Angela's Business

by Henry Sydnor Harrison

"HO!—HAD YOUR SPIES ON ME, HAVE YOU?"

---

Charles's heart seemed to leap a little. "Why, no," he said, sweetly. "I was speaking of one day last week. So you stole another drive to-day—you sly rascal!"

"Don't know that you'd call it driving, exactly. Where'd that brother of hers dig the little four-wheeler, d'you s'pose? I thought that kind were extinct, same as the Dodo—"

"Why, I think it's a very nice little car, Donald! Small, old-fashioned, yes—but very comfortable and—easy-going. I've—ah—had a—a number of pleasant drives in it. The real trouble is," said Charles, with immense carelessness, "she honestly doesn't know how to manage it very well as yet. And I, of course, don't know how to teach her—unfortunately."

Having seated himself in Judge Blenso's chair, Donald was lighting, with a lordly air, one of Judge Blenso's cigars; the Judge himself being at his club, through lack of interest in the Studio. Extinguishing his match by waving it languidly back and forth, the youth said, with a faint reminiscent smile:—

"Well, I gave her a pretty good lesson this afternoon, far as that goes. Had a very fairish time, too. Nice little girl, she is."

The author gazed, with a sort of nervous incredulity. He laughed hurriedly.

"Nice!—well, I should say so! She's—she's charming! You'll have to look pretty sharp if you want any more drives there—too much competition! But, of course, she may not be bookish enough, to suit your new taste—"

"Oh, bookish, no. She's not that sort. I'll tell you what your little friend is, Charlie," said the young engineer, with an air of insufferable conceit. "She's what I call a womanly woman."

Charles averted his eyes. This simple fool's quick response to the "putting on" treatment almost passed belief. Unquestionably, Donald was far more receptive to feminine influences now, than he had been in his industrious pre-Wyoming days; again, mere use, mere custom and propinquity, were famous for accomplishing just these wonders. Still, Charles's philosophic overmind, contrasting this grin on Donald's face with that unflattering remark of his last November, threw out a different concept, viz.: that perseverance in a woman is a marvelous thing.

But the hope, though it shot up delightfully, was a thin one yet. Dull Donald went on knowingly:—

"But speaking of the competition, what's happened to you, old horse?"

"How do you mean, happened to me?"

"Your little friend says you used to meet her nearly every day for a drive, but now you haven't been seen for days. I told her you'd probably changed your hours a little, as I'd seen you at lunch earlier than—"

"You did?" said the author, looking at the engineer with unconcealed annoyance. "Well, you were mistaken, that's all! You had no business to say anything of the sort. Of course, my hours may vary a little—in fact, they vary a good deal. Great heavens, I—"

"Well, don't get peevish about it!—friendly tip I'm giving you, that's all. She thinks you're mad with her—do you get me? Says you've never forgiven her for something she said to you once—some misunderstanding you had—you know, I guess—"

"Why, damnation, we never had any misunderstanding! I'm busy! I don't undertake to start to lunch at a certain particular second—"

"Well, don't tell it to me!" said Donald, cheerfully. "Trot along and explain it to her, that's the way.—I say, Charlie—change the subject—did I tell you what old Gebhardt said to me the first day we looked over the plans? About my concrete bridge over Sankey River?"

And then the childish egotistical youth was off. It seemed, indeed, that the monologue ensuing was what he had come for; it seemed that he had dressed himself one hour too early for the German with just this most agreeable of all purposes in his mind: to sit and have a good long talk about himself. Charles received his boastings with restless boredom, marking meaninglessly on the pad before him, moodily biding his time. He could have kicked Donald for his stupidity in mentioning his trifling change of hours; but of course his need was to get the conversation back to Angela quietly, without arousing the slightest suspicion. His need was that Donald should agree to give Angela regular lessons in driving the Fordette, every day through the lunch-hour.

But Donald, happening to note the face of Big Bill, came suddenly to his feet: and then, as suddenly, gave the talk an unlooked-for turn.

"I say, Charlie! How about you and old Blenso for the Wings' apartment?"

Charles's head came slowly round. "How about what?"

"Dashed sight more comfortable than up your two flights here!"

"The Wings' apartment is for rent?"

"Didn't you know that, old stick-in-the-mud? What's the matter with you? Mary's been hunting a tenant for two weeks."

Charles, finding it unnecessary to state that he had not seen Mary for exactly that length of time,—barring one very transient meeting on the street,—merely indicated, without any polish, that, not being a gadabout ass like some, he made no pretense of keeping up with all the latest tittle-tattle.

He then asked, in a voice indicating no interest in the subject: "What's Mrs. Wing going to do?"

"Going to North Carolina to live with Fanny."

"With Fanny!... I suppose she didn't consider going with Miss Mary?"

"Couldn't stand the pressure. Why, New York would kill her off like a fly! And besides, she doesn't want to get too far away from the Warders, you know. Of course, Fanny can't make her very comfortable just now—but we talked it all over and that seemed the best arrangement, all round."

"I see."

"Mary can't turn back now, of course. Well, Charlie," said Donald, earnestly, "I don't hold with her fool notions, and all that but hang it all!—she's no ordinary woman, and this is no ordinary job. Those people are giving her two assistants and $5000 a year. What d'you know about that for a poor little girl?"

He was struggling to get into his overcoat without "breaking" his shirt-front—going at once, evidently. But Charles had lost sight of his strategic intentions.

"Well, how about you two old chaps for the furnished apartment—February fifteenth, if you want it?"

Charles observed that he couldn't look at it. Donald, as if only stimulated by his host's taciturnity, became sentimental.

"First Mary, then Mrs. Wing, then me—this is going to be a break-up, Charlie, do you realize it? I'm beginning to feel it, too, let me tell you! Jove," said Donald, putting on his shining head-piece and bringing the conversation back to himself simultaneously—"now that I come right down to it, I don't want to leave this good old town!"

He departed, to his unconscious match-making. Charles, left alone, merely sat on at his table. And all that he thought of Angela Flower now was of an insignificant remark she had let fall, the first time they had walked together: "Mr. Garrott do you know who Marna reminded me of? Somebody you admire a great deal...."

And then for half an hour, his writer's mind insisted on working over and over that detestable conversation between Marna and her father, and changing it a little, just a little touch here and there, to make it fit smoothly upon Mrs. Wing and Mary....

"I tell you," said the lonely authority, suddenly, bringing his fist down on the table with a thump,—"this whole Movement's a failure if it lessens woman's lovableness! I tell you the whole object of this Movement is to make women more lovable!"

For he, of course, had never thought—like the author of "Marna" for example—that passionate love was the only sort of love worth mentioning. In that narrow sense, in her sufficiently cheap faculty for stirring the senses of men, it was clear that woman, whatever she did or left undone, would always remain "lovable." But as to love in broad and human terms—well (to keep the subject wholly impersonal); could any one in his senses call Marna a lovable being? No, her creator, in his determination to show how strong and "free" she was, had quite unconsciously made her a harsh and vain self-worshiper, revolting to decent persons. Had he, as we might say, thus inadvertently given the whole thing away? Was it finally true that a woman could not claim and lead her Own Life, except at a heavy price—paid down in her best treasure? Was the ruthless Career-Maker but the logical other-form of the waiting, the too pursuing, Maker of Homes?

From his drawer, Charles presently pulled out the former exercise-book which had enjoyed the great rise in the world. In this book, he had written no sentence since his remembered Notes on Flora Trevenna. Now he set down with a firm hand:—

What is called the Woman's Movement is seen, in the last analysis, to be only every woman's struggle between two irreconcilable impulses in her own nature.

Having written that sentence, the young man stared at it long. To him it was like a bright beam of light, turned upon the roots of his peculiar problem. For if these two impulses were in truth irreconcilable, why need he go on struggling to reconcile them in a heroine he could unreservedly admire?

---

XVI

With the sun of a new noon, with the recurring need of obtaining sustenance from one's environment, there came again the more practical problems of this weary world.

At ten minutes past one on this day, Tuesday, Charles went slipping from the house of the little Deming boys to that of the old lady who was studying French. She lived, luckily, but three doors away. She was a very lively old lady, and possessed her tutor's high regard. But that she might represent help to him, that she could personify the tutelary god of Bachelors rushing at last to his aid, had simply never crossed his mind.

The old lady's regular lesson-hour was, of course, two-thirty o'clock. But, as it happened, she had had her last instruction in the French language for some time to come, it having popped into her head, and that of the old gentleman her husband, to go to Palm Beach for a three weeks' vacation. Hence her tutor's presence in her drawing-room at this unwonted hour seemed to be due to mere chance (though who knows?). In short, as he saw it, he had merely "stopped by" to deliver a list of irregular verbs, which the old lady was to master completely while at the Beach.

Having stopped, Charles did not start again upon the instant: far from it. Friday's and Monday's run of luck had not been expected to keep up indefinitely, at the best. And Donald's blundering remark betraying his ruse had inevitably suggested the idea of experimenting a bit with opposite tactics, to wit: quietly turning his schedule backward, for variety's sake, and starting to lunch very late. Thus it was that Charles, having said all he had to say to the old lady, lingered to say it all again, and again, clinging verbosely to his oldest living pupil as it were, while one eye shot perpetually out the front window, close beside which he had taken up his position.

For the third time, the old lady promised to be studious on her holiday.

"Don't you remember how well I knew the plurals of the -ou nouns yesterday?" said she, chipper as a boy. "Well, my husband had heard them every one to me the night before!—that was how I did it! Well, don't you see, I'll make him hear me the verbs every afternoon while he's taking his nap—over and over!"

"Exactly, ma'am. Do just that. Have him hear them over and over—every afternoon. That's the only way really to master them—the only possible way. And as I say—be sure to take along your dictionary and your Fontaine's 'Fables,' and read three or four pages every day—except Sunday. I said that just now, I know. But, ma'am, it's one of those things that—ah—can't be said too often—"

Here the tutor's eye, reconnoitering out the window again, fell upon a motor-car just coming to a standstill before the old lady's door. He started, nervously. But, of course, this was not the Fordette: it was five times too big, at least.

And he said, in a quickened voice: "Whose car is that standing out there?"

"Why, mine, of course! Eustace stops for orders before going down to bring my husband up and I just sign to him out of the window if there's nothing. Indeed I hoped you wouldn't make me read my 'Fables' while I was away, but I will if you say so, for of course I'm going to learn French. And you take care of yourself, young man. You haven't looked well to me for several days."

"I'm not quite well, ma'am, I fear," said Charles. "I was just thinking I'd better let Eustace drive me down with him, if you don't mind. I—ah—scarcely feel like walking to-day."

"Of course. And have him bring you up again when he takes my husband back, why don't you? My dear young man, I reproach myself. I'd have had him call for you at the Demings' and take you down every day, but you know you always said you loved to walk."

"I did—I used to—but—ah—I rather think I've been overdoing it, of late. I've been walking more than is good for me. Well!—thank you very much. I'll go and get right in, shall I?"

Having wished his aged pupil a happy journey once more, Charles started toward the door, much pleased with his lucky stroke. And then, all at once, a splendid idea burst upon him, a vast and brilliant possibility. And in exactly the same instant, he heard the chipper voice of the old lady speaking again behind him, rather thoughtfully:—

"I wish I could persuade you to use my car altogether while we're away.... But I suppose you'd think that fearfully—fearfully effete!"

"What?"

It must have seemed odd to her, the instantaneousness with which her tutor sprang round. And then he began to move back toward her, very slowly, round unwinking eyes glued upon her.

"Ah—what did you say?"

"You look astounded. I suppose you're offended at the suggestion. Now, really—why not take my car while I'm away?" said the old lady. (What a dear, what a darling old lady she was, to be sure!) "Why are you young men so reckless with your health, breaking it down with all this foolish walking, up and down—"

"Oh, ma'am!" stammered Charles. "I—I hardly know what to say. I'm not offended in the least—feeling as I do at present. But I—I really—"

"Then I'll make you do it!" she said, with the greatest energy. "I'm going to exert all my will-power—I'm chock full of it, I warn you!—and make you use the car regularly from now on, and stop this walking. Promise me! I'll have Eustace report to you every morning for his orders, and you are to use him as your own ..."

The tutor stood like a man entranced. Before his mind's eye there were unrolling the most enchanting pictures: pictures of the same series that had fascinated Angela's mind's eye when her brother had offered her the Fordette, but of precisely the opposite intention; pictures of himself whizzing securely from point to point, here or there at his careless ease, all walking henceforth reduced to the mere hurried crossing of sidewalks....

"But I—I'm afraid it would be an imposition! I don't deny it would be a—a pleasure—a benefit—feeling as I—"

"Then that's settled! Imposition, nonsense! As it happens, you will be doing us a favor. Why, wasn't my husband saying only last night that Eustace, having nobody at all to look after him, was certain to spend these three weeks in one long spree, and be worn to a shadow when we get back? His habits are so unfortunate, I warn you about that—"

"It's so—awfully—kind of you, ma'am! I hardly know how to—"

"Not another word!—leave all the rest to me. And you really don't look well, young man. Now, shall I have Bruce make you something,—oh, very nice,—before you start down? Oh, why, bless you, I take a julep myself whenever I feel the least bit like it!"

Then the ardor of his gratitude really touched the old lady, even though it seemed excessive for her small courtesy. Later, looking out the window, to sign to Eustace, she saw that the young man was actually laughing to himself with pleasure, as he went down the front steps. She thought him a very strange young man.

---

He gave his machine-god standing orders, which, after all, proved simple enough. Eustace and the Big Six were to pick him up at the little Deming boys' every day at one o'clock, and drive him to lunch; Eustace and the Big Six were to call for him at Mrs. Herman's every afternoon at half-past three, and take him to and from the Choristers'. Those, positively, were the only danger-points, these the small arrangements by which peril was to be circumvented. And he had not overrated the value of his brilliant gift from fortune; the arrangements, being made, were executed with the happiest success. In the fine big limousine of the old lady (la grande jolie limousine de la vieille) Charles pursued his daily rounds in complete security, and he hardly saw the shadow of another meeting now.

Or rather, there was the possibility of but one more meeting; and, that scarcely seemed to matter, now that he had so clearly won back his voluntary celibacy.

At Saltman's bookstore, he had purchased a fresh copy of the odious "Marna," and in his new kindness and good-will toward all, he finally resolved to return the book in person, and to ask for Angela at the door, to boot. Utter freedom of the city upheld his native dislike for being a mere rude boor. And by one simple venture, he could honorably liquidate all claims, pay at one stroke all the various calls demanded of him: the book-call, the party-call, and the call in acknowledgment of the Kiss.

Even if Angela should happen to be at home when he called, the isolated meeting could hardly lead to trouble. But, after all, of course, the point was to fulfill rather the letter of a call than its essential spirit. Charles thought it decidedly for the best that Angela should not be at home at the time. Thus he further procrastinated, awaiting an afternoon so sweet and balmy that every owner of a self-propelling vehicle would be morally certain to be out in it.

And then, while he so dallied about the Call, while his own days continued to reel off smooth as clockwork, a faint new cloud began to steal over his first careless happiness. Having finally saved himself, the unheroic bachelor felt his deadened consideration for others slowly and reluctantly stirring into life.

The first time he in his speedy limousine passed captive Donald in the Fordette, Charles was even more pleased than he had been that other day, at Miss Grace's window. By chance, he overhauled the little conveyance on the second day of the new era, as he shot away from the Choristers' at half-past four o'clock; and, captivated by the sight of the simpleton engineer in his own old place, he could not resist leaning forward as he drew abreast, knocking on the window and waving gayly to the two nice normal cousins of Mary. He saw that Angela, recognizing him, gave him one swift surprised stare. And then the old lady's Big Six leapt by her, as the limited leaps by a tank in the night, and he sat back convulsed with a brilliant diplomat's delights.

He, indeed, had put her on. Clearer and clearer it grew that he could beat Mary Wing at match-making, if at nothing else under the sun.... Let her look to herself!

But the second time Charles had this interesting experience—just two days later, on his drive to Berringer's—he did not knock on the window, or laugh, or even smile. No, this time he sat still on his luxurious seat, looking straight ahead. And presently he found himself arguing, very earnestly and conscientiously, and somewhat as follows:—

While it might be true that for the moment Angela liked him best (entirely owing to the tender feelings aroused by the Kiss) no one could deny that a match between her and Donald would be a far more suitable thing. In fact, such a match would really be very suitable, indeed, whatever cold-blooded eugenists like Mary Wing might think. Talk as you liked, Donald was not at all the man to be happy with a girl who firmly and continually "made a fellow use his cocoa." On the contrary, Donald was the mere simple, primitive male who wanted a woman that he could "protect," feel superior to and be coddled and attended by. And any fair-minded person must admit that Angela, whatever little faults or foibles she might seem to have, was precisely this sort of girl. Harsh nonsense about her Sacred Duty to the Race was not in her.

Did she, indeed, have any faults—real faults of character, that is? Womanly though she was, she was no idler, no parasite like Miss Grace, for instance, but a genuine worker, accustomed to pay her own way by the practice of a highly specialized and difficult business. This business, at best, was a monotonous and grinding one; she herself was a stranger, poor and lonely. Was it so wicked, then, that in her leisure-hour she should wish to drive out occasionally, and meet her young friends?

The Big Six, "Marna," the matter of the Wings' flat, doubtless each had contributed in its way to put Angela back in her true light: the light she had shone in before the days of the wooing. Admit, if you liked, that for the moment her purely feminine, or pursuing, side might seem to be just a little over-developed: that, argued Charles, was but a temporary, and really a proper and necessary manifestation. The Home that Angela was at present engaged in making was Dr. and Mrs. Flower's Home. The Will in things had it that every girl should have a Home of her own to make. There lay the momentary source of Unrest: considered rightly, the Fordette was merely the ingenious instrument employed by the Will for working out its high designs. Once that was accomplished, once Angela was established in her own little nest as Donald's sweet true wife, then, beyond doubt, her essentially womanly side would at once spring into full possession of her. Then she would fairly settle to her life-work of making her own Home, while supplying large quantities of just the sort of beauty and charm that engineers appreciate most.

Moreover (concluded Charles's argument of the case) marriage was clearly a matter where quixotism was misplaced, and a man's first duty was to himself. And, finally, of course he would never have put her on to Donald, if he had known that the old lady was going to lend him her limousine. But he had not known: and that was the old lady's fault if anybody's.

On the night of this day, by chance,—the day of Donald's known fourth drive in the instrument of the Will,—as Charles lay prone upon the Studio lounge, feebly thinking up, Judge Blenso suddenly opened the Studio door and said: "Charles! A lady at the 'phone!" Instantly coming to an elbow, Charles inquired who this lady might be; and the Judge (whose manner toward his relative had markedly changed, since Charles was known to have abandoned his exercises and foregone his affair of honor) replied with great coldness: "It's Miss Rose. Come along!" "Miss Rose?" repeated Charles, slowly beginning to rise. "Why, I don't—" "Yes, yes, I said! Miss Rose! No!—let me see! Miss Flower—something of the sort! Good gad, how long're you going to keep her waiting?" But Charles, remembering the promised bridge-party in a flash, said: "I'm sick, Judge," and lay back on the lounge forthwith. "Ah—just say, please, that you found me lying down—not well at all. She might leave a message, if necessary." To which the Judge replied, disgusted: "I don't wonder you're sick, the sickenin' life you lead! By gad, sir!—can't even walk!..."

No message came back other than that Miss Flower was sorry to hear he wasn't well. But the little incident, though nothing came of it, showed clearly that she wasn't going to give him up without a struggle, Donald or no. He could never feel completely safe until she was married, and that was the truth. And he still had that cursed book to return, too.

But it seemed that his higher nature, once aroused, would not go quietly back to sleep again. The first glad selfish days were over. When, on the Tuesday following, he again saw Donald as Angela's willing captive, when, shooting by, he observed the fatuous youth ogling and smirking over his predicament, as much as to say that there was no such person as Helen Carson, then Charles's face became very grave, his look intensely thoughtful. And when he reached Berringer's that day, he ordered—sure enough—"Wait for me, Eustace." And when he emerged from Berringer's, at a little before two, he said, in the face of all resolves:—

"To Olive and Washington Streets, Eustace. And then turn and go slowly out Dean Street, toward Lee Grammar School."

---

XVII

Partly because she was not ready to resign her place in the schools, partly, perhaps, to heighten the dramatic stinging quality of what she called her "brilliant revenge," Mary Wing had kept her great coup a secret for the present. So she, famous wherever weekly periodicals were read round the world, honored officer-elect of a powerful national organization, walked daily, in sun and rain, to a grammar school as before.

As to looks and appearance, Charles had always recognized Mary as one of the variable women. She was not indifferent on those subjects, he judged, but the utilitarian supremacy of work in her life commonly produced that effect. Mary rarely went to parties any more; but at her flat in Olive Street she often enough entertained at dinner, strategically, a person or two of consequence in the educational or political world. Charles (being, of course, of not the slightest help to anybody) had never been invited to but one of these little dinners. On that solitary occasion, the look and air of his friend in evening dress had considerably surprised him, and in several other ways, including the dinner, he had absorbed agreeable impressions of Mary not tallying with other impressions. However, pretty clothes and pretty manner were deemed too good for every day, it seemed; for the realities, Mary dressed as plainly as she acted. And now, trudging homeward along this slightly squalid street, she looked, it must be admitted, not like a shining celebrity at all, but just like an ordinary person, a school-teacher, and rather a fatigued one at that.

So, at least, thought the author of the write-ups, catching sight of her through the glass over Eustace's shoulder, noting the somewhat droopy manner of her walk. But he reflected, there was no satisfying some people. And hastily clutching up the speaking-tube of the old lady, he gave the order which brought his great car to a standstill; and so stepped forth upon the sunny sidewalk, just in front of her.

The General Secretary looked up, with a small start at finding herself intercepted. She saw Charles Garrott, and her face changed perceptibly, though under what impulse he could scarcely have said. That his recent demeanor must have seemed slightly puzzling to her, the young man was, however, sufficiently aware: and now he was all at once conscious of a want of ease within himself, a rare and odd constraint.

Hence he fell instinctively into his lightest and most mask-like tone: "Well met! I was hoping I might run on you somewhere out this way. Do get in and let me take you home."

Mary accepted at once, with pleasure.

"But whose beautiful car is this you're using now?" she went on easily. "I was sure I saw you whiz by in it the other day."

"Oh, this!—yes!—I must tell you about it."

So due explanations covered the start of the drive. Establishing his famous friend in the old lady's limousine, Charles told, in modified, expurgated form, how he had got possession of it. For Angela's benefit, he had lately informed Donald that he was unwell from overwork: that was why he had to ride in a closed car wherever he went. Report of this had unluckily reached Mary, it seemed, necessitating more explanation: that he was not sick at all, unless you would count writer's sickness, etc., etc.

"And this saves such a lot of time, getting around, too—which is no small thing."

The conclusion of the explanation was followed by a small silence: scarcely one of the golden sort, but rather a dearth of conversation such as had once been rare between these two. But Mary, whose manner seemed as usual, or perhaps only the least bit more polite, broke it at once, saying cordially:—

"So you have an extra hour for your own work now? That's splendid! And how's your new novel getting on?"

"Oh!—not at all, thank you! I've made two starts, but both of them proved false, I regret to state. So now I'm back at zero again. It's a hard business, writing a book.... And as far as I can make out, I'm specially handicapped by having all sorts of foolish theories as to what a novel ought to be. If I were only a good plain realist now, how simple life would be!"

His tongue loosened; he found himself embracing the chance topic, so hard and impersonal, so beautifully remote from everything that fretted his mind. He had come, magnanimously, to give one fair warning about Donald; but no doubt he planned it that his warning should fall casually, half-buried in other talk. There was such a thing as being too generous for self-interest, of course. Or possibly Charles perceived that the sound of his own voice, running surely along on a subject of which he knew everything, and she knew nothing, gave him just that sense of easy command of the situation which his manly need demanded.

Mary had said courteously: "You think realism is so much easier to write?"

"I've never tried, of course—but doesn't it impress you so? You remember old Meredith said distinctly, that was the cue for little writers. And I must say I think he had an idea what he was talking about. In fact," continued Charles, with unwonted loquacity, while his limousine rolled rapidly, "if I were old and generally recognized as the dean of American novelists—kindly do not laugh—and was visited for counsel by a young writing fellow who had no literary abilities except industry—why, I should say to him at once, 'My dear young man, become a realist, of course. That is really the only line where you will find your want of abilities a positive advantage. If you possess any shred of humor, charm, insight, sympathy, idealism, so-called,—above all, idealism,—and if you are cursed with any sense of form and unity, and feel that a story ought to have a beginning and an end, and be about something in the mean time,—why, trample on all this as you would on so many snakes,' I should say to him. 'Get it fixed firmly in your dull mind that life is dreary and meaningless, or has but a material meaning, if you like, and that sound fiction must behave accordingly. Then,' I should say to my young friend, 'if you will but choose as your heroine a young girl with more looks than character—and not necessarily such a lot of looks either—who comes up to the city to get on, it is inconceivable to me that even you could fail to score a great realistic success.'—'But,' we can imagine this fellow, this nonexistent admirer of mine, saying, 'I don't understand you. What am I, as a creative author, to put in to take the place of the insight, humor, unity, and all the rest that I've eliminated?' 'My poor boy, I've just told you,' I should reply. 'Industry and pessimism. That is all a realist knows and all he needs to know. You tell me you have the industry. I tell you that the pessimism is the easiest little trick to pick up in the world.' But," said Charles, in his own voice, "I fear, Miss Mary, I 'm putting you to sleep with all this musty shop-talk—"

"Indeed, no!—it's extremely interesting," said the heroine of the write-ups, very civilly, but looking straight ahead. "You don't often talk about your work."

"Haven't often had the chance," thought Charles. And if that was considerably unjust, he did not seem to mind at all, but rather was pleased by the knowledge that Mary observed his copious ironic manner, and found it baffling and queer.

"Well,—in conclusion, as you public speakers say,—I was only going to add that I didn't know enough to swallow my own medicine. The trouble seems to be—Well, take the horrible thing called sentiment now, that makes a sophisticated realist so sick. I look about me and, try as I will, I seem to see the disgusting thing very much alive and kicking—not something made up by a fourth-class writer to tickle shopgirls, but actually playing a prominent part in the hard world round me, all the time, everywhere. I seem—"

"I don't see how any one could deny that!"

