THE GREAT GOD SUCCESS

“Hum—I thought Yale men went into something commercial; law or banking or railroads. ‘Leave hope of fortune behind, ye who enter here’ is over the door of this profession.”

“I haven’t the money-making instinct.”

“We pay fifteen dollars a week at the start.”

“Couldn’t you make it twenty?”

The Managing Editor of the News-Record turned slowly in his chair until his broad chest was full-front toward the young candidate for the staff. He lowered his florid face slowly until his double chin swelled out over his low “stick-up” collar. Then he gradually raised his eyelids until his amused blue eyes were looking over the tops of his glasses, straight into Howard’s eyes.

“Why?” he asked. “Why should we?”

Howard’s grey eyes showed embarrassment and he flushed to the line of his black hair which was so smoothly parted in the middle. “Well—you see—the fact is—I need twenty a week. My expenses are arranged on that scale. I’m not clever at money matters. I’m afraid I’d get in a mess with only fifteen.”

“My dear young man,” said Mr. King, “I started here at fifteen dollars a week. And I had a wife; and the first baby was coming.”

“Yes, but your wife was an energetic woman. She stood right beside you and worked too. Now I have only myself.”

Mr. King raised his eyebrows and became a rosier red. He was evidently preparing to rebuke this audacious intrusion into his private affairs by a stranger whose card had been handed to him not ten minutes before. But Howard’s tone and manner were simple and sincere. And they happened to bring into Mr. King’s mind a rush of memories of his youth and his wife. She had married him on faith. They had come to New York fifteen years before, he to get a place as reporter on the News-Record, she to start a boarding-house; he doubting and trembling, she with courage and confidence for two. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and opened the book of memory at the place where the leaves most easily fell apart:

He is coming home at one in the morning, worn out, sick at heart from the day’s buffetings. As he puts his key into the latch, the door opens. There stands a handsome girl; her face is flushed; her eyes are bright; her lips are held up for him to kiss; she shows no trace of a day that began hours before his and has been a succession of exasperations and humiliations against which her sensitive nature, trained in the home of her father, a distinguished up-the-state Judge, gives her no protection, “Victory,” she whispers, her arms about his neck and her head upon his coat collar. “Victory! We are seventy-two cents ahead on the week, and everything paid up!”

Mr. King opened his eyes—they had been closed less than five seconds. “Well, let it be twenty—though just why I’m sure I don’t know. And we’ll give you a four weeks’ trial. When will you begin?”

“Now,” answered the young man, glancing about the room. “And I shall try to show that I appreciate your consideration, whether I deserve it or not.”

It was a large bare room, low of ceiling. Across one end were five windows overlooking from a great height the tempest that rages about the City Hall day and night with few lulls and no pauses. Mr. King’s roll-top desk was at the first window. Under each of the other windows was a broad flat table desk—for copy-readers. At the farthest of these sat the City Editor—thin, precise-looking, with yellow skin, hollow cheeks, ragged grey-brown moustache, ragged scant grey-brown hair and dark brown eyes. He looked nervously tired and, because brown was his prevailing shade, dusty. He rose as Mr. King came with young Howard.

“Here, Mr. Bowring, is a young man from Yale. He wishes you to teach him how to write. Mr. Howard, Mr. Bowring. I hope you gentlemen will get on comfortably together.”

Mr. King went back to his desk. Mr. Bowring and Howard looked each at the other. Mr. Bowring smiled, with good-humour, without cordiality. “Let me see, where shall we put you?” And his glance wandered along the rows of sloping table-desks—those nearer the windows lighted by daylight; those farther away, by electric lamps. Even on that cool, breezy August afternoon the sunlight and fresh air did not penetrate far into the room.

“Do you see the young man with the beautiful fair moustache,” said Mr. Bowring, “toiling away in his shirt-sleeves—there?”

“Near the railing at the entrance?”

“Precisely. I think I will put you next him.” Mr. Bowring touched a button on his desk and presently an office boy—a mop of auburn curls, a pert face and gangling legs in knickerbockers—hurried up with a “Yes, Sir?”

“Please tell Mr. Kittredge that I would like to speak to him and—please scrape your feet along the floor as little as possible.”

The boy smiled, walking away less as if he were trying to terrorize park pedestrians by a rush on roller skates. Kittredge and Howard were made acquainted and went toward their desks together. “A few moments—if you will excuse me—and I’m done,” said Kittredge motioning Howard into the adjoining chair as he sat and at once bent over his work.

Howard watched him with interest, admiration and envy. The reporter was perhaps twenty-five years old—fair of hair, fair of skin, goodlooking in a pretty way. His expression was keen and experienced yet too self-complacent to be highly intelligent. He was rapidly covering sheet after sheet of soft white paper with bold, loose hand-writing. Howard noticed that at the end of each sentence he made a little cross with a circle about it, and that he began each paragraph with a paragraph sign. Presently he scrawled a big double cross in the centre of the sheet under the last line of writing and gathered up his sheets in the numbered order. “Done, thank God,” he said. “And I hope they won’t butcher it.”

“Do you send it to be put in type?” asked Howard.

“No,” Kittredge answered with a faint smile. “I hand it in to Mr. Bowring—the City Editor, you know. And when the copyreaders come at six, it will be turned over to one of them. He reads it, cuts it down if necessary, and writes headlines for it. Then it goes upstairs to the composing room—see the box, the little dumb-waiter, over there in the wall?—well, it goes up by that to the floor above where they set the type and make up the forms.”

“I’m a complete ignoramus,” said Howard, “I hope you’ll not mind my trying to find out things. I hope I shall not bore you.”

“Glad to help you, I’m sure. I had to go through this two years ago when I came here from Princeton.”

Kittredge “turned in” his copy and returned to his seat beside Howard.

“What were you writing about, if I may ask?” inquired Howard.

“About some snakes that came this morning in a ‘tramp’ from South America. One of them, a boa constrictor, got loose and coiled around a windlass. The cook was passing and it caught him. He fainted with fright and the beast squeezed him to death. It’s a fine story—lots of amusing and dramatic details. I wrote it for a column and I think they won’t cut it. I hope not, anyhow. I need the money.”

“You are paid by the column?”

“Yes. I’m on space—what they call a space writer. If a man is of any account here they gradually raise him to twenty-five dollars a week and then put him on space. That means that he will make anywhere from forty to a hundred a week, or perhaps more at times. The average for the best is about eighty.”

“Eighty dollars a week,” thought Howard. “Fifty-two times eighty is forty-one hundred and sixty. Four thousand a year, counting out two weeks for vacation.” To Howard it seemed wealth at the limit of imagination. If he could make so much as that!—he who had grave doubts whether, no matter how hard he worked, he would ever wrench a living from the world.

Just then a seedy young man with red hair and a red beard came through the gate in the railing, nodded to Kittredge and went to a desk well up toward the daylight end of the room.

“That’s the best of ‘em all,” said Kittredge in a low tone. “His name is Sewell. He’s a Harvard man—Harvard and Heidelberg. But drink! Ye gods, how he does drink! His wife died last Christmas—practically starvation. Sewell disappeared—frightful bust. A month afterward they found him under an assumed name over on Blackwell’s Island, doing three months for disorderly conduct. He wrote a Christmas carol while his wife was dying. It began “Merrily over the Snow” and went on about light hearts and youth and joy and all that—you know, the usual thing. When he got the money, she didn’t need it or anything else in her nice quiet grave over in Long Island City. So he ‘blew in’ the money on a wake.”

Sewell was coming toward them. Kittredge called out: “Was it a good story, Sam?”

“Simply great! You ought to have seen the room. Only the bed and the cook-stove and a few dishes on a shelf—everything else gone to the pawnshop. The man must have killed the children first. They lay side by side on the bed, each with its hands folded on its chest—suppose the mother did that; and each little throat was cut from ear to ear—suppose the father did that. Then he dipped his paint brush in the blood and daubed on the wall in big scrawling letters: ‘There is no God!’ Then he took his wife in his arms, stabbed her to the heart and cut his own throat. And there they lay, his arms about her, his cheek against hers, dead. It was murder as a fine art. Gad, I wish I could write.”

Kittredge introduced Howard—“a Yale man—just came on the paper.”

“Entering the profession? Well, they say of the other professions that there is always room at the top. Journalism is just the reverse. The room is all at the bottom—easy to enter, hard to achieve, impossible to leave. It is all bottom, no top.” Sewell nodded, smiled attractively in spite of his swollen face and his unsightly teeth, and went back to his work.

“He’s sober,” said Kittredge when he was out of hearing, “so his story is pretty sure to be the talk of Park Row tomorrow.”

Howard was astonished at the cheerful, businesslike point of view of these two educated and apparently civilised young men as to the tragedies of life. He had shuddered at Kittredge’s story of the man squeezed to death by the snake. Sewell’s story, so graphically outlined, filled him with horror, made it a struggle for him to conceal his feelings.

“I suppose you must see a lot of frightful things,” he suggested.

“That’s our business. You soon get used to it, just as a doctor does. You learn to look at life from the purely professional standpoint. Of course you must feel in order to write. But you must not feel so keenly that you can’t write. You have to remember always that you’re not there to cheer or sympathise or have emotions, but only to report, to record. You tell what your eyes see. You’ll soon get so that you can and will make good stories out of your own calamaties.”

“Is that a portrait of the editor?” asked Howard, pointing to a grimed oil-painting, the only relief to the stretch of cracked and streaked white wall except a few ragged maps.

“That—oh, that is old man Stone—the ‘great condenser.’ He’s there for a double purpose, as an example of what a journalist should be and as a warning of what a journalist comes to. After twenty years of fine work at crowding more news in good English into one column than any other editor could get in bad English into four columns, he was discharged for drunkenness. Soon afterwards he walked off the end of a dock one night in a fog. At least it was said that there was a fog and that he was drunk. I have my doubts.”

“Cheerful! I have not been in the profession an hour but I have already learned something very valuable.”

“What’s that?” asked Kittredge, “that it’s a good profession to get out of?”

“No. But that bad habits will not help a man to a career in journalism any more than in any other profession.”

“Career?” smiled Kittredge, resenting Howard’s good-humoured irony and putting on a supercilious look that brought out more strongly the insignificance of his face. “Journalism is not a career. It is either a school or a cemetery. A man may use it as a stepping-stone to something else. But if he sticks to it, he finds himself an old man, dead and done for to all intents and purposes years before he’s buried.”

“I wonder if it doesn’t attract a great many men who have a little talent and fancy that they have much. I wonder if it does not disappoint their vanity rather than their merit.”

“That sounds well,” replied Kittredge, “and there’s some truth in it. But, believe me, journalism is the dragon that demands the annual sacrifice of youth. It will have only youth. Why am I here? Why are you here? Because we are young, have a fresh, a new point of view. As soon as we get a little older, we shall be stale and, though still young in years, we must step aside for young fellows with new ideas and a new point of view.”

“But why should not one have always new ideas, always a new point of view? Why should one expect to escape the penalties of stagnation in journalism when one can’t escape them in any other profession?”

“But who has new ideas all the time? The average successful man has at most one idea and makes a whole career out of it. Then there are the temptations.”

“How do you mean?”

Kittredge flushed slightly and answered in a more serious tone:

“We must work while others amuse themselves or sleep. We must sleep while others are at work. That throws us out of touch with the whole world of respectability and regularity. When we get done at night, wrought up by the afternoon and evening of this gambling with our brains and nerves as the stake, what is open to us?”

“That is true,” said Howard. “There are the all-night saloons and—the like.”

“And if we wish society, what society is open to us? What sort of young women are waiting to entertain us at one, two, three o’clock in the morning? Why, I have not made a call in a year. And I have not seen a respectable girl of my acquaintance in at least that time, except once or twice when I happened to have assignments that took me near Fifth Avenue in the afternoon.”

“Mr. Kittredge, Mr. Bowring wishes to speak to you,” an office boy said and Kittredge rose. As he went, he put his hand on Howard’s shoulder and said: “No, I am getting out of it as fast as ever I can. I’m writing books.”

“Kittredge,” thought Howard, “I wonder, is this Henry Jennings Kittredge, whose stories are on all the news stands?” He saw an envelope on the floor at his feet. The address was “Henry Jennings Kittredge, Esq.”

When Kittredge came back for his coat, Howard said in a tone of frank admiration: “Why, I didn’t know you were the Kittredge that everybody is talking about. You certainly have no cause for complaint.”

Kittredge shrugged his shoulders. “At fifteen cents a copy, I have to sell ten thousand copies before I get enough to live on for four months. And you’d be surprised how much reputation and how little money a man can make out of a book. Don’t be distressed because they keep you here with nothing to do but wonder how you’ll have the courage to face the cashier on pay day. It’s the system. Your chance will come.”

It was three days before Howard had a chance. On a Sunday afternoon the Assistant City Editor who was in charge of the City Desk for the day sent him up to the Park to write a descriptive story of the crowds. “Try to get a new point of view,” he said, “and let yourself loose. There’s usually plenty of room in Monday’s paper.”

Howard wandered through the Central Park for two hours, struggling for the “new point of view” of the crowds he saw there—these monotonous millions, he thought, lazily drinking at a vast trough of country air in the heart of the city. He planned an article carefully as he dined alone at the Casino. He went down to the office early and wrote diligently—about two thousand words. When he had finished, the Night City Editor told him that he might go as there would be nothing more that night.

He was in the street at seven the next morning. As he walked along with a News-Record, bought at the first news-stand, he searched every page: first, the larger “heads”—such a long story would call for a “big head;” then the smaller “heads”—they may have been crowded and have had to cut it down; then the single-line “heads”—surely they found a “stickful” or so worth printing.

At last he found it. A dozen items in the smallest type, agate, were grouped under the general heading “City Jottings” at the end of an inside column of an inside page. The first of these City Jottings was two lines in length:

“The millions were in the Central Park yesterday, lazily drinking at that vast trough of country air in the heart of the city.”

As he entered the office Howard looked appealingly and apologetically at the boy on guard at the railing and braced himself to receive the sneering frown of the City Editor and to bear the covert smiles of his fellow reporters. But he soon saw that no one had observed his mighty spring for a foothold and his ludicrous miss and fall.

“Had anything in yet?” Kittredge inquired casually, late in the afternoon.

“I wrote a column and a half yesterday and I found two lines among the City Jottings,” replied Howard, reddening but laughing.

“The first story I wrote was cut to three lines but they got a libel suit on it.”

II. — THE CITY EDITOR RECONSIDERS.

At the end of six weeks, the City Editor called Howard up to the desk and asked him to seat himself. He talked in a low tone so that the Assistant City Editor, reading the newspapers at a nearby desk, could not hear.

“We like you, Mr. Howard.” Mr. Bowring spoke slowly and with a carefulness in selecting words that indicated embarrassment. “And we have been impressed by your earnestness. But we greatly fear that you are not fitted for this profession. You write well enough, but you do not seem to get the newspaper—the news—idea. So we feel that in justice to you and to ourselves we ought to let you know where you stand. If you wish, we shall be glad to have you remain with us two weeks longer. Meanwhile you can be looking about you. I am certain that you will succeed somewhere, in some line, sooner or later. But I think that the newspaper profession is a waste of your time.”

Howard had expected this. Failure after failure, his articles thrown away or rewritten by the copyreaders, had prepared him for the blow. Yet it crushed him for the moment. His voice was not steady as he replied:

“No doubt you are right. Thank you for taking the trouble to study my case and tell me so soon.”

“Don’t hesitate to stay on for the two weeks,” Mr. Bowring continued. “We can make you useful to us. And you can look about to much better advantage than if you were out of a place.”

“I’ll stay the two weeks,” Howard said, “unless I find something sooner.”

“Don’t be more discouraged than you can help,” said Mr. Bowring. “You may be very grateful before long for finding out so early what many of us—I myself, I fear—find out after years and—when it is too late.”

Always that note of despair; always that pointing to the motto over the door of the profession: “Abandon hope, ye who enter here.” What was the explanation? Were these men right? Was he wrong in thinking that journalism offered the most splendid of careers—the development of the mind and the character; the sharpening of all the faculties; the service of truth and right and human betterment, in daily combat with injustice and error and falsehood; the arousing and stimulating of the drowsy minds of the masses of mankind?

Howard looked about at the men who held on where he was slipping. “Can it be,” he thought, “that I cannot survive in a profession where the poorest are so poor in intellect and equipment? Why am I so dull that I cannot catch the trick?”

He set himself to study newspapers, reading them line by line, noting the modes of presenting facts, the arrangement of headlines, the order in which the editors put the several hundred items before the eyes of the reader—what they displayed on each page and why; how they apportioned the space. With the energy of unconquerable resolution he applied himself to solving for himself the puzzle of the press—the science and art of catching the eye and holding the attention of the hurrying, impatient public.

He learned much. He began to develop the news-instinct, that subtle instant realisation of what is interesting and what is not interesting to the public mind. But the time was short; a sense of impending calamity and the lack of self-confidence natural to inexperience made it impossible for him effectively to use his new knowledge in the few small opportunities which Mr. Bowring gave him. With only six days of his two weeks left, he had succeeded in getting into the paper not a single item of a length greater than two sticks. He slept little; he despaired not at all; but he was heart-sick and, as he lay in his bed in the little hall-room of the furnished-room house, he often envied women the relief of tears. What he endured will be appreciated only by those who have been bred in sheltered homes; who have abruptly and alone struck out for themselves in the ocean of a great city without a single lesson in swimming; who have felt themselves seized from below and dragged downward toward the deep-lying feeding-grounds of Poverty and Failure.

“Buck up, old man,” said Kittredge to whom he told his bad news after several days of hesitation and after Kittredge had shown him that he strongly suspected it. “Don’t mind old Bowring. You’re sure to get on, and, if you insist upon the folly, in this profession. I’ll give you a note to Montgomery—he’s City Editor over at the World-shop—and he’ll take you on. In some ways you will do better there. You’ll rise faster, get a wider experience, make more money. In fact, this shop has only one advantage. It does give a man peace of mind. It’s more like a club than an office. But in a sense that is a drawback. I’ll give you a note to-night. You will be at work over there to-morrow.”

“I think I’ll wait a few days,” said Howard, his tone corresponding to the look in his eyes and the compression of his resolute mouth.

The next day but one Mr. Bowring called him up to the City Desk and gave him a newspaper-clipping which read:

“Bald Peak, September 29—Willie Dent, the three-year-old baby
of John Dent, a farmer living two miles from here, strayed away
into the mountains yesterday and has not been seen since. His
dog, a cur, went with him. Several hundred men are out searching.
It has been storming, and the mountains are full of bears
and wild cats.”

“Yes, I saw this in the Herald,” said Howard.

“Will you take the train that leaves at eleven tonight and get us the story—if it is not a ‘fake,’ as I strongly suspect. Telegraph your story if there is not time for you to get back here by nine to-morrow night.”

“Of course it’s a fake, or at least a wild exaggeration,” thought Howard as he turned away. “If Bowring had not been all but sure there was nothing in it, he would never have given it to me.”

He was not well, his sleepless nights having begun to tell even upon his powerful constitution. The rest of that afternoon and all of a night without sleep in the Pullman he was in a depth of despond. He had been in the habit of getting much comfort out of an observation his father had made to him just before he died: “Remember that ninety per cent of these fourteen hundred million human beings are uncertain where to-morrow’s food is to come from. Be prudent but never be afraid.” But just then he could get no consolation out of this maxim of grim cheer. He seemed to himself incompetent and useless, a predestined failure. “What is to become of me?” he kept repeating, his heart like lead and his mind fumbling about in a confused darkness.

At Bald Peak he was somewhat revived by the cold mountain air of the early morning. As he alighted upon the station platform he spoke to the baggage-master standing in front of the steps.

“Was the little boy of a man named Dent lost in the mountains near here?”

“Yes—three days ago,” replied the baggage-man.

“Have they found him yet?”

“No—nor never will alive—that’s my opinion.”

Howard asked for the nearest livery-stable and within twenty minutes was on his way to Dent’s farm. His driver knew all about the lost child. Two hundred men were still searching. “And Mrs. Dent, she’s been sittin’ by the window, list’nin’ day and night. She won’t speak nor eat and she ain’t shed a tear. It was her only child. The men come in sayin’ it ain’t no use to hunt any more, an’ they look at her an’ out they goes ag’in.”

Soon the driver pointed to a cottage near the road. The gate was open; the grass and the flower-beds were trampled into a morass. The door was thrown wide and several women were standing about the threshold. At the window within view of the road and the mountains sat the mother—a young woman with large brown eyes, and clear-cut features, refined, beautified, exalted by suffering. Her look was that of one listening for a faint, far away sound upon which hangs the turn of the balances to joy or to despair.

