts; but above all prevails the abundance of orchardand garden, while within the fine edifice are thestalls of the butchers, and in the basem*nt belowa world of household utensils, glass-ware, hard-ware,and wooden-ware. As in other Latin countries,

each peasant has given a personal interest to hiswares, but the bargains are not clamored over as inLatin lands abroad. Whatever protest and concessionand invocation of the saints attend the transactingof business at Bonsecours Market are in a subduedtone. The fat huckster-women drowsing beside theirwares, scarce send their voices beyond the bordersof their broad-brimmed straw hats, as they softlyhaggle with purchasers, or tranquilly gossip together.

At the cathedral there are, perhaps, the worst paintingsin the world, and the massive pine-board pillars areunscrupulously smoked to look like marble; but ourtourists enjoyed it as if it had been St. Peter’s;in fact it has something of the barnlike immensityand impressiveness of St. Peter’s. Theydid not ask it to be beautiful or grand; they desiredit only to recall the beloved ugliness, the fondlycherished hideousness and incongruity of the averageCatholic churches of their remembrance, and it didthis and more: it added an effect of its own;it offered the spectacle of a swarthy old Indian kneelingbefore the high altar, telling his beads, and sayingwith many sighs and tears the prayers which it costso much martyrdom and heroism to teach his race.“O, it is only a savage man,” said thelittle French boy who was showing them the place,impatient of their interest in a thing so unworthyas this groaning barbarian. He ran swiftly aboutfrom object to object, rapidly lecturing their inattention.“It is now time to go up into the tower,”said he, and they gladly made that toilsome ascent,though it is doubtful if the ascent of towers is nottoo much like the ascent of mountains ever to be compensatory.From the top of Notre Dame is certainly to be had aprospect upon which, but for his fluttered nerves andtrembling muscles and troubled respiration, the travellermight well look with delight, and as it is must beholdwith wonder. So far as the eye reaches it dwellsonly upon what is magnificent. All the featuresof that landscape are grand. Below you spreadsthe city, which has less that is merely mean in itthan any other city of our continent, and which iseverywhere ennobled by stately civic edifices, adornedby tasteful churches, and skirted by full foliagedavenues of mansions and villas. Behind it risesthe beautiful mountain, green with woods and gardensto its crest, and flanked on the east by an endlessfertile plain, and on the west by another expanse,through which the Ottawa rushes, turbid and dark, toits confluence with the St. Lawrence. Then thesetwo mighty streams commingled flow past the city,lighting up the vast Champaign country to the south,while upon the utmost southern verge, as on the northern,rise the cloudy summits of far-off mountains.

As our travellers gazed upon all this grandeur, theirhearts were humbled to the tacit admission that thecolonial metropolis was not only worthy of its seat,but had traits of a solid prosperity not excelled byany of the abounding and boastful cities of the Republic.Long before they quitted Montreal they had ralliedfrom this weakness, but they delighted still to honorher superb beauty.

The tower is naturally bescribbled to its top withthe names of those who have climbed it, and most ofthese are Americans, who flock in great numbers toCanada in summer. They modify its hotel life,and the objects of interest thrive upon their bounty.Our friends met them at every turn, and knew themat a glance from the native populations, who are alsoeasily distinguishable from each other. The FrenchCanadians are nearly always of a peasant-like commonness,or where they rise above this have a bourgeois commonnessof face and manner, and the English Canadians are tobe known from the many English sojourners by the effortto look much more English than the latter. Thesocial heart of the colony clings fast to the mother-country,that is plain, whatever the political tendency maybe; and the public monuments and inscriptions celebratethis affectionate union.

At the English cathedral the effect is deepened bythe epitaphs of those whose lives were passed in thejoint service of England and her loyal child; andour travellers, whatever their want of sympathy withthe sentiment, had to own to a certain beauty in thatattitude of proud reverence. Here, at least,was a people not cut off from its past, but holding,unbroken in life and death, the ties which exist forus only in history. It gave a glamour of oldentime to the new land; it touched the prosaic democraticpresent with the waning poetic light of the aristocraticand monarchical tradition. There was here andthere a title on the tablets, and there was everywherethe formal language of loyalty and of veneration forthings we have tumbled into the dust. It is abeautiful church, of admirable English Gothic; if youare so happy, you are rather curtly told you may enterby a burly English figure in some kind of sombre ecclesiasticaldrapery, and within its quiet precincts you may feelyourself in England if you like,—­which,for my part, I do not. Neither did our friendsenjoy it so much as the Church of the Jesuits, withits more than tolerable painting, its coldly frescoedceiling, its architectural taste of subdued Renaissance,and its black-eyed peasant-girl telling her beadsbefore a side altar, just as in the enviably deplorablecountries we all love; nor so much even as the Irishcathedral which they next visited. That is a verygorgeous cathedral indeed, painted and gilded ‘amerveille’, and everywhere stuck about withbig and little saints and crucifixes, and picturesincredibly bad—­but for those in the Frenchcathedral. There is, of course, a series representingChrist’s progress to Calvary; and there was avery tattered old man,—­an old man whosevoice had been long ago drowned in whiskey, and whonow spoke in a ghostly whisper,—­who, whenhe saw Basil’s eye fall upon the series, madehim go the round of them, and tediously explainedthem.

“Why did you let that old wretch bore you, andthen pay him for it?” Isabel asked.

“O, it reminded me so sweetly of the swindlesof other lands and days, that I couldn’t helpit,” he answered; and straightway in the eyesof both that poor, whiskeyfied, Irish tatterdemalionstood transfigured to the glorious likeness of anItalian beggar.

They were always doing something of this kind, thoseabsurdly sentimental people, whom yet I cannot findit in my heart to blame for their folly, though Icould name ever so many reasons for rebuking it.Why, in fact, should we wish to find America likeEurope? Are the ruins and impostures and miseriesand superstitions which beset the traveller abroadso precious, that he should desire to imagine themat every step in his own hemisphere? Or havewe then of our own no effective shapes of ignoranceand want and incredibility, that we must forever seekan alien contrast to our native intelligence and comfort?Some such questions this guilty couple put to eachother, and then drove off to visit the convent of theGray Nuns with a joyful expectation which I supposethe prospect of the finest public-school exhibitionin Boston could never have inspired. But, indeed,since there must be Gray Nuns, is it not well thatthere are sentimentalists to take a mournful pleasurein their sad, pallid existence?

The convent is at a good distance from the Irish cathedral,and in going to it the tourists made their drivercarry them through one of the few old French streetswhich still remain in Montreal. Fires and improvementshad made havoc among the quaint horses since Basil’sfirst visit; but at last they came upon a narrow,ancient Rue Saint Antoine,—­or whateverother saint it was called after,—­in whichthere was no English face or house to be seen.The doors of the little one-story dwellings openedfrom the pavement, and within you saw fat madame themother moving about her domestic affairs, and sparemonsieur the elderly husband smoking beside the openwindow; French babies crawled about the tidy floors;French martyrs (let us believe Lalement or Brebeuf,who gave up their heroic lives for the conversionof Canada) sifted their eyes in high-colored lithographson the wall; among the flower-pots in the dormer-windowlooking from every tin roof sat and sewed a smoothhaired young girl, I hope,—­the romanceof each little mansion. The antique and foreigncharacter of the place was accented by the inscriptionupon a wall of “Sirop adoucissant de MadameWinslow.”

Ever since 1692 the Gray Nuns have made refuge withinthe ample borders of their convent for infirm oldpeople and for foundling children, and it is now inthe regular course of sight-seeing for the travellerto visit their hospital at noonday, when he beholdsthe Sisters at their devotions in the chapel.It is a bare, white-walled, cold-looking chapel, withthe usual paraphernalia of pictures and crucifixes.Seated upon low benches on either side of the aislewere the curious or the devout; the former in greaternumber and chiefly Americans, who were now and thenwhispered silent by an old pauper zealous for thesanctity of the place. At the stroke of twelvethe Sisters entered two by two, followed by the lady-superiorwith a prayerbook in her hand. She clapped the

leaves of this together in signal for them to kneel,to rise, to kneel again and rise, while they repeatedin rather harsh voices their prayers, and then clatteredout of the chapel as they had clattered in, with resoundingshoes. The two young girls at the head were verypretty, and all the pale faces had a corpse-like peace.As Basil looked at their pensive sameness, it seemedto him that those prettiest girls might very well bethe twain that he had seen here so many years ago,stricken forever young in their joyless beauty.The ungraceful gowns of coarse gray, the blue checkedaprons, the black crape caps, were the same; they cameand went with the same quick tread, touching theirbrows with holy water and kneeling and rising nowas then with the same constrained and ordered movements.Would it be too cruel if they were really the samepersons? or would it be yet more cruel if every yeartwo girls so young and fair were self-doomed to renewthe likeness of that youthful death?

The visitors went about the hospital, and saw theold men and the little children to whom these goodpure lives were given, and they could only blame thesystem, not the instruments or their work. Perhapsthey did not judge wisely of the amount of self-sacrificeinvolved, for they judged from hearts to which lovewas the whole of earth and heaven; but neverthelessthey pitied the Gray Nuns amidst the unhomelike comfortof their convent, the unnatural care of those alienlittle ones. Poor ‘Soeurs Grises’in their narrow cells; at the bedside of sickness andage and sorrow; kneeling with clasped hands and yearningeyes before the bloody spectacle of the cross!—­thepower of your Church is shown far more subtly andmightily in such as you, than in her grandest fanesor the sight of her most august ceremonies, with prayingpriests, swinging censers, tapers and pictures andimages, under a gloomy heaven of cathedral arches.There, indeed, the faithful have given their substance;but here the nun has given up the most precious partof her woman’s nature, and all the tendernessthat clings about the thought of wife and mother.

“There are some things that always greatly afflictme in the idea of a new country,” said Basil,as they loitered slowly through the grounds of theconvent toward the gate. “Of course, it’sabsurd to think of men as other than men, as havingchanged their natures with their skies; but a newland always does seem at first thoughts like a newchance afforded the race for goodness and happiness,for health and life. So I grieve for the earliestdead at Plymouth more than for the multitude that theplague swept away in London; I shudder over the crimeof the first guilty man, the sin of the first wickedwoman in a new country; the trouble of the first youthor maiden crossed in love there is intolerable.All should be hope and freedom and prosperous lifeupon that virgin soil. It never was so sinceEden; but none the less I feel it ought to be; and

I am oppressed by the thought that among the earliestwalls which rose upon this broad meadow of Montrealwere those built to immure the innocence of such younggirls as these and shut them from the life we findso fair. Wouldn’t you like to know whowas the first that took the veil in this wild newcountry? Who was she, poor soul, and what washer deep sorrow or lofty rapture? You can fancyher some Indian maiden lured to the renunciation bythe splendor of symbols and promises seen vaguely throughthe lingering mists of her native superstitions; orsome weary soul, sick from the vanities and vices,the bloodshed and the tears of the Old World, andeager for a silence profounder than that of the wildernessinto which she had fled. Well, the Church knowsand God. She was dust long ago.”

From time to time there had fallen little fitful showersduring the morning. Now as the wedding-journeyerspassed out of the convent gate the rain dropped softand thin, and the gray clouds that floated throughthe sky so swiftly were as far-seen Gray Sisters inflight for heaven.

“We shall have time for the drive round themountain before dinner,” said Basil, as theygot into their carriage again; and he was giving theorder to the driver, when Isabel asked how far itwas.

“Nine miles.”

“O, then we can’t think of going withone horse. You know,” she added, “thatwe always intended to have two horses for going roundthe mountain.”

“No,” said Basil, not yet used to havinghis decisions reached without his knowledge.“And I don’t see why we should. Everybodygoes with one. You don’t suppose we’retoo heavy, do you?”

“I had a party from the States, ma’am,yesterday,” interposed the driver; “twoladies, real heavy apes, two gentlemen, weighin’two hundred apiece, and a stout young man on the boxwith me. You’d ‘a’ thought thehorse was drawin’ an empty carriage, the wayshe darted along.”

“Then his horse must be perfectly worn out to-day,”said Isabel, refusing to admit the pool fellow directlyeven to the honors of a defeat. He had provedtoo much, and was put out of court with no hope ofrepairing his error.

“Why, it seems a pity,” whispered Basil,dispassionately, “to turn this man adrift, whenhe had a reasonable hope of being with us all day,and has been so civil and obliging.”

“O yes, Basil, sentimentalize him, do!Why don’t you sentimentalize his helpless, overworkedhorse?—­all in a reek of perspiration.”

“Perspiration! Why, my dear, it ’sthe rain!”

“Well, rain or shine, darling, I don’twant to go round the mountain with one horse; andit ’s very unkind of you to insist now, whenyou’ve tacitly promised me all along to taketwo.”

“Now, this is a little too much, Isabel.You know we never mentioned the matter till this moment.”

“It ’s the same as a promise, your notsaying you wouldn’t. But I don’task you to keep your word. I don’t wantto go round the mountain. I’d much rathergo to the hotel. I’m tired.”

“Very well, then, Isabel, I’ll leave youat the hotel.”

In a moment it had come, the first serious disputeof their wedded life. It had come as all suchcalamities come, from nothing, and it was on themin full disaster ere they knew. Such a very littlewhile ago, there in the convent garden, their liveshad been drawn closer in sympathy than ever before;and now that blessed time seemed ages since, and theywere further asunder than those who have never beenfriends. “I thought,” bitterly musedIsabel, “that he would have done anything forme.” “Who could have dreamed thata woman of her sense would be so unreasonable,”he wondered. Both had tempers, as I know my dearestreader has (if a lady), and neither would yield; andso, presently, they could hardly tell how, for theywere aghast at it all, Isabel was alone in her roomamidst the ruins of her life, and Basil alone in theone-horse carriage, trying to drive away from thewreck of his happiness. All was over; the dreamwas past; the charm was broken. The sweetnessof their love was turned to gall; whatever had pleasedthem in their loving moods was loathsome now, andthe things they had praised a moment before were hateful.In that baleful light, which seemed to dwell uponall they ever said or did in mutual enjoyment, howpoor and stupid and empty looked their wedding-journey!Basil spent five minutes in arraigning his wife andconvicting her of every folly and fault. His soulwas in a whirl,

“For to be wrothwith one we love
Doth work like madnessin the brain.”

In the midst of his bitter and furious upbraidingshe found himself suddenly become her ardent advocate,and ready to denounce her judge as a heartless monster.“On our wedding journey, too! Good heavens,what an incredible brute I am!” Then he said,“What an ass I am!” And the pathos ofthe case having yielded to its absurdity, he was helpless.In five minutes more he was at Isabel’s side,the one-horse carriage driver dismissed with a handsomepour-boire, and a pair of lusty bays with a glitteringbarouche waiting at the door below. He swiftlyaccounted for his presence, which she seemed to findthe most natural thing that could be, and she methis surrender with the openness of a heart that forgivesbut does not forget, if indeed the most gracious artis the only one unknown to the sex.

She rose with a smile from the ruins of her life,amidst which she had heart-brokenly sat down withall her things on. “I knew you’d comeback,” she said.

“So did I,” he answered. “Iam much too good and noble to sacrifice my preferenceto my duty.”

“I didn’t care particularly for the twohorses, Basil,” she said, as they descendedto the barouche. “It was your refusing themthat hurt me.”

“And I didn’t want the one-horse carriage.It was your insisting so that provoked me.”

“Do you think people ever quarreled before ona wedding journey?” asked Isabel as they drovegayly out of the city.

“Never! I can’t conceive of it.I suppose if this were written down, nobody wouldbelieve it.”

“No, nobody could,” said Isabel, musingly,and she added after a pause, “I wish you wouldtell me just what you thought of me, dearest.Did you feel as you did when our little affair wasbroken off, long ago? Did you hate me?”

“I did, most cordially; but not half so muchas I despised myself the next moment. As to itsbeing like a lover’s quarrel, it wasn’t.It was more bitter, so much more love than loversever give had to be taken back. Besides, it hadno dignity, and a lover’s quarrel always has.A lover’s quarrel always springs from a moreserious cause, and has an air of romantic tragedy.This had no grace of the kind. It was a poor shabbylittle squabble.”

“O, don’t call it so, Basil! I shouldlike you to respect even a quarrel of ours more thanthat. It was tragical enough with me, for I didn’tsee how it could ever be made up. I knew I couldn’tmake the advances. I don’t think it isquite feminine to be the first to forgive, is it?”

“I’m sure I can’t say. Perhapsit would be rather unladylike.”

“Well, you see, dearest, what I am trying toget at is this: whether we shall love each otherthe more or the less for it. I think we shallget on all the better for a while, on account of it.But I should have said it was totally out of characterit’s something you might have expected of avery young bridal couple; but after what we’vebeen through, it seems too improbable.”

“Very well,” said Basil, who, having madeall the concessions, could not enjoy the quarrel asshe did, simply because it was theirs; “let ’sbehave as if it had never been.”

“O no, we can’t. To me, it’sas if we had just won each other.”

In fact it gave a wonderful zest and freshness tothat ride round the mountain, and shed a beneficentglow upon the rest of their journey. The suncame out through the thin clouds, and lighted up thevast plain that swept away north and east, with thepurple heights against the eastern sky. The royalmountain lifted its graceful mass beside them, andhid the city wholly from sight. Peasant-villages,in the shade of beautiful elms, dotted the plain inevery direction, and at intervals crept up to theside of the road along which they drove. But thesehad been corrupted by a more ambitious architecturesince Basil saw them last, and were no longer purelyFrench in appearance. Then, nearly every housewas a tannery in a modest way, and poetically publishedthe fact by the display of a sheep’s tail overthe front door, like a bush at a wine-shop. Now,if the tanneries still existed, the poetry of the cheeps’tails had vanished from the portals. But ourfriends were consoled by meeting numbers of the peasantsjolting home from market in the painted carts, whichare doubtless of the pattern of the carts first builtthere two hundred years ago. They were gratefulfor the immortal old wooden, crooked and brown withthe labor of the fields, who abounded in these vehicles;when a huge girl jumped from the tail of her cart,and showed the thick, clumsy ankles of a true peasant-maid,they could only sigh out their unspeakable satisfaction.

Gardens embowered and perfumed the low cottages, throughthe open doors of which they could see the exquisiteneatness of the life within. One of the doorsopened into a school-house, where they beheld withrapture the school-mistress, book in hand, and witha quaint cap on her gray head, and encircled by herflock of little boys and girls.

By and by it began to rain again; and now while theirdriver stopped to put up the top of the barouche,they entered a country church which had taken theirfancy, and walked up the aisle with the steps thatblend with silence rather than break it, while theyheard only the soft whisper of the shower without.There was no one there but themselves. The urnof holy water seemed not to have been troubled thatday, and no penitent knelt at the shrine, before whichtwinkled so faintly one lighted lamp. The whiteroof swelled into dim arches over their heads; thepale day like a visible hush stole through the paintedwindows; they heard themselves breathe as they creptfrom picture to picture.

A narrow door opened at the side of the high altar,and a slender young priest appeared in a long blackrobe, and with shaven head. He, too as he movedwith noiseless feet, seemed a part of the silence;and when he approached with dreamy black eyes fixedupon them, and bowed courteously, it seemed impossiblehe should speak. But he spoke, the pale youngpriest, the dark-robed tradition, the tonsured visionof an age and a church that are passing.

“Do you understand French, monsieur?”

“A very little, monsieur.”

“A very little is more than my English,”he said, yet he politely went the round of the pictureswith them, and gave them the names of the paintersbetween his crossings at the different altars.At the high altar there was a very fair Crucifixion;before this the priest bent one knee. “Finepicture, fine altar, fine church,” he said inEnglish. At last they stopped next the poor-box.As their coins clinked against those within, he smiledserenely upon the good heretics. Then he bowed,and, as if he had relapsed into the past, he vanishedthrough the narrow door by which he had entered.

Basil and Isabel stood speechless a moment on thechurch steps. Then she cried,

“O, why didn’t something happen?”

“Ah, my dear! what could have keen half so goodas the nothing that did happen? Suppose we knewhim to have taken orders because of a disappointmentin love: how common it would have made him; everybodyhas been crossed in love once or twice.”He bade the driver take them back to the hotel.“This is the very bouquet of adventure why shouldwe care for the grosser body? I dare say if weknew all about yonder pale young priest, we shouldnot think him half so interesting as we do now.”

At dinner they spent the intervals of the coursesin guessing the nationality of the different persons,and in wondering if the Canadians did not make ita matter of conscientious loyalty to out-English theEnglish even in the matter of pale-ale and sherry,and in rotundity of person and freshness of face,just as they emulated them in the cut of their clothesand whiskers. Must they found even their healthupon the health of the mother-country?

Our friends began to detect something servile in itall, and but that they were such amiable persons,the loyally perfect digestion of Montreal would havegone far to impair their own.

The loyalty, which had already appeared to them inthe cathedral, suggested itself in many ways uponthe street, when they went out after dinner to dothat little shopping which Isabel had planned to doin Montreal. The booksellers’ windows werefull of Canadian editions of our authors, and Englishcopies of English works, instead of our pirated editions;the dry-goods stores were gay with fabrics in the Londontaste and garments of the London shape; here was thesign of a photographer to the Queen, there of a hatterto H. R. H. the Prince of Wales; a barber was “underthe patronage of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, H. E.the Duke of Cambridge, and the gentry of Montreal.”‘Ich dien’ was the motto of a restaurateur;a hosier had gallantly labeled his stock in trade with‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’. Againthey noted the English solidity of the civic edifices,and already they had observed in the foreign populationa difference from that at home. They saw no Germanfaces on the streets, and the Irish faces had notthat truculence which they wear sometimes with us.They had not lost their native simpleness and kindliness;the Irishmen who drove the public carriages were ascivil as our own Boston hackmen, and behaved as respectfullyunder the shadow of England here, as they world havedone under it in Ireland. The problem which vexesus seems to have been solved pleasantly enough inCanada. Is it because the Celt cannot brook equality;and where he has not an established and recognizedcaste above him, longs to trample on those about him;and if he cannot be lowest, will at least be highest?

However, our friends did not suffer this or any otheradvantage of the colonial relation to divert themfrom the opinion to which their observation was graduallybringing them,—­that its overweening loyaltyplaced a great country like Canada in s very sillyattitude, the attitude of an overgrown, unmanly boy,clinging to the maternal skirts, and though spoiltand willful, without any character of his own.The constant reference of local hopes to that remotecentre beyond seas, the test of success by the criterionsof a necessarily different civilization, the socialand intellectual dependence implied by traits thatmeet the most hurried glance in the Dominion, givean effect of meanness to the whole fabric. Doubtlessit is a life of comfort, of peace, of irresponsibilitythey live there, but it lacks the grandeur which nosum of material prosperity can give; it is ignoble,like all voluntarily subordinate things. Somehow,one feels that it has no basis in the New World, andthat till it is shaken loose from England it cannothave.

It would be a pity, however, if it should be partedfrom the parent country merely to be joined to anunsympathetic half-brother like ourselves and nothing,fortunately, seems to be further from the Canadianmind. There are some experiments no longer possibleto us which could still be tried there to the advantageof civilization, and we were better two great nationsside by side than a union of discordant traditionsand ideas. But none the less does the Americantraveller, swelling with forgetfulness of the shabbydespots who govern New York, and the swindling railroadkings whose word is law to the whole land, feel likesaying to the hulling young giant beyond St. Lawrenceand the Lakes, “Sever the apron-strings of allegiance,and try to be yourself whatever you are.”

Something of this sort Basil said, though of coursenot in apostrophic phrase, nor with Isabel’sentire concurrence, when he explained to her thatit was to the colonial dependence of Canada she owedthe ability to buy things so cheaply there.

The fact is that the ladies’ parlor at the hotelhad been after dinner no better than a den of smugglers,in which the fair contrabandists had debated the bestmeans of evading the laws of their country. Atheart every man is a smuggler, and how much more everywoman! She would have no scruple in ruining thesilk and woolen interest throughout the United States.She is a free-trader by intuitive perception of right,and is limited in practice by nothing but fear ofthe statute. What could be taken into the Stateswithout detection, was the subject before that wickedconclave; and next, what it would pay to buy in Canada.It seemed that silk umbrellas were most eligible wares;and in the display of such purchases the parlor wasgiven the appearance of a violent thunder-storm.Gloves it was not advisable to get; they were betterat home, as were many kinds of fine woolen goods.But laces, which you could carry about you, were excellent;and so was any kind of silk. Could it be carriedif simply cut, and not made up? There was a differenceabout this: the friend of one lady had takenhome half a trunkful of cut silks; the friend of anotherhad “run up the breadths” of one lone littlesilk skirt, and then lost it by the rapacity of thecustoms officers. It was pretty much luck, andwhether the officers happened to be in good-humoror not. You must not try to take in anything outof season, however. One had heard of a Bostonlady going home in July, who “had the furs takenoff her back,” in that inclement month.Best get everything seasonable, and put it on at once.“And then, you know, if they ask you, you cansay it’s been worn.” To this blackwisdom came the combined knowledge of those miscreants.Basil could not repress a shudder at the innate depravityof the female heart. Here were virgins nurturedin the most spotless purity of life, here were virtuousmothers of families, here were venerable matrons,patterns in society and the church,—­smugglersto a woman, and eager for any guilty subterfuge!He glanced at Isabel to see what effect the evil conversationhad upon her. Her eyes sparkled; her cheeks glowed;all the woman was on fire for smuggling. He sighedheavily and went out with her to do the little shopping.

Shall I follow them upon their excursion? Shoppingin Montreal is very much what it is in Boston or NewYork, I imagine, except that the clerks have a morehoneyed sweetness of manners towards the ladies ofour nation, and are surprisingly generous constructionistsof our revenue laws. Isabel had profited by everyword that she had heard in the ladies’ parlor,and she would not venture upon unsafe ground; but hertender eyes looked her unutterable longing to believein the charming possibilities that the clerks suggested.She bemoaned herself before the corded silks, whichthere was no time to have made up; the piece-velvetsand the linens smote her to the heart. But theyalso stimulated her invention, and she bought andbought of the made-up wares in real or fancied needs,till Basil represented that neither their purses northeir trunks could stand any more. “O,don’t be troubled about the trunks, dearest,”she cried, with that gayety which nothing but shoppingcan kindle in a woman’s heart; while he falteredon from counter to counter, wondering at which heshould finally swoon from fatigue. At last, aftershe had declared repeatedly, “There, now, Iam done,” she briskly led the way back to thehotel to pack up her purchases.

Basil parted with her at the door. He was a manof high principle himself, and that scene in the smugglers’den, and his wife’s preparation for transgression,were revelations for which nothing could have consoledhim but a paragon umbrella for five dollars, and anexcellent business suit of Scotch goods for twenty.

When some hours later he sat with Isabel on the forwardpromenade of the steamboat for Quebec, and summedup the profits of their shopping, they were both inthe kindliest mood towards the poor Canadians, whohad built the admirable city before them.

For miles the water front of Montreal is superblyfaced with quays and locks of solid stone masonry,and thus she is clean and beautiful to the very feet.Stately piles of architecture, instead of the foulold tumble-down warehouses that dishonor the watersidein most cities, rise from the broad wharves; behindthese spring the twin towers of Notre Dame, and thesteeples of the other churches above the city roofs.

“It’s noble, yes, it’s noble, afterthe best that Europe can show,” said Isabel,with enthusiasm; “and what a pleasant day we’vehad here! Doesn’t even our quarrel show‘couleur de rose’ in this light?”

“One side of it,” answered Basil, dreamily,“but all the rest is black.”

“What do you mean, my dear?”

“Why, the Nelson Monument, with the sunset onit at the head of the street there.”

The affect was so fine that Isabel could not be angrywith him for failing to heed what she had said, andshe mused a moment with him.

“It seems rather far-fetched,” she saidpresently, “to erect a monument to Nelson inMontreal, doesn’t it? But then, it’sa very absurd monument when you’re near it,”she added, thoughtfully.

Basil did not answer at once, for gazing on this Nelsoncolumn in Jacques Cartier Square, his thoughts wanderedaway, not to the hero of the Nile, but to the doughtyold Breton navigator, the first white man who everset foot upon that shore, and who more than threehundred years ago explored the St. Lawrence as faras Montreal, and in the splendid autumn weather climbedto the top of her green height and named it. Thescene that Jacques Cartier then beheld, like a mirageof the fast projected upon the present, floated beforehim, and he saw at the mountain’s foot the Indiancity of Hochelaga, with its vast and populous lodgesof bark, its encircling palisades, and its wide outlyingfields of yellow maize. He heard with JacquesCartier’s sense the blare of his followers’trumpets down in the open square of the barbarouscity, where the soldiers of many an Old-World fight,“with mustached lip and bearded chin, with arquebuseand glittering halberd, helmet, and cuirass,”moved among the plumed and painted savages; then helifted Jacques Cartier’s eyes, and looked outupon the magnificent landscape. “East, wept,and north, the mantling forest was over all, and thebroad blue ribbon of the great river glistened amida realm of verdure. Beyond, to the bounds of Mexico,stretched a leafy desert, and the vast hive of industry,the mighty battle-ground of late; centuries, lay sunkin savage torpor, wrapped in illimitable woods.”

A vaguer picture of Champlain, who, seeking a westwardroute to China and the East, some three quarters ofa century later, had fixed the first trading-postat Montreal, and camped upon the spot where the conventof the Gray Nuns now stands, appeared before him,and vanished with all its fleets of fur-traders’boats and hunters’ birch canoes, and the watch-firesof both; and then in the sweet light of the springmorning, he saw Maisonneuve leaping ashore upon thegreen meadows, that spread all gay with early flowerswhere Hochelaga once stood, and with the black-robedJesuits, the high-born, delicately nurtured, and devotednuns, and the steel-clad soldiers of his train, kneelingabout the altar raised there in the wilderness, andsilent amidst the silence of nature at the liftedHost.

He painted a semblance of all this for Isabel, usingthe colors of the historian who has made these scenesthe beautiful inheritance of all dream era, and sketchedthe battles, the miracles, the sufferings, and thepenances through which the pious colony was preservedand prospered, till they both grew impatient of modernMontreal, and would fain have had the ancient Villemarieback in its place.

“Think of Maisonneuve, dearest, climbing inmidwinter to the top of the mountain there, undera heavy cross set with the bones of saints, and plantingit on the summit, in fulfillment of a vow to do soif Villemarie were saved from the freshet; and thenof Madame de la Peltrie romantically receiving thesacrament there, while all Villemarie fell down adoring!Ah, that was a picturesque people! When did evera Boston governor climb to the top of Beacon hillin fulfillment of a vow? To be sure, we may yetsee a New York governor doing something of the kind—­ifhe can find a hill. But this ridiculous columnto Nelson, who never had anything to do with Montreal,”he continued; “it really seems to me the perfectexpression of snobbish colonial dependence and sentimentality,seeking always to identify itself with the mother-country,and ignoring the local past and its heroic figures.A column to Nelson in Jacques Cartier Square, on theground that was trodden by Champlain, and won forits present masters by the death of Wolfe”

The boat departed on her trip to Quebec. Duringsupper they were served by French waiters, who, withoutapparent English of their own, miraculously understoodthat of the passengers, except in the case of thefurious gentleman who wanted English breakfast tea;to so much English as that their inspiration did notreach, and they forced him to compromise on coffee.It was a French boat, owned by a French company, andseemed to be officered by Frenchmen throughout; certainly,as our tourists in the joy of their good appetitesaffirmed, the cook was of that culinarily delightfulnation.

The boat was almost as large as those of the Hudson,but it was not so lavishly splendid, though it hadeverything that could minister to the comfort andself-respect of the passengers. These were ofall nations, but chiefly Americans, with some FrenchCanadians. The former gathered on the forwardpromenade, enjoying what little of the landscape thegrowing night left visible, and the latter made societyafter their manner in the saloon. They were plain-lookingmen and women, mostly, and provincial, it was evident,to their inmost hearts; provincial in origin, provincialby inheritance, by all their circ*mstances, socialand political. Their relation with France wasnot a proud one, but it was not like submersion bythe slip-slop of English colonial loyalty; yet theyseem to be troubled by no memories of their hundredyears’ dominion of the land that they rescuedfrom, the wilderness, and that was wrested from themby war. It is a strange fate for any people thusto have been cut off from the parent-country, andabandoned to whatever destiny their conquerors choseto reserve for them; and if each of the race wore thesadness and strangeness of that fate in his countenanceit would not be wonderful. Perhaps it is wonderfulthat none of them shows anything of the kind.In their desertion they have multiplied and prospered;they may have a national grief, but they hide it well;and probably they have none.

Later, one of them appeared to Isabel in the personof the pale, slender young ecclesiastic who had shownher and Basil the pictures in the country church.She was confessing to the priest, and she was not atall surprised to find that he was Basil in a suitof medieval armor. He had an immense cross onhis shoulder.

“To get this cross to the top of the mountain,”thought Isabel, “we must have two horses.Basil,” she added, aloud, “we must havetwo horses!”

“Ten, if you like, my dear,” answeredhis voice, cheerfully, “though I think we’dbetter ride up in the omnibus.”

She opened her eyes, and saw him smiling.

“We’re in sight of Quebec,” he said.“Come out as soon as you can,—­comeout into the seventeenth century.”

IX. QUEBEC.

Isabel hurried out upon the forward promenade, whereall the other passengers seemed to be assembled, andbeheld a vast bulk of gray and purple rock, swellingtwo hundred feet up from the mists of the river, andtaking the early morning light warm upon its face andcrown. Black-hulked, red-illumined Liverpoolsteamers, gay river-craft and ships of every sailand flag, filled the stream athwart which the ferriessped their swift traffic-laden shuttles; a lower townhung to the foot of the rock, and crept, populousand picturesque, up its sides; from the massive citadelon its crest flew the red banner of Saint George, andalong its brow swept the gray wall of the famous,heroic, beautiful city, overtopped by many a gleamingspire and antique roof.

Slowly out of our work-day, business-suited, modernworld the vessel steamed up to this city of an oldentime and another ideal,—­to her who wasa lady from the first, devout and proud and strong,and who still, after two hundred and fifty years,keeps perfect the image and memory of the feudal pastfrom which she sprung. Upon her height she sitsunique; and when you say Quebec, having once beheldher, you invoke a sense of medieval strangeness andof beauty which the name of no other city could intensify.

As they drew near the steamboat wharf they saw, swarmingover a broad square, a market beside which the BonsecoursMarket would have shown as common as the Quincy, andup the odd wooden-sidewalked street stretched an aisleof carriages and those high swung calashes, which areto Quebec what the gondolas are to Venice. Butthe hand of destiny was upon our tourists, and theyrode up town in an omnibus. They were going tothe dear old Hotel Musty in Street, wanting whichQuebec is not to be thought of without a pang.It is now closed, and Prescott Gate, through whichthey drove into the Upper Town, has been demolishedsince the summer of last year. Swiftly whirledalong the steep winding road, by those Quebec horseswhich expect to gallop up hill whatever they do goingdown, they turned a corner of the towering weed-grownrock, and shot in under the low arch of the gate,

pierced with smaller doorways for the foot-passengers.The gloomy masonry dripped with damp, the doors werethickly studded with heavy iron spikes; old cannon,thrust endwise into the ground at the sides of thegate, protected it against passing wheels. Whydid not some semi-forbidding commissary of police,struggling hard to overcome his native politeness,appear and demand their passports? The illusionwas otherwise perfect, and it needed but this touch.How often in the adored Old World, which we so loveand disapprove, had they driven in through such gatesat that morning hour! On what perverse pretext,then, was it not some ancient town of Normandy?

“Put a few enterprising Americans in here, andthey’d soon rattle this old wall down and letin a little fresh air!” said a patriotic voiceat Isabel’s elbow, and continued to find faultwith the narrow irregular streets, the huddling gables,the quaint roofs, through which and under which theydrove on to the hotel.

As they dashed into a broad open square, “Hereis the French Cathedral; there is the Upper Town Market;yonder are the Jesuit Barracks!” cried Basil;and they had a passing glimpse of gray stone towersat one side of the square, and a low, massive yellowbuilding at the other, and, between the two, longranks of carts, and fruit and vegetable stands, protectedby canvas awnings and broad umbrellas. Then theydashed round the corner of a street, and drew up beforethe hotel door. The low ceilings, the thick walls,the clumsy wood-work, the wandering corridors, gavethe hotel all the desired character of age, and itsslovenly state bestowed an additional charm.In another place they might have demanded neatness,but in Quebec they would almost have resented it.By a chance they had the best room in the house, butthey held it only till certain people who had engagedit by telegraph should arrive in the hourly expectedsteamer from Liverpool; and, moreover, the best roomat Hotel Musty was consolingly bad. The housewas very full, and the Ellisons (who had come on withthem from Montreal) were bestowed in less state onlyon like conditions.

The travellers all met at breakfast, which was admirablycooked, and well served, with the attendance of thoseswarms of flies which infest Quebec. and especiallyinfested the old Musty House, in summer. It had,of course, the attraction of broiled salmon, uponwhich the traveller breakfasts every day as long ashe remains in Lower Canada; and it represented theabundance of wild berries in the Quebec market; andit was otherwise a breakfast worthy of the appetitesthat honored it.

There were not many other Americans besides themselvesat this hotel, which seemed, indeed, to be kept opento oblige such travellers as had been there before,and could not persuade themselves to try the new HotelSt. Louis, whither the vastly greater number resorted.Most of the faces our tourists saw were English orEnglish-Canadian, and the young people from Omaha;who had got here by some chance, were scarcely in harmonywith the place. They appeared to be a bridal party,but which of the two sisters, in buff linen ‘cladfrom head to foot’ was the bride, never becameknown. Both were equally free with the husband,and he was impartially fond of both: it was quitea family affair.

For a moment Isabel harbored the desire to see thecity in company with Miss Ellison; but it was onlya passing weakness. She remembered directly thecoolness between friends which she had seen causedby objects of interest in Europe, and she wisely deferreda more intimate acquaintance till it could have apurely social basis. After all, nothing is sotiresome as continual exchange of sympathy or so aptto end in mutual dislike,—­except gratitude.So the ladies parted friends till dinner, and droveoff in separate carriages.

As in other show cities, there is a routine at Quebecfor travellers who come on Saturday and go on Monday,and few depart from it. Our friends necessarily,therefore, drove first to the citadel. It wasraining one of those cold rains by which the scarce-banishedwinter reminds the Canadian fields of his nearnesseven in midsummer, though between the bitter showersthe air was sultry and close; and it was just the lightin which to see the grim strength of the fortressnext strongest to Gibraltar in the world. Theypassed a heavy iron gateway, and up through a windinglane of masonry to the gate of the citadel, where theywere delivered into the care of Private Joseph Drakes,who was to show them such parts of the place as areopen to curiosity. But, a citadel which has neverstood a siege, or been threatened by any danger moreserious than Fenianism, soon becomes, however strong,but a dull piece of masonry to the civilian; and ourtourists more rejoiced in the crumbling fragment ofthe old French wall which the English destroyed thanin all they had built; and they valued the latterwork chiefly for the glorious prospects of the St.Lawrence and its mighty valleys which it commanded.Advanced into the centre of an amphitheatre inconceivablyvast, that enormous beak of rock overlooks the narrowangle of the river, and then, in every direction,immeasurable stretches of gardened vale, and woodedupland, till all melts into the purple of the encirclingmountains. Far and near are lovely white villagesnestling under elms, in the heart of fields and meadows;and everywhere the long, narrow, accurately dividedfarms stretch downward to the river-shores. Thebest roads on the continent make this beauty and richnessaccessible; each little village boasts some naturalwonder in stream, or lake, or cataract: and thislandscape, magnificent beyond any in eastern America,is historical and interesting beyond all others.Hither came Jacques Cartier three hundred and fiftyyears ago, and wintered on the low point there by theSt. Charles; here, nearly a century after, but stillfourteen years before the landing at Plymouth, Champlainfounded the missionary city of Quebec; round thisrocky beak came sailing the half-piratical armamentof the Calvinist Kirks in 1629, and seized Quebecin the interest of the English, holding it three years;in the Lower Town, yonder, first landed the coldlywelcomed Jesuits, who came with the returning French

and made Quebec forever eloquent of their zeal, theirguile, their heroism; at the foot of this rock laythe fleet of Sir William Phipps, governor of Massachusetts,and vainly assailed it in 1698; in 1759 came Wolfeand embattled all the region, on river and land, tillat last the bravely defended city fell into his dyinghand on the Plains of Abraham; here Montgomery laiddown his life at the head of the boldest and mosthopeless effort of our War of Independence.

Private Joseph Drakes, with the generosity of an enemyexpecting drink-money, pointed out the sign, boardon the face of the crag commemorating ‘Montgomery’sdeath’; and then showed them the officers’quarters and those of the common soldiers, not farfrom which was a line of hang-dog fellows drawn upto receive sentence for divers small misdemeanors,from an officer whose blond whiskers drooped Dundrearilyfrom his fresh English cheeks. There was thatimmense difference between him and the men in physicalgrandeur and beauty, which is so notable in the aristocraticallyordered military services of Europe, and which makesthe rank seem of another race from the file. PrivateDrakes saluted his superior, and visibly deterioratedin his presence, though his breast was covered withmedals, and he had fought England’s battles inevery part of the world. It was a gross injustice,the triumph of a thousand years of wrong; and it wastouching to have Private Drakes say that he expectedin three months to begin life for himself, after twentyyears’ service of the Queen; and did they thinkhe could get anything to do in the States? Hescarcely knew what he was fit for, but he thought—­toso little in him came the victories he had helpedto win in the Crimea, in China, and in India—­thathe coald take care of a gentleman’s horse andwork about his place. He looked inquiringly atBasil, as if he might be a gentleman with a horseto be taken care of and a place to be worked about,and made him regret that he was not a man of substanceenough to provide for Private Drakes and Mrs. Drakesand the brood of Ducklings, who had been shown tohim stowed away in one of those cavernous rooms inthe earthworks where the married soldiers have theirquarters. His regret enriched the reward of PrivateDrakes’ service,—­which perhaps answeredone of Private Drakes’ purposes, if not hischief aim. He promised to come to the Statesupon the pressing advice of Isabel, who, speaking fromher own large experience, declared that everybodygot on there,—­and he bade our friends anaffectionate farewell as they drove away to the Plainsof Abraham.

The fashionable suburban cottages and places of Quebecare on the St. Louis Road leading northward to theold battle-ground and beyond it; but, these face chieflytowards the rivers St. Lawrence and St. Charles, andlofty hedges and shrubbery hide them in an Englishseclusion from the highway; so that the visitor mayuninterruptedly meditate whatever emotion he willfor the scene of Wolfe’s death as he rides along.His loftiest emotion will want the noble height ofthat heroic soul, who must always stand forth in historya figure of beautiful and singular distinction, admirablealike for the sensibility and daring, the poetic pensiveness,and the martial ardor that mingled in him and taxedhis feeble frame with tasks greater than it couldbear. The whole story of the capture of Quebecis full of romantic splendor and pathos. Her fallwas a triumph for all the English-speaking race, andto us Americans, long scourged by the cruel Indianwars plotted within her walls or sustained by herstrength, such a blessing as was hailed with ringingbells and blazing bonfires throughout the Colonies;yet now we cannot think without pity of the hopesextinguished and the labors brought to naught in heroverthrow. That strange colony of priests andsoldiers, of martyrs and heroes, of which she wasthe capital, willing to perish for an allegiance towhich the mother-country was indifferent, and fightingagainst the armies with which England was preparedto outnumber the whole Canadian population, is a magnificentspectacle; and Montcalm laying down his life to loseQuebec is not less affecting than Wolfe dying to winher. The heart opens towards the soldier who recited,on the eve of his costly victory, the “Elegyin a Country Churchyard,” which he would “ratherhave written than beat the French to-morrow;”but it aches for the defeated general, who, hurt todeath, answered, when told how brief his time was,“So much the better; then I shall not live tosee the surrender of Quebec.”

In the city for which they perished their fame hasnever been divided. The English have shown themselvesvery generous victors; perhaps nothing could be allegedagainst them, but that they were victors. A shaftcommon to Wolfe and Montcalm celebrates them bothin the Governor’s Garden; and in the Chapelof the Ursuline Convent a tablet is placed, where Montcalmdied, by the same conquerors who raised to Wolfe’smemory the column on the battle-field.

A dismal prison covers the ground where the hero fell,and the monument stands on the spot where Wolfe breathedhis last, on ground lower than the rest of the field;the friendly hollow that sheltered him from the fireof the French dwarfs his monument; yet it is sufficient,and the simple inscription, “Here died Wolfevictorious,” gives it a dignity which many cubitsof added stature could not bestow. Another ofthose bitter showers, which had interspersed the morning’ssunshine, drove suddenly across the open plain, andour tourists comfortably sentimentalized the scenebehind the close-drawn curtains of their carriage.Here a whole empire had been lost and won, Basil remindedIsabel; and she said, “Only think of it!”and looked to a wandering fold of her skirt, uponwhich the rain beat through a rent of the curtain.

Do I pitch the pipe too low? We poor honest menare at a sad disadvantage; and now and then I am mindedto give a loose to fancy, and attribute somethingreally grand and fine to my people, in order to makethem worthier the reader’s respected acquaintance.But again, I forbid myself in a higher interest; andI am afraid that even if I were less virtuous, I couldnot exalt their mood upon a battle-field; for of allthings of the past a battle is the least conceivable.I have heard men who fought in many battles say thatthe recollection was like a dream to them; and whatcan the merely civilian imagination do on the Plainsof Abraham, with the fact that there, more than acentury ago, certain thousands of Frenchmen marchedout, on a bright September morning, to kill and maimas many Englishmen? This ground, so green andoft with grass beneath the feet, was it once tornwith shot and soaked with the blood of men? Didthey lie here in ranks and heaps, the miserable slain,for whom tender hearts away yonder over the sea wereto ache and break? Did the wretches that fellwounded stretch themselves here, and writhe beneaththe feet of friend and foe, or crawl array for shelterinto little hollows, and behind gushes and fallentrees! Did he, whose soul was so full of nobleand sublime impulses, die here, shot through likesome ravening beast? The loathsome carnage, theshrieks, the hellish din of arms, the cries of victory,—­Ivainly strive to conjure up some image of it all now;and God be thanked, horrible spectre! that, fill theworld with sorrow as thou wilt, thou still remainestincredible in its moments of sanity and peace.Least credible art thou on the old battle-fields,where the mother of the race denies thee with breezeand sun and leaf and bird, and every blade of grass!The red stain in Basil’s thought yielded tothe rain sweeping across the pasture-land from whichit had long since faded, and the words on the monument,“Here died Wolfe victorious,” did notproclaim his bloody triumph over the French, but hisself-conquest, his victory over fear and pain andlove of life. Alas! when shall the poor, blind,stupid world honor those who renounce self in the joyof their kind, equally with those who devote themselvesthrough the anguish and loss of thousands? Soold a world and groping still!

The tourists were better fitted for the next occasionof sentiment, which was at the Hotel Dieu whitherthey went after returning from the battlefield.It took all the mal-address of which travellers aremasters to secure admittance, and it was not tillthey had rung various wrong bells, and misunderstoodmany soft nun-voices speaking French through grateddoors, and set divers sympathetic spectators doingineffectual services, that they at last found theproper entrance, and were answered in English thatthe porter would ask if they might see the chapel.They hoped to find there the skull of Brebeuf, oneof those Jesuit martyrs who perished long ago for

the conversion of a race that has perished, and whoserelics they had come, fresh from their reading of Parkman,with some vague and patronizing intention to revere.An elderly sister with a pale, kind face led themthrough a ward of the hospital into the chapel, whichthey found in the expected taste, and exquisitely neatand cool, but lacking the martyr’s skull.They asked if it were not to be seen. “Ah,yes, poor Pere Brebeuf!” sighed the gentle sister,with the tone and manner of having lost him yesterday;“we had it down only last week, showing it tosome Jesuit fathers; but it’s in the conventnow, and isn’t to be seen.” And theremingled apparently in her regret for Pere Brebeufa confusing sense of his actual state as a portablepiece of furniture. She would not let them praisethe chapel. It was very clean, yes, but therewas nothing to see in it. She deprecated theircompliments with many shrugs, but she was pleased;for when we renounce the pomps and vanities of thisworld, we are pretty sure to find them in some other,—­ifwe are women. She, good and pure soul, whose wholelife was given to self-denying toil, had yet somethingangelically coquettish in her manner, a spiritual-worldlinesswhich was the clarified likeness of this-worldliness.O, had they seen the Hotel Dieu at Montreal? Then(with a vivacious wave of the hands) they would notcare to look at this, which by comparison was nothing.Yet she invited them to go through the wards if theywould, and was clearly proud to have them see the wonderfulcleanness and comfort of the place. There werenot many patients, but here and there a wan or feveredface looked at them from its pillow, or a weak formdrooped beside a bed, or a group of convalescents softlytalked together. They came presently to the lasthall, at the end of which sat another nun, besidea window that gave a view of the busy port, and beyondit the landscape of village-lit plain and forest-darkenedheight. On a table at her elbow stood a rose-tree,on which hung two only pale tea-roses, so fair, soperfect, that Isabel cried out in wonder and praise.Ere she could prevent it, the nun, to whom there hadbeen some sort of presentation, gathered one of theroses, and with a shy grace offered it to Isabel,who shrank back a little as from too costly a gift.“Take it,” said the first nun, with herpretty French accent; while the other, who spoke noEnglish at all, beamed a placid smile; and Isabeltook it. The flower, lying light in her palm,exhaled a delicate odor, and a thrill of exquisitecompassion for it trembled through her heart, as ifit had been the white, cloistered life of the silentnun: with its pallid loveliness, it was as aflower that had taken the veil. It could neverhave uttered the burning passion of a lover for hismistress; the nightingale could have found no thornon it to press his aching poet’s heart against;but sick and weary eyes had dwelt gratefully upon it;at most it might have expressed, like a prayer, thenun’s stainless love of some favorite saintin paradise. Cold, and pale, and sweet,—­wasit indeed only a flower, this cloistered rose of theHotel Dieu?

“Breathe it,” said the gentle Gray Sister;“sometimes the air of the hospital offends.Not us, no; we are used; but you come from the outside.”And she gave her rose for this humble use as lovinglyas she devoted herself to her lowly taxes.

“It is very little to see,” she said atthe end; “but if you are pleased, I am veryglad. Goodby, good-by!” She stood with herarms folded, and watched them out of sight with herkind, coquettish little smile, and then the mute,blank life of the nun resumed her.

From Hotel Dieu to Hotel Musty it was but a step;both were in the same street; but our friends fanciedthemselves to have come an immense distance when theysat down at an early dinner, amidst the clash of crockeryand cutlery, and looked round upon all the profanetravelling world assembled. Their regard presentlyfixed upon one company which monopolized a whole table,and were defined from the other diners by peculiaritiesas marked as those of the Soeurs Grises themselves.There were only two men among some eight or ten women;one of the former had a bad amiable face, with eyesfull of a merry deviltry; the other, clean. shaven,and dark, was demure and silent as a priest. Theladies were of various types, but of one effect, withlarge rolling eyes, and faces that somehow regardedthe beholder as from a distance, and with an impartialfeeling for him as for an element of publicity.One of them, who caressed a lapdog with one hand whileshe served herself with the other, was, as she seemedto believe, a blonde; she had pale blue eyes, and herhair was cut in front so as to cover her foreheadwith a straggling sandy-colored fringe. She hadan English look, and three or four others, with darkcomplexion and black, unsteady eyes, and various abandonof back-hair, looked like co*ckney houris of Jewishblood; while two of the lovely company were clearlyof our own nation, as was the young man with the recklesslaughing face. The ladies were dressed and jeweledwith a kind of broad effectiveness, which was to theordinary style of society what scene-painting is topainting, and might have borne close inspection nobetter. They seemed the best-humored people inthe world, and on the kindliest terms with each other.The waiters shared their pleasant mood, and servedthem affectionately, and were now and then invitedto join in the gay talk which babbled on over dislocatedaspirates, and filled the air with a sentiment ofvagabond enjoyment, of the romantic freedom of violatedconvention, of something Gil Blas-like, almost picaresque.

If they had needed explanation it would have beengiven by the announcement in the office of the hotelthat a troupe of British blondes was then appearingin Quebec for one week only.

After dinner they took possession of the parlor, andwhile one strummed fitfully upon the ailing hotelpiano, the rest talked, and talked shop, of course,as all of us do when several of a trade are got together.

“W’at,” said the eldest of the dark-faced,black haired British blondes of Jewish race,—­“w’atare we going to give at Montrehal?”

“We’re going to give ‘Pygmalion,’at Montrehal,” answered the British blonde ofAmerican birth, good-humoredly burlesquing the erringh of her sister.

“But we cahn’t, you know,” saidthe lady with the fringed forehead; “Hagnesis gone on to New York, and there’s nobody todo Wenus.”

“Yes, you know,” demanded the, first speaker,“oo’s to do Wenus?

“Bella’s to do Wenus,” said a third.

There was an outcry at this, and “’Owever would she get herself up for ’Venus?”and “W’at a guy she’ll look!”and “Nonsense! Bella’s too ’eavyfor Venus!” came from different lively critics;and the debate threatened to become too intimate forthe public ear, when one of their gentlemen came inand said, “Charley don’t seem so well thisafternoon.” On this the chorus changedits note, and at the proposal, “Poor Charley,let ’s go and cheer ’im hop a bit,”the whole good-tempered company trooped out of theparlor together.

Our tourists meant to give the rest of the afternoonto that sort of aimless wandering to and fro aboutthe streets which seizes a foreign city unawares,and best develops its charm of strangeness. Sothey went out and took their fill of Quebec with appetiteskeen through long fasting from the quaint and old,and only sharpened by Montreal, and impartially rejoicedin the crooked up-and-down hill streets; the thoroughlyFrench domestic architecture of a place that thus deniedhaving been English for a hundred years; the porte-cocheresbeside every house; the French names upon the doors,and the oddity of the bellpulls; the rough-paved,rattling streets; the shining roofs of tin, and theuniversal dormer-windows; the littleness of the privatehouses, and the greatness of the high-walled and garden-girdledconvents; the breadths of weather-stained city wall,and the shaggy cliff beneath; the batteries, withtheir guns peacefully staring through loop-holes ofmasonry, and the red-coated sergeants flirting withnursery-maids upon the carriages, while the childrentumbled about over the pyramids of shot and shell;the sloping market-place before the cathedral, whereyet some remnant of the morning’s traffic lingeredunder canvas canopies, and where Isabel bought a bouquetof marigolds and asters of an old woman peasant enoughto have sold it in any market-place of Europe; thesmall, dark shops beyond the quarter invaded by Englishretail trade; the movement of all the strange figuresof cleric and lay and military life; the sound of aforeign speech prevailing over the English; the encounterof other tourists, the passage back and forth throughthe different city gates; the public wooden stairways,dropping flight after flight from the Upper to theLower Town; the bustle of the port, with its commerceand shipping and seafaring life huddled close in underthe hill; the many desolate streets of the Lower Town,as black and ruinous as the last great fire left them;and the marshy meadows beyond, memorable of Recolletsand Jesuits, of Cartier and Montcalm.

They went to the chapel of the Seminary at Laval University,and admired the Le Brun, and the other paintings ofless merit, but equal interest through their suggestionof a whole dim religious world of paintings; and thenthey spent half an hour in the cathedral, not so muchin looking at the Crucifixion by Vandyck which isthere, as in reveling amid the familiar rococo splendorsof the temple. Every swaggering statue of a saint,every rope-dancing angel, every cherub of those thaton the carven and gilded clouds above the high altarfloat—­

“Like little wantonboys that swim on bladders,”—­

was precious to them; the sacristan dusting the sacredproperties with a feather brush, and giving each shrinea business-like nod as he passed, was as a long-lostbrother; they had hearts of aggressive tenderness forthe young girls and old women who stepped in for ahalf-hour’s devotion, and for the men with bourgeoisor peasant faces, who stole a moment from affairsand crops, and gave it to the saints. There wasnothing in the place that need remind them of America,and its taste was exactly that of a thousand otherchurches of the eighteenth century. They couldeasily have believed themselves in the farthest CatholicSouth, but for the two great porcelain stoves thatstood on either side of the nave near the entrance,and that too vividly reminded them of the possibilityof cold.

In fact, Quebec is a little painful in this and otherconfusions of the South and North, and one never quitereconciles himself to them. The Frenchmen, whoexpected to find there the climate of their nativeland, and ripen her wines in as kindly a sun, haveperpetuated the image of home in so many things, thatit goes to the heart with a painful emotion to findthe sad, oblique light of the North upon them.As you ponder some characteristic aspect of Quebec,—­abit of street with heavy stone houses opening upona stretch of the city wall, with a Lombardy poplarrising slim against it,—­you say, to yoursatisfied soul, “Yes, it is the real thing!”and then all at once a sense of that Northern sky strikesin upon you, and makes the reality a mere picture.The sky is blue, the sun is often fiercely hot; youcould not perhaps prove that the pathetic radianceis not an efflux of your own consciousness that summeris but hanging over the land, briefly poising on wingswhich flit at the first dash of rain, and will soonvanish in long retreat before the snow. But somehow,from without or from within, that light of the Northis there.

It lay saddest, our travellers thought, upon the littlecircular garden near Durham Terrace, where every brightnessof fall flowers abounded,—­marigold, coxcomb,snap-dragon, dahlia, hollyhock, and sunflower.It was a substantial and hardy efflorescence, and theyfancied that fainter-hearted plants would have pinedaway in that garden, where the little fountain, leapingup into the joyless light, fell back again with a

musical shiver. The consciousness of this latentcold, of winter only held in abeyance by the brightsun, was not deeper even in the once magnificent,now neglected Governor’s Garden, where therewas actually a rawness in the late afternoon air,and whither they were strolling for the view fromits height, and to pay their duty to the obelisk raisedthere to the common fame of Wolfe and Montcalm.The sounding Latin inscription celebrates the royalgovernor-general who erected it almost as much asthe heroes to whom it was raised; but these spectatorsdid not begrudge the space given to his praise, forso fine a thought merited praise. It enforcedagain the idea of a kind posthumous friendship betweenWolfe and Montcalm, which gives their memory its raredistinction, and unites them, who fell in fight againsteach other, as closely as if they had both died forthe same cause.

Some lasting dignity seems to linger about the citythat has once been a capital; and this odor of fallennobility belongs to Quebec, which was a capital inthe European sense, with all the advantages of a smallvice-regal court, and its social and political intrigues,in the French times. Under the English, for ahundred years it was the centre of Colonial civilizationand refinement, with a governor-general’s residenceand a brilliant, easy, and delightful society, to whichthe large garrison of former days gave gayety andromance. The honors of a capital, first sharedwith Montreal and Toronto, now rest with half-savageOttawa; and the garrison has dwindled to a regimentof rifles, whose presence would hardly be known, butfor the natty sergeants lounging, stick in hand, aboutthe streets and courting the nurse-maids. Butin the days of old there were scenes of carnival pleasurein the Governor’s Garden, and there the garrisonband still plays once a week, when it is filled bythe fashion and beauty of Quebec, and some semblanceof the past is recalled. It is otherwise a lonesome,indifferently tended place, and on this afternoonthere was no one there but a few loafing young fellowsof low degree, French and English, and children thatplayed screaming from seat to seat and path to pathand over the too-heavily shaded grass. In spiteof a conspicuous warning that any dog entering thegarden would be destroyed, the place was throngedwith dogs unmolested and apparently in no danger ofthe threatened doom. The seal of a disagreeabledesolation was given in the legend rudely carved uponone of the benches, “Success to the Irish Republic!”

The morning of the next day our tourists gave to hearingmass at the French cathedral, which was not different,to their heretical senses, from any other mass, exceptthat the ceremony was performed with a very full clericalforce, and was attended by an uncommonly devout congregation.With Europe constantly in their minds, they were bewilderedto find the worshippers not chiefly old and young women,but men also of all ages and of every degree, fromthe neat peasant in his Sabbath-day best to the modishyoung Quebecker, who spread his handkerchief on thefloor to save his pantaloons during supplication.There was fashion and education in large degree amongthe men, and there was in all a pious attention tothe function in poetical keeping with the origin andhistory of a city which the zeal of the Church hadfounded.

A magnificent beadle, clothed in a gold-laced coataid bearing a silver staff, bowed to them when theyentered, and, leading them to a pew, punched up akneeling peasant, who mutely resumed his prayers inthe aisle outside, while they took his place.It appeared to Isabel very unjust that their curiosityshould displace his religion; but she consoled herselfby making Basil give a shilling to the man who, precededby the shining beadle, came round to take up a collection.The peasant could have given nothing but copper, andshe felt that this restored the lost balance of righteousnessin their favor. There was a sermon, very sweetlyand gracefully delivered by a young priest of singularbeauty, even among clergy whose good looks are sonotable as those of Quebec; and then they followedthe orderly crowd of worshippers out, and left thecathedral to the sacristan and the odor of incense.

They thought the type of French-Canadian better herethan at Montreal, and they particularly noticed thegreater number of pretty young girls. All classeswere well dressed; for though the best dressed couldnot be called stylish according to the American standard,as Isabel decided, and had only a provincial gentility,the poorest wore garments that were clean and whole.Everybody, too, was going to have a hot Sunday dinner,if there was any truth in the odors that steamed outof every door and window; and this dinner was to beabundantly garnished with onions, for the dullestnose could not err concerning that savor.

Numbers of tourists, of a nationality that showeditself superior to every distinction of race, werestrolling vaguely and not always quite happily about;but they made no impression on the proper local character,and the air throughout the morning was full of thesentiment of Sunday in a Catholic city. Therewas the apparently meaningless jangling of bells,with profound hushes between, and then more jubilantjangling, and then deeper silence; there was the devouttrooping of the crowds to the churches; and therewas the beginning of the long afternoon’s loungingand amusem*nt with which the people of that faith rewardtheir morning’s devotion. Little standsfor the sale of knotty apples and choke-cherries andcakes and cider sprang magically into existence afterservice, and people were already eating and drinkingat them. The carriage-drivers resumed their chaseof the tourists, and the unvoiceful stir of the newweek had begun again. Quebec, in fact, is buta pantomimic reproduction of France; it is as if twocenturies in a new land, amidst the primeval silencesof nature and the long hush of the Northern winters,had stilled the tongues of the lively folk and madethem taciturn as we of a graver race. They havekept the ancestral vivacity of manner; the eleganceof the shrug is intact; the talking hands take partin dialogue; the agitated person will have its shareof expression. But the loud and eager tone iswanting, and their dumb show mystifies the beholderalmost as much as the Southern architecture underthe slanting Northern sun. It is not America;if it is not France, what is it?

Of the many beautiful things to see in the neighborhoodof Quebec, our wedding-journeyers were in doubt onwhich to bestow their one precious afternoon.Should it be Lorette, with its cataract and its remnantof bleached and fading Hurons, or the Isle of Orleanswith its fertile farms and its primitive peasant life,or Montmorenci, with the unrivaled fall and the longdrive through the beautiful village of Beauport?Isabel chose the last, because Basil had been therebefore, and it had to it the poetry of the wastedyears in which she did not know him. She hadpossessed herself of the journal of his early travels,among the other portions and parcels recoverable fromthe dreadful past, and from time to time on this journeyshe had read him passages out of it, with mingledsentiment and irony, and, whether she was mocking oradmiring, equally to his confusion. Now, as theysmoothly bowled away from the city, she made him listento what he had written of the same excursion long ago.

It was, to be sure, a sad farrago of sentiment aboutthe village and the rural sights, and especially agirl tossing hay in the field. Yet it had touchesof nature and reality, and Basil could not utterlydespise himself for having written it. “Yes,”he said, “life was then a thing to be put intopretty periods; now it’s something that has risksand averages, and may be insured.”

There was regret, fancied or expressed, in his tone,that made her sigh, “Ah! if I’d only hada little more money, you might have devoted yourselfto literature;” for she was a true Bostonianin her honor of our poor craft.

“O, you’re not greatly to blame,”answered her husband, “and I forgive you thelittle wrong you’ve done me. I was quitswith the Muse, at any rate, you know, before we weremarried; and I’m very well satisfied to be goingback to my applications and policies to-morrow.”

To-morrow? The word struck cold upon her.Then their wedding journey would begin to end tomorrow!So it would, she owned with another sigh; and yetit seemed impossible.

“There, ma’am,” said the driver,rising from his seat and facing round, while he pointedwith his whip towards Quebec, “that’s whatwe call the Silver City.”

They looked back with him at the city, whose thousandsof tinned roofs, rising one above the other from thewater’s edge to the citadel, were all a splendorof argent light in the afternoon sun. It was indeedas if some magic had clothed that huge rock, baseand steepy flank and crest, with a silver city.They gazed upon the marvel with cries of joy that satisfiedthe driver’s utmost pride in it, and Isabel said,“To live there, there in that Silver City, inperpetual sojourn! To be always going to go ona morrow that never came! To be forever withinone day of the end of a wedding journey that neverended!”

From far down the river by which they rode came thesound of a cannon, breaking the Sabbath repose ofthe air. “That’s the gun of the Liverpoolsteamer, just coming in,” said the driver.

“O,” cried Isabel, “I’m thankfulwe’re only to stay one night more, for now weshall be turned out of our nice room by those peoplewho telegraphed for it!”

There is a continuous village along the St. Lawrencefrom Quebec, almost to Montmorenci; and they met crowdsof villagers coming from the church as they passedthrough Beauport. But Basil was dismayed at thechange that had befallen them. They had theirSunday’s best on, and the women, instead ofwearing the peasant costume in which he had first seenthem, were now dressed as if out of “Harper’sBazar” of the year before. He anxiouslyasked the driver if the broad straw hats and the brightsacks and kirtles were no more. “O, you’dsee them on weekdays, sir,” was the answer,“but they’re not so plenty any time asthey used to be.” He opened his store offacts about the habitans, whom he praised for everyvirtue,—­for thrift, for sobriety, for neatness,for amiability; and his words ought to have had thegreater weight, because he was of the Irish race,between which and the Canadians there is no kindnesslost. But the looks of the passers-by corroboratedhim, and as for the little houses, open-doored besidethe way, with the pleasant faces at window and portal,they were miracles of picturesqueness and cleanliness.From each the owner’s slim domain, narrowingat every successive division among the abundant generations,runs back to hill or river in well-defined lines,and beside the cottage is a garden of pot-herbs, borderedwith a flame of bright autumn flowers; somewhere indecent seclusion grunts the fattening pig, which isto enrich all those peas and onions for the winter’sbroth; there is a cheerfulness of poultry about thebarns; I dare be sworn there is always a small girldriving a flock of decorous ducks down the middleof the street; and of the priest with a book underhis arm, passing a way-side shrine, what possibledoubt? The houses, which are of one model, arebuilt by the peasants themselves with the stone whichtheir land yields more abundantly than any other crop,and are furnished with galleries and balconies tocatch every ray of the fleeting summer, and perhapsto remember the long-lost ancestral summers of Normandy.At every moment, in passing through this ideally neatand pretty village, our tourists must think of thelovely poem of which all French Canada seems but areminiscence and illustration. It was Grand Pre,not Beauport; and they paid an eager homage to thebeautiful genius which has touched those simple villageaspects with an undying charm, and which, whateverthe land’s political allegiance, is there perpetualSeigneur.

The village, stretching along the broad interval ofthe St. Lawrence, grows sparser as you draw near theFalls of Montmorenci, and presently you drive pastthe grove shutting from the road the country-housein which the Duke of Kent spent some merry days ofhis jovial youth, and come in sight of two lofty towersof stone,—­monuments and witnesses of thetragedy of Montmorenci.

Once a suspension-bridge, built sorely against thewill of the neighboring habitans, hung from thesetowers high over the long plunge of the cataract.But one morning of the fatal spring after the firstwinter’s frost had tried the hold of the cableon the rocks, an old peasant and his wife with theirlittle grandson set out in their cart to pass thebridge. As they drew near the middle the anchoringwires suddenly lost their grip upon the shore, andwhirled into the air; the bridge crashed under thehapless passengers and they were launched from itsheight, upon the verge of the fall and thence plunged,two hundred and fifty feet, into the ruin of the abyss.

The habitans rebuilt their bridge of wood upon lowstone piers, so far up the river from the cataractthat whoever fell from it would yet have many a chancefor life; and it would have been perilous to offerto replace the fallen structure, which, in the beliefof faithful Christians, clearly belonged to the numerousbridges built by the Devil, in times when the Devildid not call himself a civil engineer.

The driver, with just unction, recounted the sad taleas he halted his horses on the bridge; and as hispassengers looked down the rock-fretted brown torrenttowards the fall, Isabel seized the occasion to shudderthat ever she had set foot on that suspension-bridgebelow Niagara, and to prove to Basil’s confusionthat her doubt of the bridges between the Three Sisterswas not a case of nerves but an instinctive wisdomconcerning the unsafety of all bridges of that design.

From the gate opening into the grounds about the falltwo or three little French boys, whom they had notthe heart to forbid, ran noisily before them withcries in their sole English, “This way, sir”and led toward a weather-beaten summer-house thattottered upon a projecting rock above the verge ofthe cataract. But our tourists shook their heads,and turned away for a more distant and less dizzyenjoyment of the spectacle, though any commandingpoint was sufficiently chasmal and precipitous.The lofty bluff was scooped inward from the St. Lawrencein a vast irregular semicircle, with cavernous hollows,one within another, sinking far into its sides, andnaked from foot to crest, or meagrely wooded here andthere with evergreen. From the central brink ofthese gloomy purple chasms the foamy cataract launcheditself, and like a cloud,

“Along the cliffto fall and pause and fall did seem.”

I say a cloud, because I find it already said to myhand, as it were, in a pretty verse, and because Imust needs liken Montmorenci to something that issoft and light. Yet a cloud does not representthe glinting of the water in its downward swoop; itis like some broad slope of sun-smitten snow; butsnow is coldly white and opaque, and this has a creamywarmth in its luminous mass; and so, there hangs thecataract unsaid as before. It is a mystery thatanything so grand should be so lovely, that anything

so tenderly fair in whatever aspect should yet beso large that one glance fails to comprehend it all.The rugged wildness of the cliffs and hollows aboutit is softened by its gracious beauty, which halfredeems the vulgarity of the timber-merchant’suses in setting the river at work in his saw-millsand choking its outlet into the St. Lawrence withrafts of lumber and rubbish of slabs and shingles.Nay, rather, it is alone amidst these things, andthe eye takes note of them by a separate effort.

Our tourists sank down upon the turf that crept withits white clover to the edge of the precipice, andgazed dreamily upon the fall, filling their visionwith its exquisite color and form. Being wiserthan I, they did not try to utter its loveliness;they were content to feel it, and the perfection ofthe afternoon, whose low sun slanting over the landscapegave, under that pale, greenish-blue sky, a pensivesentiment of autumn to the world. The cricketscried amongst the grass; the hesitating chirp of birdscame from the tree overhead; a shaggy colt left offgrazing in the field and stalked up to stare at them;their little guides, having found that these peoplehad no pleasure in the sight of small boys scufflingon the verge of a precipice, threw themselves alsodown upon the grass and crooned a long, long balladin a mournful minor key about some maiden whose namewas La Belle Adeline. It was a moment of unmixedenjoyment for every sense, and through all their beingthey were glad; which considering, they ceased tobe so, with a deep sigh, as one reasoning that hedreams must presently awake. They never couldhave an emotion without desiring to analyze it; butperhaps their rapture would have ceased as swiftly,even if they had not tried to make it a fact of consciousness.

“If there were not dinner after such experiencesas these,” said Isabel, as they sat at tablethat evening, “I don’t know what wouldbecome of one. But dinner unites the idea ofpleasure and duty, and brings you gently back to earth.You must eat, don’t you see, and there’snothing disgraceful about what you’re obligedto do; and so—­it’s all right.”

“Isabel, Isabel,” cried her husband, “youhave a wonderful mind, and its workings always amazeme. But be careful, my dear; be careful.Don’t work it too hard. The human brain,you know: delicate organ.”

“Well, you understand what I mean; and I thinkit’s one of the great charms of a husband, thatyou’re not forced to express yourself to him.A husband,” continued Isabel, sententiously,poising a bit of meringue between her thumb and finger,—­forthey had reached that point in the repast, “ahusband is almost as good as another woman!”

In the parlor they found the Ellisons, and exchangedthe history of the day with them.

“Certainly,” said Mrs. Ellison, at theend, “it’s been a pleasant day enough,but what of the night? You’ve been turnedout, too, by those people who came on the steamer,and who might as well have stayed on board to-night;have you got another room?”

“Not precisely,” said Isabel; “wehave a coop in the fifth story, right under the roof.”

Mrs. Ellison turned energetically upon her husbandand cried in tones of reproach, “Richard, Mrs.March has a room!”

“A coop, she said,” retorted that amiableColonel, “and we’re too good for that.The clerk is keeping us in suspense about a room, becausehe means to surprise us with something palatial atthe end. It ’s his joking way.”

“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Ellison. “Haveyou seen him since dinner?”

“I have made life a burden to him for the lasthalf-hour,” returned the Colonel, with the kindliestsmile.

“O Richard,” cried his wife, in despairof his amendment, “you wouldn’t make lifea burden to a mouse!” And having nothing elsefor it, she laughed, half in sorrow, half in fondness.

“Well, Fanny,” the Colonel irrelevantlyanswered, “put on your hat and things, and let’sall go up to Durham Terrace for a promenade. Iknow our friends want to go. It’s somethingworth seeing; and by the time we get back, the clerkwill have us a perfectly sumptuous apartment.”

Nothing, I think, more enforces the illusion of SouthernEurope in Quebec than the Sunday-night promenadingon Durham Terrace. This is the ample space onthe brow of the cliff to the left of the citadel, thenoblest and most commanding position in the wholecity, which was formerly occupied by the old castleof Saint Louis, where dwelt the brave Count Frontenacand his splendid successors of the French regime.The castle went the way of Quebec by fire some fortyyears ago, and Lord Durham leveled the site and madeit a public promenade. A stately arcade of solidmasonry supports it on the brink of the rock, and aniron parapet incloses it; there are a few seats tolounge upon, and some idle old guns for the childrento clamber over and play with. A soft twilighthad followed the day, and there was just enough obscurityto hide from a willing eye the Northern and New Worldfacts of the scene, and to bring into more romanticrelief the citadel dark against the mellow evening,and the people gossiping from window to window acrossthe narrow streets of the Lower Town. The Terraceitself was densely thronged, and there was a constantcoming and going of the promenaders, who each formallypaced back and forth upon the planking for a certaintime, and then went quietly home, giving place tothe new arrivals. They were nearly all French,and they were not generally, it seemed, of the firstfashion, but rather of middling condition in life;the English being represented only by a few youngfellows and now and then a redfaced old gentleman withan Indian scarf trailing from his hat. Therewere some fair American costumes and faces in thecrowd, but it was essentially Quebecian. Theyoung girls walking in pairs, or with their lovers,had the true touch of provincial unstylishness, theyoung men the ineffectual excess of the second-rate

Latin dandy, their elders the rich inelegance of abourgeoisie in their best. A few, better-figuredavocats or notaires (their profession was as unmistakableas if they had carried their well-polished brass doorplatesupon their breasts) walked and gravely talked witheach other. The non-American character of thescene was not less vividly marked in the fact thateach person dressed according to his own taste andfrankly indulged private preferences in shapes andcolors. One of the promenaders was in white,even to his canvas shoes; another, with yet bolderindividuality, appeared in perfect purple. Ithad a strange, almost portentous effect when thesetwo startling figures met as friends and joined eachother in the promenade with linked arms; but the eveningwas already beginning to darken round them, and presentlythe purple comrade was merely a sombre shadow besidethe glimmering white.

The valleys and the heights now vanished; but theriver defined itself by the varicolored lights ofthe ships and steamers that lay, dark, motionlessbulks, upon its broad breast; the lights of Point Lewisswarmed upon the other shore; the Lower Town, two hundredfeet below them, stretched an alluring mystery ofclustering roofs and lamplit windows and dark andshining streets around the mighty rock, mural-crowned.Suddenly a spectacle peculiarly Northern and characteristicof Quebec revealed itself; a long arch brightened overthe northern horizon; the tremulous flames of theaurora, pallid violet or faintly tinged with crimson,shot upward from it, and played with a weird apparitionand evanescence to the zenith. While the strangerslooked, a gun boomed from the citadel, and the wildsweet notes of the bugle sprang out upon the silence.

Then they all said, “How perfectly in keepingeverything has been!” and sauntered back tothe hotel.

The Colonel went into the office to give the clerkanother turn on the rack, and make him confess toa hidden apartment somewhere, while Isabel left herhusband to Mrs. Ellison in the parlor, and invitedMiss Kitty to look at her coop in the fifth story.As they approached, light and music and laughter stoleout of an open door next hers, and Isabel, distinguishingthe voices of the theatrical party, divined that thiswas the sick-chamber, and that they were again cheeringup the afflicted member of the troupe. Some onewas heard to say, “Well, ’ow do you feelnow, Charley?” and a sound of subdued swearingresponded, followed by more laughter, and the twangingof a guitar, and a snatch of song, and a stir of feetand dresses as for departure.

The two listeners shrank together; as women they couldnot enjoy these proofs of the jolly camaraderie existingamong the people of the troupe. They trembledas before the merriment of as many light-hearted, careless,good-natured young men: it was no harm, but itwas dismaying; and, “Dear!” cried Isabel,“what shall we do?”

“Go back,” said Miss Ellison, boldly,and back they ran to the parlor, where they foundBasil and the Colonel and his wife in earnest conclave.The Colonel, like a shrewd strategist, was making showof a desperation more violent than his wife’s,who was thus naturally forced into the attitude ofmoderating his fury.

“Well, Fanny, that’s all he can do forus; and I do think it ’s the most outrageousthing in the world! It ’s real mean!”

Fanny perceived a bold parody of her own denunciatorymanner, but just then she was obliged to answer Isabel’seager inquiry whether they had got a room yet.“Yes, a room,” she said, “with twobeds. But what are we to do with one room?That clerk—­I don’t know what to callhim”—­("Call him a hotel-clerk, mydear; you can’t say anything worse,” interruptedher husband)—­“seems to think the matterperfectly settled.”

“You see, Mrs. March,” added the Colonel,“he’s able to bully us in this way becausehe has the architecture on his side. There isn’tanother room in the house.”

“Let me think a moment,” said Isabel notthinking an instant. She had taken a fancy toat least two of these people from the first, and inthe last hour they had all become very well acquaintednow she said, “I’ll tell you: thereare two beds in our room also; we ladies will takeone room, and you gentlemen the other!”

“Mrs. March, I bow to the superiority of theBoston mind,” said the Colonel, while his femalescivilly protested and consented; “and I mightalmost hail you as our preserver. If ever youcome to Milwaukee,—­which is the centreof the world, as Boston is,—­we—­I—­shallbe happy to have you call at my place of business.—­Ididn’t commit myself, did I, Fanny?—­Iam sometimes hospitable to excess, Mrs. March,”he said, to explain his aside. “And now,let us reconnoitre. Lead on, madam, and the gratitudeof the houseless stranger will follow you.”

The whole party explored both rooms, and the ladiesdecided to keep Isabel’s. The Colonel wasdispatched to see that the wraps and traps of hisparty were sent to this number, and Basil went withhim. The things came long before the gentlemenreturned, but the ladies happily employed the intervalin talking over the excitements of the day, and insaying from time to time, “So very kind of you,Mrs. March,” and “I don’t know whatwe should have done,” and “Don’tspeak of it, please,” and “I’m sureit ’s a great pleasure to me.”

In the room adjoining theirs, where the invalid actorlay, and where lately there had been minstrelsy andapparently dancing for his solace, there was now comparativesilence. Two women’s voices talked together,and now and then a guitar was touched by a wanderinghand. Isabel had just put up her handkerchiefto conceal her first yawn, when the gentlemen, odorousof cigars, returned to say good-night.

“It’s the second door from this, isn’tit, Isabel?” asked her husband.

“Yes, the second door. Good-night.Good-night.”

The two men walked off together; but in a minute afterwardsthey had returned and were knocking tremulously atthe closed door.

“O, what has happened?” chorused the ladiesin woeful tune, seeing a certain wildness in the facethat confronted them.

“We don’t know!” answered the othersin as fearful a key, and related how they had foundthe door of their room ajar, and a bright light streaminginto the corridor. They did not stop to ponderthis fact, but, with the heedlessness of their sex,pushed the door wide open, when they saw seated beforethe mirror a bewildering figure, with disheveled lockswandering down the back, and in dishabille expressiveof being quite at home there, which turned upon thema pair of pale blue eyes, under a forehead remarkablefor the straggling fringe of hair that covered it.They professed to have remained transfixed at the sight,and to have noted a like dismay on the visage beforethe glass, ere they summoned strength to fly.These facts Colonel Ellison gave at the command ofhis wife, with many protests and insincere delaysamidst which the curiosity of his hearers alone preventedthem from rending him in pieces.

“And what do you suppose it was?” demandedhis wife, with forced calmness, when he had at lastmade an end of the story and his abominable hypoocisies.

“Well, I think it was a mermaid.”

“A mermaid!” said his wife, scornfully.“How do you know?”

“It had a comb in its hand, for one thing; andbesides, my dear, I hope I know a mermaid when I seeit.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Ellison, “it wasno mermaid, it was a mistake; and I’m goingto see about it. Will you go with me, Richard?”

“No money could induce me! If it’sa mistake, it isn’t proper for me to go; ifit’s a mermaid, it’s dangerous.”

“O you coward!” said the intrepid littlewoman to a hero of all the fights on Sherman’smarch to the sea; and presently they heard her attackthe mysterious enemy with a lady-like courage, claimingthe invaded chamber. The foe replied with likecivility, saying the clerk had given her that roomwith the understanding that another lady was to beput there with her, and she had left the door unlockedto admit her. The watchers with the sick mannext door appeared and confirmed this speech, a feeblevoice from the bedclothes swore to it.

“Of course,” added the invader, “ifI’d known ’ow it really was, I never wouldlave listened to such a thing, never. And thereisn’t another ’ole in the louse to layme ’ead,” she concluded.

“Then it’s the clerk’s fault,”said Mrs. Ellison, glad to retreat unharmed; and shemade her husband ring for the guilty wretch, a pale,quiet young Frenchman, whom the united party, sallyinginto the corridor, began to upbraid in one breath,the lady in dishabille vanishing as often as she rememberedit, and reappearing whenever some strong point ofargument or denunciation occurred to her.

The clerk, who was the Benjamin of his wicked tribe,threw himself upon their mercy and confessed everything:the house was so crowded, and he had been so crazedby the demands upon him, that he had understood ColonelEllison’s application to be for a bed for theyoung lady in his party, and he had done the verybest he could. If the lady there—­shevanished again—­would give up the room tothe two gentlemen, he would find her a place withthe housekeeper. To this the lady consented withoutdifficulty, and the rest dispersing, she kissed oneof the sick man’s watchers with “Isn’tit a shame, Bella?” and flitted down the darknessof the corridor. The rooms upon it seemed all,save the two assigned our travellers, to be occupiedby ladies of the troupe; their doors successivelyopened, and she was heard explaining to each as shepassed. The momentary displeasure which she hadshown at her banishment was over. She detailedthe facts with perfect good-nature, and though theothers appeared no more than herself to find any humorouscast in the affair, they received her narration withthe same amiability. They uttered their sympathyseriously, and each parted from her with some friendlyword. Then all was still.

“Richard,” said Mrs. Ellison, when inIsabel’s room the travellers had briefly celebratedthese events, “I should think you’d hateto leave us alone up here.”

“I do; but you can’t think how I hateto go off alone. I wish you’d come partof the way with us, Ladies; I do indeed. Leaveyour door unlocked, at any rate.”

This prayer, uttered at parting outside the room,was answered from within by a sound of turning keysand sliding bolts, and a low thunder as of bureausand washstands rolled against the door. “Theladies are fortifying their position,” saidthe Colonel to Basil, and the two returned to theirown chamber. “I don’t wish any intrusions,”he said, instantly shutting himself in; “mynerves are too much shaken now. What an awfullymysterious old place this Quebec is, Mr. March!I’ll tell you what: it’s my opinionthat this is an enchanted castle, and if my ribs arenot walked over by a muleteer in the course of thenight, it’s all I ask.”

In this and other discourse recalling the famous adventureof Don Quixote, the Colonel beguiled the labor ofdisrobing, and had got as far as his boots, when therecame a startling knock at the door. With oneboot in his hand and the other on his foot, the Colonellimped forward. “I suppose it’s thatclerk has sent to say he’s made some other mistake,”and he flung wide the door, and then stood motionlessbefore it, dumbly staring at a figure on the threshold,—­afigure with the fringed forehead and pale blue eyesof her whom they had so lately turned out of thatroom.

Shrinking behind the side of the doorway, “Excuseme, gentlemen,” she said, with a dignity thatrecalled their scattered senses, “but will you’ave the goodness to look if my beads are onyour table—­O thanks, thanks, thanks!”she continued, showing her face and one hand, as Basilblushingly advanced with a string of heavy black beads,piously adorned with a large cross. “I’msure, I’m greatly obliged to you, gentlemen,and I hask a thousand pardons for troublin’you,” she concluded in a somewhat severe tone,that left them abashed and culpable; and vanished asmysteriously as she had appeared.

“Now, see here,” said the Colonel, witha huge sigh as he closed the door again, and thistime locked it, “I should like to know how longthis sort of thing is to be kept up? Because,if it’s to be regularly repeated during thenight, I’m going to dress again.”Nevertheless, he finished undressing and got intobed, where he remained for some time silent.Basil put out the light. “O, I’m sorryyou did that, my dear fellow,” said the Colonel;“but never mind, it was an idle curiosity, nodoubt. It’s my belief that in the landlord’sextremity of bedlinen, I’ve been put to sleepbetween a pair of tablecloths; and I thought I’dlike to look. It seems to me that I make outa checkered pattern on top and a flowered or arabesquepattern underneath. I wish they had given me mates.It ’s pretty hard having to sleep between oddtablecloths. I shall complain to the landlordof this in the morning. I’ve never had tosleep between odd table-cloths at any hotel before.”

The Colonel’s voice seemed scarcely to havedied away upon Basil’s drowsy ear, when suddenlythe sounds of music and laughter from the invalid’sroom startled him wide awake. The sick man’swatchers were coquetting with some one who stood inthe little court-yard five stories below. A certainbreadth of repartee was naturally allowable at thatdistance; the lover avowed his passion in ardent terms,and the ladies mocked him with the same freedom, nowand then totally neglecting him while they sang asnatch of song to the twanging of the guitar, or talkedprofessional gossip, and then returning to him withsome tormenting expression of tenderness.

All this, abstractly speaking, was nothing to Basil;yet he could recollect few things intended for hispleasure that had given him more satisfaction.He thought, as he glanced out into the moonlight onthe high-gabled silvery roofs around and on the gardensof the convents and the towers of the quaint city,that the scene wanted nothing of the proper charmof Spanish humor and romance, and he was as gratefulto those poor souls as if they had meant him a favor.To us of the hither side of the foot-lights, thereis always something fascinating in the life of thestrange beings who dwell beyond them, and who are neverso unreal as in their own characters. In theirshabby bestowal in those mean upper rooms, their tawdry

poverty, their merry submission to the errors andcaprices of destiny, their mutual kindliness and carelessfriendship, these unprofitable devotees of the twinkling-footedburlesque seemed to be playing rather than livingthe life of strolling players; and their love-makingwas the last touch of a comedy that Basil could hardlyaccept as reality, it was so much more like somethingseen upon the stage. He would not have detractedanything from the commonness and cheapness of the‘mise en scene’, for that, he reflecteddrowsily and confusedly, helped to give it an airof fact and make it like an episode of fiction.But above all, he was pleased with the natural eventlessnessof the whole adventure, which was in perfect agreementwith his taste; and just as his reveries began tolose shape in dreams, he was aware of an absurd pridein the fact that all this could have happened to himin our commonplace time and hemisphere. “Why,”he thought, “if I were a student in Alcala,what better could I have asked?” And as at lasthis soul swung out from its moorings and lapsed downthe broad slowly circling tides out in the sea ofsleep, he was conscious of one subtle touch of compassionfor those poor strollers,—­a pity so delicateand fine and tender that it hardly seemed his ownbut rather a sense of the compassion that pities thewhole world.

X. HOMEWARD AND HOME.

The travellers all met at breakfast and duly discussedthe adventures of the night; and for the rest, theforenoon passed rapidly and slowly with Basil andIsabel, as regret to leave Quebec, or the natural impatienceof travellers to be off, overcame them. Isabelspent part of it in shopping, for she had found somesmall sums of money and certain odd corners in hertrunks still unappropriated, and the handsome storeson the Rue Fabrique were very tempting. She saidshe would just go in and look; and the wise readerimagines the result. As she knelt over her boxes,trying so to distribute her purchases as to make themlook as if they were old,—­old things ofhers, which she had brought all the way round fromBoston with her,—­a fleeting touch of consciencestayed her hand.

“Basil,” she said, “perhaps we’dbetter declare some of these things. What’sthe duty on those?” she asked, pointing to certainarticles.

“I don’t know. About a hundred percent. ad valorem.”

“C’est a dire—?”

“As much as they cost.”

“O then, dearest,” responded Isabel indignantly,“it can’t be wrong to smuggle! Iwon’t declare a thread!”

“That’s very well for you, whom they won’task. But what if they ask me whether there’sanything to declare?”

Isabel looked at her husband and hesitated. Thenshe replied in terms that I am proud to record inhonor of American womanhood: “You mustn’tfib about—­it, Basil” (heroically);“I couldn’t respect you if you did,”(tenderly); “but” (with decision) “youmust slip out of it some way!”

The ladies of the Ellison party, to whom she put thecase in the parlor, agreed with her perfectly.They also had done a little shopping in Quebec, andthey meant to do more at Montreal before they returnedto the States. Mrs. Ellison was disposed to lookupon Isabel’s compunctions as a kind of treasonto the sex, to be forgiven only because so quicklyrepented.

The Ellisons were going up the Saguenay before comingon to Boston, and urged our friends hard to go withthem. “No, that must be for another time,”said Isabel. “Mr. March has to be home bya certain day; and we shall just get back in season.”Then she made them promise to spend a day with herin Boston, and the Colonel coming to say that he hada carriage at the door for their excursion to Lorette,the two parties bade good-by with affection and manyexplicit hopes of meeting soon again.

“What do you think of them, dearest?”demanded Isabel, as she sallied out with Basil fora final look at Quebec.

“The young lady is the nicest; and the otheris well enough, too. She is a good deal likeyou, but with the sense of humor left out. You’veonly enough to save you.”

“Well, her husband is jolly enough for bothof them. He’s funnier than you, Basil,and he hasn’t any of your little languid airsand affectations. I don’t know but I’ma bit disappointed in my choice, darling; but I daresay I shall work out of it. In fact, I don’tknow but the Colonel is a little too jolly. Thisdrolling everything is rather fatiguing.”And having begun, they did not stop till they had takentheir friends to pieces. Dismayed, then, theyhastily reconstructed them, and said that they wereamong the pleasantest people they ever knew, and theywere really very sorry to part with them, and theyshould do everything to make them have a good timein Boston.

They were sauntering towards Durham Terrace wherethey leaned long upon the iron parapet and blest themselveswith the beauty of the prospect. A tender hazehung upon the landscape and subdued it till the scenewas as a dream before them. As in a dream theriver lay, and dream-like the shipping moved or restedon its deep, broad bosom. Far off stretched thehappy fields with their dim white villages; fartherstill the mellow heights melted into the low hoveringheaven. The tinned roofs of the Lower Town twinkledin the morning sun; around them on every hand, onthat Monday forenoon when the States were stirringfrom ocean to ocean in feverish industry, drowsedthe gray city within her walls; from the flag-staffof the citadel hung the red banner of Saint Georgein sleep.

Their hearts were strangely and deeply moved.It seemed to them that they looked upon the last strongholdof the Past, and that afar off to the southward theycould hear the marching hosts of the invading Present;and as no young and loving soul can relinquish oldthings without a pang, they sighed a long mute farewellto Quebec.

Next summer they would come again, yes; but, ah me’every one knows what next summer is!

Part of the burlesque troupe rode down in the omnibus to the Grand Trunk

Ferry with them, and were good-natured to the last,having shaken hands all round with the waiters, chambermaids,and porters of the hotel. The young fellow withthe bad amiable face came in a calash, and refusedto overpay the driver with a gay decision that madehim Basil’s envy till he saw his tribulationin getting the troupe’s luggage checked.There were forty pieces, and it always remained amystery, considering the small amount of clothingnecessary to those people on the stage, what couldhave filled their trunks. The young man and thetwo English blondes of American birth found placesin the same car with our tourists, and enlivened thejourney with their frolics. When the young manpretended to fall asleep, they wrapped his goldencurly head in a shawl, and vexed him with many thumpsand thrusts, till he bought a brief truce with a handfulof almonds; and the ladies having no other way to eatthem, one of them saucily snatched off her shoe, andcracked them hammerwise with the heel. It wasall so pleasant that it ought to have been all right;and in their merry world of outlawry perhaps thingsare not so bad as we like to think them.

The country into which the train plunges as soon asQuebec is out of sight is very stupidly savage, andour friends had little else to do but to watch thegambols of the players, till they came to the riverSt. Francis, whose wandering loveliness the road followsthrough an infinite series of soft and beautiful landscapes,and finds everywhere glassing in its smooth currentthe elms and willows of its gentle shores. Atone place, where its calm broke into foamy rapids,there was a huge saw mill, covering the stream withlogs and refuse, and the banks with whole cities oflumber; which also they accepted as no mean elementsof the picturesque. They clung the most tenderlyto traces of the peasant life they were leaving.When some French boys came aboard with wild raspberriesto sell in little birch-bark canoes, they thrilledwith pleasure, and bought them, but sighed then, andsaid, “What thing characteristic of the locallife will they sell us in Maine when we get there?A section of pie poetically wrapt in a broad leaf ofthe squash-vine, or pop-corn in its native tissue-paper,and advertising the new Dollar Store in Portland?”They saw the quaintness vanish from the farm-houses;first the dormer-windows, then the curve of the steeproof, then the steep roof itself. By and by theycame to a store with a Grecian portico and four squarepine pillars. They shuddered and looked no more.

The guiltily dreaded examination of baggage at IslandPond took place at nine o’clock, without costingthem a cent of duty or a pang of conscience.At that charming station the trunks are piled higgledy-piggledyinto a room beside the track, where a few inspectorswith stifling lamps of smoky kerosene await the passengers.There are no porters to arrange the baggage, and eachlady and gentleman digs out his box, and opens itbefore the lordly inspector, who stirs up its contentswith an unpleasant hand and passes it. He makesyou feel that you are once more in the land of officialinsolence, and that, whatever you are collectively,you are nothing personally. Isabel, who had senther husband upon this business with quaking meeknessof heart, experienced the bold indignation of virtueat his account of the way people were made their ownbaggage-smashers, and would not be amused when he paintedthe vile terrors of each husband as he tremblinglyunlocked his wife’s store of contraband.

The morning light showed them the broad elmy meadowsof western-looking Maine; and the Grand Trunk broughtthem, of course, an hour behind time into Portland.All breakfastless they hurried aboard the Boston trainon the Eastern Road, and all along that line (whichis built to show how uninteresting the earth can bewhen she is ‘ennuyee’ of both sea andland), Basil’s life became a struggle to constructa meal from the fragmentary opportunities of twentydifferent stations where they stopped five minutesfor refreshments. At one place he achieved twocups of shameless chickory, at another three sardines,at a third a dessert of elderly bananas.

“Home again, homeagain, from a foreign shore!”

they softly sang as the successive courses of thisfeast were disposed of.

The drouth and heat, which they had briefly escapedduring their sojourn in Canada, brooded sovereignupon the tiresome landscape. The red graniterocks were as if red-hot; the banks of the deep cutswere like ash heaps; over the fields danced the sultryatmosphere; they fancied that they almost heard thegrasshoppers sing above the rattle of the train.When they reached Boston at last, they were dustierthan most of us would like to be a hundred years hence.The whole city was equally dusty; and they found thetrees in the square before their own door gray withdust. The bit of Virginia-creeper planted underthe window hung shriveled upon its trellis.

But Isabel’s aunt met them with a refreshingshower of tears and kisses in the hall, throwing asolid arm about each of them. “O you dears!”the good soul cried, “you don’t know howanxious I’ve been about you; so many accidentshappening all the time. I’ve never readthe ’Evening Transcript’ till the nextmorning, for fear I should find your names among thekilled and wounded.”

“O aunty, you’re too good, always!”whimpered Isabel; and neither of the women took noteof Basil, who said, “Yes, it ’s probablythe only thing that preserved our lives.”

The little tinge of discontent, which had coloredtheir sentiment of return faded now in the kindlylight of home. Their holiday was over, to besure, but their bliss had but began; they had enteredupon that long life of holidays which is happy marriage.By the time dinner was ended they were both enthusiasticat having got back, and taking their aunt betweenthem walked up and down the parlor with their armsround her massive waist, and talked out the gladnessof their souls.

Then Basil said he really must run down to the officethat afternoon, and he issued all aglow upon the street.He was so full of having been long away and of havingjust returned, that he unconsciously tried to imparthis mood to Boston, and the dusty composure of thestreet and houses, as he strode along, bewilderedhim. He longed for some familiar face to welcomehim, and in the horse-car into which he stepped hewas charmed to see an acquaintance. This wasa man for whom ordinarily he cared nothing, and whomhe would perhaps rather have gone out upon the platformto avoid than have spoken to; but now he plunged athim with effusion, and wrung his hand, smiling fromear to ear.

The other remained coldly unaffected, after a firststart of surprise at his cordiality, and then reviledthe dust and heat. “But I’m goingto take a little run down to Newport, to-morrow, fora week,” he said. “By the way, youlook as if you needed a little change. Aren’tyou going anywhere this summer?”

“So you see, my dear,” observed Basil,when he had recounted the fact to Isabel at tea, “ourtravels are incommunicably our own. We had bestsay nothing about our little jaunt to other people,and they won’t know we’ve been gone.Even if we tried, we couldn’t make our wedding-journeytheirs.”

She gave him a great kiss of recompense and consolation.“Who wants it,” she demanded, “tobe Their Wedding Journey?”

NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

Life had not used them ill in this time, and the fairishtreatment they had received was not wholly unmerited.The twelve years past had made them older, as theyears must in passing. Basil was now forty-two,and his moustache was well sprinkled with gray.Isabel was thirty-nine, and the parting of her hairhad thinned and retreated; but she managed to giveit an effect of youthful abundance by combing it lowdown upon her forehead, and roughing it there witha wet brush. By gaslight she was still very pretty;she believed that she looked more interesting, andshe thought Basil’s gray moustache distinguished.He had grown stouter; he filled his double-breastedfrock coat compactly, and from time to time he hadthe buttons set forward; his hands were rounded upon the backs, and he no longer wore his old numberof gloves by two sizes; no amount of powder or manipulationfrom the young lady in the shop would induce them

to go on. But this did not matter much now, forhe seldom wore gloves at all. He was glad thatthe fashion suffered him to spare in that direction,for he was obliged to look somewhat carefully afterthe out-goes. The insurance business was notwhat it had been, and though Basil had comfortablyestablished himself in it, he had not made money.He sometimes thought that he might have done quiteas well if he had gone into literature; but it wasnow too late. They had not a very large family:they had a boy of eleven, who took after his father,and a girl of nine, who took after the boy; but withthe American feeling that their children must havethe best of everything, they made it an expensivefamily, and they spent nearly all Basil earned.

The narrowness of their means, as well as their householdcares, had kept them from taking many long journeys.They passed their winters in Boston, and their summerson the South Shore, cheaper than the North Shore, andnear enough for Basil to go up and down every day forbusiness; but they promised themselves that some daythey would revisit certain points on their weddingjourney, and perhaps somewhere find their lost second-youthon the track. It was not that they cared to beyoung, but they wished the children to see them asthey used to be when they thought themselves veryold; and one lovely afternoon in June they startedfor Niagara.

It had been very hot for several days, but that morningthe east wind came in, and crisped the air till itseemed to rustle like tinsel, and the sky was as sincerelyand solidly blue as if it had been chromoed.They felt that they were really looking up into theroof of the world, when they glanced at it; but whenan old gentleman hastily kissed a young woman, andcommended her to the conductor as being one who wasgoing all the way to San Francisco alone, and thenrisked his life by stepping off the moving train,the vastness of the great American fact began to affectIsabel disagreeably. “Is n’t it toobig, Basil?” she pleaded, peering timidly outof the little municipal consciousness in which shehad been so long housed.—­In that seclusionshe had suffered certain original tendencies to increaseupon her; her nerves were more sensitive and electrical;her apprehensions had multiplied quite beyond the ratioof the dangers that beset her; and Basil had countedupon a tonic effect of the change the journey wouldmake in their daily lives. She looked ruefullyout of the window at the familiar suburbs whiskingout of sight, and the continental immensity that advanceddevouringly upon her. But they had the best sectionin the very centre of the sleeping-car,—­shedrew what consolation she could from the fact,—­andthe children’s premature demand for lunch helpedher to forget her anxieties; they began to be hungryas soon as the train started. She found that shehad not put up sandwiches enough; and when she toldBasil that he would have to get out somewhere andbuy some cold chicken, he asked her what in the worldhad become of that whole ham she had had boiled.It seemed to him, he said, that there was enough ofit to subsist them to Niagara and back; and he wenton as some men do, while Somerville vanished, and evenTufts College, which assails the Bostonian visionfrom every point of the compass, was shut out by thecurve at the foot of the Belmont hills.

They had chosen the Hoosac Tunnel route to Niagara,because, as Basil said, their experience of travelhad never yet included a very long tunnel, and itwould be a signal fact by which the children wouldalways remember the journey, if nothing else remarkablehappened to impress it upon them. Indeed, theywere so much concerned in it that they began to askwhen they should come to this tunnel, even before theybegan to ask for lunch; and the long time before theyreached it was not perceptibly shortened by Tom’squarter-hourly consultations of his father’swatch.

It scarcely seemed to Basil and Isabel that theirfellow-passengers were so interesting as their fellowpassengers used to be in their former days of travel.They were soberly dressed, and were all of a middle-agedsobriety of deportment, from which nothing salientoffered itself for conjecture or speculation; andthere was little within the car to take their mindsfrom the brilliant young world that flashed and sangby them outside. The belated spring had ripened,with its frequent rains, into the perfection of earlysummer; the grass was thicker and the foliage denserthan they had ever seen it before; and when they hadrun out into the hills beyond Fitchburg, they sawthe laurel in bloom. It was everywhere in thewoods, lurking like drifts among the underbrush, andoverflowing the tops, and stealing down the hollows,of the railroad embankments; a snow of blossom flushedwith a mist of pink. Its shy, wild beauty ceasedwhenever the train stopped, but the orioles made upfor its absence with their singing in the villagetrees about the stations; and though Fitchburg andAyer’s Junction and Athol are not names thatinvoke historical or romantic associations, the heartsof Basil and Isabel began to stir with the joy oftravel before they had passed these points. Atthe first Basil got out to buy the cold chicken whichhad been commanded, and he recognized in the keeperof the railroad restaurant their former conductor,who had been warned by the spirits never to travelwithout a flower of some sort carried between hislips, and who had preserved his own life and the livesof his passengers for many years by this simple device.His presence lent the sponge cake and rhubarb pie andbaked beans a supernatural interest, and reconciledBasil to the toughness of the athletic bird whichthe mystical ex-partner of fate had sold him; he justlyreflected that if he had heard the story of the restaurateur’ssuperstition in a foreign land, or another time, hewould have found in it a certain poetry. It wasthis willingness to find poetry in things around themthat kept his life and Isabel’s fresh, and theytaught their children the secret of their elixir.To be sure, it was only a genre poetry, but it wassuch as has always inspired English art and song; andnow the whole family enjoyed, as if it had been a passagefrom Goldsmith or Wordsworth, the flying sentimentof the railroad side. There was a simple interior

at one place,—­a small shanty, showing throughthe open door a cook stove surmounted by the eveningcoffee-pot, with a lazy cat outstretched upon thefloor in the middle distance, and an old woman standingjust outside the threshold to see the train go by,—­whichhad an unrivaled value till they came to a superannuatedcar on a siding in the woods, in which the railroadworkmen boarded—­some were lounging on theplatform and at the open windows, while others were“washing up” for supper, and the wholescene was full of holiday ease and sylvan comraderythat went to the hearts of the sympathetic spectators.Basil had lately been reading aloud the delightfulhistory of Rudder Grange, and the children, who hadmade their secret vows never to live in anything butan old canal-boat when they grew up, owned that therewere fascinating possibilities in a worn-out railroadcar.

The lovely Deerfield Valley began to open on eitherhand, with smooth stretches of the quiet river, andbreadths of grassy intervale and tableland; the elmsgrouped themselves like the trees of a park; here andthere the nearer hills broke away, and revealed long,deep, chasmed hollows, full of golden light and deliciousshadow. There were people rowing on the water;and every pretty town had some touch of picturesquenessor pastoral charm to offer: at Greenfield, therewere children playing in the new-mown hay along therailroad embankment; at Shelburne Falls, there wasa game of cricket going on (among the English operativesof the cutlery works, as Basil boldly asserted).They looked down from their car-window on a younglady swinging in a hammock, in her door-yard, andon an old gentleman hoeing his potatoes; a group ofgirls waved their handkerchiefs to the passing train,and a boy paused in weeding a garden-bed,—­andprobably denied that he had paused, later. Inthe mean time the golden haze along the mountain sidechanged to a clear, pearly lustre, and the quiet eveningpossessed the quiet landscape. They confessedto each other that it was all as sweet and beautifulas it used to be; and in fact they had seen palaces,in other days, which did not give them the pleasurethey found in a woodcutter’s shanty, losing itselfamong the shadows in a solitude of the hills.The tunnel, after this, was a gross and material sensation;but they joined the children in trying to hold andkeep it, and Basil let the boy time it by his watch.“Now,” said Tom, when five minutes weregone, “we are under the very centre of the mountain.”But the tunnel was like all accomplished facts, allhopes fulfilled, valueless to the soul, and scarcelyappreciable to the sense; and the children emergedat North Adams with but a mean opinion of that greatfeat of engineering. Basil drew a pretty moralfrom their experience. “If you rode upona comet you would be disappointed. Take my advice,and never ride upon a comet. I shouldn’tobject to your riding on a little meteor,—­youwould n’t expect much of that; but I warn youagainst comets; they are as bad as tunnels.”

The children thought this moral was a joke at theirexpense, and as they were a little sleepy they permittedthemselves the luxury of feeling trifled with.But they woke, refreshed and encouraged, from slumbersthat had evidently been unbroken, though they bothprotested that they had not slept a wink the wholenight, and gave themselves up to wonder at the interminablelevels of Western New York over which the train wasrunning. The longing to come to an edge, somewhere,that the New England traveler experiences on thisplain, was inarticulate with the children; but itbreathed in the sigh with which Isabel welcomed eventhe architectural inequalities of a city into whichthey drew in the early morning. This city showedto their weary eyes a noble stretch of river, fromthe waters of which lofty piles of buildings roseabruptly; and Isabel, being left to guess where theywere, could think of no other place so picturesqueas Rochester.

“Yes,” said her husband; “it isour own Enchanted City. I wonder if that unstintedhospitality is still dispensed by the good head waiterat the hotel where we stopped, to bridal parties whohave passed the ordeal of the haughty hotel clerk.I wonder what has become of that hotel clerk.Has he fallen, through pride, to some lower level,or has he bowed his arrogant spirit to the demandsof advancing civilization, and realized that he isthe servant, and not the master, of the public?I think I’ve noticed, since his time, a growingkindness in hotel clerks; or perhaps I have becomeof a more impressive presence; they certainly unbendto me a little more. I should like to go up toour hotel, and try myself on our old enemy, if heis still there. I can fancy how his shirt fronthas expanded in these twelve years past; he has growna little bald, after the fashion of middle-aged hotelclerks, but he parts his hair very much on one side,and brushes it squarely across his forehead to hidehis loss; the forefinger that he touches that littlesnapbell with, when he doesn’t look at you,must be very pudgy now. Come, let us get out andbreakfast at, Rochester; they will give us broiledwhitefish; and we can show the children where SamPatch jumped over Genesee Falls, and—­”

“No, no, Basil,” cried his wife.“It would be sacrilege! All that is sacredto those dear young days of ours; and I wouldn’tthink of trying to repeat it. Our own ghostswould rise up in that dining-room to reproach us forour intrusion! Oh, perhaps we have done a wickedthing in coming this journey! We ought to haveleft the past alone; we shall only mar our memoriesof all these beautiful places. Do you supposeBuffalo can be as poetical as it was then? Buffalo!The name does n’t invite the Muse very much.Perhaps it never was very poetical! Oh, Basil,dear, I’m afraid we have only come to find outthat we were mistaken about everything! Let’sleave Rochester alone, at any rate!”

I’m not troubled! We won’t disturbour dream of Rochester; but I don’t despairof Buffalo. I’m sure that Buffalo will beall that our fancy ever painted it. I believein Buffalo.”

“Well, well,” murmured Isabel, “Ihope you’re right;” and she put some thingstogether for leaving their car at Buffalo, while theywere still two hours away.

When they reached a place where the land mated itslevel with the level of the lake, they ran into awilderness of railroad cars, in a world where lifeseemed to be operated solely by locomotives and theirhelpless minions. The bellowing and bleatingtrains were arriving in every direction, not onlyalong the ground floor of the plain, but stately stretchesof trestle-work, which curved and extended across theplain, carried them to and fro overhead. Thetravelers owned that this railroad suburb had itsown impressiveness, and they said that the trestle-workwas as noble in effect as the lines of aqueduct thatstalk across the Roman Campagna. Perhaps thiswas because they had not seen the Campagna or itsaqueducts for a great while; but they were so gladto find themselves in the spirit of their former journeyagain that they were amiable to everything. Whenthe children first caught sight of the lake’sdelicious blue, and cried out that it was lovelierthan the sea, they felt quite a local pride in theirpreference. It was what Isabel had said twelveyears before, on first beholding the lake.

But they did not really see the lake till they hadtaken the train for Niagara Falls, after breakfastingin the depot, where the children, used to the severenative or the patronizing Irish ministrations of Bostonrestaurants and hotels, reveled for the first timein the affectionate devotion of a black waiter.There was already a ridiculous abundance and varietyon the table; but this waiter brought them strawberriesand again strawberries, and repeated plates of griddlecakes with maple syrup; and he hung over the backof first one chair and then another with an unselfishjoy in the appetites of the breakfasters which gaveBasil renewed hopes of his race. “Suchrapture in serving argues a largeness of nature whichwill be recognized hereafter,” he said, feelingabout in his waistcoat pocket for a quarter.It seemed a pity to render the waiter’s zealretroactively interested, but in view of the fact thathe possibly expected the quarter, there was nothingelse to do; and by a mysterious stroke of gratitudethe waiter delivered them into the hands of a friend,who took another quarter from them for carrying theirbags and wraps to the train. This second retainerapproved their admiration of the aesthetic forms andcolors of the depot colonnade; and being asked ifthat were the depot whose roof had fallen in some yearsbefore, proudly replied that it was.

“There were a great many killed, were n’tthere?” asked Basil, with sympathetic satisfactionin the disaster. The porter seemed humiliated;he confessed the mortifying truth that the loss oflife was small, but he recovered a just self-respectin adding, “If the roof had fallen in five minutessooner, it would have killed about three hundred people.”

Basil had promised the children a sight of the Rapidsbefore they reached the Falls, and they held him rigidlyaccountable from the moment they entered the train,and began to run out of the city between the riverand the canal. He attempted a diversion withthe canal boats, and tried to bring forward the subjectof Rudder Grange in that connection. They saidthat the canal boats were splendid, but they were lookingfor the Rapids now; and they declined to be interestedin a window in one of the boats, which Basil saidwas just like the window that the Rudder Granger andthe boarder had popped Pomona out of when they tookher for a burglar.

“You spoil those children, Basil,” saidhis wife, as they clambered over him, and clamoredfor the Rapids.

“At present I’m giving them an object-lessonin patience and self-denial; they are experiencingthe fact that they can’t have the Rapids tillthey get to them, and probably they’ll be disappointedin them when they arrive.”

In fact, they valued the Rapids very little more thanthe Hoosac Tunnel, when they came in sight of them,at last; and Basil had some question in his own mindwhether the Rapids had not dwindled since his formervisit. He did not breathe this doubt to Isabel,however, and she arrived at the Falls with unabatedexpectations. They were going to spend only halfa day there; and they turned into the station, awayfrom the phalanx of omnibuses, when they dismountedfrom their train. They seemed, as before, tobe the only passengers who had arrived, and they foundan abundant choice of carriages waiting in the street,outside the station. The Niagara hackman mayonce have been a predatory and very rampant animal,but public opinion, long expressed through the publicprints, has reduced him to silence and meekness.Apparently, he may not so much as beckon with hiswhip to the arriving wayfarer; it is certain that hecannot cross the pavement to the station door; andBasil, inviting one of them to negotiation, was himselfrequired by the attendant policeman to step out tothe curbstone, and complete his transaction there.It was an impressive illustration of the power ofa free press, but upon the whole Basil found the effectmelancholy; it had the saddening quality which inheresin every sort of perfection. The hackman, reducedto entire order, appealed to his compassion, and hehad not the heart to beat him down from his moderatefirst demand, as perhaps he ought to have done.They drove directly to the cataract, and found themselvesin the pretty grove beside the American Fall, andin the air whose dampness was as familiar as if theyhad breathed it all their childhood. It was fullnow of the fragrance of some sort of wild blossom;and again they had that old, entrancing sense of themingled awfulness and loveliness of the great spectacle.This sylvan perfume, the gayety of the sunshine, themildness of the breeze that stirred the leaves overhead,

and the bird-singing that made itself heard amid theroar of the rapids and the solemn incessant plungeof the cataract, moved their hearts, and made themchildren with the boy and girl, who stood rapt fora moment and then broke into joyful wonder. Theycould sympathize with the ardor with which Tom longedto tempt fate at the brink of the river, and over thetops of the parapets which have been built along theedge of the precipice, and they equally entered intothe terror with which Bella screamed at his suicidalzeal. They joined her in restraining him; theyreduced him to a beggarly account of half a dozenstones, flung into the Rapids at not less than tenpaces from the brink; and they would not let him tossthe smallest pebble over the parapet, though he laughedto scorn the notion that anybody should be hurt bythem below.

It seemed to them that the triviality of man in thesurroundings of the Falls had increased with the lapseof time. There were more booths and bazaars,and more colored feather fans with whole birds spittedin the centres; and there was an offensive array ofblue and green and yellow glasses on the shore, throughwhich you were expected to look at the Falls gratis.They missed the simple dignity of the blanching Indianmaids, who used to squat about on the grass, with theirlaps full of moccasins and pin-cushions. But,as of old, the photographer came out of his saloon,and invited them to pose for a family group; representingthat the light and the spray were singularly propitious,and that everything in nature invited them to be taken.Basil put him off gently, for the sake of the timewhen he had refused to be photographed in a bridalgroup, and took refuge from him in the long low buildingfrom which you descend to the foot of the cataract.

The grove beside the American Fall has been inclosed,and named Prospect Park, by a company which exactshalf a dollar for admittance, and then makes you freeof all its wonders and conveniences, for which youonce had to pay severally. This is well enough;but formerly you could refuse to go down the inclinedtramway, and now you cannot, without feeling thatyou have failed to get your money’s worth.It was in this illogical spirit of economy that Basilinvited his family to the descent; but Isabel shookher head. “No, you go with the children,”she said, “and I will stay, here, till you getback;” her agonized countenance added, “andpray for you;” and Basil took his children oneither side of him, and rumbled down the, terribledescent with much of the excitement that attends travelin an open horse-car. When he stepped out of thecar he felt that increase of courage which comes toevery man after safely passing through danger.He resolved to brave the mists and slippery-stonesat the foot of the Fall; and he would have plungedat once into this fresh peril, if he had not beenprevented by the Prospect Park Company. Thisingenious association has built a large tunnel-like

shed quite to the water’s edge, so that you cannotview the cataract as you once could, at a reasonableremoteness, but must emerge from the building intoa storm of spray. The roof of the tunnel is paintedwith a lively effect in party-colored stripes, andis lettered “The Shadow of the Rock,”so that you take it at first to be an appeal to youraesthetic sense; but the real object of the companyis not apparent till you put your head out into thetempest, when you agree with the nearest guide—­andone is always very near—­that you had betterhave an oil-skin dress, as Basil did. He toldthe guide that he did not wish to go under the Fall,and the guide confidentially admitted that there wasno fun in that, any way; and in the mean time he equippedhim and his children for their foray into the mist.When they issued forth, under their friend’sleadership, Basil felt that, with his children clingingto each hand, he looked like some sort of animal withits young, and, though not unsocial by nature, hewas glad to be among strangers for the time. Theyclimbed hither and thither over the rocks, and liftedtheir streaming faces for the views which the guidepointed out; and in a rift of the spray they reallycaught one glorious glimpse of the whole sweep of theFall. The next instant the spray swirled back,and they were glad to turn for a sight of the rainbow,lying in a circle on the rocks as quietly and naturallyas if that had been the habit of rainbows ever sincethe flood. This was all there was to be done,and they streamed back into the tunnel, where theydisrobed in the face of a menacing placard, whichannounced that the hire of a guide and a dress forgoing under the Fall was one dollar.

“Will they make you pay a dollar for each ofus, papa?” asked Tom, fearfully.

“Oh, pooh, no!” returned Basil; “wehave n’t been under the Fall.” Buthe sought out the proprietor with a trembling heart.The proprietor was a man of severely logical mind;he said that the charge would be three dollars, forthey had had the use of the dresses and the guide justthe same as if they had gone under the Fall; and herefused to recognize anything misleading in the dressing-roomplacard: In fine, he left Basil without a legto stand upon. It was not so much the three dollarsas the sense of having been swindled that vexed him;and he instantly resolved not to share his annoyancewith Isabel. Why, indeed, should he put thatburden upon her? If she were none the wiser, shewould be none the poorer; and he ought to be willingto deny himself her sympathy for the sake of sparingher needless pain.

He met her at the top of the inclined tramway witha face of exemplary unconsciousness, and he listenedwith her to the tale their coachman told, as theysat in a pretty arbor looking out on the Rapids, ofa Frenchman and his wife. This Frenchman hadreturned, one morning, from a stroll on Goat Island,and reported with much apparent concern that his wifehad fallen into the water, and been carried over theFall. It was so natural for a man to grieve forthe loss of his wife, under the peculiar circ*mstances,that every one condoled with the widower; but whena few days later, her body was found, and the distractedhusband refused to come back from New York to herfuneral, there was a general regret that he had notbeen arrested. A flash of conviction illumed thewhole fact to Basil’s guilty consciousness:this unhappy Frenchman had paid a dollar for the useof an oil-skin suit at the foot of the Fall, and hadbeen ashamed to confess the swindle to his wife, till,in a moment of remorse and madness, he shouted thefact into her ear, and then Basil looked at the motherof his children, and registered a vow that if he gotaway from Niagara without being forced to a similarexcess he would confess his guilt to Isabel at thevery first act of spendthrift profusion she committed.The guide pointed out the rock in the Rapids to whichAvery had clung for twenty-four hours before he wascarried over the Falls, and to the morbid fancy ofthe deceitful husband Isabel’s bonnet ribbonsseemed to flutter from the pointed reef. He couldendure the pretty arbor no longer. “Come,children!” he cried, with a wild, unnatural gayety;“let us go to Goat Island, and see the Bridgeto the Three Sisters, that your mother was afraidto walk back on after she had crossed it.”

“For shame, Basil!” retorted Isabel.“You know it was you who were afraid of thatbridge.”

The children, who knew the story by heart, laughedwith their father at the monstrous pretension; andhis simulated hilarity only increased upon payinga toll of two dollars at the Goat Island bridge.

“What extortion!” cried Isabel, with anindignation that secretly unnerved him. He trembledupon the verge of confession; but he had finally themoral force to resist. He suffered her to computethe cost of their stay at Niagara without allowingthose three dollars to enter into her calculation;he even began to think what justificative extravagancehe could tempt her to. He suggested the purchaseof local bric-a-brac; he asked her if she would notlike to dine at the International, for old times’sake. But she answered, with disheartening virtue,that they must not think of such a thing, after whatthey had spent already. Nothing, perhaps, markedthe confirmed husband in Basil more than these hiddenfears and reluctances.

In the mean time Isabel ignorantly abandoned herselfto the charm of the place, which she found unimpaired,in spite of the reported ravages of improvement aboutNiagara. Goat Island was still the sylvan solitudeof twelve years ago, haunted by even fewer nymphsand dryads than of old. The air was full of theperfume that scented it at Prospect Park; the leavesshowered them with shade and sun, as they drove along.“If it were not for the children here,”she said, “I should think that our first driveon Goat Island had never ended.”

She sighed a little, and Basil leaned forward andtook her hand in his. “It never has ended;it’s the same drive; only we are younger now,and enjoy it more.” It always touched himwhen Isabel was sentimental about the past, for theyears had tended to make her rather more seriouslymaternal towards him than towards the other children;and he recognized that these fond reminiscences werethe expression of the girlhood still lurking deepwithin her heart.

She shook her head. “No, but I’mwilling the children should be young in our place.It’s only fair they should have their turn.”

She remained in the carriage, while Basil visitedthe various points of view on Luna Island with theboy and girl. A boy is probably of considerableinterest to himself, and a man looks back at his ownboyhood with some pathos. But in his actualitya boy has very little to commend him to the tolerationof other human beings. Tom was very well, as boysgo; but now his contribution to the common enjoymentwas to venture as near as possible to all perilousedges; to throw stones into the water, and to makeas if to throw them over precipices on the people below;to pepper his father with questions, and to collectcumbrous mementos of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms.He kept the carriage waiting a good five minutes,while he could cut his initials on a band-rail.“You can come back and see ’em on yourbridal tower,” said the driver. Isabel gavea little start, as if she had almost thought of somethingshe was trying to think of.

They occasionally met ladies driving, and sometimesthey encountered a couple making a tour of the islandon foot. But none of these people were young,and Basil reported that the Three Sisters were inhabitedonly by persons of like maturity; even a group ofpeople who were eating lunch to the music of the shoutingRapids, on the outer edge of the last Sister, wereno younger, apparently.

Isabel did not get out of the carriage to verify hisreport; she preferred to refute his story of her formerpanic on those islands by remaining serenely seatedwhile he visited them. She thus lost a superbnovelty which nature has lately added to the wondersof this Fall, in that place at the edge of the greatHorse Shoe where the rock has fallen and left a peculiarlyshaped chasm: through this the spray leaps upfrom below, and flashes a hundred feet into the air,in rocket-like jets and points, and then breaks anddissolves away in the pyrotechnic curves of a perpetualFourth of July. Basil said something like thisin celebrating the display, with the purpose of renderingher loss more poignant; but she replied, with tranquilpiety, that she would rather keep her Niagara unchanged;and she declared that, as she understood him, theremust be something rather cheap and conscious in thenew feature. She approved, however, of the changethat had removed that foolish little Terrapin Towerfrom the brink on which it stood, and she confessedthat she could have enjoyed a little variety in thestories the driver told them of the Indian burial-groundon the island: they were exactly the stories sheand Basil had heard twelve years before, and the ill-starredgoats, from which the island took its name, perishedonce more in his narrative.

Under the influence of his romances our travelersbegan to find the whole scene hackneyed; and theywere glad to part from him a little sooner than theyhad bargained to do. They strolled about the anomalousvillage on foot, and once more marveled at the paucityof travel and the enormity of the local preparation.Surely the hotels are nowhere else in the world solarge! Could there ever have been visitors enoughat Niagara to fill them? They were built so bigfor some good reason, no doubt; but it is no moreapparent than why all these magnificent equipages arewaiting about the empty streets for the people whonever come to hire them.

“It seems to me that I don’t see so manystrangers here as I used,” Basil had suggestedto their driver.

“Oh, they have n’t commenced coming yet,”he replied, with hardy cheerfulness, and pretendedthat they were plenty enough in July and August.

They went to dine at the modest restaurant of a coloredman, who advertised a table d’hote dinner ona board at his door; and they put their misgivingsto him, which seemed to grieve him, and he contendedthat Niagara was as prosperous and as much resortedto as ever. In fact, they observed that theirregret for the supposed decline of the Falls as asummer resort was nowhere popular in the village, andthey desisted in their offers of sympathy, after theirrebuff from the restaurateur.

Basil got his family away to the station after dinner,and left them there, while he walked down the villagestreet, for a closer inspection of the hotels.At the door of the largest a pair of children sportedin the solitude, as fearlessly as the birds on Selkirk’sisland; looking into the hotel, he saw a few portersand call-boys seated in statuesque repose againstthe wall, while the clerk pined in dreamless inactivitybehind the register; some deserted ladies flitted throughthe door of the parlor at the side. He recalledthe evening of his former visit, when he and Isabelhad met the Ellisons in that parlor, and it seemed,in the retrospect, a scene of the wildest gayety.He turned for consolation into the barber’sshop, where he found himself the only customer, andno busy sound of “Next” greeted his ear.But the barber, like all the rest, said that Niagarawas not unusually empty; and he came out feeling bewilderedand defrauded. Surely the agent of the boats whichdescend the Rapids of the St. Lawrence must be frank,if Basil went to him and pretended that he was goingto buy a ticket. But a glance at the agent’ssign showed Basil that the agent, with his brave jollityof manner and his impressive “Good-morning,”had passed away from the deceits of travel, and thathe was now inherited by his widow, who in turn wasabsent, and temporarily represented by their son.The boy, in supplying Basil with an advertisem*ntof the line, made a specious show of haste, as if therewere a long queue of tourists waiting behind him tobe served with tickets. Perhaps there was, indeed,a spectral line there, but Basil was the only touristpresent in the flesh, and he shivered in his isolation,and fled with the advertisem*nt in his hand. Isabelmet him at the door of the station with a frightenedface.

“Basil,” she cried, “I have foundout what the trouble is! Where are the brides?”

He took her outstretched hands in his, and passingone of them through his arm walked with her apartfrom the children, who were examining at the news-man’sbooth the moccasins and the birchbark bric-a-brac ofthe Irish aborigines, and the cups and vases of Niagaraspar imported from Devonshire.

“My dear,” he said, “there are nobrides; everybody was married twelve years ago, andthe brides are middle-aged mothers of families now,and don’t come to Niagara if they are wise.”

“Yes,” she desolately asserted, “thatis so! Something has been hanging over me eversince we came, and suddenly I realized that it wasthe absence of the brides. But—­but—­downat the hotels—­Didn’t you see anythingbridal there? When the omnibuses arrived, wasthere no burst of minstrelsy? Was there—­”

She could not go on, but sank nervelessly into thenearest seat.

“Perhaps,” said Basil, dreamily regardingthe contest of Tom and Bella for a newly-purchasedpaper of sour cherries, and helplessly forecastingin his remoter mind the probable consequences, “therewere both brides and minstrelsy at the hotel, if Ihad only had the eyes to see and the ears to hear.In this world, my dear, we are always of our own time,and we live amid contemporary things. I daresaythere were middle-aged people at Niagara when we werehere before, but we did not meet them, nor they us.I daresay that the place is now swarming with bridalcouples, and it is because they are invisible andinaudible to us that it seems such a howling wilderness.But the hotel clerks and the restaurateurs and thehackmen know them, and that is the reason why theyreceive with surprise and even offense our sympathyfor their loneliness. Do you suppose, Isabel,that if you were to lay your head on my shoulder, ina bridal manner, it would do anything to bring usen rapport with that lost bridal world again?”

Isabel caught away her hand. “Basil,”she cried, “it would be disgusting! I wouldn’tdo it for the world—­not even for that world.I saw one middle-aged couple on Goat Island, whileyou were down at the Cave of the Winds, or somewhere,with the children. They were sitting on some steps,he a step below her, and he seemed to want to put hishead on her knee; but I gazed at him sternly, andhe didn’t dare. We should look like them,if we yielded to any outburst of affection. Don’tyou think we should look like them?”

“I don’t know,” said Basil.“You are certainly a little wrinkled, my dear.”

“And you are very fat, Basil.”

They glanced at each other with a flash of resentment,and then they both laughed. “We couldn’tlook young if we quarreled a week,” he said.“We had better content ourselves with feelingyoung, as I hope we shall do if we live to be ninety.It will be the loss of others if they don’t seeour bloom upon us. Shall I get you a paper ofcherries, Isabel? The children seem to be enjoyingthem.”

Isabel sprang upon her offspring with a cry of despair.“Oh, what shall I do? Now we shall nothave a wink of sleep with them to-night. Whereis that nux?” She hunted for the medicine inher bag, and the children submitted; for they hadeaten all the cherries, and they took their medicinewithout a murmur. “I wonder at your lettingthem eat the sour things, Basil,” said theirmother, when the children bad run off to the newsstandagain.

“I wonder that you left me to see what theywere doing,” promptly retorted their father.

“It was your nonsense about the brides,”said Isabel; “and I think this has been a lessonto us. Don’t let them get anything elseto eat, dearest.”

“They are safe; they have no more money.They are frugally confining themselves to the admirationof the Japanese bows and arrows yonder. Why haveour Indians taken to making Japanese bows and arrows?”

Isabel despised the small pleasantry. “Thenyou saw nobody at the hotel?” she asked.

“Not even the Ellisons,” said Basil.

“Ah, yes,” said Isabel; “that waswhere we met them. How long ago it seems!And poor little Kitty! I wonder what has becomeof them? But I’m glad they’re nothere. That’s what makes you realize yourage: meeting the same people in the same placea great while after, and seeing how old—­they’vegrown. I don’t think I could bear to seeKitty Ellison again. I’m glad she did n’tcome to visit us in Boston, though, after what happened,she could n’t, poor thing! I wonder if she’s ever regretted her breaking with him in theway she did. It’s a very painful thingto think of,—­such an inconclusive conclusion;it always seemed as if they ought to meet again, somewhere.”

“I don’t believe she ever wished it.”

“A man can’t tell what a woman wishes.”

“Well, neither can a woman,” returnedBasil, lightly.

His wife remained serious. “It was a veryfine point,—­a very little thing to rejecta man for. I felt that when I first read her letterabout it.”

Basil yawned. “I don’t believe Iever knew just what the point was.”

“Oh yes, you did; but you forget everything.You know that they met two Boston ladies just afterthey were engaged, and she believed that he did n’tintroduce her because he was ashamed of her countrifiedappearance before them.”

“It was a pretty fine point,” said Basil,and he laughed provokingly.

“He might not have meant to ignore her,”answered Isabel thoughtfully; “he might havechosen not to introduce her because he felt too proudof her to subject her to any possible misappreciationfrom them. You might have looked at it in thatway.”

“Why didn’t you look at it in that way?You advised her against giving him another chance.Why did you?”

“Why?” repeated Isabel, absently.“Oh, a woman does n’t judge a man by whathe does, but by what he is! I knew that if shedismissed him it was because she never really hadtrusted or could trust his love; and I thought shehad better not make another trial.”

“Well, very possibly you were right. Atany rate, you have the consolation of knowing thatit’s too late to help it now.”

“Yes, it’s too late,” said Isabel;and her thoughts went back to her meeting with theyoung girl whom she had liked so much, and whose afterhistory had interested her so painfully. It seemedto her a hard world that could come to nothing betterthan that for the girl whom she had seen in her firstglimpse of it that night. Where was she now?What had become of her? If she had married thatman, would she have been any happier? Marriagewas not the poetic dream of perfect union that a girlimagines it; she herself had found that out. Itwas a state of trial, of probation; it was an ordeal,not an ecstasy. If she and Basil had broken eachother’s hearts and parted, would not the fragmentsof their lives have been on a much finer, much higherplane? Had not the commonplace, every-day experiencesof marriage vulgarized them both? To be sure,there were the children; but if they had never hadthe children, she would never have missed them; andif Basil had, for example, died just before they weremarried—­She started from this wicked reverie,and ran towards her husband, whose broad, honest back,with no visible neck or shirt-collar, was turned towardsher, as he stood, with his head thrown up, studyinga time-table on the wall; she passed her arm convulsivelythrough his, and pulled him away.

“It’s time to be getting our bags outto the train, Basil! Come, Bella! Tom, we’regoing!”

The children reluctantly turned from the newsman’strumpery, and they all went out to the track, andtook seats on the benches under the colonnade.While they waited; the train for Buffalo drew in, andthey remained watching it till it started. Inthe last car that passed them, when it was fairlyunder way, a face looked full at Isabel from one ofthe windows. In that moment of astonishment sheforgot to observe whether it was sad or glad; sheonly saw, or believed she saw, the light of recognitiondawn into its eyes, and then it was gone.

“Basil!” she cried, “stop the train!That was Kitty Ellison!”

“Oh no, it wasn’t,” said Basil,easily. “It looked like her; but it lookedat least ten years older.”

“Why, of course it was! We’re allten years older,” returned his wife in suchindignation at his stupidity that she neglected toinsist upon his stopping the train, which was rapidlydiminishing in the perspective.

He declared it was only a fancied resemblance; shecontended that this was in the neighborhood of Eriecreek,and it must be Kitty; and thus one of their most inveteratedisagreements began.

Their own train drew into the depot, and they disputedupon the fact in question till they entered on thepassage of the Suspension Bridge. Then Basilrose and called the children to his side. On theleft hand, far up the river, the great Fall shows,with its mists at its foot and its rainbow on itsbrow, as silent and still as if it were vastly paintedthere; and below the bridge on the right, leap theRapids in the narrow gorge, like seas on a rocky shore.“Look on both sides, now,” he said tothe children. “Isabel you must see this!”

Isabel had been preparing for the passage of thisbridge ever since she left Boston. “Never!”she exclaimed. She instantly closed her eyes,and hid her face in her handkerchief. Thanksto this precaution of hers, the train crossed thebridge in perfect safety.

PG EDITORS BOOKMARKS:

All luckiest or the unluckiest,the healthiest or the sickest
All the loveliness that existsoutside of you, dearest is little
Amusing world, if you do notrefuse to be amused
At heart every man is a smuggler
Beautiful with the radianceof loving and being loved
Bewildering labyrinth of error
Biggest place is always thekindest as well as the cruelest
Brown-stone fronts
Civilly protested and consented
Coldly and inaccessibly vigilant
Collective silence which passesfor sociality
Deadly summer day
Dinner unites the idea ofpleasure and duty
Dog that had plainly madeup his mind to go mad
Evil which will not let aman forgive his victim
Feeblest-minded are sure tolead the talk
Feeling of contempt for hisunambitious destination
Feeling rather ashamed,—­forhe had laughed too
Glad; which considering, theyceased to be
Guilty rapture of a deliberatedereliction
Happiness built upon and hedgedabout with misery
Happiness is so unreasonable
Headache darkens the universewhile it lasts
Heart that forgives but doesnot forget
Helplessness accounts formany heroic facts in the world
Helplessness begets a senseof irresponsibility
I supposed I had the pleasureof my wife’s acquaintance
I want to be sorry upon theeasiest possible terms
I’m not afraid—­I’mawfully demoralized
Indulge safely in the pleasuresof autobiography
It ’s the same as apromise, your not saying you wouldn’t
It had come as all such calamitiescome, from nothing
Jesting mood in the face ofall embarrassments
Long life of holidays whichis happy marriage
Married the whole mystifyingworld of womankind
Muddy draught which impudentlyaffected to be coffee
Never could have an emotionwithout desiring to analyze it
Nothing so apt to end in mutualdislike,—­except gratitude
Nothing so sad to her as abride, unless it’s a young mother
Oblivion of sleep
Only so much clothing as thelaw compelled
Parkman
Patronizing spirit of travellersin a foreign country
Rejoice in everything thatI haven’t done
Seemed the last phase of aworld presently to be destroyed
Self-sufficiency, withoutit* vulgarity
So hard to give up doing anythingwe have meant to do
So old a world and gropingstill
The knowledge of your helplessnessin any circ*mstances
There is little proportion

about either pain or pleasure
They can only do harm by anexpression of sympathy
Tragical character of heat
Used to having his decisionsreached without his knowledge
Vexed by a sense of his ownpitifulness
Voice of the common imbecilityand incoherence
Weariness of buying
Willingness to find poetryin things around them

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

By William Dean Howells

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

The following story was the first fruit of my NewYork life when I began to live it after my quarterof a century in Cambridge and Boston, ending in 1889;and I used my own transition to the commercial metropolisin framing the experience which was wholly that ofmy supposititious literary adventurer. He wasa character whom, with his wife, I have employed insome six or eight other stories, and whom I made asmuch the hero and heroine of ‘Their WeddingJourney’ as the slight fable would bear.In venturing out of my adoptive New England, whereI had found myself at home with many imaginary friends,I found it natural to ask the company of these familiaracquaintances, but their company was not to be hadat once for the asking. When I began speakingof them as Basil and Isabel, in the fashion of ‘TheirWedding Journey,’ they would not respond withthe effect of early middle age which I desired in them.They remained wilfully, not to say woodenly, the youngbridal pair of that romance, without the promise ofnovel functioning. It was not till I tried addressingthem as March and Mrs. March that they stirred undermy hand with fresh impulse, and set about the workassigned them as people in something more than theirsecond youth.

The scene into which I had invited them to figurefilled the largest canvas I had yet allowed myself;and, though ’A Hazard of New Fortunes was notthe first story I had written with the printer at myheels, it was the first which took its own time toprescribe its own dimensions. I had the generaldesign well in mind when I began to write it, but asit advanced it compelled into its course incidents,interests, individualities, which I had not knownlay near, and it specialized and amplified at pointswhich I had not always meant to touch, though I shouldnot like to intimate anything mystical in the fact.It became, to my thinking, the most vital of my fictions,through my quickened interest in the life about me,at a moment of great psychological import. Wehad passed through a period of strong emotioning inthe direction of the humaner economics, if I may phraseit so; the rich seemed not so much to despise thepoor, the poor did not so hopelessly repine. Thesolution of the riddle of the painful earth throughthe dreams of Henry George, through the dreams ofEdward Bellamy, through the dreams of all the generousvisionaries of the past, seemed not impossibly faroff. That shedding of blood which is for the

remission of sins had been symbolized by the bombsand scaffolds of Chicago, and the hearts of those whofelt the wrongs bound up with our rights, the slaveryimplicated in our liberty, were thrilling with griefsand hopes hitherto strange to the average Americanbreast. Opportunely for me there was a great street-carstrike in New York, and the story began to find itsway to issues nobler and larger than those of thelove-affairs common to fiction. I was in my fifty-secondyear when I took it up, and in the prime, such as itwas, of my powers. The scene which I had chosenappealed prodigiously to me, and the action passedas nearly without my conscious agency as I ever allowmyself to think such things happen.

The opening chapters were written in a fine, old fashionedapartment house which had once been a family house,and in an uppermost room of which I could look frommy work across the trees of the little park in StuyvesantSquare to the towers of St. George’s Church.Then later in the spring of 1889 the unfinished novelwas carried to a country house on the Belmont borderof Cambridge. There I must have written very rapidlyto have pressed it to conclusion before the summerended. It came, indeed, so easily from the penthat I had the misgiving which I always have of thingswhich do not cost me great trouble.

There is nothing in the book with which I amused myselfmore than the house-hunting of the Marches when theywere placing themselves in New York; and if the contemporaryreader should turn for instruction to the pages inwhich their experience is detailed I assure him thathe may trust their fidelity and accuracy in the articleof New York housing as it was early in the last decadeof the last century: I mean, the housing of peopleof such moderate means as the Marches. In my zealfor truth I did not distinguish between reality andactuality in this or other matters—­thatis, one was as precious to me as the other. Butthe types here portrayed are as true as ever theywere, though the world in which they were findingtheir habitat is wonderfully, almost incredibly different.Yet it is not wholly different, for a young literarypair now adventuring in New York might easily parallelthe experience of the Marches with their own, if notfor so little money; many phases of New York housingare better, but all are dearer. Other aspectsof the material city have undergone a transformationmuch more wonderful. I find that in my book itspopulation is once modestly spoken of as two millions,but now in twenty years it is twice as great, and thegrandeur as well as grandiosity of its forms is doublyapparent. The transitional public that then mopedabout in mildly tinkling horse-cars is now hurriedback and forth in clanging trolleys, in honking andwhirring motors; the Elevated road which was the lastword of speed is undermined by the Subway, shootingits swift shuttles through the subterranean woof ofthe city’s haste. From these feet let thewitness infer our whole massive Hercules, a bulk thatsprawls and stretches beyond the rivers through thetunnels piercing their beds and that towers into theskies with innumerable tops—­a Herculesblent of Briareus and Cerberus, but not so bad a monsteras it seemed then to threaten becoming.

Certain hopes of truer and better conditions on whichmy heart was fixed twenty years ago are not less dear,and they are by no means touched with despair, thoughthey have not yet found the fulfilment which I wouldthen have prophesied for them. Events have notwholly played them false; events have not halted,though they have marched with a slowness that mightaffect a younger observer as marking time. Theywho were then mindful of the poor have not forgottenthem, and what is better the poor have not often forgottenthemselves in violences such as offered me the materialof tragedy and pathos in my story. In my qualityof artist I could not regret these, and I gratefullyrealize that they offered me the opportunity of amore strenuous action, a more impressive catastrophethan I could have achieved without them. Theytended to give the whole fable dignity and doubtlessmade for its success as a book. As a serial ithad crept a sluggish course before a public apparentlyso unmindful of it that no rumor of its acceptanceor rejection reached the writer during the half yearof its publication; but it rose in book form from thatfailure and stood upon its feet and went its way togreater favor than any book of his had yet enjoyed.I hope that my recognition of the fact will not seemlike boasting, but that the reader will regard it asa special confidence from the author and will letit go no farther.

Kittery point, Maine, July, 1909.

PART FIRST

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNESI.

“Now, you think this thing over, March, andlet me know the last of next week,” said Fulkerson.He got up from the chair which he had been sittingastride, with his face to its back, and tilting towardMarch on its hind-legs, and came and rapped upon histable with his thin bamboo stick. “Whatyou want to do is to get out of the insurance business,anyway. You acknowledge that yourself. Younever liked it, and now it makes you sick; in otherwords, it’s killing you. You ain’tan insurance man by nature. You’re a natural-bornliterary man, and you’ve been going against thegrain. Now, I offer you a chance to go with thegrain. I don’t say you’re going tomake your everlasting fortune, but I’ll giveyou a living salary, and if the thing succeeds you’llshare in its success. We’ll all share inits success. That’s the beauty of it.I tell you, March, this is the greatest idea thathas been struck since”—­Fulkerson stoppedand searched his mind for a fit image—­“sincethe creation of man.”

He put his leg up over the corner of March’stable and gave himself a sharp cut on the thigh, andleaned forward to get the full effect of his wordsupon his listener.

March had his hands clasped together behind his head,and he took one of them down long enough to put hisinkstand and mucilage-bottle out of Fulkerson’sway. After many years’ experiment of a mustacheand whiskers, he now wore his grizzled beard full,but cropped close; it gave him a certain grimness,corrected by the gentleness of his eyes.

“Some people don’t think much of the creationof man nowadays. Why stop at that? Why notsay since the morning stars sang together?”

“No, sir; no, sir! I don’t want toclaim too much, and I draw the line at the creationof man. I’m satisfied with that. Butif you want to ring the morning stars into the prospectusall right; I won’t go back on you.”

“But I don’t understand why you’veset your mind on me,” March said. “Ihaven’t had, any magazine experience, you knowthat; and I haven’t seriously attempted to doanything in literature since I was married. Igave up smoking and the Muse together. I supposeI could still manage a cigar, but I don’t believeI could—­”

“Muse worth a cent.” Fulkerson tookthe thought out of his mouth and put it into his ownwords. “I know. Well, I don’twant you to. I don’t care if you neverwrite a line for the thing, though you needn’treject anything of yours, if it happens to be good,on that account. And I don’t want muchexperience in my editor; rather not have it. Youtold me, didn’t you, that you used to do somenewspaper work before you settled down?”

“Yes; I thought my lines were permanently castin those places once. It was more an accidentthan anything else that I got into the insurance business.I suppose I secretly hoped that if I made my livingby something utterly different, I could come morefreshly to literature proper in my leisure.”

“I see; and you found the insurance businesstoo many, for you. Well, anyway, you’vealways had a hankering for the inkpots; and the factthat you first gave me the idea of this thing showsthat you’ve done more or less thinking aboutmagazines.”

“Yes—­less.”

“Well, all right. Now don’t you betroubled. I know what I want, generally, speaking,and in this particular instance I want you. Imight get a man of more experience, but I should probablyget a man of more prejudice and self-conceit alongwith him, and a man with a following of the literaryhangers-on that are sure to get round an editor sooneror later. I want to start fair, and I’vefound out in the syndicate business all the men thatare worth having. But they know me, and they don’tknow you, and that’s where we shall have thepull on them. They won’t be able to workthe thing. Don’t you be anxious about theexperience. I’ve got experience enoughof my own to run a dozen editors. What I wantis an editor who has taste, and you’ve got it;and conscience, and you’ve got it; and horsesense, and you’ve got that. And I like youbecause you’re a Western man, and I’manother. I do cotton to a Western man when I findhim off East here, holding his own with the best of’em, and showing ’em that he’s justas much civilized as they are. We both know whatit is to have our bright home in the setting sun;heigh?”

“I think we Western men who’ve come Eastare apt to take ourselves a little too objectivelyand to feel ourselves rather more representative thanwe need,” March remarked.

Fulkerson was delighted. “You’vehit it! We do! We are!”

“And as for holding my own, I’m not veryproud of what I’ve done in that way; it’sbeen very little to hold. But I know what youmean, Fulkerson, and I’ve felt the same thingmyself; it warmed me toward you when we first met.I can’t help suffusing a little to any man whenI hear that he was born on the other side of the Alleghanies.It’s perfectly stupid. I despise the samething when I see it in Boston people.”

Fulkerson pulled first one of his blond whiskers andthen the other, and twisted the end of each into apoint, which he left to untwine itself. He fixedMarch with his little eyes, which had a curious innocencein their cunning, and tapped the desk immediatelyin front of him. “What I like about youis that you’re broad in your sympathies.The first time I saw you, that night on the Quebecboat, I said to myself: ’There’s aman I want to know. There’s a human being.’I was a little afraid of Mrs. March and the children,but I felt at home with you—­thoroughlydomesticated—­before I passed a word withyou; and when you spoke first, and opened up witha joke over that fellow’s tableful of light literatureand Indian moccasins and birch-bark toy canoes andstereoscopic views, I knew that we were brothers-spiritualtwins. I recognized the Western style of fun,and I thought, when you said you were from Boston,that it was some of the same. But I see now thatit* being a cold fact, as far as the last fifteenor twenty years count, is just so much gain. Youknow both sections, and you can make this thing go,from ocean to ocean.”

“We might ring that into the prospectus, too,”March suggested, with a smile. “You mightcall the thing ‘From Sea to Sea.’By-the-way, what are you going to call it?”

“I haven’t decided yet; that’s oneof the things I wanted to talk with you about.I had thought of ‘The Syndicate’; but itsounds kind of dry, and doesn’t seem to coverthe ground exactly. I should like something thatwould express the co-operative character of the thing,but I don’t know as I can get it.”

“Might call it ’The Mutual’.”

“They’d think it was an insurance paper.No, that won’t do. But Mutual comes prettynear the idea. If we could get something likethat, it would pique curiosity; and then if we couldget paragraphs afloat explaining that the contributorswere to be paid according to the sales, it would bea first-rate ad.”

He bent a wide, anxious, inquiring smile upon March,who suggested, lazily: “You might callit ‘The Round-Robin’. That would expressthe central idea of irresponsibility. As I understand,everybody is to share the profits and be exempt fromthe losses. Or, if I’m wrong, and the reverseis true, you might call it ‘The Army of Martyrs’.Come, that sounds attractive, Fulkerson! Or whatdo you think of ‘The Fifth Wheel’?That would forestall the criticism that there are toomany literary periodicals already. Or, if youwant to put forward the idea of complete independence,you could call it ‘The Free Lance’; or—­”

“Or ’The Hog on Ice’—­eitherstand up or fall down, you know,” Fulkersonbroke in coarsely. “But we’ll leavethe name of the magazine till we get the editor.I see the poison’s beginning to work in you,March; and if I had time I’d leave the resultto time. But I haven’t. I’vegot to know inside of the next week. To comedown to business with you, March, I sha’n’tstart this thing unless I can get you to take holdof it.”

He seemed to expect some acknowledgment, and Marchsaid, “Well, that’s very nice of you,Fulkerson.”

“No, sir; no, sir! I’ve always likedyou and wanted you ever since we met that first night.I had this thing inchoately in my mind then, when Iwas telling you about the newspaper syndicate business—­beautifulvision of a lot of literary fellows breaking loosefrom the bondage of publishers and playing it alone—­”

“You might call it ‘The Lone Hand’;that would be attractive,” March interrupted.“The whole West would know what you meant.”

Fulkerson was talking seriously, and March was listeningseriously; but they both broke off and laughed.Fulkerson got down off the table and made some turnsabout the room. It was growing late; the Octobersun had left the top of the tall windows; it was stillclear day, but it would soon be twilight; they hadbeen talking a long time. Fulkerson came andstood with his little feet wide apart, and bent hislittle lean, square face on March. “Seehere! How much do you get out of this thing here,anyway?”

“The insurance business?” March hesitateda moment and then said, with a certain effort of reserve,“At present about three thousand.”He looked up at Fulkerson with a glance, as if hehad a mind to enlarge upon the fact, and then droppedhis eyes without saying more.

Whether Fulkerson had not thought it so much or not,he said: “Well, I’ll give you thirty-fivehundred. Come! And your chances in the success.”

“We won’t count the chances in the success.And I don’t believe thirty-five hundred wouldgo any further in New York than three thousand inBoston.”

“But you don’t live on three thousandhere?”

“No; my wife has a little property.”

“Well, she won’t lose the income if yougo to New York. I suppose you pay ten or twelvehundred a year for your house here. You can getplenty of flats in New York for the same money; andI understand you can get all sorts of provisions forless than you pay now—­three or four centson the pound. Come!”

This was by no means the first talk they had had aboutthe matter; every three or four months during thepast two years the syndicate man had dropped in uponMarch to air the scheme and to get his impressionsof it. This had happened so often that it hadcome to be a sort of joke between them. But nowFulkerson clearly meant business, and March had a struggleto maintain himself in a firm poise of refusal.

“I dare say it wouldn’t—­orit needn’t-cost so very much more, but I don’twant to go to New York; or my wife doesn’t.It’s the same thing.”

“A good deal samer,” Fulkerson admitted.

March did not quite like his candor, and he went onwith dignity. “It’s very naturalshe shouldn’t. She has always lived in Boston;she’s attached to the place. Now, if youwere going to start ‘The Fifth Wheel’in Boston—­”

Fulkerson slowly and sadly shook his head, but decidedly.“Wouldn’t do. You might as well saySt. Louis or Cincinnati. There’s only onecity that belongs to the whole country, and that’sNew York.”

“Yes, I know,” sighed March; “andBoston belongs to the Bostonians, but they like youto make yourself at home while you’re visiting.”

“If you’ll agree to make phrases likethat, right along, and get them into ‘The Round-Robin’somehow, I’ll say four thousand,” saidFulkerson. “You think it over now, March.You talk it over with Mrs. March; I know you will,anyway; and I might as well make a virtue of advisingyou to do it. Tell her I advised you to do it,and you let me know before next Saturday what you’vedecided.”

March shut down the rolling top of his desk in thecorner of the room, and walked Fulkerson out beforehim. It was so late that the last of the chore-womenwho washed down the marble halls and stairs of thegreat building had wrung out her floor-cloth and departed,leaving spotless stone and a clean, damp smell inthe darkening corridors behind her.

“Couldn’t offer you such swell quartersin New York, March,” Fulkerson said, as he wenttack-tacking down the steps with his small boot-heels.“But I’ve got my eye on a little houseround in West Eleventh Street that I’m goingto fit up for my bachelor’s hall in the thirdstory, and adapt for ‘The Lone Hand’ inthe first and second, if this thing goes through;and I guess we’ll be pretty comfortable.It’s right on the Sand Strip—­no malariaof any kind.”

“I don’t know that I’m going toshare its salubrity with you yet,” March sighed,in an obvious travail which gave Fulkerson hopes.

“Oh yes, you are,” he coaxed. “Now,you talk it over with your wife. You give hera fair, unprejudiced chance at the thing on its merits,and I’m very much mistaken in Mrs. March ifshe doesn’t tell you to go in and win.We’re bound to win!”

They stood on the outside steps of the vast edificebeetling like a granite crag above them, with thestone groups of an allegory of life-insurance foreshortenedin the bas-relief overhead. March absently liftedhis eyes to it. It was suddenly strange afterso many years’ familiarity, and so was the well-knownstreet in its Saturday-evening solitude. He askedhimself, with prophetic homesickness, if it were anomen of what was to be. But he only said, musingly:“A fortnightly. You know that didn’twork in England. The fortnightly is publishedonce a month now.”

“It works in France,” Fulkerson retorted.“The ‘Revue des Deux Mondes’ isstill published twice a month. I guess we canmake it work in America—­with illustrations.”

“Going to have illustrations?”

“My dear boy! What are you giving me?Do I look like the sort of lunatic who would starta thing in the twilight of the nineteenth century withoutillustrations? Come off!”

“Ah, that complicates it! I don’tknow anything about art.” March’slook of discouragement confessed the hold the schemehad taken upon him.

“I don’t want you to!” Fulkersonretorted. “Don’t you suppose I shallhave an art man?”

“And will they—­the artists—­workat a reduced rate, too, like the writers, with thehopes of a share in the success?”

“Of course they will! And if I want anyparticular man, for a card, I’ll pay him bigmoney besides. But I can get plenty of first-ratesketches on my own terms. You’ll see!They’ll pour in!”

“Look here, Fulkerson,” said March, “you’dbetter call this fortnightly of yours ‘The Madnesso f the Half-Moon’; or ‘Bedlam Broke Loose’wouldn’t be bad! Why do you throw away allyour hard earnings on such a crazy venture? Don’tdo it!” The kindness which March had always felt,in spite of his wife’s first misgivings andreservations, for the merry, hopeful, slangy, energeticl*ttle creature trembled in his voice. They hadboth formed a friendship for Fulkerson during the weekthey were together in Quebec. When he was notworking the newspapers there, he went about with themover the familiar ground they were showing their children,and was simply grateful for the chance, as well asvery entertaining about it all. The childrenliked him, too; when they got the clew to his intention,and found that he was not quite serious in many ofthe things he said, they thought he was great fun.They were always glad when their father brought himhome on the occasion of Fulkerson’s visits toBoston; and Mrs. March, though of a charier hospitality,welcomed Fulkerson with a grateful sense of his admirationfor her husband. He had a way of treating Marchwith deference, as an older and abler man, and ofqualifying the freedom he used toward every one withan implication that March tolerated it voluntarily,which she thought very sweet and even refined.

“Ah, now you’re talking like a man anda brother,” said Fulkerson. “Why,March, old man, do you suppose I’d come on hereand try to talk you into this thing if I wasn’tmorally, if I wasn’t perfectly, sure of success?There isn’t any if or and about it. I knowmy ground, every inch; and I don’t stand aloneon it,” he added, with a significance which didnot escape March. “When you’ve madeup your mind I can give you the proof; but I’mnot at liberty now to say anything more. I tellyou it’s going to be a triumphal march fromthe word go, with coffee and lemonade for the processionalong the whole line. All you’ve got todo is to fall in.” He stretched out hishand to March. “You let me know as soonas you can.”

March deferred taking his hand till he could ask,“Where are you going?”

“Parker House. Take the eleven for NewYork to-night.”

“I thought I might walk your way.”March looked at his watch. “But I shouldn’thave time. Goodbye!”

He now let Fulkerson have his hand, and they exchangeda cordial pressure. Fulkerson started away ata quick, light pace. Half a block off he stopped,turned round, and, seeing March still standing wherehe had left him, he called back, joyously, “I’vegot the name!”

“What?”

“Every Other Week.”

“It isn’t bad.”

“Ta-ta!”

II.

All the way up to the South End March mentally prolongedhis talk with Fulkerson, and at his door in NankeenSquare he closed the parley with a plump refusal togo to New York on any terms. His daughter Bellawas lying in wait for him in the hall, and she threwher arms round his neck with the exuberance of herfourteen years and with something of the histrionicintention of her sex. He pressed on, with herclinging about him, to the library, and, in the glowof his decision against Fulkerson, kissed his wife,where she sat by the study lamp reading the Transcriptthrough her first pair of eye-glasses: it wasagreed in the family that she looked distinguishedin them, or, at any rate, cultivated. She tookthem off to give him a glance of question, and theirson Tom looked up from his book for a moment; he wasin his last year at the high school, and was preparingfor Harvard.

“I didn’t get away from the office tillhalf-past five,” March explained to his wife’sglance, “and then I walked. I suppose dinner’swaiting. I’m sorry, but I won’t doit any more.”

At table he tried to be gay with Bella, who babbledat him with a voluble pertness which her brother hadoften advised her parents to check in her, unlessthey wanted her to be universally despised.

“Papa!” she shouted at last, “you’renot listening!” As soon as possible his wifetold the children they might be excused. Thenshe asked, “What is it, Basil?”

“What is what?” he retorted, with a speciousbrightness that did not avail.

“What is on your mind?”

“How do you know there’s anything?”

“Your kissing me so when you came in, for onething.”

“Don’t I always kiss you when I come in?”

“Not now. I suppose it isn’t necessaryany more. ‘Cela va sans baiser.’”

“Yes, I guess it’s so; we get along withoutthe symbolism now.” He stopped, but sheknew that he had not finished.

“Is it about your business? Have they doneanything more?”

“No; I’m still in the dark. I don’tknow whether they mean to supplant me, or whetherthey ever did. But I wasn’t thinking aboutthat. Fulkerson has been to see me again.”

“Fulkerson?” She brightened at the name,and March smiled, too. “Why didn’tyou bring him to dinner?”

“I wanted to talk with you. Then you dolike him?”

“What has that got to do with it, Basil?”

“Nothing! nothing! That is, he was boringaway about that scheme of his again. He’sgot it into definite shape at last.”

“What shape?”

March outlined it for her, and his wife seized itsmain features with the intuitive sense of affairswhich makes women such good business-men when theywill let it.

“It sounds perfectly crazy,” she said,finally. “But it mayn’t be. Theonly thing I didn’t like about Mr. Fulkersonwas his always wanting to chance things. Butwhat have you got to do with it?”

“What have I got to do with it?” Marchtoyed with the delay the question gave him; then hesaid, with a sort of deprecatory laugh: “Itseems that Fulkerson has had his eye on me ever sincewe met that night on the Quebec boat. I openedup pretty freely to him, as you do to a man you neverexpect to see again, and when I found he was in thatnewspaper syndicate business I told him about my earlyliterary ambitions—­”

“You can’t say that I ever discouragedthem, Basil,” his wife put in. “Ishould have been willing, any time, to give up everythingfor them.”

“Well, he says that I first suggested this brilliantidea to him. Perhaps I did; I don’t remember.When he told me about his supplying literature tonewspapers for simultaneous publication, he says Iasked: ’Why not apply the principle ofco-operation to a magazine, and run it in the interestof the contributors?’ and that set him to thinking,and he thought out his plan of a periodical whichshould pay authors and artists a low price outrightfor their work and give them a chance of the profitsin the way of a percentage. After all, it isn’tso very different from the chances an author takeswhen he publishes a book. And Fulkerson thinksthat the novelty of the thing would pique public curiosity,if it didn’t arouse public sympathy. Andthe long and short of it is, Isabel, that he wantsme to help edit it.”

“To edit it?” His wife caught her breath,and she took a little time to realize the fact, whileshe stared hard at her husband to make sure he wasnot joking.

“Yes. He says he owes it all to me; thatI invented the idea—­the germ—­themicrobe.”

His wife had now realized the fact, at least in adegree that excluded trifling with it. “Thatis very honorable of Mr. Fulkerson; and if he owesit to you, it was the least he could do.”Having recognized her husband’s claim to thehonor done him, she began to kindle with a sense ofthe honor itself and the value of the opportunity.“It’s a very high compliment to you, Basil—­avery high compliment. And you could give up thiswretched insurance business that you’ve alwayshated so, and that’s making you so unhappy nowthat you think they’re going to take it fromyou. Give it up and take Mr. Fulkerson’soffer! It’s a perfect interposition, comingjust at this time! Why, do it! Mercy!”she suddenly arrested herself, “he wouldn’texpect you to get along on the possible profits?”Her face expressed the awfulness of the notion.

March smiled reassuringly, and waited to give himselfthe pleasure of the sensation he meant to give her.“If I’ll make striking phrases for it andedit it, too, he’ll give me four thousand dollars.”

He leaned back in his chair, and stuck his hands deepinto his pockets, and watched his wife’s face,luminous with the emotions that flashed through hermind-doubt, joy, anxiety.

“Basil! You don’t mean it! Why,take it! Take it instantly! Oh, what a thingto happen! Oh, what luck! But you deserveit, if you first suggested it. What an escape,what a triumph over all those hateful insurance people!Oh, Basil, I’m afraid he’ll change hismind! You ought to have accepted on the spot.You might have known I would approve, and you couldso easily have taken it back if I didn’t.Telegraph him now! Run right out with the despatch—­Orwe can send Tom!”

In these imperatives of Mrs. March’s there wasalways much of the conditional. She meant thathe should do what she said, if it were entirely right;and she never meant to be considered as having urgedhim.

“And suppose his enterprise went wrong?”her husband suggested.

“It won’t go wrong. Hasn’the made a success of his syndicate?”

“He says so—­yes.”

“Very well, then, it stands to reason that he’llsucceed in this, too. He wouldn’t undertakeit if he didn’t know it would succeed; he musthave capital.”

“It will take a great deal to get such a thinggoing; and even if he’s got an Angel behindhim—­”

She caught at the word—­“An Angel?”

“It’s what the theatrical people calla financial backer. He dropped a hint of somethingof that kind.”

“Of course, he’s got an Angel,”said his wife, promptly adopting the word. “Andeven if he hadn’t, still, Basil, I should bewilling to have you risk it. The risk isn’tso great, is it? We shouldn’t be ruinedif it failed altogether. With our stocks we havetwo thousand a year, anyway, and we could pinch throughon that till you got into some other business afterward,especially if we’d saved something out of yoursalary while it lasted. Basil, I want you totry it! I know it will give you a new lease oflife to have a congenial occupation.” Marchlaughed, but his wife persisted. “I’mall for your trying it, Basil; indeed I am. Ifit’s an experiment, you can give it up.”

“It can give me up, too.”

“Oh, nonsense! I guess there’s notmuch fear of that. Now, I want you to telegraphMr. Fulkerson, so that he’ll find the despatchwaiting for him when he gets to New York. I’lltake the whole responsibility, Basil, and I’llrisk all the consequences.”

III.

March’s face had sobered more and more as shefollowed one hopeful burst with another, and now itexpressed a positive pain. But he forced a smileand said: “There’s a little conditionattached. Where did you suppose it was to bepublished?”

“Why, in Boston, of course. Where elseshould it be published?”

She looked at him for the intention of his questionso searchingly that he quite gave up the attempt tobe gay about it. “No,” he said, gravely,“it’s to be published in New York.”

She fell back in her chair. “In New York?”She leaned forward over the table toward him, as ifto make sure that she heard aright, and said, withall the keen reproach that he could have expected:“In New York, Basil! Oh, how could youhave let me go on?”

He had a sufficiently rueful face in owning:“I oughtn’t to have done it, but I gotstarted wrong. I couldn’t help putting thebest foot, forward at first—­or as longas the whole thing was in the air. I didn’tknow that you would take so much to the general enterprise,or else I should have mentioned the New York conditionat once; but, of course, that puts an end to it.”

“Oh, of course,” she assented, sadly.“We couldn’t go to New York.”

“No, I know that,” he said; and with thisa perverse desire to tempt her to the impossibilityawoke in him, though he was really quite cold aboutthe affair himself now. “Fulkerson thoughtwe could get a nice flat in New York for about whatthe interest and taxes came to here, and provisionsare cheaper. But I should rather not experimentat my time of life. If I could have been caughtyounger, I might have been inured to New York, butI don’t believe I could stand it now.”

“How I hate to have you talk that way, Basil!You are young enough to try anything—­anywhere;but you know I don’t like New York. I don’tapprove of it. It’s so big, and so hideous!Of course I shouldn’t mind that; but I’vealways lived in Boston, and the children were bornand have all their friendships and associations here.”She added, with the helplessness that discreditedher good sense and did her injustice, “I havejust got them both into the Friday afternoon classat Papanti’s, and you know how difficult thatis.”

March could not fail to take advantage of an occasionlike this. “Well, that alone ought to settleit. Under the circ*mstances, it would be flyingin the face of Providence to leave Boston. Themere fact of a brilliant opening like that offeredme on ‘The Microbe,’ and the halcyon futurewhich Fulkerson promises if we’ll come to NewYork, is as dust in the balance against the advantagesof the Friday afternoon class.”

“Basil,” she appealed, solemnly, “haveI ever interfered with your career?”

“I never had any for you to interfere with,my dear.”

“Basil! Haven’t I always had faithin you? And don’t you suppose that if Ithought it would really be for your advancement I wouldgo to New York or anywhere with you?”

“No, my dear, I don’t,” he teased.“If it would be for my salvation, yes, perhaps;but not short of that; and I should have to prove bya cloud of witnesses that it would. I don’tblame you. I wasn’t born in Boston, butI understand how you feel. And really, my dear,”he added, without irony, “I never seriouslythought of asking you to go to New York. I wasdazzled by Fulkerson’s offer, I’ll ownthat; but his choice of me as editor sapped my confidencein him.”

“I don’t like to hear you say that, Basil,”she entreated.

“Well, of course there were mitigating circ*mstances.I could see that Fulkerson meant to keep the whip-handhimself, and that was reassuring. And, besides,if the Reciprocity Life should happen not to want myservices any longer, it wouldn’t be quite likegiving up a certainty; though, as a matter of business,I let Fulkerson get that impression; I felt rathersneaking to do it. But if the worst comes to theworst, I can look about for something to do in Boston;and, anyhow, people don’t starve on two thousanda year, though it’s convenient to have five.The fact is, I’m too old to change so radically.If you don’t like my saying that, then you are,Isabel, and so are the children. I’ve noright to take them from the home we’ve made,and to change the whole course of their lives, unlessI can assure them of something, and I can’t assurethem of anything. Boston is big enough for us,and it’s certainly prettier than New York.I always feel a little proud of hailing from Boston;my pleasure in the place mounts the farther I get awayfrom it. But I do appreciate it, my dear; I’veno more desire to leave it than you have. Youmay be sure that if you don’t want to take thechildren out of the Friday afternoon class, I don’twant to leave my library here, and all the ways I’vegot set in. We’ll keep on. Very likelythe company won’t supplant me, and if it does,and Watkins gets the place, he’ll give me asubordinate position of some sort. Cheer up, Isabel!I have put Satan and his angel, Fulkerson, behindme, and it’s all right. Let’s goin to the children.”

He came round the table to Isabel, where she sat ina growing distraction, and lifted her by the waistfrom her chair.

She sighed deeply. “Shall we tell the childrenabout it?”

“No. What’s the use, now?”

“There wouldn’t be any,” she assented.When they entered the family room, where the boy andgirl sat on either side of the lamp working out thelessons for Monday which they had left over from theday before, she asked, “Children, how wouldyou like to live in New York?”

Bella made haste to get in her word first. “Andgive up the Friday afternoon class?” she wailed.

Tom growled from his book, without lifting his eyes:“I shouldn’t want to go to Columbia.They haven’t got any dormitories, and you haveto board round anywhere. Are you going to NewYork?” He now deigned to look up at his father.

“No, Tom. You and Bella have decided meagainst it. Your perspective shows the affairin its true proportions. I had an offer to goto New York, but I’ve refused it.”

IV

March’s irony fell harmless from the children’spreoccupation with their own affairs, but he knewthat his wife felt it, and this added to the bitternesswhich prompted it. He blamed her for letting herprovincial narrowness prevent his accepting Fulkerson’soffer quite as much as if he had otherwise entirelywished to accept it. His world, like most worlds,had been superficially a disappointment. He wasno richer than at the beginning, though in marryinghe had given up some tastes, some preferences, someaspirations, in the hope of indulging them later, withlarger means and larger leisure. His wife hadnot urged him to do it; in fact, her pride, as shesaid, was in his fitness for the life he had renounced;but she had acquiesced, and they had been very happytogether. That is to say, they made up theirquarrels or ignored them.

They often accused each other of being selfish andindifferent, but she knew that he would always sacrificehimself for her and the children; and he, on his part,with many gibes and mockeries, wholly trusted in her.They had grown practically tolerant of each other’sdisagreeable traits; and the danger that really threatenedthem was that they should grow too well satisfiedwith themselves, if not with each other. Theywere not sentimental, they were rather matter-of-factin their motives; but they had both a sort of humorousfondness for sentimentality. They liked to playwith the romantic, from the safe vantage-ground oftheir real practicality, and to divine the poetryof the commonplace. Their peculiar point of viewseparated them from most other people, with whom theirmeans of self-comparison were not so good since theirmarriage as before. Then they had travelled andseen much of the world, and they had formed tasteswhich they had not always been able to indulge, butof which they felt that the possession reflected distinctionon them. It enabled them to look down upon thosewho were without such tastes; but they were not ill-natured,and so they did not look down so much with contemptas with amusem*nt. In their unfashionable neighborhoodthey had the fame of being not exclusive precisely,but very much wrapped up in themselves and their children.

Mrs. March was reputed to be very cultivated, andMr. March even more so, among the simpler folk aroundthem. Their house had some good pictures, whichher aunt had brought home from Europe in more affluentdays, and it abounded in books on which he spent morethan he ought. They had beautified it in everyway, and had unconsciously taken credit to them selvesfor it. They felt, with a glow almost of virtue,how perfectly it fitted their lives and their children’s,and they believed that somehow it expressed theircharacters—­that it was like them. Theywent out very little; she remained shut up in itsrefinement, working the good of her own; and he wentto his business, and hurried back to forget it, anddream his dream of intellectual achievement in the

flattering atmosphere of her sympathy. He couldnot conceal from himself that his divided life wassomewhat like Charles Lamb’s, and there weretimes when, as he had expressed to Fulkerson, he believedthat its division was favorable to the freshness ofhis interest in literature. It certainly keptit a high privilege, a sacred refuge. Now andthen he wrote something, and got it printed afterlong delays, and when they met on the St. LawrenceFulkerson had some of March’s verses in his pocket-book,which he had cut out of astray newspaper and carriedabout for years, because they pleased his fancy somuch; they formed an immediate bond of union betweenthe men when their authorship was traced and owned,and this gave a pretty color of romance to their acquaintance.But, for the most part, March was satisfied to read.He was proud of reading critically, and he kept inthe current of literary interests and controversies.It all seemed to him, and to his wife at second-hand,very meritorious; he could not help contrasting hislife and its inner elegance with that of other menwho had no such resources. He thought that hewas not arrogant about it, because he did full justiceto the good qualities of those other people; he congratulatedhimself upon the democratic instincts which enabledhim to do this; and neither he nor his wife supposedthat they were selfish persons. On the contrary,they were very sympathetic; there was no good causethat they did not wish well; they had a generous scornof all kinds of narrow-heartedness; if it had evercome into their way to sacrifice themselves for others,they thought they would have done so, but they neverasked why it had not come in their way. They werevery gentle and kind, even when most elusive; andthey taught their children to loathe all manner ofsocial cruelty. March was of so watchful a consciencein some respects that he denied himself the pensivepleasure of lapsing into the melancholy of unfulfilledaspirations; but he did not see that, if he had abandonedthem, it had been for what he held dearer; generallyhe felt as if he had turned from them with a high,altruistic aim. The practical expression of hislife was that it was enough to provide well for hisfamily; to have cultivated tastes, and to gratify themto the extent of his means; to be rather distinguished,even in the simplification of his desires. Hebelieved, and his wife believed, that if the timeever came when he really wished to make a sacrificeto the fulfilment of the aspirations so long postponed,she would be ready to join with heart and hand.

When he went to her room from his library, where sheleft him the whole evening with the children, he foundher before the glass thoughtfully removing the firstdismantling pin from her back hair.

“I can’t help feeling,” she grievedinto the mirror, “that it’s I who keepyou from accepting that offer. I know it is!I could go West with you, or into a new country—­anywhere;but New York terrifies me. I don’t likeNew York, I never did; it disheartens and distractsme; I can’t find myself in it; I shouldn’tknow how to shop. I know I’m foolish andnarrow and provincial,” she went on, “butI could never have any inner quiet in New York; Icouldn’t live in the spirit there. I supposepeople do. It can’t be that all these millions—­’

“Oh, not so bad as that!” March interposed,laughing. “There aren’t quite two.”

“I thought there were four or five. Well,no matter. You see what I am, Basil. I’mterribly limited. I couldn’t make my sympathiesgo round two million people; I should be wretched.I suppose I’m standing in the way of your highestinterest, but I can’t help it. We took eachother for better or worse, and you must try to bearwith me—­” She broke off and beganto cry.

“Stop it!” shouted March. “Itell you I never cared anything for Fulkerson’sscheme or entertained it seriously, and I shouldn’tif he’d proposed to carry it out in Boston.”This was not quite true, but in the retrospect itseemed sufficiently so for the purposes of argument.“Don’t say another word about it.The thing’s over now, and I don’t wantto think of it any more. We couldn’t changeits nature if we talked all night. But I wantyou to understand that it isn’t your limitationsthat are in the way. It’s mine. Ishouldn’t have the courage to take such a place;I don’t think I’m fit for it, and that’sthe long and short of it.”

“Oh, you don’t know how it hurts me tohave you say that, Basil.”

The next morning, as they sat together at breakfast,without the children, whom they let lie late on Sunday,Mrs. March said to her husband, silent over his fish-ballsand baked beans: “We will go to New York.I’ve decided it.”

“Well, it takes two to decide that,” Marchretorted. “We are not going to New York.”

“Yes, we are. I’ve thought it out.Now, listen.”

“Oh, I’m willing to listen,” heconsented, airily.

“You’ve always wanted to get out of theinsurance business, and now with that fear of beingturned out which you have you mustn’t neglectthis offer. I suppose it has its risks, but it’sa risk keeping on as we are; and perhaps you willmake a great success of it. I do want you to try,Basil. If I could once feel that you had fairlyseen what you could do in literature, I should diehappy.”

“Not immediately after, I hope,” he suggested,taking the second cup of coffee she had been pouringout for him. “And Boston?”

“We needn’t make a complete break.We can keep this place for the present, anyway; wecould let it for the winter, and come back in thesummer next year. It would be change enough fromNew York.”

“Fulkerson and I hadn’t got as far asto talk of a vacation.”

“No matter. The children and I could come.And if you didn’t like New York, or the enterprisefailed, you could get into something in Boston again;and we have enough to live on till you did. Yes,Basil, I’m going.”

“I can see by the way your chin trembles thatnothing could stop you. You may go to New Yorkif you wish, Isabel, but I shall stay here.”

“Be serious, Basil. I’m in earnest.”

“Serious? If I were any more serious Ishould shed tears. Come, my dear, I know whatyou mean, and if I had my heart set on this thing—­Fulkersonalways calls it ‘this thing’ I would cheerfullyaccept any sacrifice you could make to it. ButI’d rather not offer you up on a shrine I don’tfeel any particular faith in. I’m very comfortablewhere I am; that is, I know just where the pinch comes,and if it comes harder, why, I’ve got used tobearing that kind of pinch. I’m too oldto change pinches.”

“Now, that does decide me.”

“It decides me, too.”

“I will take all the responsibility, Basil,”she pleaded.

“Oh yes; but you’ll hand it back to meas soon as you’ve carried your point with it.There’s nothing mean about you, Isabel, whereresponsibility is concerned. No; if I do thisthing—­Fulkerson again? I can’tget away from ‘this thing’; it’sominous—­I must do it because I want todo it, and not because you wish that you wanted meto do it. I understand your position, Isabel,and that you’re really acting from a generousimpulse, but there’s nothing so precarious atour time of life as a generous impulse. Whenwe were younger we could stand it; we could give wayto it and take the consequences. But now we can’tbear it. We must act from cold reason even inthe ardor of self-sacrifice.”

“Oh, as if you did that!” his wife retorted.

“Is that any cause why you shouldn’t?”She could not say that it was, and he went on triumphantly:

“No, I won’t take you away from the onlysafe place on the planet and plunge you into the mostperilous, and then have you say in your revulsionof feeling that you were all against it from the first,and you gave way because you saw I had my heart seton it.” He supposed he was treating thematter humorously, but in this sort of banter betweenhusband and wife there is always much more than thejoking. March had seen some pretty feminine inconsistenciesand trepidations which once charmed him in his wifehardening into traits of middle-age which were verylike those of less interesting older women. Thesight moved him with a kind of pathos, but he feltthe result hindering and vexatious.

She now retorted that if he did not choose to takeher at her word be need not, but that whatever hedid she should have nothing to reproach herself with;and, at least, he could not say that she had trappedhim into anything.

“What do you mean by trapping?” he demanded.

“I don’t know what you call it,”she answered; “but when you get me to commitmyself to a thing by leaving out the most essentialpoint, I call it trapping.”

“I wonder you stop at trapping, if you thinkI got you to favor Fulkerson’s scheme and thensprung New York on you. I don’t supposeyou do, though. But I guess we won’t talkabout it any more.”

He went out for a long walk, and she went to her room.They lunched silently together in the presence oftheir children, who knew that they had been quarrelling,but were easily indifferent to the fact, as childrenget to be in such cases; nature defends their youth,and the unhappiness which they behold does not infectthem. In the evening, after the boy and girlhad gone to bed, the father and mother resumed theirtalk. He would have liked to take it up at thepoint from which it wandered into hostilities, forhe felt it lamentable that a matter which so seriouslyconcerned them should be confused in the fumes of senselessanger; and he was willing to make a tacit acknowledgmentof his own error by recurring to the question, butshe would not be content with this, and he had toconcede explicitly to her weakness that she reallymeant it when she had asked him to accept Fulkerson’soffer. He said he knew that; and he began soberlyto talk over their prospects in the event of theirgoing to New York.

“Oh, I see you are going!” she twitted.

“I’m going to stay,” he answered,“and let them turn me out of my agency here,”and in this bitterness their talk ended.

V.

His wife made no attempt to renew their talk beforeMarch went to his business in the morning, and theyparted in dry offence. Their experience was thatthese things always came right of themselves at last,and they usually let them. He knew that she hadreally tried to consent to a thing that was repugnantto her, and in his heart he gave her more credit forthe effort than he had allowed her openly. Sheknew that she had made it with the reservation heaccused her of, and that he had a right to feel soreat what she could not help. But he left her tobrood over his ingratitude, and she suffered him togo heavy and unfriended to meet the chances of theday. He said to himself that if she had assentedcordially to the conditions of Fulkerson’s offer,he would have had the courage to take all the otherrisks himself, and would have had the satisfactionof resigning his place. As it was, he must waittill he was removed; and he figured with bitter pleasurethe pain she would feel when he came home some dayand told her he had been supplanted, after it was toolate to close with Fulkerson.

He found a letter on his desk from the secretary,“Dictated,” in typewriting, which brieflyinformed him that Mr. Hubbell, the Inspector of Agencies,would be in Boston on Wednesday, and would call athis office during the forenoon. The letter wasnot different in tone from many that he had formerlyreceived; but the visit announced was out of the usualorder, and March believed he read his fate in it.During the eighteen years of his connection with it—­firstas a subordinate in the Boston office, and finallyas its general agent there—­he had seen agood many changes in the Reciprocity; presidents,

vice-presidents, actuaries, and general agents hadcome and gone, but there had always seemed to be arecognition of his efficiency, or at least sufficiency,and there had never been any manner of trouble, noquestion of accounts, no apparent dissatisfactionwith his management, until latterly, when there hadbegun to come from headquarters some suggestions ofenterprise in certain ways, which gave him his firstsuspicions of his clerk Watkins’s willingnessto succeed him; they embodied some of Watkins’sideas. The things proposed seemed to March undignified,and even vulgar; he had never thought himself wantingin energy, though probably he had left the businessto take its own course in the old lines more thanhe realized. Things had always gone so smoothlythat he had sometimes fancied a peculiar regard forhim in the management, which he had the weakness toattribute to an appreciation of what he occasionallydid in literature, though in saner moments he felthow impossible this was. Beyond a reference fromMr. Hubbell to some piece of March’s which hadhappened to meet his eye, no one in the managementever gave a sign of consciousness that their servicewas adorned by an obscure literary man; and Mr. Hubbellhimself had the effect of regarding the excursionsof March’s pen as a sort of joke, and of winkingat them; as he might have winked if once in a way hehad found him a little the gayer for dining.

March wore through the day gloomily, but he had iton his conscience not to show any resentment towardWatkins, whom he suspected of wishing to supplanthim, and even of working to do so. Through thisself-denial he reached a better mind concerning hiswife. He determined not to make her suffer needlessly,if the worst came to the worst; she would suffer enough,at the best, and till the worst came he would spareher, and not say anything about the letter he hadgot.

But when they met, her first glance divined that somethinghad happened, and her first question frustrated hisgenerous intention. He had to tell her aboutthe letter. She would not allow that it had anysignificance, but she wished him to make an end ofhis anxieties and forestall whatever it might portendby resigning his place at once. She said she wasquite ready to go to New York; she had been thinkingit all over, and now she really wanted to go.He answered, soberly, that he had thought it over,too; and he did not wish to leave Boston, where hehad lived so long, or try a new way of life if hecould help it. He insisted that he was quiteselfish in this; in their concessions their quarrelvanished; they agreed that whatever happened wouldbe for the best; and the next day he went to his officefortified for any event.

His destiny, if tragical, presented itself with anaspect which he might have found comic if it had beenanother’s destiny. Mr. Hubbell broughtMarch’s removal, softened in the guise of a promotion.The management at New York, it appeared, had actedupon a suggestion of Mr. Hubbell’s, and nowauthorized him to offer March the editorship of themonthly paper published in the interest of the company;his office would include the authorship of circularsand leaflets in behalf of life-insurance, and wouldgive play to the literary talent which Mr. Hubbellhad brought to the attention of the management; hissalary would be nearly as much as at present, butthe work would not take his whole time, and in a placelike New York he could get a great deal of outsidewriting, which they would not object to his doing.

Mr. Hubbell seemed so sure of his acceptance of aplace in every way congenial to a man of literarytastes that March was afterward sorry he dismissedthe proposition with obvious irony, and had needlesslyhurt Hubbell’s feelings; but Mrs. March hadno such regrets. She was only afraid that hehad not made his rejection contemptuous enough.“And now,” she said, “telegraphMr. Fulkerson, and we will go at once.”

“I suppose I could still get Watkins’sformer place,” March suggested.

“Never!” she retorted. “Telegraphinstantly!”

They were only afraid now that Fulkerson might havechanged his mind, and they had a wretched day in whichthey heard nothing from him. It ended with hisanswering March’s telegram in person. Theywere so glad of his coming, and so touched by hissatisfaction with his bargain, that they laid allthe facts of the case before him. He entered fullyinto March’s sense of the joke latent in Mr.Hubbell’s proposition, and he tried to makeMrs. March believe that he shared her resentment ofthe indignity offered her husband.

March made a show of willingness to release him inview of the changed situation, saying that he heldhim to nothing. Fulkerson laughed, and askedhim how soon he thought he could come on to New York.He refused to reopen the question of March’sfitness with him; he said they, had gone into thatthoroughly, but he recurred to it with Mrs. March,and confirmed her belief in his good sense on allpoints. She had been from the first moment defiantlyconfident of her husband’s ability, but tillshe had talked the matter over with Fulkerson she wassecretly not sure of it; or, at least, she was notsure that March was not right in distrusting himself.When she clearly understood, now, what Fulkerson intended,she had no longer a doubt. He explained how theenterprise differed from others, and how he neededfor its direction a man who combined general businessexperience and business ideas with a love for thething and a natural aptness for it. He did notwant a young man, and yet he wanted youth—­itsfreshness, its zest—­such as March would

feel in a thing he could put his whole heart into.He would not run in ruts, like an old fellow who hadgot hackneyed; he would not have any hobbies; he wouldnot have any friends or any enemies. Besides,he would have to meet people, and March was a manthat people took to; she knew that herself; he hada kind of charm. The editorial management wasgoing to be kept in the background, as far as thepublic was concerned; the public was to suppose thatthe thing ran itself. Fulkerson did not care fora great literary reputation in his editor—­heimplied that March had a very pretty little one.At the same time the relations between the contributorsand the management were to be much more, intimate thanusual. Fulkerson felt his personal disqualificationfor working the thing socially, and he counted uponMr. March for that; that was to say, he counted uponMrs. March.

She protested he must not count upon her; but it byno means disabled Fulkerson’s judgment in herview that March really seemed more than anything elsea fancy of his. He had been a fancy of hers; andthe sort of affectionate respect with which Fulkersonspoke of him laid forever some doubt she had of thefineness of Fulkerson’s manners and reconciledher to the graphic slanginess of his speech.

The affair was now irretrievable, but she gave herapproval to it as superbly as if it were submittedin its inception. Only, Mr. Fulkerson must notsuppose she should ever like New York. She wouldnot deceive him on that point. She never shouldlike it. She did not conceal, either, that shedid not like taking the children out of the Fridayafternoon class; and she did not believe that Tomwould ever be reconciled to going to Columbia.She took courage from Fulkerson’s suggestionthat it was possible for Tom to come to Harvard evenfrom New York; and she heaped him with questions concerningthe domiciliation of the family in that city.He tried to know something about the matter, and hesucceeded in seeming interested in points necessarilyindifferent to him.

VI.

In the uprooting and transplanting of their home thatfollowed, Mrs. March often trembled before distantproblems and possible contingencies, but she was nevertroubled by present difficulties. She kept upwith tireless energy; and in the moments of dejectionand misgiving which harassed her husband she remaineddauntless, and put heart into him when he had lostit altogether.

She arranged to leave the children in the house withthe servants, while she went on with March to lookup a dwelling of some sort in New York. It madehim sick to think of it; and, when it came to the point,he would rather have given up the whole enterprise.She had to nerve him to it, to represent more thanonce that now they had no choice but to make thisexperiment. Every detail of parting was anguishto him. He got consolation out of the notion

of letting the house furnished for the winter; thatimplied their return to it, but it cost him pangs ofthe keenest misery to advertise it; and, when a tenantwas actually found, it was all he could do to givehim the lease. He tried his wife’s loveand patience as a man must to whom the future is easyin the mass but terrible as it translates itself piecemealinto the present. He experienced remorse in thepresence of inanimate things he was going to leaveas if they had sensibly reproached him, and an anticipativehomesickness that seemed to stop his heart. Againand again his wife had to make him reflect that hisdepression was not prophetic. She convinced himof what he already knew, and persuaded him againsthis knowledge that he could be keeping an eye outfor something to take hold of in Boston if they couldnot stand New York. She ended by telling him thatit was too bad to make her comfort him in a trialthat was really so much more a trial to her.She had to support him in a last access of despairon their way to the Albany depot the morning theystarted to New York; but when the final details hadbeen dealt with, the tickets bought, the trunks checked,and the handbags hung up in their car, and the futurehad massed itself again at a safe distance and wasseven hours and two hundred miles away, his spiritsbegan to rise and hers to sink. He would havebeen willing to celebrate the taste, the domesticrefinement, of the ladies’ waiting-room in thedepot, where they had spent a quarter of an hour beforethe train started. He said he did not believethere was another station in the world where mahoganyrocking-chairs were provided; that the dull-red warmthof the walls was as cozy as an evening lamp, and thathe always hoped to see a fire kindled on that vasthearth and under that aesthetic mantel, but he supposednow he never should. He said it was all verydifferent from that tunnel, the old Albany depot, wherethey had waited the morning they went to New Yorkwhen they were starting on their wedding journey.

“The morning, Basil!” cried his wife.“We went at night; and we were going to takethe boat, but it stormed so!” She gave him aglance of such reproach that he could not answer anything,and now she asked him whether he supposed their cookand second girl would be contented with one of thosedark holes where they put girls to sleep in New Yorkflats, and what she should do if Margaret, especially,left her. He ventured to suggest that Margaretwould probably like the city; but, if she left, therewere plenty of other girls to be had in New York.She replied that there were none she could trust,and that she knew Margaret would not stay. Heasked her why she took her, then—­why shedid not give her up at once; and she answered thatit would be inhuman to give her up just in the edgeof the winter. She had promised to keep her; andMargaret was pleased with the notion of going to NewYork, where she had a cousin.

“Then perhaps she’ll be pleased with thenotion of staying,” he said.

“Oh, much you know about it!” she retorted;and, in view of the hypothetical difficulty and hiswant of sympathy, she fell into a gloom, from whichshe roused herself at last by declaring that, if therewas nothing else in the flat they took, there shouldbe a light kitchen and a bright, sunny bedroom forMargaret. He expressed the belief that they couldeasily find such a flat as that, and she denouncedhis fatal optimism, which buoyed him up in the absenceof an undertaking and let him drop into the depthsof despair in its presence.

He owned this defect of temperament, but he said thatit compensated the opposite in her character.“I suppose that’s one of the chief usesof marriage; people supplement one another, and forma pretty fair sort of human being together. Theonly drawback to the theory is that unmarried peopleseem each as complete and whole as a married pair.”

She refused to be amused; she turned her face to thewindow and put her handkerchief up under her veil.

It was not till the dining-car was attached to theirtrain that they were both able to escape for an hourinto the care-free mood of their earlier travels,when they were so easily taken out of themselves.The time had been when they could have found enoughin the conjectural fortunes and characters of theirfellow-passengers to occupy them. This phase oftheir youth had lasted long, and the world was stillfull of novelty and interest for them; but it requiredall the charm of the dining-car now to lay the anxietiesthat beset them. It was so potent for the moment,however, that they could take an objective view attheir sitting cozily down there together, as if theyhad only themselves in the world. They wonderedwhat the children were doing, the children who possessedthem so intensely when present, and now, by a fantasticoperation of absence, seemed almost non-existents.They tried to be homesick for them, but failed; theyrecognized with comfortable self-abhorrence that thiswas terrible, but owned a fascination in being alone;at the same time, they could not imagine how peoplefelt who never had any children. They contrastedthe luxury of dining that way, with every advantageexcept a band of music, and the old way of rushingout to snatch a fearful joy at the lunch-countersof the Worcesier and Springfield and New Haven stations.They had not gone often to New York since their weddingjourney, but they had gone often enough to have notedthe change from the lunch-counter to the lunch-basketbrought in the train, from which you could subsistwith more ease and dignity, but seemed destined toa superabundance of pickles, whatever you ordered.

They thought well of themselves now that they couldbe both critical and tolerant of flavors not verysharply distinguished from one another in their dinner,and they lingered over their coffee and watched theautumn landscape through the windows.

“Not quite so loud a pattern of calico thisyear,” he said, with patronizing forbearancetoward the painted woodlands whirling by. “Doyou see how the foreground next the train rushes fromus and the background keeps ahead of us, while themiddle distance seems stationary? I don’tthink I ever noticed that effect before. Thereought to be something literary in it: retreatingpast and advancing future and deceitfully permanentpresent—­something like that?”

His wife brushed some crumbs from her lap before rising.“Yes. You mustn’t waste any of theseideas now.”

“Oh no; it would be money out of Fulkerson’spocket.”

VII.

They went to a quiet hotel far down-town, and tooka small apartment which they thought they could easilyafford for the day or two they need spend in lookingup a furnished flat. They were used to stayingat this hotel when they came on for a little outingin New York, after some rigid winter in Boston, atthe time of the spring exhibitions. They wereremembered there from year to year; the colored call-boys,who never seemed to get any older, smiled upon them,and the clerk called March by name even before heregistered. He asked if Mrs. March were with him,and said then he supposed they would want their usualquarters; and in a moment they were domesticated ina far interior that seemed to have been waiting forthem in a clean, quiet, patient disoccupation eversince they left it two years before. The littleparlor, with its gilt paper and ebonized furniture,was the lightest of the rooms, but it was not verylight at noonday without the gas, which the bell-boynow flared up for them. The uproar of the citycame to it in a soothing murmur, and they took possessionof its peace and comfort with open celebration.After all, they agreed, there was no place in theworld so delightful as a hotel apartment like that;the boasted charms of home were nothing to it; andthen the magic of its being always there, ready forany one, every one, just as if it were for some onealone: it was like the experience of an ArabianNights hero come true for all the race.

“Oh, why can’t we always stay here, justwe two!” Mrs. March sighed to her husband, ashe came out of his room rubbing his face red with thetowel, while she studied a new arrangement of her bonnetand handbag on the mantel.

“And ignore the past? I’m willing.I’ve no doubt that the children could get onperfectly well without us, and could find some lotin the scheme of Providence that would really be justas well for them.”

“Yes; or could contrive somehow never to haveexisted. I should insist upon that. If theyare, don’t you see that we couldn’t wishthem not to be?”

“Oh yes; I see your point; it’s simplyincontrovertible.”

She laughed and said: “Well, at any rate,if we can’t find a flat to suit us we can allcrowd into these three rooms somehow, for the winter,and then browse about for meals. By the weekwe could get them much cheaper; and we could saveon the eating, as they do in Europe. Or on somethingelse.”

“Something else, probably,” said March.“But we won’t take this apartment tillthe ideal furnished flat winks out altogether.We shall not have any trouble. We can easilyfind some one who is going South for the winter andwill be glad to give up their flat ‘to the rightparty’ at a nominal rent. That’smy notion. That’s what the Evanses did onewinter when they came on here in February. Allbut the nominality of the rent.”

“Yes, and we could pay a very good rent andstill save something on letting our house. Youcan settle yourselves in a hundred different waysin New York, that is one merit of the place. Butif everything else fails, we can come back to this.I want you to take the refusal of it, Basil.And we’ll commence looking this very eveningas soon as we’ve had dinner. I cut a lotof things out of the Herald as we came on. Seehere!”

She took a long strip of paper out of her hand-bagwith minute advertisem*nts pinned transversely uponit, and forming the effect of some glittering nondescriptvertebrate.

“Looks something like the sea-serpent,”said March, drying his hands on the towel, while heglanced up and down the list. “But we sha’n’thave any trouble. I’ve no doubt there arehalf a dozen things there that will do. You haven’tgone up-town? Because we must be near the ’EveryOther Week’ office.”

“No; but I wish Mr. Fulkerson hadn’t calledit that! It always makes one think of ‘jamyesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam to-day,’in ‘Through the Looking-Glass.’ They’reall in this region.”

They were still at their table, beside a low window,where some sort of never-blooming shrub symmetricallybalanced itself in a large pot, with a leaf to theright and a leaf to the left and a spear up the middle,when Fulkerson came stepping square-footedly overthe thick dining-room carpet. He wagged in theair a gay hand of salutation at sight of them, andof repression when they offered to rise to meet him;then, with an apparent simultaneity of action he gavea hand to each, pulled up a chair from the next table,put his hat and stick on the floor beside it, andseated himself.

“Well, you’ve burned your ships behindyou, sure enough,” he said, beaming his satisfactionupon them from eyes and teeth.

