THE
FAITH DOCTOR

A STORY OF NEW YORK

BY
EDWARD EGGLESTON
AUTHOR OF THE HOOSIER SCHOOLMASTER, ROXY, ETC.

THIRD EDITION

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1891

Copyright, 1891,
By EDWARD EGGLESTON.

All rights reserved.

PREFACE.

Though there is no life that I know more intimately and none that I have known for so long a period as that of New York, the present story is the first in which I have essayed to depict phases of the complex society of the metropolis. I use the word society in its general, not in its narrow sense, for in no country has the merely "society novel" less reason for being than in ours.

The prevailing interest in mind-cure, faith-cure, Christian science, and other sorts of aërial therapeutics has supplied a motive for this story, and it is only proper that I should feel a certain gratitude to the advocates of the new philosophy. But the primary purpose of this novel is artistic, not polemical. The book was not written to depreciate anybody's valued delusions, but to make a study of human nature under certain modern conditions. In one age men cure diseases by potable gold and strengthen their faith by a belief in witches, in another they substitute animal magnetism and adventism. Within the memory of those of us who are not yet old, the religious fervor of millenarianism and the imitation science of curative mesmerism gave way to spirit-rappings and clairvoyant medical treatment. Now spiritism in all its forms is passing into decay, only to leave the field free to mind-doctors and faith-healers. There is nothing for it but to wait for the middle ages to pass; when modern times arrive, there will be more criticism and less credulity, let us hope.

The propositions put into the mouth of Miss Bowyer, though they sound like burlesque, are taken almost verbatim from the writings of those who claim to be expounders of Christian science. While Miss Bowyer was drawn more closely from an original than is usual in fictitious writing, I am well aware that there are professors of Christian science much superior to her. There are, indeed, souls who are the victims of their own generous enthusiasm; and it grieves me that, in treating the subject with fidelity and artistic truthfulness, I must give pain to many of the best—to some whose friendship I hold dear.

For the idea of a novel on the present theme I am indebted to an unpublished short story entitled An Irregular Practitioner, by Miss Anne Steger Winston, which came under my eye three or four years ago. I secured the transfer to me of Miss Winston's rights in the subject, and, though I have not followed the lines of her story, it gives me pleasure to acknowledge my obligation to her for the suggestion of a motive without which this novel would not have had existence.

For the comfort of the reader, let me add that the name Phillida should be accented on the first syllable, and pronounced with the second vowel short.

Joshua's Rock on Lake George, September, 1891.

CONTENTS.

THE FAITH DOCTOR.

I.
THE ORIGIN OF A MAN OF FASHION.

It was the opinion of a good many people that Charles Millard was "something of a dude." But such terms are merely relative; every fairly dressed man is a dude to somebody. There are communities in this free land of ours in which the wearing of a coat at dinner is a most disreputable mark of dudism.

That Charles Millard was accounted a dude was partly Nature's fault. If not handsome, he was at least fine-looking, and what connoisseurs in human exteriors call stylish. Put him into a shad-bellied drab and he would still have retained traces of dudishness; a Chatham street outfit could hardly have unduded him. With eyes so luminous and expressive in a face so masculine, with shoulders so well carried, a chest so deep, and legs so perfectly proportioned and so free from any deviation from the true line of support, Millard had temptations to cultivate natural gifts.

There was a notion prevalent among Millard's acquaintances that one so versed in the lore and so deft in the arts of society must belong to a family of long standing; the opinion was held, indeed, by pretty much everybody except Millard himself. His acquaintance with people of distinction, and his ready access to whatever was deemed desirable in New York, were thought to indicate some hereditary patent to social privilege. Millard had, indeed, lines of ancestors as long as the longest, and, so far as they could be traced, his forefathers were honest and industrious people, mostly farmers. Nor were they without distinction: one of his grandfathers enjoyed for years the felicity of writing "J. P." after his name; another is remembered as an elder in the little Dutch Reformed Church at Hamburg Four Corners. But Charley Millard did not boast of these lights of his family, who would hardly have availed him in New York. Nor did he boast of anything, indeed; his taste was too fastidious for self-assertion of the barefaced sort. But if people persisted in fitting him out with an imaginary pedigree, just to please their own sense of congruity, why should he feel obliged to object to an amusement so harmless?

Charles Millard was the son of a farmer who lived near the village of Cappadocia in the State of New York. When Charley was but twelve years old his father sold his farm and then held what was called in the country a "vendoo," at which he sold "by public outcry" his horses, cows, plows, and pigs. With his capital thus released he bought a miscellaneous store in the village, in order that his boys "might have a better chance in the world." This change was brought about by the discovery on the part of Charley's father that his brother, a commission merchant in New York, "made more in a week than a farmer could make in a year." From this time Charley, when not in school, busied himself behind the counter, or in sweeping out the store, with no other feeling than that sweeping store, measuring calico, and drawing molasses were employments more congenial to his tastes and less hard on good clothes than hoeing potatoes or picking hops. Two years after his removal to the village the father of Charley Millard died, and the store, which had not been very successful, was sold to another. Charley left the counter to take a course in the high school, doing odd jobs in the mean while.

When young Millard was eighteen years old he came into what was a great fortune in village eyes. His father's more fortunate brother, who had amassed money as a dealer in country produce in Washington street, New York, died, leaving the profits of all his years of toil over eggs and butter, Bermuda potatoes and baskets of early tomatoes, to his two nephews, Charley Millard and Charley's elder brother, Richard. After the lawyers, the surrogate, the executor, and the others had taken each his due allowance out of it, there may have been fifty or seventy-five thousand dollars apiece left for the two young men. Just how much it was the village people never knew, for Charley was not prone to talk of his own affairs, and Dick spent his share before he fairly had time to calculate what it amounted to. When Richard had seen the last of his money, and found himself troubled by small debts, he simplified matters by executing a "mysterious disappearance," dropping out of sight of his old associates as effectually as though he had slipped into some cosmical crack. Charley, though nominally subject to a guardian, managed his own affairs, husbanded his money, paid Dick's debts, and contrived to take up the bank stock and other profitable securities that his brother had hypothecated. He lived with his mother till she died, and then he found himself at twenty-one with money enough to keep him at ease, and with no family duty but that which his mother had laid upon him of finding the recreant Dick if possible, and helping him to some reputable employment—again if possible.

In Cappadocia Charley's little fortune made him the beau of the town; the "great catch," in the slang phrase of the little society of the village—a society in which there were no events worth reckoning but betrothals and weddings. In such a place leisure is productive of little except ennui. To get some relief from the fatigue of moving around a circle so small, and to look after his investments, Charley made a visit to New York a month after the death of his mother. His affection for his mother was too fresh for him to neglect her sister, who was the wife of a mechanic living in Avenue C. He would have preferred to go to a hotel, but he took up his abode dutifully in his aunt's half of a floor in Avenue C, where the family compressed themselves into more than their usual density to give him a very small room to himself. His Aunt Hannah did her best to make him comfortable, preparing for him the first day a clam chowder, which delicacy Charley, being an inlander, could not eat. His cup of green tea she took pains to serve to him hot from the stove at his elbow. But he won the affection of the children with little presents, and made his aunt happy by letting her take him to see Central Park and the animals.

As seen in the narrow apartment of his Aunt Hannah Martin, life in the metropolis appeared vastly more pinched and sordid than it did in the cottages at Cappadocia. How the family contrived to endure living in relations so constant and intimate with the cooking stove and the feather beds Charley could not understand. But the spectacle of the streets brought to him notions of a life greatly broader and more cultivated and inconceivably more luxurious than the best in Cappadocia.

The third day after his arrival he called at the Bank of Manhadoes, in which the greater part of his uncle's savings had been invested, to make the acquaintance of the officers in control, and to have transferred to his own name the shares which his brother had hypothecated. He was very cordially received by Farnsworth, the cashier, who took him into the inner office and introduced him to the president of the bank, Mr. Masters. The president showed Charley marked attention; he was very sensible of the voting importance of so considerable a block of stock as Charley held, now that he had acquired all that was his uncle's. Masters was sorry that his family was out of town, he would have been pleased to have Mr. Millard dine with him. Would Mr. Millard be in town long? Dining with a New York bank president would have been a novel experience for young Millard, but he felt obliged to go home the last of the week. Not that there was anything of pleasure or duty to render his return to Cappadocia imperative or desirable, but the pressure he was daily putting on his aunt's hospitality was too great to be prolonged, and the discomfort of his situation in Avenue C was too much for a fastidious man to endure.

Though his return to Cappadocia made a ripple of talk among the young women of the village, to whom he was at least a most interesting theme for gossip, he found the place duller than ever. His mind reverted to the great, dazzling spectacle of the thronged streets of the metropolis, with their unceasing processions of eager people. Since he had all the world to choose from, why not live in New York? But he did not care to go to the city to be idle. He liked employment, and he preferred to earn something, though he had no relish for speculation, nor even any desire to run the risks of trade. But he thought that if he could contrive to make enough to pay a portion of his own expenses, so as to add the greater part of each year's dividends to his principal, such cautious proceeding would entirely suit his prudent temperament and content his moderate ambition. After taking time to revolve the matter carefully, he wrote to the obliging Mr. Masters, suggesting that he would like to secure some position in the bank. The letter came at an opportune moment. A considerable number of the stockholders were opposed to the president in regard to the general policy to be pursued. The opposition was strong enough to give Masters some anxiety. What was known as "the Millard stock" had been held neutral in consequence of Charley's minority. If now Masters could attach this young shareholder to himself, it would be a positive gain to the administration party in the stockholders' meetings, and indeed it would put the opposition beyond any chance of doing much mischief.

When Masters got the letter Farnsworth, the cashier, was called into his room. But Farnsworth could not give him any information about Millard's character or capacities. That he would not do without special training for a teller or bookkeeper was too evident to require discussion. All that could be said of him at first glance was that he wrote a good hand and composed a letter with intelligence. He might be made of assistance to the cashier if he should prove to be a man of regular habits and application. What Masters wrote in reply was: "We should be most happy to have the nephew and heir of one of our founders in the bank. At present we have no vacancy suitable to you; for, of course, a man of your position ought not to be assigned to one of the lowest clerkships. But if an opportunity to meet your wishes should arise in the future we will let you know."

It was only after some years' experience in the bank that Millard, in looking over this letter, was able to conjecture its real significance. Then he knew that when that letter went out of the bank addressed to him at Cappadocia another must have gone with it to a certain commercial agency, requesting that Charles Millard, of Cappadocia, New York, be carefully looked up. Two weeks later Masters wrote that it had been found necessary to employ a correspondent to aid the cashier of the bank. The salary would be two thousand dollars if Mr. Millard would accept it. The offer, he added, was rather larger than would be made to any one else, as the officers of the bank preferred to have a stockholder in a semi-confidential position such as this would be. In village scales two thousand dollars a year was much, but when Charley came to foot up the expenses of his first year in New York, this salary seemed somewhat less munificent.

Millard's relations were directly with the cashier, Farnsworth, an eager, pushing, asthmatic little man, wholly given to business. Farnsworth's mind rarely took time to peep over the fence that divided the universe into two parts—the Bank of Manhadoes and its interests lying on the one side, and all the rest of creation on the other. Not that he ignored society; he gave dinner parties in his elegant housekeeping apartment in the Sebastopol Flats. But the dinner parties all had reference to the Bank of Manhadoes; the invitations were all calculated with reference to business relations, and the dinners were neatly planned to bring new business or to hold the old. But there were dinners and dinners, in the estimation of Farnsworth. Some were aimed high, and when these master-strokes of policy were successful they tended to promote the main purposes of the bank. The second-rate dinners were meant merely to smooth the way in minor business relations.

It was to one of these less significant entertainments, a dinner of not more than three horse-power, that he invited his correspondent-clerk, Mr. Millard. It would make the relations between him and Millard smoother, and serve to attach Millard to his leadership in the bank management. Millard, he reasoned, being from the country, would be just as well pleased with a company made up of nobodies in particular and his wife's relatives as he could be if he were invited to meet a railway president and a leather merchant from the swamp turned art connoisseur in his old age.

Charley found his boarding-house a little "poky," to borrow his own phrase, and he was pleased with Farnsworth's invitation. He honored the occasion by the purchase of a new black satin cravat. This he tied with extreme care, according to the approved formula of "twice around and up and down." Few men could tie a cravat in better style. He also got out the new frock-coat, made by the best tailor in Cappadocia, carefully cherished, and only worn on special occasions—the last being the evening on which he had taken supper at the house of the Baptist minister. If there was something slightly rustic about the cut or set of the coat, Millard did not suspect it. The only indispensable thing about clothes is that the wearer shall be at peace with them. Poor Richard ventured the proposition that "our neighbors' eyes" are the costliest things in life, but Bonhomme Richard may have been a little off the mark just there. Other people's opinions about my garments are of small consequence except in so far as they affect my own conceit of them. Charley Millard issued from his room at half-past six content with himself, and, what was of much more importance to the peace of his soul, content with his clothes.

At eleven o'clock Millard is in his room again. The broadcloth Prince Albert lies in an ignominious heap in the corner of the sofa. The satin cravat is against the looking-glass on the dressing-case, just as Charley has thrown it down. Nothing has happened to the coat or the cravat; both are as immaculate as at their sallying forth. But Millard does not regard either of them; he sits moodily in his chair by the grate and postpones to the latest moment the disagreeable task of putting them away.

No matter what the subject under consideration, we later nineteenth-century people are pretty sure to be brought face to face with the intellect that has dominated our age, modified our modes of thinking, and become the main source of all our metaphysical discomforts. It is this same inevitable Charles Darwin who says that a man may be made more unhappy by committing a breach of etiquette than by falling into sin. If Millard had embezzled a thousand dollars of the bank's funds, could he have been more remorseful than he is now? And all for nothing but that he found himself at dinner with more cloth in the tail of his coat than there was in the coattails of his neighbors, and that he wore an expensive black cravat while all the rest of the world had on ghostly white linen ties that cost but a dime or two apiece.

Of course Millard exaggerated the importance of his mistake. Young men who wear frock-coats to dinner, and men of respectability who do not possess a dress-coat, are not entirely lacking in New York. If he had known more of the world he would have known that the world is to be taken less to heart. People are always more lenient toward a mistake in etiquette than the perspiring culprit is able to imagine them. In after years Millard smiled at the remembrance that he had worried over Farnsworth's company. It was not worth the trouble of a dress-coat.

His first impulse was to forswear society, and to escape mortification in future, by refusing all invitations. If he had been a weakling such an outcome would have followed a false start. It is only a man who can pluck the blossom of success out of the very bramble of disaster.

During that dinner party had come to him a dim conception of a society complicated and conventional to a degree that the upper circle in Cappadocia had never dreamed of. He firmly resolved now to know this in all its ramifications; to get the mastery of it in all its details, so that no man should understand it better than he. To put it under foot by superior skill was to be his revenge, the satisfaction he proposed to make to his wounded vanity. As he could not even faintly conceive what New York society was like—as he had no notion of its Pelions on Ossas piled—so he could as yet form no estimate of the magnitude of the success he was destined to achieve. It is always thus with a man on the threshold of a great career.

Among the widely varying definitions of genius in vogue, everybody is permitted to adopt that which flatters his self-love or serves his immediate purpose. "Great powers accidentally determined in a given direction" is what some one has called it. Millard was hardly a man of great powers, but he was a man of no small intelligence. If he had been sufficiently bedeviled by poverty at the outset who knows that he might not have hardened into a stock-jobbing prestidigitator, and made the world the poorer by so much as he was the richer? On the other hand, he might perhaps have been a poet. Certainly a man of his temperament and ingenuity might by practice have come to write rondeaus, ballades, and those other sorts of soap-bubble verse just now in fashion; and if he had been so lucky as to be disappointed in love at the outset of his career, it is quite within the limits of possibility that he should have come to write real poetry, fourteen lines to the piece. But as the first great reverse of Millard's life was in a matter of dress and etiquette, the innate force of his nature sent him by mere rebound in the direction of a man of fashion—that is to say, an artist not in words or pigments, but in dress and manners.

II.
THE EVOLUTION OF A SOCIETY MAN.

It is the first step that costs, say the French, and Millard made those false starts that are inevitable at the outset of every career. A beginner has to trust somebody, and in looking around for a mentor he fell into the hands of a fellow-boarder, one Sampson, who was a quiet man with the air of one who knows it all and is rather sorry that he does. Sampson fondly believed himself a man of the world, and he had the pleasure of passing for one among those who knew nothing at all about the world. He was a reflective man, who had given much thought to that gravest problem of a young man's life—how to keep trousers from bagging at the knees, the failure to solve which is one of the most pathetic facts of human history. After he had made one or two mistakes in following the dicta that Sampson uttered with all the diffidence of a papal encyclical, Millard became aware that in social matters pretension is often in inverse ratio to accomplishment. About the time that he gave up Sampson he renounced the cheap tailor into whose hands he had unwarily fallen, and consigned to oblivion a rather new thirty-dollar dress-suit in favor of one that cost half a hundred dollars more. He had by this time found out that the society which he had a chance to meet moved only in a borderland, and, like the ambitious man he was, he began already to lay his plans broad and deep, and to fit himself, by every means within his reach, for success in the greater world beyond.

Having looked about the circle of his small acquaintance in vain for a guide, he bethought him that there were probably books on etiquette. He entered a bookstore one day with the intention of asking for some work of the sort, but finding in the proprietor a well-known depositor of the bank, Charley bought a novel instead. Behold already the instinct of a man of the world, whose rôle it is to know without ever seeming to learn!

When at length Millard had secured a book with the title, "Guide to Good Manners as Recognized in the Very Best Society. By One of the Four Hundred," he felt that he had got his feet on firm ground.

It chanced about this time that Sampson brought an old college chum of his to eat a Sunday dinner at the boarding-house in Eighteenth street. He introduced this friend to Millard with that impressiveness which belonged to all that the melancholy Sampson did, as "Mr. Bradley, Mr. Harrison Holmes Bradley, the author; you know his writings."

Millard was covered with concealed shame to think that he did not happen to know the books of an author with a name so resonant, but he did not confess his ignorance. This was his first acquaintance with a real literary man—for the high-school teacher in Cappadocia who wrote poetry for the country papers would hardly count. The aspiring Millard thought himself in luck in thus early making the acquaintance of a man of letters, for to the half-sophisticated an author seems a person who reflects a mild and moonshiny luster on even a casual acquaintance. To know Mr. Bradley might be a first step toward gaining access to the more distinguished society of the metropolis.

Harrison Holmes Bradley proved to be on examination a New-Englander of the gaunt variety, an acute man of thirty, who ate his roast turkey and mashed potatoes with that avidity he was wont to manifest when running down an elusive fact in an encyclopædia. At the table Millard, for want of other conversation, plucked up courage to ask him whether he was connected with a newspaper.

"No; I am engaged in general literary work," said Bradley.