That morning two of the searchers went to the northeast into the dense and tangled swamp woods between Bald Peak and Cloudy Peak—the wildest wilderness in the mountains. The light barely penetrates the foliage on the brightest days. The ground is rough, sometimes precipitous, closely covered with bushes and tangled creepers.

The two explorers, almost lost themselves, came at last to the edge of a swamp surrounded by cedars. They half-crawled, half-climbed through the low trees and festooning creepers to the edge of a clear bit of open, firm ground.

In the middle was a cedar tree. Under it, seated upon the ground, was the lost boy. His bare, brown legs, torn and bleeding, were stretched straight in front of him. His bare feet were bruised and cut. His gingham dress was torn and wet and stained. His small hands were smears of dirt and blood. He was playing with a tin can. He had put a stone into it and was making a great rattling. The dog was running to and fro, apparently enjoying the noise. The little boy’s face was tear-stained and his eyes were swollen. But he was not crying just then and laughter lurked in his thin, fever-flushed face.

As the men came into view, the dog began to bark angrily, but the boy looked a solemn welcome.

“Want mamma,” he said. “I’se hungry.”

One of the men picked him up—the gingham dress was saturated.

“You’re hungry?” asked the man, his voice choking.

“Yes. An’ I’se so wet. It wained and wained.” Then the child began to sob. “It was dark,” he whispered, “an’ cold. I want my mamma.”

It was an hour’s tedious journey back to Dent’s by the shortest route. At the top of the hill those near the cottage saw the boy in the arms of the man who had found him. They shouted and the mother sprang out of the house and came running, stumbling down the path to the gate. She caught at the gate-post and stood there, laughing, screaming, sobbing.

“Baby! Baby!” she called.

The little boy turned his head and stretched out his thin, blood-stained arms. She ran toward him and snatched him from the young farmer.

“Hungry, mamma,” he sobbed, hiding his face on her shoulder.

Howard wrote his story on the train, going down to New York. It was a straightforward chronicle of just what he had seen and heard. He began at the beginning—the little mountain home, the family of three, the disappearance of the child. He described the perils of the mountains, the storm, the search, the wait, the listening mother, scene by scene, ending with mother and child together again and the dog racing around them, with wagging tail and hanging tongue. He wrote swiftly, making no changes, without a trace of his usual self-consciousness in composition. When he had done he went into the restaurant car and dined almost gaily. He felt that he had failed again. How could he hope to tell such a story? But he was not despondent. He was still under the spell of that intense human drama with its climax of joy. His own concerns seemed secondary, of no consequence.

He reached the office at half-past nine, handed in his “copy” and went away. He was in bed at half-past ten and was at once asleep. At eleven the next morning a knocking awakened him from a sound sleep that had restored and refreshed him. “A messenger from the office,” was called through the door in answer to his inquiry. He took the note from the boy and tore it open:

“My dear Mr. Howard: Thank you for the splendid story you gave us last night. It is one of the best, if not the best, we have had the pleasure of publishing in years. Your salary has been raised to twenty-five dollars a week.

“Congratulations. You have ‘caught on’ at last. I’m glad to take back what I said the other day.

“HENRY C. BOWRING.”

III. — A PARK ROW CELEBRITY.

Kittredge was the first to congratulate him when he reached the office. “Everybody is talking about your story,” he said. “I must say I was surprised when I read it. I had begun to fear that you would never catch the trick—for, with most of us writing is only a trick. But now I see that you are a born writer. Your future is in your own hands.”

“You think I can learn to write?”

“That is the sane way to put it. Yes, I know that you can. If you’ll only not be satisfied with the results that come easy, you will make a reputation. Not a mere Park Row reputation, but the real thing.”

Howard got flattery enough in the next few days to turn a stronger head than was his at twenty-two. But a few partial failures within a fortnight sobered him and steadied him. His natural good sense made him take himself in hand. He saw that his success had been to a great extent a happy accident; that to repeat it, to improve upon it he must study life, study the art of expression. He must keep his senses open to impression. He must work at style, enlarge his vocabulary, learn the use of words, the effect of varying combinations of words both as to sound and as to meaning. “I must learn to write for the people,” he thought, “and that means to write the most difficult of all styles.”

He was, then and always, one of those who like others and are liked by them, yet never seek company and so are left to themselves. As he had no money to spare and a deep aversion to debt, he was not tempted into joining in the time-wasting dissipations that were now open to him. He worked hard at his profession and, when he left the office, usually went direct to his rooms to read until far into the morning. He was often busy sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. His day at reporting was long—from noon until midnight, and frequently until three in the morning. But the work was far different from the grind which is the lot of the young men striving in other professions or in business. It was the most fascinating work imaginable for an intelligent, thirsty mind—the study of human nature under stress of the great emotions.

His mode of thought and his style made Mr. Bowring and Mr. King give him much of this particular kind of reporting. So he was always observing love, hate, jealousy, revenge, greed. He saw these passions in action in the lives of people of all kinds and conditions. And he saw little else. The reporter is a historian. And history is, as Gibbon says, for the most part “a record of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

For many a man this has been a ruinous, one-sided development. Howard was saved by his extremely intelligent, sympathetic point of view. He saw the whole of each character, each conflict that he was sent to study. If the point of the story was the good side of human nature—some act of generosity or self-sacrifice—he did not exaggerate it into godlike heroism but adjusted it in its proper prospective by bringing out its human quality and its human surroundings. If the main point was violence or sordidness or baseness, he saw the characteristics which relieved and partially redeemed it. His news-reports were accounts of the doings not of angels or devils but of human beings, accounts written from a thoroughly human standpoint.

Here lay the cause of his success. In all his better stories—for he often wrote poor ones—there was the atmosphere of sincerity, of realism, the marks of an acute observer, without prejudice and with a justifiable leaning toward a belief in the fundamental worth of humanity. Where others were cynical he was just. Where others were sentimental, he had sincere, healthful sentiment. Where others were hysterical, he calmly and accurately described, permitting the tragedy to reveal itself instead of burying it beneath high-heaped adjectives. Simplicity of style was his aim and he was never more delighted by any compliment than by one from the chief political reporter.

“That story of yours this morning,” said this reporter whose lack as a writer was more than compensated by his ability to get intimately acquainted with public men, “reads as if a child might have written it. I don’t see how you get such effects without any style at all. You just let your story tell itself.”

“Well, you see,” replied Howard, “I am writing for the masses, and fine writing would be wasted upon them.”

“You’re right,” said Jackman, “we don’t need literature on this paper—long words, high-sounding phrases and all that sort of thing. What we want is just plain, simple English that goes straight to the point.”

“Like Shakespeare’s and Bunyan’s,” suggested Kittredge with a grin.

“Shakespeare? Fudge!” scoffed Jackman. “Why he couldn’t have made a living as a space-writer on a New York newspaper.”

“No, I don’t think he would have staid long in Park Row,” replied Kittredge with a subtlety of meaning that escaped Jackman.

A few days before New Year’s the Managing Editor looked up and smiled as Howard was passing his desk.

“How goes it?” he asked.

“Oh, not so badly,” Howard answered, “but I am a good deal depressed at times.”

“Depressed? Nonsense! You’ve got everything—youth, health and freedom. And by the way, you are going on space the first of the year. Our rule is a year on salary before space. But we felt that it was about time to strengthen the rule by making an exception.”

Howard stammered thanks and went away. This piece of news, dropped apparently so carelessly by Mr. King, meant a revolution in fortune for him. It was the transition from close calculation on twenty-five dollars a week to wealth beyond his most fanciful dreams of six months ago. Not having the money-getting instinct and being one of those who compare their work with the best instead of with the inferior, Howard never felt that he was “entitled to a living.” He had a lively sense of gratitude for the money return for his services which prudence presently taught him to conceal.

“Space” meant to him eighty dollars a week at least—circumstances of ease. So vast a sum did it seem that he began to consider the problem of investment. “I have been not badly off on twenty-five dollars a week,” he thought. “With, well, say forty dollars a week I shall be able to satisfy all my wants. I can save at least forty a week and that will mean an independence with a small income by the time I am thirty-four.”

But—a year after he was put “on space” he was still just about even with his debts. He seemed to himself to be living no better and it was only by careful counting-up that he could see how that dream of independence had eluded him. A more extensive wardrobe, a little better food, a more comfortable suite of rooms, an occasional dinner to some friends, loans to broken-down reporters, and the mysteriously vanished two thousand dollars was accounted for.

Howard tried to retrench, devised small ingenious schemes for saving money, lectured himself severely and frequently for thus trifling away his chance to be a free man. But all in vain. He remained poor; and, whenever he gave the matter thought, which was not often, gloomy forebodings as to the future oppressed him. “I shall find myself old,” he thought, “with nothing accomplished, with nothing laid by. I shall be an old drudge.” He understood the pessimistic tone of his profession. All about him were men like himself—leading this gambler’s life of feverish excitement and evanescent achievement, earning comfortable incomes and saving nothing, looking forward to the inevitable time of failing freshness and shattered nerves and declining income.

He spasmodically tried to write stories for the magazines, contrived plots for novels and plays, wrote first chapters, first scenes of first acts. But the exactions of newspaper life, the impossibility of continuous effort at any one piece of work and his natural inertia—he was inert but neither idle nor lazy—combined to make futile his efforts to emancipate himself from hand-to-mouth journalism.

He had been four years a reporter and was almost twenty-six years old. He was known throughout his profession in New York, although he had never signed an article. One remarkable “human interest” story after another had forced the knowledge of his abilities upon the reporters and editors of other newspapers. And he was spoken of as one of the best and in some respects the best “all round reporter” in the city. This meant that he was capable to any emergency—that, whatever the subject, he could write an accurate, graphic, consecutive and sustained story and could get it into the editor’s hands quickly.

Indeed he possessed facility to the perilous degree. What others achieved only after long toil, he achieved without effort. This was due chiefly to the fact that he never relaxed but was at all times the journalist, reading voraciously newspapers, magazines and the best books, and using what he read; observing constantly and ever trying to see something that would make “good copy”; turning over phrases in his mind to test the value of words both as to sound and as to meaning. He was an incessantly active man. His great weakness was the common weakness—failure to concentrate. In Park Row they regarded him as a brilliant success. Brilliant he was. But a success he was not. He knew that he was a brilliant failure—and not very brilliant.

“Why is it?” he asked himself again and again in periods of reaction from the nervous strain of some exciting experience. “Shall I never seize any of these chances that are always thrusting themselves at me? Shall I always act like a Neapolitan beggar? Will the stimulus to ambition never come?”

IV. — IN THE EDGE OF BOHEMIA.

Howard lived in Washington Square, South. He had gone to a “furnished-room house” there because it was cheap. He staid because he was comfortable and was without a motive for moving.

It was the centre of the most varied life in New York. To the north lay fashion and wealth, to the east and west, respectability and moderate means; to the south, poverty and squalor, vice and crime. All could be seen and heard from the windows of his sitting room. In the evenings toward spring he looked out upon a panorama of the human race such as is presented by no other city in the world and by no other part of that city. Within view were Americans of all kinds, French and Germans, Italians and Austrians, Spaniards and Moors, Scandinavians and negroes, born New Yorkers and born citizens of most of the capitals of civilisation and semi-barbarism. There were actresses, dancers, shop girls, cocottes; touts, thieves, confidence-men, mission workers; artists and students from the musty University building, tramps and drunkards from the “barrel-houses” and “stale-beer shops;” and, across the square to the north, representatives of New York’s oldest and most noted families. To the west were apartment houses whence stiff, prim bookkeepers, floor-walkers, clerks and small shop-keepers issued with their families on Sundays, bound for church. There were other apartment houses—the most of them to the south—whence in the midnight hours came slattern servants and reckless looking girls in loose wrappers and high-heeled slippers, pitcher in hand, bound for the nearest saloon.

After dusk from early spring until late fall a multitude of interesting sounds mingled with the roar of the elevated trains to the west and south and the rumble of carriages in “the Avenue” to the north. Howard, reading or writing at his window on his leisure days, heard the young men and young women laughing and shouting and making love under the trees where the Washington Arch glistened in the twilight. Later came the songs—“I want you, my honey, yes I do,” or “Lu, Lu, how I love my Lu!”, or some other of the current concert-hall jingles. Many figures could be seen flitting about in the shadows. Usually these figures were in pairs; usually one was in white; usually at her waist-line there was a black belt that continued on until it was lost in the other and darker figure.

Scraps of a score of languages—curses, jests, terms of endearment—would float up to him. Then came the hours of comparative silence, with the city breathing softly and regularly, with the moon hanging low and the pale arch rising above the dark trees like a giant ghost. There would be an occasional drunken shout or shriek; a riotous roar of song from some staggering reveller making company for himself on the journey home; the heavy step of the policeman. Or perhaps the only sound to disturb the city’s sleep would be that soft tread, timid as a mouse’s, stealthy as a jackal’s—the tread of a lonely woman with draggled silk skirt and painted cheeks and eyes burning into the darkness, and a heart as bitter and as sad as no money, no home, no friends, no hope can make it.

Once he threw a silver dollar from his window to the sidewalk well in front of her. She did not see it flash downward but she heard it ring upon the walk. She rushed forward and twice kicked it away from her in her frenzy to get it. When her bare hand—or was it a claw?—at last closed upon it, she gave a low scream, looked slyly and fearfully about, then ran as if death were at her heels.

Soon after Howard was put “on space” he took the best suite of rooms in the house. It was a strange company which Mrs. Sands had gathered under her roof. Except Howard there was no one, not even Mrs. Sands herself, who did not have so much past that there was little left for future. Indeed, perhaps none of these storm-tossed or wrecked human craft had had more of a past than Mrs. Sands. There was no mistaking the significance of those deep furrows filled with powder and plastered with paint, those few hairs tinted and frizzed. But like all persons with real pasts Mrs. Sands and her lodgers kept the veil tightly drawn. They confessed to no yesterdays and they did not dare think of to-morrow. They were incuriously awaiting the impulse which was sure to come, sure to thrust them on downward.

A new lodger at Mrs. Sand’s usually took the best rooms that were to be had. Then, sometimes slowly, sometimes swiftly, came the retreat upward until a cubby-hole under the eaves was reached. Finally came precipitate and baggageless departure, often with a week or two of lodging unpaid. The next pause, if pause there was, would be still nearer the river-bed or the Morgue.

One morning when he had been living in Washington Square, South, about—three years, Howard was dressing hurriedly, the door of his sitting-room accidentally ajar. Through the crack he saw some one stooping over the serving tray which he had himself put outside his door when he had finished breakfast. He looked more closely. It was “the clergyman” from up under the eaves—an unfrocked priest, thin to emaciation, misery written upon his face even more deeply than weakness. He hastily bundled the bones of two chops and a bit of bread into a stained and torn handkerchief, and sprang away up the stairs toward his little hole at the roof.

Howard was in a hurry and so put off for the time action upon the natural impulse. When he came back at midnight, there was soon a knock at his door. He opened it and invited in the man at the threshold—a tall, strongly built, erect German, with a dissipated handsome face, heavily scarred from university duels.

“Pardon me for disturbing you,” said the German. His speech, his tone, his manner, left no doubt as to his breeding though they raised the gravest doubts as to his being willing to give a true account of why he had become a tenant in that lodging house.

“Will you have a cigarette and some whiskey?” inquired Howard.

The German’s glance lit and lingered upon the bottle of Scotch on the table. “Concentrated, double-distilled friendship,” said he as he poured out his drink.

“But a friend that drives all others away,” smiled Howard.

“I have found it of a very jealous disposition,” replied the German with a careless shrug of the shoulders and a lifting of the eyebrows. “But at least this friend has the grace to stay after it has driven the others away.”

“To stay until the last piece of silver is gone.”

“But what more does one expect of a friend? Besides, we are overlooking one friend—the one who helped our clerical fellow-lodger of the attic out of his troubles to-day.”

“His luck has turned?”

“Permanently. He shot himself this afternoon.”

“And only this morning I made up my mind to try to help him,” said Howard regretfully.

“You could not have hoped to succeed so well. His case needed something more than temporary expedient. But, to come to the point, I had a slight acquaintance with him. He left a note for me—mailed it just before he shot himself. In it he asked that I insert a personal in the Herald. Unfortunately I have not the money. I thought that you as a journalist might be able to suggest something.”

The German held out a slip of cheap writing paper on which was written: “Helen—when you see this it will be over—L.”

“A good story,” was Howard’s first thought, his news-instinct alert. And then he remembered that it was not for him to tell. “I will attend to this for you to-morrow.”

“Thank you,” said the German, helping himself to the whiskey. “Have you seen the new lodgers?”

“Those in the room behind me? Yes. I saw them at the front door as I came in.”

“They’re a queer pair—the youngest I’ve seen in this house. I’ve been wondering what tempest wrecked them on this forlorn coast so early in the voyage.”

“Why wrecked?”

“My dear sir, we are all—except you—wrecks here, all unseaworthy at least.”

“One of them was quite pretty, I thought,” said Howard, “the slender one with the black hair.”

“They are not mates. The other girl is of a different sort. She’s more used to this kind of life, at least to poverty. I fancy Miss Black-Hair looks on it as a lark. But she’ll find out the truth by the time she has mounted another story.”

“Here, to go up means to go down,” Howard said, weary of the conversation and wishing that the German would leave.

“They say that they’re sisters,” the German went on, again helping himself to the whiskey; “They say they have run away from home because of a stepmother and that they are going to earn their own living. But they won’t. They spend the nights racing about with a gang of the young wretches of this neighbourhood. They won’t be able to stand getting up early for work. And then——”

The German blew out a huge cloud of cigarette smoke, shrugged his shoulders and added: “Miss Black-Hair may get on up town presently. But I doubt it. The Tenderloin rarely recruits from down here.”

The bottle was empty and the German bowed himself out. As the night was hot, Howard opened the door a few moments afterward. At the other end of the short hall light was streaming through the open door of the room the two girls had taken. Before he could turn, there was a shadow and “Miss Black-Hair” was standing in her doorway:

“Oh,” she began, “I thought——”

Howard paused, looking at her. She was above the medium height—tall for a woman—and slender. Her loose wrapper, a little open at her round throat, clung to her, attracting attention to all the lines of her form. Her hair was indeed black, jet black, waving back from her forehead in a line of curving and beautiful irregularity. Her skin was clear and dark. There were deep circles under her eyes, making them look unnaturally large, pathetically weary. In repose her face was childish and sadly serious. When she smiled she looked older and pert, but no happier.

“I thought,” she continued with the pert, self-confident smile, “that you were my sister Nellie. I’m waiting for her.”

“You’re in early tonight,” said Howard, the circles under her eyes reminding him of what the German had told him.

“I haven’t slept much for a week,” the girl replied, “I’m nearly dead. But I won’t go to bed till Nellie comes.”

Howard was about to turn when she went on: “We agreed always to stay together. She broke it tonight. My fellow got too fresh, so I came home. She said she’d come too. That was an hour ago and she isn’t here yet.”

“Isn’t she rather young to be out alone at this time?”

Howard could hardly have told why he continued the conversation. He certainly would not, had she been less beautiful or less lonely and childish. At his remark about her sister’s youth she laughed with an expression of cunning at once amusing and pitiful.

“She’s a year older than me,” she said, “and I guess I can take care of myself. Still she hasn’t much sense. She’ll get into trouble yet. She doesn’t understand how to manage the boys when they’re too fresh.”

“But you do, I suppose?” suggested Howard.

“Indeed I do,” with a quick nod of her small graceful head, “I know what I’m about. My mother taught me a few things.”

“Didn’t she teach your sister also?”

“Miss Black-Hair” dropped her eyes and flushed a little, looking like a child caught in a lie. “Of course,” she said after a pause.

“How long have you been without your mother?”

“I’ve been away from home four months. But I saw her in the street yesterday. She didn’t see me though.”

“Then you’ve got a step-father?”

“No, I haven’t. Nellie told that to Mrs. Sands. But it’s not so. You know Nellie’s not my sister?”

“I fancied not from what you said a moment ago.”

“No, she used to be nurse girl in our family. We just say we’re sisters. I wish she’d come. I’m tired of standing. Won’t you come in?”

She went into her room, her manner a frank and simple invitation. Howard hesitated, then went just inside the door and half sat, half leaned upon the high roll of the lounge. The room was cheaply furnished, the lounge and a closed folding bed almost filling it. Upon the mantel, the bureau and the little table were a few odds and ends that stamped it a woman’s room. A street gown of thin pale-blue cloth was thrown over a rocking chair. As the girl leaned back in this chair with her face framed in the pale-blue of the gown, she looked tired and sad and beautiful and very young.