“The ships are burned,” said March, “thoughI’m not sure we alone did it. But herewe are, looking for shelter, and a little anxious aboutthe disposition of the natives.”

“Oh, they’re an awful peaceable lot,”said Fulkerson. “I’ve been roundamong the caciques a little, and I think I’vegot two or three places that will just suit you, Mrs.March. How did you leave the children?”

“Oh, how kind of you! Very well, and veryproud to be left in charge of the smoking wrecks.”

Fulkerson naturally paid no attention to what shesaid, being but secondarily interested in the childrenat the best. “Here are some things rightin this neighborhood, within gunshot of the office,and if you want you can go and look at them to-night;the agents gave me houses where the people would bein.”

“We will go and look at them instantly,”said Mrs. March. “Or, as soon as you’vehad coffee with us.”

“Never do,” Fulkerson replied. Hegathered up his hat and stick. “Just rushedin to say Hello, and got to run right away again.I tell you, March, things are humming. I’mafter those fellows with a sharp stick all the whileto keep them from loafing on my house, and at the sametime I’m just bubbling over with ideas about’The Lone Hand—­wish we could callit that!—­that I want to talk up with you.”

“Well, come to breakfast,” said Mrs. March,cordially.

“No; the ideas will keep till you’ve securedyour lodge in this vast wilderness. Good-bye.”

“You’re as nice as you can be, Mr. Fulkerson,”she said, “to keep us in mind when you haveso much to occupy you.”

“I wouldn’t have anything to occupy meif I hadn’t kept you in mind, Mrs. March,”said Fulkerson, going off upon as good a speech ashe could apparently hope to make.

“Why, Basil,” said Mrs. March, when hewas gone, “he’s charming! But nowwe mustn’t lose an instant. Let’ssee where the places are.” She ran overthe half-dozen agents’ permits. “Capital-first-rate-thevery thing-every one. Well, I consider ourselvessettled! We can go back to the children to-morrowif we like, though I rather think I should like tostay over another day and get a little rested forthe final pulling up that’s got to come.But this simplifies everything enormously, and Mr.Fulkerson is as thoughtful and as sweet as he canbe. I know you will get on well with him.He has such a good heart. And his attitude towardyou, Basil, is beautiful always—­so respectful;or not that so much as appreciative. Yes, appreciative—­that’sthe word; I must always keep that in mind.”

“It’s quite important to do so,”said March.

“Yes,” she assented, seriously, “andwe must not forget just what kind of flat we are goingto look for. The ‘sine qua nons’ arean elevator and steam heat, not above the third floor,to begin with. Then we must each have a room,and you must have your study and I must have my parlor;and the two girls must each have a room. Withthe kitchen and dining room, how many does that make?”

“Ten.”

“I thought eight. Well, no matter.You can work in the parlor, and run into your bedroomwhen anybody comes; and I can sit in mine, and thegirls must put up with one, if it’s large andsunny, though I’ve always given them two athome. And the kitchen must be sunny, so they cansit in it. And the rooms must all have outsidelight. And the rent must not be over eight hundredfor the winter. We only get a thousand for ourwhole house, and we must save something out of that,so as to cover the expenses of moving. Now, doyou think you can remember all that?”

“Not the half of it,” said March.“But you can; or if you forget a third of it,I can come in with my partial half and more than makeit up.”

She had brought her bonnet and sacque down-stairswith her, and was transferring them from the hatrackto her person while she talked. The friendlydoor-boy let them into the street, and the clear Octoberevening air brightened her so that as she tucked herhand under her husband’s arm and began to pullhim along she said, “If we find something rightaway—­and we’re just as likely to getthe right flat soon as late; it’s all a lottery—­wellgo to the theatre somewhere.”

She had a moment’s panic about having left theagents’ permits on the table, and after rememberingthat she had put them into her little shopping-bag,where she kept her money (each note crushed into around wad), and had heft it on the hat-rack, whereit would certainly be stolen, she found it on herwrist. She did not think that very funny; butafter a first impulse to inculpate her husband, shelet him laugh, while they stopped under a lamp andshe held the permits half a yard away to read thenumbers on them.

“Where are your glasses, Isabel?”

“On the mantel in our room, of course.”

“Then you ought to have brought a pair of tongs.”

“I wouldn’t get off second-hand jokes,Basil,” she said; and “Why, here!”she cried, whirling round to the door before whichthey had halted, “this is the very number.Well, I do believe it’s a sign!”

One of those colored men who soften the trade of janitorin many of the smaller apartment-houses in New Yorkby the sweetness of their race let the Marches in,or, rather, welcomed them to the possession of thepremises by the bow with which he acknowledged theirpermit. It was a large, old mansion cut up intofive or six dwellings, but it had kept some traitsof its former dignity, which pleased people of theirsympathetic tastes. The dark-mahogany trim, ofsufficiently ugly design, gave a rich gloom to thehallway, which was wide and paved with marble; thecarpeted stairs curved aloft through a generous space.

“There is no elevator?” Mrs. March askedof the janitor.

He answered, “No, ma’am; only two flightsup,” so winningly that she said,

“Oh!” in courteous apology, and whisperedto her husband, as she followed lightly up, “We’lltake it, Basil, if it’s like the rest.”

“If it’s like him, you mean.”

“I don’t wonder they wanted to own them,”she hurriedly philosophized. “If I hadsuch a creature, nothing but death should part us,and I should no more think of giving him his freedom!”

“No; we couldn’t afford it,” returnedher husband.

The apartment which the janitor unlocked for them,and lit up from those chandeliers and brackets ofgilt brass in the form of vine bunches, leaves, andtendrils in which the early gas-fitter realized mostof his conceptions of beauty, had rather more of theugliness than the dignity of the hall. But therooms were large, and they grouped themselves in areminiscence of the time when they were part of a dwelling

that had its charm, its pathos, its impressiveness.Where they were cut up into smaller spaces, it hadbeen done with the frankness with which a proud oldfamily of fallen fortunes practises its economies.The rough pine-floors showed a black border of tack-headswhere carpets had been lifted and put down for generations;the white paint was yellow with age; the apartmenthad light at the front and at the back, and two orthree rooms had glimpses of the day through smallwindows let into their corners; another one seemedlifting an appealing eye to heaven through a glasscircle in its ceiling; the rest must darkle in perpetualtwilight. Yet something pleased in it all, andMrs. March had gone far to adapt the different roomsto the members of her family, when she suddenly thought(and for her to think was to say), “Why, butthere’s no steam heat!”

“No, ma’am,” the janitor admitted;“but dere’s grates in most o’ derooms, and dere’s furnace heat in de halls.”

“That’s true,” she admitted, and,having placed her family in the apartments, it washard to get them out again. “Could we manage?”she referred to her husband.

“Why, I shouldn’t care for the steam heatif—­What is the rent?” he broke offto ask the janitor.

“Nine hundred, sir.”

March concluded to his wife, “If it were furnished.”

“Why, of course! What could I have beenthinking of? We’re looking for a furnishedflat,” she explained to the janitor, “andthis was so pleasant and homelike that I never thoughtwhether it was furnished or not.”

She smiled upon the janitor, and he entered into thejoke and chuckled so amiably at her flattering oversighton the way down-stairs that she said, as she pinchedher husband’s arm, “Now, if you don’tgive him a quarter I’ll never speak to you again,Basil!”

“I would have given half a dollar willinglyto get you beyond his glamour,” said March,when they were safely on the pavement outside.“If it hadn’t been for my strength of character,you’d have taken an unfurnished flat withoutheat and with no elevator, at nine hundred a year,when you had just sworn me to steam heat, an elevator,furniture, and eight hundred.”

“Yes! How could I have lost my head socompletely?” she said, with a lenient amusem*ntin her aberration which she was not always able tofeel in her husband’s.

“The next time a colored janitor opens the doorto us, I’ll tell him the apartment doesn’tsuit at the threshold. It’s the only wayto manage you, Isabel.”

“It’s true. I am in love with thewhole race. I never saw one of them that didn’thave perfectly angelic manners. I think we shallall be black in heaven—­that is, black-souled.”

“That isn’t the usual theory,” saidMarch.

“Well, perhaps not,” she assented.“Where are we going now? Oh yes, to theXenophon!”

She pulled him gayly along again, and after they hadwalked a block down and half a block over they stoodbefore the apartment-house of that name, which wascut on the gas-lamps on either side of the heavilyspiked, aesthetic-hinged black door. The titterof an electric-bell brought a large, fat Buttons,with a stage effect of being dressed to look small,who said he would call the janitor, and they waitedin the dimly splendid, copper-colored interior, admiringthe whorls and waves into which the wallpaint wascombed, till the janitor came in his gold-banded cap,like a Continental porker. When they said theywould like to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green’s apartment,he owned his inability to cope with the affair, andsaid he must send for the superintendent; he was eitherin the Herodotus or the Thucydides, and would be therein a minute. The Buttons brought him—­aYankee of browbeating presence in plain clothes—­almostbefore they had time to exchange a frightened whisperin recognition of the fact that there could be nodoubt of the steam heat and elevator in this case.Half stifled in the one, they mounted in the othereight stories, while they tried to keep their self-respectunder the gaze of the superintendent, which they feltwas classing and assessing them with unfriendly accuracy.They could not, and they faltered abashed at the thresholdof Mrs. Grosvenor Green’s apartment, while thesuperintendent lit the gas in the gangway that he calleda private hall, and in the drawing-room and the successionof chambers stretching rearward to the kitchen.Everything had, been done by the architect to savespace, and everything, to waste it by Mrs. GrosvenorGreen. She had conformed to a law for the necessityof turning round in each room, and had folding-bedsin the chambers, but there her subordination had ended,and wherever you might have turned round she had puta gimcrack so that you would knock it over if you didturn. The place was rather pretty and even imposingat first glance, and it took several joint ballotsfor March and his wife to make sure that with the kitchenthere were only six rooms. At every door hunga portiere from large rings on a brass rod; everyshelf and dressing-case and mantel was littered withgimcracks, and the corners of the tiny rooms were curtainedoff, and behind these portieres swarmed more gimcracks.The front of the upright piano had what March calleda short-skirted portiere on it, and the top was coveredwith vases, with dragon candlesticks and with Jap fans,which also expanded themselves bat wise on the wallsbetween the etchings and the water colors. Thefloors were covered with filling, and then rugs andthen skins; the easy-chairs all had tidies, Armenianand Turkish and Persian; the lounges and sofas hadembroidered cushions hidden under tidies.

The radiator was concealed by a Jap screen, and overthe top of this some Arab scarfs were flung.There was a superabundance of clocks. China pugsguarded the hearth; a brass sunflower smiled from thetop of either andiron, and a brass peaco*ck spreadits tail before them inside a high filigree fender;on one side was a coalhod in ‘repousse’brass, and on the other a wrought iron wood-basket.Some red Japanese bird-kites were stuck about in thenecks of spelter vases, a crimson Jap umbrella hungopened beneath the chandelier, and each globe had ashade of yellow silk.

March, when he had recovered his self-command a littlein the presence of the agglomeration, comforted himselfby calling the bric-a-brac Jamescracks, as if thiswas their full name.

The disrespect he was able to show the whole apartmentby means of this joke strengthened him to say boldlyto the superintendent that it was altogether too small;then he asked carelessly what the rent was.

“Two hundred and fifty.”

The Marches gave a start, and looked at each other.

“Don’t you think we could make it do?”she asked him, and he could see that she had mentallysaved five hundred dollars as the difference betweenthe rent of their house and that of this flat.“It has some very pretty features, and we couldmanage to squeeze in, couldn’t we?”

“You won’t find another furnished flatlike it for no two-fifty a month in the whole city,”the superintendent put in.

They exchanged glances again, and March said, carelessly,“It’s too small.”

“There’s a vacant flat in the Herodotusfor eighteen hundred a year, and one in the Thucydidesfor fifteen,” the superintendent suggested,clicking his keys together as they sank down in theelevator; “seven rooms and bath.”

“Thank you,” said March; “we’relooking for a furnished flat.”

They felt that the superintendent parted from themwith repressed sarcasm.

“Oh, Basil, do you think we really made himthink it was the smallness and not the dearness?”

“No, but we saved our self-respect in the attempt;and that’s a great deal.”

“Of course, I wouldn’t have taken it,anyway, with only six rooms, and so high up.But what prices! Now, we must be very circ*mspectabout the next place.”

It was a janitress, large, fat, with her arms woundup in her apron, who received them there. Mrs.March gave her a succinct but perfect statement oftheir needs. She failed to grasp the nature ofthem, or feigned to do so. She shook her head,and said that her son would show them the flat.There was a radiator visible in the narrow hall, andIsabel tacitly compromised on steam heat without anelevator, as the flat was only one flight up.When the son appeared from below with a small kerosenehand-lamp, it appeared that the flat was unfurnished,but there was no stopping him till he had shown itin all its impossibility. When they got safelyaway from it and into the street March said: “Well,have you had enough for to-night, Isabel? Shallwe go to the theatre now?”

“Not on any account. I want to see thewhole list of flats that Mr. Fulkerson thought wouldbe the very thing for us.” She laughed,but with a certain bitterness.

“You’ll be calling him my Mr. Fulkersonnext, Isabel.”

“Oh no!”

The fourth address was a furnished flat without akitchen, in a house with a general restaurant.The fifth was a furnished house. At the sixtha pathetic widow and her pretty daughter wanted totake a family to board, and would give them a privatetable at a rate which the Marches would have thoughtlow in Boston.

Mrs. March came away tingling with compassion fortheir evident anxiety, and this pity naturally souredinto a sense of injury. “Well, I must sayI have completely lost confidence in Mr. Fulkerson’sjudgment. Anything more utterly different fromwhat I told him we wanted I couldn’t imagine.If he doesn’t manage any better about his businessthan he has done about this, it will be a perfectfailure.”

“Well, well, let’s hope he’ll bemore circ*mspect about that,” her husband returned,with ironical propitiation. “But I don’tthink it’s Fulkerson’s fault altogether.Perhaps it’s the house-agents’. They’rea very illusory generation. There seems to besomething in the human habitation that corrupts thenatures of those who deal in it, to buy or sell it,to hire or let it. You go to an agent and tellhim what kind of a house you want. He has nosuch house, and he sends you to look at somethingaltogether different, upon the well-ascertained principlethat if you can’t get what you want you willtake what you can get. You don’t supposethe ‘party’ that took our house in Bostonwas looking for any such house? He was lookingfor a totally different kind of house in another partof the town.”

“I don’t believe that!” his wifebroke in.

“Well, no matter. But see what a scandalousrent you asked for it.”

“We didn’t get much more than half; and,besides, the agent told me to ask fourteen hundred.”

“Oh, I’m not blaming you, Isabel.I’m only analyzing the house-agent and exoneratingFulkerson.”

“Well, I don’t believe he told them justwhat we wanted; and, at any rate, I’m done withagents. Tomorrow I’m going entirely byadvertisem*nts.”

VIII.

Mrs. March took the vertebrate with her to the ViennaCoffee-House, where they went to breakfast next morning.She made March buy her the Herald and the World, andshe added to its spiny convolutions from them.She read the new advertisem*nts aloud with ardor andwith faith to believe that the apartments describedin them were every one truthfully represented, andthat any one of them was richly responsive to theirneeds. “Elegant, light, large, single andoutside flats” were offered with “allimprovements—­bath, ice-box, etc.”—­fortwenty-five to thirty dollars a month. The cheapness

was amazing. The Wagram, the Esmeralda, the Jacinth,advertised them for forty dollars and sixty dollars,“with steam heat and elevator,” rent freetill November. Others, attractive from theirair of conscientious scruple, announced “first-classflats; good order; reasonable rents.” TheHelena asked the reader if she had seen the “cabinetfinish, hard-wood floors, and frescoed ceilings”of its fifty-dollar flats; the Asteroid affirmed thatsuch apartments, with “six light rooms and bath,porcelain wash-tubs, electric bells, and hall-boy,”as it offered for seventy-five dollars were unapproachedby competition. There was a sameness in the jargonwhich tended to confusion. Mrs. March got severalflats on her list which promised neither steam heatnor elevators; she forgot herself so far as to includetwo or three as remote from the down-town region ofher choice as Harlem. But after she had rejectedthese the nondescript vertebrate was still voluminousenough to sustain her buoyant hopes.

The waiter, who remembered them from year to year,had put them at a window giving a pretty good sectionof Broadway, and before they set out on their searchthey had a moment of reminiscence. They recalledthe Broadway of five, of ten, of twenty years ago,swelling and roaring with a tide of gayly paintedomnibuses and of picturesque traffic that the horsecarshave now banished from it. The grind of theirwheels and the clash of their harsh bells imperfectlyfill the silence that the omnibuses have left, andthe eye misses the tumultuous perspective of formertimes.

They went out and stood for a moment before GraceChurch, and looked down the stately thoroughfare,and found it no longer impressive, no longer characteristic.It is still Broadway in name, but now it is like anyother street. You do not now take your life inyour hand when you attempt to cross it; the Broadwaypoliceman who supported the elbow of timorous beautyin the hollow of his cotton-gloved palm and guidedits little fearful boots over the crossing, whilehe arrested the billowy omnibuses on either side withan imperious glance, is gone, and all that certainprocessional, barbaric gayety of the place is gone.

“Palmyra, Baalbec, Timour of the Desert,”said March, voicing their common feeling of the change.

They turned and went into the beautiful church, andfound themselves in time for the matin service.Rapt far from New York, if not from earth, in thedim richness of the painted light, the hallowed musictook them with solemn ecstasy; the aerial, aspiringGothic forms seemed to lift them heavenward.They came out, reluctant, into the dazzle and bustleof the street, with a feeling that they were too goodfor it, which they confessed to each other with whimsicalconsciousness.

“But no matter how consecrated we feel now,”he said, “we mustn’t forget that we wentinto the church for precisely the same reason thatwe went to the Vienna Cafe for breakfast—­togratify an aesthetic sense, to renew the faded pleasureof travel for a moment, to get back into the Europeof our youth. It was a purely Pagan impulse,Isabel, and we’d better own it.”

“I don’t know,” she returned.“I think we reduce ourselves to the bare bonestoo much. I wish we didn’t always recognizethe facts as we do. Sometimes I should like toblink them. I should like to think I was devouterthan I am, and younger and prettier.”

“Better not; you couldn’t keep it up.Honesty is the best policy even in such things.”

“No; I don’t like it, Basil. I shouldrather wait till the last day for some of my motivesto come to the top. I know they’re alwaysmixed, but do let me give them the benefit of a doubtsometimes.”

“Well, well, have it your own way, my dear.But I prefer not to lay up so many disagreeable surprisesfor myself at that time.”

She would not consent. “I know I am a gooddeal younger than I was. I feel quite in themood of that morning when we walked down Broadway onour wedding journey. Don’t you?”

“Oh yes. But I know I’m not younger;I’m only prettier.”

She laughed for pleasure in his joke, and also forunconscious joy in the gay New York weather, in whichthere was no ‘arriere pensee’ of the eastwind. They had crossed Broadway, and were walkingover to Washington Square, in the region of whichthey now hoped to place themselves. The ‘primotenore’ statue of Garibaldi had already takenpossession of the place in the name of Latin progress,and they met Italian faces, French faces, Spanishfaces, as they strolled over the asphalt walks, underthe thinning shadows of the autumn-stricken sycamores.They met the familiar picturesque raggedness of SouthernEurope with the old kindly illusion that somehow itexisted for their appreciation, and that it foundadequate compensation for poverty in this. Marchthought he sufficiently expressed his tacit sympathyin sitting down on one of the iron benches with hiswife and letting a little Neapolitan put a superfluousshine on his boots, while their desultory commentwandered with equal esteem to the old-fashioned Americanrespectability which keeps the north side of the squarein vast mansions of red brick, and the internationalshabbiness which has invaded the southern border, andbroken it up into lodging-houses, shops, beer-gardens,and studios.

They noticed the sign of an apartment to let on thenorth side, and as soon as the little bootblack couldbe bought off they went over to look at it. Thejanitor met them at the door and examined them.Then he said, as if still in doubt, “It hasten rooms, and the rent is twenty-eight hundred dollars.”

“It wouldn’t do, then,” March replied,and left him to divide the responsibility betweenthe paucity of the rooms and the enormity of the rentas he best might. But their self-love had receiveda wound, and they questioned each other what it wasin their appearance made him doubt their ability topay so much.

“Of course, we don’t look like New-Yorkers,”sighed Mrs. March, “and we’ve walked throughthe Square. That might be as if we had walkedalong the Park Street mall in the Common before wecame out on Beacon. Do you suppose he could haveseen you getting your boots blacked in that way?”

“It’s useless to ask,” said March.“But I never can recover from this blow.”

“Oh, pshaw! You know you hate such thingsas badly as I do. It was very impertinent ofhim.”

“Let us go back and ‘ecraser l’infame’by paying him a year’s rent in advance and takingimmediate possession. Nothing else can soothemy wounded feelings. You were not having yourboots blacked: why shouldn’t he have supposedyou were a New-Yorker, and I a country cousin?”

“They always know. Don’t you rememberMrs. Williams’s going to a Fifth Avenue millinerin a Worth dress, and the woman’s asking herinstantly what hotel she should send her hat to?”

“Yes; these things drive one to despair.I don’t wonder the bodies of so many genteelstrangers are found in the waters around New York.Shall we try the south side, my dear? or had we bettergo back to our rooms and rest awhile?”

Mrs. March had out the vertebrate, and was consultingone of its glittering ribs and glancing up from itat a house before which they stood. “Yes,it’s the number; but do they call this beingready October first?” The little area in frontof the basem*nt was heaped with a mixture of mortar,bricks, laths, and shavings from the interior; thebrownstone steps to the front door were similarly bestrewn;the doorway showed the half-open, rough pine carpenter’ssketch of an unfinished house; the sashless windowsof every story showed the activity of workmen within;the clatter of hammers and the hiss of saws came outto them from every opening.

“They may call it October first,” saidMarch, “because it’s too late to contradictthem. But they’d better not call it Decemberfirst in my presence; I’ll let them say Januaryfirst, at a pinch.”

“We will go in and look at it, anyway,”said his wife; and he admired how, when she was oncewithin, she began provisionally to settle the familyin each of the several floors with the female instinctfor domiciliation which never failed her. Shehad the help of the landlord, who was present to urgeforward the workmen apparently; he lent a hopefulfancy to the solution of all her questions. Toget her from under his influence March had to representthat the place was damp from undried plastering, andthat if she stayed she would probably be down withthat New York pneumonia which visiting Bostoniansare always dying of. Once safely on the pavementoutside, she realized that the apartment was not onlyunfinished, but unfurnished, and had neither steamheat nor elevator. “But I thought we hadbetter look at everything,” she explained.

“Yes, but not take everything. If I hadn’tpulled you away from there by main force you’dhave not only died of New York pneumonia on the spot,but you’d have had us all settled there beforewe knew what we were about.”

“Well, that’s what I can’t help,Basil. It’s the only way I can realizewhether it will do for us. I have to dramatizethe whole thing.”

She got a deal of pleasure as well as excitement outof this, and he had to own that the process of settingup housekeeping in so many different places was notonly entertaining, but tended, through associationwith their first beginnings in housekeeping, to restorethe image of their early married days and to makethem young again.

It went on all day, and continued far into the night,until it was too late to go to the theatre, too lateto do anything but tumble into bed and simultaneouslyfall asleep. They groaned over their reiterateddisappointments, but they could not deny that the interestwas unfailing, and that they got a great deal of funout of it all. Nothing could abate Mrs. March’sfaith in her advertisem*nts. One of them senther to a flat of ten rooms which promised to be thesolution of all their difficulties; it proved to beover a livery-stable, a liquor store, and a milliner’sshop, none of the first fashion. Another led themfar into old Greenwich Village to an apartment-house,which she refused to enter behind a small girl witha loaf of bread under one arm and a quart can of milkunder the other.

In their search they were obliged, as March complained,to the acquisition of useless information in a degreeunequalled in their experience. They came toexcel in the sad knowledge of the line at which respectabilitydistinguishes itself from shabbiness. Flatteringadvertisem*nts took them to numbers of huge apartment-houseschiefly distinguishable from tenement-houses by theabsence of fire-escapes on their facades, till Mrs.March refused to stop at any door where there weremore than six bell-ratchets and speaking-tubes on eitherhand. Before the middle of the afternoon shedecided against ratchets altogether, and confinedherself to knobs, neatly set in the door-trim.Her husband was still sunk in the superstition thatyou can live anywhere you like in New York, and hewould have paused at some places where her quickereye caught the fatal sign of “Modes” inthe ground-floor windows. She found that therewas an east and west line beyond which they couldnot go if they wished to keep their self-respect, andthat within the region to which they had restrictedthemselves there was a choice of streets. Atfirst all the New York streets looked to them ill-paved,dirty, and repulsive; the general infamy imparted itselfin their casual impression to streets in no wise guilty.But they began to notice that some streets were quietand clean, and, though never so quiet and clean asBoston streets, that they wore an air of encouragingreform, and suggested a future of greater and greaterdomesticity. Whole blocks of these downtown cross-streetsseemed to have been redeemed from decay, and evenin the midst of squalor a dwelling here and there hadbeen seized, painted a dull red as to its brick-work,and a glossy black as to its wood-work, and with abright brass bell-pull and door-knob and a large brass

plate for its key-hole escutcheon, had been endowedwith an effect of purity and pride which removed itsshabby neighborhood far from it. Some of thesehouses were quite small, and imaginably within theirmeans; but, as March said, some body seemed alwaysto be living there himself, and the fact that noneof them was to rent kept Mrs. March true to her idealof a fiat. Nothing prevented its realization somuch as its difference from the New York ideal ofa flat, which was inflexibly seven rooms and a bath.One or two rooms might be at the front, the rest crookedand cornered backward through in creasing and thendecreasing darkness till they reached a light bedroomor kitchen at the rear. It might be the one orthe other, but it was always the seventh room withthe bath; or if, as sometimes happened, it was theeighth, it was so after having counted the bath asone; in this case the janitor said you always countedthe bath as one. If the flats were advertisedas having “all light rooms,” he explainedthat any room with a window giving into the open airof a court or shaft was counted a light room.

The Marches tried to make out why it was that theseflats were go much more repulsive than the apartmentswhich everyone lived in abroad; but they could onlydo so upon the supposition that in their European daysthey were too young, too happy, too full of the future,to notice whether rooms were inside or outside, lightor dark, big or little, high or low. “Nowwe’re imprisoned in the present,” he said,“and we have to make the worst of it.”

In their despair he had an inspiration, which shedeclared worthy of him: it was to take two smallflats, of four or five rooms and a bath, and livein both. They tried this in a great many places,but they never could get two flats of the kind onthe same floor where there was steam heat and an elevator.At one place they almost did it. They had resignedthemselves to the humility of the neighborhood, tothe prevalence of modistes and livery-stablemen (theyseem to consort much in New York), to the garbagein the gutters and the litter of paper in the streets,to the faltering slats in the surrounding window-shuttersand the crumbled brownstone steps and sills, whenit turned out that one of the apartments had beentaken between two visits they made. Then the onlycombination left open to them was of a ground-floorflat to the right and a third-floor flat to the left.

Still they kept this inspiration in reserve for useat the first opportunity. In the mean time therewere several flats which they thought they could almostmake do: notably one where they could get an extraservant’s room in the basem*nt four flights down,and another where they could get it in the roof fiveflights up. At the first the janitor was respectfuland enthusiastic; at the second he had an effect ofironical pessimism. When they trembled on theverge of taking his apartment, he pointed out a spot

in the kalsomining of the parlor ceiling, and gratuitouslysaid, Now such a thing as that he should not agreeto put in shape unless they took the apartment fora term of years. The apartment was unfurnished,and they recurred to the fact that they wanted a furnishedapartment, and made their escape. This saved themin several other extremities; but short of extremitythey could not keep their different requirements inmind, and were always about to decide without regardto some one of them.

They went to several places twice without intending:once to that old-fashioned house with the pleasantcolored janitor, and wandered all over the apartmentagain with a haunting sense of familiarity, and thenrecognized the janitor and laughed; and to that housewith the pathetic widow and the pretty daughter whowished to take them to board. They stayed toexcuse their blunder, and easily came by the fact thatthe mother had taken the house that the girl mighthave a home while she was in New York studying art,and they hoped to pay their way by taking boarders.Her daughter was at her class now, the mother concluded;and they encouraged her to believe that it could onlybe a few days till the rest of her scheme was realized.

“I dare say we could be perfectly comfortablethere,” March suggested when they had got away.“Now if we were truly humane we would modifyour desires to meet their needs and end this sickeningsearch, wouldn’t we?”

“Yes, but we’re not truly humane,”his wife answered, “or at least not in thatsense. You know you hate boarding; and if we wentthere I should have them on my sympathies the wholetime.”

“I see. And then you would take it outof me.”

“Then I should take it out of you. Andif you are going to be so weak, Basil, and let everylittle thing work upon you in that way, you’dbetter not come to New York. You’ll seeenough misery here.”

“Well, don’t take that superior tone withme, as if I were a child that had its mind set onan undesirable toy, Isabel.”

“Ah, don’t you suppose it’s becauseyou are such a child in some respects that I likeyou, dear?” she demanded, without relenting.

“But I don’t find so much misery in NewYork. I don’t suppose there’s anymore suffering here to the population than there isin the country. And they’re so gay aboutit all. I think the outward aspect of the placeand the hilarity of the sky and air must get intothe people’s blood. The weather is simplyunapproachable; and I don’t care if it is theugliest place in the world, as you say. I supposeit is. It shrieks and yells with ugliness hereand there but it never loses its spirits. Thatwidow is from the country. When she’s beena year in New York she’ll be as gay—­asgay as an L road.” He celebrated a satisfactionthey both had in the L roads. “They killthe streets and avenues, but at least they partiallyhide them, and that is some comfort; and they do triumph

over their prostrate forms with a savage exultationthat is intoxicating. Those bends in the L thatyou get in the corner of Washington Square, or justbelow the Cooper Institute—­they’rethe gayest things in the world. Perfectly atrocious,of course, but incomparably picturesque! And thewhole city is so,” said March, “or elsethe L would never have got built here. New Yorkmay be splendidly gay or squalidly gay; but, princeor pauper, it’s gay always.”

“Yes, gay is the word,” she admitted,with a sigh. “But frantic. I can’tget used to it. They forget death, Basil; theyforget death in New York.”

“Well, I don’t know that I’ve everfound much advantage in remembering it.”

“Don’t say such a thing, dearest.”

He could see that she had got to the end of her nervousstrength for the present, and he proposed that theyshould take the Elevated road as far as it would carrythem into the country, and shake off their nightmareof flat-hunting for an hour or two; but her consciencewould not let her. She convicted him of levityequal to that of the New-Yorkers in proposing sucha thing; and they dragged through the day. Shewas too tired to care for dinner, and in the nightshe had a dream from which she woke herself with acry that roused him, too. It was something aboutthe children at first, whom they had talked of wistfullybefore falling asleep, and then it was of a hideousthing with two square eyes and a series of sectionsgrowing darker and then lighter, till the tail of themonstrous articulate was quite luminous again.She shuddered at the vague description she was ableto give; but he asked, “Did it offer to biteyou?”

“No. That was the most frightful thingabout it; it had no mouth.”

March laughed. “Why, my dear, it was nothingbut a harmless New York flat—­seven roomsand a bath.”

“I really believe it was,” she consented,recognizing an architectural resemblance, and shefell asleep again, and woke renewed for the work beforethem.

IX.

Their house-hunting no longer had novelty, but itstill had interest; and they varied their day by takinga coupe, by renouncing advertisem*nts, and by revertingto agents. Some of these induced them to considerthe idea of furnished houses; and Mrs. March learnedtolerance for Fulkerson by accepting permits to visitflats and houses which had none of the qualificationsshe desired in either, and were as far beyond her meansas they were out of the region to which she had geographicallyrestricted herself. They looked at three-thousandand four-thousand dollar apartments, and rejectedthem for one reason or another which had nothing todo with the rent; the higher the rent was, the morecritical they were of the slippery inlaid floors andthe arrangement of the richly decorated rooms.They never knew whether they had deceived the janitoror not; as they came in a coupe, they hoped they had.

They drove accidentally through one street that seemedgayer in the perspective than an L road. Thefire-escapes, with their light iron balconies andladders of iron, decorated the lofty house fronts;the roadway and sidewalks and door-steps swarmed withchildren; women’s heads seemed to show at everywindow. In the basem*nts, over which flights ofhigh stone steps led to the tenements, were green-grocers’shops abounding in cabbages, and provision storesrunning chiefly to bacon and sausages, and cobblers’and tinners’ shops, and the like, in proportionto the small needs of a poor neighborhood. Ashbarrels lined the sidewalks, and garbage heaps filledthe gutters; teams of all trades stood idly about;a peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through thestreet, and mixed his cry with the joyous screams andshouts of the children and the scolding and gossipingvoices of the women; the burly blue bulk of a policemandefined itself at the corner; a drunkard zigzaggeddown the sidewalk toward him. It was not the abodeof the extremest poverty, but of a poverty as hopelessas any in the world, transmitting itself from generationto generation, and establishing conditions of permanencyto which human life adjusts itself as it does to thoseof some incurable disease, like leprosy.

The time had been when the Marches would have takena purely aesthetic view of the facts as they glimpsedthem in this street of tenement-houses; when theywould have contented themselves with saying that itwas as picturesque as a street in Naples or Florence,and with wondering why nobody came to paint it; theywould have thought they were sufficiently seriousabout it in blaming the artists for their failure toappreciate it, and going abroad for the picturesquewhen they had it here under their noses. It wasto the nose that the street made one of its strongestappeals, and Mrs. March pulled up her window of thecoupe. “Why does he take us through sucha disgusting street?” she demanded, with anexasperation of which her husband divined the origin.

“This driver may be a philanthropist in disguise,”he answered, with dreamy irony, “and may wantus to think about the people who are not merely carriedthrough this street in a coupe, but have to spend theirwhole lives in it, winter and summer, with no hopesof driving out of it, except in a hearse. I mustsay they don’t seem to mind it. I haven’tseen a jollier crowd anywhere in New York. Theyseem to have forgotten death a little more completelythan any of their fellow-citizens, Isabel. AndI wonder what they think of us, making this gorgeousprogress through their midst. I suppose theythink we’re rich, and hate us—­if theyhate rich people; they don’t look as if theyhated anybody. Should we be as patient as theyare with their discomfort? I don’t believethere’s steam heat or an elevator in the wholeblock. Seven rooms and a bath would be more thanthe largest and genteelest family would know what todo with. They wouldn’t know what to dowith the bath, anyway.”

His monologue seemed to interest his wife apart fromthe satirical point it had for themselves. “Youought to get Mr. Fulkerson to let you work some ofthese New York sights up for Every Other Week, Basil;you could do them very nicely.”

“Yes; I’ve thought of that. But don’tlet’s leave the personal ground. Doesn’tit make you feel rather small and otherwise unworthywhen you see the kind of street these fellow-beingsof yours live in, and then think how particular youare about locality and the number of bellpulls?I don’t see even ratchets and speaking-tubesat these doors.” He craned his neck outof the window for a better look, and the children ofdiscomfort cheered him, out of sheer good feelingand high spirits. “I didn’t know Iwas so popular. Perhaps it’s a recognitionof my humane sentiments.”

“Oh, it’s very easy to have humane sentiments,and to satirize ourselves for wanting eight roomsand a bath in a good neighborhood, when we see howthese wretched creatures live,” said his wife.“But if we shared all we have with them, andthen settled down among them, what good would it do?”

“Not the least in the world. It might helpus for the moment, but it wouldn’t keep thewolf from their doors for a week; and then they wouldgo on just as before, only they wouldn’t be onsuch good terms with the wolf. The only way forthem is to keep up an unbroken intimacy with the wolf;then they can manage him somehow. I don’tknow how, and I’m afraid I don’t wantto. Wouldn’t you like to have this fellowdrive us round among the halls of pride somewherefor a little while? Fifth Avenue or Madison,up-town?”

“No; we’ve no time to waste. I’vegot a place near Third Avenue, on a nice cross street,and I want him to take us there.” It provedthat she had several addresses near together, andit seemed best to dismiss their coupe and do the restof their afternoon’s work on foot. It cameto nothing; she was not humbled in the least by whatshe had seen in the tenement-house street; she yieldedno point in her ideal of a flat, and the flats persistentlyrefused to lend themselves to it. She lost allpatience with them.

“Oh, I don’t say the flats are in theright of it,” said her husband, when she denouncedtheir stupid inadequacy to the purposes of a Christianhome. “But I’m not so sure that weare, either. I’ve been thinking about thathome business ever since my sensibilities were dragged—­ina coupe—­through that tenement-house street.Of course, no child born and brought up in such aplace as that could have any conception of home.But that’s because those poor people can’tgive character to their habitations. They haveto take what they can get. But people like us—­thatis, of our means—­do give character to theaverage flat. It’s made to meet their tastes,or their supposed tastes; and so it’s made forsocial show, not for family life at all. Thinkof a baby in a flat! It’s a contradiction

in terms; the flat is the negation of motherhood.The flat means society life; that is, the pretenceof social life. It’s made to give artificialpeople a society basis on a little money—­toomuch money, of course, for what they get. Sothe cost of the building is put into marble hallsand idiotic decoration of all kinds. I don’tobject to the conveniences, but none of these flatshas a living-room. They have drawing-rooms tofoster social pretence, and they have dining-roomsand bedrooms; but they have no room where the familycan all come together and feel the sweetness of beinga family. The bedrooms are black-holes mostly,with a sinful waste of space in each. If it werenot for the marble halls, and the decorations, andthe foolishly expensive finish, the houses could bebuilt round a court, and the flats could be shapedsomething like a Pompeiian house, with small sleeping-closets—­onlylit from the outside—­and the rest of thefloor thrown into two or three large cheerful halls,where all the family life could go on, and societycould be transacted unpretentiously. Why, thosetenements are better and humaner than those flats!There the whole family lives in the kitchen, and hasits consciousness of being; but the flat abolishesthe family consciousness. It’s confinementwithout coziness; it’s cluttered without beingsnug. You couldn’t keep a self-respectingcat in a flat; you couldn’t go down cellar toget cider. No! the Anglo-Saxon home, as we knowit in the Anglo-Saxon house, is simply impossible inthe Franco-American flat, not because it’s humble,but because it’s false.”

“Well, then,” said Mrs. March, “let’slook at houses.”

He had been denouncing the flat in the abstract, andhe had not expected this concrete result. Buthe said, “We will look at houses, then.”

X.

Nothing mystifies a man more than a woman’saberrations from some point at which he, supposesher fixed as a star. In these unfurnished houses,without steam or elevator, March followed his wifeabout with patient wonder. She rather liked theworst of them best: but she made him go downinto the cellars and look at the furnaces; she exactedfrom him a rigid inquest of the plumbing. Shefollowed him into one of the cellars by the fitfulglare of successively lighted matches, and they enjoyeda moment in which the anomaly of their presence thereon that errand, so remote from all the facts of theirlong-established life in Boston, realized itself forthem.

“Think how easily we might have been murderedand nobody been any the wiser!” she said whenthey were comfortably outdoors again.

“Yes, or made way with ourselves in an accessof emotional insanity, supposed to have been inducedby unavailing flat-hunting,” he suggested.She fell in with the notion. “I’mbeginning to feel crazy. But I don’t wantyou to lose your head, Basil. And I don’twant you to sentimentalize any of the things you seein New York. I think you were disposed to do itin that street we drove through. I don’tbelieve there’s any real suffering—­notreal suffering—­among those people; thatis, it would be suffering from our point of view,but they’ve been used to it all their lives,and they don’t feel their’ discomfort somuch.”

“Of course, I understand that, and I don’tpropose to sentimentalize them. I think whenpeople get used to a bad state of things they hadbetter stick to it; in fact, they don’t usuallylike a better state so well, and I shall keep thatfirmly in mind.”

She laughed with him, and they walked along the Lbestridden avenue, exhilarated by their escape frommurder and suicide in that cellar, toward the nearestcross town track, which they meant to take home totheir hotel. “Now to-night we will go tothe theatre,” she said, “and get thiswhole house business out of our minds, and be perfectlyfresh for a new start in the morning.”Suddenly she clutched his arm. “Why, didyou see that man?” and she signed with her headtoward a decently dressed person who walked besidethem, next the gutter, stooping over as if to examineit, and half halting at times.

“No. What?”

“Why, I saw him pick up a dirty bit of crackerfrom the pavement and cram it into his mouth and eatit down as if he were famished. And look! he’sactually hunting for more in those garbage heaps!”

This was what the decent-looking man with the hardhands and broken nails of a workman was doing-likea hungry dog. They kept up with him, in the fascinationof the sight, to the next corner, where he turned downthe side street still searching the gutter.

They walked on a few paces. Then March said,“I must go after him,” and left his wifestanding.

“Are you in want—­hungry?” heasked the man.

The man said he could not speak English, Monsieur.

March asked his question in French.

The man shrugged a pitiful, desperate shrug, “Mais,Monsieur—­”

March put a coin in his hand, and then suddenly theman’s face twisted up; he caught the hand ofthis alms-giver in both of his and clung to it.“Monsieur! Monsieur!” he gasped, andthe tears rained down his face.

His benefactor pulled himself away, shocked and ashamed,as one is by such a chance, and got back to his wife,and the man lapsed back into the mystery of miseryout of which he had emerged.

March felt it laid upon him to console his wife forwhat had happened. “Of course, we mightlive here for years and not see another case likethat; and, of course, there are twenty places wherehe could have gone for help if he had known whereto find them.”

“Ah, but it’s the possibility of his needingthe help so badly as that,” she answered.“That’s what I can’t bear, and Ishall not come to a place where such things are possible,and we may as well stop our house-hunting here atonce.”

“Yes? And what part of Christendom willyou live in? Such things are possible everywherein our conditions.”

“Then we must change the conditions—­”

“Oh no; we must go to the theatre and forgetthem. We can stop at Brentano’s for ourtickets as we pass through Union Square.”

“I am not going to the theatre, Basil.I am going home to Boston to-night. You can stayand find a flat.”

He convinced her of the absurdity of her position,and even of its selfishness; but she said that hermind was quite made up irrespective of what had happened,that she had been away from the children long enough;that she ought to be at home to finish up the workof leaving it. The word brought a sigh.“Ah, I don’t know why we should see nothingbut sad and ugly things now. When we were young—­”

“Younger,” he put in. “We’restill young.”

“That’s what we pretend, but we know better.But I was thinking how pretty and pleasant thingsused to be turning up all the time on our travelsin the old days. Why, when we were in New Yorkhere on our wedding journey the place didn’tseem half so dirty as it does now, and none of thesedismal things happened.”

“It was a good deal dirtier,” he answered;“and I fancy worse in every way-hungrier, raggeder,more wretchedly housed. But that wasn’tthe period of life for us to notice it. Don’tyou remember, when we started to Niagara the lasttime, how everybody seemed middle-aged and commonplace;and when we got there there were no evident brides;nothing but elderly married people?”

“At least they weren’t starving,”she rebelled.

“No, you don’t starve in parlor-cars andfirst-class hotels; but if you step out of them yourun your chance of seeing those who do, if you’regetting on pretty well in the forties. If it’sthe unhappy who see unhappiness, think what miserymust be revealed to people who pass their lives inthe really squalid tenement-house streets—­Idon’t mean picturesque avenues like that wepassed through.”

“But we are not unhappy,” she protested,bringing the talk back to the personal base again,as women must to get any good out of talk. “We’rereally no unhappier than we were when we were young.”

“We’re more serious.”

“Well, I hate it; and I wish you wouldn’tbe so serious, if that’s what it brings us to.”

“I will be trivial from this on,” saidMarch. “Shall we go to the Hole in theGround to-night?”

“I am going to Boston.”

“It’s much the same thing. How doyou like that for triviality? It’s a littleblasphemous, I’ll allow.”

“It’s very silly,” she said.

At the hotel they found a letter from the agent whohad sent them the permit to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green’sapartment. He wrote that she had heard they werepleased with her apartment, and that she thought shecould make the terms to suit. She had taken herpassage for Europe, and was very anxious to let theflat before she sailed. She would call that eveningat seven.

“Mrs. Grosvenor Green!” said Mrs. March.“Which of the ten thousand flats is it, Basil?”

“The gimcrackery,” he answered. “Inthe Xenophon, you know.”

“Well, she may save herself the trouble.I shall not see her. Or yes—­I must.I couldn’t go away without seeing what sort ofcreature could have planned that fly-away flat.She must be a perfect—­”

“Parachute,” March suggested.

“No! anybody so light as that couldn’tcome down.”

“Well, toy balloon.”

“Toy balloon will do for the present,”Mrs. March admitted. “But I feel that naughtbut herself can be her parallel for volatility.”

When Mrs. Grosvenor-Green’s card came up theyboth descended to the hotel parlor, which March saidlooked like the saloon of a Moorish day-boat; notthat he knew of any such craft, but the decorationswere so Saracenic and the architecture so Hudson Riverish.They found there on the grand central divan a largelady whose vast smoothness, placidity, and plumpnessset at defiance all their preconceptions of Mrs. GrosvenorGreen, so that Mrs. March distinctly paused with hercard in her hand before venturing even tentativelyto address her. Then she was astonished at thelow, calm voice in which Mrs. Green acknowledged herself,and slowly proceeded to apologize for calling.It was not quite true that she had taken her passagefor Europe, but she hoped soon to do so, and she confessedthat in the mean time she was anxious to let her flat.She was a little worn out with the care of housekeeping—­Mrs.March breathed, “Oh yes!” in the sighwith which ladies recognize one another’s martyrdom—­andMrs. Green had business abroad, and she was going topursue her art studies in Paris; she drew in Mr. Ilcomb’sclass now, but the instruction was so much betterin Paris; and as the superintendent seemed to thinkthe price was the only objection, she had venturedto call.

“Then we didn’t deceive him in the least,”thought Mrs. March, while she answered, sweetly:“No; we were only afraid that it would be toosmall for our family. We require a good manyrooms.” She could not forego the opportunityof saying, “My husband is coming to New Yorkto take charge of a literary periodical, and he willhave to have a room to write in,” which madeMrs. Green bow to March, and made March look sheepish.“But we did think the apartment very charming”,(It was architecturally charming, she protested toher conscience), “and we should have been soglad if we could have got into it.” Shefollowed this with some account of their house-hunting,amid soft murmurs of sympathy from Mrs. Green, whosaid that she had been through all that, and thatif she could have shown her apartment to them shefelt sure that she could have explained it so thatthey would have seen its capabilities better, Mrs.March assented to this, and Mrs. Green added thatif they found nothing exactly suitable she would beglad to have them look at it again; and then Mrs. March

said that she was going back to Boston herself, butshe was leaving Mr. March to continue the search;and she had no doubt he would be only too glad tosee the apartment by daylight. “But if youtake it, Basil,” she warned him, when they werealone, “I shall simply renounce you. I wouldn’tlive in that junk-shop if you gave it to me.But who would have thought she was that kind of lookingperson? Though of course I might have known ifI had stopped to think once. It’s becausethe place doesn’t express her at all that it’sso unlike her. It couldn’t be like anybody,or anything that flies in the air, or creeps uponthe earth, or swims in the waters under the earth.I wonder where in the world she’s from; she’sno New-Yorker; even we can see that; and she’snot quite a country person, either; she seems likea person from some large town, where she’s beenan aesthetic authority. And she can’t findgood enough art instruction in New York, and has togo to Paris for it! Well, it’s pathetic,after all, Basil. I can’t help feelingsorry for a person who mistakes herself to that extent.”

“I can’t help feeling sorry for the husbandof a person who mistakes herself to that extent.What is Mr. Grosvenor Green going to do in Paris whileshe’s working her way into the Salon?”

“Well, you keep away from her apartment, Basil;that’s all I’ve got to say to you.And yet I do like some things about her.”

“I like everything about her but her apartment,”said March.

“I like her going to be out of the country,”said his wife. “We shouldn’t be overlooked.And the place was prettily shaped, you can’tdeny it. And there was an elevator and steamheat. And the location is very convenient.And there was a hall-boy to bring up cards. Thehalls and stairs were kept very clean and nice.But it wouldn’t do. I could put you a foldingbed in the room where you wrote, and we could evenhave one in the parlor”

“Behind a portiere? I couldn’t standany more portieres!”

“And we could squeeze the two girls into oneroom, or perhaps only bring Margaret, and put outthe whole of the wash. Basil!” she almostshrieked, “it isn’t to be thought of!”

He retorted, “I’m not thinking of it,my dear.”

Fulkerson came in just before they started for Mrs.March’s train, to find out what had become ofthem, he said, and to see whether they had got anythingto live in yet.

“Not a thing,” she said. “AndI’m just going back to Boston, and leaving Mr.March here to do anything he pleases about it.He has ’carte blanche.’”

“But freedom brings responsibility, you know,Fulkerson, and it’s the same as if I’dno choice. I’m staying behind because I’mleft, not because I expect to do anything.”

“Is that so?” asked Fulkerson. “Well,we must see what can be done. I supposed youwould be all settled by this time, or I should havehumped myself to find you something. None ofthose places I gave you amounts to anything?”

“As much as forty thousand others we’velooked at,” said Mrs. March. “Yes,one of them does amount to something. It comesso near being what we want that I’ve given Mr.March particular instructions not to go near it.”

She told him about Mrs. Grosvenor Green and her flats,and at the end he said:

“Well, well, we must look out for that.I’ll keep an eye on him, Mrs. March, and seethat he doesn’t do anything rash, and I won’tleave him till he’s found just the right thing.It exists, of course; it must in a city of eighteenhundred thousand people, and the only question is whereto find it. You leave him to me, Mrs. March; I’llwatch out for him.”

Fulkerson showed some signs of going to the stationwhen he found they were not driving, but she badehim a peremptory good-bye at the hotel door.

“He’s very nice, Basil, and his way withyou is perfectly charming. It’s very sweetto see how really fond of you he is. But I didn’twant him stringing along with us up to Forty-secondStreet and spoiling our last moments together.”

At Third Avenue they took the Elevated for which sheconfessed an infatuation. She declared it themost ideal way of getting about in the world, andwas not ashamed when he reminded her of how she usedto say that nothing under the sun could induce herto travel on it. She now said that the nighttransit was even more interesting than the day, andthat the fleeing intimacy you formed with people insecond and third floor interiors, while all the usualstreet life went on underneath, had a domestic intensitymixed with a perfect repose that was the last effectof good society with all its security and exclusiveness.He said it was better than the theatre, of which itreminded him, to see those people through their windows:a family party of work-folk at a late tea, some ofthe men in their shirt-sleeves; a woman sewing by alamp; a mother laying her child in its cradle; a manwith his head fallen on his hands upon a table; agirl and her lover leaning over the window-sill together.What suggestion! what drama? what infinite interest!At the Forty-second Street station they stopped aminute on the bridge that crosses the track to thebranch road for the Central Depot, and looked up anddown the long stretch of the Elevated to north andsouth. The track that found and lost itself athousand times in the flare and tremor of the innumerablelights; the moony sheen of the electrics mixing withthe reddish points and blots of gas far and near;the architectural shapes of houses and churches andtowers, rescued by the obscurity from all that wasignoble in them, and the coming and going of the trainsmarking the stations with vivider or fainter plumesof flame-shot steam-formed an incomparable perspective.They often talked afterward of the superb spectacle,which in a city full of painters nightly works itsunrecorded miracles; and they were just to the Arachne

roof spun in iron over the cross street on which theyran to the depot; but for the present they were mostlyinarticulate before it. They had another momentof rich silence when they paused in the gallery thatleads from the Elevated station to the waiting-roomsin the Central Depot and looked down upon the greatnight trains lying on the tracks dim under the rainof gas-lights that starred without dispersing thevast darkness of the place. What forces, whatfates, slept in these bulks which would soon be hurlingthemselves north and south and west through the night!Now they waited there like fabled monsters of Arabstory ready for the magician’s touch, tractable,reckless, will-less—­organized lifelessnessfull of a strange semblance of life.

The Marches admired the impressive sight with a thrillof patriotic pride in the fact that the whole worldperhaps could not afford just the like. Thenthey hurried down to the ticket-offices, and he gother a lower berth in the Boston sleeper, and wentwith her to the car. They made the most of thefact that her berth was in the very middle of the car;and she promised to write as soon as she reached home.She promised also that, having seen the limitationsof New York in respect to flats, she would not behard on him if he took something not quite ideal.Only he must remember that it was not to be aboveTwentieth Street nor below Washington Square; it mustnot be higher than the third floor; it must have anelevator, steam heat, hail-boys, and a pleasant janitor.These were essentials; if he could not get them, thenthey must do without. But he must get them.

XI.

Mrs. March was one of those wives who exact a morerigid adherence to their ideals from their husbandsthan from themselves. Early in their marriedlife she had taken charge of him in all matters whichshe considered practical. She did not includethe business of bread-winning in these; that was anaffair that might safely be left to his absent-minded,dreamy inefficiency, and she did not interfere withhim there. But in such things as rehanging thepictures, deciding on a summer boarding-place, takinga seaside cottage, repapering rooms, choosing seatsat the theatre, seeing what the children ate when shewas not at table, shutting the cat out at night, keepingrun of calls and invitations, and seeing if the furnacewas dampered, he had failed her so often that shefelt she could not leave him the slightest discretionin regard to a flat. Her total distrust of hisjudgment in the matters cited and others like themconsisted with the greatest admiration of his mindand respect for his character. She often saidthat if he would only bring these to bear in suchexigencies he would be simply perfect; but she hadlong given up his ever doing so. She subjectedhim, therefore, to an iron code, but after proclaimingit she was apt to abandon him to the native lawlessness

of his temperament. She expected him in this eventto do as he pleased, and she resigned herself to itwith considerable comfort in holding him accountable.He learned to expect this, and after suffering keenlyfrom her disappointment with whatever he did he waitedpatiently till she forgot her grievance and beganto extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable.She would almost admit at moments that what he haddone was a very good thing, but she reserved the rightto return in full force to her original condemnationof it; and she accumulated each act of independentvolition in witness and warning against him. Theirmass oppressed but never deterred him. He expectedto do the wrong thing when left to his own devices,and he did it without any apparent recollection ofhis former misdeeds and their consequences. Therewas a good deal of comedy in it all, and some tragedy.

He now experienced a certain expansion, such as husbandsof his kind will imagine, on going back to his hotelalone. It was, perhaps, a revulsion from thepain of parting; and he toyed with the idea of Mrs.Grosvenor Green’s apartment, which, in its preposterousunsuitability, had a strange attraction. He feltthat he could take it with less risk than anythingelse they had seen, but he said he would look at allthe other places in town first. He really spentthe greater part of the next day in hunting up theowner of an apartment that had neither steam heat noran elevator, but was otherwise perfect, and tryingto get him to take less than the agent asked.By a curious psychical operation he was able, in thetransaction, to work himself into quite a passionatedesire for the apartment, while he held the GrosvenorGreen apartment in the background of his mind as somethingthat he could return to as altogether more suitable.He conducted some simultaneous negotiation for a furnishedhouse, which enhanced still more the desirability ofthe Grosvenor Green apartment. Toward eveninghe went off at a tangent far up-town, so as to beable to tell his wife how utterly preposterous thebest there would be as compared even with this ridiculousGrosvenor Green gimcrackery. It is hard to reportthe processes of his sophistication; perhaps this,again, may best be left to the marital imagination.

He rang at the last of these up-town apartments asit was falling dusk, and it was long before the janitorappeared. Then the man was very surly, and saidif he looked at the flat now he would say it was toodark, like all the rest. His reluctance irritatedMarch in proportion to his insincerity in proposingto look at it at all. He knew he did not meanto take it under any circ*mstances; that he was goingto use his inspection of it in dishonest justificationof his disobedience to his wife; but he put on anair of offended dignity. “If you don’twish to show the apartment,” he said, “Idon’t care to see it.”

The man groaned, for he was heavy, and no doubt dreadedthe stairs. He scratched a match on his thigh,and led the way up. March was sorry for him,and he put his fingers on a quarter in his waistcoat-pocketto give him at parting. At the same time, hehad to trump up an objection to the flat. Thiswas easy, for it was advertised as containing ten rooms,and he found the number eked out with the bath-roomand two large closets. “It’s lightenough,” said March, “but I don’tsee how you make out ten rooms”

“There’s ten rooms,” said the man,deigning no proof.

March took his fingers off the quarter, and went down-stairsand out of the door without another word. Itwould be wrong, it would be impossible, to give theman anything after such insolence. He reflected,with shame, that it was also cheaper to punish thanforgive him.

He returned to his hotel prepared for any desperatemeasure, and convinced now that the Grosvenor Greenapartment was not merely the only thing left for him,but was, on its own merits, the best thing in NewYork.

Fulkerson was waiting for him in the reading-room,and it gave March the curious thrill with which aman closes with temptation when he said: “Lookhere! Why don’t you take that woman’sflat in the Xenophon? She’s been at theagents again, and they’ve been at me. Shelikes your look—­or Mrs. March’s—­andI guess you can have it at a pretty heavy discountfrom the original price. I’m authorizedto say you can have it for one seventy-five a month,and I don’t believe it would be safe for youto offer one fifty.”

March shook his head, and dropped a mask of virtuousrejection over his corrupt acquiescence. “It’stoo small for us—­we couldn’t squeezeinto it.”

“Why, look here!” Fulkerson persisted.“How many rooms do you people want?”

“I’ve got to have a place to work—­”

“Of course! And you’ve got to haveit at the Fifth Wheel office.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Marchbegan. “I suppose I could do my work atthe office, as there’s not much writing—­”

“Why, of course you can’t do your workat home. You just come round with me now, andlook at that again.”

“No; I can’t do it.”

“Why?”

“I—­I’ve got to dine.”

“All right,” said Fulkerson. “Dinewith me. I want to take you round to a littleItalian place that I know.”

One may trace the successive steps of March’sdescent in this simple matter with the same edificationthat would attend the study of the self-delusionsand obfuscations of a man tempted to crime. Theprocess is probably not at all different, and to thephilosophical mind the kind of result is unimportant;the process is everything.

Fulkerson led him down one block and half across anotherto the steps of a small dwelling-house, transformed,like many others, into a restaurant of the Latin ideal,with little or no structural change from the patternof the lower middle-class New York home. Therewere the corroded brownstone steps, the mean littlefront door, and the cramped entry with its narrowstairs by which ladies could go up to a dining-roomappointed for them on the second floor; the parlorson the first were set about with tables, where mensmoked cigarettes between the courses, and a singlewaiter ran swiftly to and fro with plates and dishes,and, exchanged unintelligible outcries with a cookbeyond a slide in the back parlor. He rushedat the new-comers, brushed the soiled table-clothbefore them with a towel on his arm, covered its worststains with a napkin, and brought them, in their order,the vermicelli soup, the fried fish, the cheese-strewnspaghetti, the veal cutlets, the tepid roast fowland salad, and the wizened pear and coffee which formthe dinner at such places.

“Ah, this is nice!” said Fulkerson, afterthe laying of the charitable napkin, and he beganto recognize acquaintances, some of whom he describedto March as young literary men and artists with whomthey should probably have to do; others were simplyfrequenters of the place, and were of all nationalitiesand religions apparently—­at least, severalwere Hebrews and Cubans. “You get a prettygood slice of New York here,” he said, “allexcept the frosting on top. That you won’tfind much at Maroni’s, though you will occasionally.I don’t mean the ladies ever, of course.”The ladies present seemed harmless and reputable-lookingpeople enough, but certainly they were not of thefirst fashion, and, except in a few instances, notAmericans. “It’s like cutting straightdown through a fruitcake,” Fulkerson went on,“or a mince-pie, when you don’t know whomade the pie; you get a little of everything.”He ordered a small flask of Chianti with the dinner,and it came in its pretty wicker jacket. Marchsmiled upon it with tender reminiscence, and Fulkersonlaughed. “Lights you up a little.I brought old Dryfoos here one day, and he thoughtit was sweet-oil; that’s the kind of bottle theyused to have it in at the country drug-stores.”

“Yes, I remember now; but I’d totallyforgotten it,” said March. “How farback that goes! Who’s Dryfoos?”

“Dryfoos?” Fulkerson, still smiling, toreoff a piece of the half-yard of French loaf whichhad been supplied them, with two pale, thin disks ofbutter, and fed it into himself. “Old Dryfoos?Well, of course! I call him old, but he ain’tso very. About fifty, or along there.”

“No,” said March, “that isn’tvery old—­or not so old as it used to be.”

“Well, I suppose you’ve got to know abouthim, anyway,” said Fulkerson, thoughtfully.“And I’ve been wondering just how I shouldtell you. Can’t always make out exactlyhow much of a Bostonian you really are! Ever beenout in the natural-gas country?”

“No,” said March. “I’vehad a good deal of curiosity about it, but I’venever been able to get away except in summer, and thenwe always preferred to go over the old ground, outto Niagara and back through Canada, the route we tookon our wedding journey. The children like it asmuch as we do.”

“Yes, yes,” said Fulkerson. “Well,the natural-gas country is worth seeing. I don’tmean the Pittsburg gas-fields, but out in NorthernOhio and Indiana around Moffitt—­that’sthe place in the heart of the gas region that they’vebeen booming so. Yes, you ought to see that country.If you haven’t been West for a good many years,you haven’t got any idea how old the countrylooks. You remember how the fields used to beall full of stumps?”

“I should think so.”

“Well, you won’t see any stumps now.All that country out around Moffitt is just as smoothas a checker-board, and looks as old as England.You know how we used to burn the stumps out; and thensomebody invented a stump-extractor, and we pulledthem out with a yoke of oxen. Now they just touch’em off with a little dynamite, and they’vegot a cellar dug and filled up with kindling readyfor housekeeping whenever you want it. Only theyhaven’t got any use for kindling in that country—­allgas. I rode along on the cars through those levelblack fields at corn-planting time, and every oncein a while I’d come to a place with a piece ofragged old stove-pipe stickin’ up out of theground, and blazing away like forty, and a fellowploughing all round it and not minding it any morethan if it was spring violets. Horses didn’tnotice it, either. Well, they’ve alwaysknown about the gas out there; they say there areplaces in the woods where it’s been burning eversince the country was settled.

“But when you come in sight of Moffitt—­my,oh, my! Well, you come in smell of it about assoon. That gas out there ain’t odorless,like the Pittsburg gas, and so it’s perfectlysafe; but the smell isn’t bad—­aboutas bad as the finest kind of benzine. Well, thefirst thing that strikes you when you come to Moffittis the notion that there has been a good warm, growingrain, and the town’s come up overnight.That’s in the suburbs, the annexes, and additions.But it ain’t shabby—­no shanty-farmbusiness; nice brick and frame houses, some of ’emQueen Anne style, and all of ’em looking asif they had come to stay. And when you drive upfrom the depot you think everybody’s moving.Everything seems to be piled into the street; oldhouses made over, and new ones going up everywhere.You know the kind of street Main Street always usedto be in our section—­half plank-road andturnpike, and the rest mud-hole, and a lot of storesand doggeries strung along with false fronts a storyhigher than the back, and here and there a decentbuilding with the gable end to the public; and a court-houseand jail and two taverns and three or four churches.Well, they’re all there in Moffitt yet, but architecture

has struck it hard, and they’ve got a lot ofnew buildings that needn’t be ashamed of themselvesanywhere; the new court-house is as big as St. Peter’s,and the Grand Opera-house is in the highest style ofthe art. You can’t buy a lot on that streetfor much less than you can buy a lot in New York—­oryou couldn’t when the boom was on; I saw theplace just when the boom was in its prime. Iwent out there to work the newspapers in the syndicatebusiness, and I got one of their men to write me areal bright, snappy account of the gas; and they justtook me in their arms and showed me everything.Well, it was wonderful, and it was beautiful, too!To see a whole community stirred up like that was—­justlike a big boy, all hope and high spirits, and nodiscount on the remotest future; nothing but perpetualboom to the end of time—­I tell you it warmedyour blood. Why, there were some things aboutit that made you think what a nice kind of world thiswould be if people ever took hold together, insteadof each fellow fighting it out on his own hook, anddevil take the hindmost. They made up their mindsat Moffitt that if they wanted their town to growthey’d got to keep their gas public property.So they extended their corporation line so as to takein pretty much the whole gas region round there; andthen the city took possession of every well that wasput down, and held it for the common good. Anybodythat’s a mind to come to Moffitt and start anykind of manufacture can have all the gas he wantsfree; and for fifteen dollars a year you can have allthe gas you want to heat and light your private house.The people hold on to it for themselves, and, as Isay, it’s a grand sight to see a whole communityhanging together and working for the good of all, insteadof splitting up into as many different cut-throatsas there are able-bodied citizens. See that fellow?”Fulkerson broke off, and indicated with a twirl ofhis head a short, dark, foreign-looking man going outof the door. “They say that fellow’sa Socialist. I think it’s a shame they’reallowed to come here. If they don’t likethe way we manage our affairs let ’em stay athome,” Fulkerson continued. “Theydo a lot of mischief, shooting off their mouths roundhere. I believe in free speech and all that;but I’d like to see these fellows shut up injail and left to jaw one another to death. Wedon’t want any of their poison.”

March did not notice the vanishing Socialist.He was watching, with a teasing sense of familiarity,a tall, shabbily dressed, elderly man, who had justcome in. He had the aquiline profile uncommonamong Germans, and yet March recognized him at onceas German. His long, soft beard and mustachehad once been fair, and they kept some tone of theiryellow in the gray to which they had turned.His eyes were full, and his lips and chin shaped thebeard to the noble outline which shows in the beardsthe Italian masters liked to paint for their LastSuppers. His carriage was erect and soldierly,and March presently saw that he had lost his lefthand. He took his place at a table where the overworkedwaiter found time to cut up his meat and put everythingin easy reach of his right hand.

“Well,” Fulkerson resumed, “theytook me round everywhere in Moffitt, and showed metheir big wells—­lit ’em up for a privateview, and let me hear them purr with the soft accentsof a mass-meeting of locomotives. Why, when theylet one of these wells loose in a meadow that they’dpiped it into temporarily, it drove the flame awayforty feet from the mouth of the pipe and blew itover half an acre of ground. They say when theylet one of their big wells burn away all winter beforethey had learned how to control it, that well keptup a little summer all around it; the grass stayedgreen, and the flowers bloomed all through the winter.I don’t know whether it’s so or not.But I can believe anything of natural gas. My!but it was beautiful when they turned on the full forceof that well and shot a roman candle into the gas—­that’sthe way they light it—­and a plume of fireabout twenty feet wide and seventy-five feet high,all red and yellow and violet, jumped into the sky,and that big roar shook the ground under your feet!You felt like saying:

“‘Don’t trouble yourself; I’mperfectly convinced. I believe in Moffitt.’We-e-e-ll!” drawled Fulkerson, with a long breath,“that’s where I met old Dryfoos.”

“Oh yes!—­Dryfoos,” said March.He observed that the waiter had brought the old one-handedGerman a towering glass of beer.

“Yes,” Fulkerson laughed. “We’vegot round to Dryfoos again. I thought I couldcut a long story short, but I seem to be cutting ashort story long. If you’re not in a hurry,though—­”

“Not in the least. Go on as long as youlike.”

“I met him there in the office of a real-estateman—­speculator, of course; everybody was,in Moffitt; but a first-rate fellow, and public-spiritedas all get-out; and when Dryfoos left he told me abouthim. Dryfoos was an old Pennsylvania Dutch farmer,about three or four miles out of Moffitt, and he’dlived there pretty much all his life; father was oneof the first settlers. Everybody knew he had theright stuff in him, but he was slower than molassesin January, like those Pennsylvania Dutch. He’dgot together the largest and handsomest farm anywherearound there; and he was making money on it, just likehe was in some business somewhere; he was a very intelligentman; he took the papers and kept himself posted; buthe was awfully old-fashioned in his ideas. Hehung on to the doctrines as well as the dollars ofthe dads; it was a real thing with him. Well,when the boom began to come he hated it awfully, andhe fought it. He used to write communicationsto the weekly newspaper in Moffitt—­they’vegot three dailies there now—­and throw coldwater on the boom. He couldn’t catch onno way. It made him sick to hear the clack thatwent on about the gas the whole while, and that stirredup the neighborhood and got into his family.Whenever he’d hear of a man that had been offereda big price for his land and was going to sell outand move into town, he’d go and labor with himand try to talk him out of it, and tell him how longhis fifteen or twenty thousand would last him to liveon, and shake the Standard Oil Company before him,and try to make him believe it wouldn’t be fiveyears before the Standard owned the whole region.

“Of course, he couldn’t do anything withthem. When a man’s offered a big pricefor his farm, he don’t care whether it’sby a secret emissary from the Standard Oil or not;he’s going to sell and get the better of theother fellow if he can. Dryfoos couldn’tkeep the boom out of has own family even. Hiswife was with him. She thought whatever he saidand did was just as right as if it had been thundereddown from Sinai. But the young folks were sceptical,especially the girls that had been away to school.The boy that had been kept at home because he couldn’tbe spared from helping his father manage the farmwas more like him, but they contrived to stir theboy up—­with the hot end of the boom, too.So when a fellow came along one day and offered oldDryfoos a cool hundred thousand for his farm, it wasall up with Dryfoos. He’d ‘a’liked to ‘a’ kept the offer to himselfand not done anything about it, but his vanity wouldn’tlet him do that; and when he let it out in his familythe girls outvoted him. They just made him sell.

“He wouldn’t sell all. He kept abouteighty acres that was off in some piece by itself,but the three hundred that had the old brick houseon it, and the big barn—­that went, andDryfoos bought him a place in Moffitt and moved intotown to live on the interest of his money. JustWhat he had scolded and ridiculed everybody else fordoing. Well, they say that at first he seemedlike he would go crazy. He hadn’t anythingto do. He took a fancy to that land-agent, andhe used to go and set in his office and ask him whathe should do. ’I hain’t got any horses,I hain’t got any cows, I hain’t got anypigs, I hain’t got any chickens. I hain’tgot anything to do from sun-up to sun-down.’The fellow said the tears used to run down the oldfellow’s cheeks, and if he hadn’t beenso busy himself he believed he should ‘a’cried, too. But most o’ people thoughtold Dryfoos was down in the mouth because he hadn’tasked more for his farm, when he wanted to buy itback and found they held it at a hundred and fiftythousand. People couldn’t believe he wasjust homesick and heartsick for the old place.Well, perhaps he was sorry he hadn’t asked more;that’s human nature, too.

“After a while something happened. Thatland-agent used to tell Dryfoos to get out to Europewith his money and see life a little, or go and livein Washington, where he could be somebody; but Dryfooswouldn’t, and he kept listening to the talkthere, and all of a sudden he caught on. He cameinto that fellow’s one day with a plan for cuttingup the eighty acres he’d kept into town lots;and he’d got it all plotted out so-well, andhad so many practical ideas about it, that the fellowwas astonished. He went right in with him, asfar as Dryfoos would let him, and glad of the chance;and they were working the thing for all it was worthwhen I struck Moffitt. Old Dryfoos wanted meto go out and see the Dryfoos & Hendry Addition—­guess

he thought maybe I’d write it up; and he droveme out there himself. Well, it was funny to seea town made: streets driven through; two rowsof shadetrees, hard and soft, planted; cellars dugand houses put up-regular Queen Anne style, too, withstained glass-all at once. Dryfoos apologizedfor the streets because they were hand-made; saidthey expected their street-making machine Tuesday,and then they intended to push things.”

Fulkerson enjoyed the effect of his picture on Marchfor a moment, and then went on: “He wasmighty intelligent, too, and he questioned me up aboutmy business as sharp as I ever was questioned; seemedto kind of strike his fancy; I guess he wanted tofind out if there was any money in it. He wasmaking money, hand over hand, then; and he never stoppedspeculating and improving till he’d scraped togetherthree or four hundred thousand dollars, they saida million, but they like round numbers at Moffitt,and I guess half a million would lay over it comfortablyand leave a few thousands to spare, probably.Then he came on to New York.”

Fulkerson struck a match against the ribbed side ofthe porcelain cup that held the matches in the centreof the table, and lit a cigarette, which he beganto smoke, throwing his head back with a leisurely effect,as if he had got to the end of at least as much ofhis story as he meant to tell without prompting.

March asked him the desired question. “Whatin the world for?”

Fulkerson took out his cigarette and said, with asmile: “To spend his money, and get hisdaughters into the old Knickerbocker society.Maybe he thought they were all the same kind of Dutch.”

“And has he succeeded?”

“Well, they’re not social leaders yet.But it’s only a question of time—­generationor two—­especially if time’s money,and if Every Other Week is the success it’sbound to be.”

“You don’t mean to say, Fulkerson,”said March, with a half-doubting, half-daunted laugh,“that he’s your Angel?”

“That’s what I mean to say,” returnedFulkerson. “I ran onto him in Broadwayone day last summer. If you ever saw anybody inyour life; you’re sure to meet him in Broadwayagain, sooner or later. That’s the philosophyof the bunco business; country people from the sameneighborhood are sure to run up against each otherthe first time they come to New York. I put outmy hand, and I said, ’Isn’t this Mr. Dryfoosfrom Moffitt?’ He didn’t seem to have anyuse for my hand; he let me keep it, and he squaredthose old lips of his till his imperial stuck straightout. Ever see Bernhardt in ‘L’Etrangere’?Well, the American husband is old Dryfoos all over;no mustache; and hay-colored chin-whiskers cut slantingfroze the corners of his mouth. He co*cked hislittle gray eyes at me, and says he: ’Yes,young man; my name is Dryfoos, and I’m fromMoffitt. But I don’t want no present ofLongfellow’s Works, illustrated; and I don’twant to taste no fine teas; but I know a policemanthat does; and if you’re the son of my old friendSquire Strohfeldt, you’d better get out.’‘Well, then,’ said I, ’how wouldyou like to go into the newspaper syndicate business?’He gave another look at me, and then he burst outlaughing, and he grabbed my hand, and he just frozeto it. I never saw anybody so glad.

“Well, the long and the short of it was thatI asked him round here to Maroni’s to dinner;and before we broke up for the night we had settledthe financial side of the plan that’s broughtyou to New York.”

“I can see,” said Fulkerson, who had kepthis eyes fast on March’s face, “that youdon’t more than half like the idea of Dryfoos.It ought to give you more confidence in the thingthan you ever had. You needn’t be afraid,”he added, with some feeling, “that I talked Dryfoosinto the thing for my own advantage.”

“Oh, my dear Fulkerson!” March protested,all the more fervently because he was really a littleguilty.

“Well, of course not! I didn’t meanyou were. But I just happened to tell him whatI wanted to go into when I could see my way to it,and he caught on of his own accord. The factis,” said Fulkerson, “I guess I’dbetter make a clean breast of it, now I’m atit, Dryfoos wanted to get something for that boy ofhis to do. He’s in railroads himself, andhe’s in mines and other things, and he keepsbusy, and he can’t bear to have his boy hanginground the house doing nothing, like as if he was agirl. I told him that the great object of a richman was to get his son into just that fix, but hecouldn’t seem to see it, and the boy hated ithimself. He’s got a good head, and he wantedto study for the ministry when they were all livingtogether out on the farm; but his father had the old-fashionedideas about that. You know they used to thinkthat any sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacherout of; but they wanted the good timber for business;and so the old man wouldn’t let him. You’llsee the fellow; you’ll like him; he’sno fool, I can tell you; and he’s going to beour publisher, nominally at first and actually whenI’ve taught him the ropes a little.”

XII.

Fulkerson stopped and looked at March, whom he sawlapsing into a serious silence. Doubtless hedivined his uneasiness with the facts that had beengiven him to digest. He pulled out his watch andglanced at it. “See here, how would youlike to go up to Forty-sixth street with me, and dropin on old Dryfoos? Now’s your chance.He’s going West tomorrow, and won’t beback for a month or so. They’ll all be gladto see you, and you’ll understand things betterwhen you’ve seen him and his family. I can’texplain.”

March reflected a moment. Then he said, witha wisdom that surprised him, for he would have likedto yield to the impulse of his curiosity: “Perhapswe’d better wait till Mrs. March comes down,and let things take the usual course. The Dryfoosladies will want to call on her as the last-comer,and if I treated myself ‘en garcon’ now,and paid the first visit, it might complicate matters.”

“Well, perhaps you’re right,” saidFulkerson. “I don’t know much aboutthese things, and I don’t believe Ma Dryfoosdoes, either.” He was on his legs lightinganother cigarette. “I suppose the girlsare getting themselves up in etiquette, though.Well, then, let’s have a look at the ‘EveryOther Week’ building, and then, if you like yourquarters there, you can go round and close for Mrs.Green’s flat.”

March’s dormant allegiance to his wife’swishes had been roused by his decision in favor ofgood social usage. “I don’t thinkI shall take the flat,” he said.

“Well, don’t reject it without givingit another look, anyway. Come on!”

He helped March on with his light overcoat, and thelittle stir they made for their departure caught thenotice of the old German; he looked up from his beerat them. March was more than ever impressed withsomething familiar in his face. In compensationfor his prudence in regard to the Dryfooses he nowindulged an impulse. He stepped across to wherethe old man sat, with his bald head shining like ivoryunder the gas-jet, and his fine patriarchal lengthof bearded mask taking picturesque lights and shadows,and put out his hand to him.

“Lindau! Isn’t this Mr. Lindau?”

The old man lifted himself slowly to his feet withmechanical politeness, and cautiously took March’shand. “Yes, my name is Lindau,” hesaid, slowly, while he scanned March’s face.Then he broke into a long cry. “Ah-h-h-h-h,my dear poy! my gong friendt! my-my—­Idtis Passil Marge, not zo? Ah, ha, ha, ha!How gladt I am to zee you! Why, I am gladt!And you rememberdt me? You remember Schiller,and Goethe, and Uhland? And Indianapolis?You still lif in Indianapolis? It sheers my hardtto zee you. But you are lidtle oldt, too?Tventy-five years makes a difference. Ah, I amgladt! Dell me, idt is Passil Marge, not zo?”

He looked anxiously into March’s face, witha gentle smile of mixed hope and doubt, and Marchsaid: “As sure as it’s Berthold Lindau,and I guess it’s you. And you rememberthe old times? You were as much of a boy as Iwas, Lindau. Are you living in New York?Do you recollect how you tried to teach me to fence?I don’t know how to this day, Lindau. Howgood you were, and how patient! Do you rememberhow we used to sit up in the little parlor back ofyour printing-office, and read Die Rauber and DieTheilung der Erde and Die Glocke? And Mrs. Lindau?Is she with—­”

“Deadt—­deadt long ago. Rightafter I got home from the war—­tventy yearsago. But tell me, you are married? Children?Yes! Goodt! And how oldt are you now?”

“It makes me seventeen to see you, Lindau, butI’ve got a son nearly as old.”

“Ah, ha, ha! Goodt! And where do youlif?”

“Well, I’m just coming to live in NewYork,” March said, looking over at Fulkerson,who had been watching his interview with the perfunctorysmile of sympathy that people put on at the meetingof old friends. “I want to introduce youto my friend Mr. Fulkerson. He and I are goinginto a literary enterprise here.”

“Ah! zo?” said the old man, with politeinterest. He took Fulkerson’s profferedhand, and they all stood talking a few moments together.

Then Fulkerson said, with another look at his watch,“Well, March, we’re keeping Mr. Lindaufrom his dinner.”

“Dinner!” cried the old man. “Idt’sbetter than breadt and meadt to see Mr. Marge!”

“I must be going, anyway,” said March.“But I must see you again soon, Lindau.Where do you live? I want a long talk.”

“And I. You will find me here at dinner-time.”said the old man. “It is the best place”;and March fancied him reluctant to give another address.

To cover his consciousness he answered, gayly:“Then, it’s ’auf wiedersehen’with us. Well!”

“Also!” The old man took his hand, andmade a mechanical movement with his mutilated arm,as if he would have taken it in a double clasp.He laughed at himself. “I wanted to gifyou the other handt, too, but I gafe it to your gountrya goodt while ago.”

“To my country?” asked March, with a senseof pain, and yet lightly, as if it were a joke ofthe old man’s. “Your country, too,Lindau?”

The old man turned very grave, and said, almost coldly,“What gountry hass a poor man got, Mr. Marge?”

“Well, you ought to have a share in the oneyou helped to save for us rich men, Lindau,”March returned, still humoring the joke.

The old man smiled sadly, but made no answer as hesat down again.

“Seems to be a little soured,” said Fulkerson,as they went down the steps. He was one of thoseAmericans whose habitual conception of life is unalloyedprosperity. When any experience or observationof his went counter to it he suffered—­somethinglike physical pain. He eagerly shrugged awaythe impression left upon his buoyancy by Lindau, andadded to March’s continued silence, “Whatdid I tell you about meeting every man in New Yorkthat you ever knew before?”

“I never expected to meat Lindau in the worldagain,” said March, more to himself than toFulkerson. “I had an impression that hehad been killed in the war. I almost wish hehad been.”

“Oh, hello, now!” cried Fulkerson.

March laughed, but went on soberly: “Hewas a man predestined to adversity, though. WhenI first knew him out in Indianapolis he was starvingalong with a sick wife and a sick newspaper. Itwas before the Germans had come over to the Republicansgenerally, but Lindau was fighting the anti-slaverybattle just as naturally at Indianapolis in 1858 ashe fought behind the barricades at Berlin in 1848.And yet he was always such a gentle soul! Andso generous! He taught me German for the loveof it; he wouldn’t spoil his pleasure by takinga cent from me; he seemed to get enough out of mybeing young and enthusiastic, and out of prophesyinggreat things for me. I wonder what the poor oldfellow is doing here, with that one hand of his?”

“Not amassing a very ‘handsome pittance,’I guess, as Artemus Ward would say,” said Fulkerson,getting back some of his lightness. “Thereare lots of two-handed fellows in New York that arenot doing much better, I guess. Maybe he getssome writing on the German papers.”

“I hope so. He’s one of the mostaccomplished men! He used to be a splendid musician—­pianist—­andknows eight or ten languages.”

“Well, it’s astonishing,” said Fulkerson,“how much lumber those Germans can carry aroundin their heads all their lives, and never work it upinto anything. It’s a pity they couldn’tdo the acquiring, and let out the use of their learningto a few bright Americans. We could make thingshum, if we could arrange ’em that way.”

He talked on, unheeded by March, who went along half-consciouslytormented by his lightness in the pensive memoriesthe meeting with Lindau had called up. Was thisall that sweet, unselfish nature could come to?What a homeless old age at that meagre Italian tabled’hote, with that tall glass of beer for a half-hour’soblivion! That shabby dress, that pathetic mutilation!He must have a pension, twelve dollars a month, oreighteen, from a grateful country. But what elsedid he eke out with?

“Well, here we are,” said Fulkerson, cheerily.He ran up the steps before March, and opened the carpenter’stemporary valve in the door frame, and led the wayinto a darkness smelling sweetly of unpainted wood-workand newly dried plaster; their feat slipped on shavingsand grated on sand. He scratched a match, andfound a candle, and then walked about up and downstairs, and lectured on the advantages of the place.He had fitted up bachelor apartments for himself inthe house, and said that he was going to have a flatto let on the top floor. “I didn’toffer it to you because I supposed you’d betoo proud to live over your shop; and it’s toosmall, anyway; only five rooms.”

“Yes, that’s too small,” said March,shirking the other point.

“Well, then, here’s the room I intendfor your office,” said Fulkerson, showing himinto a large back parlor one flight up. “You’llhave it quiet from the street noises here, and youcan be at home or not, as you please. There’llbe a boy on the stairs to find out. Now, you see,this makes the Grosvenor Green flat practicable, ifyou want it.”

March felt the forces of fate closing about him andpushing him to a decision. He feebly fought themoff till he could have another look at the flat.Then, baked and subdued still more by the unexpectedpresence of Mrs. Grosvenor Green herself, who wasoccupying it so as to be able to show it effectively,he took it. He was aware more than ever of itsabsurdities; he knew that his wife would never ceaseto hate it; but he had suffered one of those eclipsesof the imagination to which men of his temperamentare subject, and into which he could see no futurefor his desires. He felt a comfort in irretrievablycommitting himself, and exchanging the burden of indecisionfor the burden of responsibility.

“I don’t know,” said Fulkerson,as they walked back to his hotel together, “butyou might fix it up with that lone widow and her prettydaughter to take part of their house here.”He seemed to be reminded of it by the fact of passingthe house, and March looked up at its dark front.He could not have told exactly why he felt a pang ofremorse at the sight, and doubtless it was more regretfor having taken the Grosvenor Green flat than fornot having taken the widow’s rooms. Still,he could not forget her wistfulness when his wife andhe were looking at them, and her disappointment whenthey decided against them. He had toyed, in,his after-talk to Mrs. March, with a sort of hypotheticalobligation they had to modify their plans so as tomeet the widow’s want of just such a familyas theirs; they had both said what a blessing it wouldbe to her, and what a pity they could not do it; butthey had decided very distinctly that they could not.Now it seemed to him that they might; and he askedhimself whether he had not actually departed as muchfrom their ideal as if he had taken board with thewidow. Suddenly it seemed to him that his wifeasked him this, too.

“I reckon,” said Fulkerson, “thatshe could have arranged to give you your meals inyour rooms, and it would have come to about the samething as housekeeping.”

“No sort of boarding can be the same as house-keeping,”said March. “I want my little girl to havethe run of a kitchen, and I want the whole familyto have the moral effect of housekeeping. It’sdemoralizing to board, in every way; it isn’ta home, if anybody else takes the care of it off yourhands.”

“Well, I suppose so,” Fulkerson assented;but March’s words had a hollow ring to himself,and in his own mind he began to retaliate his dissatisfactionupon Fulkerson.

He parted from him on the usual terms outwardly, buthe felt obscurely abused by Fulkerson in regard tothe Dryfooses, father and son. He did not knowbut Fulkerson had taken an advantage of him in allowinghim to commit himself to their enterprise with outfully and frankly telling him who and what his backerwas; he perceived that with young Dryfoos as the publisherand Fulkerson as the general director of the paperthere might be very little play for his own ideasof its conduct. Perhaps it was the hurt to hisvanity involved by the recognition of this fact thatmade him forget how little choice he really had inthe matter, and how, since he had not accepted theoffer to edit the insurance paper, nothing remainedfor him but to close with Fulkerson. In this momentof suspicion and resentment he accused Fulkerson ofhastening his decision in regard to the GrosvenorGreen apartment; he now refused to consider it a decision,and said to himself that if he felt disposed to doso he would send Mrs. Green a note reversing it inthe morning. But he put it all off till morningwith his clothes, when he went to bed, he put off even

thinking what his wife would say; he cast Fulkersonand his constructive treachery out of his mind, too,and invited into it some pensive reveries of the past,when he still stood at the parting of the ways, andcould take this path or that. In his middle lifethis was not possible; he must follow the path chosenlong, ago, wherever, it led. He was not masterof himself, as he once seemed, but the servant ofthose he loved; if he could do what he liked, perhapshe might renounce this whole New York enterprise,and go off somewhere out of the reach of care; buthe could not do what he liked, that was very clear.In the pathos of this conviction he dwelt compassionatelyupon the thought of poor old Lindau; he resolved tomake him accept a handsome sum of money—­morethan he could spare, something that he would feelthe loss of—­in payment of the lessons inGerman and fencing given so long ago. At the usualrate for such lessons, his debt, with interest fortwenty-odd years, would run very far into the hundreds.Too far, he perceived, for his wife’s joyousapproval; he determined not to add the interest; orhe believed that Lindau would refuse the interest;he put a fine speech in his mouth, making him do so;and after that he got Lindau employment on ’EveryOther Week,’ and took care of him till he died.

Through all his melancholy and munificence he wasaware of sordid anxieties for having taken the GrosvenorGreen apartment. These began to assume visible,tangible shapes as he drowsed, and to became personalentities, from which he woke, with little starts, toa realization of their true nature, and then suddenlyfell fast asleep.

In the accomplishment of the events which his reverieplayed with, there was much that retroactively stampedit with prophecy, but much also that was better thanhe forboded. He found that with regard to theGrosvenor Green apartment he had not allowed for hiswife’s willingness to get any sort of roof overher head again after the removal from their old home,or for the alleviations that grow up through mere custom.The practical workings of the apartment were not sobad; it had its good points, and after the first sensationof oppression in it they began to feel the convenienceof its arrangement. They were at that time oflife when people first turn to their children’sopinion with deference, and, in the loss of keennessin their own likes and dislikes, consult the youngpreferences which are still so sensitive. It wentfar to reconcile Mrs. March to the apartment thather children were pleased with its novelty; when thiswore off for them, she had herself begun to find itmuch more easily manageable than a house. Aftershe had put away several barrels of gimcracks, andfolded up screens and rugs and skins, and carried themall off to the little dark store-room which the flatdeveloped, she perceived at once a roominess and cozinessin it unsuspected before. Then, when people beganto call, she had a pleasure, a superiority, in saying

that it was a furnished apartment, and in disclaimingall responsibility for the upholstery and decoration.If March was by, she always explained that it wasMr. March’s fancy, and amiably laughed it offwith her callers as a mannish eccentricity. Nobodyreally seemed to think it otherwise than pretty; andthis again was a triumph for Mrs. March, because itshowed how inferior the New York taste was to theBoston taste in such matters.

March submitted silently to his punishment, and laughedwith her before company at his own eccentricity.She had been so preoccupied with the adjustment ofthe family to its new quarters and circ*mstances thatthe time passed for laying his misgivings, if theywere misgivings, about Fulkerson before her, and whenan occasion came for expressing them they had themselvespassed in the anxieties of getting forward the firstnumber of ‘Every Other Week.’ He keptthese from her, too, and the business that broughtthem to New York had apparently dropped into abeyancebefore the questions of domestic economy that presentedand absented themselves. March knew his wifeto be a woman of good mind and in perfect sympathywith him, but he understood the limitations of herperspective; and if he was not too wise, he was tooexperienced to intrude upon it any affairs of histill her own were reduced to the right order and proportion.It would have been folly to talk to her of Fulkerson’sconjecturable uncandor while she was in doubt whetherher cook would like the kitchen, or her two servantswould consent to room together; and till it was decidedwhat school Tom should go to, and whether Bella shouldhave lessons at home or not, the relation which Marchwas to bear to the Dryfooses, as owner and publisher,was not to be discussed with his wife. He mightdrag it in, but he was aware that with her mind distractedby more immediate interests he could not get from herthat judgment, that reasoned divination, which he reliedupon so much. She would try, she would do herbest, but the result would be a view clouded and discoloredby the effort she must make.

He put the whole matter by, and gave himself to thedetails of the work before him. In this he foundnot only escape, but reassurance, for it became moreand more apparent that whatever was nominally the structureof the business, a man of his qualifications and hisinstincts could not have an insignificant place init. He had also the consolation of liking hiswork, and of getting an instant grasp of it that grewconstantly firmer and closer. The joy of knowingthat he had not made a mistake was great. Ingiving rein to ambitions long forborne he seemed toget back to the youth when he had indulged them first;and after half a lifetime passed in pursuits aliento his nature, he was feeling the serene happinessof being mated through his work to his early love.From the outside the spectacle might have had itspathos, and it is not easy to justify such an experimentas he had made at his time of life, except upon theground where he rested from its consideration—­theground of necessity.

His work was more in his thoughts than himself, however;and as the time for the publication of the first numberof his periodical came nearer, his cares all centredupon it. Without fixing any date, Fulkerson hadannounced it, and pushed his announcements with theshameless vigor of a born advertiser. He workedhis interest with the press to the utmost, and paragraphsof a variety that did credit to his ingenuity wereafloat everywhere. Some of them were speciouslyunfavorable in tone; they criticised and even ridiculedthe principles on which the new departure in literaryjournalism was based. Others defended it; othersyet denied that this rumored principle was reallythe principle. All contributed to make talk.All proceeded from the same fertile invention.

March observed with a degree of mortification thatthe talk was very little of it in the New York press;there the references to the novel enterprise wereslight and cold. But Fulkerson said: “Don’tmind that, old man. It’s the whole countrythat makes or breaks a thing like this; New York hasvery little to do with it. Now if it were a play,it would be different. New York does make orbreak a play; but it doesn’t make or break abook; it doesn’t make or break a magazine.The great mass of the readers are outside of New York,and the rural districts are what we have got to gofor. They don’t read much in New York; theywrite, and talk about what they’ve written.Don’t you worry.”

The rumor of Fulkerson’s connection with theenterprise accompanied many of the paragraphs, andhe was able to stay March’s thirst for employmentby turning over to him from day to day heaps of themanuscripts which began to pour in from his old syndicatewriters, as well as from adventurous volunteers allover the country. With these in hand March beganpractically to plan the first number, and to concretea general scheme from the material and the experiencethey furnished. They had intended to issue thefirst number with the new year, and if it had beenan affair of literature alone, it would have been veryeasy; but it was the art leg they limped on, as Fulkersonphrased it. They had not merely to deal withthe question of specific illustrations for this articleor that, but to decide the whole character of theirillustrations, and first of all to get a design fora cover which should both ensnare the heedless andcaptivate the fastidious. These things did notcome properly within March’s province—­thathad been clearly understood—­and for a whileFulkerson tried to run the art leg himself. Thephrase was again his, but it was simpler to make thephrase than to run the leg. The difficult generation,at once stiff-backed and slippery, with which he hadto do in this endeavor, reduced even so buoyant anoptimist to despair, and after wasting some valuableweeks in trying to work the artists himself, he determinedto get an artist to work them. But what artist?It could not be a man with fixed reputation and a

following: he would be too costly, and wouldhave too many enemies among his brethren, even if hewould consent to undertake the job. Fulkersonhad a man in mind, an artist, too, who would havebeen the very thing if he had been the thing at all.He had talent enough, and his sort of talent wouldreach round the whole situation, but, as Fulkersonsaid, he was as many kinds of an ass as he was kindsof an artist.

PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

Anticipative homesickness
Any sort of stuff was goodenough to make a preacher out of
Appearance made him doubttheir ability to pay so much
As much of his story as hemeant to tell without prompting
Considerable comfort in holdinghim accountable
Extract what consolation lurksin the irreparable
Flavors not very sharply distinguishedfrom one another
Handsome pittance
He expected to do the wrongthing when left to his own devices
Hypothetical difficulty
Never-blooming shrub
Poverty as hopeless as anyin the world
Seeming interested in pointsnecessarily indifferent to him
Servant of those he loved
Sigh with which ladies recognizeone another’s martyrdom
Sorry he hadn’t askedmore; that’s human nature
That isn’t very old—­ornot so old as it used to be
Tried to be homesick for them,but failed
Turn to their children’sopinion with deference
Wish we didn’t alwaysrecognize the facts as we do

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

By William Dean Howells

PART SECOND

I.

The evening when March closed with Mrs. Green’sreduced offer, and decided to take her apartment,the widow whose lodgings he had rejected sat withher daughter in an upper room at the back of her house.In the shaded glow of the drop-light she was sewing,and the girl was drawing at the same table. Fromtime to time, as they talked, the girl lifted herhead and tilted it a little on one side so as to getsome desired effect of her work.

“It’s a mercy the cold weather holds off,”said the mother. “We should have to lightthe furnace, unless we wanted to scare everybody awaywith a cold house; and I don’t know who wouldtake care of it, or what would become of us, everyway.”

“They seem to have been scared away from a housethat wasn’t cold,” said the girl.“Perhaps they might like a cold one. Butit’s too early for cold yet. It’sonly just in the beginning of November.”

“The Messenger says they’ve had a sprinklingof snow.”

“Oh yes, at St. Barnaby! I don’tknow when they don’t have sprinklings of snowthere. I’m awfully glad we haven’tgot that winter before us.”

The widow sighed as mothers do who feel the contrasttheir experience opposes to the hopeful recklessnessof such talk as this. “We may have a worsewinter here,” she said, darkly.

“Then I couldn’t stand it,” saidthe girl, “and I should go in for lighting outto Florida double-quick.”

“And how would you get to Florida?” demandedher mother, severely.

“Oh, by the usual conveyance Pullman vestibuledtrain, I suppose. What makes you so blue, mamma?”The girl was all the time sketching away, rubbingout, lifting her head for the effect, and then bendingit over her work again without looking at her mother.

“I am not blue, Alma. But I cannot endurethis—­this hopefulness of yours.”

“Why? What harm does it do?”

“Harm?” echoed the mother.

Pending the effort she must make in saying, the girlcut in: “Yes, harm. You’ve keptyour despair dusted off and ready for use at an instant’snotice ever since we came, and what good has it done?I’m going to keep on hoping to the bitter end.That’s what papa did.”

It was what the Rev. Archibald Leighton had done withall the consumptive’s buoyancy. The morninghe died he told them that now he had turned the pointand was really going to get well. The cheerfulnesswas not only in his disease, but in his temperament.Its excess was always a little against him in hischurch work, and Mrs. Leighton was right enough infeeling that if it had not been for the ballast ofher instinctive despondency he would have made shipwreckof such small chances of prosperity as befell himin life. It was not from him that his daughtergot her talent, though he had left her his temperamentintact of his widow’s legal thirds. Hewas one of those men of whom the country people saywhen he is gone that the woman gets along better withouthim. Mrs. Leighton had long eked out their incomeby taking a summer boarder or two, as a great favor,into her family; and when the greater need came, shefrankly gave up her house to the summer-folks (as theycall them in the country), and managed it for theircomfort from the small quarter of it in which sheshut herself up with her daughter.

The notion of shutting up is an exigency of the roundedperiod. The fact is, of course, that Alma Leightonwas not shut up in any sense whatever. She wasthe pervading light, if not force, of the house.She was a good cook, and she managed the kitchen withthe help of an Irish girl, while her mother lookedafter the rest of the housekeeping. But she wasnot systematic; she had inspiration but not discipline,and her mother mourned more over the days when Almaleft the whole dinner to the Irish girl than she rejoicedin those when one of Alma’s great thoughts tookform in a chicken-pie of incomparable savor or in amatchless pudding. The off-days came when herartistic nature was expressing itself in charcoal,for she drew to the admiration of all among the ladyboarders who could not draw. The others had theirreserves; they readily conceded that Alma had genius,but they were sure she needed instruction. Onthe other hand, they were not so radical as to agree

with the old painter who came every summer to paintthe elms of the St. Barnaby meadows. He contendedthat she needed to be a man in order to amount to anything;but in this theory he was opposed by an authority,of his own sex, whom the lady sketchers believed tospeak with more impartiality in a matter concerningthem as much as Alma Leighton. He said that instructionwould do, and he was not only, younger and handsomer,but he was fresher from the schools than old Harrington,who, even the lady sketchers could see, painted inan obsolescent manner. His name was Beaton—­AngusBeaton; but he was not Scotch, or not more Scotchthan Mary Queen of Scots was. His father wasa Scotchman, but Beaton was born in Syracuse, New York,and it had taken only three years in Paris to obliteratemany traces of native and ancestral manner in him.He wore his black beard cut shorter than his mustache,and a little pointed; he stood with his shoulders wellthrown back and with a lateral curve of his personwhen he talked about art, which would alone have carriedconviction even if he had not had a thick, dark bangcoming almost to the brows of his mobile gray eyes,and had not spoken English with quick, staccato impulses,so as to give it the effect of epigrammatic and sententiousFrench. One of the ladies said that you alwaysthought of him as having spoken French after it wasover, and accused herself of wrong in not being ableto feel afraid of him. None of the ladies wasafraid of him, though they could not believe that hewas really so deferential to their work as he seemed;and they knew, when he would not criticise Mr. Harrington’swork, that he was just acting from principle.

They may or may not have known the deference withwhich he treated Alma’s work; but the girl herselffelt that his abrupt, impersonal comment recognizedher as a real sister in art. He told her she oughtto come to New York, and draw in the League, or getinto some painter’s private class; and it wasthe sense of duty thus appealed to which finally resultedin the hazardous experiment she and her mother werenow making. There were no logical breaks in thechain of their reasoning from past success with boardersin St. Barnaby to future success with boarders inNew York. Of course the outlay was much greater.The rent of the furnished house they had taken wassuch that if they failed their experiment would belittle less than ruinous.

But they were not going to fail; that was what Almacontended, with a hardy courage that her mother sometimesfelt almost invited failure, if it did not deserveit. She was one of those people who believe thatif you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen.She acted on this superstition as if it were a religion.

“If it had not been for my despair, as you callit, Alma,” she answered, “I don’tknow where we should have been now.”

“I suppose we should have been in St. Barnaby,”said the girl. “And if it’s worseto be in New York, you see what your despair’sdone, mamma. But what’s the use? Youmeant well, and I don’t blame you. You can’texpect even despair to come out always just the wayyou want it. Perhaps you’ve used too muchof it.” The girl laughed, and Mrs. Leightonlaughed, too. Like every one else, she was notmerely a prevailing mood, as people are apt to bein books, but was an irregularly spheroidal character,with surfaces that caught the different lights ofcirc*mstance and reflected them. Alma got upand took a pose before the mirror, which she thentransferred to her sketch. The room was pinnedabout with other sketches, which showed with fantasticindistinctness in the shaded gaslight. Alma heldup the drawing. “How do you like it?”

Mrs. Leighton bent forward over her sewing to lookat it. “You’ve got the man’sface rather weak.”

“Yes, that’s so. Either I see allthe hidden weakness that’s in men’s natures,and bring it to the surface in their figures, or elseI put my own weakness into them. Either way,it’s a drawback to their presenting a trulymanly appearance. As long as I have one of themiserable objects before me, I can draw him; but assoon as his back’s turned I get to putting ladiesinto men’s clothes. I should think you’dbe scandalized, mamma, if you were a really feminineperson. It must be your despair that helps youto bear up. But what’s the matter with theyoung lady in young lady’s clothes? Anydust on her?”

“What expressions!” said Mrs. Leighton.“Really, Alma, for a refined girl you are themost unrefined!”

“Go on—­about the girl in the picture!”said Alma, slightly knocking her mother on the shoulder,as she stood over her.

“I don’t see anything to her. What’sshe doing?”

“Oh, just being made love to, I suppose.”

“She’s perfectly insipid!”

“You’re awfully articulate, mamma!Now, if Mr. Wetmore were to criticise that picturehe’d draw a circle round it in the air, and lookat it through that, and tilt his head first on oneside and then on the other, and then look at you,as if you were a figure in it, and then collapse awhile,and moan a little and gasp, ’Isn’t youryoung lady a little too-too—­’ andthen he’d try to get the word out of you, andgroan and suffer some more; and you’d say, ‘Sheis, rather,’ and that would give him courage,and he’d say, ‘I don’t mean thatshe’s so very—­’ ’Of coursenot.’ ‘You understand?’ ‘Perfectly.I see it myself, now.’ ’Well, then’—–­andhe’d take your pencil and begin to draw—­’Ishould give her a little more—­Ah?’‘Yes, I see the difference.’—­’Yousee the difference?’ And he’d go off tosome one else, and you’d know that you’dbeen doing the wishy-washiest thing in the world,though he hadn’t spoken a word of criticism,and couldn’t. But he wouldn’t havenoticed the expression at all; he’d have shownyou where your drawing was bad. He doesn’tcare for what he calls the literature of a thing;he says that will take care of itself if the drawing’sgood. He doesn’t like my doing these chicthings; but I’m going to keep it up, for I thinkit’s the nearest way to illustrating.”

She took her sketch and pinned it up on the door.

“And has Mr. Beaton been about, yet?”asked her mother.

“No,” said the girl, with her back stillturned; and she added, “I believe he’sin New York; Mr. Wetmore’s seen him.”

“It’s a little strange he doesn’tcall.”

“It would be if he were not an artist.But artists never do anything like other people.He was on his good behavior while he was with us, andhe’s a great deal more conventional than mostof them; but even he can’t keep it up.That’s what makes me really think that womencan never amount to anything in art. They keepall their appointments, and fulfil all their dutiesjust as if they didn’t know anything about art.Well, most of them don’t. We’ve gotthat new model to-day.”

“What new model?”

“The one Mr. Wetmore was telling us about theold German; he’s splendid. He’s gotthe most beautiful head; just like the old masters’things. He used to be Humphrey Williams’smodel for his Biblical-pieces; but since he’sdead, the old man hardly gets anything to do.Mr. Wetmore says there isn’t anybody in theBible that Williams didn’t paint him as.He’s the Law and the Prophets in all his OldTestament pictures, and he’s Joseph, Peter,Judas Iscariot, and the Scribes and Pharisees in theNew.”

“It’s a good thing people don’tknow how artists work, or some of the most sacredpictures would have no influence,” said Mrs.Leighton.

“Why, of course not!” cried the girl.“And the influence is the last thing a painterthinks of—­or supposes he thinks of.What he knows he’s anxious about is the drawingand the color. But people will never understandhow simple artists are. When I reflect what acomplex and sophisticated being I am, I’m afraidI can never come to anything in art. Or I shouldbe if I hadn’t genius.”

“Do you think Mr. Beaton is very simple?”asked Mrs. Leighton.

“Mr. Wetmore doesn’t think he’svery much of an artist. He thinks he talks toowell. They believe that if a man can express himselfclearly he can’t paint.”

“And what do you believe?”

“Oh, I can express myself, too.”

The mother seemed to be satisfied with this evasion.After a while she said, “I presume he will callwhen he gets settled.”

The girl made no answer to this. “One ofthe girls says that old model is an educated man.He was in the war, and lost a hand. Doesn’tit seem a pity for such a man to have to sit to aclass of affected geese like us as a model? Ideclare it makes me sick. And we shall keep hima week, and pay him six or seven dollars for the useof his grand old head, and then what will he do?The last time he was regularly employed was when Mr.Mace was working at his Damascus Massacre. Thenhe wanted so many Arab sheiks and Christian eldersthat he kept old Mr. Lindau steadily employed forsix months. Now he has to pick up odd jobs wherehe can.”

“I suppose he has his pension,” said Mrs.Leighton.

“No; one of the girls”—­thatwas the way Alma always described her fellow-students—­“sayshe has no pension. He didn’t apply for itfor a long time, and then there was a hitch aboutit, and it was somethinged—­vetoed, I believeshe said.”

“Who vetoed it?” asked Mrs. Leighton,with some curiosity about the process, which she heldin reserve.

“I don’t know-whoever vetoes things.I wonder what Mr. Wetmore does think of us—­hisclass. We must seem perfectly crazy. Thereisn’t one of us really knows what she’sdoing it for, or what she expects to happen when she’sdone it. I suppose every one thinks she has genius.I know the Nebraska widow does, for she says thatunless you have genius it isn’t the least use.Everybody’s puzzled to know what she does withher baby when she’s at work—­whethershe gives it soothing syrup. I wonder how Mr.Wetmore can keep from laughing in our faces. Iknow he does behind our backs.”

Mrs. Leighton’s mind wandered back to anotherpoint. “Then if he says Mr. Beaton can’tpaint, I presume he doesn’t respect him verymuch.”

“Oh, he never said he couldn’t paint.But I know he thinks so. He says he’s anexcellent critic.”

“Alma,” her mother said, with the effectof breaking off, “what do you suppose is thereason he hasn’t been near us?”

“Why, I don’t know, mamma, except thatit would have been natural for another person to come,and he’s an artist at least, artist enough forthat.”

“That doesn’t account for it altogether.He was very nice at St. Barnaby, and seemed so interestedin you—­your work.”

“Plenty of people were nice at St. Barnaby.That rich Mrs. Horn couldn’t contain her joywhen she heard we were coming to New York, but shehasn’t poured in upon us a great deal sincewe got here.”

“But that’s different. She’svery fashionable, and she’s taken up with herown set. But Mr. Beaton’s one of our kind.”

“Thank you. Papa wasn’t quite a tombstone-cutter,mamma.”

“That makes it all the harder to bear.He can’t be ashamed of us. Perhaps he doesn’tknow where we are.”

“Do you wish to send him your card, mamma?”The girl flushed and towered in scorn of the idea.

“Why, no, Alma,” returned her mother.

“Well, then,” said Alma.

But Mrs. Leighton was not so easily quelled.She had got her mind on Mr. Beaton, and she couldnot detach it at once. Besides, she was one ofthose women (they are commoner than the same sort ofmen) whom it does not pain to take out their mostintimate thoughts and examine them in the light ofother people’s opinions. “But I don’tsee how he can behave so. He must know that—­”

“That what, mamma?” demanded the girl.

“That he influenced us a great deal in coming—­”

“He didn’t. If he dared to presumeto think such a thing—­”

“Now, Alma,” said her mother, with theclinging persistence of such natures, “you knowhe did. And it’s no use for you to pretendthat we didn’t count upon him in—­inevery way. You may not have noticed his attentions,and I don’t say you did, but others certainlydid; and I must say that I didn’t expect hewould drop us so.”

“Drop us!” cried Alma, in a fury.“Oh!”

“Yes, drop us, Alma. He must know wherewe are. Of course, Mr. Wetmore’s spokento him about you, and it’s a shame that he hasn’tbeen near us. I should have thought common gratitude,common decency, would have brought him after—­afterall we did for him.”

“We did nothing for him—­nothing!He paid his board, and that ended it.”

“No, it didn’t, Alma. You know whathe used to say—­about its being like home,and all that; and I must say that after his attentionsto you, and all the things you told me he said, Iexpected something very dif—­”

A sharp peal of the door-bell thrilled through thehouse, and as if the pull of the bell-wire had twitchedher to her feet, Mrs. Leighton sprang up and grappledwith her daughter in their common terror.

They both glared at the clock and made sure that itwas five minutes after nine. Then they abandonedthemselves some moments to the unrestricted play oftheir apprehensions.

II.

“Why, Alma,” whispered the mother, “whoin the world can it be at this time of night?You don’t suppose he—­”

“Well, I’m not going to the door, anyhow,mother, I don’t care who it is; and, of course,he wouldn’t be such a goose as to come at thishour.” She put on a look of miserable trepidation,and shrank back from the door, while the hum of thebell died away, in the hall.

“What shall we do?” asked Mrs. Leighton,helplessly.

“Let him go away—­whoever they are,”said Alma.

Another and more peremptory ring forbade them refugein this simple expedient.

“Oh, dear! what shall we do? Perhaps it’sa despatch.”

The conjecture moved Alma to no more than a rigidstare. “I shall not go,” she said.A third ring more insistent than the others followed,and she said: “You go ahead, mamma, andI’ll come behind to scream if it’s anybody.We can look through the side-lights at the door first.”

Mrs. Leighton fearfully led the way from the backchamber where they bad been sitting, and slowly descendedthe stairs. Alma came behind and turned up thehall gas-jet with a sudden flash that made them bothjump a little. The gas inside rendered it moredifficult to tell who was on the threshold, but Mrs.Leighton decided from a timorous peep through thescrims that it was a lady and gentleman. Somethingin this distribution of sex emboldened her; she tookher life in her hand, and opened the door.

The lady spoke. “Does Mrs. Leighton liveheah?” she said, in a rich, throaty voice; andshe feigned a reference to the agent’s permitshe held in her hand.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Leighton; she mechanicallyoccupied the doorway, while Alma already quiveredbehind her with impatience of her impoliteness.

“Oh,” said the lady, who began to appearmore and more a young lady, “Ah didn’tknow but Ah had mistaken the hoase. Ah supposeit’s rather late to see the apawtments, andAh most ask you to pawdon us.” She put thistentatively, with a delicately growing recognitionof Mrs. Leighton as the lady of the house, and a humorousintelligence of the situation in the glance she threwAlma over her mother’s shoulder. “Ah’mafraid we most have frightened you.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Alma; and at thesame time her mother said, “Will you walk in,please?”

The gentleman promptly removed his hat and made theLeightons an inclusive bow. “You awe verykind, madam, and I am sorry for the trouble we awegiving you.” He was tall and severe-looking,with a gray, trooperish mustache and iron-gray hair,and, as Alma decided, iron-gray eyes. His daughterwas short, plump, and fresh-colored, with an effectof liveliness that did not all express itself in herbroad-vowelled, rather formal speech, with its oddvaluations of some of the auxiliary verbs, and itstotal elision of the canine letter.

“We awe from the Soath,” she said, “andwe arrived this mawning, but we got this cyahd fromthe brokah just befo’ dinnah, and so we awe rathahlate.”

“Not at all; it’s only nine o’clock,”said Mrs. Leighton. She looked up from the cardthe young lady had given her, and explained, “Wehaven’t got in our servants yet, and we hadto answer the bell ourselves, and—­”

“You were frightened, of coase,” saidthe young lady, caressingly.

The gentleman said they ought not to have come solate, and he offered some formal apologies.

“We should have been just as much scared anytime after five o’clock,” Alma said tothe sympathetic intelligence in the girl’s face.

She laughed out. “Of coase! Ah wouldhave my hawt in my moath all day long, too, if Ahwas living in a big hoase alone.”

A moment of stiffness followed; Mrs. Leighton wouldhave liked to withdraw from the intimacy of the situation,but she did not know how. It was very well forthese people to assume to be what they pretended; but,she reflected too late, she had no proof of it exceptthe agent’s permit. They were all standingin the hall together, and she prolonged the awkwardpause while she examined the permit. “Youare Mr. Woodburn?” she asked, in a way thatAlma felt implied he might not be.

“Yes, madam; from Charlottesboag, Virginia,”he answered, with the slight umbrage a man shows whenthe strange cashier turns his check over and questionshim before cashing it.

Alma writhed internally, but outwardly remained subordinate;she examined the other girl’s dress, and decidedin a superficial consciousness that she had made herown bonnet.

“I shall be glad to show you my rooms,”said Mrs. Leighton, with an irrelevant sigh.“You must excuse their being not just as I shouldwish them. We’re hardly settled yet.”

“Don’t speak of it, madam,” saidthe gentleman, “if you can overlook the troublewe awe giving you at such an unseasonable houah.”

“Ah’m a hoasekeepah mahself,” MissWoodburn joined in, “and Ah know ho’ toaccyoant fo’ everything.”

Mrs. Leighton led the way up-stairs, and the younglady decided upon the large front room and small sideroom on the third story. She said she could takethe small one, and the other was so large that herfather could both sleep and work in it. She seemednot ashamed to ask if Mrs. Leighton’s pricewas inflexible, but gave way laughing when her fatherrefused to have any bargaining, with a haughty self-respectwhich he softened to deference for Mrs. Leighton.His impulsiveness opened the way for some confidencefrom her, and before the affair was arranged she wasenjoying in her quality of clerical widow the balmof the Virginians’ reverent sympathy. Theysaid they were church people themselves.

“Ah don’t know what yo’ mothah meansby yo’ hoase not being in oddah,” theyoung lady said to Alma as they went down-stairs together.“Ah’m a great hoasekeepah mahself, andAh mean what Ah say.”

They had all turned mechanically into the room wherethe Leightons were sitting when the Woodburns rang:Mr. Woodburn consented to sit down, and he remainedlistening to Mrs. Leighton while his daughter bustledup to the sketches pinned round the room and questionedAlma about them.

“Ah suppose you awe going to be a great awtust?”she said, in friendly banter, when Alma owned to havingdone the things. “Ah’ve a great notionto take a few lessons mahself. Who’s yo’teachah?”

Alma said she was drawing in Mr. Wetmore’s class,and Miss Woodburn said: “Well, it’sjust beautiful, Miss Leighton; it’s grand.Ah suppose it’s raght expensive, now? Mahgoodness! we have to cyoant the coast so much nowadays;it seems to me we do nothing but cyoant it. Ah’dlike to hah something once without askin’ theprice.”

“Well, if you didn’t ask it,” saidAlma, “I don’t believe Mr. Wetmore wouldever know what the price of his lessons was. Hehas to think, when you ask him.”

“Why, he most be chomming,” said MissWoodburn. “Perhaps Ah maght get the lessonsfor nothing from him. Well, Ah believe in my soulAh’ll trah. Now ho’ did you begin?and ho’ do you expect to get anything oat ofit?” She turned on Alma eyes brimming with ashrewd mixture of fun and earnest, and Alma made noteof the fact that she had an early nineteenth-centuryface, round, arch, a little coquettish, but extremelysensible and unspoiled-looking, such as used to bepainted a good deal in miniature at that period; atendency of her brown hair to twine and twist at thetemples helped the effect; a high comb would have completed

it, Alma felt, if she had her bonnet off. Itwas almost a Yankee country-girl type; but perhapsit appeared so to Alma because it was, like that, pureAnglo-Saxon. Alma herself, with her dull, darkskin, slender in figure, slow in speech, with aristocraticforms in her long hands, and the oval of her fineface pointed to a long chin, felt herself much moreSouthern in style than this blooming, bubbling, bustlingVirginian.

“I don’t know,” she answered, slowly.

“Going to take po’traits,” suggestedMiss Woodburn, “or just paint the ahdeal?”A demure burlesque lurked in her tone.

“I suppose I don’t expect to paint atall,” said Alma. “I’m goingto illustrate books—­if anybody will letme.”

“Ah should think they’d just joamp atyou,” said Miss Woodburn. “Ah’lltell you what let’s do, Miss Leighton: youmake some pictures, and Ah’ll wrahte a bookfo’ them. Ah’ve got to do something.Ali maght as well wrahte a book. You know weSoutherners have all had to go to woak. But Ahdon’t mand it. I tell papa I shouldn’tca’ fo’ the disgrace of bein’ poo’if it wasn’t fo’ the inconvenience.”

“Yes, it’s inconvenient,” said Alma;“but you forget it when you’re at work,don’t you think?”

“Mah, yes! Perhaps that’s one reasonwhy poo’ people have to woak so hawd-to keeptheir wands off their poverty.”

The girls both tittered, and turned from talking ina low tone with their backs toward their elders, andfaced them.

“Well, Madison,” said Mr. Woodburn, “itis time we should go. I bid you good-night, madam,”he bowed to Mrs. Leighton. “Good-night,”he bowed again to Alma.

His daughter took leave of them in formal phrase,but with a jolly cordiality of manner that deformalizedit. “We shall be roand raght soon in themawning, then,” she threatened at the door.

“We shall be all ready for you,” Almacalled after her down the steps.

“Well, Alma?” her mother asked, when thedoor closed upon them.

“She doesn’t know any more about art,”said Alma, “than—­nothing at all.But she’s jolly and good-hearted. She praisedeverything that was bad in my sketches, and said shewas going to take lessons herself. When a persontalks about taking lessons, as if they could learnit, you know where they belong artistically.”

Mrs. Leighton shook her head with a sigh. “Iwish I knew where they belonged financially.We shall have to get in two girls at once. I shallhave to go out the first thing in the morning, andthen our troubles will begin.”

“Well, didn’t you want them to begin?I will stay home and help you get ready. Ourprosperity couldn’t begin without the troubles,if you mean boarders, and boarders mean servants.I shall be very glad to be afflicted with a cook fora while myself.”

“Yes; but we don’t know anything aboutthese people, or whether they will be able to payus. Did she talk as if they were well off?”

“She talked as if they were poor; poo’she called it.”

“Yes, how queerly she pronounced,” saidMrs. Leighton. “Well, I ought to have toldthem that I required the first week in advance.”

“Mamma! If that’s the way you’regoing to act!”

“Oh, of course, I couldn’t, after he wouldn’tlet her bargain for the rooms. I didn’tlike that.”

“I did. And you can see that they wereperfect ladies; or at least one of them.”Alma laughed at herself, but her mother did not notice.

“Their being ladies won’t help if they’vegot no money. It ’ll make it all the worse.”

“Very well, then; we have no money, either.We’re a match for them any day there. Wecan show them that two can play at that game.”

III.

Arnus Beaton’s studio looked at first glancelike many other painters’ studios. A graywall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light;casts of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints,sketches in oil and water-color stuck here and therelower down; a rickety table, with paint and palettesand bottles of varnish and siccative tossed comfortlesslyon it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaevalsilk trailing from it; a lay figure simpering in incompletenakedness, with its head on one side, and a stockingon one leg, and a Japanese dress dropped before it;dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished floor;canvases faced to the mop-board; an open trunk overflowingwith costumes: these features one might noticeanywhere. But, besides, there was a bookcase withan unusual number of books in it, and there was anopen colonial writing-desk, claw-footed, brass-handled,and scutcheoned, with foreign periodicals—­Frenchand English—­littering its leaf, and somepages of manuscript scattered among them. Aboveall, there was a sculptor’s revolving stand,supporting a bust which Beaton was modelling, withan eye fixed as simultaneously as possible on theclay and on the head of the old man who sat on theplatform beside it.

Few men have been able to get through the world withseveral gifts to advantage in all; and most men seemhandicapped for the race if they have more than one.But they are apparently immensely interested as wellas distracted by them. When Beaton was writing,he would have agreed, up to a certain point, withany one who said literature was his proper expression;but, then, when he was painting, up to a certain point,he would have maintained against the world that hewas a colorist, and supremely a colorist. Atthe certain point in either art he was apt to breakaway in a frenzy of disgust and wreak himself uponsome other. In these moods he sometimes designedelevations of buildings, very striking, very original,very chic, very everything but habitable. It wasin this way that he had tried his hand on sculpture,which he had at first approached rather slightingly

as a mere decorative accessory of architecture.But it had grown in his respect till he maintainedthat the accessory business ought to be all the otherway: that temples should be raised to enshrinestatues, not statues made to ornament temples; thatwas putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance.This was when he had carried a plastic study so farthat the sculptors who saw it said that Beaton mighthave been an architect, but would certainly never bea sculptor. At the same time he did some hurried,nervous things that had a popular charm, and thatsold in plaster reproductions, to the profit of another.Beaton justly despised the popular charm in these,as well as in the paintings he sold from time to time;he said it was flat burglary to have taken money forthem, and he would have been living almost whollyupon the bounty of the old tombstone-cutter in Syracuseif it had not been for the syndicate letters whichhe supplied to Fulkerson for ten dollars a week.

They were very well done, but he hated doing themafter the first two or three, and had to be punchedup for them by Fulkerson, who did not cease to prizethem, and who never failed to punch him up. Beatonbeing what he was, Fulkerson was his creditor as wellas patron; and Fulkerson being what he was, had anenthusiastic patience with the elusive, facile, adaptable,unpractical nature of Beaton. He was very proudof his art-letters, as he called them; but then Fulkersonwas proud of everything he secured for his syndicate.The fact that he had secured it gave it value; hefelt as if he had written it himself.

One art trod upon another’s heels with Beaton.The day before he had rushed upon canvas the conceptionof a picture which he said to himself was glorious,and to others (at the table d’hote of Maroni)was not bad. He had worked at it in a fury tillthe light failed him, and he execrated the dying day.But he lit his lamp and transferred the process ofhis thinking from the canvas to the opening of thesyndicate letter which he knew Fulkerson would becoming for in the morning. He remained talkingso long after dinner in the same strain as he hadpainted and written in that he could not finish hisletter that night. The next morning, while hewas making his tea for breakfast, the postman broughthim a letter from his father enclosing a little check,and begging him with tender, almost deferential, urgenceto come as lightly upon him as possible, for justnow his expenses were very heavy. It brought tearsof shame into Beaton’s eyes—­the fine,smouldering, floating eyes that many ladies admired,under the thick bang—­and he said to himselfthat if he were half a man he would go home and goto work cutting gravestones in his father’sshop. But he would wait, at least, to finish hispicture; and as a sop to his conscience, to stay itsimmediate ravening, he resolved to finish that syndicateletter first, and borrow enough money from Fulkerson

to be able to send his father’s check back; or,if not that, then to return the sum of it partly inFulkerson’s check. While he still teemedwith both of these good intentions the old man fromwhom he was modelling his head of Judas came, andBeaton saw that he must get through with him beforehe finished either the picture or the letter; he wouldhave to pay him for the time, anyway. He utilizedthe remorse with which he was tingling to give hisJudas an expression which he found novel in the treatmentof that character—­a look of such touching,appealing self-abhorrence that Beaton’s artisticjoy in it amounted to rapture; between the breathlessmoments when he worked in dead silence for an effectthat was trying to escape him, he sang and whistledfragments of comic opera.

In one of the hushes there came a blow on the outsideof the door that made Beaton jump, and swear witha modified profanity that merged itself in apostrophicprayer. He knew it must be Fulkerson, and afterroaring “Come in!” he said to the model,“That ’ll do this morning, Lindau.”

Fulkerson squared his feet in front of the bust andcompared it by fleeting glances with the old man ashe got stiffly up and suffered Beaton to help himon with his thin, shabby overcoat.

“Can you come to-morrow, Lindau?”

“No, not to-morrow, Mr. Peaton. I haf tozit for the young ladties.”

“Oh!” said Beaton. “Wet-more’sclass? Is Miss Leighton doing you?”

“I don’t know their namess,” Lindaubegan, when Fulkerson said:

“Hope you haven’t forgotten mine, Mr.Lindau? I met you with Mr. March at Maroni’sone night.” Fulkerson offered him a universallyshakable hand.

“Oh yes! I am gladt to zee you again, Mr.Vulkerson. And Mr. Marge—­he don’tzeem to gome any more?”

“Up to his eyes in work. Been moving onfrom Boston and getting settled, and starting in onour enterprise. Beaton here hasn’t got avery flattering likeness of you, hey? Well, good-morning,”he said, for Lindau appeared not to have heard himand was escaping with a bow through the door.

Beaton lit a cigarette which he pinched nervouslybetween his lips before he spoke. “You’vecome for that letter, I suppose, Fulkerson? Itisn’t done.”

Fulkerson turned from staring at the bust to whichhe had mounted. “What you fretting aboutthat letter for? I don’t want your letter.”

Beaton stopped biting his cigarette and looked athim. “Don’t want my letter?Oh, very good!” he bristled up. He tookhis cigarette from his lips, and blew the smoke throughhis nostrils, and then looked at Fulkerson.

“No; I don’t want your letter; I wantyou.”

Beacon disdained to ask an explanation, but he internallylowered his crest, while he continued to look at Fulkersonwithout changing his defiant countenance. Thissuited Fulkerson well enough, and he went on withrelish, “I’m going out of the syndicatebusiness, old man, and I’m on a new thing.”He put his leg over the back of a chair and restedhis foot on its seat, and, with one hand in his pocket,he laid the scheme of ‘Every Other Week’before Beaton with the help of the other. Theartist went about the room, meanwhile, with an effectof indifference which by no means offended Fulkerson.He took some water into his mouth from a tumbler,which he blew in a fine mist over the head of Judasbefore swathing it in a dirty cotton cloth; he washedhis brushes and set his palette; he put up on hiseasel the picture he had blocked on the day before,and stared at it with a gloomy face; then he gatheredthe sheets of his unfinished letter together and slidthem into a drawer of his writing-desk. By thetime he had finished and turned again to Fulkerson,Fulkerson was saying: “I did think we couldhave the first number out by New-Year’s; butit will take longer than that—­a month longer;but I’m not sorry, for the holidays kill everything;and by February, or the middle of February, peoplewill get their breath again and begin to look roundand ask what’s new. Then we’ll replyin the language of Shakespeare and Milton, ‘EveryOther Week; and don’t you forget it.’”He took down his leg and asked, “Got a pipeof ’baccy anywhere?”

Beaton nodded at a clay stem sticking out of a Japanesevase of bronze on his mantel. “There’syours,” he said; and Fulkerson said, “Thanks,”and filled the pipe and sat down and began to smoketranquilly.

Beaton saw that he would have to speak now. “Andwhat do you want with me?”

“You? Oh yes,” Fulkerson humorouslydramatized a return to himself from a pensive absence.“Want you for the art department.”

Beaton shook his head. “I’m not yourman, Fulkerson,” he said, compassionately.“You want a more practical hand, one that’sin touch with what’s going. I’m gettingfurther and further away from this century and itsclaptrap. I don’t believe in your enterprise;I don’t respect it, and I won’t have anythingto do with it. It would-choke me, that kind ofthing.”

“That’s all right,” said Fulkerson.He esteemed a man who was not going to let himselfgo cheap. “Or if it isn’t, we canmake it. You and March will pull together first-rate.I don’t care how much ideal you put into thething; the more the better. I can look after theother end of the schooner myself.”

“You don’t understand me,” saidBeaton. “I’m not trying to get a riseout of you. I’m in earnest. What youwant is some man who can have patience with mediocrityputting on the style of genius, and with genius turningmediocrity on his hands. I haven’t any luckwith men; I don’t get on with them; I’mnot popular.” Beaton recognized the factwith the satisfaction which it somehow always bringsto human pride.

“So much the better!” Fulkerson was readyfor him at this point. “I don’t wantyou to work the old-established racket the reputations.When I want them I’ll go to them with a pocketfulof rocks—­knock-down argument. Butmy idea is to deal with the volunteer material.Look at the way the periodicals are carried on now!Names! names! names! In a country that’sjust boiling over with literary and artistic abilityof every kind the new fellows have no chance.The editors all engage their material. I don’tbelieve there are fifty volunteer contributions printedin a year in all the New York magazines. It’sall wrong; it’s suicidal. ’EveryOther Week’ is going back to the good old anonymoussystem, the only fair system. It’s workedwell in literature, and it will work well in art.”

“It won’t work well in art,” saidBeaton. “There you have a totally differentset of conditions. What you’ll get by invitingvolunteer illustrations will be a lot of amateur trash.And how are you going to submit your literature forillustration? It can’t be done. Atany rate, I won’t undertake to do it.”

“We’ll get up a School of Illustration,”said Fulkerson, with cynical security. “Youcan read the things and explain ’em, and yourpupils can make their sketches under your eye.They wouldn’t be much further out than mostillustrations are if they never knew what they wereillustrating. You might select from what comesin and make up a sort of pictorial variations to theliterature without any particular reference to it.Well, I understand you to accept?”

“No, you don’t.”

“That is, to consent to help us with your adviceand criticism. That’s all I want.It won’t commit you to anything; and you canbe as anonymous as anybody.” At the doorFulkerson added: “By-the-way, the new man—­thefellow that’s taken my old syndicate business—­willwant you to keep on; but I guess he’s goingto try to beat you down on the price of the letters.He’s going in for retrenchment. I broughtalong a check for this one; I’m to pay for that.”He offered Beaton an envelope.

“I can’t take it, Fulkerson. Theletter’s paid for already.” Fulkersonstepped forward and laid the envelope on the tableamong the tubes of paint.

“It isn’t the letter merely. I thoughtyou wouldn’t object to a little advance on your‘Every Other Week’ work till you kind ofgot started.”

Beaton remained inflexible. “It can’tbe done, Fulkerson. Don’t I tell you Ican’t sell myself out to a thing I don’tbelieve in? Can’t you understand that?”

“Oh yes; I can understand that first-rate.I don’t want to buy you; I want to borrow you.It’s all right. See? Come round whenyou can; I’d like to introduce you to old March.That’s going to be our address.” Heput a card on the table beside the envelope, and Beatonallowed him to go without making him take the checkback. He had remembered his father’s plea;

that unnerved him, and he promised himself again toreturn his father’s poor little check and towork on that picture and give it to Fulkerson forthe check he had left and for his back debts.He resolved to go to work on the picture at once;he had set his palette for it; but first he lookedat Fulkerson’s check. It was for only fiftydollars, and the canny Scotch blood in Beaton rebelled;he could not let this picture go for any such money;he felt a little like a man whose generosity has beentrifled with. The conflict of emotions broke himup, and he could not work.

IV

The day wasted away in Beaton’s hands; at half-pastfour o’clock he went out to tea at the houseof a lady who was At Home that afternoon from fourtill seven. By this time Beaton was in possessionof one of those other selves of which we each haveseveral about us, and was again the laconic, staccato,rather worldlified young artist whose moments of acontrolled utterance and a certain distinction of mannerhad commended him to Mrs. Horn’s fancy in thesummer at St. Barnaby.

Mrs. Horn’s rooms were large, and they neverseemed very full, though this perhaps was becausepeople were always so quiet. The ladies, whooutnumbered the men ten to one, as they always do ata New York tea, were dressed in sympathy with thelow tone every one spoke in, and with the subduedlight which gave a crepuscular uncertainty to the fewobjects, the dim pictures, the unexcited upholstery,of the rooms. One breathed free of bric-a-bracthere, and the new-comer breathed softly as one doeson going into church after service has begun.This might be a suggestion from the voiceless behaviorof the man-servant who let you in, but it was alsobecause Mrs. Horn’s At Home was a ceremony, adecorum, and not festival. At far greater housesthere was more gayety, at richer houses there wasmore freedom; the suppression at Mrs. Horn’swas a personal, not a social, effect; it was an effluxof her character, demure, silentious, vague, but verycorrect.

Beaton easily found his way to her around the groupedskirts and among the detached figures, and receiveda pressure of welcome from the hand which she momentarilyrelaxed from the tea-pot. She sat behind a tableput crosswise of a remote corner, and offered tea topeople whom a niece of hers received provisionallyor sped finally in the outer room. They did notusually take tea, and when they did they did not usuallydrink it; but Beaton was, feverishly glad of his cup;he took rum and lemon in it, and stood talking atMrs. Horn’s side till the next arrival shoulddisplace him: he talked in his French manner.

“I have been hoping to see you,” she said.“I wanted to ask you about the Leightons.Did they really come?”

“I believe so. They are in town—­yes.I haven’t seen them.”

“Then you don’t know how they’regetting on—­that pretty creature, with hercleverness, and poor Mrs. Leighton? I was afraidthey were venturing on a rash experiment. Doyou know where they are?”

“In West Eleventh Street somewhere. MissLeighton is in Mr. Wetmore’s class.”

“I must look them up. Do you know theirnumber?”

“Not at the moment. I can find out.”

“Do,” said Mrs. Horn. “Whatcourage they must have, to plunge into New York asthey’ve done! I really didn’t thinkthey would. I wonder if they’ve succeededin getting anybody into their house yet?”

“I don’t know,” said Beaton.

“I discouraged their coming all I could,”she sighed, “and I suppose you did, too.But it’s quite useless trying to make peoplein a place like St. Barnaby understand how it is intown.”

“Yes,” said Beaton. He stirred histea, while inwardly he tried to believe that he hadreally discouraged the Leightons from coming to NewYork. Perhaps the vexation of his failure madehim call Mrs. Horn in his heart a fraud.

“Yes,” she went on, “it is very,very hard. And when they won’t understand,and rush on their doom, you feel that they are goingto hold you respons—­”

Mrs. Horn’s eyes wandered from Beaton; her voicefaltered in the faded interest of her remark, andthen rose with renewed vigor in greeting a lady whocame up and stretched her glove across the tea-cups.

Beaton got himself away and out of the house witha much briefer adieu to the niece than he had meantto make. The patronizing compassion of Mrs. Hornfor the Leightons filled him with indignation towardher, toward himself. There was no reason whyhe should not have ignored them as he had done; butthere was a feeling. It was his nature to be careless,and he had been spoiled into recklessness; he neglectedeverybody, and only remembered them when it suitedhis whim or his convenience; but he fiercely resentedthe inattentions of others toward himself. Hehad no scruple about breaking an engagement or failingto keep an appointment; he made promises without thinkingof their fulfilment, and not because he was a faithlessperson, but because he was imaginative, and expectedat the time to do what he said, but was fickle, andso did not. As most of his shortcomings wereof a society sort, no great harm was done to anybodyelse. He had contracted somewhat the circle ofhis acquaintance by what some people called his rudeness,but most people treated it as his oddity, and werepatient with it. One lady said she valued hiscoming when he said he would come because it had thecharm of the unexpected. “Only it showsthat it isn’t always the unexpected that happens,”she explained.

It did not occur to him that his behavior was immoral;he did not realize that it was creating a reputationif not a character for him. While we are stillyoung we do not realize that our actions have thiseffect. It seems to us that people will judgeus from what we think and feel. Later we findout that this is impossible; perhaps we find it outtoo late; some of us never find it out at all.

In spite of his shame about the Leightons, Beatonhad no present intention of looking them up or sendingMrs. Horn their address. As a matter of fact,he never did send it; but he happened to meet Mr. Wetmoreand his wife at the restaurant where he dined, andhe got it of the painter for himself. He didnot ask him how Miss Leighton was getting on; butWetmore launched out, with Alma for a tacit text, onthe futility of women generally going in for art.“Even when they have talent they’ve gottoo much against them. Where a girl doesn’tseem very strong, like Miss Leighton, no amount ofchic is going to help.”

His wife disputed him on behalf of her sex, as womenalways do.

“No, Dolly,” he persisted; “she’dbetter be home milking the cows and leading the horseto water.”

Do you think she’d better be up till two inthe morning at balls and going all day to receptionsand luncheons?”

“Oh, guess it isn’t a question of that,even if she weren’t drawing. You knew themat home,” he said to Beaton.

“Yes.”

“I remember. Her mother said you suggestedme. Well, the girl has some notion of it; there’sno doubt about that. But—­she’sa woman. The trouble with these talented girlsis that they’re all woman. If they weren’t,there wouldn’t be much chance for the men, Beaton.But we’ve got Providence on our own side fromthe start. I’m able to watch all theirinspirations with perfect composure. I know justhow soon it’s going to end in nervous breakdown.Somebody ought to marry them all and put them outof their misery.”

“And what will you do with your students whoare married already?” his wife said. Shefelt that she had let him go on long enough.

“Oh, they ought to get divorced.”

“You ought to be ashamed to take their moneyif that’s what you think of them.”

“My dear, I have a wife to support.”

Beaton intervened with a question. “Doyou mean that Miss Leighton isn’t standing itvery well?”

“How do I know? She isn’t the kindthat bends; she’s the kind that breaks.”

After a little silence Mrs. Wetmore asked, “Won’tyou come home with us, Mr. Beaton?”

“Thank you; no. I have an engagement.”

“I don’t see why that should prevent you,”said Wetmore. “But you always were a punctiliouscuss. Well!”

Beaton lingered over his cigar; but no one else whomhe knew came in, and he yielded to the threefold impulseof conscience, of curiosity, of inclination, in goingto call at the Leightons’. He asked forthe ladies, and the maid showed him into the parlor,where he found Mrs. Leighton and Miss Woodburn.

The widow met him with a welcome neatly marked byresentment; she meant him to feel that his not comingsooner had been noticed. Miss Woodburn bubbledand gurgled on, and did what she could to mitigatehis punishment, but she did not feel authorized tostay it, till Mrs. Leighton, by studied avoidanceof her daughter’s name, obliged Beaton to askfor her. Then Miss Woodburn caught up her work,and said, “Ah’ll go and tell her, Mrs.Leighton.” At the top of the stairs shefound Alma, and Alma tried to make it seem as if shehad not been standing there. “Mah goodness,chald! there’s the handsomest young man askingfor you down there you evah saw. Alh told you’mothah Ah would come up fo’ you.”

“What—­who is it?”

“Don’t you know? But bo’ couldyou? He’s got the most beautiful eyes,and he wea’s his hai’ in a bang, and hetalks English like it was something else, and hisname’s Mr. Beaton.”

“Did he-ask for me?” said Alma, with adreamy tone. She put her hand on the stairs rail,and a little shiver ran over her.

“Didn’t I tell you? Of coase he did!And you ought to go raght down if you want to savethe poo’ fellah’s lahfe; you’ mothah’sjust freezin’ him to death.”

V.

“She is?” cried Alma. “Tchk!”She flew downstairs, and flitted swiftly into theroom, and fluttered up to Beaton, and gave him a crushinghand-shake.

“How very kind, of you to come and see us, Mr.Beaton! When did you come to New York? Don’tyou find it warm here? We’ve only just lightedthe furnace, but with this mild weather it seems tooearly. Mamma does keep it so hot!” Sherushed about opening doors and shutting registers,and then came back and sat facing him from the sofawith a mask of radiant cordiality. “Howhave you been since we saw you?”

“Very well,” said Beaton. “Ihope you’re well, Miss Leighton?”

“Oh, perfectly! I think New York agreeswith us both wonderfully. I never knew such air.And to think of our not having snow yet! I shouldthink everybody would want to come here! Whydon’t you come, Mr. Beaton?”

Beaton lifted his eyes and looked at her. “I—­Ilive in New York,” he faltered.

“In New York City!” she exclaimed.

“Surely, Alma,” said her mother, “youremember Mr. Beaton’s telling us he lived inNew York.”

“But I thought you came from Rochester; or wasit Syracuse? I always get those places mixedup.”

“Probably I told you my father lived at Syracuse.I’ve been in New York ever since I came homefrom Paris,” said Beaton, with the confusionof a man who feels himself played upon by a woman.

“From Paris!” Alma echoed, leaning forward,with her smiling mask tight on. “Wasn’tit Munich where you studied?”

“I was at Munich, too. I met Wetmore there.”

“Oh, do you know Mr. Wetmore?”

“Why, Alma,” her mother interposed again,“it was Mr. Beaton who told you of Mr. Wetmore.”

“Was it? Why, yes, to be sure. Itwas Mrs. Horn who suggested Mr. Ilcomb.
I remember now. I can’t thank you enoughfor having sent me to Mr.
Wetmore, Mr. Beaton. Isn’t he delightful?Oh yes, I’m a perfect
Wetmorian, I can assure you. The whole classis the same way.”

“I just met him and Mrs. Wetmore at dinner,”said Beaton, attempting the recovery of somethingthat he had lost through the girl’s shining easeand steely sprightliness. She seemed to him sosmooth and hard, with a repellent elasticity fromwhich he was flung off. “I hope you’renot working too hard, Miss Leighton?”

“Oh no! I enjoy every minute of it, andgrow stronger on it. Do I look very much wastedaway?” She looked him full in the face, brilliantlysmiling, and intentionally beautiful.

“No,” he said, with a slow sadness; “Inever saw you looking better.”

“Poor Mr. Beaton!” she said, in recognitionof his doleful tune. “It seems to be quitea blow.”

“Oh no—­”

“I remember all the good advice you used togive me about not working too hard, and probably it’sthat that’s saved my life—­that andthe house-hunting. Has mamma told you of ouradventures in getting settled?

“Some time we must. It was such fun!And didn’t you think we were fortunate to getsuch a pretty house? You must see both our parlors.”She jumped up, and her mother followed her with abewildered look as she ran into the back parlor andflashed up the gas.

“Come in here, Mr. Beaton. I want to showyou the great feature of the house.” Sheopened the low windows that gave upon a glazed verandastretching across the end of the room. “Justthink of this in New York! You can’t seeit very well at night, but when the southern sun poursin here all the afternoon—­”

“Yes, I can imagine it,” he said.He glanced up at the bird-cage hanging from the roof.“I suppose Gypsy enjoys it.”

“You remember Gypsy?” she said; and shemade a cooing, kissing little noise up at the bird,who responded drowsily. “Poor old Gypsum!Well, he sha’n’t be disturbed. Yes,it’s Gyp’s delight, and Colonel Woodburnlikes to write here in the morning. Think ofus having a real live author in the house! AndMiss Woodburn: I’m so glad you’veseen her! They’re Southern people.”

“Yes, that was obvious in her case.”

“From her accent? Isn’t it fascinating?I didn’t believe I could ever endure Southerners,but we’re like one family with the Woodburns.I should think you’d want to paint Miss Woodburn.Don’t you think her coloring is delicious?And such a quaint kind of eighteenth-century typeof beauty! But she’s perfectly lovely everyway, and everything she says is so funny. TheSoutherners seem to be such great talkers; better thanwe are, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” said Beaton, inpensive discouragement. He was sensible of beingmanipulated, operated, but he was helpless to escapefrom the performer or to fathom her motives.His pensiveness passed into gloom, and was degeneratinginto sulky resentment when he went away, after severalfailures to get back to the old ground he had heldin relation to Alma. He retrieved something ofit with Mrs. Leighton; but Alma glittered upon himto the last with a keen impenetrable candor, a child-likesingleness of glance, covering unfathomable reserve.

“Well, Alma,” said her mother, when thedoor had closed upon him.

“Well, mother.” Then, after a moment,she said, with a rush: “Did you think Iwas going to let him suppose we were piqued at hisnot coming? Did you suppose I was going to lethim patronize us, or think that we were in the leastdependent on his favor or friendship?”

Her mother did not attempt to answer her. Shemerely said, “I shouldn’t think he wouldcome any more.”

“Well, we have got on so far without him; perhapswe can live through the rest of the winter.”

“I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.He was quite stupefied. I could see that he didn’tknow what to make of you.”

“He’s not required to make anything ofme,” said Alma.

“Do you think he really believed you had forgottenall those things?”

“Impossible to say, mamma.”

“Well, I don’t think it was quite right,Alma.”

“I’ll leave him to you the next time.Miss Woodburn said you were freezing him to deathwhen I came down.”

“That was quite different. But, there won’tbe any next time, I’m afraid,” sighedMrs. Leighton.

Beaton went home feeling sure there would not.He tried to read when he got to his room; but Alma’slooks, tones, gestures, whirred through and throughthe woof of the story like shuttles; he could not keepthem out, and he fell asleep at last, not becausehe forgot them, but because he forgave them.He was able to say to himself that he had been justlycut off from kindness which he knew how to value inlosing it. He did not expect ever to right himselfin Alma’s esteem, but he hoped some day to lether know that he had understood. It seemed tohim that it would be a good thing if she should findit out after his death. He imagined her beingtouched by it under those circ*mstances.

VI.

In the morning it seemed to Beaton that he had donehimself injustice. When he uncovered his Judasand looked at it, he could not believe that the manwho was capable of such work deserved the punishmentMiss Leighton had inflicted upon him. He stillforgave her, but in the presence of a thing like thathe could not help respecting himself; he believedthat if she could see it she would be sorry that shehad cut herself off from his acquaintance. Hecarried this strain of conviction all through hissyndicate letter, which he now took out of his deskand finished, with an increasing security of his opinionsand a mounting severity in his judgments. Heretaliated upon the general condition of art amongus the pangs of wounded vanity, which Alma had madehim feel, and he folded up his manuscript and putit in his pocket, almost healed of his humiliation.He had been able to escape from its sting so entirelywhile he was writing that the notion of making hislife more and more literary commended itself to him.As it was now evident that the future was to be one

of renunciation, of self-forgetting, an oblivion tingedwith bitterness, he formlessly reasoned in favor ofreconsidering his resolution against Fulkerson’soffer. One must call it reasoning, but it wasrather that swift internal dramatization which constantlygoes on in persons of excitable sensibilities, andwhich now seemed to sweep Beaton physically alongtoward the ‘Every Other Week’ office, andcarried his mind with lightning celerity on to a timewhen he should have given that journal such qualityand authority in matters of art as had never beenenjoyed by any in America before. With the prosperitywhich he made attend his work he changed the characterof the enterprise, and with Fulkerson’s enthusiasticsupport he gave the public an art journal of as highgrade as ‘Les Lettres et les Arts’, andvery much that sort of thing. All this involvednow the unavailing regret of Alma Leighton, and nowhis reconciliation with her they were married in GraceChurch, because Beaton had once seen a marriage there,and had intended to paint a picture of it some time.

Nothing in these fervid fantasies prevented his respondingwith due dryness to Fulkerson’s cheery “Hello,old man!” when he found himself in the buildingfitted up for the ‘Every Other Week’ office.Fulkerson’s room was back of the smaller oneoccupied by the bookkeeper; they had been respectivelythe reception-room and dining-room of the little placein its dwelling-house days, and they had been simplyand tastefully treated in their transformation intobusiness purposes. The narrow old trim of thedoors and windows had been kept, and the quaintly uglymarble mantels. The architect had said, Betterlet them stay they expressed epoch, if not character.

“Well, have you come round to go to work?Just hang up your coat on the floor anywhere,”Fulkerson went on.

“I’ve come to bring you that letter,”said Beaton, all the more haughtily because he foundthat Fulkerson was not alone when he welcomed him inthese free and easy terms. There was a quiet-lookingman, rather stout, and a little above the middle height,with a full, close-cropped iron-gray beard, seatedbeyond the table where Fulkerson tilted himself back,with his knees set against it; and leaning againstthe mantel there was a young man with a singularlygentle face, in which the look of goodness qualifiedand transfigured a certain simplicity. His largeblue eyes were somewhat prominent; and his rathernarrow face was drawn forward in a nose a little toolong perhaps, if it had not been for the full chindeeply cut below the lip, and jutting firmly forward.

“Introduce you to Mr. March, our editor, Mr.Beaton,” Fulkerson said, rolling his head inthe direction of the elder man; and then nodding ittoward the younger, he said, “Mr. Dryfoos, Mr.Beaton.” Beaton shook hands with March,and then with Mr. Dryfoos, and Fulkerson went on,gayly: “We were just talking of you, Beaton—­well,you know the old saying. Mr. March, as I toldyou, is our editor, and Mr. Dryfoos has charge ofthe publishing department—­he’s thecounting-room incarnate, the source of power, thefountain of corruption, the element that preventsjournalism being the high and holy thing that it wouldbe if there were no money in it.” Mr. Dryfoosturned his large, mild eyes upon Beaton, and laughedwith the uneasy concession which people make to acharacter when they do not quite approve of the character’slanguage. “What Mr. March and I are tryingto do is to carry on this thing so that there won’tbe any money in it—­or very little; and we’replanning to give the public a better article for theprice than it’s ever had before. Now here’sa dummy we’ve had made up for ‘Every OtherWeek’, and as we’ve decided to adopt it,we would naturally like your opinion of it, so’sto know what opinion to have of you.” Hereached forward and pushed toward Beaton a volumea little above the size of the ordinary duodecimo book;its ivory-white pebbled paper cover was prettily illustratedwith a water-colored design irregularly washed overthe greater part of its surface: quite acrossthe page at top, and narrowing from right to leftas it descended. In the triangular space leftblank the title of the periodical and the publisher’simprint were tastefully lettered so as to be partlycovered by the background of color.

“It’s like some of those Tartarin booksof Daudet’s,” said Beacon, looking atit with more interest than he suffered to be seen.“But it’s a book, not a magazine.”He opened its pages of thick, mellow white paper,with uncut leaves, the first few pages experimentallyprinted in the type intended to be used, and illustratedwith some sketches drawn into and over the text, forthe sake of the effect.

“A Daniel—­a Daniel come to judgment!Sit down, Dan’el, and take it easy.”Fulkerson pushed a chair toward Beaton, who droppedinto it. “You’re right, Dan’el;it’s a book, to all practical intents and purposes.And what we propose to do with the American publicis to give it twenty-four books like this a year—­acomplete library—­for the absurd sum ofsix dollars. We don’t intend to sell ’em—­it’sno name for the transaction—­but to give’em. And what we want to get out of you—­beg,borrow, buy, or steal from you is an opinion whetherwe shall make the American public this princely presentin paper covers like this, or in some sort of flexibleboards, so they can set them on the shelf and sayno more about it. Now, Dan’el, come to judgment,as our respected friend Shylock remarked.”

Beacon had got done looking at the dummy, and he droppedit on the table before Fulkerson, who pushed it away,apparently to free himself from partiality. “Idon’t know anything about the business side,and I can’t tell about the effect of eitherstyle on the sales; but you’ll spoil the wholecharacter of the cover if you use anything thickerthan that thickish paper.”

“All right; very good; first-rate. Theayes have it. Paper it is. I don’tmind telling you that we had decided for that paperbefore you came in. Mr. March wanted it, becausehe felt in his bones just the way you do about it,and Mr. Dryfoos wanted it, because he’s the counting-roomincarnate, and it’s cheaper; and I ’wantedit, because I always like to go with the majority.Now what do you think of that little design itself?”

“The sketch?” Beaton pulled the book towardhim again and looked at it again. “Ratherdecorative. Drawing’s not remarkable.Graceful; rather nice.” He pushed the bookaway again, and Fulkerson pulled it to his aide ofthe table.

“Well, that’s a piece of that amateurtrash you despise so much. I went to a painterI know-by-the-way, he was guilty of suggesting youfor this thing, but I told him I was ahead of him—­andI got him to submit my idea to one of his class, andthat’s the result. Well, now, there ain’tanything in this world that sells a book like a prettycover, and we’re going to have a pretty coverfor ‘Every Other Week’ every time.We’ve cut loose from the old traditional quartoliterary newspaper size, and we’ve cut loosefrom the old two-column big page magazine size; we’regoing to have a duodecimo page, clear black print,and paper that ’ll make your mouth water; andwe’re going to have a fresh illustration forthe cover of each number, and we ain’t agoingto give the public any rest at all. Sometimeswe’re going to have a delicate little landscapelike this, and sometimes we’re going to havean indelicate little figure, or as much so as thelaw will allow.”

The young man leaning against the mantelpiece blusheda sort of protest.

March smiled and said, dryly, “Those are thenumbers that Mr. Fulkerson is going to edit himself.”

“Exactly. And Mr. Beaton, here, is goingto supply the floating females, gracefully airingthemselves against a sunset or something of that kind.”Beaton frowned in embarrassment, while Fulkerson wenton philosophically; “It’s astonishinghow you fellows can keep it up at this stage of theproceedings; you can paint things that your harshestcritic would be ashamed to describe accurately; you’reas free as the theatre. But that’s neitherhere nor there. What I’m after is the factthat we’re going to have variety in our title-pages,and we are going to have novelty in the illustrationsof the body of the book. March, here, if he hadhis own way, wouldn’t have any illustrationsat all.”

“Not because I don’t like them, Mr. Beacon,”March interposed, “but because I like them toomuch. I find that I look at the pictures in anillustrated article, but I don’t read the articlevery much, and I fancy that’s the case withmost other people. You’ve got to doing themso prettily that you take our eyes off the literature,if you don’t take our minds off.”

“Like the society beauties on the stage:people go in for the beauty so much that they don’tknow what the play is. But the box-office getsthere all the same, and that’s what Mr. Dryfooswants.” Fulkerson looked up gayly at Mr.Dryfoos, who smiled deprecatingly.

“It was different,” March went on, “whenthe illustrations used to be bad. Then the texthad some chance.”

“Old legitimate drama days, when ugliness andgenius combined to storm the galleries,” saidFulkerson.

“We can still make them bad enough,” saidBeaton, ignoring Fulkerson in his remark to March.

Fulkerson took the reply upon himself. “Well,you needn’t make ’em so bad as the old-stylecuts; but you can make them unobtrusive, modestlyretiring. We’ve got hold of a process somethinglike that those French fellows gave Daudet thirty-fivethousand dollars to write a novel to use with; kindof thing that begins at one side; or one corner, andspreads in a sort of dim religious style over theprint till you can’t tell which is which.Then we’ve got a notion that where the picturesdon’t behave quite so sociably, they can bedropped into the text, like a little casual remark,don’t you know, or a comment that has some connection,or maybe none at all, with what’s going on inthe story. Something like this.” Fulkersontook away one knee from the table long enough to openthe drawer, and pull from it a book that he shovedtoward Beacon. “That’s a Spanishbook I happened to see at Brentano’s, and I frozeto it on account of the pictures. I guess they’repretty good.”

“Do you expect to get such drawings in thiscountry?” asked Beaton, after a glance at thebook. “Such character—­such drama?You won’t.”

“Well, I’m not so sure,” said Fulkerson,“come to get our amateurs warmed up to the work.But what I want is to get the physical effect, so tospeak-get that sized picture into our page, and setthe fashion of it. I shouldn’t care ifthe illustration was sometimes confined to an initialletter and a tail-piece.”

“Couldn’t be done here. We haven’tthe touch. We’re good in some things, butthis isn’t in our way,” said Beaton, stubbornly.“I can’t think of a man who could do it;that is, among those that would.”

“Well, think of some woman, then,” saidFulkerson, easily. “I’ve got a notionthat the women could help us out on this thing, cometo get ’em interested. There ain’tanything so popular as female fiction; why not tryfemale art?”

“The females themselves have been supposed tohave been trying it for a good while,” Marchsuggested; and Mr. Dryfoos laughed nervously; Beatonremained solemnly silent.

“Yes, I know,” Fulkerson assented.“But I don’t mean that kind exactly.What we want to do is to work the ‘ewig Weibliche’in this concern. We want to make a magazine thatwill go for the women’s fancy every time.I don’t mean with recipes for cooking and fashionsand personal gossip about authors and society, butreal high-tone literature that will show women triumphingin all the stories, or else suffering tremendously.We’ve got to recognize that women form three-fourthsof the reading public in this country, and go fortheir tastes and their sensibilities and their sex-pietyalong the whole line. They do like to think thatwomen can do things better than men; and if we canlet it leak out and get around in the papers thatthe managers of ‘Every Other Week’ couldn’tstir a peg in the line of the illustrations they wantedtill they got a lot of God-gifted girls to help them,it ’ll make the fortune of the thing. See?”

He looked sunnily round at the other men, and Marchsaid: “You ought to be in charge of a Siamesewhite elephant, Fulkerson. It’s a disgraceto be connected with you.”

“It seems to me,” said Becton, “thatyou’d better get a God-gifted girl for yourart editor.”

Fulkerson leaned alertly forward, and touched himon the shoulder, with a compassionate smile.“My dear boy, they haven’t got the geniusof organization. It takes a very masculine manfor that—­a man who combines the most subtleand refined sympathies with the most forceful purposesand the most ferruginous will-power. Which hisname is Angus Beaton, and here he sets!”

The others laughed with Fulkerson at his gross burlesqueof flattery, and Becton frowned sheepishly. “Isuppose you understand this man’s style,”he growled toward March.

“He does, my son,” said Fulkerson.“He knows that I cannot tell a lie.”He pulled out his watch, and then got suddenly uponhis feet.

“It’s quarter of twelve, and I’vegot an appointment.” Beaton rose too, andFulkerson put the two books in his lax hands.“Take these along, Michelangelo Da Vinci, myfriend, and put your multitudinous mind on them forabout an hour, and let us hear from you to-morrow.We hang upon your decision.”

“There’s no deciding to be done,”said Beaton. “You can’t combine thetwo styles. They’d kill each other.”

“A Dan’el, a Dan’el come to judgment!I knew you could help us out! Take ’emalong, and tell us which will go the furthest withthe ’ewig Weibliche.’ Dryfoos, Iwant a word with you.” He led the way intothe front room, flirting an airy farewell to Beatonwith his hand as he went.

VII.

March and Beaton remained alone together for a moment,and March said: “I hope you will thinkit worth while to take hold with us, Mr. Beaton.Mr. Fulkerson puts it in his own way, of course; butwe really want to make a nice thing of the magazine.”He had that timidity of the elder in the presenceof the younger man which the younger, preoccupied withhis own timidity in the presence of the elder, cannotimagine. Besides, March was aware of the gulfthat divided him as a literary man from Beaton as anartist, and he only ventured to feel his way towardsympathy with him. “We want to make itgood; we want to make it high. Fulkerson is rightabout aiming to please the women, but of course hecaricatures the way of going about it.”

For answer, Beaton flung out, “I can’tgo in for a thing I don’t understand the planof.”

March took it for granted that he had wounded someexposed sensibility, of Beaton’s. He continuedstill more deferentially: “Mr. Fulkerson’snotion—­I must say the notion is his, evolvedfrom his syndicate experience—­is that weshall do best in fiction to confine our selves toshort stories, and make each number complete in itself.He found that the most successful things he couldfurnish his newspapers were short stories; we Americansare supposed to excel in writing them; and most peoplebegin with them in fiction; and it’s Mr. Fulkerson’sidea to work unknown talent, as he says, and so hethinks he can not only get them easily, but can graduallyform a school of short-story writers. I can’tsay I follow him altogether, but I respect his experience.We shall not despise translations of short stories,but otherwise the matter will all be original, and,of course, it won’t all be short stories.We shall use sketches of travel, and essays, and littledramatic studies, and bits of biography and history;but all very light, and always short enough to becompleted in a single number. Mr. Fulkerson believesin pictures, and most of the things would be capableof illustration.”

“I see,” said Beaton.

“I don’t know but this is the whole affair,”said March, beginning to stiffen a little at the youngman’s reticence.

“I understand. Thank you for taking thetrouble to explain. Good-morning.”Beaton bowed himself off, without offering to shakehands.

Fulkerson came in after a while from the outer office,and Mr. Dryfoos followed him. “Well, whatdo you think of our art editor?”

“Is he our art editor?” asked March.“I wasn’t quite certain when he left.”

“Did he take the books?”

“Yes, he took the books.”

“I guess he’s all right, then.”Fulkerson added, in concession to the umbrage he detectedin March.

“Beaton has his times of being the greatestass in the solar system, but he usually takes it outin personal conduct. When it comes to work, he’sa regular horse.”

“He appears to have compromised for the presentby being a perfect mule,” said March.

“Well, he’s in a transition state,”Fulkerson allowed. “He’s the man forus. He really understands what we want. You’llsee; he’ll catch on. That lurid glare ofhis will wear off in the course of time. He’sreally a good fellow when you take him off his guard;and he’s full of ideas. He’s spreadout over a good deal of ground at present, and so he’spretty thin; but come to gather him up into a lump,there’s a good deal of substance to him.Yes, there is. He’s a first-rate critic,and he’s a nice fellow with the other artists.They laugh at his universality, but they all likehim. He’s the best kind of a teacher whenhe condescends to it; and he’s just the manto deal with our volunteer work. Yes, sir, he’sa prize. Well, I must go now.”

Fulkerson went out of the street door, and then camequickly back. “By-the-bye, March, I sawthat old dynamiter of yours round at Beaton’sroom yesterday.”

“What old dynamiter of mine?”

“That old one-handed Dutchman—­friendof your youth—­the one we saw at Maroni’s—­”

“Oh-Lindau!” said March, with a vaguepang of self reproach for having thought of Lindauso little after the first flood of his tender feelingtoward him was past.

“Yes, our versatile friend was modelling himas Judas Iscariot. Lindau makes a first-rateJudas, and Beaton has got a big thing in that headif he works the religious people right. But whatI was thinking of was this—­it struck mejust as I was going out of the door: Didn’tyou tell me Lindau knew forty or fifty, differentlanguages?”

“Four or five, yes.”

“Well, we won’t quarrel about the number.The question is, Why not work him in the field offoreign literature? You can’t go over alltheir reviews and magazines, and he could do the smellingfor you, if you could trust his nose. Would heknow a good thing?”

“I think he would,” said March, on whomthe scope of Fulkerson’s suggestion graduallyopened. “He used to have good taste, andhe must know the ground. Why, it’s a capitalidea, Fulkerson! Lindau wrote very fair English,and he could translate, with a little revision.”

“And he would probably work cheap. Well,hadn’t you better see him about it? I guessit ’ll be quite a windfall for him.”

“Yes, it will. I’ll look him up.Thank you for the suggestion, Fulkerson.”

“Oh, don’t mention it! I don’tmind doing ‘Every Other Week’ a good turnnow and then when it comes in my way.” Fulkersonwent out again, and this time March was finally leftwith Mr. Dryfoos.

“Mrs. March was very sorry not to be at homewhen your sisters called the other day. She wishedme to ask if they had any afternoon in particular.There was none on your mother’s card.”

“No, sir,” said the young man, with aflush of embarrassment that seemed habitual with him.“She has no day. She’s at home almostevery day. She hardly ever goes out.”

“Might we come some evening?” March asked.“We should be very glad to do that, if she wouldexcuse the informality. Then I could come withMrs. March.”

“Mother isn’t very formal,” saidthe young man. “She would be very gladto see you.”

“Then we’ll come some night this week,if you will let us. When do you expect your fatherback?”

“Not much before Christmas. He’strying to settle up some things at Moffitt.”

“And what do you think of our art editor?”asked March, with a smile, for the change of subject.

“Oh, I don’t know much about such things,”said the young man, with another of his embarrassedflushes. “Mr. Fulkerson seems to feel surethat he is the one for us.”

“Mr. Fulkerson seemed to think that I was theone for you, too,” said March; and he laughed.“That’s what makes me doubt his infallibility.But he couldn’t do worse with Mr. Beaton.”

Mr. Dryfoos reddened and looked down, as if unableor unwilling to cope with the difficulty of makinga polite protest against March’s self-depreciation.He said, after a moment: “It’s newbusiness to all of us except Mr. Fulkerson. ButI think it will succeed. I think we can do somegood in it.”

March asked rather absently, “Some good?”Then he added: “Oh yes; I think we can.What do you mean by good? Improve the public taste?Elevate the standard of literature? Give youngauthors and artists a chance?”

This was the only good that had ever been in March’smind, except the good that was to come in a materialway from his success, to himself and to his family.

“I don’t know,” said the young man;and he looked down in a shamefaced fashion. Helifted his head and looked into March’s face.“I suppose I was thinking that some time wemight help along. If we were to have those sketchesof yours about life in every part of New York—­”

March’s authorial vanity was tickled. “Fulkersonhas been talking to you about them? He seemedto think they would be a card. He believes thatthere’s no subject so fascinating to the generalaverage of people throughout the country as life inNew York City; and he liked my notion of doing thesethings.” March hoped that Dryfoos wouldanswer that Fulkerson was perfectly enthusiastic abouthis notion; but he did not need this stimulus, and,at any rate, he went on without it. “Thefact is, it’s something that struck my fancythe moment I came here; I found myself intensely interestedin the place, and I began to make notes, consciouslyand unconsciously, at once. Yes, I believe I canget something quite attractive out of it. I don’tin the least know what it will be yet, except thatit will be very desultory; and I couldn’t atall say when I can get at it. If we postponethe first number till February I might get a littlepaper into that. Yes, I think it might be a goodthing for us,” March said, with modest self-appreciation.

“If you can make the comfortable people understandhow the uncomfortable people live, it will be a verygood thing, Mr. March. Sometimes it seems tome that the only trouble is that we don’t knowone another well enough; and that the first thingis to do this.” The young fellow spokewith the seriousness in which the beauty of his faceresided. Whenever he laughed his face lookedweak, even silly. It seemed to be a sense of thisthat made him hang his head or turn it away at suchtimes.

“That’s true,” said March, fromthe surface only. “And then, those phasesof low life are immensely picturesque. Of course,we must try to get the contrasts of luxury for thesake of the full effect. That won’t be soeasy. You can’t penetrate to the dinner-partyof a millionaire under the wing of a detective asyou could to a carouse in Mulberry Street, or to hischildren’s nursery with a philanthropist as youcan to a street-boy’s lodging-house.”March laughed, and again the young man turned his headaway. “Still, something can be done in thatway by tact and patience.”

VII.

That evening March went with his wife to return thecall of the Dryfoos ladies. On their way up-townin the Elevated he told her of his talk with youngDryfoos. “I confess I was a little ashamedbefore him afterward for having looked at the matterso entirely from the aesthetic point of view.But of course, you know, if I went to work at thosethings with an ethical intention explicitly in mind,I should spoil them.”

“Of course,” said his wife. She hadalways heard him say something of this kind aboutsuch things.

He went on: “But I suppose that’sjust the point that such a nature as young Dryfoos’scan’t get hold of, or keep hold of. We’rea queer lot, down there, Isabel—­perfectmenagerie. If it hadn’t been that Fulkersongot us together, and really seems to know what he didit for, I should say he was the oddest stick amongus. But when I think of myself and my own crankinessfor the literary department; and young Dryfoos, whoought really to be in the pulpit, or a monastery,or something, for publisher; and that young Beaton,who probably hasn’t a moral fibre in his composition,for the art man, I don’t know but we could giveFulkerson odds and still beat him in oddity.”

His wife heaved a deep sigh of apprehension, of renunciation,of monition. “Well, I’m glad youcan feel so light about it, Basil.”

“Light? I feel gay! With Fulkersonat the helm, I tell you the rocks and the lee shorehad better keep out of the way.” He laughedwith pleasure in his metaphor. “Just whenyou think Fulkerson has taken leave of his senseshe says or does something that shows he is on the mostintimate and inalienable terms with them all the time.You know how I’ve been worrying over those foreignperiodicals, and trying to get some translations fromthem for the first number? Well, Fulkerson hasbrought his centipedal mind to bear on the subject,and he’s suggested that old German friend ofmine I was telling you of—­the one I metin the restaurant—­the friend of my youth.”

“Do you think he could do it?” asked Mrs.March, sceptically.

“He’s a perfect Babel of strange tongues;and he’s the very man for the work, and I wasashamed I hadn’t thought of him myself, for Isuspect he needs the work.”

“Well, be careful how you get mixed up withhim, then, Basil,” said his wife, who had thenatural misgiving concerning the friends of her husband’syouth that all wives have. “You know theGermans are so unscrupulously dependent. Youdon’t know anything about him now.”

“I’m not afraid of Lindau,” saidMarch. “He was the best and kindest manI ever saw, the most high-minded, the most generous.He lost a hand in the war that helped to save us andkeep us possible, and that stump of his is characterenough for me.”

“Oh, you don’t think I could have meantanything against him!” said Mrs. March, withthe tender fervor that every woman who lived in thetime of the war must feel for those who suffered init. “All that I meant was that I hopedyou would not get mixed up with him too much.You’re so apt to be carried away by your impulses.”

“They didn’t carry me very far away inthe direction of poor old Lindau, I’m ashamedto think,” said March. “I meant allsorts of fine things by him after I met him; and thenI forgot him, and I had to be reminded of him by Fulkerson.”

She did not answer him, and he fell into a remorsefulreverie, in which he rehabilitated Lindau anew, andprovided handsomely for his old age. He got himburied with military honors, and had a shaft raisedover him, with a medallion likeness by Beaton andan epitaph by himself, by the time they reached Forty-secondStreet; there was no time to write Lindau’slife, however briefly, before the train stopped.

They had to walk up four blocks and then half a blockacross before they came to the indistinctive brownstonehouse where the Dryfooses lived. It was largerthan some in the same block, but the next neighborhoodof a huge apartment-house dwarfed it again. Marchthought he recognized the very flat in which he haddisciplined the surly janitor, but he did not tellhis wife; he made her notice the transition characterof the street, which had been mostly built up in apartment-houses,with here and there a single dwelling dropped fardown beneath and beside them, to that jag-toothedeffect on the sky-line so often observable in suchNew York streets. “I don’t know exactlywhat the old gentleman bought here for,” hesaid, as they waited on the steps after ringing, “unlesshe expects to turn it into flats by-and-by. Otherwise,I don’t believe he’ll get his money back.”

An Irish serving-man, with a certain surprise thatdelayed him, said the ladies were at home, and letthe Marches in, and then carried their cards up-stairs.The drawing-room, where he said they could sit downwhile he went on this errand, was delicately, decoratedin white and gold, and furnished with a sort of extravagantgood taste; there was nothing to object to in thesatin furniture, the pale, soft, rich carpet, thepictures, and the bronze and china bric-a-brac, exceptthat their costliness was too evident; everythingin the room meant money too plainly, and too muchof it. The Marches recognized this in the hoarsewhispers which people cannot get their voices abovewhen they try to talk away the interval of waitingin such circ*mstances; they conjectured from whatthey had heard of the Dryfooses that this tastefulluxury in no wise expressed their civilization.“Though when you come to that,” said March,“I don’t know that Mrs. Green’s gimcrackeryexpresses ours.”

“Well, Basil, I didn’t take the gimcrackery.That was your—­”

The rustle of skirts on the stairs without arrestedMrs. March in the well-merited punishment which shenever failed to inflict upon her husband when thequestion of the gimcrackery—­they alwayscalled it that—­came up. She rose atthe entrance of a bright-looking, pretty-looking,mature, youngish lady, in black silk of a neutralimplication, who put out her hand to her, and said,

with a very cheery, very ladylike accent, “Mrs.March?” and then added to both of them, whileshe shook hands with March, and before they could getthe name out of their months: “No, notMiss Dryfoos! Neither of them; nor Mrs. Dryfoos.Mrs. Mandel. The ladies will be down in a moment.Won’t you throw off your sacque, Mrs. March?I’m afraid it’s rather warm here, comingfrom the outside.”

“I will throw it back, if you’ll allowme,” said Mrs. March, with a sort of provisionality,as if, pending some uncertainty as to Mrs. Mandel’squality and authority, she did not feel herself justifiedin going further.

But if she did not know about Mrs. Mandel, Mrs. Mandelseemed to know about her. “Oh, well, do!”she said, with a sort of recognition of the proprietyof her caution. “I hope you are feelinga little at home in New York. We heard so muchof your trouble in getting a flat, from Mr. Fulkerson.”

“Well, a true Bostonian doesn’t give upquite so soon,” said Mrs. March.

“But I will say New York doesn’t seemso far away, now we’re here.”

“I’m sure you’ll like it. Everyone does.” Mrs. Mandel added to March,“It’s very sharp out, isn’t it?”

“Rather sharp. But after our Boston wintersI don’t know but I ought to repudiate the word.”

“Ah, wait till you have been here through March!”said Mrs. Mandel. She began with him, but skillfullytransferred the close of her remark, and the littlesmile of menace that went with it, to his wife.

“Yes,” said Mrs. March, “or April,either: Talk about our east winds!”

“Oh, I’m sure they can’t be worsethan our winds,” Mrs. Mandel returned, caressingly.

“If we escape New York pneumonia,” Marchlaughed, “it will only be to fall a prey toNew York malaria as soon as the frost is out of theground.”

“Oh, but you know,” said Mrs. Mandel,“I think our malaria has really been slandereda little. It’s more a matter of drainage—­ofplumbing. I don’t believe it would be possiblefor malaria to get into this house, we’ve hadit gone over so thoroughly.”

Mrs. March said, while she tried to divine Mrs. Mandel’sposition from this statement, “It’s certainlythe first duty.”

“If Mrs. March could have had her way, we shouldhave had the drainage of our whole ward put in order,”said her husband, “before we ventured to takea furnished apartment for the winter.”

Mrs. Mandel looked discreetly at Mrs. March for permissionto laugh at this, but at the same moment both ladiesbecame preoccupied with a second rustling on the stairs.

Two tall, well-dressed young girls came in, and Mrs.Mandel introduced, “Miss Dryfoos, Mrs. March;and Miss Mela Dryfoos, Mr. March,” she added,and the girls shook hands in their several ways withthe Marches.

Miss Dryfoos had keen black eyes, and her hair wasintensely black. Her face, but for the slightinward curve of the nose, was regular, and the smallnessof her nose and of her mouth did not weaken her face,but gave it a curious effect of fierceness, of challenge.She had a large black fan in her hand, which she wavedin talking, with a slow, watchful nervousness.Her sister was blonde, and had a profile like her brother’s;but her chin was not so salient, and the weak lookof the mouth was not corrected by the spiritualityor the fervor of his eyes, though hers were of thesame mottled blue. She dropped into the low seatbeside Mrs. Mandel, and intertwined her fingers withthose of the hand which Mrs. Mandel let her have.She smiled upon the Marches, while Miss Dryfoos watchedthem intensely, with her eyes first on one and thenon the other, as if she did not mean to let any expressionof theirs escape her.

“My mother will be down in a minute,”she said to Mrs. March.

“I hope we’re not disturbing her.It is so good of you to let us come in the evening,”Mrs. March replied.

“Oh, not at all,” said the girl.“We receive in the evening.”

“When we do receive,” Miss Mela put in.“We don’t always get the chance to.”She began a laugh, which she checked at a smile fromMrs. Mandel, which no one could have seen to be reproving.

Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan, and looked updefiantly at Mrs. March. “I suppose youhave hardly got settled. We were afraid we woulddisturb you when we called.”

“Oh no! We were very sorry to miss yourvisit. We are quite settled in our new quarters.Of course, it’s all very different from Boston.”

“I hope it’s more of a sociable placethere,” Miss Mela broke in again. “Inever saw such an unsociable place as New York.We’ve been in this house three months, and Idon’t believe that if we stayed three years anyof the neighbors would call.”

“I fancy proximity doesn’t count for muchin New York,” March suggested.

Mrs. Mandel said: “That’s what Itell Miss Mela. But she is a very social nature,and can’t reconcile herself to the fact.”

“No, I can’t,” the girl pouted.“I think it was twice as much fun in Moffitt.I wish I was there now.”

“Yes,” said March, “I think there’sa great deal more enjoyment in those smaller places.There’s not so much going on in the way of publicamusem*nts, and so people make more of one another.There are not so many concerts, theatres, operas—­”

“Oh, they’ve got a splendid opera-housein Moffitt. It’s just grand,” saidMiss Mela.

“Have you been to the opera here, this winter?”Mrs. March asked of the elder girl.

She was glaring with a frown at her sister, and detachedher eyes from her with an effort. “Whatdid you say?” she demanded, with an absent bluntness.“Oh yes. Yes! We went once. Fathertook a box at the Metropolitan.”

“Then you got a good dose of Wagner, I suppose?”said March.

“What?” asked the girl.

“I don’t think Miss Dryfoos is very fondof Wagner’s music,” Mrs. Mandel said.“I believe you are all great Wagnerites in Boston?”

“I’m a very bad Bostonian, Mrs. Mandel.I suspect myself of preferring Verdi,” Marchanswered.

Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan again, and said,“I like ‘Trovatore’ the best.”

“It’s an opera I never get tired of,”said March, and Mrs. March and Mrs: Mandel exchangeda smile of compassion for his simplicity. He detectedit, and added: “But I dare say I shall comedown with the Wagner fever in time. I’vebeen exposed to some malignant cases of it.”

“That night we were there,” said MissMela, “they had to turn the gas down all throughone part of it, and the papers said the ladies wereawful mad because they couldn’t show their diamonds.I don’t wonder, if they all had to pay as muchfor their boxes as we did. We had to pay sixtydollars.” She looked at the Marches fortheir sensation at this expense.

March said: “Well, I think I shall takemy box by the month, then. It must come cheaper,wholesale.”

“Oh no, it don’t,” said the girl,glad to inform him. “The people that owntheir boxes, and that had to give fifteen or twentythousand dollars apiece for them, have to pay sixtydollars a night whenever there’s a performance,whether they go or not.”

“Then I should go every night,” Marchsaid.

“Most of the ladies were low neck—­”

March interposed, “Well, I shouldn’t golow-neck.”

The girl broke into a fondly approving laugh at hisdrolling. “Oh, I guess you love to train!Us girls wanted to go low neck, too; but father saidwe shouldn’t, and mother said if we did she wouldn’tcome to the front of the box once. Well, shedidn’t, anyway. We might just as well ‘a’gone low neck. She stayed back the whole time,and when they had that dance—­the ballet,you know—­she just shut her eyes. Well,Conrad didn’t like that part much, either; butus girls and Mrs. Mandel, we brazened it out rightin the front of the box. We were about the onlyones there that went high neck. Conrad had towear a swallow-tail; but father hadn’t any,and he had to patch out with a white cravat. Youcouldn’t see what he had on in the back o’the box, anyway.”

Mrs. March looked at Miss Dryfoos, who was wavingher fan more and more slowly up and down, and who,when she felt herself looked at, returned Mrs. March’ssmile, which she meant to be ingratiating and perhapssympathetic, with a flash that made her start, andthen ran her fierce eyes over March’s face.“Here comes mother,” she said, with a sortof breathlessness, as if speaking her thought aloud,and through the open door the Marches could see theold lady on the stairs.

She paused half-way down, and turning, called up:“Coonrod! Coonrod! You bring my shawldown with you.”

Her daughter Mela called out to her, “Now, mother,Christine ’ll give it to you for not sendingMike.”

“Well, I don’t know where he is, Mely,child,” the mother answered back. “Heain’t never around when he’s wanted, andwhen he ain’t, it seems like a body couldn’tgit shet of him, nohow.”

“Well, you ought to ring for him!” criedMiss Mela, enjoying the joke.

Her mother came in with a slow step; her head shookslightly as she looked about the room, perhaps fromnervousness, perhaps from a touch of palsy. Ineither case the fact had a pathos which Mrs. Marchconfessed in the affection with which she took herhard, dry, large, old hand when she was introducedto her, and in the sincerity which she put into thehope that she was well.

“I’m just middlin’,” Mrs.Dryfoos replied. “I ain’t never sowell, nowadays. I tell fawther I don’tbelieve it agrees with me very well here, but he saysI’ll git used to it. He’s away now,out at Moffitt,” she said to March, and waveredon foot a moment before she sank into a chair.She was a tall woman, who had been a beautiful girl,and her gray hair had a memory of blondeness in itlike Lindau’s, March noticed. She worea simple silk gown, of a Quakerly gray, and she helda handkerchief folded square, as it had come fromthe laundress. Something like the Sabbath quietof a little wooden meeting-house in thick Western woodsexpressed itself to him from her presence.

“Laws, mother!” said Miss Mela; “whatyou got that old thing on for? If I’d ‘a’known you’d ‘a’ come down in that!”

“Coonrod said it was all right, Mely,”said her mother.

Miss Mela explained to the Marches: “Motherwas raised among the Dunkards, and she thinks it’swicked to wear anything but a gray silk even for dress-up.”

“You hain’t never heared o’ theDunkards, I reckon,” the old woman said to Mrs.March. “Some folks calls ’em the BeardyMen, because they don’t never shave; and theywash feet like they do in the Testament. My unclewas one. He raised me.”

“I guess pretty much everybody’s a BeardyMan nowadays, if he ain’t a Dunkard!”

Miss Mela looked round for applause of her sally,but March was saying to his wife: “It’sa Pennsylvania German sect, I believe—­somethinglike the Quakers. I used to see them when I wasa boy.”

“Aren’t they something like the Mennists?”asked Mrs. Mandel.

“They’re good people,” said theold woman, “and the world ’d be a heapbetter off if there was more like ’em.”

Her son came in and laid a soft shawl over her shouldersbefore he shook hands with the visitors. “Iam glad you found your way here,” he said tothem.

Christine, who had been bending forward over her fan,now lifted herself up with a sigh and leaned backin her chair.

“I’m sorry my father isn’t here,”said the young man to Mrs. March. “He’snever met you yet?”

“No; and I should like to see him. We heara great deal about your father, you know, from Mr.Fulkerson.”

“Oh, I hope you don’t believe everythingMr. Fulkerson says about people,” Mela cried.“He’s the greatest person for carryingon when he gets going I ever saw. It makes Christinejust as mad when him and mother gets to talking aboutreligion; she says she knows he don’t care anythingmore about it than the man in the moon. I reckonhe don’t try it on much with father.”

“Your fawther ain’t ever been a perfessor,”her mother interposed; “but he’s alwaysbeen a good church-goin’ man.”

“Not since we come to New York,” retortedthe girl.

“He’s been all broke up since he cometo New York,” said the old woman, with an aggrievedlook.

Mrs. Mandel attempted a diversion. “Haveyou heard any of our great New York preachers yet,Mrs. March?”

“No, I haven’t,” Mrs. March admitted;and she tried to imply by her candid tone that sheintended to begin hearing them the very next Sunday.

“There are a great many things here,”said Conrad, “to take your thoughts off thepreaching that you hear in most of the churches.I think the city itself is preaching the best sermonall the time.”

“I don’t know that I understand you,”said March.

Mela answered for him. “Oh, Conrad hasgot a lot of notions that nobody can understand.You ought to see the church he goes to when he doesgo. I’d about as lief go to a Catholicchurch myself; I don’t see a bit o’ difference.He’s the greatest crony with one of their preachers;he dresses just like a priest, and he says he is apriest.” She laughed for enjoyment of thefact, and her brother cast down his eyes.

Mrs. March, in her turn, tried to take from it thepersonal tone which the talk was always assuming.“Have you been to the fall exhibition?”she asked Christine; and the girl drew herself upout of the abstraction she seemed sunk in.

“The exhibition?” She looked at Mrs. Mandel.

“The pictures of the Academy, you know,”Mrs. Mandel explained. “Where I wantedyou to go the day you had your dress tried on.”

“No; we haven’t been yet. Is it good?”She had turned to Mrs. March again.

“I believe the fall exhibitions are never sogood as the spring ones. But there are some goodpictures.”

“I don’t believe I care much about pictures,”said Christine. “I don’t understandthem.”

“Ah, that’s no excuse for not caring aboutthem,” said March, lightly. “Thepainters themselves don’t, half the time.”

The girl looked at him with that glance at once defiantand appealing, insolent and anxious, which he hadnoticed before, especially when she stole it towardhimself and his wife during her sister’s babble.In the light of Fulkerson’s history of the family,its origin and its ambition, he interpreted it tomean a sense of her sister’s folly and an ignorantwill to override his opinion of anything incongruousin themselves and their surroundings. He saidto himself that she was deathly proud—­tooproud to try to palliate anything, but capable of anythingthat would put others under her feet. Her eyesseemed hopelessly to question his wife’s socialquality, and he fancied, with not unkindly interest,the inexperienced girl’s doubt whether to treatthem with much or little respect. He lost himselfin fancies about her and her ideals, necessarily sordid,of her possibilities of suffering, of the triumphsand disappointments before her. Her sister wouldaccept both with a lightness that would keep no traceof either; but in her they would sink lastingly deep.He came out of his reverie to find Mrs. Dryfoos sayingto him, in her hoarse voice:

“I think it’s a shame, some of the pictur’sa body sees in the winders. They say there’sa law ag’inst them things; and if there is, Idon’t understand why the police don’ttake up them that paints ’em. I hear 182tell, since I been here, that there’s women thatgoes to have pictur’s took from them that wayby men painters.” The point seemed aimedat March, as if he were personally responsible forthe scandal, and it fell with a silencing effect forthe moment. Nobody seemed willing to take itup, and Mrs. Dryfoos went on, with an old woman’sseverity: “I say they ought to be all tarredand feathered and rode on a rail. They’dbe drummed out of town in Moffitt.”

Miss Mela said, with a crowing laugh: “Ishould think they would! And they wouldn’tanybody go low neck to the opera-house there, either—­notlow neck the way they do here, anyway.”

“And that pack of worthless hussies,”her mother resumed, “that come out on the stage,and begun to kick”

“Laws, mother!” the girl shouted, “Ithought you said you had your eyes shut!”

All but these two simpler creatures were abashed atthe indecorum of suggesting in words the commonplacesof the theatre and of art.

“Well, I did, Mely, as soon as I could believemy eyes. I don’t know what they’redoin’ in all their churches, to let such thingsgo on,” said the old woman. “It’sa sin and a shame, I think. Don’t you, Coonrod?”

A ring at the door cut short whatever answer he wasabout to deliver.

“If it’s going to be company, Coonrod,”said his mother, making an effort to rise, “Ireckon I better go up-stairs.”

“It’s Mr. Fulkerson, I guess,” saidConrad. “He thought he might come”;and at the mention of this light spirit Mrs. Dryfoossank contentedly back in her chair, and a relaxationof their painful tension seemed to pass through thewhole company. Conrad went to the door himself(the serving-man tentatively, appeared some minuteslater) and let in Fulkerson’s cheerful voicebefore his cheerful person.

“Ah, how dye do, Conrad? Brought our friend,Mr. Beaton, with me,” those within heard himsay; and then, after a sound of putting off overcoats,they saw him fill the doorway, with his feet set squareand his arms akimbo.

IX.

“Ah! hello! hello!” Fulkerson said, inrecognition of the Marches. “Regular gatheringof the clans. How are you, Mrs. Dryfoos?How do you do, Mrs. Mandel, Miss Christine, Mela,Aunt Hitty, and all the folks? How you wuz?”He shook hands gayly all round, and took a chair nextthe old lady, whose hand he kept in his own, and leftConrad to introduce Beaton. But he would notlet the shadow of Beaton’s solemnity fall uponthe company. He began to joke with Mrs. Dryfoos,and to match rheumatisms with her, and he includedall the ladies in the range of appropriate pleasantries.“I’ve brought Mr. Beaton along to-night,and I want you to make him feel at home, like youdo me, Mrs. Dryfoos. He hasn’t got anyrheumatism to speak of; but his parents live in Syracuse,and he’s a kind of an orphan, and we’vejust adopted him down at the office. When yougoing to bring the young ladies down there, Mrs. Mandel,for a champagne lunch? I will have some hydro-Mela,and Christine it, heigh? How’s that fora little starter? We dropped in at your placea moment, Mrs. March, and gave the young folks a fewpointers about their studies. My goodness! itdoes me good to see a boy like that of yours; business,from the word go; and your girl just scoops my youthfulaffections. She’s a beauty, and I guessshe’s good, too. Well, well, what a worldit is! Miss Christine, won’t you show Mr.Beaton that seal ring of yours? He knows aboutsuch things, and I brought him here to see it as muchas anything. It’s an intaglio I broughtfrom the other side,” he explained to Mrs. March,“and I guess you’ll like to look at it.Tried to give it to the Dryfoos family, and when Icouldn’t, I sold it to ’em. Boundto see it on Miss Christine’s hand somehow!Hold on! Let him see it where it belongs, first!”

He arrested the girl in the motion she made to takeoff the ring, and let her have the pleasure of showingher hand to the company with the ring on it.Then he left her to hear the painter’s wordsabout it, which he continued to deliver dissyllabicallyas he stood with her under a gas-jet, twisting hiselastic figure and bending his head over the ring.

“Well, Mely, child,” Fulkerson went on,with an open travesty of her mother’s habitualaddress, “and how are you getting along?Mrs. Mandel hold you up to the proprieties prettystrictly? Well, that’s right. Youknow you’d be roaming all over the pasture ifshe didn’t.”

The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning,and everybody took him. on his own ground of privilegedcharacter. He brought them all together in theirfriendliness for himself, and before the evening wasover he had inspired Mrs. Mandel to have them servedwith coffee, and had made both the girls feel thatthey had figured brilliantly in society, and that twoyoung men had been devoted to them.

“Oh, I think he’s just as lovely as hecan live!” said Mela, as she stood a momentwith her sister on the scene of her triumph, wherethe others had left them after the departure of theirguests.

“Who?” asked Christine, deeply. Asshe glanced down at her ring, her eyes burned witha softened fire.

She had allowed Beaton to change it himself from thefinger where she had worn it to the finger on whichhe said she ought to wear it. She did not knowwhether it was right to let him, but she was glad shehad done it.

“Who? Mr. Fulkerson, goosie-poosie!Not that old stuckup Mr. Beaton of yours!”

“He is proud,” assented Christine, witha throb of exultation.

Beaton and Fulkerson went to the Elevated stationwith the Marches; but the painter said he was goingto walk home, and Fulkerson let him go alone.

“One way is enough for me,” he explained.“When I walk up, I don’t walk down.Bye-bye, my son!” He began talking about Beatonto the Marches as they climbed the station stairstogether. “That fellow puzzles me.I don’t know anybody that I have such a desireto kick, and at the same time that I want to flatterup so much. Affect you that way?” he askedof March.

“Well, as far as the kicking goes, yes.”

“And how is it with you, Mrs. March?”

“Oh, I want to flatter him up.”

“No; really? Why? Hold on! I’vegot the change.”

Fulkerson pushed March away from the ticket-officewindow; and made them his guests, with the inexorableAmerican hospitality, for the ride down-town.“Three!” he said to the ticket-seller;and, when he had walked them before him out on theplatform and dropped his tickets into the urn, hepersisted in his inquiry, “Why?”

“Why, because you always want to flatter conceitedpeople, don’t you?” Mrs. March answered,with a laugh.

“Do you? Yes, I guess you do. Youthink Beaton is conceited?”

“Well, slightly, Mr. Fulkerson.”

“I guess you’re partly right,” saidFulkerson, with a sigh, so unaccountable in its connectionthat they all laughed.

“An ideal ’busted’?” Marchsuggested.

“No, not that, exactly,” said Fulkerson.“But I had a notion maybe Beaton wasn’tconceited all the time.”

“Oh!” Mrs. March exulted, “nobodycould be so conceited all the time as Mr. Beaton ismost of the time. He must have moments of thedirest modesty, when he’d be quite flattery-proof.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean. I guessthat’s what makes me want to kick him.He’s left compliments on my hands that no decentman would.”

“Oh! that’s tragical,” said March.

“Mr. Fulkerson,” Mrs. March began, withchange of subject in her voice, “who is Mrs.Mandel?”

“Who? What do you think of her?”he rejoined. “I’ll tell you abouther when we get in the cars. Look at that thing!Ain’t it beautiful?”

They leaned over the track and looked up at the nextstation, where the train, just starting, throbbedout the flame-shot steam into the white moonlight.

“The most beautiful thing in New York—­theone always and certainly beautiful thing here,”said March; and his wife sighed, “Yes, yes.”She clung to him, and remained rapt by the sight tillthe train drew near, and then pulled him back in apanic.

“Well, there ain’t really much to tellabout her,” Fulkerson resumed when they wereseated in the car. “She’s an inventionof mine.”

“Of yours?” cried Mrs. March.

“Of course!” exclaimed her husband.

“Yes—­at least in her present capacity.She sent me a story for the syndicate, back in Julysome time, along about the time I first met old Dryfooshere. It was a little too long for my purpose,and I thought I could explain better how I wantedit cut in a call than I could in a letter. Shegave a Brooklyn address, and I went to see her.I found her,” said Fulkerson, with a vague defiance,“a perfect lady. She was living with anaunt over there; and she had seen better days, whenshe was a girl, and worse ones afterward. I don’tmean to say her husband was a bad fellow; I guesshe was pretty good; he was her music-teacher; she methim in Germany, and they got married there, and gotthrough her property before they came over here.Well, she didn’t strike me like a person thatcould make much headway in literature. Her storywas well enough, but it hadn’t much sand init; kind of-well, academic, you know. I told herso, and she understood, and cried a little; but shedid the best she could with the thing, and I tookit and syndicated it. She kind of stuck in mymind, and the first time I went to see the Dryfoosesthey were stopping at a sort of family hotel thentill they could find a house—­” Fulkersonbroke off altogether, and said, “I don’tknow as I know just how the Dryfooses struck you,Mrs. March?”

“Can’t you imagine?” she answered,with a kindly, smile.

“Yes; but I don’t believe I could guesshow they would have struck you last summer when Ifirst saw them. My! oh my! there was the nativeearth for you. Mely is a pretty wild colt now,but you ought to have seen her before she was brokento harness.

“And Christine? Ever see that black leopardthey got up there in the Central Park? That wasChristine. Well, I saw what they wanted.They all saw it—­nobody is a fool in alldirections, and the Dryfooses are in their right sensesa good deal of the time. Well, to cut a long storyshort, I got Mrs. Mandel to take ’em in hand—­theold lady as well as the girls. She was a bornlady, and always lived like one till she saw Mandel;and that something academic that killed her for a writerwas just the very thing for them. She knows theworld well enough to know just how much polish theycan take on, and she don’t try to put on a bitmore. See?”

“Yes, I can see,” said Mrs. March.

“Well, she took hold at once, as ready as ahospital-trained nurse; and there ain’t anythingreadier on this planet. She runs the whole concern,socially and economically, takes all the care of housekeepingoff the old lady’s hands, and goes round withthe girls. By-the-bye, I’m going to takemy meals at your widow’s, March, and Conrad’sgoing to have his lunch there. I’m sickof browsing about.”

“Mr. March’s widow?” said his wife,looking at him with provisional severity.

“I have no widow, Isabel,” he said, “andnever expect to have, till I leave you in the enjoymentof my life-insurance. I suppose Fulkerson meansthe lady with the daughter who wanted to take us toboard.”

“Oh yes. How are they getting on, I dowonder?” Mrs. March asked of Fulkerson.

“Well, they’ve got one family to board;but it’s a small one. I guess they’llpull through. They didn’t want to take anyday boarders at first, the widow said; I guess theyhave had to come to it.”

“Poor things!” sighed Mrs. March.“I hope they’ll go back to the country.”

“Well, I don’t know. When you’veonce tasted New York—­You wouldn’tgo back to Boston, would you?”

“Instantly.”

Fulkerson laughed out a tolerant incredulity.