"It wouldn't seem so, would it?" said Charles respectfully, and a sudden faint gleam came into his eye. "But really isn't that what they do, in effect? Here am I, as an observer, seeing men and women all round me doing things they don't want to do, giving up things they do want to do"—did his voice, too, acquire a thin edge?—"for immaterial reasons that can only be traced to some inner ideal—hated word! And then here am I, as a writer, required to deny all these observations of mine—and for what reason? Merely, as far as I can make out, to keep some sour chap with a defective liver, probably a German to boot—why are Germans so pessimistic, do you know?—from calling me a sentimental ass. Of course we admit," he prattled on, taking note of the passing streets, "that sentiment is weak and childish and Victorian, and 'idealism' is the screaming joke on Western civilization. Still, isn't it my only business as a writer to find out whether or not these contemptible things do act and react in the life I see? And if they do—must I represent the contrary, merely to please the peculiar taste of a small sad school that has no God but a second-hand mannerism bagged from dear old Europe?—By the way, are you in a special hurry now?"

"Why, no. Not at all."

"Good!—Eustace," called Charles through the tube, "drive more slowly."

And then, feeling himself completely master of the situation now, the young man said with quite a gay laugh:—

"And to add to all my other troubles, I've deliberately gone and taken Woman for my subject! That will make you smile! You remember you warned me in advance it was a theme I didn't know the first thing about."

But Mary was not observed to smile.

"I did say that, in fun once," she said, punctiliously, after a perceptible pause—"but, of course, I didn't mean it—in any literal sense. Indeed, I think—"

"But you were right—absolutely!—that's just what I want to say! I 'm finding out more and more every day how true that word was. This whole Movement now—what is it? What's it for? Blest if I know! The last time we talked about it, you may remember, I took the ground that the Movement—or what I supposed was the Movement, that week—suffered by confusing itself with another propaganda it hadn't a thing under the sun to do with. But—"

"No—what propaganda? I don't remember."

"Oh!—Personal Liberty!... The Cult of the Ego, perhaps you might call it. But, of course, for all I know," said the light masterful Charles, "that is the Movement, and always has been. Only last week I lighted on a new formula—sort of a definition—to-morrow I'll probably discard it for another. It's very unsettling—for my writing, you know. By the way—can't you help me out a little? What would be your best definition of the Unrest—for literary purposes?"

But Mary, with a carefulness not usual to her, eluded controversy, merely saying it all depended on how you looked at it, or words to that effect. And then she gave him a small thrill by neatly taking his bait.

"But what is your new definition?"

"Oh, that! Definition's too grand a word, of course. I merely wondered if what is called the Woman's Movement was anything more than a projection—don't you know?—of an everlasting struggle going on between two irreconcilable elements in every woman's nature."

The car rolled in silence.

"There's a pessimistic definition for you! For I suppose," said the friend of women, and could no longer keep the seriousness out of his voice, "it must be true that every struggle implies the defeat—of something.... Doesn't it? I suppose we can really never get away from the sad discovery of childhood, that we can't eat our cake and have it too."

"That's interesting! But I don't believe I understand you altogether. What do you symbolize as the cake?"

She, the strong and successful, had turned on him her level arched gaze, intent with its habitual interrogativeness. It was instantly clear that, though she might be struck with his few remarks, she was far indeed from being struck personally. And her sudden characteristic look was to him like a hand held up, the banner of her independence flung out—and just in time, too.

Charles laughed mirthlessly. He was aware of the lameness of his reply.

"Exactly!—what? It all depends on how you look at it, as you just said. And I seem unable to look at it the same way two days running.... Number 6 Olive Street, Eustace."

Mary's response escaped him.

He sat staring through the glass, at the passing sights, a curious sense of anti-climax within, a strange flat feeling of failure. He was like a boy who, having run valiantly at a jump, tamely subsides and ducks under the string. What then? Had he really been about to court a new humiliation by lecturing Mary Wing? Telling himself that he came generously to warn her about Donald, had he actually been thinking that he would discuss the personal losses involved in Leaving Home?—perhaps by some frankness even bridge the gap in the old friendship? It really did seem that some such thoughts must have lurked in his mind, judging by this sense within him now.

Then, out of blankness and frustration, the young man felt slowly rising a deep exasperation, a mighty grievance. So he shook himself at once, donned his mask quickly while yet he could, and said in quite a natural-seeming voice:—

"But I'm afraid I've bored you horribly with these purely literary troubles. And, by the way,—speaking of realism versus romance just now,—how are Donald and Miss Carson getting on these days?"

She appeared a little surprised at the change of topic, but replied easily: "Oh!—very well, indeed, I believe. They're together somewhere nearly every evening.—But why—"

"Really! That relieves me—knowing your serious interest in that affair. I was beginning to fear Donald might be wandering a little in his affections."

"Wandering? No—how do you mean?"

"Well, he has seemed quite attentive to your pretty cousin of late, don't you think?"

Then the Secretary turned her head again, sharply. And it hardly improved Charles Garrott's frame of mind to perceive that, of all he had said in the strangely talkative drive, this alone had really touched her: this, which affected her personal purposes, her Own ambitions.

"Angela? Why, not that I know of! I didn't know he'd seen her at all—except one casual meeting, perhaps!"

"I've happened to see them driving together from tune to time, as I plod about on my rounds. But no doubt it's all quite casual, as you say, since you've heard nothing about it."

"You have? But please tell me!—where have you seen them together—and when?"

He cited particulars from his collection, damaging ones, though perhaps not so damaging as he could have made them had not self-interest restrained. Still, something in him was not displeased as he saw his old friend's concern steadily deepening.

"I'm surprised, and—frankly, I 'm sorry," she said slowly, at the end. "Of course Angela's a dear girl, very sweet and attractive, but—I shouldn't like Donald to see too much of her—in view of my other hopes! I've had good reason to think that he's really interested in Helen, and she in him.—Well!" she went on, after a small pause, "this seems to require some diplomatic management. Donald has engagements for every evening this week—but—"

"It's in the daytime that he meets Miss Flower. At least, I don't think she takes the Fordette out at night."

Beside him on the padded seat, Mary sat silent, a little pucker between the dark brows which set such a question-mark in her colorless face. Considering her formidable strength, it was odd how all but ethereal, how sincerely girlish, she could look at times.

"Well, Donald's going to New York on Friday," she said, thoughtfully. "He's had a fine offer from Blake & Steinert—to go into the firm, had you heard?—so fine that I think he'd have taken it, and thrown over Wyoming, if I had let him! He'll be gone nearly a week. Then, about the time he comes back, I've arranged to have him invited to Creekside, the Kingsleys' place at Hatton, for a week-end party. Helen's to be there—I've really been hoping great things of that. Meantime," she rounded up efficiently, "there are the afternoons. Perhaps I could start him to playing golf, or something of that sort.... I suppose, of course, you're too busy to—"

"I?" said the young man, hastily. "Oh, I fear I can offer nothing to rival Miss Angela's attractions just now."

"Does it look as serious as that? Well," she said, with a sort of determined friendliness, "all the more reason that I should like to have your help."

He hardly repressed a sardonic laugh. "Are you asking me to help you?"

"What's so extraordinary about that?"

"Not a thing, of course. I wasn't certain I'd understood you, that was all."

But it appeared that the idea of helping this young woman had ceased to have the smallest pulling power now. Rather, there was bitterness in the thought that she still seemed ready to use him when she could.

He said, with savage urbanity: "Perhaps you might get Donald a motor-cycle, and encourage him to practice up as a Speed Demon."

The remark was received in entire silence. It was probably true that she literally did not understand him. All the same, his displeasure grew.

"But really," he continued sweetly, "if these two young people are so strongly attracted to each other—love at first sight, who knows?—really, is it judicious to interfere? Don't you believe in elective affinities at all?"

"As a matter of fact, you know, Donald was greatly attracted to Helen, at first sight. And as for Angela, I'm certain—"

"You see," he interrupted, stung beyond all calculations, "my personal idea is that Miss Angela would probably make him a more suitable wife."

That unwisdom made everything worse at once; for Mary, after one glance at him and a stare out the window, said in a changed, "diplomatic" tone: "Well, I mustn't let you misunderstand me, at any rate. You know, I've agreed with you perfectly, all along, that she's thoroughly charming.... And, by the way, she likes you so much, too!"

Charles froze instantly.

"In fact, she thinks you're much more attractive than Donald—or did, just a little while ago. I have her word for it. So if she's seeing a good deal of Donald just now, I don't believe it's from affinity, necessarily!"

"Indeed?"

"She was inquiring about you the last time I saw her—saying that she never saw you now, asking if you ever spoke of her to me, and so on. I told her, of course, you did, and repeated some of the compliments you paid her—"

Again he interrupted her, now with some slipping of his mask. It was true, to be just, that Mary Wing knew nothing of his long struggles to elude the Fordette. Nevertheless, her patent desire to hand him back to it, merely by way of furthering a little her plans for Donald, seemed somehow the last straw. A friendly reward for magnanimity this! And it may be some touch of purely male chagrin enhanced the philosophic anger, that any woman should be thus eager to pass on him, Charles, to another.

"I believe my remark was that I considered Miss Angela a suitable wife for Donald. So far as I am aware, I do not come into the conversation at all. If your suggestion is that I should step in and take her off his hands—in order to help you—may I beg you to put such an idea from your head, once and for all?"

It was clear that he astonished her: made her indignant as well. Her scrutiny of him was direct and sharp: but she did not speak at once, as if weighing her words or firmly counting ten, and when she did speak, her manner bore evidences of strong control.

"You are rather puzzling to-day. I should like to know what you have on your mind. 'Take her off his hands!' Do you really think that's quite the way to speak of a girl who—"

"I don't, indeed. But the idea was your own, was it not?"

"Mine!—why, how can you! I only—"

"Then why not let things take their natural course, as I suggested?"

On that, turning her head away from him, she said quietly, too quietly in fact: "I'm afraid you wouldn't understand now, if I were to tell you."

That seemed to bring the conversation to a natural impasse. And then—as if no touch were to be wanting from this embittering hour—at just this instant, as Eustace slowed down to make his curve into Olive Street, the two estranged friends in the old lady's limousine found themselves looking together into the eyes of their common and particular enemy, Mary's former principal at the High School.

Mr. Mysinger, her conqueror and his own, no less, was approaching down the sunny promenade. He gave the two in the car just one full surveying stare; then casually moved his gaze a degree or two away. But, as he dropped back out of the range of vision, Charles could have sworn he saw a smile springing under the glossy mustache he had once pledged himself to pull off.

But this time, he felt no such bitter hostility toward the victorious foe as had shaken him on that other remembered occasion. There was a transient flicker of the Old Blood toward his temples, a brief iciness within, and that was all. Recalling the childish folly of the setting-up exercises, he experienced a cold mirth: "Why, of course, she'd say she'd have licked Mysinger herself, if she'd considered it worth the trouble!" And, at his old friend's side, Charles had the most disloyal thought of her that had ever knocked at his mind. Was Mysinger, perhaps, so entirely to blame for the ancient friction? Had he, Charles, been principal of the High School, did he think he would have found Mary so acceptable, so perfect, a subordinate?...

Assisting her to alight at her door, the young man inquired politely if she had yet found a tenant for her flat. Mary replied, quite distantly, he thought, that the John Wensons were going to take it. His comment was that old Jack should make her a fine tenant. He courteously sent his regards to her mother; he amiably wished her a good-afternoon.

And then he shut the limousine door on himself so hard that the glass shook.

---

XVIII

Finding himself unable to reflect with pleasure or pride upon this interview, Charles resolved, within the hour, not to reflect upon it at all. For the fourth time—or was it the fourteenth?—he determined to think of Egoettes no more. At least, he had given his warning, unthanked, and that ended it. He might rest upon the ground that the match would really be a very suitable thing; or, conversely, he might argue that Donald was just amusing himself a little with Angela, at odd times, while at heart perfectly true to Helen, etc. But chiefly he stood upon the warning which made all this Mary Wing's concern henceforward, and no longer his. And, bent upon bringing his last relation and duty in the case to a clear, honorable conclusion, Charles sallied from the Studio next morning with the new "Marna" tucked under his arm.

But there seemed to hang a curse over everything connected with this unhappy book. Because he had brought it with him to-day, the azure heavens became overcast at noon; at two o'clock, it was drizzling dismally; and all that afternoon, and all the next day, the cold rain poured in torrents. To call in such home-keeping weather would be a wanton provocation: Charles hung off, yet again. The third day proved well worth waiting for, a brilliant, blue, and tingling day, gloriously inviting to all owners of vehicles. And now a new plague befell. When Charles emerged from Miss Grace's on this day, his face firmly set for his duty, the Big Six wasn't there.

The discovery was most disconcerting. The young man stood irresolute on the Choristers' steps, "Marna" clutched in his hands, gazing up and down the street.

Unfortunately, Eustace's habits had not been kept completely virtuous by his light duties with his mistress's tutor. The grinning black rascal had got himself pleasantly illuminated the first day, and had remained in that state with considerable consistency ever since. However, being kept excellently tipped, he had never failed to meet an appointment before; and Charles, eyeing the spot where Jehu should have been, but wasn't, was most unpleasantly struck with his own sense of helplessness ensuing. It really appeared that soft custom had made him as dependent on the limousine as if he lacked the means of locomoting for himself.

He scanned the horizon. Many vehicles rolled up and down Washington Street, but his own swift chariot was nowhere among them.

Then, while he irritably hesitated between telephoning to the garage, on the off chance that Eustace might be there, and tamely abandoning the enterprise once more, a third alternative, ingenious in its way, quite unexpectedly offered itself. Down the street came jogging a carriage for hire—empty. Providence seemed to be directing straight at him, Charles. And, by chance, he knew this old carriage well; Walter Taylor's carriage, it was; many and many a time had it driven him forth to parties when he was young and gay.

On the first quick impulse, Charles went springing down the Choristers' steps.

"Walter!... Here, you old rascal! Where're you going?"

"At libbuty, suh!" cried Walter Taylor, drawing rein with alacrity. "Whar mout you wish to be druv, Mist' Garrott?"

"Well!—Perhaps I'll let you—"

The young man hesitated, fractionally, struck with the rattletrap's supreme lack of dignity. Then, with decision, he plucked open the weather-beaten door.

"One seven East Center. And look sharp now!" he ordered, stepping in—"I'm in a hurry. Mind you don't stop for anything!"

"Yassuh! Sutney, suh!" said Walter Taylor, with great enthusiasm, and gave his old nag a prodigious wallop.

So it fell out that, for his first call at the Flowers' since the bridge-party—his party-call, his book-call, and his call about the Kiss—Charles Garrott fared forth in a closed livery hack.

Inside the hack, Charles laughed briefly; and then at once began to react. In the fine afternoon, numbers of people were abroad. Strangers seemed to look with surprise at the apparently able-bodied young man who liked thus to trot around in a hack; chance acquaintances were seen to smile in passing; more than one called out derisive remarks. Charles himself questioned whether his employment of the hack was quite reasonable.... Seemed inconsistent till you stopped to think. Inasmuch as he was going straight to see Angela, why, it might be asked, all this elaborate precaution in advance? Well—there was really no inconsistency there; no, none at all. He was not going to see Angela; he was only going to pay The Call, while she was out in her Fordette—a totally different matter. But this raised fresh questions of consistency: how was he going to hold his position that Angela was just the wife for Donald, if he himself would only go to see her in a hack?... Well, the answer to that was simple enough, too. Donald was a marrying man, while he, Charles (though probably still liked best) emphatically was not. Moreover, Donald was a primitive male, while he, Charles, was a modern.... Or, no, perhaps he wasn't a modern, exactly—but—yes, he was a modern, a true one, while others he could name were only self-centered extremists....

At Gresham Street, the hack turned south, at Center it turned back west. Walter Taylor, up aloft, began to look for his street-number. And then, while Charles still argued uneasily about the spiritual differences between Donald and himself, his eye all at once fell on Donald in the flesh, close by—striding up Center Street homeward on his way from the office he left so early now.

The sight of the youth at this moment was unwelcome to Charles. Instinctively, he sat far back in the hack. But Donald, unluckily turning at the sound of wheels, had caught sight of him; and he stopped stock-still on the sidewalk at once, staring with unaffected interest.

"Well, I'll be darned!" he said, as the carriage came up with him. "Whither away in the sea-going, old top?"

Unwillingly appearing at the window, Charles said: "Well, Donald.... Just driving around."

"Driving!—Thought you must be going to a funeral, at least," said Donald, stepping along to keep up. "Here! Stop the blamed thing! I want to look you over."

"You don' want me to stop, does you, Mist' Garrott?" bawled down Walter Taylor from the box.

"No, I told you! Go on!"

Walter cut his nag a mighty crack, and with the same movement drew rein sharply.

"Here's yo' number, suh!" he cackled, with great merriment. "One seven, like you said! Yassuh!"

So the hack halted, and the fare reluctantly discharged himself. His friend, having come up, halted, too, a few feet away; it was noted that his gibing expression had suddenly altered. And then Charles understood instantly that this fool's destination was no other than his own.

"Oho!" said Donald, slowly and suspiciously. "So this is where you were driving around to?"

Controlling an immense complication of sensations, Charles said coldly: "You mean you're going to—the Flowers', too?"

"You've guessed it!" retorted the engineer, with a slight touch of consciousness. And he added, assuming an indifferent air: "Just got to stop by and leave a book Miss Flower lent me."

And then, for the first time, Charles noticed the volume in a gaudy wrapper protruding beneath Donald's sturdy arm. The coincidence was remarkable, to say the least of it. It was also exceedingly annoying.

"Time, too," quoth the primitive male. "I've had it since before I went to Wyoming."

On Angela's sidewalk, the two young men stood gazing hard at each other. Whatever the argument in the case, it was surely Charles's higher nature that spoke at last, icily but firmly:—

"I am going here to return a book, and also to pay a call—on the family. If you wish, I will return your book for you."

"Couldn't think of troubling you, Charlie, old top."

"As you like, of course—"

"But as I'm going in, anyway, why need you stop at all? Glad to take charge of your book for you. Save you a little hack-fare."

To this, Charles disdained reply. So the two members of the coterie, with their books to return under their arms, stepped up the bricked walkway side by side.

Charles rang the Flowers' loud little bell. Having done so, he turned on the shabby verandah, with the intention of looking Donald hostilely up and down. But he found that Donald was already looking him up and down, in the most hostile manner conceivable. Then the youth's dullness, his grotesque conception of a male rivalry here, his impervious blind asininity,—all this acting upon the original concern about the Call, produced a sudden infuriation. Speech flowed from Charles:—

"Of all the laughing jackasses that ever broke loose from a zoo, I do think you take the cake, Manford. How you keep from falling off bridges, or butting out the pan where your brain ought to be on stone-copings, passes all understanding. If I didn't have you to look at, I wouldn't believe it possible that an ordinary well-meaning chucklehead could deteriorate so horribly, just in a week or two."

Donald seemed slightly nonplussed by this attack. All that he could muster in reply was some very poor childish stuff, introduced by shakings of his head and "significant" tappings of his forehead.

"So that's why they sent him around here in a closed carriage—oho! Old Doc Flower's an alienist—forgot that! H'm! Funny how it runs in the family. First old Blenso, now poor Charlie-boy ..."

Then a servant opened the door, and relieved the high tension instantly by saying, in reply to two simultaneous questions, that Miss Flower was out.

Donald looked slightly crestfallen. Charles's look was the opposite. The youth's presence here had strongly suggested that Angela was known to be in, despite the fine weather. When the Flowers' servant—answering Donald's "Oh, she's out, is she?"—said further that Miss Angela had gone driving with a genaman, his relief rose to genuine thanksgiving. And then Donald cleared the air completely by cavalierly handing in his book, with only his card for acknowledgment, and clattering away down the steps. Evidently, he sought a little amusement here, and nothing more.

Charles himself hesitated on the veranda. The thing was over and done with. The Call was formally and honorably paid. Perhaps he only wanted to do something different from Donald; perhaps he thought to mark signally his revised good opinion of Angela; or perhaps mere revulsion of feeling swung him into exuberant excesses. At any rate, in the very act of extending his book, he recalled a long-forgotten promise, and said suddenly, but tentatively:—

"And Dr. Flower? I suppose he's out, too?"

"Him? Naws', he's in," said the slatternly and ill-favored woman.

"What!—he is? Are you sure?"

"Ef yo' want to see him, walk in."

"Ah—well, I'll just stop and see him for a few moments. That is, if he happens to be at leisure."

So the hack waited in front of the Flowers', and Charles stepped (for the first time on his own motion) over the threshold of Angela's Home.

He felt that this was a superfluous proceeding; it turned out considerably worse. Having entered the Home, he found himself abruptly plunged into the middle of it, as it were. In fact, the impromptu extension of the Call to Dr. Flower, besides everything else that could be said against it, proved as inopportune as could well have been imagined.

The contretemps indicated was due to the servant (Luemma, in short), who apparently did not believe in announcing visitors, or perhaps had never heard of the civil custom. She merely stood by, in a disapproving, suspicious sort of way, while the caller deposited his book on the hatstand beside Donald's, and removed his overcoat and gloves. And then she said, with a manner no whit better than her appearance:—

"Walk this way."

Charles, necessarily assuming that this was the rule of the house, walked that way.

The hall of the Home was narrow and dark, the pervading atmosphere noted as somewhat cheerless. It was not lighted and decked for festivity now, as on the famous night of the bridge-party: parlor and dingy little dining-room, glimpsed in passing, wore (to the author's sensitive eye) a depressing air, vaguely suggestive of failure, incompetence and the like. But that, of course, is the front that poverty so commonly wears: all the more reason that a hard-worked Temporary Spinster, or vicarious Home-Maker, should wish to get out sometimes, and go and meet her friends....

However, Charles also was conscious of a wish to get out. Why was he doing this, exactly? Really, now, what was the sense of it?

The black worthy was leading him toward a shut door in the dusk beyond the dining-room: the office, clearly, of that patientless provider, Angela's father. Now the young man was aware of voices behind that door, or rather of a voice. It was a woman's voice, pitched in rather a complaining key, and for the first second Charles thought, with a start, that it was Angela's. It wasn't, of course; but his steps instinctively slackened.

"Ah—the Doctor seems to be engaged—after all," he threw out, in lowered tones. "Perhaps I'd better come another day."

"Naws', he ain't engaged. Just him and Miz' Flower talkin'."

Charles, truth to tell, was scarcely reassured by that assurance: he did not like to run in on a strange couple this way, in particular when the lady was speaking in that tone. But his sour guide had not paused. And now there came a different voice through the thin door: a man's voice, faintly humorous, faintly sarcastic, and considerably weary. It was recognizably the voice of the esteemed Doctor, and it said, with fatal distinctness:—

"Is it possible you forget, madam, that you're speaking to your husband and the father of your children?"

If the feet of the reluctant caller had lagged before, they now stopped short. One of his overminds perceived instantly that the strange words he had had no business to hear possessed a sort of distorted familiarity, like a horrid parody of a sentiment known and established; but as to that, there was not time to speculate now. What was only too plain was that something like a domestic scene was afoot in the office of the home, making the intrusion of a stranger peculiarly inapropos.

"Don't!—I'll not stop now!" he murmured hastily and sharply. "Just take these cards here, and—"

But the maladroit blackamoor was already opening the door; and the young man's last stand against the Call was put down with a brief and surly:—

"Genaman to see Doctor. Walk in."

That settled the matter, beyond any undoing. Charles Garrott was a caller now, whether or no. With an embarrassment such as none of his many calculations about this hour had anticipated, he stepped blundering in upon Angela's unwitting parents.

Dr. Flower's small office was dark; its light came only through a single window from a narrow air-well. Hence, the forms of the lady and gentleman in it were at first but dimly apprehended. Having turned in their seats at the sound which disturbed their privacy, they seemed to be peering together, in silent inquiry, at the intruder. It was the intruder's move, obviously; and, being in for it, he did his hasty best to pluck a hearty calling manner over his decided malease.

"Oh!—good-afternoon, Dr. Flower! It's Garrott, Charles Garrott—perhaps you may remember—"

Now the dim forms were rising together, the tall Doctor's with a jerk:—

"Ah, yes! Howdo, Mr. Garrott! Quite—"

"I hope I'm not interrupting! I stopped to return some books, and—ah—finding that Miss Angela was out, I thought I'd take the opportunity—"

"Quite so—very kind! Come in! But I'd better make a light? Take seat, sir. Mrs. Flower?"

The Doctor's manner, of course, was natively too queer to betray anything, even astonishment at the Call. But it was not observed that Angela's mother bore any of the marks of a lady surprised in the middle of a "scene," and this was a relief, unquestionably; the parents didn't know him for an eavesdropper, at any rate. Agreeably accepting his introduction of himself, Mrs. Flower was bestowing upon him a dim but comforting smile, and a limp hand to shake.

"I feel that I already know you, Mr. Garrott. I've so often heard my daughter speak of you," she said, in the slightly plaintive voice he had heard through the door. "She'll be so sorry to miss you...."

The hearty Charles spoke his little mendacity.

"But a friend of hers from Mitchellton is here to-day to see her—Daniel Jenney—and Angela has just taken him out for a little drive in her car, to see the town. I feel sure she'll be in soon, though."

Mr. Jenney's presence in the city was the best news heard by Charles in many a day. All in all, things weren't going off so badly. And, if he knew Angela in the least, she would not be in soon, either; he had thought of all that on the verandah.

Then the Doctor's match caught the gas with a faint pop, and the little room filled with a high white light. In the sudden brightness, the caller's eye noted two unrelated matters almost together. One was merely an ash-tray upon the mantel. The other was Mrs. Flower herself, and her unexpected resemblance to her pretty young daughter. Line for line, the two faces were different enough, no doubt, and this one was no longer young. But to a stranger's eye, the general likeness was rather remarkable; Charles was much struck with it.

"Sit down, sir," said the Doctor, and contributed his match to the ash-tray.

"Ah, thank you."

But of course he could not sit down while Angela's mother remained standing and conversing with him; and she did so stand and converse a moment or so, rather idly, seemingly uncertain whether she intended to stay or go, and trying to make up her mind. Once or twice she glanced at her husband undecidedly, as if he might have something to do with the matter; and no wonder. But her final verdict was that she was to go; and Charles was rather glad that it worked out this way, though why he hardly knew.

Mrs. Flower's decisive remark was that she must get on with her household duties. She gave Charles her limp hand again, again mentioned her daughter's distress, if she missed him; she bestowed upon him another pretty and somewhat significant smile; and then faded out of the Call, leaving behind a vague impression of feminine inadequacy and a button missing from her black waist.

So the young man was left with the worthy Doctor, who could speak so sarcastically to a defenseless woman, his wife. And for a space he found the tête-à-tête heavy going, indeed, and was more oppressed than ever with the essential meaninglessness of it all.