Neither Millard nor any one else at the table had the faintest notion of the nature of "general literary work." It sounded large, and Bradley was a clever talker on many themes fresh to Millard, and when he went away the author exacted a promise from Charley to call on him soon in his "den," and he gave him a visiting card which bore a street number in Harlem.

Two weeks later Millard, who was quite unwilling to miss a chance of making the acquaintance of a distinguished man through whom he might make other eligible friends, called on Bradley. He found him at work in his shirt-sleeves, in a hall bedroom of a boarding-house, smoking and writing as he sat with a gas-stove for near neighbor on the left hand, and a table, which was originally intended to serve as a wash-stand, on the other side of him. The author welcomed his guest with unaffected condescension and borrowed a chair from the next room for him to sit on. Finding Millard curious about the ways of authors, he entertained his guest with various anecdotes going to show how books are made and tending to throw light on the relation of authors to publishers. Millard noted what seemed to him a bias against publishers, of whom as a human species Bradley evidently entertained no great opinion. Millard's love for particulars was piqued by Bradley's statement at their first meeting that he was engaged in general literary work. He contrived to bring the author to talk of what he was doing and how it was done.

"You see," said Bradley, pleased to impart information on a theme in which he was much interested himself, "a literary life isn't what people generally take it to be. Most men in general literary work fail because they can do only one thing or, at most, two. To make a living one must be able to do everything."

"I suppose that is so," said Millard, still unable to form any notion of what was implied in Bradley's everything. To him all literature was divided into prose and poetry. General literature seemed to include both of these and something more.

"Last week," Bradley continued, illustratively, "I finished an index, wrote some verses for a pictorial advertisement of Appleblossom's Toilet Soap, and ground out an encyclopædia article on Christian Missions, and a magazine paper on the history of the game of bumblepuppy. I am now just beginning a novel of society life. Versatility is the very foundation of success. If it hadn't been for my knack of doing all sorts of things I never should have succeeded as I have."

Judging by Bradley's surroundings and his own account of the sordid drudgery of a worker in general literature, his success did not seem to Millard a very stunning one. But Bradley was evidently content with it, and what more can one ask of fortune?

"There is another element that goes a long way toward success in literature," proceeded the author, "and that is ability to work rapidly. When Garfield was shot I was out of work and two weeks behind with my board. I went straight to the Astor Library and worked till the library closed, gathering material. When I went to bed that night, or rather the next morning, I had a paper on 'Famous Assassinations of History' ready for the best market. But what I hate the most about our business is the having to write, now and then, a thunder and lightning story for the weekly blood-curdlers. Now there is Milwain, the poet, a man of genius, but by shop girls and boys reading the Saturday-night papers he is adored as Guy St. Cyr, the author of a long list of ghastly horribles thrown off to get money."

"This sort of work of all kinds is what you call general literary work?" queried Millard.

"General literary work is the evening dress we put on it when it has to pass muster before strangers," said Bradley, laughing.

What Millard noted with a sort of admiration was Bradley's perfect complacency, his contentment in grinding Philistine grists, the zest even that he evinced for literary pot-hunting, the continual exhilaration that he got out of this hazardous gamble for a living, and the rank frankness with which he made his own affairs tributary to the interest of his conversation.

At length Bradley emptied his pipe and laid it across his manuscript, at the same time rising nervously from his chair and sitting down on the bed for a change.

"Millard," he said, with a Bohemian freedom of address, "you must know more about society than I do. Give me advice on a point of etiquette."

Charley Millard was flattered as he never had been flattered before. He had not hoped to be considered an oracle so soon.

"You see," Bradley went on, "the publisher of a new magazine called the 'United States Monthly' has asked me to dinner. It is away over in Brooklyn, and, besides, the real reason I can't go is that I haven't got a dress-coat. Now what is the thing to do about regrets, cards, and so on?"

Fresh from reading his new "Guide to Good Manners," Millard felt competent to decide any question of Bristol-board, however weighty or complicated. He delivered his opinion with great assurance in the very words of the book.

"I believe in my soul," said Bradley, laughing, "that you prigged that from the 'Guide to Good Manners as Recognized in the Very Best Society.'"

Millard looked foolish, but answered good-naturedly, "Well, what if I did? Have you read the book?"

Bradley rocked his long slender body backward and forward as though about to fall into a spasm with suppressed merriment.

"There is only one good thing I can say for that book," he said, recovering himself.

"What's that?" asked Millard, a little vexed with the unaccountable mirth of his host.

"Why, that I got two hundred dollars for writing it."

"You wrote it?" exclaimed Millard, not concealing his opinion that Bradley was not a suitable person to give lessons in politeness.

"You see I was offered two hundred for a book on manners. I needed the money most consumedly. There was Sampson, who knew, or thought he knew, all about the ways of the world, though, between you and me, Sampson always did do a large business on a plaguy small capital. So I put Sampson to press and got out of him whatever I could, and then I rehashed a good deal in a disguised way from the old 'Bazar Book of Decorum' and the still older Count D'Orsay, and some others. You have to know how to do such things if you're going to make a living as a literary man. The title is a sixpenny publisher's lie. In the day of judgment, authors, or at least those of us doing general literary work, will get off easy on the ground that poor devils scratching for their dinners can not afford to be too high-toned, but publishers won't have that excuse."

Millard made his way home that night with some sense of disappointment. Being a fine gentleman was not so easy as it had seemed. The heights grew more and more frosty and inaccessible as he approached them. Yet he had really made a great advance by his talk with Bradley. He had cleared the ground of rubbish. And though during the next week he bought two or three of the books of decorum then in vogue, he had learned to depend mainly on his own observations and good sense. He had also acquired a beginning of that large stock of personal information which made him in after years so remarkable. Natural bent is shown in what a man assimilates. Not an item of all the personal traits and anecdotes of writers and publishers brought out in Bradley's unreserved talk had escaped him, and years afterward he could use Bradley's funny stories to give piquancy to conversation.

It was this memory of individual traits and his tactful use of it that helped to launch him on the sea of social success. The gentleman who sat next to him at dinner, the lady who chatted with him at a tea or a reception, felt certain that a man who knew all about every person in any way distinguished in society could not be quite without conspicuousness of some sort himself. This belief served to open doors to him. Moreover, his fund of personal gossip, judiciously and good-naturedly used, made him a valuable element in a small company; the interest never flagged when he talked. Then, too, Millard had a knack of repeating in a way that seemed almost accidental, or at least purely incidental, what this or that noted person had said to him. It was in appearance only an embellishment of his talk, but it served to keep up a belief in the breadth, and especially the height, of his acquaintance. If he had only been presented to Mrs. Manorhouse, and she had repeated her stock witticism in his presence, Millard knew how to quote it as a remark of Mrs. Manorhouse, but the repose of his manner left the impression that he set no particular store by the Manorhouses. He early learned the inestimable value of a chastened impudence to a man with social ambitions.

Some sacrifice of self-respect? Doubtless. But what getter-on in the world is there that does not have to pay down a little self-respect now and then? Your millionaire usually settles at a dear rate, and to be a great statesman implies that one has paid a war tariff in this specie.

One of the talents that contributed to Millard's success was a knack of taking accomplishments quickly. Whether it was fencing, or boxing, or polo that was the temporary vogue; whether it was dancing, or speaking society French, he held his own with the best. In riding he was easily superior to the riding-school cavaliers, having the advantage of familiarity with a horse's back from the time he had bestrode the plow-horses on their way to water. Though he found time in his first years in New York for only one little run in Europe, he always had the air of a traveled man, so quickly did he absorb information, imitate fashions, and get rid of provincial manners and prejudices. His friends never knew where he learned anything. When a Frenchman of title was basking in New York drawing-rooms it was found that Millard was equal to a tête-à-tête with the monolingual foreigner, though his accent was better than his vocabulary was copious. His various accomplishments of course represented many hours of toil, but it was toil of which his associates never heard. He treated himself as a work of art, of which the beholder must judge only by the charming result, with no knowledge of the foregoing effort, no thought of the periods of ugly incompleteness that have been passed on the way to perfection.

III.
A SPONTANEOUS PEDIGREE.

It was not until the battle was more than half won, and Millard had become a welcome guest in some of the most exclusive houses, that he was outfitted with a pedigree. He knew little of his ancestors except that his father's grandfather was a humble private soldier at the storming of Stony Point. This great-grandfather's name was Miller. Dutch or German neighbors had called him Millerd by some confusion with other names having a similar termination, and as he was tolerably illiterate, and rarely wrote his name, the change came to be accepted. A new schoolmaster who spelled it Millerd in the copy-book of Charley's grandfather fixed the orthography and pronunciation in the new form. About the time that Millard Fillmore became President by succession, the contemporary Millerds, who were Whigs, substituted a for the e in the name. After he came to New York, Charley shifted the accent to the last syllable to conform to a fashion by which a hundred old English names have been treated to a Gallic accent in America. After this acquisition of a new accent Charley was frequently asked whether he were not of Huguenot descent; to which he was wont to reply prudently that he had never taken much interest in genealogy. Just why it is thought more creditable for a resident of New York to have descended from a Huguenot peasant or artisan than from an English colonist, those may tell who fancy that social pretenses have a rational basis.

Charley's mother's father was named Vandam. The family had been a little ashamed of the old Dutch cognomen; it had such a wicked sound that they tried to shift the accent to the first syllable. Among the fads that Charley had taken up for a time after he came to New York was that of collecting old prints. In looking over a lot of these one day in a second-hand book-shop, he stumbled on a picture of the colonial period in which was represented one of the ancient Dutch churches of New York. There was a single stately carriage passing in front of the church, and the artist had taken the pains to show the footman running before the coach. The picture was dedicated to "Rip Van Dam, Esq.," president of the council of the colony of New York. As a Christian name "Rip" did not tend to take the curse off the Van Dam. But this picture made Charley aware that at least one of the Van Dams had been a great man in his day. He reflected that this must be the old Rip's own carriage delineated in the foreground of the picture of which he was the patron; and this must be his footman charging along at breakneck pace to warn all vulgar carts to get out of the great gentleman's road. Millard bought the print and hung it in his sitting-room; for since he had been promoted in the bank and had been admitted to a fashionable club, he had moved into bachelor apartments suitable to his improving fortunes and social position. He had also committed himself to the keeping of an English man-servant—he did not like to call him his valet, lest the appearance of ostentation and Anglomania should prejudice him with his business associates. But somehow the new dignity of his own surroundings seemed to lend something bordering on probability to the conjecture that this once acting-governor of New York, Rip Van Dam, might have been one of Charley's ancestors.

Millard hung this print on one side of the chimney in his apartment, a chimney that had a pair of andirons and three logs of wood in it. But whether this or any other chimney in the Graydon Building was fitted to contain a fire nobody knew; for the building was heated by steam, and no one had been foolhardy enough to discover experimentally just what would happen if fire were actually lighted in fireplaces so unrealistic as these. On the other side of his chimney Charley hung a print of the storming of Stony Point. One evening, Philip Gouverneur, one of Millard's new cronies, who was calling on him, asked "Millard, what have you got that old meeting-house on your wall for?"

"Well, you see," said Millard, with the air of a man but languidly interested,—your real gentleman always affects to be bored by what he cares for,—"you see I put it there because it is dedicated to old Rip Van Dam."

"What do you care for that old cuss?" went on Gouverneur, who, being of the true blue blood himself, had a fad of making game of the whole race of ancient worthies.

"I don't really care," said Charley; "but as my mother was a Vandam, she may have descended from this Rip. I have no documents to prove it."

"Oh, I see. Excuse me for making fun of your forefathers. I say every mean thing I can think of about mine, but another man's grandfather is sacred. You see I couldn't help smiling at the meeting-house on one side and that old-fashioned, bloody bayonet-charge on the other."

"Oh, that's only another case of ancestor," said Millard; "my great-grandfather was at Stony Point."

"The more fool he," said Gouverneur. "My forefathers, now, contrived to keep out of bayonet-charges, and shed for their country mostly ink and oratory, speeches and documents."

Though Philip Gouverneur did not care for ancestors, his mother did. The one thing that enabled Mrs. Gouverneur to look down on the whole brood of railway magnates, silver-mine kings, and Standard Oil operators, who, as she phrased it, "had intruded into New York," was the fact that her own family had taken an historic part in the Revolutionary struggle. At this very moment she was concocting a ball in memory of the evacuation of New York, and she was firmly resolved that on this occasion no upstart of an Astor or a Vanderbilt, much less any later comer, should assist—nobody but those whose families were distinctly of Revolutionary or colonial dignity. In truth, Mrs. Gouverneur had some feeling of resentment that the capitalist families were of late disposed to take themselves for leaders in society, and to treat the merely old families as dispensable if necessary. This assembly to be made up exclusively of antiques was her countermove.

It cost her something of a struggle. There were amiable people, otherwise conspicuously eligible, whom she must omit if she adhered to her plan, and there were some whom she despised that must be asked on account of the illustriousness of their pedigree. But Mrs. Gouverneur had set out to check the deterioration of society in New York, and she was not the woman to draw back when principle demanded the sacrifice of her feelings. She had taken the liveliest fancy to young Millard, who by a charming address, obliging manners, and an endless stock of useful information had made himself an intimate in the Gouverneur household. He had come to dine with them informally almost every alternate Sunday evening. To leave him out would be a dreadful cut; but what else could she do? What would be said of her set of old china if she inserted such a piece of new porcelain? What would Miss Lavinia Vandeleur, special oracle on the genealogy of the exclusive families, think, if Mrs. Gouverneur should be so recreant to right principles as to invite a young man without a single grandfather to his back, only because he had virtues of his own?

"I say, mother," said Philip, her son, when he came to look over the list, "you haven't got Charley Millard down."

"Well, how can I invite Mr. Millard? He has no family."

"No family! Why, he is a descendant of old Governor Van Dam, and one of his ancestors was an officer under Wayne at Stony Point."

"Are you sure, Philip?"

"Certainly: he has pictures of Stony Point and of Rip Van Dam hanging in his room. No Revolutionary party would be complete without him."

Mrs. Gouverneur looked at Philip suspiciously; he had a way of quizzing her; but his face did not flinch, and she was greatly relieved to think she had missed making the mistake of omitting a friend with so eligible a backing. Millard was invited, rather to his own surprise, and taken into preliminary councils as a matter of course. When the introductory minuet had been danced, and the ball was at its height, Philip Gouverneur, with a smile of innocence, led his friend straight to Miss Vandeleur, who proudly wore the very dress in which, according to a rather shaky tradition, her great-great aunt had poured tea for General Washington.

"Miss Vandeleur," said Philip, "let me present Mr. Millard."

Miss Vandeleur gave Millard one of the bows she kept ready for people of no particular consequence.

"Mr. Millard is real old crockery," said Philip in a half-confidential tone. "Some of us think it enough to be Revolutionary, but he is a descendant of Rip Van Dam, the old governor of New York in the seventeenth century."

Miss Vandeleur's face relaxed, and she remarked that judging from his name, as well as from something in his appearance, Mr. Millard must have come, like herself, from one of the old Huguenot families.

"Revolutionary, too, Charley?" said Philip, looking at Millard. Then to Miss Vandeleur, "One of his ancestors was second in command in the charge on Stony Point."

"Ah, Philip, you put it too strongly, I—"

"There's Governor Cadwallader waiting to speak to you, Miss Vandeleur," interrupted Philip, bowing and drawing Millard away. "Don't say a word, Charley. The most of Miss Vandeleur's information is less sound than what I told her about you. Nine-tenths of all such a genealogy huckster takes for gospel is just rot. I knew that Rip Van Dam would impress her if I put it strongly and said seventeenth century. You see the further away your forefather is, the more the virtue. Ancestry is like homeopathic medicine, the oftener it is diluted the greater the potency."

"Yes," said Millard; "and a remote ancestor has the advantage that pretty much everything to his discredit has been forgotten."

Charley knew that this faking of a Millard pedigree by his friend would prove as valuable to him as a decoration in the eyes of certain exclusive people. His conscience did not escape without some qualms; he did not like to be labeled what he was not. But he had learned by this time that society of every grade is in great part a game of Mild Humbug, and that this game, like all others, must be played according to rule. Each player has a right to make the most of his hand, whatever it may be. He had begun without a single strong card. Neither great wealth, personal distinction, nor noted family had fallen to him. But in the game of Mild Humbug as in almost all other games, luck and good play go for much; with skill and fortune a weak card may take the trick, and Millard was in a fair way to win against odds.

IV.
THE BANK OF MANHADOES.

When a farmer turns a strange cow into his herd she has to undergo a competitive examination. The fighter of the flock, sometimes a reckless-looking creature with one horn turned down as a result of former battles, walks directly up to the stranger, as in duty bound. The duel is in good form and preceded by ceremonious bowing on both sides; one finds here the origin of that scrape with the foot which was an essential part of all obeisance before the frosty perpendicular English style came in. Politeness over, the two brutes lock horns, and there is a trial of strength, weight, and bovine persistency; let the one that first gives ground look out for a thrust in the ribs! But once the newcomer has settled her relative social standing and knows which of her fellows are to have the pas of her at the hayrick and the watering-place, and which she in turn may safely bully, all is peace in the pasture.

Something like this takes place in our social herds. In every government, cabinet, party, or deliberative body there is the preliminary set-to until it is discovered who, by one means or another, can push the hardest. Not only in governments and political bodies but in every corporation, club, Dorcas society, base-ball league, church, and grocery store, the superficial observer sees what appears to be harmony and even brotherly unity; it is only the result of preliminary pushing matches by which the equilibrium of offensive and defensive qualities has been ascertained. And much that passes for domestic harmony is nothing but a prudent acquiescence in an arrangement based on relative powers of annoyance.

This long preamble goeth to show that if the Bank of Manhadoes had its rivalries it was not singular. In the light of the general principles we have evoked, the elbowings among the officers of the bank are lifted into the dignity of instances, examples, phenomena illustrating human nature and human history. More far-reaching than human nature, they are offshoots of the great struggle for existence, which, as we moderns have had the felicity to discover, gives rise to the survival of the tough and the domination of the pugnacious—the annihilation of the tender and the subjugation of the sensitive.

When Millard entered the bank there existed a conflict in the board of directors, and a division of opinion extending to the stockholders, between those who sustained and those who opposed the policy of the Masters–Farnsworth administration. But the administration proved fortunate and successful to such a degree that the opposition and rivalry presently died away or lost hope. Once the opposition to the two managers had disappeared, the lack of adjustment between the president and cashier became more pronounced. Farnsworth was the victim of a chronic asthma, and he was as ambitious as he was restless. The wan little man was untiring in his exertions because the trouble he had to get breath left him no temptation to repose. He contrived to find vent for his uneasiness by communicating a great deal of it to others. Masters, the president, was a man of sixty-five, with neither disease nor ambition preying on his vitals. For a long while he allowed Farnsworth to have his way in most things, knowing that if one entered into contention with Farnsworth there was no hope of ever making an end of it except by death or surrender. That which was decided yesterday against Farnsworth was sure to be reopened this morning; and though finally settled again to-day, it was all to be gone over to-morrow; nor would it be nearer to an adjustment next week. Compromise did no good: Farnsworth accepted your concession to-day, and then higgled you to split the difference on the remainder to-morrow, until you had so small a dividend left that it was not worth holding to.