X

Beaton lit his pipe when he found himself in his room,and sat down before the dull fire in his grate tothink. It struck him there was a dull fire inhis heart a great deal like it; and he worked out afanciful analogy with the coals, still alive, andthe ashes creeping over them, and the dead clay andcinders. He felt sick of himself, sick of hislife and of all his works. He was angry withFulkerson for having got him into that art departmentof his, for having bought him up; and he was bitterat fate because he had been obliged to use the moneyto pay some pressing debts, and had not been ableto return the check his father had sent him.He pitied his poor old father; he ached with compassionfor him; and he set his teeth and snarled with contemptthrough them for his own baseness. This was thekind of world it was; but he washed his hands of it.The fault was in human nature, and he reflected withpride that he had at least not invented human nature;he had not sunk so low as that yet. The notionamused him; he thought he might get a Satanic epigramout of it some way. But in the mean time thatgirl, that wild animal, she kept visibly, tangiblybefore him; if he put out his hand he might touchhers, he might pass his arm round her waist. InParis, in a set he knew there, what an effect shewould be with that look of hers, and that beauty,all out of drawing! They would recognize the flamequality in her. He imagined a joke about herbeing a fiery spirit, or nymph, naiad, whatever, fromone of her native gas-wells. He began to sketchon a bit of paper from the table at his elbow vague

lines that veiled and revealed a level, dismal landscape,and a vast flame against an empty sky, and a shapeout of the flame that took on a likeness and floateddetached from it. The sketch ran up the leftside of the sheet and stretched across it. Beatonlaughed out. Pretty good to let Fulkerson havethat for the cover of his first number! In blackand red it would be effective; it would catch theeye from the news-stands. He made a motion tothrow it on the fire, but held it back and slid itinto the table-drawer, and smoked on. He sawthe dummy with the other sketch in the open drawerwhich he had brought away from Fulkerson’s inthe morning and slipped in there, and he took it outand looked at it. He made some criticisms in linewith his pencil on it, correcting the drawing hereand there, and then he respected it a little more,though he still smiled at the feminine quality—­ayoung lady quality.

In spite of his experience the night he called uponthe Leightons, Beaton could not believe that Almano longer cared for him. She played at havingforgotten him admirably, but he knew that a few monthsbefore she had been very mindful of him. He knewhe had neglected them since they came to New York,where he had led them to expect interest, if not attention;but he was used to neglecting people, and he was somewhatless used to being punished for it—­punishedand forgiven. He felt that Alma had punishedhim so thoroughly that she ought to have been satisfiedwith her work and to have forgiven him in her heartafterward. He bore no resentment after the firsttingling moments were-past; he rather admired herfor it; and he would have been ready to go back halfan hour later and accept pardon and be on the footingof last summer again. Even now he debated withhimself whether it was too late to call; but, decidedly,a quarter to ten seemed late. The next day hedetermined never to call upon the Leightons again;but he had no reason for this; it merely came intoa transitory scheme of conduct, of retirement fromthe society of women altogether; and after dinnerhe went round to see them.

He asked for the ladies, and they all three receivedhim, Alma not without a surprise that intimated itselfto him, and her mother with no appreciable relenting;Miss Woodburn, with the needlework which she foundeasier to be voluble over than a book, expressed inher welcome a neutrality both cordial to Beaton andloyal to Alma.

“Is it snowing outdo’s?” she asked,briskly, after the greetings were transacted.“Mah goodness!” she said, in answer tohis apparent surprise at the question. “Ahmahght as well have stayed in the Soath, for all thewinter Ah have seen in New York yet.”

“We don’t often have snow much beforeNew-Year’s,” said Beaton.

“Miss Woodburn is wild for a real Northern winter,”Mrs. Leighton explained.

“The othah naght Ah woke up and looked oat ofthe window and saw all the roofs covered with snow,and it turned oat to be nothing but moonlaght.Ah was never so disappointed in mah lahfe,” saidMiss Woodburn.

“If you’ll come to St. Barnaby next summer,you shall have all the winter you want,” saidAlma.

“I can’t let you slander St. Barnaby inthat way,” said Beaton, with the air of wishingto be understood as meaning more than he said.

“Yes?” returned Alma, coolly. “Ididn’t know you were so fond of the climate.”

“I never think of it as a climate. It’sa landscape. It doesn’t matter whetherit’s hot or cold.”

“With the thermometer twenty below, you’dfind that it mattered,” Alma persisted.

“Is that the way you feel about St. Barnaby,too, Mrs. Leighton?” Beaton asked, with affecteddesolation.

“I shall be glad enough to go back in the summer,”Mrs. Leighton conceded.

“And I should be glad to go now,” saidBeaton, looking at Alma. He had the dummy of‘Every Other Week’ in his hand, and hesaw Alma’s eyes wandering toward it wheneverhe glanced at her. “I should be glad togo anywhere to get out of a job I’ve undertaken,”he continued, to Mrs. Leighton. “They’regoing to start some sort of a new illustrated magazine,and they’ve got me in for their art department.I’m not fit for it; I’d like to run away.Don’t you want to advise me a little, Mrs. Leighton?You know how much I value your taste, and I’dlike to have you look at the design for the coverof the first number: they’re going to havea different one for every number. I don’tknow whether you’ll agree with me, but I thinkthis is rather nice.”

He faced the dummy round, and then laid it on thetable before Mrs. Leighton, pushing some of her workaside to make room for it and standing over her whileshe bent forward to look at it.

Alma kept her place, away from the table.

“Mah goodness! Ho’ exciting!”said Miss Woodburn. “May anybody look?”

“Everybody,” said Beaton.

“Well, isn’t it perfectly choming!”Miss Woodburn exclaimed. “Come and lookat this, Miss Leighton,” she called to Alma,who reluctantly approached.

“What lines are these?” Mrs. Leightonasked, pointing to Beaton’s pencil scratches.

“They’re suggestions of modifications,”he replied.

“I don’t think they improve it much.What do you think, Alma?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the girl,constraining her voice to an effect of indifferenceand glancing carelessly down at the sketch. “Thedesign might be improved; but I don’t thinkthose suggestions would do it.”

“They’re mine,” said Beaton, fixinghis eyes upon her with a beautiful sad dreaminessthat he knew he could put into them; he spoke witha dreamy remoteness of tone—­his wind-harpstop, Wetmore called it.

“I supposed so,” said Alma, calmly.

“Oh, mah goodness!” cried Miss Woodburn.“Is that the way you awtusts talk to each othah?Well, Ah’m glad Ah’m not an awtust—­unlessI could do all the talking.”

“Artists cannot tell a fib,” Alma said,“or even act one,” and she laughed inBeaton’s upturned face.

He did not unbend his dreamy gaze. “You’requite right. The suggestions are stupid.”

Alma turned to Miss Woodburn: “You hear?Even when we speak of our own work.”

“Ah nevah hoad anything lahke it!”

“And the design itself?” Beaton persisted.

“Oh, I’m not an art editor,” Almaanswered, with a laugh of exultant evasion.

A tall, dark, grave-looking man of fifty, with a swarthyface and iron-gray mustache and imperial and goatee,entered the room. Beaton knew the type; he hadbeen through Virginia sketching for one of the illustratedpapers, and he had seen such men in Richmond.Miss Woodburn hardly needed to say, “May Ahintroduce you to mah fathaw, Co’nel Woodburn,Mr. Beaton?”

The men shook hands, and Colonel Woodburn said, inthat soft, gentle, slow Southern voice without ourNorthern contractions: “I am very glad tomeet you, sir; happy to make yo’ acquaintance.Do not move, madam,” he said to Mrs. Leighton,who made a deprecatory motion to let him pass to thechair beyond her; “I can find my way.”He bowed a bulk that did not lend itself readily tothe devotion, and picked up the ball of yarn she hadlet drop out of her lap in half rising. “Yo’worsteds, madam.”

“Yarn, yarn, Colonel Woodburn!” Alma shouted.“You’re quite incorrigible. A spadeis a spade!”

“But sometimes it is a trump, my dear younglady,” said the Colonel, with unabated gallantry;“and when yo’ mothah uses yarn, it is worsteds.But I respect worsteds even under the name of yarn:our ladies—­my own mothah and sistahs—­hadto knit the socks we wore—­all we could getin the woe.”

“Yes, and aftah the woe,” his daughterput in. “The knitting has not stopped yetin some places. Have you been much in the Soath,Mr. Beaton?”

Beaton explained just how much.

“Well, sir,” said the Colonel, “thenyou have seen a country making gigantic strugglesto retrieve its losses, sir. The South is advancingwith enormous strides, sir.”

“Too fast for some of us to keep up,”said Miss Woodburn, in an audible aside. “Thepace in Charlottesboag is pofectly killing, and wehad to drop oat into a slow place like New York.”

“The progress in the South is material now,”said the Colonel; “and those of us whose interestsare in another direction find ourselves—­isolated—­isolated, sir. The intellectual centresare still in the No’th, sir; the great citiesdraw the mental activity of the country to them, sir.Necessarily New York is the metropolis.”

“Oh, everything comes here,” said Beaton,impatient of the elder’s ponderosity. Anothersort of man would have sympathized with the Southerner’swillingness to talk of himself, and led him on to speakof his plans and ideals. But the sort of manthat Beaton was could not do this; he put up the dummyinto the wrapper he had let drop on the floor besidehim, and tied it round with string while Colonel Woodburnwas talking. He got to his feet with the wordshe spoke and offered Mrs. Leighton his hand.

“Must you go?” she asked, in surprise.

“I am on my way to a reception,” he said.She had noticed that he was in evening dress; andnow she felt the vague hurt that people invited nowherefeel in the presence of those who are going somewhere.She did not feel it for herself, but for her daughter;and she knew Alma would not have let her feel it ifshe could have prevented it. But Alma had leftthe room for a moment, and she tacitly indulged thissense of injury in her behalf.

“Please say good-night to Miss Leighton forme,” Beaton continued. He bowed to MissWoodburn, “Goodnight, Miss Woodburn,” andto her father, bluntly, “Goodnight.”

“Good-night, sir,” said the Colonel, witha sort of severe suavity.

“Oh, isn’t he choming!” Miss Woodburnwhispered to Mrs. Leighton when Beaton left the room.

Alma spoke to him in the hall without. “Youknew that was my design, Mr. Beaton. Why didyou bring it?”

“Why?” He looked at her in gloomy hesitation.

Then he said: “You know why. I wishedto talk it over with you, to serve you, please you,get back your good opinion. But I’ve doneneither the one nor the other; I’ve made a messof the whole thing.”

Alma interrupted him. “Has it been accepted?”

“It will be accepted, if you will let it.”

“Let it?” she laughed. “I shallbe delighted.” She saw him swayed a littletoward her. “It’s a matter of business,isn’t it?”

“Purely. Good-night.”

When Alma returned to the room, Colonel Woodburn wassaying to Mrs. Leighton: “I do not contendthat it is impossible, madam, but it is very difficultin a thoroughly commercialized society, like yours,to have the feelings of a gentleman. How cana business man, whose prosperity, whose earthly salvation,necessarily lies in the adversity of some one else,be delicate and chivalrous, or even honest? Ifwe could have had time to perfect our system at theSouth, to eliminate what was evil and develop whatwas good in it, we should have had a perfect system.But the virus of commercialism was in us, too; itforbade us to make the best of a divine institution,and tempted us to make the worst. Now the curseis on the whole country; the dollar is the measureof every value, the stamp of every success. Whatdoes not sell is a failure; and what sells succeeds.”

“The hobby is oat, mah deah,” said MissWoodburn, in an audible aside to Alma.

“Were you speaking of me, Colonel Woodburn?”Alma asked.

“Surely not, my dear young lady.”

“But he’s been saying that awtusts arejust as greedy aboat money as anybody,” saidhis daughter.

“The law of commercialism is on everything ina commercial society,” the Colonel explained,softening the tone in which his convictions were presented.“The final reward of art is money, and not thepleasure of creating.”

“Perhaps they would be willing to take it alloat in that if othah people would let them pay theirbills in the pleasure of creating,” his daughterteased.

“They are helpless, like all the rest,”said her father, with the same deference to her asto other women. “I do not blame them.”

“Oh, mah goodness! Didn’t you say,sir, that Mr. Beaton had bad manners?”

Alma relieved a confusion which he seemed to feelin reference to her. “Bad manners?He has no manners! That is, when he’s himself.He has pretty good ones when he’s somebody else.”

Miss Woodburn began, “Oh, mah-” and thenstopped herself. Alma’s mother looked ather with distressed question, but the girl seemed perfectlycool and contented; and she gave her mind provisionallyto a point suggested by Colonel Woodburn’s talk.

“Still, I can’t believe it was right tohold people in slavery, to whip them and sell them.It never did seem right to me,” she added, inapology for her extreme sentiments to the gentlenessof her adversary.

“I quite agree with you, madam,” saidthe Colonel. “Those were the abuses ofthe institution. But if we had not been vitiatedon the one hand and threatened on the other by thespirit of commercialism from the North—­andfrom Europe, too—­those abuses could havebeen eliminated, and the institution developed inthe direction of the mild patriarchalism of the divineintention.” The Colonel hitched his chair,which figured a hobby careering upon its hind legs,a little toward Mrs. Leighton and the girls approachedtheir heads and began to whisper; they fell deferentiallysilent when the Colonel paused in his argument, andwent on again when he went on.

At last they heard Mrs. Leighton saying, “Andhave you heard from the publishers about your bookyet?”

Then Miss Woodburn cut in, before her father couldanswer: “The coase of commercialism ison that, too. They are trahing to fahnd oat whethahit will pay.”

“And they are right-quite right,” saidthe Colonel. “There is no longer any othercriterion; and even a work that attacks the systemmust be submitted to the tests of the system.”

“The system won’t accept destruction onany othah tomes,” said Miss Woodburn, demurely.

XI.

At the reception, where two men in livery stood asideto let him pass up the outside steps of the house,and two more helped him off with his overcoat indoors,and a fifth miscalled his name into the drawing-room,the Syracuse stone-cutter’s son met the nieceof Mrs. Horn, and began at once to tell her abouthis evening at the Dryfooses’. He was invery good spirits, for so far as he could have beenelated or depressed by his parting with Alma Leightonhe had been elated; she had not treated his impudencewith the contempt that he felt it deserved; she muststill be fond of him; and the warm sense of this,by operation of an obscure but well-recognized lawof the masculine being, disposed him to be ratherfond of Miss Vance. She was a slender girl, whosesemi-aesthetic dress flowed about her with an accentuation

of her long forms, and redeemed them from censureby the very frankness with which it confessed them;nobody could have said that Margaret Vance was tootall. Her pretty little head, which she had aneffect of choosing to have little in the same spiritof judicious defiance, had a good deal of reading init; she was proud to know literary and artistic fashionsas well as society fashions. She liked beingsingled out by an exterior distinction so obviousas Beaton’s, and she listened with sympatheticinterest to his account of those people. He gavetheir natural history reality by drawing upon hisown; he reconstructed their plebeian past from theexperiences of his childhood and his youth of thepre-Parisian period; and he had a pang of suicidaljoy in insulting their ignorance of the world.

“What different kinds of people you meet!”said the girl at last, with an envious sigh.Her reading had enlarged the bounds of her imagination,if not her knowledge; the novels nowadays dealt somuch with very common people, and made them seem sovery much more worth while than the people one met.

She said something like this to Beaton. He answered:“You can meet the people I’m talking ofvery easily, if you want to take the trouble.It’s what they came to New York for. Ifancy it’s the great ambition of their livesto be met.”

“Oh yes,” said Miss Vance, fashionably,and looked down; then she looked up and said, intellectually:“Don’t you think it’s a great pity?How much better for them to have stayed where theywere and what they were!”

“Then you could never have had any chance ofmeeting them,” said Beaton. “I don’tsuppose you intend to go out to the gas country?”

“No,” said Miss Vance, amused. “Notthat I shouldn’t like to go.”

“What a daring spirit! You ought to beon the staff of ’Every Other Week,’”said Beaton.

“The staff-Every Other Week? What is it?”

“The missing link; the long-felt want of a tiebetween the Arts and the Dollars.” Beatongave her a very picturesque, a very dramatic sketchof the theory, the purpose, and the personnel of thenew enterprise.

Miss Vance understood too little about business ofany kind to know how it differed from other enterprisesof its sort. She thought it was delightful; shethought Beaton must be glad to be part of it, thoughhe had represented himself so bored, so injured, byFulkerson’s insisting upon having him.“And is it a secret? Is it a thing not tobe spoken of?”

“‘Tutt’ altro’! Fulkersonwill be enraptured to have it spoken of in society.He would pay any reasonable bill for the advertisem*nt.”

“What a delightful creature! Tell him itshall all be spent in charity.”

“He would like that. He would get two paragraphsout of the fact, and your name would go into the ‘LiteraryNotes’ of all the newspapers.”

“Oh, but I shouldn’t want my name used!”cried the girl, half horrified into fancying the situationreal.

“Then you’d better not say anything about‘Every Other Week’. Fulkerson ispreternaturally unscrupulous.”

March began to think so too, at times. He wasperpetually suggesting changes in the make-up of thefirst number, with a view to its greater vividnessof effect. One day he came and said: “Thisthing isn’t going to have any sort of get upand howl about it, unless you have a paper in thefirst number going for Bevans’s novels.Better get Maxwell to do it.”

“Why, I thought you liked Bevans’s novels?”

“So I did; but where the good of ‘EveryOther Week’ is concerned I am a Roman father.The popular gag is to abuse Bevans, and Maxwell isthe man to do it. There hasn’t been a newmagazine started for the last three years that hasn’thad an article from Maxwell in its first number cuttingBevans all to pieces. If people don’t seeit, they’ll think ’Every Other Week’is some old thing.”

March did not know whether Fulkerson was joking ornot. He suggested, “Perhaps they’llthink it’s an old thing if they do see it.”

“Well, get somebody else, then; or else getMaxwell to write under an assumed name. Or—­Iforgot! He’ll be anonymous under our system,anyway. Now there ain’t a more popularracket for us to work in that first number than agood, swinging attack on Bevans. People read hisbooks and quarrel over ’em, and the criticsare all against him, and a regular flaying, with saltand vinegar rubbed in afterward, will tell more withpeople who like good old-fashioned fiction than anythingelse. I like Bevans’s things, but, dadburn it! when it comes to that first number, I’doffer up anybody.”

“What an immoral little wretch you are, Fulkerson!”said March, with a laugh.

Fulkerson appeared not to be very strenuous aboutthe attack on the novelist. “Say!”he called out, gayly, “what should you thinkof a paper defending the late lamented system of slavery’?”

“What do you mean, Fulkerson?” asked March,with a puzzled smile.

Fulkerson braced his knees against his desk, and pushedhimself back, but kept his balance to the eye by cantinghis hat sharply forward. “There’san old co*ck over there at the widow’s that’swritten a book to prove that slavery was and is theonly solution of the labor problem. He’sa Southerner.”

“I should imagine,” March assented.

“He’s got it on the brain that if theSouth could have been let alone by the commercialspirit and the pseudophilanthropy of the North, itwould have worked out slavery into a perfectly idealcondition for the laborer, in which he would havebeen insured against want, and protected in all hispersonal rights by the state. He read the introductionto me last night. I didn’t catch on toall the points—­his daughter’s an awfullypretty girl, and I was carrying that fact in my mindall the time, too, you know—­but that’sabout the gist of it.”

“Seems to regard it as a lost opportunity?”said March.

“Exactly! What a mighty catchy title, Neigh?Look well on the title-page.”

“Well written?”

“I reckon so; I don’t know. The Colonelread it mighty eloquently.”

“It mightn’t be such bad business,”said March, in a muse. “Could you get mea sight of it without committing yourself?”

“If the Colonel hasn’t sent it off toanother publisher this morning. He just got itback with thanks yesterday. He likes to keep ittravelling.”

“Well, try it. I’ve a notion it mightbe a curious thing.”

“Look here, March,” said Fulkerson, withthe effect of taking a fresh hold; “I wish youcould let me have one of those New York things of yoursfor the first number. After all, that’sgoing to be the great card.”

“I couldn’t, Fulkerson; I couldn’t,really. I want to philosophize the material,and I’m too new to it all yet. I don’twant to do merely superficial sketches.”

“Of course! Of course! I understandthat. Well, I don’t want to hurry you.Seen that old fellow of yours yet? I think weought to have that translation in the first number;don’t you? We want to give ’em a notionof what we’re going to do in that line.”

“Yes,” said March; “and I was goingout to look up Lindau this morning. I’veinquired at Maroni’s, and he hasn’t beenthere for several days. I’ve some ideaperhaps he’s sick. But they gave me hisaddress, and I’m going to see.”

“Well, that’s right. We want thefirst number to be the keynote in every way.”

March shook his head. “You can’tmake it so. The first number is bound to be afailure always, as far as the representative charactergoes. It’s invariably the case. Lookat the first numbers of all the things you’veseen started. They’re experimental, almostamateurish, and necessarily so, not only because themen that are making them up are comparatively inexperiencedlike ourselves, but because the material sent themto deal with is more or less consciously tentative.People send their adventurous things to a new periodicalbecause the whole thing is an adventure. I’venoticed that quality in all the volunteer contributions;it’s in the articles that have been done toorder even. No; I’ve about made up my mindthat if we can get one good striking paper into thefirst number that will take people’s minds offthe others, we shall be doing all we can possiblehope for. I should like,” March added, lessseriously, “to make up three numbers ahead,and publish the third one first.”

Fulkerson dropped forward and struck his fist on thedesk. “It’s a first-rate idea.Why not do it?”

March laughed. “Fulkerson, I don’tbelieve there’s any quackish thing you wouldn’tdo in this cause. From time to time I’mthoroughly ashamed of being connected with such acharlatan.”

Fulkerson struck his hat sharply backward. “Ah,dad burn it! To give that thing the right kindof start I’d walk up and down Broadway betweentwo boards, with the title-page of Every Other Weekfacsimiled on one and my name and address on the—­”

He jumped to his feet and shouted, “March, I’lldo it!”

“What?”

“I’ll hire a lot of fellows to make mud-turtlesof themselves, and I’ll have a lot of big facsimilesof the title-page, and I’ll paint the town red!”

March looked aghast at him. “Oh, come,now, Fulkerson!”

“I mean it. I was in London when a newman had taken hold of the old Cornhill, and they weretrying to boom it, and they had a procession of thesemudturtles that reached from Charing Cross to TempleBar. Cornhill Magazine. Sixpence. Nota dull page in it.’ I said to myself thenthat it was the livest thing I ever saw. I respectedthe man that did that thing from the bottom of myheart. I wonder I ever forgot it. But itshows what a shaky thing the human mind is at itsbest.”

“You infamous mountebank!”, said March,with great amusem*nt at Fulkerson’s access;“you call that congeries of advertising instinctof yours the human mind at its best? Come, don’tbe so diffident, Fulkerson. Well, I’m offto find Lindau, and when I come back I hope Mr. Dryfooswill have you under control. I don’t supposeyou’ll be quite sane again till after the firstnumber is out. Perhaps public opinion will soberyou then.”

“Confound it, March! How do you think theywill take it? I swear I’m getting so nervousI don’t know half the time which end of me isup. I believe if we don’t get that thingout by the first of February it ’ll be the deathof me.”

“Couldn’t wait till Washington’sBirthday? I was thinking it would give the daya kind of distinction, and strike the public imagination,if—­”

“No, I’ll be dogged if I could!”Fulkerson lapsed more and more into the parlance ofhis early life in this season of strong excitement.“I believe if Beaton lags any on the art legI’ll kill him.”

“Well, I shouldn’t mind your killing Beaton,”said March, tranquilly, as he went out.

He went over to Third Avenue and took the Elevateddown to Chatham Square. He found the varietyof people in the car as unfailingly entertaining asever. He rather preferred the East Side to theWest Side lines, because they offered more nationalities,conditions, and characters to his inspection.They draw not only from the up-town American region,but from all the vast hive of populations swarmingbetween them and the East River. He had foundthat, according to the hour, American husbands goingto and from business, and American wives going toand from shopping, prevailed on the Sixth Avenue road,and that the most picturesque admixture to these familiaraspects of human nature were the brilliant eyes andcomplexions of the American Hebrews, who otherwisecontributed to the effect of well-clad comfort andcitizen-self-satisfaction of the crowd. Now andthen he had found himself in a car mostly filled withNeapolitans from the constructions far up the line,where he had read how they are worked and fed and housed

like beasts; and listening to the jargon of theirunintelligible dialect, he had occasion for pensivequestion within himself as to what notion these pooranimals formed of a free republic from their experienceof life under its conditions; and whether they foundthem practically very different from those of theimmemorial brigandage and enforced complicity withrapine under which they had been born. But, afterall, this was an infrequent effect, however massive,of travel on the West Side, whereas the East offeredhim continual entertainment in like sort. Thesort was never quite so squalid. For short distancesthe lowest poverty, the hardest pressed labor, mustwalk; but March never entered a car without encounteringsome interesting shape of shabby adversity, which wasalmost always adversity of foreign birth. NewYork is still popularly supposed to be in the controlof the Irish, but March noticed in these East Sidetravels of his what must strike every observer returningto the city after a prolonged absence: the numericalsubordination of the dominant race. If they donot outvote them, the people of Germanic, of Slavonic,of Pelasgic, of Mongolian stock outnumber the prepotentCelts; and March seldom found his speculation centredupon one of these. The small eyes, the high cheeks,the broad noses, the puff lips, the bare, cue-filletedskulls, of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Chinese; the furtiveglitter of Italians; the blonde dulness of Germans;the cold quiet of Scandinavians—­fire underice—­were aspects that he identified, andthat gave him abundant suggestion for the personalhistories he constructed, and for the more public-spiritedreveries in which he dealt with the future economyof our heterogeneous commonwealth. It must beowned that he did not take much trouble about this;what these poor people were thinking, hoping, fearing,enjoying, suffering; just where and how they lived;who and what they individually were—­thesewere the matters of his waking dreams as he staredhard at them, while the train raced farther into thegay ugliness—­the shapeless, graceful, recklesspicturesqueness of the Bowery.

There were certain signs, certain facades, certainaudacities of the prevailing hideousness that alwaysamused him in that uproar to the eye which the stridentforms and colors made. He was interested in theinsolence with which the railway had drawn its erasingline across the Corinthian front of an old theatre,almost grazing its fluted pillars, and flouting itsdishonored pediment. The colossal effigies ofthe fat women and the tuft-headed Circassian girlsof cheap museums; the vistas of shabby cross streets;the survival of an old hip-roofed house here and thereat their angles; the Swiss chalet, histrionic decorativenessof the stations in prospect or retrospect; the vagariesof the lines that narrowed together or stretched apartaccording to the width of the avenue, but always inwanton disregard of the life that dwelt, and bought

and sold, and rejoiced or sorrowed, and clattered orcrawled, around, below, above—­were featuresof the frantic panorama that perpetually touched hissense of humor and moved his sympathy. Accidentand then exigency seemed the forces at work to thisextraordinary effect; the play of energies as freeand planless as those that force the forest from thesoil to the sky; and then the fierce struggle for survival,with the stronger life persisting over the deformity,the mutilation, the destruction, the decay of theweaker. The whole at moments seemed to him lawless,godless; the absence of intelligent, comprehensivepurpose in the huge disorder, and the violent struggleto subordinate the result to the greater good, penetratedwith its dumb appeal the consciousness of a man whohad always been too self-enwrapped to perceive thechaos to which the individual selfishness must alwayslead.

But there was still nothing definite, nothing betterthan a vague discomfort, however poignant, in hishalf recognition of such facts; and he descended thestation stairs at Chatham Square with a sense of theneglected opportunities of painters in that locality.He said to himself that if one of those fellows wereto see in Naples that turmoil of cars, trucks, andteams of every sort, intershot with foot-passengersgoing and coming to and from the crowded pavements,under the web of the railroad tracks overhead, andamid the spectacular approach of the streets thatopen into the square, he would have it down in hissketch-book at once. He decided simultaneouslythat his own local studies must be illustrated, andthat he must come with the artist and show him justwhich bits to do, not knowing that the two arts cannever approach the same material from the same point.He thought he would particularly like his illustratorto render the Dickensy, co*ckneyish quality of the,shabby-genteel ballad-seller of whom he stopped toask his way to the street where Lindau lived, andwhom he instantly perceived to be, with his stock intrade, the sufficient object of an entire study byhimself. He had his ballads strung singly upona cord against the house wall, and held down in pileson the pavement with stones and blocks of wood.Their control in this way intimated a volatility whichwas not perceptible in their sentiment. Theywere mostly tragical or doleful: some of themdealt with the wrongs of the working-man; others appealedto a gay experience of the high seas; but vastly thegreater part to memories and associations of an Irishorigin; some still uttered the poetry of plantationlife in the artless accents of the end—­man.Where they trusted themselves, with syntax that yieldedpromptly to any exigency of rhythmic art, to the ordinaryAmerican speech, it was to strike directly for theaffections, to celebrate the domestic ties, and, aboveall, to embalm the memories of angel and martyr motherswhose dissipated sons deplored their sufferings toolate. March thought this not at all a bad thing

in them; he smiled in patronage of their simple pathos;he paid the tribute of a laugh when the poet turned,as he sometimes did, from his conception of angel andmartyr motherhood, and portrayed the mother in hermore familiar phases of virtue and duty, with theretributive shingle or slipper in her hand. Hebought a pocketful of this literature, popular in asense which the most successful book can never be,and enlisted the ballad vendor so deeply in the effortto direct him to Lindau’s dwelling by the bestway that he neglected another customer, till a sarcasmon his absent-mindedness stung hint to retort, “I’ma-trying to answer a gentleman a civil question; that’swhere the absent-minded comes in.”

It seemed for some reason to be a day of leisure withthe Chinese dwellers in Mott Street, which March hadbeen advised to take first. They stood aboutthe tops of basem*nt stairs, and walked two and twoalong the dirty pavement, with their little handstucked into their sleeves across their breasts, aloofin immaculate cleanliness from the filth around them,and scrutinizing the scene with that cynical sneerof faint surprise to which all aspects of our civilizationseem to move their superiority. Their numbersgave character to the street, and rendered not them,but what was foreign to them, strange there; so thatMarch had a sense of missionary quality in the oldCatholic church, built long before their incursionwas dreamed of. It seemed to have come to themthere, and he fancied in the statued saint that lookeddown from its facade something not so much tolerantas tolerated, something propitiatory, almost deprecatory.It was a fancy, of course; the street was sufficientlypeopled with Christian children, at any rate, swarmingand shrieking at their games; and presently a Christianmother appeared, pushed along by two policemen ona handcart, with a gelatinous tremor over the pavingand a gelatinous jouncing at the curbstones. Shelay with her face to the sky, sending up an inarticulatelamentation; but the indifference of the officersforbade the notion of tragedy in her case. Shewas perhaps a local celebrity; the children left offtheir games, and ran gayly trooping after her; eventhe young fellow and young girl exchanging playfulblows in a robust flirtation at the corner of a liquorstore suspended their scuffle with a pleased interestas she passed. March understood the unwillingnessof the poor to leave the worst conditions in the cityfor comfort and plenty in the country when he reflectedupon this dramatic incident, one of many no doubt whichdaily occur to entertain them in such streets.A small town could rarely offer anything comparableto it, and the country never. He said that iflife appeared so hopeless to him as it must to thedwellers in that neighborhood he should not himselfbe willing to quit its distractions, its alleviations,for the vague promise of unknown good in the distancesomewhere.

But what charm could such a man as Lindau find insuch a place? It could not be that he lived therebecause he was too poor to live elsewhere: witha shutting of the heart, March refused to believe thisas he looked round on the abounding evidences of misery,and guiltily remembered his neglect of his old friend.Lindau could probably find as cheap a lodging in somedecenter part of the town; and, in fact, there wassome amelioration of the prevailing squalor in thequieter street which he turned into from Mott.

A woman with a tied-up face of toothache opened thedoor for him when he pulled, with a shiver of foreboding,the bell-knob, from which a yard of rusty crape dangled.But it was not Lindau who was dead, for the womansaid he was at home, and sent March stumbling up thefour or five dark flights of stairs that led to histenement. It was quite at the top of the house,and when March obeyed the German-English “Komm!”that followed his knock, he found himself in a kitchenwhere a meagre breakfast was scattered in stale fragmentson the table before the stove. The place wasbare and cold; a half-empty beer bottle scarcely gaveit a convivial air. On the left from this kitchenwas a room with a bed in it, which seemed also tobe a cobbler’s shop: on the right, througha door that stood ajar, came the German-English voiceagain, saying this time, “Hier!”

XII.

March pushed the door open into a room like that onthe left, but with a writing-desk instead of a cobbler’sbench, and a bed, where Lindau sat propped up; witha coat over his shoulders and a skull-cap on his head,reading a book, from which he lifted his eyes to stareblankly over his spectacles at March. His hairyold breast showed through the night-shirt, which gapedapart; the stump of his left arm lay upon the bookto keep it open.

“Ah, my tear yo’ng friendt! Passil!Marge! Iss it you?” he called out, joyously,the next moment.

“Why, are you sick, Lindau?” March anxiouslyscanned his face in taking his hand.

Lindau laughed. “No; I’m all righdt.Only a lidtle lazy, and a lidtle eggonomigal.Idt’s jeaper to stay in pedt sometimes as togeep a fire a-goin’ all the time. Don’twandt to gome too hardt on the ‘brafer Mann’,you know:

“Braver Mann,er schafft mir zu essen.”

You remember? Heine? You readt Heine still?Who is your favorite boet now, Passil? You writesome boetry yourself yet? No? Well, I amgladt to zee you. Brush those baperss off ofthat jair. Well, idt is goodt for zore eyess.How didt you findt where I lif?

“They told me at Maroni’s,” saidMarch. He tried to keep his eyes on Lindau’sface, and not see the discomfort of the room, but hewas aware of the shabby and frowsy bedding, the odorof stale smoke, and the pipes and tobacco shreds mixedwith the books and manuscripts strewn over the leafof the writing-desk. He laid down on the massthe pile of foreign magazines he had brought underhis arm. “They gave me another addressfirst.”

“Yes. I have chust gome here,” saidLindau. “Idt is not very coy, Neigh?”

“It might be gayer,” March admitted, witha smile. “Still,” he added, soberly,“a good many people seem to live in this partof the town. Apparently they die here, too, Lindau.There is crape on your outside door. I didn’tknow but it was for you.”

“Nodt this time,” said Lindau, in thesame humor. “Berhaps some other time.We geep the ondertakers bratty puzy down here.”

“Well,” said March, “undertakersmust live, even if the rest of us have to die to letthem.” Lindau laughed, and March went on:“But I’m glad it isn’t your funeral,Lindau. And you say you’re not sick, andso I don’t see why we shouldn’t come tobusiness.”

“Pusiness?” Lindau lifted his eyebrows.“You gome on pusiness?”

“And pleasure combined,” said March, andhe went on to explain the service he desired at Lindau’shands.

The old man listened with serious attention, and withassenting nods that culminated in a spoken expressionof his willingness to undertake the translations.March waited with a sort of mechanical expectationof his gratitude for the work put in his way, butnothing of the kind came from Lindau, and March wasleft to say, “Well, everything is understood,then; and I don’t know that I need add thatif you ever want any little advance on the work—­”

“I will ask you,” said Lindau, quietly,“and I thank you for that. But I can wait;I ton’t needt any money just at bresent.”As if he saw some appeal for greater frankness in,March’s eye, he went on: “I tidn’tgome here begause I was too boor to lif anywhere else,and I ton’t stay in pedt begause I couldn’thaf a fire to geep warm if I wanted it. I’mnodt zo padt off as Marmontel when he went to Paris.I’m a lidtle loaxurious, that is all. IfI stay in pedt it’s zo I can fling money awayon somethings else. Heigh?”

“But what are you living here for, Lindau?”March smiled at the irony lurking in Lindau’swords.

“Well, you zee, I foundt I was begoming a lidtletoo moch of an aristograt. I hadt a room oapin Creenvidge Willage, among dose pig pugs over onthe West Side, and I foundt”—­Liudau’svoice lost its jesting quality, and his face darkened—­“thatI was beginning to forget the boor!”

“I should have thought,” said March, withimpartial interest, “that you might have seenpoverty enough, now and then, in Greenwich Villageto remind you of its existence.”

“Nodt like here,” said Lindau. “Andtyou must zee it all the dtime—­zee it, hearit, smell it, dtaste it—­or you forget it.That is what I gome here for. I was begominga ploated aristograt. I thought I was nodt likethese beople down here, when I gome down once to lookaroundt; I thought I must be somethings else, andzo I zaid I better take myself in time, and I gomehere among my brothers—­the becears and thethiefs!” A noise made itself heard in the nextroom, as if the door were furtively opened, and afaint sound of tiptoeing and of hands clawing on atable.

“Thiefs!” Lindau repeated, with a shout.“Lidtle thiefs, that gabture your breakfast.Ah! ha! ha!” A wild scurrying of feet, joyouscries and tittering, and a slamming door followedupon his explosion, and he resumed in the silence:“Idt is the children cot pack from school.They gome and steal what I leaf there on my daple.Idt’s one of our lidtle chokes; we onderstandone another; that’s all righdt. Once thegobbler in the other room there he used to chase ’em;he couldn’t onderstand their lidtle tricks.Now dot goppler’s teadt, and he ton’t chase’em any more. He was a Bohemian. Gindtof grazy, I cuess.”

“Well, it’s a sociable existence,”March suggested. “But perhaps if you letthem have the things without stealing—­”

“Oh no, no! Most nodt mage them too gonceitedt.They mostn’t go and feel themselfs petter thanthose boor millionairss that hadt to steal their money.”

March smiled indulgently at his old friend’sviolence. “Oh, there are fa*gots and fa*gots,you know, Lindau; perhaps not all the millionairesare so guilty.”

“Let us speak German!” cried Lindau, inhis own tongue, pushing his book aside, and thrustinghis skullcap back from his forehead. “Howmuch money can a man honestly earn without wrongingor oppressing some other man?”

“Well, if you’ll let me answer in English,”said March, “I should say about five thousanddollars a year. I name that figure because it’smy experience that I never could earn more; but theexperience of other men may be different, and if theytell me they can earn ten, or twenty, or fifty thousanda year, I’m not prepared to say they can’tdo it.”

Lindau hardly waited for his answer. “Notthe most gifted man that ever lived, in the practiceof any art or science, and paid at the highest ratethat exceptional genius could justly demand from thosewho have worked for their money, could ever earn amillion dollars. It is the landlords and themerchant princes, the railroad kings and the coalbarons (the oppressors to whom you instinctively givethe titles of tyrants)—­it is these thatmake the millions, but no man earns them. Whatartist, what physician, what scientist, what poet wasever a millionaire?”

“I can only think of the poet Rogers,”said March, amused by Lindau’s tirade.“But he was as exceptional as the other Rogers,the martyr, who died with warm feet.” Lindauhad apparently not understood his joke, and he wenton, with the American ease of mind about everything:“But you must allow, Lindau, that some of thosefellows don’t do so badly with their guiltygains. Some of them give work to armies of poorpeople—­”

Lindau furiously interrupted: “Yes, whenthey have gathered their millions together from thehunger and cold and nakedness and ruin and despairof hundreds of thousands of other men, they ‘givework’ to the poor! They give work!They allow their helpless brothers to earn enoughto keep life in them! They give work! Whois it gives toil, and where will your rich men bewhen once the poor shall refuse to give toil’?Why, you have come to give me work!”

March laughed outright. “Well, I’mnot a millionaire, anyway, Lindau, and I hope youwon’t make an example of me by refusing to givetoil. I dare say the millionaires deserve it,but I’d rather they wouldn’t suffer inmy person.”

“No,” returned the old man, mildly relaxingthe fierce glare he had bent upon March. “Noman deserves to sufer at the hands of another.I lose myself when I think of the injustice in theworld. But I must not forget that I am like theworst of them.”

“You might go up Fifth Avenue and live amongthe rich awhile, when you’re in danger of that,”suggested March. “At any rate,” headded, by an impulse which he knew he could not justifyto his wife, “I wish you’d come some dayand lunch with their emissary. I’ve beentelling Mrs. March about you, and I want her and thechildren to see you. Come over with these thingsand report.” He put his hand on the magazinesas he rose.

“I will come,” said Lindau, gently.

“Shall I give you your book?” asked March.

“No; I gidt oap bretty soon.”

“And—­and—­can you dressyourself?”

“I vhistle, ’and one of those lidtle fellowsscomess. We haf to dake gare of one another ina blace like this. Idt iss nodt like the worldt,”said Lindau, gloomily.

March thought he ought to cheer him up. “Oh,it isn’t such a bad world, Lindau! Afterall, the average of millionaires is small in it.”He added, “And I don’t believe there’san American living that could look at that arm ofyours and not wish to lend you a hand for the one yougave us all.” March felt this to be a fineturn, and his voice trembled slightly in saying it.

Lindau smiled grimly. “You think zo?I wouldn’t moch like to drost ’em.I’ve driedt idt too often.” He beganto speak German again fiercely: “Besides,they owe me nothing. Do you think I knowinglygave my hand to save this oligarchy of traders andtricksters, this aristocracy of railroad wreckersand stock gamblers and mine-slave drivers and mill-serfowners? No; I gave it to the slave; the slave—­ha!ha! ha!—­whom I helped to unshackle to thecommon liberty of hunger and cold. And you thinkI would be the beneficiary of such a state of things?”

“I’m sorry to hear you talk so, Lindau,”said March; “very sorry.” He stoppedwith a look of pain, and rose to go. Lindau suddenlybroke into a laugh and into English.

“Oh, well, it is only dalk, Passil, and it toesme goodt. My parg is worse than my pidte, I cuess.I pring these things roundt bretty soon. Good-bye,Passil, my tear poy. Auf wiedersehen!”

XIII.

March went away thinking of what Lindau had said,but not for the impersonal significance of his wordsso much as for the light they cast upon Lindau himself.He thought the words violent enough, but in connectionwith what he remembered of the cheery, poetic, hopefulidealist, they were even more curious than lamentable.In his own life of comfortable reverie he had neverheard any one talk so before, but he had read somethingof the kind now and then in blatant labor newspaperswhich he had accidentally fallen in with, and onceat a strikers’ meeting he had heard rich peopledenounced with the same frenzy. He had made hisown reflections upon the tastelessness of the rhetoric,and the obvious buncombe of the motive, and he hadnot taken the matter seriously.

He could not doubt Lindau’s sincerity, and hewondered how he came to that way of thinking.From his experience of himself he accounted for aprevailing literary quality in it; he decided it tobe from Lindau’s reading and feeling ratherthan his reflection. That was the notion he formedof some things he had met with in Ruskin to much thesame effect; he regarded them with amusem*nt as thechimeras of a rhetorician run away with by his phrases.

But as to Lindau, the chief thing in his mind wasa conception of the droll irony of a situation inwhich so fervid a hater of millionaires should beworking, indirectly at least, for the prosperity ofa man like Dryfoos, who, as March understood, hadgot his money together out of every gambler’schance in speculation, and all a schemer’s thriftfrom the error and need of others. The situationwas not more incongruous, however, than all the restof the ‘Every Other Week’ affair.It seemed to him that there were no crazy fortuitiesthat had not tended to its existence, and as timewent on, and the day drew near for the issue of thefirst number, the sense of this intensified till thewhole lost at moments the quality of a waking fact,and came to be rather a fantastic fiction of sleep.

Yet the heterogeneous forces did co-operate to a realitywhich March could not deny, at least in their presence,and the first number was representative of all theirnebulous intentions in a tangible form. As aresult, it was so respectable that March began to respectthese intentions, began to respect himself for combiningand embodying them in the volume which appealed tohim with a novel fascination, when the first advancecopy was laid upon his desk. Every detail of itwas tiresomely familiar already, but the whole hada fresh interest now. He now saw how extremelyfit and effective Miss Leighton’s decorativedesign for the cover was, printed in black and brick-redon the delicate gray tone of the paper. It wasat once attractive and refined, and he credited Beatonwith quite all he merited in working it over to theactual shape. The touch and the taste of theart editor were present throughout the number.As Fulkerson said, Beaton had caught on with the delicacy

of a humming-bird and the tenacity of a bulldog tothe virtues of their illustrative process, and hadworked it for all it was worth. There were sevenpapers in the number, and a poem on the last page ofthe cover, and he had found some graphic comment foreach. It was a larger proportion than would afterwardbe allowed, but for once in a way it was allowed.Fulkerson said they could not expect to get their moneyback on that first number, anyway. Seven of theillustrations were Beaton’s; two or three hegot from practised hands; the rest were the work ofunknown people which he had suggested, and then relatedand adapted with unfailing ingenuity to the differentpapers. He handled the illustrations with suchsympathy as not to destroy their individual quality,and that indefinable charm which comes from good amateurwork in whatever art. He rescued them from theirweaknesses and errors, while he left in them the evidenceof the pleasure with which a clever young man, or asensitive girl, or a refined woman had done them.Inevitably from his manipulation, however, the artof the number acquired hom*ogeneity, and there wasnothing casual in its appearance. The result,March eagerly owned, was better than the literaryresult, and he foresaw that the number would be soldand praised chiefly for its pictures. Yet he wasnot ashamed of the literature, and he indulged hisadmiration of it the more freely because he had notonly not written it, but in a way had not edited it.To be sure, he had chosen all the material, but hehad not voluntarily put it all together for that number;it had largely put itself together, as every numberof every magazine does, and as it seems more and moreto do, in the experience of every editor. Therehad to be, of course, a story, and then a sketch oftravel. There was a literary essay and a socialessay; there was a dramatic trifle, very gay, verylight; there was a dashing criticism on the new pictures,the new plays, the new books, the new fashions; andthen there was the translation of a bit of vivid Russianrealism, which the editor owed to Lindau’s explorationof the foreign periodicals left with him; Lindau washimself a romanticist of the Victor Hugo sort, buthe said this fragment of Dostoyevski was good of itskind. The poem was a bit of society verse, witha backward look into simpler and wholesomer experiences.

Fulkerson was extremely proud of the number; but hesaid it was too good—­too good from everypoint of view. The cover was too good, and thepaper was too good, and that device of rough edges,which got over the objection to uncut leaves whileit secured their aesthetic effect, was a thing thathe trembled for, though he rejoiced in it as a strokeof the highest genius. It had come from Beatonat the last moment, as a compromise, when the problemof the vulgar croppiness of cut leaves and the unpopularityof uncut leaves seemed to have no solution but suicide.Fulkerson was still morally crawling round on his hands

and knees, as he said, in abject gratitude at Beaton’sfeet, though he had his qualms, his questions; andhe declared that Beaton was the most inspired ass sinceBalaam’s. “We’re all asses,of course,” he admitted, in semi-apology toMarch; “but we’re no such asses as Beaton.”He said that if the tasteful decorativeness of thething did not kill it with the public outright, itsliterary excellence would give it the finishing stroke.Perhaps that might be overlooked in the impressionof novelty which a first number would give, but itmust never happen again. He implored March topromise that it should never happen again; he saidtheir only hope was in the immediate cheapening ofthe whole affair. It was bad enough to give thepublic too much quantity for their money, but to throwin such quality as that was simply ruinous; it mustbe stopped. These were the expressions of hisintimate moods; every front that he presented to thepublic wore a glow of lofty, of devout exultation.His pride in the number gushed out in fresh burstsof rhetoric to every one whom he could get to talkwith him about it. He worked the personal kindlinessof the press to the utmost. He did not mind makinghimself ridiculous or becoming a joke in the goodcause, as he called it. He joined in the applausewhen a humorist at the club feigned to drop dead fromhis chair at Fulkerson’s introduction of thetopic, and he went on talking that first number intothe surviving spectators. He stood treat uponall occasions, and he lunched attaches of the pressat all hours. He especially befriended the correspondentsof the newspapers of other cities, for, as he explainedto March, those fellows could give him any amountof advertising simply as literary gossip. Manyof the fellows were ladies who could not be so summarilyasked out to lunch, but Fulkerson’s ingenuitywas equal to every exigency, and he contrived somehowto make each of these feel that she had been possessedof exclusive information. There was a moment whenMarch conjectured a willingness in Fulkerson to workMrs. March into the advertising department, by meansof a tea to these ladies and their friends which sheshould administer in his apartment, but he did notencourage Fulkerson to be explicit, and the momentpassed. Afterward, when he told his wife aboutit, he was astonished to find that she would not haveminded doing it for Fulkerson, and he experienced anotherproof of the bluntness of the feminine instincts insome directions, and of the personal favor which Fulkersonseemed to enjoy with the whole sex. This alonewas enough to account for the willingness of thesecorrespondents to write about the first number, butMarch accused him of sending it to their addresseswith boxes of Jacqueminot roses and Huyler candy.

Fulkerson let him enjoy his joke. He said thathe would do that or anything else for the good cause,short of marrying the whole circle of female correspondents.

March was inclined to hope that if the first numberhad been made too good for the country at large, themore enlightened taste of metropolitan journalismwould invite a compensating favor for it in New York.But first Fulkerson and then the event proved himwrong. In spite of the quality of the magazine,and in spite of the kindness which so many newspapermen felt for Fulkerson, the notices in the New Yorkpapers seemed grudging and provisional to the ardorof the editor. A merit in the work was acknowledged,and certain defects in it for which March had trembledwere ignored; but the critics astonished him by selectingfor censure points which he was either proud of orhad never noticed; which being now brought to hisnotice he still could not feel were faults. Heowned to Fulkerson that if they had said so and soagainst it, he could have agreed with them, but thatto say thus and so was preposterous; and that if theadvertising had not been adjusted with such generousrecognition of the claims of the different papers,he should have known the counting-room was at thebottom of it. As it was, he could only attributeit to perversity or stupidity. It was certainlystupid to condemn a magazine novelty like ‘EveryOther Week’ for being novel; and to augur thatif it failed, it would fail through its departure fromthe lines on which all the other prosperous magazineshad been built, was in the last degree perverse, andit looked malicious. The fact that it was neitherexactly a book nor a magazine ought to be for it andnot against it, since it would invade no other field;it would prosper on no ground but its own.

XIV.

The more March thought of the injustice of the NewYork press (which had not, however, attacked the literaryquality of the number) the more bitterly he resentedit; and his wife’s indignation superheated hisown. ‘Every Other Week’ had becomea very personal affair with the whole family; thechildren shared their parents’ disgust; Bellewas outspoken in, her denunciations of a venal press.Mrs. March saw nothing but ruin ahead, and began tacitlyto plan a retreat to Boston, and an establishmentretrenched to the basis of two thousand a year.She shed some secret tears in anticipation of theprivations which this must involve; but when Fulkersoncame to see March rather late the night of the publicationday, she nobly told him that if the worst came to theworst she could only have the kindliest feeling towardhim, and should not regard him as in the slightestdegree responsible.

“Oh, hold on, hold on!” he protested.“You don’t think we’ve made a failure,do you?”

“Why, of course,” she faltered, whileMarch remained gloomily silent.

“Well, I guess we’ll wait for the officialcount, first. Even New York hasn’t goneagainst us, and I guess there’s a majority comingdown to Harlem River that could sweep everything beforeit, anyway.”

“What do you mean, Fulkerson?” March demanded,sternly.

“Oh, nothing! Only, the ‘News Company’has ordered ten thousand now; and you know we hadto give them the first twenty on commission.”

“What do you mean?” March repeated; hiswife held her breath.

“I mean that the first number is a booming successalready, and that it’s going to a hundred thousandbefore it stops. That unanimity and variety ofcensure in the morning papers, combined with the attractivenessof the thing itself, has cleared every stand in thecity, and now if the favor of the country press doesn’tturn the tide against us, our fortune’s made.”The Marches remained dumb. “Why, look here!Didn’t I tell you those criticisms would bethe making of us, when they first began to turn youblue this morning, March?”

“He came home to lunch perfectly sick,”said Mrs. Marcli; “and I wouldn’t lethim go back again.”

“Didn’t I tell you so?” Fulkersonpersisted.

March could not remember that he had, or that he hadbeen anything but incoherently and hysterically jocoseover the papers, but he said, “Yes, yes—­Ithink so.”

“I knew it from the start,” said Fulkerson.“The only other person who took those criticismsin the right spirit was Mother Dryfoos—­I’vejust been bolstering up the Dryfoos family. Shehad them read to her by Mrs. Mandel, and she understoodthem to be all the most flattering prophecies of success.Well, I didn’t read between the lines to thatextent, quite; but I saw that they were going to helpus, if there was anything in us, more than anythingthat could have been done. And there was somethingin us! I tell you, March, that seven-shootingself-co*cking donkey of a Beaton has given us the greateststart! He’s caught on like a mouse.He’s made the thing awfully chic; it’sjimmy; there’s lots of dog about it. He’smanaged that process so that the illustrations lookas expensive as first-class wood-cuts, and they’recheaper than chromos. He’s put style intothe whole thing.”

“Oh yes,” said March, with eager meekness,“it’s Beaton that’s done it.”

Fulkerson read jealousy of Beaton in Mrs. March’sface. “Beaton has given us the start becausehis work appeals to the eye. There’s nodenying that the pictures have sold this first number;but I expect the literature of this first number tosell the pictures of the second. I’ve beenreading it all over, nearly, since I found how thecat was jumping; I was anxious about it, and I tellyou, old man, it’s good. Yes, sir!I was afraid maybe you had got it too good, with thatBoston refinement of yours; but I reckon you haven’t.I’ll risk it. I don’t see how yougot so much variety into so few things, and all ofthem palpitant, all of ’em on the keen jumpwith actuality.”

The mixture of American slang with the jargon of Europeancriticism in Fulkerson’s talk made March smile,but his wife did not seem to notice it in her exultation.“That is just what I say,” she broke in.“It’s perfectly wonderful. I neverwas anxious about it a moment, except, as you say,Mr. Fulkerson, I was afraid it might be too good.”

They went on in an antiphony of praise till Marchsaid: “Really, I don’t see what’sleft me but to strike for higher wages. I perceivethat I’m indispensable.”

“Why, old man, you’re coming in on thedivvy, you know,” said Fulkerson.

They both laughed, and when Fulkerson was gone, Mrs.March asked her husband what a divvy was.

“It’s a chicken before it’s hatched.”

“No! Truly?”

He explained, and she began to spend the divvy.

At Mrs. Leighton’s Fulkerson gave Alma all thehonor of the success; he told her mother that thegirl’s design for the cover had sold every number,and Mrs. Leighton believed him.

“Well, Ah think Ah maght have some of the glory,”Miss Woodburn pouted. “Where am Ah comin’in?”

“You’re coming in on the cover of thenext number,” said Fulkerson.” We’regoing to have your face there; Miss Leighton’sgoing to sketch it in.” He said this recklessof the fact that he had already shown them the designof the second number, which was Beaton’s weirdbit of gas-country landscape.

“Ah don’t see why you don’t wrahtethe fiction for your magazine, Mr. Fulkerson,”said the girl.

This served to remind Fulkerson of something.He turned to her father. “I’ll tellyou what, Colonel Woodburn, I want Mr. March to seesome chapters of that book of yours. I’vebeen talking to him about it.”

“I do not think it would add to the popularityof your periodical, sir,” said the Colonel,with a stately pleasure in being asked. “Myviews of a civilization based upon responsible slaverywould hardly be acceptable to your commercializedsociety.”

“Well, not as a practical thing, of course,”Fulkerson admitted. “But as something retrospective,speculative, I believe it would make a hit. There’sso much going on now about social questions; I guesspeople would like to read it.”

“I do not know that my work is intended to amusepeople,” said the Colonel, with some state.

“Mah goodness! Ah only wish it was,then,” said his daughter; and she added:“Yes, Mr. Fulkerson, the Colonel will be veryglad to submit po’tions of his woak to yo’edito’. We want to have some of the honaw.Perhaps we can say we helped to stop yo’ magazine,if we didn’t help to stawt it.”

They all laughed at her boldness, and Fulkerson said:“It ’ll take a good deal more than thatto stop ‘Every Other Week’. The Colonel’swhole book couldn’t do it.” Thenhe looked unhappy, for Colonel Woodburn did not seemto enjoy his reassuring words; but Miss Woodburn cameto his rescue. “You maght illustrate itwith the po’trait of the awthoris daughtaw, ifit’s too late for the covah.”

“Going to have that in every number, Miss Woodburn!”he cried.

“Oh, mah goodness!” she said, with mockhumility.

Alma sat looking at her piquant head, black, unconsciouslyoutlined against the lamp, as she sat working by thetable. “Just keep still a moment!”

She got her sketch-block and pencils, and began todraw; Fulkerson tilted himself forward and lookedover her shoulder; he smiled outwardly; inwardly hewas divided between admiration of Miss Woodburn’sarch beauty and appreciation of the skill which reproducedit; at the same time he was trying to remember whetherMarch had authorized him to go so far as to ask fora sight of Colonel Woodburn’s manuscript.He felt that he had trenched upon March’s province,and he framed one apology to the editor for bringinghim the manuscript, and another to the author for bringingit back.

“Most Ah hold raght still like it was a photograph?”asked Miss Woodburn. “Can Ah toak?”

“Talk all you want,” said Alma, squintingher eyes. “And you needn’t be eitheradamantine, nor yet—­wooden.”

“Oh, ho’ very good of you! Well,if Ah can toak—­go on, Mr. Fulkerson!”

“Me talk? I can’t breathe till thisthing is done!” sighed Fulkerson; at that pointof his mental drama the Colonel was behaving rustilyabout the return of his manuscript, and he felt thathe was looking his last on Miss Woodburn’s profile.

“Is she getting it raght?” asked the girl.

“I don’t know which is which,” saidFulkerson.

“Oh, Ah hope Ah shall! Ah don’t wantto go round feelin’ like a sheet of papah halfthe time.”

“You could rattle on, just the same,”suggested Alma.

“Oh, now! Jost listen to that, Mr. Fulkerson.Do you call that any way to toak to people?”

“You might know which you were by the color,”Fulkerson began, and then he broke off from the personalconsideration with a business inspiration, and smackedhimself on the knee, “We could print it in color!”

Mrs. Leighton gathered up her sewing and held it withboth hands in her lap, while she came round, and lookedcritically at the sketch and the model over her glasses.“It’s very good, Alma,” she said.

Colonel Woodburn remained restively on his side ofthe table. “Of course, Mr. Fulkerson, youwere jesting, sir, when you spoke of printing a sketchof my daughter.”

“Why, I don’t know—­If you object—?

“I do, sir—­decidedly,” saidthe Colonel.

“Then that settles it, of course,—­Ionly meant—­”

“Indeed it doesn’t!” cried the girl.“Who’s to know who it’s from?Ah’m jost set on havin’ it printed!Ah’m going to appear as the head of Slavery—­inopposition to the head of Liberty.”

“There’ll be a revolution inside of forty-eighthours, and we’ll have the Colonel’s systemgoing wherever a copy of ‘Every Other Week’circulates,” said Fulkerson.

“This sketch belongs to me,” Alma interposed.“I’m not going to let it be printed.”

“Oh, mah goodness!” said Miss Woodburn,laughing good-humoredly. “That’sbecose you were brought up to hate slavery.”

“I should like Mr. Beaton to see it,”said Mrs. Leighton, in a sort of absent tone.She added, to Fulkerson: “I rather expectedhe might be in to-night.”

“Well, if he comes we’ll leave it to Beaton,”Fulkerson said, with relief in the solution, and ananxious glance at the Colonel, across the table, tosee how he took that form of the joke. Miss Woodburnintercepted his glance and laughed, and Fulkersonlaughed, too, but rather forlornly.

Alma set her lips primly and turned her head firston one side and then on the other to look at the sketch.“I don’t think we’ll leave it toMr. Beaton, even if he comes.”

“We left the other design for the cover to Beaton,”Fulkerson insinuated. “I guess you needn’tbe afraid of him.”

“Is it a question of my being afraid?”Alma asked; she seemed coolly intent on her drawing.

“Miss Leighton thinks he ought to be afraidof her,” Miss Woodburn explained.

“It’s a question of his courage, then?”said Alma.

“Well, I don’t think there are many youngladies that Beaton’s afraid of,” saidFulkerson, giving himself the respite of this purelyrandom remark, while he interrogated the faces ofMrs. Leighton and Colonel Woodburn for some lightupon the tendency of their daughters’ words.

He was not helped by Mrs. Leighton’s saying,with a certain anxiety, “I don’t knowwhat you mean, Mr. Fulkerson.”

“Well, you’re as much in the dark as Iam myself, then,” said Fulkerson. “Isuppose I meant that Beaton is rather—­a—­favorite,you know. The women like him.”

Mrs. Leighton sighed, and Colonel Woodburn rose andleft the room.

In the silence that followed, Fulkerson looked fromone lady to the other with dismay. “I seemto have put my foot in it, somehow,” he suggested,and Miss Woodburn gave a cry of laughter.

“Poo’ Mr. Fulkerson! Poo’ Mr.Fulkerson! Papa thoat you wanted him to go.”

“Wanted him to go?” repeated Fulkerson.

“We always mention Mr. Beaton when we want toget rid of papa.”

“Well, it seems to me that I have noticed thathe didn’t take much interest in Beaton, as ageneral topic. But I don’t know that I eversaw it drive him out of the room before!”

“Well, he isn’t always so bad,”said Miss Woodburn. “But it was a case ofhate at first sight, and it seems to be growin’on papa.”

“Well, I can understand that,” said Fulkerson.“The impulse to destroy Beaton is somethingthat everybody has to struggle against at the start.”

“I must say, Mr. Fulkerson,” said Mrs.Leighton, in the tremor through which she nerved herselfto differ openly with any one she liked, “Inever had to struggle with anything of the kind, inregard to Mr. Beaton. He has always been mostrespectful and—­and—­considerate,with me, whatever he has been with others.”

“Well, of course, Mrs. Leighton!” Fulkersoncame back in a soothing tone. “But yousee you’re the rule that proves the exception.I was speaking of the way men felt about Beaton.It’s different with ladies; I just said so.”

“Is it always different?” Alma asked,lifting her head and her hand from her drawing, andstaring at it absently.

Fulkerson pushed both his hands through his whiskers.“Look here! Look here!” he said.“Won’t somebody start some other subject?We haven’t had the weather up yet, have we?Or the opera? What is the matter with a few remarksabout politics?”

“Why, Ah thoat you lahked to toak about thestaff of yo’ magazine,” said Miss Woodburn.

“Oh, I do!” said Fulkerson. “Butnot always about the same member of it. He getsmonotonous, when he doesn’t get complicated.I’ve just come round from the Marches’,”he added, to Mrs. Leighton.

“I suppose they’ve got thoroughly settledin their apartment by this time.” Mrs.Leighton said something like this whenever the Marcheswere mentioned. At the bottom of her heart shehad not forgiven them for not taking her rooms; shehad liked their looks so much; and she was alwayshoping that they were uncomfortable or dissatisfied;she could not help wanting them punished a little.

“Well, yes; as much as they ever will be,”Fulkerson answered. “The Boston style ispretty different, you know; and the Marches are old-fashionedfolks, and I reckon they never went in much for bric-a-bracThey’ve put away nine or ten barrels of dragoncandlesticks, but they keep finding new ones.”

“Their landlady has just joined our class,”said Alma. “Isn’t her name Green?She happened to see my copy of ‘Every Other Week’,and said she knew the editor; and told me.”

“Well, it’s a little world,” saidFulkerson. “You seem to be touching elbowswith everybody. Just think of your having hadour head translator for a model.”

“Ah think that your whole publication revolvesaroand the Leighton family,” said Miss Woodburn.

“That’s pretty much so,” Fulkersonadmitted. “Anyhow, the publisher seemsdisposed to do so.”

“Are you the publisher? I thought it wasMr. Dryfoos,” said Alma.

“It is.”

“Oh!”

The tone and the word gave Fulkerson a discomfortwhich he promptly confessed. “Missed again.”

The girls laughed, and he regained something of hislost spirits, and smiled upon their gayety, whichlasted beyond any apparent reason for it.

Miss Woodburn asked, “And is Mr. Dryfoos senio’anything like ouah Mr. Dryfoos?”

“Not the least.”

“But he’s jost as exemplary?”

“Yes; in his way.”

“Well, Ah wish Ah could see all those pinksof puffection togethah, once.”

“Why, look here! I’ve been thinkingI’d celebrate a little, when the old gentlemangets back. Have a little supper—­somethingof that kind. How would you like to let me haveyour parlors for it, Mrs. Leighton? You ladiescould stand on the stairs, and have a peep at us, inthe bunch.”

“Oh, mah! What a privilege! And willMiss Alma be there, with the othah contributors?Ah shall jost expah of envy!”

“She won’t be there in person,”said Fulkerson, “but she’ll be representedby the head of the art department.”

“Mah goodness! And who’ll the headof the publishing department represent?”

“He can represent you,” said Alma.

“Well, Ah want to be represented, someho’.”

“We’ll have the banquet the night beforeyou appear on the cover of our fourth number,”said Fulkerson.

“Ah thoat that was doubly fo’bidden,”said Miss Woodburn. “By the stern parentand the envious awtust.”

“We’ll get Beaton to get round them, somehow.I guess we can trust him to manage that.”

Mrs. Leighton sighed her resentment of the implication.

“I always feel that Mr. Beaton doesn’tdo himself justice,” she began.

Fulkerson could not forego the chance of a joke.“Well, maybe he would rather temper justicewith mercy in a case like his.” This madeboth the younger ladies laugh. “I judgethis is my chance to get off with my life,”he added, and he rose as he spoke. “Mrs.Leighton, I am about the only man of my sex who doesn’tthirst for Beaton’s blood most of the time.But I know him and I don’t. He’s morekinds of a good fellow than people generally understand.He doesn’t wear his heart upon his sleeve-nothis ulster sleeve, anyway. You can always countme on your side when it’s a question of findingBeaton not guilty if he’ll leave the State.”

Alma set her drawing against the wall, in rising tosay goodnight to Fulkerson. He bent over on hisstick to look at it. “Well, it’sbeautiful,” he sighed, with unconscious sincerity.

Alma made him a courtesy of mock modesty. “Thanksto Miss Woodburn!”

“Oh no! All she had to do was simply tostay put.”

“Don’t you think Ah might have improvedit if Ah had, looked better?” the girl asked,gravely.

“Oh, you couldn’t!” said Fulkerson,and he went off triumphant in their applause and theircries of “Which? which?”

Mrs. Leighton sank deep into an accusing gloom whenat last she found herself alone with her daughter.“I don’t know what you are thinking about,Alma Leighton. If you don’t like Mr. Beaton—­”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t? You know better thanthat. You know that, you did care for him.”

“Oh! that’s a very different thing.That’s a thing that can be got over.”

“Got over!” repeated Mrs. Leighton, aghast.

“Of course, it can! Don’t be romantic,mamma. People get over dozens of such fancies.They even marry for love two or three times.”

“Never!” cried her mother, doing her bestto feel shocked; and at last looking it.

Her looking it had no effect upon Alma. “Youcan easily get over caring for people; but you can’tget over liking them—­if you like them becausethey are sweet and good. That’s what lasts.I was a simple goose, and he imposed upon me becausehe was a sophisticated goose. Now the case isreversed.”

“He does care for you, now. You can seeit. Why do you encourage him to come here?”

“I don’t,” said Alma. “Iwill tell him to keep away if you like. But whetherhe comes or goes, it will be the same.”

“Not to him, Alma! He is in love with you!”

“He has never said so.”

“And you would really let him say so, when youintend to refuse him?”

“I can’t very well refuse him till hedoes say so.”

This was undeniable. Mrs. Leighton could onlydemand, in an awful tone, “May I ask why—­ifyou cared for him; and I know you care for him stillyou will refuse him?”

Alma laughed. “Because—­becauseI’m wedded to my Art, and I’m not goingto commit bigamy, whatever I do.”

“Alma!”

“Well, then, because I don’t like him—­thatis, I don’t believe in him, and don’ttrust him. He’s fascinating, but he’sfalse and he’s fickle. He can’t helpit, I dare say.”

“And you are perfectly hard. Is it possiblethat you were actually pleased to have Mr. Fulkersontease you about Mr. Dryfoos?”

“Oh, good-night, now, mamma! This is becomingpersonal”

PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

Artists never do anythinglike other people
Ballast of her instinctivedespondency
Clinging persistence of suchnatures
Dividend: It’sa chicken before it’s hatched
Gayety, which lasted beyondany apparent reason for it
Hopeful recklessness
How much can a man honestlyearn without wronging or oppressing
I cannot endure this—­thishopefulness of yours
If you dread harm enough itis less likely to happen
It must be your despair thathelps you to bear up
Marry for love two or threetimes
No man deserves to sufer atthe hands of another
Patience with mediocrity puttingon the style of genius
Person talks about takinglessons, as if they could learn it
Say when he is gone that thewoman gets along better without him
Shouldn’t ca’fo’ the disgrace of bein’ poo’—­itsinconvenience
Timidity of the elder in thepresence of the younger man

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

By William Dean Howells

PART THIRD

I.

The scheme of a banquet to celebrate the initial successof ’Every Other Week’ expanded in Fulkerson’sfancy into a series. Instead of the publishingand editorial force, with certain of the more representativeartists and authors sitting down to a modest supperin Mrs. Leighton’s parlors, he conceived ofa dinner at Delmonico’s, with the principalliterary and artistic, people throughout the countryas guests, and an inexhaustible hospitality to reportersand correspondents, from whom paragraphs, propheticand historic, would flow weeks before and after the

first of the series. He said the thing was a newdeparture in magazines; it amounted to something inliterature as radical as the American Revolution inpolitics: it was the idea of self government inthe arts; and it was this idea that had never yetbeen fully developed in regard to it. That waswhat must be done in the speeches at the dinner, andthe speeches must be reported. Then it wouldgo like wildfire. He asked March whether he thoughtMr. Depew could be got to come; Mark Twain, he wassure, would come; he was a literary man. Theyought to invite Mr. Evarts, and the Cardinal and theleading Protestant divines. His ambition stoppedat nothing, nothing but the question of expense; therehe had to wait the return of the elder Dryfoos fromthe West, and Dryfoos was still delayed at Moffitt,and Fulkerson openly confessed that he was afraid hewould stay there till his own enthusiasm escaped inother activities, other plans.

Fulkerson was as little likely as possible to fallunder a superstitious subjection to another man; butMarch could not help seeing that in this possiblemeasure Dryfoos was Fulkerson’s fetish.He did not revere him, March decided, because it wasnot in Fulkerson’s nature to revere anything;he could like and dislike, but he could not respect.Apparently, however, Dryfoos daunted him somehow; andbesides the homage which those who have not pay tothose who have, Fulkerson rendered Dryfoos the tributeof a feeling which March could only define as a sortof bewilderment. As well as March could make out,this feeling was evoked by the spectacle of Dryfoos’sunfailing luck, which Fulkerson was fond of dazzlinghimself with. It perfectly consisted with a keensense of whatever was sordid and selfish in a manon whom his career must have had its inevitable effect.He liked to philosophize the case with March, to recallDryfoos as he was when he first met him still somewhatin the sap, at Moffitt, and to study the processesby which he imagined him to have dried into the hardenedspeculator, without even the pretence to any advantagebut his own in his ventures. He was aware of paintingthe character too vividly, and he warned March notto accept it exactly in those tints, but to subduethem and shade it for himself. He said that wherehis advantage was not concerned, there was ever somuch good in Dryfoos, and that if in some things hehad grown inflexible, he had expanded in others tothe full measure of the vast scale on which he didbusiness. It had seemed a little odd to Marchthat a man should put money into such an enterpriseas ‘Every Other Week’ and go off aboutother affairs, not only without any sign of anxiety,but without any sort of interest. But Fulkersonsaid that was the splendid side of Dryfoos. Hehad a courage, a magnanimity, that was equal to thestrain of any such uncertainty. He had facedthe music once for all, when he asked Fulkerson whatthe thing would cost in the different degrees of potential

failure; and then he had gone off, leaving everythingto Fulkerson and the younger Dryfoos, with the instructionsimply to go ahead and not bother him about it.Fulkerson called that pretty tall for an old fellowwho used to bewail the want of pigs and chickens tooccupy his mind. He alleged it as another proofof the versatility of the American mind, and of thegrandeur of institutions and opportunities that letevery man grow to his full size, so that any man inAmerica could run the concern if necessary. Hebelieved that old Dryfoos could step into Bismarck’sshoes and run the German Empire at ten days’notice, or about as long as it would take him to gofrom New York to Berlin. But Bismarck would notknow anything about Dryfoos’s plans till Dryfoosgot ready to show his hand. Fulkerson himselfdid not pretend to say what the old man had been upto since he went West. He was at Moffitt first,and then he was at Chicago, and then he had gone outto Denver to look after some mines he had out there,and a railroad or two; and now he was at Moffitt again.He was supposed to be closing up his affairs there,but nobody could say.

Fulkerson told March the morning after Dryfoos returnedthat he had not only not pulled out at Moffitt, buthad gone in deeper, ten times deeper than ever.He was in a royal good-humor, Fulkerson reported, andwas going to drop into the office on his way up fromthe Street (March understood Wall Street) that afternoon.He was tickled to death with ‘Every Other Week’so far as it had gone, and was anxious to pay hisrespects to the editor.

March accounted for some rhetoric in this, but letit flatter him, and prepared himself for a meetingabout which he could see that Fulkerson was only lessnervous than he had shown himself about the publicreception of the first number. It gave March adisagreeable feeling of being owned and of being aboutto be inspected by his proprietor; but he fell backupon such independence as he could find in the thoughtof those two thousand dollars of income beyond thecaprice of his owner, and maintained an outward serenity.

He was a little ashamed afterward of the resolutionit had cost him to do so. It was not a questionof Dryfoos’s physical presence: that wasrather effective than otherwise, and carried a suggestionof moneyed indifference to convention in the graybusiness suit of provincial cut, and the low, wide-brimmedhat of flexible black felt. He had a stick withan old-fashioned top of buckhorn worn smooth and brightby the palm of his hand, which had not lost its characterin fat, and which had a history of former work inits enlarged knuckles, though it was now as soft asMarch’s, and must once have been small even fora man of Mr. Dryfoos’s stature; he was belowthe average size. But what struck March was thefact that Dryfoos seemed furtively conscious of beinga country person, and of being aware that in theirmeeting he was to be tried by other tests than those

which would have availed him as a shrewd speculator.He evidently had some curiosity about March, as thefirst of his kind whom he bad encountered; some suchcuriosity as the country school trustee feels andtries to hide in the presence of the new schoolmaster.But the whole affair was, of course, on a higher plane;on one side Dryfoos was much more a man of the worldthan March was, and he probably divined this at once,and rested himself upon the fact in a measure.It seemed to be his preference that his son shouldintroduce them, for he came upstairs with Conrad,and they had fairly made acquaintance before Fulkersonjoined them.

Conrad offered to leave them at once, but his fathermade him stay. “I reckon Mr. March andI haven’t got anything so private to talk aboutthat we want to keep it from the other partners.Well, Mr. March, are you getting used to New Yorkyet? It takes a little time.”

“Oh yes. But not so much time as most places.Everybody belongs more or less in New York; nobodyhas to belong here altogether.”

“Yes, that is so. You can try it, and goaway if you don’t like it a good deal easierthan you could from a smaller place. Wouldn’tmake so much talk, would it?” He glanced atMarch with a jocose light in his shrewd eyes.“That is the way I feel about it all the time:just visiting. Now, it wouldn’t be thatway in Boston, I reckon?”

“You couldn’t keep on visiting there yourwhole life,” said March.

Dryfoos laughed, showing his lower teeth in a waythat was at once simple and fierce. “Mr.Fulkerson didn’t hardly know as he could getyou to leave. I suppose you got used to it there.I never been in your city.”

“I had got used to it; but it was hardly mycity, except by marriage. My wife’s a Bostonian.”

“She’s been a little homesick here, then,”said Dryfoos, with a smile of the same quality ashis laugh.

“Less than I expected,” said March.“Of course, she was very much attached to ourold home.”

“I guess my wife won’t ever get used toNew York,” said Dryfoos, and he drew in hislower lip with a sharp sigh. “But my girlslike it; they’re young. You never beenout our way yet, Mr. March? Out West?”

“Well, only for the purpose of being born, andbrought up. I used to live in Crawfordsville,and then Indianapolis.”

“Indianapolis is bound to be a great place,”said Dryfoos. “I remember now, Mr. Fulkersontold me you was from our State.” He wenton to brag of the West, as if March were an Easternerand had to be convinced. “You ought tosee all that country. It’s a great country.”

“Oh yes,” said March, “I understandthat.” He expected the praise of the greatWest to lead up to some comment on ‘Every OtherWeek’; and there was abundant suggestion ofthat topic in the manuscripts, proofs of letter-pressand illustrations, with advance copies of the latestnumber strewn over his table.

But Dryfoos apparently kept himself from looking atthese things. He rolled his head about on hisshoulders to take in the character of the room, andsaid to his son, “You didn’t change thewoodwork, after all.”

“No; the architect thought we had better letit be, unless we meant to change the whole place.He liked its being old-fashioned.”

“I hope you feel comfortable here, Mr. March,”the old man said, bringing his eyes to bear upon himagain after their tour of inspection.

“Too comfortable for a working-man,” saidMarch, and he thought that this remark must bringthem to some talk about his work, but the proprietoronly smiled again.

“I guess I sha’n’t lose much onthis house,” he returned, as if musing aloud.“This down-town property is coming up. Businessis getting in on all these side streets. I thoughtI paid a pretty good price for it, too.”He went on to talk of real estate, and March beganto feel a certain resentment at his continued avoidanceof the only topic in which they could really havea common interest. “You live down this waysomewhere, don’t you?” the old man concluded.

“Yes. I wished to be near my work.”March was vexed with himself for having recurred toit; but afterward he was not sure but Dryfoos sharedhis own diffidence in the matter, and was waiting forhim to bring it openly into the talk. At timeshe seemed wary and masterful, and then March feltthat he was being examined and tested; at others sosimple that March might well have fancied that heneeded encouragement, and desired it. He talkedof his wife and daughters in a way that invited Marchto say friendly things of his family, which appearedto give the old man first an undue pleasure and thena final distrust. At moments he turned, withan effect of finding relief in it, to his son and spoketo him across March of matters which he was unacquaintedwith; he did not seem aware that this was rude, butthe young man must have felt it so; he always broughtthe conversation back, and once at some cost to himselfwhen his father made it personal.

“I want to make a regular New York businessman out of that fellow,” he said to March, pointingat Conrad with his stick. “You s’poseI’m ever going to do it?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said March,trying to fall in with the joke. “Do youmean nothing but a business man?”

The old man laughed at whatever latent meaning hefancied in this, and said: “You think hewould be a little too much for me there? Well,I’ve seen enough of ’em to know it don’talways take a large pattern of a man to do a largebusiness. But I want him to get the business training,and then if he wants to go into something else heknows what the world is, anyway. Heigh?”

“Oh yes!” March assented, with some compassionfor the young man reddening patiently under his father’scomment.

Dryfoos went on as if his son were not in hearing.“Now that boy wanted to be a preacher.What does a preacher know about the world he preachesagainst when he’s been brought up a preacher?He don’t know so much as a bad little boy inhis Sunday-school; he knows about as much as a girl.I always told him, You be a man first, and then yoube a preacher, if you want to. Heigh?”

“Precisely.” March began to feelsome compassion for himself in being witness of theyoung fellow’s discomfort under his father’shomily.

“When we first come to New York, I told him,Now here’s your chance to see the world on abig scale. You know already what work and savingand steady habits and sense will bring a man, to;you don’t want to go round among the rich; youwant to go among the poor, and see what laziness anddrink and dishonesty and foolishness will bring mento. And I guess he knows, about as well as anybody;and if he ever goes to preaching he’ll knowwhat he’s preaching about.” The oldman smiled his fierce, simple smile, and in his sharpeyes March fancied contempt of the ambition he hadbalked in his son. The present scene must havebeen one of many between them, ending in meek submissionon the part of the young man, whom his father, perhapswithout realizing his cruelty, treated as a child.March took it hard that he should be made to sufferin the presence of a co-ordinate power like himself,and began to dislike the old man out of proportionto his offence, which might have been mere want oftaste, or an effect of mere embarrassment before him.But evidently, whatever rebellion his daughters hadcarried through against him, he had kept his dominionover this gentle spirit unbroken. March did notchoose to make any response, but to let him continue,if he would, entirely upon his own impulse.

II.

A silence followed, of rather painful length.It was broken by the cheery voice of Fulkerson, sentbefore him to herald Fulkerson’s cheery person.“Well, I suppose you’ve got the glorioussuccess of ‘Every Other Week’ down prettycold in your talk by this time. I should havebeen up sooner to join you, but I was nipping a manfor the last page of the cover. I guess we’llhave to let the Muse have that for an advertisem*ntinstead of a poem the next time, March. Well,the old gentleman given you boys your scolding?”The person of Fulkerson had got into the room longbefore he reached this question, and had planted itselfastride a chair. Fulkerson looked over the chairback,now at March, and now at the elder Dryfoos as he spoke.

March answered him. “I guess we must havebeen waiting for you, Fulkerson. At any rate,we hadn’t got to the scolding yet.”

“Why, I didn’t suppose Mr. Dryfoos could‘a’ held in so long. I understoodhe was awful mad at the way the thing started off,and wanted to give you a piece of his mind, when hegot at you. I inferred as much from a remarkthat he made.” March and Dryfoos lookedfoolish, as men do when made the subject of this sortof merry misrepresentation.

“I reckon my scolding will keep awhile yet,”said the old man, dryly.

“Well, then, I guess it’s a good chanceto give Mr. Dryfoos an idea of what we’ve reallydone—­just while we’re resting, asArtemus Ward says. Heigh, March?”

“I will let you blow the trumpet, Fulkerson.I think it belongs strictly to the advertising department,”said March. He now distinctly resented the oldman’s failure to say anything to him of the magazine;he made his inference that it was from a suspicionof his readiness to presume upon a recognition ofhis share in the success, and he was determined tosecond no sort of appeal for it.

“The advertising department is the heart andsoul of every business,” said Fulkerson, hardily,“and I like to keep my hand in with a littlepractise on the trumpet in private. I don’tbelieve Mr. Dryfoos has got any idea of the extentof this thing. He’s been out among thoseRackensackens, where we were all born, and he’sread the notices in their seven by nine dailies, andhe’s seen the thing selling on the cars, andhe thinks he appreciates what’s been done.But I should just like to take him round in this littleold metropolis awhile, and show him ’Every OtherWeek’ on the centre tables of the millionaires—­theVanderbilts and the Astors—­and in the homesof culture and refinement everywhere, and let himjudge for himself. It’s the talk of theclubs and the dinner-tables; children cry for it;it’s the Castoria of literature and the Pearlineof art, the ’Won’t-be-happy-till-he-gets-itof every en lightened man, woman, and child in thisvast city. I knew we could capture the country;but, my goodness! I didn’t expect to haveNew York fall into our hands at a blow. But that’sjust exactly what New York has done. Every OtherWeek supplies the long-felt want that’s beengrinding round in New York and keeping it awake nightsever since the war. It’s the culminationof all the high and ennobling ideals of the past.”

“How much,” asked Dryfoos, “do youexpect to get out of it the first year, if it keepsthe start it’s got?”

“Comes right down to business, every time!”said Fulkerson, referring the characteristic to Marchwith a delighted glance. “Well, sir, ifeverything works right, and we get rain enough to fillup the springs, and it isn’t a grasshopper year,I expect to clear above all expenses something inthe neighborhood of twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Humph! And you are all going to work ayear—­editor, manager, publisher, artists,writers, printers, and the rest of ’em—­toclear twenty-five thousand dollars?—­I madethat much in half a day in Moffitt once. I seeit made in half a minute in Wall Street, sometimes.”The old man presented this aspect of the case witha good-natured contempt, which included Fulkersonand his enthusiasm in an obvious liking.

His son suggested, “But when we make that moneyhere, no one loses it.”

“Can you prove that?” His father turnedsharply upon him. “Whatever is won is lost.It’s all a game; it don’t make any differencewhat you bet on. Business is business, and abusiness man takes his risks with his eyes open.”

“Ah, but the glory!” Fulkerson insinuatedwith impudent persiflage. “I hadn’tgot to the glory yet, because it’s hard to estimateit; but put the glory at the lowest figure, Mr. Dryfoos,and add it to the twenty-five thousand, and you’vegot an annual income from ’Every Other Week’of dollars enough to construct a silver railroad, double-track,from this office to the moon. I don’t mentionany of the sister planets because I like to keep withinbounds.”

Dryfoos showed his lower teeth for pleasure in Fulkerson’sfooling, and said, “That’s what I likeabout you, Mr. Fulkerson—­you always keepwithin bounds.”

“Well, I ain’t a shrinking Boston violet,like March, here. More sunflower in my styleof diffidence; but I am modest, I don’t denyit,” said Fulkerson. “And I do hateto have a thing overstated.”

“And the glory—­you do really thinkthere’s something in the glory that pays?”

“Not a doubt of it! I shouldn’t carefor the paltry return in money,” said Fulkerson,with a burlesque of generous disdain, “if itwasn’t for the glory along with it.”

“And how should you feel about the glory, ifthere was no money along with it?”

“Well, sir, I’m happy to say we haven’tcome to that yet.”

“Now, Conrad, here,” said the old man,with a sort of pathetic rancor, “would ratherhave the glory alone. I believe he don’teven care much for your kind of glory, either, Mr.Fulkerson.”

Fulkerson ran his little eyes curiously over Conrad’sface and then March’s, as if searching for atrace there of something gone before which would enablehim to reach Dryfoos’s whole meaning. Heapparently resolved to launch himself upon conjecture.“Oh, well, we know how Conrad feels about thethings of this world, anyway. I should like totake ’em on the plane of another sphere, too,sometimes; but I noticed a good while ago that thiswas the world I was born into, and so I made up mymind that I would do pretty much what I saw the restof the folks doing here below. And I can’tsee but what Conrad runs the thing on business principlesin his department, and I guess you’ll find itso if you look into it. I consider that we’rea whole team and big dog under the wagon with you todraw on for supplies, and March, here, at the headof the literary business, and Conrad in the counting-room,and me to do the heavy lying in the advertising part.Oh, and Beaton, of course, in the art. I ’mostforgot Beaton—­Hamlet with Hamlet left out.”

Dryfoos looked across at his son. “Wasn’tthat the fellow’s name that was there last night?”

“Yes,” said Conrad.

The old man rose. “Well, I reckon I gotto be going. You ready to go up-town, Conrad?”

“Well, not quite yet, father.”

The old man shook hands with March, and went downstairs,followed by his son.

Fulkerson remained.

“He didn’t jump at the chance you gavehim to compliment us all round, Fulkerson,”said March, with a smile not wholly of pleasure.

Fulkerson asked, with as little joy in the grin hehad on, “Didn’t he say anything to youbefore I came in?”

“Not a word.”

“Dogged if I know what to make of it,”sighed Fulkerson, “but I guess he’s beenhaving a talk with Conrad that’s soured on him.I reckon maybe he came back expecting to find thatboy reconciled to the glory of this world, and Conrad’sshowed himself just as set against it as ever.”

“It might have been that,” March admitted,pensively. “I fancied something of thekind myself from words the old man let drop.”

Fulkerson made him explain, and then he said:

“That’s it, then; and it’s all right.Conrad ’ll come round in time; and all we’vegot to do is to have patience with the old man tillhe does. I know he likes you.” Fulkersonaffirmed this only interrogatively, and looked soanxiously to March for corroboration that March laughed.

“He dissembled his love,” he said; butafterward, in describing to his wife his interviewwith Mr. Dryfoos, he was less amused with this fact.

When she saw that he was a little cast down by it,she began to encourage him. “He’sjust a common, ignorant man, and probably didn’tknow how to express himself. You may be perfectlysure that he’s delighted with the success ofthe magazine, and that he understands as well as youdo that he owes it all to you.”

“Ah, I’m not so sure. I don’tbelieve a man’s any better for having made moneyso easily and rapidly as Dryfoos has done, and I doubtif he’s any wiser. I don’t know justthe point he’s reached in his evolution fromgrub to beetle, but I do know that so far as it’sgone the process must have involved a bewilderingchange of ideals and criterions. I guess he’scome to despise a great many things that he once respected,and that intellectual ability is among them—­whatwe call intellectual ability. He must have undergonea moral deterioration, an atrophy of the generousinstincts, and I don’t see why it shouldn’thave reached his mental make-up. He has sharpened,but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned intosuspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage toferocity. That’s the way I philosophizea man of Dryfoos’s experience, and I am not veryproud when I realize that such a man and his experienceare the ideal and ambition of most Americans.I rather think they came pretty near being mine, once.”

“No, dear, they never did,” his wife protested.

“Well, they’re not likely to be in thefuture. The Dryfoos feature of ‘Every OtherWeek’ is thoroughly distasteful to me.”

“Why, but he hasn’t really got anythingto do with it, has he, beyond furnishing the money?”

“That’s the impression that Fulkersonhas allowed us to get. But the man that holdsthe purse holds the reins. He may let us guidethe horse, but when he likes he can drive. Ifwe don’t like his driving, then we can get down.”

Mrs. March was less interested in this figure of speechthan in the personal aspects involved. “Thenyou think Mr. Fulkerson has deceived you?”

“Oh no!” said her husband, laughing.“But I think he has deceived himself, perhaps.”

“How?” she pursued.

“He may have thought he was using Dryfoos, whenDryfoos was using him, and he may have supposed hewas not afraid of him when he was very much so.His courage hadn’t been put to the test, andcourage is a matter of proof, like proficiency onthe fiddle, you know: you can’t tell whetheryou’ve got it till you try.”

“Nonsense! Do you mean that he would eversacrifice you to Mr. Dryfoos?”

“I hope he may not be tempted. But I’drather be taking the chances with Fulkerson alonethan with Fulkerson and Dryfoos to back him. Dryfoosseems, somehow, to take the poetry and the pleasureout of the thing.”

Mrs. March was a long time silent. Then she began,“Well, my dear, I never wanted to come to NewYork—­”

“Neither did I,” March promptly put in.

“But now that we’re here,” she wenton, “I’m not going to have you lettingevery little thing discourage you. I don’tsee what there was in Mr. Dryfoos’s manner togive you any anxiety. He’s just a common,stupid, inarticulate country person, and he didn’tknow how to express himself, as I said in the beginning,and that’s the reason he didn’t say anything.”

“Well, I don’t deny you’re rightabout it.”

“It’s dreadful,” his wife continued,“to be mixed up with such a man and his family,but I don’t believe he’ll ever meddle withyour management, and, till he does, all you need dois to have as little to do with him as possible, andgo quietly on your own way.”

“Oh, I shall go on quietly enough,” saidMarch. “I hope I sha’n’t begingoing stealthily.”

“Well, my dear,” said Mrs. March, “justlet me know when you’re tempted to do that.If ever you sacrifice the smallest grain of your honestyor your self-respect to Mr. Dryfoos, or anybody else,I will simply renounce you.”

“In view of that I’m rather glad the managementof ‘Every Other Week’ involves tastesand not convictions,” said March.

III.

That night Dryfoos was wakened from his after-dinnernap by the sound of gay talk and nervous gigglingin the drawing-room. The talk, which was Christine’s,and the giggling, which was Mela’s, were intershotwith the heavier tones of a man’s voice; andDryfoos lay awhile on the leathern lounge in his library,trying to make out whether he knew the voice.His wife sat in a deep chair before the fire, withher eyes on his face, waiting for him to wake.

“Who is that out there?” he asked, withoutopening his eyes.

“Indeed, indeed, I don’t know, Jacob,”his wife answered. “I reckon it’sjust some visitor of the girls’.”

“Was I snoring?”

“Not a bit. You was sleeping as quiet!I did hate to have ’em wake you, and I was justgoin’ out to shoo them. They’ve beenplayin’ something, and that made them laugh.”

“I didn’t know but I had snored,”said the old man, sitting up.

“No,” said his wife. Then she asked,wistfully, “Was you out at the old place, Jacob?”

“Yes.”

“Did it look natural?”

“Yes; mostly. They’re sinking thewells down in the woods pasture.”

“And—­the children’s graves?”

“They haven’t touched that part.But I reckon we got to have ’em moved to thecemetery. I bought a lot.”

The old woman began softly to weep. “Itdoes seem too hard that they can’t be let torest in peace, pore little things. I wanted youand me to lay there, too, when our time come, Jacob.Just there, back o’ the beehives and under themshoomakes—­my, I can see the very place!And I don’t believe I’ll ever feel athome anywheres else. I woon’t know whereI am when the trumpet sounds. I have to thinkbefore I can tell where the east is in New York; andwhat if I should git faced the wrong way when I raise?Jacob, I wonder you could sell it!” Her headshook, and the firelight shone on her tears as shesearched the folds of her dress for her pocket.

A peal of laughter came from the drawing-room, andthen the sound of chords struck on the piano.

“Hush! Don’t you cry, ’Liz’beth!”said Dryfoos. “Here; take my handkerchief.I’ve got a nice lot in the cemetery, and I’mgoin’ to have a monument, with two lambs onit—­like the one you always liked so much.It ain’t the fashion, any more, to have familyburyin’ grounds; they’re collectin’’em into the cemeteries, all round.”

“I reckon I got to bear it,” said hiswife, muffling her face in his handkerchief.“And I suppose the Lord kin find me, whereverI am. But I always did want to lay just there.You mind how we used to go out and set there, aftermilkin’, and watch the sun go down, and talkabout where their angels was, and try to figger itout?”

“I remember, ’Liz’beth.”

The man’s voice in the drawing-room sang a snatchof French song, insolent, mocking, salient; and thenChristine’s attempted the same strain, and anothercry of laughter from Mela followed.

“Well, I always did expect to lay there.But I reckon it’s all right. It won’tbe a great while, now, anyway. Jacob, I don’tbelieve I’m a-goin’ to live very long.I know it don’t agree with me here.”

“Oh, I guess it does, ’Liz’beth.You’re just a little pulled down with the weather.It’s coming spring, and you feel it; but thedoctor says you’re all right. I stoppedin, on the way up, and he says so.”

“I reckon he don’t know everything,”the old woman persisted: “I’ve beenrunnin’ down ever since we left Moffitt, andI didn’t feel any too well there, even.It’s a very strange thing, Jacob, that the richeryou git, the less you ain’t able to stay whereyou want to, dead or alive.”

“It’s for the children we do it,”said Dryfoos. “We got to give them theirchance in the world.”

“Oh, the world! They ought to bear theyoke in their youth, like we done. I know it’swhat Coonrod would like to do.”

Dryfoos got upon his feet. “If Coonrod’ll mind his own business, and do what I wanthim to, he’ll have yoke enough to bear.”He moved from his wife, without further effort tocomfort her, and pottered heavily out into the dining-room.Beyond its obscurity stretched the glitter of thedeep drawing-room. His feet, in their broad; flatslippers, made no sound on the dense carpet, and hecame unseen upon the little group there near the piano.Mela perched upon the stool with her back to the keys,and Beaton bent over Christine, who sat with a banjoin her lap, letting him take her hands and put themin the right place on the instrument. Her facewas radiant with happiness, and Mela was watching herwith foolish, unselfish pleasure in her bliss.

There was nothing wrong in the affair to a man ofDryfoos’s traditions and perceptions, and ifit had been at home in the farm sitting-room, or evenin his parlor at Moffitt, he would not have mindeda young man’s placing his daughter’s handson a banjo, or even holding them there; it would haveseemed a proper, attention from him if he was courtingher. But here, in such a house as this, withthe daughter of a man who had made as much money ashe had, he did not know but it was a liberty.He felt the angry doubt of it which beset him in regardto so many experiences of his changed life; he wantedto show his sense of it, if it was a liberty, buthe did not know how, and he did not know that it wasso. Besides, he could not help a touch of thepleasure in Christine’s happiness which Melashowed; and he would have gone back to the library,if he could, without being discovered.

But Beaton had seen him, and Dryfoos, with a nonchalantnod to the young man, came forward. “Whatyou got there, Christine?”

“A banjo,” said the girl, blushing inher father’s presence.

Mela gurgled. “Mr. Beaton is learnun’her the first position.”

Beaton was not embarrassed. He was in eveningdress, and his face, pointed with its brown beard,showed extremely handsome above the expanse of hisbroad, white shirt-front. He gave back as nonchalanta nod as he had got, and, without further greetingto Dryfoos, he said to Christine: “No,no. You must keep your hand and arm so.”He held them in position. “There!Now strike with your right hand. See?”

“I don’t believe I can ever learn,”said the girl, with a fond upward look at him.

“Oh yes, you can,” said Beaton.

They both ignored Dryfoos in the little play of protestswhich followed, and he said, half jocosely, half suspiciously,“And is the banjo the fashion, now?” Heremembered it as the emblem of low-down show business,and associated it with end-men and blackened facesand grotesque shirt-collars.

“It’s all the rage,” Mela shouted,in answer for all. “Everybody plays it.Mr. Beaton borrowed this from a lady friend of his.”

“Humph! Pity I got you a piano, then,”said Dryfoos. “A banjo would have beencheaper.”

Beaton so far admitted him to the conversation asto seem reminded of the piano by his mentioning it.He said to Mela, “Oh, won’t you just strikethose chords?” and as Mela wheeled about andbeat the keys he took the banjo from Christine andsat down with it. “This way!” He strummedit, and murmured the tune Dryfoos had heard him singingfrom the library, while he kept his beautiful eyesfloating on Christine’s. “You trythat, now; it’s very simple.”

“Where is Mrs. Mandel?” Dryfoos demanded,trying to assert himself.

Neither of the girls seemed to have heard him at firstin the chatter they broke into over what Beaton proposed.Then Mela said, absently, “Oh, she had to goout to see one of her friends that’s sick,”and she struck the piano keys. “Come; tryit, Chris!”

Dryfoos turned about unheeded and went back to thelibrary. He would have liked to put Beaton outof his house, and in his heart he burned against himas a contumacious hand; he would have liked to dischargehim from the art department of ‘Every OtherWeek’ at once. But he was aware of nothaving treated Beaton with much ceremony, and if theyoung man had returned his behavior in kind, withan electrical response to his own feeling, had heany right to complain? After all, there was noharm in his teaching Christine the banjo.

His wife still sat looking into the fire. “Ican’t see,” she said, “as we’vegot a bit more comfort of our lives, Jacob, becausewe’ve got such piles and piles of money.I wisht to gracious we was back on the farm this minute.I wisht you had held out ag’inst the childernabout sellin’ it; ’twould ‘a’bin the best thing fur ’em, I say. I believein my soul they’ll git spoiled here in New York.I kin see a change in ’em a’ready—­inthe girls.”

Dryfoos stretched himself on the lounge again.“I can’t see as Coonrod is much comfort,either. Why ain’t he here with his sisters?What does all that work of his on the East Side amountto? It seems as if he done it to cross me, asmuch as anything.” Dryfoos complained tohis wife on the basis of mere affectional habit, whichin married life often survives the sense of intellectualequality. He did not expect her to reason withhim, but there was help in her listening, and thoughshe could only soothe his fretfulness with soft answerswhich were often wide of the purpose, he still wentto her for solace. “Here, I’ve goneinto this newspaper business, or whatever it is, onhis account, and he don’t seem any more satisfiedthan ever. I can see he hain’t got his heartin it.”

“The pore boy tries; I know he does, Jacob;and he wants to please you. But he give up agood deal when he give up bein’ a preacher; Is’pose we ought to remember that.”

“A preacher!” sneered Dryfoos. “Ireckon bein’ a preacher wouldn’t satisfyhim now. He had the impudence to tell me thisafternoon that he would like to be a priest; and hethrew it up to me that he never could be because I’dkept him from studyin’.”

“He don’t mean a Catholic priest—­nota Roman one, Jacob,” the old woman explained,wistfully. “He’s told me all aboutit. They ain’t the kind o’ Catholicswe been used to; some sort of ’Piscopalians;and they do a heap o’ good amongst the poorfolks over there. He says we ain’t got anyidea how folks lives in them tenement houses, hundredsof ’em in one house, and whole families in aroom; and it burns in his heart to help ’em likethem Fathers, as he calls ’em, that gives theirlives to it. He can’t be a Father, he says,because he can’t git the eddication now; buthe can be a Brother; and I can’t find a wordto say ag’inst it, when it gits to talkin’,Jacob.”

“I ain’t saying anything against his priests,’Liz’beth,” said Dryfoos. “They’reall well enough in their way; they’ve given uptheir lives to it, and it’s a matter of businesswith them, like any other. But what I’mtalking about now is Coonrod. I don’t objectto his doin’ all the charity he wants to, andthe Lord knows I’ve never been stingy with himabout it. He might have all the money he wants,to give round any way he pleases.”

“That’s what I told him once, but he saysmoney ain’t the thing—­or not theonly thing you got to give to them poor folks.You got to give your time and your knowledge and yourlove—­I don’t know what all you gotto give yourself, if you expect to help ’em.That’s what Coonrod says.”

“Well, I can tell him that charity begins athome,” said Dryfoos, sitting up in his impatience.“And he’d better give himself to us a little—­tohis old father and mother. And his sisters.What’s he doin’ goin’ off thereto his meetings, and I don’t know what all, an’leavin’ them here alone?”

“Why, ain’t Mr. Beaton with ’em?”asked the old woman. “I thought I hearedhis voice.”

“Mr. Beaton! Of course he is! Andwho’s Mr. Beaton, anyway?”

“Why, ain’t he one of the men in Coonrod’soffice? I thought I heared—­”

“Yes, he is! But who is he? What’she doing round here? Is he makin’ up toChristine?”

“I reckon he is. From Mely’s talk,she’s about crazy over the fellow. Don’tyou like him, Jacob?”

“I don’t know him, or what he is.He hasn’t got any manners. Who broughthim here? How’d he come to come, in thefirst place?”

“Mr. Fulkerson brung him, I believe,”said the old woman, patiently.

“Fulkerson!” Dryfoos snorted. “Where’sMrs. Mandel, I should like to know? He broughther, too. Does she go traipsin’ off thisway every evening?”

“No, she seems to be here pretty regular mosto’ the time. I don’t know how wecould ever git along without her, Jacob; she seemsto know just what to do, and the girls would be tentimes as outbreakin’ without her. I hopeyou ain’t thinkin’ o’ turnin’her off, Jacob?”

Dryfoos did not think it necessary to answer sucha question. “It’s all Fulkerson,Fulkerson, Fulkerson. It seems to me that Fulkersonabout runs this family. He brought Mrs. Mandel,and he brought that Beaton, and he brought that Bostonfellow! I guess I give him a dose, though; andI’ll learn Fulkerson that he can’t haveeverything his own way. I don’t want anybodyto help me spend my money. I made it, and I canmanage it. I guess Mr. Fulkerson can bear a littlewatching now. He’s been travelling prettyfree, and he’s got the notion he’s driving,maybe. I’m a-going to look after that booka little myself.”

“You’ll kill yourself, Jacob,” saidhis wife, “tryin’ to do so many things.And what is it all fur? I don’t see as we’rebetter off, any, for all the money. It’sjust as much care as it used to be when we was allthere on the farm together. I wisht we could goback, Ja—­”

“We can’t go back!” shouted theold man, fiercely. “There’s no farmany more to go back to. The fields is full ofgas-wells and oil-wells and hell-holes generally;the house is tore down, and the barn’s goin’—­”

“The barn!” gasped the old woman.“Oh, my!”

“If I was to give all I’m worth this minute,we couldn’t go back to the farm, any more thanthem girls in there could go back and be little children.I don’t say we’re any better off, for themoney. I’ve got more of it now than I everhad; and there’s no end to the luck; it poursin. But I feel like I was tied hand and foot.I don’t know which way to move; I don’tknow what’s best to do about anything. Themoney don’t seem to buy anything but more andmore care and trouble. We got a big house thatwe ain’t at home in; and we got a lot of hiredgirls round under our feet that hinder and don’thelp. Our children don’t mind us, and wegot no friends or neighbors. But it had to be.I couldn’t help but sell the farm, and we can’tgo back to it, for it ain’t there. So don’tyou say anything more about it, ’Liz’beth.”

“Pore Jacob!” said his wife. “Well,I woon’t, dear.”

IV

It was clear to Beaton that Dryfoos distrusted him;and the fact heightened his pleasure in Christine’sliking for him. He was as sure of this as hewas of the other, though he was not so sure of anyreason for his pleasure in it. She had her charm;the charm of wildness to which a certain wildnessin himself responded; and there were times when hisfancy contrived a common future for them, which wouldhave a prosperity forced from the old fellow’slove of the girl. Beaton liked the idea of thiscompulsion better than he liked the idea of the money;there was something a little repulsive in that; heimagined himself rejecting it; he almost wished hewas enough in love with the girl to marry her withoutit; that would be fine. He was taken with herin a certain’ measure, in a certain way; thequestion was in what measure, in what way.

It was partly to escape from this question that hehurried down-town, and decided to spend with the Leightonsthe hour remaining on his hands before it was timeto go to the reception for which he was dressed.It seemed to him important that he should see AlmaLeighton. After all, it was her charm that wasmost abiding with him; perhaps it was to be final.He found himself very happy in his present relationswith her. She had dropped that barrier of pretencesand ironical surprise. It seemed to him thatthey had gone back to the old ground of common artisticinterest which he had found so pleasant the summerbefore. Apparently she and her mother had bothforgiven his neglect of them in the first months oftheir stay in New York; he was sure that Mrs. Leightonliked him as well as ever, and, if there was stillsomething a little provisional in Alma’s mannerat times, it was something that piqued more than itdiscouraged; it made him curious, not anxious.

He found the young ladies with Fulkerson when he rang.He seemed to be amusing them both, and they were bothamused beyond the merit of so small a pleasantry,Beaton thought, when Fulkerson said: “Introducemyself, Mr. Beaton: Mr. Fulkerson of ‘EveryOther Week.’ Think I’ve met you atour place.” The girls laughed, and Almaexplained that her mother was not very well, and wouldbe sorry not to see him. Then she turned, as hefelt, perversely, and went on talking with Fulkersonand left him to Miss Woodburn.

She finally recognized his disappointment: “Ahdon’t often get a chance at you, Mr. Beaton,and Ah’m just goin’ to toak yo’ todeath. Yo’ have been Soath yo’self,and yo’ know ho’ we do toak.”

“I’ve survived to say yes,” Beatonadmitted.

“Oh, now, do you think we toak so much mo’than you do in the No’th?” the young ladydeprecated.

“I don’t know. I only know you can’ttalk too much for me. I should like to hear yousay Soath and house and about for the rest of my life.”

“That’s what Ah call raght personal, Mr.Beaton. Now Ah’m goin’ to be personal,too.” Miss Woodburn flung out over her lapthe square of cloth she was embroidering, and askedhim: “Don’t you think that’sbeautiful? Now, as an awtust—­a greatawtust?”

“As a great awtust, yes,” said Beaton,mimicking her accent. “If I were less thangreat I might have something to say about the arrangementof colors. You’re as bold and originalas Nature.”

“Really? Oh, now, do tell me yo’favo’ite colo’, Mr. Beaton.”

“My favorite color? Bless my soul, whyshould I prefer any? Is blue good, or red wicked?Do people have favorite colors?” Beaton foundhimself suddenly interested.

“Of co’se they do,” answered thegirl. “Don’t awtusts?”

“I never heard of one that had—­consciously.”

“Is it possible? I supposed they all had.Now mah favo’ite colo’ is gawnet.Don’t you think it’s a pretty colo’?”

“It depends upon how it’s used. Doyou mean in neckties?” Beaton stole a glanceat the one Fulkerson was wearing.

Miss Woodburn laughed with her face bowed upon herwrist. “Ah do think you gentlemen in theNo’th awe ten tahms as lahvely as the ladies.”

“Strange,” said Beaton. “Inthe South—­Soath, excuse me! I madethe observation that the ladies were ten times aslively as the gentlemen. What is that you’reworking?”

“This?” Miss Woodburn gave it anotherflirt, and looked at it with a glance of dawning recognition.“Oh, this is a table-covah. Wouldn’tyou lahke to see where it’s to go?”

“Why, certainly.”

“Well, if you’ll be raght good I’lllet yo’ give me some professional advass aboutputting something in the co’ners or not, whenyou have seen it on the table.”

She rose and led the way into the other room.Beaton knew she wanted to talk with him about somethingelse; but he waited patiently to let her play hercomedy out. She spread the cover on the table,and he advised her, as he saw she wished, againstputting anything in the corners; just run a line ofher stitch around the edge, he said.

“Mr. Fulkerson and Ah, why, we’ve beenhaving a regular fa*ght aboat it,” she commented.“But we both agreed, fahnally, to leave it toyou; Mr. Fulkerson said you’d be sure to beraght. Ah’m so glad you took mah sahde.But he’s a great admahrer of yours, Mr. Beaton,”she concluded, demurely, suggestively.

“Is he? Well, I’m a great admirerof Fulkerson,” said Beaton, with a capriciouswillingness to humor her wish to talk about Fulkerson.“He’s a capital fellow; generous, magnanimous,with quite an ideal of friendship and an eye singleto the main chance all the time. He would advertise‘Every Other Week’ on his family vault.”

Miss Woodburn laughed, and said she should tell himwhat Beaton had said.

“Do. But he’s used to defamationfrom me, and he’ll think you’re joking.”

“Ah suppose,” said Miss Woodburn, “thathe’s quahte the tahpe of a New York businessman.” She added, as if it followed logically,“He’s so different from what I thoughta New York business man would be.”

“It’s your Virginia tradition to despisebusiness,” said Beaton, rudely.

Miss Woodburn laughed again. “Despahseit? Mah goodness! we want to get into it andwoak it fo’ all it’s wo’th,’as Mr. Fulkerson says. That tradition is allpast. You don’t know what the Soath is now.Ah suppose mah fathaw despahses business, but he’sa tradition himself, as Ah tell him.” Beatonwould have enjoyed joining the young lady in anythingshe might be going to say in derogation of her father,but he restrained himself, and she went on more andmore as if she wished to account for her father’shabitual hauteur with Beaton, if not to excuse it.“Ah tell him he don’t understand the risinggeneration. He was brought up in the old school,

and he thinks we’re all just lahke he was whenhe was young, with all those ahdeals of chivalry andfamily; but, mah goodness! it’s money that cyoantsno’adays in the Soath, just lahke it does everywhereelse. Ah suppose, if we could have slavery backin the fawm mah fathaw thinks it could have been broughtup to, when the commercial spirit wouldn’t letit alone, it would be the best thing; but we can’thave it back, and Ah tell him we had better have thecommercial spirit as the next best thing.”

Miss Woodburn went on, with sufficient loyalty andpiety, to expose the difference of her own and herfather’s ideals, but with what Beaton thoughtless reference to his own unsympathetic attention thanto a knowledge finally of the personnel and materielof ‘Every Other Week.’ and Mr. Fulkerson’srelation to the enterprise. “You most excusemy asking so many questions, Mr. Beaton. Youknow it’s all mah doing that we awe heah inNew York. Ah just told mah fathaw that if he wasevah goin’ to do anything with his wrahtings,he had got to come No’th, and Ah made him come.Ah believe he’d have stayed in the Soath allhis lahfe. And now Mr. Fulkerson wants him tolet his editor see some of his wrahtings, and Ah wantedto know something aboat the magazine. We awe agreat deal excited aboat it in this hoase, you know,Mr. Beaton,” she concluded, with a look thatnow transferred the interest from Fulkerson to Alma.She led the way back to the room where they were sitting,and went up to triumph over Fulkerson with Beaton’sdecision about the table-cover.

Alma was left with Beaton near the piano, and he beganto talk about the Dryfooses as he sat down on thepiano-stool. He said he had been giving MissDryfoos a lesson on the banjo; he had borrowed thebanjo of Miss Vance. Then he struck the chordhe had been trying to teach Christine, and playedover the air he had sung.

“How do you like that?” he asked, whirlinground.

“It seems rather a disrespectful little tune,somehow,” said Alma, placidly.

Beaton rested his elbow on the corner of the pianoand gazed dreamily at her. “Your perceptionsare wonderful. It is disrespectful. I playedit, up there, because I felt disrespectful to them.”

“Do you claim that as a merit?”

“No, I state it as a fact. How can yourespect such people?”

“You might respect yourself, then,” saidthe girl. “Or perhaps that wouldn’tbe so easy, either.”

“No, it wouldn’t. I like to haveyou say these things to me,” said Beaton, impartially.

“Well, I like to say them,” Alma returned.

“They do me good.”

“Oh, I don’t know that that was my motive.”

“There is no one like you—­no one,”said Beaton, as if apostrophizing her in her absence.“To come from that house, with its assertionsof money—­you can hear it chink; you cansmell the foul old banknotes; it stifles you—­intoan atmosphere like this, is like coming into anotherworld.”

“Thank you,” said Alma. “I’mglad there isn’t that unpleasant odor here;but I wish there was a little more of the chinking.”

“No, no! Don’t say that!” heimplored. “I like to think that there isone soul uncontaminated by the sense of money in thisbig, brutal, sordid city.”

“You mean two,” said Alma, with modesty.“But if you stifle at the Dryfooses’,why do you go there?”

“Why do I go?” he mused. “Don’tyou believe in knowing all the natures, the types,you can? Those girls are a strange study:the young one is a simple, earthly creature, as commonas an oat-field and the other a sort of sylvan life:fierce, flashing, feline—­”

Alma burst out into a laugh. “What aptalliteration! And do they like being studied?I should think the sylvan life might—­scratch.”

“No,” said Beaton, with melancholy absence,“it only-purrs.”

The girl felt a rising indignation. “Well,then, Mr. Beaton, I should hope it would scratch,and bite, too. I think you’ve no businessto go about studying people, as you do. It’sabominable.”

“Go on,” said the young man. “ThatPuritan conscience of yours! It appeals to theold Covenanter strain in me—­like a voiceof pre-existence. Go on—­”

“Oh, if I went on I should merely say it wasnot only abominable, but contemptible.”

“You could be my guardian angel, Alma,”said the young man, making his eyes more and moreslumbrous and dreamy.

“Stuff! I hope I have a soul above buttons!”

He smiled, as she rose, and followed her across theroom. “Good-night; Mr. Beaton,” shesaid.

Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson came in from the otherroom. “What! You’re not going,Beaton?”

“Yes; I’m going to a reception. Istopped in on my way.”

“To kill time,” Alma explained.

“Well,” said Fulkerson, gallantly, “thisis the last place I should like to do it. ButI guess I’d better be going, too. It hassometimes occurred to me that there is such a thingas staying too late. But with Brother Beaton,here, just starting in for an evening’s amusem*nt,it does seem a little early yet. Can’tyou urge me to stay, somebody?”

The two girls laughed, and Miss Woodburn said:

“Mr. Beaton is such a butterfly of fashion!Ah wish Ah was on mah way to a pawty. Ah feelquahte envious.”

“But he didn’t say it to make you,”Alma explained, with meek softness.

“Well, we can’t all be swells. Whereis your party, anyway, Beaton?” asked Fulkerson.“How do you manage to get your invitations tothose things? I suppose a fellow has to keephinting round pretty lively, Neigh?”

Beaton took these mockeries serenely, and shook handswith Miss Woodburn, with the effect of having alreadyshaken hands with Alma. She stood with hers claspedbehind her.

V.

Beaton went away with the smile on his face whichhe had kept in listening to Fulkerson, and carriedit with him to the reception. He believed thatAlma was vexed with him for more personal reasons thanshe had implied; it flattered him that she shouldhave resented what he told her of the Dryfooses.She had scolded him in their behalf apparently; butreally because he had made her jealous by his interest,of whatever kind, in some one else. What followed,had followed naturally. Unless she had been quitea simpleton she could not have met his provisionallove-making on any other terms; and the reason whyBeaton chiefly liked Alma Leighton was that she wasnot a simpleton. Even up in the country, whenshe was overawed by his acquaintance, at first, shewas not very deeply overawed, and at times she wasnot overawed at all. At such times she astonishedhim by taking his most solemn histrionics with flippantincredulity, and even burlesquing them. But hecould see, all the same, that he had caught her fancy,and he admired the skill with which she punished hisneglect when they met in New York. He had reallycome very near forgetting the Leightons; the intangibleobligations of mutual kindness which hold some menso fast, hung loosely upon him; it would not have hurthim to break from them altogether; but when he recognizedthem at last, he found that it strengthened them indefinitelyto have Alma ignore them so completely. If shehad been sentimental, or softly reproachful, that wouldhave been the end; he could not have stood it; hewould have had to drop her. But when she methim on his own ground, and obliged him to be sentimental,the game was in her hands. Beaton laughed, now,when he thought of that, and he said to himself thatthe girl had grown immensely since she had come toNew York; nothing seemed to have been lost upon her;she must have kept her eyes uncommonly wide open.He noticed that especially in their talks over herwork; she had profited by everything she had seenand heard; she had all of Wetmore’s ideas pat;it amused Beaton to see how she seized every usefulword that he dropped, too, and turned him to technicalaccount whenever she could. He liked that; shehad a great deal of talent; there was no questionof that; if she were a man there could be no questionof her future. He began to construct a futurefor her; it included provision for himself, too; itwas a common future, in which their lives and workwere united.

He was full of the glow of its prosperity when hemet Margaret Vance at the reception.

The house was one where people might chat a long timetogether without publicly committing themselves toan interest in each other except such a grew out ofeach other’s ideas. Miss Vance was therebecause she united in her catholic sympathies or ambitionsthe objects of the fashionable people and of the aestheticpeople who met there on common ground. It wasalmost the only house in New York where this happened

often, and it did not happen very often there.It was a literary house, primarily, with artisticqualifications, and the frequenters of it were mostlyauthors and artists; Wetmore, who was always tryingto fit everything with a phrase, said it was the unfrequenterswho were fashionable. There was great ease there,and simplicity; and if there was not distinction, itwas not for want of distinguished people, but becausethere seems to be some solvent in New York life thatreduces all men to a common level, that touches everybodywith its potent magic and brings to the surface thedeeply underlying nobody. The effect for sometemperaments, for consciousness, for egotism, is admirable;for curiosity, for hero worship, it is rather baffling.It is the spirit of the street transferred to thedrawing-room; indiscriminating, levelling, but doubtlessfinally wholesome, and witnessing the immensity ofthe place, if not consenting to the grandeur of reputationsor presences.

Beaton now denied that this house represented a salonat all, in the old sense; and he held that the salonwas impossible, even undesirable, with us, when MissVance sighed for it. At any rate, he said thatthis turmoil of coming and going, this bubble andbabble, this cackling and hissing of conversationwas not the expression of any such civilization ashad created the salon. Here, he owned, were theelements of intellectual delightfulness, but he saidtheir assemblage in such quantity alone denied thesalon; there was too much of a good thing. TheFrench word implied a long evening of general talkamong the guests, crowned with a little chicken atsupper, ending at co*ck-crow. Here was tea, withmilk or with lemon-baths of it and claret-cup forthe hardier spirits throughout the evening. Itwas very nice, very pleasant, but it was not the littlechicken—­not the salon. In fact, heaffirmed, the salon descended from above, out of thegreat world, and included the aesthetic world in it.But our great world—­the rich people, werestupid, with no wish to be otherwise; they were noteven curious about authors and artists. Beatonfancied himself speaking impartially, and so he allowedhimself to speak bitterly; he said that in no othercity in the world, except Vienna, perhaps, were suchpeople so little a part of society.

“It isn’t altogether the rich people’sfault,” said Margaret; and she spoke impartially,too. “I don’t believe that the literarymen and the artists would like a salon that descendedto them. Madame Geoffrin, you know, was veryplebeian; her husband was a business man of some sort.”

“He would have been a howling swell in New York,”said Beaton, still impartially.

Wetmore came up to their corner, with a scroll ofbread and butter in one hand and a cup of tea in theother. Large and fat, and clean-shaven, he lookedlike a monk in evening dress.

“We were talking about salons,” said Margaret.

“Why don’t you open a salon yourself?”asked Wetmore, breathing thickly from the anxietyof getting through the crowd without spilling his tea.

“Like poor Lady Barberina Lemon?” saidthe girl, with a laugh. “What a good story!That idea of a woman who couldn’t be interestedin any of the arts because she was socially and traditionallythe material of them! We can, never reach thatheight of nonchalance in this country.”

“Not if we tried seriously?” suggestedthe painter. “I’ve an idea that ifthe Americans ever gave their minds to that sort ofthing, they could take the palm—­or thecake, as Beaton here would say—­just as theydo in everything else. When we do have an aristocracy,it will be an aristocracy that will go ahead of anythingthe world has ever seen. Why don’t somebodymake a beginning, and go in openly for an ancestry,and a lower middle class, and an hereditary legislature,and all the rest? We’ve got liveries, andcrests, and palaces, and caste feeling. We’reall right as far as we’ve gone, and we’vegot the money to go any length.”

“Like your natural-gas man, Mr. Beaton,”said the girl, with a smiling glance round at him.

“Ah!” said Wetmore, stirring his tea,“has Beaton got a natural-gas man?”

“My natural-gas man,” said Beaton, ignoringWetmore’s question, “doesn’t knowhow to live in his palace yet, and I doubt if he hasany caste feeling. I fancy his family believethemselves victims of it. They say—­oneof the young ladies does—­that she neversaw such an unsociable place as New York; nobody calls.”

“That’s good!” said Wetmore.“I suppose they’re all ready for company,too: good cook, furniture, servants, carriages?”

“Galore,” said Beaton.

“Well, that’s too bad. There’sa chance for you, Miss Vance. Doesn’t yourphilanthropy embrace the socially destitute as wellas the financially? Just think of a family likethat, without a friend, in a great city! I shouldthink common charity had a duty there—­notto mention the uncommon.”

He distinguished that kind as Margaret’s bya glance of ironical deference. She had a reputefor good works which was out of proportion to theworks, as it always is, but she was really active inthat way, under the vague obligation, which we nowall feel, to be helpful. She was of the churchwhich seems to have found a reversion to the imposingritual of the past the way back to the early idealsof Christian brotherhood.

“Oh, they seem to have Mr. Beaton,” Margaretanswered, and Beaton felt obscurely flattered by herreference to his patronage of the Dryfooses.

He explained to Wetmore: “They have mebecause they partly own me. Dryfoos is Fulkerson’sfinancial backer in ’Every Other Week’.”

“Is that so? Well, that’s interesting,too. Aren’t you rather astonished, MissVance, to see what a petty thing Beaton is making ofthat magazine of his?”

“Oh,” said Margaret, “it’sso very nice, every way; it makes you feel as if youdid have a country, after all. It’s as chic—­thatdetestable little word!—­as those new Frenchbooks.”

“Beaton modelled it on them. But you mustn’tsuppose he does everything about ‘Every OtherWeek’; he’d like you to. Beaton, youhaven’t come up to that cover of your firstnumber, since. That was the design of one ofmy pupils, Miss Vance—­a little girl thatBeaton discovered down in New Hampshire last summer.”

“Oh yes. And have you great hopes of her,Mr. Wetmore?”

“She seems to have more love of it and knackfor it than any one of her sex I’ve seen yet.It really looks like a case of art for art’ssake, at times. But you can’t tell.They’re liable to get married at any moment,you know. Look here, Beaton, when your natural-gasman gets to the picture-buying stage in his development,just remember your old friends, will you? Youknow, Miss Vance, those new fellows have their regularstages. They never know what to do with theirmoney, but they find out that people buy pictures,at one point. They shut your things up in theirhouses where nobody comes, and after a while they overeatthemselves—­they don’t know what, elseto do—­and die of apoplexy, and leave yourpictures to a gallery, and then they see the light.It’s slow, but it’s pretty sure.Well, I see Beaton isn’t going to move on, ashe ought to do; and so I must. He always wasan unconventional creature.”

Wetmore went away, but Beaton remained, and he outstayedseveral other people who came up to speak to MissVance. She was interested in everybody, and sheliked the talk of these clever literary, artistic,clerical, even theatrical people, and she liked thesort of court with which they recognized her fashionas well as her cleverness; it was very pleasant tobe treated intellectually as if she were one of themselves,and socially as if she was not habitually the same,but a sort of guest in Bohemia, a distinguished stranger.If it was Arcadia rather than Bohemia, still she felther quality of distinguished stranger. The flatteryof it touched her fancy, and not her vanity; she hadvery little vanity. Beaton’s devotion madethe same sort of appeal; it was not so much that sheliked him as she liked being the object of his admiration.She was a girl of genuine sympathies, intellectualrather than sentimental. In fact, she was anintellectual person, whom qualities of the heart savedfrom being disagreeable, as they saved her on the otherhand from being worldly or cruel in her fashionableness.She had read a great many books, and had ideas aboutthem, quite courageous and original ideas; she knewabout pictures—­she had been in Wetmore’sclass; she was fond of music; she was willing to understandeven politics; in Boston she might have been agnostic,but in New York she was sincerely religious; she wasvery accomplished; and perhaps it was her goodnessthat prevented her feeling what was not best in Beaton.

“Do you think,” she said, after the retreatof one of the comers and goers left her alone withhim again, “that those young ladies would likeme to call on them?”

“Those young ladies?” Beaton echoed.“Miss Leighton and—­”

“No; I have been there with my aunt’scards already.”

“Oh yes,” said Beaton, as if he had knownof it; he admired the pluck and pride with which Almahad refrained from ever mentioning the fact to him,and had kept her mother from mentioning it, which musthave been difficult.

“I mean the Miss Dryfooses. It seems reallybarbarous, if nobody goes near them. We do allkinds of things, and help all kinds of people in someways, but we let strangers remain strangers unlessthey know how to make their way among us.”

“The Dryfooses certainly wouldn’t knowhow to make their way among you,” said Beaton,with a sort of dreamy absence in his tone.

Miss Vance went on, speaking out the process of reasoningin her mind, rather than any conclusions she had reached.“We defend ourselves by trying to believe thatthey must have friends of their own, or that theywould think us patronizing, and wouldn’t likebeing made the objects of social charity; but theyneedn’t really suppose anything of the kind.”

“I don’t imagine they would,” saidBeaton. “I think they’d be only toohappy to have you come. But you wouldn’tknow what to do with each other, indeed, Miss Vance.”

“Perhaps we shall like each other,” saidthe girl, bravely, “and then we shall know.What Church are they of?”

“I don’t believe they’re of any,”said Beaton. “The mother was brought upa Dunkard.”

“A Dunkard?”

Beaton told what he knew of the primitive sect, withits early Christian polity, its literal interpretationof Christ’s ethics, and its quaint ceremonialof foot-washing; he made something picturesque of that.“The father is a Mammon-worshipper, pure andsimple. I suppose the young ladies go to church,but I don’t know where. They haven’ttried to convert me.”

“I’ll tell them not to despair—­afterI’ve converted them,” said Miss Vance.“Will you let me use you as a ‘point d’appui’,Mr. Beaton?”

“Any way you like. If you’re reallygoing to see them, perhaps I’d better make aconfession. I left your banjo with them, afterI got it put in order.”

“How very nice! Then we have a common interestalready.”

“Do you mean the banjo, or—­”

“The banjo, decidedly. Which of them plays?”

“Neither. But the eldest heard that thebanjo was ‘all the rage,’ as the youngestsays. Perhaps you can persuade them that goodworks are the rage, too.”

Beaton had no very lively belief that Margaret wouldgo to see the Dryfooses; he did so few of the thingshe proposed that he went upon the theory that othersmust be as faithless. Still, he had a cruel amusem*ntin figuring the possible encounter between MargaretVance, with her intellectual elegance, her eager sympathiesand generous ideals, and those girls with their rudepast, their false and distorted perspective, theirsordid and hungry selfishness, and their faith in theomnipotence of their father’s wealth woundedby their experience of its present social impotence.At the bottom of his heart he sympathized with themrather than with her; he was more like them.

People had ceased coming, and some of them were going.Miss Vance said she must go, too, and she was aboutto rise, when the host came up with March; Beatonturned away.

“Miss Vance, I want to introduce Mr. March,the editor of ’Every Other Week.’You oughtn’t to be restricted to the art department.We literary fellows think that arm of the servicegets too much of the glory nowadays.” Hisbanter was for Beaton, but he was already beyond ear-shot,and the host went on:

Mr. March can talk with you about your favorite Boston.He’s just turned his back on it.”

“Oh, I hope not!” said Miss Vance.“I can’t imagine anybody voluntarily leavingBoston.”

“I don’t say he’s so bad as that,”said the host, committing March to her. “Hecame to New York because he couldn’t help it—­likethe rest of us. I never know whether that’sa compliment to New York or not.”

They talked Boston a little while, without findingthat they had common acquaintance there; Miss Vancemust have concluded that society was much larger inBoston than she had supposed from her visits there,or else that March did not know many people in it.But she was not a girl to care much for the inferencesthat might be drawn from such conclusions; she ratherprided herself upon despising them; and she gave herselfto the pleasure of being talked to as if she wereof March’s own age. In the glow of hersympathetic beauty and elegance he talked his best,and tried to amuse her with his jokes, which he hadthe art of tingeing with a little seriousness on oneside. He made her laugh; and he flattered herby making her think; in her turn she charmed him somuch by enjoying what he said that he began to bragof his wife, as a good husband always does when anotherwoman charms him; and she asked, Oh was Mrs. Marchthere; and would he introduce her?

She asked Mrs. March for her address, and whethershe had a day; and she said she would come to seeher, if she would let her. Mrs. March could notbe so enthusiastic about her as March was, but as theywalked home together they talked the girl over, andagreed about her beauty and her amiability. Mrs.March said she seemed very unspoiled for a person whomust have been so much spoiled. They tried toanalyze her charm, and they succeeded in formulatingit as a combination of intellectual fashionablenessand worldly innocence. “I think,”said Mrs. March, “that city girls, brought upas she must have been, are often the most innocentof all. They never imagine the wickedness of theworld, and if they marry happily they go through lifeas innocent as children. Everything combinesto keep them so; the very hollowness of society shieldsthem. They are the loveliest of the human race.But perhaps the rest have to pay too much for them.”

“For such an exquisite creature as Miss Vance,”said March, “we couldn’t pay too much.”

A wild laughing cry suddenly broke upon the air atthe street-crossing in front of them. A girl’svoice called out: “Run, run, Jen! Thecopper is after you.” A woman’s figurerushed stumbling across the way and into the shadowof the houses, pursued by a burly policeman.

“Ah, but if that’s part of the price?”

They went along fallen from the gay spirit of theirtalk into a silence which he broke with a sigh.“Can that poor wretch and the radiant girl weleft yonder really belong to the same system of things?How impossible each makes the other seem!”

VI.

Mrs. Horn believed in the world and in society andits unwritten constitution devoutly, and she toleratedher niece’s benevolent activities as she toleratedher aesthetic sympathies because these things, howeveroddly, were tolerated—­even encouraged—­bysociety; and they gave Margaret a charm. Theymade her originality interesting. Mrs. Horn didnot intend that they should ever go so far as to makeher troublesome; and it was with a sense of this abeyantauthority of her aunt’s that the girl askedher approval of her proposed call upon the Dryfooses.She explained as well as she could the social destitutionof these opulent people, and she had of course toname Beaton as the source of her knowledge concerningthem.

“Did Mr. Beaton suggest your calling on them?”

“No; he rather discouraged it.”

“And why do you think you ought to go in thisparticular instance? New York is full of peoplewho don’t know anybody.”

Margaret laughed. “I suppose it’slike any other charity: you reach the cases youknow of. The others you say you can’t help,and you try to ignore them.”

“It’s very romantic,” said Mrs.Horn. “I hope you’ve counted the cost;all the possible consequences.”

Margaret knew that her aunt had in mind their commonexperience with the Leightons, whom, to give theircommon conscience peace, she had called upon withher aunt’s cards and excuses, and an invitationfor her Thursdays, somewhat too late to make the visitseem a welcome to New York. She was so coldlyreceived, not so much for herself as in her qualityof envoy, that her aunt experienced all the comfortwhich vicarious penance brings. She did not perhapsconsider sufficiently her niece’s guiltlessnessin the expiation. Margaret was not with her atSt. Barnaby in the fatal fortnight she passed there,and never saw the Leightons till she went to callupon them. She never complained: the strainof asceticism, which mysteriously exists in us all,and makes us put peas, boiled or unboiled, in ourshoes, gave her patience with the snub which the Leightonspresented her for her aunt. But now she said,with this in mind: “Nothing seems simplerthan to get rid of people if you don’t wantthem. You merely have to let them alone.”

“It isn’t so pleasant, letting them alone,”said Mrs. Horn.

“Or having them let you alone,” said Margaret;for neither Mrs. Leighton nor Alma had ever come toenjoy the belated hospitality of Mrs. Horn’sThursdays.

“Yes, or having them let you alone,” Mrs.Horn courageously consented. “And all thatI ask you, Margaret, is to be sure that you reallywant to know these people.”

“I don’t,” said the girl, seriously,“in the usual way.”

“Then the question is whether you do in theun usual way. They will build a great deal uponyou,” said Mrs. Horn, realizing how much theLeightons must have built upon her, and how much outof proportion to her desert they must now dislikeher; for she seemed to have had them on her mind fromthe time they came, and had always meant to recognizeany reasonable claim they had upon her.

“It seems very odd, very sad,” Margaretreturned, “that you never could act unselfishlyin society affairs. If I wished to go and seethose girls just to do them a pleasure, and perhapsbecause if they’re strange and lonely, I mightdo them good, even—­it would be impossible.”

“Quite,” said her aunt. “Sucha thing would be quixotic. Society doesn’trest upon any such basis. It can’t; it wouldgo to pieces, if people acted from unselfish motives.”

“Then it’s a painted savage!” saidthe girl. “All its favors are really bargains.It’s gifts are for gifts back again.”

“Yes, that is true,” said Mrs. Horn, withno more sense of wrong in the fact than the politicaleconomist has in the fact that wages are the measureof necessity and not of merit. “You getwhat you pay for. It’s a matter of business.”She satisfied herself with this formula, which shedid not invent, as fully as if it were a reason; butshe did not dislike her niece’s revolt againstit. That was part of Margaret’s originality,which pleased her aunt in proportion to her own conventionality;she was really a timid person, and she liked the showof courage which Margaret’s magnanimity oftenreflected upon her. She had through her a repute,with people who did not know her well, for intellectualand moral qualities; she was supposed to be literaryand charitable; she almost had opinions and ideals,but really fell short of their possession. Shethought that she set bounds to the girl’s originalitybecause she recognized them. Margaret understoodthis better than her aunt, and knew that she had consultedher about going to see the Dryfooses out of deference,and with no expectation of luminous instruction.She was used to being a law to herself, but she knewwhat she might and might not do, so that she was rathera by-law. She was the kind of girl that mighthave fancies for artists and poets, but might endby marrying a prosperous broker, and leavening a vastlump of moneyed and fashionable life with her culture,generosity, and good-will. The intellectual interestswere first with her, but she might be equal to sacrificingthem; she had the best heart, but she might know howto harden it; if she was eccentric, her social orbitwas defined; comets themselves traverse space on fixedlines. She was like every one else, a congeriesof contradictions and inconsistencies, but obedientto the general expectation of what a girl of her positionmust and must not finally be. Provisionally, shewas very much what she liked to be.

VII

Margaret Vance tried to give herself some reason forgoing to call upon the Dryfooses, but she could findnone better than the wish to do a kind thing.This seemed queerer and less and less sufficient asshe examined it, and she even admitted a little curiosityas a harmless element in her motive, without beingvery well satisfied with it. She tried to adda slight sense of social duty, and then she decidedto have no motive at all, but simply to pay her visitas she would to any other eligible strangers she sawfit to call upon. She perceived that she mustbe very careful not to let them see that any otherimpulse had governed her; she determined, if possible,to let them patronize her; to be very modest and sincereand diffident, and, above all, not to play a part.This was easy, compared with the choice of a mannerthat should convey to them the fact that she was notplaying a part. When the hesitating Irish serving-manhad acknowledged that the ladies were at home, andhad taken her card to them, she sat waiting for themin the drawing-room. Her study of its appointments,with their impersonal costliness, gave her no suggestionhow to proceed; the two sisters were upon her beforeshe had really decided, and she rose to meet themwith the conviction that she was going to play a partfor want of some chosen means of not doing so.She found herself, before she knew it, making herbanjo a property in the little comedy, and professingso much pleasure in the fact that Miss Dryfoos wastaking it up; she had herself been so much interestedby it. Anything, she said, was a relief fromthe piano; and then, between the guitar and the banjo,one must really choose the banjo, unless one wantedto devote one’s whole natural life to the violin.Of course, there was the mandolin; but Margaret askedif they did not feel that the bit of shell you struckit with interposed a distance between you and the realsoul of the instrument; and then it did have sucha faint, mosquitoy little tone! She made muchof the question, which they left her to debate alonewhile they gazed solemnly at her till she characterizedthe tone of the mandolin, when Mela broke into a large,coarse laugh.

“Well, that’s just what it does soundlike,” she explained defiantly to her sister.“I always feel like it was going to settle somewhere,and I want to hit myself a slap before it begins tobite. I don’t see what ever brought sucha thing into fashion.”

Margaret had not expected to be so powerfully seconded,and she asked, after gathering herself together, “Andyou are both learning the banjo?” “My,no!” said Mela, “I’ve gone throughenough with the piano. Christine is learnun’it.”

“I’m so glad you are making my banjo usefulat the outset, Miss Dryfoos.” Both girlsstared at her, but found it hard to cope with the factthat this was the lady friend whose banjo Beaton hadlent them. “Mr. Beaton mentioned that hehad left it here. I hope you’ll keep itas long as you find it useful.”

At this amiable speech even Christine could not helpthanking her. “Of course,” she said,“I expect to get another, right off. Mr.Beaton is going to choose it for me.”

“You are very fortunate. If you haven’ta teacher yet I should so like to recommend mine.”

Mela broke out in her laugh again. “Oh,I guess Christine’s pretty well suited withthe one she’s got,” she said, with insinuation.Her sister gave her a frowning glance, and Margaretdid not tempt her to explain.

“Then that’s much better,” she said.“I have a kind of superstition in such matters;I don’t like to make a second choice. Ina shop I like to take the first thing of the kindI’m looking for, and even if I choose furtherI come back to the original.”

“How funny!” said Mela. “Well,now, I’m just the other way. I always takethe last thing, after I’ve picked over all therest. My luck always seems to be at the bottomof the heap. Now, Christine, she’s morelike you. I believe she could walk right up blindfoldedand put her hand on the thing she wants every time.”

“I’m like father,” said Christine,softened a little by the celebration of her peculiarity.“He says the reason so many people don’tget what they want is that they don’t want itbad enough. Now, when I want a thing, it seemsto me that I want it all through.”

“Well, that’s just like father, too,”said Mela. “That’s the way he donewhen he got that eighty-acre piece next to Moffittthat he kept when he sold the farm, and that’sgot some of the best gas-wells on it now that thereis anywhere.” She addressed the explanationto her sister, to the exclusion of Margaret, who,nevertheless, listened with a smiling face and a resolutelypolite air of being a party to the conversation.Mela rewarded her amiability by saying to her, finally,“You’ve never been in the natural-gascountry, have you?”

“Oh no! And I should so much like to seeit!” said Margaret, with a fervor that was partly,voluntary.

“Would you? Well, we’re kind of sickof it, but I suppose it would strike a stranger.”

“I never got tired of looking at the big wellswhen they lit them up,” said Christine.“It seems as if the world was on fire.”

“Yes, and when you see the surface-gas burnun’down in the woods, like it used to by our spring-house-sostill, and never spreadun’ any, just like abed of some kind of wild flowers when you ketch sightof it a piece off.”

They began to tell of the wonders of their strangeland in an antiphony of reminiscences and descriptions;they unconsciously imputed a merit to themselves fromthe number and violence of the wells on their father’sproperty; they bragged of the high civilization ofMoffitt, which they compared to its advantage withthat of New York. They became excited by Margaret’sinterest in natural gas, and forgot to be suspiciousand envious.

She said, as she rose, “Oh, how much I shouldlike to see it all!” Then she made a littlepause, and added:

“I’m so sorry my aunt’s Thursdaysare over; she never has them after Lent, but we’reto have some people Tuesday evening at a little concertwhich a musical friend is going to give with some otherartists. There won’t be any banjos, I’mafraid, but there’ll be some very good singing,and my aunt would be so glad if you could come withyour mother.”

She put down her aunt’s card on the table nearher, while Mela gurgled, as if it were the best joke:“Oh, my! Mother never goes anywhere; youcouldn’t get her out for love or money.”But she was herself overwhelmed with a simple joyat Margaret’s politeness, and showed it in asensuous way, like a child, as if she had been tickled.She came closer to Margaret and seemed about to fawnphysically upon her.

“Ain’t she just as lovely as she can live?”she demanded of her sister when Margaret was gone.

“I don’t know,” said Christine.“I guess she wanted to know who Mr. Beaton hadbeen lending her banjo to.”

“Pshaw! Do you suppose she’s in lovewith him?” asked Mela, and then she broke intoher hoarse laugh at the look her sister gave her.“Well, don’t eat me, Christine! Iwonder who she is, anyway? I’m goun’to git it out of Mr. Beaton the next time he calls.I guess she’s somebody. Mrs. Mandel cantell. I wish that old friend of hers would hurryup and git well—­or something. ButI guess we appeared about as well as she did.I could see she was afraid of you, Christine.I reckon it’s gittun’ around a littleabout father; and when it does I don’t believewe shall want for callers. Say, are you goun’?To that concert of theirs?”

“I don’t know. Not till I know whothey are first.”

“Well, we’ve got to hump ourselves ifwe’re goun’ to find out before Tuesday.”

As she went home Margaret felt wrought in her thatmost incredible of the miracles, which, nevertheless,any one may make his experience. She felt kindlyto these girls because she had tried to make them happy,and she hoped that in the interest she had shown therehad been none of the poison of flattery. Shewas aware that this was a risk she ran in such anattempt to do good. If she had escaped this effectshe was willing to leave the rest with Providence.

VIII.

The notion that a girl of Margaret Vance’s traditionswould naturally form of girls like Christine and MelaDryfoos would be that they were abashed in the presenceof the new conditions of their lives, and that theymust receive the advance she had made them with a certaingrateful humility. However they received it,she had made it upon principle, from a romantic conceptionof duty; but this was the way she imagined they wouldreceive it, because she thought that she would havedone so if she had been as ignorant and unbred asthey. Her error was in arguing their attitudefrom her own temperament, and endowing them, for the

purposes of argument, with her perspective. Theyhad not the means, intellectual or moral, of feelingas she fancied. If they had remained at home onthe farm where they were born, Christine would havegrown up that embodiment of impassioned suspicionwhich we find oftenest in the narrowest spheres, andMela would always have been a good-natured simpleton;but they would never have doubted their equality withthe wisest and the finest. As it was, they hadnot learned enough at school to doubt it, and the splendorof their father’s success in making money hadblinded them forever to any possible difference againstthem. They had no question of themselves in thesocial abeyance to which they had been left in NewYork. They had been surprised, mystified; itwas not what they had expected; there must be somemistake.

They were the victims of an accident, which wouldbe repaired as soon as the fact of their father’swealth had got around. They had been steadfastin their faith, through all their disappointment, thatthey were not only better than most people by virtueof his money, but as good as any; and they took Margaret’svisit, so far as they, investigated its motive, fora sign that at last it was beginning to get around;of course, a thing could not get around in New Yorkso quick as it could in a small place. They wereconfirmed in their belief by the sensation of Mrs.Mandel when she returned to duty that afternoon, andthey consulted her about going to Mrs. Horn’smusicale. If she had felt any doubt at the namefor there were Horns and Horns—­the addresson the card put the matter beyond question; and shetried to make her charges understand what a preciouschance had befallen them. She did not succeed;they had not the premises, the experience, for a sufficientimpression; and she undid her work in part by theeffort to explain that Mrs. Horn’s standing wasindependent of money; that though she was positivelyrich, she was comparatively poor. Christine inferredthat Miss Vance had called because she wished to bethe first to get in with them since it had begun toget around. This view commended itself to Mela,too, but without warping her from her opinion thatMiss Vance was all the same too sweet for anything.She had not so vivid a consciousness of her father’smoney as Christine had; but she reposed perhaps allthe more confidently upon its power. She was farfrom thinking meanly of any one who thought highlyof her for it; that seemed so natural a result asto be amiable, even admirable; she was willing thatany such person should get all the good there was insuch an attitude toward her.

They discussed the matter that night at dinner beforetheir father and mother, who mostly sat silent attheir meals; the father frowning absently over hisplate, with his head close to it, and making play intohis mouth with the back of his knife (he had got sofar toward the use of his fork as to despise thosewho still ate from the edge of their knives), andthe mother partly missing hers at times in the nervoustremor that shook her face from side to side.

After a while the subject of Mela’s hoarse babbleand of Christine’s high-pitched, thin, sharpforays of assertion and denial in the field whichher sister’s voice seemed to cover, made itsway into the old man’s consciousness, and heperceived that they were talking with Mrs. Mandelabout it, and that his wife was from time to time offeringan irrelevant and mistaken comment. He agreedwith Christine, and silently took her view of theaffair some time before he made any sign of havinglistened. There had been a time in his life whenother things besides his money seemed admirable tohim. He had once respected himself for the hard-headed,practical common sense which first gave him standingamong his country neighbors; which made him supervisor,school trustee, justice of the peace, county commissioner,secretary of the Moffitt County Agricultural Society.In those days he had served the public with disinterestedzeal and proud ability; he used to write to the LakeShore Farmer on agricultural topics; he took partin opposing, through the Moffitt papers, the legislativewaste of the people’s money; on the questionof selling a local canal to the railroad company, whichkilled that fine old State work, and let the dry ditchgrow up to grass, he might have gone to the Legislature,but he contented himself with defeating the Moffittmember who had voted for the job. If he opposedsome measures for the general good, like high schoolsand school libraries, it was because he lacked perspective,in his intense individualism, and suspected all expenseof being spendthrift. He believed in good districtschools, and he had a fondness, crude but genuine,for some kinds of reading—­history, and forensicsof an elementary sort.

With his good head for figures he doubted doctorsand despised preachers; he thought lawyers were allrascals, but he respected them for their ability;he was not himself litigious, but he enjoyed the intellectualencounters of a difficult lawsuit, and he often attendeda sitting of the fall term of court, when he wentto town, for the pleasure of hearing the speeches.He was a good citizen, and a good husband. Asa good father, he was rather severe with his children,and used to whip them, especially the gentle Conrad,who somehow crossed him most, till the twins died.After that he never struck any of them; and from thesight of a blow dealt a horse he turned as if sick.It was a long time before he lifted himself up fromhis sorrow, and then the will of the man seemed tohave been breached through his affections. Helet the girls do as they pleased—­the twinshad been girls; he let them go away to school, andgot them a piano. It was they who made him sellthe farm. If Conrad had only had their spirithe could have made him keep it, he felt; and he resentedthe want of support he might have found in a less yieldingspirit than his son’s.

His moral decay began with his perception of the opportunityof making money quickly and abundantly, which offereditself to him after he sold his farm. He awoketo it slowly, from a desolation in which he tastedthe last bitter of homesickness, the utter miseryof idleness and listlessness. When he broke downand cried for the hard-working, wholesome life hehad lost, he was near the end of this season of despair,but he was also near the end of what was best in himself.He devolved upon a meaner ideal than that of conservativegood citizenship, which had been his chief moral experience:the money he had already made without effort and withoutmerit bred its unholy self-love in him; he began tohonor money, especially money that had been won suddenlyand in large sums; for money that had been earnedpainfully, slowly, and in little amounts, he had onlypity and contempt. The poison of that ambitionto go somewhere and be somebody which the local speculatorshad instilled into him began to work in the vanitywhich had succeeded his somewhat scornful self-respect;he rejected Europe as the proper field for his expansion;he rejected Washington; he preferred New York, whitherthe men who have made money and do not yet know thatmoney has made them, all instinctively turn.He came where he could watch his money breed moremoney, and bring greater increase of its kind in anhour of luck than the toil of hundreds of men couldearn in a year. He called it speculation, stocks,the Street; and his pride, his faith in himself, mountedwith his luck. He expected, when he had satedhis greed, to begin to spend, and he had formulatedan intention to build a great house, to add anotherto the palaces of the country-bred millionaires whohave come to adorn the great city. In the meantime he made little account of the things that occupiedhis children, except to fret at the ungrateful indifferenceof his son to the interests that could alone makea man of him. He did not know whether his daughterswere in society or not; with people coming and goingin the house he would have supposed they must be so,no matter who the people were; in some vague way hefelt that he had hired society in Mrs. Mandel, atso much a year. He never met a superior himselfexcept now and then a man of twenty or thirty millionsto his one or two, and then he felt his soul creepwithin him, without a sense of social inferiority;it was a question of financial inferiority; and thoughDryfoos’s soul bowed itself and crawled, itwas with a gambler’s admiration of wonderfulluck. Other men said these many-millioned millionaireswere smart, and got their money by sharp practicesto which lesser men could not attain; but Dryfoosbelieved that he could compass the same ends, by thesame means, with the same chances; he respected theirmoney, not them.

When he now heard Mrs. Mandel and his daughters talkingof that person, whoever she was, that Mrs. Mandelseemed to think had honored his girls by coming tosee them, his curiosity was pricked as much as hispride was galled.

“Well, anyway,” said Mela, “I don’tcare whether Christine’s goon’ or not;I am. And you got to go with me, Mrs. Mandel.”

“Well, there’s a little difficulty,”said Mrs. Mandel, with her unfailing dignity and politeness.“I haven’t been asked, you know.”

“Then what are we goun’ to do?”demanded Mela, almost crossly. She was physicallytoo amiable, she felt too well corporeally, ever tobe quite cross. “She might ‘a’knowed—­well known—­we couldn’t‘a’ come alone, in New York. I don’tsee why, we couldn’t. I don’t callit much of an invitation.”

“I suppose she thought you could come with yourmother,” Mrs. Mandel suggested.

“She didn’t say anything about mother:Did she, Christine? Or, yes, she did, too.And I told her she couldn’t git mother out.Don’t you remember?”

“I didn’t pay much attention,” saidChristine. “I wasn’t certain we wantedto go.”

“I reckon you wasn’t goun’ to lether see that we cared much,” said Mela, halfreproachful, half proud of this attitude of Christine.“Well, I don’t see but what we got tostay at home.” She laughed at this lameconclusion of the matter.

“Perhaps Mr. Conrad—­you could veryproperly take him without an express invitation—­”Mrs. Mandel began.

Conrad looked up in alarm and protest. “I—­Idon’t think I could go that evening—­”

“What’s the reason?” his fatherbroke in, harshly. “You’re not sucha sheep that you’re afraid to go into companywith your sisters? Or are you too good to gowith them?”

“If it’s to be anything like that nightwhen them hussies come out and danced that way,”said Mrs. Dryfoos, “I don’t blame Coonrodfor not wantun’ to go. I never saw thebeat of it.”

Mela sent a yelling laugh across the table to hermother. “Well, I wish Miss Vance could‘a’ heard that! Why, mother, did youthink it like the ballet?”

“Well, I didn’t know, Mely, child,”said the old woman. “I didn’t knowwhat it was like. I hain’t never been toone, and you can’t be too keerful where yougo, in a place like New York.”

“What’s the reason you can’t go?”Dryfoos ignored the passage between his wife and daughterin making this demand of his son, with a sour face.

“I have an engagement that night—­it’sone of our meetings.”

“I reckon you can let your meeting go for onenight,” said Dryfoos. “It can’tbe so important as all that, that you must disappointyour sisters.”

“I don’t like to disappoint those poorcreatures. They depend so much upon the meetings—­”

“I reckon they can stand it for one night,”said the old man. He added, “The poor yehave with you always.”

“That’s so, Coonrod,” said his mother.“It’s the Saviour’s own words.”

“Yes, mother. But they’re not meantjust as father used them.”

“How do you know how they were meant? Orhow I used them?” cried the father. “Nowyou just make your plans to go with the girls, Tuesdaynight. They can’t go alone, and Mrs. Mandelcan’t go with them.”

“Pshaw!” said Mela. “We don’twant to take Conrad away from his meetun’, dowe, Chris?”

“I don’t know,” said Christine,in her high, fine voice. “They could getalong without him for one night, as father says.”

“Well, I’m not a-goun’ to take him,”said Mela. “Now, Mrs. Mandel, just thinkout some other way. Say! What’s thereason we couldn’t get somebody else to takeus just as well? Ain’t that rulable?”

“It would be allowable—­”

“Allowable, I mean,” Mela corrected herself.

“But it might look a little significant, unlessit was some old family friend.”

“Well, let’s get Mr. Fulkerson to takeus. He’s the oldest family friend we got.”

“I won’t go with Mr. Fulkerson,”said Christine, serenely.

“Why, I’m sure, Christine,” hermother pleaded, “Mr. Fulkerson is a very goodyoung man, and very nice appearun’.”

Mela shouted, “He’s ten times as pleasantas that old Mr. Beaton of Christine’s!”

Christine made no effort to break the constraint thatfell upon the table at this sally, but her fathersaid: “Christine is right, Mela. Itwouldn’t do for you to go with any other youngman. Conrad will go with you.”

“I’m not certain I want to go, yet,”said Christine.

“Well, settle that among yourselves. Butif you want to go, your brother will go with you.”

“Of course, Coonrod ’ll go, if his sisterswants him to,” the old woman pleaded. “Ireckon it ain’t agoun’ to be anything verybad; and if it is, Coonrod, why you can just git rightup and come out.”

“It will be all right, mother. And I willgo, of course.”

“There, now, I knowed you would, Coonrod.Now, fawther!” This appeal was to make the oldman say something in recognition of Conrad’ssacrifice.

“You’ll always find,” he said, “thatit’s those of your own household that have thefirst claim on you.”

“That’s so, Coonrod,” urged hismother. “It’s Bible truth. Yourfawther ain’t a perfesser, but he always didread his Bible. Search the Scriptures. That’swhat it means.”

“Laws!” cried Mely, “a body cansee, easy enough from mother, where Conrad’swantun’ to be a preacher comes from. I should‘a’ thought she’d ‘a’wanted to been one herself.”

“Let your women keep silence in the churches,”said the old woman, solemnly.

“There you go again, mother! I guess ifyou was to say that to some of the lady ministersnowadays, you’d git yourself into trouble.”Mela looked round for approval, and gurgled out ahoarse laugh.

IX.

The Dryfooses went late to Mrs. Horn’s musicale,in spite of Mrs. Mandel’s advice. Christinemade the delay, both because she wished to show MissVance that she was (not) anxious, and because she hadsome vague notion of the distinction of arriving lateat any sort of entertainment. Mrs. Mandel insistedupon the difference between this musicale and an ordinaryreception; but Christine rather fancied disturbinga company that had got seated, and perhaps making peoplerise and stand, while she found her way to her place,as she had seen them do for a tardy comer at the theatre.

Mela, whom she did not admit to her reasons or feelingsalways, followed her with the servile admiration shehad for all that Christine did; and she took on trustas somehow successful the result of Christine’sobstinacy, when they were allowed to stand againstthe wall at the back of the room through the wholeof the long piece begun just before they came in.There had been no one to receive them; a few people,in the rear rows of chairs near them, turned theirheads to glance at them, and then looked away again.Mela had her misgivings; but at the end of the pieceMiss Vance came up to them at once, and then Mela knewthat she had her eyes on them all the time, and thatChristine must have been right. Christine saidnothing about their coming late, and so Mela did notmake any excuse, and Miss Vance seemed to expect none.She glanced with a sort of surprise at Conrad, whenChristine introduced him; Mela did not know whethershe liked their bringing him, till she shook handswith him, and said: “Oh, I am very gladindeed! Mr. Dryfoos and I have met before.”Without explaining where or when, she led them to heraunt and presented them, and then said, “I’mgoing to put you with some friends of yours,”and quickly seated them next the Marches. Melaliked that well enough; she thought she might havesome joking with Mr. March, for all his wife was sostiff; but the look which Christine wore seemed toforbid, provisionally at least, any such recreation.On her part, Christine was cool with the Marches.It went through her mind that they must have toldMiss Vance they knew her; and perhaps they had boastedof her intimacy. She relaxed a little towardthem when she saw Beaton leaning against the wallat the end of the row next Mrs. March. Then sheconjectured that he might have told Miss Vance ofher acquaintance with the Marches, and she bent forwardand nodded to Mrs. March across Conrad, Mela, and Mr.March. She conceived of him as a sort of handof her father’s, but she was willing to takethem at their apparent social valuation for the time.She leaned back in her chair, and did not look upat Beaton after the first furtive glance, though shefelt his eyes on her.

The music began again almost at once, before Melahad time to make Conrad tell her where Miss Vancehad met him before. She would not have mindedinterrupting the music; but every one else seemed soattentive, even Christine, that she had not the courage.The concert went onto an end without realizing forher the ideal of pleasure which one ought to find.in society. She was not exacting, but it seemedto her there were very few young men, and when themusic was over, and their opportunity came to be sociable,they were not very sociable. They were not introduced,for one thing; but it appeared to Mela that they mighthave got introduced, if they had any sense; she sawthem looking at her, and she was glad she had dressedso much; she was dressed more than any other lady there,

and either because she was the most dressed of anyperson there, or because it had got around who herfather was, she felt that she had made an impressionon the young men. In her satisfaction with this,and from her good nature, she was contented to beserved with her refreshments after the concert byMr. March, and to remain joking with him. Shewas at her ease; she let her hoarse voice out in herlargest laugh; she accused him, to the admirationof those near, of getting her into a perfect gale.It appeared to her, in her own pleasure, her missionto illustrate to the rather subdued people about herwhat a good time really was, so that they could haveit if they wanted it. Her joy was crowned whenMarch modestly professed himself unworthy to monopolizeher, and explained how selfish he felt in talkingto a young lady when there were so many young mendying to do so.

“Oh, pshaw, dyun’, yes!” cried Mela,tasting the irony. “I guess I see them!”

He asked if he might really introduce a friend ofhis to her, and she said, Well, yes, if he thoughthe could live to get to her; and March brought upa man whom he thought very young and Mela thought veryold. He was a contributor to ‘Every OtherWeek,’ and so March knew him; he believed himselfa student of human nature in behalf of literature,and he now set about studying Mela. He temptedher to express her opinion on all points, and he laughedso amiably at the boldness and humorous vigor of herideas that she was delighted with him. She askedhim if he was a New-Yorker by birth; and she toldhim she pitied him, when he said he had never beenWest. She professed herself perfectly sick ofNew York, and urged him to go to Moffitt if he wantedto see a real live town. He wondered if it woulddo to put her into literature just as she was, withall her slang and brag, but he decided that he wouldhave to subdue her a great deal: he did not seehow he could reconcile the facts of her conversationwith the facts of her appearance: her beauty,her splendor of dress, her apparent right to be whereshe was. These things perplexed him; he was afraidthe great American novel, if true, must be incredible.Mela said he ought to hear her sister go on about NewYork when they first came; but she reckoned that Christinewas getting so she could put up with it a little better,now. She looked significantly across the roomto the place where Christine was now talking with Beaton;and the student of human nature asked, Was she here?and, Would she introduce him? Mela said she would,the first chance she got; and she added, They wouldbe much pleased to have him call. She felt herselfto be having a beautiful time, and she got directlyupon such intimate terms with the student of humannature that she laughed with him about some peculiaritiesof his, such as his going so far about to ask thingshe wanted to know from her; she said she never didbelieve in beating about the bush much. She had

noticed the same thing in Miss Vance when she cameto call that day; and when the young man owned thathe came rather a good deal to Mrs. Horn’s house,she asked him, Well, what sort of a girl was Miss Vance,anyway, and where did he suppose she had met her brother?The student of human nature could not say as to this,and as to Miss Vance he judged it safest to treatof the non-society side of her character, her activityin charity, her special devotion to the work amongthe poor on the East Side, which she personally engagedin.

“Oh, that’s where Conrad goes, too!”Mela interrupted. “I’ll bet anythingthat’s where she met him. I wisht I couldtell Christine! But I suppose she would wantto kill me, if I was to speak to her now.”

The student of human nature said, politely, “Oh,shall I take you to her?”

Mela answered, “I guess you better not!”with a laugh so significant that he could not helphis inferences concerning both Christine’s absorptionin the person she was talking with and the habitualviolence of her temper. He made note of how Melahelplessly spoke of all her family by their names,as if he were already intimate with them; he fanciedthat if he could get that in skillfully, it wouldbe a valuable color in his study; the English lordwhom she should astonish with it began to form himselfout of the dramatic nebulosity in his mind, and towhirl on a definite orbit in American society.But he was puzzled to decide whether Mela’swillingness to take him into her confidence on shortnotice was typical or personal: the trait ofa daughter of the natural-gas millionaire, or a foibleof her own.

Beaton talked with Christine the greater part of theevening that was left after the concert. He wasvery grave, and took the tone of a fatherly friend;he spoke guardedly of the people present, and moderatedthe severity of some of Christine’s judgmentsof their looks and costumes. He did this outof a sort of unreasoned allegiance to Margaret, whomhe was in the mood of wishing to please by being verykind and good, as she always was. He had thesense also of atoning by this behavior for some recklessthings he had said before that to Christine; he puton a sad, reproving air with her, and gave her thefeeling of being held in check.

She chafed at it, and said, glancing at Margaret intalk with her brother, “I don’t thinkMiss Vance is so very pretty, do you?”

“I never think whether she’s pretty ornot,” said Becton, with dreamy, affectation.“She is merely perfect. Does she know yourbrother?”

“So she says. I didn’t suppose Conradever went anywhere, except to tenement-houses.”

“It might have been there,” Becton suggested.“She goes among friendless people everywhere.”

“Maybe that’s the reason she came to seeus!” said Christine.

Becton looked at her with his smouldering eyes, andfelt the wish to say, “Yes, it was exactly that,”but he only allowed himself to deny the possibilityof any such motive in that case. He added:“I am so glad you know her, Miss Dryfoos.I never met Miss Vance without feeling myself betterand truer, somehow; or the wish to be so.”

“And you think we might be improved, too?”Christine retorted. “Well, I must say you’renot very flattering, Mr. Becton, anyway.”

Becton would have liked to answer her according toher cattishness, with a good clawing sarcasm thatwould leave its smart in her pride; but he was beinggood, and he could not change all at once. Besides,the girl’s attitude under the social honor doneher interested him. He was sure she had neverbeen in such good company before, but he could seethat she was not in the least affected by the experience.He had told her who this person and that was; andhe saw she had understood that the names were of consequence;but she seemed to feel her equality with them all.Her serenity was not obviously akin to the savagestoicism in which Beaton hid his own consciousnessof social inferiority; but having won his way in theworld so far by his talent, his personal quality, hedid not conceive the simple fact in her case.Christine was self-possessed because she felt thata knowledge of her father’s fortune had got around,and she had the peace which money gives to ignorance;but Beaton attributed her poise to indifference tosocial values. This, while he inwardly sneeredat it, avenged him upon his own too keen sense of them,and, together with his temporary allegiance to Margaret’sgoodness, kept him from retaliating Christine’svulgarity. He said, “I don’t see howthat could be,” and left the question of flatteryto settle itself.

The people began to go away, following each otherup to take leave of Mrs. Horn. Christine watchedthem with unconcern, and either because she wouldnot be governed by the general movement, or becauseshe liked being with Beaton, gave no sign of going.Mela was still talking to the student of human nature,sending out her laugh in deep gurgles amid the unimaginableconfidences she was making him about herself, her family,the staff of ‘Every Other Week,’ Mrs. Mandel,and the kind of life they had all led before she cameto them. He was not a blind devotee of art forart’s sake, and though he felt that if one couldportray Mela just as she was she would be the richestpossible material, he was rather ashamed to know someof the things she told him; and he kept looking anxiouslyabout for a chance of escape. The company hadreduced itself to the Dryfoos groups and some friendsof Mrs. Horn’s who had the right to linger,when Margaret crossed the room with Conrad to Christineand Beaton.

“I’m so glad, Miss Dryfoos, to find thatI was not quite a stranger to you all when I venturedto call, the other day. Your brother and I arerather old acquaintances, though I never knew who hewas before. I don’t know just how to saywe met where he is valued so much. I suppose Imustn’t try to say how much,” she added,with a look of deep regard at him.

Conrad blushed and stood folding his arms tight overhis breast, while his sister received Margaret’sconfession with the suspicion which was her firstfeeling in regard to any new thing. What she concludedwas that this girl was trying to get in with them,for reasons of her own. She said: “Yes;it’s the first I ever heard of his knowing you.He’s so much taken up with his meetings, hedidn’t want to come to-night.”

Margaret drew in her lip before she answered, withoutapparent resentment of the awkwardness or ungraciousness,whichever she found it: “I don’twonder! You become so absorbed in such work thatyou think nothing else is worth while. But I’mglad Mr. Dryfoos could come with you; I’m soglad you could all come; I knew you would enjoy themusic. Do sit down—­”

“No,” said Christine, bluntly; “wemust be going. Mela!” she called out, “come!”

The last group about Mrs. Horn looked round, but Christineadvanced upon them undismayed, and took the hand Mrs.Horn promptly gave her. “Well, I must bidyou good-night.”

“Oh, good-night,” murmured the elder lady.“So very kind of you to come.”

“I’ve had the best kind of a time,”said Mela, cordially. “I hain’t laughedso much, I don’t know when.”

“Oh, I’m glad you enjoyed it,” saidMrs. Horn, in the same polite murmur she had usedwith Christine; but she said nothing to either sisterabout any future meeting.

They were apparently not troubled. Mela saidover her shoulder to the student of human nature,“The next time I see you I’ll give it toyou for what you said about Moffitt.”

Margaret made some entreating paces after them, butshe did not succeed in covering the retreat of thesisters against critical conjecture. She couldonly say to Conrad, as if recurring to the subject,“I hope we can get our friends to play for ussome night. I know it isn’t any real help,but such things take the poor creatures out of themselvesfor the time being, don’t you think?”

“Oh yes,” he answered. “They’regood in that way.” He turned back hesitatinglyto Mrs. Horn, and said, with a blush, “I thankyou for a happy evening.”

“Oh, I am very glad,” she replied, inher murmur.

One of the old friends of the house arched her eyebrowsin saying good-night, and offered the two young menremaining seats home in her carriage. Beatongloomily refused, and she kept herself from askingthe student of human nature, till she had got himinto her carriage, “What is Moffitt, and whatdid you say about it?”

“Now you see, Margaret,” said Mrs. Horn,with bated triumph, when the people were all gone.

“Yes, I see,” the girl consented.“From one point of view, of course it’sbeen a failure. I don’t think we’vegiven Miss Dryfoos a pleasure, but perhaps nobodycould. And at least we’ve given her theopportunity of enjoying herself.”

“Such people,” said Mrs. Horn, philosophically,“people with their money, must of course bereceived sooner or later. You can’t keepthem out. Only, I believe I would rather letsome one else begin with them. The Leightonsdidn’t come?”

“I sent them cards. I couldn’t callagain.”

Mrs. Horn sighed a little. “I suppose Mr.Dryfoos is one of your fellow-philanthropists?”

“He’s one of the workers,” saidMargaret. “I met him several times at theHall, but I only knew his first name. I thinkhe’s a great friend of Father Benedict; he seemsdevoted to the work. Don’t you think helooks good?”

“Very,” said Mrs. Horn, with a color ofcensure in her assent. “The younger girlseemed more amiable than her sister. But whatmanners!”

“Dreadful!” said Margaret, with knit brows,and a pursed mouth of humorous suffering. “Butshe appeared to feel very much at home.”

“Oh, as to that, neither of them was much abashed.Do you suppose Mr. Beaton gave the other one somehints for that quaint dress of hers? I don’timagine that black and lace is her own invention.She seems to have some sort of strange fascinationfor him.”

“She’s very picturesque,” Margaretexplained. “And artists see points in peoplethat the rest of us don’t.”

“Could it be her money?” Mrs. Horn insinuated.“He must be very poor.”

“But he isn’t base,” retorted thegirl, with a generous indignation that made her auntsmile.

“Oh no; but if he fancies her so picturesque,it doesn’t follow that he would object to herbeing rich.”

“It would with a man like Mr. Beaton!”

“You are an idealist, Margaret. I supposeyour Mr. March has some disinterested motive in payingcourt to Miss Mela—­Pamela, I suppose, isher name. He talked to her longer than her literaturewould have lasted.”

“He seems a very kind person,” said Margaret.

“And Mr. Dryfoos pays his salary?”

“I don’t know anything about that.But that wouldn’t make any difference with him.”

Mrs. Horn laughed out at this security; but she wasnot displeased by the nobleness which it came from.She liked Margaret to be high-minded, and was reallynot distressed by any good that was in her.

The Marches walked home, both because it was not far,and because they must spare in carriage hire at anyrate. As soon as they were out of the house,she applied a point of conscience to him.

“I don’t see how you could talk to thatgirl so long, Basil, and make her laugh so.”

“Why, there seemed no one else to do it, tillI thought of Kendricks.”

“Yes, but I kept thinking, Now he’s pleasantto her because he thinks it’s to his interest.If she had no relation to ‘Every Other Week,’he wouldn’t waste his time on her.”

“Isabel,” March complained, “I wishyou wouldn’t think of me in he, him, and his;I never personalize you in my thoughts: you remainalways a vague unindividualized essence, not quitewithout form and void, but nounless and pronounless.I call that a much more beautiful mental attitudetoward the object of one’s affections. Butif you must he and him and his me in your thoughts,I wish you’d have more kindly thoughts of me.”

“Do you deny that it’s true, Basil?”

“Do you believe that it’s true, Isabel?”

“No matter. But could you excuse it ifit were?”

“Ah, I see you’d have been capable ofit in my, place, and you’re ashamed.”

“Yes,” sighed the wife, “I’mafraid that I should. But tell me that you wouldn’t,Basil!”

“I can tell you that I wasn’t. ButI suppose that in a real exigency, I could truckleto the proprietary Dryfooses as well as you.”

“Oh no; you mustn’t, dear! I’ma woman, and I’m dreadfully afraid. Butyou must always be a man, especially with that horridold Mr. Dryfoos. Promise me that you’llnever yield the least point to him in a matter ofright and wrong!”

“Not if he’s right and I’m wrong?”

“Don’t trifle, dear! You know whatI mean. Will you promise?”

“I’ll promise to submit the point to you,and let you do the yielding. As for me, I shallbe adamant. Nothing I like better.”

“They’re dreadful, even that poor, goodyoung fellow, who’s so different from all therest; he’s awful, too, because you feel thathe’s a martyr to them.”

“And I never did like martyrs a great deal,”March interposed.

“I wonder how they came to be there,”Mrs. March pursued, unmindful of his joke.

“That is exactly what seemed to be puzzlingMiss Mela about us. She asked, and I explainedas well as I could; and then she told me that MissVance had come to call on them and invited them; andfirst they didn’t know how they could come tillthey thought of making Conrad bring them. Butshe didn’t say why Miss Vance called on them.Mr. Dryfoos doesn’t employ her on ‘EveryOther Week.’ But I suppose she has her ownvile little motive.”

“It can’t be their money; it can’tbe!” sighed Mrs. March.

“Well, I don’t know. We all respectmoney.”

“Yes, but Miss Vance’s position is sosecure. She needn’t pay court to thosestupid, vulgar people.”

“Well, let’s console ourselves with thebelief that she would, if she needed. Such peopleas the Dryfooses are the raw material of good society.It isn’t made up of refined or meritorious people—­professorsand litterateurs, ministers and musicians, and theirfamilies. All the fashionable people there to-nightwere like the Dryfooses a generation or two ago.I dare say the material works up faster now, and ina season or two you won’t know the Dryfoosesfrom the other plutocrats. They will—­alittle better than they do now; they’ll see adifference, but nothing radical, nothing painful.People who get up in the world by service to others—­throughletters, or art, or science—­may have theirmodest little misgivings as to their social value,but people that rise by money—­especiallyif their gains are sudden—­never have.And that’s the kind of people that form ournobility; there’s no use pretending that wehaven’t a nobility; we might as well pretendwe haven’t first-class cars in the presenceof a vestibuled Pullman. Those girls had no moredoubt of their right to be there than if they hadbeen duch*esses: we thought it was very nice ofMiss Vance to come and ask us, but they didn’t;they weren’t afraid, or the least embarrassed;they were perfectly natural—­like born aristocrats.And you may be sure that if the plutocracy that nowowns the country ever sees fit to take on the outwardsigns of an aristocracy—­titles, and arms,and ancestors—­it won’t falter fromany inherent question of its worth. Money prizesand honors itself, and if there is anything it hasn’tgot, it believes it can buy it.”

“Well, Basil,” said his wife, “Ihope you won’t get infected with Lindau’sideas of rich people. Some of them are very goodand kind.”

“Who denies that? Not even Lindau himself.It’s all right. And the great thing isthat the evening’s enjoyment is over. I’vegot my society smile off, and I’m radiantlyhappy. Go on with your little pessimistic diatribes,Isabel; you can’t spoil my pleasure.”

“I could see,” said Mela, as she and Christinedrove home together, “that she was as jealousas she could be, all the time you was talkun’to Mr. Beaton. She pretended to be talkun’to Conrad, but she kep’ her eye on you prettyclose, I can tell you. I bet she just got us thereto see how him and you would act together. AndI reckon she was satisfied. He’s dead goneon you, Chris.”

Christine listened with a dreamy pleasure to the flatterieswith which Mela plied her in the hope of some returnin kind, and not at all because she felt spitefullytoward Miss Vance, or in anywise wished her ill.“Who was that fellow with you so long?”asked Christine. “I suppose you turnedyourself inside out to him, like you always do.”

Mela was transported by the cruel ingratitude.“It’s a lie! I didn’t tellhim a single thing.”

Conrad walked home, choosing to do so because he didnot wish to hear his sisters’ talk of the evening,and because there was a tumult in his spirit whichhe wished to let have its way. In his life withits single purpose, defeated by stronger wills thanhis own, and now struggling partially to fulfil itselfin acts of devotion to others, the thought of womenhad entered scarcely more than in that of a child.His ideals were of a virginal vagueness; faces, voices,gestures had filled his fancy at times, but almostpassionately; and the sensation that he now indulgedwas a kind of worship, ardent, but reverent and exalted.The brutal experiences of the world make us forgetthat there are such natures in it, and that they seemto come up out of the lowly earth as well as downfrom the high heaven. In the heart of this manwell on toward thirty there had never been left thestain of a base thought; not that suggestion and conjecturehad not visited him, but that he had not entertainedthem, or in any-wise made them his. In a Catholicage and country, he would have been one of those monkswho are sainted after death for the angelic purityof their lives, and whose names are invoked by believersin moments of trial, like San Luigi Gonzaga. Ashe now walked along thinking, with a lover’sbeatified smile on his face, of how Margaret Vancehad spoken and looked, he dramatized scenes in whichhe approved himself to her by acts of goodness andunselfishness, and died to please her for the sakeof others. He made her praise him for them, tohis face, when he disclaimed their merit, and afterhis death, when he could not. All the time hewas poignantly sensible of her grace, her elegance,her style; they seemed to intoxicate him; some tonesof her voice thrilled through his nerves, and somelooks turned his brain with a delicious, swooningsense of her beauty; her refinement bewildered him.But all this did not admit the idea of possession,even of aspiration. At the most his worship onlyset her beyond the love of other men as far as beyondhis own.

PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

Affectional habit
Brag of his wife, as a goodhusband always does
But when we make that moneyhere, no one loses it
Courage hadn’t beenput to the test
Family buryin’ grounds
Homage which those who havenot pay to those who have
Hurry up and git well—­orsomething
Made money and do not yetknow that money has made them
Society: All its favorsare really bargains
Wages are the measure of necessityand not of merit
Without realizing his cruelty,treated as a child

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

By William Dean Howells

PART FOURTH

I.

Not long after Lent, Fulkerson set before Dryfoosone day his scheme for a dinner in celebration ofthe success of ‘Every Other Week.’Dryfoos had never meddled in any manner with the conductof the periodical; but Fulkerson easily saw that hewas proud of his relation to it, and he proceededupon the theory that he would be willing to have thisrelation known: On the days when he had beenlucky in stocks, he was apt to drop in at the officeon Eleventh Street, on his way up-town, and listento Fulkerson’s talk. He was on good enoughterms with March, who revised his first impressionsof the man, but they had not much to say to each other,and it seemed to March that Dryfoos was even a littleafraid of him, as of a piece of mechanism he had acquired,but did not quite understand; he left the workingof it to Fulkerson, who no doubt bragged of it sufficiently.The old man seemed to have as little to say to hisson; he shut himself up with Fulkerson, where theothers could hear the manager begin and go on withan unstinted flow of talk about ‘Every OtherWeek;’ for Fulkerson never talked of anythingelse if he could help it, and was always bringingthe conversation back to it if it strayed:

The day he spoke of the dinner he rose and calledfrom his door: “March, I say, come downhere a minute, will you? Conrad, I want you, too.”

The editor and the publisher found the manager andthe proprietor seated on opposite sides of the table.“It’s about those funeral baked meats,you know,” Fulkerson explained, “and Iwas trying to give Mr. Dryfoos some idea of what wewanted to do. That is, what I wanted to do,”he continued, turning from March to Dryfoos.“March, here, is opposed to it, of course.He’d like to publish ‘Every Other Week’on the sly; keep it out of the papers, and off thenewsstands; he’s a modest Boston petunia, andhe shrinks from publicity; but I am not that kind ofherb myself, and I want all the publicity we can get—­beg,borrow, or steal—­for this thing. Isay that you can’t work the sacred rites of hospitalityin a better cause, and what I propose is a little

dinner for the purpose of recognizing the hit we’vemade with this thing. My idea was to strike youfor the necessary funds, and do the thing on a handsomescale. The term little dinner is a mere figureof speech. A little dinner wouldn’t makea big talk, and what we want is the big talk, at present,if we don’t lay up a cent. My notion wasthat pretty soon after Lent, now, when everybody isfeeling just right, we should begin to send out ourparagraphs, affirmative, negative, and explanatory,and along about the first of May we should sit downabout a hundred strong, the most distinguished peoplein the country, and solemnize our triumph. Thereit is in a nutshell. I might expand and I mightexpound, but that’s the sum and substance ofit.”

Fulkerson stopped, and ran his eyes eagerly over thefaces of his three listeners, one after the other.March was a little surprised when Dryfoos turned tohim, but that reference of the question seemed to giveFulkerson particular pleasure: “What doyou think, Mr. March?”

The editor leaned back in his chair. “Idon’t pretend to have Mr. Fulkerson’sgenius for advertising; but it seems to me a littleearly yet. We might celebrate later when we’vegot more to celebrate. At present we’rea pleasing novelty, rather than a fixed fact.”

“Ah, you don’t get the idea!” saidFulkerson. “What we want to do with thisdinner is to fix the fact.”

“Am I going to come in anywhere?” theold man interrupted.

“You’re going to come in at the head ofthe procession! We are going to strike everythingthat is imaginative and romantic in the newspaper soulwith you and your history and your fancy for goingin for this thing. I can start you in a paragraphthat will travel through all the newspapers, fromMaine to Texas and from Alaska to Florida. Wehave had all sorts of rich men backing up literaryenterprises, but the natural-gas man in literatureis a new thing, and the combination of your picturesquepast and your aesthetic present is something thatwill knock out the sympathies of the American publicthe first round. I feel,” said Fulkerson,with a tremor of pathos in his voice, “that ‘EveryOther Week’ is at a disadvantage before thepublic as long as it’s supposed to be my enterprise,my idea. As far as I’m known at all, I’mknown simply as a syndicate man, and nobody in thepress believes that I’ve got the money to runthe thing on a grand scale; a suspicion of insolvencymust attach to it sooner or later, and the fellowson the press will work up that impression, sooneror later, if we don’t give them something elseto work up. Now, as soon as I begin to give itaway to the correspondents that you’re in it,with your untold millions—­that, in fact,it was your idea from the start, that you originatedit to give full play to the humanitarian tendenciesof Conrad here, who’s always had these theoriesof co-operation, and longed to realize them for thebenefit of our struggling young writers and artists—­”

March had listened with growing amusem*nt to the mingledburlesque and earnest of Fulkerson’s self-sacrificingimpudence, and with wonder as to how far Dryfoos wasconsenting to his preposterous proposition, when Conradbroke out: “Mr. Fulkerson, I could not allowyou to do that. It would not be true; I did notwish to be here; and—­and what I think—­whatI wish to do—­that is something I will notlet any one put me in a false position about.No!” The blood rushed into the young man’sgentle face, and he met his father’s glancewith defiance.

Dryfoos turned from him to Fulkerson without speaking,and Fulkerson said, caressingly: “Why,of course, Coonrod! I know how you feel, and Ishouldn’t let anything of that sort go out uncontradictedafterward. But there isn’t anything inthese times that would give us better standing withthe public than some hint of the way you feel aboutsuch things. The publics expects to be interested,and nothing would interest it more than to be toldthat the success of ‘Every Other Week’sprang from the first application of the principleof Live and let Live to a literary enterprise.It would look particularly well, coming from you andyour father, but if you object, we can leave thatpart out; though if you approve of the principle Idon’t see why you need object. The mainthing is to let the public know that it owes thisthing to the liberal and enlightened spirit of oneof the foremost capitalists of the country; and thathis purposes are not likely to be betrayed in the handsof his son, I should get a little cut made from aphotograph of your father, and supply it gratis withthe paragraphs.”

“I guess,” said the old man, “wewill get along without the cut.”

Fulkerson laughed. “Well, well! Haveit your own way, But the sight of your face in thepatent outsides of the country press would be worthhalf a dozen subscribers in every school districtthroughout the length and breadth of this fair land.”

“There was a fellow,” Dryfoos explained,in an aside to March, “that was getting up ahistory of Moffitt, and he asked me to let him puta steel engraving of me in. He said a good manyprominent citizens were going to have theirs in, andhis price was a hundred and fifty dollars. I toldhim I couldn’t let mine go for less than twohundred, and when he said he could give me a splendidplate for that money, I said I should want it cash,You never saw a fellow more astonished when he gotit through him. that I expected him to pay the twohundred.”

Fulkerson laughed in keen appreciation of the joke.“Well, sir, I guess ‘Every Other Week’will pay you that much. But if you won’tsell at any price, all right; we must try to worryalong without the light of your countenance on, theposters, but we got to have it for the banquet.”

“I don’t seem to feel very hungry, yet,”said they old man, dryly.

“Oh, ‘l’appeit vient en mangeant’,as our French friends say. You’ll be hungryenough when you see the preliminary Little Neck clam.It’s too late for oysters.”

“Doesn’t that fact seem to point to apostponement till they get back, sometime in October,”March suggested,

“No, no!” said Fulkerson, “you don’tcatch on to the business end of this thing, my friends.You’re proceeding on something like the old explodedidea that the demand creates the supply, when everybodyknows, if he’s watched the course of modernevents, that it’s just as apt to be the otherway. I contend that we’ve got a real substantialsuccess to celebrate now; but even if we hadn’t,the celebration would do more than anything else tocreate the success, if we got it properly before thepublic. People will say: Those fellows arenot fools; they wouldn’t go and rejoice overtheir magazine unless they had got a big thing in it.And the state of feeling we should produce in the publicmind would make a boom of perfectly unprecedentedgrandeur for E. O. W. Heigh?”

He looked sunnily from one to the other in succession.The elder Dryfoos said, with his chin on the top ofhis stick, “I reckon those Little Neck clamswill keep.”

“Well, just as you say,” Fulkerson cheerfullyassented. “I understand you to agree tothe general principle of a little dinner?”

“The smaller the better,” said the oldman.

“Well, I say a little dinner because the ideaof that seems to cover the case, even if we vary theplan a little. I had thought of a reception,maybe, that would include the lady contributors andartists, and the wives and daughters of the othercontributors. That would give us the chance toring in a lot of society correspondents and get thething written up in first-class shape. By-the-way!”cried Fulkerson, slapping himself on the leg, “whynot have the dinner and the reception both?”

“I don’t understand,” said Dryfoos.

“Why, have a select little dinner for ten ortwenty choice spirits of the male persuasion, andthen, about ten o’clock, throw open your palatialdrawing-rooms and admit the females to champagne, salads,and ices. It is the very thing! Come!”

“What do you think of it, Mr. March?”asked Dryfoos, on whose social inexperience Fulkerson’swords projected no very intelligible image, and whoperhaps hoped for some more light.

“It’s a beautiful vision,” saidMarch, “and if it will take more time to realizeit I think I approve. I approve of anything thatwill delay Mr. Fulkerson’s advertising orgie.”

“Then,” Fulkerson pursued, “we couldhave the pleasure of Miss Christine and Miss Mela’scompany; and maybe Mrs. Dryfoos would look in on usin the course of the evening. There’s nohurry, as Mr. March suggests, if we can give the thingthis shape. I will cheerfully adopt the idea ofmy honorable colleague.”

March laughed at his impudence, but at heart he wasashamed of Fulkerson for proposing to make use ofDryfoos and his house in that way. He fanciedsomething appealing in the look that the old man turnedon him, and something indignant in Conrad’sflush; but probably this was only his fancy.He reflected that neither of them could feel it aspeople of more worldly knowledge would, and he consoledhimself with the fact that Fulkerson was really notsuch a charlatan as he seemed. But it went throughhis mind that this was a strange end for all Dryfoos’smoney-making to come to; and he philosophically acceptedthe fact of his own humble fortunes when he reflectedhow little his money could buy for such a man.It was an honorable use that Fulkerson was puttingit to in ‘Every Other Week;’ it mightbe far more creditably spent on such an enterprisethan on horses, or wines, or women, the usual resourcesof the brute rich; and if it were to be lost, it mightbetter be lost that way than in stocks. He kepta smiling face turned to Dryfoos while these irreverentconsiderations occupied him, and hardened his heartagainst father and son and their possible emotions.

The old man rose to put an end to the interview.He only repeated, “I guess those clams willkeep till fall.”

But Fulkerson was apparently satisfied with the progresshe had made; and when he joined March for the strollhomeward after office hours, he was able to detachhis mind from the subject, as if content to leave it.

“This is about the best part of the year inNew York,” he said; In some of the areas thegrass had sprouted, and the tender young foliage hadloosened itself froze the buds on a sidewalk tree hereand there; the soft air was full of spring, and thedelicate sky, far aloof, had the look it never wearsat any other season. “It ain’t a timeof year to complain much of, anywhere; but I don’twant anything better than the month of May in NewYork. Farther South it’s too hot, and I’vebeen in Boston in May when that east wind of yoursmade every nerve in my body get up and howl.I reckon the weather has a good deal to do with thelocal temperament. The reason a New York man takeslife so easily with all his rush is that his climatedon’t worry him. But a Boston man mustbe rasped the whole while by the edge in his air.That accounts for his sharpness; and when he’slived through twenty-five or thirty Boston Mays, hegets to thinking that Providence has some particularuse for him, or he wouldn’t have survived, andthat makes him conceited. See?”

“I see,” said March. “But Idon’t know how you’re going to work thatidea into an advertisem*nt, exactly.”

“Oh, pahaw, now, March! You don’tthink I’ve got that on the brain all the time?”

“You were gradually leading up to ‘EveryOther Week’, somehow.”

“No, sir; I wasn’t. I was just thinkingwhat a different creature a Massachusetts man is froma Virginian, And yet I suppose they’re both aspure English stock as you’ll get anywhere inAmerica. Marsh, I think Colonel Woodburn’spaper is going to make a hit.”

“You’ve got there! When it knocksdown the sale about one-half, I shall know it’smade a hit.”

“I’m not afraid,” said Fulkerson.“That thing is going to attract attention.It’s well written—­you can take thepomposity out of it, here and there and it’snovel. Our people like a bold strike, and it’sgoing to shake them up tremendously to have serfdomadvocated on high moral grounds as the only solutionof the labor problem. You see, in the first place,he goes for their sympathies by the way he portraysthe actual relations of capital and labor; he showshow things have got to go from bad to worse, and thenhe trots out his little old hobby, and proves thatif slavery had not been interfered with, it would haveperfected itself in the interest of humanity.He makes a pretty strong plea for it.”

March threw back his head and laughed. “He’sconverted you! I swear, Fulkerson, if we hadaccepted and paid for an article advocating cannibalismas the only resource for getting rid of the superfluouspoor, you’d begin to believe in it.”

Fulkerson smiled in approval of the joke, and onlysaid: “I wish you could meet the colonelin the privacy of the domestic circle, March.You’d like him. He’s a splendid oldfellow; regular type. Talk about spring!

“You ought to see the widow’s little backyard these days. You know that glass galleryjust beyond the dining-room? Those girls havegot the pot-plants out of that, and a lot more, andthey’ve turned the edges of that back yard,along the fence, into a regular bower; they’vegot sweet peas planted, and nasturtiums, and we shallbe in a blaze of glory about the beginning of June.Fun to see ’em work in the garden, and the birdbossing the job in his cage under the cherry-tree.Have to keep the middle of the yard for the clothesline,but six days in the week it’s a lawn, and Igo over it with a mower myself. March, there ain’tanything like a home, is there? Dear little cotof your own, heigh? I tell you, March, when Iget to pushing that mower round, and the colonel issmoking his cigar in the gallery, and those girlsare pottering over the flowers, one of these softevenings after dinner, I feel like a human being.Yes, I do. I struck it rich when I concludedto take my meals at the widow’s. For eightdollars a week I get good board, refined society, andall the advantages of a Christian home. By-the-way,you’ve never had much talk with Miss Woodburn,have you, March?”

“Not so much as with Miss Woodburn’s father.”

“Well, he is rather apt to scoop the conversation.I must draw his fire, sometime, when you and Mrs.March are around, and get you a chance with Miss Woodburn.”

“I should like that better, I believe,”said March.

“Well, I shouldn’t wonder if you did.Curious, but Miss Woodburn isn’t at all youridea of a Southern girl. She’s got lotsof go; she’s never idle a minute; she keepsthe old gentleman in first-class shape, and she don’tbelieve a bit in the slavery solution of the laborproblem; says she’s glad it’s gone, andif it’s anything like the effects of it, she’sglad it went before her time. No, sir, she’sas full of snap as the liveliest kind of a Northerngirl. None of that sunny Southern languor youread about.”

“I suppose the typical Southerner, like thetypical anything else, is pretty difficult to find,”said March. “But perhaps Miss Woodburnrepresents the new South. The modern conditionsmust be producing a modern type.”

“Well, that’s what she and the colonelboth say. They say there ain’t anythingleft of that Walter Scott dignity and chivalry in therising generation; takes too much time. You oughtto see her sketch the old-school, high-and-mightymanners, as they survive among some of the antiquesin Charlottesburg. If that thing could be putupon the stage it would be a killing success.Makes the old gentleman laugh in spite of himself.But he’s as proud of her as Punch, anyway.Why don’t you and Mrs. March come round oftener?Look here! How would it do to have a little excursion,somewhere, after the spring fairly gets in its work?”

“Reporters present?”

“No, no! Nothing of that kind; perfectlysincere and disinterested enjoyment.”

“Oh, a few handbills to be scattered around:‘Buy Every Other Week,’ ’Look outfor the next number of “Every Other Week,"’’Every Other Week at all the news-stands.’Well, I’ll talk it over with Mrs. March.I suppose there’s no great hurry.”

March told his wife of the idyllic mood in which hehad left Fulkerson at the widow’s door, andshe said he must be in love.

“Why, of course! I wonder I didn’tthink of that. But Fulkerson is such an impartialadmirer of the whole sex that you can’t thinkof his liking one more than another. I don’tknow that he showed any unjust partiality, though,in his talk of ‘those girls,’ as he calledthem. And I always rather fancied that Mrs. Mandel—­he’sdone so much for her, you know; and she is such awell-balanced, well-preserved person, and so lady-likeand correct——­”

“Fulkerson had the word for her: academic.She’s everything that instruction and disciplinecan make of a woman; but I shouldn’t think theycould make enough of her to be in love with.”

“Well, I don’t know. The academichas its charm. There are moods in which I couldimagine myself in love with an academic person.That regularity of line; that reasoned strictnessof contour; that neatness of pose; that slightly conventionalbut harmonious grouping of the emotions and morals—­youcan see how it would have its charm, the Wedgwood inhuman nature? I wonder where Mrs. Mandel keepsher urn and her willow.”

“I should think she might have use for themin that family, poor thing!” said Mrs. March.

“Ah, that reminds me,” said her husband,“that we had another talk with the old gentleman,this afternoon, about Fulkerson’s literary, artistic,and advertising orgie, and it’s postponed tillOctober.”

“The later the better, I should think,”said Mrs: March, who did not really think aboutit at all, but whom the date fixed for it caused tothink of the intervening time. “We havegot to consider what we will do about the summer,before long, Basil.”

“Oh, not yet, not yet,” he pleaded; withthat man’s willingness to abide in the present,which is so trying to a woman. “It’sonly the end of April.”

“It will be the end of June before we know.And these people wanting the Boston house anotheryear complicates it. We can’t spend thesummer there, as we planned.”

“They oughtn’t to have offered us an increasedrent; they have taken an advantage of us.”

“I don’t know that it matters,”said Mrs. March. “I had decided not to gothere.”

“Had you? This is a surprise.”

“Everything is a surprise to you, Basil, whenit happens.”

“True; I keep the world fresh, that way.”

“It wouldn’t have been any change to gofrom one city to another for the summer. We mightas well have stayed in New York.”

“Yes, I wish we had stayed,” said March,idly humoring a conception of the accomplished fact.“Mrs. Green would have let us have the gimcrackeryvery cheap for the summer months; and we could havemade all sorts of nice little excursions and tripsoff and been twice as well as if we had spent thesummer away.”

“Nonsense! You know we couldn’t spendthe summer in New York.”

“I know I could.”

“What stuff! You couldn’t manage.”

“Oh yes, I could. I could take my mealsat Fulkerson’s widow’s; or at Maroni’s,with poor old Lindau: he’s got to diningthere again. Or, I could keep house, and he coulddine with me here.”

There was a teasing look in March’s eyes, andhe broke into a laugh, at the firmness with whichhis wife said: “I think if there is to beany housekeeping, I will stay, too; and help to lookafter it. I would try not intrude upon you andyour guest.”

“Oh, we should be only too glad to have youjoin us,” said March, playing with fire.

“Very well, then, I wish you would take himoff to Maroni’s, the next time he comes to dinehere!” cried his wife.

The experiment of making March’s old friendfree of his house had not given her all the pleasurethat so kind a thing ought to have afforded so gooda woman. She received Lindau at first with robustbenevolence, and the high resolve not to let any ofhis little peculiarities alienate her from a senseof his claim upon her sympathy and gratitude, not onlyas a man who had been so generously fond of her husbandin his youth, but a hero who had suffered for hercountry. Her theory was that his mutilation mustnot be ignored, but must be kept in mind as a monumentof his sacrifice, and she fortified Bella with thisconception, so that the child bravely sat next hismaimed arm at table and helped him to dishes he couldnot reach, and cut up his meat for him. As forMrs. March herself, the thought of his mutilationmade her a little faint; she was not without a bewilderedresentment of its presence as a sort of oppression.She did not like his drinking so much of March’s

beer, either; it was no harm, but it was somehow unworthy,out of character with a hero of the war. Butwhat she really could not reconcile herself to wasthe violence of Lindau’s sentiments concerningthe whole political and social fabric. She didnot feel sure that he should be allowed to say suchthings before the children, who had been nurtured inthe faith of Bunker Hill and Appomattox, as the beginningand the end of all possible progress in human rights.As a woman she was naturally an aristocrat, but asan American she was theoretically a democrat; and itastounded, it alarmed her, to hear American democracydenounced as a shuffling evasion. She had nevercared much for the United States Senate, but she doubtedif she ought to sit by when it was railed at as arich man’s club. It shocked her to be toldthat the rich and poor were not equal before the lawin a country where justice must be paid for at everystep in fees and costs, or where a poor man must goto war in his own person, and a rich man might hiresomeone to go in his. Mrs. March felt that thisrebellious mind in Lindau really somehow outlawedhim from sympathy, and retroactively undid his pastsuffering for the country: she had always particularlyvalued that provision of the law, because in forecastingall the possible mischances that might befall herown son, she had been comforted by the thought thatif there ever was another war, and Tom were drafted,his father could buy him a substitute. Comparedwith such blasphemy as this, Lindau’s declarationthat there was not equality of opportunity in America,and that fully one-half the people were debarred theirright to the pursuit of happiness by the hopeless conditionsof their lives, was flattering praise. She couldnot listen to such things in silence, though, andit did not help matters when Lindau met her argumentswith facts and reasons which she felt she was merelynot sufficiently instructed to combat, and he wasnot quite gentlemanly to urge. “I am afraidfor the effect on the children,” she said toher husband. “Such perfectly distortedideas—­Tom will be ruined by them.”