“If Nellie doesn’t look out, I’ll go away and live alone,” she said, and the accompanying unconscious look of loneliness touched Howard.

“You might go back home.”

“You don’t know my home or you wouldn’t say that. You don’t know my father.” She had got upon the subject of herself, and, once in that road she kept it with no thought of turning out. “He can’t treat me as he treats mother. Why, he goes away and stays for days. Then he comes home and quarrels with her all the time. They never both sit through a meal. One or the other flares up and leaves. He generally whipped me when he got very mad—just for spite.”

“But there’s your mother.”

“Yes. She doesn’t like my going away. But I can’t stand it. Papa wouldn’t let me go anywhere or let anybody come to see me. He says everybody’s bad. I guess he’s about right. Only he doesn’t include himself.”

“You seem to have a poor opinion of people.”

“Well, you can’t blame me.” She put on her wise look of experience and craft. “I’ve been away, living with Nellie for four months and I’ve seen no good to speak of. A girl doesn’t get a fair chance.”

“But you’ve got work?”

“Oh, yes. We both stayed down in a restaurant, Nellie’s got a place as waiter. That’s the best she could do. The man said I was good-looking and would catch trade. So he made me cashier. I get six dollars a week to Nellie’s three. But it’s a bad place. The men are always slipping notes in my hand when they give me their checks. Then the boss, he’s always bothering around.”

“But you don’t have to work hard?”

“From nine till four. We get our lunch free. I pay three dollars on the room and Nellie pays one.”

If Howard had not seen many such problems in economics before, he would have been astonished at any one even hoping to be able to get two meals a day, clothing and carfare out of two or three dollars a week. As it was, he only wondered how long a girl who had been used at least to comfort would endure this. “It’s easy for the other girl,” he thought, “because she’s used to it. But this one—” and he decided that the “trouble” would begin as soon as her clothing was worn out.

He noticed that she was pulling at the third finger of her right hand where she would have worn rings if she had had any. “You’ve had to pawn your rings?” he ventured.

She looked at him startled. “Did Nellie tell you?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, “I saw that you were missing your rings and suspected the rest.”

“Yes; that’s so. I’ve pawned all my jewelry except a bracelet. Nellie can’t get along on her three dollars. She eats too much.”

“I should think you’d rather be at home.”

“As I told you before,” she said impatiently, “anything’s better than home. Besides, I’m pretty well off. I go where I please, stay out as late as I please and have all the company I want. At home I’d have to be in bed at ten o’clock.”

There was a sound at the front door down in the darkness. The girl started from the chair, listened, then exclaimed: “There she comes now. And it’s two o’clock!”

Howard took the hint, smiled and said: “Well, good-night. I’ll see you again.”

“Good-night,” the girl answered absently.

From his room Howard heard Nellie coming up the stairs. “You’re a nice one!” came in “Miss Black-Hair’s” indignant voice, “Where have you been? Where did you and Jack go?”

The answer came in a sob—“Oh, Alice, you’ll never forgive me!”

Their door closed upon the two girls but Howard could still hear Nellie’s voice tearful, pleading. There was the sound of some one falling heavily upon the lounge, then sobs and cries of “Oh! Oh!” As Howard went into his bedroom, he could hear the voices still more plainly through the thin wall. He caught the words only once. “Miss Black-Hair,” her voice shaking with anger, exclaimed: “Nellie Baker, you are a wicked girl, I shall go away.”

V. — ALICE.

Several nights later Howard came upon Alice at the front door, where a young man was detaining her in a lingering good-bye. Another night as he was passing her room he saw her stretched upon the floor, her head supported by her elbows and an open book in front of her. She looked so childlike that Howard paused and said: “What is it—a fairy story?”

“No, it’s a love story,” she replied, just glancing at him with a faint smile and showing that she did not wish to be interrupted. The same night as he was going to bed he heard the angry voices of the two girls. A week later, toward the end of July, he found Alice sitting on the front stoop, when he came from dinner. She was obviously in the depths of the “blues.” Her eyes, the droop of the corners of her mouth, even the colour of her skin indicated anxiety and depression. She looked so forlorn that he said gently: “Wouldn’t you like to walk in the Square?”

She rose at once. “Yes, I guess so.” They crossed to the green. She was wearing the pale-blue gown and it fitted her well. Neither in the gown nor in the big hat with its coquettish flowers nodding over the brim was there much of fashion. But there was a certain distinction in her walk and her manner of wearing her clothes; and to a pretty face and a graceful form was added the charm of youth, magnetic youth.

“Do you want to walk?” she asked, lassitude in her voice.

“No, let us sit,” he said, and they went to a bench near the arch. It was twilight. The children were still romping and shouting. Many fat elderly women—mothers and grandmothers—were solemnly marching about, talking in fat, elderly voices.

“You have the blues?” asked Howard, thinking it might make her feel better to talk of her troubles. “If I were your doctor, I should prescribe a series of good cries.”

“I don’t cry,” said the girl. “Sometimes I wish I could. Nellie cries and gets over things. I feel awful inside and sick and my eyes burn. But I can’t cry.”

“You’re too young for that.”

“Oh, in some ways I’m young; again, I’m not. I hate everybody this evening.”

“What’s the matter? Has Nellie deserted you?”

“She? Not much. I had to tell her to go”—this with a joyless little laugh—“she quit work and wouldn’t behave herself. So now I’m going on alone.”

“And you won’t go home?”

“Never in the world,” she said with almost fierce energy; then some thought made her laugh in the same way as before. Howard decided that she had not told him everything about her home life, even though she had rattled on as if there were nothing to conceal. He sat watching her, she looking straight before her, her small bare hands clasped in her lap. He was pitying her keenly—this child, at once stunted and abnormally developed, this stray from one of the classes that keeps their women sheltered; and here she was adrift, without any of those resources of experience which assist the girls of the tenements.

Her features were small, sensitive, regular. Her eyes were brown with lines of reddish gold raying from the pupils. Her chin and mouth were firm enough, yet suggested weakness through the passions. Her clear skin had the glow of youth and health upon its smooth surface. She was certainly beautiful and she certainly had magnetism.

“What do you think is going to become of you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, after a deep sigh. “A girl doesn’t have a fair chance. I don’t seem to be able to have any fun without getting into trouble. I don’t know what to think. It’s all so black. I wish I was dead.”

Her dreary tone put the deepest pathos into her words. Howard had seen despondency in youth before—had felt it himself. But there had always been a certain lightness in it. Here was a mere child who evidently thought, and thought with reason, that there was no hope for her; and her despair was not a passing cloud or storm, but a settled conviction.

“There doesn’t seem to be any chance for a young girl,” she repeated as if that phrase summed up all that was weighing upon her. And Howard feared that she, was right. Even the readiest of all commodities, advice, failed him. “What can she do?” he thought. “If she has no home, worth speaking of”—then he went on aloud:

“Haven’t you friends?”

She laughed again with that slight moving of the lips and with eyes mirthless. “Who wants me for a friend? Nobody’d think I was respectable. And I guess I’m not so very. There’s Nellie and her—friends. Oh, the girls join in with the men to drag other girls down. But I won’t do that. I don’t care what becomes of me—except that.”

“Why?” he asked, curious for her explanation of this aversion.

“I don’t know why,” she replied. “There doesn’t seem to be any good reason. I’ve thought I would several times. And then—well, I just couldn’t.”

Howard turned the subject and tried to draw her out of this mood. They sat there for several hours and became well acquainted. He found that she had an intelligent way of looking at things, that she observed closely, and that she appreciated and understood far more than he had expected.

It was the beginning of a series of evenings spent together. He took her with him on many of his assignments and they often dined together at “Le Chat Noir” or the “Restaurant de Paris,” or “The Manhattan” over in Second Avenue. Late in June she bought a new gown—a pale-grey with ribbons and hat to match. Howard was amused at the anxious expression in her gold-brown eyes as she waited for his opinion. And when he said: “Well, well, I never saw you look so pretty,” she looked much prettier with a slight colour rising to tint the usual pallor of her cheeks.

One Sunday he came home in the afternoon and found her helping the maid at straightening his rooms. As he lay on the lounge smoking he watched her lazily. She handled his books with a great deal of awe. She opened one of them and sat on the floor in the childlike way she often had. She read several sentences aloud. It was a tangle of technical words on the subject of political economy.

“What do you have such stupid things around for?” she said, smiling and rising. She began to arrange the books and papers on the table. He was looking at her but thinking of something else when he became conscious that she had got suddenly white to the lips. He jumped to his feet.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, “are you going to faint?”

Her eyes were shining as with fever out of a ghostly face. Her lips trembled as she answered: “Oh it’s nothing. I do this often.” She went slowly into the back room where the maid was. In a few minutes she returned, apparently as usual. She flitted about uneasily, taking up now one thing, now another in a purposeless, nervous way.

“I never was in here before,” she said. “You’ve got lots of pretty things. Whose picture is this?”

“That? Oh, my sister-in-law out in Chicago.”

Howard did not then understand why she became so gay, why her eyes danced with happiness, why as soon as she went into the hall she began to sing and kept it up in her own room, quieting down only to burst forth again. He did not even especially note the swift change, the, for her, extraordinary mood of high spirits. It was about this time that their relations began to change.

Howard had thought of her, or had thought that he thought of her, only as a lonely and desolate child, to be taught so far as he was capable of teaching and she of learning. He was conscious of her extreme youth and of the impassable gulf of thought and taste between them. He did not take her feelings into account at all. It never occurred to him that this part of friend and patron which he was playing was not safe for him, not just and right toward her.

One night he took her to a ball at the Terrace Garden—a respectable, amusing affair “under the auspices of the Young-German-American-Shooting-Society.” The next day a reporter for the Sun whom he knew slightly said to him with a grin he did not like: “Mighty pretty little girl you’re taking about with you, Howard. Where’d you pick her up?”

Howard reddened, angry with himself for reddening, angry with the Sun man for his impudence, ashamed that he had put himself and Alice in such a position. But the incident brought the matter of his relation with her sharply and clearly before his mind and conscience.

“This must stop,” he said to himself; “it must stop at once. It is unjust to her. And it is dragging me into an entanglement.”

But the mischief had been done. She loved him. And with the confidence of youth and inexperience, she was disregarding all the obstacles, was giving herself up to the dream that he would presently love her in return, with the end as in the story books. Indeed love stories became her constant companions. Where she once read them for amusement, she now read them as a Christian reads his Bible—for instruction, inspiration, faith, hope and courage.

One evening in July—it was in the week of Independence Day—Howard’s windows and door were thrown wide to get the full benefit of whatever stir there might be in the air. He was sprawled upon the lounge, the table drawn close and upon it a lamp shedding a dim light through the room but enough near by to let him read. He had dropped his book and was thinking whether a stroll in the Square in the moonlight would repay the trouble of moving. There were steps in the hall and then, peeping round the door-frame was the face of his young neighbour.

“Hello,” he said, “I thought you were out somewhere. Come in.”

“No, I’m going to bed,” she answered, nevertheless gradually edging into the room. She was wearing a loose wrapper of flowered silk, somewhat worn and never very fine. Her black hair hung in a long thick braid to her waist and she looked even younger than usual.

“Where have you been all evening?” asked Howard.

“Oh, I’ve been up to see a friend. She lives in Harlem, and she wants me to come and live with her.”

“Are you going?” Howard inquired, noting that he was interested and not pleased. “The house wouldn’t seem natural without you.”

She gave him a quick, gratified glance and, advancing further into the room, sat upon the arm of the big rocking-chair. “She gave me a good talking to,” she went on with a smile. “She told me I ought not to live alone at my age. She said I ought to live with her and meet some friends of hers. She said maybe I’d find a nice fellow to marry.”

Howard thought over this as he smoked and at last said in an ostentatiously judicial tone: “Well, I think she’s right. I don’t see what else there is to do. You can’t live on down here alone always. What’s become of Nellie?”

“Nellie’s got to be a bad girl,” said Alice with a blush and a dropping of the eyes. “She’s in Fourteenth Street every night. She says she doesn’t care what happens to her. I saw her last night and she wanted me to come with her. She says it’s of no use for me to put on airs. She says I’ve got no friends and I might as well join her sooner as later.”

“Well?” Howard was keeping his eyes carefully away from hers.

“Oh, I sha’n’t go with her. As long as a girl has got anything at all to live for, she doesn’t want that. Besides I’d rather go to the East River.”

“Drowning’s a serious matter,” said Howard with a smile and with banter in his tone.

“Yes, it is,” said the girl seriously, “I’ve thought of it. And I don’t believe I could.”

“Then you’d better go with your friend and get married.”

“I don’t want to get married,” she replied, shaking her head slowly from side to side.

“That’s what all the girls say,” laughed Howard. “But of course you will. It’s the only thing to do.”

“Then why don’t you get married?” asked Alice, tracing one of the flowers in her wrapper with her slim, brown forefinger.

“I couldn’t if I would and I wouldn’t if I could.”

“Oh, you could get a nice girl to marry you, I’m sure,” she said, the colour rising faintly toward her long, downcast lashes.

“But who would get the money? It takes money to keep a nice girl.”

“Oh, not much,” said Alice earnestly, yet with a queer hesitation in her voice. “You oughtn’t to marry those extravagant girls. I’ve read about them and I think they don’t make very good wives, real wives to save money and—and care.”

“You seem to know a good deal about these things for your age,” said Howard, much amused and showing it.

“I don’t care,” she persisted, “you ought to get married.”

Howard felt that this was the time to clear the girl’s mind of any “notions” she might have got. He would be very clever, very adroit. He would not let her suspect that he had any idea of her thoughts. Indeed he was not perfectly certain that he had. But he would gently and frankly tell her the truth.

“I shall never get married,” he said, sitting up and talking as one who is discussing a case which he understands thoroughly yet has no personal interest in. “I haven’t the money and I haven’t the desire. I am what they would call a confirmed bachelor. I wouldn’t marry any girl who had not been brought up as I have been. We should be unhappy together unsuited each to the other. She would soon hate me. Besides, I wish to be free. I care more for freedom than I ever shall for any human being. As I am now, so I shall always be, a wandering fellow without ties. It is not a pleasant prospect for old age. But I have made up my mind to it and I shall never marry.”

The girl’s hands had dropped limp into her lap; her face was down so that he could barely see the burning blush which overspread it.

“You don’t mean that,” she said in a voice that was queer and choked.

“Oh yes, I do, little girl,” he answered, intending to smile when she should look up.

When she did lift her eyes, his smile could not come. For her face was grey and her lips bloodless and from her eyes looked despair. Howard glanced away instantly. With rude hand he had suddenly toppled into the dust this child’s dream-castle of love and happiness which he had himself helped her build. He felt like a criminal. But partly from a sense of duty, chiefly from the cowardice of self-preservation, he made no effort to lighten her suffering.

“I should only prolong it,” he thought, “only make matters worse. To-morrow—perhaps.”

If she had been worldly wise, even if she had not been so completely absorbed in her worship of him that her woman-instincts were dormant, she would herself have found hope. But she had not a suspicion that these strong words of apparent finality were spoken to give himself courage, to keep him from obeying the impulse to respond to the appeal of her youth to his, her aloneness to his, her passion to his. She believed him literally.

There was a long silence. He heard her move, heard a suppressed cry and glanced toward her again. She was darting from the room. A second later her door crashed. He started up and after her, hesitated, returned to his book—but not to his reading.

Toward noon the next day, he passed her room on his way out. The door was wide open; none of her belongings was in sight; the maid was sweeping energetically. She paused when she saw him.

“Miss Alice left this morning,” she said, “and the room’s been let to another party.”

VI. — IN A BOHEMIAN QUICKSAND.

Howard could have got her new address; and for many weeks habit, at first steadily, afterward intermittently, teased him to look her up. He was amazed at her hold upon him. At times the longing for her was so intense that he almost suspected himself of being in love with her.

“I escaped from that none too soon,” he congratulated himself. “It wasn’t nearly so one-sided as I thought.”

He had never been gregarious. Thus far he had not had a single intimate friend, man or woman. He knew many people and knew them well. They liked him and some of them sought his friendship. These were often puzzled because it was easy to get acquainted with him, impossible to know him intimately.

The explanation of this combination of openness and reserve, friendliness and unapproachableness, was that his boyhood and youth had been spent wholly among books. That life had trained him not to look to others for amusement, sympathy or counsel, but to depend upon himself. As his temperament was open and good-natured and sympathetic, he was as free from enemies and enmities as he was from friends and friendships.

Women there had been—several women, a succession of idealizations which had dispersed in the strong light of his common sense. He had never disturbed himself about morals in what he regarded as the limited sense. He always insisted that he was free; and he was careful only of his personal pride and of taking no advantage of another. What he had said to Alice about marriage was true—as to his intentions, at least. A poor woman, he felt, he could not marry; a rich woman, he felt, he would not marry. And he cared nothing about marriage because he was never lonely, never leaned or wished to lean upon another, abhorred the idea of any one leaning upon him; because he regarded freedom as the very corner-stone of his scheme of life.

The nearest he had come to companionship was with Alice. With the other women whom he had known in various degrees from warmth to white-heat, there had been interruptions, no such constant freedom of access, no such intermingling of daily life. Her he had seen at all hours and in all circumstances. She never disturbed him but was ready to talk when he wished to listen, listened eagerly when he talked, and was silent and beautiful and restful to look at when he wished to indulge in the dissipation of mental laziness.

As she loved him, she showed him only the best that there was in her and showed it in the most attractive of all lights.

While he was still wavering or fancying that he was wavering, the Managing Editor sent him to “do” a great strike-riot in the coal regions of Pennsylvania. He was there for three weeks, active day and night, interested in the new phases of life—the mines and the miners, the display of fierce passions, the excitement, the peril.

When he returned to New York, Alice had ceased to tempt him.

One midnight in the early spring he was in his sitting room, reading and a little bored. There came a knock at the door. He hoped that it was some one bringing something interesting or coming to propose a search for something interesting. “Come in,” he said with welcome in his voice. The door opened. It was Alice.

She was dressed much as she had been the first time he talked with her—a loose, clinging wrapper open at the throat. There was a change in her face—a change for the better but also for the worse. She looked more intelligent, more of a woman. There was more sparkle in her eyes and in her smile. But—Howard saw instantly the price she had paid. As the German had suggested, she had “got on up town.”

She was pulling at the long broad blue ribbons of her negligee. Her hands were whiter and her pink finger nails had had careful attention. She smiled, enjoying his astonishment. “I have come back,” she said.

Howard came forward and took her hand. “I’m glad, very glad to see you. For a minute I thought I was dreaming.”

“Yes,” she went on, “I’m in my old room. I came this afternoon. I must have been asleep, for I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I hope it isn’t bad luck that has flung you back here.”

“Oh, no. I’ve been doing very well. I’ve been saving up to come. And when I had enough to last me through the summer, I—I came.”

“You’ve been at work?”

She dropped her eyes and flushed. And her fingers played more nervously with her ribbons.

“You needn’t treat me as a child any longer,” she said at last in a low voice; “I’m eighteen now and—well, I’m not a child.”

Again there was a long pause. Howard, watching her downcast face, saw her steadying her expression to meet his eyes. When she looked, it was straight at him—appeal but also defiance.

“I don’t ask anything of you,” she said, “we are both free. And I wanted to see you. I was sick of all those others—up there. I’ve never had—had—this out of my mind. And I’ve come. And I can see you sometimes. I won’t be in the way.”

Howard went over to the window and stared out into the lights and shadows of the leafy Square. When he turned again she had lighted and was smoking one of his cigarettes.

“Well,” he said smiling down at her, “Why not? Put on a street gown and we’ll go out and get supper and talk it over.”

She sprang up, her face alight. She was almost running toward the door. Midway she stopped, turned and came slowly back. She put one of her arms upon his shoulder—a slender, cool, smooth, white arm with the lace of the wide sleeve slipping away from it. She turned her face up until her mouth, like a rosebud, was very near his lips. There was appeal in her eyes.

“I’m very, very glad to see you,” Howard said as he kissed her.

And so Howard’s life was determined for the next four years.

He worked well at his profession. He read a great deal. He wrote fiction and essays in desultory fashion and got a few things printed in the magazines. He led a life that was a model of regularity. But he knew the truth—that Alice had ended his career.

He was content. Ambition had always been vague with him and now his habit of following the line of least resistance had drifted him into this mill-pond. Sometimes, he would give himself up to bitter self-reproach, disgusted that he should be so satisfied, so non-resisting in a lot in every way the reverse of that which he had marked out for himself. If he had been chained he might, probably would, have broken away. But Alice never attempted to control him. His will was her law. She was especially shrewd about money matters, so often the source of disputes and estrangements. Two months after she reappeared, she proposed that they take an apartment together.