Angela's father did not look like a brute, but only dryer, queerer, shabbier, than before. He jerked his neck more, looked more unrelated to his environment. He was very civil, but he cocked his eye too much toward the ceiling, felt too little responsibility as to keeping a conversation going. Charles's efforts (hearty enough, despite the counter-feelings going on within him) seemed to bound off dead from that juiceless, withdrawn manner. Having refused a cigar (there was a little talk about smoking, but he couldn't keep it going), he proposed for discussion the Doctor's son Wallie, his education, abilities as a chemist, skill as a lamp-repairer, etc. The topic promised well, and did well for a couple of minutes, but petered out mysteriously and beyond resurrection. The Doctor's work out at the Medical School yielded almost nothing; the weather enjoyed but a brief and fitful run. Presently, Charles found himself fairly driven to Mary Wing, and her imminent departure to lead her own life; and this subject won a real success, though not of a sort he could take much satisfaction in. It quickly developed that Angela's parent held ante-bellum views on Woman, which he put forward with some dry zest, in the strange backhanded fashion noted by Charles in their previous meeting. After a very few exchanges, the old eccentric was delivering himself of paragraphs like this:—

"Ah, you throw out that suggestion? An interesting idea!—quite so!" (Charles had thrown out no suggestion of any sort.) "Your observation is that the Lord has formed woman specifically for the needs of family and the home—quite so!—and that efforts to change her destiny seem to result in constitutional perversion? Well, sir, I dare say the physicians would support your contention there, too. Who knows?"

Even "Marna," even Mary Wing, had never made Charles so conservative as this. Oddly enough, he found the Doctor's criticisms unwelcome; it was his turn to let a subject die from malnutrition. In the pause, he considered whether he had not called long enough now. About to rise, he chanced to note a worn volume of Henderson's "Stonewall Jackson" lying open on the table, and asked, with little hope, if the Doctor had read it. The old codger replied: "I am reading it now for the seventh time, sir." And to the young man's agreeable surprise, he at once uncocked his eye from the ceiling (where he seemed to have meant to leave it permanently), and began to talk along almost like a regular person.

During the remainder of the Call, conversation flowed very satisfactorily. It appeared that the War was one of this old codger's subjects, even as Woman was Charles's; and he talked well, too, now that he cared to, criticizing strategy as one having authority, revealing, behind that spare, intensely conservative manner, flashes of broad outlook and incisive speech which might have helped to explain why the Medical School had been glad to draw this man from Mitchellton to its staff. But the truth was that Charles Garrott heard scarcely a word of this excellent discourse. Once he had got Angela's father fairly going, he became captured and fascinated by a totally independent line of thought.

In short, the young man's gaze had returned to almost the first thing he had definitely noticed in the Home, to wit, the ash-tray on the Doctor's mantel.

The ash-tray was really a large saucer, or small plate, and the intriguing and really exciting thing about it was that it contained the remains of scarcely less than a dozen cigars. Just before he made the lucky remark about Henderson's "Life," the caller had inadvertently discovered two more cigar-ends, poised perilously on the mantel's edge; this it was that had started him reacting yet again. For, considering that the Doctor was out a large part of the day, lecturing, it appeared incredible that he could have achieved such astonishing results since morning. Rather, the mantel had the air of having stood undisturbed for some little time....

"If those men," he was saying, "had but shot another way, that night at Chancellorsville—"

"Ah, sir! the vast 'ifs' of history. And none bigger than that, it may be. Yet, as I say ..."

From the large heaped saucer, with its ring of spilled ashes, the detective eye flitted over the room, briefly, somewhat guiltily, yet uncontrollably. It received an impression of dust on the table, dust on the bookshelves, disorder pervasively, and a waste-basket brimful of trash. Finally, the eye rested anew on the Doctor himself, with his frayed collar and joyless mien. And all the time, under the mask of the caller, a question was irresistibly rising and thrusting itself upon the attention of the authority: What housekeeper had charge of this untidy little room, what home-maker was in the business of supplying beauty and charm to this jaded gentleman?

Unaware that he was being thought of in these terms, Angela's father reverted austerely to the Seven Days' fighting around Richmond....

The scientific inquiry had a perfectly proper answer, of course. In the truest sense, Mrs. Flower was the housekeeper in question; that faded belle, with the button off her waist, owed the beauty and charm due in this quarter. Not for nothing did she have that distinctly inefficient voice. And the moment Charles thought of that voice, his mind, with a sort of jump, made a link, and he understood at once why the Doctor's strange speech, eavesdropped by him outside the door, had seemed to have the quality of a parody. Of course! This dry husband, with the sick-man's face, had merely been giving back, in a masculinized version, a reminder not infrequently heard on the lips of womanly women, when married. Before he had invented that ironic retort, how often had Angela's father heard it said: I'm your wife, and the mother of your children....

"And what," the civil caller said, "do you think of Mary Johnston's picture of Jackson? I assume, of course, you're familiar with—"

"A brilliant achievement, sir. Indeed, astonishing—for a woman," said the conservative Doctor, jerking his neck; and resumed.

But the young authority found his reactions oddly and increasingly disturbing, and shortly rose to go. He had become certain, abruptly, that he had party-called long enough.

His eccentric host, who had appeared so dryly indifferent to his coming, seemed, on the whole, to regret his departure. And Charles, perceiving this, found himself feeling rather sorry for him. But he showed his sympathies, not by offering to stay longer or to come again, but by inviting Angela's father to lunch with him at Berringer's, one day very soon at his convenience.

"I feel that we should further the acquaintance," he said, as they shook hands, "because of—ah—my long friendship for your—that is, for your wife's cousin."

And then he had a new surprise; for, though the Doctor's lips twitched a little at his correction, showing that he was not altogether devoid of humor, it was with instant seriousness that he said:—

"I do insist upon the distinction, you allege? Well, I'm free to say to you, sir, that I have but scant sympathy with these fantastic modern notions. If all women did as my wife's young cousin does, what, pray, would become of the Home?"

"Ah, what?" said Charles.

And as he thought of Mary Wing's charming and beautifully kept sitting-room, he seemed to feel his head going round. Surely, he had never before seen conservatism so magnificent as this.

"Meanwhile, come in again, sir, when you find time. I have few callers, and have appreciated your visit—"

"Yes!—thank you!"

"My daughter will be sorry—"

And then, as the Doctor opened the door, and his lusterless eye looked out, he added with an approach to grave pleasure in his voice:—

"Ah, here is Angela now—just in time."

The caller's eye went slipping down the hall; and so it was. In the light of the open front door, her rural swain behind her, the young home-maker stood by the hatstand, examining the two returned books she had just found there. What chance had brought her back thus early, cutting off his retreat? Had she passed and seen his hack standing there, and wondered?

But, curiously, Charles's bachelor shrinking from this re-meeting seemed suddenly to have vanished. All his determined championship of the Type, dating back to the Redmantle Club, all his personal sense of honorable obligation, had mysteriously thinned to nothing in half an hour in Dr. Flower's office. In some way that defied analysis, the interior of the Home seemed to have wiped out Angela's girlish claim, the ash-tray had overcome the Kiss. And Charles, bidding her father farewell, went walking down the narrow hall with a tread firm as a soldier's.

Angela had turned at the sound of voices; she stood gazing somewhat uncertainly into the dimness (for she was a little short-sighted without the opera-glasses, and perhaps this was only a patient). The instant of recognition of her friend was marked with an exclamation, almost a cry, of pleasure; and she started toward him with the happiest surprised welcome.

The re-meeting was effected by the hatstand, where Charles had stood on the day he had borrowed the book he now came to return. Water had flowed under London Bridge since then. Mr. Jenney, owner of the celebrated ring, was presented. He was a long-legged, gangling, curly-headed youth, with a face that was beautiful in its way, no less; and it must have been a frank face, too, since Charles, the observer, immediately had the fellow's whole secret. Here was Mr. Jenney's fair ideal, his high star and lady of dreams; and his full reward for his pure devotion was to be kept hanging on, a masculine anchor to windward—just in case, as they say. Still, he might prove the deus ex machina of the issue yet.

At the moment, however, little was seen of Mr. Jenney, since, almost in the first breath, his star said: "Oh, Dan, father's in now, and he'll want so to see you!"—and Mr. Jenney straightway withdrew obediently. One gathered that obedience was his fatal quality.

Thus the unheroic Charles confronted his Temporary Spinster at last, in her dark home-hall. And she, not guessing the new philosophic resistance within him, said, with the gayest confident air, and no little archness, too:—

"Well, Mr. Garrott!... Did you decide to pay your party-call?"

Charles smiled.

"I've been promising myself to come in for some time," he said pleasantly. "I had several excellent excuses, you see. For one thing, there was your book, which I've appropriated all this time—"

"Oh, that! I just saw it there—and thought I must have missed you! That would have been too mean, after all this time!" She glanced toward the hatstand, adding: "And—Mr. Manford gave you that other one to bring back, I suppose?"

"No—ah—we came together, but, of course, he left when he found that you were out. I wanted especially to pay my respects to your father, so—"

"I'm awfully glad he kept you for me.... How are you now? You don't know how I've missed you, since you had to stop walking entirely!"

"I've been extremely well, thank you. Or—at least—I've been pretty well—"

"Oh, I know you haven't been well!—you just try to make light of it! Mr. Manford told me you were breaking yourself down from overwork—you oughtn't to do it! And then that night when I phoned, and your Secretary said you were sick from not taking any exercise, I was worried, truly I was! I wanted to write you a little note—but—"

"A mere temporary indisposition, not worth a moment of your thought," said Mr. Garrott. He was wholly recovered now.

"I'm so glad. You really do look well! It's been ages since I've seen you! But why," she said, laughing up at him prettily, "am I keeping you standing at the door like this! Come in the parlor."

"I'm sorry, but I really can't, thank you. I must be going."

She stopped in complete surprise. "Going! Oh, you mustn't go now!—when I've just come in! Why, you couldn't!—"

"My time's up, you see, and more. Writing," said Charles sententiously, "is a dreadful taskmaster. But I've explained all that—"

"I know!—but you're here now! You can surely take a little time, Mr. Garrott—when I haven't seen you for days and days—"

"I've already overstayed my scant allowance, you see, with your father. But I'm glad to have had a little glimpse of you, at any rate."

On the whole, he had sought to speak in his usual voice and air; but now he saw that his new power of firmness had disclosed itself to her not too sensitive ear. The liquid eyes under the becoming new hat regarded him with sudden inquiry, puzzled and speculative....

To think seriously ill of this girl, because, perhaps, she was not an enthusiastic cleaner of the parental home, was not in Charles, the man, whatever the authority might have to say. Her soft and unlessoned youthfulness, confronting him, disarmed all criticism. But the chance resemblance to her plaintive mother had seemed, oddly, to strike him much deeper. Looking down at this virginal sweet freshness, by the hatstand and the books, the young man had been full of the elusive sense that as the daughter looked and charmed now, so the mother had looked once; and beyond her present air of alluring femininity, he seemed persistently to be seeing Angela at fifty, sitting idle in an unswept room and continually reminding a worn-out husband of her sacrifices and her service.... Pure fantasy, was it, a fiction-writer's imagining born of a superficial likeness? Or was there a deeper, a more romantic, kinship between the girl who set so naïve an estimate on the value of her kiss, and the woman who would plume herself through an indolent lifetime on the ancient history of her maternity?...

The girl opened her mouth to speak: but there came a welcome diversion. A step was heard on the wooden verandah, and the two young people, turning their heads together, saw a liveried servant at the still open door, bowing, speaking:—

"Miss Flower, marm?"

"Yes—I am Miss Flower."

"Fum Mr. Tilletts, marm," said the servant, extending a note. "And he say please don't you trouble to write, if you'd kindly send an answer by me, marm."

"Oh! All right."

Having said, "Excuse me, Mr. Garrott," Angela opened and glanced through her note, and then remarked: "Mr. Tilletts wants me to go to the theater with him to-night. How nice!"

Her back to the servant, she made a little deprecating face at Mr. Garrott; but her voice seemed pleasurably stirred all the same, and her answer to the chauffeur was:—

"Thank Mr. Tilletts, and say Miss Flower'll be very glad, indeed, to go, and will be ready at quarter past eight."

Charles wondered afterward if the opportune Tilletts had not subtly assisted his own withdrawal; but for the moment it rather seemed otherwise. While Angela spoke to the servant, he had turned hastily toward his overcoat; and now her hand fell upon his arm, with just a touch of the spoiled darling air, or at least with that added confidence which comes to a girl with these concrete evidences of her success.

"No, you mustn't! Don't go yet. Please!"

"I'm compelled to, unluckily. I very rarely allow myself the pleasure of calling at all, you know, and—"

"But you have allowed yourself the pleasure, now, Mr. Garrott! Oh!—don't be so firm! Come in—for only a minute! You can surely spare me a minute—when I ask you to specially—"

"It is literally impossible."

Angela had extended her small hand to lead him into the parlor. Now she let it fall at her side, and stood looking at him with a conscious expression on her face, a pretty expression, but one that he scarcely liked. Of course both of them knew that it was by no means literally impossible for Mr. Garrott to come in, for only a minute. But doubtless a womanly girl could be trusted to find an explanation for his peculiar speeches that plucked their stingers from them, as it were.

"You're so strange. You're displeased with me, I can see that. Why?—because I wasn't in when you called? Why, I'm nearly always out on fine afternoons!"

"I know that," ventured the young man.

"If you'd just told me in advance.... Don't you know I'd never have gone out with Dan Jenney, if I'd dreamed you were going to call?"

He knew this also, only too well; but this time he only said: "A caller must take his chances, of course. By the way, let me thank you very much, again, for lending me that book. I found it immensely interesting."

"Oh!—'Marna'? I didn't want you to come just for that.... Did she make you think of Cousin Mary at all?"

He smiled distantly, turned away, and put on his overcoat.

This was done in entire silence; Angela urged him to stay no longer. But when he turned, hat in hand, to say good-bye, she stood confronting him again, very near. There was a faint flush on her smooth cheek; her woman's eyes were very bright; her look upon him was sweet, self-conscious, and wistful, oddly appealing. Rarely had he seen her look more girlishly desirable.

"Mr. Garrott, why have you always been different to me since that night—of my bridge-party?"

"Different?" queried Mr. Garrott.

"Oh, you know you have! You know you've never really got over what I said to you—and all that dreadful misunderstanding!"

And he knew then that this nice girl would go to her grave thinking of him as a lover whose confidence in his suit had been reft from him by a too sharp rebuke. Well, so be it. He was content that she should have that satisfaction: let that stand as a further liquidation of the old obligation, a bonus payment on the esteemed Kiss.

"You know you've never forgiven me!"

"I've never had anything to forgive you, Miss Flower."

"Then you've never believed I've forgiven you! I've tried to show you that I have, that I've truly appreciated all the nice things you've done for me—but you've still been different."

It was doubtless his imagination, but she seemed to be a little nearer as she said, with a pink and winsome hesitancy:—

"Can't I make you believe that I—I've really always been the same?"

Extending his hand, the voluntary celibate replied, with cheerful reassurance: "I believe it now, Miss Flower. Absolutely. Positively. And now I must run."

Angela did not seem to see the hand he offered. She continued to look at him, and something seemed to die out of her face,—a momentary expectancy, was it, or the mere native optimism of youth? Her gaze turned away from his face, turned back again; and then she suddenly gave a little laugh, an odd laugh, half angry, half sad:—

"Oh, I do think you're absolutely—obtuse!"

And Charles then knew that, whether she realized it or not, Angela was giving him up.

But still she did not see his farewell hand. Her eyes, going past him again, had become fixed with a new expression, arresting him, and now she said, in another tone, what he found perhaps the most interesting remark in the duologue:—

"Here's Mr. Manford back!"

Charles wheeled, with a little jump.

And sure enough, there, beyond the glass of the door, was the form of the young engineer, incredibly returning. Yes, there he came back again, poor, vain, grinning, flattered fool, who only the other day had said: "Charlie, she worries me."

With one last look at Mr. Garrott, Angela turned to open the door for Mr. Manford. The greeting smile succeeded the good-bye reproach. And even in this disturbed moment, the writer's mind was subtly struck with the symbolism of that gesture: and once again this girl was a type to him, sister of a million sisters. Even so, must the womanly Spinster, through all her seeking days, turn from the man who does not desire her little offerings of beauty and charm, to the man who—well, possibly may. And it really wasn't right, wasn't fair....

"Old Sherlock!—sees the Fordette outside—guesses who's at home now!" the man who possibly might was saying, with a tone of buoyant intimacy and a repellent smirk. "I thought you weren't going to forget me altogether!... Oh! And there's Charlie-boy, too! Feeling better, old top?"

Charles looked through him in silence.

But when Angela drifted by them into the parlor—for she avoided any formal farewell with her former principal friend—and he was passing Donald to the door, he bent and flung into the youth's long ear one futile taunt:—

"Fool, I suppose she lent you the sequel!"

---

Before the dingy little house of the Flowers', there stood a line of waiting vehicles. The passer would have said that a reception, or perhaps a wedding, was going on within.

To the left, Mr. Tilletts's shining sedan still stood at the broken curb. The driver, having paused to exchange badinage with Walter Taylor, was just mounting to his seat. Full in front of the house stood a conveyance more in character with the unpretentious street: Charles Garrott's aged hackney-coach, in short. On the other side, at the nose of the hack-horse and properly leading the procession, stood the stout little Fordette, resting now from its labors. There only lacked a bicycle for Mr. Jenney, and something—a donkey, let us say—to stand for Donald Manford.

And Angela, indeed, had accomplished this; here was her true creative work, here her self-expression made visible. She it was who, poor and obscure, with nobody to help her, had drawn these vehicles and these gentlemen thronging about her door.

"Where toe, suh?" cried Walter Taylor, flourishing his whip.

"Number 6 Olive Street."

The fare spoke all but automatically, out of his new genuine disquiet. However, he corrected himself at once: "No—wait a minute."

If his position that she was just the wife for Donald lay silently abandoned somewhere behind him: if the business could no longer be viewed as Donald's idle-hour amusement, but all at once had come to look decidedly serious: still, what under heaven was the use of giving Mary another and more rousing warning? He had warned Mary once, and what was the result? Two calls from Donald to Angela in the course of a single afternoon. No; if the labor of taking off was now to follow "putting on," it was clear that some hand far subtler than the too manly Mary's would have to do the job. And he knew whose hand was plainly indicated, too....

And then the young man remembered, with a surprising uprush of relief and freedom, that this day was Friday, and Donald was off to New York to-night, within an hour or two. And the foolish youth would be gone a solid week, too, with Mr. Jenney and Mr. Tilletts left in possession of the field.

Thus, Walter Taylor, on his box, received a small surprise. Instead of giving him a new number, Mr. Garrott unexpectedly produced a dollar-bill from his pocketbook, and tossed it up to him with a sudden laugh.

"That's all, Walter. I'll walk!"

---

XIX

Donald Manford's absence in far-away New York saw the calendar into February. It was a month which for some time had held a fixed place in Charles's thought, as Mary Wing's last month at home. Now the days had brought him this new concern, by no means unrelated to Mary's impending departure. That Donald was his concern now, as well as hers, he had acknowledged, once and for all, in that moment of pause by the hack: and none saw more clearly than he that the acknowledgment was a damaging one, opening long vistas of annoying possibilities. Well it might be that all he had once planned and worried for himself, and much more, he would now have to plan and worry for his weak and amorous friend. And suppose Mary Wing went off, leaving the whole business still unsettled?

However, there was no use in borrowing trouble. For the present, Donald's well-wishers enjoyed an interlude of complete repose. And on or about the day of the simpleton's return to the danger-zone, it was recalled, he was to be whisked off again to the Helen Carson house-party, where all might end happily yet. Mary deserved her tittle of credit for that arrangement, at any rate. Charles, making the most of these peaceful days, reconsecrated himself to Letters and the finding of his Line.

Donald himself remained pleasantly unaware of the difficulties created by his unreliable antics. The youth was known to possess a common combination of characteristics: he had a novel-hero's chin and an underlying soft streak. Donald was a little ease-loving; he unconsciously slanted to the line of least resistance. As to work, Mary Wing, who had caught him young, had pretty well ironed out his softness; yet it seemed to persist even there. Witness his dallying for a moment with an "office proposition" in New York, at whatever emolument, when far larger professional opportunities awaited him in a Wyoming camp. As to getting himself married off, Donald's traits were obviously at once an advantage to his friends and an added risk: they seemed to indicate clearly that he or she who had his ear last, and took the strongest hand with him, would win the day. Doubtless his truest friends were most resolved that such hand should be theirs.

At any rate, the young squire's presentation of himself at the Wings', on the afternoon of the day he got back from New York, was by appointment strictly. It was Friday again, a week to a day from his two calls upon Angela. Donald "stopped by" Olive Street on his hurried way uptown. Having had a very strenuous part of a day in his office at Hoag, Hackett & Manford's, and having a number of things still to do before five o'clock, he designed to give, say, ten minutes to his call upon his more than sister. He gave thirty minutes, and emerged into the sunshine with a sobered face. And, on leaving Mary thus, almost the first person he saw next was Mary's special friend, Charles Garrott, bowling by.

The eyes of the young men met and Donald nodded gloomily. Charles, as it happened, was but taking a last use of his car, prior to the old lady's return on Monday. But Donald did not know that, and he thought, absently, what a fool old Charlie was to ride around this way all the time, when he had legs and could walk like a man. At the same moment, Charles, inevitably, was thinking what a fool Donald was, for exactly the opposite reason. Never again, it might be, would Charles Garrott see a bachelor walking Washington Street alone, without some vague sense of circumambient peril.

Charles had not expected to take up the new worries until after the match-making house-party; but the sight of Donald unprotected out there made an irresistible appeal to his higher nature, especially as no trouble to himself would be involved. Accordingly, he answered Donald's distrait salute with demonstrative smiles and signalings, and immediately fired an order through the speaking-tube. And the engineer, surprised, saw the splendid car of the old lady stop with a jerk, back, wheel, and come sliding up to his side at the curb.

"Well, old fellow! Glad to see you back!" said Charles, hospitably swinging open the door. "Hop in and let me drive you up! I want to hear about your trip."

Donald was faintly pleased by this unusual attentiveness. He was one of those extraordinary persons who never ride when it is possible to walk; on the other hand, he seldom turned away from the chance of a good talk about himself. And he was very short of time now, too, owing to his detention at the Wings'.

So he stepped into the limousine, his manner abstracted and distinctly consequential.

Charles, smiling slightly to himself, gave the address, and prompted:—

"You're just back, aren't you?"

"And off again at five twenty-two. And I've got two hours' unpacking and repacking to do before then."

"You are a traveler these days! What's this," inquired Charles, innocently—"another business trip?"

"House-party at the Kingsleys', down at Hatton. Tell your boy to skip along there, Charlie. I'm in a rush."

Amiably, Charles spoke into the mouthpiece: "Skip along there, Eustace. Mr. Manford's in a rush." And resuming he said, with an air of honest envy: "At the Kingsleys'! By George, that sounds pretty good! Congenial crowd, winter sports, dancing every night—you're in luck! Who's going along?"

Donald named the guests. It did not escape the observant Charles that he named Miss Carson last, after a perceptible pause and in a manner clumsily careless. Nothing escaped Charles, not Donald's sober face, certainly not the fact that he had just come from the Wings'. Now, with a thrill of satisfaction, he understood that Mary had been talking to the young light-o'-love at last, giving him to understand plainly where his duty lay. And this look of Donald's was precisely the right look, too: just the intensely self-important, nervous, faintly complacent, highly worried look of a man who has suddenly learned that he is going to be married directly.

He gave the strong Mary another large credit-mark, and continued: "Three days with that crowd!—how I'd like to get in! As for poor old Talbott—ha, ha!—he'll foam at the mouth when I tell him about this."

"What's he got to do with it?"

"Why, I thought you'd heard! Miss Carson knocked him flat with one look—that lunch of mine! He can't see anybody else since, poor chap. But he admits he doesn't make any time at all."

"She's not the kind that takes to any whippersnapper that comes along."

His odious smugness delighted Charles. So did his fidgeting about, his hasty glances at his watch, his long solemn stares at himself in the little mirror.

"Poor old Talbott swears she must be interested in somebody else," laughed Charles. "But he confessed he couldn't think of a man he knew who'd be at all likely to interest a girl like that—I either." And then, not to overdo it, he said interestedly: "But, Donald, what about Blake & Steinert?"

"Oh, I turned 'em down," said the coming fiancé, and briefly expanded. Of the fine old firm, he said: "They were associated with me on Hog Bay Breakwater." Old Blake was a prince; Steinert a crackerjack. They had raised their offer, so eager were they to get him, and insisted on leaving it open for him. He had seen all the shows, lunched at five clubs, "closed up several important deals," etc., etc.

Dipping up his watch again, Donald said suddenly: "Seen Mary lately?"

This being none of his business, Charles replied with a monosyllable.

"Anything wrong between you two?"

"Not that I'm aware of.... Great heavens! I'm a worker, my good fellow! I haven't time to fuss around house-partying—pop-calling—all the time!—Not, of course, that I don't wish I were going—"

"Well, you won't have much time to be pop-calling on Mary," reproved Donald, with his new responsible soberness. "Drop around this afternoon, Charlie, after your lessons. See if you can't cheer her up a little."

The limousine reeled off half a block before Charles answered:

"Seems I'm behind the times again. What does Miss Mary need to be cheered up about, exactly?"

"What d'you s'pose now, Charlie? Going off to New York to live, herself; me off to Wyoming for two years at least; Aunt Ellen moving to North Carolina; home broken up—why, I tell you the thing is the worst kind of smash-up! I've just been with Mary—never saw her so blue in my life."

Charles said, after another silence: "But she understood all that from the beginning, didn't she?"

"Understood—what's that got to do with it? Besides, you never understand things till you get right down to 'em. Take me," said Donald, recurring to his favorite subject with a frown. "I hadn't an idea how much I was going to mind this business—ending it all here, moving off to the back side of nowhere to—"

"Well, don't be sentimental about it, for pity's sake! This is a realistic story we're living, or I miss my guess entirely.—When does Miss Mary leave?"

"Oh, about two weeks, I believe, but—"

"Two weeks!"

"Wensons want the flat around the 20th, I understand. We didn't speak of that just now—Mary'll tell you about it. Let's see," said Donald, fidgeting about and looking first out one window, then another. "Going to your mother's to-morrow, I suppose? Drop in this afternoon, Charlie—or to-night. And that's so!—you can take around a package for me, things I bought for Mary in New York—oh, neck-fichus, silk stockings—that sort of stuff."

But the thought of himself as Mary's cheerer-up at this juncture in her Career was bitterly ironic to Charles, and, answering curtly that he would be too busy to run errands this afternoon, he changed the subject at once. In short, when did Donald go to Wyoming? Unable to resist the opening, Donald said that he would probably start on March 15th; and so began to talk fitfully of himself. At the other window, Charles relapsed into thought. He did not speak again until the car rolled up to the entrance of the showy apartment-hotel where Donald lived. Then, rousing himself abruptly, he said, with a well-done air of negligent sprightliness:—

"Oh, by the by, Donald—heard anything from our little friend in the four-wheeler, as you call it? I haven't laid eyes on her since that day you and I marched up like little soldiers to give back her books. Funny, that was!—ha, ha!"