“Oh, let Tom find out where they’re false,”said March. “It will be good exercise forhis faculties of research. At any rate, thosethings are getting said nowadays; he’ll haveto hear them sooner or later.”

“Had he better hear them at home?” demandedhis wife.

“Why, you know, as you’re here to refutethem, Isabel,” he teased, “perhaps it’sthe best place. But don’t mind poor oldLindau, my dear. He says himself that his pargis worse than his pidte, you know.”

“Ah, it’s too late now to mind him,”she sighed. In a moment of rash good feeling,or perhaps an exalted conception of duty, she had herselfproposed that Lindau should come every week and readGerman with Tom; and it had become a question firsthow they could get him to take pay for it, and thenhow they could get him to stop it. Mrs. Marchnever ceased to wonder at herself for having broughtthis about, for she had warned her husband againstmaking any engagement with Lindau which would bringhim regularly to the house: the Germans stuckso, and were so unscrupulously dependent. Yet,the deed being done, she would not ignore the dutyof hospitality, and it was always she who made theold man stay to their Sunday-evening tea when he lingerednear the hour, reading Schiller and Heine and Uhlandwith the boy, in the clean shirt with which he observedthe day; Lindau’s linen was not to be trustedduring the week. She now concluded a season ofmournful reflection by saying, “He will get youinto trouble, somehow, Basil.”

“Well, I don’t know how, exactly.I regard Lindau as a political economist of an unusualtype; but I shall not let him array me against theconstituted authorities. Short of that, I thinkI am safe.”

“Well, be careful, Basil; be careful. Youknow you are so rash.”

“I suppose I may continue to pity him?He is such a poor, lonely old fellow. Are youreally sorry he’s come into our lives, my dear?”

“No, no; not that. I feel as you do aboutit; but I wish I felt easier about him—­sure,that is, that we’re not doing wrong to let himkeep on talking so.”

“I suspect we couldn’t help it,”March returned, lightly. “It’s oneof what Lindau calls his ‘brincibles’to say what he thinks.”

II.

The Marches had no longer the gross appetite for noveltywhich urges youth to a surfeit of strange scenes,experiences, ideas; and makes travel, with all itsannoyances and fatigues, an inexhaustible delight.But there is no doubt that the chief pleasure of theirlife in New York was from its quality of foreignness:the flavor of olives, which, once tasted, can neverbe forgotten. The olives may not be of the firstexcellence; they may be a little stale, and small andpoor, to begin with, but they are still olives, andthe fond palate craves them. The sort which grewin New York, on lower Sixth Avenue and in the regionof Jefferson Market and on the soft exposures southof Washington Square, were none the less acceptablebecause they were of the commonest Italian variety.

The Marches spent a good deal of time and money ina grocery of that nationality, where they found allthe patriotic comestibles and potables, and renewedtheir faded Italian with the friendly family in charge.Italian table d’hotes formed the adventure ofthe week, on the day when Mrs. March let her domesticsgo out, and went herself to dine abroad with her husbandand children; and they became adepts in the restaurantswhere they were served, and which they varied almostfrom dinner to dinner. The perfect decorum ofthese places, and their immunity from offence in any,emboldened the Marches to experiment in Spanish restaurants,where red pepper and beans insisted in every dinner,and where once they chanced upon a night of ‘ollapodrida’, with such appeals to March’smemory of a boyish ambition to taste the dish thathe became poetic and then pensive over its cabbageand carrots, peas and bacon. For a rare combinationof international motives they prized most the tabled’hote of a French lady, who had taken a Spanishhusband in a second marriage, and had a Cuban negrofor her cook, with a cross-eyed Alsation for waiter,and a slim young South-American for cashier.March held that some thing of the catholic characterof these relations expressed itself in the generousand tolerant variety of the dinner, which was singularlyabundant for fifty cents, without wine. At onevery neat French place he got a dinner at the sameprice with wine, but it was not so abundant; and Marchinquired in fruitless speculation why the table d’hoteof the Italians, a notoriously frugal and abstemiouspeople, should be usually more than you wanted atseventy-five cents and a dollar, and that of the Frenchrather less at half a dollar. He could not seethat the frequenters were greatly different at thedifferent places; they were mostly Americans, of subduedmanners and conjecturably subdued fortunes, with hereand there a table full of foreigners. There wasno noise and not much smoking anywhere; March likedgoing to that neat French place because there Madamesat enthroned and high behind a ‘comptoir’at one side of the room, and every body saluted herin going out. It was there that a gentle-lookingyoung couple used to dine, in whom the Marches becameeffectlessly interested, because they thought theylooked like that when they were young. The wifehad an aesthetic dress, and defined her pretty headby wearing her back-hair pulled up very tight underher bonnet; the husband had dreamy eyes set wide apartunder a pure forehead. “They are artists,August, I think,” March suggested to the waiter,when he had vainly asked about them. “Oh,hartis, cedenly,” August consented; but Heavenknows whether they were, or what they were: Marchnever learned.

This immunity from acquaintance, this touch-and goquality in their New York sojourn, this almost lossof individuality at times, after the intense identificationof their Boston life, was a relief, though Mrs. Marchhad her misgivings, and questioned whether it werenot perhaps too relaxing to the moral fibre.March refused to explore his conscience; he allowedthat it might be so; but he said he liked now and thento feel his personality in that state of solution.They went and sat a good deal in the softening eveningsamong the infants and dotards of Latin extractionin Washington Square, safe from all who ever knew them,and enjoyed the advancing season, which thickenedthe foliage of the trees and flattered out of sightthe church warden’s Gothic of the UniversityBuilding. The infants were sometimes cross, andcried in their weary mothers’ or little sisters’arms; but they did not disturb the dotards, who slept,some with their heads fallen forward, and some withtheir heads fallen back; March arbitrarily distinguishedthose with the drooping faces as tipsy and ashamedto confront the public. The small Italian childrenraced up and down the asphalt paths, playing Americangames of tag and hide and-whoop; larger boys passedball, in training for potential championships.The Marches sat and mused, or quarrelled fitfullyabout where they should spend the summer, like sparrows,he once said, till the electric lights began to showdistinctly among the leaves, and they looked roundand found the infants and dotards gone and the benchesfilled with lovers. That was the signal for theMarches to go home. He said that the spectacleof so much courtship as the eye might take in thereat a glance was not, perhaps, oppressive, but the thoughtthat at the same hour the same thing was going on allover the country, wherever two young fools could gettogether, was more than he could bear; he did notdeny that it was natural, and, in a measureuthorized,but he declared that it was hackneyed; and the factthat it must go on forever, as long as the race lasted,made him tired.

At home, generally, they found that the children hadnot missed them, and were perfectly safe. Itwas one of the advantages of a flat that they couldleave the children there whenever they liked withoutanxiety. They liked better staying there thanwandering about in the evening with their parents,whose excursions seemed to them somewhat aimless, andtheir pleasures insipid. They studied, or read,or looked out of the window at the street sights;and their mother always came back to them with a pangfor their lonesomeness. Bella knew some littlegirls in the house, but in a ceremonious way; Tomhad formed no friendships among the boys at schoolsuch as he had left in Boston; as nearly as he couldexplain, the New York fellows carried canes at anage when they would have had them broken for themby the other boys at Boston; and they were both sissyishand fast. It was probably prejudice; he never

could say exactly what their demerits were, and neitherhe nor Bella was apparently so homesick as they pretended,though they answered inquirers, the one that New Yorkwas a hole, and the other that it was horrid, andthat all they lived for was to get back to Boston.In the mean time they were thrown much upon each otherfor society, which March said was well for both ofthem; he did not mind their cultivating a little gloomand the sense of a common wrong; it made them bettercomrades, and it was providing them with amusing reminiscencesfor the future. They really enjoyed Bohemianizingin that harmless way: though Tom had his doubtsof its respectability; he was very punctilious abouthis sister, and went round from his own school everyday to fetch her home from hers. The whole familywent to the theatre a good deal, and enjoyed themselvestogether in their desultory explorations of the city.

They lived near Greenwich Village, and March likedstrolling through its quaintness toward the watersideon a Sunday, when a hereditary Sabbatarianism kepthis wife at home; he made her observe that it evenkept her at home from church. He found a lingeringquality of pure Americanism in the region, and hesaid the very bells called to worship in a nasal tone.He liked the streets of small brick houses, with hereand there one painted red, and the mortar lines pickedout in white, and with now and then a fine woodenportal of fluted pillars and a bowed transom.The rear of the tenement-houses showed him the picturesquenessof clothes-lines fluttering far aloft, as in Florence;and the new apartment-houses, breaking the old sky-linewith their towering stories, implied a life as aliento the American manner as anything in continentalEurope. In fact, foreign faces and foreign tonguesprevailed in Greenwich Village, but no longer Germanor even Irish tongues or faces. The eyes andearrings of Italians twinkled in and out of the alleywaysand basem*nts, and they seemed to abound even in thestreets, where long ranks of trucks drawn up in Sundayrest along the curbstones suggested the presence ofa race of sturdier strength than theirs. Marchliked the swarthy, strange visages; he found nothingmenacing for the future in them; for wickedness hehad to satisfy himself as he could with the sneering,insolent, clean-shaven mug of some rare American ofthe b’hoy type, now almost as extinct in NewYork as the dodo or the volunteer fireman. Whenhe had found his way, among the ash-barrels and thegroups of decently dressed church-goers, to the docks,he experienced a sufficient excitement in the recentarrival of a French steamer, whose sheds were throngedwith hacks and express-wagons, and in a tacit inquiryinto the emotions of the passengers, fresh from thecleanliness of Paris, and now driving up through thefilth of those streets.

Some of the streets were filthier than others; therewas at least a choice; there were boxes and barrelsof kitchen offal on all the sidewalks, but not everywheremanure-heaps, and in some places the stench was mixedwith the more savory smell of cooking. One Sundaymorning, before the winter was quite gone, the sightof the frozen refuse melting in heaps, and particularlythe loathsome edges of the rotting ice near the gutters,with the strata of waste-paper and straw litter, andegg-shells and orange peel, potato-skins and cigar-stumps,made him unhappy. He gave a whimsical shrug forthe squalor of the neighboring houses, and said tohimself rather than the boy who was with him:“It’s curious, isn’t it, how fondthe poor people are of these unpleasant thoroughfares?You always find them living in the worst streets.”

“The burden of all the wrong in the world comeson the poor,” said the boy. “Everysort of fraud and swindling hurts them the worst.The city wastes the money it’s paid to cleanthe streets with, and the poor have to suffer, forthey can’t afford to pay twice, like the rich.”

March stopped short. “Hallo, Tom!Is that your wisdom?”

“It’s what Mr. Lindau says,” answeredthe boy, doggedly, as if not pleased to have his ideasmocked at, even if they were second-hand.

“And you didn’t tell him that the poorlived in dirty streets because they liked them, andwere too lazy and worthless to have them cleaned?”

“No; I didn’t.”

“I’m surprised. What do you thinkof Lindau, generally speaking, Tom?”

“Well, sir, I don’t like the way he talksabout some things. I don’t suppose thiscountry is perfect, but I think it’s about thebest there is, and it don’t do any good to lookat its drawbacks all the time.”

“Sound, my son,” said March, putting hishand on the boy’s shoulder and beginning towalk on. “Well?”

“Well, then, he says that it isn’t thepublic frauds only that the poor have to pay for,but they have to pay for all the vices of the rich;that when a speculator fails, or a bank cashier defaults,or a firm suspends, or hard times come, it’sthe poor who have to give up necessaries where therich give up luxuries.”

“Well, well! And then?”

“Well, then I think the crank comes in, in Mr.Lindau. He says there’s no need of failuresor frauds or hard times. It’s ridiculous.There always have been and there always will be.But if you tell him that, it seems to make him perfectlyfurious.”

March repeated the substance of this talk to his wife.“I’m glad to know that Tom can see throughsuch ravings. He has lots of good common sense.”

It was the afternoon of the same Sunday, and theywere sauntering up Fifth Avenue, and admiring thewide old double houses at the lower end; at one cornerthey got a distinct pleasure out of the gnarled elbowsthat a pollarded wistaria leaned upon the top of agarden wall—­for its convenience in lookinginto the street, he said. The line of these comfortabledwellings, once so fashionable, was continually brokenby the facades of shops; and March professed himselfvulgarized by a want of style in the people they metin their walk to Twenty-third Street.

“Take me somewhere to meet my fellow-exclusives,Isabel,” he demanded. “I pine forthe society of my peers.”

He hailed a passing omnibus, and made his wife geton the roof with him. “Think of our doingsuch a thing in Boston!” she sighed, with a littleshiver of satisfaction in her immunity from recognitionand comment.

“You wouldn’t be afraid to do it in Londonor Paris?”

“No; we should be strangers there—­justas we are in New York. I wonder how long onecould be a stranger here.”

“Oh, indefinitely, in our way of living.The place is really vast, so much larger than it usedto seem, and so heterogeneous.”

When they got down very far up-town, and began towalk back by Madison Avenue, they found themselvesin a different population from that they dwelt among;not heterogeneous at all; very hom*ogeneous, and almostpurely American; the only qualification was AmericanHebrew. Such a well-dressed, well-satisfied,well-fed looking crowd poured down the broad sidewalksbefore the handsome, stupid houses that March couldeasily pretend he had got among his fellow-plutocratsat last. Still he expressed his doubts whetherthis Sunday afternoon parade, which seemed to be athing of custom, represented the best form among theyoung people of that region; he wished he knew; heblamed himself for becoming of a fastidious conjecture;he could not deny the fashion and the richness andthe indigeneity of the spectacle; the promenaders lookedNew-Yorky; they were the sort of people whom you wouldknow for New-Yorkers elsewhere,—­so wellequipped and so perfectly kept at all points.Their silk hats shone, and their boots; their frockshad the right distension behind, and their bonnetsperfect poise and distinction.

The Marches talked of these and other facts of theirappearance, and curiously questioned whether thiswere the best that a great material civilization couldcome to; it looked a little dull. The men’sfaces were shrewd and alert, and yet they looked dull;the women’s were pretty and knowing, and yetdull. It was, probably, the holiday expressionof the vast, prosperous commercial class, with unlimitedmoney, and no ideals that money could not realize;fashion and comfort were all that they desired tocompass, and the culture that furnishes showily, thatdecorates and that tells; the culture, say, of playsand operas, rather than books.

Perhaps the observers did the promenaders injustice;they might not have been as common-minded as theylooked. “But,” March said, “Iunderstand now why the poor people don’t comeup here and live in this clean, handsome, respectablequarter of the town; they would be bored to death.On the whole, I think I should prefer Mott Street myself.”

In other walks the Marches tried to find some of thestreets they had wandered through the first day oftheir wedding journey in New York, so long ago.They could not make sure of them; but once they randown to the Battery, and easily made sure of that,though not in its old aspect. They recalled thehot morning, when they sauntered over the trodden weedthat covered the sickly grass-plots there, and sentimentalizedthe sweltering paupers who had crept out of the squalidtenements about for a breath of air after a sleeplessnight. Now the paupers were gone, and where theold mansions that had fallen to their use once stood,there towered aloft and abroad those heights and massesof many-storied brick-work for which architecturehas yet no proper form and aesthetics no name.The trees and shrubs, all in their young spring green,blew briskly over the guarded turf in the south windthat came up over the water; and in the well-pavedalleys the ghosts of eighteenth-century fashion mighthave met each other in their old haunts, and exchangedstately congratulations upon its vastly bettered condition,and perhaps puzzled a little over the colossal ladyon Bedloe’s Island, with her lifted torch, andstill more over the curving tracks and chalet-stationsof the Elevated road. It is an outlook of unrivalledbeauty across the bay, that smokes and flashes withthe in numerable stacks and sails of commerce, tothe hills beyond, where the moving forest of mastshalts at the shore, and roots itself in the grovesof the many villaged uplands. The Marches paidthe charming prospects a willing duty, and rejoicedin it as generously as if it had been their own.Perhaps it was, they decided. He said people ownedmore things in common than they were apt to think;and they drew the consolations of proprietorship fromthe excellent management of Castle Garden, which theypenetrated for a moment’s glimpse of the hugerotunda, where the immigrants first set foot on ourcontinent. It warmed their hearts, so easilymoved to any cheap sympathy, to see the friendly carethe nation took of these humble guests; they foundit even pathetic to hear the proper authority callingout the names of such as had kin or acquaintance waitingthere to meet them. No one appeared troubled oranxious; the officials had a conscientious civility;the government seemed to manage their welcome as wellas a private company or corporation could have done.In fact, it was after the simple strangers had leftthe government care that March feared their woes mightbegin; and he would have liked the government to followeach of them to his home, wherever he meant to fixit within our borders. He made note of the looksof the licensed runners and touters waiting for theimmigrants outside the government premises; he intendedto work them up into a dramatic effect in some sketch,but they remained mere material in his memorandum-book,together with some quaint old houses on the SixthAvenue road, which he had noticed on the way down.

On the way up, these were superseded in his regardby some hip-roof structures on the Ninth Avenue, whichhe thought more Dutch-looking. The perspectivesof the cross-streets toward the river were very lively,with their turmoil of trucks and cars and carts andhacks and foot passengers, ending in the chimneys andmasts of shipping, and final gleams of dancing water.At a very noisy corner, clangorous with some sortof ironworking, he made his wife enjoy with him thequiet sarcasm of an inn that called itself the Home-likeHotel, and he speculated at fantastic length on thegentle associations of one who should have passedhis youth under its roof.

III.

First and last, the Marches did a good deal of travelon the Elevated roads, which, he said, gave you suchglimpses of material aspects in the city as some violentinvasion of others’ lives might afford in humannature. Once, when the impulse of adventure wasvery strong in them, they went quite the length ofthe West Side lines, and saw the city pushing itsway by irregular advances into the country. Somespaces, probably held by the owners for that risein value which the industry of others providentiallygives to the land of the wise and good, it left vacantcomparatively far down the road, and built up othersat remoter points. It was a world of lofty apartmenthouses beyond the Park, springing up in isolated blocks,with stretches of invaded rusticity between, and hereand there an old country-seat standing dusty in itsbudding vines with the ground before it in rocky upheavalfor city foundations. But wherever it went orwherever it paused, New York gave its peculiar stamp;and the adventurers were amused to find One Hundredand Twenty-fifth Street inchoately like Twenty-thirdStreet and Fourteenth Street in its shops and shoppers.The butchers’ shops and milliners’ shopson the avenue might as well have been at Tenth asat One Hundredth Street.

The adventurers were not often so adventurous.They recognized that in their willingness to let theirfancy range for them, and to let speculation do thework of inquiry, they were no longer young. Theirpoint of view was singularly unchanged, and their impressionsof New York remained the same that they had been fifteenyears before: huge, noisy, ugly, kindly, it seemedto them now as it seemed then. The main differencewas that they saw it more now as a life, and then theyonly regarded it as a spectacle; and March could notrelease himself from a sense of complicity with it,no matter what whimsical, or alien, or critical attitudehe took. A sense of the striving and the sufferingdeeply possessed him; and this grew the more intenseas he gained some knowledge of the forces at work-forcesof pity, of destruction, of perdition, of salvation.He wandered about on Sunday not only through the streets,but into this tabernacle and that, as the spirit movedhim, and listened to those who dealt with Christianity

as a system of economics as well as a religion.He could not get his wife to go with him; she listenedto his report of what he heard, and trembled; it allseemed fantastic and menacing. She lamented theliterary peace, the intellectual refinement of thelife they had left behind them; and he owned it wasvery pretty, but he said it was not life—­itwas death-in-life. She liked to hear him talkin that strain of virtuous self-denunciation, but sheasked him, “Which of your prophets are you goingto follow?” and he answered: “All-all!And a fresh one every Sunday.” And so theygot their laugh out of it at last, but with some sadnessat heart, and with a dim consciousness that they hadgot their laugh out of too many things in life.

What really occupied and compassed his activities,in spite of his strenuous reveries of work beyondit, was his editorship. On its social side ithad not fulfilled all the expectations which Fulkerson’sradiant sketch of its duties and relations had causedhim to form of it. Most of the contributionscame from a distance; even the articles written inNew York reached him through the post, and so farfrom having his valuable time, as they called it,consumed in interviews with his collaborators, herarely saw any of them. The boy on the stairs,who was to fence him from importunate visitors, leda life of luxurious disoccupation, and whistled almostuninterruptedly. When any one came, March foundhimself embarrassed and a little anxious. Thevisitors were usually young men, terribly respectful,but cherishing, as he imagined, ideals and opinionschasmally different from his; and he felt in theirpresence something like an anachronism, somethinglike a fraud. He tried to freshen up his sympathieson them, to get at what they were really thinking andfeeling, and it was some time before he could understandthat they were not really thinking and feeling anythingof their own concerning their art, but were necessarily,in their quality of young, inexperienced men, mereacceptants of older men’s thoughts and feelings,whether they were tremendously conservative, as somewere, or tremendously progressive, as others were.Certain of them called themselves realists, certainromanticists; but none of them seemed to know whatrealism was, or what romanticism; they apparentlysupposed the difference a difference of material.March had imagined himself taking home to lunch ordinner the aspirants for editorial favor whom he liked,whether he liked their work or not; but this was notan easy matter. Those who were at all interestingseemed to have engagements and preoccupations; aftertwo or three experiments with the bashfuller sort—­thosewho had come up to the metropolis with manuscriptsin their hands, in the good old literary tradition—­hewondered whether he was otherwise like them when hewas young like them. He could not flatter himselfthat he was not; and yet he had a hope that the worldhad grown worse since his time, which his wife encouraged:

Mrs. March was not eager to pursue the hospitalitieswhich she had at first imagined essential to the literaryprosperity of ’Every Other Week’; herfamily sufficed her; she would willingly have seenno one out of it but the strangers at the weekly table-d’hotedinner, or the audiences at the theatres. March’sdevotion to his work made him reluctant to delegateit to any one; and as the summer advanced, and thequestion of where to go grew more vexed, he showeda man’s base willingness to shirk it for himselfby not going anywhere. He asked his wife whyshe did not go somewhere with the children, and hejoined her in a search for non-malarial regions onthe map when she consented to entertain this notion.But when it came to the point she would not go; heoffered to go with her then, and then she would notlet him. She said she knew he would be anxiousabout his work; he protested that he could take itwith him to any distance within a few hours, but shewould not be persuaded. She would rather he stayed;the effect would be better with Mr. Fulkerson; theycould make excursions, and they could all get off aweek or two to the seashore near Boston—­theonly real seashore—­in August. Theexcursions were practically confined to a single dayat Coney Island; and once they got as far as Bostonon the way to the seashore near Boston; that is, Mrs.March and the children went; an editorial exigencykept March at the last moment. The Boston streetsseemed very queer and clean and empty to the children,and the buildings little; in the horse-cars the Bostonfaces seemed to arraign their mother with a down-drawnseverity that made her feel very guilty. She knewthat this was merely the Puritan mask, the cast ofa dead civilization, which people of very amiableand tolerant minds were doomed to wear, and she sighedto think that less than a year of the heterogeneousgayety of New York should have made her afraid ofit. The sky seemed cold and gray; the east wind,which she had always thought so delicious in summer,cut her to the heart. She took her children upto the South End, and in the pretty square where theyused to live they stood before their alienated home,and looked up at its close-shuttered windows.The tenants must have been away, but Mrs. March hadnot the courage to ring and make sure, though shehad always promised herself that she would go all overthe house when she came back, and see how they hadused it; she could pretend a desire for somethingshe wished to take away. She knew she could notbear it now; and the children did not seem eager.She did not push on to the seaside; it would be forlornthere without their father; she was glad to go backto him in the immense, friendly homelessness of NewYork, and hold him answerable for the change, in herheart or her mind, which made its shapeless tumulta refuge and a consolation.

She found that he had been giving the cook a holiday,and dining about hither and thither with Fulkerson.Once he had dined with him at the widow’s (asthey always called Mrs. Leighton), and then had spentthe evening there, and smoked with Fulkerson and ColonelWoodburn on the gallery overlooking the back yard.They were all spending the summer in New York.The widow had got so good an offer for her house atSt. Barnaby for the summer that she could not refuseit; and the Woodburns found New York a watering-placeof exemplary coolness after the burning Augusts andSeptembers of Charlottesburg.

“You can stand it well enough in our climate,sir,” the colonel explained, “till youcome to the September heat, that sometimes runs wellinto October; and then you begin to lose your temper,sir. It’s never quite so hot as it is inNew York at times, but it’s hot longer, sir.”He alleged, as if something of the sort were necessary,the example of a famous Southwestern editor who spentall his summers in a New York hotel as the most luxuriousretreat on the continent, consulting the weather forecasts,and running off on torrid days to the mountains orthe sea, and then hurrying back at the promise ofcooler weather. The colonel had not found itnecessary to do this yet; and he had been reluctantto leave town, where he was working up a branch ofthe inquiry which had so long occupied him, in thelibraries, and studying the great problem of laborand poverty as it continually presented itself to himin the streets. He said that he talked with allsorts of people, whom he found monstrously civil,if you took them in the right way; and he went everywherein the city without fear and apparently without danger.March could not find out that he had ridden his hobbyinto the homes of want which he visited, or had proposedtheir enslavement to the inmates as a short and simplesolution of the great question of their lives; he appearedto have contented himself with the collection of factsfor the persuasion of the cultivated classes.It seemed to March a confirmation of this impressionthat the colonel should address his deductions fromthese facts so unsparingly to him; he listened witha respectful patience, for which Fulkerson afterwardpersonally thanked him. Fulkerson said it wasnot often the colonel found such a good listener;generally nobody listened but Mrs. Leighton, who thoughthis ideas were shocking, but honored him for holdingthem so conscientiously. Fulkerson was glad thatMarch, as the literary department, had treated theold gentleman so well, because there was an open feudbetween him and the art department. Beaton wasoutrageously rude, Fulkerson must say; though as forthat, the old colonel seemed quite able to take careof himself, and gave Beaton an unqualified contemptin return for his unmannerliness. The worst ofit was, it distressed the old lady so; she admiredBeaton as much as she respected the colonel, and sheadmired Beaton, Fulkerson thought, rather more thanMiss Leighton did; he asked March if he had noticedthem together. March had noticed them, but withoutany very definite impression except that Beaton seemedto give the whole evening to the girl. Afterwardhe recollected that he had fancied her rather harassedby his devotion, and it was this point that he wishedto present for his wife’s opinion.

“Girls often put on that air,” she said.“It’s one of their ways of teasing.But then, if the man was really very much in love,and she was only enough in love to be uncertain ofherself, she might very well seem troubled. Itwould be a very serious question. Girls oftendon’t know what to do in such a case.”

“Yes,” said March, “I’ve oftenbeen glad that I was not a girl, on that account.But I guess that on general principles Beaton is notmore in love than she is. I couldn’t imaginethat young man being more in love with anybody, unlessit was himself. He might be more in love withhimself than any one else was.”

“Well, he doesn’t interest me a greatdeal, and I can’t say Miss Leighton does, either.I think she can take care of herself. She hasherself very well in hand.”

“Why so censorious?” pleaded March.“I don’t defend her for having herselfin hand; but is it a fault?”

Mrs. March did not say. She asked, “Andhow does Mr. Fulkerson’s affair get on?”

“His affair? You really think it is one?Well, I’ve fancied so myself, and I’vehad an idea of some time asking him; Fulkerson strikesone as truly domesticable, conjugable at heart; butI’ve waited for him to speak.”

“I should think so.”

“Yes. He’s never opened on the subjectyet. Do you know, I think Fulkerson has his momentsof delicacy.”

“Moments! He’s all delicacy in regardto women.”

“Well, perhaps so. There is nothing inthem to rouse his advertising instincts.”

IV

The Dryfoos family stayed in town till August.Then the father went West again to look after hisinterests; and Mrs. Mandel took the two girls to oneof the great hotels in Saratoga. Fulkerson saidthat he had never seen anything like Saratoga forfashion, and Mrs. Mandel remembered that in her ownyoung ladyhood this was so for at least some weeksof the year. She had been too far withdrawn fromfashion since her marriage to know whether it wasstill so or not. In this, as in so many othermatters, the Dryfoos family helplessly relied uponFulkerson, in spite of Dryfoos’s angry determinationthat he should not run the family, and in spite ofChristine’s doubt of his omniscience; if he didnot know everything, she was aware that he knew morethan herself. She thought that they had a rightto have him go with them to Saratoga, or at leastgo up and engage their rooms beforehand; but Fulkersondid not offer to do either, and she did not quitesee her way to commanding his services. The youngladies took what Mela called splendid dresses withthem; they sat in the park of tall, slim trees whichthe hotel’s quadrangle enclosed, and listenedto the music in the morning, or on the long piazzain the afternoon and looked at the driving in the street,or in the vast parlors by night, where all the otherladies were, and they felt that they were of the best

there. But they knew nobody, and Mrs. Mandel wasso particular that Mela was prevented from continuingthe acquaintance even of the few young men who dancedwith her at the Saturday-night hops. They droveabout, but they went to places without knowing why,except that the carriage man took them, and they hadall the privileges of a proud exclusivism withoutdesiring them. Once a motherly matron seemed toperceive their isolation, and made overtures to them,but then desisted, as if repelled by Christine’ssuspicion, or by Mela’s too instant and hilariousgood-fellowship, which expressed itself in hoarse laughterand in a flow of talk full of topical and syntacticalfreedom. From time to time she offered to betChristine that if Mr. Fulkerson was only there theywould have a good time; she wondered what they wereall doing in New York, where she wished herself; sherallied her sister about Beaton, and asked her whyshe did not write and tell him to come up there.

Mela knew that Christine had expected Beaton to followthem. Some banter had passed between them tothis effect; he said he should take them in on hisway home to Syracuse. Christine would not havehesitated to write to him and remind him of his promise;but she had learned to distrust her literature withBeaton since he had laughed at the spelling in a scrapof writing which dropped out of her music-book onenight. She believed that he would not have laughedif he had known it was hers; but she felt that shecould hide better the deficiencies which were not committedto paper; she could manage with him in talking; shewas too ignorant of her ignorance to recognize themistakes she made then. Through her own passionshe perceived that she had some kind of fascinationfor him; she was graceful, and she thought it mustbe that; she did not understand that there was a kindof beauty in her small, irregular features that piquedand haunted his artistic sense, and a look in her blackeyes beyond her intelligence and intention. Oncehe sketched her as they sat together, and flatteredthe portrait without getting what he wanted in it;he said he must try her some time in color; and hesaid things which, when she made Mela repeat them,could only mean that he admired her more than anybodyelse. He came fitfully, but he came often, andshe rested content in a girl’s indefinitenessconcerning the affair; if her thought went beyondlovemaking to marriage, she believed that she couldhave him if she wanted him. Her father’smoney counted in this; she divined that Beaton waspoor; but that made no difference; she would have enoughfor both; the money would have counted as an irresistibleattraction if there had been no other.

The affair had gone on in spite of the sidelong looksof restless dislike with which Dryfoos regarded it;but now when Beaton did not come to Saratoga it necessarilydropped, and Christine’s content with it.She bore the trial as long as she could; she usedpride and resentment against it; but at last she couldnot bear it, and with Mela’s help she wrotea letter, bantering Beaton on his stay in New York,and playfully boasting of Saratoga. It seemedto them both that it was a very bright letter, andwould be sure to bring him; they would have had noscruple about sending it but for the doubt they hadwhether they had got some of the words right.Mela offered to bet Christine anything she dared thatthey were right, and she said, Send it anyway; it wasno difference if they were wrong. But Christinecould not endure to think of that laugh of Beaton’s,and there remained only Mrs. Mandel as authority onthe spelling. Christine dreaded her authorityon other points, but Mela said she knew she wouldnot interfere, and she undertook to get round her.Mrs. Mandel pronounced the spelling bad, and the tasteworse; she forbade them to send the letter; and Melafailed to get round her, though she threatened, ifMrs. Mandel would not tell her how to spell the wrongwords, that she would send the letter as it was; thenMrs. Mandel said that if Mr. Beaton appeared in Saratogashe would instantly take them both home. WhenMela reported this result, Christine accused her ofhaving mismanaged the whole business; she quarrelledwith her, and they called each other names. Christinedeclared that she would not stay in Saratoga, andthat if Mrs. Mandel did not go back to New York withher she should go alone. They returned the firstweek in September; but by that time Beaton had goneto see his people in Syracuse.

Conrad Dryfoos remained at home with his mother afterhis father went West. He had already taken sucha vacation as he had been willing to allow himself,and had spent it on a charity farm near the city, wherethe fathers with whom he worked among the poor on theEast Side in the winter had sent some of their wardsfor the summer. It was not possible to keep hisrecreation a secret at the office, and Fulkerson founda pleasure in figuring the jolly time Brother Conradmust have teaching farm work among those paupers andpotential reprobates. He invented details ofhis experience among them, and March could not alwayshelp joining in the laugh at Conrad’s humorlesshelplessness under Fulkerson’s burlesque denunciationof a summer outing spent in such dissipation.

They had time for a great deal of joking at the officeduring the season of leisure which penetrates in Augustto the very heart of business, and they all got onterms of greater intimacy if not greater friendlinessthan before. Fulkerson had not had so long todo with the advertising side of human nature withoutdeveloping a vein of cynicism, of no great depth,perhaps, but broad, and underlying his whole pointof view; he made light of Beaton’s solemnity,as he made light of Conrad’s humanity.The art editor, with abundant sarcasm, had no morehumor than the publisher, and was an easy prey inthe manager’s hands; but when he had been ledon by Fulkerson’s flatteries to make some betrayalof egotism, he brooded over it till he had thoughthow to revenge himself in elaborate insult. ForBeaton’s talent Fulkerson never lost his admiration;but his joke was to encourage him to give himself airsof being the sole source of the magazine’s prosperity.No bait of this sort was too obvious for Beaton toswallow; he could be caught with it as often as Fulkersonchose; though he was ordinarily suspicious as to themotives of people in saying things. With Marchhe got on no better than at first. He seemedto be lying in wait for some encroachment of the literarydepartment on the art department, and he met it nowand then with anticipative reprisal. After theserebuffs, the editor delivered him over to the manager,who could turn Beaton’s contrary-mindedness toaccount by asking the reverse of what he really wanteddone. This was what Fulkerson said; the factwas that he did get on with Beaton and March contentedhimself with musing upon the contradictions of a characterat once so vain and so offensive, so fickle and sosullen, so conscious and so simple.

After the first jarring contact with Dryfoos, theeditor ceased to feel the disagreeable fact of theold man’s mastery of the financial situation.None of the chances which might have made it painfuloccurred; the control of the whole affair remainedin Fulkerson’s hands; before he went West again,Dryfoos had ceased to come about the office, as if,having once worn off the novelty of the sense of owninga literary periodical, he was no longer interestedin it.

Yet it was a relief, somehow, when he left town, whichhe did not do without coming to take a formal leaveof the editor at his office. He seemed willingto leave March with a better impression than he hadhitherto troubled himself to make; he even said somecivil things about the magazine, as if its successpleased him; and he spoke openly to March of his hopethat his son would finally become interested in itto the exclusion of the hopes and purposes which dividedthem. It seemed to March that in the old man’swarped and toughened heart he perceived a disappointedlove for his son greater than for his other children;but this might have been fancy. Lindau came inwith some copy while Dryfoos was there, and March

introduced them. When Lindau went out, Marchexplained to Dryfoos that he had lost his hand in thewar; and he told him something of Lindau’s careeras he had known it. Dryfoos appeared greatlypleased that ‘Every Other Week’ was givingLindau work. He said that he had helped to enlista good many fellows for the war, and had paid moneyto fill up the Moffitt County quota under the latercalls for troops. He had never been an Abolitionist,but he had joined the Anti-Nebraska party in ’55,and he had voted for Fremont and for every RepublicanPresident since then.

At his own house March saw more of Lindau than ofany other contributor, but the old man seemed to thinkthat he must transact all his business with Marchat his place of business. The transaction hadsome peculiarities which perhaps made this necessary.Lindau always expected to receive his money when hebrought his copy, as an acknowledgment of the immediateright of the laborer to his hire; and he would nottake it in a check because he did not approve of banks,and regarded the whole system of banking as the capitalisticmanipulation of the people’s money. Hewould receive his pay only from March’s hand,because he wished to be understood as working forhim, and honestly earning money honestly earned; andsometimes March inwardly winced a little at lettingthe old man share the increase of capital won by suchspeculation as Dryfoos’s, but he shook off thefeeling. As the summer advanced, and the artistsand classes that employed Lindau as a model left townone after another, he gave largely of his increasingleisure to the people in the office of ‘EveryOther Week.’ It was pleasant for March tosee the respect with which Conrad Dryfoos always usedhim, for the sake of his hurt and his gray beard.There was something delicate and fine in it, and therewas nothing unkindly on Fulkerson’s part inthe hostilities which usually passed between himselfand Lindau. Fulkerson bore himself reverentlyat times, too, but it was not in him to keep thatup, especially when Lindau appeared with more beeraboard than, as Fulkerson said, he could manage shipshape.On these occasions Fulkerson always tried to starthim on the theme of the unduly rich; he made himselfthe champion of monopolies, and enjoyed the invectiveswhich Lindau heaped upon him as a slave of capital;he said that it did him good.

One day, with the usual show of writhing under Lindau’sscorn, he said, “Well, I understand that althoughyou despise me now, Lindau—­”

“I ton’t desbise you,” the old manbroke in, his nostrils swelling and his eyes flamingwith excitement, “I bity you.”

“Well, it seems to come to the same thing inthe end,” said Fulkerson. “What Iunderstand is that you pity me now as the slave ofcapital, but you would pity me a great deal more ifI was the master of it.”

“How you mean?”

“If I was rich.”

“That would tebendt,” said Lindau, tryingto control himself. “If you hat inheritedtyour money, you might pe innocent; but if you hat mateit, efery man that resbectedt himself would haf toask how you mate it, and if you hat mate moch, hewould know—­”

“Hold on; hold on, now, Lindau! Ain’tthat rather un-American doctrine? We’reall brought up, ain’t we, to honor the man thatmade his money, and look down—­or try tolook down; sometimes it’s difficult on the fellowthat his father left it to?”

The old man rose and struck his breast. “OnAmerigan!” he roared, and, as he went on, hisaccent grew more and more uncertain. “Whatiss Amerigan? Dere iss no Ameriga any more!You start here free and brafe, and you glaim for eferyman de right to life, liperty, and de bursuit of habbiness.And where haf you entedt? No man that vorks vithhis handts among you has the liperty to bursue hishabbiness. He iss the slafe of some richer man,some gompany, some gorporation, dat crindt him downto the least he can lif on, and that rops him of themarchin of his earnings that he knight pe habby on.Oh, you Amerigans, you haf cot it down goldt, as yousay! You ton’t puy foters; you puy lechislaturesand goncressmen; you puy gourts; you puy gombetitors;you pay infentors not to infent; you atfertise, andthe gounting-room sees dat de etitorial-room toesn’ttink.”

“Yes, we’ve got a little arrangement ofthat sort with March here,” said Fulkerson.

“Oh, I am sawry,” said the old man, contritely,“I meant noting bersonal. I ton’ttink we are all cuilty or gorrubt, and efen among therich there are goodt men. But gabidal”—­hispassion rose again—­“where you findgabidal, millions of money that a man hass cot togederin fife, ten, twenty years, you findt the smell oftears and ploodt! Dat iss what I say. Andyou cot to loog oudt for yourself when you meet a richman whether you meet an honest man.”

“Well,” said Fulkerson, “I wishI was a subject of suspicion with you, Lindau.By-the-way,” he added, “I understand thatyou think capital was at the bottom of the veto ofthat pension of yours.”

“What bension? What feto?”—­Theold man flamed up again. “No bension ofmine was efer fetoedt. I renounce my bension,begause I would sgorn to dake money from a gofernmentthat I ton’t peliefe in any more. Whereyou hear that story?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Fulkerson,rather embarrassed. “It’s commontalk.”

“It’s a gommon lie, then! When thetime gome dat dis iss a free gountry again, then Idake a bension again for my woundts; but I would sdarfebefore I dake a bension now from a rebublic dat issbought oap by monobolies, and ron by drusts and gompines,and railroadts andt oil gompanies.”

“Look out, Lindau,” said Fulkerson.“You bite yourself mit dat dog some day.”But when the old man, with a ferocious gesture of renunciation,whirled out of the place, he added: “I guessI went a little too far that time. I touchedhim on a sore place; I didn’t mean to; I heardsome talk about his pension being vetoed from MissLeighton.” He addressed these exculpationsto March’s grave face, and to the pitying deprecationin the eyes of Conrad Dryfoos, whom Lindau’sroaring wrath had summoned to the door. “ButI’ll make it all right with him the next timehe comes. I didn’t know he was loaded,or I wouldn’t have monkeyed with him.”

“Lindau does himself injustice when he getsto talking in that way,” said March. “Ihate to hear him. He’s as good an Americanas any of us; and it’s only because he has toohigh an ideal of us—­”

“Oh, go on! Rub it in—­rub itin!” cried Fulkerson, clutching his hair insuffering, which was not altogether burlesque.“How did I know he had renounced his ‘bension’?Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know it myself. I onlyknew that he had none, and I didn’t ask, forI had a notion that it might be a painful subject.”

Fulkerson tried to turn it off lightly. “Well,he’s a noble old fellow; pity he drinks.”March would not smile, and Fulkerson broke out:“Dog on it! I’ll make it up to theold fool the next time he comes. I don’tlike that dynamite talk of his; but any man that’sgiven his hand to the country has got mine in hisgrip for good. Why, March! You don’tsuppose I wanted to hurt his feelings, do you?”

“Why, of course not, Fulkerson.”

But they could not get away from a certain ruefulnessfor that time, and in the evening Fulkerson came roundto March’s to say that he had got Lindau’saddress from Conrad, and had looked him up at his lodgings.

“Well, there isn’t so much bric-a-bracthere, quite, as Mrs. Green left you; but I’vemade it all right with Lindau, as far as I’mconcerned. I told him I didn’t know whenI spoke that way, and I honored him for sticking tohis ‘brinciples’; I don’t believein his ‘brincibles’; and we wept on eachother’s necks—­at least, he did.Dogged if he didn’t kiss me before I knew whathe was up to. He said I was his chenerous gongfriendt, and he begged my barton if he had said anythingto wound me. I tell you it was an affecting scene,March; and rats enough round in that old barrackswhere he lives to fit out a first-class case of deliriumtremens. What does he stay there for? He’snot obliged to?”

Lindau’s reasons, as March repeated them, affectedFulkerson as deliciously comical; but after that heconfined his pleasantries at the office to Beatonand Conrad Dryfoos, or, as he said, he spent the restof the summer in keeping Lindau smoothed up.

It is doubtful if Lindau altogether liked this aswell. Perhaps he missed the occasions Fulkersonused to give him of bursting out against the millionaires;and he could not well go on denouncing as the slafeof gabidal a man who had behaved to him as Fulkersonhad done, though Fulkerson’s servile relationsto capital had been in nowise changed by his noplegonduct.

Their relations continued to wear this irksome characterof mutual forbearance; and when Dryfoos returned inOctober and Fulkerson revived the question of thatdinner in celebration of the success of ’EveryOther Week,’ he carried his complaisance toan extreme that alarmed March for the consequences.

V.

“You see,” Fulkerson explained, “Ifind that the old man has got an idea of his own aboutthat banquet, and I guess there’s some sensein it. He wants to have a preliminary littledinner, where we can talk the thing up first-halfa dozen of us; and he wants to give us the dinner athis house. Well, that’s no harm. Idon’t believe the old man ever gave a dinner,and he’d like to show off a little; there’sa good deal of human nature in the old man, afterall. He thought of you, of course, and ColonelWoodburn, and Beaton, and me at the foot of the table;and Conrad; and I suggested Kendricks: he’ssuch a nice little chap; and the old man himself broughtup the idea of Lindau. He said you told him somethingabout him, and he asked why couldn’t we havehim, too; and I jumped at it.”

“Have Lindau to dinner?” asked March.

“Certainly; why not? Father Dryfoos hasa notion of paying the old fellow a compliment forwhat he done for the country. There won’tbe any trouble about it. You can sit alongsideof him, and cut up his meat for him, and help himto things—­”

“Yes, but it won’t do, Fulkerson!I don’t believe Lindau ever had on a dress-coatin his life, and I don’t believe his ‘brincibles’would let him wear one.”

“Well, neither had Dryfoos, for the matter ofthat. He’s as high-principled as old Pan-Electrichimself, when it comes to a dress-coat,” saidFulkerson. “We’re all going to goin business dress; the old man stipulated for that.

“It isn’t the dress-coat alone,”March resumed. “Lindau and Dryfoos wouldn’tget on. You know they’re opposite polesin everything. You mustn’t do it.Dryfoos will be sure to say something to outrage Lindau’s‘brincibles,’ and there’ll be anexplosion. It’s all well enough for Dryfoosto feel grateful to Lindau, and his wish to honor himdoes him credit; but to have Lindau to dinner isn’tthe way. At the best, the old fellow would bevery unhappy in such a house; he would have a badconscience; and I should be sorry to have him feelthat he’d been recreant to his ‘brincibles’;they’re about all he’s got, and whateverwe think of them, we’re bound to respect hisfidelity to them.” March warmed towardLindau in taking this view of him. “I shouldfeel ashamed if I didn’t protest against hisbeing put in a false position. After all, he’smy old friend, and I shouldn’t like to have himdo himself injustice if he is a crank.”

“Of course,” said Fulkerson, with sometrouble in his face. “I appreciate yourfeeling. But there ain’t any danger,”he added, buoyantly. “Anyhow, you spoketoo late, as the Irishman said to the chicken whenhe swallowed him in a fresh egg. I’ve askedLindau, and he’s accepted with blayzure; that’swhat he says.”

March made no other comment than a shrug.

“You’ll see,” Fulkerson continued,“it ’ll go off all right. I’llengage to make it, and I won’t hold anybodyelse responsible.”

In the course of his married life March had learnednot to censure the irretrievable; but this was justwhat his wife had not learned; and she poured outso much astonishment at what Fulkerson had done, andso much disapproval, that March began to palliatethe situation a little.

“After all, it isn’t a question of lifeand death; and, if it were, I don’t see howit’s to be helped now.”

“Oh, it’s not to be helped now. ButI am surprised at Mr. Fulkerson.”

“Well, Fulkerson has his moments of being merelyhuman, too.”

Mrs. March would not deign a direct defence of herfavorite. “Well, I’m glad there arenot to be ladies.”

“I don’t know. Dryfoos thought ofhaving ladies, but it seems your infallible Fulkersonoverruled him. Their presence might have keptLindau and our host in bounds.”

It had become part of the Marches’ conjugaljoke for him to pretend that she could allow nothingwrong in Fulkerson, and he now laughed with a mockingair of having expected it when she said: “Well,then, if Mr. Fulkerson says he will see that it allcomes out right, I suppose you must trust his tact.I wouldn’t trust yours, Basil. The firstwrong step was taken when Mr. Lindau was asked tohelp on the magazine.”

“Well, it was your infallible Fulkerson thattook the step, or at least suggested it. I’mhappy to say I had totally forgotten my early friend.”

Mrs. March was daunted and silenced for a moment.Then she said: “Oh, pshaw! You knowwell enough he did it to please you.”

“I’m very glad he didn’t do it toplease you, Isabel,” said her husband, withaffected seriousness. “Though perhaps hedid.”

He began to look at the humorous aspect of the affair,which it certainly had, and to comment on the singularincongruities which ’Every Other Week’was destined to involve at every moment of its career.“I wonder if I’m mistaken in supposingthat no other periodical was ever like it. Perhapsall periodicals are like it. But I don’tbelieve there’s another publication in New Yorkthat could bring together, in honor of itself, a fraternityand equality crank like poor old Lindau, and a belatedsociological crank like Woodburn, and a truculent speculatorlike old Dryfoos, and a humanitarian dreamer likeyoung Dryfoos, and a sentimentalist like me, and anondescript like Beaton, and a pure advertising essencelike Fulkerson, and a society spirit like Kendricks.If we could only allow one another to talk uninterruptedlyall the time, the dinner would be the greatest successin the world, and we should come home full of thehighest mutual respect. But I suspect we can’tmanage that—­even your infallible Fulkersoncouldn’t work it—­and I’m afraidthat there’ll be some listening that ’llspoil the pleasure of the time.”

March was so well pleased with this view of the casethat he suggested the idea involved to Fulkerson.Fulkerson was too good a fellow not to laugh at anotherman’s joke, but he laughed a little ruefully,and he seemed worn with more than one kind of carein the interval that passed between the present timeand the night of the dinner.

Dryfoos necessarily depended upon him for advice concerningthe scope and nature of the dinner, but he receivedthe advice suspiciously, and contested points of obviouspropriety with pertinacious stupidity. Fulkersonsaid that when it came to the point he would ratherhave had the thing, as he called it, at Delmonico’sor some other restaurant; but when he found that Dryfoos’spride was bound up in having it at his own house,he gave way to him. Dryfoos also wanted his woman-cookto prepare the dinner, but Fulkerson persuaded himthat this would not do; he must have it from a caterer.Then Dryfoos wanted his maids to wait at table, butFulkerson convinced him that this would be incongruousat a man’s dinner. It was decided thatthe dinner should be sent in from Frescobaldi’s,and Dryfoos went with Fulkerson to discuss it withthe caterer. He insisted upon having everythingexplained to him, and the reason for having it, andnot something else in its place; and he treated Fulkersonand Frescobaldi as if they were in league to imposeupon him. There were moments when Fulkerson sawthe varnish of professional politeness cracking onthe Neapolitan’s volcanic surface, and caughta glimpse of the lava fires of the cook’s naturebeneath; he trembled for Dryfoos, who was walkingrough-shod over him in the security of an Americanwho had known how to make his money, and must knowhow to spend it; but he got him safely away at last,and gave Frescobaldi a wink of sympathy for his shrugof exhaustion as they turned to leave him.

It was at first a relief and then an anxiety withFulkerson that Lindau did not come about after acceptingthe invitation to dinner, until he appeared at Dryfoos’shouse, prompt to the hour. There was, to be sure,nothing to bring him; but Fulkerson was uneasily awarethat Dryfoos expected to meet him at the office, andperhaps receive some verbal acknowledgment of thehonor done him. Dryfoos, he could see, thoughthe was doing all his invited guests a favor; and whilehe stood in a certain awe of them as people of muchgreater social experience than himself, regarded themwith a kind of contempt, as people who were going tohave a better dinner at his house than they couldever afford to have at their own. He had finallynot spared expense upon it; after pushing Frescobaldito the point of eruption with his misgivings and suspicionsat the first interview, he had gone to him a secondtime alone, and told him not to let the money standbetween him and anything he would like to do.In the absence of Frescobaldi’s fellow-conspiratorhe restored himself in the caterer’s esteemby adding whatever he suggested; and Fulkerson, aftertrembling for the old man’s nigg*rdliness, wasnow afraid of a fantastic profusion in the feast.Dryfoos had reduced the scale of the banquet as regardedthe number of guests, but a confusing remembrance ofwhat Fulkerson had wished to do remained with himin part, and up to the day of the dinner he dropped

in at Frescobaldi’s and ordered more dishes andmore of them. He impressed the Italian as an Americanoriginal of a novel kind; and when he asked Fulkersonhow Dryfoos had made his money, and learned that itwas primarily in natural gas, he made note of someof his eccentric tastes as peculiarities that wereto be caressed in any future natural-gas millionairewho might fall into his hands. He did not begrudgethe time he had to give in explaining to Dryfoos therelation of the different wines to the different dishes;Dryfoos was apt to substitute a costlier wine wherehe could for a cheaper one, and he gave Frescobaldicarte blanche for the decoration of the table withpieces of artistic confectionery. Among thesethe caterer designed one for a surprise to his patronand a delicate recognition of the source of his wealth,which he found Dryfoos very willing to talk about,when he intimated that he knew what it was.

Dryfoos left it to Fulkerson to invite the guests,and he found ready acceptance of his politeness fromKendricks, who rightly regarded the dinner as a partof the ‘Every Other Week’ business, andwas too sweet and kind-hearted, anyway, not to seemvery glad to come. March was a matter of course;but in Colonel Woodburn, Fulkerson encountered a reluctancewhich embarrassed him the more because he was consciousof having, for motives of his own, rather straineda point in suggesting the colonel to Dryfoos as afit subject for invitation. There had been onlyone of the colonel’s articles printed as yet,and though it had made a sensation in its way, andstarted the talk about that number, still it did notfairly constitute him a member of the staff, or evenentitle him to recognition as a regular contributor.Fulkerson felt so sure of pleasing him with Dryfoos’smessage that he delivered it in full family councilat the widow’s. His daughter received itwith all the enthusiasm that Fulkerson had hoped for,but the colonel said, stiffly, “I have not thepleasure of knowing Mr. Dryfoos.” Miss Woodburnappeared ready to fall upon him at this, but controlledherself, as if aware that filial authority had itslimits, and pressed her lips together without sayinganything.

“Yes, I know,” Fulkerson admitted.“But it isn’t a usual case. Mr. Dryfoosdon’t go in much for the conventionalities; Ireckon he don’t know much about ’em, cometo boil it down; and he hoped”—­hereFulkerson felt the necessity of inventing a little—­“thatyou would excuse any want of ceremony; it’sto be such an informal affair, anyway; we’reall going in business dress, and there ain’tgoing to be any ladies. He’d have comehimself to ask you, but he’s a kind of a bashfulold fellow. It’s all right, Colonel Woodburn.”

“I take it that it is, sir,” said thecolonel, courteously, but with unabated state, “comingfrom you. But in these matters we have no rightto burden our friends with our decisions.”

“Of course, of course,” said Fulkerson,feeling that he had been delicately told to mind hisown business.

“I understand,” the colonel went on, “therelation that Mr. Dryfoos bears to the periodicalin which you have done me the honor to print my papah,but this is a question of passing the bounds of a purelybusiness connection, and of eating the salt of a manwhom you do not definitely know to be a gentleman.”

“Mah goodness!” his daughter broke in.“If you bah your own salt with his money—­”

“It is supposed that I earn his money beforeI buy my salt with it,” returned her father,severely. “And in these times, when moneyis got in heaps, through the natural decay of ournefarious commercialism, it behooves a gentleman tobe scrupulous that the hospitality offered him isnot the profusion of a thief with his booty. Idon’t say that Mr. Dryfoos’s good-fortuneis not honest. I simply say that I know nothingabout it, and that I should prefer to know somethingbefore I sat down at his board.”

“You’re all right, colonel,” saidFulkerson, “and so is Mr. Dryfoos. I giveyou my word that there are no flies on his personalintegrity, if that’s what you mean. He’shard, and he’d push an advantage, but I don’tbelieve he would take an unfair one. He’sspeculated and made money every time, but I neverheard of his wrecking a railroad or belonging to anyswindling company or any grinding monopoly. Hedoes chance it in stocks, but he’s always playedon the square, if you call stocks gambling.”

“May I, think this over till morning?”asked the colonel.

“Oh, certainly, certainly,” said Fulkerson,eagerly. “I don’t know as there’sany hurry.”

Miss Woodburn found a chance to murmur to him beforehe went: “He’ll come. And Ah’mso much oblahged, Mr. Fulkerson. Ah jost knowit’s all you’ doing, and it will givepapa a chance to toak to some new people, and getaway from us evahlastin’ women for once.”

“I don’t see why any one should want todo that,” said Fulkerson, with grateful gallantry.“But I’ll be dogged,” he said toMarch when he told him about this odd experience,“if I ever expected to find Colonel Woodburnon old Lindau’s ground. He did come roundhandsomely this morning at breakfast and apologizedfor taking time to think the invitation over beforehe accepted. ‘You understand,’ hesays, ’that if it had been to the table of somefriend not so prosperous as Mr. Dryfoos—­yourfriend Mr. March, for instance—­it wouldhave been sufficient to know that he was your friend.But in these days it is a duty that a gentleman oweshimself to consider whether he wishes to know a richman or not. The chances of making money disreputablyare so great that the chances are against a man whohas made money if he’s made a great deal ofit.’”

March listened with a face of ironical insinuation.“That was very good; and he seems to have hada good deal of confidence in your patience and inyour sense of his importance to the occasion—­”

“No, no,” Fulkerson protested, “there’snone of that kind of thing about the colonel.I told him to take time to think it over; he’sthe simplest-hearted old fellow in the world.”

“I should say so. After all, he didn’tgive any reason he had for accepting. But perhapsthe young lady had the reason.”

“Pshaw, March!” said Fulkerson.

VI.

So far as the Dryfoos family was concerned, the dinnermight as well have been given at Frescobaldi’srooms. None of the ladies appeared. Mrs.Dryfoos was glad to escape to her own chamber, whereshe sat before an autumnal fire, shaking her headand talking to herself at times, with the forebodingof evil which old women like her make part of theirreligion. The girls stood just out of sight atthe head of the stairs, and disputed which guest itwas at each arrival; Mrs. Mandel had gone to her roomto write letters, after beseeching them not to standthere. When Kendricks came, Christine gave Melaa little pinch, equivalent to a little mocking shriek;for, on the ground of his long talk with Mela at Mrs.Horn’s, in the absence of any other admirer,they based a superstition of his interest in her;when Beaton came, Mela returned the pinch, but awkwardly,so that it hurt, and then Christine involuntarily struckher.

Frescobaldi’s men were in possession everywherethey had turned the cook out of her kitchen and thewaitress out of her pantry; the reluctant Irishmanat the door was supplemented by a vivid Italian, whospoke French with the guests, and said, “Bien,Monsieur,” and “toute suite,” and“Merci!” to all, as he took their hatsand coats, and effused a hospitality that needed nolanguage but the gleam of his eyes and teeth and theplay of his eloquent hands. From his professionaldress-coat, lustrous with the grease spotted on itat former dinners and parties, they passed to thefrocks of the elder and younger Dryfoos in the drawing-room,which assumed informality for the affair, but did notput their wearers wholly at their ease. The father’scoat was of black broadcloth, and he wore it unbuttoned;the skirts were long, and the sleeves came down tohis knuckles; he shook hands with his guests, andthe same dryness seemed to be in his palm and throat,as he huskily asked each to take a chair. Conrad’scoat was of modern texture and cut, and was buttonedabout him as if it concealed a bad conscience withinits lapels; he met March with his entreating smile,and he seemed no more capable of coping with the situationthan his father. They both waited for Fulkerson,who went about and did his best to keep life in theparty during the half-hour that passed before theysat down at dinner. Beaton stood gloomily aloof,as if waiting to be approached on the right basisbefore yielding an inch of his ground; Colonel Woodburn,awaiting the moment when he could sally out on hishobby, kept himself intrenched within the dignityof a gentleman, and examined askance the figure ofold Lindau as he stared about the room, with his finehead up, and his empty sleeve dangling over his wrist.March felt obliged to him for wearing a new coat in

the midst of that hostile luxury, and he was glad tosee Dryfoos make up to him and begin to talk withhim, as if he wished to show him particular respect,though it might have been because he was less afraidof him than of the others. He heard Lindau saying,“Boat, the name is Choarman?” and Dryfoosbeginning to explain his Pennsylvania Dutch origin,and he suffered himself, with a sigh of relief, tofall into talk with Kendricks, who was always pleasant;he was willing to talk about something besides himself,and had no opinions that he was not ready to holdin abeyance for the time being out of kindness to others.In that group of impassioned individualities, Marchfelt him a refuge and comfort—­with hisharmless dilettante intention of some day writing anovel, and his belief that he was meantime collectingmaterial for it.

Fulkerson, while breaking the ice for the whole company,was mainly engaged in keeping Colonel Woodburn thawedout. He took Kendricks away from March and presentedhim to the colonel as a person who, like himself,was looking into social conditions; he put one handon Kendricks’s shoulder, and one on the colonel’s,and made some flattering joke, apparently at the expenseof the young fellow, and then left them. Marchheard Kendricks protest in vain, and the colonel say,gravely: “I do not wonder, sir, that thesethings interest you. They constitute a problemwhich society must solve or which will dissolve society,”and he knew from that formula, which the colonel had,once used with him, that he was laying out a roadfor the exhibition of the hobby’s paces later.

Fulkerson came back to March, who had turned towardConrad Dryfoos, and said, “If we don’tget this thing going pretty soon, it ’ll be thedeath of me,” and just then Frescobaldi’sbutler came in and announced to Dryfoos that dinnerwas served. The old man looked toward Fulkersonwith a troubled glance, as if he did not know whatto do; he made a gesture to touch Lindau’s elbow.Fulkerson called out, “Here’s Colonel Woodburn,Mr. Dryfoos,” as if Dryfoos were looking forhim; and he set the example of what he was to do bytaking Lindau’s arm himself. “Mr.Lindau is going to sit at my end of the table, alongsideof March. Stand not upon the order of your going,gentlemen, but fall in at once.” He contrivedto get Dryfoos and the colonel before him, and helet March follow with Kendricks. Conrad camelast with Beaton, who had been turning over the musicat the piano, and chafing inwardly at the whole affair.At the table Colonel Woodburn was placed on Dryfoos’sright, and March on his left. March sat on Fulkerson’sright, with Lindau next him; and the young men occupiedthe other seats.

“Put you next to March, Mr. Lindau,” saidFulkerson, “so you can begin to put Apollinarisin his champagne-glass at the right moment; you knowhis little weakness of old; sorry to say it’sgrown on him.”

March laughed with kindly acquiescence in Fulkerson’swish to start the gayety, and Lindau patted him onthe shoulder. “I know hiss veakness.If he liges a class of vine, it iss begause his loafingludes efen hiss enemy, as Shakespeare galled it.”

“Ah, but Shakespeare couldn’t have beenthinking of champagne,” said Kendricks.

“I suppose, sir,” Colonel Woodburn interposed,with lofty courtesy, “champagne could hardlyhave been known in his day.”

“I suppose not, colonel,” returned theyounger man, deferentially. “He seemedto think that sack and sugar might be a fault; buthe didn’t mention champagne.”

“Perhaps he felt there was no question aboutthat,” suggested Beaton, who then felt thathe had not done himself justice in the sally.

“I wonder just when champagne did come in,”said March.

“I know when it ought to come in,” saidFulkerson. “Before the soup!”

They all laughed, and gave themselves the air of drinkingchampagne out of tumblers every day, as men like todo. Dryfoos listened uneasily; he did not quiteunderstand the allusions, though he knew what Shakespearewas, well enough; Conrad’s face expressed a gentledeprecation of joking on such a subject, but he saidnothing.

The talk ran on briskly through the dinner. Theyoung men tossed the ball back and forth; they madesome wild shots, but they kept it going, and theylaughed when they were hit. The wine loosed ColonelWoodburn’s tongue; he became very companionablewith the young fellows; with the feeling that a literarydinner ought to have a didactic scope, he praisedScott and Addison as the only authors fit to form theminds of gentlemen.

Kendricks agreed with him, but wished to add the nameof Flaubert as a master of style. “Style,you know,” he added, “is the man.”

“Very true, sir; you are quite right, sir,”the colonel assented; he wondered who Flaubert was.

Beaton praised Baudelaire and Maupassant; he saidthese were the masters. He recited some luridverses from Baudelaire; Lindau pronounced them a disgraceto human nature, and gave a passage from Victor Hugoon Louis Napoleon, with his heavy German accent, andthen he quoted Schiller. “Ach, boat thatis a peaudifool! Not zo?” he demanded ofMarch.

“Yes, beautiful; but, of course, you know Ithink there’s nobody like Heine!”

Lindau threw back his great old head and laughed,showing a want of teeth under his mustache. Heput his hand on March’s back. “Thispoy—­he was a poy den—­wars sogracy to pekin reading Heine that he gommence withthe tictionary bevore he knows any Grammar, and vebick it out vort by vort togeder.”

“He was a pretty cay poy in those days, heigh,Lindau?” asked Fulkerson, burlesquing the oldman’s accent, with an impudent wink that madeLindau himself laugh. “But in the darkages, I mean, there in Indianapolis. Just howlong ago did you old codgers meet there, anyway?”Fulkerson saw the restiveness in Dryfoos’s eyeat the purely literary course the talk had taken;he had intended it to lead up that way to business,to ’Every Other Week;’ but he saw thatit was leaving Dryfoos too far out, and he wishedto get it on the personal ground, where everybody isat home.

“Ledt me zee,” mused Lindau. “Wassit in fifty-nine or zixty, Passil? Idt wass ayear or dwo pefore the war proke oudt, anyway.”

“Those were exciting times,” said Dryfoos,making his first entry into the general talk.“I went down to Indianapolis with the first companyfrom our place, and I saw the red-shirts pouring ineverywhere. They had a song,

“Oh, never mind the weather, butgit over double trouble,
For we’re bound for the landof Canaan.”

The fellows locked arms and went singin’ itup and down four or five abreast in the moonlight;crowded everybody’ else off the sidewalk.”

“I remember, I remember,” said Lindau,nodding his head slowly up and down. “Acoodt many off them nefer gome pack from that landtof Ganaan, Mr. Dryfoos?”

“You’re right, Mr. Lindau. But Ireckon it was worth it—­the country we’vegot now. Here, young man!” He caught thearm of the waiter who was going round with the champagnebottle. “Fill up Mr. Lindau’s glass,there. I want to drink the health of those oldtimes with him. Here’s to your empty sleeve,Mr. Lindau. God bless it! No offence to you,Colonel Woodburn,” said Dryfoos, turning tohim before he drank.

“Not at all, sir, not at all,” said thecolonel. “I will drink with you, if youwill permit me.”

“We’ll all drink—­standing!”cried Fulkerson. “Help March to get up,somebody! Fill high the bowl with Samian Apollinarisfor Coonrod! Now, then, hurrah for Lindau!”

They cheered, and hammered on the table with the buttsof their knife-handles. Lindau remained seated.The tears came into his eyes; he said, “I thankyou, chendlemen,” and hiccoughed.

“I’d ‘a’ went into the warmyself,” said Dryfoos, “but I was raisin’a family of young children, and I didn’t seehow I could leave my farm. But I helped to fillup the quota at every call, and when the volunteeringstopped I went round with the subscription paper myself;and we offered as good bounties as any in the State.My substitute was killed in one of the last skirmishes—­infact, after Lee’s surrender—­and I’vetook care of his family, more or less, ever since.”

“By-the-way, March,” said Fulkerson, “whatsort of an idea would it be to have a good war story—­mightbe a serial—­in the magazine? The warhas never fully panned out in fiction yet. Itwas used a good deal just after it was over, and thenit was dropped. I think it’s time to takeit up again. I believe it would be a card.”

It was running in March’s mind that Dryfooshad an old rankling shame in his heart for not havinggone into the war, and that he had often made thatexplanation of his course without having ever beensatisfied with it. He felt sorry for him; thefact seemed pathetic; it suggested a dormant noblenessin the man.

Beaton was saying to Fulkerson: “You mightget a series of sketches by substitutes; the substituteshaven’t been much heard from in the war literature.How would ‘The Autobiography of a Substitute’do? You might follow him up to the moment hewas killed in the other man’s place, and inquirewhether he had any right to the feelings of a herowhen he was only hired in the place of one. Mightcall it ’The Career of a Deputy Hero.’”

“I fancy,” said March, “that therewas a great deal of mixed motive in the men who wentinto the war as well as in those who kept out of it.We canonized all that died or suffered in it, butsome of them must have been self-seeking and low-minded,like men in other vocations.” He foundhimself saying this in Dryfoos’s behalf; theold man looked at him gratefully at first, he thought,and then suspiciously.

Lindau turned his head toward him and said: “Youare righdt, Passil; you are righdt. I haf zeenon the fieldt of pattle the voarst eggsipitions ofhuman paseness—­chelousy, fanity, ecodisticbridte. I haf zeen men in the face off deathitself gofferned by motifes as low as—­aspusiness motifes.”

“Well,” said Fulkerson, “it wouldbe a grand thing for ‘Every Other Week’if we could get some of those ideas worked up intoa series. It would make a lot of talk.”

Colonel Woodburn ignored him in saying, “I think,Major Lindau—­”

“High brifate; prefet gorporal,” the oldman interrupted, in rejection of the title.

Hendricks laughed and said, with a glance of appreciationat Lindau, “Brevet corporal is good.”

Colonel Woodburn frowned a little, and passed overthe joke. “I think Mr. Lindau is right.Such exhibitions were common to both sides, thoughif you gentlemen will pardon me for saying so, I thinkthey were less frequent on ours. We were fightingmore immediately for existence. We were fewerthan you were, and we knew it; we felt more intenselythat if each were not for all, then none was for any.”

The colonel’s words made their impression.Dryfoos said, with authority, “That is so.”

“Colonel Woodburn,” Fulkerson called out,“if you’ll work up those ideas into ashort paper—­say, three thousand words—­I’llengage to make March take it.”

The colonel went on without replying: “ButMr. Lindau is right in characterizing some of themotives that led men to the cannon’s mouth asno higher than business motives, and his comparisonis the most forcible that he could have used.I was very much struck by it.”

The hobby was out, the colonel was in the saddle withso firm a seat that no effort sufficed to dislodgehim. The dinner went on from course to coursewith barbaric profusion, and from time to time Fulkersontried to bring the talk back to ‘Every OtherWeek.’ But perhaps because that was onlythe ostensible and not the real object of the dinner,which was to bring a number of men together underDryfoos’s roof, and make them the witnessesof his splendor, make them feel the power of his wealth,Fulkerson’s attempts failed. The colonelshowed how commercialism was the poison at the heartof our national life; how we began as a simple, agriculturalpeople, who had fled to these shores with the instinct,divinely implanted, of building a state such as thesun never shone upon before; how we had conqueredthe wilderness and the savage; how we had flung off,

in our struggle with the mother-country, the trammelsof tradition and precedent, and had settled down,a free nation, to the practice of the arts of peace;how the spirit of commercialism had stolen insidiouslyupon us, and the infernal impulse of competition hadembroiled us in a perpetual warfare of interests, developingthe worst passions of our nature, and teaching usto trick and betray and destroy one another in thestrife for money, till now that impulse had exhausteditself, and we found competition gone and the wholeeconomic problem in the hands of monopolies—­theStandard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the RubberTrust, and what not. And now what was the nextthing? Affairs could not remain as they were;it was impossible; and what was the next thing?

The company listened for the main part silently.Dryfoos tried to grasp the idea of commercialism asthe colonel seemed to hold it; he conceived of itas something like the dry-goods business on a vastscale, and he knew he had never been in that.He did not like to hear competition called infernal;he had always supposed it was something sacred; buthe approved of what Colonel Woodburn said of the StandardOil Company; it was all true; the Standard Oil hassqueezed Dryfoos once, and made him sell it a lotof oil-wells by putting down the price of oil so lowin that region that he lost money on every barrelhe pumped.

All the rest listened silently, except Lindau; atevery point the colonel made against the present conditionof things he said more and more fiercely, “Youare righdt, you are righdt.” His eyes glowed,his hand played with his knife-hilt. When thecolonel demanded, “And what is the next thing?”he threw himself forward, and repeated: “Yes,sir! What is the next thing?”

“Natural gas, by thunder!” shouted Fulkerson.

One of the waiters had profited by Lindau’sposture to lean over him and put down in the middleof the table a structure in white sugar. It expressedFrescobaldi’s conception of a derrick, and atouch of nature had been added in the flame of brandy,which burned luridly up from a small pit in the centreof the base, and represented the gas in combustionas it issued from the ground. Fulkerson burstinto a roar of laughter with the words that recognizedFrescobaldi’s personal tribute to Dryfoos.Everybody rose and peered over at the thing, whilehe explained the work of sinking a gas-well, as hehad already explained it to Frescobaldi. In themidst of his lecture he caught sight of the catererhimself, where he stood in the pantry doorway, smilingwith an artist’s anxiety for the effect of hismasterpiece.

“Come in, come in, Frescobaldi! We wantto congratulate you,” Fulkerson called to him.“Here, gentlemen! Here’s Frescobaldi’shealth.”

They all drank; and Frescobaldi, smiling brilliantlyand rubbing his hands as he bowed right and left,permitted himself to say to Dryfoos: “Youare please; no? You like?”

“First-rate, first-rate!” said the oldman; but when the Italian had bowed himself out andhis guests had sunk into their seats again, he saiddryly to Fulkerson, “I reckon they didn’thave to torpedo that well, or the derrick wouldn’tlook quite so nice and clean.”

“Yes,” Fulkerson answered, “andthat ain’t quite the style—­that littlewiggly-waggly blue flame—­that the gas actswhen you touch off a good vein of it. This mightdo for weak gas”; and he went on to explain:

“They call it weak gas when they tap it twoor three hundred feet down; and anybody can sink awell in his back yard and get enough gas to lightand heat his house. I remember one fellow thathad it blazing up from a pipe through a flower-bed,just like a jet of water from a fountain. My,my, my! You fel—­you gentlemen—­oughtto go out and see that country, all of you. Wishwe could torpedo this well, Mr. Dryfoos, and let ’emsee how it works! Mind that one you torpedoedfor me? You know, when they sink a well,”he went on to the company, “they can’talways most generally sometimes tell whether they’regoin’ to get gas or oil or salt water.Why, when they first began to bore for salt water outon the Kanawha, back about the beginning of the century,they used to get gas now and then, and then they consideredit a failure; they called a gas-well a blower, andgive it up in disgust; the time wasn’t ripe forgas yet. Now they bore away sometimes till theyget half-way to China, and don’t seem to strikeanything worth speaking of. Then they put a dynamitetorpedo down in the well and explode it. Theyhave a little bar of iron that they call a Go-devil,and they just drop it down on the business end of thetorpedo, and then stand from under, if you please!You hear a noise, and in about half a minute you beginto see one, and it begins to rain oil and mud andsalt water and rocks and pitchforks and adoptive citizens;and when it clears up the derrick’s painted—­gota coat on that ’ll wear in any climate.That’s what our honored host meant. Generallyget some visiting lady, when there’s one round,to drop the Go-devil. But that day we had toput up with Conrad here. They offered to let medrop it, but I declined. I told ’em I hadn’tmuch practice with Go-devils in the newspaper syndicatebusiness, and I wasn’t very well myself, anyway.Astonishing,” Fulkerson continued, with the airof relieving his explanation by an anecdote, “howreckless they get using dynamite when they’retorpedoing wells. We stopped at one place wherea fellow was handling the cartridges pretty freely,and Mr. Dryfoos happened to caution him a little,and that ass came up with one of ’em in his hand,and began to pound it on the buggy-wheel to show ushow safe it was. I turned green, I was so scared;but Mr. Dryfoos kept his color, and kind of coaxedthe fellow till he quit. You could see he wasthe fool kind, that if you tried to stop him he’dkeep on hammering that cartridge, just to show thatit wouldn’t explode, till he blew you into KingdomCome. When we got him to go away, Mr. Dryfoosdrove up to his foreman. ’Pay Sheney off,and discharge him on the spot,’ says he.’He’s too safe a man to have round; heknows too much about dynamite.’ I neversaw anybody so cool.”

Dryfoos modestly dropped his head under Fulkerson’sflattery and, without lifting it, turned his eyestoward Colonel Woodburn. “I had all sortsof men to deal with in developing my property outthere, but I had very little trouble with them, generallyspeaking.”

“Ah, ah! you foundt the laboring-man reasonable—­dractable—­tocile?”Lindau put in.

“Yes, generally speaking,” Dryfoos answered.“They mostly knew which side of their breadwas buttered. I did have one little difficultyat one time. It happened to be when Mr. Fulkersonwas out there. Some of the men tried to forma union—­”

“No, no!” cried Fulkerson. “Letme tell that! I know you wouldn’t do yourselfjustice, Mr. Dryfoos, and I want ’em to knowhow a strike can be managed, if you take it in time.You see, some of those fellows got a notion that thereought to be a union among the working-men to keep upwages, and dictate to the employers, and Mr. Dryfoos’sforeman was the ringleader in the business. Theyunderstood pretty well that as soon as he found itout that foreman would walk the plank, and so theywatched out till they thought they had Mr. Dryfoosjust where they wanted him—­everything onthe keen jump, and every man worth his weight in diamonds—­andthen they came to him, and—­told him to signa promise to keep that foreman to the end of the season,or till he was through with the work on the Dryfoosand Hendry Addition, under penalty of having themall knock off. Mr. Dryfoos smelled a mouse, buthe couldn’t tell where the mouse was; he sawthat they did have him, and he signed, of course.There wasn’t anything really against the fellow,anyway; he was a first-rate man, and he did his dutyevery time; only he’d got some of those ideasinto his head, and they turned it. Mr. Dryfoossigned, and then he laid low.”

March saw Lindau listening with a mounting intensity,and heard him murmur in German, “Shameful! shameful!”

Fulkerson went on: “Well, it wasn’tlong before they began to show their hand, but Mr.Dryfoos kept dark. He agreed to everything; therenever was such an obliging capitalist before; therewasn’t a thing they asked of him that he didn’tdo, with the greatest of pleasure, and all went merryas a marriage-bell till one morning a whole gang offresh men marched into the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition,under the escort of a dozen Pinkertons with repeatingrifles at half-co*ck, and about fifty fellows foundthemselves out of a job. You never saw such amad set.”

“Pretty neat,” said Kendricks, who lookedat the affair purely from an aesthetic point of view.“Such a coup as that would tell tremendouslyin a play.”

“That was vile treason,” said Lindau inGerman to March. “He’s an infamoustraitor! I cannot stay here. I must go.”

He struggled to rise, while March held him by thecoat, and implored him under his voice: “ForHeaven’s sake, don’t, Lindau! Youowe it to yourself not to make a scene, if you comehere.” Something in it all affected himcomically; he could not help laughing.

The others were discussing the matter, and seemednot to have noticed Lindau, who controlled himselfand sighed: “You are right. I musthave patience.”

Beaton was saying to Dryfoos, “Pity your Pinkertonscouldn’t have given them a few shots beforethey left.”

“No, that wasn’t necessary,” saidDryfoos. “I succeeded in breaking up theunion. I entered into an agreement with otherparties not to employ any man who would not swearthat he was non-union. If they had attemptedviolence, of course they could have been shot.But there was no fear of that. Those fellowscan always be depended upon to cut one another’sthroats in the long run.”

“But sometimes,” said Colonel Woodburn,who had been watching throughout. for a chance tomount his hobby again, “they make a good dealof trouble first. How was it in the great railroadstrike of ’77?”

“Well, I guess there was a little trouble thattime, colonel,” said Fulkerson. “Butthe men that undertake to override the laws and paralyzethe industries of a country like this generally getleft in the end.”

“Yes, sir, generally; and up to a certain point,always. But it’s the exceptional that isapt to happen, as well as the unexpected. Anda little reflection will convince any gentleman herethat there is always a danger of the exceptional inyour system. The fact is, those fellows havethe game in their own hands already. A strikeof the whole body of the Brotherhood of Engineersalone would starve out the entire Atlantic seaboardin a week; labor insurrection could make head at adozen given points, and your government couldn’tmove a man over the roads without the help of theengineers.”

“That is so,” said Kendrick, struck bythe dramatic character of the conjecture. Heimagined a fiction dealing with the situation as somethingalready accomplished.

“Why don’t some fellow do the Battle ofDorking act with that thing?” said Fulkerson.“It would be a card.”

“Exactly what I was thinking, Mr. Fulkerson,”said Kendricks.

Fulkerson laughed. “Telepathy—­clearcase of mind transference. Better see March,here, about it. I’d like to have it in ‘EveryOther Week.’ It would make talk.”

“Perhaps it might set your people to thinkingas well as talking,” said the colonel.

“Well, sir,” said Dryfoos, setting hislips so tightly together that his imperial stuck straightoutward, “if I had my way, there wouldn’tbe any Brotherhood of Engineers, nor any other kindof labor union in the whole country.”

“What!” shouted Lindau. “Youwould sobbress the unionss of the voarking-men?”

“Yes, I would.”

“And what would you do with the unionss of thegabidalists—­the drosts—­and gompines,and boolss? Would you dake the righdt from oneand gif it to the odder?”

“Yes, sir, I would,” said Dryfoos, witha wicked look at him.

Lindau was about to roar back at him with some furiousprotest, but March put his hand on his shoulder imploringly,and Lindau turned to him to say in German: “Butit is infamous—­infamous! What kindof man is this? Who is he? He has the heartof a tyrant.”

Colonel Woodburn cut in. “You couldn’tdo that, Mr. Dryfoos, under your system. Andif you attempted it, with your conspiracy laws, andthat kind of thing, it might bring the climax soonerthan you expected. Your commercialized societyhas built its house on the sands. It will haveto go. But I should be sorry if it went beforeits time.”

“You are righdt, sir,” said Lindau.“It would be a bity. I hobe it will lasttill it feelss its rottenness, like Herodt. Boat,when its hour gomes, when it trope to bieces withthe veight off its own gorrubtion—­whatthen?”

“It’s not to be supposed that a systemof things like this can drop to pieces of its ownaccord, like the old Republic of Venice,” saidthe colonel. “But when the last vestigeof commercial society is gone, then we can begin tobuild anew; and we shall build upon the central idea,not of the false liberty you now worship, but of responsibility—­responsibility. The enlightened, themoneyed, the cultivated class shall be responsibleto the central authority—­emperor, duke,president; the name does not matter—­forthe national expense and the national defence, andit shall be responsible to the working-classes of allkinds for homes and lands and implements, and theopportunity to labor at all times.

“The working-classes shall be responsible tothe leisure class for the support of its dignity inpeace, and shall be subject to its command in war.The rich shall warrant the poor against planless productionand the ruin that now follows, against danger fromwithout and famine from within, and the poor—­”

“No, no, no!” shouted Lindau. “TheState shall do that—­the whole beople.The men who voark shall have and shall eat; and themen that will not voark, they shall sdarfe. Butno man need sdarfe. He will go to the State,and the State will see that he haf voark, and thathe haf foodt. All the roadts and mills and minesand landts shall be the beople’s and be ronby the beople for the beople. There shall be norich and no boor; and there shall not be war any more,for what bower wouldt dare to addack a beople boundtogeder in a broderhood like that?”

“Lion and lamb act,” said Fulkerson, notwell knowing, after so much champagne, what wordshe was using.

No one noticed him, and Colonel Woodburn said coldlyto Lindau, “You are talking paternalism, sir.”

“And you are dalking feutalism!” retortedthe old man.

The colonel did not reply. A silence ensued,which no one broke till Fulkerson said: “Well,now, look here. If either one of these millenniumswas brought about, by force of arms, or otherwise,what would become of ‘Every Other Week’?Who would want March for an editor? How wouldBeaton sell his pictures? Who would print Mr.Kendricks’s little society verses and shortstories? What would become of Conrad and his goodworks?” Those named grinned in support of Fulkerson’sdiversion, but Lindau and the colonel did not speak;Dryfoos looked down at his plate, frowning.

A waiter came round with cigars, and Fulkerson tookone. “Ah,” he said, as he bit offthe end, and leaned over to the emblematic masterpiece,where the brandy was still feebly flickering, “Iwonder if there’s enough natural gas left tolight my cigar.” His effort put the flameout and knocked the derrick over; it broke in fragmentson the table. Fulkerson cackled over the ruin:“I wonder if all Moffitt will look that way afterlabor and capital have fought it out together.I hope this ain’t ominous of anything personal,Dryfoos?”

“I’ll take the risk of it,” saidthe old man, harshly.

He rose mechanically, and Fulkerson said to Frescobaldi’sman, “You can bring us the coffee in the library.”

The talk did not recover itself there. Landauwould not sit down; he refused coffee, and dismissedhimself with a haughty bow to the company; ColonelWoodburn shook hands elaborately all round, when hehad smoked his cigar; the others followed him.It seemed to March that his own good-night from Dryfooswas dry and cold.

VII.

March met Fulkerson on the steps of the office nextmorning, when he arrived rather later than his wont.Fulkerson did not show any of the signs of sufferingfrom the last night’s pleasure which paintedthemselves in March’s face. He flirted hishand gayly in the air, and said, “How’syour poor head?” and broke into a knowing laugh.“You don’t seem to have got up with thelark this morning. The old gentleman is in therewith Conrad, as bright as a biscuit; he’s beatyou down. Well, we did have a good time, didn’twe? And old Lindau and the colonel, didn’tthey have a good time? I don’t suppose theyever had a chance before to give their theories quiteso much air. Oh, my! how they did ride over us!I’m just going down to see Beaton about the coverof the Christmas number. I think we ought totry it in three or four colors, if we are going toobserve the day at all.” He was off beforeMarch could pull himself together to ask what Dryfooswanted at the office at that hour of the morning;he always came in the afternoon on his way up-town.

The fact of his presence renewed the sinister misgivingswith which March had parted from him the night before,but Fulkerson’s cheerfulness seemed to gainsaythem; afterward March did not know whether to attributethis mood to the slipperiness that he was aware ofat times in Fulkerson, or to a cynical amusem*nt hemight have felt at leaving him alone to the old man,who mounted to his room shortly after March had reachedit.

A sort of dumb anger showed itself in his face; hisjaw was set so firmly that he did not seem able atonce to open it. He asked, without the ceremoniesof greeting, “What does that one-armed Dutchmando on this book?”

“What does he do?” March echoed, as peopleare apt to do with a question that is mandatory andoffensive.

“Yes, sir, what does he do? Does he writefor it?”

“I suppose you mean Lindau,” said March.He saw no reason for refusing to answer Dryfoos’sdemand, and he decided to ignore its terms. “No,he doesn’t write for it in the usual way.He translates for it; he examines the foreign magazines,and draws my attention to anything he thinks of interest.But I told you about this before—­”

“I know what you told me, well enough.And I know what he is. He is a red-mouthed laboragitator. He’s one of those foreigners thatcome here from places where they’ve never hada decent meal’s victuals in their lives, andas soon as they get their stomachs full, they beginto make trouble between our people and their hands.There’s where the strikes come from, and theunions and the secret societies. They come hereand break our Sabbath, and teach their atheism.They ought to be hung! Let ’em go backif they don’t like it over here. They wantto ruin the country.”

March could not help smiling a little at the words,which came fast enough now in the hoarse staccatoof Dryfoos’s passion. “I don’tknow whom you mean by they, generally speaking; butI had the impression that poor old Lindau had oncedone his best to save the country. I don’talways like his way of talking, but I know that heis one of the truest and kindest souls in the world;and he is no more an atheist than I am. He ismy friend, and I can’t allow him to be misunderstood.”

“I don’t care what he is,” Dryfoosbroke out, “I won’t have him round.He can’t have any more work from this office.I want you to stop it. I want you to turn himoff.”

March was standing at his desk, as he had risen toreceive Dryfoos when he entered. He now sat down,and began to open his letters.

“Do you hear?” the old man roared at him.“I want you to turn him off.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Dryfoos,” said March,succeeding in an effort to speak calmly, “Idon’t know you, in such a matter as this.My arrangements as editor of ‘Every Other Week’were made with Mr. Fulkerson. I have always listenedto any suggestion he has had to make.”

“I don’t care for Mr. Fulkerson?He has nothing to do with it,” retorted Dryfoos;but he seemed a little daunted by March’s position.

“He has everything to do with it as far as Iam concerned,” March answered, with a steadinessthat he did not feel. “I know that you arethe owner of the periodical, but I can’t receiveany suggestion from you, for the reason that I havegiven. Nobody but Mr. Fulkerson has any rightto talk with me about its management.”

Dryfoos glared at him for a moment, and demanded,threateningly: “Then you say you won’tturn that old loafer off? You say that I havegot to keep on paying my money out to buy beer fora man that would cut my throat if he got the chance?”

“I say nothing at all, Mr. Dryfoos,” Marchanswered. The blood came into his face, and headded: “But I will say that if you speakagain of Mr. Lindau in those terms, one of us mustleave this room. I will not hear you.”

Dryfoos looked at him with astonishment; then he struckhis hat down on his head, and stamped out of the roomand down the stairs; and a vague pity came into March’sheart that was not altogether for himself. Hemight be the greater sufferer in the end, but he wassorry to have got the better of that old man for themoment; and he felt ashamed of the anger into whichDryfoos’s anger had surprised him. He knewhe could not say too much in defence of Lindau’sgenerosity and unselfishness, and he had not attemptedto defend him as a political economist. He couldnot have taken any ground in relation to Dryfoos butthat which he held, and he felt satisfied that hewas right in refusing to receive instructions or commandsfrom him. Yet somehow he was not satisfied withthe whole affair, and not merely because his presenttriumph threatened his final advantage, but becausehe felt that in his heat he had hardly done justiceto Dryfoos’s rights in the matter; it did notquite console him to reflect that Dryfoos had himselfmade it impossible. He was tempted to go homeand tell his wife what had happened, and begin hispreparations for the future at once. But he resistedthis weakness and kept mechanically about his work,opening the letters and the manuscripts before himwith that curious double action of the mind commonin men of vivid imaginations. It was a reliefwhen Conrad Dryfoos, having apparently waited to makesure that his father would not return, came up fromthe counting-room and looked in on March with a troubledface.

“Mr. March,” he began, “I hope fatherhasn’t been saying anything to you that youcan’t overlook. I know he was very muchexcited, and when he is excited he is apt to say thingsthat he is sorry for.”

The apologetic attitude taken for Dryfoos, so differentfrom any attitude the peremptory old man would haveconceivably taken for himself, made March smile.“Oh no. I fancy the boot is on the otherleg. I suspect I’ve said some things yourfather can’t overlook, Conrad.” Hecalled the young man by his Christian name partlyto distinguish him from his father, partly from theinfection of Fulkerson’s habit, and partly froma kindness for him that seemed naturally to expressitself in that way.

“I know he didn’t sleep last night, afteryou all went away,” Conrad pursued, “andof course that made him more irritable; and he wastried a good deal by some of the things that Mr. Lindausaid.”

“I was tried a good deal myself,” saidMarch. “Lindau ought never to have beenthere.”

“No.” Conrad seemed only partiallyto assent.

“I told Mr. Fulkerson so. I warned himthat Lindau would be apt to break out in some way.It wasn’t just to him, and it wasn’t justto your father, to ask him.”

“Mr. Fulkerson had a good motive,” Conradgently urged. “He did it because he hurthis feelings that day about the pension.”

“Yes, but it was a mistake. He knew thatLindau was inflexible about his principles, as hecalls them, and that one of his first principles isto denounce the rich in season and out of season.I don’t remember just what he said last night;and I really thought I’d kept him from breakingout in the most offensive way. But your fatherseems very much incensed.”

“Yes, I know,” said Conrad.

“Of course, I don’t agree with Lindau.I think there are as many good, kind, just peopleamong the rich as there are among the poor, and thatthey are as generous and helpful. But Lindau hasgot hold of one of those partial truths that hurtworse than the whole truth, and—­”

“Partial truth!” the young man interrupted.“Didn’t the Saviour himself say, ’Howhardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdomof God?’”

“Why, bless my soul!” cried March.“Do you agree with Lindau?”

“I agree with the Lord Jesus Christ,”said the young man, solemnly, and a strange lightof fanaticism, of exaltation, came into his wide blueeyes. “And I believe He meant the kingdomof heaven upon this earth, as well as in the skies.”

March threw himself back in his chair and looked athim with a kind of stupefaction, in which his eyewandered to the doorway, where he saw Fulkerson standing,it seemed to him a long time, before he heard himsaying: “Hello, hello! What’sthe row? Conrad pitching into you on old Lindau’saccount, too?”

The young man turned, and, after a glance at Fulkerson’slight, smiling face, went out, as if in his presentmood he could not bear the contact of that persiflantspirit.

March felt himself getting provisionally very angryagain. “Excuse me, Fulkerson, but did youknow when you went out what Mr. Dryfoos wanted tosee me for?”

“Well, no, I didn’t exactly,” saidFulkerson, taking his usual seat on a chair and lookingover the back of it at March. “I saw hewas on his car about something, and I thought I’dbetter not monkey with him much. I supposed hewas going to bring you to book about old Lindau, somehow.”Fulkerson broke into a laugh.

March remained serious. “Mr. Dryfoos,”he said, willing to let the simple statement haveits own weight with Fulkerson, and nothing more, “camein here and ordered me to discharge Lindau from hisemployment on the magazine—­to turn himoff, as he put it.”

“Did he?” asked Fulkerson, with unbrokencheerfulness. “The old man is business,every time. Well, I suppose you can easily getsomebody else to do Lindau’s work for you.This town is just running over with half-starved linguists.What did you say?”

“What did I say?” March echoed. “Lookhere, Fulkerson; you may regard this as a joke, butI don’t. I’m not used to being spokento as if I were the foreman of a shop, and told todischarge a sensitive and cultivated man like Lindau,as if he were a drunken mechanic; and if that’syour idea of me—­”

“Oh, hello, now, March! You mustn’tmind the old man’s way. He don’t meananything by it—­he don’t know any better,if you come to that.”

“Then I know better,” said March.“I refused to receive any instructions fromMr. Dryfoos, whom I don’t know in my relationswith ’Every Other Week,’ and I referredhim to you.”

“You did?” Fulkerson whistled. “Heowns the thing!”

“I don’t care who owns the thing,”said March. “My negotiations were withyou alone from the beginning, and I leave this matterwith you. What do you wish done about Lindau?”

“Oh, better let the old fool drop,” saidFulkerson. “He’ll light on his feetsomehow, and it will save a lot of rumpus.”

“And if I decline to let him drop?”

“Oh, come, now, March; don’t do that,”Fulkerson began.

“If I decline to let him drop,” Marchrepeated, “what will you do?”

“I’ll be dogged if I know what I’lldo,” said Fulkerson. “I hope youwon’t take that stand. If the old man wentso far as to speak to you about it, his mind is madeup, and we might as well knock under first as last.”

“And do you mean to say that you would not standby me in what I considered my duty-in a matter ofprinciple?”

“Why, of course, March,” said Fulkerson,coaxingly, “I mean to do the right thing.But Dryfoos owns the magazine—­”

“He doesn’t own me,” said March,rising. “He has made the little mistakeof speaking to me as if he did; and when”—­Marchput on his hat and took his overcoat down from itsnail—­“when you bring me his apologies,or come to say that, having failed to make him understandthey were necessary, you are prepared to stand byme, I will come back to this desk. Otherwisemy resignation is at your service.”

He started toward the door, and Fulkerson interceptedhim. “Ah, now, look here, March! Don’tdo that! Hang it all, don’t you see whereit leaves me? Now, you just sit down a minuteand talk it over. I can make you see—­Ican show you—­Why, confound the old Dutchbeer-buzzer! Twenty of him wouldn’t beworth the trouble he’s makin’. Lethim go, and the old man ’ll come round in time.”

“I don’t think we’ve understoodeach other exactly, Mr. Fulkerson,” said March,very haughtily. “Perhaps we never can; butI’ll leave you to think it out.”

He pushed on, and Fulkerson stood aside to let himpass, with a dazed look and a mechanical movement.There was something comic in his rueful bewildermentto March, who was tempted to smile, but he said tohimself that he had as much reason to be unhappy asFulkerson, and he did not smile. His indignationkept him hot in his purpose to suffer any consequencerather than submit to the dictation of a man like Dryfoos;he felt keenly the degradation of his connection withhim, and all his resentment of Fulkerson’s originaluncandor returned; at the same time his heart achedwith foreboding. It was not merely the work inwhich he had constantly grown happier that he sawtaken from him; but he felt the misery of the manwho stakes the security and plenty and peace of homeupon some cast, and knows that losing will sweep fromhim most that most men find sweet and pleasant inlife. He faced the fact, which no good man canfront without terror, that he was risking the support

of his family, and for a point of pride, of honor,which perhaps he had no right to consider in viewof the possible adversity. He realized, as everyhireling must, no matter how skillfully or gracefullythe tie is contrived for his wearing, that he belongsto another, whose will is his law. His indignationwas shot with abject impulses to go back and tellFulkerson that it was all right, and that he gave up.To end the anguish of his struggle he quickened hissteps, so that he found he was reaching home almostat a run.

VIII.

He must have made more clatter than he supposed withhis key at the apartment door, for his wife had cometo let him in when he flung it open. “Why,Basil,” she said, “what’s broughtyou back? Are you sick? You’re allpale. Well, no wonder! This is the last ofMr. Fulkerson’s dinners you shall go to.You’re not strong enough for it, and your stomachwill be all out of order for a week. How hot youare! and in a drip of perspiration! Now you’llbe sick.” She took his hat away, whichhung dangling in his hand, and pushed him into a chairwith tender impatience. “What is the matter?Has anything happened?”

“Everything has happened,” he said, gettinghis voice after one or two husky endeavors for it;and then he poured out a confused and huddled statementof the case, from which she only got at the situationby prolonged cross-questioning.

At the end she said, “I knew Lindau would getyou into trouble.”

This cut March to the heart. “Isabel!”he cried, reproachfully.

“Oh, I know,” she retorted, and the tearsbegan to come. “I don’t wonder youdidn’t want to say much to me about that dinnerat breakfast. I noticed it; but I thought youwere just dull, and so I didn’t insist.I wish I had, now. If you had told me what Lindauhad said, I should have known what would have comeof it, and I could have advised you—­”

“Would you have advised me,” March demanded,curiously, “to submit to bullying like that,and meekly consent to commit an act of cruelty againsta man who had once been such a friend to me?”

“It was an unlucky day when you met him.I suppose we shall have to go. And just whenwe bad got used to New York, and begun to like it.I don’t know where we shall go now; Boston isn’tlike home any more; and we couldn’t live ontwo thousand there; I should be ashamed to try.I’m sure I don’t know where we can liveon it. I suppose in some country village, wherethere are no schools, or anything for the children.I don’t know what they’ll say when wetell them, poor things.”

Every word was a stab in March’s heart, so weaklytender to his own; his wife’s tears, after somuch experience of the comparative lightness of thegriefs that weep themselves out in women, always seemedwrung from his own soul; if his children sufferedin the least through him, he felt like a murderer.It was far worse than he could have imagined, the wayhis wife took the affair, though he had imagined certainwords, or perhaps only looks, from her that were badenough. He had allowed for trouble, but troubleon his account: a svmpathy that might burden andembarrass him; but he had not dreamed of this merelydomestic, this petty, this sordid view of their potentialcalamity, which left him wholly out of the question,and embraced only what was most crushing and desolatingin the prospect. He could not bear it. Hecaught up his hat again, and, with some hope thathis wife would try to keep him, rushed out of thehouse. He wandered aimlessly about, thinking thesame exhausting thoughts over and over, till he foundhimself horribly hungry; then he went into a restaurantfor his lunch, and when he paid he tried to imaginehow he should feel if that were really his last dollar.

He went home toward the middle of the afternoon, baselyhoping that Fulkerson had sent him some conciliatorymessage, or perhaps was waiting there for him to talkit over; March was quite willing to talk it over now.But it was his wife who again met him at the door,though it seemed another woman than the one he hadleft weeping in the morning.

“I told the children,” she said, in smilingexplanation of his absence from lunch, “thatperhaps you were detained by business. I didn’tknow but you had gone back to the office.”

“Did you think I would go back there, Isabel?”asked March, with a haggard look. “Well,if you say so, I will go back, and do what Dryfoosordered me to do. I’m sufficiently cowedbetween him and you, I can assure you.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “I approveof everything you did. But sit down, now, anddon’t keep walking that way, and let me see ifI understand it perfectly. Of course, I had tohave my say out.”

She made him go all over his talk with Dryfoos again,and report his own language precisely. From timeto time, as she got his points, she said, “Thatwas splendid,” “Good enough for him!”and “Oh, I’m so glad you said that tohim!” At the end she said:

“Well, now, let’s look at it from hispoint of view. Let’s be perfectly justto him before we take another step forward.”

“Or backward,” March suggested, ruefully.“The case is simply this: he owns the magazine.”

“Of course.”

“And he has a right to expect that I will considerhis pecuniary interests—­”

“Oh, those detestable pecuniary interests!Don’t you wish there wasn’t any moneyin the world?”

“Yes; or else that there was a great deal moreof it. And I was perfectly willing to do that.I have always kept that in mind as one of my dutiesto him, ever since I understood what his relation tothe magazine was.”

“Yes, I can bear witness to that in any courtof justice. You’ve done it a great dealmore than I could, Basil. And it was just thesame way with those horrible insurance people.”

“I know,” March went on, trying to beproof against her flatteries, or at least to lookas if he did not deserve praise; “I know thatwhat Lindau said was offensive to him, and I can understandhow he felt that he had a right to punish it.All I say is that he had no right to punish it throughme.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. March, askingly.

“If it had been a question of making ‘EveryOther Week’ the vehicle of Lindau’s peculiaropinions—­though they’re not so verypeculiar; he might have got the most of them out ofRuskin—­I shouldn’t have had any groundto stand on, or at least then I should have had toask myself whether his opinions would be injuriousto the magazine or not.”

“I don’t see,” Mrs. March interpolated,“how they could hurt it much worse than ColonelWoodburn’s article crying up slavery.”

“Well,” said March, impartially, “wecould print a dozen articles praising the slaveryit’s impossible to have back, and it wouldn’thurt us. But if we printed one paper againstthe slavery which Lindau claims still exists, somepeople would call us bad names, and the counting-roomwould begin to feel it. But that isn’t thepoint. Lindau’s connection with ‘EveryOther Week’ is almost purely mechanical; he’smerely a translator of such stories and sketches ashe first submits to me, and it isn’t at alla question of his opinions hurting us, but of my becomingan agent to punish him for his opinions. Thatis what I wouldn’t do; that’s what I neverwill do.”

“If you did,” said his wife, “Ishould perfectly despise you. I didn’tunderstand how it was before. I thought you werejust holding out against Dryfoos because he took adictatorial tone with you, and because you wouldn’trecognize his authority. But now I’m withyou, Basil, every time, as that horrid little Fulkersonsays. But who would ever have supposed he wouldbe so base as to side against you?”

“I don’t know,” said March, thoughtfully,“that we had a right to expect anything else.Fulkerson’s standards are low; they’remerely business standards, and the good that’sin him is incidental and something quite apart fromhis morals and methods. He’s naturally agenerous and right-minded creature, but life has taughthim to truckle and trick, like the rest of us.”

“It hasn’t taught you that, Basil.”

“Don’t be so sure. Perhaps it’sonly that I’m a poor scholar. But I don’tknow, really, that I despise Fulkerson so much forhis course this morning as for his gross and fulsomeflatteries of Dryfoos last night. I could hardlystomach it.”

His wife made him tell her what they were, and thenshe said, “Yes, that was loathsome; I couldn’thave believed it of Mr. Fulkerson.”

“Perhaps he only did it to keep the talk going,and to give the old man a chance to say something,”March leniently suggested. “It was a worseeffect because he didn’t or couldn’t followup Fulkerson’s lead.”

“It was loathsome, all the same,” hiswife insisted. “It’s the end of Mr.Fulkerson, as far as I’m concerned.”

“I didn’t tell you before,” Marchresumed, after a moment, “of my little interviewwith Conrad Dryfoos after his father left,” andnow he went on to repeat what had passed between himand the young man.

“I suspect that he and his father had been havingsome words before the old man came up to talk withme, and that it was that made him so furious.”

“Yes, but what a strange position for the sonof such a man to take! Do you suppose he sayssuch things to his father?”

“I don’t know; but I suspect that in hismeek way Conrad would say what he believed to anybody.I suppose we must regard him as a kind of crank.”

“Poor young fellow! He always makes mefeel sad, somehow. He has such a pathetic face.I don’t believe I ever saw him look quite happy,except that night at Mrs. Horn’s, when he wastalking with Miss Vance; and then he made me feelsadder than ever.”

“I don’t envy him the life he leads athome, with those convictions of his. I don’tsee why it wouldn’t be as tolerable there forold Lindau himself.”

“Well, now,” said Mrs. March, “letus put them all out of our minds and see what we aregoing to do ourselves.”

They began to consider their ways and means, and howand where they should live, in view of March’sseverance of his relations with ’Every OtherWeek.’ They had not saved anything fromthe first year’s salary; they had only preparedto save; and they had nothing solid but their twothousand to count upon. But they built a futurein which they easily lived on that and on what Marchearned with his pen. He became a free lance,and fought in whatever cause he thought just; he hadno ties, no chains. They went back to Bostonwith the heroic will to do what was most distasteful;they would have returned to their own house if theyhad not rented it again; but, any rate, Mrs. Marchhelped out by taking boarders, or perhaps only lettingrooms to lodgers. They had some hard struggles,but they succeeded.

“The great thing,” she said, “isto be right. I’m ten times as happy asif you had come home and told me that you had consentedto do what Dryfoos asked and he had doubled your salary.”

“I don’t think that would have happenedin any event,” said March, dryly.

“Well, no matter. I just used it for anexample.”

They both experienced a buoyant relief, such as seemsto come to people who begin life anew on whateverterms. “I hope we are young enough yet,Basil,” she said, and she would not have it whenhe said they had once been younger.

They heard the children’s knock on the door;they knocked when they came home from school so thattheir mother might let them in. “Shall wetell them at once?” she asked, and ran to openfor them before March could answer.

They were not alone. Fulkerson, smiling fromear to ear, was with them. “Is March in?”he asked.

“Mr. March is at home, yes,” she saidvery haughtily. “He’s in his study,”and she led the way there, while the children wentto their rooms.

“Well, March,” Fulkerson called out atsight of him, “it’s all right! Theold man has come down.”

“I suppose if you gentlemen are going to talkbusiness—­” Mrs. March began.

“Oh, we don’t want you to go away,”said Fulkerson. “I reckon March has toldyou, anyway.”

“Yes, I’ve told her,” said March.“Don’t go, Isabel. What do you mean,Fulkerson?”

“He’s just gone on up home, and he sentme round with his apologies. He sees now thathe had no business to speak to you as he did, and hewithdraws everything. He’d ‘a’come round himself if I’d said so, but I toldhim I could make it all right.”

Fulkerson looked so happy in having the whole affairput right, and the Marches knew him to be so kindlyaffected toward them, that they could not refuse forthe moment to share his mood. They felt themselvesslipping down from the moral height which they hadgained, and March made a clutch to stay himself withthe question, “And Lindau?”

“Well,” said Fulkerson, “he’sgoing to leave Lindau to me. You won’t haveanything to do with it. I’ll let the oldfellow down easy.”

“Do you mean,” asked March, “thatMr. Dryfoos insists on his being dismissed?”

“Why, there isn’t any dismissing aboutit,” Fulkerson argued. “If you don’tsend him any more work, he won’t do any more,that’s all. Or if he comes round, you can—­He’sto be referred to me.”

March shook his head, and his wife, with a sigh, feltherself plucked up from the soft circ*mstance of theirlives, which she had sunk back into so quickly, andset beside him on that cold peak of principle again.“It won’t do, Fulkerson. It’svery good of you, and all that, but it comes to thesame thing in the end. I could have gone on withoutany apology from Mr. Dryfoos; he transcended his authority,but that’s a minor matter. I could haveexcused it to his ignorance of life among gentlemen;but I can’t consent to Lindau’s dismissal—­itcomes to that, whether you do it or I do it, and whetherit’s a positive or a negative thing—­becausehe holds this opinion or that.”

“But don’t you see,” said Fulkerson,“that it’s just Lindau’s opinionsthe old man can’t stand? He hasn’tgot anything against him personally. I don’tsuppose there’s anybody that appreciates Lindauin some ways more than the old man does.”

“I understand. He wants to punish him forhis opinions. Well, I can’t consent tothat, directly or indirectly. We don’t printhis opinions, and he has a perfect right to hold them,whether Mr. Dryfoos agrees with them or not.”

Mrs. March had judged it decorous for her to say nothing,but she now went and sat down in the chair next herhusband.

“Ah, dog on it!” cried Fulkerson, rumplinghis hair with both his hands. “What amI to do? The old man says he’s got to go.”

“And I don’t consent to his going,”said March.

“And you won’t stay if he goes.”

Fulkerson rose. “Well, well! I’vegot to see about it. I’m afraid the oldman won’t stand it, March; I am, indeed.I wish you’d reconsider. I—­I’dtake it as a personal favor if you would. It leavesme in a fix. You see I’ve got to side withone or the other.”

March made no reply to this, except to say, “Yes,you must stand by him, or you must stand by me.”

“Well, well! Hold on awhile! I’llsee you in the morning. Don’t take anysteps—­”

“Oh, there are no steps to take,” saidMarch, with a melancholy smile. “The stepsare stopped; that’s all.” He sankback into his chair when Fulkerson was gone and drewa long breath. “This is pretty rough.I thought we had got through it.”

“No,” said his wife. “It seemsas if I had to make the fight all over again.”

“Well, it’s a good thing it’s aholy war.”

“I can’t bear the suspense. Why didn’tyou tell him outright you wouldn’t go back onany terms?”

“I might as well, and got the glory. He’llnever move Dryfoos. I suppose we both would liketo go back, if we could.”

“Oh, I suppose so.”

They could not regain their lost exaltation, theirlost dignity. At dinner Mrs. March asked thechildren how they would like to go back to Bostonto live.

“Why, we’re not going, are we?”asked Tom, without enthusiasm.

“I was just wondering how you felt about it,now,” she said, with an underlook at her husband.

“Well, if we go back,” said Bella, “Iwant to live on the Back Bay. It’s awfullyMicky at the South End.”

“I suppose I should go to Harvard,” saidTom, “and I’d room out at Cambridge.It would be easier to get at you on the Back Bay.”

The parents smiled ruefully at each other, and, inview of these grand expectations of his children,March resolved to go as far as he could in meetingDryfoos’s wishes. He proposed the theatreas a distraction from the anxieties that he knew werepressing equally on his wife. “We mightgo to the ‘Old Homestead,’” he suggested,with a sad irony, which only his wife felt.

“Oh yes, let’s!” cried Bella.

While they were getting ready, some one rang, andBella went to the door, and then came to tell herfather that it was Mr. Lindau. “He sayshe wants to see you just a moment. He’sin the parlor, and he won’t sit down, or anything.”

“What can he want?” groaned Mrs. March,from their common dismay.

March apprehended a storm in the old man’s face.But he only stood in the middle of the room, lookingvery sad and grave. “You are Going oudt,”he said. “I won’t geep you long.I haf gome to pring pack dose macassines and dis mawney.I can’t do any more voark for you; and I can’tgeep the mawney you haf baid me a’ready.It iss not hawnest mawney—­that hass beenoarned py voark; it iss mawney that hass peen matepy sbeculation, and the obbression off lapor, andthe necessity of the boor, py a man—­Hereit is, efery tollar, efery zent. Dake it; I feelas if dere vas ploodt on it.”

“Why, Lindau,” March began, but the oldman interrupted him.

“Ton’t dalk to me, Passil! I couldnot haf believedt it of you. When you know howI feel about dose tings, why tidn’t you dellme whose mawney you bay oudt to me? Ach, I ton’tplame you—­I ton’t rebroach you.You haf nefer thought of it; boat I have thought,and I should be Guilty, I must share that man’sGuilt, if I gept hiss mawney. If you hat toldtme at the peginning—­if you hat peen frankwith meboat it iss all righdt; you can go on; youton’t see dese tings as I see them; and you hafcot a family, and I am a free man. I voark tomyself, and when I ton’t voark, I sdarfe tomyself. But. I geep my handts glean, voarkor sdarfe. Gif him hiss mawney pack! I amsawry for him; I would not hoart hiss feelings, boatI could not pear to douch him, and hiss mawney isslike boison!”

March tried to reason with Lindau, to show him thefolly, the injustice, the absurdity of his course;it ended in their both getting angry, and in Lindau’sgoing away in a whirl of German that included Basilin the guilt of the man whom Lindau called his master.

“Well,” said Mrs. March. “Heis a crank, and I think you’re well rid of him.Now you have no quarrel with that horrid old Dryfoos,and you can keep right on.”

“Yes,” said March, “I wish it didn’tmake me feel so sneaking. What a long day it’sbeen! It seems like a century since I got up.”

“Yes, a thousand years. Is there anythingelse left to happen?”

“I hope not. I’d like to go to bed.”

“Why, aren’t you going to the theatre?”wailed Bella, coming in upon her father’s desperateexpression.

“The theatre? Oh yes, certainly! Imeant after we got home,” and March amused himselfat the puzzled countenance of the child. “Comeon! Is Tom ready?”

IX.

Fulkerson parted with the Marches in such troubleof mind that he did not feel able to meet that nightthe people whom he usually kept so gay at Mrs. Leighton’stable. He went to Maroni’s for his dinner,for this reason and for others more obscure.He could not expect to do anything more with Dryfoosat once; he knew that Dryfoos must feel that he hadalready made an extreme concession to March, and hebelieved that if he was to get anything more fromhim it must be after Dryfoos had dined. But hewas not without the hope, vague and indefinite as itmight be, that he should find Lindau at Maroni’s,and perhaps should get some concession from him, someword of regret or apology which he could report toDryfoos, and at lest make the means of reopening theaffair with him; perhaps Lindau, when he knew howmatters stood, would back down altogether, and forMarch’s sake would withdraw from all connectionwith ‘Every Other Week’ himself, and soleave everything serene. Fulkerson felt capable,in his desperation, of delicately suggesting such acourse to Lindau, or even of plainly advising it:he did not care for Lindau a great deal, and he didcare a great deal for the magazine.

But he did not find Lindau at Maroni’s; he onlyfound Beaton. He sat looking at the doorway asFulkerson entered, and Fulkerson naturally came andtook a place at his table. Something in Beaton’slarge-eyed solemnity of aspect invited Fulkerson toconfidence, and he said, as he pulled his napkin openand strung it, still a little damp (as the scanty,often-washed linen at Maroni’s was apt to be),across his knees, “I was looking for you thismorning, to talk with you about the Christmas number,and I was a good deal worked up because I couldn’tfind you; but I guess I might as well have sparedmyself my emotions.”

“Why?” asked Beaton, briefly.

“Well, I don’t know as there’s goingto be any Christmas number.”

“Why?” Beaton asked again.

“Row between the financial angel and the literaryeditor about the chief translator and polyglot smeller.”

“Lindau?”

“Lindau is his name.”

“What does the literary editor expect afterLindau’s expression of his views last night?”

“I don’t know what he expected, but theground he took with the old man was that, as Lindau’sopinions didn’t characterize his work on themagazine, he would not be made the instrument of punishinghim for them the old man wanted him turned off, ashe calls it.”

“Seems to be pretty good ground,” saidBeaton, impartially, while he speculated, with a dulltrouble at heart, on the effect the row would haveon his own fortunes. His late visit home had madehim feel that the claim of his family upon him forsome repayment of help given could not be much longerdelayed; with his mother sick and his father growingold, he must begin to do something for them, but upto this time he had spent his salary even faster thanhe had earned it. When Fulkerson came in he waswondering whether he could get him to increase it,if he threatened to give up his work, and he wishedthat he was enough in love with Margaret Vance, oreven Christine Dryfoos, to marry her, only to end inthe sorrowful conviction that he was really in lovewith Alma Leighton, who had no money, and who hadapparently no wish to be married for love, even.“And what are you going to do about it?”he asked, listlessly.

“Be dogged if I know what I’m going todo about it,” said Fulkerson. “I’vebeen round all day, trying to pick up the pieces—­rowbegan right after breakfast this morning—­andone time I thought I’d got the thing all puttogether again. I got the old man to say thathe had spoken to March a little too authoritativelyabout Lindau; that, in fact, he ought to have communicatedhis wishes through me; and that he was willing tohave me get rid of Lindau, and March needn’thave anything to do with it. I thought that waspretty white, but March says the apologies and regretsare all well enough in their way, but they leave themain question where they found it.”

“What is the main question?” Beaton asked,pouring himself out some Chianti. As he set theflask down he made the reflection that if he woulddrink water instead of Chianti he could send his fatherthree dollars a week, on his back debts, and he resolvedto do it.

“The main question, as March looks at it, isthe question of punishing Lindau for his private opinions;he says that if he consents to my bouncing the oldfellow it’s the same as if he bounced him.”

“It might have that complexion in some lights,”said Beaton. He drank off his Chianti, and thoughthe would have it twice a week, or make Maroni keepthe half-bottles over for him, and send his fathertwo dollars. “And what are you going todo now?”

“That’s what I don’t know,”said Fulkerson, ruefully. After a moment he said,desperately, “Beaton, you’ve got a prettygood head; why don’t you suggest something?”

“Why don’t you let March go?” Beatonsuggested.

“Ah, I couldn’t,” said Fulkerson.“I got him to break up in Boston and come here;I like him; nobody else could get the hang of the thinglike he has; he’s—­a friend.”Fulkerson said this with the nearest approach he couldmake to seriousness, which was a kind of unhappiness.

Beaton shrugged. “Oh, if you can affordto have ideals, I congratulate you. They’retoo expensive for me. Then, suppose you get ridof Dryfoos?”

Fulkerson laughed forlornly. “Go on, Bildad.Like to sprinkle a few ashes over my boils? Don’tmind me!”

They both sat silent a little while, and then Beatonsaid, “I suppose you haven’t seen Dryfoosthe second time?”

“No. I came in here to gird up my loinswith a little dinner before I tackled him. Butsomething seems to be the matter with Maroni’scook. I don’t want anything to eat.”

“The cooking’s about as bad as usual,”said Beaton. After a moment he added, ironically,for he found Fulkerson’s misery a kind of relieffrom his own, and was willing to protract it as longas it was amusing, “Why not try an envoy extraordinaryand minister plenipotentiary?”

“What do you mean?”

“Get that other old fool to go to Dryfoos foryou!”

“Which other old fool? The old fools seemto be as thick as flies.”

“That Southern one.”

“Colonel Woodburn?”

“Mmmmm.”

“He did seem to rather take to the colonel!”Fulkerson mused aloud.

“Of course he did. Woodburn, with his idiotictalk about patriarchal slavery, is the man on horsebackto Dryfoos’s muddy imagination. He’dlisten to him abjectly, and he’d do whateverWoodburn told him to do.” Beaton smiledcynically.

Fulkerson got up and reached for his coat and hat.“You’ve struck it, old man.”The waiter came up to help him on with his coat; Fulkersonslipped a dollar in his hand. “Never mindthe coat; you can give the rest of my dinner to thepoor, Paolo. Beaton, shake! You’vesaved my life, little boy, though I don’t thinkyou meant it.” He took Beaton’s handand solemnly pressed it, and then almost ran out ofthe door.

They had just reached coffee at Mrs. Leighton’swhen he arrived and sat down with them and began toput some of the life of his new hope into them.His appetite revived, and, after protesting that hewould not take anything but coffee, he went back andate some of the earlier courses. But with thepressure of his purpose driving him forward, he didnot conceal from Miss Woodburn, at least, that hewas eager to get her apart from the rest for somereason. When he accomplished this, it seemed asif he had contrived it all himself, but perhaps hehad not wholly contrived it.

“I’m so glad to get a chance to speakto you alone,” he said at once; and while shewaited for the next word he made a pause, and thensaid, desperately, “I want you to help me; andif you can’t help me, there’s no helpfor me.”

“Mah goodness,” she said, “is thecase so bad as that? What in the woald is thetrouble?”

“Yes, it’s a bad case,” said Fulkerson.“I want your father to help me.”

“Oh, I thoat you said me!”

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

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

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

“Well, it’s a pretty lahvely kyand ofparalysis. But—­go on.”

“I will—­I will. If I can onlybegin.”

“Pohaps Ah maght begin fo’ you.”

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

Fulkerson made a clutch at his hair, and then, afteranother hesitation, he abruptly laid the whole affairbefore her. He did not think it necessary tostate the exact nature of the offence Lindau had givenDryfoos, for he doubted if she could grasp it, andhe was profuse of his excuses for troubling her withthe matter, and of wonder at himself for having doneso. In the rapture of his concern at having perhapsmade a fool of himself, he forgot why he had toldher; but she seemed to like having been confided in,and she said, “Well, Ah don’t see whatyou can do with you’ ahdeals of friendship exceptstand bah Mr. Mawch.”

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

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

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

“But Ah most say,” Miss Woodburn wenton, “Ah don’t envy you you’ nextinterview with Mr. Dryfoos. Ah suppose you’llhave to see him at once aboat it.”

The conjecture recalled Fulkerson to the object ofhis confidences. “Ah, there’s whereyour help comes in. I’ve exhausted all theinfluence I have with Dryfoos—­”

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

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

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

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

“Poo’ Mr. Fulkerson!” she said,and she insinuated something through her burlesquecompassion that lifted him to the skies. He sworein his heart that the woman never lived who was sowitty, so wise, so beautiful, and so good. “Comeraght with me this minute, if the cyoast’s clea’.”She went to the door of the diningroom and lookedin across its gloom to the little gallery where herfather sat beside a lamp reading his evening paper;Mrs. Leighton could be heard in colloquy with the cookbelow, and Alma had gone to her room. She beckonedFulkerson with the hand outstretched behind her, andsaid, “Go and ask him.”

“Alone!” he palpitated.

“Oh, what a cyowahd!” she cried, and wentwith him. “Ah suppose you’ll wantme to tell him aboat it.”

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

Miss Woodburn advanced and put her hand on her father’sshoulder. “Look heah, papa! Mr. Fulkersonwants to ask you something, and he wants me to doit fo’ him.”

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

“I do not know whethah I understand the caseexactly,” said the colonel, “but Mr. Fulkersonmay command me to the extent of my ability.”

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

“Well, Miss Woodburn has been so luminous aboutit, colonel,” said Fulkerson, glad of the jokingshape she had given the affair, “that I canonly throw in a little side-light here and there.”

The colonel listened as Fulkerson went on, with agrave diplomatic satisfaction. He felt gratified,honored, even, he said, by Mr. Fulkerson’s appealto him; and probably it gave him something of the highjoy that an affair of honor would have brought himin the days when he had arranged for meetings betweengentlemen. Next to bearing a challenge, thiswork of composing a difficulty must have been grateful.But he gave no outward sign of his satisfaction inmaking a resume of the case so as to get the pointsclearly in his mind.

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

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

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

“Of course,” said Fulkerson, while MissWoodburn perched on the arm of her father’schair.

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

“Exactly,” Fulkerson assented.

“But it must be evident to you, sir, that ahigh-spirited gentleman like Mr. March—­Iconfess that my feelings are with him very warmly inthe matter—­could not submit to dictationof the nature you describe.”

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

“Mr. Lindau,” the colonel concluded, “wasright from his point of view, and Mr. Dryfoos wasequally right. The position of Mr. March is perfectlycorrect—­”

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

“Yes, you see,” Fulkerson added, “nobodycan give in.”

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

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

The colonel rose. “Mr. Lindau must begin,sir. We must begin by seeing Mr. Lindau, andsecuring from him the assurance that in the expressionof his peculiar views he had no intention of offeringany personal offence to Mr. Dryfoos. If I haveformed a correct estimate of Mr. Lindau, this willbe perfectly simple.”

Fulkerson shook his head. “But it wouldn’thelp. Dryfoos don’t care a rap whetherLindau meant any personal offence or not. As faras that is concerned, he’s got a hide like ahippopotamus. But what he hates is Lindau’sopinions, and what he says is that no man who holdssuch opinions shall have any work from him. Andwhat March says is that no man shall be punished throughhim for his opinions, he don’t care what theyare.”

The colonel stood a moment in silence. “Andwhat do you expect me to do under the circ*mstances?”

“I came to you for advice—­I thoughtyou might suggest——?”

“Do you wish me to see Mr. Dryfoos?”

“Well, that’s about the size of it,”Fulkerson admitted. “You see, colonel,”he hastened on, “I know that you have a greatdeal of influence with him; that article of yoursis about the only thing he’s ever read in ‘EveryOther Week,’ and he’s proud of your acquaintance.Well, you know”—­and here Fulkersonbrought in the figure that struck him so much in Beaton’sphrase and had been on his tongue ever since—­“you’rethe man on horseback to him; and he’d be moreapt to do what you say than if anybody else said it.”

“You are very good, sir,” said the colonel,trying to be proof against the flattery, “butI am afraid you overrate my influence.”Fulkerson let him ponder it silently, and his daughtergoverned her impatience by holding her fan againsther lips. Whatever the process was in the colonel’smind, he said at last: “I see no good reasonfor declining to act for you, Mr. Fulkerson, and Ishall be very happy if I can be of service to you.But”—­he stopped Fulkerson from cuttingin with precipitate thanks—­“I thinkI have a right, sir, to ask what your course willbe in the event of failure?”

“Failure?” Fulkerson repeated, in dismay.

“Yes, sir. I will not conceal from youthat this mission is one not wholly agreeable to myfeelings.”

“Oh, I understand that, colonel, and I assureyou that I appreciate, I—­”

“There is no use trying to blink the fact, sir,that there are certain aspects of Mr. Dryfoos’scharacter in which he is not a gentleman. Wehave alluded to this fact before, and I need not dwellupon it now: I may say, however, that my misgivingswere not wholly removed last night.”

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

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

“I see,” said Fulkerson.

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

The colonel bent his eyes sharply on Fulkerson; MissWoodburn let hers fall; Fulkerson felt that he wasbeing tested, and he said, to gain time, “Asbetween Lindau and Dryfoos?” though he knew thiswas not the point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There is no question of courage,” saidthe colonel. “It is a question of dignity—­ofpersonal dignity.”

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

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

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

He went out, and Fulkerson returned with Miss Woodburnto the drawing-room, where she said the Leightonswere. They, were not there, but she did not seemdisappointed.

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

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

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

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

“And then what?” the girl pursued.

“And then, nothing—­till we pick ourselvesup.”

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

“He may.”

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

“I reckon.”

“And you do it jost fo’ an ahdeal?”

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

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

“Oh, they’re not so much better than women,”said Fulkerson, with a nervous jocosity. “Iguess March would have backed down if it hadn’tbeen for his wife. She was as hot as pepper aboutit, and you could see that she would have sacrificedall her husband’s relations sooner than let himback down an inch from the stand he had taken.It’s pretty easy for a man to stick to a principleif he has a woman to stand by him. But when youcome to play it alone—­”

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

“You will?” he shouted, in a rapture.“In every way—­and always—­aslong as you live? Do you mean it?” He hadcaught her hand to his breast and was grappling ittight there and drawing her to him.

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

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

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

When they lifted their eyes from each other againit was half-past ten. “No’ you mostgo,” she said.

“But the colonel—­our fate?”

“The co’nel is often oat late, and Ah’mnot afraid of ouah fate, no’ that we’vetaken it into ouah own hands.” She lookedat him with dewy eyes of trust, of inspiration.

“Oh, it’s going to come out all right,”he said. “It can’t come out wrongnow, no matter what happens. But who’d havethought it, when I came into this house, in such astate of sin and misery, half an hour ago—­”

“Three houahs and a half ago!” she said.“No! you most jost go. Ah’m tahedto death. Good-night. You can come in themawning to see-papa.” She opened the doorand pushed him out with enrapturing violence, and heran laughing down the steps into her father’sarms.

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

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

“Oh, all right,” said Fulkerson, withunabated joy. “It’s what I expected.Well, my course is clear; I shall stand by March, andI guess the world won’t come to an end if hebounces us both. But I’m everlastinglyobliged to you, Colonel Woodburn, and I don’tknow what to say to you. I—­I won’tdetain you now; it’s so late. I’llsee you in the morning. Good-ni—­”

Fulkerson did not realize that it takes two to part.The colonel laid hold of his arm and turned away withhim. “I will walk toward your place withyou. I can understand why you should be anxiousto know the particulars of my interview with Mr. Dryfoos”;and in the statement which followed he did not sparehim the smallest. It outlasted their walk anddetained them long on the steps of the ‘EveryOther Week’ building. But at the end Fulkersonlet himself in with his key as light of heart as ifhe had been listening to the gayest promises that fortunecould make.

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

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

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

“Does it? I’m not sure it lets meout,” said March; but he said this in tributeto his crippled self-respect rather than as a forecastof any action in the matter.

“Why, what are you going to do?” Fulkersonasked. “If Lindau won’t work forDryfoos, you can’t make him.”

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

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

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

“To the deserving rich? Well, you can alwaysfind them. I reckon you don’t want to appearin the transaction! I don’t, either; butI guess I must.” Fulkerson gathered upthe money and carried it to Conrad. He directedhim to account for it in his books as conscience-money,and he enjoyed the joke more than Conrad seemed todo when he was told where it came from.

Fulkerson was able to wear off the disagreeable impressionthe affair left during the course of the fore-noon,and he met Miss Woodburn with all a lover’sbuoyancy when he went to lunch. She was as happyas he when he told her how fortunately the whole thinghad ended, and he took her view that it was a rewardof his courage in having dared the worst. Theyboth felt, as the newly plighted always do, that theywere in the best relations with the beneficent powers,and that their felicity had been especially lookedto in the disposition of events. They were ina glow of rapturous content with themselves and radiantworship of each other; she was sure that he meritedthe bright future opening to them both, as much asif he owed it directly to some noble action of hisown; he felt that he was indebted for the favor ofHeaven entirely to the still incredible accident ofher preference of him over other men.

Colonel Woodburn, who was not yet in the secret oftheir love, perhaps failed for this reason to sharetheir satisfaction with a result so unexpectedly broughtabout. The blessing on their hopes seemed to hisignorance to involve certain sacrifices of personalfeeling at which he hinted in suggesting that Dryfoosshould now be asked to make some abstract concessionsand acknowledgments; his daughter hastened to denythat these were at all necessary; and Fulkerson easilyexplained why. The thing was over; what was theuse of opening it up again?

“Perhaps none,” the colonel admitted.But he added, “I should like the opportunityof taking Mr. Lindau’s hand in the presence ofMr. Dryfoos and assuring him that I considered hima man of principle and a man of honor—­agentleman, sir, whom I was proud and happy to haveknown.”

“Well, Ah’ve no doabt,” said hisdaughter, demurely, “that you’ll havethe chance some day; and we would all lahke to joinyou. But at the same tahme, Ah think Mr. Fulkersonis well oat of it fo’ the present.”

PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

Anticipative reprisal
Buttoned about him as if itconcealed a bad conscience
Courtship
Got their laugh out of toomany things in life
Had learned not to censurethe irretrievable
Had no opinions that he wasnot ready to hold in abeyance
Ignorant of her ignorance
It don’t do any goodto look at its drawbacks all the time
Justice must be paid for atevery step in fees and costs
Life has taught him to truckleand trick
Man’s willingness toabide in the present
No longer the gross appetitefor novelty
No right to burden our friendswith our decisions
Travel, with all its annoyancesand fatigues
Typical anything else, ispretty difficult to find

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

By William Dean Howells

PART FIFTH

I.

Superficially, the affairs of ‘Every Other Week’settled into their wonted form again, and for Fulkersonthey seemed thoroughly reinstated. But Marchhad a feeling of impermanency from what had happened,mixed with a fantastic sense of shame toward Lindau.He did not sympathize with Lindau’s opinions;he thought his remedy for existing evils as wildlyimpracticable as Colonel Woodburn’s. Butwhile he thought this, and while he could justly blameFulkerson for Lindau’s presence at Dryfoos’sdinner, which his zeal had brought about in spite ofMarch’s protests, still he could not rid himselfof the reproach of uncandor with Lindau. He oughtto have told him frankly about the ownership of themagazine, and what manner of man the man was whosemoney he was taking. But he said that he nevercould have imagined that he was serious in his preposterousattitude in regard to a class of men who embody halfthe prosperity of the country; and he had momentsof revolt against his own humiliation before Lindau,in which he found it monstrous that he should returnDryfoos’s money as if it had been the spoil ofa robber. His wife agreed with him in these moments,and said it was a great relief not to have that tiresomeold German coming about. They had to account forhis absence evasively to the children, whom they couldnot very well tell that their father was living onmoney that Lindau disdained to take, even though Lindauwas wrong and their father was right. This heightenedMrs. March’s resentment toward both Lindau andDryfoos, who between them had placed her husband ina false position. If anything, she resented Dryfoos’sconduct more than Lindau’s. He had neverspoken to March about the affair since Lindau had

renounced his work, or added to the apologetic messageshe had sent by Fulkerson. So far as March knew,Dryfoos had been left to suppose that Lindau had simplystopped for some reason that did not personally affecthim. They never spoke of him, and March was tooproud to ask either Fulkerson or Conrad whether theold man knew that Lindau had returned his money.He avoided talking to Conrad, from a feeling thatif he did he should involuntarily lead him on to speakof his differences with his father. Between himselfand Fulkerson, even, he was uneasily aware of a wantof their old perfect friendliness. Fulkersonhad finally behaved with honor and courage; but hisprovisional reluctance had given March the measureof Fulkerson’s character in one direction, andhe could not ignore the fact that it was smaller thanhe could have wished.

He could not make out whether Fulkerson shared hisdiscomfort or not. It certainly wore away, evenwith March, as time passed, and with Fulkerson, inthe bliss of his fortunate love, it was probably farmore transient, if it existed at all. He advancedinto the winter as radiantly as if to meet the spring,and he said that if there were any pleasanter monthof the year than November, it was December, especiallywhen the weather was good and wet and muddy most ofthe time, so that you had to keep indoors a long whileafter you called anywhere.

Colonel Woodburn had the anxiety, in view of his daughter’sengagement, when she asked his consent to it, thatsuch a dreamer must have in regard to any realitythat threatens to affect the course of his reveries.He had not perhaps taken her marriage into account,except as a remote contingency; and certainly Fulkersonwas not the kind of son-in-law that he had imaginedin dealing with that abstraction. But becausehe had nothing of the sort definitely in mind, hecould not oppose the selection of Fulkerson with success;he really knew nothing against him, and he knew, manythings in his favor; Fulkerson inspired him with theliking that every one felt for him in a measure; heamused him, he cheered him; and the colonel had beenso much used to leaving action of all kinds to hisdaughter that when he came to close quarters with thequestion of a son-in-law he felt helpless to decideit, and he let her decide it, as if it were stillto be decided when it was submitted to him. Shewas competent to treat it in all its phases:not merely those of personal interest, but those ofduty to the broken Southern past, sentimentally dearto him, and practically absurd to her. No suchSouth as he remembered had ever existed to her knowledge,and no such civilization as he imagined would everexist, to her belief, anywhere. She took the worldas she found it, and made the best of it. Shetrusted in Fulkerson; she had proved his magnanimityin a serious emergency; and in small things she waswilling fearlessly to chance it with him. Shewas not a sentimentalist, and there was nothing fantasticin her expectations; she was a girl of good senseand right mind, and she liked the immediate practicalityas well as the final honor of Fulkerson. She didnot idealize him, but in the highest effect she realizedhim; she did him justice, and she would not have believedthat she did him more than justice if she had sometimesknown him to do himself less.

Their engagement was a fact to which the Leightonhousehold adjusted itself almost as simply as thelovers themselves; Miss Woodburn told the ladies atonce, and it was not a thing that Fulkerson could keepfrom March very long. He sent word of it to Mrs.March by her husband; and his engagement perhaps didmore than anything else to confirm the confidencein him which had been shaken by his early behaviorin the Lindau episode, and not wholly restored byhis tardy fidelity to March. But now she feltthat a man who wished to get married so obviously andentirely for love was full of all kinds of the bestinstincts, and only needed the guidance of a wife,to become very noble. She interested herself intenselyin balancing the respective merits of the engagedcouple, and after her call upon Miss Woodburn in hernew character she prided herself upon recognizingthe worth of some strictly Southern qualities in her,while maintaining the general average of New Englandsuperiority. She could not reconcile herselfto the Virginian custom illustrated in her having beenchristened with the surname of Madison; and she saidthat its pet form of Mad, which Fulkerson promptlyinvented, only made it more ridiculous.

Fulkerson was slower in telling Beaton. He wasafraid, somehow, of Beaton’s taking the matterin the cynical way; Miss Woodburn said she would breakoff the engagement if Beaton was left to guess it orfind it out by accident, and then Fulkerson pluckedup his courage. Beaton received the news withgravity, and with a sort of melancholy meekness thatstrongly moved Fulkerson’s sympathy, and madehim wish that Beaton was engaged, too.

It made Beaton feel very old; it somehow left himbehind and forgotten; in a manner, it made him feeltrifled with. Something of the unfriendlinessof fate seemed to overcast his resentment, and he allowedthe sadness of his conviction that he had not the meansto marry on to tinge his recognition of the fact thatAlma Leighton would not have wanted him to marry herif he had. He was now often in that martyr moodin which he wished to help his father; not only todeny himself Chianti, but to forego a fur-lined overcoatwhich he intended to get for the winter, He postponedthe moment of actual sacrifice as regarded the Chianti,and he bought the overcoat in an anguish of self-reproach.He wore it the first evening after he got it in goingto call upon the Leightons, and it seemed to him apiece of ghastly irony when Alma complimented hispicturesqueness in it and asked him to let her sketchhim.

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

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

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

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

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

“I didn’t say so.”

“I didn’t ask you what you said.”

“And I won’t tell you what I think.”

“Ah, I know what you think.”

“What made you ask, then?” The girl laughedagain with the satisfaction of her sex in corneringa man.

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

“Ah, that’s it. But a little moreanimation—­

“’As when a great thoughtstrikes along the brain,
And flushes all the cheek.’”

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

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

“Oh, Mr. Beaton, you flatter.”

“No, I never flatter you.”

“I meant you flattered yourself.”

“How?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Imagine.”

“I know what you mean. You think I can’tbe sincere with anybody.”

“Oh no, I don’t.”

“What do you think?”

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

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

“They seem to be having a pretty good time inthere,” said Fulkerson, detaching himself fromhis own absolute good time as well as he could.

“At least Alma does,” said Miss Woodburn.

“Do you think she cares for him?”

“Quahte as moch as he desoves.”

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

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

“Oh, I guess if it was the old lady, there wouldn’tbe much question about it.”

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

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

“Don’t you always?”

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

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

“Couldn’t you believe it again? Now?”

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

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

“He’s made some very pretty ones aboutyou.”

“Like the one you just quoted?”

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“Not if you were a girl.”

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

“Who said I thought you were false?”

“No one,” said Beaton. “Itisn’t necessary, when you look it—­liveit.”

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

“I know I’m despicable. I could tellyou something—­the history of this day,even—­that would make you despise me.”Beaton had in mind his purchase of the overcoat, whichAlma was getting in so effectively, with the moneyhe ought to have sent his father. “But,”he went on, darkly, with a sense that what he wasthat moment suffering for his selfishness must somehowbe a kind of atonement, which would finally leave himto the guiltless enjoyment of the overcoat, “youwouldn’t believe the depths of baseness I coulddescend to.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes, the trouble has all blown over, I believe.Fulkerson,” said Beaton, with a return to whatthey were saying, “has managed the whole businessvery well. But he exaggerates the value of myadvice.”

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

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

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

“I know I don’t,” sighed Beaton.

“You mean you don’t get it.”

“I certainly don’t get it.”

“Ah, but that isn’t the reason.”

“What is?”

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

“Are you never serious?” he asked.

“With serious people always.”

“I am serious; and you have the secret of myhappiness—­” He threw himself impulsivelyforward in his chair.

“Oh, pose, pose!” she cried.

“I won’t pose,” he answered, “andyou have got to listen to me. You know I’min love with you; and I know that once you cared forme. Can’t that time—­won’tit—­come back again? Try to think so,Alma!”

“No,” she said, briefly and seriouslyenough.

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

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

“How could I help it? With that happinessnear us—­Fulkerson—­”

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

“No, it isn’t that—­it’ssomething far deeper. But if it’s nothingyou have against me, what is it, Alma, that keepsyou from caring for me now as you did then? Ihaven’t changed.”

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

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

“Would a man have that had done so?”

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

“I don’t want any slave—­norany slavery. I want to be free always. Nowdo you see? I don’t care for you, and Inever could in the old way; but I should have to carefor some one more than I believe I ever shall to giveup my work. Shall we go on?” She lookedat her sketch.

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

“I suppose you blame me,” she said, risingtoo.

“Oh no! I blame no one—­or onlymyself. I threw my chance away.”

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

“But you could work on with me—­”

“Second fiddle. Do you suppose I shouldn’tbe woman enough to wish my work always less and lowerthan yours? At least I’ve heart enough forthat!”

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

“I think the women who keep their hearts havean even chance, at least, of having heart—­”

“Ah, there’s where you’re wrong!”

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

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

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

“And I may come—­I may come here—­as—­asusual?”

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

He went home dazed, and feeling as if it were a badjoke that had been put upon him. At least theaffair went so deep that it estranged the aspect ofhis familiar studio. Some of the things in itwere not very familiar; he had spent lately a greatdeal on rugs, on stuffs, on Japanese bric-a-brac.When he saw these things in the shops he had feltthat he must have them; that they were necessary tohim; and he was partly in debt for them, still withouthaving sent any of his earnings to pay his father.As he looked at them now he liked to fancy somethingweird and conscious in them as the silent witnessesof a broken life. He felt about among some ofthe smaller objects on the mantel for his pipe.Before he slept he was aware, in the luxury of hisdespair, of a remote relief, an escape; and, afterall, the understanding he had come to with Alma wasonly the explicit formulation of terms long tacit betweenthem. Beaton would have been puzzled more thanhe knew if she had taken him seriously. It wasinevitable that he should declare himself in love withher; but he was not disappointed at her rejection ofhis love; perhaps not so much as he would have beenat its acceptance, though he tried to think otherwise,and to give himself airs of tragedy. He did notreally feel that the result was worse than what hadgone before, and it left him free.

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

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

“Oh, I think he will. He couldn’tvery well come the next night. But he has thehabit of coming, and with Mr. Beaton habit is everything—­eventhe habit of thinking he’s in love with someone.”

“Alma,” said her mother, “I don’tthink it’s very nice for a girl to let a youngman keep coming to see her after she’s refusedhim.”

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

“But it does hurt her, Alma. It—­it’sindelicate. It isn’t fair to him; it giveshim hopes.”

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that he spoke to me the other nightsimply because Mr. Fulkerson’s engagement hadbroken him all up.”

“What expressions!” Mrs. Leighton lamented.

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

“Did you tell him that, Alma?”

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

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

“Oh, so did he!”

“And you didn’t?”

“Oh yes, for the time being. I supposehe’s very much in earnest with Miss Vance attimes, and with Miss Dryfoos at others. Sometimeshe’s a painter, and sometimes he’s anarchitect, and sometimes he’s a sculptor.He has too many gifts—­too many tastes.”

“And if Miss Vance and Miss Dryfoos—­”

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

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

“And you know that I don’t want to letyou—­especially when I haven’t gotany real feeling in the matter. But I should think—­speakingin the abstract entirely—­that if eitherof those arts was ever going to be in earnest abouthim, it would want his exclusive devotion for a weekat least.”

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

“Oh, he is! he is!”

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

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

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

“Well, come now, mamma! Suppose you begin.I’ve been perfectly honest with myself, andI’ve been honest with Mr. Beaton. I don’tcare for him, and I’ve told him I didn’t;so he may be supposed to know it. If he comeshere after this, he’ll come as a plain, unostentatiousfriend of the family, and it’s for you to saywhether he shall come in that capacity or not.I hope you won’t trifle with him, and let himget the notion that he’s coming on any otherbasis.”

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

“Then you leave him entirely to me?”

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

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

II.

The winter did not renew for Christine and Mela thesocial opportunity which the spring had offered.After the musicale at Mrs. Horn’s, they bothmade their party-call, as Mela said, in due season;but they did not find Mrs. Horn at home, and neithershe nor Miss Vance came to see them after people returnedto town in the fall. They tried to believe fora time that Mrs. Horn had not got their cards; thispretence failed them, and they fell back upon theirpride, or rather Christine’s pride. Melahad little but her good-nature to avail her in anyexigency, and if Mrs. Horn or Miss Vance had cometo call after a year of neglect, she would have receivedthem as amiably as if they had not lost a day in coming.But Christine had drawn a line beyond which they wouldnot have been forgiven; and she had planned the wordsand the behavior with which she would have punishedthem if they had appeared then. Neither sisterimagined herself in anywise inferior to them; but Christinewas suspicious, at least, and it was Mela who inventedthe hypothesis of the lost cards. As nothinghappened to prove or to disprove the fact, she said,“I move we put Coonrod up to gittun’ itout of Miss Vance, at some of their meetun’s.”

“If you do,” said Christine, “I’llkill you.”

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

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

“Well, what I hate, mother,” said Mela,“is, it don’t seem to be any place foryoung men, either.” She found this so goodwhen she had said it that she laughed over it tillChristine was angry.

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

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

“Oh, don’t mind her, mother,” saidMela. “She’s put out because her oldMr. Beaton ha’r’t been round for a coupleo’ weeks. If you don’t watch out,that fellow ’ll give you the slip yit, Christine,after all your pains.”

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

“No; I ha’n’t ever set my trapsfor anybody.” This was what Mela said forwant of a better retort; but it was not quite true.When Kendricks came with Beaton to call after herfather’s dinner, she used all her cunning toensnare him, and she had him to herself as long asBeaton stayed; Dryfoos sent down word that he wasnot very well and had gone to bed. The noveltyof Mela had worn off for Kendricks, and she found him,as she frankly told him, not half as entertainingas he was at Mrs. Horn’s; but she did her bestwith him as the only flirtable material which had yetcome to her hand. It would have been her idealto have the young men stay till past midnight, andher father come down-stairs in his stocking-feet andtell them it was time to go. But they made a visitof decorous brevity, and Kendricks did not come again.She met him afterward, once, as she was crossing thepavement in Union Square to get into her coupe, andmade the most of him; but it was necessarily very little,and so he passed out of her life without having leftany trace in her heart, though Mela had a heart thatshe would have put at the disposition of almost anyyoung man that wanted it. Kendricks himself, Manhattanco*ckney as he was, with scarcely more out look intothe average American nature than if he had been kepta prisoner in New York society all his days, perceiveda property in her which forbade him as a man of conscienceto trifle with her; something earthly good and kind,if it was simple and vulgar. In revising hisimpressions of her, it seemed to him that she wouldcome even to better literary effect if this were recognizedin her; and it made her sacred, in spite of her willingnessto fool and to be fooled, in her merely human quality.After all, he saw that she wished honestly to loveand to be loved, and the lures she threw out to thatend seemed to him pathetic rather than ridiculous;he could not join Beaton in laughing at her; and hedid not like Beaton’s laughing at the other girl,either. It seemed to Kendricks, with the codeof honor which he mostly kept to himself because hewas a little ashamed to find there were so few others

like it, that if Beaton cared nothing for the othergirl—­and Christine appeared simply detestableto Kendricks—­he had better keep away fromher, and not give her the impression he was in lovewith her. He rather fancied that this was thepart of a gentleman, and he could not have penetratedto that aesthetic and moral complexity which formedthe consciousness of a nature like Beaton’sand was chiefly a torment to itself; he could nothave conceived of the wayward impulses indulged atevery moment in little things till the straight highwaywas traversed and well-nigh lost under their tangle.To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothingthat one likes, even though one continues to do whatone will; but Kendricks, though a sage of twenty-seven,was still too young to understand this.

Beaton scarcely understood it himself, perhaps becausehe was not yet twenty-seven. He only knew thathis will was somehow sick; that it spent itself incaprices, and brought him no happiness from the fulfilmentof the most vehement wish. But he was aware thathis wishes grew less and less vehement; he began tohave a fear that some time he might have none at all.It seemed to him that if he could once do somethingthat was thoroughly distasteful to himself, he mightmake a beginning in the right direction; but whenhe tried this on a small scale, it failed, and itseemed stupid. Some sort of expiation was thething he needed, he was sure; but he could not thinkof anything in particular to expiate; a man couldnot expiate his temperament, and his temperament waswhat Beaton decided to be at fault. He perceivedthat it went deeper than even fate would have gone;he could have fulfilled an evil destiny and had donewith it, however terrible. His trouble was thathe could not escape from himself; and, for the mostpart, he justified himself in refusing to try.After he had come to that distinct understanding withAlma Leighton, and experienced the relief it reallygave him, he thought for a while that if it had fallenout otherwise, and she had put him in charge of herdestiny, he might have been better able to manage hisown. But as it was, he could only drift, andlet all other things take their course. It wasnecessary that he should go to see her afterward, toshow her that he was equal to the event; but he didnot go so often, and he went rather oftener to theDryfooses; it was not easy to see Margaret Vance, excepton the society terms. With much sneering and scorning,he fulfilled the duties to Mrs. Horn without whichhe knew he should be dropped from her list; but onemight go to many of her Thursdays without getting manywords with her niece. Beaton hardly knew whetherhe wanted many; the girl kept the charm of her innocentstylishness; but latterly she wanted to talk moreabout social questions than about the psychical problemsthat young people usually debate so personally.Son of the working-people as he was, Beaton had nevercared anything about such matters; he did not know

about them or wish to know; he was perhaps too nearthem. Besides, there was an embarrassment, atleast on her part, concerning the Dryfooses.She was too high-minded to blame him for having temptedher to her failure with them by his talk about them;but she was conscious of avoiding them in her talk.She had decided not to renew the effort she had madein the spring; because she could not do them good asfellow-creatures needing food and warmth and work,and she would not try to befriend them socially; shehad a horror of any such futile sentimentality.She would have liked to account to Beaton in this wayfor a course which she suspected he must have heardtheir comments upon, but she did not quite know howto do it; she could not be sure how much or how littlehe cared for them. Some tentative approaches whichshe made toward explanation were met with such eagerdisclaim of personal interest that she knew less thanbefore what to think; and she turned the talk fromthe sisters to the brother, whom it seemed she stillcontinued to meet in their common work among the poor.

“He seems very different,” she ventured.

“Oh, quite,” said Beaton. “He’sthe kind of person that you might suppose gave theCatholics a hint for the cloistral life; he’sa cloistered nature—­the nature that atonesand suffers for. But he’s awfully dullcompany, don’t you think? I never can getanything out of him.”

“He’s very much in earnest.”

“Remorselessly. We’ve got a profaneand mundane creature there at the office who runsus all, and it’s shocking merely to see the contactof the tyro natures. When Fulkerson gets to jokingDryfoos—­he likes to put his joke in theform of a pretence that Dryfoos is actuated by a selfishmotive, that he has an eye to office, and is workingup a political interest for himself on the East Side—­it’ssomething inexpressible.”

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

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

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

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

He went up to Mrs. Horn for a moment’s hailand farewell, and felt himself subtly detained byher through fugitive passages of conversation withhalf a dozen other people. He fancied that atcrises of this strange interview Mrs. Horn was aboutto become confidential with him, and confidential,of all things, about her niece. She ended by nothaving palpably been so. In fact, the concernin her mind would have been difficult to impart toa young man, and after several experiments Mrs. Hornfound it impossible to say that she wished Margaretcould somehow be interested in lower things than thosewhich occupied her. She had watched with growinganxiety the girl’s tendency to various kindsof self-devotion. She had dark hours in whichshe even feared her entire withdrawal from the worldin a life of good works. Before now, girls hadentered the Protestant sisterhoods, which appeal sopotently to the young and generous imagination, andMargaret was of just the temperament to be influencedby them. During the past summer she had been unhappyat her separation from the cares that had engrossedher more and more as their stay in the city drew toan end in the spring, and she had hurried her auntback to town earlier in the fall than she would havechosen to come. Margaret had her correspondentsamong the working-women whom she befriended.Mrs. Horn was at one time alarmed to find that Margaretwas actually promoting a strike of the button-holeworkers. This, of course, had its ludicrous side,in connection with a young lady in good society, anda person of even so little humor as Mrs. Horn couldnot help seeing it. At the same time, she couldnot help foreboding the worst from it; she was afraidthat Margaret’s health would give way under thestrain, and that if she did not go into a sisterhoodshe would at least go into a decline. She beganthe winter with all such counteractive measures asshe could employ. At an age when such thingsweary, she threw herself into the pleasures of societywith the hope of dragging Margaret after her; anda sympathetic witness must have followed with compassionher course from ball to ball, from reception to reception,from parlor-reading to parlor-reading, from musicaleto musicale, from play to play, from opera to opera.She tasted, after she had practically renounced them,the bitter and the insipid flavors of fashionableamusem*nt, in the hope that Margaret might find themsweet, and now at the end she had to own to herselfthat she had failed. It was coming Lent again,and the girl had only grown thinner and more seriouswith the diversions that did not divert her from thebaleful works of beneficence on which Mrs. Horn feltthat she was throwing her youth away. Margaretcould have borne either alone, but together they werewearing her out. She felt it a duty to undergothe pleasures her aunt appointed for her, but she couldnot forego the other duties in which she found heronly pleasure.

She kept up her music still because she could employit at the meetings for the entertainment, and, asshe hoped, the elevation of her working-women; butshe neglected the other aesthetic interests which onceoccupied her; and, at sight of Beaton talking withher, Mrs. Horn caught at the hope that he might somehowbe turned to account in reviving Margaret’sformer interest in art. She asked him if Mr. Wetmorehad his classes that winter as usual; and she saidshe wished Margaret could be induced to go again:Mr. Wetmore always said that she did not draw verywell, but that she had a great deal of feeling forit, and her work was interesting. She asked,were the Leightons in town again; and she murmureda regret that she had not been able to see anythingof them, without explaining why; she said she hada fancy that if Margaret knew Miss Leighton, and whatshe was doing, it might stimulate her, perhaps.She supposed Miss Leighton was still going on withher art? Beaton said, Oh yes, he believed so.

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

He said that she was very good; but there was reallynobody who knew half as much as Wetmore, or couldmake any one understand half as much. Mrs. Hornwas afraid, she said, that Mr. Wetmore’s terriblesincerity discouraged Margaret; he would not let herhave any illusions about the outcome of what she wasdoing; and did not Mr. Beaton think that some illusionwas necessary with young people? Of course, itwas very nice of Mr. Wetmore to be so honest, butit did not always seem to be the wisest thing.She begged Mr. Beaton to try to think of some one whowould be a little less severe. Her tone assumeda deeper interest in the people who were coming upand going away, and Beaton perceived that he was dismissed.

He went away with vanity flattered by the sense ofhaving been appealed to concerning Margaret, and thenhe began to chafe at what she had said of Wetmore’shonesty, apropos of her wish that he still had a classhimself. Did she mean, confound her? that he wasinsincere, and would let Miss Vance suppose she hadmore talent than she really had? The more Beatonthought of this, the more furious he became, and themore he was convinced that something like it had beenunconsciously if not consciously in her mind.He framed some keen retorts, to the general effectthat with the atmosphere of illusion preserved so completelyat home, Miss Vance hardly needed it in her art studies.Having just determined never to go near Mrs. Horn’sThursdays again, he decided to go once more, in orderto plant this sting in her capacious but somewhatcallous bosom; and he planned how he would lead thetalk up to the point from which he should launch it.

In the mean time he felt the need of some presentsolace, such as only unqualified worship could givehim; a cruel wish to feel his power in some directionwhere, even if it were resisted, it could not be overcome,drove him on. That a woman who was to Beaton theembodiment of artificiality should intimate, howeverinnocently—­the innocence made it all theworse—­that he was less honest than Wetmore,whom he knew to be so much more honest, was somethingthat must be retaliated somewhere before his self-respectcould be restored. It was only five o’clock,and he went on up-town to the Dryfooses’, thoughhe had been there only the night before last.He asked for the ladies, and Mrs. Mandel received him.

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

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

“You have lived abroad, too, and so you won’tfind what I am going to ask so strange. Mr. Beaton,why do you come so much to this house?” Mrs.Mandel bent forward with an aspect of ladylike interestand smiled.

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

“Yes.”

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

“Oh, certainly. There’s no reasonwhy I shouldn’t say, for I wish you to be veryfrank with me. I ask because there are two youngladies in this house; and, in a certain way, I haveto take the place of a mother to them. I needn’texplain why; you know all the people here, and youunderstand. I have nothing to say about them,but I should not be speaking to you now if they werenot all rather helpless people. They do not knowthe world they have come to live in here, and theycannot help themselves or one another. But youdo know it, Mr. Beaton, and I am sure you know justhow much or how little you mean by coming here.You are either interested in one of these young girlsor you are not. If you are, I have nothing moreto say. If you are not—­” Mrs.Mandel continued to smile, but the smile had grownmore perfunctory, and it had an icy gleam.

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

“Certainly not,” she said, with the besttemper, and with something in her tone that convictedBeaton of vulgarity, in putting his question of herauthority in the form of a sneer. “As Ihave suggested, they would hardly know how to helpthemselves at all in such a matter. I have noobjection to saying that I ask it from the father ofthe young ladies. Of course, in and for myselfI should have no right to know anything about youraffairs. I assure you the duty of knowing isn’tvery pleasant.” The little tremor in herclear voice struck Beaton as something rather nice.

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

“Then I should prefer to let you characterizeyour own conduct in continuing to come here for theyear past, as you have done, and tacitly leading themon to infer differently.” They both mechanicallykept up the fiction of plurality in speaking of Christine,but there was no doubt in the mind of either whichof the young ladies the other meant. A good manythoughts went through Beaton’s mind, and noneof them were flattering. He had not been unconsciousthat the part he had played toward this girl was ignoble,and that it had grown meaner as the fancy which herbeauty had at first kindled in him had grown cooler.He was aware that of late he had been amusing himselfwith her passion in a way that was not less than cruel,not because he wished to do so, but because he waslistless and wished nothing. He rose in saying:“I might be a little more lenient than you think,Mrs. Mandel; but I won’t trouble you with anypalliating theory. I will not come any more.”

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

She seemed to him merely triumphant, and he couldnot conceive what it had cost her to nerve herselfup to her too easy victory. He left Mrs. Mandelto a far harder lot than had fallen to him, and hewent away hating her as an enemy who had humiliatedhim at a moment when he particularly needed exalting.It was really very simple for him to stop going tosee Christine Dryfoos, but it was not at all simplefor Mrs. Mandel to deal with the consequences of hisnot coming. He only thought how lightly she hadstopped him, and the poor woman whom he had left tremblingfor what she had been obliged to do embodied for himthe conscience that accused him of unpleasant things.

“By heavens! this is piling it up,” hesaid to himself through his set teeth, realizing howit had happened right on top of that stupid insultfrom Mrs. Horn. Now he should have to give uphis place on ’Every Other Week; he could notkeep that, under the circ*mstances, even if some pretencewere not made to get rid of him; he must hurry andanticipate any such pretence; he must see Fulkersonat once; he wondered where he should find him at thathour. He thought, with bitterness so real thatit gave him a kind of tragical satisfaction, how certainlyhe could find him a little later at Mrs. Leighton’s;and Fulkerson’s happiness became an added injury.

The thing had, of course, come about just at the wrongtime. There never had been a time when Beatonneeded money more, when he had spent what he had andwhat he expected to have so recklessly. He wasin debt to Fulkerson personally and officially foradvance payments of salary. The thought of sendingmoney home made him break into a scoffing laugh, whichhe turned into a cough in order to deceive the passers.What sort of face should he go with to Fulkerson andtell him that he renounced his employment on ‘EveryOther Week;’ and what should he do when he hadrenounced it? Take pupils, perhaps; open a class?A lurid conception of a class conducted on those principlesof shameless flattery at which Mrs. Horn had hinted—­hebelieved now she had meant to insult him—­presenteditself. Why should not he act upon the suggestion?He thought with loathing for the whole race of women—­dabblersin art. How easy the thing would be: aseasy as to turn back now and tell that old fool’sgirl that he loved her, and rake in half his millions.Why should not he do that? No one else caredfor him; and at a year’s end, probably, one womanwould be like another as far as the love was concerned,and probably he should not be more tired if the womanwere Christine Dryfoos than if she were Margaret Vance.He kept Alma Leighton out of the question, becauseat the bottom of his heart he believed that she mustbe forever unlike every other woman to him.

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

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

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

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

“Strike,” said the policeman. Hisinterest in Beaton’s ignorance seemed to overcomehis contempt of it. “Knocked off everywherethis morning except Third Avenue and one or two cross-townlines.” He spat again and kept his bulkat its incline over the gutter to glance at a groupof men on the corner below: They were neatlydressed, and looked like something better than workingmen,and they had a holiday air of being in their bestclothes.

“Some of the strikers?” asked Beaton.

The policeman nodded.

“Any trouble yet?”

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

Beaton felt a sudden turn of his rage toward the menwhose action would now force him to walk five blocksand mount the stairs of the Elevated station.“If you’d take out eight or ten of thosefellows,” he said, ferociously, “and setthem up against a wall and shoot them, you’dsave a great deal of bother.”

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

“Are there six thousand in it?”

“About.”

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

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

“If I was a manager of the roads,” saidBeaton, thinking of how much he was already inconveniencedby the strike, and obscurely connecting it as oneof the series with the wrongs he had suffered at thehands of Mrs. Horn and Mrs. Mandel, “I wouldsee them starve before I’d take them back—­everyone of them.”

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

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

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

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

III.

The strike made a good deal of talk in it he officeof ‘Every Other Week’ that is, it madeFulkerson talk a good deal. He congratulated himselfthat he was not personally incommoded by it, like someof the fellows who lived uptown, and had not everythingunder one roof, as it were. He enjoyed the excitementof it, and he kept the office boy running out to buythe extras which the newsmen came crying through thestreet almost every hour with a lamentable, unintelligiblenoise. He read not only the latest intelligenceof the strike, but the editorial comments on it, whichpraised the firm attitude of both parties, and theadmirable measures taken by the police to preserveorder. Fulkerson enjoyed the interviews withthe police captains and the leaders of the strike;he equally enjoyed the attempts of the reporters tointerview the road managers, which were so graphicallydetailed, and with such a fine feeling for the rightuse of scare-heads as to have almost the value ofdirect expression from them, though it seemed thatthey had resolutely refused to speak. He said,at second-hand from the papers, that if the men behavedthemselves and respected the rights of property, theywould have public sympathy with them every time; butjust as soon as they began to interfere with the roads’right to manage their own affairs in their own way,they must be put down with an iron hand; the phrase“iron hand” did Fulkerson almost as muchgood as if it had never been used before. Newsbegan to come of fighting between the police and thestrikers when the roads tried to move their cars withmen imported from Philadelphia, and then Fulkersonrejoiced at the splendid courage of the police.At the same time, he believed what the strikers said,and that the trouble was not made by them, but bygangs of roughs acting without their approval.In this juncture he was relieved by the arrival ofthe State Board of Arbitration, which took up itsquarters, with a great many scare-heads, at one ofthe principal hotels, and invited the roads and thestrikers to lay the matter in dispute before them;he said that now we should see the working of thegreatest piece of social machinery in modern times.But it appeared to work only in the alacrity of thestrikers to submit their grievance. The road;were as one road in declaring that there was nothingto arbitrate, and that they were merely asserting theirright to manage their own affairs in their own way.One of the presidents was reported to have told amember of the Board, who personally summoned him, toget out and to go about his business. Then, toFulkerson’s extreme disappointment, the augusttribunal, acting on behalf of the sovereign peoplein the interest of peace, declared itself powerless,and got out, and would, no doubt, have gone aboutit* business if it had had any. Fulkerson didnot know what to say, perhaps because the extras didnot; but March laughed at this result.

“It’s a good deal like the military manoeuvreof the King of France and his forty thousand men.I suppose somebody told him at the top of the hillthat there was nothing to arbitrate, and to get outand go about his business, and that was the reasonhe marched down after he had marched up with all thatceremony. What amuses me is to find that in anaffair of this kind the roads have rights and thestrikers have rights, but the public has no rightsat all. The roads and the strikers are allowedto fight out a private war in our midst as thoroughlyand precisely a private war as any we despise theMiddle Ages for having tolerated—­as anystreet war in Florence or Verona—­and tofight it out at our pains and expense, and we standby like sheep and wait till they get tired. It’sa funny attitude for a city of fifteen hundred thousandinhabitants.”

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

“Do? Nothing. Hasn’t the StateBoard of Arbitration declared itself powerless?We have no hold upon the strikers; and we’reso used to being snubbed and disobliged by commoncarriers that we have forgotten our hold on the roadsand always allow them to manage their own affairs intheir own way, quite as if we had nothing to do withthem and they owed us no services in return for theirprivileges.”

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

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

“I don’t know. It savors of horsesense.”

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

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

“No, I find I can philosophize the situationabout as well from the papers, and that’s whatI really want to do, I suppose. Besides, I’msolemnly pledged by Mrs. March not to go near any sortof crowd, under penalty of having her bring the childrenand go with me. Her theory is that we must alldie together; the children haven’t been at schoolsince the strike began. There’s no precautionthat Mrs. March hasn’t used. She watchesme whenever I go out, and sees that I start straightfor this office.”

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

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

“Not if he knows it. But I don’tknow—­What do you say, March? What’sthe reason you couldn’t get us up a paper onthe strike?”

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

“No, but seriously. There ’ll beplenty of news paper accounts. But you couldtreat it in the historical spirit—­like somethingthat happened several centuries ago; De Foe’sPlague of London style. Heigh? What mademe think of it was Beaton. If I could get holdof him, you two could go round together and take downits aesthetic aspects. It’s a big thing,March, this strike is. I tell you it’s imposingto have a private war, as you say, fought out thisway, in the heart of New York, and New York not minding,it a bit. See? Might take that view of it.With your descriptions and Beaton’s sketches—­well,it would just be the greatest card! Come!What do you say?”

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

“Well, it would be difficult. I wonderhow it would do to get Kendricks to do the literarypart?”

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

“Say!” March perceived that Fulkersonwas about to vent another inspiration, and smiledpatiently. “Look here! What’sthe reason we couldn’t get one of the strikersto write it up for us?”

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

“No; I’m in earnest. They say someof those fellows-especially the foreigners—­areeducated men. I know one fellow—­a Bohemian—­thatused to edit a Bohemian newspaper here. He couldwrite it out in his kind of Dutch, and we could getLindau to translate it.”

“I guess not,” said March, dryly.

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

“I don’t see Lindau any more,” saidMarch. He added, “I guess he’s renouncedme along with Mr. Dryfoos’s money.”

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

“He came for a while, but he’s left offcoming now. I don’t feel particularly gayabout it,” March said, with some resentment ofFulkerson’s grin. “He’s leftme in debt to him for lessons to the children.”

Fulkerson laughed out. “Well, he is thegreatest old fool! Who’d ‘a’thought he’d ‘a’ been in earnestwith those ‘brincibles’ of his? ButI suppose there have to be just such cranks; it takesall kinds to make a world.”

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

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

When March left the office he did not go home so directlyas he came, perhaps because Mrs. March’s eyewas not on him. He was very curious about someaspects of the strike, whose importance, as a greatsocial convulsion, he felt people did not recognize;and, with his temperance in everything, he found itsnegative expressions as significant as its more violentphases. He had promised his wife solemnly thathe would keep away from these, and he had a naturalinclination to keep his promise; he had no wish tobe that peaceful spectator who always gets shot whenthere is any firing on a mob. He interested himselfin the apparent indifference of the mighty city, whichkept on about its business as tranquilly as if theprivate war being fought out in its midst were a vaguerumor of Indian troubles on the frontier; and he realizedhow there might once have been a street feud of fortyyears in Florence without interfering materially withthe industry and prosperity of the city. On Broadwaythere was a silence where a jangle and clatter of horse-carbells and hoofs had been, but it was not very noticeable;and on the avenues, roofed by the elevated roads,this silence of the surface tracks was not noticeableat all in the roar of the trains overhead. Someof the cross-town cars were beginning to run again,with a policeman on the rear of each; on the ThirdAvenge line, operated by non-union men, who had notstruck, there were two policemen beside the driverof every car, and two beside the conductor, to protectthem from the strikers. But there were no strikersin sight, and on Second Avenue they stood quietly aboutin groups on the corners. While March watchedthem at a safe distance, a car laden with policemencame down the track, but none of the strikers offeredto molest it. In their simple Sunday best, Marchthought them very quiet, decent-looking people, andhe could well believe that they had nothing to dowith the riotous outbreaks in other parts of the city.He could hardly believe that there were any such outbreaks;he began more and more to think them mere newspaperexaggerations in the absence of any disturbance, orthe disposition to it, that he could see. He walkedon to the East River.

Avenues A, B, and C presented the same quiet aspectas Second Avenue; groups of men stood on the corners,and now and then a police-laden car was brought unmolesteddown the tracks before them; they looked at it andtalked together, and some laughed, but there was notrouble.

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

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

The officer gave him a surly glance and made him noanswer.

His behavior, from a man born to the joking give andtake of our life, impressed March. It gave hima fine sense of the ferocity which he had read ofthe French troops putting on toward the populace justbefore the coup d’etat; he began to feel likethe populace; but he struggled with himself and regainedhis character of philosophical observer. In thischaracter he remained in the car and let it carry himby the corner where he ought to have got out and gonehome, and let it keep on with him to one of the farthermosttracks westward, where so much of the fighting wasreported to have taken place. But everything onthe way was as quiet as on the East Side.

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

IV

Dryfoos sat at breakfast that morning with Mrs. Mandelas usual to pour out his coffee. Conrad had gonedown-town; the two girls lay abed much later thantheir father breakfasted, and their mother had graduallygrown too feeble to come down till lunch. SuddenlyChristine appeared at the door. Her face waswhite to the edges of her lips, and her eyes wereblazing.

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

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

Mrs. Mandel dropped her eyes, and the spoon shookin her hand.

“Then what’s the reason he don’tcome here any more?” demanded the girl; andher glance darted from her father to Mrs. Mandel.“Oh, it’s you, is it? I’d liketo know who told you to meddle in other people’sbusiness?”

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

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

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

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

“No!” shouted the old man. “Andif—­”

“That’s all I want of you!” thegirl shouted in her turn. “Here are yourpresents.” With both hands she flung thejewels-pins and rings and earrings and bracelets—­amongthe breakfast-dishes, from which some of them sprangto the floor. She stood a moment to pull the intaglioring from the finger where Beaton put it a year ago,and dashed that at her father’s plate.Then she whirled out of the room, and they heard herrunning up-stairs.

The old man made a start toward her, but he fell backin his chair before she was gone, and, with a fierce,grinding movement of his jaws, controlled himself.“Take-take those things up,” he gaspedto Mrs. Mandel. He seemed unable to rise againfrom his chair; but when she asked him if he wereunwell, he said no, with an air of offence, and gotquickly to his feet. He mechanically picked upthe intaglio ring from the table while he stood there,and put it on his little finger; his hand was notmuch bigger than Christine’s. “Howdo you suppose she found it out?” he asked,after a moment.

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

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

“Mr. Dryfoos,” palpitated Mrs. Mandel,“I can’t remain here, after the languageyour daughter has used to me—­I can’tlet you leave me—­I—­I’mafraid of her—­”

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

He took the Elevated road. The strike seemeda vary far-off thing, though the paper he bought tolook up the stockmarket was full of noisy typographyabout yesterday’s troubles on the surface lines.Among the millions in Wall Street there was some jokingand some swearing, but not much thinking, about thesix thousand men who had taken such chances in theirattempt to better their condition. Dryfoos heardnothing of the strike in the lobby of the Stock Exchange,where he spent two or three hours watching a favoritestock of his go up and go down under the betting.By the time the Exchange closed it had risen eightpoints, and on this and some other investments hewas five thousand dollars richer than he had beenin the morning. But he had expected to be richerstill, and he was by no means satisfied with his luck.All through the excitement of his winning and losinghad played the dull, murderous rage he felt towardthey child who had defied him, and when the game wasover and he started home his rage mounted into a sortof frenzy; he would teach her, he would break her.He walked a long way without thinking, and then waitedfor a car. None came, and he hailed a passingcoupe.

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

“Been away?” asked the driver. “Hasn’tbeen any car along for a week. Strike.”

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

The man asked, “Where to?”

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

He could not remember the number of ‘Every OtherWeek’ office, where he suddenly decided to stopbefore he went home. He wished to see Fulkerson,and ask him something about Beaton: whether hehad been about lately, and whether he had droppedany hint of what had happened concerning Christine;Dryfoos believed that Fulkerson was in the fellow’sconfidence.

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

“He went out a few moments ago,” saidConrad, glancing at the clock. “I’mafraid he isn’t coming back again today, if youwanted to see him.”

Dryfoos twisted his head sidewise and upward to indicateMarch’s room. “That other fellowout, too?”

“He went just before Mr. Fulkerson,” answeredConrad.

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

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

“The strike-yes! It’s a pretty pieceof business to have everything thrown out becausea parcel of lazy hounds want a chance to lay off andget drunk.” Dryfoos seemed to think Conradwould make some answer to this, but the young man’smild face merely saddened, and he said nothing.“I’ve got a coupe out there now that Ihad to take because I couldn’t get a car.If I had my way I’d have a lot of those vagabondshung. They’re waiting to get the city intoa snarl, and then rob the houses—­pack ofdirty, worthless whelps. They ought to call outthe militia, and fire into ’em. Clubbingis too good for them.” Conrad was stillsilent, and his father sneered, “But I reckonyou don’t think so.”

“I think the strike is useless,” saidConrad.

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

The young fellow dropped his eyes. “I amnot authorized to speak for them.”

“Oh, indeed! And perhaps you’re notauthorized to speak for yourself?”

“Father, you know we don’t agree aboutthese things. I’d rather not talk—­”

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

Conrad apparently judged it best to speak. “Ithink they were very foolish to strike—­atthis time, when the Elevated roads can do the work.”

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

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

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

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

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

“They lie, and you know they lie,” saidhis father, rising and coming toward him. “Andwhat do you think the upshot of it all will be, afterthey’ve ruined business for another week, andmade people hire hacks, and stolen the money of honestmen? How is it going to end?”

“They will have to give in.”

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

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

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

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

“You impudent puppy!” shouted the oldman. He lifted his hand and struck his son inthe face. Conrad caught his hand with his ownleft, and, while the blood began to trickle from awound that Christine’s intaglio ring had madein his temple, he looked at him with a kind of grievingwonder, and said, “Father!”

The old man wrenched his fist away and ran out ofthe house. He remembered his address now, andhe gave it as he plunged into the coupe. He trembledwith his evil passion, and glared out of the windowsat the passers as he drove home; he only saw Conrad’smild, grieving, wondering eyes, and the blood slowlytrickling from the wound in his temple.

Conrad went to the neat-set bowl in Fulkerson’scomfortable room and washed the blood away, and keptbathing the wound with the cold water till it stoppedbleeding. The cut was not deep, and he thoughthe would not put anything on it. After a whilehe locked up the office and started out, he hardlyknew where. But he walked on, in the directionhe had taken, till he found himself in Union Square,on the pavement in front of Brentano’s.It seemed to him that he heard some one calling gentlyto him, “Mr. Dryfoos!”

V.

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

She smiled when, he gave signs of having discoveredher, and came up to the door of her carriage.“I am so glad to meet you. I have been longingto talk to somebody; nobody seems to feel about itas I do. Oh, isn’t it horrible? Mustthey fail? I saw cars running on all the linesas I came across; it made me sick at heart. Mustthose brave fellows give in? And everybody seemsto hate them so—­I can’t bear it.”Her face was estranged with excitement, and therewere traces of tears on it. “You must thinkme almost crazy to stop you in the street this way;but when I caught sight of you I had to speak.I knew you would sympathize—­I knew you wouldfeel as I do. Oh, how can anybody help honoringthose poor men for standing by one another as theydo? They are risking all they have in the worldfor the sake of justice! Oh, they are true heroes!They are staking the bread of their wives and childrenon the dreadful chance they’ve taken! Butno one seems to understand it. No one seems tosee that they are willing to suffer more now thatother poor men may suffer less hereafter. Andthose wretched creatures that are coming in to taketheir places—­those traitors—­”

“We can’t blame them for wanting to earna living, Miss Vance,” said Conrad.

“No, no! I don’t blame them.Who am I, to do such a thing? It’s we—­peoplelike me, of my class—­who make the poor betrayone another. But this dreadful fighting—­thishideous paper is full of it!” She held up anextra, crumpled with her nervous reading. “Can’tsomething be done to stop it? Don’t youthink that if some one went among them, and triedto make them see how perfectly hopeless it was to resistthe companies and drive off the new men, he mightdo some good? I have wanted to go and try; butI am a woman, and I mustn’t! I shouldn’tbe afraid of the strikers, but I’m afraid ofwhat people would say!” Conrad kept pressinghis handkerchief to the cut in his temple, which hethought might be bleeding, and now she noticed this.“Are you hurt, Mr. Dryfoos? You look sopale.”

“No, it’s nothing—­a littlescratch I’ve got.”

“Indeed, you look pale. Have you a carriage?How will you get home? Will you get in here withme and let me drive you?”

“No, no,” said Conrad, smiling at herexcitement. “I’m perfectly well—­”

“And you don’t think I’m foolishand wicked for stopping you here and talking in thisway? But I know you feel as I do!”

“Yes, I feel as you do. You are right—­rightin every way—­I mustn’t keep you—­Good-bye.”He stepped back to bow, but she put her beautiful handout of the window, and when he took it she wrung hishand hard.

“Thank you, thank you! You are good andyou are just! But no one can do anything.It’s useless!”

The type of irreproachable coachman on the box whoserespectability had suffered through the strange behaviorof his mistress in this interview drove quickly offat her signal, and Conrad stood a moment looking afterthe carriage. His heart was full of joy; it leaped;he thought it would burst. As he turned to walkaway it seemed to him as if he mounted upon the air.The trust she had shown him, the praise she had givenhim, that crush of the hand: he hoped nothing,he formed no idea from it, but it all filled him withlove that cast out the pain and shame he had beensuffering. He believed that he could never beunhappy any more; the hardness that was in his mindtoward his father went out of it; he saw how sorelyhe had tried him; he grieved that he had done it, butthe means, the difference of his feeling about thecause of their quarrel, he was solemnly glad of thatsince she shared it. He was only sorry for hisfather. “Poor father!” he said underhis breath as he went along. He explained toher about his father in his reverie, and she pitiedhis father, too.

He was walking over toward the West Side, aimlesslyat first, and then at times with the longing to dosomething to save those mistaken men from themselvesforming itself into a purpose. Was not that whatshe meant when she bewailed her woman’s helplessness?She must have wished him to try if he, being a man,could not do something; or if she did not, still hewould try, and if she heard of it she would recallwhat she had said and would be glad he had understoodher so. Thinking of her pleasure in what he wasgoing to do, he forgot almost what it was; but whenhe came to a street-car track he remembered it, andlooked up and down to see if there were any turbulentgathering of men whom he might mingle with and helpto keep from violence. He saw none anywhere; andthen suddenly, as if at the same moment, for in hisexalted mood all events had a dream-like simultaneity,he stood at the corner of an avenue, and in the middleof it, a little way off, was a street-car, and aroundthe car a tumult of shouting, cursing, strugglingmen. The driver was lashing his horses forward,and a policeman was at their heads, with the conductor,pulling them; stones, clubs, brickbats hailed uponthe car, the horses, the men trying to move them.The mob closed upon them in a body, and then a patrol-wagonwhirled up from the other side, and a squad of policemenleaped out and began to club the rioters. Conradcould see how they struck them under the rims of theirhats; the blows on their skulls sounded as if theyhad fallen on stone; the rioters ran in all directions.

One of the officers rushed up toward the corner whereConrad stood, and then he saw at his side a tall,old man, with a long, white beard, who was callingout at the policemen: “Ah, yes! Glupthe strikerss—­gif it to them! Whydon’t you co and glup the bresidents that insoaltyour lawss, and gick your Boart of Arpidration out-of-toors?Glup the strikerss—­they cot no friendts!They cot no money to pribe you, to dreat you!”

The officer lifted his club, and the old man threwhis left arm up to shield his head. Conrad recognizedZindau, and now he saw the empty sleeve dangle inthe air over the stump of his wrist. He hearda shot in that turmoil beside the car, and somethingseemed to strike him in the breast. He was goingto say to the policeman: “Don’t strikehim! He’s an old soldier! You seehe has no hand!” but he could not speak, he couldnot move his tongue. The policeman stood there;he saw his face: it was not bad, not cruel; itwas like the face of a statue, fixed, perdurable—­amere image of irresponsible and involuntary authority.Then Conrad fell forward, pierced through the heartby that shot fired from the car.

March heard the shot as he scrambled out of his car,and at the same moment he saw Lindau drop under theclub of the policeman, who left him where he felland joined the rest of the squad in pursuing the rioters.The fighting round the car in the avenue ceased; thedriver whipped his horses into a gallop, and the placewas left empty.

March would have liked to run; he thought how hiswife had implored him to keep away from the rioting;but he could not have left Lindau lying there if hewould. Something stronger than his will drew himto the spot, and there he saw Conrad, dead besidethe old man.

VI.

In the cares which Mrs. March shared with her husbandthat night she was supported partly by principle,but mainly by the, potent excitement which bewilderedConrad’s family and took all reality from whathad happened. It was nearly midnight when theMarches left them and walked away toward the Elevatedstation with Fulkerson. Everything had been done,by that time, that could be done; and Fulkerson wasnot without that satisfaction in the business-likedespatch of all the details which attends each stepin such an affair and helps to make death tolerableeven to the most sorely stricken. We are creaturesof the moment; we live from one little space to another;and only one interest at a time fills these. Fulkersonwas cheerful when they got into the street, almostgay; and Mrs. March experienced a rebound from herdepression which she felt that she ought not to haveexperienced. But she condoned the offence a littlein herself, because her husband remained so constantin his gravity; and, pending the final accountinghe must make her for having been where he could beof so much use from the first instant of the calamity,she was tenderly, gratefully proud of all the usehe had been to Conrad’s family, and especiallyhis miserable old father. To her mind, March wasthe principal actor in the whole affair, and muchmore important in having seen it than those who hadsuffered in it. In fact, he had suffered incomparably.

“Well, well,” said Fulkerson. “They’llget along now. We’ve done all we could,and there’s nothing left but for them to bearit. Of course it’s awful, but I guess it’ll come out all right. I mean,” headded, “they’ll pull through now.”

“I suppose,” said March, “that nothingis put on us that we can’t bear. But Ishould think,” he went on, musingly, “thatwhen God sees what we poor finite creatures can bear,hemmed round with this eternal darkness of death,He must respect us.”

“Basil!” said his wife. But in herheart she drew nearer to him for the words she thoughtshe ought to rebuke him for.

“Oh, I know,” he said, “we schoolourselves to despise human nature. But God didnot make us despicable, and I say, whatever end Hemeant us for, He must have some such thrill of joyin our adequacy to fate as a father feels when hisson shows himself a man. When I think what wecan be if we must, I can’t believe the leastof us shall finally perish.”

“Oh, I reckon the Almighty won’t scoopany of us,” said Fulkerson, with a piety ofhis own.

“That poor boy’s father!” sighedMrs. March. “I can’t get his faceout of my sight. He looked so much worse thandeath.”

“Oh, death doesn’t look bad,” saidMarch. “It’s life that looks so inits presence. Death is peace and pardon.I only wish poor old Lindau was as well out of itas Conrad there.”

“Ah, Lindau! He has done harm enough,”said Mrs. March. “I hope he will be carefulafter this.”

March did not try to defend Lindau against her theoryof the case, which inexorably held him responsiblefor Conrad’s death.

“Lindau’s going to come out all right,I guess,” said Fulkerson. “He wasfirst-rate when I saw him at the hospital to-night.”He whispered in March’s ear, at a chance hegot in mounting the station stairs: “I didn’tlike to tell you there at the house, but I guess you’dbetter know. They had to take Lindau’sarm off near the shoulder. Smashed all to piecesby the clubbing.”

In the house, vainly rich and foolishly unfit forthem, the bereaved family whom the Marches had justleft lingered together, and tried to get strengthto part for the night. They were all spent withthe fatigue that comes from heaven to such miseryas theirs, and they sat in a torpor in which eachwaited for the other to move, to speak.

Christine moved, and Mela spoke. Christine roseand went out of the room without saying a word, andthey heard her going up-stairs. Then Mela said:

“I reckon the rest of us better be goun’too, father. Here, let’s git mother started.”

She put her arm round her mother, to lift her fromher chair, but the old man did not stir, and Melacalled Mrs. Mandel from the next room. Betweenthem they raised her to her feet.

“Ain’t there anybody agoin’ to setup with it?” she asked, in her hoarse pipe.“It appears like folks hain’t got any feelin’sin New York. Woon’t some o’ the neighborscome and offer to set up, without waitin’ tobe asked?”

“Oh, that’s all right, mother. Themen ’ll attend to that. Don’t youbother any,” Mela coaxed, and she kept her armround her mother, with tender patience.

“Why, Mely, child! I can’t feel rightto have it left to hirelin’s so. But thereain’t anybody any more to see things done asthey ought. If Coonrod was on’y here—­”

“Well, mother, you are pretty mixed!”said Mela, with a strong tendency to break into herlarge guffaw. But she checked herself and said:“I know just how you feel, though. It keepsacomun’ and agoun’; and it’s so andit ain’t so, all at once; that’s the plagueof it. Well, father! Ain’t you goun’to come?”

“I’m goin’ to stay, Mela,”said the old man, gently, without moving. “Getyour mother to bed, that’s a good girl.”

“You goin’ to set up with him, Jacob?”asked the old woman.

“Yes, ’Liz’beth, I’ll setup. You go to bed.”

“Well, I will, Jacob. And I believe it’ll do you good to set up. I wished I couldset up with you; but I don’t seem to have thestren’th I did when the twins died. I mustgit my sleep, so’s to—­I don’tlike very well to have you broke of your rest, Jacob,but there don’t appear to be anybody else.You wouldn’t have to do it if Coonrod was here.There I go ag’in! Mercy! mercy!”

“Well, do come along, then, mother,” saidMela; and she got her out of the room, with Mrs. Mandel’shelp, and up the stairs.

From the top the old woman called down, “Youtell Coonrod—­” She stopped, and heheard her groan out, “My Lord! my Lord!”

He sat, one silence in the dining-room, where theyhad all lingered together, and in the library beyondthe hireling watcher sat, another silence. Thetime passed, but neither moved, and the last noisein the house ceased, so that they heard each otherbreathe, and the vague, remote rumor of the city invadedthe inner stillness. It grew louder toward morning,and then Dryfoos knew from the watcher’s deeperbreathing that he had fallen into a doze.

He crept by him to the drawing-room, where his sonwas; the place was full of the awful sweetness ofthe flowers that Fulkerson had brought, and that layabove the pulseless breast. The old man turnedup a burner in the chandelier, and stood looking onthe majestic serenity of the dead face.

He could not move when he saw his wife coming downthe stairway in the hall. She was in her long,white flannel bed gown, and the candle she carriedshook with her nervous tremor. He thought shemight be walking in her sleep, but she said, quitesimply, “I woke up, and I couldn’t gitto sleep ag’in without comin’ to havea look.” She stood beside their dead sonwith him, “well, he’s beautiful, Jacob.He was the prettiest baby! And he was alwaysgood, Coonrod was; I’ll say that for him.I don’t believe he ever give me a minute’scare in his whole life. I reckon I liked himabout the best of all the children; but I don’tknow as I ever done much to show it. But youwas always good to him, Jacob; you always done thebest for him, ever since he was a little feller.I used to be afraid you’d spoil him sometimes

in them days; but I guess you’re glad now forevery time you didn’t cross him. I don’tsuppose since the twins died you ever hit him a lick.”She stooped and peered closer at the face. “Why,Jacob, what’s that there by his pore eye?”Dryfoos saw it, too, the wound that he had fearedto look for, and that now seemed to redden on hissight. He broke into a low, wavering cry, likea child’s in despair, like an animal’sin terror, like a soul’s in the anguish of remorse.

VII.

The evening after the funeral, while the Marches sattogether talking it over, and making approaches, throughits shadow, to the question of their own future, whichit involved, they were startled by the twitter of theelectric bell at their apartment door. It wasreally not so late as the children’s havinggone to bed made it seem; but at nine o’clockit was too late for any probable visitor except Fulkerson.It might be he, and March was glad to postpone theimpending question to his curiosity concerning theimmediate business Fulkerson might have with him.He went himself to the door, and confronted therea lady deeply veiled in black and attended by a verydecorous serving-woman.

“Are you alone, Mr. March—­you andMrs. March?” asked the lady, behind her veil;and, as he hesitated, she said: “You don’tknow me! Miss Vance”; and she threw backher veil, showing her face wan and agitated in thedark folds. “I am very anxious to see you—­tospeak with you both. May I come in?”

“Why, certainly, Miss Vance,” he answered,still too much stupefied by her presence to realizeit.

She promptly entered, and saying, with a glance atthe hall chair by the door, “My maid can sithere?” followed him to the room where he hadleft his wife.

Mrs. March showed herself more capable of coping withthe fact. She welcomed Miss Vance with the likingthey both felt for the girl, and with the sympathywhich her troubled face inspired.

“I won’t tire you with excuses for coming,Mrs. March,” she said, “for it was theonly thing left for me to do; and I come at my aunt’ssuggestion.” She added this as if it wouldhelp to account for her more on the conventional plane,and she had the instinctive good taste to addressherself throughout to Mrs. March as much as possible,though what she had to say was mainly for March.“I don’t know how to begin—­Idon’t know how to speak of this terrible affair.But you know what I mean. I feel as if I hadlived a whole lifetime since it happened. I don’twant you to pity me for it,” she said, forestallinga politeness from Mrs. March. “I’mthe last one to be thought of, and you mustn’tmind me if I try to make you. I came to findout all of the truth that I can, and when I know justwhat that is I shall know what to do. I have readthe inquest; it’s all burned into my brain.But I don’t care for that—­for myself:you must let me say such things without minding me.I know that your husband—­that Mr. Marchwas there; I read his testimony; and I wished to askhim—­to ask him—­” She stoppedand looked distractedly about. “But whatfolly! He must have said everything he knew—­hehad to.” Her eyes wandered to him fromhis wife, on whom she had kept them with instinctivetact.

“I said everything—­yes,” hereplied. “But if you would like to know—­”

“Perhaps I had better tell you something first.I had just parted with him—­it couldn’thave been more than half an hour—­in frontof Brentano’s; he must have gone straight tohis death. We were talking, and I—­Isaid, Why didn’t some one go among the strikersand plead with them to be peaceable, and keep themfrom attacking the new men. I knew that he feltas I did about the strikers: that he was theirfriend. Did you see—­do you know anythingthat makes you think he had been trying to do that?”

“I am sorry,” March began, “I didn’tsee him at all till—­till I saw him lyingdead.”

“My husband was there purely by accident,”Mrs. March put in. “I had begged and entreatedhim not to go near the striking anywhere. Andhe had just got out of the car, and saw the policemanstrike that wretched Lindau—­he’sbeen such an anxiety to me ever since we have had anythingto do with him here; my husband knew him when he wasa boy in the West. Mr. March came home from itall perfectly prostrated; it made us all sick!Nothing so horrible ever came into our lives before.I assure you it was the most shocking experience.”

Miss Vance listened to her with that look of patiencewhich those who have seen much of the real sufferingof the world—­the daily portion of the poor—­havefor the nervous woes of comfortable people. Marchhung his head; he knew it would be useless to protestthat his share of the calamity was, by comparison,infinitesimally small.

After she had heard Mrs. March to the end even ofher repetitions, Miss Vance said, as if it were amere matter of course that she should have lookedthe affair up, “Yes, I have seen Mr. Lindau atthe hospital—­”

“My husband goes every day to see him,”Mrs. March interrupted, to give. a final touch tothe conception of March’s magnanimity throughout.

“The poor man seems to have been in the wrongat the time,” said Miss Vance.

“I could almost say he had earned the rightto be wrong. He’s a man of the most generousinstincts, and a high ideal of justice, of equity—­toohigh to be considered by a policeman with a club inhis hand,” said March, with a bold defianceof his wife’s different opinion of Lindau.“It’s the policeman’s business, Isuppose, to club the ideal when he finds it incitinga riot.”

“Oh, I don’t blame Mr. Lindau; I don’tblame the policeman; he was as much a mere instrumentas his club was. I am only trying to find outhow much I am to blame myself. I had no thoughtof Mr. Dryfoos’s going there—­of hisattempting to talk with the strikers and keep themquiet; I was only thinking, as women do, of what Ishould try to do if I were a man.

“But perhaps he understood me to ask him togo—­perhaps my words sent him to his death.”

She had a sort of calm in her courage to know theworst truth as to her responsibility that forbadeany wish to flatter her out of it. “I’mafraid,” said March, “that is what cannever be known now.” After a moment headded: “But why should you wish to know?If he went there as a peacemaker, he died in a goodcause, in such a way as he would wish to die, I believe.”

“Yes,” said the girl; “I have thoughtof that. But death is awful; we must not thinkpatiently, forgivingly of sending any one to theirdeath in the best cause.”—­“Ifancy life was an awful thing to Conrad Dryfoos,”March replied. “He was thwarted and disappointed,without even pleasing the ambition that thwarted anddisappointed him. That poor old man, his father,warped him from his simple, lifelong wish to be a minister,and was trying to make a business man of him.If it will be any consolation to you to know it, MissVance, I can assure you that he was very unhappy,and I don’t see how he could ever have been happyhere.”

“It won’t,” said the girl, steadily.“If people are born into this world, it’sbecause they were meant to live in it. It isn’ta question of being happy here; no one is happy, inthat old, selfish way, or can be; but he could havebeen of great use.”

“Perhaps he was of use in dying. Who knows?He may have been trying to silence Lindau.”

“Oh, Lindau wasn’t worth it!” criedMrs. March.

Miss Vance looked at her as if she did not quite understand.Then she turned to March. “He might havebeen unhappy, as we all are; but I know that his lifehere would have had a higher happiness than we wishfor or aim for.” The tears began to runsilently down her cheeks.

“He looked strangely happy that day when heleft me. He had hurt himself somehow, and hisface was bleeding from a scratch; he kept his handkerchiefup; he was pale, but such a light came into his facewhen he shook hands—­ah, I know he wentto try and do what I said!” They were all silent,while she dried her eyes and then put her handkerchiefback into the pocket from which she had suddenly pulledit, with a series of vivid, young-ladyish gestures,which struck March by their incongruity with the occasionof their talk, and yet by their harmony with the restof her elegance. “I am sorry, Miss Vance,”he began, “that I can’t really tell youanything more—­”

“You are very kind,” she said, controllingherself and rising quickly. “I thank you—­thankyou both very much.” She turned to Mrs.March and shook hands with her and then with him.“I might have known—­I did know thatthere wasn’t anything more for you to tell.But at least I’ve found out from you that therewas nothing, and now I can begin to bear what I must.How are those poor creatures—­his motherand father, his sisters? Some day, I hope, Ishall be ashamed to have postponed them to the thoughtof myself; but I can’t pretend to be yet.I could not come to the funeral; I wanted to.”

She addressed her question to Mrs. March, who answered:“I can understand. But they were pleasedwith the flowers you sent; people are, at such times,and they haven’t many friends.”

“Would you go to see them?” asked thegirl. “Would you tell them what I’vetold you?”

Mrs. March looked at her husband.