But in dealing with a man like Masters it was possible to carry the policy of grand worry too far. When at length this rather phlegmatic man made up his mind that Farnsworth was systematically bullying him—a conclusion that Mrs. Masters helped him to reach—he became the very granite of obstinacy, offering a quiet but unyielding resistance to the cashier's aggressiveness. But an ease-loving man could not keep up this sort of fight forever. Masters knew this as well as any one, and he therefore felt the need of some buffer between him and his associate. There were two positions contemplated in the organization of the bank that had never yet been filled. One was that of vice-president, the other that of assistant cashier. By filling the assistant cashier's place with an active, aggressive man, Masters might secure an ally who could attack Farnsworth on the other flank. But in doing that he would have to disappoint Millard, who was steadily growing in value to the bank, but who, from habitual subordination to Farnsworth, and the natural courtesy of his disposition, could not be depended on to offer much resistance. To introduce a stranger would be to disturb the status quo, and the first maxim in the conduct of institutions is to avoid violent changes. Once the molecules of an organization are set into unusual vibration it is hard to foretell what new combinations they may form. And your practical man dislikes, of all things, to invite the unforeseen and the incalculable.

The election of a vice-president would bring a new man into the bank over the head of Farnsworth, but it would also produce a disturbance from which Masters felt a shrinking natural to an experienced and conservative administrator. Moreover, there was no one connected with the direction, or even holding stock in the bank, suitable to be put over Farnsworth. Unless, indeed, it were thought best to bring Hilbrough from Brooklyn. To introduce so forceful a man as Hilbrough into the management would certainly be a great thing for the bank, and it would not fail to put an end to the domination of Farnsworth. But Masters reflected that it might equally reduce his own importance. And with all his irritation against Farnsworth the president disliked to deal him too severe a blow.

If the matter had been left to Mrs. Masters, there would have been no relentings. In her opinion Farnsworth ought to be put out. Aren't you president, Mr. Masters? Why don't you be president, then? Don't like to be too hard on him? That's just like you. I'd just put him out, and there'd be an end of his fussiness once for all. Of course you could if you set about it. You are always saying that you don't like to let feeling interfere with business. But I wouldn't stand Farnsworth—little shrimp!—setting up to run a bank. Ill? Well, he ought to be; makes himself ill meddling with other people. He'd be better if he didn't worry about what doesn't belong to him. I'd give him rest. It's all well enough to sneer at a woman's notion of business, but the bank would be better off if you had entire control of it. The directors know that, they must know it; they are not blind.

There were no half-tones in Mrs. Master's judgment; everything was painted in coal blacks or glittering whites. She saw no mediums in character; he who was not good in every particular was capable of most sorts of deviltry, in her opinion.

This antagonism between the president and the cashier did not reach its acute stage until Millard had been in the bank for more than three years. Millard had made his way in the estimation of the directors in part by his ever-widening acquaintance with people of importance. His social connections enabled him to be of service to many men whose good-will was beneficial to the bank, and he was a ready directory to financial and family relationships, and to the business history and standing of those with whom the bank had dealings. Add to these advantages his considerable holdings of the bank's stock, and it is easy to comprehend how in spite of his youth he had come to stand next to Masters and Farnsworth. The dissensions between these two were disagreeable to one who had a decided preference for quietude and placidity of manners; but he kept aloof from their quarrel, though he must have had private grievances against a superior so pragmatical as Farnsworth.

A sort of magnanimity was mingled with craft in Masters's constitution, and, besides, he much preferred the road that was likely to give him the fewest jolts. The natural tendency of his irritation was to die away. This would have been the result in spite of the spur that Mrs. Masters supplied—applied, rather—if Farnsworth could have been content to let things take their natural course; but he could not abide to let anything go its natural way: he would have attempted a readjustment of the relations between the moon and tides if he had thought himself favorably situated for puttering in such matters. The temporary obstruction which Masters offered to his fussy willfulness seemed to the cashier an outrage hard to be borne. After he had taken so many tedious years to establish his ascendancy in nine-tenths of the bank's affairs it was sheer impertinence in Masters to wish to have any considerable share in the management. The backset to his ambition made him more sleepless than ever, bringing on frequent attacks of asthma. He lost interest even in the dinner parties, with a business squint, that he had been so fond of giving. Mrs. Farnsworth was under the frequent necessity of holding a platter of burning stramonium under his nose to subdue the paroxysms of wheezing that threatened to cut short his existence. Along with the smoke of the stramonium she was wont to administer a soothing smudge of good advice, beseeching him not to worry about things, though she knew perfectly that he would never cease to worry about things so long as his attenuated breath was not wholly turned off. She urged him to make Masters do his share of the work, and to take a vacation himself, or to resign outright, so as to spend his winters in Jacksonville. But every new paroxysm brought to Farnsworth a fresh access of resentment against Masters, whom he regarded as the source of all his woes. In his wakeful nights he planned a march on the very lines that Masters had proposed. He would get Millard made assistant cashier, and then have himself advanced to vice-president, with Millard, or some one on whom he could count more surely, for cashier. He proposed nothing less than to force the president out of all active control, and, if possible, to compel him to resign. No qualms of magnanimity disturbed this deoxygenated man. It was high time for Masters to resign, if for no other reason than that Farnsworth might occupy the private office. This inner office was a badge of Masters's superiority not to be endured.

There was one director, Meadows, whom Farnsworth lighted on as a convenient agent in his intrigue. Meadows had belonged to the old opposition which had resisted both the president and cashier. He was suspected of a desire to make a place for his brother, who had been cashier of a bank that had failed, and who had broken in nerve force when the bank broke. Farnsworth, who rode about in a coupé to save his breath for business and contention, drove up in front of Meadows's shop one morning at half-past nine, and made his way back among chandeliers of many patterns in incongruous juxtaposition, punctuated with wall burners and table argands. In the private office at the back he found Meadows opening his letters. He was a round-jawed man with blue eyes, an iron-oxide complexion, stiff, short, rusty hair, red-yellow side-whiskers, an upturned nose, and a shorn chin, habitually thrust forward. Once seated and his wind recovered, Farnsworth complained at some length that he found it hard to carry all the responsibility of the bank without adequate assistance.

"You ought to have an experienced assistant," said Meadows. This was the first occasion on which any officer of the bank had shown his good sense by consulting Meadows, and he was on that account the more disposed to encourage Farnsworth.

"If, now," said Farnsworth, "I could have as good a man as they say your brother is, I would be better fixed. But an experienced man like your brother would not take the place of assistant cashier."

Meadows was not so sure that his brother would refuse any place, but he thought it better not to say anything in reply. Farnsworth, who had no desire to take Meadows's brother unless he should be driven to it, saw the dangerous opening he had left. He therefore proceeded, as soon as he could get breath:

"Besides, the assistant's place belongs naturally to young Millard, and he would have influence enough to defeat anybody else who might be proposed. He is a good fellow, but he can't take responsibility. If Masters were not the cold-blooded man he is, he would have made Millard assistant cashier long ago, and advanced me to be vice-president."

"And then you would want some good man for cashier," said Meadows.

"Precisely," said Farnsworth; "that is just it."

"I think we can do that with or without Masters," said Meadows, turning his head to one side with a quiet air of defiance. He was only too well pleased to renew his fight against Masters with Farnsworth for ally. The question of his brother's appointment was after all an auxiliary one; he loved faction and opposition pure and simple.

"I am sure we can," said Farnsworth. "Of course my hand must not appear. But if a motion were to be made to advance both Millard and me one step, I don't think Masters would dare oppose it."

"I'll make the motion," said Meadows, with something like a sniff, as though, like Job's war-horse, he smelled the battle and liked the odor.

In taking leave Farnsworth told Meadows that he had not yet spoken to Millard about the matter, and he thought it not best to mention it to him before the meeting. But the one thing that rendered Meadows tolerably innocuous was that he never could co-operate with an ally, even in factious opposition, without getting up a new faction within the first, and so fomenting subdivisions as long as there were two to divide. The moment Farnsworth had left him he began to reflect suspiciously that the cashier intended to tell Millard himself, and so take the entire credit of the promotion. This would leave Farnsworth free to neglect Meadows's brother. Meadows, therefore, resolved to tell Millard in advance and thus put the latter under obligation to further his brother's interest. He gave himself great credit for a device by which he would play Farnsworth against Masters and then head off Farnsworth with Millard. Farnsworth wished to use him to pull some rather hot chestnuts out of the fire, and he chuckled to think that he had arranged to secure his own share of the nuts first.

With this profound scheme in his head, Meadows contrived to encounter Millard at luncheon, an encounter which the latter usually took some pains to avoid, for Millard was fastidious in eating as in everything else and he disliked to see Meadows at the table. Not that the latter did not know the use of fork and napkin, but he assaulted his food with a ferocity that, as Millard once remarked, "lent too much support to the Darwinian hypothesis."

On the day of his conversation with Farnsworth, Meadows bore down on the table where Millard sat alone, disjointing a partridge.

"Goo' morning," he said, abruptly seating himself on the rail of the chair opposite to Millard, and beckoning impatiently to a waiter, who responded but languidly, knowing that Meadows was opposed to the tip system from both principle and interest.

When he had given his order and then, as usual, called back the waiter as he was going out the door, waving his hand at him and uttering a "H-i-s-t, waitah!" to tell him that he did not want his meat so fat as it had been the last time, he gave his attention to Millard and introduced the subject of the approaching meeting of the directors.

"Why doesn't old Rip Van Winkle wake up?" said Meadows. "Why doesn't he make you assistant cashier? I'm sure you deserve it."

"Well, now, if you put it that way, Mr. Meadows, and leave it to me, I will say candidly that I suppose the real reason for not promoting me is that Mr. Masters, being a man of sound judgment, feels that he can not do me justice under the circumstances. If I had my deserts I'd be president of the bank; but it would be too much to ask a gentleman at Mr. Masters's time of life to move out of his little office just to make room for a deserving young man."

"You may joke, but you know that Masters is jealous. Why doesn't he promote Farnsworth to be vice-president? You know that Farnsworth really runs the bank."

"It isn't his fault if he doesn't," said Millard in a half-whisper.

"I believe that if I made a move to advance both you and Farnsworth it could be carried." Meadows looked inquiringly at his companion.

"What would become of the cashiership?" asked Millard. "I suppose we could divide that between us." "Won't you try a glass of Moselle?" And he passed the bottle to Meadows, who poured out a glass of it—he never declined wine when some one else paid for it—while Millard kept on talking to keep from saying anything. "I like to drink the health of any man who proposes to increase my salary, Mr. Meadows." Millard observed with disgust that the bank director drank off the wine at a gulp as he might have taken any vulgar claret, with an evident lack of appreciation. Millard himself was a light drinker; nothing but the delicate flavor of good wine could make drinking tolerable to him. The mind of Meadows, however, was intent on the subject under discussion.

"The cashiership," he said, "could either be filled by some experienced man or it might be left vacant for a while."

Millard saw a vision of Meadows, the discouraged brother, stepping in over his head.

"If a cashier should be put in now," said Meadows, "it would end presently in old Rip Van Winkle's resigning, and then an advance along the whole line would move you up once more." Meadows thought that this sop would reconcile Millard to having his brother interpolated above him.

"That's a good plan," said Millard, using his finger-bowl; "and then if Mr. Farnsworth would only be kind enough to die in one of his attacks, and the other man should get rich by speculation and retire, I'd come to be president at last. That is the only place suited to a modest and worthy young man like myself."

This fencing annoyed Meadows, who was by this time salting and peppering his roast beef, glaring at it the while like a boa-constrictor contemplating a fresh victim in anticipation of the joys of deglutition. Millard saw the importance of letting Masters know about this new move, and feared that Meadows would attempt to put him under bonds of secrecy. So, as he rose to go, like a prairie traveler protecting himself by back-firing, he said:

"If you're really serious in this matter, Mr. Meadows, I suppose you'll take pains not to have it generally known. For one thing, if you won't tell anybody else, I'll promise you not to tell my wife."

"And if Farnsworth speaks to you about it," said Meadows, "don't tell him that I have said anything to you. He wanted to tell you himself."

"I'll not let him know that you said anything about it."

And with that Millard went out. The bait of the assistant cashiership was not tempting enough to draw him into this intrigue. The greater part of his capital was in the bank, and he knew that the withdrawal of Masters would be a misfortune to him. Finding that Farnsworth was out, Millard went to the president's room under color of showing him a letter of importance. A man of dignity doesn't like to seem to bear tales with malice prepense. When he was about to leave Millard said:

"I hear that a motion is to be made looking to changes in the personnel of the bank."

The president was a little startled; his first impression from this remark being that somehow Millard had got wind of the plans he had revolved and then discarded.

"What do you hear?" he said, in his usual non-committal way.

"Nothing very definite, but something that leads me to think that Mr. Farnsworth would like to be vice-president and that Meadows would consent to have his brother take the cashiership."

"No doubt, no doubt," said Mr. Masters, smiling. It was his habit to smile when he felt the impulse to frown. He did not like to seem ignorant of anything going on in the bank, so he said no more to Millard, but let the conversation drop. He presently regretted this, and by the time Millard had reached his desk he was recalled.

"You understand that Mr. Farnsworth and Meadows are acting in concert?"

"I have reason to think so."

"Do you think it would be wise to make Mr. Farnsworth vice-president?"

Millard turned the palms of his hands upward and shrugged his shoulders. He made no other reply than to add, "You know him as well as I do."

"Who would be a good man for the place?"

"Have you thought of Hilbrough?"

"Yes, he would bring real strength to the bank; and, Mr. Millard, there is one promotion I have long had in mind," said the president. "You ought to be made assistant cashier, with a considerably larger salary than you have been getting."

Millard made a slight bow. "I'm sure you don't expect me to offer serious opposition to that proposal." Then he could not refrain from adding, "I believe Mr. Farnsworth and Meadows have also reached that conclusion."

There was no opportunity to reply to this; Farnsworth was heard wheezing outside the door.

Masters thought rapidly that afternoon. He admitted to himself, as he had hardly done before, that he was growing old and that a successful bank ought to have some more vigorous man than he in its management; some man of ideas more liberal than Farnsworth's, and of more age and experience than this young Millard. His mind turned to Hilbrough, the real-estate agent in Montague Street, Brooklyn. First a poor clerk, then a small collector of tenement-house rents, then a prosperous real-estate agent and operator on his own account, he had come by shrewd investment to be a rich man. He was accustomed to make call loans to a large amount on collateral security, and his business was even now almost that of a private banker. A director in the Bank of Manhadoes from its beginning and one of its largest stockholders, he was the most eligible man to succeed Masters in the active management of its affairs, and the only man whose election once proposed would certainly command the support of the directors against the scheme of Farnsworth. He was the one possible man who would prove quite too large for Farnsworth's domineering. It was with a pang that Masters reflected that he too would be effaced in a measure by the advent of a man so vital as Warren Hilbrough; but there was for him only the choice between being effaced by Hilbrough's superior personality and being officially put out of the way by Farnsworth's process of slow torture. He saw, too, that a bank with four high-grade officers would have a more stable official equilibrium than one where the power is shared between two. The head of such an institution is sheltered from adverse intrigues by the counterpoise of the several officers to one another.

If Masters had needed any stimulus to his resolution to contravene the ambitious plans of the cashier, Mrs. Masters would have supplied it. When she heard of Farnsworth's scheme, she raised again her old cry of Carthago delenda est, Farnsworth must be put out. In her opinion nothing else would meet the requirement of poetic justice; but she despaired of persuading Masters to a measure so extreme. It was always the way. Mr. Masters was too meek for anything; he would let people run over him.

But Masters had no notion of being run over. He went to the office every day, and from the office he went to his country-place in New Jersey every afternoon. There was nothing in his actions to excite the suspicion of the cashier, who could not know that negotiations with Hilbrough, and the private submission of the proposition to certain directors, had all been intrusted to the tact of Charley Millard. It was rather hard on Millard, too; for though he enjoyed his success in an undertaking so delicate, he regretted two dinner parties and one desirable reception that he was compelled to forego in order to carry on his negotiations out of bank hours.

The day before the directors met, Farnsworth confided to Millard his intention to have him made assistant cashier. Millard said that if Mr. Masters and the directors should agree to that he would be very well pleased. Considering his evident loyalty to Masters, Farnsworth did not think it wise to tell Millard anything further.

In the board of directors Meadows sat with a more than usually defiant face—with a face which showed premonitions of exultation. Farnsworth felt sure of his game, but he found breathing so laborious that he did not show any emotion. Masters thought it best to soften the humiliation of his associate as much as possible by forestalling his proposition. So at the first moment he suggested to the directors that the bank needed new force, on account both of his own advancing years and of Mr. Farnsworth's ill-health, much aggravated by his excessive industry. He therefore proposed to have Mr. Hilbrough made vice-president with the same salary as that paid to the president, to add a thousand to the cashier's salary, and to promote Mr. Millard to be assistant cashier on a salary of five thousand a year. He said that the prosperity of the bank justified the increased expense, and that the money would be well invested.

Meadows opposed this plan as extravagant. He favored the promotion of Mr. Millard, and the promotion of Mr. Farnsworth to be vice-president, leaving the cashiership vacant for a while. But the directors, accustomed to follow the lead of Masters and Hilbrough, and suspicious of Meadows as habitually factious, voted the president's proposition.

Farnsworth went home and to bed. Then he asked for a vacation and went South. The bank officers sent him a handsome bouquet when he sailed away on the Savannah steamer; for commerce by the very rudeness of its encounters makes men forgiving. In business it is unprofitable to cherish animosities, and contact with a great variety of character makes business men usually more tolerant than men of secluded lives. Farnsworth, for his part, was as pleased as a child might have been with the attention paid him on his departure, and Mrs. Farnsworth was delighted that her husband had consented to take rest, and "make the others do their share of the work."

V.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE HILBROUGHS.

Of course there is a small set who affect not to mingle freely with newly prosperous people like the Hilbroughs. These are they in whose estimation wealth and distinction only gain their proper flavor—their bouquet, so to speak—by resting stagnant for three generations, for gentility, like game, acquires an admirable highness by the lapse of time. Descendants of the Lord knows whom, with fortunes made the devil knows how, fondly imagine that a village storekeeper who has risen to affluence is somehow inferior to the grandson of a Dutch sailor who amassed a fortune by illicit trade with the Madagascar pirates, or a worse trade in rum and blackamoors on the Guinea coast, and that a quondam bookkeeper who has fairly won position and money by his own shrewdness is lower down than the lineal descendant of an Indian trader who waxed great by first treating and then cheating shivering Mohawks. Which only shows that we are prone to plant ourselves on the sound traditions of ancestors; for where is the aristocracy which does not regard wealth won by ancient thievery as better than money modernly earned in a commonplace way? But among a gentry so numerous and so democratic, in spite of itself, as that of our American Babel, exclusiveness works discomfort mainly to the exclusive. The Hilbroughs are agreeable Americans, their suppers are provided by the best caterers, their house has been rendered attractive by boughten taste, and the company one sees there is not more stupid than that in other miscellaneous assemblies.