Donald's face of a young man about to be married changed perceptibly. He answered, quite stiffly:—

"I fail to see anything funny in it. Miss Flower's perfectly well, I believe."

"Good!—glad to hear it. She needs her health, all the driving about she does.... Why, where'd she see you to-day?"

"I didn't say I'd seen her to-day, that I remember. By Jove, I don't get a minute to see anybody or anything, rushed about this way all the time!... Well! Obliged for the lift."

"And how do you know she's well, then?"

"Because she told me so over the telephone, if you give a darn! What's this about, anyway?"

"Why, not a thing! Why, my dear fellow! Of course, I understand perfectly! You don't suppose I suspect you of being old Tilletts's rival, do you? Not likely—ha, ha! No, I think it's awfully nice of you, old fellow, knowing as I do that you don't admire her particularly. That's what I wanted to say," proceeded Charles, laying his hand affectionately and detainingly on Donald's arm. "Of course you know she doesn't have much of a time—attention and all that—oh, I see through you perfectly! It's just Talbott and the Oldmixon girls over again—"

"Oh, she told me about you!" said Donald in a blustering manner; and, snatching his arm away, he sprang out upon the sidewalk.

His remark evoked curiosity; but Charles's overweening interest was not in Angela now. And he was thinking intently: "He's not engaged to Helen Carson yet, by a long shot. He's not even at the station—that's a mile—on Washington Street. I'd better keep an eye on you, my buck ..."

Aloud he said: "She did?—nothing good, I fear. Here!—wait a minute! That package for Miss Mary, Donald—I expect you'd better leave it for me to take, after all. I'll find some way to get it around to her—"

"All right—"

"You bring it by as you start for the station, that's the best way. Then we'll drive down together," said Charles, fixing his friend with a compelling gaze. "I've—ah—got some things I want to talk to you about."

"I'll bring it by," said Donald, non-committally, and rushed away.

He went up seven floors, telephoned for the "staff valet," and proceeded to business. There was a period of the wildest activity. At the end of it, the hour being then too late for hope that any expressman would make the train with the trunk, Donald engaged the valet to secure a carriage, take down and check the baggage, get him a ticket and a seat, and be waiting for him with these things at a given point. In such slapdash, inefficient fashion this young man conducted all his personal life.

"And mind you see the baggage on the train," he warned the fellow. "This is an important trip."

He shot down again, dressed to "kill" the house-party, but lugging a large box, and strode out into the fading sunshine. Before the hotel door, to his surprise, stood Charlie Garrott's borrowed car, empty, and before the car stood Charlie Garrott's borrowed driver, greeting him with all his teeth.

"What're you waiting here for?" said Donald, staring.

"Goin' to drive you an' Mist' Garrott to the deepo—yessuh! Mist' Garrott tole me to wait right here an' bring you round, suh!"

Donald again was rather touched by the thoughtfulness of his friend. Take him all in all, old Charlie was a pretty good fellow. However, he would have ridden down in the hack with the valet, if he had wanted to ride. Of course, he might send the box around by this fellow—but no, if old Charlie was expecting him, that would seem pretty short, particularly as Mrs. Herman's was right on his way.

"I'm much obliged to you—er—Eustace—but I'll walk, I guess. I haven't had any exercise to-day."

"Boss, he say you mout not ketch yo' train if you was to walk."

"Oh, I've got plenty of time for the train—plenty!" said Donald, hastily, and shifted the box to look at his watch again. "I'll leave word for Mr. Garrott myself."

"Suh! Thank you kindly, suh!"

Donald swung off toward Mrs. Herman's, but three blocks distant. Behind him, unobserved, trailed the old lady's limousine, very slow. When he was still a block from his destination, the hurrying young man was all at once struck with an annoying recollection. "Curses!" he groaned. "I forgot my sweater!" That meant that he would have to go back, without doubt: for the sweater was a brand-new one, of brilliant Australian wool, and specially purchased in New York for the winter-sports. Donald, accordingly, felt unable to linger over his good-bye messages to Charles. He said hurriedly to Mrs. Herman, who opened the door for him: "How-do! Please give this box to Mr. Garrott, and tell him I decided to walk. He'll understand." And on that, he sprang away down the steps, two at a time, and started swiftly back to the Bellingham.

But just as he reached the corner, he was suddenly arrested by the sound of his own name, rolling loudly after him down the street.

"Donald! Hi, there! Stop!"

Donald halting, looked upward and all about him. Presently, through the top branches of an intervening tree, he descried Charles Garrott leaning far out of Mrs. Herman's third-story window. "Well?" called Donald.

"What's the matter? Where're you going?" demanded Charles in a voice that broke easily through the tree. "I said we'd drive down together!"

He was heard continuing in another tone: "No! Stop, Eustace! Don't go away—I want you!"

"Much obliged," shouted Donald, "but I'd rather walk."

Charles said something out the window, which Donald failed to catch.

"What say?"

"You come back!" cried Charles, beckoning, while passing pedestrians craned their necks upward. "Wait for me—just a minute—I'm all ready! And I've got to speak to you—about several things! About the package!"

But Donald, objecting to the attention they were attracting, shook his head decisively. "Haven't time now. Forgot something ... back to my rooms."

"If you haven't time to wait, you certainly haven't time to walk back to your rooms! You're going to miss your train with all this walking!"

That was pointed enough to cause Donald to pause again, and look at his watch for the twentieth time. He found that he still had twenty-five minutes, time enough, of course, but then he might have to hunt for the sweater, and there was the business of the luggage at the station, too.

Down through the branches boomed the strangely insistent voice of Charles: "Why, by George! You've only got twenty minutes. Here, take my car there, quick! You can barely make it, driving fast ..."

And in a lower voice he said: "After him, Eustace! Get him to the station as fast as you can. Don't fail this time."

Donald was hesitating, struck as Charles meant him to be, with the fear that his watch might be slow. He now called, with evidences of ill-humor and disturbance:—

"All right, then! But I can't stop for you."

"Oh, that's all right, old fellow—my matters can wait! I'll look out for the package! Just you catch your train, that's all!"

Continuing to lean out of the Studio window, Charles watched the dullard step into the old lady's tightly closed car, and whirl away—safe at last. As the car shot round the corner, he suddenly laughed aloud: a triumphant laugh, but charged with irritation, too.

Then Charles, aloft, drew head and torso back into the Studio, banged shut the window, and found Mrs. Herman just plumping the large white box of things for Mary down on his writing-table. The spectacle brought forward the other matter instantly. Of course, he had agreed to receive the box purely as a means of keeping an eye on Donald.

"Oh, yes—as to the package, Mrs. Herman, perhaps you wouldn't mind taking it down as you go, and just leaving it on the hall table? I—ah—shall probably call a messenger to take it—a little later."

"Certainly, Mr. Garrott," said Mrs. Herman, picking up the box again. "And oh, would you mind telling the Judge I'd like to speak to him a minute before he goes out?"

"Certainly, Mrs. Herman."

The landlady, lingering, said: "He seems in poor spirits, don't you think so, Mr. Garrott? His appetite is not what it was. And he goes out and takes these long walks, alone, day after day, or sits here by himself in the Studio. I don't think it's good for him. I think he broods."

"It's nothing serious, Mrs. Herman. He's annoyed with me, I fear, for giving up some physical culture exercises which he hoped might make a man of me yet. Also, for being such a continuous failure as a writer."

"But it's not your fault, Mr. Garrott! You do the very best you can, I'm sure. The Judge is unreasonable—that's what I say. Oh, I could coax him into a good humor easily enough, but I scarcely ever see him nowadays, except at meal times. I can't very well offer to go with him on his walks, can I?—but I'm sure the solitude is bad for him."

"Ah, you should get yourself a little Fordette, Mrs. Herman."

"And what is a little Fordette, Mr. Garrott?"

"Oh—simply a sort of wheeled device for going with people on their walks. I'm explaining it in a story. But," said Charles, "I won't fail to give the Judge your message."

Left alone, the young man stood for a space in the middle of the floor, gazing intently at nothing. Then he seated himself at his table and produced manuscript from the drawer. Then he put the manuscript back in the drawer, and stared at nothing again. Finally, he rose, opened the bedroom door quietly, and said:—

"Judge, I find I have to go out for a little while."

Judge Blenso, in the bedroom, received the friendly information, and then his message from Mrs. Herman, with only a cold "Very well!" He stood at a long board, balanced on two distant chair-backs, listlessly pressing the trousers he didn't have on; his instrument being a patent electric-flatiron, which consumed quantities of current, which indeed fairly gave the measure of his landlady's adoration. Catch Mrs. Herman letting Two-Book McGee use so much as an electric curling-iron in the Second Hall Back!

"And Judge," added Charles, conciliatingly, "please don't bother to take that manuscript to the express-office—I mean 'Bandwomen'—unless you really want the walk."

"Very well! I hear you! Good gad, very well!" said the Judge.

Charles shut the door, regretfully. It had been like this between them for some weeks now. Even his generosity in quietly yielding the name of his own only novel produced no softening effect on his secretary's cold bored disapprobation.

He put on hat and overcoat, descended two flights, picked up the box of things for Mary, and went out upon his errand. He walked slowly, down Mason Street to Olive, and at Olive turned south.

For the second time, Donald had contrived to force his hand in regard to Mary: he was conscious of resenting that. Still—of course he had never meant to let the old friendship end in estrangement, and doubtless the casual pretext of the box was better than the formal "call" next week he had had in mind. To appear as Mary's cheerer-up now was, indeed, considerably beyond him. Nevertheless, he was well aware that what Donald had told him in this connection had made an instant difference in his feeling, made him readier to be friends again. If only she had felt and realized all this in the beginning, if only she had showed him so that day over the telephone....

Still, feeling wasn't enough, unfortunately. There was this whole business about Donald, for instance. In one way he could think of that almost pleasurably. Mary seemed to suppose that if she but arranged a house-party and gave Donald a sound talking to in advance, the whole thing was settled, down to the orange-blossoms. It required him to revise her crude plannings, put in the omitted finesse, and deliver Donald safely at the station. But Charles, pacing gravely toward the unpremeditated meeting, large box under his arm, found his thought of the episode continually seeking deeper levels. If, two weeks from now, Donald was still not engaged to Helen, whose was to be the responsibility of pushing him on? Not Mary's, evidently. Was not this youth, in fact, but one more of those countless intimate obligations which strong women must "hack away," when resolved to lead their own lives? Donald was the apple of Mary's eye. Normally speaking, she was ready to do anything for him. But it seemed that even Donald, if he crossed the trail of the Career, would have to look to himself.

Or, more probably, he, Charles, would have to look out for him.

At the corner of Washington Street, pausing, the meditative young man consulted his watch; he shifted the box for the purpose just as Donald had done a few minutes earlier. It was quarter past five, exactly. Donald would be at the station now, without doubt, safe on the train. Well, here was one thing he had done for Mary, at any rate, as he should not fail to indicate to her. And thus, insensibly, his thought slipped into the pleasurable vein again, the superior, masterful vein, and his mind composed the light ironic sentences with which he should make known to Mary her remissness and his own subtle services.

Stepping down from the curb in this brown study, he all but walked into a motor-car whirring by: a car that was stealing the wrong side of the street, and cutting close to the sidewalk at that. Charles stopped and stepped back, just in time. And then, all in the same breath, his ears, his eyes, and his nostrils telegraphed his brain what car, and whose, this was. It was the Fordette, none other, going at an unprecedented speed, now curving back dangerously to the side where it belonged. On a cloud of the dark smoke it sometimes emitted, Angela's girlish laugh came floating back to him distinctly. But Charles's gaze was fixed on the figure of the man who sat at Angela's side and held the Fordette wheel; and his eyes all but started from his head as he perceived that it was Donald....

Yes, it was poor Donald fast in the Home-Making conveyance: Donald, snatched, she alone knew how, from his wedding-coach.

---

XX

The famous Secretary sat at her desk in the well-kept sitting-room. She sat in the midst of documents and letters; large white sheets of her Education League writing-paper lay before her, the topmost sheet nearly filled with her neat chirography. Oblivious to small happenings in the world without, the Secretary was deep in her distinguished correspondence. But her desk, as it happened, stood in the window, and the Secretary, after all, was not so immersed in her affairs but that she looked out into the Park now and then, sometimes for whole minutes together. She looked, too, into the quiet street before the house. And so it was that her eyes, in time, fell upon the familiar figure of Charles Garrott; striding all at once into her range, turning swiftly in at her door, vanishing again into her vestibule, scarcely five feet from where she sat.

Though thus aware that she was about to have a caller, Mary did not at once spring up to go and welcome him. She sat, entirely motionless, her permanently questioning gaze fixed on the spot where the caller had passed from view. The ringing of the bell scarcely seemed to penetrate her consciousness. But then, in a moment, she dropped her pen quickly, and rose. Standing, she locked her two hands together before her, very tight, released them again, passed out into the hall, and opened her front door.

"Good-afternoon! This is an unexpected pleasure," said she, in her natural voice, or very near it. "Come in!—or can you?"

Her visitor looked full at her from the vestibule, unsmiling.

"Oh, certainly—if you're not too busy! It's what I am here for. How do you do to-day?"

"That's nice! You don't often honor us, and—I feared you had merely stopped to leave that package."

"Ah, yes!—the package! Some things Donald got for you—I suppose you know? He asked me—"

"Oh! I'm afraid that was very much of an imposition—and I was really in no hurry for them at all."

She thanked him, relieved him of the pretextual box, laid it on the hall table, and, with inevitable but extreme infelicity, continued:—

"You saw Donald to-day, then?"

A small silence preceded his controlled reply "Oh, yes!—I saw him."

"I've just packed him off to a house-party at the Kingsleys'—to make love to Helen Carson. But perhaps he told you?"

In the large mirror overhanging the table, the eyes of the once excellent friends briefly encountered. She was puzzled by the quality of his grave gaze.

"He did mention a house-party, I believe. But—"

Turning away toward the sitting-room, Mary filled the pause with a little laugh: "But you think he won't make love to Helen, perhaps?"

The grave young man, following her, did not burst forth, even then. His restraint seemed curious, even to himself. Crossing Washington Street just now, he had been full enough of plain speech, for this young woman's good. "I've had quite enough of this!" he would say to her. "I can't and won't give up my afternoons, my life, to playing nurse to Donald. If you are satisfied to have him marry Miss Angela, well and good. If not—" and then a last warning, far sharper, far more direct, than the other. But then as he waited upon her steps, and then as he looked at her in the door, the springs of this trivial anger had seemed mysteriously to subside and dry up. No doubt the Career-Maker's own look had something to do with that. Her face in the afternoon light was seen to be thin and tired; he thought he detected faint circles under her eyes, a slightly pinched look about her nostrils. But beyond all that, beyond any question of "sympathy," or cheering-up, it seemed that the affair itself had suddenly shrunk in importance. Donald's folly, Angela's little foibles, seemed to matter less to Charles as he found himself looking again at the departing heroine of his write-ups.

So he discharged his bolt with restrained formality: "It isn't that. I was only wondering whether or not you had packed him off, as yet."

"Oh!—but haven't I?... I don't understand."

"I happened to see him a minute ago, driving on Washington Street with your cousin—Miss Angela."

It was clear that the topic had lost no interest for Mary, at any rate. She stopped short in the middle of the floor, utterly taken aback.

"Donald!—as you came here?"

And, instantly recovering from mere astonishment, her capable gaze flew to the little watch on her wrist.

Charles reassured her, as dryly as possible: "However, they were headed toward the station, and going as fast as they could. I think he will make his train."

"But—it's not possible, I'm afraid! His train goes at five twenty-two—it's just that now!... Ah, how could he!"

Producing his own valued chronometer, the young man compared it with the educator's small trinket.

"I believe you're a little fast, aren't you? I'm five-eighteen. And it was just quarter past when I saw them, for I looked to see. That gave him seven minutes—"

"Yes—well!—but Angela's little car is so slow—"

"Oh!—it can go fast enough for practical purposes—I've observed. Besides, Donald may have telephoned and found that the train was late."

"Yes—that's true."

Mary Wing looked toward the window, characteristically composed again, but evidently concerned enough.

"Well, I hope so. It would be too stupid of him to miss it, after all ... I can't think how he happened to be with Angela—at the last minute this way."

"How, indeed? But sit down, do, and I'll tell you why it seems particularly—mystifying to me. I hope," the formal caller added, with a glance toward the busy-looking desk, "I'm not interrupting?"

The General Secretary said no, with some brevity.

In sentences less copious and biting than he had sketched out on the corner, Charles recited the history of his futile afternoon. He could not, indeed, believe it possible that Donald, having donned the solemn bridegroom look for Helen Carson, would deliberately throw it off again for the sake of a short drive in the Fordette: which, to say the least of it, could be had at any time at his desire. Nor was Donald really a born fool, who would miss a train through sheer childish carelessness. The inference was that, encountering Angela, accidentally (more or less), just after his second start, the youth had calculated that he still had time to spare; and so had consented to exchange the speedy limousine for the Fordette: quite probably in no spirit more serious than that of a venturesome lark. Charles's remarks, at least, took these generous grounds, reassuring as to the moment. And still a tinge of exasperation crept into his account of his wasted labors. And still something in him seemed to require that he should bring these small responsibilities home where they belonged, for once: leaving them on her doorstep, as it were, for her to jump over when she went away.

But his story, inevitably, was one of ungallant efforts to evade impending pursuit. And when, to point up his lesson, he guardedly suggested a connection between the natural ambitions of Miss Angela, and the two complete transplantations of her family, Mary Wing seemed to gather more of his purely private thought than he had intended. One of her intent interrogative stares brought him to an unintended pause. And she commented quietly, but rebukingly, he considered:—

"You seem to have changed your opinion of Angela since last week."

There, of course, he hardly cared to justify himself. He could not well explain what Angela's resemblance to her mother had signified to him, and why he considered poor Dr. Flower the most magnificent romanticist in the world.

"I merely suggest," he said, with stiffening dignity, "that she does seem to be much interested in Donald—and he in her—now. I happen to know that he called on her twice the day he left for New York, and talked with her over the telephone this morning. But you mistake me, if you think I mean to criticize your cousin—personally. I hope I understand better than that how—all this—is as logical and mathematical as a natural law. How far in the other direction the education of women ought to take them ... that, of course, is not for me to guess.... My point is only that these—these perfectly logical ambitions—are strong enough to be taken seriously by those who mean to oppose them."

"Do you doubt that I take this seriously?"

"I have doubted it, I must admit.... Suppose this house-party comes to nothing, what do you mean to do?"

The former heroine of the write-ups did not answer him at once. She sat in a straight chair, half-sidewise, a considerable distance away; her arm was laid along the chair-back, her cheek sunk upon her hand. Something in the pose made the caller think of Donald's exaggerated statement, that he had never seen Mary so blue in his life.

When she spoke, it was not again to suggest, offhand, that he should save Donald by stepping in.

"You are right, of course," she said with a certain dignity herself. "I haven't been thinking of it as seriously as I should—evidently. Now—if this doesn't come to anything—I'll need some time to plan about it."

"It's going to be rather troublesome, I'm afraid. And you—I—"

"I'll make it my chief interest, you may be sure."

Then the stiff caller, examining his shirt-cuff as if he had never seen such an object before, released his logical comment:

"But I'm afraid you haven't left yourself a great deal of time, have you? Two weeks may prove rather a small allowance—for a difficult matter like this."

"Oh, I—hope there will be time enough. Meantime, I—"

"I hadn't realized you were going so soon, you see. That will add to the difficulties, I'm afraid. Donald says you expect to leave on the 20th."

He meant his rejoinders to be unanswerable, and she seemed to find them so. Glancing up from his cuff in the silence, Charles found his famous friend's eyes fixed upon him in a strange gaze, which her lids and lashes veiled at once. Had that look struck him from any other eyes in the world, he would have labeled it reproachful, without the smallest hesitation. But Mary was never reproachful: she scarcely thought enough of him for that; and, besides, the shoe was on the other foot, as she should know very well.

"I did say something of the sort last week, I believe—though no day was really settled on. But it was very nice of you," she went on naturally enough, but with too evident a wish to shift the conversation, "to take so much trouble about it to-day. I do appreciate all your interest in it—and I do believe it's going to turn out right, too. Donald certainly left me with that feeling, this afternoon. So don't let's bother about it any more now," said Mary. "I'd much rather hear—some more about your writing. I hope you've gotten the book well started now?"

But Charles, unique among the writers of the world, did not want to talk about himself to-day. No, he had found the topic for him now.

"No!—I haven't, I'm sorry to say. Your arrangements are all made, aren't they? Judge Blenso tells me you're going to live with Sophy Stein, who used to run the Pure Food laboratories here?"

Again her brief look seemed to thrust upon him like a hand, and again her reply glanced off:—

"Yes—I was planning to live with her. You knew her, didn't you, when—"

"I was going to say—if everything is arranged, perhaps you wouldn't need to start so early.... Of course, the idea of your friends here would be that you should wait till the last day."

As she neither approved nor rejected this amiable suggestion, Charles said: "How does that idea appeal to you?"

To his surprise, instead of answering his question, Mary rose abruptly and went over to her desk. He then assumed that she wished to show him some letter bearing on her arrangements for her new life. But it seemed that her movement had no such object. She merely stood there a moment, fingering her papers in an irresolute sort of way; and then, without a word, she moved a little farther, and stood, looking out of the window.

He said, at once with bewilderment and with increasing constraint: "Or possibly you don't wish me to know when you are going?"

Then Mary Wing turned in the dying light, and said, not dramatically at all, but in her quietest everyday voice:—

"No, I don't mind your knowing. I'm not going."

And still the authority on women did not understand.

"Not going—when?"

"I've decided not to accept the appointment."

And, sitting down, suddenly and purposelessly at her desk, the young woman of the Career added in a rather let-down voice: "I haven't told anybody at all yet. I just decided—last night."

Then came silence into the twilight sitting-room, surely a silence like none here before it. In the Wings' best chair, the caller sat still as a marble man, while the little noises from the street grew loud and louder. And then, quite abruptly and mechanically, he began to rise, exactly as if an unseen spirit were lifting him bodily by the hair. And he could feel all the blood drawing out of his face.

"Not going to accept the appointment," he echoed suddenly, in a queer voice.

And then, as if so reminded that his tongue possessed this accomplishment, he all at once burst out: "Why—but—why! You have accepted it! It was settled!—long ago! Not going!—what do you mean? Why, what's happened?"

The young woman seated so inappropriately at the desk, gazing so meaninglessly into pigeon-holes, made no reply. And now Charles Garrott was walking toward her, walking as the entranced walk, fascinated, staring with fixed eyes that had forgotten how to wink.

"What're you talking about? I don't know what you mean! Why, what's happened—what's gone wrong?"

Mary Wing grew restless under his questionings; she spoke with obvious effort: "Nothing's happened—nothing's gone wrong. I say, I simply decided that I wouldn't—take the position, after all. I decided I would refuse it. So I was writing to Dr. Ames—to explain ... That's all I can say."

But the man standing over her looked more spellbound than ever.

"Explain!—explain what?... Why—you can't put me off like this—can you?" said he, all his stiffness so shattered by her thunderbolt, all his struggle but for some effect of poise. "You must know—I'm tremendously interested. And—I'm obliged to feel that something pretty serious has happened to make you—"

"No!—nothing has happened at all, I've said. I assure you—nothing."

"But ... You can't imagine how absolutely in the dark ... Do you mean you've found something else you'd rather do—here?"

"I suppose that's one way of putting it—yes.... Why, I simply say that when the time came—I wasn't able to do it, that's all.... No, I didn't want to do it—that must have been it. Of course, people always do what they really want most."

"You didn't want to do what?... You know, that's just what I don't quite understand."

"But I've just told you," she protested; and there stopped short.

She had overcome the brief weakness which had seemed to seize her when, for the first time, she heard her intention declared aloud, the spoken word, it may be, imparting to it the last irrevocable stroke. She, the competent, would not be incompetent with her own great affair. And now, as if she reluctantly acknowledged some right he had to understand, she seemed to force herself to speak again, in a voice from which her self-control had pressed all tone.

"I mean that, when the time came, I couldn't pick up and go away—for good—no matter what was at the other end. I mean I wasn't willing to. I'd rather not."

She took a breath; and then tone came into her sentences, but it was only a sort of light hardness.

"I suppose it all came down to this—that I wasn't willing to leave mother—in the way I should have to leave her. I didn't want to. It was not possible ... And I'm afraid that's all I can say."

"But of course I understand you now," said the young man instantly, in the strangest mild voice.

"Then, if you will—please me—let's say no more about it."

To that stanch speech he made no reply: perhaps he did not hear it. Winter dusk had crept quickly into the pretty sitting-room. The tall figure motionless by the little desk grew perceptibly dimmer.

That understanding Charles spoke of had come upon him by successive shocks, each violent in its way. His had been the mere mad sense of a world too suddenly swung upside down, of the individual himself left standing brilliantly on his head. That had been just at first; and then perception had slid into him like a lance, and his feet had struck the solid ground with a staggering jolt. It was as if, at a word, all the supporting fabrications of his mind had turned to thin air, and out he fell headlong, at last, upon the real and the true. And this real and this true was Mary Wing, nothing else, standing where she had always stood; Mary, his best old friend, whom he had given his back to, belabored with harsh words, while she struggled at the crossroads of her life—to this. Now contrition, now humbleness had shaken the young authority, a poignant conviction of his failure, in understanding and in friendship. And then she spoke again, making it all quite perfect with simple words that he himself, in a dream, might have shaped and put into her mouth. I wasn't willing to leave mother. And after that, it seemed that nothing about himself could possibly matter in the least.

"You know," he said, quite naturally, out of the small silence, "I think it's beautiful that a girl like you can feel this way—a girl with your abilities—your usefulness and splendid success—and now this magnificent oppor—"

"Don't!—please don't! I hadn't meant to speak of it at all. I—we won't discuss it, please."

She spoke hastily, pushing back the papers she had been pretending to arrange, starting to rise. But that word or that movement seemed to galvanize the still Charles into the suddenest life.

"Discuss it!" he cried, in a new voice. "Why, we're going to have the greatest discussion you ever heard!"

For perhaps the strangest part of this destructive upheaval was that it seemed to leave every idea he had ever had about this Career completely reversed. One word from Mary Wing about not leaving her mother, and nothing seemed to matter but that she, in her fine recklessness, should not be allowed to sacrifice her triumph and her life.

"No!—please! It's settled now. And it only makes—"

But her friend, the authority, had flung himself into the chair beside her, like an excited boy, and he seized her wrist on the desk-leaf in an arresting grip.