“I don’t see what good it would do.They wouldn’t understand. But if it wouldrelieve you—­”

“I’ll wait till it isn’t a questionof self-relief,” said the girl. “Good-bye!”

She left them to long debate of the event. Atthe end Mrs. March said, “She is a strange being;such a mixture of the society girl and the saint.”

Her husband answered: “She’s thepotentiality of several kinds of fanatic. She’svery unhappy, and I don’t see how she’sto be happier about that poor fellow. I shouldn’tbe surprised if she did inspire him to attempt somethingof that kind.”

“Well, you got out of it very well, Basil.I admired the way you managed. I was afraid you’dsay something awkward.”

“Oh, with a plain line of truth before me, asthe only possible thing, I can get on pretty well.When it comes to anything decorative, I’d ratherleave it to you, Isabel.”

She seemed insensible of his jest. “Ofcourse, he was in love with her. That was thelight that came into his face when he was going todo what he thought she wanted him to do.”

“And she—­do you think that she was—­”

“What an idea! It would have been perfectlygrotesque!”

VIII.

Their affliction brought the Dryfooses into humanerrelations with the Marches, who had hitherto regardedthem as a necessary evil, as the odious means of theirown prosperity. Mrs. March found that the womenof the family seemed glad of her coming, and in thesense of her usefulness to them all she began to feela kindness even for Christine. But she couldnot help seeing that between the girl and her fatherthere was an unsettled account, somehow, and thatit was Christine and not the old man who was holdingout. She thought that their sorrow had tendedto refine the others. Mela was much more subdued,and, except when she abandoned herself to a childishinterest in her mourning, she did nothing to shockMrs. March’s taste or to seem unworthy of hergrief. She was very good to her mother, whomthe blow had left unchanged, and to her father, whomit had apparently fallen upon with crushing weight.Once, after visiting their house, Mrs. March describedto March a little scene between Dryfoos and Mela,when he came home from Wall Street, and the girl methim at the door with a kind of country simpleness,and took his hat and stick, and brought him into theroom where Mrs. March sat, looking tired and broken.She found this look of Dryfoos’s pathetic, anddwelt on the sort of stupefaction there was in it;he must have loved his son more than they ever realized.“Yes,” said March, “I suspect hedid. He’s never been about the place sincethat day; he was always dropping in before, on hisway up-town. He seems to go down to Wall Streetevery day, just as before, but I suppose that’smechanical; he wouldn’t know what else to do;I dare say it’s best for him. The sanguineFulkerson is getting a little anxious about the futureof ‘Every Other Week.’ Now Conrad’sgone, he isn’t sure the old man will want tokeep on with it, or whether he’ll have to lookup another Angel. He wants to get married, I imagine,and he can’t venture till this point is settled.”

“It’s a very material point to us too,Basil,” said Mrs. March.

“Well, of course. I hadn’t overlookedthat, you may be sure. One of the things thatFulkerson and I have discussed is a scheme for buyingthe magazine. Its success is pretty well assurednow, and I shouldn’t be afraid to put moneyinto it—­if I had the money.”

“I couldn’t let you sell the house inBoston, Basil!”

“And I don’t want to. I wish we couldgo back and live in it and get the rent, too!It would be quite a support. But I suppose ifDryfoos won’t keep on, it must come to anotherAngel. I hope it won’t be a literary one,with a fancy for running my department.”

“Oh, I guess whoever takes the magazine willbe glad enough to keep you!”

“Do you think so? Well, perhaps. ButI don’t believe Fulkerson would let me standlong between him and an Angel of the right description.”

“Well, then, I believe he would. And you’venever seen anything, Basil, to make you really thinkthat Mr. Fulkerson didn’t appreciate you to theutmost.”

“I think I came pretty near an undervaluationin that Lindau trouble. I shall always wonderwhat put a backbone into Fulkerson just at that crisis.Fulkerson doesn’t strike me as the stuff of amoral hero.”

“At any rate, he was one,” said Mrs. March,“and that’s quite enough for me.”

March did not answer. “What a noble thinglife is, anyway! Here I am, well on the way tofifty, after twenty-five years of hard work, lookingforward to the potential poor-house as confidentlyas I did in youth. We might have saved a littlemore than we have saved; but the little more wouldn’tavail if I were turned out of my place now; and weshould have lived sordidly to no purpose. Someone always has you by the throat, unless you havesome one else in your grip. I wonder if that’sthe attitude the Almighty intended His respectablecreatures to take toward one another! I wonderif He meant our civilization, the battle we fightin, the game we trick in! I wonder if He considersit final, and if the kingdom of heaven on earth, whichwe pray for—­”

“Have you seen Lindau to-day?” Mrs. Marchasked.

“You inferred it from the quality of my piety?”March laughed, and then suddenly sobered. “Yes,I saw him. It’s going rather hard with him,I’m afraid. The amputation doesn’theal very well; the shock was very great, and he’sold. It ’ll take time. There’sso much pain that they have to keep him under opiates,and I don’t think he fully knew me. At anyrate, I didn’t get my piety from him to-day.”

“It’s horrible! Horrible!”said Mrs. March. “I can’t get overit! After losing his hand in the war, to losehis whole arm now in this way! It does seem toocruel! Of course he oughtn’t to have beenthere; we can say that. But you oughtn’tto have been there, either, Basil.”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly advising the policeto go and club the railroad presidents.”

“Neither was poor Conrad Dryfoos.”

“I don’t deny it. All that was distinctlythe chance of life and death. That belonged toGod; and no doubt it was law, though it seems chance.But what I object to is this economic chance-worldin which we live, and which we men seem to have created.It ought to be law as inflexible in human affairsas the order of day and night in the physical worldthat if a man will work he shall both rest and eat,and shall not be harassed with any question as tohow his repose and his provision shall come.Nothing less ideal than this satisfies the reason.But in our state of things no one is secure of this.No one is sure of finding work; no one is sure ofnot losing it. I may have my work taken away fromme at any moment by the caprice, the mood, the indigestionof a man who has not the qualification for knowingwhether I do it well, or ill. At my time of life—­atevery time of life—­a man ought to feel thatif he will keep on doing his duty he shall not sufferin himself or in those who are dear to him, exceptthrough natural causes. But no man can feel thisas things are now; and so we go on, pushing and pulling,climbing and crawling, thrusting aside and tramplingunderfoot; lying, cheating, stealing; and then weget to the end, covered with blood and dirt and sinand shame, and look back over the way we’vecome to a palace of our own, or the poor-house, whichis about the only possession we can claim in commonwith our brother-men, I don’t think the retrospectcan be pleasing.”

“I know, I know!” said his wife.“I think of those things, too, Basil. Lifeisn’t what it seems when you look forward toit. But I think people would suffer less, andwouldn’t have to work so hard, and could makeall reasonable provision for the future, if they werenot so greedy and so foolish.”

“Oh, without doubt! We can’t putit all on the conditions; we must put some of theblame on character. But conditions make character;and people are greedy and foolish, and wish to haveand to shine, because having and shining are heldup to them by civilization as the chief good of life.We all know they are not the chief good, perhaps notgood at all; but if some one ventures to say so, allthe rest of us call him a fraud and a crank, and gomoiling and toiling on to the palace or the poor-house.We can’t help it. If one were less greedyor less foolish, some one else would have and wouldshine at his expense. We don’t moil andtoil to ourselves alone; the palace or the poor-houseis not merely for ourselves, but for our children,whom we’ve brought up in the superstition thathaving and shining is the chief good. We darenot teach them otherwise, for fear they may falterin the fight when it comes their turn, and the childrenof others will crowd them out of the palace into thepoor-house. If we felt sure that honest work sharedby all would bring them honest food shared by all,some heroic few of us, who did not wish our childrento rise above their fellows—­though we couldnot bear to have them fall below—­mighttrust them with the truth. But we have no suchassurance, and so we go on trembling before Dryfoosesand living in gimcrackeries.”

“Basil, Basil! I was always willing tolive more simply than you. You know I was!”

“I know you always said so, my dear. Buthow many bell-ratchets and speaking-tubes would yoube willing to have at the street door below? Iremember that when we were looking for a flat you rejectedevery building that had a bell-ratchet or a speaking-tube,and would have nothing to do with any that had morethan an electric button; you wanted a hall-boy, withelectric buttons all over him. I don’t blameyou. I find such things quite as necessary asyou do.”

“And do you mean to say, Basil,” she asked,abandoning this unprofitable branch of the inquiry,“that you are really uneasy about your place?that you are afraid Mr. Dryfoos may give up beingan Angel, and Mr. Fulkerson may play you false?”

“Play me false? Oh, it wouldn’t beplaying me false. It would be merely lookingout for himself, if the new Angel had editorial tastesand wanted my place. It’s what any onewould do.”

“You wouldn’t do it, Basil!”

“Wouldn’t I? Well, if any one offeredme more salary than ’Every Other Week’pays—­say, twice as much—­whatdo you think my duty to my suffering family wouldbe? It’s give and take in the business world,Isabel; especially take. But as to being uneasy,I’m not, in the least. I’ve the spiritof a lion, when it comes to such a chance as that.When I see how readily the sensibilities of the passingstranger can be worked in New York, I think of takingup the role of that desperate man on Third Avenuewho went along looking for garbage in the gutter toeat. I think I could pick up at least twentyor thirty cents a day by that little game, and maintainmy family in the affluence it’s been accustomedto.”

“Basil!” cried his wife. “Youdon’t mean to say that man was an impostor!And I’ve gone about, ever since, feeling thatone such case in a million, the bare possibility ofit, was enough to justify all that Lindau said aboutthe rich and the poor!”

March laughed teasingly. “Oh, I don’tsay he was an impostor. Perhaps he really washungry; but, if he wasn’t, what do you thinkof a civilization that makes the opportunity of sucha fraud? that gives us all such a bad conscience forthe need which is that we weaken to the need that isn’t?Suppose that poor fellow wasn’t personally foundedon fact: nevertheless, he represented the truth;he was the ideal of the suffering which would be lesseffective if realistically treated. That man isa great comfort to me. He probably rioted fordays on that quarter I gave him; made a dinner verylikely, or a champagne supper; and if ‘EveryOther Week’ wants to get rid of me, I intendto work that racket. You can hang round the cornerwith Bella, and Tom can come up to me in tears, atstated intervals, and ask me if I’ve found anythingyet. To be sure, we might be arrested and sentup somewhere. But even in that extreme case weshould be provided for. Oh no, I’m notafraid of losing my place! I’ve merely asort of psychological curiosity to know how men likeDryfoos and Fulkerson will work out the problem beforethem.”

IX.

It was a curiosity which Fulkerson himself shared,at least concerning Dryfoos. “I don’tknow what the old man’s going to do,” hesaid to March the day after the Marches had talkedtheir future over. “Said anything to youyet?”

“No, not a word.”

“You’re anxious, I suppose, same as Iam. Fact is,” said Fulkerson, blushinga little, “I can’t ask to have a day namedtill I know where I am in connection with the oldman. I can’t tell whether I’ve gotto look out for something else or somebody else.Of course, it’s full soon yet.”

“Yes,” March said, “much soonerthan it seems to us. We’re so anxious aboutthe future that we don’t remember how very recentthe past is.”

“That’s something so. The old man’shardly had time yet to pull himself together.Well, I’m glad you feel that way about it, March.I guess it’s more of a blow to him than we realize.He was a good deal bound up in Coonrod, though hedidn’t always use him very well. Well, Ireckon it’s apt to happen so oftentimes; curioushow cruel love can be. Heigh? We’rean awful mixture, March!”

“Yes, that’s the marvel and the curse,as Browning says.”

“Why, that poor boy himself,” pursuedFulkerson, had streaks of the mule in him that couldgive odds to Beaton, and he must have tried the oldman by the way he would give in to his will and holdout against his judgment. I don’t believehe ever budged a hairs-breadth from his original positionabout wanting to be a preacher and not wanting to bea business man. Well, of course! I don’tthink business is all in all; but it must have madethe old man mad to find that without saying anything,or doing anything to show it, and after seeming tocome over to his ground, and really coming, practically,Coonrod was just exactly where he first planted himself,every time.”

“Yes, people that have convictions are difficult.Fortunately, they’re rare.”

“Do you think so? It seems to me that everybody’sgot convictions. Beaton himself, who hasn’ta principle to throw at a dog, has got convictionsthe size of a barn. They ain’t always thesame ones, I know, but they’re always to thesame effect, as far as Beaton’s being NumberOne is concerned. The old man’s got convictionsor did have, unless this thing lately has shaken himall up—­and he believes that money will doeverything. Colonel Woodburn’s got convictionsthat he wouldn’t part with for untold millions.Why, March, you got convictions yourself!”

“Have I?” said March. “I don’tknow what they are.”

“Well, neither do I; but I know you were readyto kick the trough over for them when the old manwanted us to bounce Lindau that time.”

“Oh yes,” said March; he remembered thefact; but he was still uncertain just what the convictionswere that he had been so stanch for.

“I suppose we could have got along without you,”Fulkerson mused aloud. “It’s astonishinghow you always can get along in this world withoutthe man that is simply indispensable. Makes afellow realize that he could take a day off now andthen without deranging the solar system a great deal.Now here’s Coonrod—­or, rather, heisn’t. But that boy managed his part ofthe schooner so well that I used to tremble when Ithought of his getting the better of the old man andgoing into a convent or something of that kind; andnow here he is, snuffed out in half a second, and Idon’t believe but what we shall be sailing alongjust as chipper as usual inside of thirty days.I reckon it will bring the old man to the point whenI come to talk with him about who’s to be putin Coonrod’s place. I don’t likevery well to start the subject with him; but it’sgot to be done some time.”

“Yes,” March admitted. “It’sterrible to think how unnecessary even the best andwisest of us is to the purposes of Providence.When I looked at that poor young fellow’s facesometimes—­so gentle and true and pure—­Iused to think the world was appreciably richer forhis being in it. But are we appreciably poorerfor his being out of it now?”

“No, I don’t reckon we are,” saidFulkerson. “And what a lot of the raw materialof all kinds the Almighty must have, to waste us theway He seems to do. Think of throwing away aprecious creature like Coonrod Dryfoos on one chancein a thousand of getting that old fool of a Lindauout of the way of being clubbed! For I supposethat was what Coonrod was up to. Say! Haveyou been round to see Lindau to-day?”

Something in the tone or the manner of Fulkerson startledMarch. “No! I haven’t seen himsince yesterday.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Fulkerson.“I guess I saw him a little while after youdid, and that young doctor there seemed to feel kindof worried about him.

“Or not worried, exactly; they can’t affordto let such things worry them, I suppose; but—­”

“He’s worse?” asked March.

“Oh, he didn’t say so. But I justwondered if you’d seen him to-day.”

“I think I’ll go now,” said March,with a pang at heart. He had gone every day tosee Lindau, but this day he had thought he would notgo, and that was why his heart smote him. Heknew that if he were in Lindau’s place Lindauwould never have left his side if he could have helpedit. March tried to believe that the case wasthe same, as it stood now; it seemed to him that hewas always going to or from the hospital; he saidto himself that it must do Lindau harm to be visitedso much. But he knew that this was not true whenhe was met at the door of the ward where Lindau layby the young doctor, who had come to feel a personalinterest in March’s interest in Lindau.

He smiled without gayety, and said, “He’sjust going.”

“What! Discharged?”

“Oh no. He has been failing very fast sinceyou saw him yesterday, and now—­”They had been walking softly and talking softly downthe aisle between the long rows of beds. “Wouldyou care to see him?”

The doctor made a slight gesture toward the whitecanvas screen which in such places forms the death-chamberof the poor and friendless. “Come roundthis way—­he won’t know you! I’vegot rather fond of the poor old fellow. He wouldn’thave a clergyman—­sort of agnostic, isn’the? A good many of these Germans are—­butthe young lady who’s been coming to see him—­”

They both stopped. Lindau’s grand, patriarchalhead, foreshortened to their view, lay white uponthe pillow, and his broad, white beard flowed uponthe sheet, which heaved with those long last breaths.Beside his bed Margaret Vance was kneeling; her veilwas thrown back, and her face was lifted; she heldclasped between her hands the hand of the dying man;she moved her lips inaudibly.

X.

In spite of the experience of the whole race fromtime immemorial, when death comes to any one we knowwe helplessly regard it as an incident of life, whichwill presently go on as before. Perhaps this isan instinctive perception of the truth that it doesgo on somewhere; but we have a sense of death as absolutelythe end even for earth only if it relates to someone remote or indifferent to us. March tried toproject Lindau to the necessary distance from himselfin order to realize the fact in his case, but he couldnot, though the man with whom his youth had been associatedin a poetic friendship had not actually reentered theregion of his affection to the same degree, or in anylike degree. The changed conditions forbade that.He had a soreness of heart concerning him; but hecould not make sure whether this soreness was grieffor his death, or remorse for his own uncandor withhim about Dryfoos, or a foreboding of that accountingwith his conscience which he knew his wife would nowexact of him down to the last minutest particular oftheir joint and several behavior toward Lindau eversince they had met him in New York.

He felt something knock against his shoulder, andhe looked up to have his hat struck from his headby a horse’s nose. He saw the horse puthis foot on the hat, and he reflected, “Nowit will always look like an accordion,” andhe heard the horse’s driver address him somesarcasms before he could fully awaken to the situation.He was standing bareheaded in the middle of FifthAvenue and blocking the tide of carriages flowingin either direction. Among the faces put out ofthe carriage windows he saw that of Dryfoos lookingfrom a coupe. The old man knew him, and said,“Jump in here, Mr. March”; and March, whohad mechanically picked up his hat, and was thinking,“Now I shall have to tell Isabel about this atonce, and she will never trust me on the street againwithout her,” mechanically obeyed. Herconfidence in him had been undermined by his beingso near Conrad when he was shot; and it went throughhis mind that he would get Dryfoos to drive him toa hatter’s, where he could buy a new hat, and

not be obliged to confess his narrow escape to hiswife till the incident was some days old and she couldbear it better. It quite drove Lindau’sdeath out of his mind for the moment; and when Dryfoossaid if he was going home he would drive up to thefirst cross-street and turn back with him, March saidhe would be glad if he would take him to a hat-store.The old man put his head out again and told the driverto take them to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. “There’sa hat-store around there somewhere, seems to me,”he said; and they talked of March’s accidentas well as they could in the rattle and clatter ofthe street till they reached the place. Marchgot his hat, passing a joke with the hatter aboutthe impossibility of pressing his old hat over again,and came out to thank Dryfoos and take leave of him.

“If you ain’t in any great hurry,”the old man said, “I wish you’d get inhere a minute. I’d like to have a littletalk with you.”

“Oh, certainly,” said March, and he thought:“It’s coming now about what he intendsto do with ‘Every Other Week.’ Well,I might as well have all the misery at once and haveit over.”

Dryfoos called up to his driver, who bent his headdown sidewise to listen: “Go over thereon Madison Avenue, onto that asphalt, and keep drivin’up and down till I stop you. I can’t hearmyself think on these pavements,” he said toMarch. But after they got upon the asphalt, andbegan smoothly rolling over it, he seemed in no hasteto begin. At last he said, “I wanted totalk with you about that—­that Dutchman thatwas at my dinner—­Lindau,” and March’sheart gave a jump with wonder whether he could alreadyhave heard of Lindau’s death; but in an instanthe perceived that this was impossible. “Ibeen talkin’ with Fulkerson about him, and hesays they had to take the balance of his arm off.”

March nodded; it seemed to him he could not speak.He could not make out from the close face of the oldman anything of his motive. It was set, but setas a piece of broken mechanism is when it has lostthe power to relax itself. There was no otherhistory in it of what the man had passed through inhis son’s death.

“I don’t know,” Dryfoos resumed,looking aside at the cloth window-strap, which hekept fingering, “as you quite understood whatmade me the maddest. I didn’t tell himI could talk Dutch, because I can’t keep it upwith a regular German; but my father was PennsylvanyDutch, and I could understand what he was saying toyou about me. I know I had no business to understoodit, after I let him think I couldn’t but I did,and I didn’t like very well to have a man callin’me a traitor and a tyrant at my own table. Well,I look at it differently now, and I reckon I had betterhave tried to put up with it; and I would, if I couldhave known—­” He stopped with a quiveringlip, and then went on: “Then, again, Ididn’t like his talkin’ that paternalismof his. I always heard it was the worst kind

of thing for the country; I was brought up to thinkthe best government was the one that governs the least;and I didn’t want to hear that kind of talkfrom a man that was livin’ on my money.I couldn’t bear it from him. Or I thoughtI couldn’t before—­before—­”He stopped again, and gulped. “I reckonnow there ain’t anything I couldn’t bear.”March was moved by the blunt words and the mute stareforward with which they ended. “Mr. Dryfoos,I didn’t know that you understood Lindau’sGerman, or I shouldn’t have allowed him he wouldn’thave allowed himself—­to go on. Hewouldn’t have knowingly abused his position ofguest to censure you, no matter how much he condemnedyou.” “I don’t care for itnow,” said Dryfoos. “It’s allpast and gone, as far as I’m concerned; butI wanted you to see that I wasn’t tryin’to punish him for his opinions, as you said.”

“No; I see now,” March assented, thoughhe thought, his position still justified. “Iwish—­”

“I don’t know as I understand much abouthis opinions, anyway; but I ain’t ready to sayI want the men dependent on me to manage my businessfor me. I always tried to do the square thingby my hands; and in that particular case out thereI took on all the old hands just as fast as they lefttheir Union. As for the game I came on them, itwas dog eat dog, anyway.”

March could have laughed to think how far this oldman was from even conceiving of Lindau’s point’ofview, and how he was saying the worst of himself thatLindau could have said of him. No one could havecharacterized the kind of thing he had done more severelythan he when he called it dog eat dog.

“There’s a great deal to be said on bothsides,” March began, hoping to lead up throughthis generality to the fact of Lindau’s death;but the old man went on:

“Well, all I wanted him to know is that I wasn’ttrying to punish him for what he said about thingsin general. You naturally got that idea, I reckon;but I always went in for lettin’ people say whatthey please and think what they please; it’sthe only way in a free country.”

“I’m afraid, Mr. Dryfoos, that it wouldmake little difference to Lindau now—­”

“I don’t suppose he bears malice for it,”said Dryfoos, “but what I want to do is to havehim told so. He could understand just why I didn’twant to be called hard names, and yet I didn’tobject to his thinkin’ whatever he pleased.I’d like him to know—­”

“No one can speak to him, no one can tell him,”March began again, but again Dryfoos prevented himfrom going on.

“I understand it’s a delicate thing; andI’m not askin’ you to do it. WhatI would really like to do—­if you think hecould be prepared for it, some way, and could standit—­would be to go to him myself, and tellhim just what the trouble was. I’m in hopes,if I done that, he could see how I felt about it.”

A picture of Dryfoos going to the dead Lindau withhis vain regrets presented itself to March, and hetried once more to make the old man understand.“Mr. Dryfoos,” he said, “Lindau ispast all that forever,” and he felt the ghastlycomedy of it when Dryfoos continued, without heedinghim.

“I got a particular reason why I want him tobelieve it wasn’t his ideas I objected to—­themideas of his about the government carryin’ everythingon and givin’ work. I don’t understand’em exactly, but I found a writin’—­among—­myson’s-things” (he seemed to force the wordsthrough his teeth), “and I reckon he—­thought—­thatway. Kind of a diary—­where he—­putdown—­his thoughts. My son and me—­wediffered about a good-many things.” Hischin shook, and from time to time he stopped.“I wasn’t very good to him, I reckon;I crossed him where I guess I got no business to crosshim; but I thought everything of—­Coonrod.He was the best boy, from a baby, that ever was; justso patient and mild, and done whatever he was told.I ought to ‘a’ let him been a preacher!Oh, my son! my son!” The sobs could not be keptback any longer; they shook the old man with a violencethat made March afraid for him; but he controlled himselfat last with a series of hoarse sounds like barks.“Well, it’s all past and gone! Butas I understand you from what you saw, when Coonrodwas—­killed, he was tryin’ to savethat old man from trouble?”

Yes, yes! It seemed so to me.”

“That ’ll do, then! I want you tohave him come back and write for the book when hegets well. I want you to find out and let me knowif there’s anything I can do for him. I’llfeel as if I done it—­for my—­son.I’ll take him into my own house, and do forhim there, if you say so, when he gets so he can bemoved. I’ll wait on him myself. It’swhat Coonrod ’d do, if he was here. I don’tfeel any hardness to him because it was him that gotCoonrod killed, as you might say, in one sense of theterm; but I’ve tried to think it out, and Ifeel like I was all the more beholden to him becausemy son died tryin’ to save him. WhateverI do, I’ll be doin’ it for Coonrod, andthat’s enough for me.” He seemed tohave finished, and he turned to March as if to hearwhat he had to say.

March hesitated. “I’m afraid, Mr.Dryfoos—­Didn’t Fulkerson tell youthat Lindau was very sick?”

“Yes, of course. But he’s all right,he said.”

Now it had to come, though the fact had been latterlyplaying fast and loose with March’s consciousness.Something almost made him smile; the willingness hehad once felt to give this old man pain; then he consoledhimself by thinking that at least he was not obligedto meet Dryfoos’s wish to make atonement withthe fact that Lindau had renounced him, and wouldon no terms work for such a man as he, or suffer anykindness from him. In this light Lindau seemedthe harder of the two, and March had the momentaryforce to say—­

“Mr. Dryfoos—­it can’t be.Lindau—­I have just come from him—­isdead.”

XI.

“How did he take it? How could he bearit? Oh, Basil! I wonder you could have theheart to say it to him. It was cruel!”

“Yes, cruel enough, my dear,” March ownedto his wife, when they talked the matter over on hisreturn home. He could not wait till the childrenwere out of the way, and afterward neither he nor hiswife was sorry that he had spoken of it before them.The girl cried plentifully for her old friend whowas dead, and said she hated Mr. Dryfoos, and thenwas sorry for him, too; and the boy listened to all,and spoke with a serious sense that pleased his father.“But as to how he took it,” March wenton to answer his wife’s question about Dryfoos—­“howdo any of us take a thing that hurts? Some ofus cry out, and some of us don’t. Dryfoosdrew a kind of long, quivering breath, as a childdoes when it grieves—­there’s somethingcuriously simple and primitive about him—­anddidn’t say anything. After a while he askedme how he could see the people at the hospital aboutthe remains; I gave him my card to the young doctorthere that had charge of Lindau. I suppose hewas still carrying forward his plan of reparationin his mind—­to the dead for the dead.But how useless! If he could have taken the livingLindau home with him, and cared for him all his days,what would it have profited the gentle creature whoselife his worldly ambition vexed and thwarted here?He might as well offer a sacrifice at Conrad’sgrave. Children,” said March, turning tothem, “death is an exile that no remorse andno love can reach. Remember that, and be goodto every one here on earth, for your longing to retrieveany harshness or unkindness to the dead will be thevery ecstasy of anguish to you. I wonder,”he mused, “if one of the reasons why we’reshut up to our ignorance of what is to be hereafterisn’t because if we were sure of another worldwe might be still more brutal to one another here,in the hope of making reparation somewhere else.Perhaps, if we ever come to obey the law of love onearth, the mystery of death will be taken away.”

“Well”—­the ancestral Puritanismspoke in Mrs. March—­“these two oldmen have been terribly punished. They have bothbeen violent and wilful, and they have both been punished.No one need ever tell me there is not a moral governmentof the universe!”

March always disliked to hear her talk in this way,which did both her head and heart injustice.“And Conrad,” he said, “what washe punished for?”

“He?”—­she answered, in an exaltation—­“hesuffered for the sins of others.”

“Ah, well, if you put it in that way, yes.That goes on continually. That’s anothermystery.”

He fell to brooding on it, and presently he heardhis son saying, “I suppose, papa, that Mr. Lindaudied in a bad cause?”

March was startled. He had always been so sorryfor Lindau, and admired his courage and generosityso much, that he had never fairly considered thisquestion. “Why, yes,” he answered;“he died in the cause of disorder; he was tryingto obstruct the law. No doubt there was a wrongthere, an inconsistency and an injustice that he feltkeenly; but it could not be reached in his way withoutgreater wrong.”

“Yes; that’s what I thought,” saidthe boy. “And what’s the use of ourever fighting about anything in America? I alwaysthought we could vote anything we wanted.”

“We can, if we’re honest, and don’tbuy and sell one another’s votes,” saidhis father. “And men like Lindau, who renouncethe American means as hopeless, and let their loveof justice hurry them into sympathy with violence—­yes,they are wrong; and poor Lindau did die in a bad cause,as you say, Tom.”

“I think Conrad had no business there, or you,either, Basil,” said his wife.

“Oh, I don’t defend myself,” saidMarch. “I was there in the cause of literarycuriosity and of conjugal disobedience. But Conrad—­yes,he had some business there: it was his businessto suffer there for the sins of others. Isabel,we can’t throw aside that old doctrine of theAtonement yet. The life of Christ, it wasn’tonly in healing the sick and going about to do good;it was suffering for the sins of others. That’sas great a mystery as the mystery of death. Whyshould there be such a principle in the world?But it’s been felt, and more or less dumbly,blindly recognized ever since Calvary. If we lovemankind, pity them, we even wish to suffer for them.That’s what has created the religious ordersin all times—­the brotherhoods and sisterhoodsthat belong to our day as much as to the mediaevalpast. That’s what is driving a girl likeMargaret Vance, who has everything that the world canoffer her young beauty, on to the work of a Sisterof Charity among the poor and the dying.”

“Yes, yes!” cried Mrs. March. “How—­howdid she look there, Basil?” She had her femininemisgivings; she was not sure but the girl was somethingof a poseuse, and enjoyed the picturesqueness, as wellas the pain; and she wished to be convinced that itwas not so.

“Well,” she said, when March had toldagain the little there was to tell, “I supposeit must be a great trial to a woman like Mrs. Hornto have her niece going that way.”

“The way of Christ?” asked March, witha smile.

“Oh, Christ came into the world to teach ushow to live rightly in it, too. If we were allto spend our time in hospitals, it would be ratherdismal for the homes. But perhaps you don’tthink the homes are worth minding?” she suggested,with a certain note in her voice that he knew.

He got up and kissed her. “I think thegimcrackeries are.” He took the hat hehad set down on the parlor table on coming in, andstarted to put it in the hall, and that made her noticeit.

“You’ve been getting a new hat!”

“Yes,” he hesitated; “the old onehad got—­was decidedly shabby.”

“Well, that’s right. I don’tlike you to wear them too long. Did you leavethe old one to be pressed?”

“Well, the hatter seemed to think it was hardlyworth pressing,” said March. He decidedthat for the present his wife’s nerves had quiteall they could bear.

XII.

It was in a manner grotesque, but to March it wasall the more natural for that reason, that Dryfoosshould have Lindau’s funeral from his house.He knew the old man to be darkly groping, through thepayment of these vain honors to the dead, for someatonement to his son, and he imagined him findingin them such comfort as comes from doing all one can,even when all is useless.

No one knew what Lindau’s religion was, andin default they had had the Anglican burial serviceread over him; it seems so often the refuge of thehomeless dead. Mrs. Dryfoos came down for theceremony. She understood that it was for Coonrod’ssake that his father wished the funeral to be there;and she confided to Mrs. March that she believed Coonrodwould have been pleased. “Coonrod was amember of the ’Piscopal Church; and fawther’sdoin’ the whole thing for Coonrod as much asfor anybody. He thought the world of Coonrod,fawther did. Mela, she kind of thought it wouldlook queer to have two funerals from the same house,hand-runnin’, as you might call it, and one of’em no relation, either; but when she saw howfawther was bent on it, she give in. Seems asif she was tryin’ to make up to fawther forCoonrod as much as she could. Mela always wasa good child, but nobody can ever come up to Coonrod.”

March felt all the grotesqueness, the hopeless absurdityof Dryfoos’s endeavor at atonement in thesevain obsequies to the man for whom he believed hisson to have died; but the effort had its magnanimity,its pathos, and there was a poetry that appealed tohim in the reconciliation through death of men, ofideas, of conditions, that could only have gone warringon in life. He thought, as the priest went onwith the solemn liturgy, how all the world must cometogether in that peace which, struggle and striveas we may, shall claim us at last. He looked atDryfoos, and wondered whether he would consider theserites a sufficient tribute, or whether there was enoughin him to make him realize their futility, exceptas a mere sign of his wish to retrieve the past.He thought how we never can atone for the wrong wedo; the heart we have grieved and wounded cannot kindlewith pity for us when once it is stilled; and yetwe can put our evil from us with penitence, and somehow,somewhere, the order of loving kindness, which ourpassion or our wilfulness has disturbed, will be restored.

Dryfoos, through Fulkerson, had asked all the moreintimate contributors of ‘Every Other Week’to come. Beaton was absent, but Fulkerson hadbrought Miss Woodburn, with her father, and Mrs. Leightonand Alma, to fill up, as he said. Mela was muchpresent, and was official with the arrangement ofthe flowers and the welcome of the guests. Sheimparted this impersonality to her reception of Kendricks,whom Fulkerson met in the outer hall with his party,and whom he presented in whisper to them all.Kendricks smiled under his breath, as it were, andwas then mutely and seriously polite to the Leightons.Alma brought a little bunch of flowers, which werelost in those which Dryfoos had ordered to be unsparinglyprovided.

It was a kind of satisfaction to Mela to have MissVance come, and reassuring as to how it would lookto have the funeral there; Miss Vance would certainlynot have come unless it had been all right; she hadcome, and had sent some Easter lilies.

“Ain’t Christine coming down?” Fulkersonasked Mela.

“No, she ain’t a bit well, and she ain’tbeen, ever since Coonrod died. I don’tknow, what’s got over her,” said Mela.She added, “Well, I should ‘a’ thoughtMr. Beaton would ‘a’ made out to ‘a’come!”

“Beaton’s peculiar,” said Fulkerson.“If he thinks you want him he takes a pleasurein not letting you have him.”

“Well, goodness knows, I don’t want him,”said the girl.

Christine kept her room, and for the most part kepther bed; but there seemed nothing definitely the matterwith her, and she would not let them call a doctor.Her mother said she reckoned she was beginning to feelthe spring weather, that always perfectly pulled abody down in New York; and Mela said if being as crossas two sticks was any sign of spring-fever, Christinehad it bad. She was faithfully kind to her, andsubmitted to all her humors, but she recompensed herselfby the freest criticism of Christine when not in actualattendance on her. Christine would not sufferMrs. Mandel to approach her, and she had with her fathera sullen submission which was not resignation.For her, apparently, Conrad had not died, or had diedin vain.

“Pshaw!” said Mela, one morning when shecame to breakfast, “I reckon if we was to sendup an old card of Mr. Beaton’s she’d rattledown-stairs fast enough. If she’s sick,she’s love-sick. It makes me sick to seeher.”

Mela was talking to Mrs. Mandel, but her father lookedup from his plate and listened. Mela went on:“I don’t know what’s made the fellowquit comun’. But he was an aggravatun’thing, and no more dependable than water. It’sjust like Air. Fulkerson said, if he thinks youwant him he’ll take a pleasure in not lettun’you have him. I reckon that’s what’sthe matter with Christine. I believe in my heartthe girl ’ll die if she don’t git him.”

Mela went on to eat her breakfast with her own goodappetite. She now always came down to keep herfather company, as she said, and she did her bestto cheer and comfort him. At least she kept thetalk going, and she had it nearly all to herself,for Mrs. Mandel was now merely staying on provisionally,and, in the absence of any regrets or excuses fromChristine, was looking ruefully forward to the momentwhen she must leave even this ungentle home for thechances of the ruder world outside.

The old man said nothing at table, but, when Melawent up to see if she could do anything for Christine,he asked Mrs. Mandel again about all the facts ofher last interview with Beaton.

She gave them as fully as she could remember them,and the old man made no comment on them. Buthe went out directly after, and at the ’EveryOther Week’ office he climbed the stairs to Fulkerson’sroom and asked for Beaton’s address. Noone yet had taken charge of Conrad’s work, andFulkerson was running the thing himself, as he said,till he could talk with Dryfoos about it. Theold man would not look into the empty room where hehad last seen his son alive; he turned his face awayand hurried by the door.

XIII.

The course of public events carried Beaton’sprivate affairs beyond the reach of his simple firstintention to renounce his connection with ‘EveryOther Week.’ In fact, this was not perhapsso simple as it seemed, and long before it could beput in effect it appeared still simpler to do nothingabout the matter—­to remain passive and leavethe initiative to Dryfoos, to maintain the dignityof unconsciousness and let recognition of any changein the situation come from those who had caused thechange. After all, it was rather absurd to proposemaking a purely personal question the pivot on whichhis relations with ‘Every Other Week’ turned.He took a hint from March’s position and decidedthat he did not know Dryfoos in these relations; heknew only Fulkerson, who had certainly had nothingto do with Mrs. Mandel’s asking his intentions.As he reflected upon this he became less eager tolook Fulkerson up and make the magazine a partnerof his own sufferings. This was the soberer moodto which Beaton trusted that night even before heslept, and he awoke fully confirmed in it. Ashe examined the offence done him in the cold lightof day, he perceived that it had not come either fromMrs. Mandel, who was visibly the faltering and unwillinginstrument of it, or from Christine, who was altogetherignorant of it, but from Dryfoos, whom he could nothurt by giving up his place. He could only punishFulkerson by that, and Fulkerson was innocent.Justice and interest alike dictated the passive courseto which Beaton inclined; and he reflected that hemight safely leave the punishment of Dryfoos to Christine,who would find out what had happened, and would beable to take care of herself in any encounter of temperswith her father.

Beaton did not go to the office during the week thatfollowed upon this conclusion; but they were usedthere to these sudden absences of his, and, as hiswork for the time was in train, nothing was made ofhis staying away, except the sarcastic comment whichthe thought of him was apt to excite in the literarydepartment. He no longer came so much to theLeightons, and Fulkerson was in no state of mind tomiss any one there except Miss Woodburn, whom he nevermissed. Beaton was left, then, unmolestedly awaitingthe course of destiny, when he read in the morningpaper, over his coffee at Maroni’s, the deeplyscare-headed story of Conrad’s death and the

clubbing of Lindau. He probably cared as littlefor either of them as any man that ever saw them; buthe felt a shock, if not a pang, at Conrad’sfate, so out of keeping with his life and character.He did not know what to do; and he did nothing.He was not asked to the funeral, but he had not expectedthat, and, when Fulkerson brought him notice thatLindau was also to be buried from Dryfoos’shouse, it was without his usual sullen vindictivenessthat he kept away. In his sort, and as much asa man could who was necessarily so much taken up withhimself, he was sorry for Conrad’s father; Beatonhad a peculiar tenderness for his own father, andhe imagined how his father would feel if it were hewho had been killed in Conrad’s place, as itmight very well have been; he sympathized with himselfin view of the possibility; and for once they weremistaken who thought him indifferent and merely brutalin his failure to appear at Lindau’s obsequies.

He would really have gone if he had known how to reconcilehis presence in that house with the terms of his effectivebanishment from it; and he was rather forgivinglyfinding himself wronged in the situation, when Dryfoosknocked at the studio door the morning after Lindau’sfuneral. Beaton roared out, “Come in!”as he always did to a knock if he had not a model;if he had a model he set the door slightly ajar, andwith his palette on his thumb frowned at his visitorand told him he could not come in. Dryfoos fumbledabout for the knob in the dim passageway outside,and Beaton, who had experience of people’s difficultieswith it, suddenly jerked the door open. The twomen stood confronted, and at first sight of each othertheir quiescent dislike revived. Each would havebeen willing to turn away from the other, but thatwas not possible. Beaton snorted some sort ofinarticulate salutation, which Dryfoos did not tryto return; he asked if he could see him alone for aminute or two, and Beaton bade him come in, and sweptsome paint-blotched rags from the chair which he toldhim to take. He noticed, as the old man sanktremulously into it, that his movement was like thatof his own father, and also that he looked very muchlike Christine. Dryfoos folded his hands tremulouslyon the top of his horn-handled stick, and he was ratherfinely haggard, with the dark hollows round his blackeyes and the fall of the muscles on either side ofhis chin. He had forgotten to take his soft,wide-brimmed hat off; and Beaton felt a desire to sketchhim just as he sat.

Dryfoos suddenly pulled himself together from thedreary absence into which he fell at first. “Youngman,” he began, “maybe I’ve comehere on a fool’s errand,” and Beaton ratherfancied that beginning.

But it embarrassed him a little, and he said, witha shy glance aside, “I don’t know whatyou mean.” “I reckon,” Dryfoosanswered, quietly, “you got your notion, though.I set that woman on to speak to you the way she done.But if there was anything wrong in the way she spoke,or if you didn’t feel like she had any rightto question you up as if we suspected you of anythingmean, I want you to say so.”

Beaton said nothing, and the old man went on.

“I ain’t very well up in the ways of theworld, and I don’t pretend to be. All Iwant is to be fair and square with everybody.I’ve made mistakes, though, in my time—­”He stopped, and Beaton was not proof against the miseryof his face, which was twisted as with some strongphysical ache. “I don’t know as Iwant to make any more, if I can help it. I don’tknow but what you had a right to keep on comin’,and if you had I want you to say so. Don’tyou be afraid but what I’ll take it in the rightway. I don’t want to take advantage of anybody,and I don’t ask you to say any more than that.”

Beaton did not find the humiliation of the man whohad humiliated him so sweet as he could have fanciedit might be. He knew how it had come about, andthat it was an effect of love for his child; it didnot matter by what ungracious means she had broughthim to know that he loved her better than his ownwill, that his wish for her happiness was strongerthan his pride; it was enough that he was now somehowbrought to give proof of it. Beaton could notbe aware of all that dark coil of circ*mstance throughwhich Dryfoos’s present action evolved itself;the worst of this was buried in the secret of theold man’s heart, a worm of perpetual torment.What was apparent to another was that he was brokenby the sorrow that had fallen upon him, and it wasthis that Beaton respected and pitied in his impulseto be frank and kind in his answer.

“No, I had no right to keep coming to your housein the way I did, unless—­unless I meantmore than I ever said.” Beaton added:“I don’t say that what you did was usual—­inthis country, at any rate; but I can’t say youwere wrong. Since you speak to me about the matter,it’s only fair to myself to say that a gooddeal goes on in life without much thinking of consequences.That’s the way I excuse myself.”

“And you say Mrs. Mandel done right?”asked Dryfoos, as if he wished simply to be assuredof a point of etiquette.

“Yes, she did right. I’ve nothingto complain of.”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” saidDryfoos; but apparently he had not finished, and hedid not go, though the silence that Beaton now keptgave him a chance to do so. He began a seriesof questions which had no relation to the matter inhand, though they were strictly personal to Beaton.“What countryman are you?” he asked, aftera moment.

“What countryman?” Beaton frowned backat him.

“Yes, are you an American by birth?”

“Yes; I was born in Syracuse.”

“Protestant?”

“My father is a Scotch Seceder.”

“What business is your father in?”

Beaton faltered and blushed; then he answered:

“He’s in the monument business, as hecalls it. He’s a tombstone cutter.”Now that he was launched, Beaton saw no reason fornot declaring, “My father’s always beena poor man, and worked with his own hands for hisliving.” He had too slight esteem sociallyfor Dryfoos to conceal a fact from him that he mighthave wished to blink with others.

“Well, that’s right,” said Dryfoos.“I used to farm it myself. I’ve gota good pile of money together, now. At firstit didn’t come easy; but now it’s gotstarted it pours in and pours in; it seems like therewas no end to it. I’ve got well on to threemillion; but it couldn’t keep me from losin’my son. It can’t buy me back a minute ofhis life; not all the money in the world can do it!”

He grieved this out as if to himself rather than toBeaton, who, scarcely ventured to say, “I know—­Iam very sorry—­”

“How did you come,” Dryfoos interrupted,“to take up paintin’?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Beaton,a little scornfully. “You don’t takea thing of that kind up, I fancy. I always wantedto paint.”

“Father try to stop you?”

“No. It wouldn’t have been of anyuse. Why—­”

“My son, he wanted to be a preacher, and I didstop him or I thought I did. But I reckon hewas a preacher, all the same, every minute of hislife. As you say, it ain’t any use to tryto stop a thing like that. I reckon if a childhas got any particular bent, it was given to it; andit’s goin’ against the grain, it’sgoin’ against the law, to try to bend it someother way. There’s lots of good businessmen, Mr. Beaton, twenty of ’em to every goodpreacher?”

“I imagine more than twenty,” said Beaton,amused and touched through his curiosity as to whatthe old man was driving at by the quaint simplicityof his speculations.

“Father ever come to the city?”

“No; he never has the time; and my mother’san invalid.”

“Oh! Brothers and sisters?”

“Yes; we’re a large family.”

“I lost two little fellers—­twins,”said Dryfoos, sadly. “But we hain’tever had but just the five. Ever take portraits?”

“Yes,” said Beaton, meeting this zigzagin the queries as seriously as the rest. “Idon’t think I am good at it.”

Dryfoos got to his feet. “I wish you’dpaint a likeness of my son. You’ve seenhim plenty of times. We won’t fight aboutthe price, don’t you be afraid of that.”

Beaton was astonished, and in a mistaken way he wasdisgusted. He saw that Dryfoos was trying toundo Mrs. Mandel’s work practically, and gethim to come again to his house; that he now conceivedof the offence given him as condoned, and wished torestore the former situation. He knew that hewas attempting this for Christine’s sake, buthe was not the man to imagine that Dryfoos was tryingnot only to tolerate him, but to like him; and, infact, Dryfoos was not wholly conscious himself of thisend. What they both understood was that Dryfooswas endeavoring to get at Beaton through Conrad’smemory; but with one this was its dedication to apurpose of self sacrifice, and with the other a vulgarand shameless use of it.

“I couldn’t do it,” said Beaton.“I couldn’t think of attempting it.”

“Why not?” Dryfoos persisted. “Wegot some photographs of him; he didn’t liketo sit very well; but his mother got him to; and youknow how he looked.”

“I couldn’t do it—­I couldn’t.I can’t even consider it. I’m verysorry. I would, if it were possible. Butit isn’t possible.”

“I reckon if you see the photographs once”

“It isn’t that, Mr. Dryfoos. ButI’m not in the way of that kind of thing anymore.”

“I’d give any price you’ve a mindto name—­”

“Oh, it isn’t the money!” criedBeaton, beginning to lose control of himself.

The old man did not notice him. He sat with hishead fallen forward, and his chin resting on his foldedhands. Thinking of the portrait, he saw Conrad’sface before him, reproachful, astonished, but all gentleas it looked when Conrad caught his hand that dayafter he struck him; he heard him say, “Father!”and the sweat gathered on his forehead. “Oh,my God!” he groaned. “No; there ain’tanything I can do now.”

Beaton did not know whether Dryfoos was speaking tohim or not. He started toward him. “Areyou ill?”

“No, there ain’t anything the matter,”said the old man. “But I guess I’lllay down on your settee a minute.” He totteredwith Beaton’s help to the aesthetic couch coveredwith a tiger-skin, on which Beaton had once thoughtof painting a Cleopatra; but he could never get theright model. As the old man stretched himselfout on it, pale and suffering, he did not look muchlike a Cleopatra, but Beaton was struck with his effectiveness,and the likeness between him and his daughter; shewould make a very good Cleopatra in some ways.All the time, while these thoughts passed throughhis mind, he was afraid Dryfoos would die. Theold man fetched his breath in gasps, which presentlysmoothed and lengthened into his normal breathing.Beaton got him a glass of wine, and after tastingit he sat up.

“You’ve got to excuse me,” he said,getting back to his characteristic grimness with surprisingsuddenness, when once he began to recover himself.“I’ve been through a good deal lately;and sometimes it ketches me round the heart like apain.”

In his life of selfish immunity from grief, Beatoncould not understand this experience that poignantsorrow brings; he said to himself that Dryfoos wasgoing the way of angina pectoris; as he began shufflingoff the tiger-skin he said: “Had you betterget up? Wouldn’t you like me to call adoctor?”

“I’m all right, young man.”Dryfoos took his hat and stick from him, but he madefor the door so uncertainly that Beaton put his handunder his elbow and helped him out, and down the stairs,to his coupe.

“Hadn’t you better let me drive home withyou?” he asked.

“What?” said Dryfoos, suspiciously.

Beaton repeated his question.

“I guess I’m able to go home alone,”said Dryfoos, in a surly tone, and he put his headout of the window and called up “Home!”to the driver, who immediately started off and leftBeaton standing beside the curbstone.

XIV.

Beaton wasted the rest of the day in the emotionsand speculations which Dryfoos’s call inspired.It was not that they continuously occupied him, butthey broke up the train of other thoughts, and spoiledhim for work; a very little spoiled Beaton for work;he required just the right mood for work. Hecomprehended perfectly well that Dryfoos had made himthat extraordinary embassy because he wished him torenew his visits, and he easily imagined the meansthat had brought him to this pass. From what heknew of that girl he did not envy her father his meetingwith her when he must tell her his mission had failed.But had it failed? When Beaton came to ask himselfthis question, he could only perceive that he and Dryfooshad failed to find any ground of sympathy, and hadparted in the same dislike with which they had met.But as to any other failure, it was certainly tacit,and it still rested with him to give it effect.He could go back to Dryfoos’s house, as freelyas before, and it was clear that he was very muchdesired to come back. But if he went back it wasalso clear that he must go back with intentions moreexplicit than before, and now he had to ask himselfjust how much or how little he had meant by goingthere. His liking for Christine had certainlynot increased, but the charm, on the other hand, ofholding a leopardess in leash had not yet palled uponhim. In his life of inconstancies, it was a pleasureto rest upon something fixed, and the man who hadno control over himself liked logically enough tofeel his control of some one else. The fact cannotother wise be put in terms, and the attraction whichChristine Dryfoos had for him, apart from this, escapesfrom all terms, as anything purely and merely passionalmust. He had seen from the first that she wasa cat, and so far as youth forecasts such things,he felt that she would be a shrew. But he hada perverse sense of her beauty, and he knew a sortof life in which her power to molest him with hertemper could be reduced to the smallest proportions,and even broken to pieces. Then the consciousnessof her money entered. It was evident that theold man had mentioned his millions in the way of ahint to him of what he might reasonably expect ifhe would turn and be his son-in-law. Beaton didnot put it to himself in those words; and in facthis cogitations were not in words at all. Itwas the play of cognitions, of sensations, formlesslytending to the effect which can only be very clumsilyinterpreted in language. But when he got to thispoint in them, Beaton rose to magnanimity and in aflash of dramatic reverie disposed of a part of Dryfoos’sriches in placing his father and mother, and his brothersand sisters, beyond all pecuniary anxiety forever.He had no shame, no scruple in this, for he had beena pensioner upon others ever since a Syracusan amateurof the arts had detected his talent and given him themoney to go and study abroad. Beaton had alwaysconsidered the money a loan, to be repaid out of his

future success; but he now never dreamt of repayingit; as the man was rich, he had even a contempt forthe notion of repaying him; but this did not preventhim from feeling very keenly the hardships he puthis father to in borrowing money from him, though henever repaid his father, either. In this reveriehe saw himself sacrificed in marriage with ChristineDryfoos, in a kind of admiring self-pity, and he wasmelted by the spectacle of the dignity with whichhe suffered all the lifelong trials ensuing from hisunselfishness. The fancy that Alma Leighton camebitterly to regret him, contributed to soothe andflatter him, and he was not sure that Margaret.Vance did not suffer a like loss in him.

There had been times when, as he believed, that beautifulgirl’s high thoughts had tended toward him;there had been looks, gestures, even words, that hadthis effect to him, or that seemed to have had it;and Beaton saw that he might easily construe Mrs.Horn’s confidential appeal to him to get Margaretinterested in art again as something by no means necessarilyoffensive, even though it had been made to him as toa master of illusion. If Mrs. Horn had to choosebetween him and the life of good works to which herniece was visibly abandoning herself, Beaton couldnot doubt which she would choose; the only questionwas how real the danger of a life of good works was.

As he thought of these two girls, one so charmingand the other so divine, it became indefinitely difficultto renounce them for Christine Dryfoos, with her sultrytemper and her earthbound ideals. Life had beenso flattering to Beaton hitherto that he could notbelieve them both finally indifferent; and if theywere not indifferent, perhaps he did not wish eitherof them to be very definite. What he really longedfor was their sympathy; for a man who is able to walkround quite ruthlessly on the feelings of others oftenhas very tender feelings of his own, easily lacerated,and eagerly responsive to the caresses of compassion.In this frame Beaton determined to go that afternoon,though it was not Mrs. Horn’s day, and callupon her in the hope of possibly seeing Miss Vancealone. As he continued in it, he took this fora sign and actually went. It did not fall outat once as he wished, but he got Mrs. Horn to talkingagain about her niece, and Mrs. Horn again regrettedthat nothing could be done by the fine arts to reclaimMargaret from good works.

“Is she at home? Will you let me see her?”asked Beacon, with something of the scientific interestof a physician inquiring for a patient whose symptomshave been rehearsed to him. He had not asked forher before.

“Yes, certainly,” said Mrs. Horn, andshe went herself to call Margaret, and she did notreturn with her. The girl entered with the gentlegrace peculiar to her; and Beaton, bent as he wason his own consolation, could not help being struckwith the spiritual exaltation of her look. Atsight of her, the vague hope he had never quite relinquished,that they might be something more than aesthetic friends,died in his heart. She wore black, as she oftendid; but in spite of its fashion her dress receiveda nun-like effect from the pensive absence of herface. “Decidedly,” thought Beaton,“she is far gone in good works.”

But he rose, all the same, to meet her on the oldlevel, and he began at once to talk to her of thesubject he had been discussing with her aunt.He said frankly that they both felt she had unjustifiablyturned her back upon possibilities which she oughtnot to neglect.

“You know very well,” she answered, “thatI couldn’t do anything in that way worth thetime I should waste on it. Don’t talk ofit, please. I suppose my aunt has been askingyou to say this, but it’s no use. I’msorry it’s no use, she wishes it so much; butI’m not sorry otherwise. You can find thepleasure at least of doing good work in it; but Icouldn’t find anything in it but a barren amusem*nt.Mr. Wetmore is right; for me, it’s like enjoyingan opera, or a ball.”

“That’s one of Wetmore’s phrases.He’d sacrifice anything to them.”

She put aside the whole subject with a look.“You were not at Mr. Dryfoos’s the otherday. Have you seen them, any of them, lately?”

“I haven’t been there for some time, no,”said Beaton, evasively. But he thought if hewas to get on to anything, he had better be candid.“Mr. Dryfoos was at my studio this morning.He’s got a queer notion. He wants me topaint his son’s portrait.”

She started. “And will you—­”

“No, I couldn’t do such a thing.It isn’t in my way. I told him so.His son had a beautiful face an antique profile; asort of early Christian type; but I’m too muchof a pagan for that sort of thing.”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” Beaton continued, not quite likingher assent after he had invited it. He had hispride in being a pagan, a Greek, but it failed himin her presence, now; and he wished that she had protestedhe was none. “He was a singular creature;a kind of survival; an exile in our time and place.I don’t know: we don’t quite expecta saint to be rustic; but with all his goodness ConradDryfoos was a country person. If he were not dyingfor a cause you could imagine him milking.”Beaton intended a contempt that came from the bitternessof having himself once milked the family cow.

His contempt did not reach Miss Vance. “Hedied for a cause,” she said. “Theholiest.”

“Of labor?”

“Of peace. He was there to persuade thestrikers to be quiet and go home.”

“I haven’t been quite sure,” saidBeaton. “But in any case he had no businessthere. The police were on hand to do the persuading.”

“I can’t let you talk so!” criedthe girl. “It’s shocking! Oh,I know it’s the way people talk, and the worstis that in the sight of the world it’s the rightway. But the blessing on the peacemakers is notfor the policemen with their clubs.”

Beaton saw that she was nervous; he made his reflectionthat she was altogether too far gone in good worksfor the fine arts to reach her; he began to thinkhow he could turn her primitive Christianity to theaccount of his modern heathenism. He had no deeperdesign than to get flattered back into his own favorfar enough to find courage for some sort of decisivestep. In his heart he was trying to will whetherhe should or should not go back to Dryfoos’shouse. It could not be from the caprice thathad formerly taken him; it must be from a definitepurpose; again he realized this. “Of course;you are right,” he said. “I wish Icould have answered that old man differently.I fancy he was bound up in his son, though he quarrelledwith him, and crossed him. But I couldn’tdo it; it wasn’t possible.” He saidto himself that if she said “No,” now,he would be ruled by her agreement with him; and ifshe disagreed with him, he would be ruled still bythe chance, and would go no more to the Dryfooses’.He found himself embarrassed to the point of blushingwhen she said nothing, and left him, as it were, onhis own hands. “I should like to have givenhim that comfort; I fancy he hasn’t much comfortin life; but there seems no comfort in me.”

He dropped his head in a fit attitude for compassion;but she poured no pity upon it.

“There is no comfort for us in ourselves,”she said. “It’s hard to get outside;but there’s only despair within. When wethink we have done something for others, by some greateffort, we find it’s all for our own vanity.”

“Yes,” said Beaton. “If I couldpaint pictures for righteousness’ sake, I shouldhave been glad to do Conrad Dryfoos for his father.I felt sorry for him. Did the rest seem verymuch broken up? You saw them all?”

“Not all. Miss Dryfoos was ill, her sistersaid. It’s hard to tell how much peoplesuffer. His mother seemed bewildered. Theyounger sister is a simple creature; she looks likehim; I think she must have something of his spirit.”

“Not much spirit of any kind, I imagine,”said Beaton. “But she’s amiably material.Did they say Miss Dryfoos was seriously ill?”

“No. I supposed she might be prostratedby her brother’s death.”

“Does she seem that kind of person to you, MissVance?” asked Beaton.

“I don’t know. I haven’t triedto see so much of them as I might, the past winter.I was not sure about her when I met her; I’venever seen much of people, except in my own set, andthe—­very poor. I have been afraidI didn’t understand her. She may have akind of pride that would not let her do herself justice.”

Beaton felt the unconscious dislike in the endeavorof praise. “Then she seems to you likea person whose life—­its trials, its chances—­wouldmake more of than she is now?”

“I didn’t say that. I can’tjudge of her at all; but where we don’t know,don’t you think we ought to imagine the best?”

“Oh yes,” said Beaton. “I didn’tknow but what I once said of them might have prejudicedyou against them. I have accused myself of it.”He always took a tone of conscientiousness, of self-censure,in talking with Miss Vance; he could not help it.

“Oh no. And I never allowed myself to formany judgment of her. She is very pretty, don’tyou think, in a kind of way?”

“Very.”

“She has a beautiful brunette coloring:that floury white and the delicate pink in it.Her eyes are beautiful.”

“She’s graceful, too,” said Beaton.“I’ve tried her in color; but I didn’tmake it out.”

“I’ve wondered sometimes,” saidMiss Vance, “whether that elusive quality youfind in some people you try to paint doesn’tcharacterize them all through. Miss Dryfoos mightbe ever so much finer and better than we would findout in the society way that seems the only way.”

“Perhaps,” said Beaton, gloomily; andhe went away profoundly discouraged by this last analysisof Christine’s character. The angelic imperviousnessof Miss Vance to properties of which his own wickednesswas so keenly aware in Christine might have made himlaugh, if it had not been such a serious affair withhim. As it was, he smiled to think how very differentlyAlma Leighton would have judged her from Miss Vance’spremises. He liked that clear vision of Alma’seven when it pierced his own disguises. Yes,that was the light he had let die out, and it mighthave shone upon his path through life. Beatonnever felt so poignantly the disadvantage of havingon any given occasion been wanting to his own intereststhrough his self-love as in this. He had no oneto blame but himself for what had happened, but heblamed Alma for what might happen in the future becauseshe shut out the way of retrieval and return.When be thought of the attitude she had taken towardhim, it seemed incredible, and he was always longingto give her a final chance to reverse her final judgment.It appeared to him that the time had come for thisnow, if ever.

XV.

While we are still young we feel a kind of pride,a sort of fierce pleasure, in any important experience,such as we have read of or heard of in the lives ofothers, no matter how painful. It was this pride,this pleasure, which Beaton now felt in realizingthat the toils of fate were about him, that betweenhim and a future of which Christine Dryfoos must bethe genius there was nothing but the will, the mood,the fancy of a girl who had not given him the hopethat either could ever again be in his favor.He had nothing to trust to, in fact, but his knowledgethat he had once had them all; she did not deny that;but neither did she conceal that he had flung awayhis power over them, and she had told him that theynever could be his again. A man knows that hecan love and wholly cease to love, not once merely,but several times; he recognizes the fact in regard

to himself, both theoretically and practically; butin regard to women he cherishes the superstition ofthe romances that love is once for all, and forever.It was because Beaton would not believe that AlmaLeighton, being a woman, could put him out of her heartafter suffering him to steal into it, that he nowhoped anything from her, and she had been so explicitwhen they last spoke of that affair that he did nothope much. He said to himself that he was goingto cast himself on her mercy, to take whatever chanceof life, love, and work there was in her having thesmallest pity on him. If she would have none,then there was but one thing he could do: marryChristine and go abroad. He did not see how hecould bring this alternative to bear upon Alma; evenif she knew what he would do in case of a final rejection,he had grounds for fearing she would not care; buthe brought it to bear upon himself, and it nerved himto a desperate courage. He could hardly wait forevening to come, before he went to see her; when itcame, it seemed to have come too soon. He hadwrought himself thoroughly into the conviction thathe was in earnest, and that everything depended uponher answer to him, but it was not till he found himselfin her presence, and alone with her, that he realizedthe truth of his conviction. Then the influencesof her grace, her gayety, her arch beauty, above all,her good sense, penetrated his soul like a subtleintoxication, and he said to himself that he was right;he could not live without her; these attributes ofhers were what he needed to win him, to cheer him,to charm him, to guide him. He longed so to pleaseher, to ingratiate himself with her, that he attemptedto be light like her in his talk, but lapsed intoabysmal absences and gloomy recesses of introspection.

“What are you laughing at?” he asked,suddenly starting from one of these.

“What you are thinking of.”

“It’s nothing to laugh at. Do youknow what I’m thinking of?”

“Don’t tell, if it’s dreadful.”

“Oh, I dare say you wouldn’t think it’sdreadful,” he said, with bitterness. “It’ssimply the case of a man who has made a fool of himselfand sees no help of retrieval in himself.”

“Can any one else help a man unmake a fool ofhimself?” she asked, with a smile.

“Yes. In a case like this.”

“Dear me! This is very interesting.”

She did not ask him what the case was, but he waslaunched now, and he pressed on. “I amthe man who has made a fool of himself—­”

“Oh!”

“And you can help me out if you will. Alma,I wish you could see me as I really am.”

“Do you, Mr. Beacon? Perhaps I do.”

“No; you don’t. You formulated mein a certain way, and you won’t allow for thechange that takes place in every one. You havechanged; why shouldn’t I?”

“Has this to do with your having made a foolof yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Oh! Then I don’t see how you havechanged.”

She laughed, and he too, ruefully. “You’recruel. Not but what I deserve your mockery.But the change was not from the capacity of makinga fool of myself. I suppose I shall always dothat more or less—­unless you help me.Alma! Why can’t you have a little compassion?You know that I must always love you.”

“Nothing makes me doubt that like your sayingit, Mr. Beaton. But now you’ve broken yourword—­”

“You are to blame for that. You knew Icouldn’t keep it!”

“Yes, I’m to blame. I was wrong tolet you come—­after that. And so Iforgive you for speaking to me in that way again.But it’s perfectly impossible and perfectlyuseless for me to hear you any more on that subject;and so-good-bye!”

She rose, and he perforce with her. “Anddo you mean it?” he asked. “Forever?”

“Forever. This is truly the last time Iwill ever see you if I can help it. Oh, I feelsorry enough for you!” she said, with a glanceat his face. “I do believe you are in earnest.But it’s too late now. Don’t letus talk about it any more! But we shall, if wemeet, and so,—­”

“And so good-bye! Well, I’ve nothingmore to say, and I might as well say that. Ithink you’ve been very good to me. It seemsto me as if you had been—­shall I say it?—­tryingto give me a chance. Is that so?” She droppedher eyes and did not answer.

“You found it was no use! Well, I thankyou for trying. It’s curious to think thatI once had your trust, your regard, and now I haven’tit. You don’t mind my remembering thatI had? It’ll be some little consolation,and I believe it will be some help. I know I can’tretrieve the past now. It is too late. Itseems too preposterous—­perfectly lurid—­thatI could have been going to tell you what a tangleI’d got myself in, and to ask you to help untangleme. I must choke in the infernal coil, but I’dlike to have the sweetness of your pity in it—­whateverit is.”

She put out her hand. “Whatever it is,I do pity you; I said that.”

“Thank you.” He kissed the band shegave him and went.

He had gone on some such terms before; was it nowfor the last time? She believed it was.She felt in herself a satiety, a fatigue, in whichhis good looks, his invented airs and poses, his realtrouble, were all alike repulsive. She did notacquit herself of the wrong of having let him thinkshe might yet have liked him as she once did; but shehad been honestly willing to see whether she could.It had mystified her to find that when they firstmet in New York, after their summer in St. Barnaby,she cared nothing for him; she had expected to punishhim for his neglect, and then fancy him as before,but she did not. More and more she saw him selfishand mean, weak-willed, narrow-minded, and hard-hearted;and aimless, with all his talent. She admiredhis talent in proportion as she learned more of artists,and perceived how uncommon it was; but she said toherself that if she were going to devote herself toart, she would do it at first-hand. She was perfectlyserene and happy in her final rejection of Beaton;he had worn out not only her fancy, but her sympathy,too.

This was what her mother would not believe when Almareported the interview to her; she would not believeit was the last time they should meet; death itselfcan hardly convince us that it is the last time ofanything, of everything between ourselves and the dead.“Well, Alma,” she said, “I hopeyou’ll never regret what you’ve done.”

“You may be sure I shall not regret it.If ever I’m low-spirited about anything, I’llthink of giving Mr. Beaton his freedom, and that willcheer me up.”

“And don’t you expect to get married?Do you intend to be an old maid?” demanded hermother, in the bonds of the superstition women haveso long been under to the effect that every womanmust wish to get married, if for no other purposethan to avoid being an old maid.

“Well, mamma,” said Alma, “I intendbeing a young one for a few years yet; and then I’llsee. If I meet the right person, all well andgood; if not, not. But I shall pick and choose,as a man does; I won’t merely be picked andchosen.”

“You can’t help yourself; you may be veryglad if you are picked and chosen.”

“What nonsense, mamma! A girl can get anyman she wants, if she goes about it the right way.And when my ‘fated fairy prince’ comesalong, I shall just simply make furious love to himand grab him. Of course, I shall make a decentpretence of talking in my sleep. I believe it’sdone that way more than half the time. The fatedfairy prince wouldn’t see the princess in ninecases out of ten if she didn’t say something;he would go mooning along after the maids of honor.”

Mrs. Leighton tried to look unspeakable horror; butshe broke down and laughed. “Well, youare a strange girl, Alma.”

“I don’t know about that. But onething I do know, mamma, and that is that Prince Beatonisn’t the F. F. P. for me. How strange youare, mamma! Don’t you think it would beperfectly disgusting to accept a person you didn’tcare for, and let him go on and love you and marryyou? It’s sickening.”

“Why, certainly, Alma. It’s onlybecause I know you did care for him once—­”

“And now I don’t. And he didn’tcare for me once, and now he does. And so we’requits.”

“If I could believe—­”

“You had better brace up and try, mamma; foras Mr. Fulkerson says, it’s as sure as guns.From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot,he’s loathsome to me; and he keeps getting loathsomer.Ugh! Goodnight!”

XVI.

“Well, I guess she’s given him the grandbounce at last,” said Fulkerson to March inone of their moments of confidence at the office.“That’s Mad’s inference from appearances—­anddisappearances; and some little hints from Alma Leighton.”

“Well, I don’t know that I have any criticismsto offer,” said March. “It may bebad for Beaton, but it’s a very good thing forMiss Leighton. Upon the whole, I believe I congratulateher.”

“Well, I don’t know. I always kindof hoped it would turn out the other way. Youknow I always had a sneaking fondness for the fellow.”

“Miss Leighton seems not to have had.”

“It’s a pity she hadn’t. Itell you, March, it ain’t so easy for a girlto get married, here in the East, that she can affordto despise any chance.”

“Isn’t that rather a low view of it?”

“It’s a common-sense view. Beatonhas the making of a first-rate fellow in him.He’s the raw material of a great artist and agood citizen. All he wants is somebody to takehim in hand and keep him from makin’ an assof himself and kickin’ over the traces generally,and ridin’ two or three horses bareback at once.”

“It seems a simple problem, though the metaphoris rather complicated,” said March. “Buttalk to Miss Leighton about it. I haven’tgiven Beaton the grand bounce.”

He began to turn over the manuscripts on his table,and Fulkerson went away. But March found himselfthinking of the matter from time to time during theday, and he spoke to his wife about it when he wenthome. She surprised him by taking Fulkerson’sview of it.

“Yes, it’s a pity she couldn’t havemade up her mind to have him. It’s betterfor a woman to be married.”

“I thought Paul only went so far as to say itwas well. But what would become of Miss Leighton’sartistic career if she married?”

“Oh, her artistic career!” said Mrs. March,with matronly contempt of it.

“But look here!” cried her husband.“Suppose she doesn’t like him?”

“How can a girl of that age tell whether shelikes any one or not?”

“It seems to me you were able to tell at thatage, Isabel. But let’s examine this thing.(This thing! I believe Fulkerson is characterizingmy whole parlance, as well as your morals.) Why shouldn’twe rejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriage?When we consider the enormous risks people take inlinking their lives together, after not half so muchthought as goes to an ordinary horse trade, I thinkwe ought to be glad whenever they don’t do it.I believe that this popular demand for the matrimonyof others comes from our novel-reading. We getto thinking that there is no other happiness or good-fortunein life except marriage; and it’s offered infiction as the highest premium for virtue, courage,beauty, learning, and saving human life. We allknow it isn’t. We know that in realitymarriage is dog cheap, and anybody can have it forthe asking—­if he keeps asking enough people.By-and-by some fellow will wake up and see that afirst-class story can be written from the anti-marriagepoint of view; and he’ll begin with an engagedcouple, and devote his novel to disengaging them andrendering them separately happy ever after in thedenouement. It will make his everlasting fortune.”

“Why don’t you write it, Basil?”she asked. “It’s a delightful idea.You could do it splendidly.”

He became fascinated with the notion. He developedit in detail; but at the end he sighed and said:“With this ‘Every Other Week’ workon my hands, of course I can’t attempt a novel.But perhaps I sha’n’t have it long.”

She was instantly anxious to know what he meant, andthe novel and Miss Leighton’s affair were bothdropped out of their thoughts. “What doyou mean? Has Mr. Fulkerson said anything yet?”

“Not a word. He knows no more about itthan I do. Dryfoos hasn’t spoken, and we’reboth afraid to ask him. Of course, I couldn’task him.”

“No.”

“But it’s pretty uncomfortable, to bekept hanging by the gills so, as Fulkerson says.”

“Yes, we don’t know what to do.”

March and Fulkerson said the same to each other; andFulkerson said that if the old man pulled out, hedid not know what would happen. He had no capitalto carry the thing on, and the very fact that the oldman had pulled out would damage it so that it wouldbe hard to get anybody else to put it. In themean time Fulkerson was running Conrad’s office-work,when he ought to be looking after the outside interestsof the thing; and he could not see the day when hecould get married.

“I don’t know which it’s worse for,March: you or me. I don’t know, underthe circ*mstances, whether it’s worse to havea family or to want to have one. Of course—­ofcourse! We can’t hurry the old man up.It wouldn’t be decent, and it would be dangerous.We got to wait.”

He almost decided to draw upon Dryfoos for some money;he did not need any, but, he said maybe the demandwould act as a hint upon him. One day, abouta week after Alma’s final rejection of Beaton,Dryfoos came into March’s office. Fulkersonwas out, but the old man seemed not to have triedto see him.

He put his hat on the floor by his chair, after hesat down, and looked at March awhile with his oldeyes, which had the vitreous glitter of old. eyesstimulated to sleeplessness. Then he said, abruptly,“Mr. March, how would you like to take thisthing off my hands?”

“I don’t understand, exactly,” Marchbegan; but of course he understood that Dryfoos wasoffering to let him have ‘Every Other Week’on some terms or other, and his heart leaped withhope.

The old man knew he understood, and so he did notexplain. He said: “I am going to Europe,to take my family there. The doctor thinks itmight do my wife some good; and I ain’t verywell myself, and my girls both want to go; and sowe’re goin’. If you want to take thisthing off my hands, I reckon I can let you have itin ’most any shape you say. You’reall settled here in New York, and I don’t supposeyou want to break up, much, at your time of life,and I’ve been thinkin’ whether you wouldn’tlike to take the thing.”

The word, which Dryfoos had now used three times,made March at last think of Fulkerson; he had beenfilled too full of himself to think of any one elsetill he had mastered the notion of such wonderful goodfortune as seemed about falling to him. But nowhe did think of Fulkerson, and with some shame andconfusion; for he remembered how, when Dryfoos hadlast approached him there on the business of his connectionwith ‘Every Other Week,’ he had been veryhaughty with him, and told him that he did not knowhim in this connection. He blushed to find howfar his thoughts had now run without encounteringthis obstacle of etiquette.

“Have you spoken to Mr. Fulkerson?” heasked.

“No, I hain’t. It ain’t a questionof management. It’s a question of buyingand selling. I offer the thing to you first.I reckon Fulkerson couldn’t get on very wellwithout you.”

March saw the real difference in the two cases, andhe was glad to see it, because he could act more decisivelyif not hampered by an obligation to consistency.“I am gratified, of course, Mr. Dryfoos; extremelygratified; and it’s no use pretending that Ishouldn’t be happy beyond bounds to get possessionof ‘Every Other Week.’ But I don’tfeel quite free to talk about it apart from Mr. Fulkerson.”

“Oh, all right!” said the old man, withquick offence.

March hastened to say: “I feel bound toMr. Fulkerson in every way. He got me to comehere, and I couldn’t even seem to act withouthim.”

He put it questioningly, and the old man answered:

“Yes, I can see that. When ’ll hebe in? I can wait.” But he lookedimpatient.

“Very soon, now,” said March, lookingat his watch. “He was only to be gone amoment,” and while he went on to talk with Dryfoos,he wondered why the old man should have come firstto speak with him, and whether it was from some obscurewish to make him reparation for displeasures in thepast, or from a distrust or dislike of Fulkerson.Whichever light he looked at it in, it was flattering.

“Do you think of going abroad soon?” heasked.

“What? Yes—­I don’t know—­Ireckon. We got our passage engaged. It’son one of them French boats. We’re goin’to Paris.”

“Oh! That will be interesting to the youngladies.”

“Yes. I reckon we’re goin’for them. ’Tain’t likely my wife andme would want to pull up stakes at our age,”said the old man, sorrowfully.

“But you may find it do you good, Mr. Dryfoos,”said March, with a kindness that was real, mixed asit was with the selfish interest he now had in theintended voyage.

“Well, maybe, maybe,” sighed the old man;and he dropped his head forward. “It don’tmake a great deal of difference what we do or we don’tdo, for the few years left.”

“I hope Mrs. Dryfoos is as well as usual,”said March, finding the ground delicate and difficult.

“Middlin’, middlin’,” saidthe old man. “My daughter Christine, sheain’t very well.”

“Oh,” said March. It was quite impossiblefor him to affect a more explicit interest in thefact. He and Dryfoos sat silent for a few moments,and he was vainly casting about in his thought forsomething else which would tide them over the intervaltill Fulkerson came, when he heard his step on thestairs.

“Hello, hello!” he said. “Meetingof the clans!” It was always a meeting of theclans, with Fulkerson, or a field day, or an extrasession, or a regular conclave, whenever he saw peopleof any common interest together. “Hain’tseen you here for a good while, Mr. Dryfoos. Didthink some of running away with ‘Every OtherWeek’ one while, but couldn’t seem to workMarch up to the point.”

He gave Dryfoos his hand, and pushed aside the paperson the corner of March’s desk, and sat downthere, and went on briskly with the nonsense he couldalways talk while he was waiting for another to developany matter of business; he told March afterward thathe scented business in the air as soon as he cameinto the room where he and Dryfoos were sitting.

Dryfoos seemed determined to leave the word to March,who said, after an inquiring look at him, “Mr.Dryfoos has been proposing to let us have ‘EveryOther Week,’ Fulkerson.”

“Well, that’s good; that suits yours truly;March & Fulkerson, publishers and proprietors, won’tpretend it don’t, if the terms are all right.”

“The terms,” said the old man, “arewhatever you want ’em. I haven’t gotany more use for the concern—­” Hegulped, and stopped; they knew what he was thinkingof, and they looked down in pity. He went on:“I won’t put any more money in it; butwhat I’ve put in a’ready can stay; andyou can pay me four per cent.”

He got upon his feet; and March and Fulkerson stood,too.

“Well, I call that pretty white,” saidFulkerson. “It’s a bargain as faras I’m concerned. I suppose you’llwant to talk it over with your wife, March?”

“Yes; I shall,” said March. “Ican see that it’s a great chance; but I wantto talk it over with my wife.”

“Well, that’s right,” said the oldman. “Let me hear from you tomorrow.”

He went out, and Fulkerson began to dance round theroom. He caught March about his stalwart girthand tried to make him waltz; the office-boy came tothe door and looked on with approval.

“Come, come, you idiot!” said March, rootinghimself to the carpet.

“It’s just throwing the thing into ourmouths,” said Fulkerson. “The weddingwill be this day week. No cards! Teedle-lumpty-diddle!Teedle-lumpty-dee! What do you suppose he meansby it, March?” he asked, bringing himself soberlyup, of a sudden. “What is his little game?Or is he crazy? It don’t seem like theDryfoos of my previous acquaintance.”

“I suppose,” March suggested, “thathe’s got money enough, so that he don’tcare for this—­”

“Pshaw! You’re a poet! Don’tyou know that the more money that kind of man hasgot, the more he cares for money? It’s somefancy of his—­like having Lindau’sfuneral at his house—­By Jings, March, Ibelieve you’re his fancy!”

“Oh, now! Don’t you be a poet, Fulkerson!”

“I do! He seemed to take a kind of shineto you from the day you wouldn’t turn off oldLindau; he did, indeed. It kind of shook him up.It made him think you had something in you. Hewas deceived by appearances. Look here!I’m going round to see Mrs. March with you, andexplain the thing to her. I know Mrs. March!She wouldn’t believe you knew what you weregoing in for. She has a great respect for yourmind, but she don’t think you’ve got anysense. Heigh?”

“All right,” said March, glad of the notion;and it was really a comfort to have Fulkerson withhim to develop all the points; and it was delightfulto see how clearly and quickly she seized them; itmade March proud of her. She was only angry thatthey had lost any time in coming to submit so plaina case to her.

Mr. Dryfoos might change his mind in the night, andthen everything would be lost. They must go tohim instantly, and tell him that they accepted; theymust telegraph him.

“Might as well send a district messenger; he’dget there next week,” said Fulkerson. “No,no! It ’ll all keep till to-morrow, andbe the better for it. If he’s got thisfancy for March, as I say, he ain’t agoing tochange it in a single night. People don’tchange their fancies for March in a lifetime.Heigh?”

When Fulkerson turned up very early at the officenext morning, as March did, he was less strenuousabout Dryfoos’s fancy for March. It wasas if Miss Woodburn might have blown cold upon thattheory, as something unjust to his own merit, forwhich she would naturally be more jealous than he.

March told him what he had forgotten to tell him theday before, though he had been trying, all throughtheir excited talk, to get it in, that the Dryfooseswere going abroad.

“Oh, ho!” cried Fulkerson. “That’sthe milk in the cocoanut, is it? Well, I thoughtthere must be something.”

But this fact had not changed Mrs. March at all inher conviction that it was Mr. Dryfoos’s fancyfor her husband which had moved him to make him thisextraordinary offer, and she reminded him that it hadfirst been made to him, without regard to Fulkerson.“And perhaps,” she went on, “Mr.Dryfoos has been changed—–­softened;and doesn’t find money all in all any more.He’s had enough to change him, poor old man!”

“Does anything from without change us?”her husband mused aloud. “We’re broughtup to think so by the novelists, who really have thecharge of people’s thinking, nowadays.But I doubt it, especially if the thing outside issome great event, something cataclysmal, like thistremendous sorrow of Dryfoos’s.”

“Then what is it that changes us?” demandedhis wife, almost angry with him for his heresy.

“Well, it won’t do to say, the Holy Spiritindwelling. That would sound like cant at thisday. But the old fellows that used to say thathad some glimpses of the truth. They knew thatit is the still, small voice that the soul heeds,not the deafening blasts of doom. I suppose Ishould have to say that we didn’t change atall. We develop. There’s the makingof several characters in each of us; we are each severalcharacters, and sometimes this character has the leadin us, and sometimes that. From what Fulkersonhas told me of Dryfoos, I should say he had alwayshad the potentiality of better things in him thanhe has ever been yet; and perhaps the time has comefor the good to have its chance. The growth inone direction has stopped; it’s begun in another;that’s all. The man hasn’t been changedby his son’s death; it stunned, it benumbed him;but it couldn’t change him. It was an event,like any other, and it had to happen as much as hisbeing born. It was forecast from the beginningof time, and was as entirely an effect of his cominginto the world—­”

“Basil! Basil!” cried his wife.“This is fatalism!”

“Then you think,” he said, “thata sparrow falls to the ground without the will ofGod?” and he laughed provokingly. But hewent on more soberly: “I don’t knowwhat it all means Isabel though I believe it meansgood. What did Christ himself say? That ifone rose from the dead it would not avail. Andyet we are always looking for the miraculous!I believe that unhappy old man truly grieves for hisson, whom he treated cruelly without the final intentionof cruelty, for he loved him and wished to be proudof him; but I don’t think his death has changedhim, any more than the smallest event in the chainof events remotely working through his nature fromthe beginning. But why do you think he’schanged at all? Because he offers to sell meEvery Other Week on easy terms? He says himselfthat he has no further use for the thing; and he knowsperfectly well that he couldn’t get his moneyout of it now, without an enormous shrinkage.He couldn’t appear at this late day as the owner,and sell it to anybody but Fulkerson and me for afifth of what it’s cost him. He can sellit to us for all it’s cost him; and four percent. is no bad interest on his money till we canpay it back. It’s a good thing for us;but we have to ask whether Dryfoos has done us thegood, or whether it’s the blessing of Heaven.If it’s merely the blessing of Heaven, I don’tpropose being grateful for it.”

March laughed again, and his wife said, “It’sdisgusting.”

“It’s business,” he assented.“Business is business; but I don’t sayit isn’t disgusting. Lindau had a low opinionof it.”

“I think that with all his faults Mr. Dryfoosis a better man than Lindau,” she proclaimed.

“Well, he’s certainly able to offer usa better thing in ’Every Other Week,’”said March.

She knew he was enamoured of the literary finish ofhis cynicism, and that at heart he was as humbly andtruly grateful as she was for the good-fortune openingto them.

XVII.

Beaton was at his best when he parted for the lasttime with Alma Leighton, for he saw then that whathad happened to him was the necessary consequenceof what he had been, if not what he had done.Afterward he lost this clear vision; he began to denythe fact; he drew upon his knowledge of life, andin arguing himself into a different frame of mindhe alleged the case of different people who had doneand been much worse things than he, and yet no suchdisagreeable consequence had befallen them. Thenhe saw that it was all the work of blind chance, andhe said to himself that it was this that made himdesperate, and willing to call evil his good, andto take his own wherever he could find it. Therewas a great deal that was literary and factitiousand tawdry in the mood in which he went to see ChristineDryfoos, the night when the Marches sat talking theirprospects over; and nothing that was decided in hispurpose. He knew what the drift of his mind was,but he had always preferred to let chance determinehis events, and now since chance had played him suchan ill turn with Alma, he left it the whole responsibility.Not in terms, but in effect, this was his thought ashe walked on up-town to pay the first of the visitswhich Dryfoos had practically invited him to resume.He had an insolent satisfaction in having delayedit so long; if he was going back he was going backon his own conditions, and these were to be as hardand humiliating as he could make them. But thisintention again was inchoate, floating, the stuff ofan intention, rather than intention; an expressionof temperament chiefly.

He had been expected before that. Christine hadgot out of Mela that her father had been at Beaton’sstudio; and then she had gone at the old man and gotfrom him every smallest fact of the interview there.She had flung back in his teeth the good-will towardherself with which he had gone to Beaton. Shewas furious with shame and resentment; she told himhe had made bad worse, that he had made a fool of himselfto no end; she spared neither his age nor his grief-brokenspirit, in which his will could not rise against hers.She filled the house with her rage, screaming it outupon him; but when her fury was once spent, she beganto have some hopes from what her father had done.She no longer kept her bed; every evening she dressedherself in the dress Beaton admired the most, andsat up till a certain hour to receive him. Shehad fixed a day in her own mind before which, if hecame, she would forgive him all he had made her suffer:the mortification, the suspense, the despair.Beyond this, she had the purpose of making her fathergo to Europe; she felt that she could no longer livein America, with the double disgrace that had beenput upon her.

Beaton rang, and while the servant was coming theinsolent caprice seized him to ask for the young ladiesinstead of the old man, as he had supposed of coursehe should do. The maid who answered the bell,in the place of the reluctant Irishman of other days,had all his hesitation in admitting that the youngladies were at home.

He found Mela in the drawing-room. At sight ofhim she looked scared; but she seemed to be reassuredby his calm. He asked if he was not to have thepleasure of seeing Miss Dryfoos, too; and Mela saidshe reckoned the girl had gone up-stairs to tell her.Mela was in black, and Beaton noted how well the solidsable became her rich red-blonde beauty; he wonderedwhat the effect would be with Christine.

But she, when she appeared, was not in mourning.He fancied that she wore the lustrous black silk,with the breadths of white Venetian lace about theneck which he had praised, because he praised it.Her cheeks burned with a Jacqueminot crimson; whatshould be white in her face was chalky white.She carried a plumed ostrich fan, black and soft, andafter giving him her hand, sat down and waved it toand fro slowly, as he remembered her doing the nightthey first met. She had no ideas, except suchas related intimately to herself, and she had no gabble,like Mela; and she let him talk. It was pastthe day when she promised herself she would forgivehim; but as he talked on she felt all her passion forhim revive, and the conflict of desires, the desireto hate, the desire to love, made a dizzying whirlin her brain. She looked at him, half doubtingwhether he was really there or not. He had neverlooked so handsome, with his dreamy eyes floatingunder his heavy overhanging hair, and his pointedbrown beard defined against his lustrous shirtfront.His mellowly modulated, mysterious voice lulled her;when Mela made an errand out of the room, and Beatoncrossed to her and sat down by her, she shivered.

“Are you cold?” he asked, and she feltthe cruel mockery and exultant consciousness of powerin his tone, as perhaps a wild thing feels captivityin the voice of its keeper. But now, she saidshe would still forgive him if he asked her.

Mela came back, and the talk fell again to the formerlevel; but Beaton had not said anything that reallymeant what she wished, and she saw that he intendedto say nothing. Her heart began to burn like afire in her breast.

“You been tellun’ him about our goun’to Europe?” Mela asked.

“No,” said Christine, briefly, and lookingat the fan spread out on her lap.

Beaton asked when; and then he rose, and said if itwas so soon, he supposed he should not see them again,unless he saw them in Paris; he might very likelyrun over during the summer. He said to himselfthat he had given it a fair trial with Christine,and he could not make it go.

Christine rose, with a kind of gasp; and mechanicallyfollowed him to the door of the drawing-room; Melacame, too; and while he was putting on his overcoat,she gurgled and bubbled in good-humor with all theworld. Christine stood looking at him, and thinkinghow still handsomer he was in his overcoat; and thatfire burned fiercer in her. She felt him morethan life to her and knew him lost, and the frenzy,that makes a woman kill the man she loves, or flingvitriol to destroy the beauty she cannot have forall hers, possessed her lawless soul. He gavehis hand to Mela, and said, in his wind-harp stop,“Good-bye.”

As he put out his hand to Christine, she pushed itaside with a scream of rage; she flashed at him, andwith both hands made a feline pass at the face hebent toward her. He sprang back, and after aninstant of stupefaction he pulled open the door behindhim and ran out into the street.

“Well, Christine Dryfoos!” said Mela,“Sprang at him like a wild-cat!”

“I, don’t care,” Christine shrieked.“I’ll tear his eyes out!” She flewup-stairs to her own room, and left the burden of theexplanation to Mela, who did it justice.

Beaton found himself, he did not know how, in hisstudio, reeking with perspiration and breathless.He must almost have run. He struck a match witha shaking hand, and looked at his face in the glass.He expected to see the bleeding marks of her nailson his cheeks, but he could see nothing. He grovelledinwardly; it was all so low and coarse and vulgar;it was all so just and apt to his deserts.

There was a pistol among the dusty bric-a-brac onthe mantel which he had kept loaded to fire at a catin the area. He took it and sat looking intothe muzzle, wishing it might go off by accident andkill him. It slipped through his hand and struckthe floor, and there was a report; he sprang intothe air, feeling that he had been shot. But hefound himself still alive, with only a burning linealong his cheek, such as one of Christine’sfinger-nails might have left.

He laughed with cynical recognition of the fact thathe had got his punishment in the right way, and thathis case was not to be dignified into tragedy.

XVIII.

The Marches, with Fulkerson, went to see the Dryfoosesoff on the French steamer. There was no longerany business obligation on them to be civil, and therewas greater kindness for that reason in the attentionthey offered. ‘Every Other Week’had been made over to the joint ownership of Marchand Fulkerson, and the details arranged with a hardnesson Dryfoos’s side which certainly left Mrs.March with a sense of his incomplete regeneration.Yet when she saw him there on the steamer, she pitiedhim; he looked wearied and bewildered; even his wife,with her twitching head, and her prophecies of evil,croaked hoarsely out, while she clung to Mrs. March’shand where they sat together till the leave-takerswere ordered ashore, was less pathetic. Mela waslooking after both of them, and trying to cheer themin a joyful excitement. “I tell ’emit’s goun’ to add ten years to both theirlives,” she said. “The voyage ‘lldo their healths good; and then, we’re gittun’away from that miser’ble pack o’ servantsthat was eatun’ us up, there in New York.I hate the place!” she said, as if they hadalready left it. “Yes, Mrs. Mandel’sgoun’, too,” she added, following the directionof Mrs. March’s eyes where they noted Mrs. Mandel,speaking to Christine on the other side of the cabin.“Her and Christine had a kind of a spat, andshe was goun’ to leave, but here only the otherday, Christine offered to make it up with her, andnow they’re as thick as thieves. Well, Ireckon we couldn’t very well ‘a’got along without her. She’s about the onlyone that speaks French in this family.”

Mrs. March’s eyes still dwelt upon Christine’sface; it was full of a furtive wildness. Sheseemed to be keeping a watch to prevent herself fromlooking as if she were looking for some one. “Doyou know,” Mrs. March said to her husband asthey jingled along homeward in the Christopher Streetbob-tail car, “I thought she was in love withthat detestable Mr. Beaton of yours at one time; andthat he was amusing himself with her.”

“I can bear a good deal, Isabel,” saidMarch, “but I wish you wouldn’t attributeBeaton to me. He’s the invention of thatMr. Fulkerson of yours.”

“Well, at any rate, I hope, now, you’llboth get rid of him, in the reforms you’re goingto carry out.”

These reforms were for a greater economy in the managementof ’Every Other Week;’ but in their verynature they could not include the suppression of Beaton.He had always shown himself capable and loyal to theinterests of the magazine, and both the new ownerswere glad to keep him. He was glad to stay, thoughhe made a gruff pretence of indifference, when theycame to look over the new arrangement with him.In his heart he knew that he was a fraud; but at leasthe could say to himself with truth that he had notnow the shame of taking Dryfoos’s money.

March and Fulkerson retrenched at several points whereit had seemed indispensable to spend, as long as theywere not spending their own: that was only human.Fulkerson absorbed Conrad’s department into his,and March found that he could dispense with Kendricksin the place of assistant which he had lately filledsince Fulkerson had decided that March was overworked.They reduced the number of illustrated articles, andthey systematized the payment of contributors strictlyaccording to the sales of each number, on their originalplan of co-operation: they had got to payingrather lavishly for material without reference to thesales.

Fulkerson took a little time to get married, and wenton his wedding journey out to Niagara, and down theSt. Lawrence to Quebec over the line of travel thatthe Marches had taken on their wedding journey.He had the pleasure of going from Montreal to Quebecon the same boat on which he first met March.

They have continued very good friends, and their wivesare almost without the rivalry that usually embittersthe wives of partners. At first Mrs. March didnot like Mrs. Fulkerson’s speaking of her husbandas the Ownah, and March as the Edito’; but itappeared that this was only a convenient method ofrecognizing the predominant quality in each, and wasmeant neither to affirm nor to deny anything.Colonel Woodburn offered as his contribution to thecelebration of the copartnership, which Fulkersoncould not be prevented from dedicating with a littledinner, the story of Fulkerson’s magnanimousbehavior in regard to Dryfoos at that crucial momentwhen it was a question whether he should give up Dryfoosor give up March. Fulkerson winced at it; butMrs. March told her husband that now, whatever happened,she should never have any misgivings of Fulkersonagain; and she asked him if he did not think he oughtto apologize to him for the doubts with which he hadonce inspired her. March said that he did notthink so.

The Fulkersons spent the summer at a seaside hotelin easy reach of the city; but they returned earlyto Mrs. Leighton’s, with whom they are to boardtill spring, when they are going to fit up Fulkerson’sbachelor apartment for housekeeping. Mrs. March,with her Boston scruple, thinks it will be odd, livingover the ‘Every Other Week’ offices; butthere will be a separate street entrance to the apartment;and besides, in New York you may do anything.

The future of the Leightons promises no immediatechange. Kendricks goes there a good deal to seethe Fulkersons, and Mrs. Fulkerson says he comes tosee Alma. He has seemed taken with her ever sincehe first met her at Dryfoos’s, the day of Lindau’sfuneral, and though Fulkerson objects to dating afancy of that kind from an occasion of that kind, hejustly argues with March that there can be no harmin it, and that we are liable to be struck by lightningany time. In the mean while there is no proofthat Alma returns Kendricks’s interest, if hefeels any. She has got a little bit of colorinto the fall exhibition; but the fall exhibition isnever so good as the spring exhibition. Wetmoreis rather sorry she has succeeded in this, thoughhe promoted her success. He says her real hopeis in black and white, and it is a pity for her tolose sight of her original aim of drawing for illustration.

News has come from Paris of the engagement of ChristineDryfoos. There the Dryfooses met with the successdenied them in New York; many American plutocratsmust await their apotheosis in Europe, where societyhas them, as it were, in a translation. Shortlyafter their arrival they were celebrated in the newspapers as the first millionaire American family ofnatural-gas extraction who had arrived in the capitalof civilization; and at a French watering-place Christineencountered her fate—­a nobleman full ofpresent debts and of duels in the past. Fulkersonsays the old man can manage the debtor, and Christinecan look out for the duellist. “They saythose fellows generally whip their wives. He’dbetter not try it with Christine, I reckon, unlesshe’s practised with a panther.”

One day, shortly after their return to town in theautumn from the brief summer outing they permittedthemselves, the Marches met Margaret Vance. Atfirst they did not know her in the dress of the sisterhoodwhich she wore; but she smiled joyfully, almost gayly,on seeing them, and though she hurried by with thesister who accompanied her, and did not stay to speak,they felt that the peace that passeth understandinghad looked at them from her eyes.

“Well, she is at rest, there can’t beany doubt of that,” he said, as he glanced roundat the drifting black robe which followed her free,nun-like walk.

“Yes, now she can do all the good she likes,”sighed his wife. “I wonder—­Iwonder if she ever told his father about her talk withpoor Conrad that day he was shot?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care.In any event, it would be right. She did nothingwrong. If she unwittingly sent him to his death,she sent him to die for God’s sake, for man’ssake.”

“Yes—­yes. But still—­”

“Well, we must trust that look of hers.”

PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

Affected absence of mind
Be good, sweet man, and letwho will be clever
Comfort of the critical attitude
Conscience weakens to theneed that isn’t
Death is an exile that noremorse and no love can reach
Death is peace and pardon
Did not idealize him, butin the highest effect she realized him
Does any one deserve happiness
Does anything from withoutchange us?
Europe, where society hasthem, as it were, in a translation
Favorite stock of his go upand go down under the betting
Hemmed round with this eternaldarkness of death
Indispensable
Love of justice hurry theminto sympathy with violence
Married for no other purposethan to avoid being an old maid
Nervous woes of comfortablepeople
Novelists, who really havethe charge of people’s thinking
People that have convictionsare difficult
Rejoice as much at a non-marriageas a marriage
Respect for your mind, butshe don’t think you’ve got any sense
Superstition of the romancesthat love is once for all
Superstition that having andshining is the chief good
To do whatever one likes isfinally to do nothing that one likes
Took the world as she foundit, and made the best of it
What we can be if we must
When you look it—­liveit
Would sacrifice his best friendto a phrase

THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY.

By William Dean Howells

Part I.

[Note: Several chapter heading numeralsare out of order or missing in this 1899 edition,however the text is all present in the three volumes.D.W.]

I.

“You need the rest,” said the BusinessEnd; “and your wife wants you to go, as wellas your doctor. Besides, it’s your Sabbaticalyear, and you, could send back a lot of stuff forthe magazine.”

“Is that your notion of a Sabbatical year?”asked the editor.

“No; I throw that out as a bait to your conscience.You needn’t write a line while you’regone. I wish you wouldn’t for your own sake;although every number that hasn’t got you init is a back number for me.”

“That’s very nice of you, Fulkerson,”said the editor. “I suppose you realizethat it’s nine years since we took ‘EveryOther Week’ from Dryfoos?”

“Well, that makes it all the more Sabbatical,”said Fulkerson. “The two extra years thatyou’ve put in here, over and above the old styleSabbatical seven, are just so much more to your credit.It was your right to go, two years ago, and now it’syour duty. Couldn’t you look at it in thatlight?”

“I dare say Mrs. March could,” the editorassented. “I don’t believe she couldbe brought to regard it as a pleasure on any otherterms.”

“Of course not,” said Fulkerson.“If you won’t take a year, take threemonths, and call it a Sabbatical summer; but go, anyway.You can make up half a dozen numbers ahead, and Tom,here, knows your ways so well that you needn’tthink about ‘Every Other Week’ from thetime you start till the time you try to bribe thecustoms inspector when you get back. I can takea hack at the editing myself, if Tom’s inspirationgives out, and put a little of my advertising fireinto the thing.” He laid his hand on theshoulder of the young fellow who stood smiling by,and pushed and shook him in the liking there was betweenthem. “Now you go, March! Mrs. Fulkersonfeels just as I do about it; we had our outing lastyear, and we want Mrs. March and you to have yours.You let me go down and engage your passage, and—­”

“No, no!” the editor rebelled. “I’llthink about it;” but as he turned to the workhe was so fond of and so weary of, he tried not tothink of the question again, till he closed his deskin the afternoon, and started to walk home; the doctorhad said he ought to walk, and he did so, though helonged to ride, and looked wistfully at the passingcars.

He knew he was in a rut, as his wife often said; butif it was a rut, it was a support too; it kept himfrom wobbling: She always talked as if the floweryfields of youth lay on either side of the dusty roadhe had been going so long, and he had but to stepaside from it, to be among the butterflies and buttercupsagain; he sometimes indulged this illusion, himself,in a certain ironical spirit which caressed while itmocked the notion. They had a tacit agreementthat their youth, if they were ever to find it again,was to be looked for in Europe, where they met whenthey were young, and they had never been quite withoutthe hope of going back there, some day, for a longsojourn. They had not seen the time when theycould do so; they were dreamers, but, as they recognized,even dreaming is not free from care; and in his dreamMarch had been obliged to work pretty steadily, ifnot too intensely. He had been forced to foregothe distinctly literary ambition with which he hadstarted in life because he had their common livingto make, and he could not make it by writing gracefulverse, or even graceful prose. He had been manyyears in a sufficiently distasteful business, andhe had lost any thought of leaving it when it lefthim, perhaps because his hold on it had always beenrather lax, and he had not been able to conceal thathe disliked it. At any rate, he was supplantedin his insurance agency at Boston by a subordinatein his office, and though he was at the same time offereda place of nominal credit in the employ of the company,he was able to decline it in grace of a chance whichunited the charm of congenial work with the solid

advantage of a better salary than he had been gettingfor work he hated. It was an incredible chance,but it was rendered appreciably real by the necessityit involved that they should leave Boston, where theyhad lived all their married life, where Mrs. Marchas well as their children was born, and where alltheir tender and familiar ties were, and come to NewYork, where the literary enterprise which formed hischance was to be founded.

It was then a magazine of a new sort, which his businesspartner had imagined in such leisure as the managementof a newspaper syndicate afforded him, and had alwaysthought of getting March to edit. The magazinewhich is also a book has since been realized elsewhereon more or less prosperous terms, but not for anylong period, and ’Every Other Week’ wasapparently—­the only periodical of the kindconditioned for survival. It was at first backedby unlimited capital, and it had the instant favorof a popular mood, which has since changed, but whichdid not change so soon that the magazine had not timeto establish itself in a wide acceptance. Itwas now no longer a novelty, it was no longer in themaiden blush of its first success, but it had enteredupon its second youth with the reasonable hope ofmany years of prosperity before it. In fact itwas a very comfortable living for all concerned, andthe Marches had the conditions, almost dismayinglyperfect, in which they had often promised themselvesto go and be young again in Europe, when they rebelledat finding themselves elderly in America. Theirdaughter was married, and so very much to her mother’smind that she did not worry about her, even thoughshe lived so far away as Chicago, still a wild frontiertown to her Boston imagination; and their son, as soonas he left college, had taken hold on ‘EveryOther Week’, under his father’s instruction,with a zeal and intelligence which won him Fulkerson’spraise as a chip of the old block. These two likedeach other, and worked into each other’s handsas cordially and aptly as Fulkerson and March hadever done. It amused the father to see his sonoffering Fulkerson the same deference which the BusinessEnd paid to seniority in March himself; but in fact,Fulkerson’s forehead was getting, as he said,more intellectual every day; and the years were pushingthem all along together.

Still, March had kept on in the old rut, and one dayhe fell down in it. He had a long sickness, andwhen he was well of it, he was so slow in gettinghis grip of work again that he was sometimes deeplydiscouraged. His wife shared his depression,whether he showed or whether he hid it, and when thedoctor advised his going abroad, she abetted the doctorwith all the strength of a woman’s hygienicintuitions. March himself willingly consented,at first; but as soon as he got strength for his work,he began to temporize and to demur. He said thathe believed it would do him just as much good to goto Saratoga, where they always had such a good time,as to go to Carlsbad; and Mrs. March had been obligedseveral times to leave him to his own undoing; shealways took him more vigorously in hand afterwards.

II.

When he got home from the ‘Every Other Week’office, the afternoon of that talk with the BusinessEnd, he wanted to laugh with his wife at Fulkerson’snotion of a Sabbatical year. She did not thinkit was so very droll; she even urged it seriouslyagainst him, as if she had now the authority of HolyWrit for forcing him abroad; she found no relish ofabsurdity in the idea that it was his duty to takethis rest which had been his right before.

He abandoned himself to a fancy which had been workingto the surface of his thought. “We couldcall it our Silver Wedding Journey, and go round toall the old places, and see them in the reflected lightof the past.”

“Oh, we could!” she responded, passionately;and he had now the delicate responsibility of persuadingher that he was joking.

He could think of nothing better than a return toFulkerson’s absurdity. “It wouldbe our Silver Wedding Journey just as it would be mySabbatical year—­a good deal after date.But I suppose that would make it all the more silvery.”

She faltered in her elation. “Didn’tyou say a Sabbatical year yourself?” she demanded.

“Fulkerson said it; but it was a figurativeexpression.”

“And I suppose the Silver Wedding Journey wasa figurative expression too!”

“It was a notion that tempted me; I thoughtyou would enjoy it. Don’t you suppose Ishould be glad too, if we could go over, and find ourselvesjust as we were when we first met there?”

“No; I don’t believe now that you careanything about it.”

“Well, it couldn’t be done, anyway; sothat doesn’t matter.”

“It could be done, if you were a mind to thinkso. And it would be the greatest inspirationto you. You are always longing for some chanceto do original work, to get away from your editing,but you’ve let the time slip by without reallytrying to do anything; I don’t call those littlestudies of yours in the magazine anything; and nowyou won’t take the chance that’s almostforcing itself upon you. You could write an originalbook of the nicest kind; mix up travel and fiction;get some love in.”

“Oh, that’s the stalest kind of thing!”

“Well, but you could see it from a perfectlynew point of view. You could look at it as asort of dispassionate witness, and treat it humorously—­ofcourse it is ridiculous—­and do somethingentirely fresh.”

“It wouldn’t work. It would be carryingwater on both shoulders. The fiction would killthe travel, the travel would kill the fiction; thelove and the humor wouldn’t mingle any more thanoil and vinegar.”

“Well, and what is better than a salad?”

“But this would be all salad-dressing, and nothingto put it on.” She was silent, and he yieldedto another fancy. “We might imagine comingupon our former selves over there, and travellinground with them—­a wedding journey ’enpartie carree’.”

“Something like that. I call it a verypoetical idea,” she said with a sort of provisionality,as if distrusting another ambush.

“It isn’t so bad,” he admitted.“How young we were, in those days!”

“Too young to know what a good time we werehaving,” she said, relaxing her doubt for theretrospect. “I don’t feel as if Ireally saw Europe, then; I was too inexperienced,too ignorant, too simple. I would like to go,just to make sure that I had been.” He wassmiling again in the way he had when anything occurredto him that amused him, and she demanded, “Whatis it?”

“Nothing. I was wishing we could go inthe consciousness of people who actually hadn’tbeen before—­carry them all through Europe,and let them see it in the old, simple-hearted Americanway.”

She shook her head. “You couldn’t!They’ve all been!”

“All but about sixty or seventy millions,”said March.

“Well, those are just the millions you don’tknow, and couldn’t imagine.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

“And even if you could imagine them, you couldn’tmake them interesting. All the interesting oneshave been, anyway.”

“Some of the uninteresting ones too. Iused, to meet some of that sort over there. Ibelieve I would rather chance it for my pleasure withthose that hadn’t been.”

“Then why not do it? I know you could getsomething out of it.”

“It might be a good thing,” he mused,“to take a couple who had passed their wholelife here in New York, too poor and too busy ever togo; and had a perfect famine for Europe all the time.I could have them spend their Sunday afternoons goingaboard the different boats, and looking up their accommodations.I could have them sail, in imagination, and discoveran imaginary Europe, and give their grotesque misconceptionsof it from travels and novels against a backgroundof purely American experience. We needn’tgo abroad to manage that. I think it would berather nice.”

“I don’t think it would be nice in theleast,” said Mrs. March, “and if you don’twant to talk seriously, I would rather not talk atall.”

“Well, then, let’s talk about our SilverWedding Journey.”

“I see. You merely want to tease and Iam not in the humor for it.”

She said this in a great many different ways, andthen she was really silent. He perceived thatshe was hurt; and he tried to win her back to good-humor.He asked her if she would not like to go over to Hobokenand look at one of the Hanseatic League steamers,some day; and she refused. When he sent the nextday and got a permit to see the boat; she consentedto go.

III.

He was one of those men who live from the inside outward;he often took a hint for his actions from his fancies;and now because he had fancied some people going tolook at steamers on Sundays, he chose the next Sundayhimself for their visit to the Hanseatic boat at Hoboken.To be sure it was a leisure day with him, but he mighthave taken the afternoon of any other day, for thatmatter, and it was really that invisible thread ofassociation which drew him.

The Colmannia had been in long enough to have madeher toilet for the outward voyage, and was lookingher best. She was tipped and edged with shiningbrass, without and within, and was red-carpeted andwhite-painted as only a ship knows how to be.A little uniformed steward ran before the visitors,and showed them through the dim white corridors intotypical state-rooms on the different decks; and thenlet them verify their first impression of the grandeurof the dining-saloon, and the luxury of the ladies’parlor and music-room. March made his wife observethat the tables and sofas and easy-chairs, which seemedso carelessly scattered about, were all suggestivelyscrewed fast to the floor against rough weather; andhe amused himself with the heavy German browns andgreens and coppers in the decorations, which he saidmust have been studied in color from sausage, beer,and spinach, to the effect of those large march-panesin the roof. She laughed with him at the tastelessnessof the race which they were destined to marvel atmore and more; but she made him own that the stewardesseswhom they saw were charmingly like serving-maids inthe ‘Fliegende Blatter’; when they wentashore she challenged his silence for some assentto her own conclusion that the Colmannia was perfect.

“She has only one fault,” he assented.“She’s a ship.”

“Yes,” said his wife, “and I shallwant to look at the Norumbia before I decide.”

Then he saw that it was only a question which steamerthey should take, and not whether they should takeany. He explained, at first gently and afterwardssavagely, that their visit to the Colmannia was quiteenough for him, and that the vessel was not builtthat he would be willing to cross the Atlantic in.

When a man has gone so far as that he has committedhimself to the opposite course in almost so many words;and March was neither surprised nor abashed when hediscovered himself, before they reached home, offeringhis wife many reasons why they should go to Europe.She answered to all, No, he had made her realize thehorror of it so much that she was glad to give itup. She gave it up, with the best feeling; allthat she would ask of him was that he should nevermention Europe to her again. She could imaginehow much he disliked to go, if such a ship as theColmannia did not make him want to go.

At the bottom of his heart he knew that he had notused her very well. He had kindled her fancywith those notions of a Sabbatical year and a SilverWedding Journey, and when she was willing to renounceboth he had persisted in taking her to see the ship,only to tell her afterwards that he would not go abroadon any account. It was by a psychological jugglewhich some men will understand that he allowed himselfthe next day to get the sailings of the Norumbia fromthe steamship office; he also got a plan of the shipshowing the most available staterooms, so that theymight be able to choose between her and the Colmanniafrom all the facts.

IV.

From this time their decision to go was none the lessexplicit because so perfectly tacit.

They began to amass maps and guides. She gota Baedeker for Austria and he got a Bradshaw for thecontinent, which was never of the least use there,but was for the present a mine of unavailable information.He got a phrase-book, too, and tried to rub up hisGerman. He used to read German, when he was aboy, with a young enthusiasm for its romantic poetry,and now, for the sake of Schiller and Uhland and Heine,he held imaginary conversations with a barber, a bootmaker,and a banker, and tried to taste the joy which hehad not known in the language of those poets for awhole generation. He perceived, of course, thatunless the barber, the bootmaker, and the banker answeredhim in terms which the author of the phrase-book directedthem to use, he should not get on with them beyondhis first question; but he did not allow this to spoilhis pleasure in it. In fact, it was with a tenderemotion that he realized how little the world, whichhad changed in everything else so greatly, had changedin its ideal of a phrase-book.

Mrs. March postponed the study of her Baedeker tothe time and place for it; and addressed herself tothe immediate business of ascertaining the respectivemerits of the Colmannia and Norumbia. She carriedon her researches solely among persons of her ownsex; its experiences were alone of that positive characterwhich brings conviction, and she valued them equallyat first or second hand. She heard of ladies whowould not cross in any boat but the Colmannia, andwho waited for months to get a room on her; she talkedwith ladies who said that nothing would induce themto cross in her. There were ladies who said shehad twice the motion that the Norumbia had, and thevibration from her twin screws was frightful; it alwayswas, on those twin-screw boats, and it did not affecttheir testimony with Mrs. March that the Norumbia wasa twin-screw boat too. It was repeated to herin the third or fourth degree of hear-say that thediscipline on the Colmannia was as perfect as thaton the Cunarders; ladies whose friends had tried everyline assured her that the table of the Norumbia wasalmost as good as the table of the French boats.To the best of the belief of lady witnesses still livingwho had friends on board, the Colmannia had once gotaground, and the Norumbia had once had her bridgecarried off by a tidal wave; or it might be the Colmannia;they promised to ask and let her know. Their lightestword availed with her against the most solemn assurancesof their husbands, fathers, or brothers, who mightbe all very well on land, but in navigation were notto be trusted; they would say anything from a recklessand culpable optimism. She obliged March all thesame to ask among them, but she recognized their guiltyinsincerity when he came home saying that one manhad told him you could have played croquet on thedeck of the Colmannia the whole way over when he crossed,and another that he never saw the racks on in threepassages he had made in the Norumbia.

The weight of evidence was, he thought, in favor ofthe Norumbia, but when they went another Sunday toHoboken, and saw the ship, Mrs. March liked her somuch less than the Colmannia that she could hardlywait for Monday to come; she felt sure all the goodrooms on the Colmannia would be gone before they couldengage one.

From a consensus of the nerves of all the ladies leftin town so late in the season, she knew that the onlyplace on any steamer where your room ought to be wasprobably just where they could not get it. Ifyou went too high, you felt the rolling terribly,and people tramping up and down on the promenade underyour window kept you awake the whole night; if youwent too low, you felt the engine thump, thump, thumpin your head the whole way over. If you wenttoo far forward, you got the pitching; if you wentaft, on the kitchen side, you got the smell of thecooking. The only place, really, was just backof the dining-saloon on the south side of the ship;it was smooth there, and it was quiet, and you hadthe sun in your window all the way over. He askedher if he must take their room there or nowhere, andshe answered that he must do his best, but that shewould not be satisfied with any other place.

In his despair he went down to the steamer office,and took a room which one of the clerks said was thebest. When he got home, it appeared from referenceto the ship’s plan that it was the very roomhis wife had wanted from the beginning, and she praisedhim as if he had used a wisdom beyond his sex in gettingit.

He was in the enjoyment of his unmerited honor whena belated lady came with her husband for an eveningcall, before going into the country. At sightof the plans of steamers on the Marches’ table,she expressed the greatest wonder and delight thatthey were going to Europe. They had supposedeverybody knew it, by this time, but she said she hadnot heard a word of it; and she went on with somefelicitations which March found rather unduly filial.In getting a little past the prime of life he didnot like to be used with too great consideration ofhis years, and he did not think that he and his wifewere so old that they need be treated as if they weregoing on a golden wedding journey, and heaped withall sorts of impertinent prophecies of their enjoyingit so much and being so much the better for the littleouting! Under his breath, he confounded thislady for her impudence; but he schooled himself tolet her rejoice at their going on a Hanseatic boat,because the Germans were always so careful of you.She made her husband agree with her, and it came outthat he had crossed several times on both the Colmanniaand the Norumbia. He volunteered to say thatthe Colmannia, was a capital sea-boat; she did nothave her nose under water all the time; she was steadyas a rock; and the captain and the kitchen were simplyout of sight; some people did call her unlucky.

“Unlucky?” Mrs. March echoed, faintly.“Why do they call her unlucky?”

“Oh, I don’t know. People will sayanything about any boat. You know she broke hershaft, once, and once she got caught in the ice.”

Mrs. March joined him in deriding the superstitionof people, and she parted gayly with this over-goodyoung couple. As soon as they were gone, Marchknew that she would say: “You must changethat ticket, my dear. We will go in the Norumbia.”

“Suppose I can’t get as good a room onthe Norumbia?”

“Then we must stay.”

In the morning after a night so bad that it was worsethan no night at all, she said she would go to thesteamship office with him and question them up aboutthe Colmannia. The people there had never heardshe was called an unlucky boat; they knew of nothingdisastrous in her history. They were so frankand so full in their denials, and so kindly patientof Mrs. March’s anxieties, that he saw everyword was carrying conviction of their insincerityto her. At the end she asked what rooms were lefton the Norumbia, and the clerk whom they had fallento looked through his passenger list with a shakinghead. He was afraid there was nothing they wouldlike.

“But we would take anything,” she entreated,and March smiled to think of his innocence in supposingfor a moment that she had ever dreamed of not going.

“We merely want the best,” he put in.“One flight up, no noise or dust, with sun inall the windows, and a place for fire on rainy days.”

They must be used to a good deal of American jokingwhich they do not understand, in the foreign steamshipoffices. The clerk turned unsmilingly to oneof his superiors and asked him some question in Germanwhich March could not catch, perhaps because it formedno part of a conversation with a barber, a bootmakeror a banker. A brief drama followed, and thenthe clerk pointed to a room on the plan of the Norumbiaand said it had just been given up, and they couldhave it if they decided to take it at once.

They looked, and it was in the very place of theirroom on the Colmannia; it was within one of beingthe same number. It was so providential, if itwas providential at all, that they were both humblysilent a moment; even Mrs. March was silent.In this supreme moment she would not prompt her husbandby a word, a glance, and it was from his own free willthat he said, “We will take it.”

He thought it was his free will, but perhaps one’swill is never free; and this may have been an instanceof pure determinism from all the events before it.No event that followed affected it, though the dayafter they had taken their passage on the Norumbiahe heard that she had once been in the worst sortof storm in the month of August. He felt obligedto impart the fact to his wife, but she said that itproved nothing for or against the ship, and confoundedhim more by her reason than by all her previous unreason.Reason is what a man is never prepared for in women;perhaps because he finds it so seldom in men.

V.

During nearly the whole month that now passed beforethe date of sailing it seemed to March that in somefamiliar aspects New York had never been so interesting.He had not easily reconciled himself to the place afterhis many years of Boston; but he had got used to theugly grandeur, to the noise and the rush, and he haddivined more and more the careless good-nature andfriendly indifference of the vast, sprawling, ungainlymetropolis. There were happy moments when he felta poetry unintentional and unconscious in it, andhe thought there was no point more favorable for thesense of this than Stuyvesant Square, where they hada flat. Their windows looked down into its tree-tops,and across them to the truncated towers of St. George’s,and to the plain red-brick, white-trimmed front ofthe Friends’ Meeting House; he came and wentbetween his dwelling and his office through the twoplaces that form the square, and after dinner hiswife and he had a habit of finding seats by one ofthe fountains in Livingston Place, among the fathersand mothers of the hybrid East Side children swarmingthere at play. The elders read their Englishor Italian or German or Yiddish journals, or gossiped,or merely sat still and stared away the day’sfatigue; while the little ones raced in and out amongthem, crying and laughing, quarrelling and kissing.Sometimes a mother darted forward and caught her childfrom the brink of the basin; another taught hers towalk, holding it tightly up behind by its short skirts;another publicly nursed her baby to sleep.

While they still dreamed, but never thought, of goingto Europe, the Marches often said how European allthis was; if these women had brought their knittingor sewing it would have been quite European; but assoon as they had decided to go, it all began to seempoignantly American. In like manner, before theconditions of their exile changed, and they stillpined for the Old World, they contrived a very agreeableillusion of it by dining now and then at an Austrianrestaurant in Union Square; but later when they beganto be homesick for the American scenes they had notyet left, they had a keener retrospective joy in thestrictly New York sunset they were bowed out into.

The sunsets were uncommonly characteristic that Mayin Union Square. They were the color of the redstripes in the American flag, and when they were seenthrough the delirious architecture of the Broadwayside, or down the perspective of the cross-streets,where the elevated trains silhouetted themselves againsttheir pink, they imparted a feeling of pervasive Americanismin which all impression of alien savors and civilitieswas lost. One evening a fire flamed up in Hoboken,and burned for hours against the west, in the luridcrimson tones of a conflagration as memorably andappealingly native as the colors of the sunset.

The weather for nearly the whole month was of a moodfamiliar enough in our early summer, and it was thiswhich gave the sunsets their vitreous pink. Athrilling coolness followed a first blaze of heat,and in the long respite the thoughts almost went backto winter flannels. But at last a hot wave wastelegraphed from the West, and the week before theNorumbia sailed was an anguish of burning days andbreathless nights, which fused all regrets and reluctancesin the hope of escape, and made the exiles of twocontinents long for the sea, with no care for eithershore.

VI.

Their steamer was to sail early; they were up at dawnbecause they had scarcely lain down, and March creptout into the square for a last breath of its morningair before breakfast. He was now eager to be gone;he had broken with habit, and he wished to put alltraces of the past out of sight. But this wascuriously like all other early mornings in his consciousness,and he could not alienate himself from the wontedenvironment. He stood talking on every-day termsof idle speculation with the familiar policeman, abouta stray parrot in the top of one of the trees, whereit screamed and clawed at the dead branch to whichit clung. Then he went carelessly indoors againas if he were secure of reading the reporter’sstory of it in that next day’s paper which heshould not see.

The sense of an inseverable continuity persisted throughthe breakfast, which was like other breakfasts inthe place they would be leaving in summer shroudsjust as they always left it at the end of June.The illusion was even heightened by the fact thattheir son was to be in the apartment all summer, andit would not be so much shut up as usual. Theheavy trunks had been sent to the ship by express theafternoon before, and they had only themselves andtheir stateroom baggage to transport to Hoboken; theycame down to a carriage sent from a neighboring livery-stable,and exchanged good-mornings with a driver they knewby name.

March had often fancied it a chief advantage of livingin New York that you could drive to the steamer andstart for Europe as if you were starting for Albany;he was in the enjoyment of this advantage now, butsomehow it was not the consolation he had expected.He knew, of course, that if they had been coming fromBoston, for instance, to sail in the Norumbia, theywould probably have gone on board the night before,and sweltered through its heat among the strange smellsand noises of the dock and wharf, instead of breakfastingat their own table, and smoothly bowling down theasphalt on to the ferryboat, and so to the very footof the gangway at the ship’s side, all in thecool of the early morning. But though he hadnow the cool of the early morning on these conditions,there was by no means enough of it.

The sun was already burning the life out of the air,with the threat of another day of the terrible heatthat had prevailed for a week past; and that lastbreakfast at home had not been gay, though it had beenlively, in a fashion, through Mrs. March’s effortsto convince her son that she did not want him to comeand see them off. Of, her daughter’s comingall the way from Chicago there was no question, andshe reasoned that if he did not come to say good-byon board it would be the same as if they were notgoing.

“Don’t you want to go?” March askedwith an obscure resentment.

“I don’t want to seem to go,” shesaid, with the calm of those who have logic on theirside.

As she drove away with her husband she was not sosure of her satisfaction in the feint she had arranged,though when she saw the ghastly partings of peopleon board, she was glad she had not allowed her sonto come. She kept saying this to herself, andwhen they climbed to the ship from the wharf, andfound themselves in the crowd that choked the saloonsand promenades and passages and stairways and landings,she said it more than once to her husband.

She heard weary elders pattering empty politenessesof farewell with friends who had come to see themoff, as they stood withdrawn in such refuges as theship’s architecture afforded, or submitted tobe pushed and twirled about by the surging throngwhen they got in its way. She pitied these intheir affliction, which she perceived that they couldnot lighten or shorten, but she had no patience withthe young girls, who broke into shrieks of nervouslaughter at the coming of certain young men, and keptlaughing and beckoning till they made the young mensee them; and then stretched their hands to them andstood screaming and shouting to them across the interveningheads and shoulders. Some girls, of those whomno one had come to bid good-by, made themselves merry,or at least noisy, by rushing off to the dining-roomand looking at the cards on the bouquets heaping thetables, to find whether any one had sent them flowers.Others whom young men had brought bunches of violetshid their noses in them, and dropped their fans andhandkerchiefs and card-cases, and thanked the youngmen for picking them up. Others, had got placesin the music-room, and sat there with open boxes oflong-stemmed roses in their laps, and talked up intothe faces of the men, with becoming lifts and slantsof their eyes and chins. In the midst of theturmoil children struggled against people’s feetand knees, and bewildered mothers flew at the ship’sofficers and battered them with questions alien totheir respective functions as they amiably stifledabout in their thick uniforms.

Sailors, slung over the ship’s side on swingingseats, were placidly smearing it with paint at thatlast moment; the bulwarks were thickly set with theheads and arms of passengers who were making signsto friends on shore, or calling messages to them thatlost themselves in louder noises midway. Someof the women in the steerage were crying; they wereprobably not going to Europe for pleasure like thefirst-cabin passengers, or even for their health;on the wharf below March saw the face of one younggirl twisted with weeping, and he wished he had notseen it. He turned from it, and looked into theeyes of his son, who was laughing at his shoulder.He said that he had to come down with a good-by letterfrom his sister, which he made an excuse for followingthem; but he had always meant to see them off, heowned. The letter had just come with a specialdelivery stamp, and it warned them that she had sentanother good-by letter with some flowers on board.Mrs. March scolded at them both, but with tears inher eyes, and in the renewed stress of parting whichhe thought he had put from him, March went on takingnote, as with alien senses, of the scene before him,while they all talked on together, and repeated thenothings they had said already.

A rank odor of beet-root sugar rose from the far-branchingsheds where some freight steamers of the line lay,and seemed to mingle chemically with the noise whichcame up from the wharf next to the Norumbia. Themass of spectators deepened and dimmed away into theshadow of the roofs, and along their front came filesof carriages and trucks and carts, and dischargedthe arriving passengers and their baggage, and werelost in the crowd, which they penetrated like slowcurrents, becoming clogged and arrested from timeto time, and then beginning to move again.

The passengers incessantly mounted by the canvas-drapedgalleries leading, fore and aft, into the ship.Bareheaded, blue-jacketed, brass-buttoned stewardsdodged skillfully in and out among them with theirhand-bags, holdalls, hat-boxes, and state-room trunks,and ran before them into the different depths andheights where they hid these burdens, and then ranback for more. Some of the passengers followedthem and made sure that their things were put in theright places; most of them remained wedged among theearlier comers, or pushed aimlessly in and out ofthe doors of the promenades.

The baggage for the hold continually rose in hugeblocks from the wharf, with a loud clucking of thetackle, and sank into the open maw of the ship, momentlygathering herself for her long race seaward, with harshhissings and rattlings and gurglings. There wasno apparent reason why it should all or any of itend, but there came a moment when there began to bewarnings that were almost threats of the end.The ship’s whistle sounded, as if marking acertain interval; and Mrs. March humbly entreated,sternly commanded, her son to go ashore, or else becarried to Europe. They disputed whether thatwas the last signal or not; she was sure it was, andshe appealed to March, who was moved against his reason.He affected to talk calmly with his son, and gave himsome last charges about ‘Every Other Week’.

Some people now interrupted their leave-taking; butthe arriving passengers only arrived more rapidlyat the gang-ways; the bulks of baggage swung moreswiftly into the air. A bell rang, and there rosewomen’s cries, “Oh, that is the shore-bell!”and men’s protests, “It is only the firstbell!” More and more began to descend the gangways,fore and aft, and soon outnumbered those who werecoming aboard.

March tried not to be nervous about his son’slingering; he was ashamed of his anxiety; but he saidin a low voice, “Better be off, Tom.”

His mother now said she did not care if Tom were reallycarried to Europe; and at last he said, Well, he guessedhe must go ashore, as if there had been no questionof that before; and then she clung to him and wouldnot let him go; but she acquired merit with herselfat last by pushing him into the gangway with her ownhands: he nodded and waved his hat from its foot,and mixed with the crowd.

Presently there was hardly any one coming aboard,and the sailors began to undo the lashings of thegangways from the ship’s side; files of menon the wharf laid hold of their rails; the stewardsguarding their approach looked up for the signal tocome aboard; and in vivid pantomime forbade some belatedleavetakers to ascend. These stood aside, exchangingbows and grins with the friends whom they could notreach; they all tried to make one another hear somelast words. The moment came when the saloon gangwaywas detached; then it was pulled ashore, and the sectionof the bulwarks opening to it was locked, not to beunlocked on this side of the world. An indefinableimpulse communicated itself to the steamer: whileit still seemed motionless it moved. The thickspread of faces on the wharf, which had looked attimes like some sort of strange flowers in a levelfield, broke into a universal tremor, and the air abovethem was filled with hats and handkerchiefs, as ifwith the flight of birds rising from the field.

The Marches tried to make out their son’s face;they believed that they did; but they decided thatthey had not seen him, and his mother said that shewas glad; it would only have made it harder to bear,though she was glad he had come over to say good-byit had seemed so unnatural that he should not, wheneverybody else was saying good-by.

On the wharf color was now taking the place of form;the scene ceased to have the effect of an instantaneousphotograph; it was like an impressionistic study.As the ship swung free of the shed and got into thestream, the shore lost reality. Up to a certainmoment, all was still New York, all was even Hoboken;then amidst the grotesque and monstrous shows of thearchitecture on either shore March felt himself atsea and on the way to Europe.

The fact was accented by the trouble people were alreadymaking with the deck-steward about their steamer chairs,which they all wanted put in the best places, andMarch, with a certain heart-ache, was involuntarilyverifying the instant in which he ceased to be of hisnative shores, while still in full sight of them,when he suddenly reverted to them, and as it werelanded on them again in an incident that held him breathless.A man, bareheaded, and with his arms flung wildly abroad,came flying down the promenade from the steerage.“Capitan! Capitan! There is a woman!”he shouted in nondescript English. “Shemust go hout! She must go hout!” Some vitalfact imparted itself to the ship’s command andseemed to penetrate to the ship’s heart; shestopped, as if with a sort of majestic relenting.A tug panted to her side, and lifted a ladder to it;the bareheaded man, and a woman gripping a baby inher arms, sprawled safely down its rungs to the deckof the tug, and the steamer moved seaward again.

“What is it? Oh, what is it?” hiswife demanded of March’s share of their commonignorance. A young fellow passing stopped, asif arrested by the tragic note in her voice, and explainedthat the woman had left three little children lockedup in her tenement while she came to bid some friendson board good-by.

He passed on, and Mrs. March said, “What a charmingface he had!” even before she began to wreakupon that wretched mother the overwrought sympathywhich makes good women desire the punishment of peoplewho have escaped danger. She would not hear anyexcuse for her. “Her children oughtn’tto have been out of her mind for an instant.”

“Don’t you want to send back a line toours by the pilot?” March asked.

She started from him. “Oh, was I reallybeginning to forget them?”

In the saloon where people were scattered about writingpilot’s letters she made him join her in animpassioned epistle of farewell, which once more leftnone of the nothings unsaid that they had many timesreiterated. She would not let him put the stampon, for fear it would not stick, and she had an agonizingmoment of doubt whether it ought not to be a Germanstamp; she was not pacified till the steward in chargeof the mail decided.

“I shouldn’t have forgiven myself,”March said, “if we hadn’t let Tom knowthat twenty minutes after he left us we were stillalive and well.”

“It’s to Bella, too,” she reasoned.

He found her making their state-room look homelikewith their familiar things when he came with theirdaughter’s steamer letter and the flowers andfruit she had sent. She said, Very well, theywould all keep, and went on with her unpacking.He asked her if she did not think these home thingsmade it rather ghastly, and she said if he kept onin that way she should certainly go back on the pilot-boat.He perceived that her nerves were spent. He hadresisted the impulse to an ill-timed joke about thelife-preservers under their berths when the sound ofthe breakfast-horn, wavering first in the distance,found its way nearer and clearer down their corridor.

VII.

In one of the many visits to the steamship officewhich his wife’s anxieties obliged him to make,March had discussed the question of seats in the dining-saloon.At first he had his ambition for the captain’stable, but they convinced him more easily than he afterwardsconvinced Mrs. March that the captain’s tablehad become a superstition of the past, and conferredno special honor. It proved in the event thatthe captain of the Norumbia had the good feeling todine in a lower saloon among the passengers who paidleast for their rooms. But while the Marcheswere still in their ignorance of this, they decidedto get what adventure they could out of letting thehead steward put them where he liked, and they camein to breakfast with a careless curiosity to see whathe had done for them.

There seemed scarcely a vacant place in the huge saloon;through the oval openings in the centre they lookeddown into the lower saloon and up into the music-room,as thickly thronged with breakfasters. The tableswere brightened with the bouquets and the floral designsof ships, anchors, harps, and doves sent to the ladypassengers, and at one time the Marches thought theywere going to be put before a steam-yacht realizedto the last detail in blue and white violets.The ports of the saloon were open, and showed thelevel sea; the ship rode with no motion except thetremor from her screws. The sound of talkingand laughing rose with the clatter of knives and forksand the clash of crockery; the homely smell of thecoffee and steak and fish mixed with the spice of theroses and carnations; the stewards ran hither andthither, and a young foolish joy of travel welledup in the elderly hearts of the pair. When thehead steward turned out the swivel-chairs where theywere to sit they both made an inclination toward thepeople already at table, as if it had been a companyat some far-forgotten table d’hote in the latersixties. The head steward seemed to understandas well as speak English, but the table-stewards hadonly an effect of English, which they eked out with“Bleace!” for all occasions of inquiry,apology, or reassurance, as the equivalent of theirnative “Bitte!” Otherwise there was noreason to suppose that they did not speak German,which was the language of a good half of the passengers.The stewards looked English, however, in conformityto what seems the ideal of every kind of foreign seafaringpeople, and that went a good way toward making themintelligible.

March, to whom his wife mainly left their obeisance,made it so tentative that if it should meet no responsehe could feel that it had been nothing more than aforward stoop, such as was natural in sitting down.He need not really have taken this precaution; thosewhose eyes he caught more or less nodded in return.

A nice-looking boy of thirteen or fourteen, who hadthe place on the left of the lady in the sofa seatunder the port, bowed with almost magisterial gravity,and made the lady on the sofa smile, as if she werehis mother and understood him. March decided thatshe had been some time a widow; and he easily divinedthat the young couple on her right had been so littletime husband and wife that they would rather not haveit known. Next them was a young lady whom hedid not at first think so good-looking as she provedlater to be, though she had at once a pretty nose,with a slight upward slant at the point, long eyesunder fallen lashes, a straight forehead, not toohigh, and a mouth which perhaps the exigencies ofbreakfasting did not allow all its characteristic charm.She had what Mrs. March thought interesting hair, ofa dull black, roughly rolled away from her foreheadand temples in a fashion not particularly becomingto her, and she had the air of not looking so wellas she might if she had chosen. The elderly manon her right, it was easy to see, was her father;they had a family likeness, though his fair hair,now ashen with age, was so different from hers.He wore his beard cut in the fashion of the SecondEmpire, with a Louis Napoleonic mustache, imperial,and chin tuft; his neat head was cropt close; and therewas something Gallic in its effect and something remotelymilitary: he had blue eyes, really less severethan he meant, though be frowned a good deal, andmanaged them with glances of a staccato quickness,as if challenging a potential disagreement with hisopinions.

The gentleman on his right, who sat at the head ofthe table, was of the humorous, subironical Americanexpression, and a smile at the corner of his kindlymouth, under an iron-gray full beard cut short, atonce questioned and tolerated the new-comers as heglanced at them. He responded to March’sbow almost as decidedly as the nice boy, whose motherhe confronted at the other end of the table, and withhis comely bulk formed an interesting contrast toher vivid slightness. She was brilliantly dark,behind the gleam of the gold-rimmed glasses perchedon her pretty nose.

If the talk had been general before the Marches came,it did not at once renew itself in that form.Nothing was said while they were having their firststruggle with the table-stewards, who repeated theorder as if to show how fully they had misunderstoodit. The gentleman at the head of the table intervenedat last, and then, “I’m obliged to you,”March said, for your German. I left mine in aphrase-book in my other coat pocket.”

“Oh, I wasn’t speaking German,”said the other. “It was merely their kindof English.”

The company were in the excitement of a novel situationwhich disposes people to acquaintance, and this exchangeof small pleasantries made every one laugh, exceptthe father and daughter; but they had the effect ofbeing tacitly amused.

The mother of the nice boy said to Mrs. March, “Youmay not get what you ordered, but it will be good.”

“Even if you don’t know what it is!”said the young bride, and then blushed, as if shehad been too bold.

Mrs. March liked the blush and the young bride forit, and she asked, “Have you ever been on oneof these German boats before? They seem verycomfortable.”

“Oh, dear, no! we’ve never been on anyboat before.” She made a little pettedmouth of deprecation, and added, simple-heartedly,“My husband was going out on business, and hethought he might as well take me along.”

The husband seemed to feel himself brought in by this,and said he did not see why they should not make ita pleasure-trip, too. They put themselves ina position to be patronized by their deference, andin the pauses of his talk with the gentleman at thehead of the table, March heard his wife abusing theirinexperience to be unsparingly instructive about Europeantravel. He wondered whether she would be afraidto own that it was nearly thirty years since she hadcrossed the ocean; though that might seem recent topeople who had never crossed at all.

They listened with respect as she boasted in whatan anguish of wisdom she had decided between the Colmanniaand the Norumbia. The wife said she did not knowthere was such a difference in steamers, but when Mrs.March perfervidly assured her that there was all thedifference in the world, she submitted and said shesupposed she ought to be thankful that they, had hitupon the right one. They had telegraphed for berthsand taken what was given them; their room seemed tobe very nice.

“Oh,” said Mrs. March, and her husbandknew that she was saying it to reconcile them to theinevitable, “all the rooms on the Norumbia arenice. The only difference is that if they areon the south side you have the sun.”

“I’m not sure which is the south side,”said the bride. “We seem to have been goingwest ever since we started, and I feel as if we shouldreach home in the morning if we had a good night.Is the ocean always so smooth as this?”

“Oh, dear, no!” said Mrs. March.“It’s never so smooth as this,” andshe began to be outrageously authoritative about theocean weather. She ended by declaring that theJune passages were always good, and that if the shipkept a southerly course they would have no fogs andno icebergs. She looked round, and caught herhusband’s eye. “What is it? HaveI been bragging? Well, you understand,”she added to the bride, “I’ve only beenover once, a great while ago, and I don’t reallyknow anything about it,” and they laughed together.“But I talked so much with people after we decidedto go, that I feel as if I had been a hundred times.”

“I know,” said the other lady, with caressingintelligence. “That is just the way with—­”She stopped, and looked at the young man whom the headsteward was bringing up to take the vacant place nextto March. He came forward, stuffing his cap intothe pocket of his blue serge sack, and smiled downon the company with such happiness in his gay eyesthat March wondered what chance at this late day couldhave given any human creature his content so absolute,and what calamity could be lurking round the cornerto take it out of him. The new-comer looked atMarch as if he knew him, and March saw at a secondglance that he was the young fellow who had told himabout the mother put off after the start. He askedhim whether there was any change in the weather yetoutside, and he answered eagerly, as if the chanceto put his happiness into the mere sound of wordswere a favor done him, that their ship had just spokenone of the big Hanseatic mailboats, and she had signalledback that she had met ice; so that they would probablykeep a southerly course, and not have it cooler tillthey were off the Banks.

The mother of the boy said, “I thought we mustbe off the Banks when I came out of my room, but itwas only the electric fan at the foot of the stairs.”

“That was what I thought,” said Mrs. March.“I almost sent my husband back for my shawl!”Both the ladies laughed and liked each other for theircommon experience.

The gentleman at the head of the table said, “Theyought to have fans going there by that pillar, orelse close the ports. They only let in heat.”

They easily conformed to the American convention ofjocosity in their talk; it perhaps no more representsthe individual mood than the convention of dulnessamong other people; but it seemed to make the youngman feel at home.

“Why, do you think it’s uncomfortablywarm?” he asked, from what March perceived tobe a meteorology of his own. He laughed and added,“It is pretty summerlike,” as if he hadnot thought of it before. He talked of the bigmail-boat, and said he would like to cross on sucha boat as that, and then he glanced at the possibleadvantage of having your own steam-yacht like theone which he said they had just passed, so near thatyou could see what a good time the people were havingon board. He began to speak to the Marches; histalk spread to the young couple across the table;it visited the mother on the sofa in a remark whichshe might ignore without apparent rejection, and withoutreally avoiding the boy, it glanced off toward thefather and daughter, from whom it fell, to rest withthe gentleman at the head of the table.

It was not that the father and daughter had slightedhis overture, if it was so much as that, but thatthey were tacitly preoccupied, or were of some philosophyconcerning their fellow-breakfasters which did notsuffer them, for the present, at least, to share inthe common friendliness. This is an attitudesometimes produced in people by a sense of just, oreven unjust, superiority; sometimes by serious trouble;sometimes by transient annoyance. The cause wasnot so deep-seated but Mrs. March, before she rosefrom her place, believed that she had detected a slantof the young lady’s eyes, from under her lashes,toward the young man; and she leaped to a conclusionconcerning them in a matter where all logical stepsare impertinent. She did not announce her arrivalat this point till the young man had overtaken herbefore she got out of the saloon, and presented thehandkerchief she had dropped under the table.

He went away with her thanks, and then she said toher husband, “Well, he’s perfectly charming,and I don’t wonder she’s taken with him;that kind of cold girl would be, though I’mnot sure that she is cold. She’s interesting,and you could see that he thought so, the more he lookedat her; I could see him looking at her from the veryfirst instant; he couldn’t keep his eyes offher; she piqued his curiosity, and made him wonderabout her.”

“Now, look here, Isabel! This won’tdo. I can stand a good deal, but I sat betweenyou and that young fellow, and you couldn’t tellwhether he was looking at that girl or not.”

“I could! I could tell by the expressionof her face.”

“Oh, well! If it’s gone as far asthat with you, I give it up. When are you goingto have them married?”

“Nonsense! I want you to find out who allthose people are. How are you going to do it?”

“Perhaps the passenger list will say,”he suggested.

VIII.

The list did not say of itself, but with the helpof the head steward’s diagram it said that thegentleman at the head of the table was Mr. R. M. Kenby;the father and the daughter were Mr. E. B. Triscoeand Miss Triscoe; the bridal pair were Mr. and Mrs.Leffers; the mother and her son were Mrs. Adding andMr. Roswell Adding; the young man who came in lastwas Mr. L. J. Burnamy. March carried the list,with these names carefully checked and rearrangedon a neat plan of the table, to his wife in her steamerchair, and left her to make out the history and thecharacter of the people from it. In this sortof conjecture long experience had taught him his futility,and he strolled up and down and looked at the lifeabout him with no wish to penetrate it deeply.

Long Island was now a low yellow line on the left.Some fishing-boats flickered off the shore; they meta few sail, and left more behind; but already, andso near one of the greatest ports of the world, thespacious solitude of the ocean was beginning.There was no swell; the sea lay quite flat, with afine mesh of wrinkles on its surface, and the sunflamed down upon it from a sky without a cloud.With the light fair wind, there was no resistancein the sultry air, the thin, dun smoke from the smoke-stackfell about the decks like a stifling veil.

The promenades, were as uncomfortably crowded as thesidewalk of Fourteenth Street on a summer’sday, and showed much the social average of a New Yorkshopping thoroughfare. Distinction is somethingthat does not always reveal itself at first sighton land, and at sea it is still more retrusive.A certain democracy of looks and clothes was the mostnotable thing to March in the apathetic groups anddetached figures. His criticism disabled thesaloon passengers of even so much personal appealas he imagined in some of the second-cabin passengerswhom he saw across their barrier; they had at leastthe pathos of their exclusion, and he could wonderif they felt it or envied him. At Hoboken he hadseen certain people coming on board who looked likeswells; but they had now either retired from the crowd,or they had already conformed to the prevailing type.It was very well as a type; he was of it himself; buthe wished that beauty as well as distinction had notbeen so lost in it.

In fact, he no longer saw so much beauty anywhereas he once did. It might be that he saw lifemore truly than when he was young, and that his glasseswere better than his eyes had been; but there wereanalogies that forbade his thinking so, and he sometimeshad his misgivings that the trouble was with his glasses.He made what he could of a pretty girl who had theair of not meaning to lose a moment from flirtation,and was luring her fellow-passengers from under hersailor hat. She had already attached one of them;and she was hooking out for more. She kept movingherself from the waist up, as if she worked there ona pivot, showing now this side and now that side ofher face, and visiting the admirer she had securedwith a smile as from the lamp of a revolving lightas she turned.

While he was dwelling upon this folly, with a senseof impersonal pleasure in it as complete through hisyears as if he were already a disembodied spirit,the pulse of the engines suddenly ceased, and he joinedthe general rush to the rail, with a fantastic expectationof seeing another distracted mother put off; but itwas only the pilot leaving the ship. He was climbingdown the ladder which hung over the boat, rising andsinking on the sea below, while the two men in herheld her from the ship’s side with their oars;in the offing lay the white steam-yacht which nowreplaces the picturesque pilot-sloop of other times.The Norumbia’s screws turned again under halfa head of steam; the pilot dropped from the last rungof the ladder into the boat, and caught the bundleof letters tossed after him. Then his men letgo the line that was towing their craft, and the incidentof the steamer’s departure was finally closed.It had been dramatically heightened perhaps by herfinal impatience to be off at some added risks tothe pilot and his men, but not painfully so, and Marchsmiled to think how men whose lives are all of dangerouschances seem always to take as many of them as theycan.

He heard a girl’s fresh voice saying at hisshoulder, “Well, now we are off; and I supposeyou’re glad, papa!”

“I’m glad we’re not taking the piloton, at least,” answered the elderly man whomthe girl had spoken to; and March turned to see thefather and daughter whose reticence at the breakfasttable had interested him. He wondered that hehad left her out of the account in estimating the beautyof the ship’s passengers: he saw now thatshe was not only extremely pretty, but as she movedaway she was very graceful; she even had distinction.He had fancied a tone of tolerance, and at the sametime of reproach in her voice, when she spoke, anda tone of defiance and not very successful denialin her father’s; and he went back with theseimpressions to his wife, whom he thought he ought totell why the ship had stopped.

She had not noticed the ship’s stopping, inher study of the passenger list, and she did not carefor the pilot’s leaving; but she seemed to thinkhis having overheard those words of the father anddaughter an event of prime importance. With awoman’s willingness to adapt the means to theend she suggested that he should follow them up andtry to overhear something more; she only partiallyrealized the infamy of her suggestion when he laughedin scornful refusal.

“Of course I don’t want you to eavesdrop,but I do want you to find out about them. Andabout Mr. Burnamy, too. I can wait, about theothers, or manage for myself, but these are drivingme to distraction. Now, will you?”

He said he would do anything he could with honor,and at one of the earliest turns he made on the otherside of the ship he was smilingly halted by Mr. Burnamy,who asked to be excused, and then asked if he werenot Mr. March of ‘Every Other Week’; hehad seen the name on the passenger list, and feltsure it must be the editor’s. He seemedso trustfully to expect March to remember his ownname as that of a writer from whom he had accepteda short poem, yet unprinted, that the editor feignedto do so until he really did dimly recall it.He even recalled the short poem, and some civil wordshe said about it caused Burnamy to overrun in confidencesthat at once touched and amused him.

IX.

Burnamy, it seemed, had taken passage on the Norumbiabecause he found, when he arrived in New York theday before, that she was the first boat out.His train was so much behind time that when he reachedthe office of the Hanseatic League it was nominallyshut, but he pushed in by sufferance of the janitor,and found a berth, which had just been given up, inone of the saloon-deck rooms. It was that or nothing;and he felt rich enough to pay for it himself if theBird of Prey, who had cabled him to come out to Carlsbadas his secretary, would not stand the difference betweenthe price and that of the lower-deck six-in-a-roomberth which he would have taken if he had been alloweda choice.

With the three hundred dollars he had got for hisbook, less the price of his passage, changed intoGerman bank-notes and gold pieces, and safely buttonedin the breast pocket of his waistcoat, he felt as safefrom pillage as from poverty when he came out frombuying his ticket; he covertly pressed his arm againsthis breast from time to time, for the joy of feelinghis money there and not from any fear of finding itgone. He wanted to sing, he wanted to dance;he could not believe it was he, as he rode up thelonely length of Broadway in the cable-car, betweenthe wild, irregular walls of the canyon which thecable-cars have all to themselves at the end of asummer afternoon.

He went and dined, and he thought he dined well, ata Spanish-American restaurant, for fifty cents, witha half-bottle of California claret included.When he came back to Broadway he was aware that itwas stiflingly hot in the pinkish twilight, but hetook a cable-car again in lack of other pastime, andthe motion served the purpose of a breeze, which hemade the most of by keeping his hat off. It didnot really matter to him whether it was hot or cool;he was imparadised in weather which had nothing todo with the temperature. Partly because he wasborn to such weather, in the gayety of soul whichamused some people with him, and partly because theworld was behaving as he had always expected, he wasopulently content with the present moment. Buthe thought very tolerantly of the future, and he confirmedhimself in the decision he had already made, to stickto Chicago when he came back to America. New Yorkwas very well, and he had no sentiment about Chicago;but he had got a foothold there; he had done betterwith an Eastern publisher, he believed, by hailingfrom the West, and he did not believe it would hurthim with the Eastern public to keep on hailing fromthe West.

He was glad of a chance to see Europe, but he didnot mean to come home so dazzled as to see nothingelse against the American sky. He fancied, forhe really knew nothing, that it was the light of Europe,not its glare that he wanted, and he wanted it chieflyon his material, so as to see it more and more objectively.It was his power of detachment from this that hadenabled him to do his sketches in the paper with suchcharm as to lure a cash proposition from a publisherwhen he put them together for a book, but he believedthat his business faculty had much to do with hissuccess; and he was as proud of that as of the bookitself. Perhaps he was not so very proud of thebook; he was at least not vain of it; he could, detachhimself from his art as well as his material.

Like all literary temperaments he was of a certainhardness, in spite of the susceptibilities that couldbe used to give coloring to his work. He knewthis well enough, but he believed that there were depthsof unprofessional tenderness in his nature. Hewas good to his mother, and he sent her money, andwrote to her in the little Indiana town where he hadleft her when he came to Chicago. After he gotthat invitation from the Bird of Prey, he exploredhis heart for some affection that he had not feltfor him before, and he found a wish that his employershould not know it was he who had invented that nicknamefor him. He promptly avowed this in the newspaperoffice which formed one of the eyries of the Birdof Prey, and made the fellows promise not to give himaway. He failed to move their imagination whenhe brought up as a reason for softening toward himthat he was from Burnamy’s own part of Indiana,and was a benefactor of Tippecanoe University, fromwhich Burnamy was graduated. But they, relishedthe cynicism of his attempt; and they were glad ofhis good luck, which he was getting square and notrhomboid, as most people seem to get their luck.They liked him, and some of them liked him for hisclean young life as well as for his cleverness.His life was known to be as clean as a girl’s,and he looked like a girl with his sweet eyes, thoughhe had rather more chin than most girls.

The conductor came to reverse his seat, and Burnamytold him he guessed he would ride back with him asfar as the cars to the Hoboken Ferry, if the conductorwould put him off at the right place. It was nearlynine o’clock, and he thought he might as wellbe going over to the ship, where he had decided topass the night. After he found her, and went onboard, he was glad he had not gone sooner. Aqueasy odor of drainage stole up from the waters ofthe dock, and mixed with the rank, gross sweetnessof the bags of beet-root sugar from the freight-steamers;there was a coming and going of carts and trucks onthe wharf, and on the ship a rattling of chains anda clucking of pulleys, with sudden outbreaks and thensudden silences of trampling sea-boots. Burnamylooked into the dining-saloon and the music-room,with the notion of trying for some naps there; thenhe went to his state-room. His room-mate, whoeverhe was to be, had not come; and he kicked off hisshoes and threw off his coat and tumbled into hisberth.

He meant to rest awhile, and then get up and spendthe night in receiving impressions. He couldnot think of any one who had done the facts of theeve of sailing on an Atlantic liner. He thoughthe would use the material first in a letter to thepaper and afterwards in a poem; but he found himselfunable to grasp the notion of its essential relationto the choice between chicken croquettes and sweetbreadsas entrees of the restaurant dinner where he had beenoffered neither; he knew that he had begun to dream,and that he must get up. He was just going toget up, when he woke to a sense of freshness in theair, penetrating from the new day outside. Helooked at his watch and found it was quarter past six;he glanced round the state-room and saw that he hadpassed the night alone in it. Then he splashedhimself hastily at the basin next his berth, and jumpedinto his clothes, and went on deck, anxious to loseno feature or emotion of the ship’s departure.

When she was fairly off he returned to his room tochange the thick coat he had put on at the instigationof the early morning air. His room-mate was stillabsent, but he was now represented by his state-roombaggage, and Burnamy tried to infer him from it.He perceived a social quality in his dress-coat case,capacious gladstone, hat-box, rug, umbrella, and sole-leathersteamer trunk which he could not attribute to his ownequipment. The things were not so new as his;they had an effect of polite experience, with a foreignregistry and customs label on them here and there.They had been chosen with both taste and knowledge,and Burnamy would have said that they were certainlyEnglish things, if it had not been for the initialsU. S. A. which followed the name of E. B. Triscoeon the end of the steamer trunk showing itself underthe foot of the lower berth.

The lower berth had fallen to Burnamy through thedefault of the passenger whose ticket he had got atthe last hour; the clerk in the steamer office hadbeen careful to impress him with this advantage, andhe now imagined a trespass on his property. Buthe reassured himself by a glance at his ticket, andwent out to watch the ship’s passage down thestream and through the Narrows. After breakfasthe came to his room again, to see what could be donefrom his valise to make him look better in the eyesof a girl whom he had seen across the table; of coursehe professed a much more general purpose. Heblamed himself for not having got at least a pairof the white tennis-shoes which so many of the passengerswere wearing; his russet shoes had turned shabby onhis feet; but there was a, pair of enamelled leatherboots in his bag which he thought might do.

His room was in the group of cabins on the upper deck;he had already missed his way to it once by mistakingthe corridor which it opened into; and he was notsure that he was not blundering again when he peereddown the narrow passage where he supposed it was.A lady was standing at an open state-room door, restingher hands against the jambs and leaning forward withher head within and talking to some one there.Before he could draw back and try another corridorhe heard her say: “Perhaps he’s someyoung man, and wouldn’t care.”

Burnamy could not make out the answer that came fromwithin. The lady spoke again in a tone of reluctantassent, “No, I don’t suppose you could;but if he understood, perhaps he would offer.”

She drew her head out of the room, stepping back apace, and lingering a moment at the threshold.She looked round over her shoulder and discoveredBurnamy, where he stood hesitating at the head of thepassage. She ebbed before him, and then flowedround him in her instant escape; with some murmuredincoherencies about speaking to her father, she vanishedin a corridor on the other side of the ship, whilehe stood staring into the doorway of his room.

He had seen that she was the young lady for whom hehad come to put on his enamelled shoes, and he sawthat the person within was the elderly gentleman whohad sat next her at breakfast. He begged his pardon,as he entered, and said he hoped he should not disturbhim. “I’m afraid I left my thingsall over the place, when I got up this morning.”

The other entreated him not to mention it and wenton taking from his hand-bag a variety of toilet applianceswhich the sight of made Burnamy vow to keep his ownsimple combs and brushes shut in his valise all theway over. “You slept on board, then,”he suggested, arresting himself with a pair of lowshoes in his hand; he decided to put them in a certainpocket of his steamer bag.

“Oh, yes,” Burnamy laughed, nervously:“I came near oversleeping, and getting off tosea without knowing it; and I rushed out to save myself,and so—­”

He began to gather up his belongings while he followedthe movements of Mr. Triscoe with a wistful eye.He would have liked to offer his lower berth to thissenior of his, when he saw him arranging to take possessionof the upper; but he did not quite know how to manageit. He noticed that as the other moved abouthe limped slightly, unless it were rather a wearyeasing of his person from one limb to the other.He stooped to pull his trunk out from under the berth,and Burnamy sprang to help him.

“Let me get that out for you!” He caughtit up and put it on the sofa under the port.“Is that where you want it?”

“Why, yes,” the other assented. “You’revery good,” and as he took out his key to unlockthe trunk he relented a little farther to the intimaciesof the situation. “Have you arranged withthe bath-steward yet? It’s such a fullboat.”

“No, I haven’t,” said Burnamy, asif he had tried and failed; till then he had not knownthat there was a bath-steward. “Shall Iget him for you?”

“No; no. Our bedroom-steward will sendhim, I dare say, thank you.”

Mr. Triscoe had got his trunk open, and Burnamy hadno longer an excuse for lingering. In his defeatconcerning the bath-steward, as he felt it to be,he had not the courage, now, to offer the lower berth.He went away, forgetting to change his shoes; buthe came back, and as soon as he got the enamelledshoes on, and shut the shabby russet pair in his bag,he said, abruptly: “Mr. Triscoe, I wishyou’d take the lower berth. I got it atthe eleventh hour by some fellow’s giving itup, and it isn’t as if I’d bargained forit a month ago.”

The elder man gave him one of his staccato glancesin which Burnamy fancied suspicion and even resentment.But he said, after the moment of reflection whichhe gave himself, “Why, thank you, if you don’tmind, really.”

“Not at all!” cried the young man.“I should like the upper berth better.We’ll, have the steward change the sheets.”

“Oh, I’ll see that he does that,”said Mr. Triscoe. “I couldn’t allowyou to take any trouble about it.” He nowlooked as if he wished Burnamy would go, and leavehim to his domestic arrangements.

X.

In telling about himself Burnamy touched only uponthe points which he believed would take his listener’sintelligent fancy, and he stopped so long before hehad tired him that March said he would like to introducehim to his wife. He saw in the agreeable youngfellow an image of his own youth, with some differenceswhich, he was willing to own, were to the young fellow’sadvantage. But they were both from the middleWest; in their native accent and their local traditionthey were the same; they were the same in their aspirations;they were of one blood in their literary impulse toexternate their thoughts and emotions.

Burnamy answered, with a glance at his enamelled shoes,that he would be delighted, and when her husband broughthim up to her, Mrs. March said she was always gladto meet the contributors to the magazine, and askedhim whether he knew Mr. Kendricks, who was her favorite.Without giving him time to reply to a question thatseemed to depress him, she said that she had a sonwho must be nearly his own age, and whom his fatherhad left in charge of ‘Every Other Week’for the few months they were to be gone; that theyhad a daughter married and living in Chicago.She made him sit down by her in March’s chair,and before he left them March heard him magnanimouslyasking whether Mr. Kendricks was going to do somethingmore for the magazine soon. He sauntered awayand did not know how quickly Burnamy left this questionto say, with the laugh and blush which became himin her eyes:

“Mrs. March, there is something I should liketo tell you about, if you will let me.”

“Why, certainly, Mr. Burnamy,” she began,but she saw that he did not wish her to continue.

“Because,” he went on, “it’sa little matter that I shouldn’t like to gowrong in.”

He told her of his having overheard what Miss Triscoehad said to her father, and his belief that she wastalking about the lower berth. He said he wouldhave wished to offer it, of course, but now he wasafraid they might think he had overheard them andfelt obliged to do it.

“I see,” said Mrs. March, and she added,thoughtfully, “She looks like rather a proudgirl.”

“Yes,” the young fellow sighed.

“She is very charming,” she continued,thoughtfully, but not so judicially.

“Well,” Burnamy owned, “that iscertainly one of the complications,” and theylaughed together.

She stopped herself after saying, “I see whatyou mean,” and suggested, “I think I shouldbe guided by circ*mstances. It needn’t bedone at once, I suppose.”

“Well,” Burnamy began, and then he brokeout, with a laugh of embarrassment, “I’vedone it already.”

“Oh! Then it wasn’t my advice, exactly,that you wanted.”

“No!”

“And how did he take it?”

“He said he should be glad to make the exchangeif I really didn’t mind.” Burnamyhad risen restlessly, and she did not ask him to stay.She merely said:

“Oh, well, I’m glad it turned out so nicely.”

“I’m so glad you think it was the thingto do.” He managed to laugh again, buthe could not hide from her that he was not feelingaltogether satisfied. “Would you like meto send Mr. March, if I see him?” he asked,as if he did not know on what other terms to get away.

“Do, please!” she entreated, and it seemedto her that he had hardly left her when her husbandcame up. “Why, where in the world did hefind you so soon?”

“Did you send him for me? I was just hanginground for him to go.” March sank into thechair at her side. “Well, is he going tomarry her?”

“Oh, you may laugh! But there is somethingvery exciting!” She told him what had happened,and of her belief that Burnamy’s handsome behaviorhad somehow not been met in kind.

March gave himself the pleasure of an immense laugh.“It seems to me that this Mr. Burnamy of yourswanted a little more gratitude than he was entitledto. Why shouldn’t he have offered him thelower berth? And why shouldn’t the oldgentleman have taken it just as he did? Did youwant him to make a counteroffer of his daughter’shand? If he does, I hope Mr. Burnamy won’tcome for your advice till after he’s acceptedher.”

“He wasn’t very candid. I hoped youwould speak about that. Don’t you thinkit was rather natural, though?”

“For him, very likely. But I think youwould call it sinuous in some one you hadn’ttaken a fancy to.”

“No, no. I wish to be just. I don’tsee how he could have come straight at it. Andhe did own up at last.” She asked him whatBurnamy had done for the magazine, and he could remembernothing but that one small poem, yet unprinted; hewas rather vague about its value, but said it hadtemperament.

“He has temperament, too,” she commented,and she had made him tell her everything he knew,or could be forced to imagine about Burnamy, beforeshe let the talk turn to other things.

The life of the promenade had already settled intoseafaring form; the steamer chairs were full, andpeople were reading or dozing in them with an effectof long habit. Those who would be walking up anddown had begun their walks; some had begun going inand out of the smoking-room; ladies who were easilyaffected by the motion were lying down in the music-room.Groups of both sexes were standing at intervals alongthe rail, and the promenaders were obliged to doubleon a briefer course or work slowly round them.Shuffleboard parties at one point and ring-toss partiesat another were forming among the young people.It was as lively and it was as dull as it would betwo thousand miles at sea. It was not the leastcooler, yet; but if you sat still you did not suffer.

In the prompt monotony the time was already passingswiftly. The deck-steward seemed hardly to havebeen round with tea and bouillon, and he had not yetgathered up all the empty cups, when the horn for lunchsounded. It was the youngest of the table-stewardswho gave the summons to meals; and whenever the prettyboy appeared with his bugle, funny passengers gatheredround him to make him laugh, and stop him from windingit. His part of the joke was to fulfill his dutywith gravity, and only to give way to a smile of triumphas he walked off.

XI.

At lunch, in the faded excitement of their first meeting,the people at the Marches’ table did not renewthe premature intimacy of their breakfast talk.Mrs. March went to lie down in her berth afterwards,and March went on deck without her. He beganto walk to and from the barrier between the firstand second cabin promenades; lingering near it, andmusing pensively, for some of the people beyond itlooked as intelligent and as socially acceptable,even to their clothes, as their pecuniary bettersof the saloon.

There were two women, a mother and daughter, whomhe fancied to be teachers, by their looks, going outfor a little rest, or perhaps for a little furtherstudy to fit them more perfectly for their work.They gazed wistfully across at him whenever he cameup to the barrier; and he feigned a conversation withthem and tried to convince them that the stamp ofinferiority which their poverty put upon them was just,or if not just, then inevitable. He argued withthem that the sort of barrier which here preventedtheir being friends with him, if they wished it, raninvisibly through society everywhere but he felt ashamedbefore their kind, patient, intelligent faces, andfound himself wishing to excuse the fact he was defending.Was it any worse, he asked them, than their not beinginvited to the entertainments of people in upper FifthAvenue? He made them own that if they were letacross that barrier the whole second cabin would havea logical right to follow; and they were silenced.But they continued to gape at him with their sincere,gentle eyes whenever he returned to the barrier inhis walk, till he could bear it no longer, and strolledoff toward the steerage.

There was more reason why the passengers there shouldbe penned into a little space of their own in thesort of pit made by the narrowing deck at the bow.They seemed to be all foreigners, and if any had madetheir fortunes in our country they were hiding theirprosperity in the return to their own. They couldhardly have come to us more shabby and squalid thanthey were going away; but he thought their averageless apathetic than that of the saloon passengers,as he leaned over the rail and looked down at them.Some one had brought out an electric battery, and thelumpish boys and slattern girls were shouting and laughingas they writhed with the current. A young motherseated flat on the deck, with her bare feet stuckout, inattentively nursed her babe, while she laughedand shouted with the rest; a man with his head tiedin a shawl walked about the pen and smiled grotesquelywith the well side of his toothache-swollen face.The owner of the battery carried it away, and a groupof little children, with blue eyes and yellow hair,gathered in the space he had left, and looked up ata passenger near March who was eating some plums andcherries which he had brought from the luncheon table.He began to throw the fruit down to them, and thechildren scrambled for it.

An elderly man, with a thin, grave, aquiline face,said, “I shouldn’t want a child of minedown there.”

“No,” March responded, “it isn’tquite what one would choose for one’s own.It’s astonishing, though, how we reconcile ourselvesto it in the case of others.”

“I suppose it’s something we’llhave to get used to on the other side,” suggestedthe stranger.

“Well,” answered March, “you havesome opportunities to get used to it on this side,if you happen to live in New York,” and he wenton to speak of the raggedness which often penetratedthe frontier of comfort where he lived in StuyvesantSquare, and which seemed as glad of alms in food ormoney as this poverty of the steerage.

The other listened restively like a man whose idealsare disturbed. “I don’t believe Ishould like to live in New York, much,” he said,and March fancied that he wished to be asked wherehe did live. It appeared that he lived in Ohio,and he named his town; he did not brag of it, buthe said it suited him. He added that he had neverexpected to go to Europe, but that he had begun torun down lately, and his doctor thought he had bettergo out and try Carlsbad.

March said, to invite his further confidence, thatthis was exactly his own case. The Ohio man metthe overture from a common invalidism as if it detractedfrom his own distinction; and he turned to speak ofthe difficulty, he had in arranging his affairs forleaving home. His heart opened a little withthe word, and he said how comfortable he and his wifewere in their house, and how much they both hated toshut it up. When March offered him his card,he said he had none of his own with him, but thathis name was Eltwin. He betrayed a simple wishto have March realize the local importance he hadleft behind him; and it was not hard to comply; Marchsaw a Grand Army button in the lapel of his coat, andhe knew that he was in the presence of a veteran.

He tried to guess his rank; in telling his wife abouthim, when he went down to find her just before dinner,but he ended with a certain sense of affliction.“There are too many elderly invalids on thisship. I knock against people of my own age everywhere.Why aren’t your youthful lovers more in evidence,my dear? I don’t believe they are lovers,and I begin to doubt if they’re young even.”

“It wasn’t very satisfactory at lunch,certainly,” she owned. “But I knowit will be different at dinner.” She wasputting herself together after a nap that had madeup for the lost sleep of the night before. “Iwant you to look very nice, dear. Shall you dressfor dinner?” she asked her husband’s imagein the state-room glass which she was preoccupying.

“I shall dress in my pea-jacket and sea-boots,”it answered.

“I have heard that they always dress for dinneron the big Cunard and White Star boats, when it’sgood weather,” she went on, placidly. “Ishouldn’t want those people to think you werenot up in the convenances.”

They both knew that she meant the reticent fatherand daughter, and March flung out, “I shouldn’twant them to think you weren’t. There’ssuch a thing as overdoing.”

She attacked him at another point. “Whathas annoyed you? What else have you been doing?”

“Nothing. I’ve been reading mostof the afternoon.”

“The Maiden Knight?”

This was the book which nearly everybody had broughton board. It was just out, and had caught aninstant favor, which swelled later to a tidal wave.It depicted a heroic girl in every trying circ*mstanceof mediaeval life, and gratified the perennial passionof both sexes for historical romance, while it flatteredwoman’s instinct of superiority by the celebrationof her unintermitted triumphs, ending in a preposterousand wholly superfluous self-sacrifice.

March laughed for pleasure in her guess, and she pursued,“I suppose you didn’t waste time lookingif anybody had brought the last copy of ’EveryOther Week’?”

“Yes, I did; and I found the one you had leftin your steamer chair—­for advertising purposes,probably.”

“Mr. Burnamy has another,” she said.“I saw it sticking out of his pocket this morning.”

“Oh, yes. He told me he had got it on thetrain from Chicago to see if it had his poem in it.He’s an ingenuous soul—­in some ways.”

“Well, that is the very reason why you oughtto find out whether the men are going to dress, andlet him know. He would never think of it himself.”

“Neither would I,” said her husband.

“Very well, if you wish to spoil his chanceat the outset,” she sighed.

She did not quite know whether to be glad or not thatthe men were all in sacks and cutaways at dinner;it saved her, from shame for her husband and Mr. Burnamy;but it put her in the wrong. Every one talked;even the father and daughter talked with each other,and at one moment Mrs. March could not be quite surethat the daughter had not looked at her when she spoke.She could not be mistaken in the remark which the fatheraddressed to Burnamy, though it led to nothing.

XII.

The dinner was uncommonly good, as the first dinnerout is apt to be; and it went gayly on from soup tofruit, which was of the American abundance and variety,and as yet not of the veteran freshness imparted bythe ice-closet. Everybody was eating it, whenby a common consciousness they were aware of alienwitnesses. They looked up as by a single impulse,and saw at the port the gaunt face of a steerage passengerstaring down upon their luxury; he held on his arma child that shared his regard with yet hungrier eyes.A boy’s nose showed itself as if tiptoed to theheight of the man’s elbow; a young girl peeredover his other arm.

The passengers glanced at one another; the two table-stewards,with their napkins in their hands, smiled vaguely,and made some indefinite movements.

The bachelor at the head of the table broke the spell.“I’m glad it didn’t begin with theLittle Neck clams!”

“Probably they only let those people come forthe dessert,” March suggested.

The widow now followed the direction of the othereyes; and looked up over her shoulder; she gave alittle cry, and shrank down. The young bridemade her petted mouth, in appeal to the company; herhusband looked severe, as if he were going to do something,but refrained, not to make a scene. The reticentfather threw one of his staccato glances at the port,and Mrs. March was sure that she saw the daughter steala look at Burnamy.

The young fellow laughed. “I don’tsuppose there’s anything to be done about it,unless we pass out a plate.”

Mr. Kenby shook his head. “It wouldn’tdo. We might send for the captain. Or thechief steward.”

The faces at the port vanished. At other portsprofiles passed and repassed, as if the steerage passengershad their promenade under them, but they paused nomore.

The Marches went up to their steamer chairs, and fromher exasperated nerves Mrs. March denounced the arrangementof the ship which had made such a cruel thing possible.

“Oh,” he mocked, “they had probablyhad a good substantial meal of their own, and thescene of our banquet was of the quality of a picture,a purely aesthetic treat. But supposing it wasn’t,we’re doing something like it every day andevery moment of our lives. The Norumbia is a pieceof the whole world’s civilization set afloat,and passing from shore to shore with unchanged classes,and conditions. A ship’s merely a smallstage, where we’re brought to close quarterswith the daily drama of humanity.”

“Well, then,” she protested, “Idon’t like being brought to close quarters withthe daily drama of humanity, as you call it. AndI don’t believe that the large English shipsare built so that the steerage passengers can starein at the saloon windows while one is eating; andI’m sorry we came on the Norumbia.”

“Ah, you think the Norumbia doesn’t hideanything,” he began, and he was going to speakof the men in the furnace pits of the steamer, howthey fed the fires in a welding heat, and as if theyhad perished in it crept out on the forecastle likeblanched phantasms of toil; but she interposed intime.

“If there’s anything worse, for pity’ssake don’t tell me,” she entreated, andhe forebore.

He sat thinking how once the world had not seemedto have even death in it, and then how as he had grownolder death had come into it more and more, and sufferingwas lurking everywhere, and could hardly be kept outof sight. He wondered if that young Burnamy nowsaw the world as he used to see it, a place for makingverse and making love, and full of beauty of all kindswaiting to be fitted with phrases. He had liveda happy life; Burnamy would be lucky if he shouldlive one half as happy; and yet if he could show himhis whole happy life, just as it had truly been, mustnot the young man shrink from such a picture of hisfuture?

“Say something,” said his wife. “Whatare you thinking about?”

“Oh, Burnamy,” he answered, honestly enough.

“I was thinking about the children,” shesaid. “I am glad Bella didn’t tryto come from Chicago to see us off; it would have beentoo silly; she is getting to be very sensible.I hope Tom won’t take the covers off the furniturewhen he has the fellows in to see him.”

“Well, I want him to get all the comfort hecan out of the place, even if the moths eat up everystick of furniture.”

“Yes, so do I. And of course you’re wishingthat you were there with him!” March laughedguiltily. “Well, perhaps it was a crazything for us to start off alone for Europe, at ourage.”

“Nothing of the kind,” he retorted inthe necessity he perceived for staying her droopingspirits. “I wouldn’t be anywhere elseon any account. Isn’t it perfectly delicious?It puts me in mind of that night on the Lake Ontarioboat, when we were starting for Montreal. Therewas the same sort of red sunset, and the air wasn’ta bit softer than this.”

He spoke of a night on their wedding-journey whenthey were sill new enough from Europe to be comparingeverything at home with things there.

“Well, perhaps we shall get into the spiritof it again,” she said, and they talked a longtime of the past.

All the mechanical noises were muffled in the dullair, and the wash of the ship’s course throughthe waveless sea made itself pleasantly heard.In the offing a steamer homeward bound swam smoothlyby, so close that her lights outlined her to the eye;she sent up some signal rockets that soared againstthe purple heaven in green and crimson, and spoke tothe Norumbia in the mysterious mute phrases of shipsthat meet in the dark.

Mrs. March wondered what had become of Burnamy; thepromenades were much freer now than they had beensince the ship sailed; when she rose to go below,she caught sight of Burnamy walking the deck transverselywith some lady. She clutched her husband’sarm and stayed him in rich conjecture.

“Do you suppose he can have got her to walkingwith him already?”

They waited till Burnamy and his companion came insight again. She was tilting forward, and turningfrom the waist, now to him and now from him.

“No; it’s that pivotal girl,” saidMarch; and his wife said, “Well, I’m gladhe won’t be put down by them.”

In the music-room sat the people she meant, and atthe instant she passed on down the stairs, the daughterwas saying to the father, “I don’t seewhy you didn’t tell me sooner, papa.”

“It was such an unimportant matter that I didn’tthink to mention it. He offered it, and I tookit; that was all. What difference could it havemade to you?”

“None. But one doesn’t like to doany one an injustice.”

“I didn’t know you were thinking anythingabout it.”

“No, of course not.”

XIII.

The voyage of the Norumbia was one of those whichpassengers say they have never seen anything like,though for the first two or three days out neitherthe doctor nor the deck-steward could be got, to prophesywhen the ship would be in. There was only a dayor two when it could really be called rough, and thesea-sickness was confined to those who seemed wilfulsufferers; they lay on the cushioned benching aroundthe stairs-landing, and subsisted on biscuit and beeftea without qualifying the monotonous well-being ofthe other passengers, who passed without noticingthem.

The second morning there was rain, and the air freshened,but the leaden sea lay level as before. The sunshone in the afternoon; with the sunset the fog camethick and white; the ship lowed dismally through thenight; from the dense folds of the mist answeringnoises called back to her. Just before dark twomen in a dory shouted up to her close under her bows,and then melted out of sight; when the dark fell thelights of fishing-schooners were seen, and their bellspealed; once loud cries from a vessel near at handmade themselves heard. Some people in the dining-saloonsang hymns; the smoking-room was dense with cigar fumes,and the card-players dealt their hands in an atmosphereemulous of the fog without.

The Norumbia was off the Banks, and the second dayof fog was cold as if icebergs were haunting the opaquepallor around her. In the ranks of steamer chairspeople lay like mummies in their dense wrappings; inthe music-room the little children of travel discussedthe different lines of steamers on which they hadcrossed, and babes of five and seven disputed aboutthe motion on the Cunarders and White Stars; theirnurses tried in vain to still them in behalf of olderpassengers trying to write letters there.

By the next morning the ship had run out of the fog;and people who could keep their feet said they wereglad of the greater motion which they found beyondthe Banks. They now talked of the heat of thefirst days out, and how much they had suffered; somewho had passed the night on board before sailing triedto impart a sense of their misery in trying to sleep.

A day or two later a storm struck the ship, and thesailors stretched canvas along the weather promenadeand put up a sheathing of boards across the bow endto keep off the rain. Yet a day or two more andthe sea had fallen again and there was dancing onthe widest space of the lee promenade.

The little events of the sea outside the steamer offeredthemselves in their poor variety. Once a shipin the offing, with all its square sails set, liftedthem like three white towers from the deep. Onthe rim of the ocean the length of some westward linerblocked itself out against the horizon, and swiftlytrailed its smoke out of sight. A few tramp steamers,lounging and lunging through the trough of the sea,were overtaken and left behind; an old brigantinepassed so close that her rusty iron sides showed plain,and one could discern the faces of the people on board.

The steamer was oftenest without the sign of any lifebeyond her. One day a small bird beat the airwith its little wings, under the roof of the promenade,and then flittered from sight over the surface, ofthe waste; a school of porpoises, stiff and woodenin their rise, plunged clumsily from wave to wave.The deep itself had sometimes the unreality, the artificialityof the canvas sea of the theatre. Commonly itwas livid and cold in color; but there was a morningwhen it was delicately misted, and where the mistleft it clear, it was blue and exquisitely iridescentunder the pale sun; the wrinkled waves were finelypitted by the falling spray. These were raremoments; mostly, when it was not like painted canvas,is was hard like black rock, with surfaces of smoothcleavage. Where it met the sky it lay flat andmotionless, or in the rougher weather carved itselfalong the horizon in successions of surges.

If the sun rose clear, it was overcast in a few hours;then the clouds broke and let a little sunshine through,to close again before the dim evening thickened overthe waters. Sometimes the moon looked throughthe ragged curtain of vapors; one night it seemedto shine till morning, and shook a path of quicksilverfrom the horizon to the ship. Through every change,after she had left the fog behind, the steamer droveon with the pulse of her engines (that stopped nomore than a man’s heart stops) in a course whichhad nothing to mark it but the spread of the furrowsfrom her sides, and the wake that foamed from herstern to the western verge of the sea.

The life of the ship, like the life of the sea, wasa sodden monotony, with certain events which werepart of the monotony. In the morning the littlesteward’s bugle called the passengers from theirdreams, and half an hour later called them to theirbreakfast, after such as chose had been served withcoffee by their bedroom-stewards. Then they wenton deck, where they read, or dozed in their chairs,or walked up and down, or stood in the way of thosewho were walking; or played shuffleboard and ring-toss;or smoked, and drank whiskey and aerated waters overtheir cards and papers in the smoking-room; or wroteletters in the saloon or the music-room. At eleveno’clock they spoiled their appetites for lunchwith tea or bouillon to the music of a band of second-cabinstewards; at one, a single blast of the bugle calledthem to lunch, where they glutted themselves to thetorpor from which they afterwards drowsed in theirberths or chairs. They did the same things inthe afternoon that they had done in the forenoon;and at four o’clock the deck-stewards came roundwith their cups and saucers, and their plates of sandwiches,again to the music of the band. There were twobugle-calls for dinner, and after dinner some wentearly to bed, and some sat up late and had grills andtoast. At twelve the lights were put out in thesaloons and the smoking-rooms.

There were various smells which stored themselvesup in the consciousness to remain lastingly relativeto certain moments and places: a whiff of whiskeyand tobacco that exhaled from the door of the smoking-room;the odor of oil and steam rising from the open skylightsover the engine-room; the scent of stale bread aboutthe doors of the dining-saloon.

The life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, onlymore monotonous. The walking was limited; thetalk was the tentative talk of people aware that therewas no refuge if they got tired of one another.The flirting itself, such as there was of it, mustbe carried on in the glare of the pervasive publicity;it must be crude and bold, or not be at all.

There seemed to be very little of it. There werenot many young people on board of saloon quality,and these were mostly girls. The young men weremainly of the smoking-room sort; they seldom riskedthemselves among the steamer chairs. It was gayerin the second cabin, and gayer yet in the steerage,where robuster emotions were operated by the accordion.The passengers there danced to its music; they sangto it and laughed to it unabashed under the eyes ofthe first-cabin witnesses clustered along the railabove the pit where they took their rude pleasures.

With March it came to his spending many hours of eachlong, swift day in his berth with a book under theconvenient electric light. He was safe therefrom the acquaintances which constantly formed themselvesonly to fall into disintegration, and cling to himafterwards as inorganic particles of weather-guessing,and smoking-room gossip about the ship’s run.

In the earliest hours of the voyage he thought thathe saw some faces of the great world, the world ofwealth and fashion; but these afterward vanished,and left him to wonder where they hid themselves.He did not meet them even in going to and from hismeals; he could only imagine them served in thosepalatial state-rooms whose interiors the stewards nowand then rather obtruded upon the public. Therewere people whom he encountered in the promenadeswhen he got up for the sunrise, and whom he neversaw at other times; at midnight he met men prowlingin the dark whom he never met by day. But noneof these were people of the great world. Beforesix o’clock they were sometimes second-cabinpassengers, whose barrier was then lifted for a littlewhile to give them the freedom of the saloon promenade.

From time to time he thought he would look up hisOhioan, and revive from a closer study of him hisinterest in the rare American who had never been toEurope. But he kept with his elderly wife, whohad the effect of withholding him from March’sadvances. Young Mr. and Mrs. Leffers threw offmore and more their disguise of a long-married pair,and became frankly bride and groom. They seldomtalked with any one else, except at table; they walkedup and down together, smiling into each others faces;they sat side by side in their steamer chairs; oneshawl covered them both, and there was reason to believethat they were holding each other’s hands underit.

Mrs. Adding often took the chair beside Mrs. Marchwhen her husband was straying about the ship or readingin his berth; and the two ladies must have exchangedautobiographies, for Mrs. March was able to tell himjust how long Mrs. Adding had been a widow, what herhusband died of, and what had been done to save him;how she was now perfectly wrapt up in her boy, andwas taking him abroad, with some notion of going toSwitzerland, after the summer’s travel, andsettling down with him at school there. She andMrs. March became great friends; and Rose, as his mothercalled him, attached himself reverently to March,not only as a celebrity of the first grade in hisquality of editor of ‘Every Other Week’,but as a sage of wisdom and goodness, with whom hemust not lose the chance of counsel upon almost everyhypothesis and exigency of life.

March could not bring himself to place Burnamy quitewhere he belonged in contemporary literature, whenRose put him very high in virtue of the poem whichhe heard Burnamy was going to have printed in ’EveryOther Week’, and of the book which he was goingto have published; and he let the boy bring to theyoung fellow the flattery which can come to any authorbut once, in the first request for his autograph thatBurnamy confessed to have had. They were so nearin age, though they were ten years apart, that Rosestood much more in awe of Burnamy than of others muchmore his seniors. He was often in the companyof Kenby, whom he valued next to March as a personacquainted with men; he consulted March upon Kenby’spractice of always taking up the language of the countryhe visited, if it were only for a fortnight; and heconceived a higher opinion of him from March’sapproval.

Burnamy was most with Mrs. March, who made him talkabout himself when he supposed he was talking aboutliterature, in the hope that she could get him totalk about the Triscoes; but she listened in vain ashe poured out-his soul in theories of literary art,and in histories of what he had written and what hemeant to write. When he passed them where theysat together, March heard the young fellow’sperpetually recurring I, I, I, my, my, my, me, me,me; and smiled to think how she was suffering underthe drip-drip of his innocent egotism.

She bore in a sort of scientific patience his attentionsto the pivotal girl, and Miss Triscoe’s indifferenceto him, in which a less penetrating scrutiny couldhave detected no change from meal to meal. Itwas only at table that she could see them together,or that she could note any break in the reserve ofthe father and daughter. The signs of this wereso fine that when she reported them March laughedin scornful incredulity. But at breakfast thethird day out, the Triscoes, with the authority ofpeople accustomed to social consideration, suddenlyturned to the Marches, and began to make themselvesagreeable; the father spoke to March of ’EveryOther Week’, which he seemed to know of in its

relation to him; and the young girl addressed herselfto Mrs. March’s motherly sense not the lessacceptably because indirectly. She spoke of goingout with her father for an indefinite time, as ifit were rather his wish than hers, and she made someinquiries about places in Germany; they had never beenin Germany. They had some idea of Dresden; butthe idea of Dresden with its American colony seemedrather tiresome; and did Mrs. March know anything aboutWeimar?

Mrs. March was obliged to say that she knew nothingabout anyplace in Germany; and she explained perhapstoo fully where and why she was going with her husband.She fancied a Boston note in that scorn for the tiresomenessof Dresden; but the girl’s style was of New Yorkrather than of Boston, and her accent was not quiteof either place. Mrs. March began to try theTriscoes in this place and in that, to divine themand to class them. She had decided from the firstthat they were society people, but they were cultivatedbeyond the average of the few swells whom she hadmet; and there had been nothing offensive in theirmanner of holding themselves aloof from the otherpeople at the table; they had a right to do that ifthey chose.

When the young Lefferses came in to breakfast, thetalk went on between these and the Marches; the Triscoespresently left the table, and Mrs. March rose soonafter, eager for that discussion of their behaviorwhich March knew he should not be able to postpone.

He agreed with her that they were society people,but she could not at once accept his theory that theyhad themselves been the objects of an advance fromthem because of their neutral literary quality, throughwhich they were of no social world, but potentiallycommon to any. Later she admitted this, as shesaid, for the sake of argument, though what she wantedhim to see, now, was that this was all a step of thegirl’s toward finding out something about Burnamy.

The same afternoon, about the time the deck-stewardwas making his round with his cups, Miss Triscoe abruptlyadvanced upon her from a neighboring corner of thebulkhead, and asked, with the air of one accustomedto have her advances gratefully received, if she mightsit by her. The girl took March’s vacantchair, where she had her cup of bouillon, which shecontinued to hold untasted in her hand after the firstsip. Mrs. March did the same with hers, and atthe moment she had got very tired of doing it, Burnamycame by, for the hundredth time that day, and gaveher a hundredth bow with a hundredth smile. Heperceived that she wished to get rid of her cup, andhe sprang to her relief.

“May I take yours too?” he said very passivelyto Miss Triscoe.

“You are very good.” she answered, andgave it.

Mrs. March with a casual air suggested, “Doyou know Mr. Burnamy, Miss Triscoe?” The girlsaid a few civil things, but Burnamy did not try tomake talk with her while he remained a few momentsbefore Mrs. March. The pivotal girl came in sight,tilting and turning in a rare moment of isolationat the corner of the music-room, and he bowed abruptly,and hurried off to join her.

Miss Triscoe did not linger; she alleged the necessityof looking up her father, and went away with a smileso friendly that Mrs. March might easily have construedit to mean that no blame attached itself to her inMiss Triscoe’s mind.

“Then you don’t feel that it was a verydistinct success?” her husband asked on hisreturn.

“Not on the surface,” she said.

“Better let ill enough alone,” he advised.

She did not heed him. “All the same shecares for him. The very fact that she was socold shows that.”

“And do you think her being cold will make himcare for her?”

“If she wants it to.”

XIV.

At dinner that day the question of ‘The MaidenKnight’ was debated among the noises and silencesof the band. Young Mrs. Leffers had brought thebook to the table with her; she said she had not beenable to lay it down before the last horn sounded;in fact she could have been seen reading it to herhusband where he sat under the same shawl, the wholeafternoon.

“Don’t you think it’s perfectlyfascinating,” she asked Mrs. Adding, with herpetted mouth.

“Well,” said the widow, doubtfully, “it’snearly a week since I read it, and I’ve hadtime to get over the glow.”

“Oh, I could just read it forever!” thebride exclaimed.

“I like a book,” said her husband, “thattakes me out of myself. I don’t want tothink when I’m reading.”

March was going to attack this ideal, but he reflectedin time that Mr. Leffers had really stated his ownmotive in reading. He compromised. “Well,I like the author to do my thinking for me.”

“Yes,” said the other, “that iswhat I mean.”

“The question is whether ‘The Maiden Knight’fellow does it,” said Kenby, taking duck andpease from the steward at his shoulder.

“What my wife likes in it is to see what onewoman can do and be single-handed,” said March.

“No,” his wife corrected him, “whata man thinks she can.”

“I suppose,” said Mr. Triscoe, unexpectedly,“that we’re like the English in our habitof going off about a book like a train of powder.”

“If you’ll say a row of bricks,”March assented, “I’ll agree with you.It’s certainly Anglo-Saxon to fall over one anotheras we do, when we get going. It would be interestingto know just how much liking there is in the popularityof a given book.”

“It’s like the run of a song, isn’tit?” Kenby suggested. “You can’tstand either, when it reaches a given point.”

He spoke to March and ignored Triscoe, who had hithertoignored the rest of the table.

“It’s very curious,” March said.“The book or the song catches a mood, or feedsa craving, and when one passes or the other is glutted—­”

“The discouraging part is,” Triscoe putin, still limiting himself to the Marches, “thatit’s never a question of real taste. Thethings that go down with us are so crude, so coarselyspiced; they tickle such a vulgar palate—­Nowin France, for instance,” he suggested.

“Well, I don’t know,” returned theeditor. “After all, we eat a good dealof bread, and we drink more pure water than any otherpeople. Even when we drink it iced, I fancy itisn’t so bad as absinthe.”

The young bride looked at him gratefully, but shesaid, “If we can’t get ice-water in Europe,I don’t know what Mr. Leffers will do,”and the talk threatened to pass among the ladies intoa comparison of American and European customs.

Burnamy could not bear to let it. “I don’tpretend to be very well up in French literature,”he began, “but I think such a book as ’TheMaiden Knight’ isn’t such a bad pieceof work; people are liking a pretty well-built storywhen they like it. Of course it’s sentimental,and it begs the question a good deal; but it imaginessomething heroic in character, and it makes the readerimagine it too. The man who wrote that book maybe a donkey half the time, but he’s a geniusthe other half. By-and-by he’ll do something—­afterhe’s come to see that his ’Maiden Knight’was a fool—­that I believe even you won’tbe down on, Mr. March, if he paints a heroic typeas powerfully as he does in this book.”

He spoke with the authority of a journalist, and thoughhe deferred to March in the end, he deferred withauthority still. March liked him for coming tothe defence of a young writer whom he had not himselflearned to like yet. “Yes,” he said,“if he has the power you say, and can keep itafter he comes to his artistic consciousness!”

Mrs. Leffers, as if she thought things were goingher way, smiled; Rose Adding listened with shiningeyes expectantly fixed on March; his mother viewedhis rapture with tender amusem*nt. The stewardwas at Kenby’s shoulder with the salad and hisentreating “Bleace!” and Triscoe seemedto be questioning whether he should take any noticeof Burnamy’s general disagreement. He saidat last: “I’m afraid we haven’tthe documents. You don’t seem to have caredmuch for French books, and I haven’t read ’TheMaiden Knight’.” He added to March:“But I don’t defend absinthe. Ice-wateris better. What I object to is our indiscriminatetaste both for raw whiskey—­and for milk-and-water.”

No one took up the question again, and it was Kenbywho spoke next. “The doctor thinks, ifthis weather holds, that we shall be into PlymouthWednesday morning. I always like to get a professionalopinion on the ship’s run.”

In the evening, as Mrs. March was putting away inher portfolio the journal-letter which she was writingto send back from Plymouth to her children, Miss Triscoedrifted to the place where she sat at their tablein the dining-room by a coincidence which they bothrespected as casual.

“We had quite a literary dinner,” sheremarked, hovering for a moment near the chair whichshe later sank into. “It must have madeyou feel very much at home. Or perhaps you’reso tired of it at home that you don’t talk aboutbooks.”

“We always talk shop, in some form or other,”said Mrs. March. “My husband never tiresof it. A good many of the contributors come tous, you know.”

“It must be delightful,” said the girl.She added as if she ought to excuse herself for neglectingan advantage that might have been hers if she hadchosen, “I’m sorry one sees so little ofthe artistic and literary set. But New York issuch a big place.”

“New York people seem to be very fond of it,”said Mrs. March. “Those who have alwayslived there.”

“We haven’t always lived there,”said the girl. “But I think one has a goodtime there—­the best time a girl can have.It’s all very well coming over for the summer;one has to spend the summer somewhere. Are yougoing out for a long time?”

“Only for the summer. First to Carlsbad.”

“Oh, yes. I suppose we shall travel aboutthrough Germany, and then go to Paris. We alwaysdo; my father is very fond of it.”

“You must know it very well,” said Mrs.March, aimlessly.

“I was born there,—­if that meansknowing it. I lived there—­till I waseleven years old. We came home after my motherdied.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. March.

The girl did not go further into her family history;but by one of those leaps which seem to women as logicalas other progressions, she arrived at asking, “IsMr. Burnamy one of the contributors?”

Mrs. March laughed. “He is going to be,as soon as his poem is printed.”

“Poem?”

“Yes. Mr. March thinks it’s verygood.”

“I thought he spoke very nicely about ‘TheMaiden Knight’. And he has been very niceto papa. You know they have the same room.”

“I think Mr. Burnamy told me,” Mrs. Marchsaid.

The girl went on. “He had the lower berth,and he gave it up to papa; he’s done everythingbut turn himself out of doors.”

“I’m sure he’s been very glad,”Mrs. March ventured on Burnamy’s behalf, butvery softly, lest if she breathed upon these buddingconfidences they should shrink and wither away.

“I always tell papa that there’s no countrylike America for real unselfishness; and if they’reall like that, in Chicago!” The girl stopped,and added with a laugh, “But I’m alwaysquarrelling with papa about America.”

“We have a daughter living in Chicago,”said Mrs. March, alluringly.

But Miss Triscoe refused the bait, either becauseshe had said all she meant, or because she had saidall she would, about Chicago, which Mrs. March feltfor the present to be one with Burnamy. She gaveanother of her leaps. “I don’t seewhy people are so anxious to get it like Europe, athome. They say that there was a time when therewere no chaperons before hoops, you know.”She looked suggestively at Mrs. March, resting oneslim hand on the table, and controlling her skirt withthe other, as if she were getting ready to rise atany moment. “When they used to sit on theirsteps.”

“It was very pleasant before hoops—­inevery way,” said Mrs. March. “I wasyoung, then; and I lived in Boston, where I supposeit was always simpler than in New York. I usedto sit on our steps. It was delightful for girls—­thefreedom.”

“I wish I had lived before hoops,” saidMiss Triscoe.

“Well, there must be places where it’sbefore hoops yet: Seattle, and Portland, Oregon,for all I know,” Mrs. March suggested. “Andthere must be people in that epoch everywhere.”

“Like that young lady who twists and turns?”said Miss Triscoe, giving first one side of her faceand then the other. “They have a good time.I suppose if Europe came to us in one way it had tocome in another. If it came in galleries andall that sort of thing, it had to come in chaperons.You’ll think I’m a great extremist, Mrs.March; but sometimes I wish there was more Americainstead of less. I don’t believe it’sas bad as people say. Does Mr. March,”she asked, taking hold of the chair with one hand,to secure her footing from any caprice of the sea,while she gathered her skirt more firmly into theother, as she rose, “does he think that Americais going—­all wrong?”

“All wrong? How?”

“Oh, in politics, don’t you know.And government, and all that. And bribing.And the lower classes having everything their own way.And the horrid newspapers. And everything gettingso expensive; and no regard for family, or anythingof that kind.”

Mrs. March thought she saw what Miss Triscoe meant,but she answered, still cautiously, “I don’tbelieve he does always. Though there are timeswhen he is very much disgusted. Then he says thathe is getting too old—­and we always quarrelabout that—­to see things as they reallyare. He says that if the world had been goingthe way that people over fifty have always thoughtit was going, it would have gone to smash in the timeof the anthropoidal apes.”

“Oh, yes: Darwin,” said Miss Triscoe,vaguely. “Well, I’m glad he doesn’tgive it up. I didn’t know but I was holdingout just because I had argued so much, and was doingit out of—­opposition. Goodnight!”She called her salutation gayly over her shoulder,and Mrs. March watched her gliding out of the saloonwith a graceful tilt to humor the slight roll of theship, and a little lurch to correct it, once or twice,and wondered if Burnamy was afraid of her; it seemedto her that if she were a young man she should notbe afraid of Miss Triscoe.

The next morning, just after she had arranged herselfin her steamer chair, he approached her, bowing andsmiling, with the first of his many bows and smilesfor the day, and at the same time Miss Triscoe cametoward her from the opposite direction. She noddedbrightly to him, and he gave her a bow and smile too;he always had so many of them to spare.