People who are Livingstons of the manor on their great-grandmother's side, and Van Something-or-others on the side of a great-great-uncle by his second marriage, and who perhaps have never chanced to be asked to the Hilbroughs' receptions, shrug their shoulders, and tell you that they do not know them. But Mrs. Hilbrough does not slight such families because of the colonialness of their ancestry. Her own progenitors came to America in some capacity long before the disagreement about the Stamp Act, though they were not brilliant enough to buy small kingdoms from the Hudson River Indians with jews'-harps and cast-iron hatchets, nor supple enough to get manor lordships by bribes to royal governors.

I suppose the advent of the Hilbroughs in society might be dated from the first reception they gave in New York, though, for that matter, the Hilbroughs do not take pains to date it at all. For it is a rule of good society that as soon as you arrive you affect to have always been there. Of other ascents men boast; of social success, rarely. Your millionaire, for example,—and millionairism is getting so common as to be almost vulgar,—your millionaire never tires of telling you how he worked the multiplication table until cents became dimes, and dimes well sown blossomed presently into dollars, till hundreds swelled to hundreds of thousands, and the man who had been a blithe youth but twenty years before became the possessor of an uneasy tumor he calls a fortune. Once this narrative is begun no matter that you beat your breast with reluctance to hear out the tedious tale, while loud bassoons perchance are calling you to wedding feasts. Pray hear the modern Whittington with patience, good reader! The recital of this story is his main consolation for the boredom of complicated possession in which his life is inextricably involved—his recoupment for the irksome vigilance with which he must defend his hoard against the incessant attacks of cheats and beggars, subscription papers and poor relations. But the man who has won his way in that illusive sphere we call society sends to swift oblivion all his processes. In society no man asks another, "How did you get here?" or congratulates him on moving among better people than he did ten years ago. Theoretically society is stationary. Even while breathless from climbing, the newcomer affects to have been always atop.

Warren Hilbrough's family had risen with his bettered circumstances from a two-story brick in Degraw street, Brooklyn, by the usual stages to a brownstone "mansion" above the reservoir in New York. When he came to be vice-president of the Bank of Manhadoes, Hilbrough had in a measure reached the goal of his ambition. He felt that he could slacken the strenuousness of his exertions and let his fortune expand naturally under prudent management. But Mrs. Hilbrough was ten years younger than her husband, and her ambition was far from spent. She found herself only on the threshold of her career. In Brooklyn increasing prosperity had made her a leader in church fairs and entertainments. The "Church Social" had often assembled at her house, and she had given a reception in honor of the minister when he came back from the Holy Land—a party which the society reporter of the "Brooklyn Daily Eagle" had pronounced "a brilliant affair." This last stroke had put her at the head of her little world. But now that Hilbrough was vice-president of the Bank of Manhadoes, the new business relations brought her invitations from beyond the little planetary system that revolved around the Reverend Dr. North. It became a question of making her way in the general society of Brooklyn, which had long drawn its members from the genteel quarters of the Heights, the Hill, and the remoter South Brooklyn, and, in later days, also from Prospect Park Slope. But at the houses of the officers of the bank she had caught somewhat bewildering vistas of those involved and undefined circles of people that make up in one way and another metropolitan society on the New York side of East River. Three years before Hilbrough entered the bank his family had removed into a new house in South Oxford street, and lately they had contemplated building a finer dwelling on the Slope. But Mrs. Hilbrough in a moment of inspiration decided to omit Brooklyn and to persuade her husband to remove to New York. There would be many advantages in this course. In New York her smaller social campaigns were unknown, and by removal she would be able to readjust with less difficulty her relations with old friends in Dr. North's congregation. When one goes up one must always leave somebody behind; but crossing the river would give her a clean slate, and make it easy to be rid of old scores when she pleased. So it came about that on the first of May following Hilbrough's accession to the bank the family in a carriage, and all their belongings on trucks, were trundled over Fulton Ferry to begin life anew, with painted walls, more expensive carpets, and twice as many servants. A carriage with a coachman in livery took the place of the top-buggy in which, by twos, and sometimes by threes, the Hilbroughs had been wont to enjoy Prospect Park. The Hilbrough children did not relish this part of the change. The boys could not see the fun of sitting with folded hands on a carriage seat while they rumbled slowly through Fifth Avenue and Central Park, even when the Riverside Park was thrown in. An augmentation of family dignity was small compensation for the loss of the long drive between the quadruple lines of maples that shade the Ocean Parkway in full view of the fast trotting horses which made a whirling maze as they flew past them in either direction.

"There was some fun in a long Saturday's drive to Coney Island, and round by Fort Hamilton and the Narrows," muttered Jack, as the horses toiled up a steep in Central Park; "this here is about as amusing as riding in a black maria would be."

Ah, Jack! You are too young to comprehend the necessity that rests upon us of swelling our dignity into some proportion to a growing stock balance. It is irksome this living on stilts, but an unfortunate inability to match our fortune by increasing our bulk leaves us no alternative but to augment our belongings so as to preserve the fitness of things at any cost. There is as yet no Society for the Emancipation of Princes, and the Association for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Children of the Rich has no place in the list of New York philanthropies.

Mrs. Hilbrough prudently spent her first winter on Manhattan Island in looking about her. She ventured a dinner company two or three times, but went no further. She received calls from the wives of those who had, and those who wished to have, business relations with her husband, and she returned them, making such observations as she could on the domestic economy, or rather the domestic extravagance, of those she visited. The first result of this was that she changed her door-boy. The fine-looking mulatto she had installed in imitation of some of her richer Brooklyn acquaintances had to be discharged. The Anglomania of the early eighties cruelly abolished the handsome darky hall-boy, that most artistic living bronze, with all his suggestion of barbaric magnificence, and all his Oriental obsequiousness. His one fault was that he was not English. Fashion forbade the rich to avail themselves of one of the finest products of the country. The lackey who took his place had the English superciliousness, and marked the advance of American civilization by adding a new discomfort and deformity to the life of people of fashion.

The minister of the church in which the Hilbroughs had taken pews sent his wife to call on Mrs. Hilbrough, and two of the church officers, knowing the value of such an acquisition to the church, showed their Christian feeling in the same way. Many of her old Degraw street and South Oxford street friends called at the new house, their affection being quickened by a desire "to see what sort of style the Hilbroughs are putting on now." Some of her Brooklyn calls she returned out of a positive liking for good old friends, some because the callers were those who could introduce her to people she desired to know in New York. She excused herself from calling on the most of her trans-East-River acquaintances by urging that it is so much farther from New York to Brooklyn than it is from Brooklyn to New York, you know. She attended several large evening receptions in New York, and drank five o'clock tea at six in the evening at a good many places. She thus made acquaintances, while with a clever woman's tact she kept her wits about her and began to "get the hang of the thing," as she expressed it to one of her confidential friends. Meantime she was as constant in her attendance at the opera as she had been at the prayer-meeting in former days.

It was at the beginning of her second winter in New York that she served notice on Hilbrough that she meant to give a reception; or, as she put it, "We must give a reception." The children had gone to school, the butler was otherwise engaged, and there was nobody but a waitress present.

Hilbrough's face was of that sunny, sanguine sort which always seems to indicate that things are booming, to borrow a phrase from our modern argot. His plump, cheery countenance, and the buoyant spontaneity of his laugh, inspired a confidence which had floated his craft over more than one financial shoal. But when Mrs. Hilbrough proposed a reception, just as he finished his coffee, he became meditative, leaned his two large arms on the table, and made a careful inspection of the china cup: his wife—Brooklyn woman that she was—had lately made a journey across the new bridge to buy the set at Ovington's.

"You don't mean one of those stupid crushes," he began, "where all the people outside are trying to butt their way in, and all those inside are wishing to heaven that they were well out again—like so many June bugs and millers on a summer night bumping against both sides of a window with a candle in it?" Hilbrough finished with a humorous little chuckle at his own comparison.

"Well," rejoined Mrs. Hilbrough, firmly, "a reception is the thing to give. We owe it to our social position."

"Social position be hanged!" said Hilbrough, half in vexation, but still laughing, while his wife tried by frowning to remind him that the use of such words in the presence of a servant was very improper.

"It seems as though I never could get square with that thing you call social position. I pay all my other debts and take receipts in full, but the more money we have the more we owe to social position. I have a great mind to suspend payment for a while and let social position go to smash. I detest a reception. I don't mind a nice little gathering of good friendly folks such as we used to have in Degraw street at the church socials—"

"Church socials!"

His wife's interruption took Hilbrough's breath. She muttered rather than spoke these few words, but with a contemptuousness of inflection that was most expressive. Hilbrough was left in some doubt as to whether all the contempt was intended for the church socials in Degraw street, or whether a part of it might not be meant for a husband whose mind had not kept pace with his fortune.

"I am sure there was real enjoyment in a church social," he said, with a deprecating laugh, "to say nothing of the money raised to recarpet the church aisles. And I confess I rather enjoyed the party you gave in Oxford street when Dr. North got back from the Holy Land."

While Hilbrough was making this speech his wife had, by dumb show, ordered the waitress to take something down-stairs, in order that there might be no listener to Hilbrough's autobiographical reminiscences but herself.

"Well, my dear," she said, taking a conciliatory tone, "our walk in life has changed, and we must adapt ourselves to our surroundings. You know you always said that we ought to do our share toward promoting sociability."

"Sociability!" It was Hilbrough's turn now. His laugh had a note of derision in it. "W'y, my dear, there is rather more sociability in a cue of depositors at the teller's window of an afternoon than there was at Mrs. Master's reception last winter."

"Well, don't let's argue. I hate arguments of all things."

"Most people do, when they get the worst of them," rejoined Hilbrough, merrily.

"You are positively rude," pouted Mrs. Hilbrough, rising from the table. If she hated arguments, her husband hated tiffs, and her look of reproach accomplished what her arguments could not. Hilbrough knew that at the game of injured innocence he was no match for his wife. The question in his mind now was to find a line of retreat.

"You ought to have more consideration for my feelings, Warren," she went on. "Besides, you know you said that whatever widened our acquaintance was likely to do the bank good. You know you did."

"So I did, my dear; so I did," he answered, soothingly, as he rose from the table and looked at his watch. "There's one comfort, anyhow. You don't know a great many people on this side of the river yet, and so I guess I sha'n't have to put hoops on the house this time, unless you fetch all Brooklyn across the new bridge."

Mrs. Hilbrough did not care to contradict her husband now that he had relented. But as for crowding the house she felt sure there was a way to do it, if she could only find it, and she was resolved not to have fewer people than Mrs. Masters, and that without depleting Brooklyn.

What she needed was an adviser. She went over the bead-roll of her acquaintance and found nobody eligible. Those who could have pointed out to her what were the proper steps to take in such a case were just the people to whom she was not willing to expose herself in her unfledged condition. At last she felt obliged to ask Mr. Hilbrough about it.

"Don't you know somebody, my dear, who knows New York better than I do, who could give me advice about our reception?" This was her opening of the matter as she sat crocheting by the glowing grate of anthracite in the large front room on the second floor, while her husband smoked, and read his evening paper.

"I? How should I know?" he said, laying down the paper. "I don't know many New York ladies."

"Not a woman! I mean some man. You can't speak to a woman about such things so well as you can to a man;" and she spread her fancy-work out over her knee and turned her head on one side to get a good view of its general effect.

"I should think you would rather confide in a woman." Hilbrough looked puzzled and curious as he said this.

"You don't understand," she said. "A woman doesn't like to give herself away to another woman. Women always think you ridiculous if you don't understand everything, and they remember and talk about it. But a man likes to give information to a woman. I suppose men like to have a woman look up to them." Mrs. Hilbrough laughed at the explanation, which was not quite satisfactory to herself.

"Well," said Hilbrough, after a minute's amused meditation, "the men I know are all like me. They are business men, and are rather dragged into society, I suppose, by their wives, and by"—he chuckled merrily at this point—"by the debts they owe to social position, you know. I don't believe there's a man in the bank that wouldn't be as likely to ask me about what coat he ought to wear on any occasion as to give me any information on the subject. Yes, there is one man. That's young Millard, or Millard, as he calls it. He's a sort of a dude, and I never could stand dudes. I asked Mr. Masters the other day whether the assistant cashier was worth so large a salary as five thousand dollars, and he said that that man had the entry—the ontray, as he called it—to the best houses in New York. He's cheek by jowl with a dozen of the richest men, he's invited everywhere, and is considered a great authority on all matters of that kind. He brings some business to the bank, and he's one of the best judges in New York of a man's character and responsibility. He knows all about pretty nearly every man whose note is presented for discount, and, if he does not know at once, he can generally find out in an hour. I believe he could tell us the name of the grandmother of almost every prominent depositor if we wished to know, and how every man got his money."

"Is he rich?"

"Well, nobody seems to know for certain. He has a large slice of the bank's stock, and he's known to have good investments outside. He's well enough off to live without his salary if he wanted to. But I am pretty sure he isn't rich. Belongs to some old family, I suppose."

"I should be afraid of him," said Mrs. Hilbrough, ruefully.

"You needn't be. He's a good enough sort of fellow if he only wouldn't part his hair in the middle. I can't abide that in a man. But it's no use being afraid of him. He probably knows all about you and me already. He first came to see me about coming into the bank, and I don't know but it was his move to get me."

"Would he come up to dinner some evening?"

"He'd rather like to oblige me. I'll have to get him when he's disengaged. What shall I tell him?"

"Tell him that Mrs. Hilbrough wishes his advice, and would be glad if he would come to dinner with us some evening."

"Why do I need to say anything about your wanting advice? I don't just like to ask a favor of such a dude. I'll ask him to dinner, and you can ask his advice as though by accident."

"No; that won't do. That kind of man would see through it all. Tell him that I wish his advice. That will show him that I recognize his position as an authority. He'll like that better."

Warren Hilbrough suddenly discovered that his wife was cleverer—or, as he would have said, "smarter"—than he had thought her.

"You are a good hand, Jenny," he said. "You'll win your game." And after he had resumed the reading of his paper he looked over the top of it once or twice in furtive admiration of her as she sat between him and the dark portière, which set her form in relief against the rich background and made her seem a picture to the fond eyes of her husband. He reflected that perhaps after all managing church fairs and running sewing societies was no bad training for a larger social activity.

VI.
PHILLIDA CALLENDER.

"Hilbrough has sent for me," said Millard to Philip Gouverneur, who was sitting so as to draw his small form into the easy-chair as he smoked by the open fire in the newspaper room at the Terrapin Club. Millard, who had never liked tobacco, was pretending to smoke a cigarette because smoking seemed to him the right thing to do. He had no taste for any more desperate vice, and tobacco smoke served to take the gloss off a character which seemed too highly finished for artistic effect.

"Hilbrough"—Charley smiled as he recalled it—"always gets uneasy when he's talking to me. He takes his foot off the chair and puts it on the floor. Then he throws himself forward on the table with his elbows outward, and then he straightens up. He's a jolly kind of man, though, and a good banker. But his wife—she is the daughter of a Yankee school-teacher that taught in Brooklyn till he died—is a vigorous little woman. She hasn't come to New York to live quietly. She's been head and front of her set in Brooklyn, and the Lord knows what she won't undertake now that Hilbrough's getting rich very fast. I haven't seen her yet, but I rather like her in advance. She didn't try to trap me into an acquaintance, but sent me word that she wanted advice. There's a woman who knows what she wants, and goes for it with a clear head. But what can I do for her? She'll be wanting to give a tea or a ball before she has acquaintances enough. It's awfully ticklish making such people understand that they must go slow and take what they can get to begin with."

"Why," said Gouverneur, "you can tell her to take the religious or moral reform dodge, and invite all the friends of some cause to meet some distinguished leader of that cause. Bishop Whipple, if she could capture him, would bring all the Friends of the Red Man, just as Miss Willard or Mrs. Livermore would fetch the temperance and woman-suffrage people. You remember the converted Hindu princess they had over here last winter? Between her rank, and her piety, and her coming from the antipodes, and her heathen antecedents, she drew beautifully. Fine woman, too. Even my mother forgave her for not having a drop of Dutch or Revolutionary blood in her veins, and we all liked her very much. Give Mrs. Hilbrough that tip."

Millard shook his head, and smiled. He had the appreciative smile of a man with a genius for listening, which is a better, because a rarer, contribution to conversation than good speech. Philip, crouched in his chair with his face averted from the electric lights, went on:

"Well, then you know there is the literary dodge. Have papers read, not enough to bore people too deeply, but to bore them just enough to give those who attend an impression of intellectuality. Have discussions of literary questions, seasoned with stewed terrapin, and decorated with dress coats and external anatomy gowns. Those who go to such places flatter themselves that they are getting into literary circles and improving their minds, especially if a popular magazinist or the son of some great author can be persuaded to read one of his rejected articles or to make a few remarks now and then. Then there is the musical dodge on the drawing-room scale, or by wholesale, like the Seidl Society, for example. One is able by this means to promote a beautiful art and increase one's social conspicuousness at the same time. Then there is the distinguished-foreigner dodge, give a reception in honor of—"

"Hang it, Philip; I'll tell Mrs. Hilbrough to send for you," said Millard, laughing as he got up and threw his cigarette into the grate. "I don't like to interrupt your lecture, but it's eleven o'clock, and I'm going home. Good-night."

Philip sat there alone and listened to the rain against the windows, and smoked until his cigar went out. The mere turning of things over in his mind, and tacking witty labels to them, afforded so much amusement that inactivity and revery were his favorite indulgences.

Mrs. Hilbrough gave a good deal of thought to her dinner on the next evening after the conversation between Philip Gouverneur and Millard. To have it elegant, and yet not to appear vulgar by making too much fuss over a dinner en famille, taxed her thought and taste. Half an hour before dinner she met her husband with a perturbed face.

"It's too bad that Phillida Callender should have come this evening. That's just the way with an indefinite invitation. Poor girl, I've been asking her to come any evening, and now she has hit on the only one in the year on which I would rather she should have stayed at home."

"I'm sure Phillida is nice enough for anybody," said Hilbrough, sturdily. "I don't see how she interferes with your plan."

"Well, Mr. Millard'll think I've asked her specially to help entertain him, and Phillida is so peculiar. She's nobody in particular, socially, and it will seem an unskillful thing to have asked her—and then she has ideas. Young girls with notions of their own are—well—you know."