"No, it isn't settled till it's settled right!—don't you know that? Is this your letter to Ames here? Let me tear it up for you now! Refuse the appointment! Why, Miss Mary! You can't think of such a thing! You!—a worker with a mission—and this your great call!—your big opportunity—your duty! Yes, your—"

She interrupted his flowing modernisms to say, quite patiently: "You're hurting my wrist."

"Yes, and I'm going on hurting it till I see that letter torn up! Now, Miss Mary!—listen to me—for once—I beg! You won't suppose I don't understand—now—what made you sit down to do this, and I—I needn't say I admire you immensely for feeling so. But—don't you see—if life's hard, it's not your doing, and if it's hardest on mothers, you can't change the conditions by a hair's-breadth, no matter what you do.... Why, if you were going to marry Donald, and go off to Wyoming, the break here would be just as bad, but you'd never think it wasn't right—you'd know that these were the terms and conditions of life. Oh, you know all that as well as I! You know the duty isn't from children to parents—no, I swear, it's from parents to children, every time. And your mother'll be the first to say so—you know that, too! You know, when you tell her you're thinking of doing this, she'll go down on her knees to beg you to take your youth—and your life—and be free—"

He was deflected by one of Mary's normal level gazes, turned upon him. She said steadily:—

"How long have you been feeling this way?"

"Ten years! And then—for about five minutes."

"I had understood somehow—I don't know how exactly—that you always thought I should stay here."

The young man felt a flush spreading upward toward his hair, but would not lower his eyes.

"Perhaps I did have some such feeling—in a sort of—personal, illogical way. But if it's the last word I ever speak—you've destroyed the last shred of it."

He rose abruptly, without intention. Nothing in the world was clearer to him than that he and his reactions mattered little to her now; yet the desire mounted in him to explain how it was never the thing itself, but always the feeling about it, that had seemed so important to him. However, the school-teacher, with a little definitive gesture of the arm he had released, spoke first:—

"Well, never mind! Don't argue with me, please. It's as over and done with as something last year—"

But Charles, upon his unimagined task of persuading Mary to act as the Egoettes act, cried out: "No!—no! Argue! Why, d'you think I'll stand by and hold my tongue, while you sacrifice the great chance of your life, your particular dream—for a mere notion of duty! I say, and I've always said, that freedom—and the right to do your work—belong to you, if to anybody in the world! You've—"

"Do you really suppose I've lain awake all these nights without learning what my own mind is?"

Having stopped him effectually with this dry thrust, she went on in another manner, not controversial at all, rather like one speaking to herself.

"And as for my freedom—that's not involved at all.... I was thinking just now that maybe this is just what freedom—responsible freedom—really is—means. It's having the ability and the desire and the fair chance to do a thing—and then not do it."

And then Charles Garrott knew, quite suddenly and finally, that this, indeed, was no talk in a book, but the realest thing in the world; that this incredible had really happened: that Mary Wing, the "hard" Career-Maker, was tossing her Career away....

He stood quite silenced, while she spoke her last decisive word.

"So you see you have a wrong idea of—what I'm doing, altogether. I appreciate your—being so interested—I value it, you know that," said Mary Wing in a controlled voice, hard even. "But I can't leave you thinking that I'm simply sacrificing myself—to my mother, for instance. It isn't that way at all. Of course, I'm no more to mother than mother is to me. It's not a sacrifice.... Or, rather—I'm in the position that people are always in—more or less. Either way, I've got to sacrifice—and this is the way I choose. But it's getting very dark. I must light the lamps."

She rose as she spoke, and having risen, bent again, to snap on, superfluously, her little desk-light. And as she so stood and bent, the large hand of Charles Garrott reached out suddenly, and began to pat her shoulder.

She seemed but a slip of a girl, no more, that he, Charles, could have tossed upon his shoulder, and so walked out upon a journey. But here, in a wink, she had shot up so tall upon his horizon that he himself, beside her, seemed to possess no significance at all. She might be right, she might be wrong: but, to him, the authority, this crashing negation of the Ego was the flung banner of a splendid trustworthiness, a fitness to lead her own life, indeed, such as should not be questioned henceforward. Never had this woman's independence of him spoken out to him with so clarion a voice as now. And still, over and through her unemotional firmness, the sense of what a giving-up was here swelled in him almost overwhelmingly. It was the brilliant prize of ten years' checkered struggle that his old friend to-day so stoically threw away. Here was a refusal which would touch every corner of her life to its farthest reaches....

So Charles Garrott's warring sensations, his humility and his pride in her, had instinctively expressed themselves in the awkward mute gesture of his sympathies.

By chance, it was Mary's more distant shoulder that his novel impulse had prompted him to pat and go on patting: so, from the accident of their positions, an eye-witness might have been with difficulty convinced that this man's arm was not actually about the slim figure of his friend. But a jury, without doubt, would have accepted the friend's attitude, her entire indifference to what was going on, as fair proof that this was purely a modern proceeding, and no caress. To ask why he did this clearly did not enter Mary's head. Had she been a man, indeed, or he her father, she could hardly have seemed more unaffected by Charles Garrott's unexampled ministrations.

With what speech he meant to accompany and justify his pattings, Charles had not stopped to think. He had, in fact, himself just become conscious of them, when Mary, straightening up, said suddenly in her normal voice:—

"There's the telephone ringing. Excuse me a minute."

She gave him a brief look in passing, which may have been intended as some sort of courteous acknowledgment of the pattings after all. And then she disappeared into the hall, putting an end to talk: inopportunely he felt; leaving him with, a vague sense of inartistic incompletion....

The young man stood still in the silent sitting-room, in a duskiness just punctuated by the small green glow of the desk-lamp.

One of those many minds of his, which are at once a writer's genius and his curse,—that completely detached, cool overmind which never sleeps, never ceases to scrutinize and appraise,—was quite conscious that Mary had held him off with a hand firmer than his own. There was a tremendous lot that he really needed to say, it seemed, in sheer admiration, sheer feeling; and, the truth was, she didn't wish to have him say it. No; her strength, though so far finer and more sensitive than the strength of the Egoette, was, indeed, not "soft." She would not sentimentalize even her own suicidal renouncing. As for weeping—he himself had seemed rather nearer tears than his iron-hearted friend....

But the intense thought of the central mind, of the net Charles, had never wavered from its great stark fact, that Mary Wing was going to stay at home—and be a school-teacher.... And why had he, who thought himself as observant as another authority, been staggered so by the revelation? Had not he himself divined just this subtler quality in her long ago, when he found and named her as the best type of modern woman?... But no, even in "Bondwomen," he had had reservations, it seemed; open doubts in the write-ups.

And now, Charles the author, in his turn, abruptly collided with a strange discovery. He stood rigid, startled.... This strength and this surrender, this power to act, this power to feel, this freedom fine enough to accept the responsibilities of freedom, and to have no part with that hollow Self-Assertion which traded round the world in freedom's name: what was all this but the rounded half of that true Line which, in the Studio, had so long eluded him? What had he wished to say about freedom so much as just this? And why need he search in his fancy now for his wholly Admirable Heroine?...

Mary Wing appeared suddenly in the door. Unmoving, the young man stood and gazed at her; and so vivid had his imaginings become that his stare was touched with no greeting, no recognition even. And then, even in the dusk, he seemed to see that she, his Heroine in the flesh, brought back a face more troubled than she had taken out, eyes colored with a fresh anxiety.

He spoke rather confusedly: "What was it? Is anything the matter?"

"Dr. Flower's very ill," she answered hurriedly. "He's had a stroke, or something. I'm afraid it's very serious. I must go there at once."

All the small fret of the earlier afternoon, every thought and association with which he had walked into this room just now had receded so fast and far that re-connection, all in a moment, was not easy. Charles, staring, seemed to say: "And who, if you please, is Dr. Flower?" And then his mind replied with a flashing picture of Angela's father, as he had last seen him, sitting forlorn among his cigar-stubs: and at once he touched reality again.

"Ah! I'm sorry!" said he; and then: "You must let me go with you."

"Well—thank you—if you like."

And Mary, already moving away toward the bedrooms, added then, in a colorless sort of way:—

"Who do you suppose telephoned me from there?"

"Who telephoned?—I don't know—"

She paused, half turned, looked back at him, hesitated, and then spoke but a single word:—

"Donald."

Brief though the reply was, it was sufficient to plant Charles Garrott's feet permanently upon the earth.

After an interval, with movements purely mechanical, he sought for his watch. It was quarter past six. And he understood everything then.

---

XXI

Charles thought that he understood everything now. In so far as he built a theory on the cold Argument from Design, he understood, of course, nothing whatever. The truth was that Angela had had other things than Mr. Manford to think of to-day. That she had gone out in her Fordette at all was only by the merest chance.

Trouble had come into the little house of the Flowers. As early as one o'clock, Dr. Flower had preëmpted the family attention. Coming in from the Medical School half an hour before his regular time, he had shut himself in his office, without explanation; and there he sat all afternoon, declining dinner with a shake of his head, and otherwise strangely uncommunicative and withdrawn. Reminded that this was Friday, which meant another lecture at half-past two, he only said in his puzzling way: "Quite so. I have no stomach for the small talk to-day." Mrs. Flower, stealing now and again to the dark office, doing her duty as wife and mother, returned each time more concerned by her husband's remoteness, less reassured by his grave statements that he was not sick, in stomach or elsewhere. The two women spent a long and uneasy afternoon. And at the critical moment of it—the moment when, a mile to the west, Charles Garrott leaned out of his third-story window—Angela sat anxious in her mother's bedroom, discussing whether or not they should take the responsibility of calling in Dr. Blakie, on the next block.

But Angela did not think that her father was ill, exactly: it was more as if his increasing queerness had reached a sort of climax. And now, by chance,—or was it destiny, in this its favorite mask?—he quite suddenly got over his mysterious attack; and the deepening worry lifted from her young shoulders. Of his own accord, her father emerged from the office and his unusual aloofness together, and came walking upstairs to the bedroom, speaking with his own voice—speaking, indeed, more freely than was his wont. He said at once that his headache was better now: this being his first reference to his head at all. As if struck by his daughter's troubled expression as he entered, he smiled at her and patted her cheek in the kindliest way; and then, becoming thoughtful, unexpectedly produced a two-dollar bill from his trousers pocket, and handed it to her with some characteristically strange words about her dowry, words which afterwards she could never quite remember. There followed some commonplace family talk, entirely reassuring.

And it was only then, in the certainty that everything was all right again, that Angela allowed herself to recall her own affairs once more. It was only then, with the thought that her recovered father very likely wished to talk alone with her mother, that she left the bedroom and her two parents together. At the door, she mentioned that probably she would go out and get a little air, before it was time for supper.

The old clock in the dining-room downstairs had then just struck five. However, very little more time could have elapsed before the relieved young girl, hatted and coated, issued hurrying from the kitchen door, toward the garage that had once been a shed. Yet another minute, and she was rolling from the alley-mouth.

To snatch Mr. Manford from his wedding-coach: was this the calculation that sent Angela forth in the fair eve of the disquieting day? Perhaps such a raid and capture would not have seemed quite a crime to her, or to any woman that ever lived. But nothing, of course, was further from her thoughts. That she might conceivably meet Mr. Manford while she took the air, and even exchange a few words with him, Angela did, indeed, think, and hope. But this mild maidenly fancy was as innocent as it was rightfully hers. Good reason she had to know that a little chat in passing, if so be it should come about, would be no less acceptable to Mr. Manford than to herself. Had he not told her by telephone this morning that if he could find so much as a minute in this rushing day, he would spend it in calling on her?

On the eleventh floor of the Bellingham, Donald stood hastily rolling his new sweater into a brown-paper parcel. Now into Washington Street, the little Fordette came curving and snorting toward him: toward him, no doubt, in a spiritual, as well as a geographical sense. And still the full depth of the young girl's design was simply this: that her new principal friend, going off for a gay week-end among maidens more blest by opportunity than she, might go with a last pleasant thought of her.

For Mr. Manford was Angela's principal friend now; there was no longer the smallest doubt of that. On that day of culminating results last week, when the unusual line of vehicles had stood before her door, the stalwart engineer had definitely moved up to first place in her thoughts. Not only had Mr. Manford called for an hour and three-quarters that day, while Dan Jenney cooled his heels in the office, and then went off for a walk alone: but then also he had first shown, by unmistakable signs, that he was truly interested in her. Moreover, in the very same moments, by a strange and rather exciting coincidence, she found herself becoming almost certain that she was truly interested in Mr. Manford. She must have been pretty certain, even then, for it was that night after supper, just before she started off to the theater with Mr. Tilletts, that she had told Dan Jenney in the parlor, sadly but firmly, that it could never be, and given him back his ring.

And since then, the shy girlish surmise had been further fed. One pleasant happening continued to lead to another. When she had asked Mr. Manford, half-jokingly, to send her some picture post-cards from New York, for her collection, it was—again—purely from the instinctive wish to know that she remained in her new admirer's thought, even when he was far away. But he had sent her not only stacks of the loveliest post-cards, showing the Flatiron Building, the Statue of Liberty, and other well-known sights, but also the most beautiful book, called "Queens"—a book of gorgeous pictures of American girls, all in color, by one of the most famous artists in Chicago. Of course, common politeness demanded that she should thank him—for "Queens," if not for the post-cards—just as soon as he got back. And the resultant talk, quarter of an hour over the telephone, had been just as satisfying as possible....

Thus it was nothing less than a complete realignment of the coterie that had taken place, this week. For if Mr. Manford had advanced rapidly in the young girl's thought, even more rapidly, of course, had her old principal friend dropped backward out of it. After the unattractive way he had showed his pique that day, Angela had thought about Mr. Garrott, indeed, only long enough to take a final position about him. That position came simply to this, that if he was the sort of person who expected to take liberties with you all the time, then he was not the sort that she, Angela, cared to have anything to do with. She recalled now her early premonition, that Mr. Garrott was a man of low ideals. And she was glad to remember how she had put him in his place, the night he had showed his real nature, and positively refused to compromise her standards, simply to keep him on, as so many girls would have done.

Now, in the tail of the complicated day, Angela thought only, and with right, of her engineer. Rapidly up the Street of the Rich she drove, and alert she kept her eyes. But, in truth, the hope in her heart had been but a slim one; and now, with each passing block, she felt it growing slimmer. When she got as far as the Green Park, and saw the time by the church-clock there, it dwindled away blankly to nothing: the worry about her father had kept her in till too late, just as she had thought all along. In short, her mind's eye was picturing Mr. Manford already seated in his train, when he suddenly made her start and jump by appearing at her elbow.

The meeting was his doing altogether. The maid scanned the sidewalks as she proceeded; the man in a closed conveyance came skimming down the middle of the highway. Nothing on earth could have been easier than for him to skim on by her unseen, and nobody a whit the wiser. On the contrary, he must have given the order to stop with instantaneous alacrity. The very first Angela knew of Mr. Manford's nearness at all was the sight of his head sticking out the door of a great car, just ahead of her.

The door was open; the car was coming to a standstill; Mr. Manford was signaling. Nimbly, with an inner leap of happiness, the girl complied with his obvious wishes.

The two self-propelling vehicles, the big one and the little, stood side by side in the middle of Washington Street, while passing chauffeurs detoured around them with looks that cursed as they went. Between the vehicles, on the asphaltum, stood Mr. Manford, dark head bared, speaking sweet, hasty parting words: explaining what a terrible rush he had been in since eight o'clock this morning, saying (and looking) how sorry he was not to have been able to call. Eager manly words and self-conscious manner, he was all that a girl could have wished. But then he stopped himself, quite abruptly, as if he had recollected something, and put out his hand with the solemnest look. "Good-bye!" he said, and seemed to sigh, as if he never expected to see her again.

But Angela did not take Mr. Manford's hand. Possibly these two minutes should have filled the round of her expectancy; possibly not. Now there rose in her a graceful thought which the sight of her admirer in a conveyance of his own had momentarily rolled flat.

Lifting her soft eyes to his, she said: "I wish—is there time for me to drive you to the station? Or had you rather...?"

"By Jove!" said he, staring. "That is an idea!"

The two normal young people gazed at each other through five seconds of intense silence. When the man's gaze broke, it was only to fling it upon the watch he had hurriedly jerked out. And that movement seemed to settle everything. One glance was enough to satisfy the young bridegroom that there was time. He so announced, and proceeded accordingly.

Thus, for the second time in fifteen minutes, Eustace and the Big Six were sent empty about their business. And Donald, dressed to "kill" the Carson house-party, sprang to the wheel of Angela's Fordette.

"I'll hop her along," cried he, laughing with the excitement of the thing, as he made the turnabout, "till she won't believe it's her!"

And so he did, as old Charlie Garrott, passed unnoticed on the next corner, could have testified, and did. Ten full blocks Donald proceeded toward his train at a wholly honorable, indeed dangerous, celerity. And then his single-mindedness began imperceptibly to yield.

It was, indeed, touch-and-go with Mary Wing's male cousin, here at the turning-point of his life. Had he not forgotten his sweater—well, who knows? Now as the station grew steadily nearer, now as the pretty and familiar voice spoke at his side, one thing was leading to another, and his nervous fidgeting increased.

It occurred to Donald, not for the first time, that he was being rushed about a great deal here lately, with never a minute he could call his own. Managed around all the time—that was about the size of it, here lately: railroaded along into things, with no chance at all to stop and think quietly what he wanted to do.... Then, in a quiet stretch before the turn at Ninth Street, he looked down at the beguiling soft creature beside him, whom he had come to know so easily, so quickly, and so well. His gaze rested upon the rounded girlish bosom, rising and falling with tender young life, at the neck fair as a lily where the V of the thin white waist liberally revealed it, at the big eyes of a woman looking back at him so dark and sweet. And he was surprised at the sensations the look of these eyes now had power to draw up out of him. How? Why? Had absence made the heart mysteriously fonder? Or was it something in the intimacy of this swift adventure together—her sharing his dash for the train like some one who belonged to him?...

"I wish I didn't have to run off this way," he muttered, restively, after a long silence.

"I'll miss you," said she, and the dark eyes fell.

He found the simple reply oddly stirring, arresting, and significant. He was going to be away only three days, and she, this dear, different fellow-being whose gentle weakness already seemed to depend on him, was going to miss him. At some risk, for they now bounced through the traffic of Center Street, he looked down at her again. And once again the sum of all Donald's observations was this, that Angela was a Woman....

No jawing here about the isms of the day, Browning—Tosti—no, Tolstoy—those chaps; no arguing back at you over things a man, of course, knows most about. No; this girl was all Woman....

"I suppose," said she, all at once, "there isn't a train just a little later you could take?"

By singular chance, the thought of the later train had that second knocked at Donald's own mind. Marveling at the coincidence, he hesitated, and answered weakly:—

"Well, there's sort of a train at 7.50—a local. But—this is the train they're expecting me by."

She made no reply. Glancing down, he got no answering glance: she was looking, large-eyed and wistful, into empty space. Her silence, that look, seemed in some subtle way to lay hold on whatever was best in the young man, compellingly. Beyond his understanding, they seemed to envelop Donald with a sudden profound pressure, immensely detaining.

Now, over lower roofs, the station clock-tower, two blocks away, shot suddenly up into the fading sky before them. They saw together that it was twenty minutes past five.

"Oh, hurry!... You've caught it, haven't you?"

The speech, for some reason, pressed more than the silence. He answered, shortly: "Remains to be seen." Down the long hill, the little Fordette raced and rattled. The young man's hard breathing became noticeable. And the broad entrance of the station was but half a block away when, with abrupt violence, he threw out his clutch and jammed on his brake.

"I've missed it!" said he, in a voice that brooked no argument.

Tommy's valuable gift had stopped with a hard bump. Angela did not mind the inconvenience. Her eyes were rewarding her principal friend. Her heart seemed to turn a little within her. Into her cheeks flowed the sweet warm pink.

Together, the two normal young people laughed, suddenly, a little unsteadily. Then, with gayety and some suppressed excitement, they sat discussing an important point, viz.: what to do with their two hours' holiday, before the later train?

It was quickly decided that they should go home. Angela's Home was the one intended; Donald it was who decided the point, as befitted the man. He flung out a commanding hand to notify whom it might concern that he purposed to face about, yet again. And the faithful Fordette, which had set forth with so frail a hope, turned and snorted homeward with the great victory of its career.

Angela sat with shining eyes. She would not have been a woman, she would not have been human but a plaster saint on a pedestal, if her natural happiness had not had the added poignancy of a triumph among her sisters. Just how far Mr. Manford considered himself interested in Miss Carson, she had never yet been able to determine exactly; but that beautiful damsel's position in the scheme of things she, of course, understood perfectly. If her own intuitions had lacked, there were the plain hints Cousin Mary had given her only the other day. Hence, since last week, it was impossible to view Miss Carson other than as a rival, an enemy almost, and one possessing all the odds. For Miss Carson was rich and prominent, with powerful family connections behind and around her, and every possible opportunity and advantage: while she, Angela,—as we know,—had practically not a single rich relation on earth, and not one soul to help her but herself. And still—here was Mr. Manford at her side.

They stepped up on the verandah of the home; and the girl remembered the anxiety of the afternoon. But, listening as she opened the front-door, she heard from above the distinct murmur of her mother's voice, talking to her father, and knew again, with fresh relief, that all was well. Mr. Manford having accepted an invitation to stay to supper, she disappeared briefly to confer with Luemma—bribing Luemma with the promise of her old black skirt, in short, to go out and purchase certain extras, in honor of the guest. Returning again, she found her guest standing in the dark hall exactly where she had left him, motionless, a strange absorbed look on his masculine face. And as he met her eyes, there in the dimness by the hatstand, some of the fine color seemed to ebb from his cheek.

They went into the parlor, and sat down on the dented sofa; and her conquest, still, was but part of a day that had belonged to another. But now it quickly became clear that matters had taken a headlong jump, beyond all calculation.

It was, indeed, as if the man himself was profoundly reacted upon by those proofs of his own interest which had so stirred the maiden. Unknown to any one, he had missed his train and important engagements for nothing else than to be here with this girl: and it was as if the fact of itself thrust her far forward in his imagination, wrapped her about with a new startling significance. Men didn't do these things for any girl that came along. Or, possibly, the heady sensations were but the cumulative results of a slower process, and the friendly vehicle now resting at the door had done its decisive work before to-day. At any rate, Angela soon observed that Mr. Manford's behavior was quite embarrassed and peculiar; and of course, in the womanly way, his manifestations reacted instantly upon her. The more peculiarly interested Mr. Manford showed himself to be in her, the more peculiarly interesting she found him. Stranger still, the more she found him advancing, the more it was in her mind to retreat. Or, no—not in her mind; it was, of course, much deeper than that. This reluctance could be nothing else than the ancient virginal recoil, somehow remembered, strange latter-day reminiscence of old flights through the woods.

Instinctively, Angela talked commonplaces. The man's replies showed that he hardly listened to her. As she recounted how her father had missed a lecture for the first time to-day, he interrupted brusquely:—

"What's that ring you're wearing?"

Oh, that; oh, an old family ring, she explained, that her mother had given her on a birthday once. He must have seen it a dozen of times. Mr. Manford said, on the contrary, that he had never seen it before in his life. So—was it the voluntary lingering, perhaps, a backward look through the leaves, as it were?—Angela lifted her hand for him to see. The hand was tightly clasped at once. "Where's that other ring—the one you were going to wear till—you know?" Oh, that one? She had given that one back to the person it belonged to. When? Oh, last week. Why? Because she knew then that she could never care for him. "Does that mean you know somebody you—you care for more?" She said that that wouldn't mean anything so very much; and thereupon made an effort to withdraw her hand.

"There is a time for lighting a fire; there is a time for leaving it to burn of itself." Put otherwise, Angela saw that Mr. Manford wasn't even glancing at her ring. However, her proper gesture to recover it accomplished no more than her commonplaces. For the cells and tissues of the gentleman, too, harbored ancestral memories, masculine recollections of agreeable old captures. And the touch and cling of the warm soft her had seemed to set them all to singing, drawing him, drawing him. So far from recovering that hand of hers, in fine, the fleeing maiden abruptly lost possession of the other one.

Thus in the storied way, there approached the second Occurrence on a Sofa. It may have been only the last recoil; it may have been that that other occurrence, fruitless contact with the low ideals of man, had permanently injured the womanly trustfulness. There was, at least, a kind of terror among the mingled sensations, as Angela beheld the second event resistlessly approaching.

"Oh, please!... You mustn't ..."

And—so sardonically does life twine joy with sorrow in its willful tangle—it was as she spoke these words that Mrs. Flower, standing at the head of the dark stairs, first called Angela's name. However, that call died unheard. The mother's voice was low, the daughter, for her part, could be conscious of nothing but that this dear and imperious Mr. Manford was a very difficult person to resist. Perhaps something in her had been against resistance from the first; but now, over his inconclusive endearments, the pardonable inquiry sighed from her:—

"Oh, why do you do this? Tell me."

Angela's mother stood two steps farther down: "Angela!... Angela!"

But Angela, deep in her great business in the world, once again failed to hear the alarmed low summons. Now sweet nearer speech filled her woman's ear. For Mr. Manford, it is welcome to record, did not run, as the cads run, from that artless challenge: he met it ready, like a soldier and a gentleman. That touch of lips softer than a flower had taught this young man, once and for all, what it was he wanted; huskily his voice came from a swelling chest. "I love you!" said Miss Carson's anointed, unmistakably. And then, indeed, the maiden, unaware of all else, let her conquered cheek rest upon her victor's breast: still and awed with the discovery that she loved, and in the same breath thrilled with the knowledge that she was a Successful Girl.

For our ruling passions are strong in death: more particularly, of course, when the death in question is not our own....

Yet her moment of exquisite peace was brief enough, poor child. Scarcely had the dearest words been spoken, scarcely had she known her awe and her thrill, when all was snatched from her. That other voice outside, more insistent, struck suddenly in to her unsteadied mind; too quickly, the surrendered cheek lifted. There was a swift upstarting, the abrupt parting of lovers: and after that fear descending, precipitate and dark as a cloud, over the new great joy.

The course of the succeeding hours was never clear in Angela's memory. There was a rush of unfamiliar and frightening activity. Donald was gone at a run for Dr. Blakie. She herself fled for Mrs. Doremus, on whose judgment her mother much relied. Mysteriously, Mrs. Finchman and poor Jennie appeared, tipping up the steps. Then Mr. Garrott stood suddenly in the hall, with Cousin Mary and Mrs. Wing, all very grave and breathless, they had come so fast. Mr. Garrott must have left very soon; there was nothing for him to do; but Cousin Mary, who had once meant to be a doctor, took charge of everything from the start, and was very helpful. She slept that night in Wallie's room.

At ten o'clock, Donald left her to take Mrs. Wing home; but he, her new comforter, returned directly, in the sweetest way, to say good-night. Earlier in the evening Donald had dispatched a telegram to Mrs. Kingsley at Hatton, in which he said: "Serious illness in my family prevents coming." The due excuse was strong enough, in all conscience. But the matter had gone beyond illness now.