“Here is your chair!” Mrs. March calledto her, drawing the shawl out of the chair next herown. “Mr. March is wandering about the shipsomewhere.”

“I’ll keep it for him,” said MissTriscoe, and as Burnamy offered to take the shawlthat hung in the hollow of her arm, she let it slipinto his hand with an “Oh; thank you,”which seemed also a permission for him to wrap itabout her in the chair.

He stood talking before the ladies, but he lookedup and down the promenade. The pivotal girl showedherself at the corner of the music-room, as she haddone the day before. At first she revolved thereas if she were shedding her light on some one hiddenround the corner; then she moved a few paces fartherout and showed herself more obviously alone.Clearly she was there for Burnamy to come and walkwith her; Mrs. March could see that, and she feltthat Miss Triscoe saw it too. She waited forher to dismiss him to his flirtation; but Miss Triscoekept chatting on, and he kept answering, and makingno motion to get away. Mrs. March began to beas sorry for her as she was ashamed for him. Thenshe heard him saying, “Would you like a turnor two?” and Miss Triscoe answering, “Why,yes, thank you,” and promptly getting out ofher chair as if the pains they had both been at toget her settled in it were all nothing.

She had the composure to say, “You can leaveyour shawl with me, Miss Triscoe,” and to receiveher fervent, “Oh, thank you,” before theysailed off together, with inhuman indifference tothe girl at the corner of the music-room. Thenshe sank into a kind of triumphal collapse, from whichshe roused herself to point her husband to the chairbeside her when he happened along.

He chose to be perverse about her romance. “Well,now, you had better let them alone. RememberKendricks.” He meant one of their youngfriends whose love-affair they had promoted till hishappy marriage left them in lasting doubt of whatthey had done. “My sympathies are all withthe pivotal girl. Hadn’t she as much rightto him, for the time being, or for good and all, asMiss Triscoe?”

“That depends upon what you think of Burnamy.”

“Well, I don’t like to see a girl havea young man snatched away from her just when she’smade sure of him. How do you suppose she is feelingnow?”

“She isn’t feeling at all. She’sletting her revolving light fall upon half a dozenother young men by this time, collectively or consecutively.All that she wants to make sure of is that they’reyoung men—­or old ones, even.”

March laughed, but not altogether at what his wifesaid. “I’ve been having a littletalk with Papa Triscoe, in the smoking-room.”

“You smell like it,” said his wife, notto seem too eager: “Well?”

“Well, Papa Triscoe seems to be in a pout.He doesn’t think things are going as they shouldin America. He hasn’t been consulted, orif he has, his opinion hasn’t been acted upon.”

“I think he’s horrid,” said Mrs.March. “Who are they?”

“I couldn’t make out, and I couldn’task. But I’ll tell you what I think.”

“What?”

“That there’s no chance for, Burnamy.He’s taking his daughter out to marry her toa crowned head.”

XV.

It was this afternoon that the dance took place onthe south promenade. Everybody came and looked,and the circle around the waltzers was three or fourdeep. Between the surrounding heads and shoulders,the hats of the young ladies wheeling and whirling,and the faces of the men who were wheeling and whirlingthem, rose and sank with the rhythm of their steps.The space allotted to the dancing was walled to seawardwith canvas, and was prettily treated with German,and American flags: it was hard to go wrong withflags, Miss Triscoe said, securing herself under Mrs.March’s wing.

Where they stood they could see Burnamy’s face,flashing and flushing in the dance; at the end ofthe first piece he came to them, and remained talkingand laughing till the music began again.

“Don’t you want to try it?” he askedabruptly of Miss Triscoe.

“Isn’t it rather—­public?”she asked back.

Mrs. March could feel the hand which the girl hadput through her arm thrill with temptation; but Burnamycould not.

“Perhaps it is rather obvious,” he said,and he made a long glide over the deck to the feetof the pivotal girl, anticipating another young manwho was rapidly advancing from the opposite quarter.The next moment her hat and his face showed themselvesin the necessary proximity to each other within thecircle.

“How well she dances!” said Miss Triscoe.

“Do you think so? She looks as if she hadbeen wound up and set going.”

“She’s very graceful,” the girlpersisted.

The day ended with an entertainment in the saloonfor one of the marine charities which address themselvesto the hearts and pockets of passengers on all steamers.There were recitations in English and German, andsongs from several people who had kindly consented,and ever more piano performance. Most of thosewho took part were of the race gifted in art and finance;its children excelled in the music, and its fatherscounted the gate-money during the last half of theprogramme, with an audible clinking of the silveron the table before them.

Miss Triscoe was with her father, and Mrs. March washerself chaperoned by Mr. Burnamy: her husbandhad refused to come to the entertainment. Shehoped to leave Burnamy and Miss Triscoe together beforethe evening ended; but Miss Triscoe merely stoppedwith her father, in quitting the saloon, to laughat some features of the entertainment, as people whotake no part in such things do; Burnamy stood up toexchange some unimpassioned words with her, and thenthey said good-night.

The next morning, at five o’clock, the Norumbiacame to anchor in the pretty harbor of Plymouth.In the cool early light the town lay distinct alongthe shore, quaint with its small English houses, andstately with come public edifices of unknown functionon the uplands; a country-seat of aristocratic aspectshowed itself on one of the heights; on another thetower of a country church peered over the tree-tops;there were lines of fortifications, as peaceful, attheir distance, as the stone walls dividing the greenfields. The very iron-clads in the harbor closeat hand contributed to the amiable gayety of the sceneunder the pale blue English sky, already broken withclouds from which the flush of the sunrise had notquite faded. The breath of the land came freshlyout over the water; one could almost smell the grassand the leaves. Gulls wheeled and darted overthe crisp water; the tones of the English voices onthe tender were pleasant to the ear, as it fussedand scuffled to the ship’s side. A fewscore of the passengers left her; with their baggagethey formed picturesque groups on the tender’sdeck, and they set out for the shore waving theirhands and their handkerchiefs to the friends they leftclustering along the rail of the Norumbia. Mr.and Mrs. Leffers bade March farewell, in the finalfondness inspired by his having coffee with them beforethey left the ship; they said they hated to leave.

The stop had roused everybody, and the breakfast tableswere promptly filled, except such as the passengerslanding at Plymouth had vacated; these were strippedof their cloths, and the remaining commensals placedat others. The seats of the Lefferses were givento March’s old Ohio friend and his wife.He tried to engage them in the tally which began tobe general in the excitement of having touched land;but they shyly held aloof.

Some English newspapers had come aboard from the tug,and there was the usual good-natured adjustment ofthe American self-satisfaction, among those who hadseen them, to the ever-surprising fact that our continentis apparently of no interest to Europe. Therewere some meagre New York stock-market quotationsin the papers; a paragraph in fine print announcedthe lynching of a negro in Alabama; another recordeda coal-mining strike in Pennsylvania.

“I always have to get used to it over again,”said Kenby. “This is the twentieth timeI have been across, and I’m just as much astonishedas I was the first, to find out that they don’twant to know anything about us here.”

“Oh,” said March, “curiosity andthe weather both come from the west. San Franciscowants to know about Denver, Denver about Chicago, Chicagoabout New York, and New York about London; but curiositynever travels the other way any more than a hot waveor a cold wave.”

“Ah, but London doesn’t care a rap aboutVienna,” said Kenby.

“Well, some pressures give out before they reachthe coast, on our own side. It isn’t aninfallible analogy.”

Triscoe was fiercely chewing a morsel, as if in hasteto take part in the discussion. He gulped it,and broke out. “Why should they care aboutus, anyway?”

March lightly ventured, “Oh, men and brothers,you know.”

“That isn’t sufficient ground. TheChinese are men and brothers; so are the South-Americansand Central-Africans, and Hawaiians; but we’renot impatient for the latest news about them.It’s civilization that interests civilization.”

“I hope that fact doesn’t leave us outin the cold with the barbarians?” Burnamy putin, with a smile.

“Do you think we are civilized?” retortedthe other.

“We have that superstition in Chicago,”said Burnamy. He added, still smiling, “Aboutthe New-Yorkers, I mean.”

“You’re more superstitious in Chicagothan I supposed. New York is an anarchy, temperedby vigilance committees.”

“Oh, I don’t think you can say that,”Kenby cheerfully protested, “since the Reformerscame in. Look at our streets!”

“Yes, our streets are clean, for the time being,and when we look at them we think we have made a cleansweep in our manners and morals. But how longdo you think it will be before Tammany will be in thesaddle again?”

“Oh, never in the world!” said the optimistichead of the table.

“I wish I had your faith; or I should if I didn’tfeel that it is one of the things that help to establishTammanys with us. You will see our Tammany inpower after the next election.” Kenby laughedin a large-hearted incredulity; and his laugh waslike fuel to the other’s flame. “NewYork is politically a mediaeval Italian republic, andit’s morally a frontier mining-town. Sociallyit’s—­” He stopped as if hecould not say what.

“I think it’s a place where you have avery nice time, papa,” said his daughter, andBurnamy smiled with her; not because he knew anythingabout it.

Her father went on as if he had not heard her.“It’s as vulgar and crude as money canmake it. Nothing counts but money, and as soonas there’s enough, it counts for everything.In less than a year you’ll have Tammany in power;it won’t be more than a year till you’llhave it in society.”

“Oh no! Oh no!” came from Kenby.He did not care much for society, but he vaguely respectedit as the stronghold of the proprieties and the amenities.

“Isn’t society a good place for Tammanyto be in?” asked March in the pause Triscoelet follow upon Kenby’s laugh.

“There’s no reason why it shouldn’tbe. Society is as bad as all the rest of it.And what New York is, politically, morally, and socially,the whole country wishes to be and tries to be.”

There was that measure of truth in the words whichsilences; no one could find just the terms of refutation.

“Well,” said Kenby at last, “it’sa good thing there are so many lines to Europe.We’ve still got the right to emigrate.”

“Yes, but even there we don’t escape theabuse of our infamous newspapers for exercising aman’s right to live where he chooses. Andthere is no country in Europe—­except Turkey,or Spain—­that isn’t a better homefor an honest man than the United States.”

The Ohioan had once before cleared his throat as ifhe were going to speak. Now, he leaned far enoughforward to catch Triscoe’s eye, and said, slowlyand distinctly: “I don’t know justwhat reason you have to feel as you do about the country.I feel differently about it myself—­perhapsbecause I fought for it.”

At first, the others were glad of this arrogance;it even seemed an answer; but Burnamy saw Miss Triscoe’scheek, flush, and then he doubted its validity.

Triscoe nervously crushed a biscuit in his hand, asif to expend a violent impulse upon it. He said,coldly, “I was speaking from that stand-point.”

The Ohioan shrank back in his seat, and March feltsorry for him, though he had put himself in the wrong.His old hand trembled beside his plate, and his headshook, while his lips formed silent words; and hisshy wife was sharing his pain and shame.

Kenby began to talk about the stop which the Norumbiawas to make at Cherbourg, and about what hour thenext day they should all be in Cuxhaven. MissTriscoe said they had never come on the Hanseatic Linebefore, and asked several questions. Her fatherdid not speak again, and after a little while he rosewithout waiting for her to make the move from table;he had punctiliously deferred to her hitherto.Eltwin rose at the same time, and March feared thathe might be going to provoke another defeat, in someway.

Eltwin lifted his voice, and said, trying to catchTriscoe’s eye, “I think I ought to begyour pardon, sir. I do beg your pardon.”

March perceived that Eltwin wished to make the offerof his reparation as distinct as his aggression hadbeen; and now he quaked for Triscoe, whose daughterhe saw glance apprehensively at her father as she swayedaside to let the two men come together.

“That is all right, Colonel—­”

“Major,” Eltwin conscientiously interposed.

“Major,” Triscoe bowed; and he put outhis hand and grasped the hand which had been tremulouslyrising toward him. “There can’t beany doubt of what we did, no matter what we’vegot.”

“No, no!” said the other, eagerly.“That was what I meant, sir. I don’tthink as you do; but I believe that a man who helpedto save the country has a right to think what he pleasesabout it.”

Triscoe said, “That is all right, my dear sir.May I ask your regiment?”

The Marches let the old fellows walk away together,followed by the wife of the one and the daughter ofthe other. They saw the young girl making somegraceful overtures of speech to the elder woman asthey went.

“That was rather fine, my dear,” saidMrs. March.

“Well, I don’t know. It was a littletoo dramatic, wasn’t it? It wasn’twhat I should have expected of real life.”

“Oh, you spoil everything! If that’sthe spirit you’re going through Europe in!”

“It isn’t. As soon as I touch Europeansoil I shall reform.”

XVI.

That was not the first time General Triscoe had silencedquestion of his opinions with the argument he hadused upon Eltwin, though he was seldom able to useit so aptly. He always found that people suffered,his belief in our national degeneration much morereadily when they knew that he had left a diplomaticposition in Europe (he had gone abroad as secretaryof a minor legation) to come home and fight for theUnion. Some millions of other men had gone intothe war from the varied motives which impelled menat that time; but he was aware that he had distinction,as a man of property and a man of family, in doingso. His family had improved as time passed, andit was now so old that back of his grandfather it waslost in antiquity. This ancestor had retired fromthe sea and become a merchant in his native RhodeIsland port, where his son established himself asa physician, and married the daughter of a former slave-traderwhose social position was the highest in the place;Triscoe liked to mention his maternal grandfatherwhen he wished a listener to realize just how anomaloushis part in a war against slavery was; it heightenedthe effect of his pose.

He fought gallantly through the war, and he was brevettedBrigadier-General at the close. With this honor,and with the wound which caused an almost imperceptiblelimp in his gait, he won the heart of a rich New Yorkgirl, and her father set him up in a business, whichwas not long in going to pieces in his hands.Then the young couple went to live in Paris, wheretheir daughter was born, and where the mother diedwhen the child was ten years old. A little laterhis father-in-law died, and Triscoe returned to NewYork, where he found the fortune which his daughterhad inherited was much less than he somehow thoughthe had a right to expect.

The income from her fortune was enough to live on,and he did not go back to Paris, where, in fact, thingswere not so much to his mind under the Republic asthey had been under the Second Empire. He wasstill willing to do something for his country, however,and he allowed his name to be used on a citizen’sticket in his district; but his provision-man wassent to Congress instead. Then he retired to RhodeIsland and attempted to convert his shore propertyinto a watering-place; but after being attractivelyplotted and laid out with streets and sidewalks, itallured no one to build on it except the birds andthe chipmonks, and he came back to New York, wherehis daughter had remained in school.

One of her maternal aunts made her a coming-out tea,after she left school; and she entered upon a seriesof dinners, dances, theatre parties, and receptionsof all kinds; but the tide of fairy gold pouring throughher fingers left no engagement-ring on them. Shehad no duties, but she seldom got out of humor withher pleasures; she had some odd tastes of her own,and in a society where none but the most serious bookswere ever seriously mentioned she was rather fond ofgood ones, and had romantic ideas of a life that shevaguely called bohemian. Her character was nevertested by anything more trying than the fear that herfather might take her abroad to live; he had takenher abroad several times for the summer.

The dreaded trial did not approach for several yearsafter she had ceased to be a bud; and then it camewhen her father was again willing to serve his countryin diplomacy, either at the Hague, or at Brussels,or even at Berne. Reasons of political geographyprevented his appointment anywhere, but General Triscoehaving arranged his affairs for going abroad on themission he had expected, decided to go without it.He was really very fit for both of the offices hehad sought, and so far as a man can deserve publicplace by public service, he had deserved it. Hispessimism was uncommonly well grounded, and if itdid not go very deep, it might well have reached thebottom of his nature.

His daughter had begun to divine him at the earlyage when parents suppose themselves still to be mysteriesto their children. She did not think it necessaryever to explain him to others; perhaps she would nothave found it possible; and now after she parted fromMrs. Eltwin and went to sit down beside Mrs. Marchshe did not refer to her father. She said howsweet she had found the old lady from Ohio; and whatsort of place did Mrs. March suppose it was whereMrs. Eltwin lived? They seemed to have everythingthere, like any place. She had wanted to ask Mrs.Eltwin if they sat on their steps; but she had notquite dared.

Burnamy came by, slowly, and at Mrs. March’ssuggestion he took one of the chairs on her otherside, to help her and Miss Triscoe look at the ChannelIslands and watch the approach of the steamer to Cherbourg,where the Norumbia was to land again. The youngpeople talked across Mrs. March to each other, andsaid how charming the islands were, in their gray-greeninsubstantiality, with valleys furrowing them far inward,like airy clefts in low banks of clouds. It seemedall the nicer not to know just which was which; butwhen the ship drew nearer to Cherbourg, he suggestedthat they could see better by going round to the otherside of the ship. Miss Triscoe, as at the othertimes when she had gone off with Burnamy, marked herallegiance, to Mrs. March by leaving a wrap with her.

Every one was restless in breaking with the old lifeat sea. There had been an equal unrest when theship first sailed; people had first come aboard inthe demoralization of severing their ties with home,and they shrank from forming others. Then thecharm of the idle, eventless life grew upon them,and united them in a fond reluctance from the inevitableend.

Now that the beginning of the end had come, the pangsof disintegration were felt in all the once-more-repellantparticles. Burnamy and Miss Triscoe, as theyhung upon the rail, owned to each other that they hatedto have the voyage over. They had liked leavingPlymouth and being at sea again; they wished thatthey need not be reminded of another debarkation bythe energy of the crane in hoisting the Cherbourg baggagefrom the hold.

They approved of the picturesqueness of three Frenchvessels of war that passed, dragging their krakenshapes low through the level water. At Cherbourgan emotional French tender came out to the ship, verydifferent in her clamorous voices and excited figuresfrom the steady self-control of the English tenderat Plymouth; and they thought the French fortificationsmuch more on show than the English had been. Nothingmarked their youthful date so much to the Marches,who presently joined them, as their failure to realizethat in this peaceful sea the great battle betweenthe Kearsarge and the Alabama was fought. Theelder couple tried to affect their imaginations withthe fact which reanimated the spectre of a dreadfulwar for themselves; but they had to pass on and, leavethe young people unmoved.

Mrs. March wondered if they noticed the debarkationof the pivotal girl, whom she saw standing on thedeck of the tender, with her hands at her waist, andgiving now this side and now that side of her faceto the young men waving their hats to her from therail of the ship. Burnamy was not of their number,and he seemed not to know that the girl was leavinghim finally to Miss Triscoe. If Miss Triscoe knewit she did nothing the whole of that long, last afternoonto profit by the fact. Burnamy spent a greatpart of it in the chair beside Mrs. March, and he showedan intolerable resignation to the girl’s absence.

“Yes,” said March, taking the place Burnamyleft at last, “that terrible patience of youth!”

“Patience? Folly! Stupidity!They ought to be together every instant! Do theysuppose that life is full of such chances? Dothey think that fate has nothing to do but—­”

She stopped for a fit climax, and he suggested, “Hanground and wait on them?”

“Yes! It’s their one chance in alife-time, probably.”

“Then you’ve quite decided that they’rein love?” He sank comfortably back, and putup his weary legs on the chair’s extension withthe conviction that love had no such joy as that tooffer.

“I’ve decided that they’re intenselyinterested in each other.”

“Then what more can we ask of them? Andwhy do you care what they do or don’t do withtheir chance? Why do you wish their love well,if it’s that? Is marriage such a very certaingood?”

“It isn’t all that it might be, but it’sall that there is. What would our lives havebeen without it?” she retorted.

“Oh, we should have got on. It’ssuch a tremendous risk that we, ought to go roundbegging people to think twice, to count a hundred,or a nonillion, before they fall in love to the marrying-point.I don’t mind their flirting; that amuses them;but marrying is a different thing. I doubt ifPapa Triscoe would take kindly to the notion of a son-in-lawhe hadn’t selected himself, and his daughterdoesn’t strike me as a young lady who has anywisdom to throw away on a choice. She has herlittle charm; her little gift of beauty, of grace,of spirit, and the other things that go with her ageand sex; but what could she do for a fellow like Burnamy,who has his way to make, who has the ladder of fameto climb, with an old mother at the bottom of it tolook after? You wouldn’t want him to havean eye on Miss Triscoe’s money, even if she hadmoney, and I doubt if she has much. It’sall very pretty to have a girl like her fascinatedwith a youth of his simple traditions; though Burnamyisn’t altogether pastoral in his ideals, andhe looks forward to a place in the very world shebelongs to. I don’t think it’s forus to promote the affair.”

“Well, perhaps you’re right,” shesighed. “I will let them alone from thisout. Thank goodness, I shall not have them undermy eyes very long.”

“Oh, I don’t think there’s any harmdone yet,” said her husband, with a laugh.

At dinner there seemed so little harm of the kindhe meant that she suffered from an illogical disappointment.The young people got through the meal with no talkthat seemed inductive; Burnamy left the table first,and Miss Triscoe bore his going without apparent discouragement;she kept on chatting with March till his wife tookhim away to their chairs on deck.

There were a few more ships in sight than there werein mid-ocean; but the late twilight thickened overthe North Sea quite like the night after they leftNew York, except that it was colder; and their heartsturned to their children, who had been in abeyancefor the week past, with a remorseful pang. “Well,”she said, “I wish we were going to be in NewYork to-morrow, instead of Hamburg.”

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” he protested.“Not so bad as that, my dear. This is thelast night, and it’s hard to manage, as the lastnight always is. I suppose the last night onearth—­”

“Basil!” she implored.

“Well, I won’t, then. But what Iwant is to see a Dutch lugger. I’ve neverseen a Dutch lugger, and—­”

She suddenly pressed his arm, and in obedience tothe signal he was silent; though it seemed afterwardsthat he ought to have gone on talking as if he didnot see Burnamy and Miss Triscoe swinging slowly by.They were walking close together, and she was leaningforward and looking up into his face while he talked.

“Now,” Mrs. March whispered, long afterthey were out of hearing, “let us go instantly.I wouldn’t for worlds have them see us here whenthey get found again. They would feel that theyhad to stop and speak, and that would spoil everything.Come!”

XVII.

Burnamy paused in a flow of autobiography, and modestlywaited for Miss Triscoe’s prompting. Hehad not to wait long.

“And then, how soon did you think of printingyour things in a book?”

“Oh, about as soon as they began to take withthe public.”

“How could you tell that they were-taking?”

“They were copied into other papers, and peopletalked about them.”

“And that was what made Mr. Stoller want youto be his secretary?”

“I don’t believe it was. The theoryin the office was that he didn’t think muchof them; but he knows I can write shorthand, and putthings into shape.”

“What things?”

“Oh—­ideas. He has a notion oftrying to come forward in politics. He owns sharesin everything but the United States Senate—­gas,electricity, railroads, aldermen, newspapers—­andnow he would like some Senate. That’s whatI think.”

She did not quite understand, and she was far fromknowing that this cynic humor expressed a deadlierpessimism than her father’s fiercest accusalsof the country. “How fascinating it is!”she said, innocently.

“And I suppose they all envy your coming out?”

“In the office?”

“Yes. I should envy, them—­staying.”

Burnamy laughed. “I don’t believethey envy me. It won’t be all roses forme—­they know that. But they know thatI can take care of myself if it isn’t.”He remembered something one of his friends in the officehad said of the painful surprise the Bird of Preywould feel if he ever tried his beak on him in thebelief that he was soft.

She abruptly left the mere personal question.“And which would you rather write: poemsor those kind of sketches?”

“I don’t know,” said Burnamy, willingto talk of himself on any terms. “I supposethat prose is the thing for our time, rather more;but there are things you can’t say in prose.I used to write a great deal of verse in college;but I didn’t have much luck with editors tillMr. March took this little piece for ’EveryOther Week’.”

“Little? I thought it was a long poem!”

Burnamy laughed at the notion. “It’sonly eight lines.”

“Oh!” said the girl. “Whatis it about?”

He yielded to the temptation with a weakness whichhe found incredible in a person of his make.“I can repeat it if you won’t give me awayto Mrs. March.”

“Oh, no indeed!” He said the lines overto her very simply and well.” They arebeautiful—­beautiful!”

“Do you think so?” he gasped, in his joyat her praise.

“Yes, lovely. Do you know, you are thefirst literary man—­the only literary man—­Iever talked with. They must go out—­somewhere!Papa must meet them at his clubs. But I neverdo; and so I’m making the most of you.”

“You can’t make too much of me, Miss Triscoe,”said Burnamy.

She would not mind his mocking. “That dayyou spoke about ’The Maiden Knight’, don’tyou know, I had never heard any talk about books inthat way. I didn’t know you were an authorthen.”

“Well, I’m not much of an author now,”he said, cynically, to retrieve his folly in repeatinghis poem to her.

“Oh, that will do for you to say. But Iknow what Mrs. March thinks.”

He wished very much to know what Mrs. March thought,too; ’Every Other Week’ was such a verygood place that he could not conscientiously neglectany means of having his work favorably considered there;if Mrs. March’s interest in it would act uponher husband, ought not he to know just how much shethought of him as a writer? “Did she likethe poem.”

Miss Triscoe could not recall that Mrs. March hadsaid anything about the poem, but she launched herselfupon the general current of Mrs. March’s likingfor Burnamy. “But it wouldn’t do totell you all she said!” This was not what hehoped, but he was richly content when she returnedto his personal history. “And you didn’tknow any one when, you went up to Chicago from—­”

“Tippecanoe? Not exactly that. I wasn’tacquainted with any one in the office, but they hadprinted somethings of mine, and they were willing tolet me try my hand. That was all I could ask.”

“Of course! You knew you could do the rest.Well, it is like a romance. A woman couldn’thave such an adventure as that!” sighed the girl.

“But women do!” Burnamy retorted.“There is a girl writing on the paper now—­she’sgoing to do the literary notices while I’m gone—­whocame to Chicago from Ann Arbor, with no more chancethan I had, and who’s made her way single-handedfrom interviewing up.”

“Oh,” said Miss Triscoe, with a distinctdrop in her enthusiasm. “Is she nice?”

“She’s mighty clever, and she’snice enough, too, though the kind of journalism thatwomen do isn’t the most dignified. And she’sone of the best girls I know, with lots of sense.”

“It must be very interesting,” said MissTriscoe, with little interest in the way she saidit. “I suppose you’re quite a littlecommunity by yourselves.”

“On the paper?”

“Yes.”

“Well, some of us know one another, in the office,but most of us don’t. There’s quitea regiment of people on a big paper. If you’dlike to come out,” Burnamy ventured, “perhapsyou could get the Woman’s Page to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, fashion; and personal gossip about societyleaders; and recipes for dishes and diseases; andcorrespondence on points of etiquette.”

He expected her to shudder at the notion, but shemerely asked, “Do women write it?”

He laughed reminiscently. “Well, not always.We had one man who used to do it beautifully—­whenhe was sober. The department hasn’t hadany permanent head since.”

He was sorry he had said this, but it did not seemto shock her, and no doubt she had not taken it infully. She abruptly left the subject. “Doyou know what time we really get in to-morrow?”

“About one, I believe—­there’sa consensus of stewards to that effect, anyway.”After a pause he asked, “Are you likely to bein Carlsbad?”

“We are going to Dresden, first, I believe.Then we may go on down to Vienna. But nothingis settled, yet.”

“Are you going direct to Dresden?”

“I don’t know. We may stay in Hamburga day or two.”

“I’ve got to go straight to Carlsbad.There’s a sleeping-car that will get me thereby morning: Mr. Stoller likes zeal. But Ihope you’ll let me be of use to you any wayI can, before we part tomorrow.”

“You’re very kind. You’ve beenvery good already—­to papa.” Heprotested that he had not been at all good. “Buthe’s used to taking care of himself on the otherside. Oh, it’s this side, now!”

“So it is! How strange that seems!It’s actually Europe. But as long as we’reat sea, we can’t realize it. Don’tyou hate to have experiences slip through your fingers?”

“I don’t know. A girl doesn’thave many experiences of her own; they’re alwaysother people’s.”

This affected Burnamy as so profound that he did notquestion its truth. He only suggested, “Well;sometimes they make other people have the experiences.”

Whether Miss Triscoe decided that this was too intimateor not she left the question. “Do you understandGerman?”

“A little. I studied it at college, andI’ve cultivated a sort of beer-garden Germanin Chicago. I can ask for things.”

“I can’t, except in French, and that’sworse than English, in Germany, I hear.”

“Then you must let me be your interpreter upto the last moment. Will you?”

She did not answer. “It must be ratherlate, isn’t it?” she asked. He lether see his watch, and she said, “Yes, it’svery late,” and led the way within. “Imust look after my packing; papa’s always soprompt, and I must justify myself for making him letme give up my maid when we left home; we expect toget one in Dresden. Good-night!”

Burnamy looked after her drifting down their corridor,and wondered whether it would have been a fit returnfor her expression of a sense of novelty in him asa literary man if he had told her that she was thefirst young lady he had known who had a maid.The fact awed him; Miss Triscoe herself did not awehim so much.

XVIII.

The next morning was merely a transitional period,full of turmoil and disorder, between the broken lifeof the sea and the untried life of the shore.No one attempted to resume the routine of the voyage.People went and came between their rooms and the saloonsand the decks, and were no longer careful to taketheir own steamer chairs when they sat down for amoment.

In the cabins the berths were not made up, and thosewho remained below had to sit on their hard edges,or on the sofas, which were cumbered with, hand-bagsand rolls of shawls. At an early hour after breakfastthe bedroom stewards began to get the steamer trunksout and pile them in the corridors; the servants allbecame more caressingly attentive; and people whohad left off settling the amount of the fees they weregoing to give, anxiously conferred together.The question whether you ought ever to give the headsteward anything pressed crucially at the early lunch,and Kenby brought only a partial relief by sayingthat he always regarded the head steward as an officerof the ship. March made the experiment of offeringhim six marks, and the head steward took them quiteas if he were not an officer of the ship. Healso collected a handsome fee for the music, whichis the tax levied on all German ships beyond the tollsexacted on the steamers of other nations.

After lunch the flat shore at Cuxhaven was so nearthat the summer cottages of the little watering-placeshowed through the warm drizzle much like the summercottages of our own shore, and if it had not beenfor the strange, low sky, the Americans might easilyhave fancied themselves at home again.

Every one waited on foot while the tender came outinto the stream where the Norumbia had dropped anchor.People who had brought their hand-baggage with themfrom their rooms looked so much safer with it thatpeople who had left theirs to their stewards had togo back and pledge them afresh not to forget it.The tender came alongside, and the transfer of theheavy trunks began, but it seemed such an endless workthat every one sat down in some other’s chair.At last the trunks were all on the tender, and thebareheaded stewards began to run down the gangwayswith the hand-baggage. “Is this Hoboken?”March murmured in his wife’s ear, with a bewilderedsense of something in the scene like the reversedaction of the kinematograph.

On the deck of the tender there was a brief momentof reunion among the companions of the voyage, themore intimate for their being crowded together undercover from the drizzle which now turned into a dashingrain. Burnamy’s smile appeared, and thenMrs. March recognized Miss Triscoe and her fatherin their travel dress; they were not far from Burnamy’ssmile, but he seemed rather to have charge of the Eltwins,whom he was helping look after their bags and bundles.Rose Adding was talking with Kenby, and apparentlyasking his opinion of something; Mrs. Adding sat nearthem tranquilly enjoying her son.

Mrs. March made her husband identify their baggage,large and small, and after he had satisfied her, hefurtively satisfied himself by a fresh count thatit was all there. But he need not have taken thetrouble; their long, calm bedroom-steward was keepingguard over it; his eyes expressed a contemptuous pityfor their anxiety, whose like he must have been verytired of. He brought their handbags into the customs-roomat the station where they landed; and there took alast leave and a last fee with unexpected cordiality.

Again their companionship suffered eclipse in thedistraction which the customs inspectors of all countriesbring to travellers; and again they were united duringthe long delay in the waiting-room, which was alsothe restaurant. It was full of strange noisesand figures and odors—­the shuffling offeet, the clash of crockery, the explosion of nervousGerman voices, mixed with the smell of beer and ham,and the smoke of cigars. Through it all piercedthe wail of a postman standing at the door with aletter in his hand and calling out at regular intervals,“Krahnay, Krahnay!” When March could bearit no longer he went up to him and shouted, “Crane!Crane!” and the man bowed gratefully, and beganto cry, “Kren! Kren!” But whetherMr. Crane got his letter or not, he never knew.

People were swarming at the window of the telegraph-office,and sending home cablegrams to announce their safearrival; March could not forbear cabling to his son,though he felt it absurd. There was a great dealof talking, but no laughing, except among the Americans,and the girls behind the bar who tried to understand,what they wanted, and then served them with what theychose for them. Otherwise the Germans, thoughvoluble, were unsmiling, and here on the thresholdof their empire the travellers had their first hintof the anxious mood which seems habitual with theseamiable people.

Mrs. Adding came screaming with glee to March wherehe sat with his wife, and leaned over her son to ask,“Do you know what lese-majesty is? Roseis afraid I’ve committed it!”

“No, I don’t,” said March.“But it’s the unpardonable sin. Whathave you been doing?”

“I asked the official at the door when our trainwould start, and when he said at half past three,I said, ‘How tiresome!’ Rose says the railroadsbelong to the state here, and that if I find faultwith the time-table, it’s constructive censureof the Emperor, and that’s lese-majesty.”She gave way to her mirth, while the boy studied March’sface with an appealing smile.

“Well, I don’t think you’ll be arrestedthis time, Mrs. Adding; but I hope it will be a warningto Mrs. March. She’s been complaining ofthe coffee.”

“Indeed I shall say what I like,” saidMrs. March. “I’m an American.”

“Well, you’ll find you’re a German,if you like to say anything disagreeable about thecoffee in the restaurant of the Emperor’s railroadstation; the first thing you know I shall be giventhree months on your account.”

Mrs. Adding asked: “Then they won’tpunish ladies? There, Rose! I’m safe,you see; and you’re still a minor, though youare so wise for your years.”

She went back to her table, where Kenby came and satdown by her.

“I don’t know that I quite like her playingon that sensitive child,”, said Mrs. March.“And you’ve joined with her in her joking.Go and speak, to him!”

The boy was slowly following his mother, with hishead fallen. March overtook him, and he startednervously at the touch of a hand on his shoulder,and then looked gratefully up into the man’sface. March tried to tell him what the crimeof lese-majesty was, and he said: “Oh, yes.I understood that. But I got to thinking; andI don’t want my mother to take any risks.”

“I don’t believe she will, really, Rose.But I’ll speak to her, and tell her she can’tbe too cautious.”

“Not now, please!” the boy entreated.

“Well, I’ll find another chance,”March assented. He looked round and caught asmiling nod from Burnamy, who was still with the Eltwins;the Triscoes were at a table by themselves; Miss Triseoenodded too, but her father appeared not to see March.“It’s all right, with Rose,” he said,when he sat down again by his wife; “but I guessit’s all over with Burnamy,” and he toldher what he had seen. “Do you think it cameto any displeasure between them last night? Doyou suppose he offered himself, and she—­”

“What nonsense!” said Mrs. March, butshe was not at peace. “It’s her fatherwho’s keeping her away from him.”

“I shouldn’t mind that. He’skeeping her away from us, too.” But at thatmoment Miss Triscoe as if she had followed his returnfrom afar, came over to speak to his wife. Shesaid they were going on to Dresden that evening, andshe was afraid they might have no chance to see eachother on the train or in Hamburg. March, at thisadvance, went to speak with her father; he found himno more reconciled to Europe than America.

“They’re Goths,” he said of theGermans. “I could hardly get that stupidbrute in the telegraph-office to take my despatch.”

On his way back to his wife March met Miss Triscoe;he was not altogether surprised to meet Burnamy withher, now. The young fellow asked if he couldbe of any use to him, and then he said he would lookhim up in the train. He seemed in a hurry, butwhen he walked away with Miss Triscoe he did not seemin a hurry.

March remarked upon the change to his wife, and shesighed, “Yes, you can see that as far as they’reconcerned.”

“It’s a great pity that there should beparents to complicate these affairs,” he said.“How simple it would be if there were no partiesto them but the lovers! But nature is alwaysinsisting upon fathers and mothers, and families onboth sides.”

XIX.

The long train which they took at last was for theNorumbia’s people alone, and it was of severaltransitional and tentative types of cars. Somewere still the old coach-body carriages; but most wereof a strange corridor arrangement, with the aide atthe aide, and the seats crossing from it, with compartmentssometimes rising to the roof, and sometimes risinghalf-way. No two cars seemed quite alike, butall were very comfortable; and when the train beganto run out through the little sea-side town into thecountry, the old delight of foreign travel began.Most of the houses were little and low and gray, withivy or flowering vines covering their walls to theirbrowntiled roofs; there was here and there a touchof Northern Gothic in the architecture; but usuallywhere it was pretentious it was in the mansard taste,which was so bad with us a generation ago, and isstill very bad in Cuxhaven.

The fields, flat and wide, were dotted with familiarshapes of Holstein cattle, herded by little girls,with their hair in yellow pigtails. The gray,stormy sky hung low, and broke in fitful rains; butperhaps for the inclement season of mid-summer itwas not very cold. Flowers were blooming alongthe embankments and in the rank green fields with adogged energy; in the various distances were groupsof trees embowering cottages and even villages, andalways along the ditches and watercourses were doublelines of low willows. At the first stop the trainmade, the passengers flocked to the refreshment-booth,prettily arranged beside the station, where the abundanceof the cherries and strawberries gave proof that vegetationwas in other respects superior to the elements.But it was not of the profusion of the sausages, andthe ham which openly in slices or covertly in sandwichesclaimed its primacy in the German affections; everyform of this was flanked by tall glasses of beer.

A number of the natives stood by and stared unsmilingat the train, which had broken out in a rash of littleAmerican flags at every window. This boyish display,which must have made the Americans themselves laugh,if their sense of humor had not been lost in theirimpassioned patriotism, was the last expression ofunity among the Norumbia’s passengers, and theymet no more in their sea-solidarity. Of theirtable acquaintance the Marches saw no one except Burnamy,who came through the train looking for them.He said he was in one of the rear cars with the Eltwins,and was going to Carlsbad with them in the sleeping-cartrain leaving Hamburg at seven. He owned to havingseen the Triscoes since they had left Cuxhaven; Mrs.March would not suffer herself to ask him whether theywere in the same carriage with the Eltwins. Hehad got a letter from Mr. Stoller at Cuxhaven, andhe begged the Marches to let him engage rooms for themat the hotel where he was going to stay with him.

After they reached Hamburg they had flying glimpsesof him and of others in the odious rivalry to gettheir baggage examined first which seized upon all,and in which they no longer knew one another, but selfishlystruggled for the good-will of porters and inspectors.There was really no such haste; but none could governthemselves against the general frenzy. With theporter he secured March conspired and perspired towin the attention of a cold but not unkindly inspector.The officer opened one trunk, and after a glance atit marked all as passed, and then there ensued a heroicstrife with the porter as to the pieces which wereto go to the Berlin station for their journey nextday, and the pieces which were to go to the hotelovernight. At last the division was made; theMarches got into a cab of the first class; and theporter, crimson and steaming at every pore from thephysical and intellectual strain, went back into thestation.

They had got the number of their cab from the policemanwho stands at the door of all large German stationsand supplies the traveller with a metallic check forthe sort of vehicle he demands. They were notproud, but it seemed best not to risk a second-classcab in a strange city, and when their first-classcab came creaking and limping out of the rank, theysaw how wise they had been, if one of the second classcould have been worse.

As they rattled away from the station they saw yetanother kind of turnout, which they were destinedto see more and more in the German lands. Itwas that team of a woman harnessed with a dog to acart which the women of no other country can see withouta sense of personal insult. March tried to takethe humorous view, and complained that they had notbeen offered the choice of such an equipage by thepoliceman, but his wife would not be amused.She said that no country which suffered such a thingcould be truly civilized, though he made her observethat no city in the world, except Boston or Brooklyn,was probably so thoroughly trolleyed as Hamburg.The hum of the electric car was everywhere, and everywherethe shriek of the wires overhead; batlike flights ofconnecting plates traversed all the perspectives throughwhich they drove to the pleasant little hotel theyhad chosen.

XX.

On one hand their windows looked toward a basin ofthe Elbe, where stately white swans were sailing;and on the other to the new Rathhaus, over the treesthat deeply shaded the perennial mud of a cold, dimpublic garden, where water-proof old women and imperviousnurses sat, and children played in the long twilightof the sour, rain-soaked summer of the fatherland.It was all picturesque, and within-doors there wasthe novelty of the meagre carpets and stalwart furnitureof the Germans, and their beds, which after so manyages of Anglo-Saxon satire remain immutably preposterous.They are apparently imagined for the stature of sleeperswho have shortened as they broadened; their pillowsare triangularly shaped to bring the chin tight uponthe breast under the bloated feather bulk which ismeant for covering, and which rises over the sleeperfrom a thick substratum of cotton coverlet, neatlybuttoned into the upper sheet, with the effect ofa portly waistcoat.

The hotel was illumined by the kindly splendor ofthe uniformed portier, who had met the travellersat the door, like a glowing vision of the past, anda friendly air diffused itself through the whole house.At the dinner, which, if not so cheap as they hadsomehow hoped, was by no means bad, they took counselwith the English-speaking waiter as to what entertainmentHamburg could offer for the evening, and by the timethey had drunk their coffee they had courage for theCircus Renz, which seemed to be all there was.

The conductor of the trolley-car, which they hailedat the street corner, stopped it and got off the platform,and stood in the street until they were safely aboard,without telling them to step lively, or pulling themup the steps; or knuckling them in the back to makethem move forward. He let them get fairly seatedbefore he started the car, and so lost the fun ofseeing them lurch and stagger violently, and wildlyclutch each other for support. The Germans haveso little sense of humor that probably no one in the

car would have been amused to see the strangers flungupon the floor. No one apparently found it drollthat the conductor should touch his cap to them whenhe asked for their fare; no one smiled at their effortsto make him understand where they wished to go, andhe did not wink at the other passengers in tryingto find out. Whenever the car stopped he descendedfirst, and did not remount till the dismounting passengerhad taken time to get well away from it. Whenthe Marches got into the wrong car in coming home,and were carried beyond their street, the conductorwould not take their fare.

The kindly civility which environed them went farto alleviate the inclemency of the climate; it beganto rain as soon as they left the shelter of the car,but a citizen of whom they asked the nearest way tothe Circus Renz was so anxious to have them go arightthat they did not mind the wet, and the thought ofhis goodness embittered March’s self-reproachfor under-tipping the sort of gorgeous heyduk, witha staff like a drum-major’s, who left his placeat the circus door to get their tickets. He broughtthem back with a magnificent bow, and was then asvisibly disappointed with the share of the change returnedto him as a child would have been.

They went to their places with the sting of his disappointmentrankling in their hearts. “One ought alwaysto overpay them,” March sighed, “and Iwill do it from this time forth; we shall not be muchthe poorer for it. That heyduk is not going toget off with less than a mark when we come out.”As an earnest of his good faith he gave the old manwho showed them to their box a tip that made him bowdouble, and he bought every conceivable libretto andplay-bill offered him at prices fixed by his remorse.

“One ought to do it,” he said. “Weare of the quality of good geniuses to these poorsouls; we are Fortune in disguise; we are money foundin the road. It is an accursed system, but theyare more its victims than we.” His wifequite agreed with him, and with the same good consciencebetween them they gave themselves up to the pure joywhich the circus, of all modern entertainments, seemsalone to inspire. The house was full from floorto roof when they came ins and every one was intentupon the two Spanish clowns, Lui-Lui and Soltamontes,whose drolleries spoke the universal language of circushumor, and needed no translation into either Germanor English. They had missed by an event or twothe more patriotic attraction of “Miss Darlings,the American Star,” as she was billed in English,but they were in time for one of those equestrian performanceswhich leave the spectator almost exanimate from theirprolixity, and the pantomimic piece which closed theevening.

This was not given until nearly the whole house hadgone out and stayed itself with beer and cheese andham and sausage, in the restaurant which purveys theselight refreshments in the summer theatres all overGermany. When the people came back gorged tothe throat, they sat down in the right mood to enjoythe allegory of “The Enchanted Mountain’sFantasy; the Mountain episodes; the High-interestingSledges-Courses on the Steep Acclivities; the Amazing-Up-rushof the thence plunging-Four Trains, which arrive withLightnings-swiftness at the Top of the over-40-feet-highMountain-the Highest Triumph of the To-day’sCircus-Art; the Sledge-journey in the Wizard-mountain,and the Fairy Ballet in the Realm of the Ghost-prince,with Gold and Silver, Jewel, Bloomghosts, Gnomes,Gnomesses, and Dwarfs, in never-till-now-seen Splendorof Costume.” The Marches were happy in thisallegory, and happier in the ballet, which is everywheredelightfully innocent, and which here appealed withthe large flat feet and the plain good faces of the‘coryphees’ to all that was simplest andsweetest in their natures. They could not haveresisted, if they had wished, that environment, ofgood-will; and if it had not been for the disappointedheyduk, they would have got home from their eveningat the Circus Renz without a pang.

They looked for him everywhere when they came out,but he had vanished, and they were left with a regretwhich, if unavailing, was not too poignant. Inspite of it they had still an exhilaration in theirrelease from the companionship of their fellow-voyagerswhich they analyzed as the psychical revulsion fromthe strain of too great interest in them. Mrs.March declared that for the present, at least, shewanted Europe quite to themselves; and she said thatnot even for the pleasure of seeing Burnamy and MissTriscoe come into their box together world she havesuffered an American trespass upon their exclusivepossession of the Circus Renz.

In the audience she had seen German officers for thefirst time in Hamburg, and she meant, if unremittingquestion could bring out the truth, to know why shehad not met any others. She had read much of theprevalence and prepotence of the German officers whowould try to push her off the sidewalk, till theyrealized that she was an American woman, and wouldthen submit to her inflexible purpose of holding it.But she had been some seven or eight hours in Hamburg,and nothing of the kind had happened to her, perhapsbecause she had hardly yet walked a block in the citystreets, but perhaps also because there seemed to bevery few officers or military of any kind in Hamburg.

XXI.

Their absence was plausibly explained, the next morning,by the young German friend who came in to see theMarches at breakfast. He said Hamburg had beenso long a free republic that the presence of a largeimperial garrison was distasteful to the people, andas a matter of fact there were very few soldiers quarteredthere, whether the authorities chose to indulge thepopular grudge or not. He was himself in a joyfulflutter of spirits, for he had just the day beforegot his release from military service. He gavethem a notion of what the rapture of a man reprievedfrom death might be, and he was as radiantly happyin the ill health which had got him his release asif it had been the greatest blessing of heaven.He bubbled over with smiling regrets that he shouldbe leaving his home for the first stage of the journeywhich he was to take in search of strength, just asthey had come, and he pressed them to say if therewere not something that he could do for them.

“Yes,” said Mrs. March, with a promptnesssurprising to her husband, who could think of nothing;“tell us where Heinrich Heine lived when he wasin Hamburg. My husband has always had a greatpassion for him and wants to look him up everywhere.”

March had forgotten that Heine ever lived in Hamburg,and the young man had apparently never known it.His face fell; he wished to make Mrs. March believethat it was only Heine’s uncle who had livedthere; but she was firm; and when he had asked amongthe hotel people he came back gladly owning that hewas wrong, and that the poet used to live in Konigstrasse,which was very near by, and where they could easilyknow the house by his bust set in its front.The portier and the head waiter shared his ecstasyin so easily obliging the friendly American pair, andjoined him in minutely instructing the driver whenthey shut them into their carriage.

They did not know that his was almost the only laughingface they should see in the serious German Empire;just as they did not know that it rained there everyday. As they drove off in the gray drizzle withthe unfounded hope that sooner or later the weatherwould be fine, they bade their driver be very slowin taking them through Konigstrasse, so that he shouldby no means Miss Heine’s dwelling, and he dulystopped in front of a house bearing the promised bust.They dismounted in order to revere it more at theirease, but the bust proved, by an irony bitterer thanthe sick, heart-breaking, brilliant Jew could haveimagined in his cruelest moment, to be that of theGerman Milton, the respectable poet Klopstock, whomHeine abhorred and mocked so pitilessly.

In fact it was here that the good, much-forgottenKlopstock dwelt, when he came home to live with acomfortable pension from the Danish government; andthe pilgrims to the mistaken shrine went asking aboutamong the neighbors in Konigstrasse, for some mannerof house where Heine might have lived; they wouldhave been willing to accept a flat, or any sort oftwo-pair back. The neighbors were somewhat movedby the anxiety of the strangers; but they were notso much moved as neighbors in Italy would have been.There was no eager and smiling sympathy in the littlecrowd that gathered to see what was going on; theywere patient of question and kind in their helplessresponse, but they were not gay. To a man theyhad not heard of Heine; even the owner of a sausageand blood-pudding shop across the way had not heardof him; the clerk of a stationer-and-bookseller’snext to the butcher’s had heard of him, but hehad never heard that he lived in Konigstrasse; he neverhad heard where he lived in Hamburg.

The pilgrims to the fraudulent shrine got back intotheir carriage, and drove sadly away, instructingtheir driver with the rigidity which their limitedGerman favored, not to let any house with a bust inits front escape him. He promised, and took hiscourse out through Konigstrasse, and suddenly theyfound themselves in a world of such eld and quaintnessthat they forgot Heine as completely as any of hiscountrymen had done. They were in steep and narrowstreets, that crooked and turned with no apparentpurpose of leading anywhere, among houses that lookeddown upon them with an astonished stare from the leaden-sashedwindows of their timber-laced gables. The facadeswith their lattices stretching in bands quite acrossthem, and with their steep roofs climbing high insuccessions of blinking dormers, were more richly mediaevalthan anything the travellers had ever dreamt of before,and they feasted themselves upon the unimagined picturesquenesswith a leisurely minuteness which brought responsivegazers everywhere to the windows; windows were setajar; shop doors were darkened by curious figures fromwithin, and the traffic of the tortuous alleys wasinterrupted by their progress. They could nothave said which delighted them more—­thehouses in the immediate foreground, or the sharp highgables in the perspectives and the background; butall were like the painted scenes of the stage, andthey had a pleasant difficulty in realizing that theywere not persons in some romantic drama.

The illusion remained with them and qualified theimpression which Hamburg made by her much-trolleyedBostonian effect; by the decorous activity and Parisianarchitecture of her business streets; by the turmoilof her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneysof her shipping. At the heart of all was thatquaintness, that picturesqueness of the past, whichembodied the spirit of the old Hanseatic city, andseemed the expression of the home-side of her history.

The sense of this gained strength from such slightstudy of her annals as they afterwards made, and assistedthe digestion of some morsels of tough statistics.In the shadow of those Gothic houses the fact thatHamburg was one of the greatest coffee marts and moneymarts of the world had a romantic glamour; and thefact that in the four years from 1870 till 1874 aquarter of a million emigrants sailed on her shipsfor the United States seemed to stretch a nerve ofkindred feeling from those mediaeval streets throughthe whole shabby length of Third Avenue.

It was perhaps in this glamour, or this feeling ofcommercial solidarity, that March went to have a lookat the Hamburg Bourse, in the beautiful new Rathhaus.It was not undergoing repairs, it was too new for that;but it was in construction, and so it fulfilled thefunction of a public edifice, in withholding its entireinterest from the stranger. He could not getinto the Senate Chamber; but the Bourse was free tohim, and when he stepped within, it rose at him witha roar of voices and of feet like the New York StockExchange. The spectacle was not so frantic; peoplewere not shaking their fists or fingers in each other’snoses; but they were all wild in the tamer Germanway, and he was glad to mount from the Bourse to thepoor little art gallery upstairs, and to shut out itsclamor. He was not so glad when he looked roundon these, his first, examples of modern German art.The custodian led him gently about and said whichthings were for sale, and it made his heart ache tosee how bad they were, and to think that, bad as theywere, he could not buy any of them.

XXII.

In the start from Cuxhaven the passengers had theirresponsible ease of people ticketed through, andthe steamship company had still the charge of theirbaggage. But when the Marches left Hamburg forLeipsic (where they had decided to break the longpull to Carlsbad), all the anxieties of European travel,dimly remembered from former European days, offeredthemselves for recognition. A porter vanishedwith their hand-baggage before they could note anytrait in him for identification; other porters madeaway with their trunks; and the interpreter who helpedMarch buy his tickets, with a vocabulary of strictlyrailroad English, had to help him find the piecesin the baggage-room, curiously estranged in a mountainof alien boxes. One official weighed them; anotherobliged him to pay as much in freight as for a thirdpassenger, and gave him an illegible scrap of paperwhich recorded their number and destination. Theinterpreter and the porters took their fees with aprofessional effect of dissatisfaction, and he wentto wait with his wife amidst the smoking and eatingand drinking in the restaurant. They burst throughwith the rest when the doors were opened to the train,and followed a glimpse of the porter with their hand-bags,as he ran down the platform, still bent upon escapingthem, and brought him to bay at last in a car wherehe had got very good seats for them, and sank intotheir places, hot and humiliated by their needlesstumult.

As they cooled, they recovered their self-respect,and renewed a youthful joy in some of the long-estrangedfacts. The road was rougher than the roads athome; but for much less money they had the comfort,without the unavailing splendor, of a Pullman in theirsecond-class carriage. Mrs. March had expectedto be used with the severity on the imperial railroadswhich she had failed to experience from the militaryon the Hamburg sidewalks, but nothing could be kindlierthan the whole management toward her. Her fellow-travellerswere not lavish of their rights, as Americans are;what they got, that they kept; and in the run fromHamburg to Leipsic she had several occasions to observethat no German, however young or robust, dreams ofoffering a better place, if he has one, to a ladyin grace to her sex or age; if they got into a carriagetoo late to secure a forward-looking seat, she rodebackward to the end of that stage. But if theyappealed to their fellow-travellers for informationabout changes, or stops, or any of the little factsthat they wished to make sure of, they were enlightenedpast possibility of error. At the point wherethey might have gone wrong the explanations were renewedwith a thoughtfulness which showed that their anxietieshad not been forgotten. She said she could notsee how any people could be both so selfish and sosweet, and her husband seized the advantage of sayingsomething offensive:

“You women are so pampered in America that youare astonished when you are treated in Europe likethe mere human beings you are.”

She answered with unexpected reasonableness:

“Yes, there’s something in that; but whenthe Germans have taught us how despicable we are aswomen, why do they treat us so well as human beings?”

This was at ten o’clock, after she had riddenbackward a long way, and at last, within an hour ofLeipsic, had got a seat confronting him. Thedarkness had now hidden the landscape, but the impressionof its few simple elements lingered pleasantly intheir sense: long levels, densely wooded withthe precise, severely disciplined German forests, andcheckered with fields of grain and grass, soaking underthe thin rain that from time to time varied the thinsunshine.

The villages and peasants’ cottages were notablyfew; but there was here and there a classic or a gothicvilla, which, at one point, an English-speaking younglady turned from her Tauchnitz novel to explain asthe seat of some country gentleman; the land was inlarge holdings, and this accounted for the sparsityof villages and cottages.

She then said that she was a German teacher of English,in Hamburg, and was going home to Potsdam for a visit.She seemed like a German girl out of ‘The Initials’,and in return for this favor Mrs. March tried to investherself with some romantic interest as an American.She failed to move the girl’s fancy, even aftershe had bestowed on her an immense bunch of roseswhich the young German friend in Hamburg had sent tothem just before they left their hotel. She failed,later, on the same ground with the pleasant-lookingEnglish woman who got into their carriage at Magdeburg,and talked over the ‘London Illustrated News’with an English-speaking Fraulein in her company;she readily accepted the fact of Mrs. March’snationality, but found nothing wonderful in it, apparently;and when she left the train she left Mrs. March torecall with fond regret the old days in Italy whenshe first came abroad, and could make a whole carriagefull of Italians break into ohs and ahs by sayingthat she was an American, and telling how far she hadcome across the sea.

“Yes,” March assented, “but thatwas a great while ago, and Americans were much rarerthan they are now in Europe. The Italians areso much more sympathetic than the Germans and English,and they saw that you wanted to impress them.Heaven knows how little they cared! And then,you were a very pretty young girl in those days; orat least I thought so.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “and now I’ma plain old woman.”

“Oh, not quite so bad as that.”

“Yes, I am! Do you think they would havecared more if it had been Miss Triscoe?”

“Not so much as if it had been the pivotal girl.They would have found her much more their ideal ofthe American woman; and even she would have had tohave been here thirty years ago.”

She laughed a little ruefully. “Well, atany rate, I should like to know how Miss Triscoe wouldhave affected them.”

“I should much rather know what sort of lifethat English woman is living here with her Germanhusband; I fancied she had married rank. I couldimagine how dull it must be in her little Saxon town,from the way she clung to her Illustrated News, andexplained the pictures of the royalties to her friend.There is romance for you!”

They arrived at Leipsic fresh and cheerful after theirfive hours’ journey, and as in a spell of theirtravelled youth they drove up through the academicold town, asleep under its dimly clouded sky, and silentexcept for the trolley-cars that prowled its streetswith their feline purr, and broke at times into along, shrill caterwaul. A sense of the past imparteditself to the well-known encounter with the portierand the head waiter at the hotel door, to the paymentof the driver, to the endeavor of the secretary tohave them take the most expensive rooms in the house,and to his compromise upon the next most, where theyfound themselves in great comfort, with electric lights

and bells, and a quick succession of fee-taking call-boysin dress-coats too large for them. The spellwas deepened by the fact, which March kept at the bottomof his consciousness for the present, that one oftheir trunks was missing. This linked him moreclosely to the travel of other days, and he spent thenext forenoon in a telegraphic search for the estray,with emotions tinged by the melancholy of recollection,but in the security that since it was somewhere inthe keeping of the state railway, it would be finallyrestored to him.

XXIII.

Their windows, as they saw in the morning, lookedinto a large square of aristocratic physiognomy, andof a Parisian effect in architecture, which afterwardsproved characteristic of the town, if not quite socharacteristic as to justify the passion of Leipsicfor calling itself Little Paris. The prevailingtone was of a gray tending to the pale yellow of theTauchnitz editions with which the place is more familiarlyassociated in the minds of English-speaking travellers.It was rather more sombre than it might have beenif the weather had been fair; but a quiet rain wasfalling dreamily that morning, and the square was providedwith a fountain which continued to dribble in the raremoments when the rain forgot itself. The placewas better shaded than need be in that sunless landby the German elms that look like ours and it wassufficiently stocked with German statues, that looklike no others. It had a monument, too, of thesort with which German art has everywhere disfiguredthe kindly fatherland since the war with France.These monuments, though they are so very ugly, havea sort of pathos as records of the only war in whichGermany unaided has triumphed against a foreign foe,but they are as tiresome as all such memorial pompsmust be. It is not for the victories of a peoplethat any other people can care. The wars comeand go in blood and tears; but whether they are badwars, or what are comically called good wars, theyare of one effect in death and sorrow, and their fameis an offence to all men not concerned in them, tilltime has softened it to a memory

“Of old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.”

It was for some such reason that while the Marchesturned with instant satiety from the swelling andstrutting sculpture which celebrated the Leipsic heroesof the war of 1870, they had heart for those of thewar of 1813; and after their noonday dinner they drovewillingly, in a pause of the rain, out between yellowingharvests of wheat and oats to the field where Napoleonwas beaten by the Russians, Austrians and Prussians(it always took at least three nations to beat thelittle wretch) fourscore years before. Yet eventhere Mrs. March was really more concerned for thesparsity of corn-flowers in the grain, which in theirmodern character of Kaiserblumen she found strangelyabsent from their loyal function; and March was more

taken with the notion of the little gardens which hisguide told him the citizens could have in the suburbsof Leipsic and enjoy at any trolley-car distance fromtheir homes. He saw certain of these gardensin groups, divided by low, unenvious fences, and sometimesfurnished with summer-houses, where the tenant couldtake his pleasure in the evening air, with his family.The guide said he had such a garden himself, at arent of seven dollars a year, where he raised vegetablesand flowers, and spent his peaceful leisure; and Marchfancied that on the simple domestic side of theirlife, which this fact gave him a glimpse of, the Germanswere much more engaging than in their character ofvictors over either the First or the Third Napoleon.But probably they would not have agreed with him,and probably nations will go on making themselvescruel and tiresome till humanity at last prevails overnationality.

He could have put the case to the guide himself; butthough the guide was imaginably liberated to a cosmopolitanconception of things by three years’ serviceas waiter in English hotels, where he learned thelanguage, he might not have risen to this. Hewould have tried, for he was a willing and kindlysoul, though he was not a ‘valet de place’by profession. There seemed in fact but one ofthat useless and amusing race (which is everywherefalling into decay through the rivalry of the perfectedBaedeker,) left in Leipsic, and this one was engaged,so that the Marches had to devolve upon their ex-waiter,who was now the keeper of a small restaurant.He gladly abandoned his business to the care of hiswife, in order to drive handsomely about in his bestclothes, with strangers who did not exact too muchknowledge from him. In his zeal to do somethinghe possessed himself of March’s overcoat whenthey dismounted at their first gallery, and let fallfrom its pocket his prophylactic flask of brandy,which broke with a loud crash on the marble floorin the presence of several masterpieces, and perfumedthe whole place. The masterpieces were some excellentworks of Luke Kranach, who seemed the only Germanpainter worth looking at when there were any Dutchor Italian pictures near, but the travellers forgotthe name and nature of the Kranachs, and rememberedafterwards only the shattered fragments of the brandy-flask,just how they looked on the floor, and the fumes,how they smelt, that rose from the ruin.

It might have been a warning protest of the veracitiesagainst what they were doing; but the madness of sight-seeing,which spoils travel, was on them, and they deliveredthemselves up to it as they used in their ignorantyouth, though now they knew its futility so well.They spared themselves nothing that they had timefor, that day, and they felt falsely guilty for theiromissions, as if they really had been duties to artand history which must be discharged, like obligationsto one’s maker and one’s neighbor.

They had a touch of genuine joy in the presence ofthe beautiful old Rathhaus, and they were sensibleof something like a genuine emotion in passing thefamous and venerable university; the very air of Leipsicis redolent of printing and publication, which appealedto March in his quality of editor, and they couldnot fail of an impression of the quiet beauty of thetown, with its regular streets of houses breaking intosuburban villas of an American sort, and intersectedwith many canals, which in the intervals of the rainwere eagerly navigated by pleasure boats, and contributedto the general picturesqueness by their frequent bridges,even during the drizzle. There seemed to be nochurches to do, and as it was a Sunday, the gallerieswere so early closed against them that they were makinga virtue as well as a pleasure of the famous sceneof Napoleon’s first great defeat.

By a concert between their guide and driver theircarriage drew up at the little inn by the road-side,which is also a museum stocked with relics from thebattle-field, and with objects of interest relatingto it. Old muskets, old swords, old shoes andold coats, trumpets, drums, gun-carriages, wheels,helmets, cannon balls, grape-shot, and all the murderousrubbish which battles come to at last, with proclamations,autographs, caricatures and likenesses of Napoleon,and effigies of all the other generals engaged, andminiatures and jewels of their womenkind, filled roomafter room, through which their owner vaunted his way,with a loud pounding voice and a bad breath.When he wished them to enjoy some gross British satireor clumsy German gibe at Bonaparte’s expense,and put his face close to begin the laugh, he wassomething so terrible that March left the place witha profound if not a reasoned regret that the Frenchhad not won the battle of Leipsic. He walked awaymusing pensively upon the traveller’s inadequacyto the ethics of history when a breath could so swayhim against his convictions; but even after he hadcleansed his lungs with some deep respirations hefound himself still a Bonapartist in the presenceof that stone on the rising ground where Napoleonsat to watch the struggle on the vast plain, and seehis empire slipping through his blood-stained fingers.It was with difficulty that he could keep from reveringthe hat and coat which are sculptured on the stone,but it was well that he succeeded, for he could notmake out then or afterwards whether the habilimentsrepresented were really Napoleon’s or not, andthey might have turned out to be Barclay de Tolly’s.

While he stood trying to solve this question of clotheshe was startled by the apparition of a man climbingthe little slope from the opposite quarter, and advancingtoward them. He wore the imperial crossed by thepointed mustache once so familiar to a world much theworse for them, and March had the shiver of a finemoment in which he fancied the Third Napoleon risingto view the scene where the First had looked his comingruin in the face.

“Why, it’s Miss Triscoe!” criedhis wife, and before March had noticed the approachof another figure, the elder and the younger lady hadrushed upon each other, and encountered with a kiss.At the same time the visage of the last Emperor resolveditself into the face of General Triscoe, who gaveMarch his hand in a more tempered greeting.

The ladies began asking each other of their livessince their parting two days before, and the men strolleda few paces away toward the distant prospect of Leipsic,which at that point silhouettes itself in a noblestretch of roofs and spires and towers against thehorizon.

General Triscoe seemed no better satisfied with Germanythan he had been on first stepping ashore at Cuxhaven.He might still have been in a pout with his own country,but as yet he had not made up with any other; andhe said, “What a pity Napoleon didn’t thrashthe whole dunderheaded lot! His empire wouldhave been a blessing to them, and they would have hadsome chance of being civilized under the French.All this unification of nationalities is the greathumbug of the century. Every stupid race thinksit’s happy because it’s united, and civilizationhas been set back a hundred years by the wars thatwere fought to bring the unions about; and more warswill have to be fought to keep them up. What afarce it is! What’s become of the nationalityof the Danes in Schleswig-Holstein, or the Frenchin the Rhine Provinces, or the Italians in Savoy?”

March had thought something like this himself, butto have it put by General Triscoe made it offensive.“I don’t know. Isn’t it ratherquarrelling with the course of human events to opposeaccomplished facts? The unifications were boundto be, just as the separations before them were.And so far they have made for peace, in Europe at least,and peace is civilization. Perhaps after a greatmany ages people will come together through theirreal interests, the human interests; but at presentit seems as if nothing but a romantic sentiment ofpatriotism can unite them. By-and-by they mayfind that there is nothing in it.”

“Perhaps,” said the general, discontentedly.“I don’t see much promise of any kindin the future.”

“Well, I don’t know. When you thinkof the solid militarism of Germany, you seem remandedto the most hopeless moment of the Roman Empire; youthink nothing can break such a force; but my guidesays that even in Leipsic the Socialists outnumberall the other parties, and the army is the great fieldof the Socialist propaganda. The army itself maybe shaped into the means of democracy—­evenof peace.”

“You’re very optimistic,” said Triscoe,curtly. “As I read the signs, we are notfar from universal war. In less than a year weshall make the break ourselves in a war with Spain.”He looked very fierce as he prophesied, and he dottedMarch over with his staccato glances.

“Well, I’ll allow that if Tammany comesin this year, we shall have war with Spain. Youcan’t ask more than that, General Triscoe?”

Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had not said a word ofthe ’battle of Leipsic’, or of the impersonalinterests which it suggested to the men. Forall these, they might still have been sitting in theirsteamer chairs on the promenade of the Norumbia ata period which seemed now of geological remoteness.The girl accounted for not being in Dresden by herfather’s having decided not to go through Berlinbut to come by way of Leipsic, which he thought theyhad better see; they had come without stopping inHamburg. They had not enjoyed Leipsic much; ithad rained the whole day before, and they had notgone out. She asked when Mrs. March was goingon to Carlsbad, and Mrs. March answered, the next morning;her husband wished to begin his cure at once.

Then Miss Triscoe pensively wondered if Carlsbad woulddo her father any good; and Mrs. March discreetlyinquired General Triscoe’s symptoms.

“Oh, he hasn’t any. But I know hecan’t be well—­with his gloomy opinions.”

“They may come from his liver,” said Mrs.March. “Nearly everything of that kinddoes. I know that Mr. March has been terriblydepressed at times, and the doctor said it was nothingbut his liver; and Carlsbad is the great place forthat, you know.”

“Perhaps I can get papa to run over some day,if he doesn’t like Dresden. It isn’tvery far, is it?”

They referred to Mrs. March’s Baedeker together,and found that it was five hours.

“Yes, that is what I thought,” said MissTriscoe, with a carelessness which convinced Mrs.March she had looked up the fact already.

“If you decide to come, you must let us getrooms for you at our hotel. We’re goingto Pupp’s; most of the English and Americansgo to the hotels on the Hill, but Pupp’s isin the thick of it in the lower town; and it’svery gay, Mr. Kenby says; he’s been there often.Mr. Burnamy is to get our rooms.”

“I don’t suppose I can get papa to go,”said Miss Triscoe, so insincerely that Mrs. Marchwas sure she had talked over the different routes;to Carlsbad with Burnamy—­probably on theway from Cuxhaven. She looked up from diggingthe point of her umbrella in the ground. “Youdidn’t meet him here this morning?”

Mrs. March governed herself to a calm which she respectedin asking, “Has Mr. Burnamy been here?”

“He came on with Mr. and Mrs. Eltwin, when wedid, and they all decided to stop over a day.They left on the twelve-o’clock train to-day.”

Mrs. March perceived that the girl had decided notto let the facts betray themselves by chance, andshe treated them as of no significance.

“No, we didn’t see him,” she said,carelessly.

The two men came walking slowly towards them, andMiss Triscoe said, “We’re going to Dresdenthis evening, but I hope we shall meet somewhere,Mrs. March.”

“Oh, people never lose sight of each other inEurope; they can’t; it’s so little!”

“Agatha,” said the girl’s father,“Mr. March tells me that the museum over thereis worth seeing.”

“Well,” the girl assented, and she tooka winning leave of the Marches, and moved gracefullyaway with her father.

“I should have thought it was Agnes,”said Mrs. March, following them with her eyes beforeshe turned upon her husband. “Did he tellyou Burnamy had been here? Well, he has!He has just gone on to Carlsbad. He made, thosepoor old Eltwins stop over with him, so he could bewith her.”

“Did she say that?”

“No, but of course he did.”

“Then it’s all settled?”

“No, it isn’t settled. It’sat the most interesting point.”

“Well, don’t read ahead. You alwayswant to look at the last page.”

“You were trying to look at the last page yourself,”she retorted, and she would have liked to punish himfor his complex dishonesty toward the affair; butupon the whole she kept her temper with him, and shemade him agree that Miss Triscoe’s getting herfather to Carlsbad was only a question of time.

They parted heart’s-friends with their ineffectualguide, who was affectionately grateful for the fewmarks they gave him, at the hotel door; and they werein just the mood to hear men singing in a fartherroom when they went down to supper. The waiter,much distracted from their own service by his dutiesto it, told them it was the breakfast party of studentswhich they had heard beginning there about noon.The revellers had now been some six hours at table,and he said they might not rise before midnight; theyhad just got to the toasts, which were apparentlyset to music.

The students of right remained a vivid color in theimpression of the university town. They pervadedthe place, and decorated it with their fantastic personaltaste in coats and trousers, as well as their corpscaps of green, white, red, and blue, but above allblue. They were not easily distinguishable fromthe bicyclers who were holding one of the dull festivalsof their kind in Leipsic that day, and perhaps theywere sometimes both students and bicyclers. Asbicyclers they kept about in the rain, which theyseemed not to mind; so far from being disheartened,they had spirits enough to take one another by thewaist at times and waltz in the square before thehotel. At one moment of the holiday some chiefsamong them drove away in carriages; at supper a winnerof prizes sat covered with badges and medals; anotherwho went by the hotel streamed with ribbons; and anelderly man at his side was bespattered with smallknots and ends of them, as if he had been in an explosionof ribbons somewhere. It seemed all to be asexciting for them, and it was as tedious for the witnesses,as any gala of students and bicyclers at home.

Mrs. March remained with an unrequited curiosity concerningtheir different colors and different caps, and shetried to make her husband find out what they severallymeant; he pretended a superior interest in the natureof a people who had such a passion for uniforms thatthey were not content with its gratification in theirimmense army, but indulged it in every pleasure andemployment of civil life. He estimated, perhapsnot very accurately, that only one man out of tenin Germany wore citizens’ dress; and of allfunctionaries he found that the dogs of the women-and-dogteams alone had no distinctive dress; even the womenhad their peasant costume.

There was an industrial fair open at Leipsic whichthey went out of the city to see after supper, alongwith a throng of Leipsickers, whom an hour’sinterval of fine weather tempted forth on the trolley;and with the help of a little corporal, who took afee for his service with the eagerness of a civilian,they got wheeled chairs, and renewed their associationswith the great Chicago Fair in seeing the expositionfrom them. This was not, March said, quite thesame as being drawn by a woman-and-dog team, whichwould have been the right means of doing a Germanfair; but it was something to have his chair pushedby a slender young girl, whose stalwart brother appliedhis strength to the chair of the lighter traveller;and it was fit that the girl should reckon the commonhire, while the man took the common tip. Theymade haste to leave the useful aspects of the fair,and had themselves trundled away to the Colonial Exhibit,where they vaguely expected something like the agreeablecorruptions of the Midway Plaisance. The ideaof her colonial progress with which Germany is tryingto affect the home-keeping imagination of her peoplewas illustrated by an encampment of savages from herCentral-African possessions. They were gettingtheir supper at the moment the Marches saw them, andwere crouching, half naked, around the fires underthe kettles, and shivering from the cold, but theywere not very characteristic of the imperial expansion,unless perhaps when an old man in a red blanket suddenlysprang up with a knife in his hand and began to chasea boy round the camp. The boy was lighter-footed,and easily outran the sage, who tripped at times onhis blanket. None of the other Central Africansseemed to care for the race, and without waiting forthe event, the American spectators ordered themselvestrundled away to another idle feature of the fair,where they hoped to amuse themselves with the imageof Old Leipsic.

This was so faithfully studied from the past in itsnarrow streets and Gothic houses that it was almostas picturesque as the present epoch in the old streetsof Hamburg. A drama had just begun to be representedon a platform of the public square in front of a fourteenth-centurybeer-house, with people talking from the windows round,and revellers in the costume of the period drinkingbeer and eating sausages at tables in the open air.Their eating and drinking were genuine, and in themidst of it a real rain began, to pour down upon them,without affecting them any more than if they had beenGermans of the nineteenth century. But it drovethe Americans to a shelter from which they could notsee the play, and when it held up, they made theirway back to their hotel.

Their car was full of returning pleasurers, some ofwhom were happy beyond the sober wont of the fatherland.The conductor took a special interest in his tipsypassengers, trying to keep them in order, and geniallyentreating them to be quiet when they were too obstreperous.From time to time he got some of them off, and then,when he remounted the car, he appealed to the remainingpassengers for their sympathy with an innocent smile,which the Americans, still strange to the unjoyousphysiognomy of the German Empire, failed to value atit* rare worth.

Before he slept that night March tried to assemblefrom the experiences and impressions of the day somefacts which he would not be ashamed of as a seriousobserver of life in Leipsic, and he remembered thattheir guide had said house-rent was very low.He generalized from the guide’s content withhis fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; andhe became quite irrelevantly aware that in Germanyno man’s clothes fitted him, or seemed expectedto fit him; that the women dressed somewhat better,and were rather pretty sometimes, and that they hadfeet as large as the kind hearts of the Germans ofevery age and sex. He was able to note, rathermore freshly, that with all their kindness the Germanswere a very nervous people, if not irritable, andat the least cause gave way to an agitation, whichindeed quickly passed, but was violent while it lasted.Several times that day he had seen encounters betweenthe portier and guests at the hotel which promisedviolence, but which ended peacefully as soon as somesimple question of train-time was solved. Theencounters always left the portier purple and perspiring,as any agitation must with a man so tight in his livery.He bemoaned himself after one of them as the victimof an unhappy calling, in which he could take no exercise.“It is a life of excitements, but not of movements,”he explained to March; and when he learned where hewas going, he regretted that he could not go to Carlsbadtoo. “For sugar?” he asked, as ifthere were overmuch of it in his own make.

March felt the tribute, but he had to say, “No;liver.”

“Ah!” said the portier, with the air offailing to get on common ground with him.

XXV.

The next morning was so fine that it would have beena fine morning in America. Its beauty was scarcelysullied, even subjectively, by the telegram whichthe portier sent after the Marches from the hotel,saying that their missing trunk had not yet been found,and their spirits were as light as the gay littleclouds which blew about in the sky, when their traindrew out in the sunshine, brilliant on the charminglandscape all the way to Carlsbad. A fatherly‘traeger’ had done his best to get themthe worst places in a non-smoking compartment, buthad succeeded so poorly that they were very comfortable,with no companions but a mother and daughter, whospoke German in soft low tones together. Theircompartment was pervaded by tobacco fumes from thesmokers, but as these were twice as many as the non-smokers,it was only fair, and after March had got a windowopen it did not matter, really.

He asked leave of the strangers in his German, andthey consented in theirs; but he could not masterthe secret of the window-catch, and the elder ladysaid in English, “Let me show you,” andcame to his help.

The occasion for explaining that they were Americansand accustomed to different car windows was so temptingthat Mrs. March could not forbear, and the other ladieswere affected as deeply as she could wish. Perhapsthey were the more affected because it presently appearedthat they had cousins in New York whom she knew of,and that they were acquainted with an American familythat had passed the winter in Berlin. Life likesto do these things handsomely, and it easily turnedout that this was a family of intimate friendshipwith the Marches; the names, familiarly spoken, abolishedall strangeness between the travellers; and they enteredinto a comparison of tastes, opinions, and experiences,from which it seemed that the objects and interestsof cultivated people in Berlin were quite the sameas those of cultivated people in New York. Eachof the parties to the discovery disclaimed any superiorityfor their respective civilizations; they wished ratherto ascribe a greater charm and virtue to the alienconditions; and they acquired such merit with one anotherthat when the German ladies got out of the train atFranzensbad, the mother offered Mrs. March an ingeniousfolding footstool which she had admired. In fact,she left her with it clasped to her breast, and bowingspeechless toward the giver in a vain wish to expressher gratitude.

“That was very pretty of her, my dear,”said March. “You couldn’t have donethat.”

“No,” she confessed; “I shouldn’thave had the courage. The courage of my emotions,”she added, thoughtfully.

“Ah, that’s the difference! A Berlinercould do it, and a Bostonian couldn’t.Do you think it so much better to have the courageof your convictions?”

“I don’t know. It seems to me thatI’m less and less certain of everything thatI used to be sure of.”

He laughed, and then he said, “I was thinkinghow, on our wedding journey, long ago, that Gray Sisterat the Hotel Dieu in Quebec offered you a rose.”

“Well?”

“That was to your pretty youth. Now thegracious stranger gives you a folding stool.”

“To rest my poor old feet. Well, I wouldrather have it than a rose, now.”

“You bent toward her at just the slant you hadwhen you took the flower that time; I noticed it.I didn’t see that you looked so very different.To be sure the roses in your cheeks have turned intorosettes; but rosettes are very nice, and they’remuch more permanent; I prefer them; they will keepin any climate.”

She suffered his mockery with an appreciative sigh.“Yes, our age caricatures our youth, doesn’tit?”

“I don’t think it gets much fun out ofit,” he assented.

“No; but it can’t help it. I usedto rebel against it when it first began. I didenjoy being young.”

“You did, my dear,” he said, taking herhand tenderly; she withdrew it, because though shecould bear his sympathy, her New England nature couldnot bear its expression. “And so did I;and we were both young a long time. Travellingbrings the past back, don’t you think? Thereat that restaurant, where we stopped for dinner—­”

“Yes, it was charming! Just as it usedto be! With that white cloth, and those tallshining bottles of wine, and the fruit in the centre,and the dinner in courses, and that young waiter whospoke English, and was so nice! I’m nevergoing home; you may, if you like.”

“You bragged to those ladies about our dining-cars;and you said that our railroad restaurants were quiteas good as the European.”

“I had to do that. But I knew better; theydon’t begin to be.”

“Perhaps not; but I’ve been thinking thattravel is a good deal alike everywhere. It’sthe expression of the common civilization of the world.When I came out of that restaurant and ran the traindown, and then found that it didn’t start forfifteen minutes, I wasn’t sure whether I wasat home or abroad. And when we changed cars atEger, and got into this train which had been bakingin the sun for us outside the station, I didn’tknow but I was back in the good old Fitchburg depot.To be sure, Wallenstein wasn’t assassinatedat Boston, but I forgot his murder at Eger, and sothat came to the same thing. It’s theseconfounded fifty-odd years. I used to recollecteverything.”

He had got up and was looking out of the window atthe landscape, which had not grown less amiable ingrowing rather more slovenly since they had crossedthe Saxon bolder into Bohemia. All the morningand early afternoon they had run through lovely levelsof harvest, where men were cradling the wheat andwomen were binding it into sheaves in the narrow fieldsbetween black spaces of forest. After they leftEger, there was something more picturesque and lessthrifty in the farming among the low hills which theygradually mounted to uplands, where they tasted amountain quality in the thin pure air. The railroadstations were shabbier; there was an indefinable touchof something Southern in the scenery and the people.Lilies were rocking on the sluggish reaches of thestreams, and where the current quickened, tall wheelswere lifting water for the fields in circles of brimmingand spilling pockets. Along the embankments,where a new track was being laid, barefooted womenwere at work with pick and spade and barrow, and littleyellow-haired girls were lugging large white-headedbabies, and watching the train go by. At an upgrade where it slowed in the ascent he began to throwout to the children the pfennigs which had been leftover from the passage in Germany, and he pleased himselfwith his bounty, till the question whether the childrencould spend the money forced itself upon him.He sat down feeling less like a good genius than a

cruel magician who had tricked them with false wealth;but he kept his remorse to himself, and tried to interesthis wife in the difference of social and civic idealexpressed in the change of the inhibitory notices atthe car windows, which in Germany had strongliestforbidden him to outlean himself, and now in Austriaentreated him not to outbow himself. She refusedto share in the speculation, or to debate the yetnicer problem involved by the placarded prayer inthe washroom to the Messrs. Travellers not to takeaway the soap; and suddenly he felt himself as tiredas she looked, with that sense of the futility oftravel which lies in wait for every one who profitsby travel.

PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

Bad wars, or what are comicallycalled good wars
Calm of those who have logicon their side
Decided not to let the factsbetray themselves by chance
Explained perhaps too fully
Futility of travel
Humanity may at last prevailover nationality
Impertinent prophecies oftheir enjoying it so much
Less certain of everythingthat I used to be sure of
Life of the ship, like thelife of the sea: a sodden monotony
Life was like the life ata sea-side hotel, but more monotonous
Madness of sight-seeing, whichspoils travel
Night so bad that it was worsethan no night at all
Our age caricatures our youth
Prices fixed by his remorse
Recipes for dishes and diseases
Reckless and culpable optimism
Repeated the nothings theyhad said already
She cares for him: thatshe was so cold shows that
She could bear his sympathy,but not its expression
Suffering under the drip-dripof his innocent egotism
They were so near in age,though they were ten years apart
Unfounded hope that sooneror later the weather would be fine
Wilful sufferers
Woman harnessed with a dogto a cart
Wooded with the precise, severelydisciplined German forests
Work he was so fond of andso weary of

THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

PART II.

XXVI.

They found Burnamy expecting them at the station inCarlsbad, and she scolded him like a mother for takingthe trouble to meet them, while she kept back forthe present any sign of knowing that he had staid overa day with the Triscoes in Leipsic. He was asaffectionately glad to see her and her husband asshe could have wished, but she would have liked itbetter if he had owned up at once about Leipsic.He did not, and it seemed to her that he was holdingher at arm’s-length in his answers about hisemployer. He would not say how he liked his work,or how he liked Mr. Stoller; he merely said that theywere at Pupp’s together, and that he had gotin a good day’s work already; and since he wouldsay no more, she contented herself with that.

The long drive from the station to the hotel was bystreets that wound down the hill-side like those ofan Italian mountain town, between gay stuccoed houses,of Southern rather than of Northern architecture; andthe impression of a Latin country was heightened ata turn of the road which brought into view a colossalcrucifix planted against a curtain of dark green foliageon the brow of one of the wooded heights that surroundedCarlsbad. When they reached the level of the Tepl,the hill-fed torrent that brawls through the littlecity under pretty bridges within walls of solid masonry,they found themselves in almost the only vehicle ona brilliant promenade thronged with a cosmopolitanworld. Germans in every manner of misfit; PolishJews in long black gabardines, with tight corkscrewcurls on their temples under their black velvet derbys;Austrian officers in tight corsets; Greek priests inflowing robes and brimless high hats; Russians incaftans and Cossacks in Astrakhan caps, accented themore hom*ogeneous masses of western Europeans, in whichit would have been hard to say which were English,French or Italians. Among the vividly dressedladies, some were imaginably Parisian from their chiccostumes, but they might easily have been Hungariansor Levantines of taste; some Americans, who might havepassed unknown in the perfection of their dress, gavetheir nationality away in the flat wooden tones oftheir voices, which made themselves heard above thelow hum of talk and the whisper of the innumerablefeet.

The omnibus worked its way at a slow walk among thepromenaders going and coming between the rows of pollardlocusts on one side and the bright walls of the houseson the other. Under the trees were tables, servedby pretty bareheaded girls who ran to and from therestaurants across the way. On both sides flashedand glittered the little shops full of silver, glass,jewelry, terracotta figurines, wood-carvings, and allthe idle frippery of watering-place traffic:they suggested Paris, and they suggested Saratoga,and then they were of Carlsbad and of no place elsein the world, as the crowd which might have been thatof other cities at certain moments could only havebeen of Carlsbad in its habitual effect.

“Do you like it?” asked Burnamy, as ifhe owned the place, and Mrs. March saw how simple-heartedhe was in his reticence, after all. She was readyto bless him when they reached the hotel and foundthat his interest had got them the only rooms leftin the house. This satisfied in her the passionfor size which is at the bottom of every American heart,and which perhaps above all else marks us the youngestof the peoples. We pride ourselves on the bignessof our own things, but we are not ungenerous, andwhen we go to Europe and find things bigger than ours,we are magnanimously happy in them. Pupp’s,in its altogether different way, was larger than anyhotel at Saratoga or at Niagara; and when Burnamytold her that it sometimes fed fifteen thousand peoplea day in the height of the season, she was personallyproud of it.

She waited with him in the rotunda of the hotel, whilethe secretary led March off to look at the rooms reservedfor them, and Burnamy hospitably turned the revolvingoctagonal case in the centre of the rotunda wherethe names of the guests were put up. They wereof all nations, but there were so many New Yorkerswhose names ended in berg, and thal, and stern, andbaum that she seemed to be gazing upon a cycloramaof the signs on Broadway. A large man of unmistakableAmerican make, but with so little that was of NewEngland or New York in his presence that she mightnot at once have thought him American, lounged towardthem with a quill toothpick in the corner of his mouth.He had a jealous blue eye, into which he seemed tryingto put a friendly light; his straight mouth stretchedinto an involuntary smile above his tawny chin-beard,and he wore his soft hat so far back from his highforehead (it showed to the crown when he took hishat off) that he had the effect of being uncovered.

At his approach Burnamy turned, and with a flush said:“Oh! Let me introduce Mr. Stoller, Mrs.March.”

Stoller took his toothpick out of his mouth and bowed;then he seemed to remember, and took off his hat.“You see Jews enough, here to make you feelat home?” he asked; and he added: “Well,we got some of ’em in Chicago, too, I guess.This young man”—­he twisted his headtoward Burnamy—­“found you easy enough?”

“It was very good of him to meet us,”Mrs. March began. “We didn’t expect—­”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Stoller,putting his toothpick back, and his hat on. “We’dgot through for the day; my doctor won’t letme work all I want to, here. Your husband’sgoing to take the cure, they tell me. Well, hewants to go to a good doctor, first. You can’tgo and drink these waters hit or miss. I foundthat out before I came.”

“Oh, no!” said Mrs. March, and she wishedto explain how they had been advised; but he saidto Burnamy:

“I sha’n’t want you again till tento-morrow morning. Don’t let me interruptyou,” he added patronizingly to Mrs. March.He put his hand up toward his hat, and sauntered awayout of the door.

Burnamy did not speak; and she only asked at last,to relieve the silence, “Is Mr. Stoller an American?”

“Why, I suppose so,” he answered, withan uneasy laugh. “His people were Germanemigrants who settled in Southern Indiana. Thatmakes him as much American as any of us, doesn’tit?”

Burnamy spoke with his mind on his French-Canadiangrandfather, who had come down through Detroit, whentheir name was Bonami; but Mrs. March answered fromher eight generations of New England ancestry.“Oh, for the West, yes, perhaps,” andthey neither of them said anything more about Stoller.

In their room, where she found March waiting for heramidst their arriving baggage, she was so full ofher pent-up opinions of Burnamy’s patron thatshe, would scarcely speak of the view from their windowsof the wooded hills up and down the Tepl. “Yes,yes; very nice, and I know I shall enjoy it ever somuch. But I don’t know what you will thinkof that poor young Burnamy!”

“Why, what’s happened to him?”

“Happened? Stoller’s happened.”

“Oh, have you seen him, already? Well?”

“Well, if you had been going to pick out thattype of man, you’d have rejected him, becauseyou’d have said he was too pat. He’slike an actor made up for a Western millionaire.Do you remember that American in ‘L’Etranger’which Bernhardt did in Boston when she first came?He, looks exactly like that, and he has the worstmanners. He stood talking to me with his haton, and a toothpick in his mouth; and he made me feelas if he had bought me, along with Burnamy, and hadpaid too much. If you don’t give him asetting down, Basil, I shall never speak to you; that’sall. I’m sure Burnamy is in some troublewith him; he’s got some sort of hold upon him;what it could be in such a short time, I can’timagine; but if ever a man seemed to be, in a man’spower, he does, in his!

“Now,” said March, “your pronounshave got so far beyond me that I think we’dbetter let it all go till after supper; perhaps I shallsee Stoller myself by that time.”

She had been deeply stirred by her encounter withStoller, but she entered with impartial intensityinto the fact that the elevator at Pupp’s hadthe characteristic of always coming up and never goingdown with passengers. It was locked into itscloset with a solid door, and there was no bell tosummon it, or any place to take it except on the ground-floor;but the stairs by which she could descend were abundantand stately; and on one landing there was the lithographof one of the largest and ugliest hotels in New York;how ugly it was, she said she should never have knownif she had not seen it there.

The dining-room was divided into the grand saloon,where they supped amid rococo sculptures and frescoes,and the glazed veranda opening by vast windows ona spread of tables without, which were already fillingup for the evening concert. Around them at thedifferent tables there were groups of faces and figuresfascinating in their strangeness, with that distinctionwhich abashes our American level in the presence ofEuropean inequality.

“How simple and unimpressive we are, Basil,”she said, “beside all these people! I usedto feel it in Europe when I was young, and now I’mcertain that we must seem like two faded-in old villagephotographs. We don’t even look intellectual!I hope we look good.”

“I know I do,” said March. The waiterwent for their supper, and they joined in guessingthe different nationalities in the room. A Frenchparty was easy enough; a Spanish mother and daughterwere not difficult, though whether they were not South-Americanremained uncertain; two elderly maiden ladies wereunmistakably of central Massachusetts, and were obviouslyof a book-club culture that had left no leaf unturned;some Triestines gave themselves away by their Venetianaccent; but a large group at a farther table were

unassignable in the strange language which they clatteredloudly together, with bursts of laughter. Theywere a family party of old and young, they were havinga good time, with a freedom which she called baronial;the ladies wore white satin, or black lace, but themen were in sack-coats; she chose to attribute them,for no reason but their outlandishness, to Transylvania.March pretended to prefer a table full of Germans,who were unmistakably bourgeois, and yet of intellectualeffect. He chose as his favorite a middle-agedman of learned aspect, and they both decided to thinkof him as the Herr Professor, but they did not imaginehow perfectly the title fitted him till he drew along comb from his waistcoat pocket and combed hishair and beard with it above the table.

The wine wrought with the Transylvanians, and theyall jargoned together at once, and laughed at thejokes passing among them. One old gentleman hada peculiar fascination from the infantile innocenceof his gums when he threw his head back to laugh,and showed an upper jaw toothless except for two incisors,standing guard over the chasm between. Suddenlyhe choked, coughed to relieve himself, hawked, heldhis napkin up before him, and—­

“Noblesse oblige,” said March, with thetone of irony which he reserved for his wife’spreoccupations with aristocracies of all sorts.“I think I prefer my Hair Professor, bourgeois,as he is.”

The ladies attributively of central Massachusettshad risen from their table, and were making for thedoor without having paid for their supper. Thehead waiter ran after them; with a real delicacy fortheir mistake he explained that though in most placesthe meals were charged in the bill, it was the customin Carlsbad to pay for them at the table; one couldsee that he was making their error a pleasant adventureto them which they could laugh over together, andwrite home about without a pang.

“And I,” said Mrs. March, shamelesslyabandoning the party of the aristocracy, “preferthe manners of the lower classes.”

“Oh, yes,” he admitted. “Theonly manners we have at home are black ones.But you mustn’t lose courage. Perhaps thenobility are not always so baronial.”

“I don’t know whether we have mannersat home,” she said, “and I don’tbelieve I care. At least we have decencies.”

“Don’t be a jingo,” said her husband.

XXVII.

Though Stoller had formally discharged Burnamy fromduty for the day, he was not so full of resourcesin himself, and he had not so general an acquaintancein the hotel but he was glad to have the young fellowmake up to him in the reading-room, that night.He laid down a New York paper ten days old in despairof having left any American news in it, and pushedseveral continental Anglo-American papers aside withhis elbow, as he gave a contemptuous glance at theforeign journals, in Bohemian, Hungarian, German,French, and Italian, which littered the large table.

“I wonder,” he said, “how long it’lltake’em, over here, to catch on to our way ofhaving pictures?”

Burnamy had come to his newspaper work since illustratedjournalism was established, and he had never had anyshock from it at home, but so sensitive is youth toenvironment that, after four days in Europe, the NewYork paper Stoller had laid down was already hideousto him. From the politic side of his nature,however, he temporized with Stoller’s preference.“I suppose it will be some time yet.”

“I wish,” said Stoller, with a savagedisregard of expressed sequences and relevancies,“I could ha’ got some pictures to sendhome with that letter this afternoon: somethingto show how they do things here, and be a kind ofobject-lesson.” This term had come up ina recent campaign when some employers, by shuttingdown their works, were showing their employees whatwould happen if the employees voted their politicalopinions into effect, and Stoller had then masteredits meaning and was fond of using it. “I’dlike ’em to see the woods around here, that thecity owns, and the springs, and the donkey-carts, andthe theatre, and everything, and give ’em somepractical ideas.”

Burnamy made an uneasy movement.

“I’d ‘a’ liked to put ’emalongside of some of our improvements, and show howa town can be carried on when it’s managed onbusiness principles.”

“Why didn’t you think of it?”

“Really, I don’t know,” said Burnamy,with a touch of impatience.

They had not met the evening before on the best ofterms. Stoller had expected Burnamy twenty-fourhours earlier, and had shown his displeasure withhim for loitering a day at Leipsic which he might havespent at Carlsbad; and Burnamy had been unsatisfactoryin accounting for the delay. But he had takenhold so promptly and so intelligently that by workingfar into the night, and through the whole forenoon,he had got Stoller’s crude mass of notes intoshape, and had sent off in time for the first steamerthe letter which was to appear over the proprietor’sname in his paper. It was a sort of rough butvery full study of the Carlsbad city government, themethods of taxation, the municipal ownership of thesprings and the lands, and the public control in everything.It condemned the aristocratic constitution of themunicipality, but it charged heavily in favor of thepurity, beneficence, and wisdom of the administration,under which there was no poverty and no idleness,and which was managed like any large business.

Stoller had sulkily recurred to his displeasure, onceor twice, and Burnamy suffered it submissively untilnow. But now, at the change in Burnamy’stone, he changed his manner a little.

“Seen your friends since supper?” he asked.

“Only a moment. They are rather tired,and they’ve gone to bed.”

That the fellow that edits that book you write for?”

“Yes; he owns it, too.”

The notion of any sort of ownership moved Stoller’srespect, and he asked more deferentially, “Makin’a good thing out of it?”

“A living, I suppose. Some of the high-classweeklies feel the competition of the ten-cent monthlies.But ‘Every Other Week’ is about the bestthing we’ve got in the literary way, and I guessit’s holding its own.”

“Have to, to let the editor come to Carlsbad,”Stoller said, with a return to the sourness of hisearlier mood. “I don’t know as I caremuch for his looks; I seen him when he came in withyou. No snap to him.” He clicked shutthe penknife he had been paring his nails with, andstarted up with the abruptness which marked all hismotions, mental and physical; as he walked heavilyout of the room he said, without looking at Burnamy,“You want to be ready by half past ten at thelatest.”

Stoller’s father and mother were poor emigrantswho made their way to the West with the instinct forsordid prosperity native to their race and class;and they set up a small butcher shop in the littleIndiana town where their son was born, and throvein it from the start. He could remember his motherhelping his father make the sausage and head-cheeseand pickle the pigs’ feet, which they took turnsin selling at as great a price as they could extortfrom the townspeople. She was a good and tendermother, and when her little Yawcup, as the boys calledJacob in mimicry after her, had grown to the school-goingage, she taught him to fight the Americans, who stonedhim when he came out of his gate, and mobbed his home-coming;and mocked and tormented him at play-time till theywore themselves into a kindlier mind toward him throughthe exhaustion of their invention. No one, sofar as the gloomy, stocky, rather dense little boycould make out, ever interfered in his behalf; andhe grew up in bitter shame for his German origin, whichentailed upon him the hard fate of being Dutch amongthe Americans. He hated his native speech somuch that he cried when he was forced to use it withhis father and mother at home; he furiously deniedit with the boys who proposed to parley with him init on such terms as “Nix come arouce in de Dytchman’shouse.” He disused it so thoroughly thatafter his father took him out of school, when he wasold enough to help in the shop, he could not get backto it. He regarded his father’s businessas part of his national disgrace, and at the costof leaving his home he broke away from it, and informallyapprenticed himself to the village blacksmith and wagon-maker.When it came to his setting up for himself in the businesshe had chosen, he had no help from his father, whohad gone on adding dollar to dollar till he was oneof the richest men in the place.

Jacob prospered too; his old playmates, who had usedhim so cruelly, had many of them come to like him;but as a Dutchman they never dreamt of asking himto their houses when they were young people, any morethan when they were children. He was long deeplyin love with an American girl whom he had never spokento, and the dream of his life was to marry an American.He ended by marrying the daughter of Pferd the brewer,who had been at an American school in Indianapolis,and had come home as fragilely and nasally Americanas anybody. She made him a good, sickly, fretfulwife; and bore him five children, of whom two survived,with no visible taint of their German origin.

In the mean time Jacob’s father had died andleft his money to his son, with the understandingthat he was to provide for his mother, who would gladlyhave given every cent to him and been no burden tohim, if she could. He took her home, and caredtenderly for her as long as she lived; and she meeklydid her best to abolish herself in a household tryingso hard to be American. She could not help hernative accent, but she kept silence when her son’swife had company; and when her eldest granddaughterbegan very early to have American callers, she wentout of the room; they would not have noticed her ifshe had staid.

Before this Jacob had come forward publicly in proportionto his financial importance in the community.He first commended himself to the Better Element bycrushing out a strike in his Buggy Works, which werenow the largest business interest of the place; andhe rose on a wave of municipal reform to such a heightof favor with the respectable classes that he waselected on a citizens’ ticket to the Legislature.In the reaction which followed he was barely defeatedfor Congress, and was talked of as a dark horse whomight be put up for the governorship some day; butthose who knew him best predicted that he would notget far in politics, where his bull-headed businessways would bring him to ruin sooner or later; theysaid, “You can’t swing a bolt like youcan a strike.”

When his mother died, he surprised his old neighborsby going to live in Chicago, though he kept his worksin the place where he and they had grown up together.His wife died shortly after, and within four yearshe lost his three eldest children; his son, it wassaid, had begun to go wrong first. But the rumorof his increasing wealth drifted back from Chicago;he was heard of in different enterprises and speculations;at last it was said that he had bought a newspaper,and then his boyhood friends decided that Jake wasgoing into politics again.

In the wider horizons and opener atmosphere of thegreat city he came to understand better that to bean American in all respects was not the best.His mounting sense of importance began to be retroactivein the direction of his ancestral home; he wrote backto the little town near Wurzburg which his peoplehad come from, and found that he had relatives stillliving there, some of whom had become people of substance;and about the time his health gave way from life-longgluttony, and he was ordered to Carlsbad, he had prettymuch made up his mind to take his younger daughtersand put them in school for a year or two in Wurzburg,for a little discipline if not education. He hadnow left them there, to learn the language, whichhe had forgotten with such heart-burning and shame,and music, for which they had some taste.

The twins loudly lamented their fate, and they partedfrom their father with open threats of running away;and in his heart he did not altogether blame them.He came away from Wurzburg raging at the disrespectfor his money and his standing in business which hadbrought him a more galling humiliation there thananything he had suffered in his boyhood at Des Vaches.It intensified him in his dear-bought Americanism tothe point of wishing to commit lese majesty in theteeth of some local dignitaries who had snubbed him,and who seemed to enjoy putting our eagle to shamein his person; there was something like the bird ofhis step-country in Stoller’s pale eyes andhuge beak.

XXVIII.

March sat with a company of other patients in theanteroom of the doctor, and when it came his turnto be prodded and kneaded, he was ashamed at beingtold he was not so bad a case as he had dreaded.The doctor wrote out a careful dietary for him, witha prescription of a certain number of glasses of waterat a certain spring and a certain number of baths,and a rule for the walks he was to take before andafter eating; then the doctor patted him on the shoulderand pushed him caressingly out of his inner office.It was too late to begin his treatment that day, buthe went with his wife to buy a cup, with a strap forhanging it over his shoulder, and he put it on soas to be an invalid with the others at once; he camenear forgetting the small napkin of Turkish towellingwhich they stuffed into their cups, but happily theshopman called him back in time to sell it to him.

At five the next morning he rose, and on his way tothe street exchanged with the servants cleaning thehotel stairs the first of the gloomy ‘GutenMorgens’ which usher in the day at Carlsbad.They cannot be so finally hopeless as they sound;they are probably expressive only of the popular despairof getting through with them before night; but Marchheard the salutations sorrowfully groaned out on everyhand as he joined the straggling current of invalidswhich swelled on the way past the silent shops and

cafes in the Alte Wiese, till it filled the street,and poured its thousands upon the promenade beforethe classic colonnade of the Muhlbrunn. On theother bank of the Tepl the Sprudel flings its steamingwaters by irregular impulses into the air under a pavilionof iron and glass; but the Muhlbrunn is the sourceof most resort. There is an instrumental concertsomewhere in Carlsbad from early rising till bedtime;and now at the Muhlbrunn there was an orchestra alreadyplaying; and under the pillared porch, as well asbefore it, the multitude shuffled up and down, drainingtheir cups by slow sips, and then taking each hisplace in the interminable line moving on to replenishthem at the spring.

A picturesque majority of Polish Jews, whom some viceof their climate is said peculiarly to fit for thehealing effects of Carlsbad, most took his eye intheir long gabardines of rusty black and their derbyhats of plush or velvet, with their corkscrew curlscoming down before their ears. They were oldand young, they were grizzled and red and black, butthey seemed all well-to-do; and what impresses onefirst and last at Carlsbad is that its waters aremainly for the healing of the rich. After thePolish Jews, the Greek priests of Russian race werethe most striking figures. There were types ofLatin ecclesiastics, who were striking in their waytoo; and the uniforms of certain Austrian officersand soldiers brightened the picture. Here andthere a southern face, Italian or Spanish or Levantine,looked passionately out of the mass of dull Germanvisages; for at Carlsbad the Germans, more than anyother gentile nation, are to the fore. Theirmisfits, their absence of style, imparted the prevalenteffect; though now and then among the women a Hungarian,or Pole, or Parisian, or American, relieved the eyewhich seeks beauty and grace rather than the domesticvirtues. There were certain faces, types of discomfortand disease, which appealed from the beginning to theend. A young Austrian, yellow as gold, and alivid South-American, were of a lasting fascinationto March.

What most troubled him, in his scrutiny of the crowd,was the difficulty of assigning people to their respectivenations, and he accused his years of having dulledhis perceptions; but perhaps it was from their longdisuse in his hom*ogeneous American world. TheAmericans themselves fused with the European raceswho were often so hard to make out; his fellow-citizenswould not be identified till their bad voices gavethem away; he thought the women’s voices theworst.

At the springs, a line of young girls with a steadymechanical action dipped the cups into the steamingsource, and passed them impersonally up to their owners.With the patients at the Muhlbrunn it was often ahalf-hour before one’s turn came, and at alla strict etiquette forbade any attempt to anticipateit. The water was merely warm and flat, and afterthe first repulsion one could forget it. March

formed a childish habit of counting ten between thesips, and of finishing the cup with a gulp which endedit quickly; he varied his walks between cups by goingsometimes to a bridge at the end of the colonnade wherea group of Triestines were talking Venetian, and sometimesto the little Park beyond the Kurhaus, where someold women were sweeping up from the close sward theyellow leaves which the trees had untidily droppedovernight. He liked to sit there and look atthe city beyond the Tepl, where it climbed the woodedheights in terraces till it lost its houses in theskirts and folds of the forest. Most morningsit rained, quietly, absent-mindedly, and this, withthe chili in the air, deepened a pleasant illusionof Quebec offered by the upper town across the stream;but there were sunny mornings when the mountains shonesoftly through a lustrous mist, and the air was almostwarm.

Once in his walk he found himself the companion ofBurnamy’s employer, whom he had sometimes notedin the line at the Muhlbrunn, waiting his turn, cupin hand, with a face of sullen impatience. Stollerexplained that though you could have the water broughtto you at your hotel, he chose to go to the springfor the sake of the air; it was something you hadgot to live through; before he had that young Burnamyto help him he did not know what to do with his time,but now, every minute he was not eating or sleepinghe was working; his cure did not oblige him to walkmuch. He examined March, with a certain mixtureof respect and contempt, upon the nature of the literarylife, and how it differed from the life of a journalist.He asked if he thought Burnamy would amount to anythingas a literary man; he so far assented to March’sfaith in him as to say, “He’s smart.”He told of leaving his daughters in school at Wurzburg;and upon the whole he moved March with a sense ofhis pathetic loneliness without moving his liking,as he passed lumberingly on, dangling his cup.

March gave his own cup to the little maid at his spring,and while she gave it to a second, who dipped it andhanded it to a third for its return to him, he heardan unmistakable fellow-countryman saying good-, morningto them all in English. “Are you going toteach them United States?” he asked of a facewith which he knew such an appeal would not fail.

“Well,” the man admitted, “I tryto teach them that much. They like it. Youare an American? I am glad of it. I have’most lost the use of my lungs, here. I’ma great talker, and I talk to my wife till she’sabout dead; then I’m out of it for the restof the day; I can’t speak German.”

His manner was the free, friendly manner of the West.He must be that sort of untravelled American whomMarch had so seldom met, but he was afraid to askhim if this was his first time at Carlsbad, lest itshould prove the third or fourth. “Areyou taking the cure?” he asked instead.

“Oh, no. My wife is. She’llbe along directly; I come down here and drink thewaters to encourage her; doctor said to. Thatgets me in for the diet, too. I’ve e’tmore cooked fruit since I been here than I ever didin my life before. Prunes? My Lord, I’mfull o’ prunes! Well, it does me good tosee an American, to know him. I couldn’t‘a’ told you, it you hadn’t havespoken.”

“Well,” said March, “I shouldn’thave been so sure of you, either, by your looks.”

“Yes, we can’t always tell ourselves fromthese Dutch. But they know us, and they don’twant us, except just for one thing, and that’sour money. I tell you, the Americans are thechumps over here. Soon’s they got all ourmoney, or think they have, they say, ’Here, youAmericans, this is my country; you get off;’and we got to get. Ever been over before?”

“A great while ago; so long that I can hardlybelieve it.”

“It’s my first time. My name’sOtterson: I’m from out in Iowa.”

March gave him his name, and added that he was fromNew York.

“Yes. I thought you was Eastern. Butthat wasn’t an Eastern man you was just with?”

“No; he’s from Chicago. He’sa Mr. Stoller.”

“Not the buggy man?”

“I believe he makes buggies.”

“Well, you do meet everybody here.”The Iowan was silent for a moment, as if, hushed bythe weighty thought. “I wish my wife couldhave seen him. I just want her to see the manthat made our buggy. I don’t know what’skeeping her, this morning,” he added, apologetically.“Look at that fellow, will you, tryin’to get away from those women!” A young officerwas doing his best to take leave of two ladies, whoseemed to be mother and daughter; they detained himby their united arts, and clung to him with caressingwords and looks. He was red in the face with hispolite struggles when he broke from them at last.“How they do hang on to a man, over here!”the Iowa man continued. “And the Americansare as bad as any. Why, there’s one rattylittle Englishman up at our place, and our girls justswarm after him; their mothers are worse. Well,it’s so, Jenny,” he said to the lady whohad joined them and whom March turned round to seewhen he spoke to her. “If I wanted a foreignerI should go in for a man. And these officers!Put their mustaches up at night in curl-papers, theytell me. Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson, Mr. March.Well, had your first glass, yet, Jenny? I’mjust going for my second tumbler.”

He took his wife back to the spring, and began totell her about Stoller; she made no sign of caringfor him; and March felt inculpated. She relenteda little toward him as they drank together; when hesaid he must be going to breakfast with his wife,she asked where he breakfasted, and said, “Why,we go to the Posthof, too.” He answeredthat then they should be sure some time to meet there;he did not venture further; he reflected that Mrs.March had her reluctances too; she distrusted peoplewho had amused or interested him before she met them.

XXIX.

Burnamy had found the Posthof for them, as he hadfound most of the other agreeable things in Carlsbad,which he brought to their knowledge one by one, withsuch forethought that March said he hoped he shouldbe cared for in his declining years as an editor ratherthan as a father; there was no tenderness like a youngcontributor’s.

Many people from the hotels on the hill found at Pupp’sjust the time and space between their last cup ofwater and their first cup of coffee which are prescribedat Carlsbad; but the Marches were aware somehow fromthe beginning that Pupp’s had not the hold uponthe world at breakfast which it had at the mid-daydinner, or at supper on the evenings when the concertwas there. Still it was amusing, and they werepatient of Burnamy’s delay till he could geta morning off from Stoller and go with them to thePosthof. He met Mrs. March in the reading-room,where March was to join them on his way from the springswith his bag of bread. The earlier usage of buyingthe delicate pink slices of Westphalia ham, whichform the chief motive of a Carlsbad breakfast, at acertain shop in the town, and carrying them to thecafe with you, is no longer of such binding forceas the custom of getting your bread at the Swiss bakery.You choose it yourself at the counter, which beginsto be crowded by half past seven, and when you havecollected the prescribed loaves into the basket ofmetallic filigree given you by one of the baker’smaids, she puts it into a tissue-paper bag of a gayred color, and you join the other invalids streamingaway from the bakery, their paper bags making a festiverustling as they go.

Two roads lead out of the town into the lovely meadow-lands,a good mile up the brawling Tepl, before they joinon the right side of the torrent, where the Posthoflurks nestled under trees whose boughs let the sunand rain impartially through upon its army of littletables. By this time the slow omnibus plyingbetween Carlsbad and some villages in the valley beyondhas crossed from the left bank to the right, and keepson past half a dozen other cafes, where patients whoseprescriptions marshal them beyond the Posthof dropoff by the dozens and scores.

The road on the left bank of the Tepl is wild andoverhung at points with wooded steeps, when it leavesthe town; but on the right it is bordered with shopsand restaurants a great part of its length. Inleafy nooks between these, uphill walks begin theirclimb of the mountains, from the foot of votive shrinesset round with tablets commemorating in German, French,Russian, Hebrew, Magyar and Czech, the cure of high-well-bornsof all those races and languages. Booths glitteringwith the lapidary’s work in the cheaper gems,or full of the ingenious figures of the toy-makers,alternate with the shrines and the cafes on the wayto the Posthof, and with their shoulders against theoverhanging cliff, spread for the passing crowd alure of Viennese jewelry in garnets, opals, amethysts,and the like, and of such Bohemian playthings as carrot-eatingrabbits, worsted-working cats, dancing-bears, andpeaco*cks that strut about the feet of the passersand expand their iridescent tails in mimic pride.

Burnamy got his charges with difficulty by the shrinesin which they felt the far-reflected charm of thecrucifixes of the white-hot Italian highways of theirearly travel, and by the toyshops where they had amechanical, out-dated impulse to get something forthe children, ending in a pang for the fact that theywere children no longer. He waited politely whileMrs. March made up her mind that she would not buyany laces of the motherly old women who showed themunder pent-roofs on way-side tables; and he waitedpatiently at the gate of the flower-gardens beyondthe shops where March bought lavishly of sweetpeasefrom the businesslike flower-woman, and feigned a gratefuljoy in her because she knew no English, and gave hima chance of speaking his German.

“You’ll find,” he said, as theycrossed the road again, “that it’s wellto trifle a good deal; it makes the time pass.I should still be lagging along in my thirties ifit hadn’t been for fooling, and here I am wellon in my fifties, and Mrs. March is younger than ever.”

They were at the gate of the garden and grounds ofthe cafe at last, and a turn of the path brought themto the prospect of its tables, under the trees, betweenthe two long glazed galleries where the breakfasterstake refuge at other tables when it rains; it rainsnearly always, and the trunks of the trees are asgreen with damp as if painted; but that morning thesun was shining. At the verge of the open spacea group of pretty serving-maids, each with her nameon a silver band pinned upon her breast, met themand bade them a ‘Guten Morgen’ of almostcheerful note, but gave way, to an eager little smilingblonde, who came pushing down the path at sight ofBurnamy, and claimed him for her own.

“Ah, Lili! We want an extra good table,this morning. These are some American Excellencies,and you must do your best for them.”

“Oh, yes,” the girl answered in English,after a radiant salutation of the Marches; “Iget you one.”

“You are a little more formerly, to-day, andI didn’t had one already.”

She ran among the tables along the edge of the westernedge of the gallery, and was far beyond hearing hisprotest that he was not earlier than usual when shebeckoned him to the table she had found. She hadcrowded it in between two belonging to other girls,and by the time her breakfasters came up she was readyfor their order, with the pouting pretence that thegirls always tried to rob her of the best places.Burnamy explained proudly, when she went, that noneof the other girls ever got an advantage of her; shehad more custom than any three of them, and she hadhired a man to help her carry her orders. Thegirls were all from the neighboring villages, he said,and they lived at home in the winter on their summertips; their wages were nothing, or less, for sometimesthey paid for their places.

“What a mass of information!” said March.“How did you come by it?”

“Newspaper habit of interviewing the universe.”

“It’s not a bad habit, if one doesn’tcarry it too far. How did Lili learn her English?”

“She takes lessons in the winter. She’sa perfect little electric motor. I don’tbelieve any Yankee girl could equal her.”

“She would expect to marry a millionaire ifshe did. What astonishes one over here is tosee how contentedly people prosper along on their ownlevel. And the women do twice the work of themen without expecting to equal them in any other way.At Pupp’s, if we go to one end of the out-doorrestaurant, it takes three men to wait on us:one to bring our coffee or tea, another to bring ourbread and meat, and another to make out our bill,and I have to tip all three of them. If we goto the other end, one girl serves us, and I have togive only one fee; I make it less than the least Igive any three of the men waiters.”

“You ought to be ashamed of that,” saidhis wife.

“I’m not. I’m simply proudof your sex, my dear.”

“Women do nearly everything, here,” saidBurnamy, impartially. “They built thatbig new Kaiserbad building: mixed the mortar,carried the hods, and laid the stone.”

“That makes me prouder of the sex than ever.But come, Mr. Burnamy! Isn’t there anybodyof polite interest that you know of in this crowd?”

“Well, I can’t say,” Burnamy hesitated.

The breakfasters had been thronging into the groveand the galleries; the tables were already filled,and men were bringing other tables on their heads,and making places for them, with entreaties for pardoneverywhere; the proprietor was anxiously directingthem; the pretty serving-girls were running to andfrom the kitchen in a building apart with shrill,sweet promises of haste. The morning sun fellbroken through the leaves on the gay hats and dressesof the ladies, and dappled the figures of the menwith harlequin patches of light and shade. A tallwoman, with a sort of sharpened beauty, and an artificialpermanency of tint in her cheeks and yellow hair,came trailing herself up the sun-shot path, and found,with hardy insistence upon the publicity, places forthe surly-looking, down-faced young man behind her,and for her maid and her black poodle; the dog waslike the black poodle out of Faust. Burnamy hadheard her history; in fact, he had already roughedout a poem on it, which he called Europa, not afterthe old fable, but because it seemed to him that sheexpressed Europe, on one side of its civilization,and had an authorized place in its order, as she wouldnot have had in ours. She was where she was bya toleration of certain social facts which correspondsin Europe to our reverence for the vested interests.In her history there, had been officers and bankers;even foreign dignitaries; now there was this sullenyoung fellow . . . . Burnamy had wondered if itwould do to offer his poem to March, but the presenceof the original abashed him, and in his mind he hadtorn the poem up, with a heartache for its aptness.

“I don’t believe,” he said, “thatI recognize-any celebrities here.”

“I’m sorry,” said March. “Mrs.March would have been glad of some Hoheits, some Grafsand Grafins, or a few Excellenzes, or even some merewell-borns. But we must try to get along withthe picturesqueness.”

“I’m satisfied with the picturesqueness,”said his wife. “Don’t worry aboutme, Mr. Burnamy.”

“Why can’t we have this sort of thingat home?”

“We’re getting something like it in theroof-gardens,” said March. “We couldn’thave it naturally because the climate is against it,with us. At this time in the morning over there,the sun would be burning the life out of the air,and the flies would be swarming on every table.At nine A. M. the mosquitoes would be eating us upin such a grove as this. So we have to use artifice,and lift our Posthof above the fly-line and the mosquito-lineinto the night air. I haven’t seen a flysince I came to Europe. I really miss them; itmakes me homesick.”

“There are plenty in Italy,” his wifesuggested.

“We must get down there before we go home.”

“But why did nobody ever tell us that therewere no flies in Germany? Why did no travellerever put it in his book? When your stewardesssaid so on the steamer, I remember that you regardedit as a bluff.” He turned to Burnamy, whowas listening with the deference of a contributor:“Isn’t Lili rather long? I mean forsuch a very prompt person. Oh, no!”

But Burnamy got to his feet, and shouted “Fraulein!”to Lili; with her hireling at her heels she was flyingdown a distant aisle between the tables. Shecalled back, with a face laughing over her shoulder,“In a minute!” and vanished in the crowd.

“Does that mean anything in particular?There’s really no hurry.”

“Oh, I think she’ll come now,” saidBurnamy. March protested that he had only beenamused at Lili’s delay; but his wife scoldedhim for his impatience; she begged Burnamy’spardon, and repeated civilities passed between them.She asked if he did not think some of the young ladieswere pretty beyond the European average; a very fewhad style; the mothers were mostly fat, and not stylish;it was well not to regard the fathers too closely;several old gentlemen were clearing their throats behindtheir newspapers, with noises that made her quail.There was no one so effective as the Austrian officers,who put themselves a good deal on show, bowing fromtheir hips to favored groups; with the sun glintingfrom their eyeglasses, and their hands pressing theirsword-hilts, they moved between the tables with thegait of tight-laced women.

“They all wear corsets,” Burnamy explained.

“How much you know already!” said Mrs.March. “I can see that Europe won’tbe lost on you in anything. Oh, who’s that?”A lady whose costume expressed saris at every pointglided up the middle aisle of the grove with a gracefultilt. Burnamy was silent. “She mustbe an American. Do you know who she is?”

“Yes.” He hesitated, a little toname a woman whose tragedy had once filled the newspapers.

Mrs. March gazed after her with the fascination whichsuch tragedies inspire. “What grace!Is she beautiful?”

“Very.” Burnamy had not obtrudedhis knowledge, but somehow Mrs. March did not likehis knowing who she was, and how beautiful. Sheasked March to look, but he refused.

“Those things are too squalid,” he said,and she liked him for saying it; she hoped it wouldnot be lost upon Burnamy.

One of the waitresses tripped on the steps near themand flung the burden off her tray on the stone floorbefore her; some of the dishes broke, and the breakfastwas lost. Tears came into the girl’s eyesand rolled down her hot cheeks. “There!That is what I call tragedy,” said March.“She’ll have to pay for those things.”

“Oh, give her the money, dearest!”

“How can I?”

The girl had just got away with the ruin when Liliand her hireling behind her came bearing down uponthem with their three substantial breakfasts on twowell-laden trays. She forestalled Burnamy’sreproaches for her delay, laughing and bridling, whileshe set down the dishes of ham and tongue and egg,and the little pots of coffee and frothed milk.

“I could not so soon I wanted, because I wasto serve an American princess.”

Mrs. March started with proud conjecture of one ofthose noble international marriages which fill ourwomen with vainglory for such of their compatriotsas make them.

“Oh, come now, Lili!” said Burnamy.“We have queens in America, but nothing so lowas princesses. This was a queen, wasn’tit?”

She referred the case to her hireling, who confirmedher. “All people say it is princess,”she insisted.

“Well, if she’s a princess we must lookher up after breakfast,” said Burnamy.“Where is she sitting?”

She pointed at a corner so far off on the other sidethat no one could be distinguished, and then was gone,with a smile flashed over her shoulder, and her hirelingtrying to keep up with her.

“We’re all very proud of Lili’shaving a hired man,” said Burnamy. “Wethink it reflects credit on her customers.”

March had begun his breakfast with-the voracious appetiteof an early-rising invalid. “What coffee!”

He drew a long sigh after the first draught.

“It’s said to be made of burnt figs,”said Burnamy, from the inexhaustible advantage ofhis few days’ priority in Carlsbad.

“Then let’s have burnt figs introducedat home as soon as possible. But why burnt figs?That seems one of those doubts which are much moredifficult than faith.”

“It’s not only burnt figs,” saidBurnamy, with amiable superiority, “if it isburnt figs, but it’s made after a formula inventedby a consensus of physicians, and enforced by themunicipality. Every cafe in Carlsbad makes thesame kind of coffee and charges the same price.”

“You are leaving us very little to find outfor ourselves,” sighed March.

“Oh, I know a lot more things. Are youfond of fishing?”

“Not very.”

“You can get a permit to catch trout in theTepl, but they send an official with you who keepscount, and when you have had your sport, the troutbelong to the municipality just as they did beforeyou caught them.”

“I don’t see why that isn’t a goodnotion: the last thing I should want to do wouldbe to eat a fish that I had caught, and that I waspersonally acquainted with. Well, I’m nevergoing away from Carlsbad. I don’t wonderpeople get their doctors to tell them to come back.”

Burnamy told them a number of facts he said Stollerhad got together about the place, and had given himto put in shape. It was run in the interest ofpeople who had got out of order, so that they wouldkeep coming to get themselves in order again; youcould hardly buy an unwholesome meal in the town;all the cooking was ‘kurgemass’. Hewon such favor with his facts that he could not stopin time: he said to March, “But if youever should have a fancy for a fish of your personalacquaintance, there’s a restaurant up the Tepl,where they let you pick out your trout in the water;then they catch him and broil him for you, and youknow what you are eating.”

“Is it a municipal restaurant?”

“Semi-municipal,” said Burnamy, laughing.

“We’ll take Mrs. March,” said herhusband, and in her gravity Burnamy felt the limitationsof a woman’s sense of humor, which always definethemselves for men so unexpectedly.

He did what he could to get back into her good gracesby telling her what he knew about distinctions anddignities that he now saw among the breakfasters.The crowd had now grown denser till the tables wereset together in such labyrinths that any one who leftthe central aisle was lost in them. The serving-girlsran more swiftly to and fro, responding with a morenervous shrillness to the calls of “Fraulein!Fraulein!” that followed them. The proprietor,in his bare head, stood like one paralyzed by hisprosperity, which sent up all round him the clash ofknives and crockery, and the confusion of tongues.It was more than an hour before Burnamy caught Lili’seye, and three times she promised to come and be paidbefore she came. Then she said, “It is sonice, when you stay a little,” and when he toldher of the poor Fraulein who had broken the dishesin her fall near them, she almost wept with tenderness;she almost winked with wickedness when he asked ifthe American princess was still in her place.

“Do go and see who it can be!” Mrs. Marchentreated. “We’ll wait here,”and he obeyed. “I am not sure that I likehim,” she said, as soon as he was out of hearing.“I don’t know but he’s coarse, afterall. Do you approve of his knowing so many people’s‘taches’ already?”

“Would it be any better later?” he askedin tern. “He seemed to find you interested.”

“It’s very different with us; we’renot young,” she urged, only half seriously.

Her husband laughed. “I see you want meto defend him. Oh, hello!” he cried, andshe saw Burnamy coming toward them with a young lady,who was nodding to them from as far as she could seethem. “This is the easy kind of thing thatmakes you Blush for the author if you find it in anovel.”

XXX.

Mrs. March fairly took Miss Triscoe in her arms tokiss her. “Do you know I felt it must beyou, all the time! When did you come? Whereis your father? What hotel are you staying at?”

It appeared, while Miss Triscoe was shaking handswith March, that it was last night, and her fatherwas finishing his breakfast, and it was one of thehotels on the hill. On the way back to her fatherit appeared that he wished to consult March’sdoctor; not that there was anything the matter.

The general himself was not much softened by the reunionwith his fellow-Americans; he confided to them thathis coffee was poisonous; but he seemed, standingup with the Paris-New York Chronicle folded in hishand, to have drunk it all. Was March going offon his forenoon tramp? He believed that was partof the treatment, which was probably all humbug, thoughhe thought of trying it, now he was there. Hewas told the walks were fine; he looked at Burnamyas if he had been praising them, and Burnamy saidhe had been wondering if March would not like to trya mountain path back to his hotel; he said, not sosincerely, that he thought Mrs. March would like it.

“I shall like your account of it,” sheanswered. “But I’ll walk back on alevel, if you please.”

“Oh, yes,” Miss Triscoe pleaded, “comewith us!”

She played a little comedy of meaning to go back withher father so gracefully that Mrs. March herself couldscarcely have told just where the girl’s realpurpose of going with Burnamy began to be evident,or just how she managed to make General Triscoe begto have the pleasure of seeing Mrs. March back toher hotel.

March went with the young people across the meadowbehind the Posthof and up into the forest, which beganat the base of the mountain. At first they triedto keep him in the range of their talk; but he fellbehind more and more, and as the talk narrowed tothemselves it was less and less possible to includehim in it. When it began to concern their commonappreciation of the Marches, they even tried to getout of his hearing.

“They’re so young in their thoughts,”said Burnamy, “and they seem as much interestedin everything as they could have been thirty yearsago. They belong to a time when the world wasa good deal fresher than it is now; don’t youthink? I mean, in the eighteen-sixties.”

“Oh, yes, I can see that.”

“I don’t know why we shouldn’t beborn older in each generation than people were inthe last. Perhaps we are,” he suggested.

“I don’t know how you mean,” saidthe girl, keeping vigorously up with him; she lethim take the jacket she threw off, but she would nothave his hand at the little steeps where he wantedto give it.

“I don’t believe I can quite make it outmyself. But fancy a man that began to act attwenty, quite unconsciously of course, from the pastexperience of the whole race—­”

“He would be rather a dreadful person, wouldn’the?”

“Rather monstrous, yes,” he owned, witha laugh. “But that’s where the psychologicalinterest would come in.”

As if she did not feel the notion quite pleasant sheturned from it. “I suppose you’vebeen writing all sorts of things since you came here.”

“Well, it hasn’t been such a great whileas it’s seemed, and I’ve had Mr. Stoller’spsychological interests to look after.”

“Oh, yes! Do you like him?”

“I don’t know. He’s a lumpof honest selfishness. He isn’t bad.You know where to have him. He’s simple,too.”

“You mean, like Mr. March?”

“I didn’t mean that; but why not?They’re not of the same generation, but Stollerisn’t modern.”

“I’m very curious to see him,” saidthe girl.

“Do you want me to introduce him?”

“You can introduce him to papa.”

They stopped and looked across the curve of the mountingpath, down on March, who had sunk on a way-side seat,and was mopping his forehead. He saw them, andcalled up: “Don’t wait for me.I’ll join you, gradually.”

“I don’t want to lose you,” Burnamycalled back, but he kept on with Miss Triscoe.“I want to get the Hirschensprung in,”he explained. “It’s the cliff wherea hunted deer leaped down several hundred feet to getaway from an emperor who was after him.”

“Oh, yes. They have them everywhere.”

“Do they? Well, anyway, there’s anoble view up there.”

There was no view on the way up. The Germans’notion of a woodland is everywhere that of a denseforest such as their barbarous tribes primevally herdedin. It means the close-set stems of trees, withtheir tops interwoven in a roof of boughs and leavesso densely that you may walk dry through it almostas long as a German shower lasts. When the sunshines there is a pleasant greenish light in the aisles,shot here and there with the gold that trickles through.There is nothing of the accident of an American woodin these forests, which have been watched and weededby man ever since they burst the soil. They remainnurseries, but they have the charm which no humancare can alienate. The smell of their bark andtheir leaves, and of the moist, flowerless earth abouttheir roots, came to March where he sat rich with thememories of his country-bred youth, and drugged allconsciousness of his long life in cities since, andmade him a part of nature, with dulled interests anddimmed perspectives, so that for the moment he hadthe enjoyment of exemption from care. There wasno wild life to penetrate his isolation; no birds,not a squirrel, not an insect; an old man who had biddenhim good-morning, as he came up, kept fumbling atthe path with his hoe, and was less intrusive thanif he had not been there.

March thought of the impassioned existence of theseyoung people playing the inevitable comedy of hideand seek which the youth of the race has played fromthe beginning of time. The other invalids whohaunted the forest, and passed up and down beforehim in fulfilment of their several prescriptions,had a thin unreality in spite of the physical bulkthat prevailed among them, and they heightened therelief that the forest-spirit brought him from thestrenuous contact of that young drama. He hadbeen almost painfully aware that the persons in ithad met, however little they knew it, with an eagernessintensified by their brief separation, and he fanciedit was the girl who had unconsciously operated theirreunion in response to the young man’s longing,her will making itself electrically felt through spaceby that sort of wireless telegraphy which love haslong employed, and science has just begun to imagine.

He would have been willing that they should get homealone, but he knew that his wife would require anaccount of them from him, and though he could haveinvented something of the kind, if it came to the worst,he was aware that it would not do for him to arrivewithout them. The thought goaded him from hisseat, and he joined the upward procession of his fellow-sick,as it met another procession straggling downward; theways branched in all directions, with people on themeverywhere, bent upon building up in a month the healthwhich they would spend the rest of the year in demolishing.

He came upon his charges unexpectedly at a turn ofthe path, and Miss Triscoe told him that he oughtto have been with them for the view from the Hirschensprung.It was magnificent, she said, and she made Burnamycorroborate her praise of it, and agree with her thatit was worth the climb a thousand times; he modestlyaccepted the credit she appeared willing to give him,of inventing the Hirschensprung.

XXXI.

Between his work for Stoller and what sometimes seemedthe obstructiveness of General Triscoe, Burnamy wasnot very much with Miss Triscoe. He was not devout,but he went every Sunday to the pretty English churchon the hill, where he contributed beyond his meansto the support of the English clergy on the Continent,for the sake of looking at her back hair during theservice, and losing himself in the graceful lineswhich defined, the girl’s figure from the slantof her flowery hat to the point where the pewtop crossedher elastic waist. One happy morning the generaldid not come to church, and he had the fortune towalk home with her to her pension, where she lingeredwith him a moment, and almost made him believe shemight be going to ask him to come in.

The next evening, when he was sauntering down therow of glittering shops beside the Tepl, with Mrs.March, they overtook the general and his daughterat a place where the girl was admiring some stork-scissorsin the window; she said she wished she were stilllittle, so that she could get them. They walkedhome with the Triscoes, and then he hurried Mrs. Marchback to the shop. The man had already put up hisshutters, and was just closing his door, but Burnamypushed in, and asked to look at the stork-scissorsthey had seen in the window. The gas was out,and the shopman lighted a very dim candle, to showthem.

“I knew you wanted to get them for her, afterwhat she said, Mrs. March,” he laughed, nervously,“and you must let me lend you the money.”

“Why, of course!” she answered, joyfullyhumoring his feint. “Shall I put my cardin for the man to send home to her with them?”

“Well—­no. No. Not yourcard—­exactly. Or, yes! Yes, youmust, I suppose.”

They made the hushing street gay with their laughter;the next evening Miss Triscoe came upon the Marchesand Burnamy where they sat after supper listeningto the concert at Pupp’s, and thanked Mrs. Marchfor the scissors. Then she and Burnamy had theirlaugh again, and Miss Triscoe joined them, to herfather’s frowning mystification. He staredround for a table; they were all taken, and he couldnot refuse the interest Burnamy made with the waitersto bring them one and crowd it in. He had toask him to sup with them, and Burnamy sat down andheard the concert through beside Miss Triscoe.

“What is so tremendously amusing in a pair ofstork-scissors?” March demanded, when his wifeand he were alone.

“Why, I was wanting to tell you, dearest,”she began, in a tone which he felt to be wheedling,and she told the story of the scissors.

“Look here, my dear! Didn’t you promiseto let this love-affair alone?”

“That was on the ship. And besides, whatwould you have done, I should like to know? Wouldyou have refused to let him buy them for her?”She added, carelessly, “He wants us to go tothe Kurhaus ball with him.”

“Oh, does he!”

“Yes. He says he knows that she can gether father to let her go if we will chaperon them.And I promised that you would.”

“That I would?”

“It will do just as well if you go. Andit will be very amusing; you can see something ofCarlsbad society.”

“But I’m not going!” he declared.“It would interfere with my cure. The sittingup late would be bad enough, but I should get veryhungry, and I should eat potato salad and sausages,and drink beer, and do all sorts of unwholesome things.”

“Nonsense! The refreshments will be ‘kurgemass’,of course.”

“You can go yourself,” he said.

A ball is not the same thing for a woman after fiftyas it is before twenty, but still it has claims uponthe imagination, and the novel circ*mstance of a ballin the Kurhaus in Carlsbad enhanced these for Mrs.March. It was the annual reunion which is givenby municipal authority in the large hall above thebathrooms; it is frequented with safety and pleasureby curious strangers, and now, upon reflection, itbegan to have for Mrs. March the charm of duty; shebelieved that she could finally have made March goin her place, but she felt that she ought really togo in his, and save him from the late hours and thelate supper.

“Very well, then,” she said at last, “Iwill go.”

It appeared that any civil person might go to thereunion who chose to pay two florins and a half.There must have been some sort of restriction, andthe ladies of Burnamy’s party went with a gooddeal of amused curiosity to see what the distinctionswere; but they saw none unless it was the advantageswhich the military had. The long hall over thebathrooms shaped itself into a space for the dancingat one end, and all the rest of it was filled withtables, which at half past eight were crowded withpeople, eating, drinking, and smoking. The militaryenjoyed the monopoly of a table next the rail dividingthe dancing from the dining space. There thetight-laced Herr Hauptmanns and Herr Lieutenants satat their sausage and beer and cigars in the intervalsof the waltzes, and strengthened themselves for aforay among the gracious Fraus and Frauleins on thebenches lining three sides of the dancing-space.From the gallery above many civilian spectators lookeddown upon the gayety, and the dress-coats of a fewcitizens figured among the uniforms.

As the evening wore on some ladies of greater fashionfound their way to the dancing-floor, and toward teno’clock it became rather crowded. A partyof American girls showed their Paris dresses in thetransatlantic versions of the waltz. At firstthey danced with the young men who came with them;but after a while they yielded to the custom of theplace, and danced with any of the officers who askedthem.

“I know it’s the custom,” said Mrs.March to Miss Triscoe, who was at her side in oneof the waltzes she had decided to sit out, so as notto be dancing all the time with Burnamy, “butI never can like it without an introduction.”

“No,” said the girl, with the air of puttingtemptation decidedly away, “I don’t believepapa would, either.”

A young officer came up, and drooped in mute supplicationbefore her. She glanced at Mrs. March, who turnedher face away; and she excused herself with the pretencethat she had promised the dance, and by good fortune,Burnamy, who had been unscrupulously waltzing witha lady he did not know, came up at the moment.She rose and put her hand on his arm, and they bothbowed to the officer before they whirled away.The officer looked after them with amiable admiration;then he turned to Mrs. March with a light of banterin his friendly eyes, and was unmistakably askingher to dance. She liked his ironical daring, sheliked it so much that she forgot her objection topartners without introductions; she forgot her fifty-oddyears; she forgot that she was a mother of grown childrenand even a mother-in-law; she remembered only the stepof her out-dated waltz.

It seemed to be modern enough for the cheerful youngofficer, and they were suddenly revolving with therest. . . A tide of long-forgotten girlhood welledup in her heart, and she laughed as she floated offon it past the astonished eyes of Miss Triscoe andBurnamy. She saw them falter, as if they hadlost their step in their astonishment; then they seemedboth to vanish, and her partner had released her, andwas helping Miss Triscoe up from the floor; Burnamywas brushing the dust from his knees, and the citizenwho had bowled them over was boisterously apologizingand incessantly bowing.

“Oh, are you hurt?” Mrs. March implored.“I’m sure you must be killed; and I didit! I don’t know, what I was thinking of!”

The girl laughed. “I’m not hurt abit!”

They had one impulse to escape from the place, andfrom the sympathy and congratulation. In thedressing-room she declared again that she was allright. “How beautifully you waltz, Mrs.March!” she said, and she laughed again, andwould not agree with her that she had been ridiculous.“But I’m glad those American girls didn’tsee me. And I can’t be too thankful papadidn’t come!”

Mrs. March’s heart sank at the thought of whatGeneral Triscoe would think of her. “Youmust tell him I did it. I can never lift up myhead!”

“No, I shall not. No one did it,”said the girl, magnanimously. She looked downsidelong at her draperies. “I was so afraidI had torn my dress! I certainly heard somethingrip.”

It was one of the skirts of Burnamy’s coat,which he had caught into his hand and held in placetill he could escape to the men’s dressing-room,where he had it pinned up so skillfully that the damagewas not suspected by the ladies. He had bangedhis knee abominably too; but they did not suspectthat either, as he limped home on the air beside them,first to Miss Triscoe’s pension, and then toMrs. March’s hotel.

It was quite eleven o’clock, which at Carlsbadis as late as three in the morning anywhere else,when she let herself into her room. She decidednot to tell her husband, then; and even at breakfast,which they had at the Posthof, she had not got toher confession, though she had told him everythingelse about the ball, when the young officer with whomshe had danced passed between the tables near her.He caught her eye and bowed with a smile of so muchmeaning that March asked, “Who’s your prettyyoung friend?”

“Oh, that!” she answered carelessly.“That was one of the officers at the ball,”and she laughed.

“You seem to be in the joke, too,” hesaid. “What is it?”

“Oh, something. I’ll tell you sometime. Or perhaps you’ll find out.”

“I’m afraid you won’t let me wait.”

“No, I won’t,” and now she toldhim. She had expected teasing, ridicule, sarcasm,anything but the psychological interest mixed witha sort of retrospective tenderness which he showed.“I wish I could have seen you; I always thoughtyou danced well.” He added: “Itseems that you need a chaperon too.”

The next morning, after March and General Triscoehad started off upon one of the hill climbs, the youngpeople made her go with them for a walk up the Tepl,as far as the cafe of the Freundschaftsaal. Inthe grounds an artist in silhouettes was cutting outthe likenesses of people who supposed themselves tohave profiles, and they begged Mrs. March to sit forhers. It was so good that she insisted on MissTriscoe’s sitting in turn, and then Burnamy.Then he had the inspiration to propose that they shouldall three sit together, and it appeared that such agroup was within the scope of the silhouettist’sart; he posed them in his little bower, and whilehe was mounting the picture they took turns, at fivekreutzers each, in listening to American tunes playedby his Edison phonograph.

Mrs. March felt that all this was weakening her moralfibre; but she tried to draw the line at letting Burnamykeep the group. “Why not?” he pleaded.

“You oughtn’t to ask,” she returned.“You’ve no business to have Miss Triscoe’spicture, if you must know.”

“But you’re there to chaperon us!”he persisted.

He began to laugh, and they all laughed when she said,“You need a chaperon who doesn’t loseher head, in a silhouette.” But it seemeduseless to hold out after that, and she heard herselfasking, “Shall we let him keep it, Miss Triscoe?”

Burnamy went off to his work with Stoller, carryingthe silhouette with him, and she kept on with MissTriscoe to her hotel. In turning from the gateafter she parted with the girl she found herself confrontedwith Mrs. Adding and Rose. The ladies exclaimedat each other in an astonishment from which they hadto recover before they could begin to talk, but fromthe first moment Mrs. March perceived that Mrs. Addinghad something to say. The more freely to sayit she asked Mrs. March into her hotel, which wasin the same street with the pension of the Triscoes,and she let her boy go off about the exploration ofCarlsbad; he promised to be back in an hour.

“Well, now what scrape are you in?” Marchasked when his wife came home, and began to put offher things, with signs of excitement which he couldnot fail to note. He was lying down after a longtramp, and he seemed very comfortable.

His question suggested something of anterior import,and she told him about the silhouettes, and the advantagethe young people had taken of their power over herthrough their knowledge of her foolish behavior atthe ball.

He said, lazily: “They seem to be workingyou for all you’re worth. Is that it?”

“No; there is something worse. Something’shappened which throws all that quite in the shade.Mrs. Adding is here.”

“Mrs. Adding?” he repeated, with a dimnessfor names which she would not allow was growing onhim.

“Don’t be stupid, dear! Mrs. Adding,who sat opposite Mr. Kenby on the Norumbia. Themother of the nice boy.”

“Oh, yes! Well, that’s good!”

“No, it isn’t! Don’t say sucha thing—­till you know!” she cried,with a certain shrillness which warned him of an unfathomedseriousness in the fact. He sat up as if betterto confront the mystery. “I have been ather hotel, and she has been telling me that she’sjust come from Berlin, and that Mr. Kenby’sbeen there, and—­Now I won’t have youmaking a joke of it, or breaking out about it, asif it were not a thing to be looked for; though ofcourse with the others on our hands you’re notto blame for not thinking of it. But you cansee yourself that she’s young and good-looking.She did speak beautifully of her son, and if it werenot for him, I don’t believe she would hesitate—­”

“For heaven’s sake, what are you drivingat?” March broke in, and she answered him asvehemently:

“He’s asked her to marry him!”

“Kenby? Mrs. Adding?”

“Yes!”

“Well, now, Isabel, this won’t do!They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Withthat morbid, sensitive boy! It’s shocking—­”

“Will you listen? Or do you want me tostop?” He arrested himself at her threat, andshe resumed, after giving her contempt of his turbulencetime to sink in, “She refused him, of course!”

“Oh, all right, then!”

“You take it in such a way that I’ve agreat mind not to tell you anything more about it.”

“I know you have,” he said, stretchinghimself out again; “but you’ll do it,all the same. You’d have been awfully disappointedif I had been calm and collected.”

“She refused him,” she began again, “althoughshe respects him, because she feels that she oughtto devote herself to her son. Of course she’svery young, still; she was married when she was onlynineteen to a man twice her age, and she’s notthirty-five yet. I don’t think she evercared much for her husband; and she wants you to findout something about him.”

“I never heard of him. I—­”

Mrs. March made a “tchck!” that wouldhave recalled the most consequent of men from themost logical and coherent interpretation to the trueintent of her words. He perceived his mistake,and said, resolutely: “Well, I won’tdo it. If she’s refused him, that’sthe end of it; she needn’t know anything abouthim, and she has no right to.”

“Now I think differently,” said Mrs. March,with an inductive air. “Of course she hasto know about him, now.” She stopped, andMarch turned his head and looked expectantly at her.“He said he would not consider her answer final,but would hope to see her again and—­She’safraid he may follow her—­What are you lookingat me so for?”

“Is he coming here?”

“Am I to blame if he is? He said he wasgoing to write to her.”

March burst into a laugh. “Well, they haven’tbeen beating about the bush! When I think howMiss Triscoe has been pursuing Burnamy from the firstmoment she set eyes on him, with the settled beliefthat she was running from him, and he imagines thathe has been boldly following her, without the leasthope from her, I can’t help admiring the simpledirectness of these elders.”

“And if Kenby wants to talk with you, what willyou say?” she cut in eagerly.

“I’ll say I don’t like the subject.What am I in Carlsbad for? I came for the cure,and I’m spending time and money on it. Imight as well go and take my three cups of Felsenquelleon a full stomach as to listen to Kenby.”

“I know it’s bad for you, and I wish wehad never seen those people,” said Mrs. March.“I don’t believe he’ll want to talkwith you; but if—­”

“Is Mrs. Adding in this hotel? I’mnot going to have them round in my bread-trough!”

“She isn’t. She’s at one ofthe hotels on the hill.”

“Very well, let her stay there, then. Theycan manage their love-affairs in their own way.The only one I care the least for is the boy.”

“Yes, it is forlorn for him. But he likesMr. Kenby, and—­No, it’s horrid, andyou can’t make it anything else!”

“Well, I’m not trying to.”He turned his face away. “I must get mynap, now.” After she thought he must havefallen asleep, he said, “The first thing youknow, those old Eltwins will be coming round and tellingus that they’re going to get divorced.”Then he really slept.

XXXII.

The mid-day dinner at Pupp’s was the time tosee the Carlsbad world, and the Marches had the habitof sitting long at table to watch it.

There was one family in whom they fancied a sort ofliterary quality, as if they had come out of somepleasant German story, but they never knew anythingabout them. The father by his dress must havebeen a Protestant clergyman; the mother had been abeauty and was still very handsome; the daughter wasgood-looking, and of a good-breeding which was bothgirlish and ladylike. They commended themselvesby always taking the table d’hote dinner, asthe Marches did, and eating through from the soup andthe rank fresh-water fish to the sweet, upon the sameprinciple: the husband ate all the compote andgave the others his dessert, which was not good forhim. A young girl of a different fascination remainedas much a mystery. She was small and of an extremetenuity, which became more bewildering as she advancedthrough her meal, especially at supper, which she madeof a long cucumber pickle, a Frankfort sausage oftwice the pickle’s length, and a towering gobletof beer; in her lap she held a shivering little hound;she was in the decorous keeping of an elderly maid,and had every effect of being a gracious Fraulein.A curious contrast to her Teutonic voracity was thetemperance of a young Latin swell, imaginably fromTrieste, who sat long over his small coffee and cigarette,and tranquilly mused upon the pages of an Italiannewspaper. At another table there was a verynoisy lady, short and fat, in flowing draperies ofwhite, who commanded a sallow family of South-Americans,and loudly harangued them in South-American Spanish;she flared out in a picture which nowhere lacked strongeffects; and in her background lurked a mysteriousblack face and figure, ironically subservient to theold man, the mild boy, and the pretty young girl inthe middle distance of the family group.

Amidst the shows of a hardened worldliness there weretouching glimpses of domesticity and heart: ayoung bride fed her husband soup from her own platewith her spoon, unabashed by the publicity; a motherand her two pretty daughters hung about a handsomeofficer, who must have been newly betrothed to oneof the girls; and, the whole family showed a helplessfondness for him, which he did not despise, thoughhe held it in check; the girls dressed alike, andseemed to have for their whole change of costume adifference from time to time in the color of theirsleeves. The Marches believed they had seen thegrowth of the romance which had eventuated so happily;and they saw other romances which did not in any wiseeventuate. Carlsbad was evidently one of the greatmarriage marts of middle Europe, where mothers broughttheir daughters to be admired, and everywhere theflower of life was blooming for the hand of love.It blew by on all the promenades in dresses and hatsas pretty as they could be bought or imagined; butit was chiefly at Pupp’s that it flourished.For the most part it seemed to flourish in vain, andto be destined to be put by for another season todream, bulblike, of the coming summer in the quietof Moldavian and Transylvanian homes.

Perhaps it was oftener of fortunate effect than thespectators knew; but for their own pleasure they wouldnot have had their pang for it less; and March objectedto having a more explicit demand upon his sympathy.“We could have managed,” he said, at theclose of their dinner, as he looked compassionatelyround upon the parterre of young girls, “we couldhave managed with Burnamy and Miss Triscoe; but tohave Mrs. Adding and Kenby launched upon us is toomuch. Of course I like Kenby, and if the widowalone were concerned I would give him my blessing:a wife more or a widow less is not going to disturbthe equilibrium of the universe; but—­”He stopped, and then he went on: “Men andwomen are well enough. They complement each othervery agreeably, and they have very good times together.But why should they get in love?—­It is sureto make them uncomfortable to themselves and annoyingto others.” He broke off, and stared abouthim. “My dear, this is really charming—­almostas charming as the Posthof.” The crowdspread from the open vestibule of the hotel and theshelter of its branching pavilion roofs until it wasdimmed in the obscurity of the low grove across theway in an ultimate depth where the musicians weregiving the afternoon concert. Between its twostationary divisions moved a current of promenaders,with some such effect as if the colors of a lovelygarden should have liquefied and flowed in mingledrose and lilac, pink and yellow, and white and orange,and all the middle tints of modern millinery.Above on one side were the agreeable bulks of architecture,in the buff and gray of Carlsbad; and far beyond onthe other were the upland slopes, with villas and longcurves of country roads, belted in with miles of wall.“It would be about as offensive to have a love-interestthat one personally knew about intruded here,”he said, “as to have a two-spanner carriage driventhrough this crowd. It ought to be forbidden bythe municipality.”

Mrs. March listened with her ears, but not with hereyes, and she answered: “See that handsomeyoung Greek priest! Isn’t he an archimandrite?The portier said he was.”

“Then let him pass for an archimandrite.Now,” he recurred to his grievance again, dreamily,“I have got to take Papa Triscoe in hand, andpoison his mind against Burnamy, and I shall have toinstil a few drops of venomous suspicion against Kenbyinto the heart of poor little Rose Adding. Oh;”he broke out, “they will spoil everything.They’ll be with us morning, noon, and night,”and he went on to work the joke of repining at hislot. The worst thing, he said, would be the lovers’pretence of being interested in something besidesthemselves, which they were no more capable of thanso many lunatics. How could they care for prettygirls playing tennis on an upland level, in the waningafternoon? Or a cartful of peasant women stoppingto cross themselves at a way-side shrine? Or awhistling boy with holes in his trousers pausing fromsome wayside raspberries to touch his hat and saygood-morning? Or those preposterous maidens sprinklinglinen on the grass from watering-pots while the skieswere full of rain? Or that blacksmith shop wherePeter the Great made a horseshoe. Or the monumentof the young warrior-poet Koerner, with a gentle-lookinggirl and her mother reading and knitting on a benchbefore it? These simple pleasures sufficed them,but what could lovers really care for them? Apeasant girl flung down on the grassy road-side, fastasleep, while her yoke-fellow, the gray old dog, layin his harness near her with one drowsy eye half openfor her and the other for the contents of their cart;a boy chasing a red squirrel in the old upper townbeyond the Tepl, and enlisting the interest of allthe neighbors; the negro door-keeper at the GoldenShield who ought to have spoken our Southern English,but who spoke bad German and was from Cairo; the sweetafternoon stillness in the woods; the good Germanmothers crocheting at the Posthof concerts. Burnamyas a young poet might hate felt the precious qualityof these things, if his senses had not been holdenby Miss Triscoe; and she might have felt it if onlyhe had done so. But as it was it would be lostupon their preoccupation; with Mrs. Adding and Kenbyit would be hopeless.

A day or two after Mrs: March had met Mrs. Adding,she went with her husband to revere a certain magnificentblackamoor whom he had discovered at the entranceof one of the aristocratic hotels on the Schlossberg,where he performed the function of a kind of caryatid,and looked, in the black of his skin and the whiteof his flowing costume, like a colossal figure carvedin ebony and ivory. They took a roundabout waythrough a street entirely of villa-pensions; everyhouse in Carlsbad but one is a pension if it is notn hotel; but these were of a sort of sentimental prettiness;with each a little garden before it, and a bower with

an iron table in it for breakfasting and supping out-doors;and he said that they would be the very places forbridal couples who wished to spend the honey-moonin getting well of the wedding surfeit. She denouncedhim for saying such a thing as that, and for his inconsistencyin complaining of lovers while he was willing to thinkof young married people. He contended that therewas a great difference in the sort of demand thatyoung married people made upon the interest of witnesses,and that they were at least on their way to sanity;and before they agreed, they had come to the hotelwith the blackamoor at the door. While they lingered,sharing the splendid creature’s hospitable pleasurein the spectacle he formed, they were aware of a carriagewith liveried coachman and footman at the steps ofthe hotel; the liveries were very quiet and distinguished,and they learned that the equipage was waiting forthe Prince of Coburg, or the Princess of Montenegro,or Prince Henry of Prussia; there were differing opinionsamong the twenty or thirty bystanders. Mrs. Marchsaid she did not care which it was; and she was patientof the denouement, which began to postpone itself withdelicate delays. After repeated agitations atthe door among portiers, proprietors, and waiters,whose fluttered spirits imparted their thrill to thespectators, while the coachman and footman remainedsculpturesquely impassive in their places, the carriagemoved aside and let an energetic American lady andher family drive up to the steps. The hotel peoplepaid her a tempered devotion, but she marred the effectby rushing out and sitting on a balcony to wait forthe delaying royalties. There began to be morepromises of their early appearance; a footman gotdown and placed himself at the carriage door; the coachmanstiffened himself on his box; then he relaxed; thefootman drooped, and even wandered aside. Therecame a moment when at some signal the carriage drovequite away from the portal and waited near the gateof the stableyard; it drove back, and the spectatorsredoubled their attention. Nothing happened,and some of them dropped off. At last an indescribablesignificance expressed itself in the official groupat the door; a man in a high hat and dresscoat hurriedout; a footman hurried to meet him; they spoke inaudiblytogether. The footman mounted to his place; thecoachman gathered up his reins and drove rapidly outof the hotel-yard, down the street, round the corner,out of sight. The man in the tall hat and dress-coatwent in; the official group at the threshold dissolved;the statue in ivory and ebony resumed its place; evidentlythe Hoheit of Coburg, or Montenegro, or Prussia, wasnot going to take the air.

“My dear, this is humiliating.”

“Not at all! I wouldn’t have missedit for anything. Think how near we came to seeingthem!”

“I shouldn’t feel so shabby if we hadseen them. But to hang round here in this plebeianabeyance, and then to be defeated and defrauded atlast! I wonder how long this sort of thing isgoing on?”

“What thing?”

“This base subjection of the imagination tothe Tom Foolery of the Ages.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I’msure it’s very natural to want to see a Prince.”

“Only too natural. It’s so deeplyfounded in nature that after denying royalty by wordand deed for a hundred years, we Americans are hungrierfor it than anybody else. Perhaps we may comeback to it!”

“Nonsense!”

They looked up at the Austrian flag on the tower ofthe hotel, languidly curling and uncurling in thebland evening air, as it had over a thousand yearsof stupid and selfish monarchy, while all the generousrepublics of the Middle Ages had perished, and thecommonwealths of later times had passed like feverdreams. That dull, inglorious empire had antedatedor outlived Venice and Genoa, Florence and Siena,the England of Cromwell, the Holland of the Stadtholders,and the France of many revolutions, and all the fleetingdemocracies which sprang from these.

March began to ask himself how his curiosity differedfrom that of the Europeans about him; then he becameaware that these had detached themselves, and lefthim exposed to the presence of a fellow countryman.It was Otterson, with Mrs. Otterson; he turned uponMarch with hilarious recognition. “Hello!Most of the Americans in Carlsbad seem to be hanginground here for a sight of these kings. Well, wedon’t have a great many of ’em, and it’snatural we shouldn’t want to miss any. Butnow, you Eastern fellows, you go to Europe every summer,and yet you don’t seem to get enough of ’em.Think it’s human nature, or did it get so groundinto us in the old times that we can’t get itout, no difference what we say?”

“That’s very much what I’ve beenasking myself,” said March. “Perhapsit’s any kind of show. We’d wait nearlyas long for the President to come out, wouldn’twe?”

“I reckon we would. But we wouldn’tfor his nephew, or his second cousin.”

“Well, they wouldn’t be in the way ofthe succession.”

“I guess you’re right.” TheIowan seemed better satisfied with March’s philosophythan March felt himself, and he could not forbear adding:

“But I don’t, deny that we should waitfor the President because he’s a kind of kingtoo. I don’t know that we shall ever getover wanting to see kings of some kind. Or atleast my wife won’t. May I present you toMrs. March?”

“Happy to meet you, Mrs. March,” saidthe Iowan. “Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson.I’m the fool in my family, and I know just howyou feel about a chance like this. I don’tmean that you’re—­”

They all laughed at the hopeless case, and Mrs. Marchsaid, with one of her unexpected likings: “Iunderstand, Mr. Otterson. And I would ratherbe our kind of fool than the kind that pretends notto care for the sight of a king.”

“Like you and me, Mrs. Otterson,” saidMarch.

“Indeed, indeed,” said the lady, “I’dlike to see a king too, if it didn’t take allnight. Good-evening,” she said, turningher husband about with her, as if she suspected apurpose of patronage in Mrs. March, and was not goingto have it.

Otterson looked over his shoulder to explain, despairingly:“The trouble with me is that when I do get achance to talk English, there’s such a flowof language it carries me away, and I don’t knowjust where I’m landing.”

XXXIII.

There were several kings and their kindred at Carlsbadthat summer. One day the duch*ess of Orleans droveover from Marienbad, attended by the Duke on his bicycle.After luncheon, they reappeared for a moment beforemounting to her carriage with their Secretaries:two young French gentlemen whose dress and bearingbetter satisfied Mrs. March’s exacting passionfor an aristocratic air in their order. The Dukewas fat and fair, as a Bourbon should be, and theduch*ess fatter, though not so fair, as became a Hapsburg,but they were both more plebeian-looking than theirretainers, who were slender as well as young, and asperfectly appointed as English tailors could imaginethem.

“It wouldn’t do for the very highest sortof Highhotes,” March declared, “to looktheir own consequence personally; they have to leavethat, like everything else, to their inferiors.”

By a happy heterophemy of Mrs. March’s the GermanHoheit had now become Highhote, which was so muchmore descriptive that they had permanently adoptedit, and found comfort to their republican pride inthe mockery which it poured upon the feudal structureof society. They applied it with a certain compunction,however, to the King of Servia, who came a few daysafter the Duke and duch*ess: he was such a youngKing, and of such a little country. They watchedfor him from the windows of the reading-room, whilethe crowd outside stood six deep on the three sidesof the square before the hotel, and the two plain publiccarriages which brought the King and his suite drewtamely up at the portal, where the proprietor andsome civic dignitaries received him. His moderatedapproach, so little like that of royalty on the stage,to which Americans are used, allowed Mrs. March tomake sure of the pale, slight, insignificant, amiable-lookingyouth in spectacles as the sovereign she was ambuscading.Then no appeal to her principles could keep her frompeeping through the reading-room door into the rotunda,where the King graciously but speedily dismissed thecivic gentlemen and the proprietor, and vanished intothe elevator. She was destined to see him so oftenafterwards that she scarcely took the trouble to timeher dining and supping by that of the simple potentate,who had his meals in one of the public rooms, withthree gentlemen of his suite, in sack-coats like himself,after the informal manner of the place.

Still another potentate, who happened that summerto be sojourning abroad, in the interval of a successfulrebellion, was at the opera one night with some ofhis faithful followers. Burnamy had offered Mrs.March, who supposed that he merely wanted her and herhusband with him, places in a box; but after she eagerlyaccepted, it seemed that he wished her to advise himwhether it would do to ask Miss Triscoe and her fatherto join them.

“Why not?” she returned, with an archingof the eyebrows.

“Why,” he said, “perhaps I had bettermake a clean breast of it.”

“Perhaps you had,” she said, and theyboth laughed, though he laughed with a knot betweenhis eyes.

“The fact is, you know, this isn’t mytreat, exactly. It’s Mr. Stoller’s.”At the surprise in her face he hurried on. “He’sgot back his first letter in the paper, and he’sso much pleased with the way he reads in print, thathe wants to celebrate.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. March, non-committally.

Burnamy laughed again. “But he’sbashful, and he isn’t sure that you would alltake it in the right way. He wants you as friendsof mine; and he hasn’t quite the courage toask you himself.”

This seemed to Mrs. March so far from bad that shesaid: “That’s very nice of him.Then he’s satisfied with—­with yourhelp? I’m glad of that.”

“Thank you. He’s met the Triscoes,and he thought it would be pleasant to you if theywent, too.”

“Oh, certainly.”

“He thought,” Burnamy went on, with theair of feeling his way, “that we might all goto the opera, and then—­then go for a littlesupper afterwards at Schwarzkopf’s.”

He named the only place in Carlsbad where you cansup so late as ten o’clock; as the opera beginsat six, and is over at half past eight, none but thewildest roisterers frequent the place.

“Oh!” said Mrs. March. “I don’tknow how a late supper would agree with my husband’scure. I should have to ask him.”

“We could make it very hygienic,” Burnamyexplained.

In repeating his invitation she blamed Burnamy’suncandor so much that March took his part, as perhapsshe intended, and said, “Oh, nonsense,”and that he should like to go in for the whole thing;and General Triscoe accepted as promptly for himselfand his daughter. That made six people, Burnamycounted up, and he feigned a decent regret that therewas not room for Mrs. Adding and her son; he wouldhave liked to ask them.

Mrs. March did not enjoy it so much as coming withher husband alone when they took two florin seatsin the orchestra for the comedy. The comedy alwaysbegan half an hour earlier than the opera, and theyhad a five-o’clock supper at the Theatre-Cafebefore they went, and they got to sleep by nine o’clock;now they would be up till half past ten at least,and that orgy at Schwarzkopf’s might not be atall good for him. But still she liked being there;and Miss Triscoe made her take the best seat; Burnamyand Stoller made the older men take the other seatsbeside the ladies, while they sat behind, or stoodup, when they, wished to see, as people do in theback of a box. Stoller was not much at ease inevening dress, but he bore himself with a dignity whichwas not perhaps so gloomy as it looked; Mrs. Marchthought him handsome in his way, and required MissTriscoe to admire him. As for Burnamy’s

beauty it was not necessary to insist upon that; hehad the distinction of slender youth; and she likedto think that no Highhote there was of a more patricianpresence than this yet unprinted contributor to ‘EveryOther Week’. He and Stoller seemed on perfectterms; or else in his joy he was able to hide theuneasiness which she had fancied in him from the firsttime she saw them together, and which had never beenquite absent from his manner in Stoller’s presence.Her husband always denied that it existed, or if itdid that it was anything but Burnamy’s effortto get on common ground with an inferior whom fortunehad put over him.

The young fellow talked with Stoller, and tried tobring him into the range of the general conversation.He leaned over the ladies, from time to time, andpointed out the notables whom he saw in the house;she was glad, for his sake, that he did not lean lessover her than over Miss Triscoe. He explainedcertain military figures in the boxes opposite, andcertain ladies of rank who did not look their rank;Miss Triscoe, to Mrs. March’s thinking, lookedtheir united ranks, and more; her dress was very simple,but of a touch which saved it from being insipidlygirlish; her beauty was dazzling.

“Do you see that old fellow in the corner chairjust behind the orchestra?” asked Burnamy.“He’s ninety-six years old, and he comesto the theatre every night, and falls asleep as soonas the curtain rises, and sleeps through till theend of the act.”

“How dear!” said the girl, leaning forwardto fix the nonagenarian with her glasses, while manyother glasses converged upon her. “Oh, wouldn’tyou like to know him, Mr. March?”

“I should consider it a liberal education.They have brought these things to a perfect systemin Europe. There is nothing to make life passsmoothly like inflexible constancy to an entirely simplecustom. My dear,” he added to his wife,“I wish we’d seen this sage before.He’d have helped us through a good many hoursof unintelligible comedy. I’m always comingas Burnamy’s guest, after this.”

The young fellow swelled with pleasure in his triumph,and casting an eye about the theatre to cap it, hecaught sight of that other potentate. He whisperedjoyfully, “Ah! We’ve got two kingshere to-night,” and he indicated in a box oftheir tier just across from that where the King ofServia sat, the well-known face of the King of NewYork.

“He isn’t bad-looking,” said March,handing his glass to General Triscoe. “I’venot seen many kings in exile; a matter of a few Carlistprinces and ex-sovereign dukes, and the good HenryV. of France, once, when I was staying a month inVenice; but I don’t think they any of them lookedthe part better. I suppose he has his dream ofrecurring power like the rest.”

“Dream!” said General Triscoe with theglass at his eyes. “He’s dead sureof it.”

“Oh, you don’t really mean that!”

“I don’t know why I should have changedmy mind.”

“Then it’s as if we were in the presenceof Charles II. just before he was called back to England,or Napoleon in the last moments of Elba. It’sbetter than that. The thing is almost unique;it’s a new situation in history. Here’sa sovereign who has no recognized function, no legalstatus, no objective existence. He has no sortof public being, except in the affection of his subjects.It took an upheaval little short of an earthquaketo unseat him. His rule, as we understand it,was bad for all classes; the poor suffered more thanthe rich; the people have now had three years of self-government;and yet this wonderful man has such a hold upon themasses that he is going home to win the cause of oppressionat the head of the oppressed. When he’sin power again, he will be as subjective as ever,with the power of civic life and death, and an idolatrousfollowing perfectly ruthless in the execution of hiswill.”

“We’ve only begun,” said the general.“This kind of king is municipal, now; but he’sgoing to be national. And then, good-by, Republic!”

“The only thing like it,” March resumed,too incredulous of the evil future to deny himselfthe aesthetic pleasure of the parallel, “is therise of the Medici in Florence, but even the Mediciwere not mere manipulators of pulls; they had somesort of public office, with some sort of legislatedtenure of it. The King of New York is sovereignby force of will alone, and he will reign in the voluntarysubmission of the majority. Is our national dictatorto be of the same nature and quality?”

“It would be the scientific evolution, wouldn’tit?”

The ladies listened with the perfunctory attentionwhich women pay to any sort of inquiry which is notpersonal. Stoller had scarcely spoken yet; henow startled them all by demanding, with a sort ofvindictive force, “Why shouldn’t he havethe power, if they’re willing to let him?”

“Yes,” said General Triscoe, with a tiltof his head towards March. “That’swhat we must ask ourselves more and more.”

March leaned back in his chair, and looked up overhis shoulder at Stoller. “Well, I don’tknow. Do you think it’s quite right fora man to use an unjust power, even if others are willingthat he should?”

Stoller stopped with an air of bewilderment as ifsurprised on the point of saying that he thought justthis. He asked instead, “What’s wrongabout it?”

“Well, that’s one of those things thathave to be felt, I suppose. But if a man cameto you, and offered to be your slave for a certainconsideration—­say a comfortable house, anda steady job, that wasn’t too hard—­shouldyou feel it morally right to accept the offer?I don’t say think it right, for there mightbe a kind of logic for it.”

Stoller seemed about to answer; he hesitated; andbefore he had made any response, the curtain rose.

XXXIV.

There are few prettier things than Carlsbad by nightfrom one of the many bridges which span the Tepl inits course through the town. If it is a starrynight, the torrent glides swiftly away with an invertedfirmament in its bosom, to which the lamps along itsshores and in the houses on either side contributea planetary splendor of their own. By nine o’clockeverything is hushed; not a wheel is heard at thatdead hour; the few feet shuffling stealthily throughthe Alte Wiese whisper a caution of silence to thoseissuing with a less guarded tread from the opera; thelittle bowers that overhang the stream are as darkand mute as the restaurants across the way which servemeals in them by day; the whole place is as forsakenas other cities at midnight. People get quicklyhome to bed, or if they have a mind to snatch a belatedjoy, they slip into the Theater-Cafe, where the sleepyFrauleins serve them, in an exemplary drowse, withplates of cold ham and bottles of the gently gaseouswaters of Giesshubl. Few are of the bold badnesswhich delights in a supper at Schwarzkopf’s,and even these are glad of the drawn curtains whichhide their orgy from the chance passer.

The invalids of Burnamy’s party kept together,strengthening themselves in a mutual purpose not tobe tempted to eat anything which was not strictly‘kurgemass’. Mrs. March played uponthe interest which each of them felt in his own caseso artfully that she kept them talking of their cure,and left Burnamy and Miss Triscoe to a moment on thebridge, by which they profited, while the others strolledon, to lean against the parapet and watch the lightsin the skies and the water, and be alone together.The stream shone above and below, and found its wayout of and into the darkness under the successivebridges; the town climbed into the night with lamp-litwindows here and there, till the woods of the hill-sidesdarkened down to meet it, and fold it in an embracefrom which some white edifice showed palely in thefarthest gloom.

He tried to make her think they could see that greatiron crucifix which watches over it day and nightfrom its piny cliff. He had a fancy for a poem,very impressionistic, which should convey the notionof the crucifix’s vigil. He submitted itto her; and they remained talking till the othershad got out of sight and hearing; and she was lettinghim keep the hand on her arm which he had put thereto hold her from falling over the parapet, when theywere both startled by approaching steps, and a voicecalling, “Look here! Who’s runningthis supper party, anyway?”

His wife had detached March from her group for themission, as soon as she felt that the young peoplewere abusing her kindness. They answered himwith hysterical laughter, and Burnamy said, “Why,it’s Mr. Stoller’s treat, you know.”

At the restaurant, where the proprietor obsequiouslymet the party on the threshold and bowed them intoa pretty inner room, with a table set for their supper,Stoller had gained courage to play the host openly.He appointed General Triscoe to the chief seat; hewould have put his daughter next to him, if the girlhad not insisted upon Mrs. March’s having theplace, and going herself to sit next to March, whomshe said she had not been able to speak a word tothe whole evening. But she did not talk a greatdeal to him; he smiled to find how soon he droppedout of the conversation, and Burnamy, from his greaterremoteness across the table, dropped into it.He really preferred the study of Stoller, whose instinctof a greater worldly quality in the Triscoes interestedhim; he could see him listening now to what GeneralTriscoe was saying to Mrs. March, and now to whatBurnamy was saying to Miss Triscoe; his strong, selfishface, as he turned it on the young people, expresseda mingled grudge and greed that was very curious.

Stoller’s courage, which had come and gone atmoments throughout, rose at the end, and while theylingered at the table well on to the hour of ten,he said, in the sort of helpless offence he had withBurnamy, “What’s the reason we can’tall go out tomorrow to that old castle you was talkingabout?”

“To Engelhaus? I don’t know any reason,as far as I’m concerned,” answered Burnamy;but he refused the initiative offered him, and Stollerwas obliged to ask March:

“You heard about it?”

“Yes.” General Triscoe was listening,and March added for him, “It was the hold ofan old robber baron; Gustavus Adolphus knocked it down,and it’s very picturesque, I believe.”

“It sounds promising,” said the general.“Where is it?”

“Isn’t to-morrow our mineral bath?”Mrs. March interposed between her husband and temptation.

“No; the day after. Why, it’s aboutten or twelve miles out on the old postroad that Napoleontook for Prague.”

“Napoleon knew a good road when he saw it,”said the general, and he alone of the company lighteda cigar. He was decidedly in favor of the excursion,and he arranged for it with Stoller, whom he had theeffect of using for his pleasure as if he were doinghim a favor. They were six, and two carriageswould take them: a two-spanner for four, and aone-spanner for two; they could start directly afterdinners and get home in time for supper.

Stoller asserted himself to say: “That’sall right, then. I want you to be my guests,and I’ll see about the carriages.”He turned to Burnamy: “Will you order them?”

“Oh,” said the young fellow, with a sortof dryness, “the portier will get them.”

“I don’t understand why General Triscoewas so willing to accept. Surely, he can’tlike that man!” said Mrs. March to her husbandin their own room.

“Oh, I fancy that wouldn’t be essential.The general seems to me, capable of letting even anenemy serve his turn. Why didn’t you speak,if you didn’t want to go?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I wanted to go.”

“And I knew it wouldn’t do to let MissTriscoe go alone; I could see that she wished to go.”

“Do you think Burnamy did?”

“He seemed rather indifferent. And yethe must have realized that he would be with Miss Triscoethe whole afternoon.”

XXXV.

If Burnamy and Miss Triscoe took the lead in the one-spanner,and the others followed in the two-spanner, it wasnot from want of politeness on the part of the youngpeople in offering to give up their places to eachof their elders in turn. It would have been grotesquefor either March or Stoller to drive with the girl;for her father it was apparently no question, aftera glance at the more rigid uprightness of the seatin the one-spanner; and he accepted the place besideMrs. March on the back seat of the two-spanner withoutdemur. He asked her leave to smoke, and thenhe scarcely spoke to her. But he talked to thetwo men in front of him almost incessantly, haranguingthem upon the inferiority of our conditions and thefutility of our hopes as a people, with the effectof bewildering the cruder arrogance of Stoller, whocould have got on with Triscoe’s contempt forthe worthlessness of our working-classes, but didnot know what to do with his scorn of the vulgarityand venality of their employers. He accused someof Stoller’s most honored and envied capitalistsof being the source of our worst corruptions, and guiltierthan the voting-cattle whom they bought and sold.

“I think we can get rid of the whole troubleif we go at it the right way,” Stoller said,diverging for the sake of the point he wished to bringin. “I believe in having the governmentrun on business principles. They’ve gotit here in Carlsbad, already, just the right sort ofthing, and it works. I been lookin’ intoit, and I got this young man, yonder”—­hetwisted his hand in the direction of the one-spanner!“to help me put it in shape. I believeit’s going to make our folks think, the bestones among them. Here!” He drew a newspaperout of his pocket, folded to show two columns in theirfull length, and handed it to Triscoe, who took itwith no great eagerness, and began to run his eyeover it. “You tell me what you think ofthat. I’ve put it out for a kind of a feeler.I got some money in that paper, and I just thoughtI’d let our people see how a city can be managedon business principles.”

He kept his eye eagerly upon Triscoe, as if to followhis thought while he read, and keep him up to thework, and he ignored the Marches so entirely thatthey began in self-defence to talk with each other.

Their carriage had climbed from Carlsbad in long irregularcurves to the breezy upland where the great highroadto Prague ran through fields of harvest. Theyhad come by heights and slopes of forest, where theserried stems of the tall firs showed brown and whitish-blueand grew straight as stalks of grain; and now on eitherside the farms opened under a sky of unwonted cloudlessness.Narrow strips of wheat and rye, which the men werecutting with sickles, and the women in red bodiceswere binding, alternated with ribands of yellowingoats and grass, and breadths of beets and turnips,with now and then lengths of ploughed land. Inthe meadows the peasants were piling their carts withheavy rowen, the girls lifting the hay on the forks,and the men giving themselves the lighter labor ofordering the load. From the upturned earth, wherethere ought to have been troops of strutting crows,a few sombre ravens rose. But they could notrob the scene of its gayety; it smiled in the sunshinewith colors which vividly followed the slope of theland till they were dimmed in the forests on the far-offmountains. Nearer and farther, the cottages andvillages shone in the valleys, or glimmered throughthe veils of the distant haze. Over all breathedthe keen pure air of the hills, with a sentiment ofchangeless eld, which charmed March, back to his boyhood,where he lost the sense of his wife’s presence,and answered her vaguely. She talked contentedlyon in the monologue to which the wives of absent-mindedmen learn to resign themselves. They were bothroused from their vagary by the voice of General Triscoe.He was handing back the folded newspaper to Stoller,and saying, with a queer look at him over his glasses,“I should like to see what your contemporarieshave to say to all that.”

“Well, sir,” Stoller returned, “maybeI’ll have the chance to show you. Theygot my instructions over there to send everything tome.”

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe gave little heed to the landscapeas landscape. They agreed that the human interestwas the great thing on a landscape, after all; butthey ignored the peasants in the fields and meadows,who were no more to them than the driver on the box,or the people in the two-spanner behind. Theywere talking of the hero and heroine of a novel theyhad both read, and he was saying, “I supposeyou think he was justly punished.”

“Punished?” she repeated. “Why,they got married, after all!”

“Yes, but you could see that they were not goingto be happy.”

“Then it seems to me that she was punished;too.”

“Well, yes; you might say that. The authorcouldn’t help that.”

Miss Triscoe was silent a moment before she said:

“I always thought the author was rather hardon the hero. The girl was very exacting.”

“Why,” said Burnamy, “I supposedthat women hated anything like deception in men toomuch to tolerate it at all. Of course, in thiscase, he didn’t deceive her; he let her deceiveherself; but wasn’t that worse?”

“Yes, that was worse. She could have forgivenhim for deceiving her.”

“Oh!”

“He might have had to do that. She wouldn’thave minded his fibbing outright, so much, for thenit wouldn’t have seemed to come from his nature.But if he just let her believe what wasn’t true,and didn’t say a word to prevent her, of courseit was worse. It showed something weak, somethingcowardly in him.”

Burnamy gave a little cynical laugh. “Isuppose it did. But don’t you think it’srather rough, expecting us to have all the kinds ofcourage?”

“Yes, it is,” she assented. “Thatis why I say she was too exacting. But a manoughn’t to defend him.”

Burnamy’s laugh had more pleasure in it, now.“Another woman might?”

“No. She might excuse him.”

He turned to look back at the two-spanner; it wasrather far behind, and he spoke to their driver biddinghim go slowly till it caught up with them. Bythe time it did so, they were so close to it that theycould distinguish the lines of its wandering and brokenwalls. Ever since they had climbed from the woodeddepths of the hills above Carlsbad to the open plateau,it had shown itself in greater and greater detail.The detached mound of rock on which it stood roselike an island in the midst of the plain, and commandedthe highways in every direction.

“I believe,” Burnamy broke out, with abitterness apparently relevant to the ruin alone,“that if you hadn’t required any quarteringsof nobility from him, Stoller would have made a goodsort of robber baron. He’s a robber baronby nature, now, and he wouldn’t have any scruplein levying tribute on us here in our one-spanner,if his castle was in good repair and his crossbowmenwere not on a strike. But they would be on a strike,probably, and then he would lock them out, and employnone but non-union crossbowmen.”

If Miss Triscoe understood that he arraigned the moralityas well as the civility of his employer, she did nottake him more seriously than he meant, apparently,for she smiled as she said, “I don’t seehow you can have anything to do with him, if you feelso about him.”

“Oh,” Burnamy replied in kind, “hebuys my poverty and not my will. And perhapsif I thought better of myself, I should respect himmore.”

“Have you been doing something very wicked?”

“What should you have to say to me, if I had?”he bantered.

“Oh, I should have nothing at all to say toyou,” she mocked back.

They turned a corner of the highway, and drove rattlingthrough a village street up a long slope to the roundedhill which it crowned. A church at its base lookedout upon an irregular square.

A gaunt figure of a man, with a staring mask, whichseemed to hide a darkling mind within, came out ofthe church, and locked it behind him. He provedto be the sacristan, and the keeper of all the village’sclaims upon the visitors’ interest; he mastered,after a moment, their wishes in respect to the castle,and showed the path that led to it; at the top, hesaid, they would find a custodian of the ruins whowould admit them.

XXXVI.

The, path to the castle slanted upward across theshoulder of the hill, to a certain point, and theresome rude stone steps mounted more directly.Wilding lilac-bushes, as if from some forgotten garden,bordered the ascent; the chickory opened its blue flower;the clean bitter odor of vermouth rose from the troddenturf; but Nature spreads no such lavish feast in woodor field in the Old World as she spoils us with inthe New; a few kinds, repeated again and again, seemto be all her store, and man must make the most ofthem. Miss Triscoe seemed to find flowers enoughin the simple bouquet which Burnamy put together forher. She took it, and then gave it back to him,that she might have both hands for her skirt, andso did him two favors.

A superannuated forester of the nobleman who ownsthe ruin opened a gate for the party at the top, andlevied a tax of thirty kreutzers each upon them, forits maintenance. The castle, by his story, haddescended from robber sire to robber son, till Gustavusknocked it to pieces in the sixteenth century; threehundred years later, the present owner restored it;and now its broken walls and arches, built of rubblemixed with brick, and neatly pointed up with cement,form a ruin satisfyingly permanent. The wallswere not of great extent, but such as they were theyenclosed several dungeons and a chapel, all underground,and a cistern which once enabled the barons and theirretainers to water their wine in time of siege.

From that height they could overlook the neighboringhighways in every direction, and could bring a merchanttrain to, with a shaft from a crossbow, or a shotfrom an arquebuse, at pleasure. With GeneralTriscoe’s leave, March praised the strategicstrength of the unique position, which he found expressiveof the past, and yet suggestive of the present.It was more a difference in method than anything elsethat distinguished the levy of customs by the authoritiesthen and now. What was the essential difference,between taking tribute of travellers passing on horseback,and collecting dues from travellers arriving by steamer?They did not pay voluntarily in either case; but itmight be proof of progress that they no longer foughtthe customs officials.

“Then you believe in free trade,” saidStoller, severely.

“No. I am just inquiring which is the bestway of enforcing the tariff laws.”

“I saw in the Paris Chronicle, last night,”said Miss Triscoe, “that people are kept onthe docks now for hours, and ladies cry at the waytheir things are tumbled over by the inspectors.”

“It’s shocking,” said Mrs. March,magisterially.

“It seems to be a return to the scenes of feudaltimes,” her husband resumed. “ButI’m glad the travellers make no resistance.I’m opposed to private war as much as I am tofree trade.”

“It all comes round to the same thing at last,”said General Triscoe. “Your precious humanity—­”

“Oh, I don’t claim it exclusively,”March protested.

“Well, then, our precious humanity is like aman that has lost his road. He thinks he is findinghis way out, but he is merely rounding on his course,and coming back to where he started.”

Stoller said, “I think we ought to make it sorough for them, over here, that they will come toAmerica and set up, if they can’t stand theduties.”

“Oh, we ought to make it rough for them anyway,”March consented.

If Stoller felt his irony, he did not know what toanswer. He followed with his eyes the manoeuvreby which Burnamy and Miss Triscoe eliminated themselvesfrom the discussion, and strayed off to another cornerof the ruin, where they sat down on the turf in theshadow of the wall; a thin, upland breeze drew acrossthem, but the sun was hot. The land fell awayfrom the height, and then rose again on every sidein carpetlike fields and in long curving bands, whoseparallel colors passed unblended into the distance.“I don’t suppose,” Burnamy said,“that life ever does much better than this,do you? I feel like knocking on a piece of woodand saying ‘Unberufen.’ I might knockon your bouquet; that’s wood.”

“It would spoil the flowers,” she said,looking down at them in her belt. She lookedup and their eyes met.

“I wonder,” he said, presently, “whatmakes us always have a feeling of dread when we arehappy?”

“Do you have that, too?” she asked.

“Yes. Perhaps it’s because we knowthat change must come, and it must be for the worse.”

“That must be it. I never thought of itbefore, though.”

“If we had got so far in science that we couldpredict psychological weather, and could know twenty-fourhours ahead when a warm wave of bliss or a cold waveof misery was coming, and prepare for smiles and tearsbeforehand—­it may come to that.”

“I hope it won’t. I’d rathernot know when I was to be happy; it would spoil thepleasure; and wouldn’t be any compensation whenit was the other way.”

A shadow fell across them, and Burnamy glanced roundto see Stoller looking down at them, with a slantof the face that brought his aquiline profile intorelief. “Oh! Have a turf, Mr. Stoller?”he called gayly up to him.

“I guess we’ve seen about all there is,”he answered. “Hadn’t we better begoing?” He probably did not mean to be mandatory.

“All right,” said Burnamy, and he turnedto speak to Miss Triscoe again without further noticeof him.

They all descended to the church at the foot of thehill where the weird sacristan was waiting to showthem the cold, bare interior, and to account for itsnewness with the fact that the old church had beenburnt, and this one built only a few years before.Then he locked the doors after them, and ran forwardto open against their coming the chapel of the villagecemetery, which they were to visit after they had fortifiedthemselves for it at the village cafe.

They were served by a little hunch-back maid; andshe told them who lived in the chief house of thevillage. It was uncommonly pretty; where allthe houses were picturesque, and she spoke of it withrespect as the dwelling of a rich magistrate who wasclearly the great man of the place. March admiredthe cat which rubbed against her skirt while she stoodand talked, and she took his praises modestly forthe cat; but they wrought upon the envy, of her brotherso that he ran off to the garden, and came back withtwo fat, sleepy-eyed puppies which he held up, withan arm across each of their stomachs, for the acclaimof the spectators.

“Oh, give him something!” Mrs. March entreated.“He’s such a dear.”

“No, no! I am not going to have my littlehunchback and her cat outdone,” he refused;and then he was about to yield.

“Hold on!” said Stoller, assuming thehost. “I got the change.”

He gave the boy a few kreutzers, when Mrs. March hadmeant her husband to reward his naivete with halfa florin at least; but he seemed to feel that he hadnow ingratiated himself with the ladies, and he puthimself in charge of them for the walk to the cemeterychapel; he made Miss Triscoe let him carry her jacketwhen she found it warm.

The chapel is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and theJesuit brother who designed it, two or three centuriesago, indulged a devotional fancy in the triangularform of the structure and the decorative details.Everything is three-cornered; the whole chapel, tobegin with, and then the ark of the high altar inthe middle of it, and each of the three side-altars.The clumsy baroque taste of the architecture is a Germanversion of the impulse that was making Italy fantasticat the time; the carving is coarse, and the colorharsh and unsoftened by years, though it is brokenand obliterated in places.

The sacristan said that the chapel was never usedfor anything but funeral services, and he led theway out into the cemetery, where he wished to displaythe sepultural devices. The graves here were plantedwith flowers, and some were in a mourning of blackpansies; but a space fenced apart from the rest helda few neglected mounds, overgrown with weeds and brambles:This space, he said, was for suicides; but to Marchit was not so ghastly as the dapper grief of certaintombs in consecrated ground where the stones had photographsof the dead on porcelain let into them. One wasthe picture of a beautiful young woman, who had beenthe wife of the local magnate; an eternal love wasvowed to her in the inscription, but now, the sacristansaid, with nothing of irony, the magnate was marriedagain, and lived in that prettiest house of the village.He seemed proud of the monument, as the thing worthiestthe attention of the strangers, and he led them withless apparent hopefulness to the unfinished chapelrepresenting a Gethsemane, with the figure of Christpraying and his apostles sleeping. It is a subject

much celebrated in terra-cotta about Carlsbad, andit was not a novelty to his party; still, from itssurroundings, it had a fresh pathos, and March triedto make him understand that they appreciated it.He knew that his wife wished the poor man to thinkhe had done them a great favor in showing it; he hadbeen touched with all the vain shows of grief in thepoor, ugly little place; most of all he had felt theexile of those who had taken their own lives and wereparted in death from the more patient sufferers whohad waited for God to take them. With a curious,unpainful self-analysis he noted that the older membersof the party, who in the course of nature were somuch nearer death, did not shrink from its shows;but the young girl and the young man had not borneto look on them, and had quickly escaped from theplace, somewhere outside the gate. Was it thebeginning, the promise of that reconciliation withdeath which nature brings to life at last, or wasit merely the effect, or defect, of ossified sensibilities,of toughened nerves?

“That is all?” he asked of the spectralsacristan.

“That is all,” the man said, and Marchfelt in his pocket for a coin commensurate to theservice he had done them; it ought to be somethinghandsome.

“No, no,” said Stoller, detecting hisgesture. “Your money a’n’t good.”

He put twenty or thirty kreutzers into the hand ofthe man, who regarded them with a disappointment nonethe less cruel because it was so patient. InFrance, he would have been insolent; in Italy, he wouldhave frankly said it was too little; here, he merelylooked at the money and whispered a sad “Danke.”

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy bankoutside where they were sitting, and waited for theelders to get into their two-spanner.

“Oh, have I lost my glove in there?” saidMrs. March, looking at her hands and such parts ofher dress as a glove might cling to.

“Let me go and find it for you,” Burnamyentreated.

“Well,” she consented, and she added,“If the sacristan has found it, give him somethingfor me something really handsome, poor fellow.”

As Burnamy passed her, she let him see that she hadboth her gloves, and her heart yearned upon him forhis instant smile of intelligence: some men wouldhave blundered out that she had the lost glove in herhand. He came back directly, saying, “No,he didn’t find it.”

She laughed, and held both gloves up. “Nowonder! I had it all the time. Thank youever so much.”

“How are we going to ride back?” askedStoller.

Burnamy almost turned pale; Miss Triscoe smiled impenetrably.No one else spoke, and Mrs. March said, with placidauthority, “Oh, I think the way we came, isbest.”

“Did that absurd creature,” she apostrophizedher husband as soon as she got him alone after theirarrival at Pupp’s, “think I was going tolet him drive back with Agatha?”

“I wonder,” said March, “if that’swhat Burnamy calls her now?”

“I shall despise him if it isn’t.”

XXXVII.

Burnamy took up his mail to Stoller after the supperwhich they had eaten in a silence natural with twomen who have been off on a picnic together. Hedid not rise from his writing-desk when Burnamy camein, and the young man did not sit down after puttinghis letters before him. He said, with an effortof forcing himself to speak at once, “I havelooked through the papers, and there is somethingthat I think you ought to see.”

“What do you mean?” said Stoller.

Burnamy laid down three or four papers opened to pageswhere certain articles were strongly circ*mscribedin ink. The papers varied, but their editorialsdid not, in purport at least. Some were graveand some were gay; one indignantly denounced; anotheraffected an ironical bewilderment; the third simplyhad fun with the Hon. Jacob Stoller. They all,however, treated his letter on the city governmentof Carlsbad as the praise of municipal socialism,and the paper which had fun with him gleefully congratulatedthe dangerous classes on the accession of the HonorableJacob to their ranks.

Stoller read the articles, one after another, withparted lips and gathering drops of perspiration onhis upper lip, while Burnamy waited on foot.He flung the papers all down at last. “Why,they’re a pack of fools! They don’tknow what they’re talking about! I wantcity government carried on on business principles,by the people, for the people. I don’tcare what they say! I know I’m right, andI’m going ahead on this line if it takes all—­”The note of defiance died out of his voice at the sightof Burnamy’s pale face. “What’sthe matter with you?”

“There’s nothing the matter with me.”

“Do you mean to tell me it is”—­hecould not bring himself to use the word—­“whatthey say?”

“I suppose,” said Burnamy, with a drymouth, “it’s what you may call municipalsocialism.”

Stoller jumped from his seat. “And youknew it when you let me do it?”

“I supposed you knew what you were about.”

“It’s a lie!” Stoller advanced uponhim, wildly, and Burnamy took a step backward.

“Look out!” shouted Burnamy. “Younever asked me anything about it. You told mewhat you wanted done, and I did it. How couldI believe you were such an ignoramus as not to knowthe a b c of the thing you were talking about?”He added, in cynical contempt, “But you needn’tworry. You can make it right with the managersby spending a little more money than you expectedto spend.”

Stoller started as if the word money reminded himof something. “I can take care of myself,young man. How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing!” said Burnamy, with an effortfor grandeur which failed him.

The next morning as the Marches sat over their coffeeat the Posthof, he came dragging himself toward themwith such a haggard air that Mrs. March called, beforehe reached their table, “Why, Mr. Burnamy, what’sthe matter?”

He smiled miserably. “Oh, I haven’tslept very well. May I have my coffee with you?I want to tell you something; I want you to make me.But I can’t speak till the coffee comes.Fraulein!” he besought a waitress going offwith a tray near them. “Tell Lili, please,to bring me some coffee—­only coffee.”

He tried to make some talk about the weather, whichwas rainy, and the Marches helped him, but the poorendeavor lagged wretchedly in the interval betweenthe ordering and the coming of the coffee. “Ah,thank you, Lili,” he said, with a humility whichconfirmed Mrs. March in her instant belief that hehad been offering himself to Miss Triscoe and beenrejected. After gulping his coffee, he turnedto her: “I want to say good-by. I’mgoing away.”

“From Carlsbad?” asked Mrs. March witha keen distress.

The water came into his eyes. “Don’t,don’t be good to me, Mrs. March! I can’tstand it. But you won’t, when you know.”

He began to speak of Stoller, first to her, but addressinghimself more and more to the intelligence of March,who let him go on without question, and laid a restraininghand upon his wife when he saw her about to prompthim. At the end, “That’s all,”he said, huskily, and then he seemed to be waitingfor March’s comment. He made none, and theyoung fellow was forced to ask, “Well, whatdo you think, Mr. March?”

“What do you think yourself?”

“I think, I behaved badly,” said Burnamy,and a movement of protest from Mrs. March nerved himto add: “I could make out that it was notmy business to tell him what he was doing; but I guessit was; I guess I ought to have stopped him, or givenhim a chance to stop himself. I suppose I mighthave done it, if he had treated me decently when Iturned up a day late, here; or hadn’t actedtoward me as if I were a hand in his buggy-works thathad come in an hour after the whistle sounded.”

He set his teeth, and an indignant sympathy shonein Mrs. March’s eyes; but her husband only lookedthe more serious.

He asked gently, “Do you offer that fact asan explanation, or as a justification.”

Burnamy laughed forlornly. “It certainlywouldn’t justify me. You might say thatit made the case all the worse for me.”March forbore to say, and Burnamy went on. “ButI didn’t suppose they would be onto him so quick,or perhaps at all. I thought—­if I thoughtanything—­that it would amuse some of thefellows in the office, who know about those things.”He paused, and in March’s continued silencehe went on. “The chance was one in a hundredthat anybody else would know where he had brought up.”

“But you let him take that chance,” Marchsuggested.

“Yes, I let him take it. Oh, you know howmixed all these things are!”

“Yes.”

“Of course I didn’t think it out at thetime. But I don’t deny that I had a satisfactionin the notion of the hornets’ nest he was pokinghis thick head into. It makes me sick, now, tothink I had. I oughtn’t to have let him;he was perfectly innocent in it. After the letterwent, I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t;and then I took the chances too. I don’tbelieve he could have ever got forward in politics;he’s too honest—­or he isn’tdishonest in the right way. But that doesn’tlet me out. I don’t defend myself!I did wrong; I behaved badly. But I’ve sufferedfor it.

“I’ve had a foreboding all the time thatit would come to the worst, and felt like a murdererwith his victim when I’ve been alone with Stoller.When I could get away from him I could shake it off,and even believe that it hadn’t happened.You can’t think what a nightmare it’s been!Well, I’ve ruined Stoller politically, but I’veruined myself, too. I’ve spoiled my ownlife; I’ve done what I can never explain to—­tothe people I want to have believe in me; I’vegot to steal away like the thief I am. Good-by!”He jumped to his feet, and put out his hand to March,and then to Mrs. March.

“Why, you’re not going away now!”she cried, in a daze.

“Yes, I am. I shall leave Carlsbad on theeleven-o’clock train. I don’t thinkI shall see you again.” He clung to herhand. “If you see General Triscoe—­Iwish you’d tell them I couldn’t—­thatI had to—­that I was called away suddenly—­Good-by!”He pressed her hand and dropped it, and mixed withthe crowd. Then he came suddenly back, with afinal appeal to March: “Should you—­doyou think I ought to see Stoller, and—­andtell him I don’t think I used him fairly?”

“You ought to know—­” Marchbegan.

But before he could say more, Burnamy said, “You’reright,” and was off again.

“Oh, how hard you were with him, my dear!”Mrs. March lamented.

“I wish,” he said, “if our boy everwent wrong that some one would be as true to him asI was to that poor fellow. He condemned himself;and he was right; he has behaved very badly.”

“You always overdo things so, when you act righteously!”

“Now, Isabel!”

“Oh, yes, I know what you will say. ButI should have tempered justice with mercy.”