"Yes, I know, home-made ideas are a little out of fashion," laughed Hilbrough. "But I'll bet he likes her. Millard isn't a fool if he does part his hair in the middle and carry his cane balanced in his fingers like a pair of steelyards."

"If he takes me to dinner, you must follow with Phillida. Give your left arm—"

"I'll feel like a fool escorting Phillida—"

"But you must if Mr. Millard escorts me."

Hilbrough could have cursed Millard. He hated what he called "flummery." Why couldn't people walk to the table without hooking themselves together, and why couldn't they eat their food without nonsense? But he showed his vexation in a characteristic way by laughing inwardly at his wife and Millard, and most of all at himself for an old fool.

Phillida Callender was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister who had gone as missionary to one of the Oriental countries. After years of life in the East, Mr. Callender had returned to America on account of his wife's health, and had settled in Brooklyn. If illusions of his youth had been dispelled in the attempt to convert Orientals to a belief in the Shorter Catechism he never confessed it, even to himself, and he cherished the notion that he would some day return to his missionary vocation. The family had an income from the rent of a house in New York that had been inherited by Mrs. Callender, and the husband received considerable sums for supplying the pulpits of vacant churches. He had occupied the pulpit of the church that the Hilbroughs attended during the whole time of Dr. North's journey to the Holy Land, and had thus come into a half-pastoral relation to the Hilbrough family. Mr. Callender sickened and died; the fragile wife and two daughters were left to plan their lives without him. The sudden shock and the new draft upon Mrs. Callender's energies had completed her restoration to a tolerable degree of health and activity. Between the elder daughter, whom the father had fancifully named Phillida, from the leafy grove in which stood the house where she was born, and Mrs. Hilbrough there had grown up a friendship in spite of the difference in age and temperament—a friendship that had survived the shock of prosperity. Lately the Callenders had found it prudent to remove to their house situate in the region near Second Avenue below Fourteenth Street, a quarter which, having once been fashionable, abides now in the merest twilight of its former grandeur. The letting of the upper rooms of the house was a main source of income.

Born in Siam, bred in a family pervaded with religious and propagandist ideas, and having led a half-recluse life, Phillida Callender did not seem to Mrs. Hilbrough just the sort of person to entertain a man of the world.

When dinner was announced Millard did give Mrs. Hilbrough his arm, and Phillida was startled and amused, when Mr. Hilbrough, after pausing an instant to remember which of his stout arms he was to offer, presented his left elbow. Despite much internal levity and external clumsiness, Hilbrough played his rôle to the satisfaction of his anxious wife, and Phillida looked at him inquiringly after she was seated as though to discover what transformation had taken place in him.

Millard could not but feel curious about the fine-looking, dark young woman opposite him. But with his unfailing sense of propriety he gave the major part of his attention to the elder lady, and, without uttering one word of flattery, he contrived, by listening well, and by an almost undivided attention to her when he spoke, to make Mrs. Hilbrough very content with herself, her dinner, and her guest. This is the sort of politeness not acquired in dancing-school nor learned in books of decorum; it is art, and of all the fine arts perhaps the one that gives the most substantial pleasure to human beings in general. Even Hilbrough was pleased with Millard's appreciation of Mrs. Hilbrough; to think well of Jenny was an evidence of sound judgment, like the making of a prudent investment.

Meantime Millard somewhat furtively observed Miss Callender. From the small contributions she made to the table-talk, she seemed, to him, rather out of the common run. Those little touches of inflection and gesture, which one woman in society picks up from another, and which are the most evanescent bubbles of fashion, were wanting in her, and this convinced him that she was not accustomed to see much of the world. On the other hand, there was no lack of refinement either in speech or manner. That disagreeable quality in the voice which in an American woman is often the most easily perceptible note of underbreeding was not there. Her speech was correct without effort, as of one accustomed to hear good English from infancy; her voice in conversation was an alto, with something sympathetic in its vibration, as though a powerful emotional nature lay dormant under the calm exterior. Millard was not the person to formulate this, but with very little direct conversation he perceived that she was outside the category to which he was accustomed, and that her personality might prove interesting, if one had an opportunity of knowing it. He reasoned that with such a voice she ought to be fond of music.

"Have you heard much of Wagner, Miss Callender?" he said when there was a pause in the conversation. He felt before he had finished the question that it was a false beginning, and he was helped to this perception by a movement of uneasiness on the part of Mrs. Hilbrough, who was afraid that Phillida's disqualifications might be too plainly revealed. But if Mrs. Hilbrough was rendered uneasy by the question, Phillida was not. She turned her dark eyes upon Millard, and smiled with genuine amusement as she answered:

"I have heard but one opera in my life, Mr. Millard, and that was not Wagner's."

"Miss Callender," said Mrs. Hilbrough, quickly, "is one who has sacrificed social opportunities to her care for an invalid mother—a great sacrifice to one at her time of life."

"I don't think I have sacrificed much," answered Phillida with a trace of embarrassment. "My social opportunities could not have been many at best, and I would rather have led,"—she hesitated a moment,—"I don't know but I would rather have led my quiet life than—the other."

In her effort to say this so as neither to boast of her own pursuits nor to condemn those of others, Miss Callender's color was a little heightened. Millard was sorry that his innocent question had led the conversation into channels so personal. Mrs. Hilbrough was inwardly vexed that Phillida should be so frank, and express views so opposed to those of good society.

"You find Brooklyn a pleasant place to live, no doubt," said Millard, taking it for granted that Phillida was from Brooklyn, because of her friendship for the Hilbroughs.

"I liked it when we lived there. I like New York very well. My relatives all live on this side of East River, and so I am rather more at home here."

"Then you don't find New York lonesome," said Millard, with a falling cadence, seeking to drop the conversation.

"Oh, no! I live near Stuyvesant Square, and I have an aunt in Washington Square of whom I am very fond."

"I am often at the Gouverneurs, on the north side of the Square. I like Washington Square very much," said Millard, getting on solid ground again.

"We visit at the same house. Mrs. Gouverneur is my aunt," said Phillida.

Millard was a little stunned at this announcement. But his habitual tact kept him from disclosing his surprise at finding Miss Callender's affiliations better than he could have imagined. He only said with unaffected pleasure in his voice:

"The Gouverneurs are the best of people and my best friends."

Mr. Hilbrough looked in amusement at his wife, who was manifestly pleased to find that in Phillida she was entertaining an angel unawares. Millard's passion for personal details came to his relief.

"Mrs. Gouverneur," he said, "had a brother and two sisters. You must be the daughter of one of her sisters. One lives, or used to live, in San Francisco, and the other married a missionary."

"I am the missionary's daughter," said Phillida.

Millard felt impelled to redeem his default by saying something to Miss Callender about the antiquity and excellence of her mother's family. If he had been less skillful than he was he might have given way to this impulse; but with the knack of a conversational artist he contrived in talking chiefly to Mrs. Hilbrough to lead the conversation to Miss Callender's distinguished great-grandfather of the Revolutionary period, who was supposed to shed an ever-brightening luster all the way down the line of his family, and Millard added some traditional anecdotes of other ancestors of her family on the mother's side who had played a conspicuous part in the commercial or civic history of New York. All of which was flattering to Miss Callender, the more that it seemed to be uttered in the way of general conversation and with no particular reference to her.

Hilbrough listened with much interest to this very creditable account of Phillida's illustrious descent, and longed for the time when he should have the fun of reminding his wife that he had held the opinion from the beginning that Phillida Callender was good enough for anybody.

Mrs. Hilbrough took Phillida and left the table, Mr. Hilbrough rising as the ladies passed out, as he had been instructed. When he and Millard had resumed their seats the cigars were brought, but when Millard saw that his host did not smoke he did not see why he should punish himself with a cigar and a tête-à-tête with Hilbrough, whom he could see any day at the bank. So by agreement the sitting was soon cut short, and the gentlemen followed the ladies to the drawing-room. Mrs. Hilbrough had planned a conversation with Millard about her reception while Phillida should be left to talk with Mr. Hilbrough. But Phillida's position had been changed during dinner. Mrs. Hilbrough found a new card in her hand. She drew Miss Callender into the talk about the reception, leaving her husband to excuse himself, and to climb the stairs to the third floor, as was his wont, to see that the children had gone to bed well and were not quarreling, and to have a few cheery words with Jack and the smaller ones before they went to sleep. Receptions were nothing to him: the beds on the third floor contained the greater part of the world.

Millard was relieved to find that Mrs. Hilbrough proposed nothing more ambitious than an evening reception. He commended her for beginning in new surroundings in this way.

"You see, Mrs. Hilbrough," he said, "a reception seems to me more flexible than a ball. It is, in a sense, more democratic. There are many good people—people of some position—who do not care to attend a ball, who would be out of place at a ball, indeed, which should be a very fashionable assembly. The party with dancing can come after."

This commendation had an effect opposite to that intended. Mrs. Hilbrough hadn't thought of a ball, and she now suspected that she was going wrong. In proposing a reception she was imitating Mrs. Masters, and she had fancied herself doing the most proper thing of all. To have a reception called democratic, and treated as something comparatively easy of achievement, disturbed her.

"If you think a reception is not the thing, Mr. Millard, I will follow your advice. You see I only know Brooklyn, and if a reception is going to compromise our position in the future I wish you would tell me. I am afraid I can hardly accomplish even that."

But Millard again said that a reception was a very proper thing to begin with. By degrees he drew out a statement of Mrs. Hilbrough's resources for a reception, and he could not conceal from her the fact that they seemed too small, for numerousness is rather indispensable to this species of entertainment. A reception is in its essence entertainment by wholesale.

"If you could give a reception in honor of somebody," he suggested, remembering Philip Gouverneur's suggestion, "it might serve to attract many beyond your own circle, and—and—give you a reason for asking people whom—you know but slightly, if at all."

But Mrs. Hilbrough did not know any proper person to honor with a reception. Her embarrassment was considerable at finding herself so poorly provided with ways and means, and she was slowly coming to the conclusion that she must wait another winter, or take other means of widening her acquaintance. A plan had occurred to Millard by which he could help her out of the difficulty. But as it involved considerable trouble and risk on his part, he rejected it. There was no reason why he should go too far in helping the Hilbroughs. It was not a case for self-sacrifice.

Hilbrough, in the nursery, had found the youngest little girl suffering with a slight cold,—nothing more than a case of infantile sniffles,—but Hilbrough's affection had magnified it into incipient croup or pneumonia, and, after a fruitless search for the vial of tolu and squills, he dispatched the maid to call Mrs. Hilbrough.

When they were left alone, Millard turned to Phillida, who had shown nearly as much disappointment over the possible postponement of Mrs. Hilbrough's project as the projector herself.

"You are deeply interested in this affair, too, Miss Callender," he said.

"I don't care much for such things myself, but I should dislike to see Mrs. Hilbrough disappointed," answered Phillida. "She has been such a good friend to me, and in time of the greatest trouble she was such a friend to my family, and especially"—she hesitated—"to my father, who died two years ago, that I am interested in whatever concerns her happiness or even her pleasure."

Somehow this changed the color of the enterprise in the eyes of Charles Millard. The personality of Miss Callender was interesting to him, and besides she was Mrs. Gouverneur's niece. It seemed worth while gratifying Mrs. Hilbrough at considerable cost if it would give pleasure to this peculiar young lady.

"Well, with such a certificate of Mrs. Hilbrough's qualities," said Millard, after a pause, "we must strain a point and get up this reception for her. We must be good to the good. We can carry this through together, you and I, Miss Callender," he said.

"What can I do?" asked Phillida, opening her large, dark eyes with innocent surprise. "I know nobody."

"You can get Mrs. Gouverneur's countenance, perhaps. That will be a great deal for Mrs. Hilbrough hereafter."

"Perhaps I can get it, with your help, Mr. Millard. My aunt is good hearted, but she has queer notions. She has a great opinion of the social importance of her family." And Mrs. Gouverneur's niece laughed in a way which went to show that she treated with some levity her aunt's estimate of the value of ancestry.

"One couldn't avoid being proud of such forefathers," answered Millard.

"Perhaps she will help if I ask her. She is very obliging to me—I belong to the royal family too, you know," she said archly.

"Together we can get her to lend her influence to Mrs. Hilbrough," said Millard, "or at least to attend the reception. And I think I know how the whole thing can be managed."

"I am so glad, and so much obliged to you, Mr. Millard," said Phillida, a gleam of enthusiastic feeling, almost childlike, suddenly showing itself through the grave exterior. This little revelation of the self shut within the disciplined self without puzzled Millard and piqued the curiosity he felt to understand what manner of young girl this was, habitually so self-mastered, and apparently so full of unknown power or of unawakened sensibilities. An apprehension of potencies undeveloped in Miss Callender gave her new acquaintance the feeling of an explorer who stands on the margin of a land virgin and unknown, eager to discover what is beyond his sight. For Millard's main interest in life lay in the study of the personalities about him, and here was one the like of which he had never seen. The social naturalist had lighted on a new genus.

Mrs. Hilbrough returned with her husband, and Millard explained to her that a certain Baron von Pohlsen, a famous archæologist, was at that time in Mexico studying the remains of Aztec civilization with the view of enriching the pages of his great work on the "Culturgeschichte" of the ancient Americans. He was to return by way of New York, where his money had been remitted to the Bank of Manhadoes, and he had been socially consigned to Mr. Millard by a friend in Dresden. Pohlsen was obliged to observe some economy in traveling, and had asked Millard to find him a good boarding-house. If Mrs. Hilbrough cared to receive the Baron as a guest for a fortnight, Millard would advise him to accept the invitation, and, as far as possible, would relieve Mr. Hilbrough of his share of the burden by taking the Baron about. This would furnish Mrs. Hilbrough with a good excuse for giving a reception to the nobleman, and then, without any appearance of pushing, she could invite people far afield.

It was not in the nature of things that a woman in Mrs. Hilbrough's position should refuse to entertain a baron. She saw many incidental advantages in the plan, not the least of which was that Mr. Millard would be a familiar in the house during the Baron's stay. Hilbrough acquiesced with a rueful sense that he should be clumsy enough at entertaining a foreigner and a man of title. Mrs. Hilbrough thanked Millard heartily for his obliging kindness, but what he cared most for was that Miss Callender's serious face shone with pleasure and gratitude.

Having accepted another invitation for the evening, Millard took his leave soon after ten o'clock, proposing to come at a later time to help Mrs. Hilbrough—"and Miss Callender, I hope," he added with a bow to Phillida—to make up the list. Having but two blocks to go, he declined, in favor of Miss Callender, the Hilbrough carriage, which stood ready at the door.

The close carriage, with only Phillida for occupant, rattled down Fifth Avenue to Madison Square, and along Broadway to Union Square, then over eastward by Fourteenth street, until after a turn or two it waked the echoes rudely in a quiet cross street, stopping at length before a three-story house somewhat antique and a little broader than its neighbors. Phillida closed and bolted the outer doors, and then opened one of the inner ones with a night-key, and made her way to what had been the back parlor of the house. In that densification of population which proceeds so incessantly on Manhattan Island this old house, like many another, was modernly compelled to hold more people than it had been meant for in the halcyon days when Second Avenue was a fashionable thoroughfare. The second floor of the house had been let, without board, to a gentleman and his wife, and the rooms above to single gentlemen. The parlor floor and the basement were made to accommodate the mother and her two daughters with their single servant. The simple, old back parlor, with no division but a screen, had two beds for mother and daughters, while the well-lighted extension made them a sitting room in pleasant weather. Mrs. Callender clung to one luxury persistently—there was always a grate fire in the back parlor on cold evenings.

To this back parlor came Phillida with a disagreeable sense that Mrs. Hilbrough's retreating carriage was rousing the quiet neighborhood as the sleepy and impatient coachman banged his way over the pavement, the hummocky irregularities of which saved this thoroughfare from all traffic that could avoid it; for only the drivers of reckless butcher carts, and one or two shouting milkmen, habitually braved its perils.

Phillida, as she approached the old-fashioned mahogany door of the back parlor, in the dim light shed by the half-turned-down gas jet at the other end of the hall, raised her hand to the knob; but it eluded her, for the door was opened from within by some one who stood behind it. Then the head of a girl of seventeen with long, loose blond tresses peered around the edge of the door as Phillida entered.

"Come in, Philly, and tell us all about it," was the greeting she got from her sister, clad in a red wrapper covering her night-dress, and shod with worsted bedroom slippers. "Mama wanted me to go to bed; but I knew you'd have something interesting to tell about the Hilbroughs, and so I stuck it out and kept mama company while she did the mending. Come now, Philly, tell me everything all at once."

The mother sat by the drop-light mending a stocking, and she looked up at Phillida with a gentle, brightening expression of pleasure—that silent welcome of affection for which the daughters always looked on entering.

"What, mama, not in bed yet?" exclaimed Phillida, as she laid off her outer garments, and proceeded to bend over and kiss her mother, trying to take away her work at the same time. "Come now, you ought to be in bed; and, besides, this old stocking of mine is darned all over already, and ought to be thrown away."

"Ah, Phillida," said her mother with a sweet, entreating voice, holding fast to the stocking all the time, "if it gives me pleasure let me do it. If I like to save old things I'm sure it's no harm."

"But you ought to have been in bed at nine o'clock," said Phillida, her hold on the stocking weakening perceptibly under the spell of her mother's irresistible entreaty.

"It will take but a minute more if you will let me alone," was all the mother said as Phillida released the work, and the elaborate darning went on.

"There's a good deal more darn than stocking to that now," said the younger sister. "It's a work of genius. I'll tell you, Phillida: we'll take it to the picture framer's to-morrow and have it put under glass, and then we'll get a prize for it as a specimen of fancy work at the American Institute Fair. But now tell me, what did you have for dinner? How many courses were there? Was there anybody else there? What sort of china have they got? Do they keep a butler? How does Mr. Hilbrough take to the new fixings? And, oh, say! are they going to give any parties? And—"

"Give me a chance, Frisky, and I'll answer you," said Phillida, who began at the beginning and told all that she could think of, even to describing the doilies and finger-bowls.

"You said there was a gentleman there. Who was he?" said Agatha, the younger.

"That Mr. Millard that Cousin Phil is so fond of. He is at Aunt Harriet's often on Sunday evenings. He's a good looking young man, dressed with the greatest neatness, and is very polite to everybody in an easy way."

"Did he talk with you?"

"Not at first. He paid as much attention to Mrs. Hilbrough as he could have paid to a queen; treating her with a great deal of deference. You could see that she was pleased. Just think, he asked me if I liked Wagner's music."

"How did you get out of it?"

"I didn't get out of it at all. I just told him I had never heard anything of Wagner's. But when he found that I was Mrs. Gouverneur's niece it made things all right with him, and he made as handsome a speech about my great-grandfather and all the rest as Aunt Harriet could have done herself."

"Wasn't Mrs. Hilbrough surprised to hear that you were somebody?"