---

Thus it was that the strange day, already memorable to Charles Garrott, memorable, too, to Mary Wing, turned past all counting into the unforgettable day of Angela's life. Thus, into the little house in Center Street, life and death came stepping side by side.

After this day, there came another, and another and another: and still it seemed that death overshadowed life, and joy was overwhelmed in grief. The shadow of this first final parting seemed to close down on the young girl's happiness like a cover, and for a space her engagement was less real to her than the shut office downstairs, the empty seat at the table.

But youth, after all, is made for life, and thereby equipped with a merciful resilience. The passage of time, mere use, worked wonders. And Angela's blessing it was, no doubt, that from the beginning she had others than herself to think about, and the need for much activity. First and foremost, there was Donald, who was with her morning, noon, and night, whose first sight of her in a black dress had moved him almost to tears. It was not fair to the man who had won her that she should give way to a limitless melancholy. Beyond that, loomed the sudden colossal fact of the wedding, which would have to take place almost immediately; for her duty now was to her future husband, and the demands of his work must overcome her girlish shrinkings from such unwonted haste. And a wedding must mean clothes, at all times, and clothes, even at the plainest and simplest, must mean some thought and some diversion.

Insensibly, death turned back to life again. The great confused day of Angela's life was a week old; it was two weeks old; it was three. And winter now was fading from the softening air...

They were the quietest weeks imaginable. Except her mother and her fiancé, Angela saw no one for days together, not even Mary Wing. For Mary, as it happened, was sick at this time—her first illness in five years, so Mrs. Wing said. She had caught cold, it seemed, in the wet at the funeral, and the cold had developed into quite a serious attack of bronchitis, which kept her in bed two weeks or more. Thus the young couple, in their mourning, were left completely to themselves. In their isolation, in the still little parlor, they were planning at great length about their future, going over and over their new common problems from every possible angle. And the more Angela's fatherlessness was accepted as a permanent fact in the order of the future, the clearer it became that this fact must color and affect everything else.

In chief, this question of the girl's came more and more to the front of the loverly discussions: How could she go off to wild remote Wyoming, now that her mother was a widow?

---

XXII

It was March now, the mild March of an early spring. There came new days, zephyrous and sweet. All the world seemed to love a lover. But other matters were afoot in the world, too, necessarily: afoot even in the old coterie itself.

Charles Garrott, descending Miss Grace's steps on an afternoon that looked like April and felt like May, thought not of young Romance. What with the groom's absorption, and Mary Wing's unprecedented illness, the old principal friend had, indeed, heard little or nothing of the happy pair through these days. He had accepted the event, long since, once and for all, with fatalistic philosophy; and though the nuptials were now but six days distant, they were far from his mind in this moment, as, his hated tutor's stint done, he turned his long stride hurriedly toward Olive Street.

Charles, as we know, was not a caller. It was true that he had hardly seen Mary Wing since the day when she, the heroine of his write-ups, had so suddenly indicated herself as his larger heroine as well; true also that, in the engrossed and very fruitful solitude of the Studio succeeding, he had thought of her much, bookishly and otherwise. But these facts had not changed the essential nature of Charles. Still he was not a caller; still when he rang people's door-bells, it was morally certain that he had definite matters to urge upon their notice.

And so it was to-day. Charles, in a word, had conceived a new plan for helping Mary.

That she, the admirable, by way of reward for her smashing denial of the Ego, should find herself fixed for life as a grammar-school teacher, "demoted" and disgraced: this state of things had naturally seemed unendurable to Mary's good friend. That Mary did not need his help, that he recognized her now as competent, in the finest sense, to manage her own affairs henceforward, seemed to have little or nothing to do with the case. Hence, while she lay withdrawn from the battle of life with bronchitis, the helper had been elaborately at work on new lines: stalking School Board members for Mary, in fine, with great cunning. But this plan, unluckily, his fourth and most troublesome, had lately collapsed about his ears. It had cost the young man much valued time, and not a little money for lunches; and the net practical result of it had been to leave him angrily conscious of "influence," mysteriously pervasive, and by no means possessed by him. A friendly disposition toward Mary, personally, seemed to be everywhere joined to an unshakable conviction that she could not hope to get back to the High School before the fall, if then. Such was the fruit of five diplomatic conferences: the sixth had stopped Charles short. Young Dr. Hazen, who was almost as much Mary's representative on the School Board as Senff was Mysinger's, informed him that Mary herself had already canvassed over the Board with him, Hazen, and abandoned all hope in that quarter.

What, indeed, could he do for Mary Wing that she could not do better for herself?

The fifth plan concerned Public Opinion again, and a new use of the gift he had. It inspired less confidence in its author than any that had preceded it. And it was to submit it, in advance, for Mary's discussion and approval, that Charles now presented himself at the Wings' front door.

However, he met with a disappointment. Mary was out. She had gone to the Flowers' soon after luncheon—unexpectedly, it appeared—and, at half-past four, was not yet back. That seemed more or less surprising. Mrs. Wing, who had answered his ring, looked somewhat concerned, he thought. However, as it was agreed that Mary could not remain with Angela indefinitely, the caller decided, after brief hesitation,—for the Studio allured in these days as never before,—to wait for her.

So he came again into the sitting-room, and Mrs. Wing sat to keep him company. Naturally, there was but one subject for their conversation.

Charles liked Mrs. Wing. She always began every conversation with him by asking: "And how did you find your dear mother on your last visit?" Mary's mother had never seen his mother, and possibly never would, but (being a frightful sentimentalist) she assumed that all mothers are dear. It was next her habit to inquire whether Charles had written any stories lately, and why they never saw anything of his in the magazines. Such things tended to create a bond. And recently the tie had been strengthened by an unusually intimate talk on the subject of Mary, whose surrender of her great prize had, indeed, upset and distressed her mother even more than Charles had predicted.

To-day, again, Mrs. Wing appeared somewhat unlike her usual calm self. She omitted her inquiry about Charles's writing altogether (thus denying him his chance to mention the recent rather gratifying acceptance of Dionysius, no less), and the flattering things she kept saying of Angela had, to his ear, a faintly tentative ring, requiring his confirmation. But his first vague wonder, whether anything could have happened, was soon lost in other reactions. Thus, he had to wince a little in agreeing, once more, that Donald's future wife was a thoroughly "womanly girl." Few authorities enjoy denying the ripe sum of their own best thinking. But a later remark of Mrs. Wing's took a much deeper twist in his mind.

"Really," she said, slowly and dubiously, following a pause, "I have but one fault to find with Donald's choice, and that is—well, frankly, Angela seemed to care so little for Paulie and Neddy Warder.... And Donald was such a goose over them, dear boy."

As he did not see his way clear to replying to that, "I hope you're mistaken, ma'am," Charles merely smiled vaguely, and said nothing. But what he thought, on the delicate implication, was nothing about Angela at all—only that Donald had been rather less of a goose over Paulie and Neddy than Mary Wing had been....

Then the sitting-room clock ticked for a space, while Mrs. Wing communed with herself. And Charles, gazing out into the park, waiting for his friend, thought how it was that a young woman's work—even an extraordinary young woman like Mary—always subtly lacked just that ultimate touch of grim seriousness which justified the "fierce hackings away" of a man. For, as an abstract truth, there was positively no such thing as a Permanent Spinster: and women who were not spinsters, and normally desired Paulies and Neddies of their own, could not possibly fulfill their longings without serious complications to themselves, then and thenceforward. It was no human or escapable "tyranny" that had made Woman, to this degree, to her glory or her disaster, forever the victim of her sex: and, by the same token, fixed the final responsibility for the economic support of the family upon the shoulders of the predestined and uncompromised provider, Man....

Yes, then and thenceforward ... Could you, for example, imagine Mary Wing—who had had chances to marry before now, who might reasonably marry at any time—could you picture Mary packing off her three little darlings to a crèche every morning, that she might go and grow her soul at a desk somewhere? Maybe so; but he wondered....

He was thinking whether he could contrive to discuss the crèche and endowment arguments in his novel—for of course you could make a story carry just a certain amount of "solid stuff," and only dreary prigs of readers would lie still while you tried to feed them forcibly with a spoon—when all at once Mrs. Wing, near by, was heard to strike her hands together, with a little ejaculation.

"Oh, Mr. Garrott! I do believe Mary's at the High School all the time!"

That made the thoughtful visitor turn swiftly enough.

"At the High School?"

"It's so stupid of me!" she explained, with some relief, it seemed. "I've just remembered. You know, she never cleared her papers and things out of her office closet there, and it got on her mind when she was sick. And to-day, when she came in from school, she told me she had arranged with Mr. Geddie over the telephone—the man who has her office now—to go and attend to it this afternoon. Yes, that's it—I'm sure!"

"Oh!" said Charles, not a little perplexed. "And then, you mean—she decided to go to the Flowers' instead?"

"Well, to go there first—I suppose. Donald came in just as she finished lunch—to talk with her about something. Then, when he had gone, Mary told me she was going down to see Angela. It was all rather unexpected—and somehow the High School went out of my mind completely."

"But I hope nothing's happened?" he said quickly.

"Well—I don't know that there has."

Perplexity passed at once into the certainty that something had happened. The instant thought in the young man's mind was: What's Angela done now? Having risen, he gazed with direct inquiry at his elderly friend. But her eyes glanced away from him; and she put him off further by repeating: "It was stupid of me to keep you."

Mrs. Wing added that Mary was certainly at the High School now. Charles, turning disturbed away, remarked that perhaps he would still be in time to help with the office cleaning, and she said that was very kind of him.

"She'll be glad to see you, I know. Indeed, she has appreciated all you've done for her—those beautiful articles, for example—more than you quite realize, perhaps."

But the young man shook his head, and said with a kind of bitterness: "I've never done anything for her in my life."

And then, as he took the lady's hand to say good-bye, he asked abruptly: "But why shouldn't I know what's happened, Mrs. Wing?"

"Oh," said Mary's mother, and hesitated.

"Yes, why shouldn't you?" said she, and hesitated again.

"Well," she began again slowly, "it's nothing so serious, as I said,—just a fresh disappointment for Mary,—that is really all it amounts to with me. Very likely Donald has intimated to you that he was not going to Wyoming?"

The caller stared at her dumbfounded.

"Not going to Wyoming! Why!—why not?"

"Well, he feels, in his new circumstances," said Mrs. Wing, uneasily, "that it would be more suitable to accept the position in New York. But—I really had little opportunity to discuss it with Mary. She seemed—to be frank—much disturbed, she had so set her heart on this work in the West—"

"More suitable!... How?"

"Well, for one thing—it doesn't seem fair to separate Angela so far from her mother, as would have to be the case in Wyoming."

But into Charles's mind there had suddenly popped back a stray remark let fall by Donald, in the only talk he had had with him for weeks: "I tell you, Charlie, it's pretty rough on a girl to be dragged off to live in a shack nine miles from nowhere!" A mere passing observation, that he had paid no attention to at the time—but was that it? Was that the reason why another of Mary Wing's most cherished plans must suddenly cave in?

He stood utterly dismayed.

"So Mrs. Flower," he asked, with some want of composure, "is going to live with them in New York?"

"Oh, no,—not for the present, I believe. She feels, and so do I, that young couples should be left to themselves to make their start. But they will be so near that they can visit back and forth—which would be impossible if Donald—"

"But Mrs. Flower can't live here by herself?"

"Well, no," said Mrs. Wing, and fussed with books on the table. "That has been the great problem, of course. Dr. Flower's death has complicated the situation sadly. I believe the present plan is for Wallace—the boy, you know—to come back and live with her—just for the next few months, while Donald and Angela are finding themselves."

Charles stood without a word. But perhaps his look betrayed what he felt, for Mrs. Wing threw out her hands with a helpless gesture, and cried: "Well, he is the man of the family now!"

"However," she added, turning away, "perhaps Mary will be able to hit upon some other arrangement. That is what she went there for—to talk the whole situation over with Angela."

But Charles, who had always thought of Angela as "soft" and Mary as "hard," seemed somehow quite certain that that talk had accomplished nothing. With brief speech, he moved toward the door. Doubtless struck with the fixed gravity of his look, Mary's mother, who had been an old-fashioned girl herself once, said with an effort, and yet firmly too:—

"It is life itself that is hard. Marriage means—readjustment. That is the only comment to make."

It was precisely the point on which the silent young man did not agree with her. To him, as to her, all the sharp force of this tidings was, indeed, in Mary's new overthrow. And yet for the moment there seemed to be room in him for nothing else but comments on the vast void in Mary's so different cousin.

Angela was wanting in the responsible qualities of a full-grown human being. Her fatal lack was in human worth. It was the sum of all he had thought about her since the day he had called upon her poor father. It was the cap and climax of all he meant to say about her in his New Novel.

So Charles took his leave with an abstracted face.

In the drawer of the Studio table, there was growing now, night by night, a fresh stack of manuscript, steady and firm upon a new Line. Mary Wing had straightened out this Line for Charles: Mary who had taught him once and for all that a woman could be finely independent, and still uphold the interdependence which held the world together. Yet Mary, the admirable, was after all but his "contrast" and his foil: it was for the peculiarities of her opposite that he had finally whetted his pencil. And, in the intense and retrospective thinking which went along with the best writing he had ever yet done, the young man considered that he had got to the bottom of Angela's case, and her sisters', quite thoroughly explored the souls of the Waiting Women of Romance.

But this news of her, these final touches as to the Nice Girl's brother and her future husband, seemed to fling at him, as it were, a last conclusive chapter for his "Notes on Women." That marriage meant readjustments he, the authority, doubtless understood as well as another. That this marriage might make it necessary for Wallie Flower to be readjusted out of his education: even that was allowed as conceivable. But that the very first act of Angela's new life should be to influence her husband in the direction of his weakness, and, as it seemed, of her own good comfort—what was this, indeed, but a brilliant certification of all the grounds of his own attack?...

The author's face, the author's swift feet, were set toward the High School. His errand—now—was to cheer up Mary Wing. "Make her look on the bright side": so her mother had urged at parting. That necessity remained as a soreness and dull anger through all the young man's consciousness. And yet, in nearly a mile's walk, he hardly thought of Mary once.

He was surveying, as if from a new peak, the unhappy situation of Home-Makers with their Homes yet to seek: the considerable army of the involuntary spinsters of leisure. And more than ever now, perhaps, he saw these sisters as a Type, pathetically marked: the innocent creatures, the helpless victims, of a dying ideal of themselves.

Here was poor little Angela, his Novel's case in point. She was born a human being, she was born a being with sex. And in twenty-six years' contact with the rich and human world, she had gathered nothing to her sum beyond what tended to enhance her sex's attraction. So selecting, she had permanently lost the fullness of her double birthright: all in nice, unconscious and inevitable response to an environment which continually assured her that being a woman was enough.

If life had been real and bright and turbulent around her, and she sat within and polished her pink nails, it was because she was a woman. If she was given no education beyond the demands of provincial parlor-talk, no training for her hands, no occupation for her head, if no one ever thought of her as a full-statured being who must pay her way in substantial coin; this, again, was because she was a woman, and a woman (if any one bothered with argument at all) some day might—or might not—be the mother of children. Surely it had not been Angela's fault if she was early apprised, though through a sweet mist, that she had but one faculty of any value in the world's market; not her fault if, amid general approval, she innocently spent her youth and idleness in tricking out her value, and bringing it steadily to the attention of the only beings who could have a use for it. Least of all was it her fault if her peculiar business, and her odd specialized training, were bounded, not by marriage, but only by a wedding-day. For the final unnaturalness, the crowning wrong in her situation was exactly this: that, being told that she must be a wife or nothing, she was coincidently told that being a wife was a matter which a nice girl did well to know nothing about....

The author, sharpening his phrases, walked in angry abstraction. He passed old acquaintances as if he had never seen them before....

Oh, it was true (he conceded), a thousand times true, that many women of this crude bringing-up did develop, when their time came, a splendid competence over all their special field. But it was a little too much to assume that every creature in the female form could be counted on to perform such a feat of pure character. And Romance, which gallantly or indifferently made these exact assumptions, defending and cherishing the queer but comfortable orientalization with the cloak of false "womanliness," scarcely pretended to believe its own agreeable fictions.

Here was Angela again, his little case in point. Angela was reasonably good-looking, adopted a flattering attitude toward eligible young men, knew her place, and kept no opinions on matters of interest to her betters; hence she was called a "womanly" woman. Being womanly implied the possession of certain home-making virtues, present and to come; hence it was assumed, and she inevitably and naïvely assumed, that she possessed these virtues. Odd as these deductions sounded, he himself, he could not deny, had swallowed them once,—that night at the Redmantle Club,—romantically accepting the appearance for the reality, willfully investing the humdrum commonplace with the full beauties of the ideal. But for him, at least, all obstinate optimisms concerning La Femme had exploded with a bang in a party-call. You did not gather figs of thistles. And now it was no longer conceivable to him that she who in quarter of a century had developed no human interests, tastes, resources at all, who seemed to lack even an average interest in Paulie and Neddy Warder, should all at once blossom marvelously into the responsible and "justified" matron. No, for him, Angela at forty, having "let herself go" now that nothing more was expected of her, sat forever in a room that she had not swept, plaintively reminding a fatigued Donald of the priceless gift of her Self.

And Donald, though his interest in exploring the creature once so elaborately mysteried was long since utterly exhausted, would probably take that argument amiss no more than Dr. Flower had done. Romantic males, with their poor opinion of the worth of a woman, might hope for true domesticity, true maternity: but in their hearts they had thought all along, with a wink, that "possession" was enough. It was "what a woman was for."

But in that they were mistaken. Possession was not enough. Being a female was not enough. Great heavens!—thought Charles Garrott, and muttered as he strode.... What a shame, what a staggering waste of rich human potentiality, to classify and file away one half the world as only "marital rights!"

Wasn't it about time to stop all this? Wasn't it time for modern writers to pull away the rosy veils and let the Angelas meet themselves—while they could still do something about it? Didn't it lay up needless future misery to go on deceiving helpless women into putting a preposterous overvaluation upon the mere possession of their sex? Lastly, and above all, wasn't it a colossal libel on all womanhood to accept the strut and mannerism born of this deception as the true essentials of "womanliness"?

Womanly!... Why, womanliness was a prime human quality, integrally necessary to the work of the world—a great positive quality, not a little passive one, productive, not sterile, of the spirit, not of the body. Womanliness was the mother and guardian of great social virtues: of a finer and deeper emotion, of more sensitive perceptions, of a subtler intuition of the sources of life, of an all-mothering sympathy, a more embracing tenderness. Womanliness had no more to do with the light bright plumage of the mating-season than a waxed mustache had to do with being a soldier.

There was a time, he understood well, when the fact of womanhood had implied substantialities: when being a wife meant also being a domestic factory superintendent, not to mention being a continuous mother. That time was gone forever. You might argue for the passing, you might argue against it: meanwhile it had happened. Inexorable economics had dried the heart from the old tradition; and in the sudden vacuum thus created there moved and thrived anomalous little creatures who never knew that they had lost all touch with reality. Untroubled by a rumor of change, Angela held contentedly to the remnant, a low ideal of herself. But it was not so with her finer sisters. For the passing of the old womanliness of four walls and dependence had flung a window wide to a nobler prospect and a vaster horizon. And already the woman of to-morrow was rising in her lusty strength to prove her fundamental racial virtue, her womanliness, upon nothing less than the world.

Well, hadn't he told Mary long ago that the object of all this was only to make women more like themselves? In that, he would stake his life, he had been exactly right.

---

A concrete High School smote across the vision of the seer, and the cloud-stepper's feet trod but the hard sidewalk again.

Groping for truth upon his favorite subject, he had been briefly lost to the issues of the practical: he had a power of concentration, as he would have been the first to admit. But the flight of his rhetoric was, after all, only an incident of his indignation and distress; which sentiments, he knew all the time, yet had to be faced on their own account. And now, as he rounded his last corner, and his destination rose abruptly before him, Charles recalled for what he had been walking so fast and far.

Or, no ... What was he coming for exactly?

It was all very fine and easy, as a writer, to polish up demolishing phrases for poor little Angela. But what did he, as a man and a friend, have to do for Mary Wing?

The helper crossed the street in the lingering vernal sunshine. Here was the great building where Mary had once held an important place, where she came to-day, by special permission only, to remove the last traces of that association. Now that plan with which he had set out to-day looked back at the young man with rather a small face, and wry. He had never thought much of the plan: only to persuade Mary to let him make public the facts about her rejected honor from the Education League—legitimate news for the papers, fine peg for a new publicity campaign, etc. But all at once he knew that he wasn't even going to mention this to Mary now. With what words, then, did he rush to her in her fresh disaster? Doubtless to say, "I'm awfully sorry." A stirring exploit. Hadn't she shown him on that other day that she, the strong, had no desire for his fruitless sympathies?

The truth was, and he had known it from the beginning, he rather shrank from seeing Mary at all now, in the stress of this final defeat. Final, yes: for while Angela was attaining success to the full limit of her small conceptions, every aspiration that Mary had cherished, literally, had one by one gone down. And if this last was not the worst, perhaps, neither was it the easiest to bear. No, if anything on earth was calculated to harden and embitter a woman who could not easily yield, surely it must be her own so easy overthrow by pink cheeks and soft, empty eyes.

And these white-stone steps Charles now ascended had for him a reminiscent power, by no means comforting. The last time he had trod these steps, he had sworn, in anger, that he, single-handed, would force the School Board to bring Mary Wing back here, without delay. Mary would have a right to smile, if she ever heard of that. She had been thrown out of this building only because she was a woman: under all the argument, that was positively the reason. And now three months had passed, and he, her helper, came to say, "Well, I'm very sorry...."

Charles pushed through the tall bronze doors of the High School, where he had seen Miss Trevenna one day, strode long-faced into the dim spaces of the entrance hall. It was five o'clock: the whole building seemed silent and empty. A rare sense of impotence within him, troubled also by a secret shrinking, the young man went stalking across the corridor toward the stairways. But just here he encountered a brief diversion.

A glazed door at his left, at which he happened to be looking, came suddenly open. The door was marked, in neat gold letters, PRINCIPAL'S OFFICE. And reasonably enough, the jaunty figure that came stepping out proved to be none other than the principal himself.

Always a hard but uncomplaining worker, Mr. Mysinger was evidently just leaving for the day. Light overcoat on his arm, stick and gloves in his hand, he whistled blithely to himself, to the tune of labor done. But at the sight of Charles Garrott here on his domain, he checked his gay air, stood still in his official door.

Over half the corridor, the two men gazed at each other. And Mr. Mysinger's specious face, after the first surprised stare, assumed the smile of amity and pleasure.

"Ah, Garrott! Well met!"

Charles had halted, too, without premeditation. The chance meeting here was natural enough. All that gave it the force of coincidence was that he had in that instant been thinking, not for the first time, of Mary Wing's old saying of this man: "If he let either Board know that he wanted me back, it would be done to-morrow...."

"I've wanted to see you for some time," said Mr. Mysinger, smiling and easy—"about a certain matter of common interest—"

On the great stairway the sound of descending feet was heard, those of a belated teacher, doubtless. But neither man looked to see. And within the sedentary Charles there was slowly spreading a vast iciness, akin to a bodily nausea.

"Can't you step into the office half a minute?"

"Certainly."

Mary's former principal stood aside from his door, bowing, with elaborate welcome. Charles, advancing, passed through it, passed through the anteroom, stepped silent into an office large as a magnate's. Here he stood, just inside the door. Mysinger, following with his faint swagger, went by him toward his handsome flat desk.

"Have a cigar?"

"Thanks, no."

The good-looking principal leaned against his desk, facing his visitor with the same air of too good-humored assurance.

"Garrott, let's be frank," said he. "You feel that I am hostile to one of your friends, and stand in the way of her advancement in the schools. You are really mistaken in that. So far as my personal opinions might carry weight, I am anxious for her—for all the teachers—to go forward just as fast as their abilities would justify. But as you know, Garrott, the Board and the Superintendent settle all these matters, and I myself am only one of the teachers under their direction."

He paused encouragingly. But the young man at the door only continued to look at him with the same lidless fixedness.

"At the same time," said the principal, a rather more resolute note tingeing his voice, "you appreciate as well as I that teachers can't be picked up and moved about like chessmen. We must have some—permanence—some constancy—to insure efficiency. And frankly, my personal judgment—after fifteen years' experience, and considering the brilliant work of Johnson Geddie—is that you could hardly hope to see your friend promoted—well, immediately."

"So you would advise—?"

Mysinger's eyelid seemed to flutter a little: he really did have a purpose, it seemed.

"I am told—ahem!—that your friend has recently received a most flattering offer—from elsewhere?"

How had he known this? "Well?"

"Well, the party in question," said he, with his set smile, "seems to have a certain prejudice against me. She refuses to speak to me, in fact,—why, I cannot imagine. All the same, I am, and always have been, her sincere well-wisher. And after earnest thought, I honestly feel sure that her friends would make no mistake if they urged her not to let slip this—ahem—well-deserved promotion. I thought," he added, his gaze a threat now, "I'd better bring the point to your attention."

Charles's fixed eyes did not waver. But before them there unrolled a thin gray mist, briefly shutting the principal from his sight. The mist queerly turned red, and became shot with fiery sparks. Then all cleared; and, behind him, the young man's hand felt for, and touched, the open door. Gently, moving only his arm, he shut it. And it seemed to him that he must be turning white inside.

"You," said he, "are more used to insulting women than I am."

Mysinger flung up a deprecating hand. "Tut, tut, my dear sir! Talk of that sort does no good whatever, I assure you. You would do well to look at the matter in a sensible way, and believe that I speak—Here! What're you doing there?"

The principal had suddenly heard a strange sound: the click of his own key in his own lock, in fine. At the same time, his visitor was observed to be regarding him with a new and peculiar intentness, arresting and significant. And his only reply to his host's indignant inquiry was to drop the key in question in his coat-pocket.

Now Mary's old conqueror, and his own, had straightened from that lounging swagger. His voice rang more angrily: "You—! What do you think you're up to, anyway—?"

"I think I'm going to beat you to a pulp," said the author,—"you puppy!"

And he started forward with a kind of bound, like one who goes to fill, at last, a long-felt need.

---

XXIII

Mary Wing was considered a reliable person. When she announced that she would clean out an office closet on a certain day, you could make your plans on the thing's being done. And to-day—if her usual principles might have weakened a little—Mary was further bound by the definite engagement she had made. As Charles had reflected, a demoted grammar-school teacher could not walk in and out of a principal's office like one who had some rights there.

Mary had not remained at the Flowers' interminably, after all. She had entered the High School before Charles Garrott had arrived at Olive Street, and had been upstairs for half an hour, when Charles, following on to help her, strode through the great bronze doors. Nevertheless, she was a full hour behind the time mentioned to Mr. Johnson Geddie over the telephone, and this increased her hope that her only too obliging successor would not be found waiting for her. However, Mr. Geddie was found waiting for her; very much so, in fact. Nothing could have exceeded the exuberance of his courtesy, and nothing could have been less welcome.