“I saw one to-day in West Twelfth Street at seventy dollars a month,” she said, “and I’m sure I could manage it so that you would be much better off than you are now.”

He viewed this plan with suspicion. It definitely committed him to a mode of life which he had always regarded as degrading both to the man and the woman and as certain of a calamitous ending. So he made excuses for delay, fully intending never to yield. But although Alice did not speak of her plan again, he found himself more and more attracted by it, caught himself speculating about various apartments he happened to see as he went about the streets. She must have been conscious of what was going on in his mind; for when, a month after she had spoken, he said abruptly: “Where was that apartment you saw?” she went straight on discussing the details as if there had been no interval. She was ready to act.

The apartment was taken in her name—Mrs. Cammack, the “Mrs.” being necessary to account for him. They selected the furniture together, he as interested as she and very pleased to find that she had the same good taste in those matters that she had in dress. She took all the troubles and annoyances upon herself. When she invited him to assist in the arrangement, it was in matters that amused him and at times when she was sure he had nothing else to do. It is not strange that he got a wholly false idea of the difficulties of setting up an establishment.

After a month of selecting and discussing, of pleasure in the new experience, pleasure in Alice’s enthusiasm and excitement and happiness, he found himself master of five attractive and comfortable rooms, his clothing, his books, all his belongings properly arranged. The door was opened for him by a cleanlooking coloured maid, with a tiny white cap on her head.

As he looked around and then at the beautiful face with the wistful, gold-brown eyes so anxiously following his wandering glance, he was very near to loving her. Indeed, he was like a husband who has left out that period of passionate love which extends into married life until it gives place to boredom, or to dislike, or to some such sympathetic affection as he felt for Alice. “It is just this that holds me,” he thought, in his infrequent moods of dissatisfaction. “If we quarrelled or if there were any deep feeling on my side, I should not be in this mess. I should be”—Well, where would he be? “Probably worse off,” he usually added.

Certainly he could not have been freer, for she never questioned him; and, if she was ever uneasy or jealous when he came in late—for him—without telling her where he had been, she never showed it. She had no friends, and he often wondered how she passed the time when he was not with her. Whenever he inquired he got the same answer: She had been busying herself with their home; she had been planning to save money or to make him more comfortable; she had been reading to improve her mind and to enable herself to start him talking on subjects that interested him.

No matter how unexpectedly he looked in upon her life or her mind, he found—himself.

One day she said to him—it was after two years of this life: “Something is worrying you. Is it about me? You look at me so queerly at times.”

“Yes,” he answered. “It is about you. Tell me, Miss Black-Hair, do you never think of getting old?”

“No,” she smiled. “I shall wait until I am twenty-five before I begin to think of that.”

“But don’t you see that this sort of thing must stop sometime? It is unjust to you. When I think of it, I reproach myself for permitting us to get into it.”

“I am happy,” she said, looking straight at him, terror in her eyes.

“But you have no friends?”

“Who has? And what do I want with friends?”

“But don’t you see, I can’t introduce you to anybody. I can’t talk about you to the people I know. I am always having to explain you away, always having to act as if I were ashamed of this, my real life. At times I am Anglo-Saxon enough to be really ashamed of it. And I ought to be and am ashamed of myself.”

“Don’t let’s talk about it. You and I understand. Why should we bother about the rest of the world?”

“No, we must talk about it. I have been going over it carefully. We must—must be married.”

He laid his hand upon hers. She blushed deeply and lowered her head. A tear dropped upon the front of her gown and hung glittering in the meshes of the white lace. She crept into his arms and buried her face upon his shoulder and sobbed. He had never seen her even look like tears before.

“We must be married,” he repeated, patting her on the shoulder.

She shook her head in negation.

“Yes,” he said firmly, mentally noting that this was the very first time he had ever caught her in a pretense.

“No.” Her tone was as firm as his. She lifted her head and put her cheek against his. “It makes me very proud that you ask it. But—I—I do not——”

“Do not—what?”

“I do not want—I will not—risk losing you.”

“But you won’t lose me. You will have me more than ever.”

“Some men—yes. But not you.”

“And why not I, O Wisdom?”

“Because—because—do you think I have watched you all this time, without learning something about you? The way to keep you is to leave you free. I do not want your name. I do not want your friends I do not want to be respectable. I want—just you.”

“But are we not as good as married now?”

“Yes—that’s it. And I want it to keep on. I never cared for anybody until I saw you. I shall never care for anybody else. I never shall try. I want you as long as I can have you. And then——”

“And then,” Howard laughed or rather, pretended to laugh, “and then, ‘Oh, dig me a grave both wide and deep, wide and deep.’ How like twenty-years-old that is.”

She seemed not to hear his jest and presently went on: “Do you remember the evening before I left, down there at Mrs. Sands’s?”

“The night you proposed to me?” Howard said, pulling her ear.

She smiled faintly and continued: “I thought it all out that night. I intended to come back just as I did. I went deliberately. I——”

Howard put his hand over her lips.

“O, I am not going to tell anything,”, said she, evading his fingers. “Only this—that I understood you then, understood just why you would never marry. Not so clearly as I understand it now, but still I—understood. And you have been teaching me ever since, teaching me manners, teaching me how to read and think and talk. And more than all, you’ve taught me your way of looking at life.”

Howard held her away from him and studied her face, surprise in his eyes. “Isn’t it strange?” he said.

“Here I’ve been seeing you day after day all this time, have had a chance to know you better than I ever knew any one in my life, have had you very near to me day and night. And just now, as I look at you, I see the real you for the first time in two years.”

“I have been wondering when you would look at me again,” said Alice with a small, sly smile.

“Why, you are a woman grown. Where is the little girl I knew, the little girl who used to look up to me?”

“Oh, she’s gone these two years. She proposed to you and, when you refused her, she—died.”

“Yes—we must be married,” Howard went on. “Why not? It is more convenient, let us say.”

Alice shook her head and put her cheek against his again and clasped his fingers in hers. “No, my instinct is against it. Some day—perhaps. But not now, not now. I want you. I want only you. We are together out here—out beyond the pale. Inside, others would come in and—and surely come between us. I want no others—none.”

VII. — A LITTLE CANDLE GOES OUT.

Howard was now thirty years old. Park Row had long ceased talking of him as a “coming man.” While his style of writing was steadily improving, he wrote with no fixed aim, wrote simply for the day, for the newspaper which dies with the day of its date. Some of his acquaintances wondered why a man of such ability should thus stand still. The less observant spoke of him as an impressive example of the “journalistic blight.” Those who looked deeper saw the truth—a dangerous facility, a perilous inertia, a fatal entanglement. Facility enabled him to earn a good living with ease, working as he chose. Inertia prevented him from seeking opportunities for advancement. Entanglement shut him off from the men and women of his own kind who would have thrust opportunities upon him and compelled him.

Howard himself saw this clearly in his occasional moods of self-criticism. But as he saw no remedy, he raged intermittently and briefly, and straightway relapsed. Vanity supplied him with many excuses and consolations. Was he not one of the best reporters in the profession? Where was there another, where indeed in any profession were there many of his age, making five thousand a year? Was he not always improving his mind? Was he not more and more careful in his personal habits? Was he not respected by all who knew him; looked upon as a successful man; regarded by those with whom he came in daily contact as a leader in the profession, a model for style, a marvel for facility and versatility and for the quantity of good “copy” he could turn out in a brief time? But with all the soothings of vanity he never could quite hide from himself that his life was a failure up to that moment.

“Why try to lie to myself?” he thought. “It’s never a question of what one has done but always of what one could have and should have done. I am thirty and I have been marking time for at least four years. Preparing by study and reading? Yes, but not preparing for anything.”

On the whole he was glad that Alice had refused to marry him. Her reason was valid. But there was another which he thought she did not see. He was deceived as to the depth of her insight because he did not watch her closely. He had no suspicion how many, many times, in their moments of demonstrativeness, she listened for those words which never came, listened and turned away to hide from him the disappointment in her eyes.

He did not love her—and she knew it. She did not inspire ambition in him—and she knew it. She simply kept him comfortable and contented. She simply prevented his amatory instincts from gathering strength vigorously to renew that search which men and women keep up incessantly until they find what they seek. She knew this also but never permitted herself to see it clearly.

He was pleased with her but not proud of her. He was not exactly ashamed of his relation with her but—well, he never relaxed his precautions for keeping it conventionally concealed. He still had a room at his club and occupied it occasionally. He laughed at himself, despised himself in a—gentle, soothing way. But he excused himself to himself with earnestness despite his sarcasms at his own expense. And for the most of the time he was content—so well, so comfortably content that if his mind had not been so nervously active he would have taken on the form and look of settled middle-life.

There was just the one saving quality—his mental alertness. All his life he had had insatiable intellectual curiosity. It had kept him from wasting his time at play when he was a boy. It had kept him from plunging deeply into dissipation when youth was hot in his veins. It was now keeping him from the sluggard’s fate.

On the last day of January—six weeks after his thirtieth birthday—he came home earlier than usual, as they were going to the theatre and were to dine at seven. He found Alice in bed and the doctor sitting beside her.

“You’ll have to get some one else to go with you, I’m afraid,” she said with good-humoured resignation, a trifle over-acted. “My cold is worse and the doctor says I must stay in bed.”

“Nothing serious?” Howard asked anxiously, for her cheeks were flaming.

“Oh, no. Just the cold. And I am taking care of myself.”

He accompanied the doctor to the door of the apartment. At the threshold the doctor whispered: “Make some excuse and come to my office. I wish to see you particularly.”

He grew pale. “Don’t let her see,” urged the doctor. He went back to Alice, sick at heart. “I must go out and arrange for some one else to do the play for me,” he said. “I shall spend the evening with you.”

She protested, but faintly. He went to the doctor’s office.

“She must go south at once,” he began, after looking at Howard steadily and keenly. “Nothing can save her life. That may prolong it.”

Howard seemed not to understand.

“She must go to-morrow or she’ll be gone forever in ten days.”

“Impossible,” Howard said in a dull, dazed tone.

“At once, I tell you—at once.”

“Impossible,” Howard repeated. He was saying to himself, “And only this afternoon I wished I were free and wondered how I could free myself.” He laughed strangely.

“Impossible,” he said again. And again he laughed. The room swam around. He stood up. “Impossible!” he said a fourth time, almost shouting it. And he struck the doctor full in the face, reeled and fell headlong to the floor. When he recovered consciousness he was lying on a lounge, the doctor’s assistant standing beside him.

“I must go to her,” he exclaimed and sat up. He saw the doctor a few feet away, holding a cloth odorous of arnica to his cheek. Howard remembered and began, “I beg your pardon,”—The doctor interrupted with: “Not at all. I’ve had many queer experiences but never one like that.” But Howard had ceased to hear. He was staring vacantly at the floor, repeating to himself, “And I wished to be free. And I am to be free.”

“You must go back to her. Take her south tomorrow. Asheville is the best place.”

Howard was on his way to the door. “We shall go by the first train,” he said.

“Pardon me for telling you so abruptly,” said the doctor, following him. “But I saw that you weren’t—that is I couldn’t help noticing that you and she were—And usually the man in such cases—well, my sympathy is for the woman.”

“Do you think a man voluntarily lives with a woman because he hates her?” Howard asked, with an angry sneer. He bowed coldly and was gone.

As he looked at Alice he saw that it was of no use to try to deceive her. “We must go South in the morning,” he almost whispered, taking her hand and kissing it again and again, slowly and gently.

The next day but one they were at Asheville and two weeks later Howard could not hide from himself that she would soon be gone.

Her bed was drawn up to the open window and she Was propped with pillows. A mild breeze was flooding the room with the odours of the pine forests and the gardens. She looked out, dilated her nostrils and her eyes.

“Beautiful!” she murmured. “It is so easy to die here.”

She put out her hand and laid it in his.

“I want you, my Alice.” He was looking into her eyes and she into his. “I need you. I can’t do without you.”

She smiled with an expression of happiness. “Is it wrong,” she asked, “to take pleasure in another’s pain? I see that you are in pain, that you suffer. And, oh, it makes me happy, so happy.”

“Don’t,” he begged. “Please don’t.”

“But listen,” she went on. “Don’t you see why? Because I—because I love you. There,” she was smiling again. “I promised myself I never, never would say it first. And I’ve broken my word.”

“What do you mean?”

“For nearly four years—all the years I’ve really lived—I have had only one thought—my love for you. But I never would say it, never would say ‘I love you,’ because I knew that you did not love me.”

He was beginning to speak but she lifted her hand to his lips. Then she put it back in his and pushed her fingers up his coat-sleeve until they were hidden, resting upon his bare arm.

“No, you did not.” Her voice was low and the words came slowly. “But since we came here, you have loved me. If I were to get well, were to go back, you would not. Ah, if you knew, if you only knew how I have wanted your love, how I have lain awake night after night, hour after hour, whispering under my breath ‘I love you. I love you. Why do you not love me?’”

Howard put his head down so that his face was hid from her in her lap.

“After the doctor had talked to me a few minutes, had asked me a few questions,” she went on, “I knew. And I was not sorry. It was nearly over, anyhow, dear. Did you know it? I often wondered if you did. Yes, I saw many little signs. I wouldn’t admit it to myself until this illness came. Then I confessed it to myself. And I was not sorry we were to part this way. But I did not expect”—and she drew a long breath—“happiness!”

“No, no,” he protested, lifting his face and looking at her. She drank in the expression of his eyes—the love, the longing, the misery—as if it had been a draught of life.

“Ah, you make me so happy, so happy. How much I owe to you. Four long, long, beautiful years. How much! How much! And at last—love!”

There was silence for several minutes. Then he spoke: “I loved you from the first, I believe. Only I never appreciated you. I was so self-absorbed. And you—you fed my vanity, never insisted upon yourself.”

“But we have had happiness. And no one, no one, no one will ever be to you what I have been.”

“I love you.” Howard’s voice had a passionate earnestness in it that carried conviction. “The light goes out with you.”

“With this little candle? No, no, dear—my dear. You will be a great man. You will not forget; but you will go on and do the things that I’m afraid I didn’t help, maybe hindered, you in trying to do. And you will keep a little room in your heart, a very little room. And I shall be in there. And you’ll open the door every once in a while and come in and take me in your arms and kiss me. And I think—yes, I feel that—that I shall know and thrill.”

Her voice sank lower and lower and then her eyes closed, and presently he called the nurse.

The next day he rose from his bed, just at the connecting door between his room and hers, and looked in at her. The shades were drawn and only a faint light crept into the room. He thought he saw her stir and went nearer.

“Why, they’ve made you very gay this morning,” he laughed, “with the red ribbons at your neck.”

There was no answer. He came still nearer. The red ribbons were long streamers of blood. She was dead.

VIII. — A STRUGGLE FOR SELF-CONTROL.

He left her at Asheville as she wished—“where I have been happiest and where I wish you to think of me.” On the train coming north he reviewed his past and made his plans for the future.

As to the past he had only one regret—that he had not learned to appreciate Alice until too late. He felt that his failure to advance had been due entirely to himself—to his inertia, his willingness to seize any pretext for refraining from action. As to the future—work, work with a purpose. His mind must be fully and actively occupied. There must be no leisure, for leisure meant paralysis.

At the Twenty-third Street ferry-house he got into a hansom and gave the address of “the flat.” He did not note where he was until the hansom drew up at the curb. He leaned forward and looked at the house—at their windows with the curtains which she had draped so gracefully, which she and he had selected at Vantine’s one morning. How often he had seen her standing between those curtains, looking out for him, her blue-black hair waving back from her forehead so beautifully and her face ready to smile so soon as ever she should catch sight of him.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. The blood was pounding through his temples and his eyeballs seemed to be scalding under the lids.

“Never again,” he moaned. “How lonely it is.”

The cabman lifted the trap. “Here we are, sir.”

“Yes—in a moment.” Where should he go? But what did it matter? “To a hotel,” he said. “The nearest.”

“The Imperial?”

“That will do—yes—go there.”

He resolved never to return to “the flat.” On the following day he sent for the maid and arranged the breaking up. He gave her everything except his personal belongings and a few of Alice’s few possessions—those he could keep, and those which he must destroy because he could not endure the thought of any one having them.

At the office all understood his mourning; but no one, not even Kittredge, knew him well enough to intrude beyond gentler looks and tones. Kittredge had written a successful novel and was going abroad for two years of travel and writing. Howard took his rooms in the Royalton. They dined together a few nights before he sailed.

“And now,” said Kittredge, “I’m my own master. Why, I can’t begin to fill the request for ‘stuff.’ I can go where I please, do as I please. At last I shall work. For I don’t call the drudgery done under compulsion work.”

“Work!” Howard repeated the word several times absently. Then he leaned forward and said with what was for him an approach to the confidential: “What a mess I have been making of my life! What waste! What folly! I’ve behaved like a child, an impulsive, irresponsible child. And now I must get to work, really to work.”

“With your talents a year or so of work would free you.”

“Oh, I’m free.” Howard hesitated and flushed. “Yes, I’m free,” he repeated bitterly. “We are all free except for the shackles we fasten upon ourselves and can unlock for ourselves. I don’t agree with you that earning one’s daily bread is drudgery.”

“Well, let’s see you work—work for something definite. Why don’t you try for some higher place on the paper—correspondent at Washington or London—no, not London, for that is a lounging job which would ruin even an energetic man. Why not try for the editorial staff? They ought to have somebody upstairs who takes an interest in something besides politics.”

“But doesn’t a man have to write what he doesn’t believe? You know how Segur is always laughing at the protection editorials he writes, although he is a free-trader.”

“Oh, there must be many directions in which the paper is free to express honest opinions.”

Howard began that very night. As soon as he reached his club where he was living for a few days he sat down to the file of the News-Record and began to study its editorial style and method. He had learned a great deal before three o’clock in the morning and had written a short editorial on a subject he took from the news. In the morning he read his article again and decided that with a few changes—adjectives cut out, long sentences cut up, short sentences made shorter and the introduction and the conclusion omitted—it would be worth handing in. With the corrected article in his hand he knocked at the door of the editor’s room.

It was a small, plainly furnished office—no carpet, three severe chairs, a revolving book case with a battered and dusty bust of Lincoln on it, a table strewn with newspaper cuttings. Newspapers from all parts of the world were scattered about the floor. At the table sat the editor, Mr. Malcolm, whom Howard had never before seen.

He was short and slender, with thin white hair and a smooth, satirical face, deeply wrinkled and unhealthily pale. He was dressed in black but wore a string tie of a peculiarly lively shade of red. His most conspicuous feature was his nose—long, narrow, pointed, sarcastic.

“My name is Howard,” began the candidate, all but stammering before Mr. Malcolm’s politely uninterested glance, “and I come from downstairs.”

“Oh—so you are Mr. Howard. I’ve heard of you often. Will you be seated?”

“Thank you—no. I’ve only brought in a little article I thought I’d submit for your page. I’d like to write for it and, if you don’t mind, I’ll bring in an article occasionally.”

“Glad to have it. We like new ideas; and a new pen, a new mind, ought to produce them. If you don’t see your articles in the paper, you’ll know what has happened to them. If you do, paste them on space slips and send them up by the boy on Thursdays.” Mr. Malcolm nodded and smiled and dipped his pen in the ink-well.

The editorial appeared just as Howard wrote it. He read and reread it, admiring the large, handsome editorial type in which it was printed, and deciding that it was worthy of the excellent place in the column which Mr. Malcolm had given it. He wrote another that very day and sent it up by the boy. He found it in his desk the next noon with “Too abstract—never forget that you are writing for a newspaper” scrawled across the last page in blue pencil.

In the two following months Howard submitted thirty-five articles. Three were published in the main as he wrote them, six were “cut” to paragraphs, one appeared as a letter to the editor with “H” signed to it. The others disappeared. It was not encouraging, but Howard kept on. He knew that if he stopped marching steadily, even though hopelessly, toward a definite goal, a heavy hand would be laid upon his shoulder to drag him away and fling him down upon a grave.

As it was, desperately though he fought to refrain from backward glances, he was now and again taken off his guard. A few of her pencil marks on the margin of a leaf in one of his books; a gesture, a little mannerism of some woman passing him in the street—and he would be ready to sink down with weariness and loneliness, like a tired traveller in a vast desert.

He completely lost self-control only once. It was a cold, wet May night and everything had gone against him that day. He looked drearily round his rooms as he came in. How stiff, how forbidding, how desert they seemed! He threw himself into a big chair.

“No friends,” he thought, “no one that cares a rap whether I live or die, suffer or am happy. Nothing to care for. Why do I go on? What’s the use if one has not an object—a human object?”