"I don't know."

"Well, don't you think she was?"

"May be so."

"Didn't she seem pleased?"

"I think she was relieved, for my confession that I hadn't heard many operas bothered her."

"You said Mr. Millard was polite. How was he polite?"

"He made you feel that he liked you, and admired you; I can't tell you how. He didn't say a single flattering word to me, but when he promised to meet Mrs. Hilbrough again, to arrange about the people she is to have at the reception, he bowed to me and said, 'And Miss Callender, I hope.'"

"I'll tell you what, Phillida, I'll bet he took a fancy to you."

"Nonsense, Agatha Callender; don't talk such stuff. He's been for years in society, and knows all the fine people in New York."

"Nonsense, yourself, Phillida; you're better than any of the fine ladies in New York. Mr. Millard isn't good enough for you. But I just know he was taken with you."

"Do you think I'm going to have my head turned by bows and fine speeches that have been made to five hundred other women?"

"There never was any other woman in New York as fine as you, Phillida."

"Not among your acquaintance, and in your opinion, my dear, seeing you hardly know any other young woman but me."

"I know more than you think I do. If you had any common sense, Phillida, you'd make the most of Aunt Harriet, and marry some man that would furnish you with a horse and a carriage of your own. But you won't. You're just a goosey. You spend your time on the urchins down in Mackerelville. The consequence is you'll never get married, and I shall have you on my hands an old maid who never improved her opportunities."

"What stuff!" laughed Phillida.

"You've got a fine figure—a splendid figure," proceeded the younger, "and a face that is sweet and charming, if I do say it. It's a dreadful waste of woman. You wrap your talent in a Sunday-school lesson-paper and bury it down in Mackerelville."

At this point Mrs. Callender put away her elaborate hand-finished stocking, saying softly:

"Agatha, why do you tease Phillida so?"

"Because she's such a goose," said the younger sister, stubbornly.

Twenty minutes later Agatha, looking from her bedside in the dark corner of the room, saw her sister kneeling by a chair near the fireside. The sight of Phillida at prayer always awed her. Agatha herself was accustomed to say, before jumping into bed, a conventional little prayer, very inclusive as to subjects embraced, and very thin in texture, but Phillida's prayers were different. Agatha regarded the form of her sister, well developed and yet delicately graceful, now more graceful than ever as she knelt in her long night-dress, her two hands folded naturally the one across the other, and her head bowed. As she arranged the bed, Agatha followed mentally what she imagined to be the tenor of the prayer—she fancied that Phillida was praying to be saved from vanity and worldliness; she knew that each of the little urchins in the mission Sunday-school class was prayed for by name. She turned away a moment, and then caught sight of Phillida as she unclasped her hands and rested them on the chair. Agatha knew that when Phillida changed her position at the close of her prayer it was to recite, as she always did, the "Now I lay me," which was associated in her mind, as in Agatha's, with an oriental environment, a swarthy nurse in waist-cloth and shoulder scarf, and, more than all, was linked with her earliest memories of the revered father at whose knees the children were accustomed to repeat it. When Phillida rose to her feet in that state of exaltation which prayer brings to one who has a natural genius for devotion, the now penitent and awe-stricken Agatha went to her sister, put her arms about her neck, and leaned her head upon her shoulder, saying softly:

"You dear, good Phillida!"

VII.
THE LION SOIRÉE.

Notwithstanding the romancing of her sister, Phillida built no castles. Millard's politeness to her had been very agreeable, but she knew that it was only politeness. Almost every man's and every woman's imagination is combustible on one side or another. Many young women are set a-dreaming by any hint of love or marriage. But Phillida had read only sober books—knowing little of romances, there was no stock of incendiary material in her memory. Her fancy was easily touched off on the side of her religious hopes; all her education had intensified the natural inflammability of her religious emotions, but in affairs of this world she was by nature and education unusually self-contained for a woman of one and twenty.

Millard, on his part, had been exposed to the charms of many women, and his special interest in Phillida amounted only to a lively curiosity. Always susceptible to the charm of a woman's presence, this susceptibility had been acted on from so many sides as to make his interest in women superficial and volatile. The man who is too much interested in women to be specially interested in a woman is pretty sure not to marry at all, or to marry late.

Baron Pohlsen arrived, and was duly installed at Mrs. Hilbrough's. He was greatly pleased with the hospitality shown him by this wealthy household, and fancied that Americans were the most generous of peoples. Millard, as in duty bound, took pains to introduce him in many desirable quarters, and showed him the lions of the city in Hilbrough's carriage. But in spite of Millard's care to relieve him, Hilbrough afterward confessed that the panic of 1873 had not taxed his patience and cheerfulness so deeply as this entertainment for two weeks of a great German antiquary. Dutifully the banker attended a session of the Geographical Society to listen to an address made by his guest in broken English, on the ancient importance of Uxmal and Palenque. Hilbrough also heard with attentive perplexity the Baron's account before the Historical Society of the Aztec Calendar Stone, and his theory of its real purpose.

When the American banker was left alone with the learned High Dutchman, it became very serious business. Von Pohlsen, with all his erudition, was extremely ignorant of the art of banking as practised in New York. He did not know, at least in English, the difference between collateral and real estate security, and "gilt-edged" paper was more foreign than papyrus to him. Nor could Hilbrough interest him much in the remarkable rise in Brooklyn real estate since 1860. Brooklyn was too new by a millennium for the Baron to care for it. Hilbrough tried the plan of shunting the antiquary to his main lines of American hieroglyphs, aboriginal architecture, and Pueblo domestic economy. But this only shifted the difficulty, for under the steady downpour of Pohlsen's erudition, Hilbrough had continually to change position, now putting the right knee over the left and now placing the left atop, to keep from nodding, and he was even reduced to pinching himself, sometimes, in order to keep awake, just as the learned and ingenious Baron had got his pyramid of inference ready to balance on its rather slender apex of fact. Archæology was new to Hilbrough, and deductive profits so large from inductive investments so small always seemed to the financier to indicate bad security.

Mrs. Hilbrough, clever woman, appeared to understand it all. She had crammed on a copy of Stephens's "Travels in Yucatan" that had belonged to her father, and she gave Pohlsen no end of pleasure by asking him about such things as the four-headed altars before the great idols at Copan, and the nature of the great closed house at Labphak. If you will look in Pohlsen's book of travels in America (Reise durch Amerika: Leipzig, 1888) you will discover in his chapter on New York that in this metropolis the ladies take a remarkable interest in science, and are generally better informed regarding such matters than their husbands, these latter being deeply immersed in mere dollar-hunting.

But Mrs. Hilbrough was much more interested in her reception to be given in honor of Baron Pohlsen than she was in the four-headed altars of the remoter Aztecs. If she could not fill her house with those very richest and most exclusive people who in a plutocratic society always try to think themselves for some reason or other the best people, she found that under Millard's guidance she could succeed in getting some people of wealth and distinction who were desirous of being presented to a baron, and, what was better, she could get a considerable number from that class of lettered men and their families and the admirers of literature, art, and learning, who, together, form the really best people in every metropolis. Most of these knew little of Pohlsen's researches, and cared less for his title, but since he was vouched for as a foreigner who had acquired distinction in his department of knowledge, they were ready to do him honor with that generous hospitality for which Americans blame themselves while they practise it; as though it were not better for us to be good-hearted, remembering that in the studious preservation of national dignity and social perpendicularity we can never hope to emulate our English cousins.

How was it all arranged? How, without violating the sanctities of etiquette, did Mrs. Hilbrough contrive to invite people whom she did not know, and how did they accept with no sacrifice of dignity? Millard was an expert adviser; he knew that just as counters are made to stand for money in a game of cards, so do little oblong bits of pastebord with the sender's name upon them pass current under certain conditions as substitutes for visits, acquaintance, esteem, and friendship. By a juggle with these social chips Mrs. Hilbrough became technically, and temporarily, acquainted with a great many people, and that without much sacrifice of time. Do not expect details here; your fashionable stationer is the best reliance in such a case, unless you chance to know Mr. Millard, or can find the law laid down in Mrs. Sherwood's tactfully vague chapters, which, like the utterances of the Delphic oracle, are sure to hit the mark one way or the other.

Now that Millard had taken Mrs. Hilbrough for a client he could not bear to be balked. The attendance of Mrs. Gouverneur he considered of the first importance, but this was not easily secured. If anything could have persuaded that lady to sacrifice her principles as an exclusive so far as to attend, it would have been her dislike of refusing Phillida; but as it was, she made excuses without positively refusing. In telling Mrs. Hilbrough of her lack of success Phillida took pains to repeat Mrs. Gouverneur's pretexts, and not to betray what she knew to be her aunt's real reason for hesitation. Millard encountered Mrs. Hilbrough at the opera, and heard from her of the failure of Phillida's endeavors. He felt himself put on his mettle.

Knowing that the next day was Mrs. Gouverneur's day for receiving, he made himself her first caller before the rest began to arrive. Looking from the old-fashioned windows of Mrs. Gouverneur's front parlor, he praised the beauty of the winter scene, and admired especially the spotted boles of the great buttonwoods in Washington Square. He thought to make his call seem less on purpose by such commonplace civilities, but Mrs. Gouverneur, who was a soft-spoken lady of much cleverness, with a talent for diplomacy inherited from her grandfather, asked herself, while she replied in the same vein to Millard's preliminary vapidities, what on earth so formal a call and such a waste of adroitness might lead up to. But Millard, even after this preparation, provided an inclined plane for approaching his proposition.

"I had the pleasure of meeting a niece of yours the other evening, a Miss Callender," he said. "I found her very agreeable."

"Oh! You met Phillida Callender at Mrs. Hilbrough's, probably," said Mrs. Gouverneur with a flush of pleasure. "She's as good as goodness itself, and very clever. But rather peculiar also. She has a great deal of Callender in her. Her father gave up good prospects in this country to preach in Siam. He might have had the pastorate of one of the best Presbyterian churches in New York, but nothing could dissuade him from what he fancied to be his duty. It only proves what I have always said, that 'blood will tell.' It is related in some of the old books that Philip has upstairs that one of the women of the Callender family, before the Revolution, felt it her duty to go through the streets of Newport, crying, 'Repent, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.' She was a refined and delicate lady, and the people of the town felt so much chagrin to see her expose herself to mortification in the public street that they shut up their windows or turned away, which I think was very nice of them. I fancy that Phillida, with all her superior intelligence, has a good deal of this great-great-aunt of her father's in her. I was talking to her once about this story of Mary Callender's preaching in the streets, and she really seemed to take more interest in that Quaker lady's delusion than she did in her ancestors on our side; and you know, Mr. Millard, we think a good deal of our descent, though of course we never say anything about it."

It was inevitable that a courteous man like Millard should meet this speech by saying, "When one has ancestors whose position is not one of mere social prominence but whose acts are a part of the history of a nation, it must be hard to forget so important a fact." It was equally inevitable that even the wary Mrs. Gouverneur could not help appreciating flattery so apropos of the subject in hand.

"But I have a notion," Millard continued, "that if we could get Miss Callender to take an interest in society she would prove an ornament to it and a credit to her family."

Mrs. Gouverneur shook her head doubtfully. "I don't believe it can be done, though I should be glad if it could."

"Did she tell you that she is deeply interested in that reception to Baron Pohlsen next week?"

"Yes; she is attached to Mrs. Hilbrough. She makes friends without the least regard to social consequences, and I believe even has friendships among the people with whom she is only connected by her mission Sunday-school class. She stoutly maintained here last night that she knew a real lady living in three rooms with a husband and four children! I declare, I like Phillida all the better for this. Her impulses are very noble, but I can't help wishing she wouldn't do it. It doesn't do for one at her time of life to be too disinterested, you know."

This turn in the talk threw Millard off the track for a moment. The mention of people living narrowly brought to his mind his own early life in a farmhouse, and reminded him of his amiable but socially unpresentable aunt, whom he was wont faithfully to visit on one Sunday afternoon in every month. There was just a little cowardly feeling that should his relations with the family in Avenue C become known among his friends, his social position might become compromised. He did not know that all exclusive people in New York have unpresentable kinsfolk hidden away somewhere, and are ever trembling lest the fact should be known to some other family that is likewise doing its best to hide some never-get-on relatives.

Mrs. Gouverneur noticed Millard's heightened color, and feared her slighting allusion to Mrs. Hilbrough might have annoyed him. Before he could pull his wits together to reply to her last remark, she added, "I have no doubt your friend Mrs. Hilbrough is a very worthy person, Mr. Millard. But she is new in New York society."

"Indeed I can not call her my friend, Mrs. Gouverneur. Her husband is the real head of our bank at present; he is likely to be a very rich man in a few years, and he has obliged me in many ways. But I have only a few weeks' acquaintance with Mrs. Hilbrough, whose chief recommendation to me, I must confess, is that she is a friend of Miss Callender, who is your niece. But Mrs. Hilbrough seems to have many admirable qualities. She is sure to make herself recognized, and I do not see any advantage in delaying the recognition. For my part, I think she will do a great service at the outset if she adds so attractive and clever a young lady as Miss Callender to society."

"Now, Mr. Millard, you are playing a strong game against me," laughed Mrs. Gouverneur. "You know my dislike for new acquaintances—for enlarging my circle. But when you propose to persuade my niece to see a little more of the world you are taking advantage of my only weakness. You play a deep game."

"I'll show you my whole hand at once," said Millard, seeing that Mrs. Gouverneur's penetration had left him no resource but candor. "I very much desire to be Miss Callender's escort at Mrs. Hilbrough's reception, if she will accept me. Mrs. Callender, I fear, can not be persuaded to go."

"You want me for chaperon," interposed Mrs. Gouverneur. "What a clever scheme! How could you dare to set such a trap for an old friend?"

"It will prove a clever scheme if it succeeds. But it wasn't clever enough to deceive you."

"Well, you and Phillida together have won. Of course I can not refuse if Phillida consents."

"Thank you from my heart," said Millard, rising at hearing the door-bell ring. "I will see Miss Callender, and if she refuses me for escort you will be able to laugh at me. I'm sure I'm greatly your debtor."

A notion, a mere notion, such as will enter the soberest woman's head sometimes, had bobbed to the surface of Mrs. Gouverneur's thoughts as she talked with Millard. It was that her niece's future might somehow hang on her decision. She was not a matchmaker, but she had a diplomatic faculty for persuading things to come out as she wished. Mr. Millard would be a most eligible husband for any woman whose expectations in life were not unreasonably great. Her practical mind went a step farther and she saw that in the event of anything so improbable happening as that Millard should fall in love with a lady without fortune, say, for example, a clergyman's daughter, his acquaintance with so prosperous a man as Hilbrough, who could help him to lucrative investments, might be very desirable. These thoughts were the mere bubbles of fancy floating in her mind. The consideration which most affected her decision was that the presentation of her niece under the auspices of Millard and herself might prove of great social advantage to Phillida.

Millard left Mrs. Gouverneur with the intention of calling at once on Miss Callender, but when he reached Broadway he was smitten with a scruple, not of conscience, but of etiquette. Phillida had not asked him to call. After staring for a full minute in perplexity at the passing vehicles and the façade of the ancient theater on the opposite side of Broadway, then in its last days of existence, he presently concluded that Miss Callender, being a young woman somewhat unsophisticated, and having therefore nothing better than good sense for guide, would probably not be shocked by the audacity of an uninvited call from a gentleman whose character was well known to her.

The bell rang as Mrs. Callender was just about to try a dress on her daughter Agatha. Callers were not a frequent interruption to their pursuits, and when the steps of a man ushered into the front parlor were heard through the sliding doors, they concluded that it was some one calling on the gentleman who occupied the second floor. Mrs. Callender and her daughters lowered their voices to a whisper, that they might not be heard through the doors; but Sarah, the servant, came to the back parlor, and said loud enough to be distinctly audible to the visitor:

"It's some cards for Mrs. Callender and Miss Callender." Then she shut the door and descended the basement stairs, without waiting to carry a reply.

Agatha took the cards and whispered, "Mr. Millard," biting her lower lip and making big eyes at Phillida, with an "I-told-you-so" nod of the head, and then she proceeded to give vent to her feelings by dancing softly about the room, a picturesque figure in her red petticoat and white waist, with her bare arms flying about her head. If the doors had not been so thin her excitement would have found vent in more noisy ways. As noise was precluded there was nothing left for her but this dumb show. In her muffled gyrations she at length knocked a chair over upon the fender, making a loud clatter. She quickly picked it up and sat down upon it in great confusion, with a remorseful feeling that by her imprudent excitement she had probably blasted Phillida's prospects in life.

"Come, mother, you must get ready and go in," whispered Phillida.

"No, please, Phillida. He doesn't really want to see me. It's only a matter of good form to ask for us both. You must beg him to excuse me. I do so want to get this dress done."

Agatha, recovering from her remorse by this time, helped Phillida to do a little hurried prinking. Luckily the latter had been getting ready to go out and had on the gown that served her on all except extraordinary occasions for both street and drawing-room.

Millard had amused himself while waiting by noting the various antiques about the parlor, heirlooms of former family greatness, arranged with an eye to tasteful effect. On the shelves in the corner some articles connected with family history were intermingled with curiosities brought from the East. A pair of brass-bound pattens hinged in the middle, once worn instead of overshoes by some colonial ancestress, sat alongside a pair of oriental sandals. Millard thought nothing could be more in keeping with the ancient desk and table than the unaffected and straightforward manner in which Miss Callender greeted him, holding out her hand with modest friendliness and just a touch of diffidence. This last was due to the innuendoes and antics of Agatha.

"I ventured to call without permission, Miss Callender," said Millard, with hesitation.

"I'm glad you did, Mr. Millard." Phillida could not see why any respectable gentleman should wait for an invitation to call on a lady, or how a young lady could ever be so bold as to ask a gentleman to call. She added, "My mother wished me to beg you to excuse her. She has some troublesome affairs on hand just now."

"Certainly; don't let me interrupt her. I came on business with you. I want to have the pleasure of escorting you to Mrs. Hilbrough's party with your mother, if she will kindly accompany us."

Phillida hesitated. She knew that chaperonage was required on such occasions. "Thank you. I should like to accept your kind offer, but my mother rarely goes out," she said. "I don't believe I could persuade her to go, and I've no other chaperon."

"How would Mrs. Gouverneur do?"

"But Aunt Harriet won't go."

"I've just come from her house, and she assured me that if you needed her for a chaperon—if Mrs. Callender could not go—she would keep us company."

"You have managed Aunt Harriet very well," said Phillida, with some elation. "Better than I could have done."

"I must have done well. Mrs. Gouverneur gives me great credit for my nice little scheme, as she calls it. But if she thinks I wish to be your escort solely in order to get her to attend, I assure you that Mrs. Gouverneur with all her penetration is mistaken."

Phillida colored a little at this polite speech as she said, "It will please Mrs. Hilbrough to have my aunt there."