Her nerves tingled with pity for Burnamy, but in herheart she was glad that her husband had had strengthto side with him against himself, and she was proudof the forbearance with which he had done it.In their earlier married life she would have confidentlytaken the initiative on all moral questions.She still believed that she was better fitted fortheir decision by her Puritan tradition and her NewEngland birth, but once in a great crisis when itseemed a question of their living, she had weakenedbefore it, and he, with no such advantages, had somehowmet the issue with courage and conscience. Shecould not believe he did so by inspiration, but shehad since let him take the brunt of all such issuesand the responsibility. He made no reply, andshe said: “I suppose you’ll admitnow there was always something peculiar in the poorboy’s manner to Stoller.”

He would confess no more than that there ought tohave been. “I don’t see how he couldstagger through with that load on his conscience.I’m not sure I like his being able to do so.”

She was silent in the misgiving which she shared withhim, but she said: “I wonder how far ithas gone with him and Miss Triscoe?”

“Well, from his wanting you to give his messageto the general in the plural—­”

“Don’t laugh! It’s wicked tolaugh! It’s heartless!” she cried,hysterically. “What will he do, poor fellow?”

“I’ve an idea that he will light on hisfeet, somehow. But, at any rate, he’s doingthe right thing in going to own up to Stoller.”

“Oh, Stoller! I care nothing for Stoller!Don’t speak to me of Stoller!”

Burnamy fond the Bird of Prey, as he no longer hadthe heart to call him, walking up and down in hisroom like an eagle caught in a trap. He erectedhis crest fiercely enough, though, when the young fellowcame in at his loudly shouted, “Herein!”

“What do you want?” he demanded, brutally.

This simplified Burnamy’s task, while it madeit more loathsome. He answered not much lessbrutally, “I want to tell you that I think Iused you badly, that I let you betray yourself, thatI feel myself to blame.” He could haveadded, “Curse you!” without change of tone.

Stoller sneered in a derision that showed his lowerteeth like a dog’s when he snarls. “Youwant to get back!”

“No,” said Burnamy, mildly, and with increasingsadness as he spoke. “I don’t wantto get back. Nothing would induce me. I’mgoing away on the first train.”

“Well, you’re not!” shouted Stoller.“You’ve lied me into this—­”

“Look out!” Burnamy turned white.

“Didn’t you lie me into it, if you letme fool myself, as you say?” Stoller pursued,and Burnamy felt himself weaken through his wrath.“Well, then, you got to lie me out of it.I been going over the damn thing, all night—­andyou can do it for me. I know you can do it,”he gave way in a plea that was almost a whimper.“Look here! You see if you can’t.I’ll make it all right with you. I’llpay you whatever you think is right—­whateveryou say.”

“Oh!” said Burnamy, in otherwise unutterabledisgust.

“You kin,” Stoller went on, breaking downmore and more into his adopted Hoosier, in the stressof his anxiety. “I know you kin, Mr. Burnamy.”He pushed the paper containing his letter into Burnamy’shands, and pointed out a succession of marked passages.“There! And here! And this place!Don’t you see how you could make out that itmeant something else, or was just ironical?”He went on to prove how the text might be given thecomplexion he wished, and Burnamy saw that he had reallythought it not impossibly out. “I can’tput it in writing as well as you; but I’ve doneall the work, and all you’ve got to do is togive it some of them turns of yours. I’ll

cable the fellows in our office to say I’ve beenmisrepresented, and that my correction is coming.We’ll get it into shape here together, and thenI’ll cable that. I don’t care forthe money. And I’ll get our counting-roomto see this scoundrel”—­he picked upthe paper that had had fun with him—­“andfix him all right, so that he’ll ask for a suspensionof public opinion, and—­You see, don’tyou?”

The thing did appeal to Burnamy. If it couldbe done, it would enable him to make Stoller the reparationhe longed to make him more than anything else in theworld. But he heard himself saying, very gently,almost tenderly, “It might be done, Mr. Stoller.But I couldn’t do it. It wouldn’tbe honest—­for me.”

“Yah!” yelled Stoller, and he crushedthe paper into a wad and flung it into Burnamy’sface. “Honest, you damn humbug! Youlet me in for this, when you knew I didn’t meanit, and now you won’t help me out because ita’n’t honest! Get out of my room,and get out quick before I—­”

He hurled himself toward Burnamy, who straightenedhimself, with “If you dare!” He knew thathe was right in refusing; but he knew that Stollerwas right, too, and that he had not meant the logicof what he had said in his letter, and of what Burnamyhad let him imply. He braved Stoller’sonset, and he left his presence untouched, but feelingas little a moral hero as he well could.

XXXVIII.

General Triscoe woke in the bad humor of an elderlyman after a day’s pleasure, and in the self-reproachof a pessimist who has lost his point of view fora time, and has to work back to it. He began atthe belated breakfast with his daughter when she said,after kissing him gayly, in the small two-seated bowerwhere they breakfasted at their hotel when they didnot go to the Posthof, “Didn’t you havea nice time, yesterday, papa?”

She sank into the chair opposite, and beamed at himacross the little iron table, as she lifted the potto pour out his coffee.

“What do you call a nice time?” he temporized,not quite able to resist her gayety.

“Well, the kind of time I had.”

“Did you get rheumatism from sitting on thegrass? I took cold in that old church, and thetea at that restaurant must have been brewed in abrass kettle. I suffered all night from it.And that ass from Illinois—­”

“Oh, poor papa! I couldn’t go withMr. Stoller alone, but I might have gone in the two-spannerwith him and let you have Mr. or Mrs. March in theone-spanner.”

“I don’t know. Their interest ineach other isn’t so interesting to other peopleas they seem to think.”

“Do you feel that way really, papa? Don’tyou like their being so much in love still?”

“At their time of life? Thank you it’sbad enough in young people.”

The girl did not answer; she appeared altogether occupiedin pouring out her father’s coffee.

He tasted it, and then he drank pretty well all ofit; but he said, as he put his cup down, “Idon’t know what they make this stuff of.I wish I had a cup of good, honest American coffee.”

“Oh, there’s nothing like American food!”said his daughter, with so much conciliation thathe looked up sharply.

But whatever he might have been going to say was atleast postponed by the approach of a serving-maid,who brought a note to his daughter. She blusheda little at sight of it, and then tore it open andread:

“I am going away from Carlsbad, for a faultof my own which forbids me to look you in the face.If you wish to know the worst of me, ask Mrs. March.I have no heart to tell you.”

Agatha read these mystifying words of Burnamy’sseveral times over in a silent absorption with themwhich left her father to look after himself, and hehad poured out a second cup of coffee with his ownhand, and was reaching for the bread beside her beforeshe came slowly back to a sense of his presence.

“Oh, excuse me, papa,” she said, and shegave him the butter. “Here’s a verystrange letter from Mr. Burnamy, which I think you’dbetter see.” She held the note across thetable to him, and watched his face as he read it.

After he had read it twice, he turned the sheet over,as people do with letters that puzzle them, in thevain hope of something explanatory on the back.Then he looked up and asked: “What do yousuppose he’s been doing?”

“I don’t believe he’s been doinganything. It’s something that Mr. Stoller’sbeen doing to him.”

“I shouldn’t infer that from his own words.What makes you think the trouble is with Stoller?”

“He said—­he said yesterday—­somethingabout being glad to be through with him, because hedisliked him so much he was always afraid of wronginghim. And that proves that now Mr. Stoller hasmade him believe that he’s done wrong, and hasworked upon him till he does believe it.”

“It proves nothing of the kind,” saidthe general, recurring to the note. After readingit again, he looked keenly at her: “Am Ito understand that you have given him the right tosuppose you would want to know the worst—­orthe best of him?”

The girl’s eyes fell, and she pushed her knifeagainst her plate. She began: “No—­”

“Then confound his impudence!” the generalbroke out. “What business has he to writeto you at all about this?”

“Because he couldn’t go away without it!”she returned; and she met her father’s eye courageously.“He had a right to think we were his friends;and if he has done wrong, or is in disgrace any way,isn’t it manly of him to wish to tell us firsthimself?”

Her father could not say that it was not. Buthe could and did say, very sceptically: “Stuff!Now, see here, Agatha: what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to see Mrs. March, and then—­”

“You mustn’t do anything of the kind,my dear,” said her father, gently. “You’veno right to give yourself away to that romantic oldgoose.” He put up his hand to interrupther protest. “This thing has got to be goneto the bottom of. But you’re not to do it.I will see March myself. We must consider yourdignity in this matter—­and mine. Andyou may as well understand that I’m not goingto have any nonsense. It’s got to be managedso that it can’t be supposed we’re anxiousabout it, one way or the other, or that he was authorizedto write to you in this way—­”

“No, no! He oughtn’t to have doneso. He was to blame. He couldn’t havewritten to you, though, papa—­”

“Well, I don’t know why. But that’sno reason why we should let it be understood thathe has written to you. I will see March; and Iwill manage to see his wife, too. I shall probablyfind them in the reading-room at Pupp’s, and—­”

The Marches were in fact just coming in from theirbreakfast at the Posthof, and he met them at the doorof Pupp’s, where they all sat down on one ofthe iron settees of the piazza, and began to ask oneanother questions of their minds about the pleasureof the day before, and to beat about the bush whereBurnamy lurked in their common consciousness.

Mrs. March was not able to keep long from startinghim. “You knew,” she said, “thatMr. Burnamy had left us?”

“Left! Why?” asked the general.

She was a woman of resource, but in a case like thisshe found it best to trust her husband’s povertyof invention. She looked at him, and he answeredfor her with a promptness that made her quake at first,but finally seemed the only thing, if not the bestthing: “He’s had some trouble withStoller.” He went on to tell the generaljust what the trouble was.

At the end the general grunted as from an uncertainmind. “You think he’s behaved badly.”

“I think he’s behaved foolishly—­youthfully.But I can understand how strongly he was tempted.He could say that he was not authorized to stop Stollerin his mad career.”

At this Mrs. March put her hand through her husband’sarm.

“I’m not so sure about that,” saidthe general.

March added: “Since I saw him this morning,I’ve heard something that disposes me to lookat his performance in a friendlier light. It’ssomething that Stoller told me himself; to heightenmy sense of Burnamy’s wickedness. He seemsto have felt that I ought to know what a serpent Iwas cherishing in my bosom,” and he gave Triscoethe facts of Burnamy’s injurious refusal tohelp Stoller put a false complexion on the opinionshe had allowed him ignorantly to express.

The general grunted again. “Of course hehad to refuse, and he has behaved like a gentlemanso far. But that doesn’t justify him inhaving let Stoller get himself into the scrape.”

“No,” said March. “It’sa tough nut for the casuist to try his tooth on.And I must say I feel sorry for Stoller.”

Mrs. March plucked her hand from his arm. “Idon’t, one bit. He was thoroughly selfishfrom first to last. He has got just what he deserved.”

“Ah, very likely,” said her husband.“The question is about Burnamy’s partin giving him his deserts; he had to leave him to them,of course.”

The general fixed her with the impenetrable glitterof his eye-glasses, and left the subject as of noconcern to him. “I believe,” he said,rising, “I’ll have a look at some of yourpapers,” and he went into the reading-room.

“Now,” said Mrs. March, “he willgo home and poison that poor girl’s mind.And, you will have yourself to thank for prejudicinghim against Burnamy.”

“Then why didn’t you do it yourself, mydear?” he teased; but he was really too sorryfor the whole affair, which he nevertheless enjoyedas an ethical problem.

The general looked so little at the papers that beforeMarch went off for his morning walk he saw him comeout of the reading-room and take his way down theAlte Wiese. He went directly back to his daughter,and reported Burnamy’s behavior with entireexactness. He dwelt upon his making the bestof a bad business in refusing to help Stoller out ofit, dishonorably and mendaciously; but he did notconceal that it was a bad business.

“Now, you know all about it,” he saidat the end, “and I leave the whole thing toyou. If you prefer, you can see Mrs. March.I don’t know but I’d rather you’dsatisfy yourself—­”

“I will not see Mrs. March. Do you thinkI would go back of you in that way? I am satisfiednow.”

XXXIX.

Instead of Burnamy, Mrs. Adding and her son now breakfastedwith the Marches at the Posthof, and the boy was withMarch throughout the day a good deal. He rectifiedhis impressions of life in Carlsbad by March’sgreater wisdom and experience, and did his best toanticipate his opinions and conform to his conclusions.This was not easy, for sometimes he could not concealfrom himself, that March’s opinions were whimsical,and his conclusions fantastic; and he could not alwaysconceal from March that he was matching them withKenby’s on some points, and suffering from theirdivergence. He came to join the sage in his earlyvisit to the springs, and they walked up and downtalking; and they went off together on long strollsin which Rose was proud to bear him company. Hewas patient of the absences from which he was oftenanswered, and he learned to distinguish between theearnest and the irony of which March’s repliesseemed to be mixed. He examined him upon manyfeatures of German civilization, but chiefly uponthe treatment of women in it; and upon this his philosopherwas less satisfactory than he could have wished himto be. He tried to excuse his trifling as an escapefrom the painful stress of questions which he foundso afflicting himself; but in the matter of the woman-and-dogteams, this was not easy. March owned that thenotion of their being yokemates was shocking; but heurged that it was a stage of evolution, and a distinctadvance upon the time when women dragged the cartswithout the help of the dogs; and that the time mightnot be far distant when the dogs would drag the cartswithout the help of the women.

Rose surmised a joke, and he tried to enjoy it, butinwardly he was troubled by his friend’s apparentacceptance of unjust things on their picturesque side.Once as they were sauntering homeward by the brinkof the turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on thegrass with a pipe in his mouth, and lazily watchingfrom under his fallen lids the cows grazing by theriver-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a fileof women were reaping a belated harvest with sickles,bending wearily over to clutch the stems togetherand cut them with their hooked blades. “Ah,delightful!” March took off his hat as if tosalute the pleasant sight.

“But don’t you think, Mr. March,”the boy ventured, “that the man had better becutting the wheat, and letting the women watch thecows?”

“Well, I don’t know. There are moreof them; and he wouldn’t be half so gracefulas they are, with that flow of their garments, andthe sway of their aching backs.” The boysmiled sadly, and March put his hand on his shoulderas they walked on. “You find a lot of thingsin Europe that need putting right, don’t you,Rose?”

“Yes; I know it’s silly.”

“Well, I’m not sure. But I’mafraid it’s useless. You see, these oldcustoms go such a way back, and are so grounded inconditions. We think they might be changed, ifthose who rule could be got to see how cruel and uglythey are; but probably they couldn’t. I’mafraid that the Emperor of Austria himself couldn’tchange them, in his sovereign plenitude of power.The Emperor is only an old custom too, and he’sas much grounded in the conditions as any.”This was the serious way Rose felt that March oughtalways to talk; and he was too much grieved to laughwhen he went on. “The women have so muchof the hard work to do, over here, because the emperorsneed the men for their armies. They couldn’tlet their men cut wheat unless it was for their officers’horses, in the field of some peasant whom it wouldruin.”

If Mrs. March was by she would not allow him to workthese paradoxes for the boy’s confusion.She said the child adored him, and it was a sacrilegeto play with his veneration. She always interferedto save him, but with so little logic though so muchjustice that Rose suffered a humiliation from herchampionship, and was obliged from a sense of self-respectto side with the mocker. She understood this,and magnanimously urged it as another reason why herhusband should not trifle with Rose’s idealof him; to make his mother laugh at him was wicked.

“Oh, I’m not his only ideal,” Marchprotested. “He adores Kenby too, and everynow and then he brings me to book with a text fromKenby’s gospel.”

Mrs. March caught her breath. “Kenby!Do you really think, then, that she—­”

“Oh, hold on, now! It isn’t a questionof Mrs. Adding; and I don’t say Rose had aneye on poor old Kenby as a step-father. I merelywant you to understand that I’m the object ofa divided worship, and that when I’m off dutyas an ideal I don’t see why I shouldn’thave the fun of making Mrs. Adding laugh. Youcan’t pretend she isn’t wrapped up in theboy. You’ve said that yourself.”

“Yes, she’s wrapped up in him; she’dgive her life for him; but she is so light. Ididn’t suppose she was so light; but it’sborne in upon me more and more.”

They were constantly seeing Rose and his mother, inthe sort of abeyance the Triscoes had fallen into.One afternoon the Addings came to Mrs. March’sroom to look from her windows at a parade of bicyclers’clubs from the neighboring towns. The spectacleprospered through its first half-hour, with the charmwhich German sentiment and ingenuity, are able tolend even a bicycle parade. The wheelmen and wheelwomenfiled by on machines wreathed with flowers and ribbons,and decked with streaming banners. Here and thereone sat under a moving arch of blossoms, or in a bowerof leaves and petals, and they were all gay with theirclub costumes and insignia. In the height ofthe display a sudden mountain shower gathered andbroke upon them. They braved it till it becamea drenching down-pour; then they leaped from theirmachines and fled to any shelter they could find,under trees and in doorways. The men used theirgreater agility to get the best places, and kept them;the women made no appeal for them by word or look,but took the rain in the open as if they expectednothing else.

Rose watched the scene with a silent intensity whichMarch interpreted. “There’s yourchance, Rose. Why don’t you go down andrebuke those fellows?”

Rose blushed and shrank away without answer, and Mrs.March promptly attacked her husband in his behalf.“Why don’t you go and rebuke them yourself?”

“Well, for one thing, there isn’t anyconversation in my phrase-book Between an indignantAmerican Herr and a Party of German Wheelmen who havetaken Shelter from the Rain and are keeping the Wheelwomenout in the Wet.” Mrs. Adding shrieked herdelight, and he was flattered into going on.“For another thing, I think it’s very wellfor you ladies to realize from an object-lesson ofthis sort what spoiled children of our civilizationyou are. It ought to make you grateful for yourprivileges.”

“There is something in that,” Mrs. Addingjoyfully consented.

“Oh, there is no civilization but ours,”said Mrs. March, in a burst of vindictive patriotism.“I am more and more convinced of it the longerI stay in Europe.”

“Perhaps that’s why we like to stay solong in Europe; it strengthens us in the convictionthat America is the only civilized country in theworld,” said March.

The shower passed as quickly as it had gathered, andthe band which it had silenced for a moment burstforth again in the music which fills the Carlsbadday from dawn till dusk. Just now, it began toplay a pot pourri of American airs; at the end someunseen Americans under the trees below clapped andcheered.

“That was opportune of the band,” saidMarch. “It must have been a telepathicimpulse from our patriotism in the director. Buta pot pourri of American airs is like that tabletdedicating the American Park up here on the Schlossberg,which is signed by six Jews and one Irishman.The only thing in this medley that’s the leastcharacteristic or original is Dixie; and I’mglad the South has brought us back into the Union.”

“You don’t know one note from another,my dear,” said his wife.

“I know the ‘Washington Post.’”

“And don’t you call that American?”

“Yes, if Sousa is an American name; I shouldhave thought it was Portuguese.”

“Now that sounds a little too much like GeneralTriscoe’s pessimism,” said Mrs. March;and she added: “But whether we have anynational melodies or not, we don’t poke womenout in the rain and keep them soaking!”

“No, we certainly don’t,” he assented,with such a well-studied effect of yielding to superiorlogic that Mrs. Adding screamed for joy.

The boy had stolen out of the room, and he said, “Ihope Rose isn’t acting on my suggestion?”

“I hate to have you tease him, dearest,”his wife interposed.

“Oh, no,” the mother said, laughing still,but with a note of tenderness in her laugh, whichdropped at last to a sigh. “He’s toomuch afraid of lese-majesty, for that. But Idare say he couldn’t stand the sight. He’squeer.”

“He’s beautiful!” said Mrs. March.

“He’s good,” the mother admitted.“As good as the day’s long. He’snever given me a moment’s trouble—­buthe troubles me. If you can understand!”

“Oh, I do understand!” Mrs. March returned.“By his innocence, you mean. That is theworst of children. Their innocence breaks ourhearts and makes us feel ourselves such dreadful oldthings.”

“His innocence, yes,” pursued Mrs. Adding,“and his ideals.” She began to laughagain. “He may have gone off for a seasonof meditation and prayer over the misbehavior of thesebicyclers. His mind is turning that way a gooddeal lately. It’s only fair to tell you,Mr. March, that he seems to be giving up his notionof being an editor. You mustn’t be disappointed.”

“I shall be sorry,” said the editor.“But now that you mention it, I think I havenoticed that Rose seems rather more indifferent toperiodical literature. I supposed he might simplyhave exhausted his questions—­or my answers.”

“No; it goes deeper than that. I thinkit’s Europe that’s turned his mind inthe direction of reform. At any rate he thinksnow he will be a reformer.”

“Really! What kind of one? Not religious,I hope?”

“No. His reform has a religious basis,but its objects are social. I don’t makeit out, exactly; but I shall, as soon as Rose does.He tells me everything, and sometimes I don’tfeel equal to it, spiritually or even intellectually.”

“Don’t laugh at him, Mrs. Adding!”Mrs. March entreated.

“Oh, he doesn’t mind my laughing,”said the mother, gayly. Rose came shyly backinto the room, and she said, “Well, did you rebukethose bad bicyclers?” and she laughed again.

“They’re only a custom, too, Rose,”,said March, tenderly. “Like the man restingwhile the women worked, and the Emperor, and all therest of it.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” the boy returned.

“They ride modern machines, but they live inthe tenth century. That’s what we’realways forgetting when we come to Europe and see thesebarbarians enjoying all our up-to-date improvements.”

“There, doesn’t that console you?”asked his mother, and she took him away with her,laughing back from the door. “I don’tbelieve it does, a bit!”

“I don’t believe she understands the child,”said Mrs. March. “She is very light, don’tyou think? I don’t know, after all, whetherit wouldn’t be a good thing for her to marryKenby. She is very easygoing, and she will besure to marry somebody.”

She had fallen into a tone of musing censure, andhe said, “You might put these ideas to her.”

XL.

With the passage of the days and weeks, the strangefaces which had familiarized themselves at the springsdisappeared; even some of those which had become thefaces of acquaintance began to go. In the diminishingcrowd the smile of Otterson was no longer to be seen;the sad, severe visage of Major Eltwin, who seemednever to have quite got his bearings after his errorwith General Triscoe, seldom showed itself. TheTriscoes themselves kept out of the Marches’way, or they fancied so; Mrs. Adding and Rose aloneremained of their daily encounter.

It was full summer, as it is everywhere in mid-August,but at Carlsbad the sun was so late getting up overthe hills that as people went to their breakfastsat the cafes up the valley of the Tepl they found himlooking very obliquely into it at eight o’clockin the morning. The yellow leaves were thickerabout the feet of the trees, and the grass was silverygray with the belated dews. The breakfasters werefewer than they had been, and there were more littlebarefooted boys and girls with cups of red raspberrieswhich they offered to the passers with cries of “Himbeeren!Himbeeren!” plaintive as the notes of birds leftsongless by the receding summer.

March was forbidden the fruit, but his wife and Mrs.Adding bought recklessly of it, and ate it under hiseyes with their coffee and bread, pouring over itpots of clotted cream that the ‘schone’Lili brought them. Rose pretended an indifferenceto it, which his mother betrayed was a sacrifice inbehalf of March’s inability.

Lili’s delays in coming to be paid had beensuch that the Marches now tried to pay her when shebrought their breakfast, but they sometimes forgot,and then they caught her whenever she came near them.In this event she liked to coquet with their impatience;she would lean against their table, and say:“Oh, no. You stay a little. It is sonice.” One day after such an entreaty,she said, “The queen is here, this morning.”

Mrs. March started, in the hope of highhotes.“The queen!”

“Yes; the young lady. Mr. Burnamy was sayingshe was a queen. She is there with her father.”She nodded in the direction of a distant corner, andthe Marches knew that she meant Miss Triscoe and thegeneral. “She is not seeming so gayly asshe was being.”

March smiled. “We are none of us so gaylyas we were being, Lili. The summer is going.”

“But Mr. Burnamy will be returning, not true?”the girl asked, resting her tray on the corner ofthe table.

“No, I’m afraid he won’t,”March returned sadly.

“He was very good. He was paying the proprietorfor the dishes that Augusta did break when she wasfalling down. He was paying before he went away,when he was knowing that the proprietor would makeAugusta to pay.”

“Ah!” said March, and his wife said, “Thatwas like him!” and she eagerly explained toMrs. Adding how good and great Burnamy had been inthis characteristic instance, while Lili waited withthe tray to add some pathetic facts about Augusta’spoverty and gratitude. “I think Miss Triscoeought to know it. There goes the wretch, now!”she broke off. “Don’t look at him!”She set her husband the example of averting his facefrom the sight of Stoller sullenly pacing up the middleaisle of the grove, and looking to the right and leftfor a vacant table. “Ugh! I hope hewon’t be able to find a single place.”

Mrs. Adding gave one of her pealing laughs, whileRose watched March’s face with grave sympathy.“He certainly doesn’t deserve one.Don’t let us keep you from offering Miss Triscoeany consolation you can.” They got up,and the boy gathered up the gloves, umbrella, and handkerchiefwhich the ladies let drop from their laps.

“Have you been telling?” March asked hiswife.

“Have I told you anything?” she demandedof Mrs. Adding in turn. “Anything thatyou didn’t as good as know, already?”

“Not a syllable!” Mrs. Adding repliedin high delight. “Come, Rose!”

“Well, I suppose there’s no use sayinganything,” said March, after she left them.

“She had guessed everything, without my tellingher,” said his wife.

“About Stoller?”

“Well-no. I did tell her that part, butthat was nothing. It was about Burnamy and Agathathat she knew. She saw it from the first.”

“I should have thought she would have enoughto do to look after poor old Kenby.”

“I’m not sure, after all, that she caresfor him. If she doesn’t, she oughtn’tto let him write to her. Aren’t you goingover to speak to the Triscoes?”

“No, certainly not. I’m going backto the hotel. There ought to be some steamerletters this morning. Here we are, worrying aboutthese strangers all the time, and we never give athought to our own children on the other side of theocean.”

“I worry about them, too,” said the mother,fondly. “Though there is nothing to worryabout,” she added.

“It’s our duty to worry,” he insisted.

At the hotel the portier gave them four letters.There was one from each of their children: onevery buoyant, not to say boisterous, from the daughter,celebrating her happiness in her husband, and the lovelinessof Chicago as a summer city ("You would think shewas born out there!” sighed her mother); andone from the son, boasting his well-being in spiteof the heat they were having ("And just think how coolit is here!” his mother upbraided herself),and the prosperity of ‘Every Other Week’.There was a line from Fulkerson, praising the boy’seditorial instinct, and ironically proposing March’sresignation in his favor.

“I do believe we could stay all winter, justas well as not,” said Mrs. March, proudly.“What does ’Burnamy say?”

“How do you know it’s from him?”

“Because you’ve been keeping your handon it! Give it here.”

“When I’ve read it.”

The letter was dated at Ansbach, in Germany, and dealt,except for some messages of affection to Mrs. March,with a scheme for a paper which Burnamy wished towrite on Kaspar Hauser, if March thought he could useit in ‘Every Other Week’. He had comeupon a book about that hapless foundling in Nuremberg,and after looking up all his traces there he had goneon to Ansbach, where Kaspar Hauser met his death sopathetically. Burnamy said he could not giveany notion of the enchantment of Nuremberg; but hebesought March, if he was going to the Tyrol for hisafter-cure, not to fail staying a day or so in thewonderful place. He thought March would enjoyAnsbach too, in its way.

“And, not a word—­not a syllable—­aboutMiss Triscoe!” cried Mrs. March. “Shallyou take his paper?”

“It would be serving him right, if I refusedit, wouldn’t it?”

They never knew what it cost Burnamy to keep her nameout of his letter, or by what an effort of the willhe forbade himself even to tell of his parting interviewwith Stoller. He had recovered from his remorsefor letting Stoller give himself away; he was stillsorry for that, but he no longer suffered; yet hehad not reached the psychological moment when he couldcelebrate his final virtue in the matter. He wasglad he had been able to hold out against the temptationto retrieve himself by another wrong; but he was humblyglad, and he felt that until happier chance broughthim and his friends together he must leave them totheir merciful conjectures. He was young, andhe took the chance, with an aching heart. Ifhe had been older, he might not have taken it.

XLI.

The birthday of the Emperor comes conveniently, inlate August, in the good weather which is pretty sureto fall then, if ever in the Austrian summer.For a week past, at Carlsbad, the workmen had beenbuilding a scaffolding for the illumination in thewoods on a height overlooking the town, and makingunobtrusive preparations at points within it.

The day was important as the last of March’scure, and its pleasures began for him by a renewalof his acquaintance in its first kindliness with theEltwins. He had met them so seldom that at onetime he thought they must have gone away, but nowafter his first cup he saw the quiet, sad old pair,sitting together on a bench in the Stadt Park, andhe asked leave to sit down with them till it was timefor the next. Eltwin said that this was theirlast day, too; and explained that his wife alwayscame with him to the springs, while he took the waters.

“Well,” he apologized, “we’reall that’s left, and I suppose we like to keeptogether.” He paused, and at the look inMarch’s face he suddenly went on. “Ihaven’t been well for three or four years; butI always fought against coming out here, when thedoctors wanted me to. I said I couldn’tleave home; and, I don’t suppose I ever should.But my home left me.”

As he spoke his wife shrank tenderly near him, andMarch saw her steal her withered hand into his.

“We’d had a large family, but they’dall died off, with one thing or another, and herein the spring we lost our last daughter. Seemedperfectly well, and all at once she died; heart-failure,they called it. It broke me up, and mother, here,got at me to go. And so we’re here.”His voice trembled; and his eyes softened; then theyflashed up, and March heard him add, in a tone thatastonished him less when he looked round and saw GeneralTriscoe advancing toward them, “I don’tknow what it is always makes me want to kick thatman.”

The general lifted his hat to their group, and hopedthat Mrs. Eltwin was well, and Major Eltwin better.He did not notice their replies, but said to March,“The ladies are waiting for you in Pupp’sreadingroom, to go with them to the Posthof for breakfast.”

“Aren’t you going, too?” asked March.

“No, thank you,” said the general, asif it were much finer not; “I shall breakfastat our pension.” He strolled off with theair of a man who has done more than his duty.

“I don’t suppose I ought to feel thatway,” said Eltwin, with a remorse which Marchsuspected a reproachful pressure of his wife’shand had prompted in him. “I reckon hemeans well.”

“Well, I don’t know,” March said,with a candor he could not wholly excuse.

On his way to the hotel he fancied mocking his wifefor her interest in the romantic woes of her lovers,in a world where there was such real pathos as thesepoor old people’s; but in the company of MissTriscoe he could not give himself this pleasure.He tried to amuse her on the way from Pupp’s,with the doubt he always felt in passing the CafeSans-Souci, whether he should live to reach the Posthofwhere he meant to breakfast. She said, “PoorMr. March!” and laughed inattentively; when hewent on to philosophize the commonness of the sparsecompany always observable at the Sans-Souci as a justeffect of its Laodicean situation between Pupp’sand the Posthof, the girl sighed absently, and hiswife frowned at him.

The flower-woman at the gate of her garden had nowonly autumnal blooms for sale in the vases which flankedthe entrance; the windrows of the rowen, left steepingin the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fragrance; apoor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itselfalong to the various cafes of the valley, its pinkpaper bags of bread rustling like sere foliage asit moved.

At the Posthof the ‘schone’ Lili alonewas as gay, as in the prime of July. She playedarchly about the guests she welcomed to a table ina sunny spot in the gallery. “You are tiredof Carlsbad?” she said caressingly to Miss Triscoe,as she put her breakfast before her.

“Not of the Posthof,” said the girl, listlessly.

“Posthof, and very little Lili?” She showed,with one forefinger on another, how very little shewas.

Miss Triscoe laughed, not cheerily, and Lili saidto Mrs. March, with abrupt seriousness, “Augustawas finding a handkerchief under the table, and shewas washing it and ironing it before she did bringit. I have scolded her, and I have made her giveit to me.”

She took from under her apron a man’s handkerchief,which she offered to Mrs. March. It bore, asshe saw Miss Triscoe saw, the initials L. J. B. But,“Whose can it be?” they asked each other.

“Why, Burnamy’s,” said March; andLili’s eyes danced. “Give it here!”

His wife caught it farther away. “No, I’mgoing to see whose it is, first; if it’s his,I’ll send it to him myself.”

She tried to put it into the pocket which was notin her dress by sliding it down her lap; then shehanded it to the girl, who took it with a carelessair, but kept it after a like failure to pocket it.

Mrs. March had come out in her India-rubber sandals,but for once in Carlsbad the weather was too dry forthem, and she had taken them off and was holding themin her lap. They fell to the ground when she nowrose from breakfast, and she stooped to pick themup. Miss Triscoe was too quick for her.

“Oh, let me carry them for you!” she entreated,and after a tender struggle she succeed in enslavingherself to them, and went away wearing them throughthe heel-bands like manacles on her wrist. Shewas not the kind of girl to offer such pretty devotions,and Mrs. March was not the kind of woman to sufferthem; but they played the comedy through, and letMarch go off for his last hill-climb with the promiseto meet him in the Stadt Park when he came to theKurhaus for his last mineral bath.

Mrs. March in the mean time went about some finalshopping, and invited the girl’s advice witha fondness which did not prevent her rejecting itin every case, with Miss Triscoe’s eager approval.In the Stadt Park they sat down and talked; from timeto time Mrs. March made polite feints of recoveringher sandals, but the girl kept them with increasedeffusion.

When they rose, and strolled away from the bench wherethey had been sitting, they seemed to be followed.They looked round and saw no one more alarming thana very severe-looking old gentleman, whose hat brimin spite of his severity was limp with much lifting,as all Austrian hat brims are. He touched it,and saying haughtily in German, “Something leftlying,” passed on.

They stared at each other; then, as women do, theyglanced down at their skirts to see if there was anythingamiss with them, and Miss Triscoe perceived her handsempty of Mrs. March’s sandals and of Burnamy’shandkerchief.

“Oh, I put it in one of the toes!” shelamented, and she fled back to their bench, alarmingin her course the fears of a gendarme for the publicsecurity, and putting a baby in its nurse’s armsinto such doubts of its personal safety that it burstinto a desolate cry. She laughed breathlesslyas she rejoined Mrs. March. “That comesof having no pocket; I didn’t suppose I couldforget your sandals, Mrs. March! Wasn’tit absurd?”

“It’s one of those things,” Mrs.March said to her husband afterwards, “thatthey can always laugh over together.”

“They? And what about Burnamy’s behaviorto Stoller?”

“Oh, I don’t call that anything but whatwill come right. Of course he can make it upto him somehow. And I regard his refusal to dowrong when Stoller wanted him to as quite wiping outthe first offence.”

“Well, my dear, you have burnt your ships behindyou. My only hope is that when we leave heretomorrow, her pessimistic papa’s poison willneutralize yours somehow.”

XLII.

One of the pleasantest incidents of March’ssojourn in Carlsbad was his introduction to the managerof the municipal theatre by a common friend who explainedthe editor in such terms to the manager that he conceivedof him as a brother artist. This led to much bowingand smiling from the manager when the Marches methim in the street, or in their frequent visits tothe theatre, with which March felt that it might wellhave ended, and still been far beyond his desert.He had not thought of going to the opera on the Emperor’sbirthnight, but after dinner a box came from the manager,and Mrs. March agreed with him that they could notin decency accept so great a favor. At the sametime she argued that they could not in decency refuseit, and that to show their sense of the pleasure donethem, they must adorn their box with all the beautyand distinction possible; in other words, she saidthey must ask Miss Triscoe and her father.

“And why not Major Eltwin and his wife?Or Mrs. Adding and Rose?”

She begged him, simply in his own interest, not tobe foolish; and they went early, so as to be in theirbox when their guests came. The foyer of thetheatre was banked with flowers, and against a curtainof evergreens stood a high-pedestalled bust of thepaternal Caesar, with whose side-whiskers a laurelcrown comported itself as well as it could. Atthe foot of the grand staircase leading to the boxesthe manager stood in evening dress, receiving hisfriends and their felicitations upon the honor whichthe theatre was sure to do itself on an occasion soaugust. The Marches were so cordial in theirprophecies that the manager yielded to an artist’simpulse and begged his fellow-artist to do him thepleasure of coming behind the scenes between the actsof the opera; he bowed a heart-felt regret to Mrs.March that he could not make the invitation includeher, and hoped that she would not be too lonely whileher husband was gone.

She explained that they had asked friends, and sheshould not be alone, and then he entreated March tobring any gentleman who was his guest with him.On the way up to their box, she pressed his arm asshe used in their young married days, and asked himif it was not perfect. “I wish we weregoing to have it all to ourselves; no one else canappreciate the whole situation. Do you thinkwe have made a mistake in having the Triscoes?”

“We!” he retorted. “Oh, that’sgood! I’m going to shirk him, when it comesto going behind the scenes.”

“No, no, dearest,” she entreated.“Snubbing will only make it worse. We muststand it to the bitter end, now.”

The curtain rose upon another laurelled bust of theEmperor, with a chorus of men formed on either side,who broke into the grave and noble strains of theAustrian Hymn, while every one stood. Then thecurtain fell again, and in the interval before theopera could begin, General Triscoe and his daughtercame in.

Mrs. March took the splendor in which the girl appearedas a tribute to her hospitality. She had hithertobeen a little disappointed of the open homage to Americangirlhood which her readings of international romancehad taught her to expect in Europe, but now her patrioticvanity feasted full. Fat highhotes of her ownsex levelled their lorgnettes at Miss Triscoe allaround the horseshoe, with critical glances which fellblunted from her complexion and costume; the housewas brilliant with the military uniforms, which wehave not yet to mingle with our unrivalled millinery,and the ardent gaze of the young officers dwelt onthe perfect mould of her girlish arms and neck, andthe winning lines of her face. The girl’seyes shone with a joyful excitement, and her littlehead, defined by its dark hair, trembled as she slowlyturned it from side to side, after she removed theairy scarf which had covered it. Her father,in evening dress, looked the Third Emperor complaisantto a civil occasion, and took a chair in the frontof the box without resistance; and the ladies disputedwhich should yield the best place to the other, tillMiss Triscoe forced Mrs. March fondly into it for thefirst act at least.

The piece had to be cut a good deal to give peopletime for the illuminations afterwards; but as it wasit gave scope to the actress who, ‘als Gast’from a Viennese theatre, was the chief figure in it.She merited the distinction by the art which stilllingered, deeply embedded in her massive balk, butnever wholly obscured.

“That is grand, isn’t it?” saidMarch, following one of the tremendous strokes bywhich she overcame her physical disadvantages.“It’s fine to see how her art can undo,for one splendid instant, the work of all those steinsof beer, those illimitable licks of sausage, thoseboundless fields of cabbage. But it’s ratherpathetic.”

“It’s disgusting,” said his wife;and at this General Triscoe, who had been watchingthe actress through his lorgnette, said, as if hiscontrary-mindedness were irresistibly invoked:

“Well, I don’t know. It’s amusing.Do you suppose we shall see her when we go behind,March?”

He still professed a desire to do so when the curtainfell, and they hurried to the rear door of the theatre.It was slightly ajar, and they pulled it wide open,with the eagerness of their age and nation, and beganto mount the stairs leading up from it between rowsof painted dancing-girls, who had come out for a breathof air, and who pressed themselves against the wallsto make room for the intruders. With their rougedfaces, and the stare of their glassy eyes intensifiedby the coloring of their brows and lashes, they werelike painted statues, as they stood there with theircrimsoned lips parted in astonished smiles.

“This is rather weird,” said March, falteringat the sight. “I wonder if we might askthese young ladies where to go?” General Triscoemade no answer, and was apparently no more preparedthan himself to accost the files of danseuses, whenthey were themselves accosted by an angry voice fromthe head of the stairs with a demand for their business.The voice belonged to a gendarme, who descended towardthem and seemed as deeply scandalized at their appearanceas they could have been at that of the young ladies.

March explained, in his ineffective German, with everyeffect of improbability, that they were there by appointmentof the manager, and wished to find his room.

The gendarme would not or could not make anythingout of it. He pressed down upon them, and layinga rude hand on a shoulder of either, began to forcethem back to the door. The mild nature of theeditor might have yielded to his violence, but themartial spirit of General Triscoe was roused.He shrugged the gendarme’s hand from his shoulder,and with a voice as furious as his own required him,in English, to say what the devil he meant. Thegendarme rejoined with equal heat in German; the general’stone rose in anger; the dancing-girls emitted somelittle shrieks of alarm, and fled noisily up the stairs.From time to time March interposed with a word ofthe German which had mostly deserted him in his hourof need; but if it had been a flow of intelligibleexpostulation, it would have had no effect upon thedisputants. They grew more outrageous, till themanager himself, appeared at the head of the stairs,and extended an arresting hand over the hubbub.As soon as the situation clarified itself he hurrieddown to his visitors with a polite roar of apologyand rescued them from the gendarme, and led them upto his room and forced them into arm-chairs with arapidity of reparation which did not exhaust itselftill he had entreated them with every circ*mstanceof civility to excuse an incident so mortifying tohim. But with all his haste he lost so much timein this that he had little left to show them throughthe theatre, and their presentation to the prima donnawas reduced to the obeisances with which they metand parted as she went upon the stage at the liftingof the curtain. In the lack of a common languagethis was perhaps as well as a longer interview; andnothing could have been more honorable than theirdismissal at the hands of the gendarme who had receivedthem so stormily. He opened the door for them,and stood with his fingers to his cap saluting, inthe effect of being a whole file of grenadiers.

XLIII.

At the same moment Burnamy bowed himself out of thebox where he had been sitting with the ladies duringthe absence of the gentlemen. He had knockedat the door almost as soon as they disappeared, andif he did not fully share the consternation whichhis presence caused, he looked so frightened thatMrs. March reserved the censure which the sight ofhim inspired, and in default of other inspirationtreated his coming simply as a surprise. Sheshook hands with him, and then she asked him to sitdown, and listened to his explanation that he had comeback to Carlsbad to write up the birthnight festivities,on an order from the Paris-New York Chronicle; thathe had seen them in the box and had ventured to tookin. He was pale, and so discomposed that the heartof justice was softened more and more in Mrs. March’sbreast, and she left him to the talk that sprang up,by an admirable effect of tact in the young lady,between him and Miss Triscoe.

After all, she decided, there was nothing criminalin his being in Carlsbad, and possibly in the lastanalysis there was nothing so very wicked in his beingin her box. One might say that it was not verynice of him after he had gone away under such a cloud;but on the other hand it was nice, though in a differentway, if he longed so much to see Miss Triscoe thathe could not help coming. It was altogether inhis favor that he was so agitated, though he was momentlybecoming less agitated; the young people were beginningto laugh at the notion of Mr. March and General Triscoegoing behind the scenes. Burnamy said he enviedthem the chance; and added, not very relevantly, thathe had come from Baireuth, where he had seen the lastof the Wagner performances. He said he was goingback to Baireuth, but not to Ansbach again, where hehad finished looking up that Kaspar Hauser business.He seemed to think Mrs. March would know about it,and she could not help saying; Oh, yes, Mr. Marchwas so much interested. She wondered if she oughtto tell him about his handkerchief; but she rememberedin time that she had left it in Miss Triscoe’skeeping. She wondered if the girl realized howhandsome he was. He was extremely handsome, inhis black evening dress, with his Tuxedo, and thepallor of his face repeated in his expanse of shirtfront.

At the bell for the rising of the curtain he rosetoo, and took their offered hands. In offeringhers Mrs. March asked if he would not stay and speakwith Mr. March and the general; and now for the firsttime he recognized anything clandestine in his visit.He laughed nervously, and said, “No, thank you!”and shut himself out.

“We must tell them,” said Mrs. March,rather interrogatively, and she was glad that thegirl answered with a note of indignation.

“Why, certainly, Mrs. March.”

They could not tell them at once, for the second acthad begun when March and the general came back; andafter the opera was over and they got out into thecrowded street there was no chance, for the generalwas obliged to offer his arm to Mrs. March, whileher husband followed with his daughter.

The facades of the theatre and of the hotels wereoutlined with thickly set little lamps, which beadedthe arches of the bridges spanning the Tepl, and lightedthe casem*nts and portals of the shops. High aboveall, against the curtain of black woodland on themountain where its skeleton had been growing for days,glittered the colossal effigy of the doubleheadedeagle of Austria, crowned with the tiara of the HolyRoman Empire; in the reflected splendor of its myriadlamps the pale Christ looked down from the mountainopposite upon the surging multitudes in the streetsand on the bridges.

They were most amiable multitudes, March thought,and they responded docilely to the entreaties of thepolicemen who stood on the steps of the bridges, anddivided their encountering currents with patient appealsof “Bitte schon! Bitte schon!” Helaughed to think of a New York cop saying “Pleaseprettily! Please prettily!” to a New Yorkcrowd which he wished to have go this way or that,and then he burned with shame to think how far ourmanners were from civilization, wherever our headsand hearts might be, when he heard a voice at hiselbow:

“A punch with a club would start some of thesefellows along quicker.”

It was Stoller, and March turned from him to losehis disgust in the sudden terror of perceiving thatMiss Triscoe was no longer at his side. Neithercould he see his wife and General Triscoe, and he beganto push frantically about in the crowd looking forthe girl. He had an interminable five or tenminutes in his vain search, and he was going to callout to her by name, when Burnamy saved him from thehopeless absurdity by elbowing his way to him withMiss. Triscoe on his arm.

“Here she is, Mr. March,” he said, asif there were nothing strange in his having been thereto find her; in fact he had followed them all fromthe theatre, and at the moment he saw the party separated,and Miss Triscoe carried off helpless in the humanstream, had plunged in and rescued her. BeforeMarch could formulate any question in his bewilderment,Burnamy was gone again; the girl offered no explanationfor him, and March had not yet decided to ask anywhen he caught sight of his wife and General Triscoestanding tiptoe in a doorway and craning their necksupward and forward to scan the crowd in search of himand his charge. Then he looked round at her andopened his lips to express the astonishment that filledhim, when he was aware of an ominous shining of hereyes and trembling of her hand on his arm.

She pressed his arm nervously, and he understood herto beg him to forbear at once all question of herand all comment on Burnamy’s presence to herfather.

It would not have been just the time for either.Not only Mrs. March was with the general, but Mrs.Adding also; she had called to them from that place,where she was safe with Rose when she saw them eddyingabout in the crowd. The general was still, expressinga gratitude which became more pressing the more itwas disclaimed; he said casually at sight of his daughter,“Ah; you’ve found us, have you?”and went on talking to Mrs. Adding, who nodded tothem laughingly, and asked, “Did you see mebeckoning?”

“Look here, my dear!” March said to hiswife as soon as they parted from the rest, the generalgallantly promising that his daughter and he wouldsee Mrs. Adding safe to her hotel, and were makingtheir way slowly home alone. “Did you knowthat Burnamy was in Carlsbad?”

“He’s going away on the twelve-o’clocktrain tonight,” she answered, firmly.

“What has that got to do with it? Wheredid you see him?”

“In the box, while you were behind the scenes.”

She told him all about it, and he listened in silentendeavor for the ground of censure from which a senseof his own guilt forced him. She asked suddenly,“Where did you see him?” and he told herin turn.

He added severely, “Her father ought to know.Why didn’t you tell him?”

“Why didn’t you?” she retorted withgreat reason.

“Because I didn’t think he was just inthe humor for it.” He began to laugh ashe sketched their encounter with the gendarme, butshe did not seem to think it amusing; and he becameserious again. “Besides, I was afraid shewas going to blubber, any way.”

“She wouldn’t have blubbered, as you callit. I don’t know why you need be so disgusting!It would have given her just the moral support sheneeded. Now she will have to tell him herself,and he will blame us. You ought to have spoken;you could have done it easily and naturally when youcame up with her. You will have yourself to thankfor all the trouble that comes of it, now, my dear.”

He shouted in admiration of her skill in shiftingthe blame on him. “All right! I shouldhave had to stand it, even if you hadn’t behavedwith angelic wisdom.”

“Why,” she said, after reflection, “Idon’t see what either of us has done. Wedidn’t get Burnamy to come here, or connive athis presence in any way.”

“Oh! Make Triscoe believe that! Heknows you’ve done all you could to help theaffair on.”

“Well, what if I have? He began makingup to Mrs. Adding himself as soon as he saw her, to-night.She looked very pretty.”

“Well, thank Heaven! we’re off to-morrowmorning, and I hope we’ve seen the last of them.They’ve done what they could to spoil my cure,but I’m not going to have them spoil my aftercure.”

XLIV.

Mrs. March had decided not to go to the Posthof forbreakfast, where they had already taken a lavish leaveof the ‘schone’ Lili, with a sense ofbeing promptly superseded in her affections. Theyfound a place in the red-table-cloth end of the pavilionat Pupp’s, and were served by the pretty girlwith the rose-bud mouth whom they had known only asEin-und-Zwanzig, and whose promise of “Komm’gleich, bitte schon!” was like a bird’snote. Never had the coffee been so good, the breadso aerially light, the Westphalian ham so tenderlypink. A young married couple whom they knew cameby, arm in arm, in their morning walk, and sat downwith them, like their own youth, for a moment.

“If you had told them we were going, dear,”said Mrs. March, when the couple were themselves gone,“we should have been as old as ever. Don’tlet us tell anybody, this morning, that we’regoing. I couldn’t bear it.”

They had been obliged to take the secretary of thehotel into their confidence, in the process of payingtheir bill. He put on his high hat and came outto see them off. The portier was already there,standing at the step of the lordly two-spanner whichthey had ordered for the long drive to the station.The Swiss elevator-man came to the door to offer thema fellow-republican’s good wishes for their journey;Herr Pupp himself appeared at the last moment to hopefor their return another summer. Mrs. March benta last look of interest upon the proprietor as theirtwo-spanner whirled away.

“They say that he is going to be made a count.”

“Well, I don’t object,” said March.“A man who can feed fourteen thousand people,mostly Germans, in a day, ought to be made an archduke.”

At the station something happened which touched themeven more than these last attentions of the hotel.They were in their compartment, and were in the actof possessing themselves of the best places by puttingtheir bundles and bags on them, when they heard Mrs.March’s name called.

They turned and saw Rose Adding at the door, his thinface flushed with excitement and his eyes glowing.“I was afraid I shouldn’t get here intime,” he panted, and he held up to her a hugebunch of flowers.

“Why Rose! From your mother?”

“From me,” he said, timidly, and he wasslipping out into the corridor, when she caught himand his flowers to her in one embrace. “Iwant to kiss you,” she said; and presently,when he had waved his hand to them from the platformoutside, and the train had started, she fumbled forher handkerchief. “I suppose you call itblubbering; but he is the sweetest child!”

“He’s about the only one of our Carlsbadcompatriots that I’m sorry to leave behind,”March assented. “He’s the only unmarriedone that wasn’t in danger of turning up a loveron my hands; if there had been some rather old girl,or some rather light matron in our acquaintance, I’mnot sure that I should have been safe even from Rose.Carlsbad has been an interruption to our silver weddingjourney, my dear; but I hope now that it will beginagain.”

“Yes,” said his wife, “now we canhave each other all to ourselves.”

“Yes. It’s been very different fromour first wedding journey in that. It isn’tthat we’re not so young now as we were, but thatwe don’t seem so much our own property.We used to be the sole proprietors, and now we seemto be mere tenants at will, and any interloping lovermay come in and set our dearest interests on the sidewalk.The disadvantage of living along is that we get toomuch into the hands of other people.”

“Yes, it is. I shall be glad to be ridof them all, too.”

“I don’t know that the drawback is seriousenough to make us wish we had died young—­oryounger,” he suggested.

“No, I don’t know that it is,” sheassented. She added, from an absence where hewas sufficiently able to locate her meaning, “Ihope she’ll write and tell me what her fathersays and does when she tells him that he was there.”

There were many things, in the weather, the landscape,their sole occupancy of an unsmoking compartment,while all the smoking compartments round overflowedwith smokers, which conspired to offer them a pleasingillusion of the past; it was sometimes so perfect thatthey almost held each other’s hands. Inlater life there are such moments when the youthfulemotions come back, as certain birds do in winter,and the elderly heart chirps and twitters to itselfas if it were young. But it is best to discouragethis fondness; and Mrs. March joined her husband inmocking it, when he made her observe how fit it wasthat their silver wedding journey should be resumedas part of his after-cure. If he had found thefountain of youth in the warm, flat, faintly nauseouswater of the Felsenquelle, he was not going to callhimself twenty-eight again till his second month ofthe Carlsbad regimen was out, and he had got backto salad and fruit.

At Eger they had a memorable dinner, with so muchleisure for it that they could form a life-long friendshipfor the old English-speaking waiter who served them,and would not suffer them to hurry themselves.The hills had already fallen away, and they ran alongthrough a cheerful country, with tracts of forestunder white clouds blowing about in a blue sky, andgayly flinging their shadows down upon the brown ploughedland, and upon the yellow oat-fields, where womenwere cutting the leisurely harvest with sickles, andwhere once a great girl with swarthy bare arms unbentherself from her toil, and rose, a statue of rude vigorand beauty, to watch them go by. Hedges of evergreenenclosed the yellow oat-fields, where slow wagonspaused to gather the sheaves of the week before, andthen loitered away with them. Flocks of geesewaddled in sculpturesque relief against the close-croptpastures, herded by little girls with flaxen pigtails,whose eyes, blue as corn-flowers, followed the flyingtrain. There were stretches of wild thyme purplinglong barren acreages, and growing up the railroadbanks almost to the rails themselves. From themeadows the rowen, tossed in long loose windrows,sent into their car a sad autumnal fragrance whichmingled with the tobacco smoke, when two fat smokersemerged into the narrow corridor outside their compartmentsand tried to pass each other. Their vast stomachsbeat together in a vain encounter.

“Zu enge!” said one, and “Ja, zuenge!” said the other, and they laughed innocentlyin each other’s’ faces, with a joy in theirrecognition of the corridor’s narrowness asgreat as if it had been a stroke of the finest wit.

All the way the land was lovely, and as they drewnear Nuremberg it grew enchanting, with a fairy quaintness.The scenery was Alpine, but the scale was toy-like,as befitted the region, and the mimic peaks and valleyswith green brooks gushing between them, and strangerock forms recurring in endless caprice, seemed thehome of children’s story. All the gnomesand elves might have dwelt there in peaceful fellowshipwith the peasants who ploughed the little fields,and gathered the garlanded hops, and lived in thefarmsteads and village houses with those high timber-lacedgables.

“We ought to have come here long ago with thechildren, when they were children,” said March.

“No,” his wife returned; “it wouldhave been too much for them. Nobody but grownpeople could bear it.”

The spell which began here was not really broken byanything that afterwards happened in Nuremberg, thoughthe old toy-capital was trolley-wired through allits quaintness, and they were lodged in a hotel lightedby electricity and heated by steam, and equipped withan elevator which was so modern that it came downwith them as well as went up. All the thingsthat assumed to be of recent structure or inventionwere as nothing against the dense past, which overwhelmedthem with the sense of a world elsewhere outlived.In Nuremberg it is not the quaint or the picturesquethat is exceptional; it is the matter-of-fact and thecommonplace. Here, more than anywhere else, youare steeped in the gothic spirit which expresses itselfin a Teutonic dialect of homely sweetness, of endearingcaprice, of rude grotesqueness, but of positive graceand beauty almost never. It is the architecturalspeech of a strenuous, gross, kindly, honest people’sfancy; such as it is it was inexhaustible, and suchas it is it was bewitching for the travellers.

They could hardly wait till they had supper beforeplunging into the ancient town, and they took thefirst tram-car at a venture. It was a sort oftransfer, drawn by horses, which delivered them a littleinside. of the city gate to a trolley-car. Theconductor with their fare demanded their destination;March frankly owned that they did not know where theywanted to go; they wanted to go anywhere the conductorchose; and the conductor, after reflection, decidedto put them down at the public garden, which, as oneof the newest things in the city, would make the mostfavorable impression upon strangers. It was infact so like all other city gardens, with the foliageof its trimly planted alleys, that it sheltered themeffectually from the picturesqueness of Nuremberg,and they had a long, peaceful hour on one of its benches,where they rested from their journey, and repentedtheir hasty attempt to appropriate the charm of thecity.

The next morning it rained, according to a customwhich the elevator-boy (flown with the insolent recollectionof a sunny summer in Milan) said was invariable inNuremberg; but after the one-o’clock table d’hotethey took a noble two-spanner carriage, and droveall round the city. Everywhere the ancient moat,thickly turfed and planted with trees and shrubs,stretched a girdle of garden between their course andthe wall beautifully old, with knots of dead ivy clingingto its crevices, or broad meshes of the shining foliagemantling its blackened masonry. A tile-roofedopen gallery ran along the top, where so many centuriesof sentries had paced, and arched the massive gateswith heavily moulded piers, where so countlessly thefierce burgher troops had sallied forth against theirbesiegers, and so often the leaguer hosts had dashedthemselves in assault. The blood shed in forgottenbattles would have flooded the moat where now thegrass and flowers grew, or here and there a peacefulstretch of water stagnated.

The drive ended in a visit to the old Burg, wherethe Hapsburg Kaisers dwelt when they visited theirfaithful imperial city. From its ramparts theincredible picturesqueness of Nuremberg best showsitself, and if one has any love for the distinctivequality of Teutonic architecture it is here that morethan anywhere else one may feast it. The prospectof tower and spire and gable is of such a mediaevalrichness, of such an abounding fulness, that all incidentsare lost in it. The multitudinous roofs of red-browntiles, blinking browsily from their low dormers, pressupon one another in endless succession; they clustertogether on a rise of ground and sink away where thestreet falls, but they nowhere disperse or scatter,and they end abruptly at the other rim of the city,beyond which looms the green country, merging in theremoter blue of misty uplands.

A pretty young girl waited at the door of the towerfor the visitors to gather in sufficient number, andthen led them through the terrible museum, discantingin the same gay voice and with the same smiling airon all the murderous engines and implements of torture.First in German and then in English she explainedthe fearful uses of the Iron Maiden, she winninglyillustrated the action of the racks and wheels on whichmen had been stretched and broken, and she sweetlyvaunted a sword which had beheaded eight hundred persons.When she took the established fee from March she suggested,with a demure glance, “And what more you pleasefor saying it in English.”

“Can you say it in Russian?” demandeda young man, whose eyes he had seen dwelling on herfrom the beginning. She laughed archly, and respondedwith some Slavic words, and then delivered her trainof sight-seers over to the custodian who was to showthem through the halls and chambers of the Burg.These were undergoing the repairs which the monumentsof the past are perpetually suffering in the present,

and there was some special painting and varnishingfor the reception of the Kaiser, who was coming toNuremberg for the military manoeuvres then at hand.But if they had been in the unmolested discomfortof their unlivable magnificence, their splendor wassuch as might well reconcile the witness to the superiorcomfort of a private station in our snugger day.The Marches came out owning that the youth which mightonce have found the romantic glories of the placeenough was gone from them. But so much of it wasleft to her that she wished to make him stop and lookat the flirtation which had blossomed out betweenthat pretty young girl and the Russian, whom theyhad scarcely missed from their party in the Burg.He had apparently never parted from the girl, andnow as they sat together on the threshold of the gloomytower, he most have been teaching her more Slavic words,for they were both laughing as if they understoodeach other perfectly.

In his security from having the affair in any wiseon his hands, March would have willingly lingered,to see how her education got on; but it began to rain,The rain did not disturb the lovers, but it obligedthe elderly spectators to take refuge in their carriage;and they drove off to find the famous Little GooseMan. This is what every one does at Nuremberg;it would be difficult to say why. When they foundthe Little Goose Man, he was only a mediaeval fancyin bronze, who stood on his pedestal in the market-placeand contributed from the bill of the goose under hisarm a small stream to the rainfall drenching the wetwares of the wet market-women round the fountain,and soaking their cauliflowers and lettuce, theirgrapes and pears, their carrots and turnips, to thewatery flavor of all fruits and vegetables in Germany.

The air was very raw and chill; but after supper theclouds cleared away, and a pleasant evening temptedthe travellers out. The portier dissembled anyslight which their eagerness for the only amusem*nthe could think of inspired, and directed them to apopular theatre which was giving a summer season atlow prices to the lower classes, and which they surprised,after some search, trying to hide itself in a sortof back square. They got the best places at aprice which ought to have been mortifyingly cheap,and found themselves, with a thousand other harmlessbourgeois folk, in a sort of spacious, agreeable barn,of a decoration by no means ugly, and of a certainartless comfort. Each seat fronted a shelf atthe back of the seat before it, where the spectatorcould put his hat; there was a smaller shelf for hisstein of the beer passed constantly throughout theevening; and there was a buffet where he could stayhimself with cold ham and other robust German refreshments.

It was “The Wedding Journey to Nuremberg”upon which they had oddly chanced, and they acceptedas a national tribute the character of an Americangirl in it. She was an American girl of the advancedpattern, and she came and went at a picnic on thearm of a head waiter. She seemed to have no officein the drama except to illustrate a German conceptionof American girlhood, but even in this simple functionshe seemed rather to puzzle the German audience; perhapsbecause of the occasional English words which sheused.

To the astonishment of her compatriots, when theycame out of the theatre it was not raining; the nightwas as brilliantly starlit as a night could be inGermany, and they sauntered home richly content throughthe narrow streets and through the beautiful old Damenthor,beyond which their hotel lay. How pretty, theysaid, to call that charming port the Ladies’Gate! They promised each other to find out why,and they never did so, but satisfied themselves byassigning it to the exclusive use of the slim maidensand massive matrons of the old Nuremberg patriciate,whom they imagined trailing their silken splendorsunder its arch in perpetual procession.

XLV.

The life of the Nuremberg patriciate, now extinctin the control of the city which it builded so strenuouslyand maintained so heroically, is still insistent inall its art. This expresses their pride at onceand their simplicity with a childish literality.At its best it is never so good as the good Italianart, whose influence is always present in its best.The coloring of the great canvases is Venetian, butthere is no such democracy of greatness as in thepainting at Venice; in decoration the art of Nurembergis at best quaint, and at the worst puerile.Wherever it had obeyed an academic intention it seemedto March poor and coarse, as in the bronze fountainbeside the Church of St. Lawrence. The waterspins from the pouted breasts of the beautiful figuresin streams that cross and interlace after a fancytrivial and gross; but in the base of the church thereis a time-worn Gethsemane, exquisitely affecting inits simple-hearted truth. The long ages have madeit even more affecting than the sculptor imaginedit; they have blurred the faces and figures in passingtill their features are scarcely distinguishable; andthe sleeping apostles seem to have dreamed themselvesback into the mother-marble. It is of the sametradition and impulse with that supreme glory of thenative sculpture, the ineffable tabernacle of AdamKrafft, which climbs a column of the church within,a miracle of richly carven story; and no doubt ifthere were a Nuremberg sculptor doing great thingstoday, his work would be of kindred inspiration.

The descendants of the old patrician who ordered thetabernacle at rather a hard bargain from the artiststill worship on the floor below, and the descendantsof his neighbor patricians have their seats in thepews about, and their names cut in the proprietaryplates on the pew-tops. The vergeress who showedthe Marches through the church was devout in the praiseof these aristocratic fellow-citizens of hers.“So simple, and yet so noble!” she said.She was a very romantic vergeress, and she told themat unsparing length the legend of the tabernacle, howthe artist fell asleep in despair of winning his patron’sdaughter, and saw in a vision the master-work withthe lily-like droop at top, which gained him her hand.They did not realize till too late that it was allout of a novel of Georg Ebers’s, but added tothe regular fee for the church a gift worthy of aninedited legend.

Even then they had a pleasure in her enthusiasm rarelyimparted by the Nuremberg manner. They missedthere the constant, sweet civility of Carlsbad, andfound themselves falling flat in their endeavors fora little cordiality. They indeed inspired withsome kindness the old woman who showed them throughthat cemetery where Albert Durer and Hans Sachs andmany other illustrious citizens lie buried under monumentalbrasses of such beauty:

“That kings to have the like,might wish to die.”

But this must have been because they abandoned themselvesso willingly to the fascination of the bronze skullon the tomb of a fourteenth-century patrician, whichhad the uncommon advantage of a lower jaw hinged tothe upper. She proudly clapped it up and downfor their astonishment, and waited, with a toothlesssmile, to let them discover the bead of a nail artfullyfigured in the skull; then she gave a shrill cackleof joy, and gleefully explained that the wife of thispatrician had killed him by driving a nail into histemple, and had been fitly beheaded for the murder.

She cared so much for nothing else in the cemetery,but she consented to let them wonder at the richnessof the sculpture in the level tombs, with their escutcheonsand memorial tablets, overrun by the long grass andthe matted ivy; she even consented to share theirindignation at the destruction of some of the brassesand the theft of others. She suffered more reluctantlytheir tenderness for the old, old crucifixion figuredin sculpture at one corner of the cemetery, wherethe anguish of the Christ had long since faded intothe stone from which it had been evoked, and the thieveswere no longer distinguishable in their penitence orimpenitence; but she parted friends with them whenshe saw how much they seemed taken with the votivechapel of the noble Holzschuh family, where a lineof wooden shoes puns upon the name in the frieze, likethe line of dogs which chase one another, with bonesin their mouths, around the Canossa palace at Verona.A sense of the beautiful house by the Adige was partof the pleasing confusion which possessed them in Nurembergwhenever they came upon the expression of the gothicspirit common both to the German and northern Italianart. They knew that it was an effect which hadpassed from Germany into Italy, but in the liberalair of the older land it had come to so much morebeauty that now, when they found it in its home, itseemed something fetched from over the Alps and coarsenedin the attempt to naturalize it to an alien air.

In the Germanic Museum they fled to the Italian paintersfrom the German pictures they had inspired; in thegreat hall of the Rathhaus the noble Processionalof Durer was the more precious, because his Triumphof Maximilian somehow suggested Mantegna’s Triumphof Caesar. There was to be a banquet in the hall,under the mighty fresco, to welcome the German Emperor,coming the next week, and the Rathhaus was full of

work-people furbishing it up against his arrival,and making it difficult for the custodian who hadit in charge to show it properly to strangers.She was of the same enthusiastic sisterhood as thevergeress of St. Lawrence and the guardian of theold cemetery, and by a mighty effort she prevailedover the workmen so far as to lead her charges outthrough the corridor where the literal conscienceof the brothers Kuhn has wrought in the roof to anexact image of a tournament as it was in Nurembergfour hundred years ago. In this relief, throngedwith men and horses, the gala-life of the past survivesin unexampled fulness; and March blamed himself afterenjoying it for having felt in it that toy-figure qualitywhich seems the final effect of the German gothicismin sculpture.

XLVI.

On Sunday Mrs. March partially conformed to an earlierNew England ideal of the day by ceasing from sight-seeing.She could not have understood the sermon if she hadgone to church, but she appeased the lingering conscienceshe had on this point by not going out till afternoon.Then she found nothing of the gayety which Sundayafternoon wears in Catholic lands. The peoplewere resting from their week-day labors, but they werenot playing; and the old churches, long since convertedto Lutheran uses, were locked against tourist curiosity.

It was as it should be; it was as it would be at home;and yet in this ancient city, where the past was somuch alive in the perpetual picturesqueness, the Marchesfelt an incongruity in it; and they were fain to escapefrom the Protestant silence and seriousness of thestreets to the shade of the public garden they hadinvoluntarily visited the evening of their arrival.

On a bench sat a quiet, rather dejected man, whomMarch asked some question of their way. He answeredin English, and in the parley that followed they discoveredthat they were all Americans. The stranger provedto be an American of the sort commonest in Germany,and he said he had returned to his native countryto get rid of the ague which he had taken on StatenIsland. He had been seventeen years in New York,and now a talk of Tammany and its chances in the nextelection, of pulls and deals, of bosses and heelers,grew up between the civic step-brothers, and joinedthem is a common interest. The German-Americansaid he was bookkeeper in some glass-works which hadbeen closed by our tariff, and he confessed that hedid not mean to return to us, though he spoke of Germanaffairs with the impartiality of an outsider.He said that the Socialist party was increasing fasterthan any other, and that this tacitly meant the suppressionof rank and the abolition of monarchy. He warnedMarch against the appearance of industrial prosperityin Germany; beggary was severely repressed, and ifpoverty was better clad than with us, it was as hungryand as hopeless in Nuremberg as in New York. Theworking classes were kindly and peaceable; they onlyknifed each other quietly on Sunday evenings afterhaving too much beer.

Presently the stranger rose and bowed to the Marchesfor good-by; and as he walked down the aisle of treesin which they had been fitting together, he seemedto be retreating farther and farther from such Americanismas they had in common. He had reverted to an entirelyGerman effect of dress and figure; his walk was slowand Teutonic; he must be a type of thousands who havereturned to the fatherland without wishing to ownthemselves its children again, and yet out of heartwith the only country left them.

“He was rather pathetic, my dear,” saidMarch, in the discomfort he knew his wife must befeeling as well as himself. “How odd tohave the lid lifted here, and see the same old problemsseething and bubbling in the witch’s caldronwe call civilization as we left simmering away at home!And how hard to have our tariff reach out and snatchthe bread from the mouths of those poor glass-workers!”

“I thought that was hard,” she sighed.“It must have been his bread, too.”

“Let’s hope it was not his cake, anyway.I suppose,” he added, dreamily, “thatwhat we used to like in Italy was the absence of allthe modern activities. The Italians didn’trepel us by assuming to be of our epoch in the presenceof their monuments; they knew how to behave as pensivememories. I wonder if they’re still as charming.”

“Oh, no,” she returned, “nothingis as charming as it used to be. And now we needthe charm more than ever.”

He laughed at her despair, in the tacit understandingthey had lived into that only one of them was to bedesperate at a time, and that they were to take turnsin cheering each other up. “Well, perhapswe don’t deserve it. And I’m notsure that we need it so much as we did when we wereyoung. We’ve got tougher; we can stand thecold facts better now. They made me shiver once,but now they give me a sort of agreeable thrill.Besides, if, life kept up its pretty illusions, ifit insisted upon being as charming as it used to be,how could we ever bear to die? We’ve gotthat to consider.” He yielded to the temptationof his paradox, but he did not fail altogether ofthe purpose with which he began, and they took thetrolley back to their hotel cheerful in the intrepidfancy that they had confronted fate when they hadonly had the hardihood to face a phrase.

They agreed that now he ought really to find out somethingabout the contemporary life of Nuremberg, and thenext morning he went out before breakfast, and strolledthrough some of the simpler streets, in the hope ofintimate impressions. The peasant women, servingportions of milk from house to house out of the cansin the little wagons which they drew themselves, werea touch of pleasing domestic comedy; a certain effectof tragedy imparted itself from the lamentations ofthe sucking-pigs jolted over the pavements in handcarts;a certain majesty from the long procession of yellowmail-wagons, with drivers in the royal Bavarian blue,

trooping by in the cold small rain, impassibly drippingfrom their glazed hat-brims upon their uniforms.But he could not feel that these things were any ofthem very poignantly significant; and he covered hisretreat from the actualities of Nuremberg by visitingthe chief book-store and buying more photographs ofthe architecture than he wanted, and more local historiesthan he should ever read. He made a last effortfor the contemporaneous life by asking the English-speakingclerk if there were any literary men of distinctionliving in Nuremberg, and the clerk said there wasnot one.

He went home to breakfast wondering if he should beable to make his meagre facts serve with his wife;but he found her far from any wish to listen to them.She was intent upon a pair of young lovers, at a tablenear her own, who were so absorbed in each other thatthey were proof against an interest that must otherwisehave pierced them through. The bridegroom, ashe would have called himself, was a pretty little Bavarianlieutenant, very dark and regular, and the bride wasas pretty and as little, but delicately blond.Nature had admirably mated them, and if art had helpedto bring them together through the genius of the bride’smother, who was breakfasting with them, it had wroughtalmost as fitly. Mrs. March queried impartiallywho they were, where they met, and how, and just whenthey were going to be married; and March consented,in his personal immunity from their romance, to letit go on under his eyes without protest. Butlater, when they met the lovers in the street, walkingarm in arm, with the bride’s mother behind themgloating upon their bliss, he said the woman ought,at her time of life, to be ashamed of such folly.She must know that this affair, by nine chances outof ten, could not fail to eventuate at the best ina marriage as tiresome as most other marriages, andyet she was abandoning herself with those ignorantyoung people to the illusion that it was the finestand sweetest thing in life.

“Well, isn’t it?” his wife asked.

“Yes, that’s the worst of it. Itshows how poverty-stricken life really is. Wewant somehow to believe that each pair of lovers willfind the good we have missed, and be as happy as weexpected to be.”

“I think we have been happy enough, and thatwe’ve had as much good as was wholesome forus,” she returned, hurt.

“You’re always so concrete! I meantus in the abstract. But if you will be personal,I’ll say that you’ve been as happy as youdeserve, and got more good than you had any rightto.”

She laughed with him, and then they laughed againto perceive that they were walking arm in arm too,like the lovers, whom they were insensibly following.

He proposed that while they were in the mood theyshould go again to the old cemetery, and see the hingedjaw of the murdered Paumgartner, wagging in eternalaccusation of his murderess. “It’srather hard on her, that he should be having the lastword, that way,” he said. “She wasa woman, no matter what mistakes she had committed.”

“That’s what I call ’banale’,”said Mrs. March.

“It is, rather,” he confessed. “Itmakes me feel as if I must go to see the house ofDurer, after all.”

“Well, I knew we should have to, sooner or later.”

It was the thing that they had said would not do,in Nuremberg, because everybody did it; but now theyhailed a fiacre, and ordered it driven to Durer’shouse, which they found in a remote part of the townnear a stretch of the city wall, varied in its picturesquenessby the interposition of a dripping grove; it was rainingagain by the time they reached it. The quarterhad lapsed from earlier dignity, and without beingsqualid, it looked worn and hard worked; otherwiseit could hardly have been different in Durer’stime. His dwelling, in no way impressive outside,amidst the environing quaintness, stood at the cornerof a narrow side-hill street that sloped cityward;and within it was stripped bare of all the furnitureof life below-stairs, and above was none the cozierfor the stiff appointment of a show-house. Itwas cavernous and cold; but if there had been a firein the kitchen, and a table laid in the dining-room,and beds equipped for nightmare, after the Germanfashion, in the empty chambers, one could have imagineda kindly, simple, neighborly existence there.It in no wise suggested the calling of an artist,perhaps because artists had not begun in Durer’stime to take themselves so objectively as they donow, but it implied the life of a prosperous citizen,and it expressed the period.

The Marches wrote their names in the visitors’book, and paid the visitor’s fee, which alsobought them tickets in an annual lottery for a reproductionof one of Durer’s pictures; and then they cameaway, by no means dissatisfied with his house.By its association with his sojourns in Italy it recalledvisits to other shrines, and they had to own that itwas really no worse than Ariosto’s house at Ferrara,or Petrarch’s at Arqua, or Michelangelo’sat Florence. “But what I admire,”he said, “is our futility in going to see it.We expected to surprise some quality of the man leftlying about in the house because he lived and diedin it; and because his wife kept him up so close there,and worked him so hard to save his widow from comingto want.”

“Who said she did that?”

“A friend of his who hated her. But hehad to allow that she was a God-fearing woman, andhad a New England conscience.”

“Well, I dare say Durer was easy-going.”

“Yes; but I don’t like her laying herplans to survive him; though women always do that.”

They were going away the next day, and they sat downthat evening to a final supper in such good-humorwith themselves that they were willing to includea young couple who came to take places at their table,though they would rather have been alone. Theylifted their eyes for their expected salutation, andrecognized Mr. and Mrs. Leffers, of the Norumbia.

The ladies fell upon each other as if they had beenmother and daughter; March and the young man shookhands, in the feeling of passengers mutually endearedby the memories of a pleasant voyage. They arrivedat the fact that Mr. Leffers had received lettersin England from his partners which allowed him toprolong his wedding journey in a tour of the continent,while their wives were still exclaiming at their encounterin the same hotel at Nuremberg; and then they all satdown to have, as the bride said, a real Norumbia time.

She was one of those young wives who talk always withtheir eyes submissively on their husbands, no matterwhom they are speaking to; but she was already unconsciouslyruling him in her abeyance. No doubt she wasruling him for his good; she had a livelier, mind thanhe, and she knew more, as the American wives of youngAmerican business men always do, and she was planningwisely for their travels. She recognized hermerit in this devotion with an artless candor, whichwas typical rather than personal. March was gladto go out with Leffers for a little stroll, and toleave Mrs. March to listen to Mrs. Leffers, who didnot let them go without making her husband promiseto wrap up well, and not get his feet wet. Shemade March promise not to take him far, and to bringhim back early, which he found himself very willingto do, after an exchange of ideas with Mr. Leffers.The young man began to talk about his wife, in herprovidential, her almost miraculous adaptation to thesort of man he was, and when he had once begun toexplain what sort of man he was, there was no endto it, till they rejoined the ladies in the reading-room.

XLVII.

The young couple came to the station to see the Marchesoff after dinner the next day; and the wife left abank of flowers on the seat beside Mrs. March, whosaid, as soon as they were gone, “I believe Iwould rather meet people of our own age after this.I used to think that you could keep young by beingwith young people; but I don’t, now. Thereworld is very different from ours. Our worlddoesn’t really exist any more, but as long aswe keep away from theirs we needn’t realize it.Young people,” she went on, “are morepractical-minded than we used to be; they’requite as sentimental; but I don’t think theycare so much for the higher things. They’renot so much brought up on poetry as we were,”she pursued. “That little Mrs. Lefferswould have read Longfellow in our time; but now shedidn’t know of his poem on Nuremberg; she wasintelligent enough about the place, but you could seethat its quaintness was not so precious as it wasto us; not so sacred.” Her tone entreatedhim to find more meaning in her words than she hadput into them. “They couldn’t havefelt as we did about that old ivied wall and that grassy,flowery moat under it; and the beautiful Damenthorand that pile-up of the roofs from the Burg; and thosewinding streets with their Gothic facades all, cobwebbedwith trolley wires; and that yellow, aguish-lookingriver drowsing through the town under the windows ofthose overhanging houses; and the market-place, andthe squares before the churches, with their queershops in the nooks and corners round them!”

“I see what you mean. But do you thinkit’s as sacred to us as it would have been twenty-fiveyears ago? I had an irreverent feeling now andthen that Nuremberg was overdoing Nuremberg.”

“Oh, yes; so had I. We’re that modern,if we’re not so young as we were.”

“We were very simple, in those days.”

“Well, if we were simple, we knew it!”

“Yes; we used to like taking our unconsciousnessto pieces and looking at it.”

“We had a good time.”

“Too good. Sometimes it seems as if itwould have lasted longer if it had not been so good.We might have our cake now if we hadn’t eatenit.”

“It would be mouldy, though.”

“I wonder,” he said, recurring to theLefferses; “how we really struck them.”

“Well, I don’t believe they thought weought to be travelling about alone, quite, at ourage.”

“Oh, not so bad as that!” After a momenthe said, “I dare say they don’t go roundquarrelling on their wedding journey, as we did.”

“Indeed they do! They had an awful quarreljust before they got to Nuremberg: about hiswanting to send some of the baggage to Liverpool byexpress that she wanted to keep with them. Butshe said it had been a lesson, and they were nevergoing to quarrel again.” The elders lookedat each other in the light of experience, and laughed.“Well,” she ended, “that’sone thing we’re through with. I supposewe’ve come to feel more alike than we used to.”

“Or not to feel at all. How did they settleit about the baggage?”

“Oh! He insisted on her keeping it withher.” March laughed again, but this timehe laughed alone, and after a while she said:“Well, they gave just the right relief to Nuremberg,with their good, clean American philistinism.I don’t mind their thinking us queer; they musthave thought Nuremberg was queer.”

“Yes. We oldsters are always queer to theyoung. We’re either ridiculously livelyand chirpy, or we’re ridiculously stiff and grim;they never expect to be like us, and wouldn’t,for the world. The worst of it is, we elderlypeople are absurd to one another; we don’t, atthe bottom of our hearts, believe we’re likethat, when we meet. I suppose that arrogant oldass of a Triscoe looks upon me as a grinning dotard.”

“I wonder,” said Mrs. March, “ifshe’s told him yet,” and March perceivedthat she was now suddenly far from the mood of philosophicintrospection; but he had no difficulty in followingher.

“She’s had time enough. But it wasan awkward task Burnamy left to her.”

“Yes, when I think of that, I can hardly forgivehim for coming back in that way. I know she isdead in love with him; but she could only have acceptedhim conditionally.”

“Conditionally to his making it all right withStoller?”

“Stoller? No! To her father’sliking it.”

“Ah, that’s quite as hard. What makesyou think she accepted him at all?”

“What do you think she was crying about?”

“Well, I have supposed that ladies occasionallyshed tears of pity. If she accepted him conditionallyshe would have to tell her father about it.”Mrs. March gave him a glance of silent contempt, andhe hastened to atone for his stupidity. “Perhapsshe’s told him on the instalment plan.She may have begun by confessing that Burnamy had beenin Carlsbad. Poor old fellow, I wish we weregoing to find him in Ansbach! He could make thingsvery smooth for us.”

“Well, you needn’t flatter yourself thatyou’ll find him in Ansbach. I’m sureI don’t know where he is.”

“You might write to Miss Triscoe and ask.”

“I think I shall wait for Miss Triscoe to writeto me,” she said, with dignity.

“Yes, she certainly owes you that much, afterall your suffering for her. I’ve askedthe banker in Nuremberg to forward our letters to theposte restante in Ansbach. Isn’t it goodto see the crows again, after those ravens aroundCarlsbad?”

She joined him in looking at the mild autumnal landscapethrough the open window. The afternoon was fairand warm, and in the level fields bodies of soldierswere at work with picks and spades, getting the groundready for the military manoeuvres; they disturbedamong the stubble foraging parties of crows, whichrose from time to time with cries of indignant protest.She said, with a smile for the crows, “Yes.And I’m thankful that I’ve got nothingon my conscience, whatever happens,” she addedin dismissal of the subject of Burnamy.

“I’m thankful too, my dear. I’dmuch rather have things on my own. I’mmore used to that, and I believe I feel less remorsethan when you’re to blame.”

They might have been carried near this point by thosetelepathic influences which have as yet been so imperfectlystudied. It was only that morning, after thelapse of a week since Burnamy’s furtive reappearancein Carlsbad, that Miss Triscoe spoke to her fatherabout it, and she had at that moment a longing forsupport and counsel that might well have made itsmystical appeal to Mrs. March.

She spoke at last because she could put it off nolonger, rather than because the right time had come.She began as they sat at breakfast. “Papa,there is something that I have got to tell you.It is something that you ought to know; but I haveput off telling you because—­”

She hesitated for the reason, and “Well!”said her father, looking up at her from his secondcup of coffee. “What is it?”

Then she answered, “Mr. Burnamy has been here.”

“In Carlsbad? When was he here?”

“The night of the Emperor’s birthday.He came into the box when you were behind the sceneswith Mr. March; afterwards I met him in the crowd.”

“Well?”

“I thought you ought to know. Mrs. Marchsaid I ought to tell you.”

“Did she say you ought to wait a week?”He gave way to an irascibility which he tried to check,and to ask with indifference, “Why did he comeback?”

“He was going to write about it for that paperin Paris.” The girl had the effect of gatheringher courage up for a bold plunge. She lookedsteadily at her father, and added: “He saidhe came back because he couldn’t help it.He—­wished to speak with me, He said he knewhe had no right to suppose I cared anything aboutwhat had happened with him and Mr. Stoller. Hewanted to come back and tell me—­that.”

Her father waited for her to go on, but apparentlyshe was going to leave the word to him, now.He hesitated to take it, but he asked at last witha mildness that seemed to surprise her, “Haveyou heard anything from him since?”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. I told him I couldnot say what he wished; that I must tell you aboutit.”

The case was less simple than it would once have beenfor General Triscoe. There was still his affectionfor his daughter, his wish for her happiness, butthis had always been subordinate to his sense of hisown interest and comfort, and a question had recentlyarisen which put his paternal love and duty in a newlight. He was no more explicit with himself thanother men are, and the most which could ever be saidof him without injustice was that in his dependenceupon her he would rather have kept his daughter tohimself if she could not have been very prosperouslymarried. On the other hand, if he disliked theman for whom she now hardly hid her liking, he wasnot just then ready to go to extremes concerning him.

“He was very anxious,” she went on, “thatyou should know just how it was. He thinks everythingof your judgment and—­and—­opinion.”The general made a consenting noise in his throat.“He said that he did not wish me to ‘whitewash’him to you. He didn’t think he had doneright; he didn’t excuse himself, or ask youto excuse him unless you could from the stand-pointof a gentleman.”

The general made a less consenting noise in his throat,and asked, “How do you look at it, yourself,Agatha?”

“I don’t believe I quite understand it;but Mrs. March—­”

“Oh, Mrs. March!” the general snorted.

“—­says that Mr. March does not thinkso badly of it as Mr. Burnamy does.”

“I doubt it. At any rate, I understoodMarch quite differently.”

“She says that he thinks he behaved very noblyafterwards when Mr. Stoller wanted him to help himput a false complexion on it; that it was all themore difficult for him to do right then, because ofhis remorse for what he had done before.”As she spoke on she had become more eager.

“There’s something in that,” thegeneral admitted, with a candor that he made the mostof both to himself and to her. “But I shouldlike to know what Stoller had to say of it all.Is there anything,” he inquired, “anyreason why I need be more explicit about it, just now?”

“N—­no. Only, I thought—­Hethinks so much of your opinion that—­if—­”

“Oh, he can very well afford to wait. Ifhe values my opinion so highly he can give me timeto make up my mind.”

“Of course—­”

“And I’m not responsible,” the generalcontinued, significantly, “for the delay altogether.If you had told me this before—­Now, I don’tknow whether Stoller is still in town.”

He was not behaving openly with her; but she had notbehaved openly with him. She owned that to herself,and she got what comfort she could from his makingthe affair a question of what Burnamy had done to Stollerrather than of what Burnamy had said to her, and whatshe had answered him. If she was not perfectlyclear as to what she wanted to do, or wished to havehappen, there was now time and place in which she coulddelay and make sure. The accepted theory of suchmatters is that people know their minds from the beginning,and that they do not change them. But experienceseems to contradict this theory, or else people oftenact contrary to their convictions and impulses.If the statistics were accessible, it might be foundthat many potential engagements hovered in a doubtfulair, and before they touched the earth in actual promisewere dissipated by the play of meteorological chances.

When General Triscoe put down his napkin in risinghe said that he would step round to Pupp’s andsee if Stoller were still there. But on the wayhe stepped up to Mrs. Adding’s hotel on the hill,and he came back, after an interval which he seemednot to have found long, to report rather casuallythat Stoller had left Carlsbad the day before.By this time the fact seemed not to concern Agathaherself very vitally.

He asked if the Marches had left any address withher, and she answered that they had not. Theywere going to spend a few days in Nuremberg, and thenpush on to Holland for Mr. March’s after-cure.There was no relevance in his question unless it intimatedhis belief that she was in confidential correspondencewith Mrs. March, and she met this by saying that shewas going to write her in care of their bankers; sheasked whether he wished to send any word.

“No. I understand,” he intimated,“that there is nothing at all in the natureof a—­a—­an understanding, then,with—­”

“No, nothing.”

“Hm!” The general waited a moment.Then he ventured, “Do you care to say—­doyou wish me to know—­how he took it?”

The tears came into the girl’s eyes, but shegoverned herself to say, “He—­he wasdisappointed.”

“He had no right to be disappointed.”

It was a question, and she answered: “Hethought he had. He said—­that he wouldn’t—­troubleme any more.”

The general did not ask at once, “And you don’tknow where he is now—­you haven’theard anything from him since?”

Agatha flashed through her tears, “Papa!”

“Oh! I beg your pardon. I think youtold me.”

PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

Americans are hungrier forroyalty than anybody else
Effort to get on common groundwith an inferior
He buys my poverty and notmy will
Honest selfishness
Intrepid fancy that they hadconfronted fate
Less intrusive than if hehad not been there
Monologue to which the wivesof absent-minded men resign
Only one of them was to bedesperate at a time
Reconciliation with deathwhich nature brings to life at last
Voting-cattle whom they boughtand sold
We don’t seem so muchour own property
We get too much into the handsof other people

THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

PART III.

XLVIII.

At the first station where the train stopped, a youngGerman bowed himself into the compartment with theMarches, and so visibly resisted an impulse to smokethat March begged him to light his cigarette.In the talk which this friendly overture led to betweenthem he explained that he was a railway architect,employed by the government on that line of road, andwas travelling officially. March spoke of Nuremberg;he owned the sort of surfeit he had suffered fromits excessive mediaevalism, and the young man saidit was part of the new imperial patriotism to cherishthe Gothic throughout Germany; no other sort of architecturewas permitted in Nuremberg. But they would findenough classicism at Ansbach, he promised them, andhe entered with sympathetic intelligence into theirwish to see this former capital when March told himthey were going to stop there, in hopes of somethingtypical of the old disjointed Germany of the pettyprincipalities, the little paternal despotisms nowextinct.

As they talked on, partly in German and partly inEnglish, their purpose in visiting Ansbach appearedto the Marches more meditated than it was. Infact it was somewhat accidental; Ansbach was near Nuremberg;it was not much out of the way to Holland. Theytook more and more credit to themselves for a reasonedand definite motive, in the light of their companion’senthusiasm for the place, and its charm began for themwith the drive from the station through streets whosesentiment was both Italian and French, and where therewas a yellowish cast in the gray of the architecturewhich was almost Mantuan. They rested their sensibilities,so bruised and fretted by Gothic angles and points,against the smooth surfaces of the prevailing classicisticfacades of the houses as they passed, and when theyarrived at their hotel, an old mansion of Versaillestype, fronting on a long irregular square plantedwith pollard sycamores, they said that it might aswell have been Lucca.

The archway and stairway of the hotel were drapedwith the Bavarian colors, and they were obscurelyflattered to learn that Prince Leopold, the brotherof the Prince-Regent of the kingdom, had taken roomsthere, on his way to the manoeuvres at Nuremberg,and was momently expected with his suite. Theyrealized that they were not of the princely party,however, when they were told that he had sole possessionof the dining-room, and they went out to another hotel,and had their supper in keeping delightfully native.People seemed to come there to write their lettersand make up their accounts, as well as to eat theirsuppers; they called for stationery like charactersin old comedy, and the clatter of crockery and thescratching of pens went on together; and fortune offeredthe Marches a delicate reparation for their exclusionfrom their own hotel in the cold popular receptionof the prince which they got back just in time towitness. A very small group of people, mostlywomen and boys, had gathered to see him arrive, butthere was no cheering or any sign of public interest.Perhaps he personally merited none; he looked a dull,sad man, with his plain, stubbed features; and afterhe had mounted to his apartment, the officers of hisstaff stood quite across the landing, and barred thepassage of the Americans, ignoring even Mrs. March’spresence, as they talked together.

“Well, my dear,” said her husband, “hereyou have it at last. This is what you’vebeen living for, ever since we came to Germany.It’s a great moment.”

“Yes. What are you going to do?”

“Who? I? Oh, nothing! This isyour affair; it’s for you to act.”

If she had been young, she might have withered themwith a glance; she doubted now if her dim eyes wouldhave any such power; but she advanced steadily uponthem, and then the officers seemed aware of her, andstood aside.

March always insisted that they stood aside apologetically,but she held as firmly that they stood aside impertinently,or at least indifferently, and that the insult toher American womanhood was perfectly ideal. Itis true that nothing of the kind happened again duringtheir stay at the hotel; the prince’s officerswere afterwards about in the corridors and on thestairs, but they offered no shadow of obstruction toher going and coming, and the landlord himself wasnot so preoccupied with his highhotes but he had timeto express his grief that she had been obliged togo out for supper.

They satisfied the passion for the little obsoletecapital which had been growing upon them by strollingpast the old Resident at an hour so favorable fora first impression. It loomed in the gatheringdusk even vaster than it was, and it was really vastenough for the pride of a King of France, much morea Margrave of Ansbach. Time had blackened andblotched its coarse limestone walls to one complexionwith the statues swelling and strutting in the figure

of Roman legionaries before it, and standing out againstthe evening sky along its balustraded roof, and hadsoftened to the right tint the stretch of half a dozenhouses with mansard roofs and renaissance facadesobsequiously in keeping with the Versailles idealof a Resident. In the rear, and elsewhere at fitdistance from its courts, a native architecture prevailed;and at no great remove the Marches found themselvesin a simple German town again. There they stumbledupon a little bookseller’s shop blinking in aquiet corner, and bought three or four guides andsmall histories of Ansbach, which they carried home,and studied between drowsing and waking. Thewonderful German syntax seems at its most enigmaticalin this sort of literature, and sometimes they lostthemselves in its labyrinths completely, and onlymade their way perilously out with the help of cumulativedeclensions, past articles and adjectives blindly seekingtheir nouns, to long-procrastinated verbs dancing likeswamp-fires in the distance. They emerged a littleless ignorant than they went in, and better qualifiedthan they would otherwise have been for their secondvisit to the Schloss, which they paid early the nextmorning.

They were so early, indeed, that when they mountedfrom the great inner court, much too big for Ansbach,if not for the building, and rung the custodian’sbell, a smiling maid who let them into an ante-room,where she kept on picking over vegetables for herdinner, said the custodian was busy, and could notbe seen till ten o’clock. She seemed, inher nook of the pretentious pile, as innocently unconsciousof its history as any hen-sparrow who had built hernest in some coign of its architecture; and her friendly,peaceful domesticity remained a wholesome human backgroundto the tragedies and comedies of the past, and heldthem in a picturesque relief in which they were aliketolerable and even charming.

The history of Ansbach strikes its roots in the soilof fable, and above ground is a gnarled and twistedgrowth of good and bad from the time of the GreatCharles to the time of the Great Frederick. Betweenthese times she had her various rulers, ecclesiasticaland secular, in various forms of vassalage to theempire; but for nearly four centuries her sovereigntywas in the hands of the margraves, who reigned in aconstantly increasing splendor till the last soldher outright to the King of Prussia in 1791, and wentto live in England on the proceeds. She had takenher part in the miseries and glories of the wars thatdesolated Germany, but after the Reformation, whenshe turned from the ancient faith to which she owedher cloistered origin under St. Gumpertus, her peoplehad peace except when their last prince sold themto fight the battles of others. It is in thislast transaction that her history, almost in the momentwhen she ceased to have a history of her own, linksto that of the modern world, and that it came hometo the Marches in their national character; for twothousand of those poor Ansbach mercenaries were boughtup by England and sent to put down a rebellion inher American colonies.

Humanly, they were more concerned for the Last Margrave,because of certain qualities which made him the BestMargrave, in spite of the defects of his qualities.He was the son of the Wild Margrave, equally knownin the Ansbach annals, who may not have been the WorstMargrave, but who had certainly a bad trick of puttinghis subjects to death without trial, and in caseswhere there was special haste, with his own hand.He sent his son to the university at Utrecht becausehe believed that the republican influences in Hollandwould be wholesome for him, and then he sent him totravel in Italy; but when the boy came home lookingfrail and sick, the Wild Margrave charged his officialtravelling companion with neglect, and had the unhappyHofrath Meyer hanged without process for this crime.One of the gentlemen of his realm, for a pasquinadeon the Margrave, was brought to the scaffold; he had,at various times, twenty-two of his soldiers shotwith arrows and bullets or hanged for desertion, besidesmany whose penalties his clemency commuted to theloss of an ear or a nose; a Hungarian who killed hishunting-dog, he had broken alive on the wheel.A soldier’s wife was hanged for complicity ina case of desertion; a young soldier who eloped withthe girl he loved was brought to Ansbach from a neighboringtown, and hanged with her on the same gallows.A sentry at the door of one of the Margrave’scastles amiably complied with the Margrave’srequest to let him take his gun for a moment, on thepretence of wishing to look at it. For this breachof discipline the prince covered him with abuse andgave him over to his hussars, who bound him to a horse’stail and dragged him through the streets; he diedof his injuries. The kennel-master who had chargeof the Margrave’s dogs was accused of neglectingthem: without further inquiry the Margrave rodeto the man’s house and shot him down on hisown threshold. A shepherd who met the Margraveon a shying horse did not get his flock out of theway quickly enough; the Margrave demanded the pistolsof a gentleman in his company, but he answered thatthey were not loaded, and the shepherd’s lifewas saved. As they returned home the gentlemanfired them off. “What does that mean?”cried the Margrave, furiously. “It means,gracious lord, that you will sleep sweeter tonight,for not having heard my pistols an hour sooner.”

From this it appears that the gracious lord had hismoments of regret; but perhaps it is not altogetherstrange that when he died, the whole population “stormedthrough the streets to meet his funeral train, notin awe-stricken silence to meditate on the fall ofhuman grandeur, but to unite in an eager tumult ofrejoicing, as if some cruel brigand who had long heldthe city in terror were delivered over to them boundand in chains.” For nearly thirty yearsthis blood-stained miscreant had reigned over hishapless people in a sovereign plenitude of power, whichby the theory of German imperialism in our day isstill a divine right.

They called him the Wild Margrave, in their instinctiverevolt from the belief that any man not untamablysavage could be guilty of his atrocities; and theycalled his son the Last Margrave, with a touch ofthe poetry which perhaps records a regret for theirextinction as a state. He did not harry themas his father had done; his mild rule was the effectpartly of the indifference and distaste for his countrybred, by his long sojourns abroad; but doubtless alsoit was the effect of a kindly nature. Even inthe matter of selling a few thousands of them to fightthe battles of a bad cause on the other side of theworld, he had the best of motives, and faithfullyapplied the proceeds to the payment of the state debtand the embellishment of the capital.

His mother was a younger sister of Frederick the Great,and was so constantly at war with her husband thatprobably she had nothing to do with the marriage whichthe Wild Margrave forced upon their son. Lovecertainly had nothing to do with it, and the Last Margraveearly escaped from it to the society of Mlle.Clairon, the great French tragedienne, whom he metin Paris, and whom he persuaded to come and make herhome with him in Ansbach. She lived there seventeenyears, and though always an alien, she bore herselfwith kindness to all classes, and is still rememberedthere by the roll of butter which calls itself a Klarungsweckein its imperfect French.

No roll of butter records in faltering accents thename of the brilliant and disdainful English ladywho replaced this poor tragic muse in the Margrave’sheart, though the lady herself lived to be the lastMargravine of Ansbach, where everybody seems to havehated her with a passion which she doubtless knewhow to return. She was the daughter of the Earlof Berkeley, and the wife of Lord Craven, a sufficientlyunfaithful and unworthy nobleman by her account, fromwhom she was living apart when the Margrave askedher to his capital. There she set herself to oustMlle. Clairon with sneers and jests for the theatricalstyle which the actress could not outlive. LadyCraven said she was sure Clairon’s nightcap mustbe a crown of gilt paper; and when Clairon threatenedto kill herself, and the Margrave was alarmed, “Youforget,” said Lady Craven, “that actressesonly stab themselves under their sleeves.”

She drove Clairon from Ansbach, and the great tragediennereturned to Paris, where she remained true to herfalse friend, and from time to time wrote him lettersfull of magnanimous counsel and generous tenderness.But she could not have been so good company as LadyCraven, who was a very gifted person, and knew howto compose songs and sing them, and write comediesand play them, and who could keep the Margrave amusedin many ways. When his loveless and childlesswife died he married the English woman, but he grewmore and more weary of his dull little court and hisdull little country, and after a while, consideringthe uncertain tenure sovereigns had of their headssince the French King had lost his, and the fact thathe had no heirs to follow him in his principality,he resolved to cede it for a certain sum to Prussia.To this end his new wife’s urgence was perhapsnot wanting. They went to England, where sheoutlived him ten years, and wrote her memoirs.

The custodian of the Schloss came at last, and theMarches saw instantly that he was worth waiting for.He was as vainglorious of the palace as any grand-monarchingmargrave of them all. He could not have been morepersonally superb in showing their different effigiesif they had been his own family portraits, and hewould not spare the strangers a single splendor ofthe twenty vast, handsome, tiresome, Versailles-likerooms he led them through. The rooms were fatiguingphysically, but so poignantly interesting that Mrs.March would not have missed, though she perished ofher pleasure, one of the things she saw. She hadfor once a surfeit of highhoting in the pictures,the porcelains, the thrones and canopies, the tapestries,the historical associations with the margraves andtheir marriages, with the Great Frederick and theGreat Napoleon. The Great Napoleon’s manBernadotte made the Schloss his headquarters when heoccupied Ansbach after Austerlitz, and here he completedhis arrangements for taking her bargain from Prussiaand handing it over to Bavaria, with whom it stillremains. Twice the Great Frederick had sojournedin the palace; visiting his sister Louise, the wifeof the Wild Margrave, and more than once it had welcomedher next neighbor and sister Wilhelmina, the Margravineof Baireuth, whose autobiographic voice, piercinglyplaintive and reproachful, seemed to quiver in theair. Here, oddly enough, the spell of the WildMargrave weakened in the presence of his portrait,which signally failed to justify his fame of furioustyrant. That seems, indeed, to have been ratherthe popular and historical conception of him thanthe impression he made upon his exalted contemporaries.The Margravine of Baireuth at any rate could so farexcuse her poor blood-stained brother-in-law as tosay: “The Margrave of Ansbach . . . wasa young prince who had been very badly educated.He continually ill-treated my sister; they led thelife of cat and dog. My sister, it is true, wassometimes in fault . . . . Her education had beenvery bad. . . She was married at fourteen.”

At parting, the custodian told the Marches that hewould easily have known them for Americans by thehandsome fee they gave him; they came away flown withhis praise; and their national vanity was again flatteredwhen they got out into the principal square of Ansbach.There, in a bookseller’s window, they foundamong the pamphlets teaching different languages withouta master, one devoted to the Amerikanische Spracheas distinguished from the Englische Sprache.That there could be no mistake, the cover was printedwith colors in a German ideal of the star-spangledbanner; and March said he always knew that we had alanguage of our own, and that now he was going into buy that pamphlet and find out what it was like.He asked the young shop-woman how it differed fromEnglish, which she spoke fairly well from having livedeight years in Chicago. She said that it differedfrom the English mainly in emphasis and pronunciation.“For instance, the English say ‘halfpast’, and the Americans ‘Half past’;the English say ‘laht’ and the Americanssay ’late’.”

The weather had now been clear quite long enough,and it was raining again, a fine, bitter, piercingdrizzle. They asked the girl if it always rainedin Ansbach; and she owned that it nearly always did.She said that sometimes she longed for a little Americansummer; that it was never quite warm in Ansbach; andwhen they had got out into the rain, March said:“It was very nice to stumble on Chicago in anAnsbach book-store. You ought to have told heryou had a married daughter in Chicago. Don’tmiss another such chance.”

“We shall need another bag if we keep on buyingbooks at this rate,” said his wife with tranquilirrelevance; and not to give him time for protest;she pushed him into a shop where the valises in thewindow perhaps suggested her thought. March madehaste to forestall her there by saying they were Americans,but the mistress of the shop seemed to have her misgivings,and “Born Americans, perhaps?” she ventured.She had probably never met any but the naturalizedsort, and supposed these were the only sort.March re-assured her, and then she said she had a sonliving in Jersey City, and she made March take hisaddress that he might tell him he had seen his mother;she had apparently no conception what a great wayJersey City is from New York.

Mrs. March would not take his arm when they came out.“Now, that is what I never can get used to inyou, Basil, and I’ve tried to palliate it fortwenty-seven years. You know you won’t lookup that poor woman’s son! Why did you lether think you would?”

“How could I tell her I wouldn’t?Perhaps I shall.”

“No, no! You never will. I know you’regood and kind, and that’s why I can’tunderstand your being so cruel. When we get back,how will you ever find time to go over to Jersey City?”

He could not tell, but at last he said: “I’lltell you what! You must keep me up to it.You know how much you enjoy making me do my duty, andthis will be such a pleasure!”

She laughed forlornly, but after a moment she tookhis arm; and he began, from the example of this goodmother, to philosophize the continuous simplicityand sanity of the people of Ansbach under all theircivic changes. Saints and soldiers, knights andbarons, margraves, princes, kings, emperors, had comeand gone, and left their single-hearted, friendlysubjectfolk pretty much what they found them.The people had suffered and survived through a thousandwars, and apparently prospered on under all governmentsand misgovernments. When the court was most French,most artificial, most vicious, the citizen life musthave remained immutably German, dull, and kind.After all, he said, humanity seemed everywhere tobe pretty safe, and pretty much the same.

“Yes, that is all very well,” she returned,“and you can theorize interestingly enough;but I’m afraid that poor mother, there, had nomore reality for you than those people in the past.You appreciate her as a type, and you don’tcare for her as a human being. You’re nothingbut a dreamer, after all. I don’t blameyou,” she went on. “It’s yourtemperament, and you can’t change, now.”

“I may change for the worse,” he threatened.“I think I have, already. I don’tbelieve I could stand up to Dryfoos, now, as I didfor poor old Lindau, when I risked your bread andbutter for his. I look back in wonder and admirationat myself. I’ve steadily lost touch withlife since then. I’m a trifler, a dilettante,and an amateur of the right and the good as I usedto be when I was young. Oh, I have the grace tobe troubled at times, now, and once I never was.It never occurred to me then that the world wasn’tmade to interest me, or at the best to instruct me,but it does, now, at times.”

She always came to his defence when he accused himself;it was the best ground he could take with her.“I think you behaved very well with Burnamy.You did your duty then.”

“Did I? I’m not so sure. Atany rate, it’s the last time I shall do it.I’ve served my term. I think I should tellhim that he was all right in that business with Stoller,if I were to meet him, now.”

“Isn’t it strange,” she said, provisionally,“that we don’t come upon a trace of himanywhere in Ansbach?”

“Ah, you’ve been hoping he would turnup!”

“Yes. I don’t deny it. I feelvery unhappy about him.”

“I don’t. He’s too much likeme. He would have been quite capable of promisingthat poor woman to look up her son in Jersey City.When I think of that, I have no patience with Burnamy.”

“I am going to ask the landlord about him, nowhe’s got rid of his highhotes,” said Mrs.March.

XLIX.

They went home to their hotel for their midday dinner,and to the comfort of having it nearly all to themselves.Prince Leopold had risen early, like all the hard-workingpotentates of the continent, and got away to the manoeuvressomewhere at six o’clock; the decorations hadbeen removed, and the court-yard where the hired coachand pair of the prince had rolled in the evening beforehad only a few majestic ducks waddling about in itand quacking together, indifferent to the presenceof a yellow mail-wagon, on which the driver had beenapparently dozing till the hour of noon should sound.He sat there immovable, but at the last stroke ofthe clock he woke up and drove vigorously away to thestation.

The dining-room which they had been kept out of bythe prince the night before was not such as to embitterthe sense of their wrong by its splendor. Afterall, the tastes of royalty must be simple, if the princemight have gone to the Schloss and had chosen ratherto stay at this modest hotel; but perhaps the Schlosswas reserved for more immediate royalty than the brothersof prince-regents; and in that case he could not havedone better than dine at the Golden Star. If hepaid no more than two marks, he dined as cheaply asa prince could wish, and as abundantly. The wineat Ansbach was rather thin and sour, but the bread,March declared, was the best bread in the whole world,not excepting the bread of Carlsbad.

After dinner the Marches had some of the local pastry,not so incomparable as the bread, with their coffee,which they had served them in a pavilion of the beautifulgarden remaining to the hotel from the time when itwas a patrician mansion. The garden had rosesin it and several sorts of late summer flowers, aswell as ripe cherries, currants, grapes, and a Virginia-creeperred with autumn, all harmoniously contemporaneous,as they might easily be in a climate where no one ofthe seasons can very well know itself from the others.It had not been raining for half an hour, and thesun was scalding hot, so that the shelter of theirroof was very grateful, and the puddles of the pathswere drying up with the haste which puddles have tomake in Germany, between rains, if they are ever goingto dry up at all.

The landlord came out to see if they were well served,and he was sincerely obliging in the English he hadlearned as a waiter in London. Mrs. March madehaste to ask him if a young American of the name ofBurnamy had been staying with him a few weeks before;and she described Burnamy’s beauty and amiabilityso vividly that the landlord, if he had been a woman,could not have failed to remember him. But hefailed, with a real grief, apparently, and certainlya real politeness, to recall either his name or hisperson. The landlord was an intelligent, good-lookingyoung fellow; he told them that he was lately married,and they liked him so much that they were sorry tosee him afterwards privately boxing the ears of thepiccolo, the waiter’s little understudy.Perhaps the piccolo deserved it, but they would rathernot have witnessed his punishment; his being in adress-coat seemed to make it also an indignity.

In the late afternoon they went to the cafe in theold Orangery of the Schloss for a cup of tea, andfound themselves in the company of several Ansbachladies who had brought their work, in the evident habitof coming there every afternoon for their coffee andfor a dish of gossip. They were kind, uncomely,motherly-looking bodies; one of them combed her hairat the table; and they all sat outside of the cafewith their feet on the borders of the puddles whichhad not dried up there in the shade of the building.

A deep lawn, darkened at its farther edge by the longshadows of trees, stretched before them with the sunsetlight on it, and it was all very quiet and friendly.The tea brought to the Marches was brewed from someherb apparently of native growth, with bits of whatlooked like willow leaves in it, but it was flavoredwith a clove in each cup, and they sat contentedlyover it and tried to make out what the Ansbach ladieswere, talking about. These had recognized thestrangers for Americans, and one of them explainedthat Americans spoke the same language as the Englishand yet were not quite the same people.

“She differs from the girl in the book-store,”said March, translating to his wife. “Letus get away before she says that we are not so niceas the English,” and they made off toward theavenue of trees beyond the lawn.

There were a few people walking up and down in thealley, making the most of the moment of dry weather.They saluted one another like acquaintances, and threeclean-shaven, walnut-faced old peasants bowed in responseto March’s stare, with a self-respectful civility.They were yeomen of the region of Ansbach, where thecountry round about is dotted with their cottages,and not held in vast homeless tracts by the noblesas in North Germany.

The Bavarian who had imparted this fact to March atbreakfast, not without a certain tacit pride in itto the disadvantage of the Prussians, was at the suppertable, and was disposed to more talk, which he managedin a stout, slow English of his own. He said hehad never really spoken English with an English-speakingperson before, or at all since he studied it in schoolat Munich.

“I should be afraid to put my school-boy Germanagainst your English,” March said, and, whenhe had understood, the other laughed for pleasure,and reported the compliment to his wife in their ownparlance. “You Germans certainly beat usin languages.”

“Oh, well,” he retaliated, “theAmericans beat us in some other things,” andMrs. March felt that this was but just; she would haveliked to mention a few, but not ungraciously; sheand the German lady kept smiling across the table,and trying detached vocables of their respective tonguesupon each other.

The Bavarian said he lived in Munich still, but wasin Ansbach on an affair of business; he asked Marchif he were not going to see the manoeuvres somewhere.Till now the manoeuvres had merely been the interestingbackground of their travel; but now, hearing that theEmperor of Germany, the King of Saxony, the Regentof Bavaria, and the King of Wurtemberg, the Grand-Dukesof Weimar and Baden, with visiting potentates of allsorts, and innumerable lesser highhotes, foreign anddomestic, were to be present, Mrs. March resolvedthat they must go to at least one of the reviews.

“If you go to Frankfort, you can see the Kingof Italy too,” said the Bavarian, but he ownedthat they probably could not get into a hotel there,and he asked why they should not go to Wurzburg, wherethey could see all the sovereigns except the Kingof Italy.

“Wurzburg? Wurzburg?” March queriedof his wife. “Where did we hear of thatplace?”

“Isn’t it where Burnamy said Mr. Stollerhad left his daughters at school?”

“So it is! And is that on the way to theRhine?” he asked the Bavarian.

“No, no! Wurzburg is on the Main, aboutfive hours from Ansbach. And it is a very interestingplace. It is where the good wine comes from.”

“Oh, yes,” said March, and in their roomshis wife got out all their guides and maps and beganto inform herself and to inform him about Wurzburg.But first she said it was very cold and he must ordersome fire made in the tall German stove in their parlor.The maid who came said “Gleich,” but shedid not come back, and about the time they were gettingfurious at her neglect, they began getting warm.He put his hand on the stove and found it hot; thenhe looked down for a door in the stove where he mightshut a damper; there was no door.

“Good heavens!” he shouted. “It’slike something in a dream,” and he ran to pullthe bell for help.

“No, no! Don’t ring! It willmake us ridiculous. They’ll think Americansdon’t know anything. There must be someway of dampening the stove; and if there isn’t,I’d rather suffocate than give myself away.”Mrs. March ran and opened the window, while her husbandcarefully examined the stove at every point, and exploredthe pipe for the damper in vain. “Can’tyou find it?” The night wind came in raw anddamp, and threatened to blow their lamp out, and shewas obliged to shut the window.

“Not a sign of it. I will go down and askthe landlord in strict confidence how they dampentheir stoves in Ansbach.”

“Well, if you must. It’s gettinghotter every moment.” She followed himtimorously into the corridor, lit by a hanging lamp,turned low for the night.

He looked at his watch; it was eleven o’clock.“I’m afraid they’re all in bed.”

“Yes; you mustn’t go! We must tryto find out for ourselves. What can that doorbe for?”

It was a low iron door, half the height of a man,in the wall near their room, and it yielded to hispull. “Get a candle,” he whispered,and when she brought it, he stooped to enter the doorway.

“Oh, do you think you’d better?”she hesitated.

“You can come, too, if you’re afraid.You’ve always said you wanted to die with me.”

“Well. But you go first.”

He disappeared within, and then came back to the doorway.“Just come in here, a moment.” Shefound herself in a sort of antechamber, half the heightof her own room, and following his gesture she lookeddown where in one corner some crouching monster seemedshowing its fiery teeth in a grin of derision.This grin was the damper of their stove, and this waswhere the maid had kindled the fire which had beenroasting them alive, and was still joyously chucklingto itself. “I think that Munich man waswrong. I don’t believe we beat the Germansin anything. There isn’t a hotel in theUnited States where the stoves have no front doors,and every one of them has the space of a good-sizedflat given up to the convenience of kindling a firein it.”

L.

After a red sunset of shameless duplicity March wasawakened to a rainy morning by the clinking of cavalryhoofs on the pavement of the long-irregular squarebefore the hotel, and he hurried out to see the passingof the soldiers on their way to the manoeuvres.They were troops of all arms, but mainly infantry,and as they stumped heavily through the groups ofapathetic citizens in their mud-splashed boots, theytook the steady downpour on their dripping helmets.Some of them were smoking, but none smiling, exceptone gay fellow who made a joke to a serving-maid onthe sidewalk. An old officer halted his staffto scold a citizen who had given him a mistaken direction.The shame of the erring man was great, and the prideof a fellow-citizen who corrected him was not less,though the arrogant brute before whom they both cringedused them with equal scorn; the younger officers listenedindifferently round on horseback behind the glitterof their eyeglasses, and one of them amused himselfby turning the silver bangles on his wrist.

Then the files of soldier slaves passed on, and Marchcrossed the bridge spanning the gardens in what hadbeen the city moat, and found his way to the market-place,under the walls of the old Gothic church of St. Gumpertus.The market, which spread pretty well over the square,seemed to be also a fair, with peasants’ clothesand local pottery for sale, as well as fruits andvegetables, and large baskets of flowers, with oldwomen squatting before them. It was all as picturesqueas the markets used to be in Montreal and Quebec,and in a cloudy memory of his wedding journey longbefore, he bought so lavishly of the flowers to carryback to his wife that a little girl, who saw his arm-loadfrom her window as he returned, laughed at him, andthen drew shyly back. Her laugh reminded himhow many happy children he had seen in Germany, andhow freely they seemed to play everywhere, with noone to make them afraid. When they grow up thewomen laugh as little as the men, whose rude toil thesoldiering leaves them to.

He got home with his flowers, and his wife took themabsently, and made him join her in watching the sightwhich had fascinated her in the street under theirwindows. A slender girl, with a waist as slimas a corseted officer’s, from time to time cameout of the house across the way to the firewood whichhad been thrown from a wagon upon the sidewalk there.Each time she embraced several of the heavy four-footlogs and disappeared with them in-doors. Onceshe paused from her work to joke with a well-dressedman who came by; and seemed to find nothing odd inher work; some gentlemen lounging at the window overhead watched her with no apparent sense of anomaly.

“What do you think of that?” asked Mrs.March. “I think it’s good exercisefor the girl, and I should like to recommend it tothose fat fellows at the window. I suppose she’llsaw the wood in the cellar, and then lug it up stairs,and pile it up in the stoves’ dressing-rooms.”

“Don’t laugh! It’s too disgraceful.”

“Well, I don’t know! If you like,I’ll offer these gentlemen across the way youropinion of it in the language of Goethe and Schiller.”

“I wish you’d offer my opinion of them.They’ve been staring in here with an opera-glass.”

“Ah, that’s a different affair. Thereisn’t much going on in Ansbach, and they haveto make the most of it.”

The lower casem*nts of the houses were furnished withmirrors set at right angles with them, and nothingwhich went on in the streets was lost. Some ofthe streets were long and straight, and at rare momentsthey lay full of sun. At such times the Marcheswere puzzled by the sight of citizens carrying openumbrellas, and they wondered if they had forgottento put them down, or thought it not worth while inthe brief respites from the rain, or were profitingby such rare occasions to dry them; and some othersights remained baffling to the last. Once a man

with his hands pinioned before him, and a gendarmemarching stolidly after him with his musket on hisshoulder, passed under their windows; but who he was,or what he, had done, or was to suffer, they neverknew. Another time a pair went by on the wayto the railway station: a young man carryingan umbrella under his arm, and a very decent-lookingold woman lugging a heavy carpet bag, who left themto the lasting question whether she was the youngman’s servant in her best clothes, or merelyhis mother.

Women do not do everything in Ansbach, however, thesacristans being men, as the Marches found when theywent to complete their impression of the courtly pastof the city by visiting the funeral chapel of the margravesin the crypt of St. Johannis Church. In the littleex-margravely capital there was something of the neighborlyinterest in the curiosity of strangers which endearsItalian witness. The white-haired street-sweeperof Ansbach, who willingly left his broom to guide themto the house of the sacristan, might have been a street-sweeperin Vicenza; and the old sacristan, when he put hisvelvet skull-cap out of an upper window and professedhis willingness to show them the chapel, disappointedthem by saying “Gleich!” instead of “Subito!”The architecture of the houses was a party to theillusion. St. Johannis, like the older churchof St. Gumpertus, is Gothic, with the two unequaltowers which seem distinctive of Ansbach; at the St.Gumpertus end of the place where they both stand thedwellings are Gothic too, and might be in Hamburg;but at the St. Johannis end they seem to have feltthe exotic spirit of the court, and are of a sortof Teutonized renaissance.

The rococo margraves and margravines used of courseto worship in St. Johannis Church. Now they all,such as did not marry abroad, lie in the crypt ofthe church, in caskets of bronze and copper and marble,with draperies of black samite, more and more funereallyvainglorious to the last. Their courtly coffinsare ranged in a kind of hemicycle, with the littlecoffins of the children that died before they cameto the knowledge of their greatness. On one ofthese a kneeling figurine in bronze holds up the effigyof the child within; on another the epitaph playstenderly with the fate of a little princess, who diedin her first year.

In the Rose-month wasthis sweet Rose taken.
For the Rose-kind hathshe earth forsaken.
The Princess is theRose, that here no longer blows.
From the stem by death’shand rudely shaken.
Then rest in the Rose-house.
Little Princess-Rosebuddear!
There life’s Roseshall bloom again
In Heaven’s sunshineclear.

While March struggled to get this into English words,two German ladies, who had made themselves of hisparty, passed reverently away and left him to paythe sacristan alone.

“That is all right,” he said, when hecame out. “I think we got the most value;and they didn’t look as if they could affordit so well; though you never can tell, here.These ladies may be the highest kind of highhotespractising a praiseworthy economy. I hope thelesson won’t be lost on us. They have savedenough by us for their coffee at the Orangery.Let us go and have a little willow-leaf tea!”

The Orangery perpetually lured them by what it hadkept of the days when an Orangery was essential tothe self-respect of every sovereign prince, and ofso many private gentlemen. On their way they alwayspassed the statue of Count Platen, the dull poet whomHeine’s hate would have delivered so cruellyover to an immortality of contempt, but who standsthere near the Schloss in a grass-plot prettily plantedwith flowers, and ignores his brilliant enemy in thecomfortable durability of bronze; and there alwaysawaited them in the old pleasaunce the pathos of KasparHauser’s fate; which his murder affixes to itwith a red stain.

After their cups of willow leaves at the cafe theywent up into that nook of the plantation where thesimple shaft of church-warden’s Gothic commemoratesthe assassination on the spot where it befell.Here the hapless youth, whose mystery will never befathomed on earth, used to come for a little respitefrom his harsh guardian in Ansbach, homesick for thekindness of his Nuremberg friends; and here his murdererfound him and dealt him the mortal blow.

March lingered upon the last sad circ*mstance of thetragedy in which the wounded boy dragged himself home,to suffer the suspicion and neglect of his guardiantill death attested his good faith beyond cavil.He said this was the hardest thing to bear in allhis story, and that he would like to have a look intothe soul of the dull, unkind wretch who had so misreadhis charge. He was going on with an inquiry thatpleased him much, when his wife pulled him abruptlyaway.

“Now, I see, you are yielding to the fascinationof it, and you are wanting to take the material fromBurnamy!”

“Oh, well, let him have the material; he willspoil it. And I can always reject it, if he offersit to ’Every Other Week’.”

“I could believe, after your behavior to thatpoor woman about her son in Jersey City, you’rereally capable of it.”

“What comprehensive inculpation! I hadforgotten about that poor woman.”

LI.

The letters which March had asked his Nuremberg bankerto send them came just as they were leaving Ansbach.The landlord sent them down to the station, and Mrs.March opened them in the train, and read them firstso that she could prepare him if there were anythingannoying in them, as well as indulge her liveliercuriosity.

“They’re from both the children,”she said, without waiting for him to ask. “Youcan look at them later. There’s a very niceletter from Mrs. Adding to me, and one from dear littleRose for you.” Then she hesitated, withher hand on a letter faced down in her lap. “Andthere’s one from Agatha Triscoe, which I wonderwhat you’ll think of.” She delayedagain, and then flashed it open before him, and waitedwith a sort of impassioned patience while he readit.

He read it, and gave it back to her. “Theredoesn’t seem to be very much in it.”

“That’s it! Don’t you thinkI had a right to there being something in it, afterall I did for her?”

“I always hoped you hadn’t done anythingfor her, but if you have, why should she give herselfaway on paper? It’s a very proper letter.”

“It’s a little too proper, and it’sthe last I shall have to do with her. She knewthat I should be on pins and needles till I heard howher father had taken Burnamy’s being there,that night, and she doesn’t say a word aboutit.”

“The general may have had a tantrum that shecouldn’t describe. Perhaps she hasn’ttold him, yet.”

“She would tell him instantly!” criedMrs. March who began to find reason in the supposition,as well as comfort for the hurt which the girl’sreticence had given her. “Or if she wouldn’t,it would be because she was waiting for the best chance.”

“That would be like the wise daughter of a difficultfather. She may be waiting for the best chanceto say how he took it. No, I’m all for MissTriscoe, and I hope that now, if she’s takenherself off our hands, she’ll keep off.”

“It’s altogether likely that he’smade her promise not to tell me anything about it,”Mrs. March mused aloud.

“That would be unjust to a person who had behavedso discreetly as you have,” said her husband.

They were on their way to Wurzburg, and at the firststation, which was a junction, a lady mounted to theircompartment just before the train began to move.She was stout and middle-aged, and had never been pretty,but she bore herself with a kind of authority in spiteof her thread gloves, her dowdy gray travelling-dress,and a hat of lower middle-class English tastelessness.She took the only seat vacant, a backward-riding placebeside a sleeping passenger who looked like a commercialtraveller, but she seemed ill at ease in it, and Marchoffered her his seat. She accepted it very promptly,and thanked him for it in the English of a German,and Mrs. March now classed her as a governess who hadbeen teaching in England and had acquired the nationalfeeling for dress. But in this character shefound her interesting, and even a little pathetic,and she made her some overtures of talk which the othermet eagerly enough. They were now running amonglow hills, not so picturesque as those between Egerand Nuremberg, but of much the same toylike quaintnessin the villages dropped here and there in their valleys.One small town, completely walled, with its gray housesand red roofs, showed through the green of its treesand gardens so like a colored print in a child’sstory-book that Mrs. March cried out for joy in it,and then accounted for her rapture by explaining tothe stranger that they were Americans and had neverbeen in Germany before. The lady was not visiblyaffected by the fact, she said casually that she hadoften been in that little town, which she named; heruncle had a castle in the country back of it, and

she came with her husband for the shooting in the autumn.By a natural transition she spoke of her children,for whom she had an English governess; she said shehad never been in England, but had learnt the languagefrom a governess in her own childhood; and throughit all Mrs. March perceived that she was trying toimpress them with her consequence. To humor herpose, she said they had been looking up the scene ofKaspar Hauser’s death at Ansbach; and at thisthe stranger launched into such intimate particularsconcerning him, and was so familiar at first handswith the facts of his life, that Mrs. March let herrun on, too much amused with her pretensions to betrayany doubt of her. She wondered if March wereenjoying it all as much, and from time to time shetried to catch his eye, while the lady talked constantlyand rather loudly, helping herself out with wordsfrom them both when her English failed her. Inthe safety of her perfect understanding of the case,Mrs. March now submitted farther, and even sufferedsome patronage from her, which in another mood shewould have met with a decided snub.

As they drew in among the broad vine-webbed slopesof the Wurzburg, hills, the stranger said she wasgoing to change there, and take a train on to Berlin.Mrs. March wondered whether she would be able to keepup the comedy to the last; and she had to own thatshe carried it off very easily when the friends whomshe was expecting did not meet her on the arrivalof their train. She refused March’s offersof help, and remained quietly seated while he gotout their wraps and bags. She returned with ahardy smile the cold leave Mrs. March took of her;and when a porter came to the door, and forced hisway by the Marches, to ask with anxious servilityif she, were the Baroness von-----, she bade the manget them. a ‘traeger’, and then come backfor her. She waved them a complacent adieu beforethey mixed with the crowd and lost sight of her.

“Well, my dear,” said March, addressingthe snobbishness in his wife which he knew to be sowholly impersonal, “you’ve mingled withone highhote, anyway. I must say she didn’tlook it, any more than the Duke and duch*ess of Orleans,and yet she’s only a baroness. Think ofour being three hours in the same compartment, andshe doing all she could to impress us and our gettingno good of it! I hoped you were feeling her quality,so that we should have it in the family, anyway, andalways know what it was like. But so far, thehighhotes have all been terribly disappointing.”

He teased on as they followed the traeger with theirbaggage out of the station; and in the omnibus onthe way to their hotel, he recurred to the loss theyhad suffered in the baroness’s failure to dramatizeher nobility effectually. “After all, perhapsshe was as much disappointed in us. I don’tsuppose we looked any more like democrats than shelooked like an aristocrat.”

“But there’s a great difference,”Mrs. March returned at last. “It isn’tat all a parallel case. We were not real democrats,and she was a real aristocrat.”

“To be sure. There is that way of lookingat it. That’s rather novel; I wish I hadthought of that myself. She was certainly moreto blame than we were.”

LII.

The square in front of the station was planted withflag-poles wreathed in evergreens; a triumphal archwas nearly finished, and a colossal allegory in imitationbronze was well on the way to completion, in honorof the majesties who were coming for the manoeuvres.The streets which the omnibus passed through to theSwan Inn were draped with the imperial German andthe royal Bavarian colors; and the standards of thevisiting nationalities decked the fronts of the houseswhere their military attaches were lodged; but theMarches failed to see our own banner, and were sparedfor the moment the ignominy of finding it over an apothecaryshop in a retired avenue. The sun had come out,the sky overhead was of a smiling blue; and they feltthe gala-day glow and thrill in the depths of theirinextinguishable youth.

The Swan Inn sits on one of the long quays borderingthe Main, and its windows look down upon the bridgesand shipping of the river; but the traveller reachesit by a door in the rear, through an archway into aback street, where an odor dating back to the foundationof the city is waiting to welcome him.

The landlord was there, too, and he greeted the Marchesso cordially that they fully partook his grief inbeing able to offer them rooms on the front of thehouse for two nights only. They reconciled themselvesto the necessity of then turning out for the staffof the King of Saxony, the more readily because theyknew that there was no hope of better things at anyother hotel.

The rooms which they could have for the time werecharming, and they came down to supper in a glazedgallery looking out on the river picturesque withcraft of all fashions: with row-boats, sail-boats,and little steamers, but mainly with long black bargesbuilt up into houses in the middle, and defended eachby a little nervous German dog. Long rafts oflogs weltered in the sunset red which painted the swiftcurrent, and mantled the immeasurable vineyards ofthe hills around like the color of their ripeninggrapes. Directly in face rose a castled steep,which kept the ranging walls and the bastions andbattlements of the time when such a stronghold couldhave defended the city from foes without or from tumultwithin. The arches of a stately bridge spannedthe river sunsetward, and lifted a succession of colossalfigures against the crimson sky.

“I guess we have been wasting our time, my dear,”said March, as they, turned from this beauty to thequestion of supper. “I wish we had alwaysbeen here!”

Their waiter had put them at a table in a divisionof the gallery beyond that which they entered, wheresome groups of officers were noisily supping.There was no one in their room but a man whose facewas indistinguishable against the light, and two younggirls who glanced at them with looks at once quelledand defiant, and then after a stare at the officersin the gallery beyond, whispered together with suppressedgiggling. The man fed on without noticing them,except now and then to utter a growl that silencedthe whispering and giggling for a moment. TheMarches, from no positive evidence of any sense, decidedthat they were Americans.

“I don’t know that I feel responsiblefor them as their fellow-countryman; I should, once,”he said.

“It isn’t that. It’s the worryof trying to make out why they are just what theyare,” his wife returned.

The girls drew the man’s attention to them andhe looked at them for the first time; then after asort of hesitation he went on with his supper.They had only begun theirs when he rose with the twogirls, whom Mrs. March now saw to be of the same sizeand dressed alike, and came heavily toward them.

“I thought you was in Carlsbad,” he saidbluntly to March, with a nod at Mrs. March. Headded, with a twist of his head toward the two girls,“My daughters,” and then left them toher, while he talked on with her husband. “Cometo see this foolery, I suppose. I’m on myway to the woods for my after-cure; but I thoughtI might as well stop and give the girls a chance;they got a week’s vacation, anyway.”Stoller glanced at them with a sort of troubled tendernessin his strong dull face.

“Oh, yes. I understood they were at schoolhere,” said March, and he heard one of themsaying, in a sweet, high pipe to his wife:

“Ain’t it just splendid? I ha’n’tseen anything equal to it since the Worrld’sFairr.” She spoke with a strong contortionof the Western r, and her sister hastened to put in:

“I don’t think it’s to be comparedwith the Worrld’s Fairr. But these Germangirls, here, just think it’s great. It justdoes me good to laff at ’em, about it.I like to tell ’em about the electric fountainand the Courrt of Iionorr when they get to talkin’about the illuminations they’re goun’to have. You goun’ out to the parade?You better engage your carriage right away if youarre. The carrs’ll be a perfect jam.Father’s engaged ourrs; he had to pay sixty marrksforr it.”

They chattered on without shyness and on as easy termswith a woman of three times their years as if shehad been a girl of their own age; they willingly tookthe whole talk to themselves, and had left her quiteoutside of it before Stoller turned to her.

“I been telling Mr. March here that you betterboth come to the parade with us. I guess my twospannerwill hold five; or if it won’t, we’ll makeit. I don’t believe there’s a carriageleft in Wurzburg; and if you go in the cars, you’llhave to walk three or four miles before you get tothe parade-ground. You think it over,”he said to March. “Nobody else is goingto have the places, anyway, and you can say yes atthe last minute just as well as now.”

He moved off with his girls, who looked over theirshoulders at the officers as they passed on throughthe adjoining room.

“My dear!” cried Mrs. March. “Didn’tyou suppose he classed us with Burnamy in that business?Why should he be polite to us?”

“Perhaps he wants you to chaperon his daughters.He’s probably heard of your performance at theKurhaus ball. But he knows that I thought Burnamyin the wrong. This may be Stoller’s wayof wiping out an obligation. Wouldn’t youlike to go with him?”

“The mere thought of his being in the same townis prostrating. I’d far rather he hatedus; then he would avoid us.”

“Well, he doesn’t own the town, and ifit comes to the worst, perhaps we can avoid him.Let us go out, anyway, and see if we can’t.”

“No, no; I’m too tired; but you go.And get all the maps and guides you can; there’sso very little in Baedeker, and almost nothing in thatgreat hulking Bradshaw of yours; and I’m surethere must be the most interesting history of Wurzburg.Isn’t it strange that we haven’t the slightestassociation with the name?”

“I’ve been rummaging in my mind, and I’vegot hold of an association at last,” said March.“It’s beer; a sign in a Sixth Avenue saloonwindow Wurzburger Hof-Brau.”

“No matter if it is beer. Find some sketchof the history, and we’ll try to get away fromthe Stollers in it. I pitied those wild girls,too. What crazy images of the world must filltheir empty minds! How their ignorant thoughtsmust go whirling out into the unknown! I don’tenvy their father. Do hurry back! I shallbe thinking about them every instant till you come.”

She said this, but in their own rooms it was so soothingto sit looking through the long twilight at the lovelylandscape that the sort of bruise given by their encounterwith the Stollers had left her consciousness beforeMarch returned. She made him admire first theconvent church on a hill further up the river whichexactly balanced the fortress in front of them, andthen she seized upon the little books he had brought,and set him to exploring the labyrinths of their German,with a mounting exultation in his discoveries.There was a general guide to the city, and a specialguide, with plans and personal details of the approachingmanoeuvres and the princes who were to figure in them;and there was a sketch of the local history:a kind of thing that the Germans know how to writeparticularly, well, with little gleams of pleasanthumor blinking through it. For the study of this,Mrs. March realized, more and more passionately, thatthey were in the very most central and convenientpoint, for the history of Wurzburg might be said tohave begun with her prince-bishops, whose rule hadbegun in the twelfth century, and who had built, ona forgotten Roman work, the fortress of the Marienburgon that vineyarded hill over against the Swan Inn.There had of course been history before that, but

’nothing so clear, nothing so peculiarly swell,nothing that so united the glory of this world andthe next as that of the prince-bishops. Theyhad made the Marienburg their home, and kept it againstforeign and domestic foes for five hundred years.Shut within its well-armed walls they had awed theoften-turbulent city across the Main; they had heldit against the embattled farmers in the Peasants’War, and had splendidly lost it to Gustavus Adolphus,and then got it back again and held it till Napoleontook it from them. He gave it with their flockto the Bavarians, who in turn briefly yielded it tothe Prussians in 1866, and were now in apparentlyfinal possession of it.

Before the prince-bishops, Charlemagne and Barbarossahad come and gone, and since the prince-bishops therehad been visiting thrones and kingdoms enough in theancient city, which was soon to be illustrated by thepresence of imperial Germany, royal, Wirtemberg andSaxony, grand-ducal Baden and Weimar, and a surfeitof all the minor potentates among those who speakthe beautiful language of the Ja.

But none of these could dislodge the prince-bishopsfrom that supreme place which they had at once takenin Mrs. March’s fancy. The potentates wereall going to be housed in the vast palace which theprince-bishops had built themselves in Wurzburg assoon as they found it safe to come down from theirstronghold of Marienburg, and begin to adorn theircity, and to confirm it in its intense fidelity tothe Church. Tiepolo had come up out of Italyto fresco their palace, where he wrought year afteryear, in that worldly taste which has somehow cometo express the most sovereign moment of ecclesiasticism.It prevailed so universally in Wurzburg that it lefther with the name of the Rococo City, intrenched ina period of time equally remote from early Christianityand modern Protestantism. Out of her sixty thousandsouls, only ten thousand are now of the reformed religion,and these bear about the same relation to the Catholicspirit of the place that the Gothic architecture bearsto the baroque.

As long as the prince-bishops lasted the Wurzburgersgot on very well with but one newspaper, and perhapsthe smallest amount of merrymaking known outside ofthe colony of Massachusetts Bay at the same epoch.The prince-bishops had their finger in everybody’spie, and they portioned out the cakes and ale, whichwere made according to formulas of their own.The distractions were all of a religious character;churches, convents, monasteries, abounded; ecclesiasticalprocessions and solemnities were the spectacles thatedified if they did not amuse the devout population.

It seemed to March an ironical outcome of all thisspiritual severity that one of the greatest modernscientific discoveries should have been made in Wurzburg,and that the Roentgen rays should now be giving hername a splendor destined to eclipse the glories ofher past.

Mrs. March could not allow that they would do so;or at least that the name of Roentgen would ever lendmore lustre to his city than that of Longfellow’sWalther von der Vogelweide. She was no less surprisedthan pleased to realize that this friend of the birdswas a Wurzburger, and she said that their first pilgrimagein the morning should be to the church where he liesburied.

LIII.

March went down to breakfast not quite so early ashis wife had planned, and left her to have her coffeein her room. He got a pleasant table in the galleryoverlooking the river, and he decided that the landscape,though it now seemed to be rather too much studiedfrom a drop-certain, had certainly lost nothing ofits charm in the clear morning light. The waiterbrought his breakfast, and after a little delay cameback with a card which he insisted was for March.It was not till he put on his glasses and read thename of Mr. R. M. Kenby that he was able at all toagree with the waiter, who stood passive at his elbow.

“Well,” he said, “why wasn’tthis card sent up last night?”

The waiter explained that the gentleman had just,given him his card, after asking March’s nationality,and was then breakfasting in the next room. Marchcaught up his napkin and ran round the partition wall,and Kenby rose with his napkin and hurried to meethim.

“I thought it must be you,” he calledout, joyfully, as they struck their extended handstogether, “but so many people look alike, nowadays,that I don’t trust my eyes any more.”

Kenby said he had spent the time since they last metpartly in Leipsic and partly in Gotha, where he hadamused himself in rubbing up his rusty German.As soon as he realized that Wurzburg was so near hehad slipped down from Gotha for a glimpse of the manoeuvres.He added that he supposed March was there to see them,and he asked with a quite unembarrassed smile if theyhad met Mr. Adding in Carlsbad, and without heedingMarch’s answer, he laughed and added: “Ofcourse, I know she must have told Mrs. March all aboutit.”

March could not deny this; he laughed, too; thoughin his wife’s absence he felt bound to forbidhimself anything more explicit.

“I don’t give it up, you know,”Kenby went on, with perfect ease. “I’mnot a young fellow, if you call thirty-nine old.”

“At my age I don’t,” March put in,and they roared together, in men’s securityfrom the encroachments of time.

“But she happens to be the only woman I’veever really wanted to marry, for more than a few daysat a stretch. You know how it is with us.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” said March, and theyshouted again.

“We’re in love, and we’re out oflove, twenty times. But this isn’t a merefancy; it’s a conviction. And there’sno reason why she shouldn’t marry me.”

March smiled gravely, and his smile was not lost uponKenby. “You mean the boy,” he said.“Well, I like Rose,” and now March reallyfelt swept from his feet. “She doesn’tdeny that she likes me, but she seems to think thather marrying again will take her from him; the factis, it will only give me to him. As for devotingher whole life to him, she couldn’t do a worsething for him. What the boy needs is a man’scare, and a man’s will—­Good heavens!You don’t think I could ever be unkind to thelittle soul?” Kenby threw himself forward overthe table.

“My dear fellow!” March protested.

“I’d rather cut off my right hand!”Kenby pursued, excitedly, and then he said, with ahumorous drop: “The fact is, I don’tbelieve I should want her so much if I couldn’thave Rose too. I want to have them both.So far, I’ve only got no for an answer; butI’m not going to keep it. I had a letterfrom Rose at Carlsbad, the other day; and—­”

The waiter came forward with a folded scrap of paperon his salver, which March knew must be from his wife.“What is keeping you so?” she wrote.“I am all ready.” “It’sfrom Mrs. March,” he explained to Kenby.“I am going out with her on some errands.I’m awfully glad to see you again. We musttalk it all over, and you must—­you mustn’t—­Mrs.March will want to see you later—­I—­Areyou in the hotel?”

“Oh yes. I’ll see you at the one-o’clocktable d’hote, I suppose.”

March went away with his head whirling in the questionwhether he should tell his wife at once of Kenby’spresence, or leave her free for the pleasures of Wurzburg,till he could shape the fact into some safe and acceptableform. She met him at the door with her guide-books,wraps and umbrellas, and would hardly give him timeto get on his hat and coat.

“Now, I want you to avoid the Stollers as faras you can see them. This is to be a real wedding-journeyday, with no extraneous acquaintance to bother; themore strangers the better. Wurzburg is richerthan anything I imagined. I’ve looked itall up; I’ve got the plan of the city, so thatwe can easily find the way. We’ll walk first,and take carriages whenever we get tired. We’llgo to the cathedral at once; I want a good gulp ofrococo to begin with; there wasn’t half enoughof it at Ansbach. Isn’t it strange howwe’ve come round to it?”

She referred to that passion for the Gothic whichthey had obediently imbibed from Ruskin in the daysof their early Italian travel and courtship, whenall the English-speaking world bowed down to him indevout aversion from the renaissance, and pious abhorrenceof the rococo.

“What biddable little things we were!”she went on, while March was struggling to keep Kenbyin the background of his consciousness. “Therococo must have always had a sneaking charm for us,when we were pinning our faith to pointed arches;and yet I suppose we were perfectly sincere.Oh, look at that divinely ridiculous Madonna!”They were now making their way out of the crookedfootway behind their hotel toward the street leadingto the cathedral, and she pointed to the Blessed Virginover the door of some religious house, her draperybillowing about her feet; her body twisting to showthe sculptor’s mastery of anatomy, and the haloheld on her tossing head with the help of stout giltrays. In fact, the Virgin’s whole figurewas gilded, and so was that of the child in her arms.“Isn’t she delightful?”

“I see what you mean,” said March, witha dubious glance at the statue, “but I’mnot sure, now, that I wouldn’t like somethingquieter in my Madonnas.”

The thoroughfare which they emerged upon, with thecathedral ending the prospective, was full of theholiday so near at hand. The narrow sidewalkswere thronged with people, both soldiers and civilians,and up the middle of the street detachments of militarycame and went, halting the little horse-cars and thehuge beer-wagons which otherwise seemed to have thesole right to the streets of Wurzburg; they came jinglingor thundering out of the aide streets and hurled themselvesround the corners reckless of the passers, who escapedalive by flattening themselves like posters againstthe house walls. There were peasants, men andwomen, in the costume which the unbroken course oftheir country life had kept as quaint as it was ahundred years before; there were citizens in the misfitsof the latest German fashions; there were soldiersof all arms in their vivid uniforms, and from timeto time there were pretty young girls in white dresseswith low necks, and bare arms gloved to the elbows,who were following a holiday custom of the place ingoing about the streets in ball costume. Theshop windows were filled with portraits of the Emperorand the Empress, and the Prince-Regent and the ladiesof his family; the German and Bavarian colors drapedthe facades of the houses and festooned the fantasticMadonnas posing above so many portals. The modernpatriotism included the ancient piety without disturbingit; the rococo city remained ecclesiastical throughits new imperialism, and kept the stamp given it bythe long rule of the prince-bishops under the sovereigntyof its King and the suzerainty of its Kaiser.

The Marches escaped from the present, when they enteredthe cathedral, as wholly as if they had taken holdof the horns of the altar, though they were far fromliterally doing this in an interior so grandiose.There area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhapsmore in Spain, which approach the perfection achievedby the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroque style.For once one sees what that style can do in architectureand sculpture, and whatever one may say of the details,one cannot deny that there is a prodigiously effectivekeeping in it all. This interior came together,as the decorators say, with a harmony that the travellershad felt nowhere in their earlier experience of therococo. It was, unimpeachably perfect in itsway, “Just,” March murmured to his wife,“as the social and political and scientificscheme of the eighteenth century was perfected incertain times and places. But the odd thing isto find the apotheosis of the rococo away up herein Germany. I wonder how much the prince-bishopsreally liked it. But they had become rococo, too!Look at that row of their statues on both sides ofthe nave! What magnificent swell! How theyabash this poor plain Christ, here; he would like toget behind the pillar; he knows that he could neverlend himself to the baroque style. It expressesthe eighteenth century, though. But how you longfor some little hint of the thirteenth, or even thenineteenth.”

“I don’t,” she whispered back.“I’m perfectly wild with Wurzburg.I like to have a thing go as far as it can. AtNuremberg I wanted all the Gothic I could get, andin Wurzburg I want all the baroque I can get.I am consistent.”

She kept on praising herself to his disadvantage,as women do, all the way to the Neumunster Church,where they were going to revere the tomb of Walthervon der Vogelweide, not so much for his own sake asfor Longfellow’s. The older poet lies buriedwithin, but his monument is outside the church, perhapsfor the greater convenience of the sparrows, whichnow represent the birds he loved. The cenotaphis surmounted by a broad vase, and around this arethickly perched the effigies of the Meistersinger’sfeathered friends, from whom the canons of the church,as Mrs. March read aloud from her Baedeker, long agodirected his bequest to themselves. In revengefor their lawless greed the defrauded beneficiarieschoose to burlesque the affair by looking like thefour-and-twenty blackbirds when the pie was opened.

She consented to go for a moment to the Gothic Marienkapellewith her husband in the revival of his mediaeval taste,and she was rewarded amidst its thirteenth-centurysincerity by his recantation. “You areright! Baroque is the thing for Wurzburg; onecan’t enjoy Gothic here any more than one couldenjoy baroque in Nuremberg.”

Reconciled in the rococo, they now called a carriage,and went to visit the palace of the prince-bishopswho had so well known how to make the heavenly takethe image and superscription of the worldly; and theywere jointly indignant to find it shut against thepublic in preparation for the imperialities and royaltiescoming to occupy it. They were in time for thenoon guard-mounting, however, and Mrs. March said thatthe way the retiring squad kicked their legs out inthe high martial step of the German soldiers was aperfect expression of the insolent militarism of theirempire, and was of itself enough to make one thankHeaven that one was an American and a republican.She softened a little toward their system when itproved that the garden of the palace was still open,and yet more when she sank down upon a bench betweentwo marble groups representing the Rape of Proserpineand the Rape of Europa. They stood each in agravelled plot, thickly overrun by a growth of ivy,and the vine climbed the white naked limbs of thenymphs, who were present on a pretence of gatheringflowers, but really to pose at the spectators, andclad them to the waist and shoulders with an effectof modesty never meant by the sculptor, but not displeasing.There was an old fountain near, its stone rim andcentre of rock-work green with immemorial mould, andits basin quivering between its water-plants underthe soft fall of spray. At a waft of fitful breezesome leaves of early autumn fell from the trees overheadupon the elderly pair where they sat, and a littlecompany of sparrows came and hopped about their feet.Though the square without was so all astir with festiveexpectation, there were few people in the garden;three or four peasant women in densely fluted whiteskirts and red aprons and shawls wandered by and staredat the Europa and at the Proserpine.

It was a precious moment in which the charm of thecity’s past seemed to culminate, and they wereloath to break it by speech.

“Why didn’t we have something like allthis on our first wedding journey?” she sighedat last. “To think of our battening fromBoston to Niagara and back! And how hard we triedto make something of Rochester and Buffalo, of Montrealand Quebec!”

“Niagara wasn’t so bad,” he said,“and I will never go back on Quebec.”

“Ah, but if we could have had Hamburg and Leipsic,and Carlsbad and Nuremberg, and Ansbach and Wurzburg!Perhaps this is meant as a compensation for our lostyouth. But I can’t enjoy it as I could whenI was young. It’s wasted on my sere andyellow leaf. I wish Burnamy and Miss Triscoewere here; I should like to try this garden on them.”

“They wouldn’t care for it,” hereplied, and upon a daring impulse he added, “Kenbyand Mrs. Adding might.” If she took thissuggestion in good part, he could tell her that Kenbywas in Wurzburg.

“Don’t speak of them! They’rein just that besotted early middle-age when life hassettled into a self-satisfied present, with no pastand no future; the most philistine, the most bourgeois,moment of existence. Better be elderly at once,as far as appreciation of all this goes.”She rose and put her hand on his arm, and pushed himaway in the impulsive fashion of her youth, acrossalleys of old trees toward a balustraded terrace inthe background which had tempted her.

“It isn’t so bad, being elderly,”he said. “By that time we have accumulatedenough past to sit down and really enjoy its associations.We have got all sorts of perspectives and points ofview. We know where we are at.”

“I don’t mind being elderly. Theworld’s just as amusing as ever, and lots ofdisagreeable things have dropped out. It’sthe getting more than elderly; it’s the gettingold; and then—­”

They shrank a little closer together, and walked onin silence till he said, “Perhaps there’ssomething else, something better—­somewhere.”

They had reached the balustraded terrace, and werepausing for pleasure in the garden tops below, withthe flowery spaces, and the statued fountains allcoming together. She put her hand on one of thefat little urchin-groups on the stone coping.“I don’t want cherubs, when I can havethese putti. And those old prince-bishops didn’t,either!”

“I don’t suppose they kept a New Englandconscience,” he said, with a vague smile.“It would be difficult in the presence of therococo.”

They left the garden through the beautiful gate whichthe old court ironsmith Oegg hammered out in lovelyforms of leaves and flowers, and shaped laterallyupward, as lightly as if with a waft of his hand, ingracious Louis Quinze curves; and they looked backat it in the kind of despair which any perfectioninspires. They said how feminine it was, howexotic, how expressive of a luxurious ideal of lifewhich art had purified and left eternally charming.They remembered their Ruskinian youth, and the confidencewith which they would once have condemned it; andthey had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; butthey certainly admired it, and it remained for themthe supreme expression of that time-soul, mundane,courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which once influencedthe art of the whole world, and which had here so curiouslyfound its apotheosis in a city remote from its nativeplace and under a rule sacerdotally vowed to austerity.The vast superb palace of the prince bishops, whichwas now to house a whole troop of sovereigns, imperial,royal, grand ducal and ducal, swelled aloft in superbamplitude; but it did not realize their historic prideso effectively as this exquisite work of the courtironsmith. It related itself in its aerial beautyto that of the Tiepolo frescoes which the travellersknew were swimming and soaring on the ceilings within,and from which it seemed to accent their exclusionwith a delicate irony, March said. “Oriron-mongery,” he corrected himself upon reflection.

LIV.

He had forgotten Kenby in these aesthetic interests,but he remembered him again when he called a carriage,and ordered it driven to their hotel. It wasthe hour of the German mid-day table d’hote,and they would be sure to meet him there. Thequestion now was how March should own his presencein time to prevent his wife from showing her ignoranceof it to Kenby himself, and he was still turning thequestion hopelessly over in his mind when the sightof the hotel seemed to remind her of a fact whichshe announced.

“Now, my dear, I am tired to death, and I amnot going to sit through a long table d’hote.I want you to send me up a simple beefsteak and a cupof tea to our rooms; and I don’t want you tocome near for hours; because I intend to take a wholeafternoon nap. You can keep all the maps andplans, and guides, and you had better go and see whatthe Volksfest is like; it will give you some notionof the part the people are really taking in all thisofficial celebration, and you know I don’t care.Don’t come up after dinner to see how I am gettingalong; I shall get along; and if you should happento wake me after I had dropped off—­”

Kenby had seen them arrive from where he sat at thereading-room window, waiting for the dinner hour,and had meant to rush out and greet Mrs. March asthey passed up the corridor. But she looked sotired that he had decided to spare her till she camedown to dinner; and as he sat with March at theirsoup, he asked if she were not well.

March explained, and he provisionally invented someregrets from her that she should not see Kenby tillsupper.

Kenby ordered a bottle of one of the famous Wurzburgwines for their mutual consolation in her absence,and in the friendliness which its promoted they agreedto spend the afternoon together. No man is soinveterate a husband as not to take kindly an occasionalrelease to bachelor companionship, and before thedinner was over they agreed that they would go tothe Volksfest, and get some notion of the popular lifeand amusem*nts of Wurzburg, which was one of the fewplaces where Kenby had never been before; and theyagreed that they would walk.

Their way was partly up the quay of the Main, pasta barrack full of soldiers. They met detachmentsof soldiers everywhere, infantry, artillery, cavalry.

“This is going to be a great show,” Kenbysaid, meaning the manoeuvres, and he added, as ifnow he had kept away from the subject long enough andhad a right to recur to it, at least indirectly, “Ishould like to have Rose see it, and get his impressions.”

“I’ve an idea he wouldn’t approveof it. His mother says his mind is turning moreand more to philanthropy.”

Kenby could not forego such a chance to speak of Mrs.Adding. “It’s one of the prettiestthings to see how she understands Rose. It’scharming to see them together. She wouldn’thave half the attraction without him.”

“Oh, yes,” March assented. He hadoften wondered how a man wishing to marry a widowmanaged with the idea of her children by another marriage;but if Kenby was honest; it was much simpler than hehad supposed. He could not say this to him, however,and in a certain embarrassment he had with the conjecturein his presence he attempted a diversion. “We’repromised something at the Volksfest which will be agreat novelty to us as Americans. Our drivertold us this morning that one of the houses therewas built entirely of wood.”

When they reached the grounds of the Volksfest, thiscivil feature of the great military event at hand,which the Marches had found largely set forth in theprogramme of the parade, did not fully keep the glowingpromises made for it; in fact it could not easily havedone so. It was in a pleasant neighborhood ofnew villas such as form the modern quarter of everyGerman city, and the Volksfest was even more unfinishedthan its environment. It was not yet enclosedby the fence which was to hide its wonders from thenon-paying public, but March and Kenby went in throughan archway where the gate-money was as effectuallycollected from them as if they were barred every otherentrance.

The wooden building was easily distinguishable fromthe other edifices because these were tents and boothsstill less substantial. They did not make outit* function, but of the others four sheltered merry-go-rounds,four were beer-gardens, four were restaurants, andthe rest were devoted to amusem*nts of the usual country-fairtype. Apparently they had little attraction forcountry people. The Americans met few peasantsin the grounds, and neither at the Edison kinematograph,where they refreshed their patriotism with some scenesof their native life, nor at the little theatre wherethey saw the sports of the arena revived, in the wrestleof a woman with a bear, did any of the people excepttradesmen and artisans seem to be taking part in thefestival expression of the popular pleasure.

The woman, who finally threw the bear, whether byslight, or by main strength, or by a previous understandingwith him, was a slender creature, pathetically smalland not altogether plain; and March as they walkedaway lapsed into a pensive muse upon her strange employ.He wondered how she came to take it up, and whethershe began with the bear when they were both very young,and she could easily throw him.

“Well, women have a great deal more strengththan we suppose,” Kenby began with a philosophicalair that gave March the hope of some rational conversation.Then his eye glazed with a far-off look, and a dotingsmile came into his face. “When we wentthrough the Dresden gallery together, Rose and I wereperfectly used up at the end of an hour, but his motherkept on as long as there was anything to see, and cameaway as fresh as a peach.”

Then March saw that it was useless to expect anythingdifferent from him, and he let him talk on about Mrs.Adding all the rest of the way back to the hotel.Kenby seemed only to have begun when they reached thedoor, and wanted to continue the subject in the reading-room.

March pleaded his wish to find how his wife had gotthrough the afternoon, and he escaped to her.He would have told her now that Kenby was in the house,but he was really so sick of the fact himself thathe could not speak of it at once, and he let her goon celebrating all she had seen from the window sinceshe had waked from her long nap. She said shecould never be glad enough that they had come justat that time. Soldiers had been going by thewhole afternoon, and that made it so feudal.

“Yes,” he assented. “But aren’tyou coming up to the station with me to see the Prince-Regentarrive? He’s due at seven, you know.”

“I declare I had forgotten all about it.No, I’m not equal to it. You must go; youcan tell me everything; be sure to notice how the PrincessMaria looks; the last of the Stuarts, you know; andsome people consider her the rightful Queen of England;and I’ll have the supper ordered, and we cango down as soon as you’ve got back.”

LV.

March felt rather shabby stealing away without Kenby;but he had really had as much of Mrs. Adding as hecould stand, for one day, and he was even beginningto get sick of Rose. Besides, he had not sentback a line for ‘Every Other Week’ yet,and he had made up his mind to write a sketch of themanoeuvres. To this end he wished to receive animpression of the Prince-Regent’s arrival whichshould not be blurred or clouded by other interests.His wife knew the kind of thing he liked to see, andwould have helped him out with his observations, butKenby would have got in the way, and would have cloggedthe movement of his fancy in assigning the facts tothe parts he would like them to play in the sketch.

At least he made some such excuses to himself as hehurried along toward the Kaiserstrasse. The draughtof universal interest in that direction had left theother streets almost deserted, but as he approachedthe thoroughfare he found all the ways blocked, andthe horse-cars, ordinarily so furiously headlong,arrested by the multiple ranks of spectators on thesidewalks. The avenue leading from the railwaystation to the palace was decorated with flags andgarlands, and planted with the stems of young firsand birches. The doorways were crowded, and thewindows dense with eager faces peering out of the drapedbunting. The carriageway was kept clear by mildpolicemen who now and then allowed one of the crowdto cross it.

The crowd was made up mostly of women and boys, andwhen March joined them, they had already been waitingan hour for the sight of the princes who were to blessthem with a vision of the faery race which kings alwaysare to common men. He thought the people lookeddull, and therefore able to bear the strain of expectationwith patience better than a livelier race. Theyrelieved it by no attempt at joking; here and therea dim smile dawned on a weary face, but it seemedan effect of amiability rather than humor. Therewas so little of this, or else it was so well bridledby the solemnity of the occasion, that not a man, woman,or child laughed when a bareheaded maid-servant brokethrough the lines and ran down between them with alife-size plaster bust of the Emperor William in herarms: she carried it like an overgrown infant,and in alarm at her conspicuous part she cast frightenedlooks from side to side without arousing any sortof notice. Undeterred by her failure, a young

dog, parted from his owner, and seeking him in thecrowd, pursued his search in a wild flight down theguarded roadway with an air of anxiety that in Americawould have won him thunders of applause, and all sortsof kindly encouragements to greater speed. Butthis German crowd witnessed his progress apparentlywithout interest, and without a sign of pleasure.They were there to see the Prince-Regent arrive, andthey did not suffer themselves to be distracted byany preliminary excitement. Suddenly the indefinableemotion which expresses the fulfilment of expectationin a waiting crowd passed through the multitude, andbefore he realized it March was looking into the friendlygray-bearded face of the Prince-Regent, for the momentthat his carriage allowed in passing. This camefirst preceded by four outriders, and followed by othersimple equipages of Bavarian blue, full of highnessesof all grades. Beside the Regent sat his daughter-in-law,the Princess Maria, her silvered hair framing a faceas plain and good as the Regent’s, if not sointelligent.

He, in virtue of having been born in Wurzburg, isofficially supposed to be specially beloved by hisfellow townsmen; and they now testified their affectionas he whirled through their ranks, bowing right andleft, by what passes in Germany for a cheer.It is the word Hoch, groaned forth from abdominaldepths, and dismally prolonged in a hollow roar likethat which the mob makes behind the scenes at thetheatre before bursting in visible tumult on the stage.Then the crowd dispersed, and March came away wonderingwhy such a kindly-looking Prince-Regent should nothave given them a little longer sight of himself;after they had waited so patiently for hours to seehim. But doubtless in those countries, he concluded,the art of keeping the sovereign precious by sufferinghim to be rarely and briefly seen is wisely studied.

On his way home he resolved to confess Kenby’spresence; and he did so as soon as he sat down tosupper with his wife. “I ought to have toldyou the first thing after breakfast. But whenI found you in that mood of having the place all toourselves, I put it off.”

“You took terrible chances, my dear,”she said, gravely.

“And I have been terribly punished. You’veno idea how much Kenby has talked to me about Mrs.Adding!”

She broke out laughing. “Well, perhapsyou’ve suffered enough. But you can seenow, can’t you, that it would have been awfulif I had met him, and let out that I didn’tknow he was here?”

“Terrible. But if I had told, it wouldhave spoiled the whole morning for you; you couldn’thave thought of anything else.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, airily.“What should you think if I told you I had knownhe was here ever since last night?” She wenton in delight at the start he gave. “Isaw him come into the hotel while you were gone forthe guide-books, and I determined to keep it from youas long as I could; I knew it would worry you.We’ve both been very nice; and I forgive you,”she hurried on, “because I’ve really gotsomething to tell you.”

“Don’t tell me that Burnamy is here!”

“Don’t jump to conclusions! No, Burnamyisn’t here, poor fellow! And don’tsuppose that I’m guilty of concealment becauseI haven’t told you before. I was just thinkingwhether I wouldn’t spare you till morning, butnow I shall let you take the brunt of it. Mrs.Adding and Rose are here.” She gave thefact time to sink in, and then she added, “AndMiss Triscoe and her father are here.”

“What is the matter with Major Eltwin and hiswife being here, too? Are they in our hotel?”

“No, they are not. They came to look forrooms while you were off waiting for the Prince-Regent,and I saw them. They intended to go to Frankfortfor the manoeuvres, but they heard that there was noteven standing-room there, and so the general telegraphedto the Spanischer Hof, and they all came here.As it is, he will have to room with Rose, and Agathaand Mrs. Adding will room together. I didn’tthink Agatha was looking very well; she looked unhappy;I don’t believe she’s heard, from Burnamyyet; I hadn’t a chance to ask her. Andthere’s something else that I’m afraidwill fairly make you sick.”

“Oh, no; go on. I don’t think anythingcan do that, after an afternoon of Kenby’s confidences.”

“It’s worse than Kenby,” she saidwith a sigh. “You know I told you at CarlsbadI thought that ridiculous old thing was making up toMrs. Adding.”

“Kenby? Why of co—­”

“Don’t be stupid, my dear! No, notKenby: General Triscoe. I wish you couldhave been here to see him paying her all sort; of sillyattentions, and hear him making her compliments.”

“Thank you. I think I’m just as wellwithout it. Did she pay him silly attentionsand compliments, too?”

“That’s the only thing that can make meforgive her for his wanting her. She was keepinghim at arm’s-length the whole time, and she wasdoing it so as not to make him contemptible beforehis daughter.”

“It must have been hard. And Rose?”

“Rose didn’t seem very well. He looksthin and pale; but he’s sweeter than ever.She’s certainly commoner clay than Rose.No, I won’t say that! It’s reallynothing but General Triscoe’s being an old gooseabout her that makes her seem so, and it isn’tfair.”

March went down to his coffee in the morning withthe delicate duty of telling Kenby that Mrs. Addingwas in town. Kenby seemed to think it quite naturalshe should wish to see the manoeuvres, and not at allstrange that she should come to them with General Triscoeand his daughter. He asked if March would notgo with him to call upon her after breakfast, andas this was in the line of his own instructions fromMrs. March, he went.

They found Mrs. Adding with the Triscoes, and Marchsaw nothing that was not merely friendly, or at themost fatherly, in the general’s behavior towardher. If Mrs. Adding or Miss Triscoe saw more,they hid it in a guise of sisterly affection for eachother. At the most the general showed a gayetywhich one would not have expected of him under anyconditions, and which the fact that he and Rose hadkept each other awake a good deal the night beforeseemed so little adapted to call out. He jokedwith Rose about their room and their beds, and puton a comradery with him that was not a perfect fit,and that suffered by contrast with the pleasure ofthe boy and Kenby in meeting. There was a certainquestion in the attitude of Mrs. Adding till Marchhelped Kenby to account for his presence; then sherelaxed in an effect of security so tacit that wordsoverstate it, and began to make fun of Rose.

March could not find that Miss Triscoe looked unhappy,as his wife had said; he thought simply that she hadgrown plainer; but when he reported this, she losther patience with him. In a girl, she said, plainnesswas unhappiness; and she wished to know when he wouldever learn to look an inch below the surface:She was sure that Agatha Triscoe had not heard fromBurnamy since the Emperor’s birthday; that shewas at swords’-points with her father, and sodesperate that she did not care what became of her.

He had left Kenby with the others, and now, afterhis wife had talked herself tired of them all, heproposed going out again to look about the city, wherethere was nothing for the moment to remind them ofthe presence of their friends or even of their existence.She answered that she was worrying about all thosepeople, and trying to work out their problem for them.He asked why she did not let them work it out themselvesas they would have to do, after all her worry, andshe said that where her sympathy had been excitedshe could not stop worrying, whether it did any goodor not, and she could not respect any one who coulddrop things so completely out of his mind as he could;she had never been able to respect that in him.

“I know, my dear,” he assented. “ButI don’t think it’s a question of moralresponsibility; it’s a question of mental structure,isn’t it? Your consciousness isn’tbuilt in thought-tight compartments, and one emotiongoes all through it, and sinks you; but I simply closethe doors and shut the emotion in, and keep on.”

The fancy pleased him so much that he worked it outin all its implications, and could not, after theirlong experience of each other, realize that she wasnot enjoying the joke too, till she said she saw thathe merely wished to tease. Then, too late, hetried to share her worry; but she protested that shewas not worrying at all; that she cared nothing aboutthose people: that she was nervous, she was tired;and she wished he would leave her, and go out alone.

He found himself in the street again, and he perceivedthat he must be walking fast when a voice called himby name, and asked him what his hurry was. Thevoice was Stoller’s, who got into step with himand followed the first with a second question.

“Made up your mind to go to the manoeuvres withme?”

His bluntness made it easy for March to answer:“I’m afraid my wife couldn’t standthe drive back and forth.”

“Come without her.”

“Thank you. It’s very kind of you.I’m not certain that I shall go at all.If I do, I shall run out by train, and take my chanceswith the crowd.”

Stoller insisted no further. He felt no offenceat the refusal of his offer, or chose to show none.He said, with the same uncouth abruptness as before:“Heard anything of that fellow since he leftCarlsbad?”

“Burnamy?”

“Mm.”

“No.”

“Know where he is?”

“I don’t in the least.”

Stoller let another silence elapse while they hurriedon, before he said, “I got to thinking whathe done afterwards. He wasn’t bound to lookout for me; he might suppose I knew what I was about.”

March turned his face and stared in Stoller’s,which he was letting hang forward as he stamped heavilyon. Had the disaster proved less than he hadfeared, and did he still want Burnamy’s helpin patching up the broken pieces; or did he reallywish to do Burnamy justice to his friend?

In any case March’s duty was clear. “Ithink Burnamy was bound to look out for you; Mr. Stoller,and I am glad to know that he saw it in the same light.”

“I know he did,” said Stoker with a blazeas from a long-smouldering fury, “and damn him,I’m not going to have it. I’m notgoing to, plead the baby act with him, or with anyman. You tell him so, when you get the chance.You tell him I don’t hold him accountable foranything I made him do. That ain’t business;I don’t want him around me, any more; but ifhe wants to go back to the paper he can have his place.You tell him I stand by what I done; and it’sall right between him and me. I hain’t doneanything about it, the way I wanted him to help meto; I’ve let it lay, and I’m a-going to.I guess it ain’t going to do me any harm, afterall; our people hain’t got very long memories;but if it is, let it. You tell him it’sall right.”

“I don’t know where he is, Mr. Stoller,and I don’t know that I care to be the bearerof your message,” said March.

“Why not?”

“Why, for one thing, I don’t agree withyou that it’s all right. Your choosingto stand by the consequences of Burnamy’s wrongdoesn’t undo it. As I understand, you don’tpardon it—­”

Stoller gulped and did not answer at once. Thenhe said, “I stand by what I done. I’mnot going to let him say I turned him down for doingwhat I told him to, because I hadn’t the senseto know what I was about.”

“Ah, I don’t think it’s a thinghe’ll like to speak of in any case,” saidMarch.

Stoller left him, at the corner they had reached,as abruptly as he had joined him, and March hurriedback to his wife, and told her what had just passedbetween him and Stoller.

She broke out, “Well, I am surprised at you,my dear! You have always accused me of suspectingpeople, and attributing bad motives; and here you’verefused even to give the poor man the benefit of thedoubt. He merely wanted to save his savage pridewith you, and that’s all he wants to do withBurnamy. How could it hurt the poor boy to knowthat Stoller doesn’t blame him? Why shouldyou refuse to give his message to Burnamy? Idon’t want you to ridicule me for my conscienceany more, Basil; you’re twice as bad as I everwas. Don’t you think that a person can everexpiate an offence? I’ve often heard yousay that if any one owned his fault, he put it fromhim, and it was the same as if it hadn’t been;and hasn’t Burnamy owned up over and over again?I’m astonished at you, dearest.”

March was in fact somewhat astonished at himself inthe light of her reasoning; but she went on with somesophistries that restored him to his self-righteousness.

“I suppose you think he has interfered withStoller’s political ambition, and injured himin that way. Well, what if he has? Wouldit be a good thing to have a man like that succeedin politics? You’re always saying thatthe low character of our politicians is the ruin ofthe country; and I’m sure,” she added,with a prodigious leap over all the sequences, “thatMr. Stoller is acting nobly; and it’s your dutyto help him relieve Burnamy’s mind.”At the laugh he broke into she hastened to say, “Orif you won’t, I hope you’ll not objectto my doing so, for I shall, anyway!”

She rose as if she were going to begin at once, inspite of his laughing; and in fact she had alreadya plan for coming to Stoller’s assistance bygetting at Burnamy through Miss Triscoe, whom she suspectedof knowing where he was. There had been no chancefor them to speak of him either that morning or theevening before, and after a great deal of controversywith herself in her husband’s presence she decidedto wait till they came naturally together the nextmorning for the walk to the Capuchin Church on thehill beyond the river, which they had agreed to take.She could not keep from writing a note to Miss Triscoebegging her to be sure to come, and hinting that shehad something very important to speak of.

She was not sure but she had been rather silly todo this, but when they met the girl confessed thatshe had thought of giving up the walk, and might nothave come except for Mrs. March’s note.She had come with Rose, and had left him below withMarch; Mrs. Adding was coming later with Kenby andGeneral Triscoe.

Mrs. March lost no time in telling her the great news;and if she had been in doubt before of the girl’sfeeling for Burnamy she was now in none. Shehad the pleasure of seeing her flush with hope, andthen the pain which was also a pleasure, of seeingher blanch with dismay.

“I don’t know where he is, Mrs. March.I haven’t heard a word from him since that nightin Carlsbad. I expected—­I didn’tknow but you—­”

Mrs. March shook her head. She treated the factskillfully as something to be regretted simply becauseit would be such a relief to Burnamy to know how Mr.Stoller now felt. Of course they could reach himsomehow; you could always get letters to people inEurope, in the end; and, in fact, it was altogetherprobable that he was that very instant in Wurzburg;for if the New York-Paris Chronicle had wanted himto write up the Wagner operas, it would certainlywant him to write up the manoeuvres. She establishedhis presence in Wurzburg by such an irrefragable chainof reasoning that, at a knock outside, she was justable to kelp back a scream, while she ran to open thedoor. It was not Burnamy, as in compliance withevery nerve it ought to have been, but her husband,who tried to justify his presence by saying that theywere all waiting for her and Miss Triscoe, and askedwhen they were coming.

She frowned him silent, and then shut herself outsidewith him long enough to whisper, “Say she’sgot a headache, or anything you please; but don’tstop talking here with me, or I shall go wild.”She then shut herself in again, with the effect ofholding him accountable for the whole affair.

LVI.

General Triscoe could not keep his irritation, athearing that his daughter was not coming, out of theexcuses he made to Mrs. Adding; he said again andagain that it must seem like a discourtesy to her.She gayly disclaimed any such notion; she would nothear of putting off their excursion to another day;it had been raining just long enough to give thema reasonable hope of a few hours’ drought, andthey might not have another dry spell for weeks.She slipped off her jacket after they started, andgave it to Kenby, but she let General Triscoe holdher umbrella over her, while he limped beside her.She seemed to March, as he followed with Rose, tobe playing the two men off against each other, withan ease which he wished his wife could be there tosee, and to judge aright.

They crossed by the Old Bridge, which is of the earliestyears of the seventh century, between rows of saintswhose statues surmount the piers. Some are bishopsas well as saints; one must have been at Rome in hisday, for he wore his long thick beard in the fashionof Michelangelo’s Moses. He stretched outtoward the passers two fingers of blessing and wasunaware of the sparrow which had lighted on them andwas giving him the effect of offering it to the publicadmiration. Squads of soldiers tramping by turnedto look and smile, and the dull faces of citizenslighted up at the quaint sight. Some childrenstopped and remained very quiet, not to scare awaythe bird; and a cold-faced, spiritual-looking priestpaused among them as if doubting whether to rescuethe absent-minded bishop from a situation derogatoryto his dignity; but he passed on, and then the sparrowsuddenly flew off.

Rose Adding had lingered for the incident with March,but they now pushed on, and came up with the othersat the end of the bridge, where they found them inquestion whether they had not better take a carriageand drive to the foot of the hill before they begantheir climb. March thanked them, but said hewas keeping up the terms of his cure, and was gettingin all the walking he could. Rose begged his mothernot to include him in the driving party; he protestedthat he was feeling so well, and the walk was doinghim good. His mother consented, if he would promisenot to get tired, and then she mounted into the two-spannerwhich had driven instinctively up to their party whentheir parley began, and General Triscoe took the placebeside her, while Kenby, with smiling patience, seatedhimself in front.

Rose kept on talking with March about Wurzburg andits history, which it seemed he had been reading thenight before when he could not sleep. He explained,“We get little histories of the places whereverwe go. That’s what Mr. Kenby does, youknow.”

“Oh, yes,” said March.

“I don’t suppose I shall get a chanceto read much here,” Rose continued, “withGeneral Triscoe in the room. He doesn’tlike the light.”

“Well, well. He’s rather old, youknow. And you musn’t read too much, Rose.It isn’t good for you.”

“I know, but if I don’t read, I think,and that keeps me awake worse. Of course, I respectGeneral Triscoe for being in the war, and gettingwounded,” the boy suggested.

“A good many did it,” March was temptedto say.

The boy did not notice his insinuation. “Isuppose there were some things they did in the army,and then they couldn’t get over the habit.But General Grant says in his ‘Life’ thathe never used a profane expletive.”

“Does General Triscoe?”

Rose answered reluctantly, “If anything wakeshim in the night, or if he can’t make theseGerman beds over to suit him—­”

“I see.” March turned his face tohide the smile which he would not have let the boydetect. He thought best not to let Rose resumehis impressions of the general; and in talk of weightiermatters they found themselves at that point of theclimb where the carriage was waiting for them.From this point they followed an alley through ivied,garden walls, till they reached the first of the balustradedterraces which ascend to the crest of the hill wherethe church stands. Each terrace is planted withsycamores, and the face of the terrace wall supportsa bass-relief commemorating with the drama of itslifesize figures the stations of the cross.

Monks and priests were coming and going, and droppedon the steps leading from terrace to terrace werewomen and children on their knees in prayer.It was all richly reminiscent of pilgrim scenes inother Catholic lands; but here there was a touch ofearnest in the Northern face of the worshipers whichthe South had never imparted. Even in the beautifulrococo interior of the church at the top of the hillthere was a sense of something deeper and truer thanmere ecclesiasticism; and March came out of it ina serious muse while the boy at his side did nothingto interrupt. A vague regret filled his heartas he gazed silently out over the prospect of riverand city and vineyard, purpling together below thetop where he stood, and mixed with this regret wasa vague resentment of his wife’s absence.She ought to have been there to share his pang andhis pleasure; they had so long enjoyed everything togetherthat without her he felt unable to get out of eitheremotion all there was in it.

The forgotten boy stole silently down the terracesafter the rest of the party who had left him behindwith March. At the last terrace they stoppedand waited; and after a delay that began to be longto Mrs. Adding, she wondered aloud what could havebecome of them.

Kenby promptly offered to go back and see, and sheconsented in seeming to refuse: “It isn’tworth while. Rose has probably got Mr. March intosome deep discussion, and they’ve forgotten allabout us. But if you will go, Mr. Kenby, youmight just remind Rose of my existence.”She let him lay her jacket on her shoulders beforehe left her, and then she sat down on one of the steps,which General Triscoe kept striking with the pointof her umbrella as he stood before her.

“I really shall have to take it from you ifyou do that any more,” she said, laughing upin his face. “I’m serious.”

He stopped. “I wish I could believe youwere serious, for a moment.”

“You may, if you think it will do you any good.But I don’t see why.”

The general smiled, but with a kind of tremulous eagernesswhich might have been pathetic to any one who likedhim. “Do you know this is almost the firsttime I have spoken alone with you?”

“Really, I hadn’t noticed,” saidMrs. Adding.

General Triscoe laughed in rather a ghastly way.“Well, that’s encouraging, at least, toa man who’s had his doubts whether it wasn’tintended.”

“Intended? By whom? What do you mean,General Triscoe? Why in the world shouldn’tyou have spoken alone with me before?”

He was not, with all his eagerness, ready to say,and while she smiled pleasantly she had the look inher eyes of being brought to bay and being prepared,if it must come to that, to have the worst over, thenand there. She was not half his age, but he wasaware of her having no respect for his years; comparedwith her average American past as he understood it,his social place was much higher, but, she was notin the least awed by it; in spite of his war recordshe was making him behave like a coward. He wasin a false position, and if he had any one but himselfto blame he had not her. He read her equal knowledgeof these facts in the clear eyes that made him flushand turn his own away.

Then he started with a quick “Hello!”and stood staring up at the steps from the terraceabove, where Rose Adding was staying himself weaklyby a clutch of Kenby on one side and March on theother.

His mother looked round and caught herself up fromwhere she sat and ran toward him. “Oh,Rose!”

“It’s nothing, mother,” he calledto her, and as she dropped on her knees before himhe sank limply against her. “It was likewhat I had in Carlsbad; that’s all. Don’tworry about me, please!”

“I’m not worrying, Rose,” she saidwith courage of the same texture as his own.“You’ve been walking too much. Youmust go back in the carriage with us. Can’tyou have it come here?” she asked Kenby.

“There’s no road, Mrs. Adding. Butif Rose would let me carry him—­”

“I can walk,” the boy protested, tryingto lift himself from her neck.

“No, no! you mustn’t.” Shedrew away and let him fall into the arms that Kenbyput round him. He raised the frail burden lightlyto his shoulder, and moved strongly away, followedby the eyes of the spectators who had gathered aboutthe little group, but who dispersed now, and went backto their devotions.

March hurried after Kenby with Mrs. Adding, whom hetold he had just missed Rose and was looking aboutfor him, when Kenby came with her message for them.They made sure that he was nowhere about the church,and then started together down the terraces. Atthe second or third station below they found the boyclinging to the barrier that protected the bass-relieffrom the zeal of the devotees. He looked whiteand sick, though he insisted that he was well, andwhen he turned to come away with them he reeled andwould have fallen if Kenby had not caught him.Kenby wanted to carry him, but Rose would not lethim, and had made his way down between them.

“Yea, he has such a spirit,” she said,“and I’ve no doubt he’s sufferingnow more from Mr. Kenby’s kindness than fromhis own sickness he had one of these giddy turns inCarlsbad, though, and I shall certainly have a doctorto see him.”

“I think I should, Mrs. Adding,” saidMarch, not too gravely, for it seemed to him thatit was not quite his business to alarm her further,if she was herself taking the affair with that seriousness.He questioned whether she was taking it quite seriouslyenough, when she turned with a laugh, and called toGeneral Triscoe, who was limping down the steps ofthe last terrace behind them:

“Oh, poor General Triscoe! I thought youhad gone on ahead.”

General Triscoe could not enter into the joke of beingforgotten, apparently. He assisted with gravityat the disposition of the party for the return, whenthey all reached the carriage. Rose had the placebeside his mother, and Kenby wished March to takehis with the general and let him sit with the driver;but he insisted that he would rather walk home, andhe did walk till they had driven out of eight.Then he called a passing one-spanner, and drove tohis hotel in comfort and silence.

LVII.

Kenby did not come to the Swan before supper; thenhe reported that the doctor had said Rose was on theverge of a nervous collapse. He had overworkedat school, but the immediate trouble was the high,thin air, which the doctor said he must be got outof at once, into a quiet place at the sea-shore somewhere.He had suggested Ostend; or some point on the Frenchcoast; Kenby had thought of Schevleningen, and thedoctor had said that would do admirably.

“I understood from Mrs. Adding,” he concluded,“that you were going. there for your after-cure,Mr. March, and I didn’t know but you might begoing soon.”

At the mention of Schevleningen the Marches had lookedat each other with a guilty alarm, which they bothtried to give the cast of affectionate sympathy butshe dismissed her fear that he might be going to lethis compassion prevail with him to his hurt when hesaid: “Why, we ought to have been therebefore this, but I’ve been taking my life inmy hands in trying to see a little of Germany, andI’m afraid now that Mrs. March has her mindtoo firmly fixed on Berlin to let me think of goingto Schevleningen till we’ve been there.”

“It’s too bad!” said Mrs. March,with real regret. “I wish we were going.”But she had not the least notion of gratifying herwish; and they were all silent till Kenby broke out:

“Look here! You know how I feel about MrsAdding! I’ve been pretty frank with Mr.March myself, and I’ve had my suspicions thatshe’s been frank with you, Mrs. March.There isn’t any doubt about my wanting to marryher, and up to this time there hasn’t been anydoubt about her not wanting to marry me. Butit isn’t a question of her or of me, now.It’s a question of Rose. I love the boy,”and Kenby’s voice shook, and he faltered a moment.“Pshaw! You understand.”

“Indeed I do, Mr. Kenby,” said Mrs. March.“I perfectly understand you.”

“Well, I don’t think Mrs. Adding is fitto make the journey with him alone, or to place herselfin the best way after she gets to Schevleningen.She’s been badly shaken up; she broke down beforethe doctor; she said she didn’t know what todo; I suppose she’s frightened—­”

Kenby stopped again, and March asked, “Whenis she going?”

“To-morrow,” said Kenby, and he added,“And now the question is, why shouldn’tI go with her?”

Mrs. March gave a little start, and looked at herhusband, but he said nothing, and Kenby seemed notto have supposed that he would say anything.

“I know it would be very American, and all that,but I happen to be an American, and it wouldn’tbe out of character for me. I suppose,”he appealed to Mrs. March, “that it’ssomething I might offer to do if it were from NewYork to Florida—­and I happened to be goingthere? And I did happen to be going to Holland.”

“Why, of course, Mr. Kenby,” she responded,with such solemnity that March gave way in an outrageouslaugh.

Kenby laughed, and Mrs. March laughed too, but withan inner note of protest.

“Well,” Kenby continued, still addressingher, “what I want you to do is to stand by mewhen I propose it.”

Mrs. March gathered strength to say, “No, Mr.Kenby, it’s your own affair, and you must takethe responsibility.”

“Do you disapprove?”

“It isn’t the same as it would be at home.You see that yourself.”

“Well,” said Kenby, rising, “I haveto arrange about their getting away to-morrow.It won’t be easy in this hurly-burly that’scoming off.”

“Give Rose our love; and tell Mrs. Adding thatI’ll come round and see her to-morrow beforeshe starts.”

“Oh! I’m afraid you can’t,Mrs. March. They’re to start at six in themorning.”

“They are! Then we must go and see themtonight. We’ll be there almost as soonas you are.”

March went up to their rooms with, his wife, and shebegan on the stairs:

“Well, my dear, I hope you realize that yourlaughing so gave us completely away. And whatwas there to keep grinning about, all through?”

“Nothing but the disingenuous, hypocriticalpassion of love. It’s always the most amusingthing in the world; but to see it trying to pass itselfoff in poor old Kenby as duty and humanity, and disinterestedaffection for Rose, was more than I could stand.I don’t apologize for laughing; I wanted toyell.”

His effrontery and his philosophy both helped to savehim; and she said from the point where he had side-trackedher mind: “I don’t call it disingenuous.He was brutally frank. He’s made it impossibleto treat the affair with dignity. I want youto leave the whole thing to me, from this out.Now, will you?”

On their way to the Spanischer Hof she arranged inher own mind for Mrs. Adding to get a maid, and forthe doctor to send an assistant with her on the journey,but she was in such despair with her scheme that shehad not the courage to right herself when Mrs. Addingmet her with the appeal:

“Oh, Mrs. March, I’m so glad you approveof Mr. Kenby’s plan. It does seem the onlything to do. I can’t trust myself alonewith Rose, and Mr. Kenby’s intending to go toSchevleningen a few days later anyway. Thoughit’s too bad to let him give up the manoeuvres.”

“I’m sure he won’t mind that,”Mrs. March’s voice said mechanically, whileher thought was busy with the question whether thisscandalous duplicity was altogether Kenby’s,and whether Mrs. Adding was as guiltless of any sharein it as she looked. She looked pitifully distracted;she might not have understood his report; or Kenbymight really have mistaken Mrs. March’s sympathyfor favor.

“No, he only lives to do good,” Mrs. Addingreturned. “He’s with Rose; won’tyou come in and see them?”

Rose was lying back on the pillows of a sofa, fromwhich they would not let him get up. He was fullof the trip to Holland, and had already pushed Kenby,as Kenby owned, beyond the bounds of his very generalknowledge of the Dutch language, which Rose had plansfor taking up after they were settled in Schevleningen.The boy scoffed at the notion that he was not perfectlywell, and he wished to talk with March on the pointswhere he had found Kenby wanting.

“Kenby is an encyclopaedia compared with me,Rose,” the editor protested, and he amplifiedhis ignorance for the boy’s good to an extentwhich Rose saw was a joke. He left Holland totalk about other things which his mother thought quiteas bad for him. He wished to know if March didnot think that the statue of the bishop with the sparrowon its finger was a subject for a poem; and Marchsaid gayly that if Rose would write it he would printit in ‘Every Other Week’.

The boy flushed with pleasure at his banter.“No, I couldn’t do it. But I wishMr. Burnamy had seen it. He could. Will youtell him about it?” He wanted to know if Marchhad heard from Burnamy lately, and in the midst ofhis vivid interest he gave a weary sigh.

His mother said that now he had talked enough, andbade him say good-by to the Marches, who were comingso soon to Holland, anyway. Mrs. March put herarms round him to kiss him, and when she let him sinkback her eyes were dim.

“You see how frail he is?” said Mrs. Adding.“I shall not let him out of my sight, afterthis, till he’s well again.”

She had a kind of authority in sending Kenby awaywith them which was not lost upon the witnesses.He asked them to come into the reading-room a momentwith him, and Mrs. March wondered if he were goingto make some excuse to her for himself; but he said:“I don’t know how we’re to manageabout the Triscoes. The general will have a roomto himself, but if Mrs. Adding takes Rose in withher, it leaves Miss Triscoe out, and there isn’ta room to be had in this house for love or money.Do you think,” he appealed directly to Mrs.March, “that it would do to offer her my roomat the Swan?”

“Why, yes,” she assented, with a reluctancerather for the complicity in which he had alreadyinvolved her, and for which he was still unpunished,than for what he was now proposing. “Orshe could come in with me, and Mr. March could takeit.”

“Whichever you think,” said Kenby so submissivelythat she relented, to ask:

“And what will you do?”

He laughed. “Well, people have been knownto sleep in a chair. I shall manage somehow.”

“You might offer to go in with the general,”March suggested, and the men apparently thought thiswas a joke. Mrs. March did not laugh in her feminineworry about ways and means.

“Where is Miss Triscoe?” she asked.“We haven’t seen them.”

“Didn’t Mrs. Adding tell you? Theywent to supper at a restaurant; the general doesn’tlike the cooking here. They ought to have beenback before this.”

He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she said,“I suppose you would like us to wait.”

“It would be very kind of you.”

“Oh, it’s quite essential,” shereturned with an airy freshness which Kenby did notseem to feel as painfully as he ought.

They all sat down, and the Triscoes came in aftera few minutes, and a cloud on the general’sface lifted at the proposition Kenby left Mrs. Marchto make.

“I thought that child ought to be in his mother’scharge,” he said. With his own comfortprovided for, he made no objections to Mrs. March’splan; and Agatha went to take leave of Rose and hismother. “By-the-way,” the generalturned to March, “I found Stoller at the restaurantwhere we supped. He offered me a place in hiscarriage for the manoeuvres. How are you going?”

“I think I shall go by train. I don’tfancy the long drive.”

“Well, I don’t know that it’s worsethan the long walk after you leave the train,”said the general from the offence which any differenceof taste was apt to give him. “Are yougoing by train, too?” he asked Kenby with indifference.

“I’m not going at all,” said Kenby.“I’m leaving Wurzburg in the morning.”

“Oh, indeed,” said the general.

Mrs. March could not make out whether he knew thatKenby was going with Rose and Mrs. Adding, but shefelt that there must be a full and open recognitionof the fact among them. “Yes,” shesaid, “isn’t it fortunate that Mr. Kenbyshould be going to Holland, too! I should havebeen so unhappy about them if Mrs. Adding had beenobliged to make that long journey with poor littleRose alone.”

“Yes, yes; very fortunate, certainly,”said the general colorlessly.

Her husband gave her a glance of intelligent appreciation;but Kenby was too simply, too densely content withthe situation to know the value of what she had done.She thought he must certainly explain, as he walkedback with her to the Swan, whether he had misrepresentedher to Mrs. Adding, or Mrs. Adding had misunderstoodhim. Somewhere there had been an error, or aduplicity which it was now useless to punish; and Kenbywas so apparently unconscious of it that she had notthe heart to be cross with him. She heard MissTriscoe behind her with March laughing in the gayetywhich the escape from her father seemed to inspirein her. She was promising March to go with himin the morning to see the Emperor and Empress of Germanyarrive at the station, and he was warning her thatif she laughed there, like that, she would subjecthim to fine and imprisonment. She pretended thatshe would like to see him led off between two gendarmes,but consented to be a little careful when he askedher how she expected to get back to her hotel withouthim, if such a thing happened.

LVIII.

After all, Miss Triscoe did not go with March; shepreferred to sleep. The imperial party was toarrive at half past seven, but at six the crowd wasalready dense before the station, and all along thestreet leading to the Residenz. It was a brilliantday, with the promise of sunshine, through which achilly wind blew, for the manoeuvres. The colorsof all the German states flapped in this breeze fromthe poles wreathed with evergreen which encircledthe square; the workmen putting the last touches onthe bronzed allegory hurried madly to be done, andthey had, scarcely finished their labors when twotroops of dragoons rode into the place and formedbefore the station, and waited as motionlessly as theirhorses would allow.

These animals were not so conscious as lions at theapproach of princes; they tossed and stamped impatientlyin the long interval before the Regent and his daughter-in-lawcame to welcome their guests. All the human beings,both those who were in charge and those who were undercharge, were in a quiver of anxiety to play their partswell, as if there were some heavy penalty for failurein the least point. The policemen keeping thepeople, in line behind the ropes which restrained themtrembled with eagerness; the faces of some of the trooperstwitched. An involuntary sigh went up from thecrowd as the Regent’s carriage appeared, heraldedby outriders, and followed by other plain carriagesof Bavarian blue with liveries of blue and silver.Then the whistle of the Kaiser’s train sounded;a trumpeter advanced and began to blow his trumpetas they do in the theatre; and exactly at the appointedmoment the Emperor and Empress came out of the stationthrough the brilliant human alley leading from it,mounted their carriages, with the stage trumpeteralways blowing, and whirled swiftly round half thesquare and flashed into the corner toward the Residenzout of sight. The same hollow groans of Ho-o-o-chgreeted and followed them from the spectators as hadwelcomed the Regent when he first arrived among hisfellow-townsmen, with the same effect of being theconventional cries of a stage mob behind the scenes.

The Emperor was like most of his innumerable pictures,with a swarthy face from which his blue eyes glancedpleasantly; he looked good-humored if not good-natured;the Empress smiled amiably beneath her deeply fringedwhite parasol, and they both bowed right and left inacknowledgment of those hollow groans; but again itseemed, to March that sovereignty, gave the popularcuriosity, not to call it devotion, a scantier returnthan it merited. He had perhaps been insensiblyworking toward some such perception as now came tohim that the great difference between Europe and Americawas that in Europe life is histrionic and dramatized,and that in America, except when it is trying to beEuropean, it is direct and sincere. He wonderedwhether the innate conviction of equality, the deep,underlying sense of a common humanity transcendingall social and civic pretences, was what gave theirtheatrical effect to the shows of deference from lowto high, and of condescension from high to low.If in such encounters of sovereigns and subjects, theprince did not play his part so well as the people,it might be that he had a harder part to play, andthat to support his dignity at all, to keep from beingfound out the sham that he essentially was, he hadto hurry across the stage amidst the distracting thundersof the orchestra. If the star staid to be scrutinizedby the soldiers, citizens, and so forth, even the poorsupernumeraries and scene-shifters might see that hewas a tallow candle like themselves.

In the censorious mood induced by the reflection thathe had waited an hour and a half for half a minute’sglimpse of the imperial party, March now decided notto go to the manoeuvres, where he might be subjectedto still greater humiliation and disappointment.He had certainly come to Wurzburg for the manoeuvres,but Wurzburg had been richly repaying in itself; andwhy should he stifle half an hour in an overcrowdedtrain, and struggle for three miles on foot againstthat harsh wind, to see a multitude of men give proofsof their fitness to do manifold murder? He was,in fact, not the least curious for the sight, and theonly thing that really troubled him was the questionof how he should justify his recreance to his wife.This did alloy the pleasure with which he began, afteran excellent breakfast at a neighboring cafe, to strollabout the streets, though he had them almost to himself,so many citizens had followed the soldiers to themanoeuvres.

It was not till the soldiers began returning fromthe manoeuvres, dusty-footed, and in white canvasoveralls drawn over their trousers to save them, thathe went back to Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe at theSwan. He had given them time enough to imaginehim at the review, and to wonder whether he had seenGeneral Triscoe and the Stollers there, and they methim with such confident inquiries that he would notundeceive them at once. He let them divine fromhis inventive answers that he had not gone to themanoeuvres, which put them in the best humor with themselves,and the girl said it was so cold and rough that shewished her father had not gone, either. The generalappeared just before dinner and frankly avowed thesame wish. He was rasping and wheezing from thedust which filled his lungs; he looked blown and red,and he was too angry with the company he had beenin to have any comments on the manoeuvres. Hereferred to the military chiefly in relation to theMiss Stollers’ ineffectual flirtations, whichhe declared had been outrageous. Their fatherhad apparently no control over them whatever, or elsewas too ignorant to know that they were misbehaving.They were without respect or reverence for any one;they had talked to General Triscoe as if he were aboy of their own age, or a dotard whom nobody needmind; they had not only kept up their foolish babblebefore him, they had laughed and giggled, they hadbroken into snatches of American song, they had allbut whistled and danced. They made loud commentsin Illinois English—­on the cuteness ofthe officers whom they admired, and they had at onetime actually got out their handkerchiefs. Hesupposed they meant to wave them at the officers,but at the look he gave them they merely put theirhats together and snickered in derision of him.They were American girls of the worst type; they conformedto no standard of behavior; their conduct was personal.They ought to be taken home.

Mrs. March said she saw what he meant, and she agreedwith him that they were altogether unformed, and werethe effect of their own ignorant caprices. Probably,however, it was too late to amend them by taking themaway.

“It would hide them, at any rate,” heanswered. “They would sink back into thegreat mass of our vulgarity, and not be noticed.We behave like a parcel of peasants with our women.We think that if no harm is meant or thought, we mayrisk any sort of appearance, and we do things thatare scandalously improper simply because they areinnocent. That may be all very well at home,but people who prefer that sort of thing had betterstay there, where our peasant manners won’t makethem conspicuous.”

As their train ran northward out of Wurzburg thatafternoon, Mrs. March recurred to the general’sclosing words. “That was a slap at Mrs.Adding for letting Kenby go off with her.”