And their life together came flooding back—her eyes, her kisses, her attentions, her passionate love for him, so pervasive yet so unobtrusive; the feeling of her smooth, round arm about his neck; her way of pressing close up to him and locking her fingers in his; the music of her voice, singing her heartsong to him yet never putting it into words——

He stumbled over to the divan and stretched himself out and buried his face in the cushions. “Come back!” he sobbed. “Come back to me, dear.” And then he cried, as a man cries—without tears, with sobs choking up into his throat and issuing in moans.

“Curious,” he said aloud when the storm was over and he was sitting up, ashamed before himself for his weakness, “who would have suspected me of this?”

IX. — AMBITION AWAKENS.

Howard was now thirty-two. He was still trying for the editorial staff; but in the last month only five of his articles had been printed to twenty-three thrown away. A national campaign was coming on and the News-Record was taking a political stand that seemed to him sound and right. For the first time he tried political editorials.

The cause aroused his passion for justice, for democratic equality and the abolition of privilege. He had something to say and he succeeded in saying it vigorously, effectively, with clearness and moderation of statement. How to avoid hysteria; how to set others on fire instead of only making of himself a fiery spectacle; how to be earnest, yet calm; how to be satirical yet sincere; how to be interesting, yet direct—these were his objects, pursued with incessant toiling, rewriting again and again, recasting of sentences, careful balancing of words for exact shades of meaning.

“I shall never learn to write,” had been his complaint of himself to himself for years. And in these days it seemed to him that he was farther from a good style than ever. His standards had risen, were rising; he feared that his power of accomplishment was failing. Therefore his heart sank and his face paled when an office boy told him that Mr. Malcolm wished to see him.

“I suppose it’s to tell me not to annoy him with any more of my attempts,” he thought. “Well, anyway, I’ve had the benefit of the work. I’ll try a novel next.”

“Take a seat,” said Mr. Malcolm with an absent nod. “Just a moment, if you please.”

On a chair beside him was the remnant of what had been a huge up-piling of newspapers—the exchanges that had come in during the past twenty-four hours. The Exchange Editor had been through them and Mr. Malcolm was reading “to feel the pulse of the country” and also to make sure that nothing of importance had been overlooked.

On the floor were newspapers by the score, thrown about tumultuously. Mr. Malcolm would seize a paper from the unread heap, whirl it open and send his glance and his long pointed nose tearing down one column and up another, and so from page to page. It took less than a minute for him to finish and filing away great sixteen page dailies. A few seconds sufficed for the smaller papers. Occasionally he took his long shears and with a skilful twist cut out a piece from the middle of a page and laid it and the shears upon the table with a single motion.

“Now, Mr. Howard.” Malcolm sent the last paper to increase the chaos on the floor and faced about in his revolving chair. “How would you like to come up here?”

Howard looked at him in amazement. “You mean——”

“We want you to join the editorial staff. Mr. Walker has married him a rich wife and is going abroad to do literary work, which means that he is going to do nothing. Will you come?”

“It is what I have been working for.”

“And very hard you have worked.” Mr. Malcolm’s cold face relaxed into a half-friendly, half-satirical smile. “After you’d been sending up articles for a fortnight, I knew you’d make it. You went about it systematically. An intelligent plan, persisted in, is hard to beat in this world of laggards and hap-hazard strugglers.”

“And I was on the point of giving up—that is, giving up this particular ambition,” Howard confessed.

“Yes, I saw it in your articles—a certain pessimism and despondency. You show your feelings plainly, young man. It is an excellent quality—but dangerous. A man ought to make his mind a machine working evenly without regard to his feelings or physical condition. The night my oldest child died—I was editor of a country newspaper—I wrote my leaders as usual. I never had written better. You can be absolute master inside, if you will. You can learn to use your feelings when they’re helpful and to shut them off when they hinder.”

“But don’t you think that temperament——”

“Temperament—that’s one of the subtlest forms of self-excuse. However, the place is yours. The salary is a hundred and twenty-five a week—an advance of about twelve hundred a year, I believe, on your average downstairs. Can you begin soon?”

“Immediately,” said Howard, “if the City Editor is satisfied.”

An office boy showed him to his room—a mere hole-in-the-wall with just space for a table-desk, a small table, a case of shelves for books of reference, and two chairs. The one window overlooked the lower end of Manhattan Island—the forest of business buildings peaked with the Titan-tenements of financial New York. Their big, white plumes of smoke and steam were waving in the wind and reflecting in pale pink the crimson of the setting sun.

Howard had his first taste of the intoxication of triumph, his first deep inspiration of ambition. He recalled his arrival in New York, his timidity, his dread lest he should be unable to make a living—“Poor boy,” they used to say at home, “he will have to be supported. He is too much of a dreamer.” He remembered his explorations of those now familiar streets—how acutely conscious he had been that they were paved with stone, walled with stone, roofed with a stony sky, peopled with faces and hearts of stone. How miserably insignificant he had felt!

And all these years he had been almost content to be one of the crowd, like them exerting himself barely enough to provide himself with the essentials of existence. Like them, he had given no real thought to the morrow. And now, with comparatively little labour, he had put himself in the way to become a master, a director of the enormous concentrated energies summed up in the magic word New York.

The key to the situation was—work, incessant, self-improving, self-developing. “And it is the key to happiness also,” he thought. “Work and sleep—the two periods of unconsciousness of self—are the two periods of happiness.”

His aloofness freed him from the temptations of distraction. He knew no women. He did not put himself in the way of meeting them. He kept away from theatres. He sunk himself in a routine of labour which, viewed from the outside, seemed dull and monotonous. Viewed from his stand-point of acquisition, of achievement, it was just the reverse.

The mind soon adapts itself to and enjoys any mental routine which exercises it. The only difficulty is in forming the habit of the routine.

Howard was greatly helped by his natural bent toward editorial writing. The idea of discussing important questions each day with a vast multitude as an audience stirred his imagination and aroused his instincts for helping on the great world-task of elevating the race. This enthusiasm pleased and also amused his cynical chief.

“You believe in things?” Malcolm said to him after they had become well acquainted. “Well, it is an admirable quality—but dangerous. You will need careful editing. Your best plan is to give yourself up to your belief while you are writing—then to edit yourself in cold blood. That is the secret of success, of great success in any line, business, politics, a profession—enthusiasm, carefully revised and edited.”

“It is difficult to be cold blooded when one is in earnest.”

“True,” Malcolm answered, “and there is the danger. My own enthusiasms are confined to the important things—food, clothing and shelter. It seems to me that the rest is largely a matter of taste, training and time of life. But don’t let me discourage you. I only suggest that you may have to guard against believing so intensely that you produce the impression of being an impracticable, a fanatic. Be cautious always; be especially cautious when you are cocksure you’re right. Unadulterated truth always arouses suspicion in the unaccustomed public. It has the alarming tastelessness of distilled water.”

Howard was acute enough to separate the wisdom from the cynicism of his chief. He saw the lesson of moderation. “You have failed, my very able chief,” he said to himself, “because you have never believed intensely enough to move you to act. You have attached too much importance to the adulteration—the folly and the humbug. And here you are, still only a critic, destructive but never constructive.”

At first his associates were much amused by his intensity. But as he learned to temper and train his enthusiasm they grew to respect both his ability and his character. Before a year had passed they were feeling the influence of his force—his trained, informed mind, made vigorous by principles and ideals.

Malcolm had the keen appreciation of a broad mind for this honest, intelligent energy. He used the editorial “blue-pencil” for alteration and condensation with the hand of a master. He cut away Howard’s crudities, toned down and so increased his intensity, and pointed it with the irony and satire necessary to make it carry far and penetrate easily.

Malcolm was at once giving Howard a reputation greater than he deserved and training him to deserve it.

In the office next to Howard’s sat Segur, a bachelor of forty-five who took life as a good-humoured jest and amused his leisure with the New Yorkers who devote a life of idleness to a nervous flight from boredom. Howard interested Segur who resolved to try to draw him out of his seclusion.

“I’m having some people to dinner at the Waldorf on Thursday,” he said, looking in at the door. “Won’t you join us?”

“I’d be glad to,” replied Howard, casting about for an excuse for declining. “But I’m afraid I’d ruin your dinner. I haven’t been out for years. I’ve been too busy to make friends or, rather, acquaintances.”

“A great mistake. You ought to see more of people.”

“Why? Can they tell me anything that I can’t learn from newspapers or books more accurately and without wasting so much time? I’d like to know the interesting people and to see them in their interesting moments. But I can’t afford to hunt for them through the wilderness of nonentities and wait for them to become interesting.”

“But you get amusement, relaxation. Then too, it’s first-hand study of life.”

“I’m not sure of that. Yawning is not a very attractive kind of relaxation, is it? And as for study of life, eight years of reporting gave me more of that than I could assimilate. And it was study of realities, not of pretenses. As I remember them, ‘respectable’ people are all about the same, whether in their vices or in their virtues. They are cut from a few familiar, ‘old reliable’ patterns. No, I don’t think there is much to be learned from respectability on dress parade.”

“You’ll be amused on Thursday. You must come. I’m counting on you.”

Howard accepted—cordially as he could not refuse decently. Yet he had a presentiment or a shyness or an impatience at the interruption of his routine which reproached him for accepting with insistence and persistence.

X. — THE ETERNAL MASCULINE.

It was the first week in November, and in those days “everybody” did not stay in the country so late as now. There were many New Yorkers in the crowd of out-of-town people at the Waldorf. Howard was attracted, fascinated by the scene—carefully-groomed men and women, the air of gaiety and ease, the flowers, the music, the lights, the perfumes. At a glance it seemed a dream of life with evil and sorrow and pain banished.

“No place for a working man,” thought he, “at least not for my kind of a working man. It appeals too sharply to the instincts for laziness and luxury.”

He was late and stood in the entrance to the palm-garden, looking about for Segur. Soon he saw him waving from a table near the wall under the music-alcove.

“The oysters are just coming,” said Segur. “Sit over there between Mrs. Carnarvon and Miss Trevor. They are cousins, Howard, so be cautious what you say to one about the other. Oh, here is Mr. Berersford.”

The others knew each other well; Howard knew them only as he had seen their names in the “fashionable intelligence” columns of the newspapers. Mrs. Carnarvon was a small thin woman in a black velvet gown which made her thinness obtrusive and attractive or the reverse according as one’s taste is toward or away from attenuation. Her eyes were a dull, greenish grey, her skin brown and smooth and tough from much exposure in the hunting field. Her cheeks were beginning to hang slightly, so that one said: “She is pretty, but she will soon not be.” Her mouth proclaimed strong appetites—not unpleasantly since she was good-looking.

Miss Trevor was perhaps ten years younger than her cousin, not far from twenty-four. She had a critical, almost amused yet not unpleasant way of looking out of unusually clear blue-green eyes. Her hair was of an ordinary shade of dark brown, but fine and thick and admirably arranged to set off her long, sensitive, high bred features. Her chin and mouth expressed decision and strong emotions.

There was a vacant chair between Segur and Berersford and it was presently filled by a fat, middle-aged woman, neither blonde nor brunette, with a large, serene face. Upon it was written a frank confession that she had never in her life had an original thought capable of creating a ripple of interest. She was Mrs. Sidney, rich, of an “old” family—in the New York meaning of the word “old”—both by marriage and by birth, much courted because of her position and because she entertained a great deal both in town and at a large and hospitable country house.

The conversation was lively and amused, or seemed to amuse, all. It was purely personal—about Kittie and Nellie and Jim and Peggie and Amy and Bob; about the sayings and doings of a few dozen people who constituted the intimates of these five persons.

Mrs. Carnarvon turned to the silent Howard at last and began about the weather.

“Horrible in the city, isn’t it?”

“Well, perhaps it is,” replied Howard. “But I fancied it delightful. You see I have not lived anywhere but New York for so long that I am hardly capable to judge.”

“Why everybody says we have the worst climate in the world.”

“Far be it from me to contradict everybody. But for me New York has the ideal climate. Isn’t it the best of any great city in the world? You see, we have the air of the sea in our streets. And when the sun shines, which it does more days in the year than in any other great city, the effect is like champagne—or rather, like the effect champagne looks as if it ought to have.”

“I hate champagne,” said Mrs. Carnarvon. “Marian, you must not drink it; you know you mustn’t.” This to Miss Trevor who was lifting the glass to her lips. She drank a little of the champagne, then set the glass down slowly.

“What you said made me want to drink it,” she said to Howard. “I was glad to hear your lecture on the weather. I had never thought of it before, but New York really has a fine climate. And only this afternoon I let that stupid Englishman—Plymouth—you’ve met him? No?—Well, at any rate, he was denouncing our climate and for the moment I forgot about London.”

“Frightful there, isn’t it, after October and until May?”

“Yes, and the air is usually stale even in the late spring. When it’s warm, it’s sticky. And when it’s cold, it’s raw.”

“You are a New Yorker?”

“Yes,” said Miss Trevor faintly, and for an instant showing surprise at his ignorance. “That is, I spend part of the winter here—like all New Yorkers.”

“All?”

“Oh, all except those who don’t count, or rather, who merely count.”

“How do you mean?” Howard was taking advantage of her looking into her plate to smile with a suggestion of irony. She happened to glance up and so caught him.

“Oh,” she said, smiling with frank irony at him, “I mean all those people—the masses, I think they’re called—the people who have to be fussed over and reformed and who keep shops and—and all that.”

“The people who work, you mean?”

“No, I mean the people you never meet about anywhere, the people who read the newspapers and come to the basement door.”

“Oh, yes, I understand.” Howard was laughing. “Well, that’s one way of looking at life. Of course it’s not my way.”

“What is your way?”

“Why, being one of those who count only in the census, I naturally take a view rather different from yours. Now I should say that your people don’t count. You see, I am most deeply interested in people who read newspapers.”

“Oh, you write for the papers, like Jim Segur? What do you write?”

“What they call editorials.”

“You are an editor?”

“Yes and no. I am one of the editors who does not edit but is edited.”

“It must be interesting,” said Miss Trevor, vaguely.

“More interesting than you imagine. But then all work is that. In fact work is the only permanently interesting thing in life. The rest produces dissatisfaction and regret.”

“Oh, I’m not so very dissatisfied. Yet I don’t work.”

“Are you quite sure? Think how hard you work at being fitted for gowns, at going about to dinners and balls and the like, at chasing foxes and anise seed bags and golf balls.”

“But that is not work. It is amusing myself.”

“Yes, you think so. But you forget that you are doing it in order that all these people who don’t count may read about it in the papers and so get a little harmless relaxation.”

“But we don’t do it to get into the papers.”

“Probably not. Neither did this—what is it here in my plate, a lamb chop?—this lamb gambol about and keep itself in condition to form a course at Segur’s dinner. But after all, wasn’t that what it was really for? Then think how many people you support by your work.”

“You make me feel like a day-labourer.”

“Oh, you’re a much harder worker than any day labourer. And the saddest part of it to me is that you work altogether for others. You give, give and get in return nothing but a few flattering glances, a few careless pats on the back of your vanity. I should hate to work so hard for so little.”

“But what would you do?” Miss Trevor was looking at him, interested and amused.

“Well, I’d work for myself. I’d insist on a return, on getting back something equivalent or near it. I’d insist on having my mind improved, or having my power or my reputation advanced.”

“I was only jesting when I said that about people not counting.”

“Altogether?”

“No, not altogether. I don’t care much about the masses. They seem to me to be underbred, of a different sort. I hate doing things that are useful and I hate people that do useful things—in a general way, I mean.”

“That is doubtless due to defective education,” said Howard, with a smile that carried off the thrust as a jest.

“Is that the way you’d describe a horror of contact with—well, with unpleasant things?” Miss Trevor was serious.

“But is it that? Isn’t it just an unconscious affectation, taken up simply because all the people about you think that way—if one can call the process thinking? You don’t think, do you, that it is a sign of superiority to be narrow, to be ignorant, to be out of touch with the great masses of one’s fellow-beings, to play the part of a harlequin or a ballet-girl on the stage of life? I understand how a stupid ass can fritter away his one chance to live in saying and hearing and doing silly things. But ought not an intelligent person try to enjoy life, try to get something substantial out of it, try to possess himself of its ideas and emotions? Why should one play the fool simply because those about one are incapable of playing any other part?”

“I’m surprised that you are here to-night. Still, I suppose you’ll give yourself absolution on the plea that one must dine somewhere.”

“But I’m not wasting my time. I’m learning. I’m observing a phase of life. And I’m seeing the latest styles in women’s gowns and—”

“Is that important—styles, I mean?”

“Do you suppose that my kind of people, the working classes, would spend so much time and thought in making anything that was not important? There is nothing more important.”

“Then you don’t think we women are wasting time when we talk about dress so much?”

“On the contrary, it is an evidence of your superior sagacity. Women talk trade, ‘shop,’ as soon as they get away from the men. They talk men and dress—fish and nets.”

Berersford heard the word fish and interrupted.

“Do you go South next month, Marian?”

“Yes—about the fifteenth.” Miss Trevor explained to Howard: “Bobby—Mr. Berersford here—always fishes in Florida in January.”

The conversation again became general and personal. Howard knew none of the people of whom they were talking and all that they said was of the nature of gossip. But they talked in a sparkling way, using good English, speaking in agreeable voices with a correct accent, and indulging in a great deal of malicious humour.

As they separated Mrs. Sidney, to whom Howard had not spoken during the evening, said to Segur: “You must bring Mr. Howard on Sunday afternoon.”

“Will you drop Marian at the house for me?” Mrs. Carnarvon asked her. “I want to go on to Edith’s.”

Segur went with Mrs. Sidney and Marian to their carriage. “Who is Mr. Howard?” Mrs. Sidney said, and Miss Trevor drew nearer to hear the answer.

“One of the editorial writers down on the paper and a very clever one—none better. He works hard and is desperately serious and a regular hermit.”

“I think he’s very handsome—don’t you, Marian?”

“I found him interesting,” said Miss Trevor.

Howard thought a great deal about Miss Trevor that night, and she was still in his head the next day. “This comes of never seeing women,” he said to himself. “The first girl I meet seems the most beautiful I ever saw, and the most intellectual. And, when I think it over, what did she say that was startling?”

Nevertheless he went with Segur the next Sunday to Mrs. Sidney’s great house in the upper Avenue overlooking the Park.

“Why do I come here?” he asked himself. “It is a sheer waste of time. Mrs. Sidney can do me no good, or I her. It must be the hope of seeing Miss Trevor.”

When the gaudy and be-powdered flunkey held back the heavy curtains of the salon to announce him and Segur, he saw Miss Trevor on a low chair absently staring into the fire. Yet when he had spoken to Mrs. Sidney and turned toward her she at once stretched out her hand with a slight smile. Some others came in and Howard was free to talk to her. He sat looking at her steadily, admiring her almost perfect profile, delicate yet strong.

“And what have you been doing since I saw you?” Miss Trevor asked.

“Writing little pieces about politics for the paper,” replied Howard.

“Politics? I detest it. It is all stealing and calling names, isn’t it? And something dreadful is always going to happen if somebody or other isn’t elected, or is elected, to something or other. And then, whether he is or not, nothing happens. I should think the men who have been so excited and angry and alarmed would feel very cheap. But they don’t. And the next time they carry on in just the same ridiculous way.”

“Politics is like everything else—interesting if you understand what it is all about. But like everything else, you can’t understand it without a little study at first. It’s a pity women don’t take an interest. If they did the men might become more reasonable and sane about it than they are now. But you—what have you been doing?”

“I—oh, industriously superintending the making of my new nets.” Marian laughed and Howard was flattered. “And also, well, riding in the Park every morning. But I never do anything interesting. I simply drift.”

“That’s so much simpler and more satisfactory than threshing and splashing about as I do. It seems so fussy and foolish and futile. I wish—that is, sometimes I wish—that I had learned to amuse myself in some less violent and exhausting way.”

“Marian—I say, Marian,” called Mrs. Sidney. “Has Teddy come down?”

Miss Trevor coloured slightly as she answered: “No, he comes a week Wednesday. He’s still hunting.”

“Hunting,” Howard repeated when Mrs. Sidney was again busy with the others. “Now there is a kind of work that never bothers a man’s brains or sets him to worrying. I wish I knew how to amuse myself in some such way.”

“You should go about more.”

“Go—where?”

“To see people.”

“But I do see a great many people. I’m always seeing them—all day long.”

“Yes—but that is in a serious way. I mean go where you will be amused—to dinners for instance.”

“I don’t dare. I can’t work at work and also work at play. I must work at one or the other all the time. I can do nothing without a definite object. I can’t be just a little interested in anything or anybody. With me it is no interest at all or else absorption until interest is exhausted.”

“Then if you were interested in a woman, let us say, you’d be absorbed until you found out all there was, and then you’d—take to your heels.”