"Yes, Mrs. Hilbrough also will give me great credit where I do not deserve it. I may call for you with Mrs. Gouverneur?"

"Thank you, it will give me a great deal of pleasure." Phillida said this with a momentary fear of hearing Agatha overturn another chair behind the sliding doors; but Mrs. Callender had taken herself and Agatha to the basement, from motives of delicacy which Agatha was hardly old enough to appreciate.

Mrs. Gouverneur never did anything by halves. She made herself agreeable to Mrs. Hilbrough on the evening of the reception and complimented her heartily on the distinguished people she had brought together. For there was the learned president of the Geographical, with overhanging brows and slow and gentle speech; there was the foreign corresponding secretary of the Historical, a man better known as a diplomatist and an author, whose long years abroad had liberalized his mind without spoiling his open-hearted American manners. There were some of the directors of the Metropolitan Museum, to which institution Pohlsen had given some Central American pottery. The senior New York poet wandered in his childlike way among the guests, making gentle and affectionate speeches to friends, who wondered at the widely contrary moods to which his susceptible nature is subject. Bolton, known in two hemispheres by his prose and poetry, had come out of complaisance, protesting rather indignantly to his friends that he didn't believe in Americans making such an ado over a mere baron. In him the stranger saw a slight figure full of character and not in any way to be trifled with; only men of letters and his friends knew what pains he could be at to oblige and to help the humblest of struggling fellow-craftsmen, provided he was not forbidden to accompany the unstinted assistance with a little grumbling at the fearful wreck of his time which all sorts of people, even the tramps of the literary profession, make without remorse.

"Charley," said Philip Gouverneur, when he got Millard into a corner, "what have you been doing? This is society and it isn't; it is more like what Carlyle calls a 'lion soirée.'"

"Well," said Millard, "it's either society or better. You understand that the Baron's reputation as a scholar has modified things."

"I say, Charley," said Philip, "I was ashamed to find my little self lost among these know-it-alls until I met Mrs. Maginnis. She said, 'Oh, Mr. Gouverneur, I am so glad to see somebody that I know. Who are all these people?' So I pointed out the university president over there; and I told her that St. John was our great sculptor, though I'm not sure she makes any clear distinctions between a sculptor and a maker of gravestones; and I assured her that we had several magazine editors, and writers, and illustrators, and painters, and leading journalists, and some of the very foremost of our German citizens. 'Oh, yes,' she replied, 'newspaper men, artists, and Germans! Just what I thought; but there are not more than a dozen people here who were invited to Marshmallow's great ball last winter.'"

"It mightn't be a bad thing," said Millard, "if Marshmallow, who pretends to be the boss of society, were to include more people of artistic and literary distinction such as we have here to-night."

"Nonsense, Charley! he couldn't do it. There are a few men who contrive to be great and to be men of the world at the same time. But what society wants is polish. You can put gloss on varnish, but some of these men are too original to be sand-papered down to a fashionable uniformity. No, no! Old Red Sandstone and his wife over there are well enough at a lion soirée, but how would their Silurian manners shine at the Patriarchs' ball? You see my cousin Phillida, with all her seriousness, is getting too much of his talk."

At this hint from Philip, Millard moved away and glanced hurriedly about the room. His eye lighted on Lucas, who is a natural adept as a man of the world though a man of letters. Approaching him, Millard said:

"Mr. Lucas, let me introduce you to an interesting being."

"That's what I've been looking for in vain all the evening," said Lucas.

The two forced a sinuous way to where Phillida was trying to enjoy the small talk of a man who was incapable of profitable speech at a depth of less than fifty fathoms. Millard presented Lucas first to Mrs. Gouverneur on a chair in the corner, and then bowed politely to the geologist as he interrupted his remarks on the curiosities of the Bad Lands, and made Lucas acquainted with Miss Callender. The latter showed her pleasure at thus encountering a favorite writer, but she had the good sense not to assure him that she had "long known him through his books." She reflected in time that such a man must have heard remarks of this sort rather frequently. But when Millard had moved away he turned about to note the change in Miss Callender's countenance under the influence of that stream of sparkling talk that Lucas never fails to give forth when confronted with an inspiring listener.

Later in the evening when the reception had passed its climax, and the antiquaries, geographers, historical investigators, and other lions, grown sleepy, were looking up their wives and daughters to be gone, Millard found time for conversation with his companion of the evening, who had drifted away from her chaperon, for chaperonage only half flourishes in our society, and is indeed quite out of place at a New York lion soirée, where a maiden's heart is pretty safe without guardianship.

"You have had a pleasant evening, Miss Callender, I hope. I'm sure you've helped the rest of us to a pleasant evening."

"Indeed, I have enjoyed myself, Mr. Millard. I have met my favorite poet, have talked with the editor of my magazine, and have found that Mr. Lucas makes amends for the bores."

"I hope this will not be the last time we shall meet you in society," said Millard. "It would be a pity for one who can do so much to make an evening delightful to others, not to go more into society."

"It takes a great deal of time, Mr. Millard. I don't think society any harm as a recreation, but as a pursuit—" Here she checked herself.

"It gives a great deal of happiness, though."

"Yes; but only to those whose lot is fortunate enough anyhow. It seems to me that we have something else to do in the world than just to amuse ourselves." At this point it occurred to Phillida that in defending her own view of life she was reflecting on her companion's. "I don't mean to find fault with anybody else's pursuits, Mr. Millard, but rather to defend my own."

The last remark, by focusing what she had said before upon Millard, only made the matter worse. But the talk was interrupted at this point by Mrs. Gouverneur, who came to inquire if her younger companions were ready to go. Millard was a little sorry for the interruption. He could not but feel that he was in some sort under condemnation by Miss Callender, and there was something about Miss Callender which made one respect her moral judgment and desire to stand well in her estimation. But the conversation in the carriage took another turn, and as she approached her own home it occurred to Phillida that Millard's remark at the time of his call implied that his acquaintance with the family might depend on her inviting him. She felt grateful to him for his graceful attentions during the evening, and when he left her at the door she extended her hand and said:

"We shall be glad to see you, Mr. Millard."

When Millard had landed Mrs. Gouverneur in Washington Square, with many polite speeches on both sides, and had reached his bachelor apartment, he sat down in front of the grate with a comfortable feeling of complacency. He had helped Mrs. Hilbrough to launch her little bark without any untoward accident; he had secured for the Baron an honor which the latter would certainly not underestimate. Then, too, he had obliged Mrs. Gouverneur while he gratified his own inclinations in escorting Miss Callender to the reception. Whenever he came around to Phillida he found the only uncomfortable spot in his meditations. He had never dreamed that anybody could think the life of a consummate gentleman like himself deserving of anything but commendation. The rector of St. Mathias, who was a genial man of the world himself, with just the amount of devoutness admixed that was indispensable to his professional character, had never for a moment found fault with Millard, who was liberal in parish affairs and an ornament to the church. Here was a young lady with a very different standard, who thought it a Christian duty to be useful not so much to the church as to people less fortunate than herself. Millard tried to dismiss the matter from his mind by reflecting that Miss Callender's father must have been a peculiar man. But there was an elevation about Phillida's nature that made him feel his own to be something less than was desirable. Yet it was clear to him that Miss Callender misjudged society people from ignorance of them. He would call some day and set her right. Then he laughed at the notion. What did it matter to him whether this young woman judged rightly or wrongly of people in society generally, and of himself in particular. He dismissed the matter from his mind. But by the time he had taken off his ties, which were a trifle too narrow in the toes to be comfortable, he had somehow returned to his first resolution to set Miss Callender right in the matter if he should have opportunity.

VIII.
IN AVENUE C.

If Phillida could have known the thoughts that occupied the mind of Millard on Sunday afternoon, two or three weeks later, as he started for his monthly visit in Avenue C, she would not have judged his purposes in life severely. His walk lay through a cross-street which steadily deteriorated as he journeyed eastward, condescendingly assimilating itself to the character of each avenue in turn. Beer saloons, cheap grocery stores, carts against the curbstones with their shafts pointing skyward, and troops of children on the sidewalk, marked the increasing poverty and density of the population. Millard wondered at the display of trinkets and confectionery in the shop-windows, not knowing that those whose backs are cheaply clad crave ornaments, and those whose bellies lack bread are ravenous for luxuries.

Being a fastidious man and for years accustomed to the refinements of life, he exaggerated the discomforts of tenement-house living. How people endured such misery and yet seemed so cheerful he could not imagine. And though he did not feel that diffusive benevolence which prompted Phillida to try to ameliorate the moral condition of such of this mass as she could reach, he had a strong desire to lift his aunt and her children to a little higher plane. To this, hitherto, he had found an obstacle in the pride of her husband. Henry Martin was a tinsmith who had come to the city to work in a great factory for a little higher wages than he could get as a journeyman tinker in a country town. He did not refuse to let the children accept presents from "Cousin Charley," but he was not willing "to be beholden to any of his wife's folks," as he expressed it. He resented the fact that even in Cappadocia he had been somewhat outstripped by his brother-in-law, Charles Millard's father, and when the "Millard boys" had inherited money from their father's brother, and Martin saw their mother, his wife's sister, living in a style to which he could never hope to lift his own family, it weighed on his mind, and this offense to his pride had helped to fix his resolution in favor of a removal to New York.

During the walk eastward Millard was debating what might be done for the promising eldest girl in his aunt's family and for the two boys. Once, it is true, the throng of children that obstructed his path, as they chased one another round and round in a maze, did suggest to him that from Miss Callender's standpoint he ought to do something "for those less fortunate than himself" even beyond the circle of relationship. But what could he do? He felt that by his very nature he was disqualified for contact and personal sympathy with humanity rough-hewn. And as he crossed Avenue A, and paused to look up and down it, he saw such inexhaustible swarms of people that what one man could do for them seemed of no avail. He might give something to some mission or other agency, and thus get the disagreeables of benevolence done, as he got his boots blacked, by paying for it. Then he wondered what Miss Callender would think of such a device, and whether in the luminous moral atmosphere which enveloped her it would seem mean to substitute a money service for a personal one—to employ a substitute when you have no stomach for the war yourself.

He climbed the flights of dark stairs to his aunt's dwelling, which occupied half of the next to the top floor of a four-story building; the flat above being the dwelling and working-place of a slop-shop tailor. He was welcomed with sincere affection by Aunt Hannah Martin, and with shouts of delight by the two smaller children—the two older ones had not yet come back from Sunday-school. Mr. Martin, a tallish and rather broad-shouldered man, with a face whose habitual seriousness was deepened into a tombstone solemnity by its breadth and flatness in the region of the cheek-bones, shook hands cordially, but with a touch of reserve in favor of his own dignity, saying, "How are you, Charley? How's things with you?" He was proud enough of his connection with a prosperous man like Millard, and among his comrades in the shop he often affected to settle points in dispute regarding finance or the ways of people in high life by gravely reminding the others that he had superior opportunities for knowing, since his nephew was a banker and "knew all the rich men in Wall street." But face to face with Charley Millard his pride was rendered uneasy, and he generally managed to have some pressing occasion for absenting himself on the afternoons of Millard's visits.

Millard's attentions were soon engrossed by the little boy Tommy, who of all the children was his favorite. Tommy climbed on his knees and rifled his pockets, certain of finding something hidden there for himself. Presently Millard drew Uncle Martin into talk. With his chair tilted back and his broad hands locked together on his lap, Uncle Martin gave Charley an oracular account of all the mistakes which his employers had recently made in the conduct of their business. From his standpoint the affairs of the company were usually on the high road to bankruptcy, and all because of certain failures of judgment which Uncle Martin could have pointed out in a moment had they taken the trouble to consult a man of his experience. When Charley suggested that the company had paid an eight per cent. dividend during the past year Uncle Martin put on a look of contempt, and shook his head.

"Dividing their capital in order to keep up the price of stock," he said sagely. Then he proceeded to show that if they would only do this and not do the other they might easily crowd their rivals to the wall. He knew three months before it took place that tin would fall in price. But the company laid in a big stock just in time to get caught.

Having done the polite by Uncle Martin, Millard turned to Aunt Hannah. Uncle Martin proceeded, therefore, to fill up the stove; which done, he said:

"Well, Charley, I am going to see one of the men in our shop that got his foot hurt a week ago Friday. I'll see you at supper; you'll take tea with us."

"Thank you, Uncle Martin, but this time I can't stay so long. I've promised to take dinner with some friends."

He held out his hand, and Uncle Martin said good-by, and good luck to you, and come again, and always glad to see you, Charley, and then made his exit, stooping a little as he went out through the low door, leaving Charley what he wanted most, a chance to talk with his aunt about the progress her children were making in their studies, and to find out what he could do to help them. The mother told him that besides their school they were reading some books brought to them by Dick's Sunday-school teacher, who took a great interest in all the children. Millard always expected to hear the praises of this Sunday-school teacher when he came to see his aunt. Once on this theme good Aunt Hannah could not easily stop.

"She doesn't put on the fine lady or talk to me as though I was somebody different because I am a workingman's wife. I haven't many friends; the people down here are so different from the people up in the country. But I think she is the best friend I ever had. There, she's coming up now," she said, hearing the clatter of feet and voices ascending the stairway.

Millard was a little curious to see the teacher of whom he had heard so much. He figured to himself some one only a little above his aunt in station, and so the more ready to form an intimacy with humble people. When Mary and Dick threw open the hall door of the apartment, so as to make the interior visible from the obscurity of the stair-landing, Millard, who was sitting with his back to the door, holding Tommy on his lap, heard the voice of Phillida Callender say:

"I'll not go in this time; you have company."

"Do come in; it's only our Cousin Charley," pleaded Mary Martin, a girl of fourteen.

Millard felt himself caught, and he would have liked to sit there and let Miss Callender go down the stairs without recognizing him. But he felt that he must be polite to her above all things, and his relationship to the Martins was not a thing to be ashamed of, and must besides soon be known to Phillida. So he rose with quick decision and said as he walked towards the door:

"Don't let my presence keep you from coming in, Miss Callender; I am on the point of leaving."

"You, Mr. Millard!" Phillida came forward, coloring a little, while Aunt Hannah and the children stood and looked on in amazement. "Who would have believed it! You are the cousin—the Cousin Charley of whom the children here speak as though he were a good fairy. They pronounce the name Millerd, you know, and I didn't suspect you."

"But fancy my surprise!" said Millard. "I ought to have guessed that such a famous Sunday-school teacher could not be anybody but Miss Callender. But I didn't even think to ask the name. So you are the person of whose praises I am so jealous when I come here."

"Don't you think we're lucky to have such a cousin?" said Dick Martin, the second child and the eldest boy, looking up at Miss Callender.

"Ah! now, Dick, you can't trap me into praising Mr. Millard to his face," said Miss Callender. "Maybe I'll tell you some time when he isn't here what I think of him." She was patting Dick on the shoulder. "But I don't mind telling Mr. Millard right here and now that he is a very lucky man to have such an aunt as your mother."

"Well said and true," answered Millard. "I like that better than anything Miss Callender could say about me, Dick, even if what she should say were to be all good; and that it wouldn't be, for she speaks the truth, and I'll tell you for a secret that she doesn't quite approve of a man that wastes his leisure time as I do. She'd like me better if I were to come down to the mission every Sunday."

"Well, there ain't anybody at the mission as good as you, except Miss Callender," objected Dick.

That young lady only laughed and put her arms about Tommy, who had deserted Millard and was now climbing on her lap.

This encounter advanced Millard's acquaintance with Phillida more than a dozen calls or conversations in formal society. Phillida was pleased to find that Millard was not merely a male butterfly, and he in turn felt strangely drawn to this young woman who had discovered the royal excellence of Aunt Hannah Martin amid the rubbish of Avenue C. Millard, who was "just going" when Phillida came in, sat out the half-hour that she staid, and when she rose to go he asked her if he might have the pleasure of walking with her as far as Second Avenue. It seemed to him, though he did not say so, that a young lady needed an escort in that part of the town; but Phillida, who knew the people better, had no such thought.

"Thank you, Mr. Millard," she said; "I should be glad of your company. But I am not going home; I am going to Washington Square: I promised my aunt that I would go directly there from Sunday-school, and now I've staid here longer than I intended, and I shall be late."

"Why, I'm expected there too. If you don't object we'll go together."

The two said good-by all around and descended the stairs, holding on to the narrow steps with their heels, as it were. When they came into the light, and breathed the cool salt air blowing into the avenue from the neighboring East River, Phillida, who had something on her mind, said rather awkwardly:

"I did not know that you were expected at Aunt Harriet's this evening."

The speech was one of maidenly modesty; if Aunt Gouverneur had planned to bring the two people together at her table, Phillida wished it known that she was not a party to the plot. But Millard laughed and said:

"If you had known, I am to understand that you would have declined to go."

"I did not say that I should be sorry to have you there," she answered, with the hesitancy of one stepping among pitfalls.

"Shall we take the Tenth street car?" asked Millard. "It runs through Eighth street on the west side."

"As you please. I should have walked if alone," said Phillida.

"And I would much rather walk with good company than ride. So we will walk."

It took them full three-quarters of an hour to reach Washington Square, though either would have done it alone in a quarter less, for walking is a kind of work that is not shortened when shared with a friend.

Millard purposely drew Miss Callender into talk about the work of the mission, and he was soon rewarded by seeing her break through her habitual restraint and reveal the enthusiastic self within. She told him of the reading-room at the mission, and of the coffee-room where rolls and hot coffee were served to men every day in the week, so as to keep them from the saloons. Her face was aglow with interest as she talked, but Millard would rather have drawn her to speak of her own relation to the work. This she avoided, beyond confessing that she took her turn with the other ladies in superintending the coffee-room. At length, however, as they passed one of those open stairways that lead to thronged tenements above,—like the entrance to a many-chambered ant-hill, save that this mounts and that descends,—she spoke to a lad on the sidewalk, telling him to give her love to his sister and say that she was coming in to see her the next day. To Millard she explained that the boy's sister was an invalid young woman on one of the upper floors, bed-ridden for many years.

"And you visit her?" asked Millard, with a hardly concealed repulsion at the notion of Phillida climbing these populous stairs and threading the dingy and malodorous hallways above.

"Yes; she thinks so much of seeing me—because I am well, I suppose. She says it makes her stronger just to look at me. And if I can take her a flower, or some little bit of outdoors, it is more in her life than a trip to the country would be in mine. Poor Wilhelmina Schulenberg has not been down the stairs for five years. We talk of trying to get an invalid's chair for her when the warm weather comes, so that her brother can wheel her in the Square."

Millard turned and looked again at the stairway as though noticing all the particulars of its environment. It was a balmy day in the last of February, and they were soon crossing Tompkins Square diagonally towards Eighth street. He had caught the infection of Phillida's exaltation; instead of feeling repulsion at sight of the swarming children in cheap and often shabby clothes, racing madly up and down the broad asphalted walks, instead of turning in aversion from the commonplace people sitting talking, staring, smoking, sleeping, flirting, or courting on the benches, he was able to take Miss Callender's view of the matter and to feel gratified that the poor, and especially the little folk so long winter-cribbed in narrow tenements, were now able to get so much happiness in the open ground.