The new assistant principal was a plump, white person, in whose face a reddish mustache and gold-rimmed spectacles—his own personal addenda, as it were—were the only salient features. Not brilliant, he was rising by character, evinced in an unconquerable optimism. "Keep a-smiling, brother—it costs you nothing!"—so Mr. Geddie's roguish eyes seemed continually to say. But perhaps they seemed to say it more than normally to-day, by way of striking a happy average with the quite unsmiling late incumbent.

Mary, during her brief tenancy, had stored here a long accumulation of printed matter, chiefly duplicate files of "The New School," with sundry assorted leaflets of the Education Reform League. Her task to-day was to go through these files, destroy what was no longer useful to her, and pack the rest for removal. Her successor had thoroughly prepared for her. There on the floor was the packing-case, there on the floor was a table to sit at, there against the wall stood a stepladder. But Mr. Geddie would not weary in well-doing. The moment he understood what the proposition was, as he termed it, he said that, of course, he would help Miss Wing. Refusals drowned in a sea of smiles. Allow Miss Wing to climb that rickety ladder, and lift down those heavy stacks of magazines? Positively, she must not ask him that. Trouble? A pleasure, Miss Wing; a genu-wine pleasure.

He had his way, as people of strong sunny character always do. Mary, having overcome the impulse to make an excuse and abandon the enterprise, sat at the little table. Kind Mr. Geddie went up and down the ladder, fetching her dusty armfuls to sort over. In the intervals, for he had the shorter end of the job, he was down on his knees beside her, brightly stacking discarded "New Schools" into piles against the wall.

The work went forward steadily, on the woman's part almost in silence. That, however, made no difference. It was the man's power to be able to talk more than enough for two, and he did. As the old assistant principal grew steadily more quiet, the new one seemed increasingly buoyant. And it seemed to Mary that she had been listening to his conversation for a long, long time, at the moment when she heard him suddenly exclaim, from the ladder:—

"Well, well! Look who's here! Come for the spring-cleaning, Mr. Garrott? Ha, ha!"

She, in her inner absorption, had failed to hear the approaching feet. But at that she raised her head, with a kind of jerk.

"Don't mind the dust, Mr. Garrott—it eats all right! Ha, ha! Walk in!"

Mr. Garrott stood silent in the office door, looking at Miss Wing. The eyes of the old friends briefly met. Something in the young man's appearance vaguely arrested Mary Wing. She had noted, as her glance lifted, the torn glove on his right hand. Now she was remotely aware that the face looking back at her so intently appeared somehow subtly changed: there was something faintly wrong with it, it seemed. But such details Mary's consciousness hardly registered at all. All in one flash, she wondered how he happened to be here, thought how good it was of him to come, and knew that she had never been less glad to see anybody in her life.

"Good-afternoon," said she.

"How'do, Miss Mary?" said Charles; and then started forward. "How are you, Mr. Geddie? I seem to be rather late to help with the good work."

"Yes, sirree!—Can't come in at the eleventh hour and take our credit away! Can he, Miss Wing?—ha, ha! All over but the applause!"

However, Mr. Geddie did not know himself for a tactful man for nothing. Observing that Miss Wing continued to drop magazines on the floor in silence, and that her young man there didn't seem to know what to do with himself, he gracefully adopted a new position. From the third round of the ladder, he made a roguish address, the meat of which was that there was a whole corner left of the bottom shelf, and if Mr. Garrott insisted, etc.

"I'll relieve you with pleasure," said Charles, coldly.

So Mr. Geddie lumbered down from the ladder, wiped his hands on his pocket-handkerchief and re-attached his cuffs. He implored Miss Wing to make herself absolutely at home in his office, assured her, not once but three times, that John the porter, on the floor below, would be positively gratified to do any service for her, however small. In the moment of parting, he volunteered a new civility.

"Why, here, Mr. Garrott!" he hastily exclaimed, "your coat's all dusty in the back! That won't do! Just a minute while I get my whisk—"

But Miss Wing's young man interrupted him rudely.

"No, I'm not dusty at all! Thanks—don't trouble."

Another person who didn't know the value of a smile, clearly. And the man was dusty, of course. Well, no affair of his, of course. Mr. Geddie kept a-smiling.

"Well, good people!" said he. "Olive oil!"

When he had got a polite distance down the hall, Miss Wing's young man shut the office door upon him. So at last came privacy. For the first time, since the unforgotten afternoon last month, Charles Garrott stood alone with his admirable heroine.

He moved toward her, deliberating.

Downstairs there, he had been having five of the most engrossing, the most completely satisfying, minutes of his life. Being able to come upstairs at all, he had come in the spiritual state of his stimulating experience. Over all that was unsettled and unhappy, there persisted in him a fierce young elation. By the oddest luck, he was not here empty-handed, after all: he came with something rather better than a hope to give. And doubtless—since he was incurably a sentence-maker—there had already come into his head discreet phrases with which to communicate the hope, at least: phrases which, though gallantly suppressing his own exploits, might yet be somewhat tinged with a protector's strength.

But all this dropped from Charles's mind in the instant when Mary raised her head over the table, and looked at him.

He had seen his friend for a few minutes on Friday, her first day up and about. But that passing glimpse, it seemed, could hardly have counted. For now her gaze had an unexpected power for him: the sight of her came on him with a sort of impact, as if this were some one he had heard about often, but never before seen. Undoubtedly, that small phenomenon was due to the amount he had been thinking about her of late, behind her back, as it were. But beyond all this, the particular look of Mary's face had made him instantly certain that, whatever she had gone to struggle with Angela about to-day, she had, indeed, been routed. And that he had not miscalculated the effect of this upon her, he was also certain from the first sound of her voice....

Mary did not look up as her helper advanced, or cease the work of her hands. But it was she who spoke first:—

"How did you happen to come here?"

"I've been to your house. Your mother told me you were here."

She said, with a curious stilted politeness: "It was very good of you to come. But really you must not wait for me, please. I have a good deal more to do—a great deal more—and it is work of a sort that I have to do alone."

"Miss Mary," said Charles, "your mother told me, at my request, what has happened this afternoon."

Mary flinched, just perceptibly. But her voice, when she spoke, seemed harder than before.

"Well, it's the fact. That's all there is to say. There isn't anything more to discuss."

"I don't mean to discuss it, of course. There was just one thing I thought of—a—sort of suggestion."

Finding himself neither questioned nor forbidden, he continued: "Do you think it would be such a bad way out of the—the difficulty, if Donald were just to go on here for a while?"

Still Mary waited, hardly encouraging him, examining a "New School," silently laying it down in the packing-case at her feet.

"I know you feel," said Charles, inspecting the top of her hat, "that settling down to this consulting work, in a city that offers so many distractions all the time, won't be a good thing for Donald—from any point of view. Staying here won't take the place of the chance with Gebhardt he's throwing away, of course—that's pretty serious. Still, there ought to be plenty of good work for him to do here—isn't there?—for a few months, a year or two, if necessary. That would give him—and you—a little time to adjust things to—the new conditions. And then from the point of view of the Flowers, too,—of Mrs. Flower, in fact,—it occurred to me it mightn't be a bad sort of working compromise.... What do you think?"

"I think it is very sensible," she replied, with the same labored courtesy. "It is what I suggested, too."

"Oh," said Charles, and paused. "But Donald didn't want to give up Blake & Steinert, I suppose?"

"I haven't suggested it to Donald."

That brought a considerable silence.

"It's—settled, then?"

"It was settled last week."

A curious let-down feeling took possession of the young man. He pressed his hand to his forehead; and then for the first time was aware that his head ached furiously. In the same moment, his eye was unpleasantly caught by his burst-out gloves. Having stared at his hands for a second, he silently stripped off the gloves, balled them, and pitched the ball into a waste-basket near by.

"I'll just have a look into this closet for myself," said he, turning away. "I don't believe Geddie—"

"No!—please don't!—don't trouble! I really don't need any help, thank you. I don't ..."

Her wish to be alone was all but woundingly plain to him. And still it seemed to Charles physically impossible to turn now and walk out of the door. So, not looking at her, he answered in a peculiarly mild manner that, of course, this wasn't help at all, only a little indulgence of himself, which she really mustn't refuse him. And while he yet spoke, allowing no opportunity for such refusal, he hung his hat on Mr. Geddie's hook, and all the forepart of him disappeared upward into the closet.

After an interval rather longer than necessary, he re-emerged to view, a few periodicals in one hand, a faded bundle of typewritten papers in the other.

"Geddie's made a clean sweep. There's hardly another armful."

His manner was almost as cheery as Geddie's own. His "note" was to go ahead as if nothing had happened.

"Put them here?" asked Charles.

Mary Wing's arms quivered a little on the table.

"Put them anywhere! It doesn't make the least difference!"

So Charles laid his burden down on the table, and quietly went up the ladder again. Here, for a space, he pretended to be impossibly busy over nearly empty shelves.

And then, out of the silence behind him, he heard his friend's voice, painfully stiff, somewhat strained.

"You see—you oughtn't to have come to see me to-day. I—I'm not fit for society. I tried to warn you. I haven't had time—to get philosophical yet."

The helper spoke into the dusty closet: "Well, you don't need to get philosophical with me. I'm pretty mad myself—as far as that goes."

"I wasn't prepared for it—at all.... And then I've been beating my head against it—like a fool—all afternoon."

Well he knew Mary's horror of weakness, her warranted confidence in her own self-control. Well he understood her regret for that uniquely sharp speech of hers. Was it this, a novel impulse to justify herself in his eyes, that seemed to force her on, beyond his expectation and against her own will?

"But don't suppose I went there expecting to have my own way about everything—manage them around like children. I didn't. I went respectfully. I went to beg. But it was no use."

Silence: and then the hard voice went on rapidly:—

"She and Donald had talked it all over, and decided that it would be best for his career to go to New York. She and Donald ... I did think that, as I was planning Donald's work when she was still in short dresses, my opinion might have some weight with her. And I thought, just as you did, that something might be saved if they stayed here for the present—kept the house and all the rest of it. And then, of course, I lost my temper—that makes twice.... I reminded her how she had told me once that nothing could induce her to leave her mother, as a widow.... What was the use? Of course she only cried, and said it was hopeless to try to explain to me—how differently a woman felt about all these things when she was going to be married. I believe she said I was incapable of understanding the new emotions that came with a great love."

That, indeed, seemed a romantic description of the mild, chance product of the Fordette. However, the replete young authority only said:—

"Then I suppose it's great love that taught her engineering so quickly—and all Donald's little peculiarities?"

Mary Wing made no answer. Her capable small hands took up the literature lately provided by Charles. And when she spoke, it was as if his unaccustomed acrimony had met and destroyed her own.

"Oh, it's natural that we should see everything differently. She is really a sweet-natured girl. I'm sorry already for what I said to her.... And her not wanting to stay here—you mustn't think that's just a selfish whim—just wanting to live in New York. Of course, what she wants is to have Donald to herself—to have their young married life to themselves. And my going there to give advice to-day—naturally that made her more certain than ever that she could never have that here—with me just around the corner. She let me understand that, finally. She intimated that Donald had said as much—he was tired of being managed.... Oh, it's perfectly natural, perfectly right. To-morrow, I'll accept it easily enough.... As I say—I haven't had much time."

He was more touched by that speech than everything that had gone before, yet more resolved, too, not to say, "I'm sorry."

"As a matter of fact," he asked straightforwardly, "what was decided—as to Mrs. Flower?"

"It's not decided yet, at all. However, I have a plan—another suggestion—which it seems to me might meet some of the difficulties."

"Aren't there friends or relatives here that she might stay with for a time?"

"That's it. I think I can persuade her to live with us—till we have a chance to see how all this—"

"With you?"

"It's just a hope, as I say. I didn't think of it till just now. Mother is very fond of her. And Wallie can't give up college, of course. That would be—quite the worst thing."

The school-teacher spoke with characteristic matter-of-factness. If she was adding final touches to the portraits of two women, she did it, certainly, with supreme unconsciousness. In the brief stillness of the office, she efficiently neared the end of her task. The top of her table was almost bare, the litter on the floor was deep. And now she spoke again, dryly and quite conclusively.

"At any rate, nothing fatal has happened. Nobody knows that better than I do—really. No doubt it's personal vanity with me, as much as anything. And now—"

"Do you know," Charles Garrott spoke up suddenly, as if he did not hear her at all—"I think you're the best I ever knew? The best—the best—absolutely the most of a person—"

She, the strong, seemed to start and shrink; she broke in sharply, with instant signs of a shaken poise: "No—please! You don't understand me at all. I do—not need sympathy! It's just what I've been trying to say—"

"Well, you aren't getting it from me, no fear. Sympathy! If ever there was honest looking up, if ever—"

"No!—don't! I didn't tell you about it for that!—only to explain why I seemed so ... It was due you. As I say, nobody understands better than I how unreasonable it is—to be so disturbed. And if you hadn't come here to-day—"

"Won't you give me credit for some understanding? If you were ten times as disturbed, I'd think it the reasonablest—"

"Yes—for a woman. Well, I'm not that kind of woman," said Mary Wing, with curious agitation, as if she could stand any sort of talk better than this. "Please don't say any more. I don't tell my troubles to be comforted—patted on the head. I'm not feminine, I hope, after all these knocks. You make me—"

"Thank God, no!" said the young man on the ladder, considerably moved.

And then that connection which he must have been groping toward for a month flashed startlingly upon him, and he, the authority, blurted out like a boy:—

"No—you're womanly!"

He saw his old friend's face quiver a little as the strange word struck her: oddly, it seemed to silence her. But it was not possible that she could be one half so struck with that word as he, Charles Garrott, was. Mary Wing was a Womanly Woman.... And now she could no more have stopped his speech than she could have stopped a river when the one gate in the dam, long locked, has suddenly burst open.

"That's it. Of course.... Funny, I was just thinking over all that as I walked around here—how different those things are. No, not different—they don't belong in the same story at all. What's character got to do with—feathers in the springtime?... Born stupid," said Charles, in a low, stirred voice—"that seems to explain me. I'd better have been one-eyed—beat me over the head with it, and still I can't see.... Won't see. That's it!—it's worse. I'm just an old-line male—that's what. Just the sort who've taught women not to bother to try to be womanly when being feminine comes so much cheaper. Why, look at me, criticizing you in my thoughts, not liking it because you were—independent. What was that but just pique—don't you know?—just common ordinary male jealousy—because a woman didn't need my shoulder to lean on. Manly protector ... seventeenth-century stuff. Well, you've punished me, don't you worry.... Just standing where you always stood, just being your Self. Acting straight from your own law all the time, doing the best sort of things, one after the other—the biggest, the—the tenderest—"

"Don't," said the grammar-school teacher again, but in the littlest voice he had ever heard from her lips.

Rapt as he was, that voice penetrated him. More, it alarmed him: and with reason, too. Staring down with a new fixedness, touched with a faint, purely masculine horror, Charles beheld the strangest sight seen by him in many a day. Mary Wing, the unconquerable, had suddenly put her face into her hands.

He had really only been finishing that other talk of theirs, with a certain sense of right; but of course this wasn't the time for that. He had been indulging his analytic propensity, his fatal tendency to comment, at her expense. Hadn't he understood that she feared nothing so much as his sympathies?...

His friend, in her arresting attitude, sat as rigid as a carven woman. The stillness in the little office was profound. Then a voice strained out, very thin, but still not defeated:—

"Don't be alarmed. I'm ... not going to cry."

And that seemed to settle it. It was as if, in that silent struggle waged all the way from the Flowers' to now, the speaking of the word itself was the fatal admission. The school-teacher had no sooner pronounced it than her arms spread suddenly out on the table before her, and her head came down upon them.

Charles Garrott, on his ladder, was heard to take one breath, sharply. After that, no sound came from him. Quite motionless he sat, in the chance position in which the sudden disaster had overtaken him: long arms dangling from his knees, large feet hooked under a ladder-rung, some distance down. He hardly winked an eye.

Mary Wing was crying. That painful hard tension had snapped; the indomitable slim figure drooped beaten, for once. She, also, made little sound in her peculiar difficulty. But her body shook with a stormy racking. And it hurt her, he was sure; hurt her physically, as if she couldn't find tears without breaking something inside....

Strange it seemed that once, in this very room, and only the other day really, he had wanted to see Mary cry. He had thought of it then as a desirable sort of symbol, hadn't he?—something of that sort. What did her tears have to tell him now? Then he had conceived himself as watching her emotion, moved doubtless, but yet with a secretly gratified masculinity. Now every heave of those slender shoulders was like a clutch upon his heart.

And still there was something in Charles that was not distress at all. He was aware of another and quite different inner sense—peace, the end of struggle, fulfillment—he could not say what it was. It was strange. He was not unhappy....

There came, after a time, signs that his friend was overcoming that hard revolt of feelings too much put upon. Even in the beginning she had never seemed to abandon herself, quite. At length, somewhat unexpectedly, she moved, turned from her seat under his eye, and, rising, went away to the office's one window. There she stood, her back toward him. And presently she began to clear her throat, with nervous quick coughings.

Through this, Charles had not spoken, or thought of doing so. To pat Mary's shoulder, this time, had not entered his head. His instinct seemed to feel the banality of any intrusion upon her freedom: she should weep or not weep, just as seemed best to her. Now, as his grave eyes followed her, it occurred to him that his presence here had been, and was, a considerable intrusion. And about the time he had reached this conclusion, Mary spoke, naturally enough, except that a sharp catch of breath broke her sentence in the middle.

"I'm giving you ... a pleasant visit to-day."

The young man stirred on his perch. He answered, oddly, with a sort of growl:—

"That's right! I'm a fair-weather friend. Keep things pleasant for me all the time—or good-bye."

His heroine was sniffing repeatedly, in the humanest way. She kept clearing her throat. Her movements made it clear that she was searching busily for her handkerchief. However, there lay her handkerchief on the table, under his eye. And if she, perhaps, hardly wished to turn and come for it just now, no more did he see his way clear to going and taking it to her.

"No—but what's the sense of it? I'm—doing just what I told Angela not to do. Feeling sorry for myself, that's all."

"Well, I don't feel sorry for you. Don't worry about that."

Charles came down the ladder, and stood a moment kicking at the "New Schools" strewn about the floor.

"Look here, suppose I save time by arranging about this box now? You want it to go to your house, I suppose?"

"No—I'm going to send it to the grammar-school."

"Oh—all right. I'll attend to it," he said, briefly. "I'll tell the porter to keep it to-night, and get a wagon to-morrow."

On which, without more ado, he stepped from the assistant principal's office, and shut the door behind him.

Charles's conference with the negro porter in the corridor below lasted a minute, perhaps. His diplomatic retirement lasted ten minutes, at least. His surplus time the young man spent in staring out of a tall window into a white-paved courtyard. But that it was a white-paved courtyard, or that it was a courtyard, he never knew. The instant he found that he was staring at it, he jumped a little, and went upstairs....

If he had meant this interval as a punctuation and the turning of a page, Mary, it seemed, had so accepted it. Reopening Mr. Geddie's door, Charles saw that his absence had been employed for a general setting to rights. The table had been moved back against the wall; the books and globe restored to it, the chair Mary had occupied returned to its place, the window opened to blow out the dust. Mary herself stood in the middle of the room, coated, buttoning her gloves. Without looking at her exactly, he was aware that the white veil which had been caught up around her hat was now let down.

Bygones were bygones, clearly: the least said, the soonest mended. Charles remarked, exactly as if house-cleaning were the sole interest he knew of here: "Well, you've made a good job of it."

And Mary replied, with equal naturalness: "I did what I could. John will have to attend to these things on the floor."

"Yes—I told him to see to that at once."

"He ought to give the closet a good cleaning, too. I'd better tell him—this is just the time."

"I told him to be sure to scrub the closet. It'll be all right."

Looking up, she said: "You seem to have thought of everything."

"Let me get my hat," said Charles.

But Mary, standing in his way, was regarding him with a sudden directness he had no wish to reciprocate. And she answered his remark about the hat with a little exclamation.

"What's the matter with your eye?"

"My eye?" said the young man, and involuntarily put his hand there. Recollecting, he finished: "Nothing—nothing at all."

The school-teacher came a step nearer, but he went round her as he spoke, and continued his way.

"But there's a good deal the matter with it!" she exclaimed, concerned. "It's swollen—it looks discolored, too.—How did you hurt yourself?"

"Oh, that? Oh!" said Charles, carefully fitting on his hat, and then removing it again. "I remember now—it's nothing. Got a tumble this afternoon, that's all. Stupid thing."

"You must let me get some hot water down the hall. I'm afraid it's—"

But he indicated, quite brusquely, that his eye was all right, just the way he liked it, that having water put on it was, in particular, the last thing he would ever dream of.

She said behind him, slowly, after a pause: "If you won't, you won't, of course.... But it's so exactly like you—"

"Ready?" said Charles.

But when he turned he found that Mary had turned, too, after him—stood facing him anew. And this time the confrontation was too near, too immediate, to be further avoided.

He now discovered that the thin veil had not withdrawn his friend very far. Looking at her for the first time since her cataclysm, he saw that her delicate face wore that look described as "rain-washed," which commonly means peace, but peace at a price. The redness of her eyelids was quite perceptible. What struck the young man particularly, however, was the look of the blue eyes themselves. More or less irrelevant eyes he had always thought them, for all the heavy arched brows which so emphasized their faculty for steady, sometimes disconcerting, interrogation. That characteristic grave intentness was in Mary's gaze now: but it was not this that gave her look its power to hold Charles Garrott in his tracks.

The peculiar commotion within him gave forth in a short laugh, testy and embarrassed: "Honestly, if you say the word 'eye' to me again—"

"I wasn't going to speak of your eye," said Mary Wing, with quite remarkable meekness.... "I was thinking of that remark you made—about being a fair-weather friend."

And then she went on hurriedly, with a rare, impulsiveness: "I've just been thinking—I don't suppose since the world began there was ever such another rainy-day friend as you. It's got so now that I never get into trouble without thinking right away—as I was thinking this afternoon when I left the Flowers'—that you'll be right there to help me with it. Yes, I was. And it's so—perfect. Nothing to spoil it ever—not one thing for you to gain—all just your rather extravagant idea of what being a friend means. You don't know—how much it means...."

The strange speech—strange blossom of her disruptive emotion—ended a little short; but that it ended was the principal thing. Doubtless there had been a time when words such as these from Mary Wing, this fine frank expression of abiding friendship, would have been sweet and acceptable to Charles Garrott, crowning him with a full reward. But it seemed that that time must have passed, somewhat abruptly....

The two moderns stood, gazing full at each other. And now, in the same moment, a little color tinged the girl's cheek, beneath her veil, and the young man turned rather pale.

"Miss Mary, you must be dreaming," said Charles, gently. "I've never done anything for you in my life. We both know that. Let's go."

Mary, her eyes falling, had resumed the buttoning of her gloves. She moved toward the door. The descent of the High School stairs was made in comparative silence. The chief item of importance developed was that Mary intended to go home by street-car; she was tired, she mentioned. It seemed that Charles, on the contrary, had no intention of foregoing his afternoon constitutional. He said that he would see Miss Mary to her car, however; and he did.

So the old friends parted casually on a street corner, as they had done a hundred times before.

But in the Studio, there could be no such reserve, no such slurring of the characteristic services of men. Here combat must have its fair due, in the moral order of a too sedentary world. Judge Blenso, in brief, from whom no secrets were hid, had the full facts relative to the altered eye within ten minutes of Charles's homecoming, an hour later; and the Judge's cold manner, already somewhat softened by the heartening acceptance of Entry 3, straightway dissolved in exultation and proud joy. The reconciliation between uncle and nephew was instantaneous and immutable, and there followed, by consequence, the most broken, the most conversational, evening in the history of the Studio.

Charles was very glad to be reconciled with his relative. He was very glad to feel that his secretary no longer viewed him with bald disgust. Nevertheless, there were times, necessarily, when a writer wished that he had no relative and secretary at all; and this, in a word, was one of them. Charles did not wish, to-night, to go over and over one set of primitive facts indefinitely; he did not wish to listen to sporting anecdote and reminiscence, hour after hour; in chief, he did not wish to go to bed at half-past ten o'clock. However, he did each and all of these things, perforce.

"Always retire early after a fight!—that was my father's rule, long as he lived!" cried Uncle George, his black eyes dangerously bright.... "No—let's see. Before a fight—that was father's way! Well, good gad!—too late for that now! You come along to bed, my dear fellow!..."

But, in time, a sweet snoring from the parallel white couch indicated freedom, welcome solitude, at last. And then the young man rose noiselessly in the dark, and slipped back to the familiar Studio, where all his personal life had so long had its heart and center. On the old writing-table, in front of which he had sat and pondered so many hours, so many nights, the green-domed lamp was set burning anew. However, Charles did not sit at his table now. Beside the lamp, Big Bill without surcease ticked off the flying minutes of a writer's prized leisure. But Charles heeded not Big Bill. Wrapped in a bathrobe grown too short for his long shanks, he paced his carpet on slippered feet, up and down; and there was no such thing as bedtime now. For this day the authority had made the last and the best of all his many discoveries about Woman: and he did not see how he could ever sleep again.

---

XXIV

Luemma, the twelve-dollar cook, had never dreamed of having opera-glasses of her own; hence she looked pleased, for once in her life, when her departing young mistress unexpectedly presented her with a pair: old and somewhat shabby, doubtless, but still possessing the valuable power of bringing distant objects near. And it must be assumed that the nice man who sold the gasoline was equally glad to have the Fordette for his own: else he would probably not have fattened up the trousseau, one day, by purchasing the interesting little vehicle (cheap) for cash.

Because of mourning in the bride's family, the Flower-Manford nuptials would be "very quiet." Invitations were strictly limited to near relatives of the contracting parties, with a very few of the most intimate friends. So the social columns of the "Post" had warned and notified all persons in due season. However, Charles Garrott, reading, was not cast down. As the groom's chosen supporter in his "most need," Charles had had his fixed place from the beginning.

Further, he considered himself fully entitled to be present in the category of intimate friends, not to mention his peculiar relation as one who had narrowly escaped a yet closer privilege in the premises.