“But she might always be new. She might interest me more and more. Anyhow I fancy that she would weary of me long before I wearied of her. I think women usually weary first. Men are very monotonous. We are as vain as women, if not vainer, without their capacity for concealing it. And vanity makes one think he does not need to exert himself to please.”

“But why do people usually say that it is the men that are difficult to hold?”

“Because the men hold the women, not through the kind of interest we are talking about, but through another kind—quite different. Women are so lazy and so dependent—dependent upon men for homes, for money, for escort even.”

Miss Trevor was flushing, as if the fire were too hot—at least she moved a little farther away from it. “Your ideal woman would be a shop-girl, I should say from what you’ve told me.”

“Perhaps—in the abstract. I really do think that if I were going to marry, I should look about for a working-girl, a girl that supported herself. How can a man be certain of the love of a woman who is dependent upon him? I should be afraid she was only tolerating me as a labour-saving device.”

Miss Trevor laughed. “There certainly is no vanity in that remark,” she said. “Now I can’t imagine most of the men I know thinking that.”

“It’s only theory with me. In practice doubtless I should be as self-complacent as any other man.”

They left Mrs. Sidney’s together and Howard walked down the Avenue with her. It seemed a wonderful afternoon—the air dazzling, intoxicating. He was filled with the joy of living and was glad this particular tall, slender, distinguished-looking girl was there to make his enjoyment perfect. They were gay with the delight of being young and in health and attractive physically and mentally each to the other. They looked each at the other a great deal, and more and more frankly.

“Am I never to see you again?” he asked as he rang the bell for her.

“I believe Mrs. Carnarvon is going to invite you to dine here Thursday night.”

“Thank you,” said Howard.

Miss Trevor coloured. But she met his glance boldly and laughed. Howard wondered why her laugh was defiant, almost reckless.

He saw Segur at the club after dinner that same night. “And how do you like Miss Trevor?” Segur began as the whiskey and carbonic were set before them.

“A very attractive girl,” said Howard.

“Yes—so a good many men have thought in the last five years. She’s marrying Teddy Danvers in the spring, I believe. At any rate it’s generally looked on as settled. Teddy’s a good deal of a ‘chump.’ But he’s a decent fellow—good-looking, good-natured, domestic in his tastes, and nothing but money.”

Howard was smiling to himself. He understood Miss Trevor’s sudden consciousness of the nearness of the fire, her flush when Mrs. Sidney asked about “Teddy,” and the recklessness in her parting laugh.

“Well, Teddy’s in luck,” he said aloud.

“Not so sure of that. She’s quite capable of leading him a dance if he bores her. And bore her he will. But that is nothing new. This town is full of it.”

“Full of what?”

“Of weary women—weary wives. The men are hobby-riders. They have just one interest and that usually small and dull—stocks or iron or real estate or hunting or automobiles. Our women are not like the English women—stupid, sodden. They are alive, acute. They wish to be interested. Their husbands bore them. So—well, what is the natural temptation to a lazy woman in search of an interest?”

“It’s like Paris—like France?”

“Yes, something. Except that perhaps our women are more sentimental, not fond of intrigue for its own sake—at least, not as a rule.”

“Doesn’t interest them deeply enough, I suppose. It’s the American blood coming out—the passion for achievement. They want a man of whom they can be proud, a man who is doing something interesting and doing it well.”

“I doubt that,” replied Segur shrugging his shoulders. “When a woman loves a man, she wants to absorb him.”

Howard soon went away to his rooms for a long evening of undisturbed thought about Teddy Danvers’s fiancée—the first temptation that had entered his loneliness since Alice died.

In the few weeks of her illness and the few months immediately following her death, he had been at his very best. He was able to see her as she was and to appreciate her. He was living in the clear pure air of the Valley of the Great Shadow where all things appear in their true relations and true proportions. But only there was it possible for the gap between him and Alice to close—that gap of which she was more acutely conscious than he, and which she made wider far than it really was by being too humble with him, too obviously on her knees before him. Such superiority as she thought he possessed is not in human nature; but neither is it in human nature to refuse worship, to refuse to pose upon a pedestal if the opportunity presses.

In the three years between her death and his meeting Marian, the eternal masculine had been secretly gaining strength to resume its pursuit of the eternal feminine. And the eternal feminine was certainly most alluringly personified in this beautiful, graceful girl, at once appreciative and worthy of appreciation.

Perhaps she appealed most strongly to Howard in her vivid suggestion of the open air—of health and strength and nature. He had been leading a cloistered existence and his blood had grown sluggish. She gave him the sensation that a prisoner gets when he catches a glimpse from his barred window of the fields and the streams radiating the joy of life and freedom. And Marian was of his own kind—like the women among whom he had been brought up. She satisfied his idea of what a “lady” should be, but at the same time she was none the less a woman to him—a woman to love and to be loved; to give him sympathy, companionship; to inspire him to overcome his weaknesses by striving to be worthy of her; to bring into his life that feminine charm without which a man’s life must be cold and cheerless.

He knew that he could not marry her, that he had no right to make love to her, that it was unwise to go near her again. But he had no power to resist the temptation. And even in those days he had small regard for the means when the end was one upon which he had fixed his mind. “Why not take what I can get?” he thought, as he dreamed of her. “She’s engaged—her future practically settled. Yes, I’ll be as happy as she’ll let me.” And he resumed his idealising.

At his time of life idealisation is still not a difficult or a long process. And in this case there was an ample physical basis for it—and far more of a mental basis than young imagination demands. He took the draught she so frankly offered him; he added a love potion of his own concocting, and drank it off.

He was in love.

XI. — TRESPASSING.

For the first time since he had been in newspaper work, Howard came to the office the next day in a long coat and a top hat. He left early and went for a walk in the Avenue. But Miss Trevor was neither driving nor walking. He repeated this excursion the next afternoon with better success. At Fortieth Street he saw her and her cousin half a block ahead of him. He walked slowly and examined her. She was satisfactory from the aigrette in her hat to her heels—a long, narrow, graceful figure, dressed with the expensive simplicity characteristic of the most intelligent class of the women of New York and Paris. She walked as if she were accustomed to walking. Mrs. Carnarvon had that slight hesitation, almost stumble, which indicates the woman who usually drives and never walks if she can avoid it. As they paused at the crowded crossing of Forty-second Street he joined them. When Mrs. Carnarvon found that he was “just out for the air” she left them, to go home—in Forty-seventh Street, a few doors east of the Avenue.

“Come back to tea with her,” she said as she nodded to Howard.

“We have at least an hour.” Howard was looking at Miss Trevor with his happiness dancing in his eyes. “Why shouldn’t we go to the Park?”

“I believe it’s not customary,” objected Miss Trevor in a tone that made the walk in the Park a certainty.

“I’m glad to hear that. I don’t care to do customary things as a rule.”

“I see that you don’t.”

“Do you say so because I show what I am thinking so plainly that you can’t help seeing it—and don’t in the least mind?”

“Why shouldn’t you be glad to be alive and to be seeing me this fine winter day?”

“Why indeed!” Howard looked at her from head to foot and then into her eyes.

“We are not in the Park yet.” Miss Trevor accompanied her hint with a laugh and added: “I feel reckless to-day.”

“You mean you forget that there is any to-morrow. I have shut out to-morrow ever since I saw you.”

“And yesterday?” She noted that he coloured slightly, but continued to look at her, his eyes sad. “But there is a to-morrow,” she went on.

“Yes—my work, my career is my to-morrow and yours is——”

“Well?”

“Your engagement, of course.”

Miss Trevor flushed, but Howard was smiling and she did not long resist the contagion.

“My to-morrow,” he continued, “is far more menacing than yours. Yours is just an ordinary, every-day, cut-and-dried affair. Mine is full of doubts and uncertainties with the chances for failure and disappointment. If I can turn my back on my to-morrow, surely you can waive yours for the moment?”

“But why are you so certain that I wish to?”

“Instinct. I could not be so happy as I am with you if you were not content to have me here.”

They spoke little until they were well within the Park. There they turned down a by-path and took the walk skirting the lower lake. Miss Trevor looked at Howard with a puzzled expression.

“I never met any one like you,” she said. “I have always felt so sure of myself. You take me off my feet. I feel as if I did not know where I was going and—didn’t much care. And that’s the worst of it.”

“No, the best of it. You are a star going comfortably through your universe in a fixed orbit. You maintain your exact relations with your brother and sister stars. You keep all your engagements, you never wobble in your path—everything exact, mathematical. And up darts a wild-haired, impetuous comet, a hurrying, bustling, irregular wanderer coming from you don’t know where, going you don’t know whither. We pass very near each to the other. The social astronomers may or may not note a little variation in your movement—a very little, and soon over. They probably will not note the insignificant meteor that darted close up to you—close enough to get his poor face sadly scorched and his long hair cruelly singed—and then hurried sadly away. And——”

“And—what? Isn’t there any more to the story?” Marian’s eyes were shining with a light which she was conscious had never been there before.

“And—and——” Howard stopped and faced her. His hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his overcoat. He looked at her in a way that made the colour fly from her face and then leap back again. “And—I love you.”

“Oh”—Marian said, hiding her face in her white muff. “Oh.”

“I don’t wish to touch you,” he went on, “I just wish to look at you—so tall, so straight, so—so alive, and to love you and be happy.” Then he laughed and turned. “But you’ll catch cold. Let us walk on.”

“So you are trying to make a career?” she asked after a few minutes’ silence.

“Yes—trying—or, rather, I was. And shall again when you have gone your way and I mine.”

Marian was amazed at herself. Every tradition, every instinct of her life was being trampled by this unknown whom she had just met. And she was assisting in the trampling. In fact it was difficult for her to restrain herself from leading in the iconoclasm. She looked at him in wonder and delighted terror.

“Why do you look at me in that way?” he said, turning his head suddenly.

“Because you are stronger than I—and I am afraid—yet I—well—I like it.”

“It is not I that is stronger than you, nor you that are stronger than I. It is a third that is stronger than both of us. I need not mention the gentleman’s name?”

“It is not necessary. But I’d like to hear you pronounce it. At least I did a moment ago.”

“I’ll not risk repetition. I’ve been thinking of what might have been.”

“What?” Marian laughed a little, rather satirically. “A commonplace engagement and a commonplace wedding and a commonplace honeymoon leading into a land of commonplace disillusion and yawning—or worse?”

“Not unlikely. But since we’re only dreaming why not dream more to our taste? Now as I look at your strong, clear, ambitious profile, I can dream of a career made by two working as one, working cheerfully day in and day out, fair and foul weather, working with the certainty of success as the crown.”

“But failure might come.”

“It couldn’t. We wouldn’t work for fame or for riches or for any outside thing. We would work to make ourselves wiser and better and more worthy each of the other and both of our great love.”

Again they were walking in silence.

“I am so sad,” Marian said at last. “But I am so happy too. What has come over me? But—you will work on, won’t you? And you will accomplish everything. Yes, I am sure you will.”

“Oh, I’ll work—in my own way. And I’ll get a good deal of what I want. But not everything. You say you can’t understand yourself. No more can I understand myself. I thought my purpose fixed. I knew that I had nothing to do with marrying and giving in marriage, so I kept away from danger. And here, as miraculously as if a thunderbolt had dropped from this open winter sky, here is—you.”

They were in the Avenue again—“the awakening,” Howard said as the flood of carriages rolled about them.

“You will win,” she repeated, when they were almost at Forty-seventh Street. “You will be famous.”

“Probably not. The price for fame may be too big.”

“The price? But you are willing to work?”

“Work—yes. But not to lie, not to cheat, not to exchange self-respect for self-contempt—at least, I think, I hope not.”

“But why should that be necessary?”

“It may not be if I am free—free to meet every situation as it arises, with no responsibility for others resting upon me in the decision. If I had a wife, how could I be free? I might be forced to sell myself—not for fame but for a bare living. Suppose choice between freedom with poverty and comfort with self-contempt were put squarely at me, and I a married man. She would decide, wouldn’t she?”

“Yes, and if she were the right sort of a woman, decide instantly for self-respect.”

“Of course—if I asked her. But do you imagine that when a man loves a woman he lets her know?”

“It would be a crime not to let her know.”

“It would be a greater crime to put her to the test—if she were a woman brought up, say, as you have been.”

“How can you say that? How can you so overestimate the value of mere incidentals?”

“How can I? Because I have known poverty—have known what it was to look want in the face. Because I have seen women, brought up as you have been, crawling miserably about in the sloughs of poverty. Because I have seen the weaknesses of human nature and know that they exist in me—yes, and in you, for all your standing there so strong and arrogant and self-reliant. It is easy to talk of misery when one does not understand it. It is easy to be the martyr of an hour or a day. But to drag into a sordid and squalid martyrdom the woman one loves—well, the man does not live who would do it, if he knew what I know, had seen what I have seen. No, love is a luxury of the rich and the poor and the steady-going. It is not for my kind, not for me.”

They were pausing at Mrs. Carnarvon’s door.

“I shall not come in this afternoon,” he said. “But to-morrow—if I don’t come in to-day, don’t you think it will be all right for me to come then?”

“I shall expect you,” she said.

The talk of those who had come in for tea seemed artificial and flat. She soon went up-stairs, eager to be alone. Mechanically she went to her desk to write her customary daily letter to Danvers. She looked vacantly at the pen and paper, and then she remembered why she was sitting there.

“You are a traitor,” she said to her reflection in the mirror over the desk. “But you will pay for your treason. Has not one a right to that for which she is willing to pay?”

XII. — MAKING THE MOST OF A MONTH.

To be sure of a woman a man must be confident either of his own powers or of her absolute frankness and honesty. It was self-assurance that made Edward Danvers blindly confident of Marian.

His father, a man with none but selfish uses for his fellow men, had given him a pains-taking training as a vigilant guard for a great fortune. His favourite maxim was, “Always look for motives.” And he once summed up his own character and idea of life by saying: “I often wake at night and laugh as I think how many men are lying awake in their beds, scheming to get something out of me for nothing.”

There could be but one result of such an education by such an educator. Danvers was acutely suspicious, saved from cynicism and misanthropy by his vanity only. He was the familiar combination of credulity and incredulity, now trusting not at all and again trusting with an utter incapacity to judge. Had he been far more attractive personally, he might still have failed to find genuine affection. To be liked for one’s self alone or even chiefly is rarely the lot of any human being who has a possession that is all but universally coveted—wealth or position or power or beauty.

Danvers and Marian had known each the other from childhood. And she perhaps came nearer to liking him for himself than did any one else of his acquaintance. She was used to his conceit, his selfishness, his meanness and smallness in suspicion, his arrogance, his narrow-mindedness. She knew his good qualities—his kindness of heart, his shamed-face generosity, his honesty, the strong if limited sense of justice which made him a good employer and a good landlord. They had much in common—the same companions, the same idea of the agreeable and the proper, the same passion for out-door life, especially for hunting. He fell in love with her when she came back from two years in England and France, and she thought that she was in love with him. She undoubtedly was fond of him, proud of his handsome, athletic look and bearing, proud of his skill and daring in the hunting field.

One day—it was in the autumn a year before Howard met her—they were “in at the death” together after a run across a stiff country that included several dangerous jumps. “You’re the only one that can keep up with me,” he said, admiring her glowing face and star-like eyes, her graceful, assured seat on a hunter that no one else either cared or dared to ride.

“You mean you are the only one who can keep up with me,” she laughed, preparing for what his face warned her was coming.

“No I don’t, Marian dear. I mean that we ought to go right on keeping up with each other. You won’t say no, will you?”

Marian was liking him that day—he was looking his best. She particularly liked his expression as he proposed to her. She had intended to pretend to refuse him; instead her colour rose and she said: “No—which means yes. Everybody expects it of us, Teddy. So I suppose we mustn’t disappoint them.”

The fact that “everybody” did expect it, the fact that he was the great “catch” in their set, with his two hundred and fifty thousand a year, his good looks and his good character—these were her real reasons, with the first dominant. But she did not admit it to herself then. At twenty-four even the mercenary instinct tricks itself out in a most deceptive romantic disguise if there is the ghost of an opportunity. Besides, there was no reason, and no sign of an approaching reason, for the shadow of a suspicion that life with Teddy Danvers would not be full of all that she and her friends regarded as happiness.

But she would not marry immediately. She was tenacious of her freedom. She was restless, dissatisfied with herself and not elated by her prospects. She had an excellent mind, reasonable, appreciative, ambitious. Until she “came out” she had spent much time among books; but as she had had no capable director of her reading, she got from it only a vague sense, that there was somewhere something in the way of achievement which she might possibly like to attain if she knew what it was or where to look for it. As she became settled in her place in the routine of social life, as her horizon narrowed to the conventional ideas of her set, this sense of possible and attractive achievement became vaguer. But her restlessness did not diminish.

“I never saw such an ungrateful girl,” was Mrs. Carnarvon’s comment upon one of Marian’s outbursts of almost peevish fretting. “What do you want?”

“That’s just it,” exclaimed Marian, half-laughing. “What do I want? I look all about me and I can’t see it. Yet I know that there must be something. I think I ought to have been a man. Sometimes I feel like running away—away off somewhere. I feel as if I were getting second-bests, paste substitutes for the real jewels. I feel as I did when I was a child and demanded the moon. They gave me a little gilt crescent and said: ‘Here is a nice little moon for baby;’ and it made me furious.”

Mrs. Carnarvon looked irritated. “I don’t understand it. You are getting the best of everything. Of course you can’t expect to be happy. I don’t suppose that any one is happy. But all the solid things of life are yours, and you can and should be comfortable and contented.”

“That’s just it,” answered Marian indignantly. “I have always been swaddled in cotton wool. I have never been allowed really to feel. I think it is the spirit of revolt in me. Yes, I ought to have been a man. I’m sure that then I could have made life a little less tiresome.”

It was this dissatisfaction that postponed the announcement of the engagement from month to month until a year had slipped away.

Instead of coming to New York, Danvers went off to Montana for a mountain-lion hunt with two Englishmen who had been staying with him in “The Valley.” He would join Marian for the trip South, the engagement would be announced, and the wedding would be in May—such was the arrangement which Marian succeeded in making. It settled everything and at the same time it gave her a month of freedom in New York. She hinted enough of this programme to Howard to enable him to grasp its essential points.

“A month’s holiday,” was his comment. They were alone on the second seat of George Browning’s coach, driving through the Park. “If we were like those people”—he was looking at a young man and young woman, side by side upon a Park bench, blue with cold but absorbed in themselves and obviously ecstatic. Marian glanced at them with slightly supercilious amusement and became so interested that she turned her head to follow them with her eyes after the coach had passed.

“Is he kissing her?” asked Howard.

“No—not yet. But I’m sure he will as soon as we have turned the corner.” She said nothing for a moment or two, her glance straight ahead and upon vacancy, he admiring the curve of her cheek at the edge of its effective framing of fur.

“But we are not——” She spoke in a low tone, regretful, pensive, almost sad. “We are not like them.”

“Oh, yes we are. But—we fancy we are not. We’ve sold our birthright, our freedom, our independence for—for——”

“Well—what?”

“Baubles—childish toys—vanities—shadows. Doesn’t it show what ridiculous little creatures we human beings are that we regard the most valueless things as of the highest value, and think least of the true valuables. For, tell me, Lady-Whom-I-Love, what is most valuable in the few minutes of this little journey among the stars on the good ship Mother Earth?”

“But you would not care always as you care now? It would not, could not, last. If we—if we were like those people on the bench back there, we’d go on and—and spoil it all.”

“Perhaps—who can say? But in some circumstances couldn’t I make you just as happy as—as some one else could?”

“Not if you had made me infinitely happier at one time than even you could hope to make me all the time. At least I think not. It would always be—be racing against a record; we both would be, wouldn’t we?”

Howard looked at her with an expression which transfigured his face and sent the colour flaming to her cheeks. “That being the case,” he said, “let us—let us make the record one that will not be forgotten—soon.”

During the month he saw her almost every day. She was most ingenious in arranging these meetings. They were together afternoons and evenings. They were often alone. Yet she was careful not to violate any convention, always to keep, or seem to be keeping, one foot “on the line.” Howard threw himself into his infatuation with all his power of concentration He practically took a month’s holiday from the office. He thought about her incessantly. He used all his skill with words in making love to her. And she abandoned herself to an equal infatuation with equal absorption. Neither of them spoke of the past or the future. They lived in the present, talked of the present.

One day she spoke of herself as an orphan.

“I did not know that,” he said. “But then what do I know about you in relation to the rest of the world? To me you are an isolated act of creation.”

“You must tell me about yourself.” She was looking at him, surprised. “Why, I know nothing at all about you.”