She took up the history of the past twenty-four hours,from the time March had left her with Miss Triscoewhen he went with her father and the Addings and Kenbyto see that church. She had had no chance to bringup these arrears until now, and she atoned to herselffor the delay by making the history very full, andgoing back and adding touches at any point where shethought she had scanted it. After all, it consistedmainly of fragmentary intimations from Miss Triscoeand of half-uttered questions which her own art nowbuilt into a coherent statement.

March could not find that the general had much resentedBurnamy’s clandestine visit to Carlsbad whenhis daughter told him of it, or that he had done morethan make her promise that she would not keep up theacquaintance upon any terms unknown to him.

“Probably,” Mrs. March said, “aslong as he had any hopes of Mrs. Adding, he was alittle too self-conscious to be very up and down aboutBurnamy.”

“Then you think he was really serious abouther?”

“Now my dear! He was so serious that Isuppose he was never so completely taken aback inhis life as when he met Kenby in Wurzburg and saw howshe received him. Of course, that put an endto the fight.”

“The fight?”

“Yes—­that Mrs. Adding and Agathawere keeping up to prevent his offering himself.”

“Oh! And how do you know that they werekeeping up the fight together?”

“How do I? Didn’t you see yourselfwhat friends they were? Did you tell him whatStoller had, said about Burnamy?”

“I had no chance. I don’t know thatI should have done it, anyway. It wasn’tmy affair.”

“Well, then, I think you might. It wouldhave been everything for that poor child; it wouldhave completely justified her in her own eyes.”

“Perhaps your telling her will serve the samepurpose.”

“Yes, I did tell her, and I am glad of it.She had a right to know it.”

“Did she think Stoller’s willingness tooverlook Burnamy’s performance had anythingto do with its moral quality?”

Mrs. March was daunted for the moment, but she said,“I told her you thought that if a person ownedto a fault they disowned it, and put it away fromthem just as if it had never been committed; and thatif a person had taken their punishment for a wrongthey had done, they had expiated it so far as anybodyelse was concerned. And hasn’t poor Burnamydone both?”

As a moralist March was flattered to be hoist withhis own petard, but as a husband he was not goingto come down at once. “I thought probablyyou had told her that. You had it pat from havingjust been over it with me. When has she heardfrom him?”

“Why, that’s the strangest thing aboutit. She hasn’t heard at all. She doesn’tknow where he is. She thought we must know.She was terribly broken up.”

“How did she show it?”

“She didn’t show it. Either you wantto tease, or you’ve forgotten how such thingsare with young people—­or at least girls.”

“Yes, it’s all a long time ago with me,and I never was a girl. Besides, the frank anddirect behavior of Kenby and Mrs. Adding has been veryobliterating to my early impressions of love-making.”

“It certainly hasn’t been ideal,”said Mrs. March with a sigh.

“Why hasn’t it been ideal?” he asked.“Kenby is tremendously in love with her; andI believe she’s had a fancy for him from thebeginning. If it hadn’t been for Rose shewould have accepted him at once; and now he’sessential to them both in their helplessness.As for Papa Triscoe and his Europeanized scruples,if they have any reality at all they’re theresiduum of his personal resentment, and Kenby andMrs. Adding have nothing to do with their unreality.His being in love with her is no reason why he shouldn’tbe helpful to her when she needs him, and every reasonwhy he should. I call it a poem, such as veryfew people have the luck to live out together.”

Mrs. March listened with mounting fervor, and whenhe stopped, she cried out, “Well, my dear, Ido believe you are right! It is ideal, as yousay; it’s a perfect poem. And I shall alwayssay—­”

She stopped at the mocking light which she caughtin his look, and perceived that he had been amusinghimself with her perennial enthusiasm for all sortsof love-affairs. But she averred that she didnot care; what he had said was true, and she shouldalways hold him to it.

They were again in the wedding-journey sentiment inwhich they had left Carlsbad, when they found themselvesalone together after their escape from the pressureof others’ interests. The tide of travelwas towards Frankfort, where the grand parade wasto take place some days later. They were goingto Weimar, which was so few hours out of their waythat they simply must not miss it; and all the wayto the old literary capital they were alone in theircompartment, with not even a stranger, much less afriend to molest them. The flying landscape withoutwas of their own early autumnal mood, and when thevineyards of Wurzburg ceased to purple it, the heavyafter-math of hay and clover, which men, women, andchildren were loading on heavy wains, and driving fromthe meadows everywhere, offered a pastoral and pleasingchange. It was always the German landscape; sometimesflat and fertile, sometimes hilly and poor; oftenclothed with dense woods, but always charming, withcastled tops in ruin or repair, and with levels whereGothic villages drowsed within their walls, and dreamedof the mediaeval past, silent, without apparent life,except for some little goose-girl driving her flockbefore her as she sallied out into the nineteenthcentury in search of fresh pasturage.

As their train mounted among the Thuringian uplandsthey were aware of a finer, cooler air through theiropen window. The torrents foamed white out ofthe black forests of fir and pine, and brawled alongthe valleys, where the hamlets roused themselves inmomentary curiosity as the train roared into themfrom the many tunnels. The afternoon sunshinehad the glister of mountain sunshine everywhere, andthe travellers had a pleasant bewilderment in whichtheir memories of Switzerland and the White Mountainsmixed with long-dormant emotions from Adirondack sojourns.They chose this place and that in the lovely regionwhere they lamented that they had not come at oncefor the after-cure, and they appointed enough returnsto it in future years to consume all the summers theyhad left to live.

LIX.

It was falling night when they reached Weimar, wherethey found at the station a provision of omnibusesfar beyond the hotel accommodations. They drovefirst to the Crown-Prince, which was in a promisingstate of reparation, but which for the present couldonly welcome them to an apartment where a canvas curtaincut them off from a freshly plastered wall. Thelandlord deplored the fact, and sent hospitably outto try and place them at the Elephant. But theElephant was full, and the Russian Court was fulltoo. Then the landlord of the Crown-Prince bethoughthimself of a new hotel, of the second class, indeed,but very nice, where they might get rooms, and afterthe delay of an hour, they got a carriage and droveaway from the Crown-Prince, where the landlord continuedto the last as benevolent as if they had been a profitinstead of a loss to him.

The streets of the town at nine o’clock wereempty and quiet, and they instantly felt the academicquality of the place. Through the pale nightthey could see that the architecture was of the classicsentiment which they were destined to feel more andmore; at one point they caught a fleeting glimpseof two figures with clasped hands and half embraced,which they knew for the statues of Goethe and Schiller;and when they mounted to their rooms at the Grand-Dukeof Saxe-Weimar, they passed under a fresco representingGoethe and four other world-famous poets, Shakspere,Milton, Tasso, and Schiller. The poets all lookedlike Germans, as was just, and Goethe was naturallychief among them; he marshalled the immortals on theirway, and Schiller brought up the rear and kept themfrom going astray in an Elysium where they did notspeak the language. For the rest, the hotel wasbrand-new, of a quite American freshness, and waspervaded by a sweet smell as of straw matting, andprovided with steam-radiators. In the sense ofits homelikeness the Marches boasted that they werenever going away from it.

In the morning they discovered that their windowslooked out on the grand-ducal museum, with a gardenedspace before and below its classicistic bulk, where,in a whim of the weather, the gay flowers were fullof sun. In a pleasant illusion of taking it unawares,March strolled up through the town; but Weimar wasas much awake at that hour as at any of the twenty-four,and the tranquillity of its streets, where he encountereda few passers several blocks apart, was their habitualmood. He came promptly upon two objects whichhe would willingly have shunned: a ‘denkmal’of the Franco-German war, not so furiously bad as mostGerman monuments, but antipathetic and uninteresting,as all patriotic monuments are; and a woman-and-dogteam. In the shock from this he was sensiblethat he had not seen any woman-and-dog teams for sometime, and he wondered by what civic or ethnic influencestheir distribution was so controlled that they shouldhave abounded in Hamburg, Leipsic, and Carlsbad, andwholly ceased in Nuremberg, Ansbach, and Wurzburg,to reappear again in Weimar, though they seemed ascharacteristic of all Germany as the ugly denkmalsto her victories over France.

The Goethe and Schiller monument which he had glimpsedthe night before was characteristic too, but lessoffensively so. German statues at the best areconscious; and the poet-pair, as the inscription callsthem, have the air of showily confronting posteritywith their clasped hands, and of being only partiallyrapt from the spectators. But they were moreunconscious than any other German statues that Marchhad seen, and he quelled a desire to ask Goethe, ashe stood with his hand on Schiller’s shoulder,and looked serenely into space far above one of thetypical equipages of his country, what he thoughtof that sort of thing. But upon reflection hedid not know why Goethe should be held personallyresponsible for the existence of the woman-and-dogteam. He felt that he might more reasonably attributeto his taste the prevalence of classic profiles whichhe began to note in the Weimar populace. Thiscould be a sympathetic effect of that passion forthe antique which the poet brought back with him fromhis sojourn in Italy; though many of the people, especiallythe children, were bow-legged. Perhaps the antiquehad: begun in their faces, and had not yet gotdown to their legs; in any case they were charmingchildren, and as a test of their culture, he had amind to ask a little girl if she could tell him wherethe statue of Herder was, which he thought he mightas well take in on his ramble, and so be done withas many statues as he could. She answered witha pretty regret in her tender voice, “That Itruly cannot,” and he was more satisfied thanif she could, for he thought it better to be a childand honest, than to know where any German statue was.

He easily found it for himself in the place whichis called the Herder Platz after it. He wentinto the Peter and Paul Church there; where Herderused to preach sermons, sometimes not at all likedby the nobility and gentry for their revolutionarytendency; the sovereign was shielded from the worsteffects of his doctrine by worshipping apart from othersinners in a glazed gallery. Herder is buriedin the church, and when you ask where, the sacristanlifts a wooden trap-door in the pavement, and youthink you are going down into the crypt, but you areonly to see Herder’s monumental stone, whichis kept covered so to save it from passing feet.Here also is the greatest picture of that great soulLuke Kranach, who had sincerity enough in his painingto atone for all the swelling German sculptures inthe world. It is a crucifixion, and the crossis of a white birch log, such as might have been cutout of the Weimar woods, shaved smooth on the sides,with the bark showing at the edges. Kranach hasput himself among the spectators, and a stream ofblood from the side of the Savior falls in baptismupon the painter’s head. He is in the companyof John the Baptist and Martin Luther; Luther standswith his Bible open, and his finger on the line, “Theblood of Jesus cleanseth us.”

Partly because he felt guilty at doing all these thingswithout his wife, and partly because he was now veryhungry, March turned from them and got back to hishotel, where she was looking out for him from theiropen window. She had the air of being long domesticatedthere, as she laughed down at seeing him come; andthe continued brilliancy of the weather added to theillusion of home.

It was like a day of late spring in Italy or America;the sun in that gardened hollow before the museumwas already hot enough to make him glad of the shelterof the hotel. The summer seemed to have come backto oblige them, and when they learned that they wereto see Weimar in a festive mood because this was SedanDay, their curiosity, if not their sympathy, acceptedthe chance gratefully. But they were almost movedto wish that the war had gone otherwise when theylearned that all the public carriages were engaged,and they must have one from a stable if they wishedto drive after breakfast. Still it was offeredthem for such a modest number of marks, and theirdriver proved so friendly and conversable, that theyassented to the course of history, and were more andmore reconciled as they bowled along through the grand-ducalpark beside the waters of the classic Ilm.

The waters of the classic Ilm are sluggish and slimyin places, and in places clear and brooklike, butalways a dull dark green in color. They flowin the shadow of pensive trees, and by the brinks ofsunny meadows, where the after-math wanders in heavywindrows, and the children sport joyously over thesmooth-mown surfaces in all the freedom that thereis in Germany. At last, after immemorial appropriation

the owners of the earth are everywhere expropriated,and the people come into the pleasure if not the profitof it. At last, the prince, the knight, the noblefinds, as in his turn the plutocrat will find, thathis property is not for him, but for all; and thatthe nation is to enjoy what he takes from it and vainlythinks to keep from it. Parks, pleasaunces, gardens,set apart for kings, are the play-grounds of the landlesspoor in the Old World, and perhaps yield the sweetestjoy of privilege to some state-sick ruler, some world-wearyprincess, some lonely child born to the solitude ofsovereignty, as they each look down from their palacewindows upon the leisure of overwork taking its littleholiday amidst beauty vainly created for the perpetualfestival of their empty lives.

March smiled to think that in this very Weimar, wheresovereignty had graced and ennobled itself as nowhereelse in the world by the companionship of lettersand the arts, they still were not hurrying first tosee the palace of a prince, but were involuntarilymaking it second to the cottage of a poet. Butin fact it is Goethe who is forever the prince inWeimar. His greatness blots out its history, hisname fills the city; the thought of him is its chiefestimitation and largest hospitality. The travellersremembered, above all other facts of the grand-ducalpark, that it was there he first met Christiane Vulpius,beautiful and young, when he too was beautiful andyoung, and took her home to be his love, to the justand lasting displeasure of Fran von Stein, who waseven less reconciled when, after eighteen years ofdue reflection, the love of Goethe and Christianebecame their marriage. They, wondered just whereit was he saw the young girl coming to meet him asthe Grand-Duke’s minister with an office-seekingpetition from her brother, Goethe’s brotherauthor, long famed and long forgotten for his romantictale of “Rinaldo Rinaldini.”

They had indeed no great mind, in their American respectability,for that rather matter-of-fact and deliberate liaison,and little as their sympathy was for the passionlessintellectual intrigue with the Frau von Stein, itcast no halo of sentiment about the Goethe cottageto suppose that there his love-life with Christianebegan. Mrs. March even resented the fact, andwhen she learned later that it was not the fact atall, she removed it from her associations with thepretty place almost indignantly.

In spite of our facile and multiple divorces we Americansare worshipers of marriage, and if a great poet, theminister of a prince, is going to marry a poor girl,we think he had better not wait till their son isalmost of age. Mrs. March would not accept asextenuating circ*mstances the Grand-Duke’s godfatherhood,or Goethe’s open constancy to Christiane, orthe tardy consecration of their union after the Frenchsack of, Weimar, when the girl’s devotion hadsaved him from the rudeness of the marauding soldiers.

For her New England soul there were no degrees insuch guilt; and, perhaps there are really not so manyas people have tried to think, in their deferenceto Goethe’s greatness. But certainly theaffair was not so simple for a grand-ducal ministerof world-wide renown, and he might well have feltit* difficulties, for he could not have been proofa*gainst the censorious public opinion of Weimar, orthe yet more censorious private opinion of Fran vonStein.

On that lovely Italo-American morning no ghost ofthese old dead embarrassments lingered within or withoutthe Goethe garden-house. The trees which thepoet himself planted flung a sun-shot shadow upon it,and about its feet basked a garden of simple flowers,from which the sweet lame girl who limped throughthe rooms and showed them, gathered a parting nosegayfor her visitors. The few small livingrooms wereabove the ground-floor, with kitchen and offices belowin the Italian fashion; in one of the little chamberswas the camp-bed which Goethe carried with him onhis journeys through Italy; and in the larger roomat the front stood the desk where he wrote, with thechair before it from which he might just have risen.

All was much more livingly conscious of the greatman gone than the proud little palace in the town,which so abounds with relics and memorials of him.His library, his study, his study table, with everythingon it just as he left it when

“Caddela stanca mana”

are there, and there is the death-chair facing thewindow, from which he gasped for “more light”at last. The handsome, well-arranged rooms arefull of souvenirs of his travel, and of that passionfor Italy which he did so much to impart to all Germanhearts, and whose modern waning leaves its recordshere of an interest pathetically, almost amusingly,faded. They intimate the classic temper to whichhis mind tended more and more, and amidst the multitudeof sculptures, pictures, prints, drawings, gems, medals,autographs, there is the sense of the many-mindedness,the universal taste, for which he found room in littleWeimar, but not in his contemporaneous Germany.But it is all less keenly personal, less intimatethan the simple garden-house, or else, with the greattroop of people going through it, and the custodianslecturing in various voices and languages to the attendantgroups, the Marches had it less to themselves, andso imagined him less in it.

LX.

All palaces have a character of tiresome unlivablenesswhich is common to them everywhere, and very probablyif one could meet their proprietors in them one wouldas little remember them apart afterwards as the palacesthemselves. It will not do to lift either housesor men far out of the average; they become spectacles,ceremonies; they cease to have charm, to have character,which belong to the levels of life, where alone thereare ease and comfort, and human nature may be itself,with all the little delightful differences repressedin those who represent and typify.

As they followed the custodian through the grand-ducalResidenz at Weimar, March felt everywhere the strongwish of the prince who was Goethe’s friend toally himself with literature, and to be human at leastin the humanities. He came honestly by his passionfor poets; his mother had known it in her time, andWeimar was the home of Wieland and of Herder beforethe young Grand-Duke came back from his travels bringingGoethe with him, and afterwards attracting Schiller.The story of that great epoch is all there in theResidenz, told as articulately as a palace can.

There are certain Poets’ Rooms, frescoed withillustrations of Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland; thereis the room where Goethe and the Grand-Duke used toplay chess together; there is the conservatory openingfrom it where they liked to sit and chat; everywherein the pictures and sculptures, the engraving andintaglios, are the witnesses of the tastes they shared,the love they both had for Italy, and for beautifulItalian things. The prince was not so great aprince but that he could very nearly be a man; thecourt was perhaps the most human court that ever was;the Grand-Duke and the grand poet were first boon companions,and then monarch and minister working together forthe good of the country; they were always friends,and yet, as the American saw in the light of the NewWorld, which he carried with him, how far from friends!At best it was make-believe, the make-believe of superiorityand inferiority, the make-believe of master and man,which could only be the more painful and ghastly forthe endeavor of two generous spirits to reach and rescueeach other through the asphyxiating unreality; butthey kept up the show of equality faithfully to theend. Goethe was born citizen of a free republic,and his youth was nurtured in the traditions of liberty;he was one of the greatest souls of any time, andhe must have known the impossibility of the thingthey pretended; but he died and made no sign, andthe poet’s friendship with the prince has passedsmoothly into history as one of the things that mightreally be. They worked and played together; theydined and danced, they picnicked and poetized, eachon his own side of the impassable gulf; with an airof its not being there which probably did not deceivetheir contemporaries so much as posterity.

A part of the palace was of course undergoing repair;and in the gallery beyond the conservatory a companyof workmen were sitting at a table where they hadspread their luncheon. They were somewhat subduedby the consciousness of their august environment;but the sight of them was charming; they gave a kindlyinterest to the place which it had wanted before;and which the Marches felt again in another palacewhere the custodian showed them the little tin dishesand saucepans which the German Empress Augusta andher sisters played with when they were children.The sight of these was more affecting even than thewithered wreaths which they had left on the death-bedof their mother, and which are still mouldering there.

This was in the Belvedere, the country house on theheight overlooking Weimar, where the grand-ducal familyspend the month of May, and where the stranger findshimself amid overwhelming associations of Goethe,although the place is so full of relics and memorialsof the owners. It seemed in fact to be a storehousefor the wedding-presents of the whole connection,which were on show in every room; Mrs. March hardlyknew whether they heightened the domestic effect ortook from it; but they enabled her to verify withthe custodian’s help certain royal intermarriageswhich she had been in doubt about before.

Her zeal for these made such favor with him that hedid not spare them a portrait of all those which Marchhoped to escape; he passed them over, scarcely ableto stand, to the gardener, who was to show them theopen-air theatre where Goethe used to take part inthe plays.

The Natur-Theater was of a classic ideal, realizedin the trained vines and clipped trees which formedthe coulisses. There was a grassy space for thechorus and the commoner audience, and then a few semicirculargradines cut in the turf, one alcove another, wherethe more honored spectators sat. Behind the seatswere plinths bearing the busts of Goethe, Schiller,Wieland, and Herder. It was all very pretty, andif ever the weather in Weimar was dry enough to permita performance, it must have been charming to see aplay in that open day to which the drama is native,though in the late hours it now keeps in the thickair of modern theatres it has long forgotten the fact.It would be difficult to be Greek under a German sky,even when it was not actually raining, but March heldthat with Goethe’s help it might have been doneat Weimar, and his wife and he proved themselves suchenthusiasts for the Natur-Theater that the walnut-facedold gardener who showed it put together a sheaf ofthe flowers that grew nearest it and gave them to Mrs.March for a souvenir.

They went for a cup of tea to the cafe which looks,as from another eyebrow of the hill, out over lovelylittle Weimar in the plain below. In a momentof sunshine the prospect was very smiling; but theirspirits sank over their tea when it came; they wereat least sorry they had not asked for coffee.Most of the people about them were taking beer, includingthe pretty girls of a young ladies’ school, whowere there with their books and needle-work, in thecare of one of the teachers, apparently for the afternoon.

Mrs. March perceived that they were not so much engagedwith their books or their needle-work but they hadeyes for other things, and she followed the glancesof the girls till they rested upon the people at atable somewhat obliquely to the left. These wereapparently a mother and daughter, and they were listeningto a young man who sat with his back to Mrs. March,and leaned low over the table talking to them.They were both smiling radiantly, and as the girlsmiled she kept turning herself from the waist up,and slanting her face from this side to that, as ifto make sure that every one saw her smiling.

Mrs. March felt her husband’s gaze followingher own, and she had just time to press her fingerfirmly on his arm and reduce his cry of astonishmentto the hoarse whisper in which he gasped, “Goodgracious! It’s the pivotal girl!”

At the same moment the girl rose with her mother,and with the young man, who had risen too, came directlytoward the Marches on their way out of the place withoutnoticing them, though Burnamy passed so near that Mrs.March could almost have touched him.

She had just strength to say, “Well, my dear!That was the cut direct.”

She said this in order to have her husband reassureher. “Nonsense! He never saw us.Why didn’t you speak to him?”

“Speak to him? I never shall speak to himagain. No! This is the last of Mr. Burnamyfor me. I shouldn’t have minded his notrecognizing us, for, as you say, I don’t believehe saw us; but if he could go back to such a girlas that, and flirt with her, after Miss Triscoe, that’sall I wish to know of him. Don’t you tryto look him up, Basil! I’m glad-yes, I’mglad he doesn’t know how Stoller has come tofeel about him; he deserves to suffer, and I hopehe’ll keep on suffering: You were quiteright, my dear—­and it shows how true yourinstinct is in such things (I don’t call itmore than instinct)—­not to tell him whatStoller said, and I don’t want you ever should.”

She had risen in her excitement, and was making offin such haste that she would hardly give him timeto pay for their tea, as she pulled him impatientlyto their carriage.

At last he got a chance to say, “I don’tthink I can quite promise that; my mind’s beenveering round in the other direction. I thinkI shall tell him.”

“What! After you’ve seen him flirtingwith that girl? Very well, then, you won’t,my dear; that’s all! He’s behavingvery basely to Agatha.”

“What’s his flirtation with all the girlsin the universe to do with my duty to him? Hehas a right to know what Stoller thinks. And asto his behaving badly toward Miss Triscoe, how hashe done it? So far as you know, there is nothingwhatever between them. She either refused himoutright, that last night in Carlsbad, or else shemade impossible conditions with him. Burnamyis simply consoling himself, and I don’t blamehim.”

“Consoling himself with a pivotal girl!”cried Mrs. March.

“Yes, with a pivotal girl. Her pivotalitymay be a nervous idiosyncrasy, or it may be the effectof tight lacing; perhaps she has to keep turning andtwisting that way to get breath. But attributethe worst motive: say it is to make people lookat her! Well, Burnamy has a right to look withthe rest; and I am not going to renounce him becausehe takes refuge with one pretty girl from another.It’s what men have been doing from the beginningof time.”

“Oh, I dare say!”

“Men,” he went on, “are very delicatelyconstituted; very peculiarly. They have beenknown to seek the society of girls in general, of anygirl, because some girl has made them happy; and whensome girl has made them unhappy, they are still moresusceptible. Burnamy may be merely amusing himself,or he may be consoling himself; but in either caseI think the pivotal girl has as much right to himas Miss Triscoe. She had him first; and I’mall for her.”

LXI.

Burnamy came away from seeing the pivotal girl andher mother off on the train which they were takingthat evening for Frankfort and Hombourg, and strolledback through the Weimar streets little at ease withhimself. While he was with the girl and nearher he had felt the attraction by which youth impersonallydraws youth, the charm which mere maid has for mereman; but once beyond the range of this he felt sickat heart and ashamed. He was aware of havingused her folly as an anodyne for the pain which wasalways gnawing at him, and he had managed to forgetit in her folly, but now it came back, and the sensethat he had been reckless of her rights came withit. He had done his best to make her think himin love with her, by everything but words; he wonderedhow he could be such an ass, such a wicked ass, asto try making her promise to write to him from Frankfort;he wished never to see her again, and he wished stillless to hear from her. It was some comfort toreflect that she had not promised, but it was notcomfort enough to restore him to such fragmentaryself-respect as he had been enjoying since he partedwith Agatha Triscoe in Carlsbad; he could not evenget back to the resentment with which he had beenstaying himself somewhat before the pivotal girl unexpectedlyappeared with her mother in Weimar.

It was Sedan Day, but there was apparently no officialobservance of the holiday, perhaps because the Grand-Dukewas away at the manoeuvres, with all the other Germanprinces. Burnamy had hoped for some voluntaryexcitement among the people, at least enough to warranthim in making a paper about Sedan Day in Weimar, whichhe could sell somewhere; but the night was falling,and there was still no sign of popular rejoicing overthe French humiliation twenty-eight years before, exceptin the multitude of Japanese lanterns which the childrenwere everywhere carrying at the ends of sticks.Babies had them in their carriages, and the effectof the floating lights in the winding, up-and-down-hillstreets was charming even to Burnamy’s lack-lustreeyes. He went by his hotel and on to a cafe witha garden, where there was a patriotic, concert promised;he supped there, and then sat dreamily behind hisbeer, while the music banged and brayed round himunheeded.

Presently he heard a voice of friendly banter sayingin English, “May I sit at your table?”and he saw an ironical face looking down on him.“There doesn’t seem any other place.”

“Why, Mr. March!” Burnamy sprang up andwrung the hand held out to him, but he choked withhis words of recognition; it was so good to see thisfaithful friend again, though he saw him now as hehad seen him last, just when he had so little reasonto be proud of himself.

March settled his person in the chair facing Burnamy,and then glanced round at the joyful jam of peopleeating and drinking, under a firmament of lanterns.“This is pretty,” he said, “mightypretty. I shall make Mrs. March sorry for notcoming, when I go back.”

“Is Mrs. March—­she is—­withyou—­in Weimar?” Burnamy asked stupidly.

March forbore to take advantage of him. “Oh,yes. We saw you out at Belvedere this afternoon.Mrs. March thought for a moment that you meant notto see us. A woman likes to exercise her imaginationin those little flights.”

“I never dreamed of your being there—­Inever saw—­” Burnamy began.

“Of course not. Neither did Mrs. Etkins,nor Miss Etkins; she was looking very pretty.Have you been here some time?”

“Not long. A week or so. I’vebeen at the parade at Wurzburg.”

“At Wurzburg! Ah, how little the worldis, or how large Wurzburg is! We were there nearlya week, and we pervaded the place. But there wasa great crowd for you to hide in from us. Whathad I better take?” A waiter had come up, andwas standing at March’s elbow. “Isuppose I mustn’t sit here without orderingsomething?”

“White wine and selters,” said Burnamyvaguely.

“The very thing! Why didn’t I thinkof it? It’s a divine drink: it satisfieswithout filling. I had it a night or two beforewe left home, in the Madison Square Roof Garden.Have you seen ‘Every Other Week’ lately?”

“No,” said Burnamy, with more spirit thanhe had yet shown.

“We’ve just got our mail from Nuremberg.The last number has a poem in it that I rather like.”March laughed to see the young fellow’s facelight up with joyful consciousness. “Comeround to my hotel, after you’re tired here,and I’ll let you see it. There’s nohurry. Did you notice the little children withtheir lanterns, as you came along? It’sthe gentlest effect that a warlike memory ever cameto. The French themselves couldn’t haveminded those innocents carrying those soft lights onthe day of their disaster. You ought to get somethingout of that, and I’ve got a subject in trustfor you from Rose Adding. He and his mother wereat Wurzburg; I’m sorry to say the poor littlechap didn’t seem very well. They’vegone to Holland for the sea air.” Marchhad been talking for quantity in compassion of theembarrassment in which Burnamy seemed bound; but hequestioned how far he ought to bring comfort to theyoung fellow merely because he liked him. Sofar as he could make out, Burnamy had been doing ratherless than nothing to retrieve himself since they hadmet; and it was by an impulse that he could not havelogically defended to Mrs. March that he resumed.“We found another friend of yours in Wurzburg:Mr. Stoller.”

“Mr. Stoller?” Burnamy faintly echoed.

“Yes; he was there to give his daughters a holidayduring the manoeuvres; and they made the most of it.He wanted us to go to the parade with his family butwe declined. The twins were pretty nearly thedeath of General Triscoe.”

Again Burnamy echoed him. “General Triscoe?”

“Ah, yes: I didn’t tell you.General Triscoe and his daughter had come on withMrs. Adding and Rose. Kenby—­you rememberKenby, On the Norumbia?—­Kenby happenedto be there, too; we were quite a family party; andStoller got the general to drive out to the manoeuvreswith him and his girls.”

Now that he was launched, March rather enjoyed lettinghimself go. He did not know what he should sayto Mrs. March when he came to confess having toldBurnamy everything before she got a chance at him;he pushed on recklessly, upon the principle, whichprobably will not hold in morals, that one may aswell be hung for a sheep as a lamb. “I havea message for you from Mr. Stoller.”

“For me?” Burnamy gasped.

“I’ve been wondering how I should putit, for I hadn’t expected to see you. Butit’s simply this: he wants you to know—­andhe seemed to want me to know—­that he doesn’thold you accountable in the way he did. He’sthought it all over, and he’s decided that hehad no right to expect you to save him from his ownignorance where he was making a show of knowledge.As he said, he doesn’t choose to plead the babyact. He says that you’re all right, andyour place on the paper is open to you.”

Burnamy had not been very prompt before, but now heseemed braced for instant response. “Ithink he’s wrong,” he said, so harshlythat the people at the next table looked round.“His feeling as he does has nothing to do withthe fact, and it doesn’t let me out.”

March would have liked to take him in his arms; hemerely said, “I think you’re quite right,as to that. But there’s such a thing asforgiveness, you know. It doesn’t changethe nature of what you’ve done; but as far asthe sufferer from it is concerned, it annuls it.”

“Yes, I understand that. But I can’taccept his forgiveness if I hate him.”

“But perhaps you won’t always hate him.Some day you may have a chance to do him a good turn.It’s rather banale; but there doesn’t seemany other way. Well, I have given you his message.Are you going with me to get that poem?”

When March had given Burnamy the paper at his hotel,and Burnamy had put it in his pocket, the young mansaid he thought he would take some coffee, and heasked March to join him in the dining-room where theyhad stood talking.

“No, thank you,” said the elder, “Idon’t propose sitting up all night, and you’llexcuse me if I go to bed now. It’s a littleinformal to leave a guest—­”

“You’re not leaving a guest! I’mat home here. I’m staying in this hoteltoo.”

March said, “Oh!” and then he added abruptly,“Good-night,” and went up stairs underthe fresco of the five poets.

“Whom were you talking with below?” askedMrs. March through the door opening into his roomfrom hers.

“Burnamy,” he answered from within.“He’s staying in this house. He letme know just as I was going to turn him out for thenight. It’s one of those little uncandorsof his that throw suspicion on his honesty in greatthings.”

“Oh! Then you’ve been telling him,”she said, with a mental bound high above and far beyondthe point.

“Everything.”

“About Stoller, too?”

“About Stoller and his daughters, and Mrs. Addingand Rose and Kenby and General Triscoe—­andAgatha.”

“Very well. That’s what I call shabby.Don’t ever talk to me again about the inconsistenciesof women. But now there’s something perfectlyfearful.”

“What is it?”

“A letter from Miss Triscoe came after you weregone, asking us to find rooms in some hotel for herand her father to-morrow. He isn’t well,and they’re coming. And I’ve telegraphedthem to come here. Now what do you say?”

LXII.

They could see no way out of the trouble, and Mrs.March could not resign herself to it till her husbandsuggested that she should consider it providential.This touched the lingering superstition in which shehad been ancestrally taught to regard herself as ameans, when in a very tight place, and to leave theresponsibility with the moral government of the universe.As she now perceived, it had been the same as orderedthat they should see Burnamy under such conditionsin the afternoon that they could not speak to him,and hear where he was staying; and in an inferiordegree it had been the same as ordered that March shouldsee him in the evening and tell him everything, sothat she should know just how to act when she sawhim in the morning. If he could plausibly accountfor the renewal of his flirtation with Miss Elkins,or if he seemed generally worthy apart from that,she could forgive him.

It was so pleasant when he came in at breakfast withhis well-remembered smile, that she did not requirefrom him any explicit defence. While they talkedshe was righting herself in an undercurrent of dramawith Miss Triscoe, and explaining to her that theycould not possibly wait over for her and her fatherin Weimar, but must be off that day for Berlin, asthey had made all their plans. It was not easy,even in drama where one has everything one’sown way, to prove that she could not without impietyso far interfere with the course of Providence as toprevent Miss Triscoe’s coming with her fatherto the same hotel where Burnamy was staying.She contrived, indeed, to persuade her that she hadnot known he was staying there when she telegraphedthem where to come, and that in the absence of anyopen confidence from Miss Triscoe she was not obligedto suppose that his presence would be embarrassing.

March proposed leaving her with Burnamy while he wentup into the town and interviewed the house of Schiller,which he had not done yet; and as soon as he got himselfaway she came to business, breaking altogether fromthe inner drama with Miss Triscoe and devoting herselfto Burnamy. They had already got so far as tohave mentioned the meeting with the Triscoes in Wurzburg,and she said: “Did Mr. March tell you theywere coming here? Or, no! We hadn’theard then. Yes, they are coming to-morrow.They may be going to stay some time. She talkedof Weimar when we first spoke of Germany on the ship.”Burnamy said nothing, and she suddenly added, witha sharp glance, “They wanted us to get them rooms,and we advised their coming to this house.”He started very satisfactorily, and “Do youthink they would be comfortable, here?” shepursued.

“Oh, yes, very. They can have my room;it’s southeast; I shall be going into otherquarters.” She did not say anything; and“Mrs. March,” he began again, “whatis the use of my beating about the bush? You mustknow what I went back to Carlsbad for, that night—­”

“No one ever told—­”

“Well, you must have made a pretty good guess.But it was a failure. I ought to have failed,and I did. She said that unless her father likedit—­And apparently he hasn’t likedit.” Burnamy smiled ruefully.

“How do you know? She didn’t knowwhere you were!”

“She could have got word to me if she had hadgood news for me. They’ve forwarded otherletters from Pupp’s. But it’s allright; I had no business to go back to Carlsbad.Of course you didn’t know I was in this housewhen you told them to come; and I must clear out.I had better clear out of Weimar, too.”

“No, I don’t think so; I have no rightto pry into your affairs, but—­”

“Oh, they’re wide enough open!”

“And you may have changed your mind. Ithought you might, when I saw you yesterday at Belvedere—­”

“I was only trying to make bad worse.”

“Then I think the situation has changed entirelythrough what Mr. Stoller said to Mr. March.”

“I can’t see how it has. I committedan act of shabby treachery, and I’m as muchto blame as if he still wanted to punish me for it.”

“Did Mr. March say that to you?”

“No; I said that to Mr. March; and he couldn’tanswer it, and you can’t. You’revery good, and very kind, but you can’t answerit.”

“I can answer it very well,” she boasted,but she could find nothing better to say than, “It’syour duty to her to see her and let her know.”

“Doesn’t she know already?”

“She has a right to know it from you. Ithink you are morbid, Mr. Burnamy. You know verywell I didn’t like your doing that to Mr. Stoller.I didn’t say so at the time, because you seemedto feel it enough yourself. But I did like yourowning up to it,” and here Mrs. March thoughtit time to trot out her borrowed battle-horse again.“My husband always says that if a person ownsup to an error, fully and faithfully, as you’vealways done, they make it the same in its consequencesto them as if it had never been done.”

“Does Mr. March say that?” asked Burnamywith a relenting smile.

“Indeed he does!”

Burnamy hesitated; then he asked, gloomily again:

“And what about the consequences to the, otherfellow?”

“A woman,” said Mrs. March, “hasno concern with them. And besides, I think you’vedone all you could to save Mr. Stoller from the consequences.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“No matter. You would if you could.I wonder,” she broke off, to prevent his persistenceat a point where her nerves were beginning to giveway, “what can be keeping Mr. March?”

Nothing much more important, it appeared later, thanthe pleasure of sauntering through the streets onthe way to the house of Schiller, and looking at thepretty children going to school, with books under theirarms. It was the day for the schools to open afterthe long summer vacation, and there was a freshnessof expectation in the shining faces which, if it couldnot light up his own graybeard visage, could at leasttouch his heart:

When he reached the Schiller house he found that itwas really not the Schiller house, but the Schillerflat, of three or four rooms, one flight up, whosewindows look out upon the street named after the poet.The whole place is bare and clean; in one corner ofthe large room fronting the street stands Schiller’swriting-table, with his chair before it; with thefoot extending toward this there stands, in anothercorner, the narrow bed on which he died; some witheredwreaths on the pillow frame a picture of his deathmask,which at first glance is like his dead face lyingthere. It is all rather tasteless, and all rathertouching, and the place with its meagre appointments,as compared with the rich Goethe house, suggests thatpersonal competition with Goethe in which Schilleris always falling into the second place. Whetherit will be finally so with him in literature it istoo early to ask of time, and upon other points eternitywill not be interrogated. “The great, Goetheand the good Schiller,” they remain; and yet,March reasoned, there was something good in Goetheand something great, in Schiller.

He was so full of the pathos of their inequality beforethe world that he did not heed the warning on thedoor of the pastry-shop near the Schiller house, andon opening it he bedaubed his hand with the fresh painton it. He was then in such a state, that he couldnot bring his mind to bear upon the question of whichcakes his wife would probably prefer, and he stoodhelplessly holding up his hand till the good womanbehind the counter discovered his plight, and uttereda loud cry of compassion. She ran and got a wetnapkin, which she rubbed with soap, and then she instructedhim by word and gesture to rub his hand upon it, andshe did not leave him till his rescue was complete.He let her choose a variety of the cakes for him,and came away with a gay paper bag full of them, andwith the feeling that he had been in more intimaterelations with the life of Weimar than travellersare often privileged to be. He argued from theinstant and intelligent sympathy of the pastry womana high grade of culture in all classes; and he conceivedthe notion of pretending to Mrs. March that he hadgot these cakes from, a descendant of Schiller.

His deceit availed with her for the brief moment inwhich she always, after so many years’ experienceof his duplicity, believed anything he told her.They dined merrily together at their hotel, and thenBurnamy came down to the station with them and wasvery comfortable to March in helping him to get theirtickets and their baggage registered. The trainwhich was to take them to Halle, where they were tochange for Berlin, was rather late, and they had butten minutes after it came in before it would startagain. Mrs. March was watching impatiently atthe window of the waiting-room for the dismountingpassengers to clear the platform and allow the doorsto be opened; suddenly she gave a cry, and turned andran into the passage by which the new arrivals werepouring out toward the superabundant omnibuses.March and Burnamy, who had been talking apart, mechanicallyrushed after her and found her kissing Miss Triscoeand shaking hands with the general amidst a tempestof questions and answers, from which it appeared thatthe Triscoes had got tired of staying in Wurzburg,and had simply come on to Weimar a day sooner thanthey had intended.

The, general was rather much bundled up for a daywhich was mild for a German summer day, and he coughedout an explanation that he had taken an abominablecold at that ridiculous parade, and had not shakenit off yet. He had a notion that change of airwould be better for him; it could not be worse.

He seemed a little vague as to Burnamy, rather thaninimical. While the ladies were still talkingeagerly together in proffer and acceptance of Mrs.March’s lamentations that she should be goingaway just as Miss Triscoe was coming, he asked ifthe omnibus for their hotel was there. He byno means resented Burnamy’s assurance that itwas, and he did not refuse to let him order theirbaggage, little and large, loaded upon it. Bythe time this was done, Mrs. March and Miss Triscoehad so far detached themselves from each other thatthey could separate after one more formal expressionof regret and forgiveness. With a lament intowhich she poured a world of inarticulate emotions,Mrs. March wrenched herself from the place, and sufferedherself, to be pushed toward her train. But withthe last long look which she cast over her shoulder,before she vanished into the waiting-room, she sawMiss Triscoe and Burnamy transacting the elaboratepolitenesses of amiable strangers with regard to thevery small bag which the girl had in her hand.He succeeded in relieving her of it; and then he ledthe way out of the station on the left of the general,while Miss Triscoe brought up the rear.

LXIII.

From the window of the train as it drew out Mrs. Marchtried for a glimpse of the omnibus in which her protegeswere now rolling away together. As they werequite out of sight in the omnibus, which was itselfout of sight, she failed, but as she fell back againsther seat she treated the recent incident with a complexityand simultaneity of which no report can give an idea.At the end one fatal conviction remained: thatin everything she had said she had failed to explainto Miss Triscoe how Burnamy happened to be in Weimarand how he happened to be there with them in the station.She required March to say how she had overlooked thevery things which she ought to have mentioned first,and which she had on the point of her tongue the wholetime. She went over the entire ground again tosee if she could discover the reason why she had madesuch an unaccountable break, and it appeared that shewas led to it by his rushing after her with Burnamybefore she had had a chance to say a word about him;of course she could not say anything in his presence.This gave her some comfort, and there was consolationin the fact that she had left them together withoutthe least intention or connivance, and now, no matterwhat happened, she could not accuse herself, and hecould not accuse her of match-making.

He said that his own sense of guilt was so great thathe should not dream of accusing her of anything exceptof regret that now she could never claim the creditof bringing the lovers together under circ*mstancesso favorable. As soon as they were engaged theycould join in renouncing her with a good conscience,and they would probably make this the basis of theirefforts to propitiate the general.

She said she did not care, and with the mere removalof the lovers in space, her interest in them beganto abate. They began to be of a minor importancein the anxieties of the change of trains at Halle,and in the excitement of settling into the expressfrom Frankfort there were moments when they were altogetherforgotten. The car was of almost American length,and it ran with almost American smoothness; when theconductor came and collected an extra fare for theirseats, the Marches felt that if the charge had beentwo dollars instead of two marks they would have hadevery advantage of American travel.

On the way to Berlin the country was now fertile andflat, and now sterile and flat; near the capital thelevel sandy waste spread almost to its gates.The train ran quickly through the narrow fringe ofsuburbs, and then they were in one of those vast Continentalstations which put our outdated depots to shame.The good ‘traeger’ who took possessionof them and their hand-bags, put their boxes on abaggage-bearing drosky, and then got them anotherdrosky for their personal transportation. Thiswas a drosky of the first-class, but they would nothave thought it so, either from the vehicle itself,or from the appearance of the driver and his horses.The public carriages of Germany are the shabbiest inthe world; at Berlin the horses look like old hairtrunks and the drivers like their moth-eaten contents.

The Marches got no splendor for the two prices theypaid, and their approach to their hotel on Unter denLinden was as unimpressive as the ignoble avenue itself.It was a moist, cold evening, and the mean, tiresomestreet, slopped and splashed under its two rows ofsmall trees, to which the thinning leaves clung likewet rags, between long lines of shops and hotels whichhad neither the grace of Paris nor the grandiosityof New York. March quoted in bitter derision:

“Bees, bees, wasit your hydromel,
Under the Lindens?”

and his wife said that if Commonwealth Avenue in Bostoncould be imagined with its trees and without theirbeauty, flanked by the architecture of Sixth Avenue,with dashes of the west side of Union Square, thatwould be the famous Unter den Linden, where she hadso resolutely decided that they would stay while inBerlin.

They had agreed upon the hotel, and neither couldblame the other because it proved second-rate in everythingbut its charges. They ate a poorish table d’hotedinner in such low spirits that March had no heartto get a rise from his wife by calling her noticeto the mouse which fed upon the crumbs about theirfeet while they dined. Their English-speakingwaiter said that it was a very warm evening, and theynever knew whether this was because he was a humorist,or because he was lonely and wished to talk, or becauseit really was a warm evening, for Berlin. Whenthey had finished, they went out and drove about thegreater part of the evening looking for another hotel,whose first requisite should be that it was not onUnter den Linden. What mainly determined Mrs.March in favor of the large, handsome, impersonalplace they fixed upon was the fact that it was equippedfor steam-heating; what determined March was the factthat it had a passenger-office where when he wishedto leave, he could buy his railroad tickets and havehis baggage checked without the maddening anxiety,of doing it at the station. But it was preciselyin these points that the hotel which admirably fulfilledits other functions fell short. The weather madea succession of efforts throughout their stay to clearup cold; it merely grew colder without clearing up,but this seemed to offer no suggestion of steam forheating their bleak apartment and the chilly corridorsto the management. With the help of a large lampwhich they kept burning night and day they got thetemperature of their rooms up to sixty; there wasneither stove nor fireplace, the cold electric bulbsdiffused a frosty glare; and in the vast, statelydining-room with its vaulted roof, there was nothingto warm them but their plates, and the handles oftheir knives and forks, which, by a mysterious inspiration,were always hot. When they were ready to go,March experienced from the apathy of the baggage clerkand the reluctance of the porters a more piercingdistress than any he had known at the railroad stations;and one luckless valise which he ordered sent afterhim by express reached his bankers in Paris a fortnightoverdue, with an accumulation of charges upon it outvaluingthe books which it contained.

But these were minor defects in an establishment whichhad many merits, and was mainly of the temperamentand intention of the large English railroad hotels.They looked from their windows down into a gardenedsquare, peopled with a full share of the superaboundingstatues of Berlin and frequented by babies and nursemaids who seemed not to mind the cold any more thanthe stone kings and generals. The aspect of thissquare, like the excellent cooking of the hotel andthe architecture of the imperial capital, suggestedthe superior civilization of Paris. Even therows of gray houses and private palaces of Berlin arein the French taste, which is the only taste thereis in Berlin. The suggestion of Paris is constant,but it is of Paris in exile, and without the chicwhich the city wears in its native air. The crowdlacks this as much as the architecture and the sculpture;there is no distinction among the men except for nowand then a military figure, and among the women nostyle such as relieves the commonplace rash of theNew York streets. The Berliners are plain andill dressed, both men and women, and even the littlechildren are plain. Every one is ill dressed,but no one is ragged, and among the undersized homelyfolk of the lower classes there is no such poverty-strickenshabbiness as shocks and insults the sight in NewYork. That which distinctly recalls our metropolisis the lofty passage of the elevated trains intersectingthe prospectives of many streets; but in Berlin theelevated road is carried on massive brick archwaysand not lifted upon gay, crazy iron ladders like ours.

When you look away from this, and regard Berlin onits aesthetic, side you are again in that banishedParis, whose captive art-soul is made to serve, sofar as it may be enslaved to such an effect, in thecelebration of the German triumph over France.Berlin has never the presence of a great capital,however, in spite of its perpetual monumental insistence.There is no streaming movement in broad vistas; thedull looking population moves sluggishly; there isno show of fine equipages. The prevailing toneof the city and the sky is gray; but under the cloudyheaven there is no responsive Gothic solemnity in thearchitecture. There are hints of the older Germancities in some of the remote and observe streets,but otherwise all is as new as Boston, which in factthe actual Berlin hardly antedates.

There are easily more statues in Berlin than in anyother city in the world, but they only unite in failingto give Berlin an artistic air. They stand inlong rows on the cornices; they crowd the pediments;they poise on one leg above domes and arches; theyshelter themselves in niches; they ride about on horseback;they sit or lounge on street corners or in gardenwalks; all with a mediocrity in the older sort whichfails of any impression. If they were only furiouslybaroque they would be something, and it may be froma sense of this that there is a self-assertion in

the recent sculptures, which are always patriotic,more noisy and bragging than anything else in perennialbrass. This offensive art is the modern Prussianavatar of the old German romantic spirit, and bearsthe same relation to it that modern romanticism inliterature bears to romance. It finds its apotheosisin the monument to Kaiser Wilhelm I., a vast incoherentgroup of swelling and swaggering bronze, commemoratingthe victory of the first Prussian Emperor in the warwith the last French Emperor, and avenging the vanquishedupon the victors by its ugliness. The ungainlyand irrelevant assemblage of men and animals backsaway from the imperial palace, and saves itself toosoon from plunging over the border of a canal behindit, not far from Rauch’s great statue of thegreat Frederic. To come to it from the simplicityand quiet of that noble work is like passing fromsome exquisite masterpiece of naturalistic actingto the rant and uproar of melodrama; and the Marchesstood stunned and bewildered by its wild explosions.

When they could escape they found themselves so convenientto the imperial palace that they judged best to dischargeat once the obligation to visit it which must otherwiseweigh upon them. They entered the court withoutopposition from the sentinel, and joined other strangersstraggling instinctively toward a waiting-room in onecorner of the building, where after they had increasedto some thirty, a custodian took charge of them, andled them up a series of inclined plains of brick tothe state apartments. In the antechamber theyfound a provision of immense felt over-shoes whichthey were expected to put on for their passage overthe waxed marquetry of the halls. These roomyslippers were designed for the accommodation of thenative boots; and upon the mixed company of foreignersthe effect was in the last degree humiliating.The women’s skirts some what hid their disgrace,but the men were openly put to shame, and they shuffledforward with their bodies at a convenient inclinelike a company of snow-sho*rs. In the depths ofhis own abasem*nt March heard a female voice behindhim sighing in American accents, “To think Ishould be polishing up these imperial floors with myrepublican feet!”

The protest expressed the rebellion which he feltmounting in his own heart as they advanced throughthe heavily splendid rooms, in the historical orderof the family portraits recording the rise of thePrussian sovereigns from Margraves to Emperors.He began to realize here the fact which grew openhim more and more that imperial Germany is not theeffect of a popular impulse but of a dynastic propensity.There is nothing original in the imperial palace,nothing national; it embodies and proclaims a powerfulpersonal will, and in its adaptations of French artit appeals to no emotion in the German witness noblerthan his pride in the German triumph over the Frenchin war. March found it tiresome beyond the tiresomewont of palaces, and he gladly shook off the senseof it with his felt shoes. “Well,”he confided to his wife when they were fairly out-of-doors,“if Prussia rose in the strength of silence,as Carlyle wants us to believe, she is taking it outin talk now, and tall talk.”

“Yes, isn’t she!” Mrs. March assented,and with a passionate desire for excess in a bad thing,which we all know at times, she looked eagerly abouther for proofs of that odious militarism of the empire,which ought to have been conspicuous in the imperialcapital; but possibly because the troops were nearlyall away at the manoeuvres, there were hardly morein the streets than she had sometimes seen in Washington.Again the German officers signally failed to offerher any rudeness when she met them on the side-walks.There were scarcely any of them, and perhaps thatmight have been the reason why they were not more aggressive;but a whole company of soldiers marching carelesslyup to the palace from the Brandenburg gate, withoutmusic, or so much style as our own militia often putson, regarded her with inoffensive eyes so far as theylooked at her. She declared that personally therewas nothing against the Prussians; even when in uniformthey were kindly and modest-looking men; it was whenthey got up on pedestals, in bronze or marble, thatthey, began to bully and to brag.

LXIV.

The dinner which the Marches got at a restaurant onUnter den Linden almost redeemed the avenue from thedisgrace it had fallen into with them. It was,the best meal they had yet eaten in Europe, and asto fact and form was a sort of compromise betweena French dinner and an English dinner which they didnot hesitate to pronounce Prussian. The waiterwho served it was a friendly spirit, very sensibleof their intelligent appreciation of the dinner; andfrom him they formed a more respectful opinion ofBerlin civilization than they had yet held. Afterthe manner of strangers everywhere they judged thecountry they were visiting from such of its inhabitantsas chance brought them in contact with; and it wouldreally be a good thing for nations that wish to standwell with the world at large to look carefully tothe behavior of its cabmen and car conductors, itshotel clerks and waiters, its theatre-ticket sellersand ushers, its policemen and sacristans, its landlordsand salesmen; for by these rather than by its societywomen and its statesmen and divines, is it reallyjudged in the books of travellers; some attention alsoshould be paid to the weather, if the climate is tobe praised. In the railroad cafe at Potsdam therewas a waiter so rude to the Marches that if they hadnot been people of great strength of character he wouldhave undone the favorable impression the soldiersand civilians of Berlin generally had been at suchpains to produce in them; and throughout the week ofearly September which they passed there, it rainedso much and so bitterly, it was so wet and so cold,that they might have come away thinking it’sthe worst climate in the world, if it had not beenfor a man whom they saw in one of the public gardenspouring a heavy stream from his garden hose upon theshrubbery already soaked and shuddering in the cold.

But this convinced them that they were suffering fromweather and not from the climate, which must reallybe hot and dry; and they went home to their hoteland sat contentedly down in a temperature of sixtydegrees. The weather, was not always so bad; oneday it was dry cold instead of wet cold, with rough,rusty clouds breaking a blue sky; another day, upto eleven in the forenoon, it was like Indian summer;then it changed to a harsh November air; and then itrelented and ended so mildly, that they hired chairsin the place before the imperial palace for five pfennigseach, and sat watching the life before them. Motherlywomen-folk were there knitting; two American girlsin chairs near them chatted together; some fine equipages,the only ones they saw in Berlin, went by; a dog anda man (the wife who ought to have been in harness wasprobably sick, and the poor fellow was forced to takeher place) passed dragging a cart; some schoolboyswho had hung their satchels upon the low railing wereplaying about the base of the statue of King WilliamIII. in the joyous freedom of German childhood.

They seemed the gayer for the brief moments of sunshine,but to the Americans, who were Southern by virtueof their sky, the brightness had a sense of lurkingwinter in it, such as they remembered feeling on asunny day in Quebec. The blue heaven looked sad;but they agreed that it fitly roofed the bit of oldfeudal Berlin which forms the most ancient wing ofthe Schloss. This was time-blackened and rude,but at least it did not try to be French, and it overhungthe Spree which winds through the city and gives itthe greatest charm it has. In fact Berlin, whichis otherwise so grandiose without grandeur and sosevere without impressiveness, is sympathetic whereverthe Spree opens it to the sky. The stream isspanned by many bridges, and bridges cannot well beunpicturesque, especially if they have statues to helpthem out. The Spree abounds in bridges, and ithas a charming habit of slow hay-laden barges; atthe landings of the little passenger-steamers whichply upon it there are cafes and summer-gardens, andthese even in the inclement air of September suggesteda friendly gayety.

The Marches saw it best in the tour of the elevatedroad in Berlin which they made in an impassioned memoryof the elevated road in New York. The brick viaductswhich carry this arch the Spree again and again intheir course through and around the city, but withnever quite such spectacular effects as our spiderytressels, achieve. The stations are pleasant,sometimes with lunch-counters and news-stands, buthave not the comic-opera-chalet prettiness of ours,and are not so frequent. The road is not so smooth,the cars not so smooth-running or so swift. Onthe other hand they are comfortably cushioned, andthey are never overcrowded. The line is at timesabove, at times below the houses, and at times ona level with them, alike in city and in suburbs.

The train whirled out of thickly built districts,past the backs of the old houses, into outskirts thinlypopulated, with new houses springing up without orderor continuity among the meadows and vegetable-gardens,and along the ready-made, elm-planted avenues, wherewooden fences divided the vacant lots. Everywherethe city was growing out over the country, in blocksand detached edifices of limestone, sandstone, redand yellow brick, larger or smaller, of no more uniformitythan our suburban dwellings, but never of their uglinessor lawless offensiveness.

In an effort for the intimate life of the countryMarch went two successive mornings for his breakfastto the Cafe Bauer, which has some admirable wall-printings,and is the chief cafe on Unter den Linden; but onboth days there were more people in the paintings thanout of them. The second morning the waiter whotook his order recognized him and asked, “Wiegestern?” and from this he argued an affectionateconstancy in the Berliners, and a hospitable observanceof the tastes of strangers. At his bankers, onthe other hand, the cashier scrutinized his signatureand remarked that it did not look like the signaturein his letter of credit, and then he inferred a suspiciousmind in the moneyed classes of Prussia; as he hadnot been treated with such unkind doubt by Hebrewbankers anywhere, he made a mental note that the Jewswere politer than the Christians in Germany.In starting for Potsdam he asked a traeger where thePotsdam train was and the man said, “Dat traindare,” and in coming back he helped a fat oldlady out of the car, and she thanked him in English.From these incidents, both occurring the same day inthe same place, the inference of a widespread knowledgeof our language in all classes of the population wasinevitable.

In this obvious and easy manner he studied contemporarycivilization in the capital. He even carriedhis researches farther, and went one rainy afternoonto an exhibition of modern pictures in a pavilion ofthe Thiergarten, where from the small attendance heinferred an indifference to the arts which he wouldnot ascribe to the weather. One evening at asummer theatre where they gave the pantomime of the‘Puppenfee’ and the operetta of ‘Hanseland Gretel’, he observed that the greater partof the audience was composed of nice plain young girlsand children, and he noted that there was no sortof evening dress; from the large number of Americanspresent he imagined a numerous colony in Berlin, wherethey mast have an instinctive sense of their co-nationality,since one of them in the stress of getting his hatand overcoat when they all came out, confidently addressedhim in English. But he took stock of his impressionswith his wife, and they seemed to him so few, afterall, that he could not resist a painful sense of isolationin the midst of the environment.

They made a Sunday excursion to the Zoological Gardensin the Thiergarten, with a large crowd of the lowerclasses, but though they had a great deal of troublein getting there by the various kinds of horsecarsand electric cars, they did not feel that they hadgot near to the popular life. They endeavoredfor some sense of Berlin society by driving home ina drosky, and on the way they passed rows of beautifulhouses, in French and Italian taste, fronting the deep,damp green park from the Thiergartenstrasse, in whichthey were confident cultivated and delightful peoplelived; but they remained to the last with nothing buttheir unsupported conjecture.

LXV.

Their excursion to Potsdam was the cream of theirsojourn in Berlin. They chose for it the firstfair morning, and they ran out over the flat sandyplains surrounding the capital, and among the low hillssurrounding Potsdam before it actually began to rain.

They wished immediately to see Sans Souci for thegreat Frederick’s sake, and they drove througha lively shower to the palace, where they waited witha horde of twenty-five other tourists in a gusty colonnadebefore they were led through Voltaire’s roomand Frederick’s death chamber.

The French philosopher comes before the Prussian princeat Sans Souci even in the palatial villa which expressesthe wilful caprice of the great Frederick as few edificeshave embodied the whims or tastes of their owners.The whole affair is eighteenth-century French, as theGermans conceived it. The gardened terrace fromwhich the low, one-story building, thickly crustedwith baroque sculptures, looks down into a many-coloredparterre, was luxuriantly French, and sentimentallyFrench the colonnaded front opening to a perspectiveof artificial ruins, with broken pillars lifting aconscious fragment of architrave against the sky.Within, all again was French in the design, the decorationand the furnishing. At that time there, was infact no other taste, and Frederick, who despised anddisused his native tongue, was resolved upon Frenchtaste even in his intimate companionship. Thedroll story of his coquetry with the terrible freespirit which he got from France to be his guest isvividly reanimated at Sans Souci, where one breathesthe very air in which the strangely assorted companionslived, and in which they parted so soon to pursueeach other with brutal annoyance on one side, andwith merciless mockery on the other. Voltairewas long ago revenged upon his host for all the indignitieshe suffered from him in their comedy; he left deeplygraven upon Frederick’s fame the trace of thoselacerating talons which he could strike to the quick;and it is the singular effect of this scene of theirbrief friendship that one feels there the pre-eminenceof the wit in whatever was most important to mankind.

The rain had lifted a little and the sun shone outon the bloom of the lovely parterre where the Marchesprofited by a smiling moment to wander among the statuesand the roses heavy with the shower. Then theywalked back to their carriage and drove to the NewPalace, which expresses in differing architecturalterms the same subjection to an alien ideal of beauty.It is thronged without by delightfully preposterousrococco statues, and within it is rich in all thosecuriosities and memorials of royalty with which palacesso well know how to fatigue the flesh and spirit oftheir visitors.

The Marches escaped from it all with sighs and groansof relief, and before they drove off to see the greatfountain of the Orangeries, they dedicated a momentof pathos to the Temple of Friendship which Frederickbuilt in memory of unhappy Wilhelmina of Beyreuth,the sister he loved in the common sorrow of theirwretched home, and neglected when he came to his kingdom.It is beautiful in its rococco way, swept up to onits terrace by most noble staircases, and swaggeredover by baroque allegories of all sorts: Everywherethe statues outnumbered the visitors, who may havebeen kept away by the rain; the statues naturally didnot mind it.

Sometime in the midst of their sight-seeing the Marcheshad dinner in a mildewed restaurant, where a compatrioticaccent caught their ear in a voice saying to the waiter,“We are in a hurry.” They looked roundand saw that it proceeded from the pretty nose ofa young American girl, who sat with a party of youngAmerican girls at a neighboring table. Then theyperceived that all the people in that restaurant wereAmericans, mostly young girls, who all looked as ifthey were in a hurry. But neither their beautynor their impatience had the least effect with thewaiter, who prolonged the dinner at his pleasure, andalarmed the Marches with the misgiving that they shouldnot have time for the final palace on their list.

This was the palace where the father of Frederick,the mad old Frederick William, brought up his childrenwith that severity which Solomon urged but probablydid not practise. It is a vast place, but theyhad time for it all, though the custodian made themost of them as the latest comers of the day, andled them through it with a prolixity as great as theirwaiter’s. He was a most friendly custodian,and when he found that they had some little notionof what they wanted to see, he mixed zeal with hispatronage, and in a manner made them his honored guests.They saw everything but the doorway where the faithfulroyal father used to lie in wait for his childrenand beat them, princes and princesses alike, withhis knobby cane as they came through. They mighthave seen this doorway without knowing it; but fromthe window overlooking the parade-ground where hisfamily watched the manoeuvres of his gigantic grenadiers,they made sure of just such puddles as Frederick William

forced his family to sit with their feet in, whilethey dined alfresco on pork and cabbage; and theyvisited the room of the Smoking Parliament where heruled his convives with a rod of iron, and made themthe victims of his bad jokes. The measuring-boardagainst which he took the stature of his tall grenadiersis there, and one room is devoted to those masterpieceswhich he used to paint in the agonies of gout.His chef d’oeuvre contains a figure with twoleft feet, and there seemed no reason why it mightnot. have had three. In another room is a smallstatue of Carlyle, who did so much to rehabilitatethe house which the daughter of it, Wilhelmina, didso much to demolish in the regard of men.

The palace is now mostly kept for guests, and thereis a chamber where Napoleon slept, which is not likelyto be occupied soon by any other self-invited guestof his nation. It is perhaps to keep the princesof Europe humble that hardly a palace on the Continentis without the chamber of this adventurer, who, tillhe stooped to be like them, was easily their master.Another democracy had here recorded its invasion inthe American stoves which the custodian pointed outin the corridor when Mrs, March, with as little delayas possible, had proclaimed their country. Thecustodian professed an added respect for them fromthe fact, and if he did not feel it, no doubt he meritedthe drink money which they lavished on him at parting.

Their driver also was a congenial spirit, and whenhe let them out of his carriage at the station, heexcused the rainy day to them. He was a merryfellow beyond the wont of his nation, and he-laughedat the bad weather, as if it had been a good jokeon them.

His gayety, and the red sunset light, which shoneon the stems of the pines on the way back to Berlin,contributed to the content in which they reviewedtheir visit to Potsdam. They agreed that the placewas perfectly charming, and that it was incomparablyexpressive of kingly will and pride. These haddone there on the grand scale what all the Germanprinces and princelings had tried to do in imitationand emulation of French splendor. In Potsdamthe grandeur, was not a historical growth as at Versailles,but was the effect of family genius, in which therewas often the curious fascination of insanity.

They felt this strongly again amidst the futile monumentsof the Hohenzollern Museum, in Berlin, where all theportraits, effigies, personal belongings and memorialsof that gifted, eccentric race are gathered and historicallydisposed. The princes of the mighty line whostand out from the rest are Frederick the Great andhis infuriate. father; and in the waxen likeness ofthe son, a small thin figure, terribly spry, and aface pitilessly alert, appears something of the madnesswhich showed in the life of the sire.

They went through many rooms in which the memorialsof the kings and queens, the emperors and empresseswere carefully ordered, and felt no kindness exceptbefore the relics relating to the Emperor Frederickand his mother. In the presence of the greatestof the dynasty they experienced a kind of terror whichMarch expressed, when they were safely away, in theconfession of his joy that those people were dead.

LXVI.

The rough weather which made Berlin almost uninhabitableto Mrs. March had such an effect with General Triscoeat Weimar that under the orders of an English-speakingdoctor he retreated from it altogether and went tobed. Here he escaped the bronchitis which hadattacked him, and his convalesence left him so littleto complain of that he could not always keep his temper.In the absence of actual offence, either from hisdaughter or from Burnamy, his sense of injury tooka retroactive form; it centred first in Stoller andthe twins; then it diverged toward Rose Adding, hismother and Kenby, and finally involved the Marchesin the same measure of inculpation; for they had eachand all had part, directly or indirectly, in the chancesthat brought on his cold.

He owed to Burnamy the comfort of the best room inthe hotel, and he was constantly dependent upon hiskindness; but he made it evident that he did not over-valueBurnamy’s sacrifice and devotion, and that itwas not an unmixed pleasure, however great a convenience,to have him about. In giving up his room, Burnamyhad proposed going out of the hotel altogether; butGeneral Triscoe heard of this with almost as greatvexation as he had accepted the room. He besoughthim not to go, but so ungraciously that his daughterwas ashamed, and tried to atone for his manner bythe kindness of her own.

Perhaps General Triscoe would not have been withoutexcuse if he were not eager to have her share withdestitute merit the fortune which she had hithertoshared only with him. He was old, and certainluxuries had become habits if not necessaries withhim. Of course he did not say this to himself;and still less did he say it to her. But he lether see that he did not enjoy the chance which hadthrown them again in such close relations with Burnamy,and he did pot hide his belief that the Marches weresomehow to blame for it. This made it impossiblefor her to write at once to Mrs. March as she hadpromised; but she was determined that it should notmake her unjust to Burnamy. She would not avoidhim; she would not let anything that had happenedkeep her from showing that she felt his kindness andwas glad of his help.

Of course they knew no one else in Weimar, and hispresence merely as a fellow-countryman would havebeen precious. He got them a doctor, againstGeneral Triscoe’s will; he went for his medicines;he lent him books and papers; he sat with him andtried to amuse him. But with the girl he attemptedno return to the situation at Carlsbad; there is nothinglike the delicate pride of a young man who resolvesto forego unfair advantage in love.

The day after their arrival, when her father was makingup for the sleep he had lost by night, she found herselfalone in the little reading-room of the hotel withBurnamy for the first time, and she said: “Isuppose you must have been all over Weimar by thistime.”

“Well, I’ve been here, off and on, almosta month. It’s an interesting place.There’s a good deal of the old literary qualityleft.”

“And you enjoy that! I saw”—­sheadded this with a little unnecessary flush—­“yourpoem in the paper you lent papa.”

“I suppose I ought to have kept that back.But I couldn’t.” He laughed, andshe said:

“You must find a great deal of inspiration insuch a literary place.”

“It isn’t lying about loose, exactly.”Even in the serious and perplexing situation in whichhe found himself he could not help being amused withher unliterary notions of literature, her conventionaland commonplace conceptions of it. They had theirvalue with him as those of a more fashionable worldthan his own, which he believed was somehow a greaterworld. At the same time he believed that she wasnow interposing them between the present and the past,and forbidding with them any return to the mood oftheir last meeting in Carlsbad. He looked at herladylike composure and unconsciousness, and wonderedif she could be the same person and the same personas they who lost themselves in the crowd that nightand heard and said words palpitant with fate.Perhaps there had been no such words; perhaps it wasall a hallucination. He must leave her to recognizethat it was reality; till she did so, he felt bitterlythat there was nothing for him but submission andpatience; if she never did so, there was nothing forhim but acquiescence.

In this talk and in the talks they had afterwardsshe seemed willing enough to speak of what had happenedsince: of coming on to Wurzburg with the Addingsand of finding the Marches there; of Rose’s collapse,and of his mother’s flight seaward with himin the care of Kenby, who was so fortunately goingto Holland, too. He on his side told her of goingto Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, and they agreed thatit was very strange they had not met.

She did not try to keep their relations from takingthe domestic character which was inevitable, and itseemed to him that this in itself was significantof a determination on her part that was fatal to hishopes. With a lover’s indefinite power ofblinding himself to what is before his eyes, he believedthat if she had been more diffident of him, more uneasyin his presence, he should have had more courage; butfor her to breakfast unafraid with him, to meet himat lunch and dinner in the little dining-room wherethey were often the only guests, and always the onlyEnglish-speaking guests, was nothing less than prohibitive.

In the hotel service there was one of those men whoare porters in this world, but will be angels in thenext, unless the perfect goodness of their looks,the constant kindness of their acts, belies them.The Marches had known and loved the man in their briefstay, and he had been the fast friend of Burnamy fromthe moment they first saw each other at the station.He had tenderly taken possession of General Triscoeon his arrival, and had constituted himself the nurseand keeper of the irascible invalid, in the intervalsof going to the trains, with a zeal that often relievedhis daughter and Burnamy. The general in factpreferred him to either, and a tacit custom grew upby which when August knocked at his door, and offeredhimself in his few words of serviceable English, thatone of them who happened to be sitting with the generalgave way, and left him in charge. The retiringwatcher was then apt to encounter the other watcheron the stairs, or in the reading-room, or in the tiny,white-pebbled door-yard at a little table in the shadeof the wooden-tubbed evergreens. From the habitof doing this they one day suddenly formed the habitof going across the street to that gardened hollowbefore and below the Grand-Ducal Museum. Therewas here a bench in the shelter of some late-floweringbush which the few other frequenters of the placesoon recognized as belonging to the young strangers,so that they would silently rise and leave it to themwhen they saw them coming. Apparently they yieldednot only to their right, but to a certain authoritywhich resides in lovers, and which all other men, andespecially all other women, like to acknowledge andrespect.

In the absence of any civic documents bearing uponthe affair it is difficult to establish the fact thatthis was the character in which Agatha and Burnamywere commonly regarded by the inhabitants of Weimar.But whatever their own notion of their relation was,if it was not that of a Brant and a Brautigam, thepeople of Weimar would have been puzzled to say whatit was. It was known that the gracious young lady’sfather, who would naturally have accompanied them,was sick, and in the fact that they were Americansmuch extenuation was found for whatever was phenomenalin their unencumbered enjoyment of each other’ssociety.

If their free American association was indistinguishablylike the peasant informality which General Triscoedespised in the relations of Kenby and Mrs. Adding,it is to be said in his excuse that he could not befully cognizant of it, in the circ*mstances, and socould do nothing to prevent it. His pessimismextended to his health; from the first he believedhimself worse than the doctor thought him, and he wouldhave had some other physician if he had not foundconsolation in their difference of opinion and theconsequent contempt which he was enabled to cherishfor the doctor in view of the man’s completeignorance of the case. In proof of his own betterunderstanding of it, he remained in bed some time afterthe doctor said he might get up.

Nearly ten days had passed before he left his room,and it was not till then that he clearly saw how faraffairs had gone with his daughter and Burnamy, thougheven then his observance seemed to have anticipatedtheirs. He found them in a quiet acceptance ofthe fortune which had brought them together, so contentedthat they appeared to ask nothing more of it.The divine patience and confidence of their youth mightsometimes have had almost the effect of indifferenceto a witness who had seen its evolution from the moodsof the first few days of their reunion in Weimar.To General Triscoe, however, it looked like an understandingwhich had been made without reference to his wishes,and had not been directly brought to his knowledge.

“Agatha,” he said, after due note of agay contest between her and Burnamy over the pleasureand privilege of ordering his supper sent to his roomwhen he had gone back to it from his first afternoonin the open air, “how long is that young mangoing to stay in Weimar?”

“Why, I don’t know!” she answered,startled from her work of beating the sofa pillowsinto shape, and pausing with one of them in her hand.“I never asked him.” She looked downcandidly into his face where he sat in an easy-chairwaiting for her arrangement of the sofa. “Whatmakes you ask?”

He answered with another question. “Doeshe know that we had thought of staying here?”

“Why, we’ve always talked of that, haven’twe? Yes, he knows it. Didn’t you wanthim to know it, papa? You ought to have begunon the ship, then. Of course I’ve askedhim what sort of place it was. I’m sorryif you didn’t want me to.”

“Have I said that? It’s perfectlyeasy to push on to Paris. Unless—­”

“Unless what?” Agatha dropped the pillow,and listened respectfully. But in spite of herfilial attitude she could not keep her youth and strengthand courage from quelling the forces of the elderlyman.

He said querulously, “I don’t see whyyou take that tone with me. You certainly knowwhat I mean. But if you don’t care to dealopenly with me, I won’t ask you.”He dropped his eyes from her face, and at the sametime a deep blush began to tinge it, growing up fromher neck to her forehead. “You must know—­you’renot a child,” he continued, still with avertedeyes, “that this sort of thing can’t goon... It must be something else, or it mustn’tbe anything at all. I don’t ask you foryour confidence, and you know that I’ve neversought to control you.”

This was not the least true, but Agatha answered,either absently or provisionally, “No.”

“And I don’t seek to do so now. Ifyou have nothing that you wish to tell me—­”

He waited, and after what seemed a long time, sheasked as if she had not heard him, “Will youlie down a little before your supper, papa?”

“I will lie down when I feel like it,”he answered. “Send August with the supper;he can look after me.”

His resentful tone, even more than his words, dismissedher, but she left him without apparent grievance,saying quietly, “I will send August.”

LXVII.

Agatha did not come down to supper with Burnamy.She asked August, when she gave him her father’sorder, to have a cup of tea sent to her room, where,when it came, she remained thinking so long that itwas rather tepid by the time she drank it.

Then she went to her window, and looked out, firstabove and next below. Above, the moon was hangingover the gardened hollow before the Museum with theairy lightness of an American moon. Below wasBurnamy behind the tubbed evergreens, sitting tiltedin his chair against the house wall, with the sparkof his cigar fainting and flashing like an Americanfirefly. Agatha went down to the door, after alittle delay, and seemed surprised to find him there;at least she said, “Oh!” in a tone ofsurprise.

Burnamy stood up, and answered, “Nice night.”

“Beautiful!” she breathed. “Ididn’t suppose the sky in Germany could everbe so clear.”

“It seems to be doing its best.”

“The flowers over there look like ghosts inthe light,” she said dreamily.

“They’re not. Don’t you wantto get your hat and wrap, and go over and expose thefraud?”

“Oh,” she answered, as if it were merelya question of the hat and wrap, “I have them.”

They sauntered through the garden walks for a while,long enough to have ascertained that there was nota veridical phantom among the flowers, if they hadbeen looking, and then when they came to their accustomedseat, they sat down, and she said, “I don’tknow that I’ve seen the moon so clear sincewe left Carlsbad.” At the last word hisheart gave a jump that seemed to lodge it in his throatand kept him from speaking, so that she could resumewithout interruption, “I’ve got somethingof yours, that you left at the Posthof. The girlthat broke the dishes found it, and Lili gave it toMrs. March for you.” This did not accountfor Agatha’s having the thing, whatever it was;but when she took a handkerchief from her belt, andput out her hand with it toward him, he seemed to findthat her having it had necessarily followed.He tried to take it from her, but his own hand trembledso that it clung to hers, and he gasped, “Can’tyou say now, what you wouldn’t say then?”

The logical sequence was no more obvious than be fore;but she apparently felt it in her turn as he had feltit in his. She whispered back, “Yes,”and then she could not get out anything more till sheentreated in a half-stifled voice, “Oh, don’t!”

“No, no!” he panted. “I won’t—­Ioughtn’t to have done it—­I beg yourpardon—­I oughtn’t to have spoken,—­even—­I—­”

She returned in a far less breathless and tremulousfashion, but still between laughing and crying, “Imeant to make you. And now, if you’re eversorry, or I’m ever too topping about anything,you can be perfectly free to say that you’dnever have spoken if you hadn’t seen that I wantedyou to.”

“But I didn’t see any such thing,”he protested. “I spoke because I couldn’thelp it any longer.”

She laughed triumphantly. “Of course youthink so! And that shows that you are only aman after all; in spite of your finessing. ButI am going to have the credit of it. I knew thatyou were holding back because you were too proud,or thought you hadn’t the right, or something.Weren’t you?” She startled him with thesudden vehemence of her challenge: “Ifyou pretend, that you weren’t I shall never forgiveyou!”

“But I was! Of course I was. I wasafraid—­”

“Isn’t that what I said?” She triumphedover him with another laugh, and cowered a littlecloser to him, if that could be.

They were standing, without knowing how they had gotto their feet; and now without any purpose of thekind, they began to stroll again among the gardenpaths, and to ask and to answer questions, which touchedevery point of their common history, and yet leftit a mine of inexhaustible knowledge for all futuretime. Out of the sweet and dear delight of thisencyclopedian reserve two or three facts appeared witha present distinctness. One of these was thatBurnamy had regarded her refusal to be definite atCarlsbad as definite refusal, and had meant never tosee her again, and certainly never to speak againof love to her. Another point was that she hadnot resented his coming back that last night, buthad been proud and happy in it as proof of his love,and had always meant somehow to let him know thatshe was torched by his trusting her enough to comeback while he was still under that cloud with Mr. Stoller.With further logic, purely of the heart, she acquittedhim altogether of wrong in that affair, and allegedin proof, what Mr. Stoller had said of it to Mr. March.Burnamy owned that he knew what Stoller had said, buteven in his present condition he could not acceptfully her reading of that obscure passage of his life.He preferred to put the question by, and perhaps neitherof them cared anything about it except as it relatedto the fact that they were now each other’sforever.

They agreed that they must write to Mr. and Mrs. Marchat once; or at least, Agatha said, as soon as shehad spoken to her father. At her mention of herfather she was aware of a doubt, a fear, in Burnamywhich expressed itself by scarcely more than a spiritualconsciousness from his arm to the hands which shehad clasped within it. “He has always appreciatedyou,” she said courageously, “and I knowhe will see it in the right light.”

She probably meant no more than to affirm her faithin her own ability finally to bring her father toa just mind concerning it; but Burnamy accepted herassurance with buoyant hopefulness, and said he wouldsee General Triscoe the first thing in the morning.

“No, I will see him,” she said, “Iwish to see him first; he will expect it of me.We had better go in, now,” she added, but neithermade any motion for the present to do so. Onthe contrary, they walked in the other direction,and it was an hour after Agatha declared their dutyin the matter before they tried to fulfil it.

Then, indeed, after they returned to the hotel, shelost no time in going to her father beyond that whichmust be given to a long hand-pressure under the frescoof the five poets on the stairs landing, where herways and Burnamy’s parted. She went intoher own room, and softly opened the door into herfather’s and listened.

“Well?” he said in a sort of challengingvoice.

“Have you been asleep?” she asked.

“I’ve just blown out my light. Whathas kept you?”

She did not reply categorically. Standing therein the sheltering dark, she said, “Papa, I wasn’tvery candid with you, this afternoon. I am engagedto Mr. Burnamy.”

“Light the candle,” said her father.“Or no,” he added before she could doso. “Is it quite settled?”

“Quite,” she answered in a voice thatadmitted of no doubt. “That is, as faras it can be, without you.”

“Don’t be a hypocrite, Agatha,”said the general. “And let me try to getto sleep. You know I don’t like it, andyou know I can’t help it.”

“Yes,” the girl assented.

“Then go to bed,” said the general concisely.

Agatha did not obey her father. She thought sheought to kiss him, but she decided that she had betterpostpone this; so she merely gave him a tender goodnight,to which he made no response, and shut herself intoher own room, where she remained sitting and staringout into the moonlight, with a smile that never lefther lips.

When the moon sank below the horizon, the sky waspale with the coming day, but before it was fairlydawn, she saw something white, not much greater thansome moths, moving before her window. She pulledthe valves open and found it a bit of paper attachedto a thread dangling from above. She broke itloose and in the morning twilight she read the greatcentral truth of the universe:

“I love you. L. J. B.”

She wrote under the tremendous inspiration:

“So do I. Don’t be silly. A. T.”

She fastened the paper to the thread again, and gaveit a little twitch. She waited for the low noteof laughter which did not fail to flutter down fromabove; then she threw herself upon the bed, and fellasleep.

It was not so late as she thought when she woke, andit seemed, at breakfast, that Burnamy had been upstill earlier. Of the three involved in the anxietyof the night before General Triscoe was still respitedfrom it by sleep, but he woke much more haggard thaneither of the young people. They, in fact, werenot at all haggard; the worst was over, if bringingtheir engagement to his knowledge was the worst; theformality of asking his consent which Burnamy stillhad to go through was unpleasant, but after all itwas a formality. Agatha told him everything thathad passed between herself and her father, and if ithad not that cordiality on his part which they couldhave wished it was certainly not hopelessly discouraging.

They agreed at breakfast that Burnamy had better haveit over as quickly as possible, and he waited onlytill August came down with the general’s traybefore going up to his room. The young fellowdid not feel more at his ease than the elder meanthe should in taking the chair to which the generalwaved him from where he lay in bed; and there was notalk wasted upon the weather between them.

“I suppose I know what you have come for, Mr.Burnamy,” said General Triscoe in a tone whichwas rather judicial than otherwise, “and I supposeyou know why you have come.” The words certainlyopened the way for Burnamy, but he hesitated so longto take it that the general had abundant time to add,“I don’t pretend that this event is unexpected,but I should like to know what reason you have forthinking I should wish you to marry my daughter.I take it for granted that you are attached to eachother, and we won’t waste time on that point.Not to beat about the bush, on the next point, letme ask at once what your means of supporting her are.How much did you earn on that newspaper in Chicago?”

“Fifteen hundred dollars,” Burnamy answered,promptly enough.

“Did you earn anything more, say within thelast year?”

“I got three hundred dollars advance copyrightfor a book I sold to a publisher.” Theglory had not yet faded from the fact in Burnamy’smind.

“Eighteen hundred. What did you get foryour poem in March’s book?”

“That’s a very trifling matter: fifteendollars.”

“And your salary as private secretary to thatman Stoller?”

“Thirty dollars a week, and my expenses.But I wouldn’t take that, General Triscoe,”said Burnamy.

General Triscoe, from his ‘lit de justice’,passed this point in silence. “Have youany one dependent on you?”

“My mother; I take care of my mother,”answered Burnamy, proudly.

“Since you have broken with Stoller, what areyour prospects?”

“I have none.”

“Then you don’t expect to support my daughter;you expect to live upon her means.”

“I expect to do nothing of the kind!”cried Burnamy. “I should be ashamed—­Ishould feel disgraced—­I should—­Idon’t ask you—­I don’t ask hertill I have the means to support her—­”

“If you were very fortunate,” continuedthe general, unmoved by the young fellow’s pain,and unperturbed by the fact that he had himself livedupon his wife’s means as long as she lived,and then upon his daughter’s, “if youwent back to Stoller—­”

“I wouldn’t go back to him. I don’tsay he’s knowingly a rascal, but he’signorantly a rascal, and he proposed a rascally thingto me. I behaved badly to him, and I’dgive anything to undo the wrong I let him do himself;but I’ll never go back to him.”

“If you went back, on your old salary,”the general persisted pitilessly, “you wouldbe very fortunate if you brought your earnings up totwenty-five hundred a year.”

“Yes—­”

“And how far do you think that would go in supportingmy daughter on the scale she is used to? I don’tspeak of your mother, who has the first claim uponyou.”

Burnamy sat dumb; and his head which he had liftedindignantly when the question was of Stoller, beganto sink.

The general went on. “You ask me to giveyou my daughter when you haven’t money enoughto keep her in gowns; you ask me to give her to astranger—­”

“Not quite a stranger, General Triscoe,”Burnamy protested. “You have known me forthree months at least, and any one who knows me inChicago will tell you—­”

“A stranger, and worse than a stranger,”the general continued, so pleased with the logicalperfection of his position that he almost smiled,and certainly softened toward Burnamy. “Itisn’t a question of liking you, Mr. Burnamy,but of knowing you; my daughter likes you; so do theMarches; so does everybody who has met you. Ilike you myself. You’ve done me personallya thousand kindnesses. But I know very littleof you, in spite of our three months’ acquaintance;and that little is—­But you shall judgefor yourself! You were in the confidential employof a man who trusted you, and you let him betray himself.”

“I did. I don’t excuse it. Thethought of it burns like fire. But it wasn’tdone maliciously; it wasn’t done falsely; itwas done inconsiderately; and when it was done, itseemed irrevocable. But it wasn’t; I couldhave prevented, I could have stooped the mischief;and I didn’t! I can never outlive that.”

“I know,” said the general relentlessly,“that you have never attempted any defence.That has been to your credit with me. It inclinedme to overlook your unwarranted course in writingto my daughter, when you told her you would neversee her again. What did you expect me to think,after that, of your coming back to see her? Ordidn’t you expect me to know it?”

“I expected you to know it; I knew she wouldtell you. But I don’t excuse that, either.It was acting a lie to come back. All I can sayis that I had to see her again for one last time.”

“And to make sure that it was to be the lasttime, you offered yourself to her.”

“I couldn’t help doing that.”

“I don’t say you could. I don’tjudge the facts at all. I leave them altogetherto you; and you shall say what a man in my positionought to say to such a man as you have shown yourself.”

“No, I will say.” The door into theadjoining room was flung open, and Agatha flashedin from it.

Her father looked coldly at her impassioned face.“Have you been listening?” he asked.

“I have been hearing—­”

“Oh!” As nearly as a man could, in bed,General Triscoe shrugged.

“I suppose I had, a right to be in my own room.I couldn’t help hearing; and I was perfectlyastonished at you, papa, the cruel way you went on,after all you’ve said about Mr. Stoller, andhis getting no more than he deserved.”

“That doesn’t justify me,” Burnamybegan, but she cut him short almost as severely asshe—­had dealt with her father.

“Yes, it does! It justifies you perfectly!And his wanting you to falsify the whole thing afterwards,more than justifies you.”

Neither of the men attempted anything in reply toher casuistry; they both looked equally posed by it,for different reasons; and Agatha went on as vehementlyas before, addressing herself now to one and now tothe other.

“And besides, if it didn’t justify you,what you have done yourself would; and your neverdenying it, or trying to excuse it, makes it the sameas if you hadn’t done it, as far as you are concerned;and that is all I care for.” Burnamy started,as if with the sense of having heard something likethis before, and with surprise at hearing it now; andshe flushed a little as she added tremulously, “AndI should never, never blame you for it, after that;it’s only trying to wriggle out of things whichI despise, and you’ve never done that. Andhe simply had to come back,” she turned to herfather, “and tell me himself just how it was.And you said yourself, papa—­or the sameas said—­that he had no right to supposeI was interested in his affairs unless he—­unless—­AndI should never have forgiven him, if he hadn’ttold me then that he that he had come back becausehe—­felt the way he did. I considerthat that exonerated him for breaking his word, completely.If he hadn’t broken his word I should have thoughthe had acted very cruelly and—­and strangely.And ever since then, he has behaved so nobly, so honorably,so delicately, that I don’t believe he wouldever have said anything again—­if I hadn’tfairly forced him. Yes! Yes, I did!”she cried at a movement of remonstrance from Burnamy.“And I shall always be proud of you for it.”Her father stared steadfastly at her, and he only liftedhis eyebrows, for change of expression, when she wentover to where Burnamy stood, and put her hand in hiswith a certain childlike impetuosity. “Andas for the rest,” she declared, “everythingI have is his; just as everything of his would bemine if I had nothing. Or if he wishes to takeme without anything, then he can have me so, and Isha’n’t be afraid but we can get alongsomehow.” She added, “I have managedwithout a maid, ever since I left home, and povertyhas no terrors for me!”

LXVIII.

General Triscoe submitted to defeat with the patiencewhich soldiers learn. He did not submit amiably;that would have been out of character, and perhapsout of reason; but Burnamy and Agatha were both soamiable that they supplied good-humor for all.They flaunted their rapture in her father’sface as little as they could, but he may have foundtheir serene satisfaction, their settled confidencein their fate, as hard to bear as a more boisteroushappiness would have been.

It was agreed among them all that they were to returnsoon to America, and Burnamy was to find some sortof literary or journalistic employment in New York.She was much surer than he that this could be donewith perfect ease; but they were of an equal mindthat General Triscoe was not to be disturbed in anyof his habits, or vexed in the tenor of his living;and until Burnamy was at least self-supporting theremust be no talk of their being married.

The talk of their being engaged was quite enough forthe time. It included complete and minute auto-biographieson both sides, reciprocal analyses of character, ascientifically exhaustive comparison of tastes, ideasand opinions; a profound study of their respectivechins, noses, eyes, hands, heights, complexions, molesand freckles, with some account of their several friends.

In this occupation, which was profitably varied bythe confession of what they had each thought and feltand dreamt concerning the other at every instant sincethey met, they passed rapidly the days which the persistentanxiety of General Triscoe interposed before the dateof their leaving Weimar for Paris, where it was arrangedthat they should spend a month before sailing forNew York. Burnamy had a notion, which Agatha approved,of trying for something there on the New York-ParisChronicle; and if he got it they might not go homeat once. His gains from that paper had eked outhis copyright from his book, and had almost paid hisexpenses in getting the material which he had contributedto it. They were not so great, however, but thathis gold reserve was reduced to less than a hundreddollars, counting the silver coinages which had remainedto him in crossing and recrossing frontiers.He was at times dimly conscious of his finances, buthe buoyantly disregarded the facts, as incompatiblewith his status as Agatha’s betrothed, if notunworthy of his character as a lover in the abstract.

The afternoon before they were to leave Weimar, theyspent mostly in the garden before the Grand-DucalMuseum, in a conference so important that when itcame on to rain, at one moment, they put up Burnamy’sumbrella, and continued to sit under it rather thaninterrupt the proceedings even to let Agatha go backto the hotel and look after her father’s packing.Her own had been finished before dinner, so as to leaveher the whole afternoon for their conference, andto allow her father to remain in undisturbed possessionof his room as long as possible.

What chiefly remained to be put into the general’strunk were his coats and trousers, hanging in thecloset, and August took these down, and carefullyfolded and packed them. Then, to make sure thatnothing had been forgotten, Agatha put a chair intothe closet when she came in, and stood on it to examinethe shelf which stretched above the hooks.

There seemed at first to be nothing on it, and thenthere seemed to be something in the further corner,which when it was tiptoed for, proved to be a bouquetof flowers, not so faded as to seem very old; the bluesatin ribbon which they were tied up with, and whichhung down half a yard, was of entire freshness exceptfar the dust of the shelf where it had lain.

Agatha backed out into the room with her find in herhand, and examined it near to, and then at arm’slength. August stood by with a pair of the general’strousers lying across his outstretched hands, and asAgatha absently looked round at him, she caught alight of intelligence in his eyes which changed herwhole psychological relation to the withered bouquet.Till then it had been a lifeless, meaningless bunchof flowers, which some one, for no motive, had tossedup on that dusty shelf in the closet. At August’ssmile it became something else. Still she askedlightly enough, “Was ist loss, August?”

His smile deepened and broadened. “Furdie Andere,” he explained.

Agatha demanded in English, “What do you meanby feardy ondery?”

“Oddaw lehdy.”

“Other lady?” August nodded, rejoicingin big success, and Agatha closed the door into herown room, where the general had been put for the timeso as to be spared the annoyance of the packing; thenshe sat down with her hands in her lap, and the bouquetin her hands. “Now, August,” shesaid very calmly, “I want you to tell me-ichwunsche Sie zu mir sagen—­what other lady—­wassandere Dame—­these flowers belonged to—­dieseBlumen gehorte zu. Verstehen Sie?”

August nodded brightly, and with German carefullyadjusted to Agatha’s capacity, and with nowand then a word or phrase of English, he conveyedthat before she and her Herr Father had appeared, therehad been in Weimar another American Fraulein withher Frau Mother; they had not indeed staid in thathotel, but had several times supped there with theyoung Herr Bornahmee, who was occupying that room beforeher Herr Father. The young Herr had been muchabout with these American Damen, driving and walkingwith them, and sometimes dining or supping with themat their hotel, The Elephant. August had sometimescarried notes to them from the young Herr, and hehad gone for the bouquet which the gracious Frauleinwas holding, on the morning of the day that the AmericanDamen left by the train for Hanover.

August was much helped and encouraged throughout bythe friendly intelligence of the gracious Fraulein,who smiled radiantly in clearing up one dim pointafter another, and who now and then supplied the Englishanalogues which he sought in his effort to render hisGerman more luminous.

At the end she returned to the work of packing, inwhich she directed him, and sometimes assisted himwith her own hands, having put the bouquet on themantel to leave herself free. She took it up againand carried it into her own room, when she went withAugust to summon her father back to his. Shebade August say to the young Herr, if he saw him,that she was going to sup with her father, and Augustgave her message to Burnamy, whom he met on the stairscoming down as he was going up with their tray.

Agatha usually supped with her father, but that eveningBurnamy was less able than usual to bear her absencein the hotel dining-room, and he went up to a cafein the town for his supper. He did not stay long,and when he returned his heart gave a joyful liftat sight of Agatha looking out from her balcony, asif she were looking for him. He made her a gayflourishing bow, lifting his hat high, and she camedown to meet him at the hotel door. She had herhat on and jacket over one arm and she joined himat once for the farewell walk he proposed in what theyhad agreed to call their garden.

She moved a little ahead of him, and when they reachedthe place where they always sat, she shifted her jacketto the other arm and uncovered the hand in which shehad been carrying the withered bouquet. “Hereis something I found in your closet, when I was gettingpapa’s things out.”

“Why, what is it?” he asked innocently,as he took it from her.

“A bouquet, apparently,” she answered,as he drew the long ribbons through his fingers, andlooked at the flowers curiously, with his head aslant.

“Where did you get it?”

“On the shelf.”

It seemed a long time before Burnamy said with a longsigh, as of final recollection, “Oh, yes,”and then he said nothing; and they did not sit down,but stood looking at each other.

“Was it something you got for me, and forgotto give me?” she asked in a voice which wouldnot have misled a woman, but which did its work withthe young man.

He laughed and said, “Well, hardly! Thegeneral has been in the room ever since you came.”

“Oh, yes. Then perhaps somebody left itthere before you had the room?”

Burnamy was silent again, but at last he said, “No,I flung it up there I had forgotten all about it.”

“And you wish me to forget about it, too?”Agatha asked in a gayety of tone that still deceivedhim.

“It would only be fair. You made me,”he rejoined, and there was something so charming inhis words and way, that she would have been glad todo it.

But she governed herself against the temptation andsaid, “Women are not good at forgetting, atleast till they know what.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you, if you want to know,”he said with a laugh, and at the words she—­sankprovisionally in their accustomed seat. He satdown beside her, but not so near as usual, and hewaited so long before he began that it seemed as ifhe had forgotten again. “Why, it’snothing. Miss Etkins and her mother were herebefore you came, and this is a bouquet that I meantto give her at the train when she left. But Idecided I wouldn’t, and I threw it onto the shelfin the closet.”

“May I ask why you thought of taking a bouquetto her at the train?”

“Well, she and her mother—­I had beenwith them a good deal, and I thought it would be civil.”

“And why did you decide not to be civil?”

“I didn’t want it to look like more thancivility.”

“Were they here long?”

“About a week. They left just after theMarches came.”

Agatha seemed not to heed the answer she had exacted.She sat reclined in the corner of the seat, with herhead drooping. After an interval which was longto Burnamy she began to pull at a ring on the thirdfinger of her left hand, absently, as if she did notknow what she was doing; but when she had got it offshe held it towards Burnamy and said quietly, “Ithink you had better have this again,” and thenshe rose and moved slowly and weakly away.

He had taken the ring mechanically from her, and hestood a moment bewildered; then he pressed after her.

“Agatha, do you—­you don’t mean—­”

“Yes,” she said, without looking roundat his face, which she knew was close to her shoulder.“It’s over. It isn’t what you’vedone. It’s what you are. I believedin you, in spite of what you did to that man—­andyour coming back when you said you wouldn’t—­and—­ButI see now that what you did was you; it was your nature;and I can’t believe in you any more.”

“Agatha!” he implored. “You’renot going to be so unjust! There was nothingbetween you and me when that girl was here! Ihad a right to—­”

“Not if you really cared for me! Do youthink I would have flirted with any one so soon, ifI had cared for you as you pretended you did for methat night in Carlsbad? Oh, I don’t sayyou’re false. But you’re fickle—­”

“But I’m not fickle! From the firstmoment I saw you, I never cared for any one but you!”

“You have strange ways of showing your devotion.Well, say you are not fickle. Say, that I’mfickle. I am. I have changed my mind.I see that it would never do. I leave you freeto follow all the turning and twisting of your fancy.”She spoke rapidly, almost breathlessly, and she gavehim no chance to get out the words that seemed tochoke him. She began to run, but at the doorof the hotel she stopped and waited till he came stupidlyup. “I have a favor to ask, Mr. Burnamy.I beg you will not see me again, if you can help itbefore we go to-morrow. My father and I are indebtedto you for too many kindnesses, and you mustn’ttake any more trouble on our account. Augustcan see us off in the morning.”

She nodded quickly, and was gone in-doors while hewas yet struggling with his doubt of the reality ofwhat had all so swiftly happened.

General Triscoe was still ignorant of any change inthe status to which he had reconciled himself withso much difficulty, when he came down to get intothe omnibus for the train. Till then he had beentoo proud to ask what had become of Burnamy, thoughhe had wondered, but now he looked about and saidimpatiently, “I hope that young man isn’tgoing to keep us waiting.”

Agatha was pale and worn with sleeplessness, but shesaid firmly, “He isn’t going, papa.I will tell you in the train. August will seeto the tickets and the baggage.”

August conspired with the traeger to get them a first-classcompartment to themselves. But even with theadvantages of this seclusion Agatha’s confidencesto her father were not full. She told her fatherthat her engagement was broken for reasons that didnot mean anything very wrong in Mr. Burnamy but thatconvinced her they could never be happy together.As she did not give the reasons, he found a naturaldifficulty in accepting them, and there was somethingin the situation which appealed strongly to his contrary-mindedness.Partly from this, partly from his sense of injuryin being obliged so soon to adjust himself to newconditions, and partly from his comfortable feelingof security from an engagement to which his assenthad been forced, he said, “I hope you’renot making a mistake.”

“Oh, no,” she answered, and she attestedher conviction by a burst of sobbing that lasted wellon the way to the first stop of the train.

LXIX.

It would have been always twice as easy to go directfrom Berlin to the Hague through Hanover; but theMarches decided to go by Frankfort and the Rhine,because they wished to revisit the famous river, whichthey remembered from their youth, and because theywished to stop at Dusseldorf, where Heinrich Heinewas born. Without this Mrs. March, who kept herhusband up to his early passion for the poet with afeeling that she was defending him from age in it,said that their silver wedding journey would not becomplete; and he began himself to think that it wouldbe interesting.

They took a sleeping-car for Frankfort and they wokeearly as people do in sleeping-cars everywhere.March dressed and went out for a cup of the same coffeeof which sleeping-car buffets have the awful secretin Europe as well as America, and for a glimpse ofthe twilight landscape. One gray little town,towered and steepled and red-roofed within its mediaevalwalls, looked as if it would have been warmer in somethingmore. There was a heavy dew, if not a light frost,over all, and in places a pale fog began to lift fromthe low hills. Then the sun rose without dispersingthe cold, which was afterwards so severe in their roomat the Russischer Hof in Frankfort that in spite ofthe steam-radiators they sat shivering in all theirwraps till breakfast-time.

There was no steam on in the radiators, of course;when they implored the portier for at least a lampto warm their hands by he turned on all the electriclights without raising the temperature in the slightestdegree. Amidst these modern comforts they wereso miserable that they vowed each other to shun, aslong as they were in Germany, or at least while thesummer lasted, all hotels which were steam-heated andelectric-lighted. They heated themselves somewhatwith their wrath, and over their breakfast they relentedso far as to suffer themselves a certain interestin the troops of all arms beginning to pass the hotel.They were fragments of the great parade, which hadended the day before, and they were now drifting backto their several quarters of the empire. Manyof them were very picturesque, and they had for theboys and girls running before and beside them, thecharm which armies and circus processions have forchildren everywhere. But their passage filledwith cruel anxiety a large old dog whom his masterhad left harnessed to a milk-cart before the hoteldoor; from time to time he lifted up his voice, andcalled to the absentee with hoarse, deep barks thatalmost shook him from his feet.

The day continued blue and bright and cold, and theMarches gave the morning to a rapid survey of thecity, glad that it was at least not wet. Whatafterwards chiefly remained to them was the impressionof an old town as quaint almost and as Gothic as oldHamburg, and a new town, handsome and regular, and,in the sudden arrest of some streets, apparently overbuilt.The modern architectural taste was of course Parisian;

there is no other taste for the Germans; but in theprevailing absence of statues there was a relief fromthe most oppressive characteristic of the imperialcapital which was a positive delight. Some sortof monument to the national victory over France theremust have been; but it must have been unusually inoffensive,for it left no record of itself in the travellers’consciousness. They were aware of gardened squaresand avenues, bordered by stately dwellings, of dignifiedcivic edifices, and of a vast and splendid railroadstation, such as the state builds even in minor Europeancities, but such as our paternal corporations havenot yet given us anywhere in America. They wentto the Zoological Garden, where they heard the customaryKalmucks at their public prayers behind a high boardfence; and as pilgrims from the most plutrocraticcountry in the world March insisted that they mustpay their devoirs at the shrine of the Rothschilds,whose natal banking-house they revered from the outside.

It was a pity, he said, that the Rothschilds werenot on his letter of credit; he would have been willingto pay tribute to the Genius of Finance in the percentageon at least ten pounds. But he consoled himselfby reflecting that he did not need the money; and heconsoled Mrs. March for their failure to penetrateto the interior of the Rothschilds’ birthplaceby taking her to see the house where Goethe was born.The public is apparently much more expected there,and in the friendly place they were no doubt muchmore welcome than they would have been in the Rothschildhouse. Under that roof they renewed a happy momentof Weimar, which after the lapse of a week seemedalready so remote. They wondered, as they mountedthe stairs from the basem*nt opening into a clean littlecourt, how Burnamy was getting on, and whether it hadyet come to that understanding between him and Agatha,which Mrs. March, at least, had meant to be inevitable.Then they became part of some such sight-seeing retinueas followed the custodian about in the Goethe horsein Weimar, and of an emotion indistinguishable fromthat of their fellow sight-seers. They couldmake sure, afterwards, of a personal pleasure in acertain prescient classicism of the house. Itsomehow recalled both the Goethe houses at Weimar,and it somehow recalled Italy. It is a separatehouse of two floors above the entrance, which opensto a little court or yard, and gives access by a decentstairway to the living-rooms. The chief of theseis a sufficiently dignified parlor or salon, and themost important is the little chamber in the thirdstory where the poet first opened his eyes to thelight which he rejoiced in for so long a life, andwhich, dying, he implored to be with him more.It is as large as his death-chamber in Weimar, wherehe breathed this prayer, and it looks down into theItalian-looking court, where probably he noticed theworld for the first time, and thought it a paved enclosure

thirty or forty feet square. In the birth-roomthey keep his puppet theatre, and the place is fairlysuggestive of his childhood; later, in his youth, hecould look from the parlor windows and see the housewhere his earliest love dwelt. So much remainsof Goethe in the place where he was born, and as suchthings go, it is not a little. The house is thatof a prosperous and well-placed citizen, and speaksof the senatorial quality in his family which Heinesays he was fond of recalling, rather than the sartorialquality of the ancestor who, again as Heine says, mendedthe Republic’s breeches.

From the Goethe house, one drives by the Goethe monumentto the Romer, the famous town-hall of the old freeimperial city which Frankfort once was; and by thisroute the Marches drove to it, agreeing with theircoachman that he was to keep as much in the sun aspossible. It was still so cold that when theyreached the Romer, and he stopped in a broad blazeof the only means of heating that they have in Frankfortin the summer, the travellers were loath to leaveit for the chill interior, where the German emperorswere elected for so many centuries. As soon asan emperor was chosen, in the great hall effigiedround with the portraits of his predecessors, he hurriedout in the balcony, ostensibly to show himself tothe people, but really, March contended, to warm upa little in the sun. The balcony was undergoingrepairs that day, and the travellers could not goout on it; but under the spell of the historic interestof the beautiful old Gothic place, they lingered inthe interior till they were half-torpid with the cold.Then she abandoned to him the joint duty of viewingthe cathedral, and hurried to their carriage whereshe basked in the sun till he came to her. Hereturned shivering, after a half-hour’s absence,and pretended that she had missed the greatest thingin the world, but as he could never be got to say justwhat she had lost, and under the closest cross-examinationcould not prove that this cathedral was memorablydifferent from hundreds of other fourteenth-centurycathedrals, she remained in a lasting content withthe easier part she had chosen. His only definiteimpression at the cathedral seemed to be confinedto a Bostonian of gloomily correct type, whom he hadseen doing it with his Baedeker, and not letting anobject of interest escape; and his account of herfellow-townsman reconciled Mrs. March more and moreto not having gone.

As it was warmer out-doors than in-doors at Frankfort,and as the breadth of sunshine increased with theapproach of noon they gave the rest of the morningto driving about and ignorantly enjoying the outsideof many Gothic churches, whose names even they didnot trouble themselves to learn. They liked theriver Main whenever they came to it, because it wasso lately from Wurzburg, and because it was so beautifulwith its bridges, old and new, and its boats of manypatterns. They liked the market-place in front

of the Romer not only because it was full of fascinatingbargains in curious crockery and wooden-ware, but becausethere was scarcely any shade at all in it. Theyread from their Baedeker that until the end of thelast century no Jew was suffered to enter the marketplace,and they rejoiced to find from all appearances thatthe Jews had been making up for their unjust exclusionever since. They were almost as numerous thereas the Anglo-Saxons were everywhere else in Frankfort.These, both of the English and American branches ofthe race, prevailed in the hotel diningroom, wherethe Marches had a mid-day dinner so good that it almostmade amends for the steam-heating and electric-lighting.

As soon as possible after dinner they took the trainfor Mayence, and ran Rhinewards through a pretty countryinto what seemed a milder climate. It grew somuch milder, apparently, that a lady in their compartmentto whom March offered his forward-looking seat, orderedthe window down when the guard came, without askingtheir leave. Then the climate proved much colder,and Mrs. March cowered under her shawls the rest ofthe way, and would not be entreated to look at thepleasant level landscape near, or the hills far off.He proposed to put up the window as peremptorily asit had been put down, but she stayed him with a hoarsewhisper, “She may be another Baroness!”At first he did not know what she meant, then he rememberedthe lady whose claims to rank her presence had so poorlyenforced on the way to Wurzburg, and he perceived thathis wife was practising a wise forbearance with theirfellow-passengers, and giving her a chance to turnout any sort of highhote she chose. She failedto profit by the opportunity; she remained simplya selfish, disagreeable woman, of no more perceptibledistinction than their other fellow-passenger, a littlecommercial traveller from Vienna (they resolved fromhis appearance and the lettering on his valise thathe was no other), who slept with a sort of passionateintensity all the way to Mayence.

LXX.

The Main widened and swam fuller as they approachedthe Rhine, and flooded the low-lying fields in-placeswith a pleasant effect under a wet sunset. Whenthey reached the station in Mayence they drove interminablyto the hotel they had chosen on the river-shore, througha city handsomer and cleaner than any American citythey could think of, and great part of the way bya street of dwellings nobler, Mrs. March owned, thaneven Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It was planted,like that, with double rows of trees, but lacked itsgreen lawns; and at times the sign of Weinhandlungat a corner, betrayed that there was no such restrictionagainst shops as keeps the Boston street so sacred.Otherwise they had to confess once more that any inferiorcity of Germany is of a more proper and dignifiedpresence than the most parse-proud metropolis in America.To be sure, they said, the German towns had generallya thousand years’ start; but all the same thefact galled them.

It was very bleak, though very beautiful when theystopped before their hotel on the Rhine, where alltheir impalpable memories of their visit to Mayencethirty years earlier precipitated themselves into somethingtangible. There were the reaches of the storiedand fabled stream with its boats and bridges and woodedshores and islands; there were the spires and towersand roofs of the town on either bank crowding to theriver’s brink; and there within-doors was thestately portier in gold braid, and the smiling, bowing,hand-rubbing landlord, alluring them to his most expensiverooms, which so late in the season he would fain havehad them take. But in a little elevator, thatmounted slowly, very slowly, in the curve of the stairs,they went higher to something lower, and the landlordretired baked, and left them to the ministrations ofthe serving-men who arrived with their large and smallbaggage. All these retired in turn when theyasked to have a fire lighted in the stove, withoutwhich Mrs. March would never have taken the fine statelyrooms, and sent back a pretty young girl to do it.She came indignant, not because she had come lugginga heavy hod of coal and a great arm-load of wood,but because her sense of fitness was outraged by thestrange demand.

“What!” she cried. “A firein September!”

“Yes,” March returned, inspired to miraculousaptness in his German by the exigency, “yes,if September is cold.”

The girl looked at him, and then, either because shethought him mad, or liked him merry, burst into aloud laugh, and kindled the fire without a word more.

He lighted all the reluctant gas-jets in the vastgilt chandelier, and in less than half an hour thetemperature of the place rose to at least sixty-fiveFahrenheit, with every promise of going higher.Mrs. March made herself comfortable in a deep chairbefore the stove, and said she would have her supperthere; and she bade him send her just such a supperof chicken and honey and tea as they had all had inMayence when they supped in her aunt’s parlorthere all those years ago. He wished to computethe years, but she drove him out with an imploringcry, and he went down to a very gusty dining-roomon the ground-floor, where he found himself alonewith a young English couple and their little boy.They were friendly, intelligent people, and wouldhave been conversable, apparently, but for the terriblecold of the husband, which he said he had contractedat the manoeuvres in Hombourg. March said he wasgoing to Holland, and the Englishman was doubtfulof the warmth which March expected to find there.He seemed to be suffering from a suspense of faithas to the warmth anywhere; from time to time the doorof the dining-room self-opened in a silent, ghostlyfashion into the court without, and let in a chillingdraught about the legs of all, till the little Englishboy got down from his place and shut it.

He alone continued cheerful, for March’s spiritscertainly did not rise when some mumbling Americanscame in and muttered over their meat at another table.He hated to own it, but he had to own that whereverhe had met the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon racetogether in Europe, the elder had shown, by a superiorchirpiness, to the disadvantage of the younger.The cast clothes of the old-fashioned British offishnessseemed to have fallen to the American travellers whowere trying to be correct and exemplary; and he wouldalmost rather have had back the old-style braggingAmericans whom he no longer saw. He asked of anagreeable fellow-countryman whom he found later inthe reading-room, what had become of these; and thiscompatriot said he had travelled with one only theday before, who had posed before their whole compartmentin his scorn of the German landscape, the German weather,the German government, the German railway management,and then turned out an American of German birth!March found his wife in great bodily comfort when hewent back to her, but in trouble of mind about a clockwhich she had discovered standing on the lacquerediron top of the stove. It was a French clock,of architectural pretensions, in the taste of the firstEmpire, and it looked as if it had not been goingsince Napoleon occupied Mayence early in the century.But Mrs. March now had it sorely on her consciencewhere, in its danger from the heat of the stove, itrested with the weight of the Pantheon, whose classicform it recalled. She wondered that no one hadnoticed it before the fire was kindled, and she requiredher husband to remove it at once from the top of thestove to the mantel under the mirror, which was thenatural habitat of such a clock. He said nothingcould be simpler, but when he lifted it, it began tofall all apart, like a clock in the house of the Hoodoo.Its marble base dropped-off; its pillars tottered;its pediment swayed to one side. While Mrs. Marchlamented her hard fate, and implored him to hurry ittogether before any one came, he contrived to reconstructit in its new place. Then they both breathedfreer, and returned to sit down before the stove.But at the same moment they both saw, ineffaceablyoutlined on the lacquered top, the basal form of theclock. The chambermaid would see it in the morning;she would notice the removal of the clock, and wouldmake a merit of reporting its ruin by the heat tothe landlord, and in the end they would be mulctedof its value. Rather than suffer this wrong theyagreed to restore it to its place, and, let it goto destruction upon its own terms. March painfullyrebuilt it where he had found it, and they went tobed with a bad conscience to worse dreams.

He remembered, before he slept, the hour of his youthwhen he was in Mayence before, and was so care freethat he had heard with impersonal joy two young Americanvoices speaking English in the street under his window.One of them broke from the common talk with a gay burlesqueof pathos in the line:

“Oh heavens! shecried, my Heeding country save!”

and then with a laughing good-night these unseen,unknown spirits of youth parted and departed.Who were they, and in what different places, withwhat cares or ills, had their joyous voices grown old,or fallen silent for evermore? It was a moonlightnight, March remembered, and he remembered how hewished he were out in it with those merry fellows.

He nursed the memory and the wonder in his dreamingthought, and he woke early to other voices under hiswindow. But now the voices, though young, weremany and were German, and the march of feet and thestamp of hooves kept time with their singing.He drew his curtain and saw the street filled withbroken squads of men, some afoot and some on horseback,some in uniform and some in civil dress with students’caps, loosely straggling on and roaring forth thatsong whose words he could not make out. At breakfasthe asked the waiter what it all meant, and he saidthat these were conscripts whose service had expiredwith the late manoeuvres, and who were now going home.He promised March a translation of the song, but henever gave it; and perhaps the sense of their joyfulhome-going remained the more poetic with him becauseits utterance remained inarticulate.

March spent the rainy Sunday, on which they had fallen,in wandering about the little city alone. Hiswife said she was tired and would sit by the fire,and hear about Mayence when he came in. He wentto the cathedral, which has its renown for beautyand antiquity, and he there added to his stock ofuseful information the fact that the people of Mayenceseemed very Catholic and very devout. They provedit by preferring to any of the divine old Gothic shrinesin the cathedral, an ugly baroque altar, which waseverywhere hung about with votive offerings.A fashionably dressed young man and young girl sprinkledthemselves with holy water as reverently as if theyhad been old and ragged. Some tourists strolledup and down the aisles with their red guide-books,and studied the objects of interest. A resplendentbeadle in a co*cked hat, and with along staff of authorityposed before his own ecclesiastical consciousnessin blue and silver. At the high altar a priestwas saying mass, and March wondered whether his consciousnesswas as wholly ecclesiastical as the beadle’s,or whether somewhere in it he felt the historicalmajesty, the long human consecration of the place.

He wandered at random in the town through streetsGerman and quaint and old, and streets French andfine and new, and got back to the river, which hecrossed on one of the several handsome bridges.The rough river looked chill under a sky of windyclouds, and he felt out of season, both as to thesummer travel, and as to the journey he was making.The summer of life as well as the summer of that yearwas past. Better return to his own radiator inhis flat on Stuyvesant Square; to the great ugly brutaltown which, if it was not home to him, was as muchhome to him as to any one. A longing for NewYork welled up his heart, which was perhaps reallya wish to be at work again. He said he must keepthis from his wife, who seemed not very well, andwhom he must try to cheer up when he returned to thehotel.

But they had not a very joyous afternoon, and theevening was no gayer. They said that if theyhad not ordered their letters sent to Dusseldorf theybelieved they should push on to Holland without stopping;and March would have liked to ask, Why not push onto America? But he forbore, and he was afterwardsglad that he had done so.

In the morning their spirits rose with the sun, thoughthe sun got up behind clouds as usual; and they werefurther animated by the imposition which the landlordpractised upon them. After a distinct and repeatedagreement as to the price of their rooms he chargedthem twice as much, and then made a merit of throwingoff two marks out of the twenty he had plundered themof.

“Now I see,” said Mrs. March, on theirway down to the boat, “how fortunate it wasthat we baked his clock. You may laugh, but Ibelieve we were the instruments of justice.”

“Do you suppose that clock was never baked before?”asked her husband. “The landlord has hisown arrangement with justice. When he overchargeshis parting guests he says to his conscience, Well,they baked my clock.”

LXXI.

The morning was raw, but it was something not to haveit rainy; and the clouds that hung upon the hillsand hid their tops were at least as fine as the longboard signs advertising chocolate on the river banks.The smoke rising from the chimneys of the manufactoriesof Mayence was not so bad, either, when one got themin the distance a little; and March liked the waythe river swam to the stems of the trees on the lowgrassy shores. It was like the Mississippi betweenSt. Louis and Cairo in that, and it was yellow andthick, like the Mississippi, though he thought heremembered it blue and clear. A friendly German,of those who began to come aboard more and more atall the landings after leaving Mayence, assured himthat he was right, and that the Rhine was unusuallyturbid from the unusual rains. March had hisown belief that whatever the color of the Rhine mightbe the rains were not unusual, but he could not gainsaythe friendly German.

Most of the passengers at starting were English andAmerican; but they showed no prescience of the internationalaffinition which has since realized itself, in theirbehavior toward one another. They held silentlyapart, and mingled only in the effect of one youngman who kept the Marches in perpetual question whetherhe was a Bostonian or an Englishman. His lookwas Bostonian, but his accent was English; and washe a Bostonian who had been in England long enoughto get the accent, or was he an Englishman who hadbeen in Boston long enough to get the look? Hewore a belated straw hat, and a thin sack-coat; andin the rush of the boat through the raw air they fanciedhim very cold, and longed to offer him one of theirsuperabundant wraps. At times March actually lifteda shawl from his knees, feeling sure that the stranger

was English and that he might make so bold with him;then at some glacial glint in the young man’seye, or at some petrific expression of his delicateface, he felt that he was a Bostonian, and lost courageand let the shawl sink again. March tried toforget him in the wonder of seeing the Germans beginto eat and drink, as soon as they came on boards eitherfrom the baskets they had brought with them, or fromthe boat’s provision. But he prevailed,with his smile that was like a sneer, through all theevents of the voyage; and took March’s mindoff the scenery with a sudden wrench when he cameunexpectedly into view after a momentary disappearance.At the table d’hote, which was served when thelandscape began to be less interesting, the guestswere expected to hand their plates across the tableto the stewards but to keep their knives and forksthroughout the different courses, and at each of thesepartial changes March felt the young man’s chillyeyes upon him, inculpating him for the semi-civilizationof the management. At such times he knew thathe was a Bostonian.

The weather cleared, as they descended the river,and under a sky at last cloudless, the Marches hadmoments of swift reversion to their former Rhine journey,when they were young and the purple light of love mantledthe vineyarded hills along the shore, and flushed thecastled steeps. The scene had lost nothing ofthe beauty they dimly remembered; there were certainfeatures of it which seemed even fairer and granderthan they remembered. The town of Bingen, whereeverybody who knows the poem was more or less born,was beautiful in spite of its factory chimneys, thoughthere were no compensating castles near it; and thecastles seemed as good as those of the theatre.Here and there some of them had been restored andwere occupied, probably by robber barons who had goneinto trade. Others were still ruinous, and therewas now and then such a mere gray snag that March,at sight of it, involuntarily put his tongue to thebroken tooth which he was keeping for the skill ofthe first American dentist.

For natural sublimity the Rhine scenery, as they recognizedonce more, does not compare with the Hudson scenery;and they recalled one point on the American riverwhere the Central Road tunnels a jutting cliff, whichmight very well pass for the rock of the Loreley, whereshe dreams

‘Solo sittingby the shores of old romance’

and the trains run in and out under her knees unheeded.“Still, still you know,” March argued,“this is the Loreley on the Rhine, and not theLoreley on the Hudson; and I suppose that makes allthe difference. Besides, the Rhine doesn’tset up to be sublime; it only means to be storiedand dreamy and romantic and it does it. And thenwe have really got no Mouse Tower; we might buildone, to be sure.”

“Well, we have got no denkmal, either,”said his wife, meaning the national monument to theGerman reconquest of the Rhine, which they had justpassed, “and that is something in our favor.”

“It was too far off for us to see how ugly itwas,” he returned.

“The denkmal at Coblenz was so near that thebronze Emperor almost rode aboard the boat.”

He could not answer such a piece of logic as that.He yielded, and began to praise the orcharded levelswhich now replaced the vine-purpled slopes of theupper river. He said they put him in mind of orchardsthat he had known in his boyhood; and they, agreedthat the supreme charm of travel, after all, was notin seeing something new and strange, but in findingsomething familiar and dear in the heart of the strangeness.

At Cologne they found this in the tumult of gettingashore with their baggage and driving from the steamboatlanding to the railroad station, where they were toget their train for Dusseldorf an hour later.The station swarmed with travellers eating and drinkingand smoking; but they escaped from it for a precioushalf of their golden hour, and gave the time to thegreat cathedral, which was built, a thousand yearsago, just round the corner from the station, and istherefore very handy to it. Since they saw thecathedral last it had been finished, and now undera cloudless evening sky, it soared and swept upwardlike a pale flame. Within it was a bit over-clean,a bit bare, but without it was one of the great memoriesof the race, the record of a faith which wrought miraclesof beauty, at least, if not piety.

The train gave the Marches another, and last, viewof it as they slowly drew out of the city, and beganto run through a level country walled with far-offhills; past fields of buckwheat showing their stemslike coral under their black tops; past peasant houseschanging their wonted shape to taller and narrowerforms; past sluggish streams from which the mist roseand hung over the meadows, under a red sunset, glassyclear till the manifold factory chimneys of Dusseldorfstained it with their dun smoke.

This industrial greeting seemed odd from the townwhere Heinrich Heine was born; but when they had eatentheir supper in the capital little hotel they foundthere, and went out for a stroll, they found nothingto remind them of the factories, and much to makethem think of the poet. The moon, beautiful andperfect as a stage moon, came up over the shoulderof a church as they passed down a long street whichthey had all to themselves. Everybody seemedto have gone to bed, but at a certain corner a girlopened a window above them, and looked out at the moon.

When they returned to their hotel they found a highwalledgarden facing it, full of black depths of foliage.In the night March woke and saw the moon standingover the garden, and silvering its leafy tops.This was really as it should be in the town wherethe idolized poet of his youth was born; the poetwhom of all others he had adored, and who had onceseemed like a living friend; who had been witness ofhis first love, and had helped him to speak it.

His wife used to laugh at him for his Heine-worshipin those days; but she had since come to share it,and she, even more than he, had insisted upon thispilgrimage. He thought long thoughts of the past,as he looked into the garden across the way, withan ache for his perished self and the dead companionshipof his youth, all ghosts together in the silveredshadow. The trees shuddered in the night breeze,and its chill penetrated to him where he stood.

His wife called to him from her room, “Whatare you doing?”

“Oh, sentimentalizing,” he answered boldly.

“Well, you will be sick,” she said, andhe crept back into bed again.

They had sat up late, talking in a glad excitement.But he woke early, as an elderly man is apt to doafter broken slumbers, and left his wife still sleeping.He was not so eager for the poetic interests of thetown as he had been the night before; he even deferredhis curiosity for Heine’s birth-house to theinstructive conference which he had with his waiterat breakfast. After all, was not it more importantto know something of the actual life of a simple commonclass of men than to indulge a faded fancy for thememory of a genius, which no amount of associationscould feed again to its former bloom? The waitersaid he was a Nuremberger, and had learned Englishin London where he had served a year for nothing.Afterwards, when he could speak three languages hegot a pound a week, which seemed low for so many,though not so low as the one mark a day which he nowreceived in Dusseldorf; in Berlin he paid the hoteltwo marks a day. March confided to him his secrettrouble as to tips, and they tried vainly to enlighteneach other as to what a just tip was.

He went to his banker’s, and when he came backhe found his wife with her breakfast eaten, and soeager for the exploration of Heine’s birthplacethat she heard with indifference of his failure toget any letters. It was too soon to expect them,she said, and then she showed him her plan, whichshe had been working out ever since she woke.It contained every place which Heine had mentioned,and she was determined not one should escape them.She examined him sharply upon his condition, accusinghim of having taken cold when he got up in the night,and acquitting him with difficulty. She herselfwas perfectly well, but a little fa*gged, and theymust have a carriage.

They set out in a lordly two-spanner, which took uphalf the little Bolkerstrasse where Heine was born,when they stopped across the way from his birthhouse,so that she might first take it all in from the outsidebefore they entered it. It is a simple street,and not the cleanest of the streets in a town wheremost of them are rather dirty. Below the housesare shops, and the first story of Heine’s houseis a butcher shop, with sides of pork and mutton hangingin the windows; above, where the Heine family mustonce have lived, a gold-beater and a frame-maker displayedtheir signs.

But did the Heine family really once live there?The house looked so fresh and new that in spite ofthe tablet in its front affirming it the poet’sbirthplace, they doubted; and they were not reassuredby the people who half halted as they passed, andstared at the strangers, so anomalously interestedin the place. They dismounted, and crossed tothe butcher shop where the provision man corroboratedthe tablet, but could not understand their wish togo up stairs. He did not try to prevent them,however, and they climbed to the first floor above,where a placard on the door declared it private andimplored them not to knock. Was this the outcomeof the inmate’s despair from the intrusion ofother pilgrims who had wised to see the Heine dwelling-rooms?They durst not knock and ask so much, and they sadlydescended to the ground-floor, where they found abutcher boy of much greater apparent intelligence thanthe butcher himself, who told them that the buildingin front was as new as it looked, and the house whereHeine was really born was the old house in the rear.He showed them this house, across a little court patchedwith mangy grass and lilac-bushes; and when they wishedto visit it he led the way. The place was strewnboth underfoot and overhead with feathers; it hadonce been all a garden out to the street, the boy said,but from these feathers, as well as the odor whichprevailed, and the anxious behavior of a few hensleft in the high coop at one side, it was plain thatwhat remained of the garden was now a chicken slaughteryard.There was one well-grown tree, and the boy said itwas of the poet’s time; but when he let theminto the house, he became vague as to the room whereHeine was born; it was certain only that it was somewhereupstairs and that it could not be seen. The roomwhere they stood was the frame-maker’s shop,and they bought of him a small frame for a memorial.They bought of the butcher’s boy, not so commercially,a branch of lilac; and they came away, thinking howmuch amused Heine himself would have been with theirvisit; how sadly, how merrily he would have mockedat their effort to revere his birthplace.

They were too old if not too wise to be daunted bytheir defeat, and they drove next to the old courtgarden beside the Rhine where the poet says he usedto play with the little Veronika, and probably didnot. At any rate, the garden is gone; the Schlosswas burned down long ago; and nothing remains buta detached tower in which the good Elector Jan Wilhelm,of Heine’s time, amused himself with his manymechanical inventions. The tower seemed to bein process of demolition, but an intelligent workmanwho came down out of it, was interested in the strangers’curiosity, and directed them to a place behind theHistorical Museum where they could find a bit of theold garden. It consisted of two or three lowtrees, and under them the statue of the Elector bywhich Heine sat with the little Veronika, if he really

did. Afresh gale blowing through the trees stirredthe bushes that backed the statue, but not the laurelwreathing the Elector’s head, and meeting ina neat point over his forehead. The laurel wreathis stone, like the rest of the Elector, who standsthere smirking in marble ermine and armor, and restinghis baton on the nose of a very small lion, who, inthe exigencies of foreshortening, obligingly goesto nothing but a tail under the Elector’s robe.

This was a prince who loved himself in effigy so muchthat he raised an equestrian statue to his own renownin the market-place, though he modestly refused thecredit of it, and ascribed its erection to the affectionof his subjects. You see him therein a full-bottomedwig, mounted on a rampant charger with a tail as biground as a barrel, and heavy enough to keep him fromcoming down on his fore legs as long as he likes tohold them up. It was to this horse’s backthat Heine clambered when a small boy, to see theFrench take formal possession of Dusseldorf; and heclung to the waist of the bronze Elector, who had justabdicated, while the burgomaster made a long speech,from the balcony of the Rathhaus, and the Electoralarms were taken down from its doorway.

The Rathhaus is a salad-dressing of German gothicand French rococo as to its architectural style, andis charming in its way, but the Marches were in themarket-place for the sake of that moment of Heine’sboyhood. They felt that he might have been theboy who stopped as he ran before them, and smackedthe stomach of a large pumpkin lying at the feet ofan old market-woman, and then dashed away before shecould frame a protest against the indignity.From this incident they philosophized that the boysof Dusseldorf are as mischievous at the end of thecentury as they were at the beginning; and they feltthe fascination that such a bounteous, unkempt oldmarketplace must have for the boys of any period.There were magnificent vegetables of all sorts in it,and if the fruits were meagre that was the fault ofthe rainy summer, perhaps. The market-place wasvery dirty, and so was the narrow street leading downfrom it to the Rhine, which ran swift as a mountaintorrent along a slatternly quay. A bridge ofboats crossing the stream shook in the rapid current,and a long procession of market carts passed slowlyover, while a cluster of scows waited in picturesquepatience for the draw to open.

They saw what a beautiful town that was for a boyto grow up in, and how many privileges it offered,how many dangers, how many chances for hairbreadthescapes. They chose that Heine must often haverushed shrieking joyfully down that foul alley tothe Rhine with other boys; and they easily found aleaf-strewn stretch of the sluggish Dussel, in thePublic Garden, where his playmate, the little Wilhelm,lost his life and saved the kitten’s. Theywere not so sure of the avenue through which the poetsaw the Emperor Napoleon come riding on his small white

horse when he took possession of the Elector’sdominions. But if it was that where the statueof the Kaiser Wilhelm I. comes riding on a horse ledby two Victories, both poet and hero are avenged thereon the accomplished fact. Defeated and humiliatedFrance triumphs in the badness of that foolish denkmal(one of the worst in all denkmal-ridden Germany), andthe memory of the singer whom the Hohenzollern familypride forbids honor in his native place, is immortalin its presence.

On the way back to their hotel, March made some reflectionsupon the open neglect, throughout Germany, of thegreatest German lyrist, by which the poet might haveprofited if he had been present. He contendedthat it was not altogether an effect of Hohenzollernpride, which could not suffer a joke or two from thearch-humorist; but that Heine had said things of Germanyherself which Germans might well have found unpardonable.He concluded that it would not do to be perfectlyfrank with one’s own country. Though, tobe sure, there would always be the question whetherthe Jew-born Heine had even a step-fatherland in theGermany he loved so tenderly and mocked so pitilessly.He had to own that if he were a negro poet he wouldnot feel bound to measure terms in speaking of America,and he would not feel that his fame was in her keeping.

Upon the whole he blamed Heine less than Germany andhe accused her of taking a shabby revenge, in tryingto forget him; in the heat of his resentment thatthere should be no record of Heine in the city wherehe was born, March came near ignoring himself thefact that the poet Freiligrath was also born there.As for the famous Dusseldorf school of painting, whichonce filled the world with the worst art, he rejoicedthat it was now so dead, and he grudged the glancewhich the beauty of the new Art Academy extorted fromhim. It is in the French taste, and is so fara monument to the continuance in one sort of that Frenchsupremacy, of which in another sort another denkmalcelebrates the overthrow. Dusseldorf is not contentwith the denkmal of the Kaiser on horseback, withthe two Victories for grooms; there is a second, whichthe Marches found when they strolled out again latein the afternoon. It is in the lovely park whichlies in the heart of the city, and they felt in itspresence the only emotion of sympathy which the manypatriotic monuments of Germany awakened in them.It had dignity and repose, which these never had elsewhere;but it was perhaps not so much for the dying warriorand the pitying lion of the sculpture that their heartswere moved as for the gentle and mournful humanityof the inscription, which dropped into equivalentEnglish verse in March’s note-book:

Fame was enough for the Victors,and glory and verdurous laurel;
Tears by their mothers wept foundedthis image of stone.

To this they could forgive the vaunting record, onthe reverse, of the German soldiers who died heroesin the war with France, the war with Austria, andeven the war with poor little Denmark!

The morning had been bright and warm, and it was justthat the afternoon should be dim and cold, with apale sun looking through a September mist, which seemedto deepen the seclusion and silence of the forest reaches;for the park was really a forest of the German sort,as parks are apt to be in Germany. But it wasbeautiful, and they strayed through it, and sometimessat down on the benches in its damp shadows, and saidhow much seemed to be done in Germany for the people’scomfort and pleasure. In what was their own explicitly,as well as what was tacitly theirs, they were notso restricted as we were at home, and especially thechildren seemed made fondly and lovingly free of allpublic things. The Marches met troops of themin the forest, as they strolled slowly back by thewinding Dussel to the gardened avenue leading to thepark, and they found them everywhere gay and joyful.But their elders seemed subdued, and were silent.The strangers heard no sound of laughter in the streetsof Dusseldorf, and they saw no smiling except on thepart of a very old couple, whose meeting they witnessedand who grinned and cackled at each other like twochildren as they shook hands. Perhaps they wereindeed children of that sad second childhood whichone would rather not blossom back into.

In America, life is yet a joke with us, even whenit is grotesque and shameful, as it so often is; forwe think we can make it right when we choose.But there is no joking in Germany, between the firstand second childhoods, unless behind closed doors.Even there, people do not joke above their breathabout kings and emperors. If they joke about themin print, they take out their laugh in jail, for thepress laws are severely enforced, and the prisonsare full of able editors, serious as well as comic.Lese-majesty is a crime that searches sinners out inevery walk of life, and it is said that in familyjars a husband sometimes has the last word of hiswife by accusing her of blaspheming the sovereign,and so having her silenced for three months at leastbehind penitential bars.

“Think,” said March, “how simplyI could adjust any differences of opinion betweenus in Dusseldorf.”

“Don’t!” his wife implored witha burst of feeling which surprised him. “Iwant to go home!”

They had been talking over their day, and planningtheir journey to Holland for the morrow, when it cameto this outburst from her in the last half-hour beforebed which they sat prolonging beside their stove.

“What! And not go to Holland? Whatis to become of my after-cure?”

“Oh, it’s too late for that, now.We’ve used up the month running about, and tiringourselves to death. I should like to rest a week—­toget into my berth on the Norumbia and rest!”

“I guess the September gales would have somethingto say about that.”

“I would risk the September gales.”

LXXII.

In the morning March came home from his bankers gaywith the day’s provisional sunshine in his heart,and joyously expectant of his wife’s pleasurein the letters he was bringing. There was onefrom each of their children, and there was one fromFulkerson, which March opened and read on the street,so as to intercept any unpleasant news there mightbe in them; there were two letters for Mrs. Marchwhich he knew without opening were from Miss Triscoeand Mrs. Adding respectively; Mrs. Adding’s,from the postmarks, seemed to have been followingthem about for some time.

“They’re all right at home,” hesaid. “Do see what those people have beendoing.”

“I believe,” she said, taking a knifefrom the breakfast tray beside her bed to cut theenvelopes, “that you’ve really cared moreabout them all along than I have.”

“No, I’ve only been anxious to be donewith them.”

She got the letters open, and holding one of themup in each hand she read them impartially and simultaneously;then she flung them both down, and turned her faceinto her pillow with an impulse of her inalienablegirlishness. “Well, it is too silly.”

March felt authorized to take them up and read themconsecutively; when he had done, so he did not differfrom his wife. In one case, Agatha had writtento her dear Mrs. March that she and Burnamy had justthat evening become engaged; Mrs. Adding, on her partowned a farther step, and announced her marriage toMr. Kenby. Following immemorial usage in suchmatters Kenby had added a postscript affirming hishappiness in unsparing terms, and in Agatha’sletter there was an avowal of like effect from Burnamy.Agatha hinted her belief that her father would sooncome to regard Burnamy as she did; and Mrs. Addingprofessed a certain humiliation in having realizedthat, after all her misgiving about him, Rose seemedrather relieved than otherwise, as if he were gladto have her off his hands.

“Well,” said March, “with thesetroublesome affairs settled, I don’t see whatthere is to keep us in Europe any longer, unless it’sthe consensus of opinion in Tom, Bella, and Fulkerson,that we ought to stay the winter.”

“Stay the winter!” Mrs. March rose fromher pillow, and clutched the home letters to her fromthe abeyance in which they had fallen on the coverletwhile she was dealing with the others. “Whatdo you mean?”

“It seems to have been prompted by a hint youlet drop, which Tom has passed to Bella and Fulkerson.”

“Oh, but that was before we left Carlsbad!”she protested, while she devoured the letters withher eyes, and continued to denounce the absurdityof the writers. Her son and daughter both urgedthat now their father and mother were over there,they had better stay as long as they enjoyed it, andthat they certainly ought not to come home withoutgoing to Italy, where they had first met, and revisitingthe places which they had seen together when they

were young engaged people: without that theirsilver wedding journey would not be complete.Her son said that everything was going well with ‘EveryOther Week’, and both himself and Mr. Fulkersonthought his father ought to spend the winter in Italy,and get a thorough rest. “Make a job ofit, March,” Fulkerson wrote, “and havea Sabbatical year while you’re at it. Youmay not get another.”

“Well, I can tell them,” said Mrs. Marchindignantly, “we shall not do anything of thekind.”

“Then you didn’t mean it?”

“Mean it!” She stopped herself with alook at her husband, and asked gently, “Do youwant to stay?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he answeredvaguely. The fact was, he was sick of traveland of leisure; he was longing to be at home and atwork again. But if there was to be any self-sacrificewhich could be had, as it were, at a bargain; whichcould be fairly divided between them, and leave himthe self and her the sacrifice, he was too experienceda husband not to see the advantage of it, or to refusethe merit. “I thought you wished to stay.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “I did.It has been very, very pleasant, and, if anything,I have over-enjoyed myself. We have gone rompingthrough it like two young people, haven’t we?”

“You have,” he assented. “Ihave always felt the weight of my years in gettingthe baggage registered; they have made the baggageweigh more every time.”

“And I’ve forgotten mine. Yes, Ihave. But the years haven’t forgotten me,Basil, and now I remember them. I’m tired.It doesn’t seem as if I could ever get up.But I dare say it’s only a mood; it may be onlya cold; and if you wish to stay, why—­wewill think it over.”

“No, we won’t, my dear,” he said,with a generous shame for his hypocrisy if not witha pure generosity. “I’ve got all thegood out of it that there was in it, for me, and Ishouldn’t go home any better six months hencethan I should now. Italy will keep for anothertime, and so, for the matter of that, will Holland.”

“No, no!” she interposed. “Wewon’t give up Holland, whatever we do. Icouldn’t go home feeling that I had kept youout of your after-cure; and when we get there, nodoubt the sea air will bring me up so that I shallwant to go to Italy, too, again. Though it seemsso far off, now! But go and see when the afternoontrain for the Hague leaves, and I shall be ready.My mind’s quite made up on that point.”

“What a bundle of energy!” said her husbandlaughing down at her.

He went and asked about the train to the Hague, butonly to satisfy a superficial conscience; for nowhe knew that they were both of one mind about goinghome. He also looked up the trains for London,and found that they could get there by way of Ostendin fourteen hours. Then he went back to the banker’s,and with the help of the Paris-New York Chroniclewhich he found there, he got the sailings of the firststeamers home. After that he strolled about thestreets for a last impression of Dusseldorf, but itwas rather blurred by the constantly recurring pullof his thoughts toward America, and he ended by turningabruptly at a certain corner, and going to his hotel.

He found his wife dressed, but fallen again on herbed, beside which her breakfast stood still untasted;her smile responded wanly to his brightness.“I’m not well, my dear,” she said.“I don’t believe I could get off to theHague this afternoon.”

“Could you to Liverpool?” he returned.

“To Liverpool?” she gasped. “Whatdo you mean?”

“Merely that the Cupania is sailing on the twentieth,and I’ve telegraphed to know if we can get aroom. I’m afraid it won’t be a goodone, but she’s the first boat out, and—­”

“No, indeed, we won’t go to Liverpool,and we will never go home till you’ve had yourafter-cure in Holland.” She was very firmin this, but she added, “We will stay anothernight, here, and go to the Hague tomorrow. Sitdown, and let us talk it over. Where were we?”

She lay down on the sofa, and he put a shawl overher. “We were just starting for Liverpool.”

“No, no we weren’t! Don’t saysuch things, dearest! I want you to help me sumit all, up. You think it’s been a success,don’t you?”

“As a cure?”

“No, as a silver wedding journey?”

“Perfectly howling.”

“I do think we’ve had a good time.I never expected to enjoy myself so much again inthe world. I didn’t suppose I should evertake so much interest in anything. It shows thatwhen we choose to get out of our rut we shall alwaysfind life as fresh and delightful as ever. Thereis nothing to prevent our coming any year, now thatTom’s shown himself so capable, and having anothersilver wedding journey. I don’t like tothink of it’s being confined to Germany quite.”

“Oh, I don’t know. We can alwaystalk of it as our German-Silver Wedding Journey.”

“That’s true. But nobody would understandnowadays what you meant by German-silver; it’sperfectly gone out. How ugly it was! A sortof greasy yellowish stuff, always getting worn through;I believe it was made worn through. Aunt Maryhad a castor of it, that I can remember when I wasa child; it went into the kitchen long before I grewup. Would a joke like that console you for theloss of Italy?”

“It would go far to do it. And as a German-SilverWedding Journey, it’s certainly been very complete.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s given us a representative varietyof German cities. First we had Hamburg, you know,a great modern commercial centre.”

“Yes! Go on!”

“Then we had Leipsic, the academic.”

“Yes!”

“Then Carlsbad, the supreme type of a Germanhealth resort; then Nuremberg, the mediaeval; thenAnspach, the extinct princely capital; then Wurzburg,the ecclesiastical rococo; then Weimar, for the literatureof a great epoch; then imperial Berlin; then Frankfort,the memory of the old free city; then Dusseldorf,the centre of the most poignant personal interestin the world—­I don’t see how we couldhave done better, if we’d planned it all, andnot acted from successive impulses.”

“It’s been grand; it’s been perfect!As German-Silver Wedding Journey it’s perfect—­itseems as if it had been ordered! But I will neverlet you give up Holland! No, we will go thisafternoon, and when I get to Schevleningen, I’llgo to bed, and stay there, till you’ve completedyour after-cure.”

“Do you think that will be wildly gay for theconvalescent?”

She suddenly began to cry. “Oh, dearest,what shall we do? I feel perfectly broken down.I’m afraid I’m going to be sick—­andaway from home! How could you ever let me overdo,so?” She put her handkerchief to her eyes, andturned her face into the sofa pillow.

This was rather hard upon him, whom her vivid energyand inextinguishable interest had not permitted amoment’s respite from pleasure since they leftCarlsbad. But he had been married, too long notto understand that her blame of him was only a formof self-reproach for her own self-forgetfulness.She had not remembered that she was no longer youngtill she had come to what he saw was a nervous collapse.The fact had its pathos and its poetry which no onecould have felt more keenly than he. If it alsohad its inconvenience and its danger he realized thesetoo.

“Isabel,” he said, “we are goinghome.”

“Very well, then it will be your doing.”

“Quite. Do you think you could stand itas far as Cologne? We get the sleeping-car there,and you can lie down the rest of the way to Ostend.”

“This afternoon? Why I’m perfectlystrong; it’s merely my nerves that are gone.”She sat up, and wiped her eyes. “But Basil!If you’re doing this for me—­”

“I’m doing it for myself,” saidMarch, as he went out of the room.

She stood the journey perfectly well, and in the passageto Dover she suffered so little from the rough weatherthat she was an example to many robust matrons whofilled the ladies’ cabin with the noise of theiranguish during the night. She would have insistedupon taking the first train up to London, if Marchhad not represented that this would not expedite thesailing of the Cupania, and that she might as wellstay the forenoon at the convenient railway hotel,and rest. It was not quite his ideal of reposethat the first people they saw in the coffee-room whenthey went to breakfast should be Kenby and Rose Adding,who were having their tea and toast and eggs togetherin the greatest apparent good-fellowship. Hesaw his wife shrink back involuntarily from the encounter,but this was only to gather force for it; and the nextmoment she was upon them in all the joy of the surprise.Then March allowed himself to be as glad as the othersboth seemed, and he shook hands with Kenby while hiswife kissed Rose; and they all talked at once.In the confusion of tongues it was presently intelligiblethat Mrs. Kenby was going to be down in a few minutes;and Kenby took March into his confidence with a smilewhich was, almost a wink in explaining that he knew

how it was with the ladies. He said that Roseand he usually got down to breakfast first, and whenhe had listened inattentively to Mrs. March’sapology for being on her way home, he told her thatshe was lucky not to have gone to Schevleningen, whereshe and March would have frozen to death. Hesaid that they were going to spend September at a littleplace on the English coast, near by, where he had beenthe day before with Rose to look at lodgings, andwhere you could bathe all through the month.He was not surprised that the Marches were going home,and said, Well, that was their original plan, wasn’tit?

Mrs. Kenby, appearing upon this, pretended to knowbetter, after the outburst of joyful greeting withthe Marches; and intelligently reminded Kenby thathe knew the Marches had intended to pass the winterin Paris. She was looking extremely pretty, butshe wished only to make them see how well Rose waslooking, and she put her arm round his shoulders asshe spoke, Schevleningen had done wonders for him,but it was fearfully cold there, and now they wereexpecting everything from Westgate, where she advisedMarch to come, too, for his after-cure: she recollectedin time to say, She forgot they were on their wayhome. She added that she did not know when sheshould return; she was merely a passenger, now; sheleft everything to the men of the family. Shehad, in fact, the air of having thrown off every responsibility,but in supremacy, not submission. She was alwaysordering Kenby about; she sent him for her handkerchief,and her rings which she had left either in the trayof her trunk, or on the pin-cushion, or on the wash-standor somewhere, and forbade him to come back withoutthem. He asked for her keys, and then with a joyfulscream she owned that she had left the door-key inthe door and the whole bunch of trunk-keys in hertrunk; and Kenby treated it all as the greatest joke;Rose, too, seemed to think that Kenby would make everythingcome right, and he had lost that look of anxiety whichhe used to have; at the most he showed a friendlysympathy for Kenby, for whose sake he seemed mortifiedat her. He was unable to regard his mother asthe delightful joke which she appeared to Kenby, butthat was merely temperamental; and he was never distressedexcept when she behaved with unreasonable capriceat Kenby’s cost.

As for Kenby himself he betrayed no dissatisfactionwith his fate to March. He perhaps no longerregarded his wife as that strong character which hehad sometimes wearied March by celebrating; but shewas still the most brilliant intelligence, and hercharm seemed only to have grown with his perceptionof its wilful limitations. He did not want totalk about her so much; he wanted rather to talk aboutRose, his health, his education, his nature, and whatwas best to do for him. The two were on termsof a confidence and affection which perpetually amusedMrs. Kenby, but which left the sympathetic witnessnothing to desire in their relation.

They all came to the train when the Marches startedup to London, and stood waving to them as they pulledout of the station. “Well, I can’tsee but that’s all right,” he said as hesank back in his seat with a sigh of relief.“I never supposed we should get out of theirmarriage half so well, and I don’t feel thatyou quite made the match either, my dear.”

She was forced to agree with him that the Kenbys seemedhappy together, and that there was nothing to fearfor Rose in their happiness. He would be as tenderlycared for by Kenby as he could have been by his mother,and far more judiciously. She owned that she hadtrembled for him till she had seen them all together;and now she should never tremble again.

“Well?” March prompted, at a certain inconclusivenessin her tone rather than her words.

“Well, you can see that it, isn’t ideal.”

“Why isn’t it ideal? I suppose youthink that the marriage of Burnamy and Agatha Triscoewill be ideal, with their ignorances and inexperiencesand illusions.”

“Yes! It’s the illusions: nomarriage can be perfect without them, and at theirage the Kenbys can’t have them.”

“Kenby is a solid mass of illusion. AndI believe that people can go and get as many new illusionsas they want, whenever they’ve lost their oldones.”

“Yes, but the new illusions won’t wearso well; and in marriage you want illusions that willlast. No; you needn’t talk to me. It’sall very well, but it isn’t ideal.”

March laughed. “Ideal! What is ideal?”

“Going home!” she said with such passionthat he had not the heart to point out that they weremerely returning to their old duties, cares and pains,with the worn-out illusion that these would be altogetherdifferent when they took them up again.

LXXIII.

In fulfilment of another ideal Mrs. March took straightwayto her berth when she got on board the Cupania, andto her husband’s admiration she remained theretill the day before they reached New York. Hertheory was that the complete rest would do more thananything else to calm her shaken nerves; and she didnot admit into her calculations the chances of adverseweather which March would not suggest as probable inthe last week in September. The event justifiedher unconscious faith. The ship’s run wasof unparalled swiftness, even for the Cupania, andof unparalled smoothness. For days the sea wasas sleek as oil; the racks were never on the tablesonce; the voyage was of the sort which those who makeit no more believe in at the time than those whomthey afterwards weary in boasting of it.

The ship was very full, but Mrs. March did not showthe slightest curiosity to know who her fellow-passengerswere. She said that she wished to be let perfectlyalone, even by her own emotions, and for this reasonshe forbade March to bring her a list of the passengerstill after they had left Queenstown lest it shouldbe too exciting. He did not take the troubleto look it up, therefore; and the first night out hesaw no one whom he knew at dinner; but the next morningat breakfast he found himself to his great satisfactionat the same table with the Eltwins. They wereso much at ease with him that even Mrs. Eltwin tookpart in the talk, and told him how they had spentthe time of her husband’s rigorous after-curein Switzerland, and now he was going home much betterthan they had expected. She said they had ratherthought of spending the winter in Europe, but hadgiven it up because they were both a little homesick.March confessed that this was exactly the case withhis wife and himself; and he had to add that Mrs.March was not very well otherwise, and he should beglad to be at home on her account. The recurrenceof the word home seemed to deepen Eltwin’s habitualgloom, and Mrs. Eltwin hastened to leave the subjectof their return for inquiry into Mrs. March’scondition; her interest did not so far overcome hershyness that she ventured to propose a visit to her;and March found that the fact of the Eltwins’presence on board did not agitate his wife. Itseemed rather to comfort her, and she said she hopedhe would see all he could of the poor old things.She asked if he had met any one else he knew, andhe was able to tell her that there seemed to be a goodmany swells on board, and this cheered her very much,though he did not know them; she liked to be nearthe rose, though it was not a flower that she reallycared for.

She did not ask who the swells were, and March tookno trouble to find out. He took no trouble toget a passenger-list, and he had the more troublewhen he tried at last; the lists seemed to have allvanished, as they have a habit of doing, after thefirst day; the one that he made interest for withthe head steward was a second-hand copy, and had noone he knew in it but the Eltwins. The socialsolitude, however, was rather favorable to certainother impressions. There seemed even more elderlypeople than there were on the Norumbia; the human atmospherewas gray and sober; there was nothing of the gay expansionof the outward voyage; there was little talking orlaughing among those autumnal men who were going seriouslyand anxiously home, with faces fiercely set for thecoming grapple; or necks meekly bowed for the yoke.They had eaten their cake, and it had been good, butthere remained a discomfort in the digestion.They sat about in silence, and March fancied that theflown summer was as dreamlike to each of them as itnow was to him. He hated to be of their drearycompany, but spiritually he knew that he was of it;and he vainly turned to cheer himself with the youngerpassengers. Some matrons who went about cladin furs amused him, for they must have been unpleasantlywarm in their jackets and boas; nothing but the hopeof being able to tell the customs inspector with agood conscience that the things had been worn, wouldhave sustained one lady draped from head to foot inAstrakhan.

They were all getting themselves ready for the frayor the play of the coming winter; but there seemednothing joyous in the preparation. There weremany young girls, as there always are everywhere, butthere were not many young men, and such as there werekept to the smoking-room. There was no sign offlirtation among them; he would have given much fora moment of the pivotal girl, to see whether she couldhave brightened those gloomy surfaces with her impartiallamp. March wished that he could have broughtsome report from the outer world to cheer his wife,as he descended to their state-room. They hadtaken what they could get at the eleventh hour, andthey had got no such ideal room as they had in theNorumbia. It was, as Mrs. March graphically said,a basem*nt room. It was on the north side ofthe ship, which is a cold exposure, and if there hadbeen any sun it could not have got into their window,which was half the time under water. The greenwaves, laced with foam, hissed as they ran acrossthe port; and the electric fan in the corridor moanedlike the wind in a gable.

He felt a sinking of the heart as he pushed the state-roomdoor open, and looked at his wife lying with her faceturned to the wall; and he was going to withdraw,thinking her asleep, when she said quietly, “Arewe going down?”

“Not that I know of,” he answered witha gayety he did not feel. “But I’llask the head steward.”

She put out her hand behind her for him to take, andclutched his fingers convulsively. “IfI’m never any better, you will always rememberthis happy, summer, won’t you? Oh, it’sbeen such a happy summer! It has been one longjoy, one continued triumph! But it was too late;we were too old; and it’s broken me.”

The time had been when he would have attempted comfort;when he would have tried mocking; but that time waslong past; he could only pray inwardly for some sortof diversion, but what it was to be in their barrencirc*mstance he was obliged to leave altogether toProvidence. He ventured, pending an answer tohis prayers upon the question, “Don’t youthink I’d better see the doctor, and get yousome sort of tonic?”

She suddenly turned and faced him. “Thedoctor! Why, I’m not sick, Basil!If you can see the purser and get our rooms changed,or do something to stop those waves from slappingagainst that horrible blinking one-eyed window, youcan save my life; but no tonic is going to help me.”

She turned her face from him again, and buried itin the bedclothes, while he looked desperately atthe racing waves, and the port that seemed to openand shut like a weary eye.

“Oh, go away!” she implored. “Ishall be better presently, but if you stand therelike that—­Go and see if you can’tget some other room, where I needn’t feel asif I were drowning, all the way over.”

He obeyed, so far as to go away at once, and havingonce started, he did not stop short of the purser’soffice. He made an excuse of getting greenbacksfor some English bank-notes, and then he said casuallythat he supposed there would be no chance of havinghis room on the lower deck changed for something alittle less intimate with the sea. The purserwas not there to take the humorous view, but he conceivedthat March wanted something higher up, and he wasable to offer him a room of those on the promenadewhere he had seen swells going in and out, for sixhundred dollars. March did not blench, but saidhe would get his wife to look at it with him, andthen he went out somewhat dizzily to take counsel withhimself how he should put the matter to her. Shewould be sure to ask what the price of the new roomwould be, and he debated whether to take it and tellher some kindly lie about it, or trust to the bracingeffect of the sum named in helping restore the lostbalance of her nerves. He was not so rich thathe could throw six hundred dollars away, but theremight be worse things; and he walked up and down thinking.All at once it flashed upon him that he had bettersee the doctor, anyway, and find out whether therewere not some last hope in medicine before he tookthe desperate step before him. He turned in halfhis course, and ran into a lady who had just emergedfrom the door of the promenade laden with wraps, andwho dropped them all and clutched him to save herselffrom falling.

“Why, Mr. March!” she shrieked.

“Miss Triscoe!” he returned, in the astonishmentwhich he shared with her to the extent of lettingthe shawls he had knocked from her hold lie betweenthem till she began to pick them up herself. Thenhe joined her and in the relief of their common occupationthey contrived to possess each other of the reasonof their presence on, the same boat. She hadsorrowed over Mrs. March’s sad state, and hehad grieved to hear that her father was going homebecause he was not at all well, before they foundthe general stretched out in his steamer-chair, andwaiting with a grim impatience for his daughter.

“But how is it you’re not in the passenger-list?”he inquired of them both, and Miss Triscoe explainedthat they had taken their passage at the last moment,too late, she supposed, to get into the list.They were in London, and had run down to Liverpoolon the chance of getting berths. Beyond thisshe was not definite, and there was an absence of Burnamynot only from her company but from her conversationwhich mystified March through all his selfish preoccupationswith his wife. She was a girl who had her reserves,but for a girl who had so lately and rapturously writtenthem of her engagement, there was a silence concerningher betrothed that had almost positive quality.With his longing to try Miss Triscoe upon Mrs. March’smalady as a remedial agent, he had now the desireto try Mrs. March upon Miss Triscoe’s mysteryas a solvent. She stood talking to him, and refusingto sit down and be wrapped up in the chair next herfather. She said that if he were going to askMrs. March to let her come to her, it would not beworth while to sit down; and he hurried below.

“Did you get it?” asked his wife, withoutlooking round, but not so apathetically as before.

“Oh, yes. That’s all right.But now, Isabel, there’s something I’vegot to tell you. You’d find it out, andyou’d better know it at once.”

She turned her face, and asked sternly, “Whatis it?”

Then he said, with, an almost equal severity, “MissTriscoe is on board.
Miss Triscoe-and-her-father. She wishes to comedown and see you.”

Mrs. March sat up and began to twist her hair intoshape. “And Burnamy?”

“There is no Burnamy physically, or so far asI can make out, spiritually. She didn’tmention him, and I talked at least five minutes withher.”

“Hand me my dressing-sack,” said Mrs.March, “and poke those things on the sofa underthe berth. Shut up that wash-stand, and pull thecurtain across that hideous window. Stop!Throw those towels into your berth. Put my shoes,and your slippers into the shoe-bag on the door.Slip the brushes into that other bag. Beat thedent out of the sofa cushion that your head has made.Now!”

“Then—­then you will see her?”

“See her!”

Her voice was so terrible that he fled before it,and he returned with Miss Triscoe in a dreamlike simultaneity.He remembered, as he led the way into his corridor,to apologize for bringing her down into a basem*ntroom.

“Oh, we’re in the basem*nt, too; it wasall we could get,” she said in words that endedwithin the state-room he opened to her. Then hewent back and took her chair and wraps beside herfather.

He let the general himself lead the way up to hishealth, which he was not slow in reaching, and wasnot quick in leaving. He reminded March of thestate he had seen him in at Wurzburg, and he said ithad gone from bad to worse with him. At Weimarhe had taken to his bed and merely escaped from itwith his life. Then they had tried Schevleningenfor a week, where, he said in a tone of some injury,they had rather thought they might find them, theMarches. The air had been poison to him, andthey had come over to England with some notion of Bournemouth;but the doctor in London had thought not, and urgedtheir going home. “All Europe is damp,you know, and dark as a pocket in winter,” heended.

There had been nothing about Burnamy, and March decidedthat he must wait to see his wife if he wished toknow anything, when the general, who had been silent,twisted his head towards him, and said without regardto the context, “It was complicated, at Weimar,by that young man in the most devilish way. Didmy daughter write to Mrs. March about—­Wellit came to nothing, after all; and I don’t understandhow, to this day. I doubt if they do. Itwas some sort of quarrel, I suppose. I wasn’tconsulted in the matter either way. It appearsthat parents are not consulted in these trifling affairs,nowadays.” He had married his daughter’smother in open defiance of her father; but in theglare of his daughter’s wilfulness this facthad whitened into pious obedience. “I daresay I shall be told, by-and-by, and shall be expectedto approve of the result.”

A fancy possessed March that by operation of temperamentallaws General Triscoe was no more satisfied with Burnamy’sfinal rejection than with his acceptance. Ifthe engagement was ever to be renewed, it might beanother thing; but as it stood, March divined a certainfavor for the young man in the general’s attitude.But the affair was altogether too delicate for comment;the general’s aristocratic frankness in dealingwith it might have gone farther if his knowledge hadbeen greater; but in any case March did not see howhe could touch it. He could only say, He hadalways liked Burnamy, himself.

He had his good qualities, the general owned.He did not profess to understand the young men ofour time; but certainly the fellow had the instinctsof a gentleman. He had nothing to say againsthim, unless in that business with that man—­whatwas his name?

“Stoller?” March prompted. “Idon’t excuse him in that, but I don’t blamehim so much, either. If punishment means atonement,he had the opportunity of making that right very suddenly,and if pardon means expunction, then I don’tsee why that offence hasn’t been pretty wellwiped out.

“Those things are not so simple as they usedto seem,” said the general, with a seriousnessbeyond his wont in things that did not immediatelyconcern his own comfort or advantage.

LXXVI.

In the mean time Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe werediscussing another offence of Burnamy’s.

“It wasn’t,” said the girl, excitedly,after a plunge through all the minor facts to theheart of the matter, “that he hadn’t aperfect right to do it, if he thought I didn’tcare for him. I had refused him at Carlsbad,and I had forbidden him to speak to me about—­onthe subject. But that was merely temporary, andhe ought to have known it. He ought to have knownthat I couldn’t accept him, on the spur of themoment, that way; and when he had come back, aftergoing away in disgrace, before he had done anythingto justify himself. I couldn’t have keptmy self-respect; and as it was I had the greatestdifficulty; and he ought to have seen it. Ofcourse he said afterwards that he didn’t seeit. But when—­when I found out thatshe had been in Weimar, and all that time, whileI had been suffering in Carlsbad and Wurzburg, andlonging to see him—­let him know how I wasreally feeling—­he was flirting with that—­thatgirl, then I saw that he was a false nature, and Idetermined to put an end to everything. And thatis what I did; and I shall always think I—­didright—­and—­”

The rest was lost in Agatha’s handkerchief,which she put up to her eyes. Mrs. March watchedher from her pillow keeping the girl’s unoccupiedhand in her own, and softly pressing it till the stormwas past sufficiently to allow her to be heard.

Then she said, “Men are very strange—­thebest of them. And from the very fact that hewas disappointed, he would be all the more apt to rushinto a flirtation with somebody else.”

Miss Triscoe took down her handkerchief from a facethat had certainly not been beautified by grief.“I didn’t blame him for the flirting; ornot so much. It was his keeping it from me afterwards.He ought to have told me the very first instant wewere engaged. But he didn’t. He letit go on, and if I hadn’t happened on that bouquetI might never have known anything about it. Thatis what I mean by—­a false nature. Iwouldn’t have minded his deceiving me; but tolet me deceive myself—­Oh, it was too much!”

Agatha hid her face in her handkerchief again.She was perching on the edge of the berth, and Mrs.March said, with a glance, which she did not see,toward the sofa, “I’m afraid that’srather a hard seat for you.

“Oh, no, thank you! I’m perfectlycomfortable—­I like it—­if youdon’t mind?”

Mrs. March pressed her hand for answer, and afteranother little delay, sighed and said, “Theyare not like us, and we cannot help it. They aremore temporizing.”

“How do you mean?” Agatha unmasked again.

“They can bear to keep things better than wecan, and they trust to time to bring them right, orto come right of themselves.”

“I don’t think Mr. March would trust thingsto come right of themselves!” said Agatha inindignant accusal of Mrs. March’s sincerity.

“Ah, that’s just what he would do, mydear, and has done, all along; and I don’t believewe could have lived through without it: we shouldhave quarrelled ourselves into the grave!”

“Mrs. March!”

“Yes, indeed. I don’t mean that hewould ever deceive me. But he would let thingsgo on, and hope that somehow they would come rightwithout any fuss.”

“Do you mean that he would let anybody deceivethemselves?”

“I’m afraid he would—­if hethought it would come right. It used to be aterrible trial to me; and it is yet, at times whenI don’t remember that he means nothing but goodand kindness by it. Only the other day in Ansbach—­howlong ago it seems!—­he let a poor old womangive him her son’s address in Jersey City, andallowed her to believe he would look him up when wegot back and tell him we had seen her. I don’tbelieve, unless I keep right round after him, as wesay in New England, that he’ll ever go nearthe man.”

Agatha looked daunted, but she said, “That isa very different thing.”

“It isn’t a different kind of thing.And it shows what men are,—­the sweetestand best of them, that is. They are terribly aptto be—­easy-going.”

“Then you think I was all wrong?” thegirl asked in a tremor.

“No, indeed! You were right, because youreally expected perfection of him. You expectedthe ideal. And that’s what makes all thetrouble, in married life: we expect too muchof each other—­we each expect more of theother than we are willing to give or can give.If I had to begin over again, I should not expectanything at all, and then I should be sure of beingradiantly happy. But all this talking and allthis writing about love seems to turn our brains;we know that men are not perfect, even at our craziest,because women are not, but we expect perfection ofthem; and they seem to expect it of us, poor things!If we could keep on after we are in love just as wewere before we were in love, and take nice thingsas favors and surprises, as we did in the beginning!But we get more and more greedy and exacting—­”

“Do you think I was too exacting in wantinghim to tell me everything after we were engaged?”

“No, I don’t say that. But supposehe had put it off till you were married?” Agathablushed a little, but not painfully, “Would ithave been so bad? Then you might have thoughtthat his flirting up to the last moment in his desperationwas a very good joke. You would have understoodbetter just how it was, and it might even have madeyou fonder of him. You might have seen that hehad flirted with some one else because he was so heart-brokenabout you.”

“Then you believe that if I could have waitedtill—­till—­but when I had foundout, don’t you see I couldn’t wait?It would have been all very well if I hadn’tknown it till then. But as I did know it.Don’t you see?”

“Yes, that certainly complicated it,”Mrs. March admitted. “But I don’tthink, if he’d been a false nature, he’dhave owned up as he did. You see, he didn’ttry to deny it; and that’s a great point gained.”

“Yes, that is true,” said Agatha, withconviction. “I saw that afterwards.But you don’t think, Mrs. March, that I was unjustor—­or hasty?”

“No, indeed! You couldn’t have donedifferently under the circ*mstances. You maybe sure he felt that—­he is so unselfishand generous—­” Agatha began to weepinto her handkerchief again; Mrs. March caressed herhand. “And it will certainly come rightif you feel as you do.”

“No,” the girl protested. “Hecan never forgive me; it’s all over, everythingis over. It would make very little differenceto me, what happened now—­if the steamerbroke her shaft, or anything. But if I can onlybelieve I wasn’t unjust—­”

Mrs. March assured her once more that she had behavedwith absolute impartiality; and she proved to herby a process of reasoning quite irrefragable thatit was only a question of time, with which place hadnothing to do, when she and Burnamy should come togetheragain, and all should be made right between them.The fact that she did not know where he was, any morethan Mrs. March herself, had nothing to do with theresult; that was a mere detail, which would settleitself. She clinched her argument by confessingthat her own engagement had been broken off, and thatit had simply renewed itself. All you had to dowas to keep willing it, and waiting. There wassomething very mysterious in it.

“And how long was it till—­”Agatha faltered.

“Well, in our ease it was two years.”

“Oh!” said the girl, but Mrs. March hastenedto reassure her.

“But our case was very peculiar. I couldsee afterwards that it needn’t have been twomonths, if I had been willing to acknowledge at oncethat I was in the wrong. I waited till we met.”

“If I felt that I was in the wrong, I shouldwrite,” said Agatha. “I shouldn’tcare what he thought of my doing it.”

“Yes, the great thing is to make sure that youwere wrong.”

They remained talking so long, that March and thegeneral had exhausted all the topics of common interest,and had even gone through those they did not carefor. At last the general said, “I’mafraid my daughter will tire Mrs. March.”

“Oh, I don’t think she’ll tire mywife. But do you want her?”

“Well, when you’re going down.”

“I think I’ll take a turn about the deck,and start my circulation,” said March, and hedid so before he went below.

He found his wife up and dressed, and waiting provisionallyon the sofa. “I thought I might as wellgo to lunch,” she said, and then she told himabout Agatha and Burnamy, and the means she had employedto comfort and encourage the girl. “Andnow, dearest, I want you to find out where Burnamyis, and give him a hint. You will, won’tyou! If you could have seen how unhappy she was!”

“I don’t think I should have cared, andI’m certainly not going to meddle. I thinkBurnamy has got no more than he deserved, and thathe’s well rid of her. I can’t imaginea broken engagement that would more completely meetmy approval. As the case stands, they have myblessing.”

“Don’t say that, dearest! You knowyou don’t mean it.”

“I do; and I advise you to keep your hands off.You’ve done all and more than you ought to propitiateMiss Triscoe. You’ve offered yourself up,and you’ve offered me up—­”

“No, no, Basil! I merely used you as anillustration of what men were—­the bestof them.”

“And I can’t observe,” he continued,“that any one else has been considered in thematter. Is Miss Triscoe the sole sufferer by Burnamy’sflirtation? What is the matter with a little compassionfor the pivotal girl?”

“Now, you know you’re not serious,”said his wife; and though he would not admit this,he could not be seriously sorry for the new interestwhich she took in the affair. There was no longerany question of changing their state-room. Underthe tonic influence of the excitement she did notgo back to her berth after lunch, and she was up laterafter dinner than he could have advised. Shewas absorbed in Agatha, but in her liberation fromher hypochondria, she began also to make a comparativestudy of the American swells, in the light of her lateexperience with the German highhotes. It is truethat none of the swells gave her the opportunity of

examining them at close range, as the highhotes haddone. They kept to their, state-rooms mostly,where, after he thought she could bear it, March toldher how near he had come to making her their equalby an outlay of six hundred dollars. She nowshuddered at the thought; but she contended that intheir magnificent exclusiveness they could give pointsto European princes; and that this showed again howwhen Americans did try to do a thing, they beat theworld. Agatha Triscoe knew who they were, butshe did not know them; they belonged to another kindof set; she spoke of them as “rich people,”and she seemed content to keep away from them withMrs. March and with the shy, silent old wife of MajorEltwin, to whom March sometimes found her talking.

He never found her father talking with Major Eltwin.General Triscoe had his own friends in the smoking-room,where he held forth in a certain corner on the chancesof the approaching election in New York, and mockedtheir incredulity when he prophesied the success ofTammany and the return of the King. March himselfmuch preferred Major Eltwin to the general and hisfriends; he lived back in the talk of the Ohioan intohis own younger years in Indiana, and he was amusedand touched to find how much the mid-Western lifeseemed still the same as he had known. The conditionshad changed, but not so much as they had changed inthe East and the farther West. The picture thatthe major drew of them in his own region was alluring;it made March homesick; though he knew that he shouldnever go back to his native section. There wasthe comfort of kind in the major; and he had a veinof philosophy, spare but sweet, which March liked;he liked also the meekness which had come through sorrowupon a spirit which had once been proud.

They had both the elderly man’s habit of earlyrising, and they usually found themselves togetherwaiting impatiently for the cup of coffee, ingenuouslybad, which they served on the Cupania not earlier thanhalf past six, in strict observance of a rule of theline discouraging to people of their habits.March admired the vileness of the decoction, whichhe said could not be got anywhere out of the BritishEmpire, and he asked Eltwin the first morning if hehad noticed how instantly on the Channel boat theyhad dropped to it and to the sour, heavy, sodden Britishbread, from the spirited and airy Continental traditionof coffee and rolls.

The major confessed that he was no great hand to noticesuch things, and he said he supposed that if the linehad never lost a passenger, and got you to New Yorkin six days it had a right to feed you as it pleased;he surmised that if they could get their airing outsidebefore they took their coffee, it would give the coffeea chance to taste better; and this was what they afterwardsdid. They met, well buttoned and well mined up,on the promenade when it was yet so early that theywere not at once sure of each other in the twilight,and watched the morning planets pale east and westbefore the sun rose. Sometimes there were no palingplanets and no rising sun, and a black sea, ridgedwith white, tossed under a low dark sky with dim rifts.

One morning, they saw the sun rise with a serenityand majesty which it rarely has outside of the theatre.The dawn began over that sea which was like the rumpledcanvas imitations of the sea on the stage, under longmauve clouds bathed in solemn light. Above these,in the pale tender sky, two silver stars hung, andthe steamer’s smoke drifted across them likea thin dusky veil. To the right a bank of duncloud began to burn crimson, and to burn brightertill it was like a low hill-side full of gorgeousrugosities fleeced with a dense dwarfish growth ofautumnal shrubs. The whole eastern heaven softenedand flushed through diaphanous mists; the west remaineda livid mystery. The eastern masses and flakesof cloud began to kindle keenly; but the stars shoneclearly, and then one star, till the tawny pink hidit. All the zenith reddened, but still the sundid not show except in the color of the brilliant clouds.At last the lurid horizon began to burn like a flame-shotsmoke, and a fiercely bright disc edge pierced itslevel, and swiftly defined itself as the sun’sorb.

Many thoughts went through March’s mind; someof them were sad, but in some there was a touch ofhopefulness. It might have been that beauty whichconsoled him for his years; somehow he felt himself,if no longer young, a part of the young immortal frameof things. His state was indefinable, but helonged to hint at it to his companion.

“Yes,” said Eltwin, with a long deep sigh.“I feel as if I could walk out through thatbrightness and find her. I reckon that such hopeswouldn’t be allowed to lie to us; that so manyages of men couldn’t have fooled themselvesso. I’m glad I’ve seen this.”He was silent and they both remained watching therising sun till they could not bear its splendor.“Now,” said the major, “it must betime for that mud, as you call it.” Overtheir coffee and crackers at the end of the table whichthey had to themselves, he resumed. “Iwas thinking all the time—­we seem to thinkhalf a dozen things at once, and this was one of them—­abouta piece of business I’ve got to settle whenI reach home; and perhaps you can advise me aboutit; you’re an editor. I’ve got a newspaperon my hands; I reckon it would be a pretty good thing,if it had a chance; but I don’t know what todo with it: I got it in trade with a fellow whohas to go West for his lungs, but he’s stayingtill I get back. What’s become of thatyoung chap—­what’s his name?—­thatwent out with us?”

“Burnamy?” prompted March, rather breathlessly.

“Yes. Couldn’t he take hold of it?I rather liked him. He’s smart, isn’the?”

“Very,” said March. “But Idon’t know where he is. I don’t knowthat he would go into the country—. Buthe might, if—­”

They entered provisionally into the case, and forargument’s sake supposed that Burnamy wouldtake hold of the major’s paper if he could begot at. It really looked to March like a goodchance for him, on Eltwin’s showing; but hewas not confident of Burnamy’s turning up verysoon, and he gave the major a pretty clear notionwhy, by entering into the young fellow’s historyfor the last three months.

“Isn’t it the very irony of fate?”he said to his wife when he found her in their roomwith a cup of the same mud he had been drinking, andreported the facts to her.

“Irony?” she said, with all the excitementhe could have imagined or desired. “Nothingof the kind. It’s a leading, if ever therewas one. It will be the easiest thing in theworld to find Burnamy. And out there she cansit on her steps!”

He slowly groped his way to her meaning, through thehypothesis of Burnamy’s reconciliation and marriagewith Agatha Triscoe, and their settlement in MajorEltwin’s town under social conditions that implieda habit of spending the summer evenings on their frontporch. While he was doing this she showered himwith questions and conjectures and requisitions inwhich nothing but the impossibility of going ashoresaved him from the instant devotion of all his energiesto a world-wide, inquiry into Burnamy’s whereabouts.

The next morning he was up before Major Eltwin gotout, and found the second-cabin passengers free ofthe first-cabin promenade at an hour when their superiorswere not using it. As he watched these inferiors,decent-looking, well-clad men and women, enjoying theirprivilege with a furtive air, and with stolen glancesat him, he asked himself in what sort he was theirsuperior, till the inquiry grew painful. Thenhe rose from his chair, and made his way to the placewhere the material barrier between them was lifted,and interested himself in a few of them who seemedtoo proud to avail themselves of his society on theterms made. A figure seized his attention witha sudden fascination of conjecture and rejection:the figure of a tall young man who came out on thepromenade and without looking round, walked swiftlyaway to the bow of the ship, and stood there, lookingdown at the water in an attitude which was bewilderinglyfamiliar. His movement, his posture, his dress,even, was that of Burnamy, and March, after a firstflush of pleasure, felt a sickening repulsion in thenotion of his presence. It would have been sucha cheap performance on the part of life, which hasall sorts of chances at command, and need not descendto the poor tricks of second-rate fiction; and heaccused Burnamy of a complicity in the bad taste ofthe affair, though he realized, when he reflected,that if it were really Burnamy he must have sailedin as much unconsciousness of the Triscoes as he himselfhad done. He had probably got out of money andhad hurried home while he had still enough to paythe second-cabin fare on the first boat back.Clearly he was not to blame, but life was to blamefor such a shabby device; and March felt this so keenlythat he wished to turn from the situation, and havenothing to do with it. He kept moving towardhim, drawn by the fatal attraction, and at a few paces’distance the young man whirled about and showed himthe face of a stranger.

March made some witless remark on the rapid courseof the ship as it cut its way through the water ofthe bow; the stranger answered with a strong Lancashireaccent; and in the talk which followed, he said hewas going out to see the cotton-mills at Fall Riverand New Bedford, and he seemed hopeful of some adviceor information from March; then he said he must goand try to get his Missus out; March understood himto mean his wife, and he hurried down to his own,to whom he related his hair-breadth escape from Burnamy.

“I don’t call it an escape at all!”she declared. “I call it the greatest possiblemisfortune. If it had been Burnamy we could havebrought them together at once, just when she has seenso clearly that she was in the wrong, and is feelingall broken up. There wouldn’t have beenany difficulty about his being in the second-cabin.We could have contrived to have them meet somehow.If the worst came to the worst you could have lenthim money to pay the difference, and got him into thefirst-cabin.”

“I could have taken that six-hundred-dollarroom for him,” said March, “and then hecould have eaten with the swells.”

She answered that now he was teasing; that he wasfundamentally incapable of taking anything seriously;and in the end he retired before the stewardess bringingher first coffee, with a well-merited feeling thatif it had not been for his triviality the young Lancashiremanwould really have been Burnamy.

LXXV.

Except for the first day and night out from Queenstown,when the ship rolled and pitched with straining andsqueaking noises, and a thumping of the lifted screws,there was no rough weather, and at last the ocean waslivid and oily, with a long swell, on which she swayedwith no perceptible motion save from her machinery.

Most of the seamanship seemed to be done after dark,or in those early hours when March found the stewardscleaning the stairs, and the sailors scouring thepromenades. He made little acquaintance with hisfellow-passengers. One morning he almost spokewith an old Quaker lady whom he joined in lookingat the Niagara flood which poured from the churningscrews; but he did not quite get the words out.On the contrary he talked freely with an Americanwho, bred horses on a farm near Boulogne, and wasgoing home to the Horse Show; he had been thirty-fiveyears out of the country, but he had preserved hisYankee accent in all its purity, and was the mosttypical-looking American on board. Now and thenMarch walked up and down with a blond Mexican whomhe found of the usual well-ordered Latin intelligence,but rather flavorless; at times he sat beside a niceJew, who talked agreeably, but only about business;and he philosophized the race as so tiresome oftenbecause it seemed so often without philosophy.He made desperate attempts at times to interest himselfin the pool-selling in the smoking-room where the bettingon the ship’s wonderful run was continual.

He thought that people talked less and less as theydrew nearer home; but on the last day out there wasa sudden expansion, and some whom he had not spokenwith voluntarily addressed him. The sweet, softair was like midsummer the water rippled gently, withouta swell, blue under the clear sky, and the ship lefta wide track that was silver in the sun. Therewere more sail; the first and second class baggagewas got up and piled along the steerage deck.

Some people dressed a little more than usual for thelast dinner which was earlier than usual, so as tobe out of the way against the arrival which had beenvariously predicted at from five to seven-thirty.An indescribable nervousness culminated with the appearanceof the customs officers on board, who spread theirpapers on cleared spaces of the dining-tables, andsummoned the passengers to declare that they had nothingto declare, as a preliminary to being searched likethieves at the dock.

This ceremony proceeded while the Cupania made herway up the Narrows, and into the North River, wherethe flare of lights from the crazy steeps and cliffsof architecture on the New York shore seemed a persistenceof the last Fourth of July pyrotechnics. Marchblushed for the grotesque splendor of the spectacle,and was confounded to find some Englishmen admiringit, till he remembered that aesthetics were not thestrong point of our race. His wife sat hand inhand with Miss Triscoe, and from time to time madehim count the pieces of small baggage in the keepingof their steward; while General Triscoe held aloofin a sarcastic calm.

The steamer groped into her dock; the gangways werelifted to her side; the passengers fumbled and stumbleddown their incline, and at the bottom the Marchesfound themselves respectively in the arms of theirson and daughter. They all began talking at once,and ignoring and trying to remember the Triscoes towhom the young Marches were presented. Bella didher best to be polite to Agatha, and Tom offered toget an inspector for the general at the same timeas for his father. Then March, remorsefully rememberedthe Eltwins, and looked about for them, so that hisson might get them an inspector too. He foundthe major already in the hands of an inspector, whowas passing all his pieces after carelessly lookinginto one: the official who received the declarationson board had noted a Grand Army button like his ownin the major’s lapel, and had marked his fellow-veteran’spaper with the mystic sign which procures for the bearerthe honor of being promptly treated as a smuggler,while the less favored have to wait longer for thisindignity at the hands of their government. WhenMarch’s own inspector came he was as civil andlenient as our hateful law allows; when he had finishedMarch tried to put a bank-note in his hand, and wasbrought to a just shame by his refusal of it.The bed-room steward keeping guard over the baggagehelped put-it together after the search, and protestedthat March had feed him so handsomely that he wouldstay there with it as long as they wished. Thispartly restored March’s self-respect, and hecould share in General Triscoe’s indignationwith the Treasury ruling which obliged him to pay dutyon his own purchases in excess of the hundred-dollarlimit, though his daughter had brought nothing, andthey jointly came far within the limit for two.

He found that the Triscoes were going to a quiet oldhotel on the way to Stuyvesant Square, quite in hisown neighborhood, and he quickly arranged for allthe ladies and the general to drive together whilehe was to follow with his son on foot and by car.They got away from the scene of the customs’havoc while the steamer shed, with its vast darknessdimly lit by its many lamps, still showed like a battle-fieldwhere the inspectors groped among the scattered baggagelike details from the victorious army searching forthe wounded. His son clapped him on the shoulderwhen he suggested this notion, and said he was thesame old father; and they got home as gayly togetheras the dispiriting influences of the New York uglinesswould permit. It was still in those good anddecent times, now so remote, when the city got somethingfor the money paid out to keep its streets clean,and those they passed through were not foul but merelymean.

The ignoble effect culminated when they came intoBroadway, and found its sidewalks, at an hour whenthose of any European metropolis would have been brilliantwith life, as unpeopled as those of a minor countrytown, while long processions of cable-cars cartedheaps of men and women up and down the thoroughfareamidst the deformities of the architecture.

The next morning the March family breakfasted lateafter an evening prolonged beyond midnight in spiteof half-hourly agreements that now they must reallyall go to bed. The children had both to recognizeagain and again how well their parents were looking;Tom had to tell his father about the condition of‘Every Other Week’; Bella had to explainto her mother how sorry her husband was that he couldnot come on to meet them with her, but was cominga week later to take her home, and then she wouldknow the reason why they could not all, go back toChicago with him: it was just the place for herfather to live, for everybody to live. At breakfastshe renewed the reasoning with which she had maintainedher position the night before; the travellers enteredinto a full expression of their joy at being homeagain; March asked what had become of that stray parrotwhich they had left in the tree-top the morning theystarted; and Mrs. March declared that this was thelast Silver Wedding Journey she ever wished to take,and tried to convince them all that she had been onthe verge of nervous collapse when she reached theship. They sat at table till she discovered thatit was very nearly eleven o’clock, and saidit was disgraceful.

Before they rose, there was a ring at the door, anda card was brought in to Tom. He glanced at it,and said to his father, “Oh, yes! This manhas been haunting the office for the last three days.He’s got to leave to-day, and as it seemed tobe rather a case of life and death with him, I saidhe’d probably find you here this morning.But if you don’t want to see him, I can puthim off till afternoon, I suppose.”

He tossed the card to his father, who looked at itquietly, and then gave it to his wife. “PerhapsI’d as well see him?”

“See him!” she returned in accents inwhich all the intensity of her soul was centred.By an effort of self-control which no words can conveya just sense of she remained with her children, whileher husband with a laugh more teasing than can beimagined went into the drawing-room to meet Burnamy.

The poor fellow was in an effect of belated summeras to clothes, and he looked not merely haggard butshabby. He made an effort for dignity as wellas gayety, however, in stating himself to March, withmany apologies for his persistency. But, he said,he was on his way West, and he was anxious to knowwhether there was any chance of his ‘Kasper Hauler’paper being taken if he finished it up. Marchwould have been a far harder-hearted editor than hewas, if he could have discouraged the suppliant beforehim. He said he would take the Kasper Hauler paperand add a band of music to the usual rate of ten dollarsa thousand words. Then Burnamy’s dignitygave way, if not his gayety; he began to laugh, andsuddenly he broke down and confessed that he had comehome in the steerage; and was at his last cent, beyondhis fare to Chicago. His straw hat looked likea withered leaf in the light of his sad facts; histhin overcoat affected March’s imagination assomething like the diaphanous cast shell of a locust,hopelessly resumed for comfort at the approach ofautumn. He made Burnamy sit down, after he hadonce risen, and he told him of Major Eltwin’swish to see him; and he promised to go round withhim to the major’s hotel before the Eltwins lefttown that afternoon.

While he prolonged the interview in this way, Mrs.March was kept from breaking in upon them only bythe psychical experiment which she was making withthe help and sympathy of her daughter at the windowof the dining-room which looked up Sixteenth Street.At the first hint she gave of the emotional situationwhich Burnamy was a main part of, her son; with thebrutal contempt of young men for other young men’slove affairs, said he must go to the office; he badehis mother tell his father there was no need of hiscoming down that day, and he left the two women together.This gave the mother a chance to develop the wholefact to the daughter with telegrammic rapidity andbrevity, and then to enrich the first-outline withinnumerable details, while they both remained at thewindow, and Mrs. March said at two-minutely intervals,with no sense of iteration for either of them, “Itold her to come in the morning, if she felt likeit, and I know she will. But if she doesn’t,I shall say there is nothing in fate, or Providenceeither. At any rate I’m going to stay hereand keep longing for her, and we’ll see whetherthere’s anything in that silly theory of yourfather’s. I don’t believe there is,”she said, to be on the safe side.

Even when she saw Agatha Triscoe enter the park gateon Rutherford Place, she saved herself from disappointmentby declaring that she was not coming across to theirhouse. As the girl persisted in coming and coming,and at last came so near that she caught sight of Mrs.March at the window and nodded, the mother turnedungratefully upon her daughter, and drove her awayto her own room, so that no society detail should hinderthe divine chance. She went to the door herselfwhen Agatha rang, and then she was going to open theway into the parlor where March was still closetedwith Burnamy, and pretend that she had not known theywere there. But a soberer second thought thanthis prevailed, and she told the girl who it was thatwas within and explained the accident of his presence.“I think,” she said nobly, “thatyou ought to have the chance of going away if youdon’t wish to meet him.”

The girl, with that heroic precipitation which Mrs.March had noted in her from the first with regardto what she wanted to do, when Burnamy was in question,answered, “But I do wish to meet him, Mrs. March.”

While they stood looking at each other, March cameout to ask his wife if she would see Burnamy, andshe permitted herself so much stratagem as to substituteAgatha, after catching her husband aside and subduinghis proposed greeting of the girl to a hasty handshake.

Half an hour later she thought it time to join theyoung people, urged largely by the frantic interestof her daughter. But she returned from the half-opendoor without entering. “I couldn’tbring myself to break in on the poor things.They are standing at the window together looking overat St. George’s.”

Bella silently clasped her hands. March gavecynical laugh, and said, “Well we are in forit, my dear.” Then he added, “I hopethey’ll take us with them on their Silver WeddingJourney.”

PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

Declare that they had nothingto declare
Despair which any perfectioninspires
Disingenuous, hypocriticalpassion of love
Fundamentally incapable oftaking anything seriously
Held aloof in a sarcasticcalm
Illusions: no marriagecan be perfect without them
Married life: we expecttoo much of each other
Not do to be perfectly frankwith one’s own country
Offence which any differenceof taste was apt to give him
Passionate desire for excessin a bad thing
Puddles of the paths weredrying up with the haste
Race seemed so often withoutphilosophy
Self-sacrifice which couldbe had, as it were, at a bargain
She always came to his defencewhen he accused himself

PG EDITORS BOOKMARKS FOR THE COMPLETE TRILOGY:

Affected absence of mind
Affectional habit
All the loveliness that existsoutside of you, dearest is little
All luckiest or the unluckiest,the healthiest or the sickest
Americans are hungrier forroyalty than anybody else
Amusing world, if you do notrefuse to be amused
Anticipative homesickness
Anticipative reprisal
Any sort of stuff was goodenough to make a preacher out of
Appearance made him doubttheir ability to pay so much
Artists never do anythinglike other people
As much of his story as hemeant to tell without prompting
At heart every man is a smuggler
Bad wars, or what are comicallycalled good wars
Ballast of her instinctivedespondency
Be good, sweet man, and letwho will be clever
Beautiful with the radianceof loving and being loved
Bewildering labyrinth of error
Biggest place is always thekindest as well as the cruelest
Brag of his wife, as a goodhusband always does
Brown-stone fronts
But when we make that moneyhere, no one loses it
Buttoned about him as if itconcealed a bad conscience
Calm of those who have logicon their side
Civilly protested and consented
Clinging persistence of suchnatures
Coldly and inaccessibly vigilant
Collective silence which passesfor sociality
Comfort of the critical attitude
Conscience weakens to theneed that isn’t
Considerable comfort in holdinghim accountable
Courage hadn’t beenput to the test
Courtship
Deadly summer day
Death is peace and pardon
Death is an exile that noremorse and no love can reach
Decided not to let the factsbetray themselves by chance
Declare that they had nothingto declare
Despair which any perfectioninspires
Did not idealize him, butin the highest effect she realized him
Dinner unites the idea ofpleasure and duty
Disingenuous, hypocriticalpassion of love
Dividend: It’sa chicken before it’s hatched
Does any one deserve happiness
Does anything from withoutchange us?
Dog that had plainly madeup his mind to go mad
Effort to get on common groundwith an inferior
Europe, where society hasthem, as it were, in a translation
Evil which will not let aman forgive his victim
Explained perhaps too fully
Extract what consolation lurksin the irreparable
Family buryin’ grounds
Favorite stock of his go upand go down under the betting
Feeblest-minded are sure tolead the talk
Feeling rather ashamed,—­forhe had laughed too
Feeling of contempt for hisunambitious destination
Flavors not very sharply distinguishedfrom one another
Fundamentally incapable oftaking anything seriously
Futility of travel
Gayety, which lasted beyond

any apparent reason for it
Glad; which considering, theyceased to be
Got their laugh out of toomany things in life
Guilty rapture of a deliberatedereliction
Had learned not to censurethe irretrievable
Had no opinions that he wasnot ready to hold in abeyance
Handsome pittance
Happiness is so unreasonable
Happiness built upon and hedgedabout with misery
He expected to do the wrongthing when left to his own devices
He buys my poverty and notmy will
Headache darkens the universewhile it lasts
Heart that forgives but doesnot forget
Held aloof in a sarcasticcalm
Helplessness begets a senseof irresponsibility
Helplessness accounts formany heroic facts in the world
Hemmed round with this eternaldarkness of death
Homage which those who havenot pay to those who have
Honest selfishness
Hopeful recklessness
How much can a man honestlyearn without wronging or oppressing
Humanity may at last prevailover nationality
Hurry up and git well—­orsomething
Hypothetical difficulty
I cannot endure this—­thishopefulness of yours
I want to be sorry upon theeasiest possible terms
I supposed I had the pleasureof my wife’s acquaintance
I’m not afraid—­I’mawfully demoralized
If you dread harm enough itis less likely to happen
Ignorant of her ignorance
Illusions: no marriagecan be perfect without them
Impertinent prophecies oftheir enjoying it so much
Indispensable
Indulge safely in the pleasuresof autobiography
Intrepid fancy that they hadconfronted fate
It had come as all such calamitiescome, from nothing
It must be your despair thathelps you to bear up
It don’t do any goodto look at its drawbacks all the time
It ’s the same as apromise, your not saying you wouldn’t
Jesting mood in the face ofall embarrassments
Justice must be paid for atevery step in fees and costs
Less intrusive than if hehad not been there
Less certain of everythingthat I used to be sure of
Life was like the life ata sea-side hotel, but more monotonous
Life of the ship, like thelife of the sea: a sodden monotony
Life has taught him to truckleand trick
Long life of holidays whichis happy marriage
Love of justice hurry theminto sympathy with violence
Made money and do not yetknow that money has made them
Madness of sight-seeing, whichspoils travel
Man’s willingness toabide in the present
Married life: we expecttoo much of each other
Married the whole mystifyingworld of womankind
Married for no other purposethan to avoid being an old maid
Marry for love two or threetimes
Monologue to which the wivesof absent-minded men resign
Muddy draught which impudentlyaffected to be coffee
Nervous woes of comfortablepeople
Never-blooming shrub
Never could have an emotionwithout desiring to analyze it
Night so bad that it was worsethan no night at all
No man deserves to sufer atthe hands of another
No longer the gross appetitefor novelty
No right to burden our friendswith our decisions
Not do to be perfectly frankwith one’s own country
Nothing so apt to end in mutualdislike,—­except gratitude
Nothing so sad to her as abride, unless it’s a young mother
Novelists, who really havethe charge of people’s thinking
Oblivion of sleep
Offence which any differenceof taste was apt to give him
Only so much clothing as thelaw compelled
Only one of them was to bedesperate at a time
Our age caricatures our youth
Parkman
Passionate desire for excessin a bad thing
Patience with mediocrity puttingon the style of genius
Patronizing spirit of travellersin a foreign country
People that have convictionsare difficult
Person talks about takinglessons, as if they could learn it
Poverty as hopeless as anyin the world
Prices fixed by his remorse
Puddles of the paths weredrying up with the haste
Race seemed so often withoutphilosophy
Recipes for dishes and diseases
Reckless and culpable optimism
Reconciliation with deathwhich nature brings to life at last
Rejoice in everything thatI haven’t done
Rejoice as much at a non-marriageas a marriage
Repeated the nothings theyhad said already
Respect for your mind, butshe don’t think you’ve got any sense
Say when he is gone that thewoman gets along better without him
Seemed the last phase of aworld presently to be destroyed
Seeming interested in pointsnecessarily indifferent to him
Self-sufficiency, withoutit* vulgarity
Self-sacrifice which couldbe had, as it were, at a bargain
Servant of those he loved
She always came to his defencewhen he accused himself
She cares for him: thatshe was so cold shows that
She could bear his sympathy,but not its expression
Shouldn’t ca’fo’ the disgrace of bein’ poo’—­itsinconvenience
Sigh with which ladies recognizeone another’s martyrdom
So hard to give up doing anythingwe have meant to do
So old a world and gropingstill
Society: All its favorsare really bargains
Sorry he hadn’t askedmore; that’s human nature
Suffering under the drip-dripof his innocent egotism
Superstition that having andshining is the chief good
Superstition of the romancesthat love is once for all
That isn’t very old—­ornot so old as it used to be
The knowledge of your helplessnessin any circ*mstances
There is little proportionabout either pain or pleasure
They were so near in age,though they were ten years apart
They can only do harm by anexpression of sympathy
Timidity of the elder in thepresence of the younger man
To do whatever one likes isfinally to do nothing that one likes
Took the world as she foundit, and made the best of it
Tragical character of heat
Travel, with all its annoyancesand fatigues
Tried to be homesick for them,but failed
Turn to their children’sopinion with deference
Typical anything else, ispretty difficult to find
Unfounded hope that sooneror later the weather would be fine
Used to having his decisionsreached without his knowledge
Vexed by a sense of his ownpitifulness
Voice of the common imbecilityand incoherence
Voting-cattle whom they boughtand sold
Wages are the measure of necessityand not of merit
We get too much into the handsof other people
We don’t seem so muchour own property
Weariness of buying
What we can be if we must
When you look it—­liveit
Wilful sufferers
Willingness to find poetryin things around them
Wish we didn’t alwaysrecognize the facts as we do
Without realizing his cruelty,treated as a child
Woman harnessed with a dogto a cart
Wooded with the precise, severelydisciplined German forests
Work he was so fond of andso weary of
Would sacrifice his best friendto a phrase