Angela's was an afternoon wedding: the hour of "taking place," five o'clock. At four o'clock on the set day, Charles prematurely snapped his tutorial watch at Miss Grace (who was still waiting), and rushed away to his rooms. At half-past four, after scenes of wild haste, he stood out in the Studio, for final inspection. He was arrayed in what the Britons like to call a "morning coat": a morning coat new-pressed by Judge Blenso's skillful hand and patent iron, made glorious by Judge Blenso's best new waistcoat, especially urged for the occasion. Now the admiring secretary pinned a white carnation in the morning-coat lapel, as excited over it all, oddly enough, as if the wedding afoot were his young employer's own. So dismissed with a blessing, Charles jumped into a taxicab, at four thirty-five precisely, and shot away to the Bellingham. Here, in a bedroom upstairs, a brief delay occurred, owing to the appearance and behavior of the bridegroom. The face that Donald, in his regalia, turned upon his best man, bursting in, was seen to be a pale green in color; his voice and speech were highly erratic, his attempt at a brave smile a sight to rend one's heart. On this pitiful funk, Charles's gibes, his appeals to the higher nature, had but small effect. "Here's the ring," said the groom, with a sick croak. "Charlie, hadn't I better take one little drink?"

However, the cab was swift. The drive to Center Street was but a matter of five minutes. Once more the two young men were stepping, side by side, up the worn brick walkway. It made Charles think of the day they had come to return the books. But this time the line of vehicles before the weather-beaten door was conclusive testimony to the triumphant activity within.

In the hall, a lady greeted them, a near relative doubtless. A dim pleased significant hush seemed to emanate from the lady, and pervade the house. From behind the dark curtains of the parlor, there proceeded the murmur of assembled persons, waiting. Even the hatstand, though essentially unchanged, somehow conveyed a mysterious expectancy.

They were sent aloft to an upper chamber, conceived to be Wallie's. Here they were instructed to wait quietly till somebody had need of them.

The waiting was rather trying. Tête-à-tête in the small bare room, groom and attendant talked but fitfully. Donald seemed to have drawn little courage from his dram. He sat stiffly on a chair-edge, jumping at each peal of the loud little bell below. Much more unreasonably, the best man showed signs of nervousness, too: it was observed that he had cut himself twice while shaving. And suddenly, jerking out his watch, he announced that probably he had better step out for a minute—reconnoiter—see what he could see.

"They ought to want you now, seems to me," quoth he. "I'll see. You sit tight, right there."

"Awright," croaked Donald.

So Charles stepped out from the nuptial waiting-room, and closed the door behind him. Having done this, he came to a standstill, abruptly: for here, in the Flowers' still upstairs hall, he beheld just the sight he had gone forth to seek.

At the other end of the hall, in the dimness, stood the bride's attendant, Cousin Mary Wing. She, too, had just come out of a door, it seemed; she, too, had stopped and was gazing. And the first look of the blue eyes, over the space, released in him, the old helper with his secret help, a vast content; just touched with a subtle sadness that such a little gain could mean so much to her now.

He moved toward her in the expectant quiet....

Doubtless, it was no small thing that Mr. Mysinger had kept, more or less, that promise he had made under threat and duress; marvel enough that he had, in fact, "personally requested" Mr. Senff to "see what could be done," etc., as agreed. Surely the whole matter had been fuller of openings for double-dealing than an egg was of meat. And yet, to Charles, the upshot of all the hoping and planning had been a cruel disappointment. For Life, alas, still differs from Romance, realities still refuse to fade like a dream, at just the suitable moment. In brief, the School Board, by a majority of one, had yesterday ruled that Mary should have her reappointment to the High School staff, "as soon as arrangements would permit"; but of the assistant principal's office no word was said.

To one who had voluntarily surrendered her great promotion, this seemed but a scanty recompense. And as for the new plan, his and Hazen's, concerning the Assistant Superintendency of Schools next year—no less—("There's really a good chance, now that the Mysinger bunch are showing a better spirit," said Hazen)—that was much too remote to seem very substantial just now....

In the dark upstairs hall, the friends greeted briefly, in voices scarcely above a whisper. Mary said hurriedly: "Donald's here? Angela'll be ready to see him in just a second."

"I'll produce him—dead or alive."

The best man laid his hand on the banister. But his subconsciousness warned him that the banisters were dusty, and he took his hand away.

"You look happy to-day."

"Yes—shouldn't I be? Weren't you—pleased, when you read—"

"They've treated you abominably—no other way to express it."

She smiled at him, but looked away. And he perceived, or thought he did, that the memory of their last meeting remained with her, touching her manner with a faint self-consciousness.

"You are hard to satisfy," she said. "I've felt like singing all day.... Will you tell Donald to come now?"

"Yes. I'm going to see you after this is over?"

But no, she, the busy, was to stay here for the night, it seemed, keeping Mrs. Flower company in her daughterlessness. And Charles, having anticipated this occasion principally as her holiday-time and his own, turned away with the sense that most of the wedding was over....

Yet this, of course, was but the side-play of elders, counting for nothing. Now the prime action of the day, the culminating hour, was at hand.

Donald was whisked away for a brief glimpse at his love. Returning, he confronted almost immediately the moment of his public appearance and confession. Word came to Wallie's room that the gentlemen were to descend forthwith, for better or worse. "Now then!" whispered Charles, as they started down—"chest out, chin up!" And Donald grinned back feebly, as if to prove to himself that he still could. Now the dim hush deepened and thickened, the little house seemed to hold its breath. There was no music to cover these preliminaries, because of the mourning. In complete stillness, groom and escort stepped through the curtains into the assembled company, which, though limited in numbers as it was, seemed to fill the little car-shaped parlor. Through a narrow lane between vaguely discerned relatives and friends, the young men moved to their appointed place. Here they stood, almost stepping on a stout clergyman, undergoing his frank, interested scrutiny, through a dreadful pause. Then at last a stir in the company made it clear that the bride was at hand; and after that Donald could feel that nobody was paying any attention to him.

So without great pomp or ritual, fuss or feathers, came the great moment to which all one woman's life had looked forward, to which, conceivably, it might all look back. Standing statue-like a few feet from her, the fingers of one hand feeling in Judge Blenso's waistcoat-pocket for the ring, those of the other resting lightly on the cold Latrobe, Charles listened to the beautiful words which converted Angela Flower into Mrs. Donald Manford.

Angela "was married in a traveling-suit." She was a little pale, like her lord and master; her responses were just audible. And never had Charles seen her look so maidenly sweet, so feminine and engaging and desirable. Her soft and pretty face, yet unbroken by a line, was immensely serious. Her look into the beyond was faintly wistful, a little awed, supremely innocent. A wonder dawned in the great dark eyes. Here girlhood ended: in great happiness, doubtless, yet in great mysteries too. Here came change, so colossal that no man could ever know change in these terms. Where led this unknown parting of the ways, what was the heart and meaning of Life?

And Mary Wing's face, glimpsed once or twice over the bride's shoulder, was surprised wearing much the same look too. No woman, perhaps, even a fighting educator, listens quite unmoved to these old words. Sweetly pensive, Mary gazed at her so different cousin. And Charles wondered if she had got quite philosophical now, and wished that she had something much bigger to feel like singing about to-day....

"I pronounce you mon and wife," cried the parson: and it was not the first thing he had pronounced loudly, either.

So came relaxation from the solemn stiffness. There was a flutter of movement, human speech again, the swift embrace of bride and bride's mother. Then speech became free and general, and the near relatives rushed upon the happy pair.

Charles, having wrung Donald's hand in the approved manner, had his due turn before the center of the visible world. It was the first time he had seen Angela, to speak to, since the day of the party-call. But, though she was naturally a little nervous and staccato in the circumstances, he considered that she received his felicitations with dignity and graciousness.

"Donald and I appreciated your gift so much. I hope you got my note? It was perfectly lovely. We shall think of you whenever we use it."

Interesting, indeed, it was to Charles to see these pretty eyes, that he had once caused to weep, resting upon him with this genuine bright restless indifference.

"When you're in New York, you must be sure to let us know. Donald and I will always be so glad to see you. I hope we'll have a guest-room, and then you must come to stay with us. I do hope you will have better luck with your stories, Mr. Garrott. I'll be watching for you in the magazines—remember! How do you do, Cousin Annie? Donald and I appreciated your gift so much ..."

So Charles Garrott passed on, a bachelor still, still thinking about his "story."

In the "small reception following"—to quote the "Post" again—Charles did what he could to make the affair a success, circulating about like a valued member of the family, speaking winningly to old ladies whom he did not know, heartening the timid with cake and wine. His own best moments in the reception were short talks with two Flowers, brothers of the bride. But Wallie, the chemist and lamp-repairer,—so it was now written on the stars,—was down for his Easter vacation only: he was returning to college next week. "The Wings want mother to visit them, till I come back in June," he let fall, with truly masculine unconsciousness; and felt no irony in his sister's impending departure to lead her own life, while Mary Wing, staying at home, took care of her mother.

As for the older brother, the wealthy and generous Tommy, it seemed that he had run on all the way from Pittsburg for the express purpose of "giving Angela away." A handsome volatile little chap, Tommy proved to be, with a mustache, a manner, and a worried look in the corners of his eyes: and Charles, introduced, examined him with unaffected interest. For Charles had often thought of Tommy, often wondered if Tommy might not be, at heart, a master humorist. Unluckily, that interesting point was never settled, the acquaintance being cut short untimely by the general movement toward the hall.

The embarkation of Mr. and Mrs. Manford was "very quiet." There was no hurling of old slippers, no unseemly merriment. They came down the narrow stairs amid a little rice, a last subdued chorus of farewells. The bride's pallor was noticed now, her pretty smile was a little fixed. The groom, on the contrary, affected the hearty, the jovial: his manly backbone was obviously reasserting itself, now that he was a lawful protector henceforward. It was observed on all sides that they made a good-looking and well-matched couple.

So Angela and Donald went out on their great adventure. And Charles went with them down the walkway, with a bag or two to carry, doing his duty as he saw it, to the end. With his own hands he clicked shut the door of their wedding-coach. (A liveried one it was, the symbolic vehicle not being available, for reasons explained.) "We'll hope to see you soon, in our own Home," said Angela, the Home-Maker, the very last thing. And then the coach leapt away, and he, the old principal friend, stood motionless, bareheaded in the mild sunshine, staring after it....

Stepping up on the verandah again, Charles encountered the relative who had welcomed him on arrival—Mrs. Flinchman, Finchman, did she say?—and who now welcomed him anew, beaming.

"Well, Mr. Garrott!—your friend is a fortunate young man, is he not? I don't think I ever knew a sweeter, truer, more womanly girl. And you," she queried, with immense archness, "knew her so very well, too, I believe?"

He intimated pleasantly that few, indeed, had known her better, perhaps: whereon the lady's expression grew more significant than ever.

"Well, no wonder the men were all flocking about her, I'm sure—a lovely, old-time young woman! But I understand it was love at first sight with these two—they simply flew together! Ah," said Mrs. Finchman (Flinchman?) with a sigh, which, however, did not disturb the deeply gratified look indigenous to women at weddings—"ah, it's very sweet! A real old-fashioned romance, that's what I call it, Mr. Garrott! And now that we've come to the end of the story, who can doubt that they'll live happy ever after—as you literary men are so fond of putting it?"

"Who, indeed, madam? It—all went off very smoothly, I thought? Well!—"

"You must be going? Then good-bye!—so sorry it's over! Knowing of you so well as dear Angela's faithful friend, Mr. Garrott, I feel that we are anything but strangers, and hope so much you will find time to come in and see us, one evening very soon. We live quietly on Mason Street, next to the Methodist Church—I and my sweet girl Jennie."

---

He left the house, after all, with Mary Wing, who was going home for an hour's work on school examination-books, before returning to sup with Mrs. Flower. This decision she had casually communicated, by the hatstand just now. So the "holiday-time" came to a six-blocks' walk: and even that was an after-thought. Truly, if a man had a mind to see this woman, without definite transactions to discuss, he had need of all his delicacy and tact. Calls, drives, bridge-parties, going to places, doing things: she had no room in her life for such as these. Time was more precious to Mary than to a writer. And she had convinced one writer, at least, by a moving tribute to his perfect friendship, that she had never had a personal thought of him in her life.

But Charles did not despair. He was a young man still. And meantime he was happy.

"You should wear a hat like that every day," she said, agreeably, as they turned into Washington Street. "You look seven feet tall at least.... By the way, did you feel your ears burning, about one o'clock to-day?"

He said no, and smiled a little. Her intention of keeping the conversation away from certain topics—topics that might have been uppermost in both their minds to-day, perhaps—had been perfectly evident to him from the moment they crossed the verandah.

"I met Judge Blenso as I came home to lunch," continued Mary, "and he stopped for a talk—purely to tell me what a wonderful person you were, it seemed. But in that connection, he gave me some exciting news—that you've just had a very flattering offer for 'Bondwomen'—and refused it! I couldn't understand why."

At that, he looked subtly pleased, while affecting but a modest amusement. The event in question had been, in truth, sweet balm to the spirit and the confidence bruised in so many rebuffs. Still, his reply was only that his relative was born for a press-agent clearly. Requested to explain this dark saying, he gave a light disparaging account of his only offer, stating that Appleholt Brothers, before accepting his book, had desired him to rewrite it throughout, completely revolutionizing the character of his heroine and omitting not less than fifty thousand words, including the existing plot.

Mary glanced up at him. "I'm taking this with a little salt—shall I?"

The author laughed. "Well, it was about like that. Still," he added, as if there were such a thing as carrying modesty too far,—"of course I could do what they want easily enough—in a month, I think."

"You don't seem excited at all. But you aren't going to do it?"

"On the contrary, I have now formally changed the name of my old novel to 'Bandwomen,' and—put it in the Morgue."

"The Morgue?"

"A repository for deceased manuscripts, recently founded by my relative."

"Oh!" said she, slowly. And, after a pause: "You don't feel any longer that it's good?"

"I do feel that it's good! I'd swear it—before a publishers' convention. But—it doesn't happen to be the story I want to write any more. I'm not interested in it."

There was another pause.

"It doesn't represent you now, I suppose? And the one you do want to write?—you're writing it, aren't you? Judge Blenso says you work till all hours of the night—and this is going to be your masterpiece."

"I shall have to caution the Judge about this, I see. We won't have a friend left, between us."

"But I'm interested, very much so. I've wondered ... Do you remember your speech at the Redmantle Club last winter—on work for women? Do you think you'd make the same speech to-day?"

"Oh," he said, lightly, "I don't know quite so much as I did last winter, you see. I'm not in the class with the lady in Sweden any more.... Why do you suspect my—loyalty?"

"Suspect?—no. I was only deducing from what you just said. I know something about the point of view you took in 'Bondwomen'—you told me once—and now if you're so dissatisfied with it that—"

"No!—no! It isn't that! My point of view hasn't changed at all. It's only—"

He glanced down at her, and away, suddenly struck with hidden significances, abruptly recalling that this woman beside him had played hardly less part in the making of "Bondwomen" than in "Bondwomen's" final consignment to the Morgue....

"I—I want to approach the whole question differently—lay a different emphasis—that's all.... But if I believed in the value of work last year, as—as a liberal education in responsibility—I believe in it ten times as much now. Don't you know that?"

"I'm glad you feel so. And that's what you're going to say in this book?"

"Hardly anything else."

They walked on a little way in silence. The afternoon was fine; the last flickers of a vernal sun danced along the sidewalks. Many people moved on the promenade. The passing moderns attracted the favorable gaze of not a few acquaintances. In appearance, Mary was judged one of the variable women. She, the worker, with her habitually colorless face and faintly fragile look, responded remarkably to dress, as Charles had once before had occasion to note. And to-day, she was dressed as for a holiday and a fête. However, he hardly looked at her once, throughout the brief walk.

"Do you know," she said suddenly, again with some touch of consciousness, he thought,—"every conversation you and I have had for months has been about me? That came over me, with a sort of shock—the other day. I feel that there's a great arrears to make up. And I doubt if you know how much I've wanted to hear about this book—since you told me you had your 'line' straight at last. See how I remember.... Don't you mean to give me any idea what the story's to be about?"

The young man's heart seemed to move a little within him.

"Can you imagine a writer's turning away from an opening like that?"

"Well—but when will you?"

"It's a long story. I don't think I could make it all clear in five or seven minutes—and that's all the time you have to spare nowadays."

"Do I seem as bad as that?... But I know literally nothing about it yet, you see, except what I've just extracted. Idleness is bad for able-bodied persons, including women. Does that state your point of view—approximately?"

"Precisely."

"And how are you developing it this time? I mean—with a working-woman as your central figure?"

"No—principally with a woman who has nothing to do—and reacts accordingly."

"Oh!... That's what you mean by a difference of approach, I suppose? She's married?"

"No—that's the trouble."

"You are dreadfully mysterious. How does she react?"

"Of course, she marries."

"Then it's not a story of work at all?"

"Hardly at all. It's an old-fashioned romance."

"I see—told from a new-fashioned point of view?"

Charles laughed. "The description was suggested to me—very recently. Up to a point, it fits. You see, I'm still learning."

"You know," said Mary, after a step or two, "you like to picture yourself as one who can't be restrained from talking about himself and his work, on the smallest provocation. In reality ... Tell me honestly, do you object to being cross-examined this way?"

His gaze kept straight ahead.

"By you?—oh, no. Of course, I ... I've wanted to tell you my story some day."

"Then I'll continue my quiz now. I know it's usually a stupid question to ask—but have you decided on a title yet?"

But that happened to be the one thing he did not care to tell her now.

"You can't fix the title till you're done, you know," he evaded lightly. "A story changes so. But I have a sub-title in mind ..."

She asked if his sub-title was a secret, and he said no.

"I'd thought of—'A Comedy of Temporary Spinsters'—something like that," said the author, and, unseen, colored abruptly.

"That's good!" Mary exclaimed after a moment. "It suggests—so much! Temporary Spinsters.... Only—I hope you don't mean to be cruel to your heroine?"

"Oh, no."

They turned into Olive Street.

"And by the way," said Charles, "she's not my heroine—only my central figure."

"Oh! Is there a distinction? Then will there be two women in this book?"

"Of course—a common principle of writing. Your central figure—in a character story—needs the comment of contrast, you know—of a—a foil."

"I hadn't thought of that. You had only one woman in 'Bondwomen,' you see.... And the contrast—she'll be as different as possible—a working-woman, I suppose?—a Permanent Spinster! That's interesting, I think—a study in contrasting types. Now—by my catechism—I really begin to get an idea—"

"Do you? I don't know. There are points—there are points—which I've never been able to settle yet, myself."

Mary began to search for her latch-key. Splendidly competent though she was, she did not appear to have a regular place for keeping her key, like a man. And Charles wondered if she had quite forgotten that offhand remark of his, the day of his luncheon to Helen Carson, that he was drawing his Line from his life....

"But the men in the story," she was saying—rather mechanically, he thought—"I conclude there must be some, even though you don't mention them. What type do you make your hero?"

"Oh!—hero! There isn't any. The hero's the reader."

"The reader!—I fear that's too technical for me."

He explained: "My—my study develops by the method of 'progressive revelation,' so-called—the principal characters being first set out, of course, with the wrong labels carefully pinned on them. Well, the hero's just the commentator on this development as it takes place, thinking it out to save the reader the trouble."

"But—isn't it the theory nowadays that there shouldn't be any commentator?"

"Oh, there may be a theory!" he retorted, the artist briefly flashing in the man. "However, I comment."

They went up the Wings' three steps, and Mary put her key into the lock.

"But your hero can't be altogether an abstraction," she insisted, thus engaged—"else how can there be any old-fashioned romance?"

The young man's laugh covered an interest in the conversation intense to the point of physical pain.

"Really, this won't do. We get it more and more backwards. I haven't even described the story to you right. It's not an old-fashioned anything—primarily—it's not a study of types. No, it's—it's an intellectual autobiography. Do you work on Sundays?"

The school-teacher wheeled in her open but inhospitable door, with something like reproach in her eyes, and said: "No!"

"Then you can't escape me. I'll stay in town this Sunday, and you shall hear it all from the beginning. You—you've brought it on yourself now."

The two moderns looked at each other. And the young man in the tall hat was breathing rather hard.

"But—wouldn't that disappoint your mother? I know—I've noticed—that you never let anything interfere ..."

His look changed perceptibly at that. And still, it was not the son, not the old critic of Egoettes, who answered, slightly chagrined:—

"What time have you to give me, then? Some day in the summer vacation?"

Mary Wing's eyes fell to her hand on the door-knob. "I hoped," she said, "that you would come in now."

"But your—your work?"

"I—thought I would take a holiday to-day."

So they went into the house. And Charles stood alone in the Wings' silent hall, slowly pulling off his wedding-gloves.

In the sitting-room Mary was similarly occupied. Though she was going back to the Flowers' so soon, she took off her hat. Having done so, she stood before the mantel-mirror, fluffing up her hair a little, where the hat had pressed it down. It is the immemorial fashion of women: a characteristic position, and so an engaging one. Delicately the upraised arms defined the lines of a graceful figure.

But when Mary saw in the mirror that Charles Garrott had come into the room, and had stopped short just over the threshold, looking at her, she knew only that the moment had come when she must make acknowledgments due for good aid and comfort received. And in her, the strong, nervousness spread now like a fear.

So she plunged hastily, the moment their eyes met: "I know, of course, there isn't time to tell me about it now. But—I don't seem to get any picture of your—your man at all.... What sort of man is he, personally?"

The author, starting a little, moved forward in the dusky room.

"Oh, let's not speak of him," he said, with visible effort. "He's only a writer. That's polite for a poor stick."

"No—don't! Tell me—in the action of the story—what does he do?"

"Not a thing—really. Just sits around and thinks."

Strength came into her low voice: "Why—why do you always belittle him so?"

Continuing to look at her, he said, remotely surprised: "Belittle him? But I don't."

The school-teacher's fingers closed over the mantel, and the tips of her nails whitened.

"Then I don't understand at all," she said, steadily. "I've been thinking that it was he who almost murdered the villain, and gave one of the Spinsters her old place back...."

Charles Garrott stood like a man turned to stone, fascinated gaze upon the eyes in the mirror: girlish eyes, doubtless, but quite unwavering now. And then, in an instant, his face was scarlet from neck to brow. His embarrassment was frightful to see: that of a soul too suddenly stripped bare.

"Oh!... So you've been looking through me—all along. I see ... the Judge didn't confine himself to ... Well, his knowing—was purely an accident. He had, of course, no—"

"And why must my knowing be an accident, too?"

"I—it was simply something you had nothing whatever to do with. And there was an understanding—the—the matter was entirely private. You'll please forget the Judge's—small-talk, and—"

"Not if I live to be a thousand! I'll forget everything—I'll forget my name!—but that!—no, you ask too much of my feelings."

That, indeed, checked the young man's horrible self-consciousness. He saw, with unsteadying bewilderment, that this was no light conversation of hers, that Mary Wing was more deeply moved than he had ever seen her. And suddenly he was aware, by some swift flicker of his intuition, that it was to say this to him, and nothing else, that she had come home, made a holiday, to-day....

"And you told me you had done nothing for me," she said, in the same passionate low voice—"that day—when you had just done everything—what nobody else in the wide world would ever have done for me! And you were—hurt, too...."

She stopped, abruptly. Her face quivered, just perceptibly, but he saw it. Strange and incalculable.... Surely he had tried to do bigger and better things for Mary, than the impromptu display of his primitive passion.... Was this, also, of the primal and everlasting; did this, too, touch the immutable and true?

The helper was making reply, not exactly with insouciance: "Why!—why, but I can't let you think of it—it was nothing! I enjoyed it! I simply didn't think he had behaved to you as he should. Naturally, I didn't like that...."

"You didn't—because that's the way you are. You expect nothing—but give everything. I don't like to hear you make light of yourself. I don't."

She turned away, went over to her desk by the window, where the school examination-books awaited her. But once more it was clear that she had no purpose here. She moved the piled books on the desk-leaf, half an inch, perhaps, and went on in a controlled voice:—

"But I can't tell you how I felt, and feel, about it. And it's foolish to—try to say thank you. We must talk of something else.... Sit down, won't you? I'll give you some light in a minute."

But the young man in the wedding raiment did not sit down, gave no sign at all that he had heard her conclusive and hortatory speech. His eyes, turning, had followed her as she went away from him. And now, as she ended, he only stood and looked; looked over the familiar room at the slender figure of a woman which, all so suddenly, had shot up to fill the world for him.

Fading light from the Green Park just touched Mary's face, where she stood. She was a school-teacher, thirty years old. Life had buffeted her: hard contacts with the real world had left upon her their permanent marks, traced lines not to be eradicated beside these fine eyes. This woman's first youth, her April bloom, was gone forever. But to this man on the hearthside, her presence, her nearness, were charged now with an intense power over depths in him which would stir to no fleshly prettiness.

He had her secret now. He knew her, a Woman revealed. And, standing and looking at her over the darkening room, he was mysteriously shaken with a profound emotion.

This was his best old friend, this was the being he admired most upon earth. She was his dearest comrade, his work-fellow and his playmate, his human free and equal. She had a mind as good as his, a spirit whose integrity he respected no less than his own; hands that were capable and feet that she stood upon, and did not depend. She had an honor that was not woman's honor, a virtue and character that had no part with the business of sex. There was no competence a man had that this woman did not have: she was as versatile and thoughtful and fearless and free as the best of them. And, through and beyond all this, there was the discovered marvel, that she had tilled and kept sweet the garden of her womanhood. Underlying her rich human worthiness, as the mothering earth lies under a tree, there was the treasure he had hardly glimpsed, this store of her secret tenderness.

So it was that Charles Garrott spoke up suddenly, with a kind of huskiness:—

"No, there's only one thing to talk of now. You will have to hear my story."

The grammar-school teacher did not move. The twilit sitting-room was stiller than a church. The young man went toward her on feet not now to be stopped.

"But not from the beginning—no. That doesn't matter. It's the ending—I have waited to talk with you about."

He stood now by the hard-worked little desk, an elbow rested on the top; he looked down at the bent familiar head, the thick crown of feminine fair hair. Just so, he had stood and looked on that other day, when she had written upon his heart what freedom meant to her.

"I wanted to show how one man—got his education in womanhood—learned how strength is stronger for being sweet—just by coming to see and understand the moral beauty of one woman's life.... That is my story. But it isn't enough to end with."

Some of his dignity, some of his self-control, seemed abruptly to forsake the hard-pressed young man.

"You are that woman," he said, hoarsely. "You've educated me. But it isn't enough."

She, his only heroine, raised her head, gave him one look from under her arched brows; a strange look, that might have said good-bye to the perfect friendship he had forever changed now. And he saw in the dusk that her face was very pale.

"You've supposed I want nothing for myself. I am here asking for everything...."

Her lashes fell. He was so close to her now that, just by putting out his arm a little, he could have taken one of the small hands on the desk-leaf. So he did put out his arm thus. Her hand, possessed, was cold as ice; but it was not withdrawn. No, Mary's hand seemed to stay and cling, like a hand come Home.

And now he heard her voice, as tender as a mother's:—

"Ah, have I anything to give, do you think—that hasn't been given? What sort of ending do you want?"

So Charles told her then what sort of ending he wanted. And that, and no other, was the sort of ending he had.