“Oh, yes, you do. You know all that there is to know—all that is important.”

“What?” She was asking for the pleasure of hearing him say it.

“That I love you—you—all of you—all of you, with all of me.”

Her eyes answered for her lips, which only said smilingly: “No, we haven’t time to get acquainted—at least not to-day.”

She was to start for Florida at ten the next morning. Mrs. Carnarvon was going away to the opera, giving them the last evening alone. Marian had asked this of her point-blank.

“You are an extraordinarily sensible as well as strong-willed girl, Marian,” Mrs. Carnarvon replied.

“I can’t find it in my heart to blame you for what you’re doing. The fact that I haven’t even hinted a protest, but have lent myself to your little plots, shows that that young man has hypnotized me also.”

“You needn’t disturb yourself, as you know,” Marian said gaily. “I’m not hypnotized. I shall not see Mr. Howard again until—after it’s all over. Perhaps not then.”

He came to dinner and they were not alone until almost nine. She sat near the open fire among the cushions heaped high upon the little sofa. She had never been more beautiful, and apparently never in a happier mood. They both laughed and talked as if it were the first instead of the last day of their month. Neither spoke of the parting; each avoided all subjects that pointed in direction of the one subject of which both thought whenever their minds left the immediate present. As the little clock on the mantle began to intimate in a faint, polite voice the quarter before eleven, he said abruptly, almost brusquely:

“I feel like a coward, giving you up in this way. Yes—giving you up; for you have a traitor in your fortress who has offered me the keys, who offers them to me now. But I do not trust you; and I can’t trust myself. The curse of luxury is on you, the curse of ambition on me. If we had found each the other younger; if I had lived less alone, more in the ordinary habit of dependence upon others; if you had been brought up to live instead of to have all the machinery of living provided and conducted for you—well, it might have been different.”

“You are wrong as to me, right as to yourself. But yours is not the curse of ambition. It is the passion for freedom. It would be madness for you, thinking as you do, even if you could—and you can’t.”

He stood up and held out his hand. She did not rise or look at him.

“Good night,” she said at last, putting her hand in his. “Of course I am thinking I shall see you tomorrow. One does not come out of such a dream,”—she looked up at him smiling—“all in a moment.”

“Good night,” he smiled back at her. “I shall not open ‘the fiddler’s bill’ until—until I have to.” At the door he turned. She had risen and was kneeling on the sofa, her elbow on its low arm, her chin upon her hand, her eyes staring into the fire. He came toward her.

“May I kiss you?” he said.

“Yes.” Her voice was expressionless.

He bent over and just touched his lips to the back of her neck at the edge of her hair. He thought that she trembled slightly, but her face was set and she did not look toward him. He turned and left her. Half an hour later she heard the bell ring—it was Mrs. Carnarvon. She wished to see no one, so she fled through the rear door of the reception room and up the great stairway to lock herself in her boudoir. She sank slowly upon the lounge in front of the fire and closed her eyes. The fire died out and the room grew cold. A warning chilliness made her rise to get ready for bed.

“No,” she said aloud. “It isn’t ambition and it isn’t lack of love. It’s a queer sort of cowardice; but it’s cowardice for all that. He’s a coward or he wouldn’t have given up. But—I wonder—how am I going to live without him? I need him—more than he needs me, I’m afraid.”

She was standing before her dressing table. On it was a picture of Danvers—handsome, self-satisfied, healthy, unintellectual. She looked at it, gave a little shiver, and with the end of her comb toppled it over upon its face.

XIII. — RECKONING WITH DANVERS.

On that journey south Marian for the first time studied Danvers as a husband in prospect.

The morning after they left New York, their private car arrived at Savannah. At dark the night before they were rushing through a snow storm raging in a wintry landscape. Now they were looking out upon spring from the open windows. As soon as the train stopped, all except Marian and Danvers left the car to walk up and down the platform. Danvers, standing behind Marian, looked around to make sure that none of the servants was about, then rubbed his hand caressingly and familiarly upon her cheek.

“Did you miss me?” he asked.

Marian could not prevent her head from shrinking from his touch.

“There’s nobody about,” Danvers said, reassuringly. But he acted upon the hint and, taking his hand away, came around and sat beside her.

“Did you miss me?” he repeated, looking at her with an expression in his frank, manly blue eyes that made her flush at the thought of “treason” past and to come.

“Did you miss me?” she evaded.

“I would have returned long ago if I had not been ashamed,” he answered, smiling. “I never thought that I should come not to care for as good shooting as that. You almost cost me my life.”

“Yes?” Marian spoke absently. She was absorbed in her mental comparison of the two men.

“I got away from the others and was looking at your picture. They started up a lion and he came straight at me from behind. If he hadn’t made a misstep in his hurry and loosened a stone, I guess he would have got me. As it was, I got him.”

“You mean your gun got him.”

“Of course. You don’t suppose I tackled him bare-handed.”

“It might have been fairer. I don’t see how you can boast of having killed a creature that never bothered you, that you had to go thousands of miles out of your way to find, and that you attacked with a gun, giving him no chance to escape.”

“What nonsense!” laughed Danvers. “I never expected to hear you say anything like that. Who’s been putting such stuff into your head?”

Marian coloured. She did not like his tone. She resented the suggestion of the truth that her speech was borrowed. It made her uncomfortable to find herself thus unexpectedly on the dangerous ground.

“I suppose it must have been that newspaper fellow Mrs. Carnarvon has taken up. She talked about him for an hour after you left us to go to bed last night.”

“Yes, it was—was Mr. Howard.” Marian had recovered herself. “I want you to meet him some time. You’ll like him, I’m sure.”

“I doubt it. Mrs. Carnarvon seemed not to know much about him. I suppose he’s more or less of an adventurer.”

Marian wondered if this obvious dislike was the result of one of those strange instincts that sometimes enable men to scent danger before any sign of it appears.

“Perhaps he is an adventurer,” she replied. “I’m sure I don’t know. Why should one bother to find out about a passing acquaintance? It is enough to know that he is amusing.”

“I’m not so sure of that. He might make off with the jewels when you had your back turned.”

As soon as she had made her jesting denial of her real lover Marian was ashamed of herself. And Danvers’ remark, though a jest, cut her. “What I said about a passing acquaintance was not just or true,” she said impulsively and too warmly. “Mr. Howard is not an adventurer. I admire and like him very much indeed. I’m proud of his friendship.”

Danvers shrugged his shoulders and looked at her suspiciously.

“You saw a good deal of this—this friend of yours?” he demanded, his mouth straightening into a dictatorial line.

At this Marian grew haughty and her eyes flashed: “Why do you ask?” she inquired, her tone dangerously calm.

“Because I have the right to know.” He pointed to the diamond on her third finger.

“Oh—that is soon settled.” Marian drew off the ring and held it out to him. “Really, Teddy, I think you ought to have waited a little longer before insisting so fiercely on your rights.”

“Don’t be absurd, Marian.” Danvers did not take the ring but fixed his eyes upon her face and changed his tone to friendly remonstrance. “You know the ring doesn’t mean anything. It’s your promise that counts. And honestly don’t you think your promise does give me the right to ask you about your new friends when you speak of them, of one of them, in—in such a way?”

“I don’t intend to deceive you,” she said, turning the ring around slowly on her finger. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I suppose the only way to speak is just to speak.”

“Do you think you are in love with this man, Marian?”

She nodded, then after a long pause, said, “Yes, Teddy, I love him.”

“But I thought——”

“And so did I, Teddy. But he came, and I—well I couldn’t help it.”

As he did not speak, she looked at him. His face was haggard and white and in his eyes which met hers frankly there was suffering.

“It wasn’t my fault, Teddy,” Marian laid her hand on his arm, “at least, not altogether. I might have kept away and I didn’t.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you. I blame him.”

“But it wasn’t his fault. I—I—encouraged him.”

“Did he know that we were engaged?”

“Yes,” reluctantly.

“The scoundrel! I suspected that he was rotten somewhere.”

“You are unjust to him. I have not told you properly.”

“Did he tell you that he cared for you?”

“Yes—but he didn’t try to get me to break my engagement.”

“So much the more a scoundrel, he. Tell me, Marian—come to your senses and tell me—what in the devil did he hang about you for and make love to you, if he didn’t want to marry you? Would an honest man, a decent man, do that?”

Marian’s face confessed assent.

“I should think you would have seen what sort of a fellow he is. I should think you would despise him.”

“Sometimes it seems to me that I ought to. But I always end by despising myself—and—and—it makes no difference in the way I feel toward him.”

“I think I would do well to look him up and give him a horse-whipping. But you’ll get over him, Marian. I am astonished at your cousin. How could she let this go on? But then, she’s crazy about him too.”

Marian smiled miserably. “I’ve owned up and you ought to congratulate yourself on so luckily getting rid of such an untrustworthy person as I.”

“Getting rid of you?” Danvers looked at her defiantly. “Do you think I’m going to let you go on and ruin yourself on an impulse? Not much! I hold you to your promise. You’ll come round all right after you’ve been away from this fellow for a few days. You’ll be amazed at yourself a week from now.”

“You don’t understand, Teddy.” Marian wished him to see once for all that, whatever might be the future for her and Howard, there was no future for her and him. “Don’t make it so hard for me to tell you.”

“I don’t want to hear any more about it now, Marian. I can’t stand it—I hardly know what I’m saying—wait a few days—let’s go on as we have been—here they come.”

The others of the party came bustling into the car and the train started. For the rest of the journey Danvers avoided her, keeping to the smoking room and the game of poker there. Marian could neither read nor watch the landscape. She did not know whether to be glad or sorry that she had told him. She hated to think that she had inflicted pain and she could not believe, in spite of what she had seen in his eyes, that his feeling in the matter was more than jealousy and wounded vanity.

“He doesn’t really care for me,” she thought. “It’s his pride that is hurt. He will flare out at me and break it off. I do hope he’ll get angry. It will make it so much easier for me.”

Late in the afternoon she took Mrs. Carnarvon into her confidence. “I’ve told Teddy,” she said.

“I might have known!” exclaimed her cousin. “What on earth made you do that?”

“I don’t know—perhaps shame.”

“Shame—trash! Your life is going to be a fine turmoil if you run to Teddy with an account of every little mild flirtation you happen to have. Of all the imbeciles, the most imbecile is the woman who confesses.”

“But how could I marry him when——”

“When you don’t love him?”

“No—I might have done that. I like him. But, when I love another man.”

“It does make a difference. But you ought to be able to foresee that you’ll get over Howard in a few weeks——”

“Precisely what Teddy said.”

“Did he? I’m surprised at his having so much sense. For, if you’ll forgive me, I don’t think Teddy will ever set New York on fire—at least, he’s—well, he has the makings of an ideal husband. And has he broken it off?”

“No. He wouldn’t have it.”

“Really? Well he is in love. Most men in his position—able to get any girl he wants—would have thrown up the whole business. Yes, he must be awfully in love.”

“Do you think that?” Marian’s voice spoke distress but she felt only satisfaction. “Oh, I hope not—that is, I’d like to think he cared a great deal and at the same time I don’t want to hurt him.”

“Don’t fret yourself about these two men. Just go on thinking as you please. You’ll be surprised how soon Howard will fade.” Mrs. Carnarvon smiled satirically at some thought—perhaps a memory. “You’re a good deal of a goose, my dear, but you are a great deal more of a woman. That’s why I feel sure that Teddy will win.”

With such an opportunity—with the field clear and the woman half-remorseful over her treachery, half-indignant at the man who had shown himself so weak and spiritless—a cleverer or a less vain man than Danvers would have triumphed easily. And for the first week he did make progress. He acted upon the theory that Marian had been hypnotized and that the proper treatment was to ignore her delusion and to treat her with assiduous but not annoying consideration. He did not pose as an injured or jealous lover. He was the friend, always at her service, always thinking out plans for her amusement. He made no reference to their engagement or to Howard.

Several people of their set were at the hotel and Marian was soon drifting back into her accustomed modes of thought. The wider horizon which she fancied Howard had shown her was growing dim and hazy. The horizon which he had made her think narrow was beginning again to seem the only one. This meant Danvers; but he was not acute enough to understand her and to follow up his advantage.

One morning as he was walking up and down under the palms, waiting for Mrs. Carnarvon and Marian, Mrs. Fortescue called him. She was a cold, rather handsome woman. In her eyes was the expression that always betrays the wife or the mistress who loathes the man she lives with, enduring him only because he gives her that which she most wants—money. She had one fixed idea—to marry her daughter “well,” that is, to money.

“Can you join us to-day, Teddy?” she asked. “We need one more man.”

“I’m waiting for Mrs. Carnarvon and Marian,” he explained.

“Oh, of course.” Mrs. Fortescue smiled. “What a nice girl she is—so clever, so—so independent. I admired her immensely for deciding to marry that poor, obscure young fellow. I like to see the young people romantic.”

Danvers flushed angrily and pulled at his mustache. He tried to smile. “We’ve teased her about it a good deal,” he said, “but she denies it.”

“I suppose they aren’t ready to announce the engagement yet,” Mrs. Fortescue suggested. “I suppose they are waiting until he betters his position a little. It’s never a good idea to have too long a time between the announcement and the marriage.”

“Perhaps that is it.” Danvers tried to look indifferent but his eyes were sullen with jealousy.

“I always rather thought that you and Marian were going to make a match of it,” continued Mrs. Fortescue. Just then her daughter came down the walk. She was fashionably dressed in white and blue that brought out all the loveliness of her golden hair and violet eyes and faintly-coloured, smooth fair skin. Danvers had not seen her since she “came out,” and was dazzled by her radiance.

They say that every man must be a little in love with every pretty woman he sees. And Danvers at once gave Ellen Fortescue her due. She sat silent beside her mother, looking the personification of innocence, purity and poetry. Her mother continued subtly to poison Danvers against Marian, to make him feel that she had not appreciated him, that she had trifled with him, that she had not treated him as his dignity and importance merited. When she and Mrs. Carnarvon appeared, he joined them tardily, after having made an arrangement with the Fortescues for the next day.

That evening he danced several times with Ellen Fortescue and adopted the familiar lover’s tactics—he set about making Marian jealous. He scored the customary success. When she went to bed she lay for several hours looking out into the moonlight, raging against the Fortescues and against Danvers. The mere fact that a man whom she regarded as hers was permitting himself to show marked attention to another woman would have been sufficient. But in addition, Marian was perfectly aware of the material advantages of this particular man. She did not want to marry him; at least she was of that mind at the moment. But she might change her mind. Certainly, if there was to be any breaking off, she wished it to be of her doing. She did not fancy the idea of him departing joyfully.

She was far too wise to show that she saw what was going on. She praised Miss Fortescue to Danvers with apparent frankness and insisted on him devoting more time to her. Danvers persisted in his scheme boldly for a week and then, just as Marian was despairing and was casting about for another plan of campaign, he gave in. They were sitting apart in the shadow near one of the windows of the ball-room. He had been sullen all the evening, almost rude.

“How much longer are you going to keep me in suspense?” he burst out angrily.

“In suspense?”

“You know what I mean. I think I’ve been very patient.”

“You mean our engagement?” Marian was looking at him, repelled by his expression, his manner, the tone of his voice, his whole mood.

“Yes—I want your decision.”

“I have not changed.”

“You still love that—that newspaper fellow?”

“No, I don’t mean that.” Marian felt her irritation against Danvers suddenly vanish and in its place a Sense of relief and of calmness. “I mean toward you. It won’t do, Teddy. We shall get on well as friends. But I can’t think of you in—in that way.”

Mrs. Fortescue had so swollen his vanity that he was astounded at Marian’s decision. He rapidly went over in his mind all the advantages he offered as a husband, and then looked at her as if he thought her beside herself.

“Look here, Marian,” he protested. “You can’t mean it. Why, it’s all settled that we are to marry. It would be madness for you to break it off. I can give you everything—everything. And he can’t give you anything.” Then with fatal tactlessness: “He won’t even give you the little that he can, according to your own story.”

“Yes, it’s madness, isn’t it, Teddy, to refuse you—fascinating you, who can give everything. But that’s just it. You have too much. You overwhelm me. I should feel like a cheat, taking so much and giving so little.”

“Don’t,” he begged, his self-complacence and superiority all gone. “Don’t mind my blundering, please, dear. I want you. I can’t say it. I haven’t any gift of words. But you’ve known me all my life and you know that I love you. I’ve set my heart on it, Mary Ann,”—it was the name he used to tease her with when they were children playing together—“You won’t go back on me now, will you?”

“I wish I could do as you wish, Teddy.” Marian was forgetful of everything but the unhappiness she was causing this friend of so many, many years and of so many, many memories. “But I can’t—I can’t.”

“Marry me, dear, anyhow. You will care afterward.” Marian was silent and Danvers hoped. “You know all about me. I’ll not give you any surprises. I shan’t bother you. And I’ll make you happy.”

“No,” she said firmly. “You mustn’t ask it. I’ll tell you why. I have thought of marrying you regardless of this. Only last night I thought of it—finally, went over the whole thing. Listen, Teddy—if I were married to you—and if he should come—and he would come sooner or later—if he should come and say ‘Come with me,’—I’d go—yes, I’m sure I’d go. I can’t explain why. But I know that nothing would stand in the way—nothing.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Marian shrank from him. She was horrified by the malignant fury that sparkled in his eyes and raged in his voice. “That damned scoundrel is worthy of you and you of him. But I’ll get you yet. I never was crossed in anything in my life and I’ll not be beaten here.”

“And I thought you were my friend!” Marian was looking at him, pale, her eyes wide with amazement. “Is it really you?”

He laughed insolently. “Yes—you’ll see. And he’ll see. I’ll crush him as if he were an egg shell. And as for you—you perjurer—you liar!”

He looked at her with coarse contempt, rose and stalked away. Marian sat rigid. She was conscious of the insult. But even that humiliation was not so strong in her mind as the astounding revelation of Danvers. She remembered that even as his eyes blazed hatred at her, he looked at her, at her neck, her bare arms, with the baffled desire of brute passion. She did not fully understand the look, but she felt that it was a degradation far greater than his insulting words.

She slipped, almost skulked to her room, her eyes down, her face in a burning flush, her scarf drawn tightly about her neck. As her door closed behind her, she fell upon her bed and began to sob hysterically. She started up with a scream to find her cousin standing beside her.

“I’m so sorry. Forgive me.” Mrs. Carnarvon’s voice had lost its wonted levity. “I saw that you were in trouble and followed. I knocked and I thought I heard you answer. What is it, Marie? May I ask? Can I do anything?”

Marian drew her down to the bed and buried her face in her lap. “Oh, I feel so unclean,” she said. “It was—Teddy. Would you believe it, Jessie, Teddy! I looked on him as a brother. And he showed me that he was not my friend—that he didn’t even love me—that he—oh, I shall never forget the look in his eyes. He made me feel like a—like a thing.”

Mrs. Carnarvon smothered a smile. “Of course Teddy’s a brute,” she said. “I thought you knew. He’s a domesticated brute, like most of the men and some of the women. You’ll have to get used to that.”

By refusing to fall in with her mood, Mrs. Carnarvon had gone far toward curing it. Marian stopped sobbing and presently said:

“Oh, I know all that. But I didn’t expect it from Teddy—and toward me. And—” she shuddered—“I was thinking, actually thinking of marrying him. I wish never to see him again. And he pretended to be my friend!”

“And he was, no doubt, until he got you on the brain in another way, in the way he calls love. There isn’t any love that has friendship in it.”

“We must go away at once.”

“Unless Teddy saves us the trouble by going first, as I suspect he will.”

“Jessie, he hates me and—and—Mr. Howard.”

“So you talked to him about Howard again, did you?” Mrs. Carnarvon was indignant. “You are old enough to know better, Marian. You carry frankness entirely too far. There is such a thing as truth running amuck.”

“He said he would crush Howard. And I believe he really meant it.”

“Teddy is a man who believes in revenges—or thinks he does. His father taught him to keep accounts in grievances, and no doubt he has opened an account with Howard. But don’t be disturbed about it. His father would have insisted on balancing the account. Teddy will just keep on hating, but won’t do anything. He’s not underhanded.”

“He’s everything that is vile and low.”

“You’re quite mistaken, my dear. He’s what they call a manly fellow—a little too masculine perhaps, but——”

A knock interrupted and Mrs. Carnarvon, answering it, took from the bell-boy a note for Marian who read it, then handed it to her. Mrs. Carnarvon read: “I apologise for the way I said what I did this evening, not for what I said. Because you had forgotten yourself, had played the traitor and the cheat was, perhaps, no excuse for my rudeness. You have fallen under an evil influence. I hope no harm will come to you, for I can’t get over my feeling for you. But I have done my best and have not been able to save you. I am going away early in the morning.

“E. D.”

“Melodramatic, isn’t it?” laughed Mrs. Carnarvon. “So he’s off. How furious Martha Fortescue and Ellen will be. But they’ll go in pursuit, and they’ll get him. A man is never so susceptible as when he’s broken-hearted. Well, I must go. Good-night, dear. Don’t mope and whine. Take your punishment sensibly. You’ve learned something—if it’s only not to tell one man how much you love another.”

“I think I’ll go abroad with Aunt Retta next month.”

“A good idea—you’ll forget both these men. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” answered Marian dolefully, expecting to resume her thoughts of Danvers. But, instead, he straightway disappeared from her mind and she could think only of Howard. She was free now. The one barrier between him and her of which she had been really conscious was gone. And her heart began to ache with longing for him. Why had he not written? What was he doing? Did he really love her or was his passion for her only a flash of a strong and swift imagination?

No, he loved her—she could not doubt that. But she could not understand his conduct. She felt that she ought to be very unhappy, yet she was not. The longer she thought of him and the more she weighed his words and looks, the stronger became her trust in him. “He loves me,” she said. “He will come when he can. It may be even harder for him than for me.”

And so, explanation failing—for she rejected every explanation that reflected upon him—she hid and excused him behind that familiar refuge of the doubting, mystery.

XIV. — THE NEWS-RECORD GETS A NEW EDITOR.

A few minutes after leaving Marian that last night at Mrs. Carnarvon’s, Howard was deep in a mood of self-contempt. He felt that he had faced the crisis like a coward. He despised the weakness which enfeebled him for effort to win her and at the same time made it impossible for him to thrust her from his mind.

In the working hours his will conquered with the aid of fixed habit and he was able to concentrate upon his editorials. But in his rooms, and especially after the lights were out, his imagination became master, deprived him of sleep and occasionally lifted him to a height of hope in order that it might dash him down the more cruelly upon the rocks of fact.

At last he was forced to face the situation—in his own evasive fashion. It was impossible to go back. That loneliness which often threatened him after Alice’s death had become the permanent condition of his life. “I will work for her,” he said. “Until I have made a place for her I dare not claim her. So much I will concede to my weakness. But when I have won a position which reasonably assures the future, I shall claim her—no matter what has happened in the meanwhile.”

He would have smiled at this wild resolution had he been in a less distracted state of mind or had he been dealing with any other than a matter of love. But in the circumstances it gave him heart and set him to work with an energy and effectiveness which still further increased Mr. Malcolm’s esteem for him.

“Will you dine with me at the Union Club on Wednesday?” Mr. Malcolm asked one morning in mid-February. “Mr. Coulter and Mr. Stokely are coming. I want you to know them better.”

Howard accepted and wondered that he took so little interest. For Stokely and Coulter were the principal stockholders of the News-Record, and with Malcolm formed the triumvirate which directed it in all its departments. Mr. Malcolm held only a few shares of stock, but received what was in the newspaper-world an immense salary—thirty thousand a year. He was at once an able editor and an able diplomatist. He knew how to make the plans of his two associates conform to conditions of news and policy—when to let them use the paper, or, rather, when to use the paper himself for their personal interests; when and how to induce them to let the paper alone. Through a quarter of a century of changing ownerships Malcolm had persisted, chiefly because he had but one conviction—that the post of editor of the News-Record exactly suited him and must remain his at any sacrifice of personal character.

Howard had met Stokely and Coulter. He liked Stokely who was owner of a few shares more than one-third; he disliked Coulter who owned just under one-half.

Stokely was a frank, coarse, dollar-hunter, cheerfully unscrupulous in a large way, acute, caring not at all for principles of any kind, letting the paper alone most of the time because he was astute enough to know that in his ignorance of journalism he would surely injure it as a property.

Coulter was a hypocrite and a snob. Also he fancied he knew how to conduct a newspaper. He was as unscrupulous as Stokely but tried to mask it.

When Stokely wished the News-Record to advocate a “job,” or steal, or the election of some disreputable who would work in his interest, he told Malcolm precisely what he wanted and left the details of the stultification to his experienced adroitness. When Coulter wished to “poison the fountain of publicity,” as Malcolm called the paper’s departures from honesty and right, he approached the subject by stealth, trying to convince Malcolm that the wrong was not really wrong, but was right unfortunately disguised.

He would take Malcolm into his confidence by slow and roundabout steps, thus multiplying his difficulties in discharging his “duty.” If Coulter’s son had not been married to Malcolm’s daughter, it is probable that not even his complete subserviency would have enabled him to keep his place.

“If you had told me frankly what you wanted in the first place, Mr. Coulter,” he said after an exasperating episode in which Coulter’s Pharisaic sensitiveness had resulted in Malcolm’s having to “flop” the paper both editorially and in its news columns twice in three days, “we would not have made ourselves ridiculous and contemptible. The public is an ass, but it is an ass with a memory at least three days long. Your stealthiness has made the ass bray at us instead of with and for us. And that is dangerous when you consider that running a newspaper is like running a restaurant—you must please your customers every day afresh.”

Coulter was further difficult because of his anxieties about social position for himself and his family. He was disturbed whenever the News-Record published an item that might offend any of the people whose acquaintance he had gained with so much difficulty, and for whose good will he was willing to sacrifice even considerable money. Personally, but very privately, he edited the News-Record’s “fashionable intelligence” columns on Sunday and made them an exhibit of his own sycophancy and snobbishness which excited the amused disgust of all who were in the secret.

Malcolm liked Howard, admired him, in a way envied his fearlessness, his earnestness for principles. For years he had had it in mind to retire and write a history of the Civil War period which had been his own period of greatest activity and most intimate acquaintance with the behind-the-scenes of statecraft. Howard’s energy, steady application, enthusiasm for journalism and intelligence both as to editorials and as to news made Malcolm look upon him as his natural successor.

“I think Howard is the man we want,” he said to his two associates when he was arranging the dinner. “He has new ideas—just what the paper needs. He is in touch with these recent developments. And above all he has judgment. He knows what not to print, where and how to print what ought to be printed. He is still young and is over-enthusiastic. He has limitations, but he knows them and he is eager and capable to learn.”

It was a “shop” dinner, Howard doing most of the talking, led on by Malcolm. The main point was the “new journalism,” as it was called, and how to adapt it to the News-Record and the News-Record to it.

Malcolm kept the conversation closely to news and news-ideas, fearing that, if editorial policies were brought in, Howard would make “breaks.” He soon saw that his associates were much impressed with Howard, with his judgment, with his knowledge of the details of every important newspaper in the city, with his analysis of the good and bad points in each.

“I’ll drop you at your corner,” said he to Howard at the end of the dinner. As they drove up the Avenue he began: “How would you like to be the editor of the News-Record? My place, I mean.”

“I don’t understand,” Howard answered, bewildered.

“I am going to retire at once,” Malcolm went on. “I’ve been at it nearly fifty years—ever since I was a boy of eighteen and I’ve been in charge there almost a quarter of a century. I think I’ve earned a few years of leisure to work for my own amusement. I’m pretty sure they’ll want you to take my place. Would you like it?”

“I’m not fit for it,” Howard said, and he meant it. “I’m only an apprentice. I’m always making blunders—but I needn’t tell you about that.”

“You can’t say that you are not fit until you have tried. Besides, the question is not, are you fit? but, is there any one more fit than you? I confess I don’t see any one so well equipped, so certain to give the paper all of the best that there is in him.”

“Of course I’d like to try. I can only fail.”

“Oh, you won’t fail. But you may quarrel with Stokely and Coulter—especially Coulter. In fact, I’m sure you’ll quarrel with them. But if you make yourself valuable enough, you’ll probably win out. Only——”

Malcolm hesitated, then went on:

“I stopped giving advice years ago. But I’ll venture a suggestion. Whenever your principles run counter to the policy of the paper, it would be wise to think the matter over carefully before making an issue. Usually there is truth on both sides, much that can be said fairly and honestly for either side. Often devotion to principle is a mere prejudice. Often the crowd, the mob, can be better controlled to right ends by conceding or seeming to concede a principle for the time. Don’t strike a mortal blow at your own usefulness to good causes by making yourself a hasty martyr to some fancied vital principle that will seem of no consequence the next morning but one after the election.”

“I know, Mr. Malcolm, judgment is all but impossible. And I have been trying to learn what you have been teaching me with your blue pencil, what you now put into words. But there is something in me—an instinct, perhaps—that forces me on in spite of myself. I’ve learned to curb and guide it to a certain extent, but as long as I am I, I shall never learn to control it. Every man must work out his own salvation along his own lines. And with my limitations of judgment, it would be fatal to me, I feel, to study the art of compromise. Where another, broader, stronger, more master of himself and of others, would succeed by compromising, I should fail miserably. I should be lost, compassless, rudderless. I have often envied you your calmness, your ability to see not only to-morrow but the day after. But, if I ever try to imitate you, I shall make a sad mess of my career.”

As he ended Howard looked uneasily at the old editor, expecting to see that caustic smile with which he preceded and accompanied his sarcasms at “sentimental bosh.” But instead, Malcolm’s face was melancholy; and his voice was sad and weary as he answered the young man who was just starting where he had started so many years ago:

“No doubt you are right. I’m not intending to try to dissuade you from—from the best there is in you. All I mean is that caution, self-examination, self-doubt, calm consideration of the other side—these are as necessary to success as energy and resolute action. All I suggest is that its splendour does not redeem a splendid folly. Its folly remains its essential characteristic.”

Three weeks later Howard became editor-in-chief of the News-Record. His salary was fifteen thousand a year; and Stokely and Coulter, acting upon Malcolm’s advice, gave him a “free hand” for one year. They agreed not to interfere during that time unless the circulation or the profits showed a decrease at the end of a quarter.

The next morning Howard, in the Madison Avenue car on his way to the office, read among the “Incidents in Society:”

Mrs. George Alexander Provost and her niece, Miss Marion Trevor, sailed in the Campania yesterday. They will return in July for the Newport season.

XV. — YELLOW JOURNALISM.

While several of the New York dailies were circulating from two to three hundred thousand copies, the News-Record—the best-written, the most complete, and, where the interests of the owners did not interfere, the most accurate—circulated less than one hundred thousand. The Sunday edition had a circulation of one hundred and fifty thousand where two other newspapers had almost half a million.

The theory of the News-Record staff was that their journal was too “respectable,” too intelligent, to be widely read; that the “yellow journals” grovelled, “appealed to the mob,” drew their vast crowds by the methods of the fakir and the freak. They professed pride in the News-Record’s smaller circulation as proof of its freedom from vulgarity and debasement. They looked down upon the journalists of the popular newspapers and posed as the aristocracy of the profession.

Howard did not assent to these self-complacent excuses. He was democratic and modern, and the aristocratic pose appealed only to his sense of humour and his suspicions. He believed that the success of the “yellow journals” with the most intelligent, alert and progressive public in the world must be based upon solid reasons of desert, must be in spite of, not because of, their follies and exhibitions of bad taste. He resolved upon a radical departure, a revolution from the policy of satisfying petty vanity and tradition within the office to a policy of satisfying the demands of the public.

He gave Segur temporary charge of the editorial page, and, taking a desk in the news-room, centred his attention upon news and the news-staff. But he was careful not to agitate and antagonise those whose coöperation was necessary to success. He made only one change in the management; he retired old Bowring on a pension and appointed to the city editorship one of the young reporters—Frank Cumnock.

He chose Cumnock for this position, in many respects the most important on the staff of a New York daily, because he wrote well, was a judge of good writing, had a minute knowledge of New York and its neighbourhood and, finally and chiefly, because he had a “news-sense,” keener than that of any other man on the paper.

For instance, there was the murder of old Thayer, the rich miser in East Sixteenth Street. It was the sensation in all the newspapers for two weeks. Then they dropped it as an unsolvable mystery. Cumnock persuaded Mr. Bowring to let him keep on. After five days’ work he heard of a deaf and dumb woman who sat every afternoon at a back window of her flat overlooking the back windows of Thayer’s house. He had a trying struggle with her infirmity and stupidity, but finally was rewarded. On the afternoon of the murder, in its very hour (which the police had been able to discover), she had seen a man and woman in the bathroom of the Thayer house. Both were agitated and the man washed his hands again and again, carefully rinsing the bowl afterward. From her description Cumnock got upon the track of Thayer’s niece and her husband, found the proof of their guilt, had them watched until the News-Record came out with the “beat,” then turned them over to the police.

Also, Cumnock was keen at taking hints of good news-items concealed in obscure paragraphs. The Morris Prison scandal was an example of this. He found in the New England edition of The World a six-line item giving an astonishing death rate for the Morris Prison. He asked the City Editor to assign him to go there; and within a week the press of the entire country was discussing the News-Record’s exposure of the barbarities of torture and starvation practised by Warden Johnson and his keepers.

“We are going to print the news, all the news and nothing but the news,” Howard said to Cumnock. “They’ve put you here because, so they tell me, you know news no matter how thoroughly it is concealed or disguised. And I assure you that no one shall interfere with you. No favours to anybody; no use of the news-columns for revenge or exploitation. The only questions a news-item need raise in your mind are: Is it true? Is it interesting? Is it printable in a newspaper that will publish anything which a healthy-minded grown-person wishes to read?”

“Is that ‘straight’?” asked Cumnock. “No favourites? No suppressions? No exploitations?”

“‘Straight’—‘dead straight’! And if I were you I’d make this particularly clear to the Wall Street and political men. If anybody”—with stress upon the anybody—“comes to you about this, send him to me.”

Howard was uneasy about the managing editor, Mr. King. But he soon found that his fears were groundless. Mr. King was without petty vanity, and cordially and sincerely welcomed his control.

“We look too dull,” King began when Howard asked him if he had any changes to suggest. “We need more and bigger headlines, and we need pictures.”

“That is it!” Howard was delighted to find that King and he were in perfect accord. “But we must not have pictures unless we can have the best. Just at present we can’t increase expenses by any great amount. What do you say to trying what we can do with all the news, larger headlines and plenty of leads?”

“I’m sure we can do better with our class of readers by livening up the appearance of our headlines than we could with second-rate pictures.”

“I hope,” Howard said earnestly, “that we won’t have to use that phrase—‘our class of readers’—much longer. Our paper should interest every man and woman able to read. It seems to me that a newspaper’s audience should be like that of a good play—the orchestra chairs full and the last seat in the gallery taken. I suppose you know we’re not an ‘organ’ any longer?”

“No, I didn’t.” Mr. King looked surprised. “Do you mean to say that we’re free to print the news?”

“Free as freedom. In our news columns we’re neither Democrat nor Republican nor Mugwump nor Reform. We have no Wall Street or social connections. We are going to print a newspaper—all the news and nothing but the news.”

Mr. King drummed on his desk softly with the tips of his outstretched fingers. “Hum—hum,” he said. “This is news. Well—the circulation’ll go up. And that’s all I’m interested in.”

Howard went about his plans quietly. He avoided every appearance of exerting authority, disturbed not a wheel in the great machine. He made his changes so subtly that those who received the suggestions often came to him a few days afterward, proposing as their own the very plans he had hinted. He was thus cautious partly because of his experience of the vanity of men, their sensitiveness to criticism, their instinctive opposition to improvement from without; partly from his knowledge of the hysteria which raged in the offices of the “yellow journals.” He wished to avoid an epidemic of that hysteria—the mad rush for sensation and novelty; the strife of opposing ambitions; the plotting and counter-plotting of rival heads of departments; the chaos out of which the craziest ideas often emerged triumphant, making the pages of the paper look like a series of disordered dreams.

He was indifferent to the semblance of authority, to the shadows for which small men are forever struggling. What he wanted, all he wanted, was—results.

The first opposition came from the night editor, who for twenty-six years, his weekly “night off” and his two weeks’ vacation in summer excepted, had “made up” the paper—that is to say, had defined, with the advice and consent of the managing editor, the position and order of the various news items. This night editor, Mr. Vroom, was a strenuous conservative. He believed that an editor’s duty was done when he had intelligently arranged his paper so that the news was placed before the reader in the order of its importance. Big headlines, attempts at effect with varying sizes of large type and varying column-widths he held to be crowd-catching devices, vulgar and debasing. He had no sympathy with Howard’s theory that the first object of a newspaper published in a democratic republic is to catch the crowd, to interest it, to compel it to read, and so to lead it to think.

“We’re on the way to scuffling in the gutter with the ‘yellow journals’ for the pennies of the mob,” he was saying sarcastically to Mr. King, one afternoon just as Howard joined them.

Howard laughed. “Not on the way to the gutter, Mr. Vroom. Actually in the gutter, actually scuffling.”

“Well, I’m frank to say that I don’t like it. A newspaper ought to appeal to the intelligent.”

“To intelligence, yes; to the intelligent, no. At least in my opinion, that is the right theory. We want people to read us because we’re intelligent enough to know how to please them, not because they’re intelligent enough to overcome the difficulties we put in their way. But let’s go out to dinner this evening and talk it over.”

They dined together at Mouquin’s every night for a week. At the end of that time Vroom, still sarcastic and grumbling, was a convert. And a great accession Howard found him. He had sound judgment as to the value of news-items—what demanded first page, the “show-window,” because it would interest everybody; what was worth a line on an inside page because it would interest only a few thousands. He was the most skillful of the News-Record’s many good writers of headlines, a master of that, for the newspaper, art of arts—condensed and interesting statement, alluring the glancing reader to read on. Also he had an eye for effects with type. “You make every page a picture,” Howard said to him. “It is wonderful how you balance your headlines, emphasising the important news yet saving the minor items from obscurity. I should like to see the paper you would make if you had the right sort of illustrations to put in.”

Vroom was amazed at himself. He who had opposed any “head” which broke the column rule was now so far degenerated into a “yellow journalist” that, when Howard spoke of illustrations, he actually longed to test his skill at distributing them effectively.

Two months of hard work, tedious, because necessarily so indirect, produced a newspaper which was “on the right lines,” as Howard understood right lines. And he felt that the time had come to make the necessary radical changes in the editorial page.

The News-Record had long posed as independent because it supported now one political party and now the other, or divided its support. But this superficial independence was in reality subservience to the financial interests of the two principal owners. They made their newspaper assail Republican or Democratic corruption and misgovernment in city, state or nation, according as their personal interests lay. They used the editorial page and, to even better advantage, the news-columns, in revenging themselves for too heavy levies of blackmail upon their corrupt interests or in securing unjust legislation and privileges.

Obedient and cynical Mr. Malcolm had made the editorial page corrupt and brilliant—never so effective as when assailing a good cause. The great misfortune of good causes is that they attract so many fatal friends—the superciliously conscientious; the well-meaning but feeble-minded and blundering; the most offensive because least deceptive kinds of hypocrites. Mr. Malcolm, as acute as he was intellectually unscrupulous, well understood how to weaken or to ruin a just cause through these supporters. Sometimes he stood afar off, showering the poisoned arrows of raillery and satire. Again he was the plain-spoken friend of the cause and warned its honest supporters against these “fool friends” whom he pretended to regard as its leaders. Again he played the part of a blind enthusiast and praised folly as wisdom and urged it on to more damaging activities.

“We abhor humbug here,” he used to say; and perhaps he did in a measure excuse himself to his conscience with the phrase. But in fact his editorial page was usually a succession of humbugs, of brilliant hypocrisies and cheats perpetrated under the guise of exposing humbug.

Just as Howard was ready to reverse Malcolm’s editorial programme, New York was seized with one of its “periodic spasms of virtue.” The city government was, as usual, in the hands of the two bosses who owned the two political machines. One was taking the responsibility and the larger share of the spoils; the other was maintaining him in power and getting the smaller but a satisfactory share. The alliance between the police and criminal vice had become so open and aggressive under this bi-boss patronage that the people were aroused and indignant. But as they had no capable leaders and no way of selecting leaders, there arose a self-constituted leadership of uptown Phariseeism and sentimentality, planning the “purification” of the city.

Every man of sense knowing human nature and the conditions of city life knew that this plan was foredoomed to ridiculous failure, and that the event would be a popular revulsion against “reform.”

“Why not speak the truth about these vice-hunters?” Howard was discussing the situation with three of his editorial writers—Segur, Huntington and Montgomery.

“It’s mighty dangerous,” Montgomery objected. “You will be sticking knives into a sacred Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy.”

“Yes, we’ll have all the good people about our ears,” said Segur. “We’ll be denounced as a defender of depravity, a foe of purity. They’ll thunder away at us from every pulpit. The other newspapers will take it up, especially those that expect to sell millions of papers containing accounts of the ‘exposure’ of the dives and dens.”

“That’s good. I hope we shall,” said Howard cheerfully. “It will advertise us tremendously.”