IX.
WASHINGTON SQUARE AND ELSEWHERE.

Mrs. Gouverneur had invited both Phillida and Millard to a family dinner this evening with a notion of furthering their acquaintance and drawing her niece into society. She would not admit to herself any purpose or expectation ulterior. She had engaged each one to come two hours before dinner to make a quiet afternoon of it, and when she found them both unpunctual she wondered.

"Philip," she said to her son, who was sitting by the window reading a folio volume of Sir Thomas Browne, "I asked Phillida to come early this afternoon, and I can't imagine what keeps her."

"Oh, some leper, or some one who has fallen among thieves. It's a dreadful thing to be a Christian. I have only known three or four, and Phillida is one of them."

"You don't mean to say we are not all Christians?" demanded Philip's father, a taciturn man with a rather handsome face of the broad Dutch type. What history it carried was mainly one of good dinners and fine wines. The senior Gouverneur had been sitting looking into the fire for half an hour without saying a word. His son's way of treating the sacred white elephants of conventionality was the main grief of this dignified, well-bred, entirely commonplace man.

"Yes, you're all—we're all, Christians in the sense that we're neither Jews, Mohammedans, nor Buddhists. But most of us don't belong to the same totem with Jesus."

"What do you mean by the same totem with Jesus?" said the mother, who could not help shuddering a little at the temerity of her son's paradoxes, though fondly indulgent of his irreverent cleverness.

"A totem among the Indians is the subdivision of a tribe. The Mohawks or Cayugas, for example, were subdivided into totems called the 'Wolf,' the 'Turtle,' the 'Bear.' Every man belonged to the totem of his mother and was akin to everybody in it. If a Mohawk of the Wolf totem stopped in the village of the Cayugas or the Senecas, he was entertained by some Seneca of the same totem who claimed him for a kinsman."

"That's very curious," said his mother.

"I don't see what it's got to do with your cousin Phillida or with religion," said Mr. Gouverneur, who as an elder in the Dutch Reformed Church, and as the descendant of a long line of men and women who had traveled in the same well-worn path since the good old days of the Synod of Dort, felt much annoyed at Philip's waywardness.

"Well," said Philip, leaning back in his chair and letting the folio rest on his knees, "you see there are religious totems that run through all denominations of Christians and even through different religions, and the lines of cleavage between them are deeper than those between Moslems and Christians, or between Jews and idolaters. There is what I call the totem of the Wahahbees—the people who translate religion into dispute or persecution. In central Asia they get rid of an opponent by assassination in the name of Almighty God and his prophet. In the United States doctrine defenders are inconveniently placed, and they have to be content with newspaper and pulpit scolding and with excommunicating those who differ from them. Then there is the most respectable sect of all—the Pharisees, which counts eminent divines and rabbis of every religion among its people. Great church-goers and Sabbath-keepers, great distributors of shalls and shall-nots, great observers of scruples and ordinances. They hold a tight rein over recreations and keep their mint-and-cumin tithes by double-entry. Now, Phillida is no Wahahbee and she is no Pharisee. She is not above enjoying herself at your table on Sunday evening, you see, or going to Mrs. Hilbrough's reception. She takes her religion in the noblest way. Her enthusiasms all have a philanthropic coloring. She's what I call a Jesus-ite."

"Ah, now, Philip," said his mother, half-amused and half-startled by the irreverent sound of this expression, but full of admiration for Philip's originality.

"And what are you, please?" demanded his father with some severity and a slightly heightened color. He knew that Philip must be wrong, for he had never seen anything of this sort in the "Christian Intelligencer" in his life. "What are you?" he repeated.

"Only a poor doubting, mocking, useless Sadducee, I suppose," said the son as he bent again over the Religio Medici. There was a touch of dejection in his voice, which served to disarm that resentment which his father felt towards every view of anything that varied from the consecrated commonplace.

The door-bell rang, and Mrs. Gouverneur, who had intended that Phillida and Millard should each consider the other a mere coincidence, was a little disconcerted to have them enter together at a later time than she had set, and with an air of slight fatigue, as though they had come from a long walk. And, moreover, without a chaperon. The acquaintance was progressing more rapidly than she had expected.

Millard smilingly explained: "I encountered Miss Callender in a very unfashionable quarter of the city, and I thought it my duty to take charge of her."

At ten o'clock that evening Phillida was escorted to her home, her cousin Philip Gouverneur walking on one side and Millard on the other. She left them with a pleased sense of having passed an uncommonly happy afternoon and evening, but was alarmed, nevertheless, to think what a romance Agatha would build out of the encounter with Mr. Millard in Avenue C and the detected contrivance of Aunt Gouverneur.

And when she had finished deprecating Agatha's raptures and had escaped her sister's further questions by going to bed, Phillida found that her own imagination had at length been set a-going, and her pillow reveries kept her awake. Why was it always Mr. Millard? She had chanced upon him at Mrs. Hilbrough's; his desire to bring Mrs. Gouverneur to the Hilbrough reception had made him her escort; and now most unexpectedly she finds that he and she are intimates and, in a sense, benefactors in the same tenement in Avenue C; they are companions in a walk, and again guests at the same table. It made her superstitious; these coincidences looked like fate—or rather like a special manifestation of the will of Providence—to the mind of Phillida Callender.

Undeniably there was something in Charles Millard that attracted her. He was not just of her own kind, but if he had been would she have liked him so well? Certainly the young men at the mission, exemplary fellows that they were, did not excite even a languid interest in her mind. Millard took life less seriously than she did, but perhaps that very otherness was agreeable: when one is prone by nature to travel dusty paths and dutifully to wound one's feet on mountainous rocky roads, a companion who habitually beckons to green sward and shady seats, who makes life put on a little more of the air of a picnic excursion into the world, is a source of refreshment. She now knew that Millard was not without benevolence, that he clung faithfully to his aunt in spite of his connections in the great world, and that he was planning to assist in the education of his cousins. If she had not somewhat exaggerated these virtues of fidelity and generosity she would not have been a woman, for it is one of the crowning good fortunes of life that a woman can contrive to make so much of a little virtue in a man.

Having left Phillida, Millard and Gouverneur walked together up Second Avenue, past the closed gateways of Stuyvesant Park. Millard was doing the talking, at a great rate. Philip was silent in regard to everything, or if he spoke he said only so much as a decent courtesy demanded. This soon became tiresome to Millard, who was relieving the internal pressure of his thoughts by mere bubble talk about things of no interest to himself, while it seemed impossible to excite his companion's interest in anything.

"You and I have changed places to-night, Phil," he said at length; "you make me do all the talking. Come now, it's your turn."

"I don't feel in the humor," said Philip. "Are you going to the club?"

"No; I shall go home and write some letters, maybe, now I think of it. So good-night."

Philip's "Good-night" was more curt than courteous, and he made his way to the club, where, according to his habit, he crouched his small form into one of the great chairs, drawing his head down between his shoulders, which were thrust upward by the resting of his elbows on the chair-arms. Here he sat long, taking no part in any conversation, but watching the smoke from his cigar.

The next morning he came late to breakfast, and his mother lingered after the rest had left the table, to see that his coffee and chops were right and to mitigate his apparent depression.

"Your little match-making scheme is likely to succeed beautifully," he said to her when the servant had gone.

"What do you mean? I'm sure I had no views of that kind in asking Charley Millard and Phillida. I only wished to encourage Phillida to go more into society."

"Views or no views, what it'll come to will be a match," Philip retorted.

"Well, there'll be no harm done, I suppose."

"Not if you think Charley the best man for her."

There was something of dejection in the tone of this last remark, and a note of reproach to her, that rendered Mrs. Gouverneur uneasy. When Philip had left the table she revolved it in her mind. Was Philip himself in love with Phillida? Or did he know anything to the disadvantage of Millard?

"Tell Mr. Philip I wish to see him before he goes out," she said to one of the maids.

When Philip came to her room she looked at him with anxiety.

"Do you know anything against Charley, Philip?"

"Nothing whatever," said Philip, emphatically, as he pulled on his gloves.

"Philip, tell me truly, do you care for your cousin yourself?"

"Why, of course. She is my cousin, and a good girl—a little too fearfully good."

"You know what I mean, Philip. Don't trifle with me."

"What would be the use of my caring for Phillida, as you call it? Charley, with his usual luck, will get her, I am sure. You've fixed that."

"Now, Philip, you reproach me unjustly. You've had years of intimacy with Phillida. Why did you never let her know what your feelings were?"

"I? I haven't said that I have any feelings in the matter. Do you think Phillida would have me if Charley were out of the way? She knows me too well. She's a utilitarian. She would say, 'Cousin Phil is interesting, but he hides his talent in a napkin. He studied law, and now neglects to practise it because his uncle left him two or three thousand dollars a year.' To her I am only an idler, when I'm not a mocker."

"She likes you, I am sure."

"Yes, in a way, no doubt. But I'm a doubter, and a mocker, and a failure, and Phillida knows it. And so do I."

"Ah, now, Philip, why will you be so discouraged with yourself? You're the cleverest young man in New York."

But Philip only smiled and said, "Good-morning, mother," and ran down the stairs and out the door.

When Philip had left Millard in Second Avenue the evening before, the latter was puzzled. He had never seen Gouverneur so depressed and irritable. But when they had separated, Millard was relieved that he no longer had to force a conversation about things of no interest to himself, and that his thoughts were at length free to range where they would.

He turned his footsteps towards his apartment, making a detour through Madison Square to lengthen the stroll. His interest in and affection for the family of his aunt was a fact so paradoxical to the rest of his life that it was in some sense his main secret. It was not a thing he should like to have explained to Philip Gouverneur, his bosom friend, for example. But that Phillida Callender was now in possession of the chief secret of his life gave him a sort of pleasure he had never known before. That she was in friendship with his aunt's family and a sharer in this off-color part of his existence made a sort of community of feeling between him and her. He turned the matter over in his mind, he went over in memory all parts of his encounter with her in his aunt's tenement, he dwelt upon the glow of surprise on her countenance, and in imagination he again took her hand in friendly greeting. He recalled every detail of the walk through Avenue C, in Tompkins Square, and then through the cross-streets. He made himself feel over again the pleasure he had felt in those rare moments when she turned her dark, earnest eyes toward him at some more than usually interesting moment in the conversation.

This was the pleasant side of the reverie. For the rest, he was tormented with a certain feeling of unworthiness that had never troubled him so much before. The more he thought of the purposes, sweet, high, and disinterested, that moved her, the more was he pained at a sense of frivolity, or, at least, at a want of "worthwhileness" in his own aims. He was a communicant at St. Matthias's, and highly esteemed for his exemplary life and his liberality to the church. But the rector of St. Matthias's did not trouble himself, as Phillida did, about the lost sheep in the wilderness of the lettered avenues. His own flock, well washed and kempt, were much more agreeable subjects of contemplation.

Millard sat in revery a long time. He was really afraid that he should presently find himself in love with Miss Callender, and such a marriage was contrary to his whole plan of life. His purpose was primarily to remain a bachelor, though he had dreamed of himself well established, but always with a wife whose tastes and connections should incline her to those pursuits that go with a fashionable career, and he always saw a vision of himself and his wife entertaining the very elect of New York City. Here suddenly a new path, hitherto untrodden by his imagination, opened before him as a possibility. Judged by the standards used among his friends it was an undesirable road. It involved a voluntary sacrifice of that position of social prominence and leadership which he had striven so hard to secure. He resolved to put the thought away from him.

A little later his lights were out and he was abed. But he did not sleep at once, for in spite of the best resolutions he could not help recalling again and again the face and figure, the voice and movement, of Phillida Callender. Again and again he crossed Tompkins Square and walked through Eighth street and Waverley Place with her; and she once more confronted him across Mrs. Gouverneur's dinner-table.

One result of Millard's meditations was a desire to relieve his conscience by sharing a little—if ever so little—in the effort to improve the life of the multitudinous East-siders. To touch them by personal effort and contact was out of the question; he could not bring himself to attempt it, nor would it have availed anything, perhaps, if he had, for the East-siders would have shrunk from his gloves as instinctively as he did from their work-darkened palms. But there was the other resort of his check-book. He sent a check the next evening to the superintendent of the mission. He stated that he remitted this as assistant cashier of the Bank of Manhadoes on behalf of a gentleman who did not wish his name known, and requested that the subscription be announced merely as from "A Well-wisher." One half of the hundred dollars was to go to the expenses of the coffee-room and the other half to be appropriated to the library and reading-room.

Now it is not in the nature of things that a hen should see a new egg in her nest without cackling over it, or that a man in charge of a benevolent enterprise should have a hundred-dollar check mysteriously and unexpectedly dropped into his hat without talking about it. Such a gift smacks of special divine favor, and offers a good theme for an address calculated to animate those engaged in the work. The very next Sunday, when the Testaments had been shut up and the lesson papers had all been put away, Phillida and the others heard from the superintendent some very inspiriting remarks on the subject of the encouragements which ought to make them take heart in their work. He wound up, of course, by telling of this donation from an unknown well-wisher. Had he stopped there—but what talker to young people would or could have stopped there? He whisked out the check and showed it, and then the identical letter from the assistant cashier of the Bank of Manhadoes was held up before the admiring boys and girls and read aloud to show how modestly this benevolent well-wisher had hidden his hand.

And thus the only person in the audience from whom Millard had particularly wished to conceal his agency in the matter knew perfectly that the anonymous well-wisher was none other than the assistant cashier himself. And she thought what a fine thing it was to have money when there was so much good to be done with it.

X.
BROKEN RESOLVES.

Once the check was dispatched, Millard's conscience, which had been aroused—irritated—by the standing rebuke of Phillida's superior disinterestedness, was in a measure appeased. After sitting an hour in slippery meditation he resolved to master his inclination toward Miss Callender's society, for fear of jeopardizing that bachelor ideal of life he had long cherished. Hilbrough's especial friendship, supported by Mrs. Hilbrough's gratitude, had of late put him in the way of making money more rapidly than heretofore; the probable early retirement of Farnsworth would advance him to the cashiership of the bank, and there opened before him as much as he had ever desired of business and social success. It was not exactly that he put advantages of this sort into one side of the scale and the undefinable charms of Phillida into the other. But he was restrained by that natural clinging to the main purpose which saves men from frivolous changes of direction under the wayward impulses of each succeeding day. This conservative holding by guiding resolutions once formed is the balance-wheel that keeps a human life from wabbling. Western hunters used to make little square boxes with their names graven in reverse on the inside. These they fixed over a young gourd, which grew till it filled the box. Then the hunter by removing the box and cutting off the end of the stem of the gourd, to make an opening like the mouth of a bottle, secured a curious natural powder-flask, shaped to his fancy and bearing his name in relief on its side. Like the boxed gourd, the lives of men become at length rigidly shaped to their guiding purposes, and one may read early resolutions ineffaceably inscribed upon them. But the irony of it! Here was Millard, for example, a mature man of affairs, held to a scheme of life adopted almost by accident when he was but just tottering, callow, from his up-country nest. What a haphazard world is this! Draw me no Fates with solemn faces, holding distaffs and deadly snipping shears. The Fates? Mere children pitching heads and tails upon the paving-stones.

But if the dominant purpose to which the man has fitted himself is not to be suddenly changed, there are forces that modify it by degrees and sometimes gradually undermine and then break it down altogether. The man whose ruling purpose is crossed by a grand passion may say to himself, like the shorn Samson, "I will go out as at other times before," for the change that has come over him is subtle and not at once apparent to his consciousness. Millard resolutely repressed his inclination to call on Miss Callender, resolutely set himself to adhere to his old life as though adherence had been a duty. But he ceased to be interested in the decorations and amused by the articles of virtu in his apartment; he no longer contemplated with pleasure the artistic effect of his rich portières and the soft tone of his translucent window-hangings. The place seemed barren and lonely, and the life he led not much worth the having after all.

But, like the brave man he was, he stuck to his resolution not to call on Miss Callender, from a sort of blind loyalty to nothing in particular. Perhaps a notion that a beau like himself would make a ridiculous figure suing to such a saint as Phillida had something to do with his firmness of purpose. But when, a month later, he started once more for Avenue C, he became at length aware that he had not made any headway whatever in conquering his passion, which like some wild creature only grew the fiercer under restraint. In spite of himself he looked about in hope of meeting Miss Callender in the street, and all the way across the avenues he wondered whether he should encounter her at his aunt's. But Phillida had taken precautions against this. She remembered, this time, that the last Sunday in the month was his day for visiting his aunt, and she went directly home from the mission, disturbed in spite of herself by conflicting emotions.

Millard could not but respect her dignified avoidance of him, which he felt to be in keeping with her character. He listened with such grace as he could to Uncle Martin, whose pessimistic oration to-day chanced to be on the general ignorance and uselessness of doctors. His complaints about the medical faculty were uttered slowly and with long pauses between the sentences. Doctors, according to Uncle Martin, only pretend to know something, and use a lot of big words to fool people. "Now I doctor myself. I know what does me good, and I take it, doctor or no doctor." This was said with a you-don't-fool-me expression on his solemn face. "W'y, one doctor'll tell you one thing, and another'll tell you another. One says bathing's good for you, and another says no; one wants you to get up bright and early, and another says sleep a plenty; one will half-starve you, and the other says the thing is to feed you up."

At this point Uncle Martin rested his elbows against his sides, threw his forearms outward and upward at an angle of forty-five degrees, holding his broad palms toward the ceiling, while he dropped his heavy shorn chin upon his breast and gazed impressively upon Millard from under his eyebrows. The young man was rendered uneasy by this climactic pause, and he thought to break the force of Uncle Martin's attitude by changing the subject.

"Doctors differ among themselves as much as ministers do," he said.

"Ministers?" said Uncle Martin, erecting his head again, and sniffing a little. "They are just after money nowadays. W'y, I joined the Baptist church over here"—beckoning with his thumb—"when I came to New York, and the minister never come a-nigh us. We are not fine enough, I suppose. Ministers don't believe the plain Bible; they go on about a lot of stuff that they get from somewheres else. I say take the plain Bible, that a plain man like me can understand. I don't want the Greek and Latin of it. Now the Bible says in one place that if a man's sick the elders are to pray over him and anoint him with oil—I suppose it was sweet oil; but I don't know—that they used. But did you ever know any elder to do that? Naw; they just off for the doctor. Now, I say take the plain word of God, that's set down so't you couldn't noways make any mistakes."

Here Uncle Martin again dropped his head forward in a butting position, and stared at Charley Millard from under his brows. This time the younger man judged it best to make no rejoinder. Instead, he took the little Tommy in his arms and began to stroke the cheeks of the nestling child. The diversion had the proper effect. Uncle Martin, perceiving that the results of his exhaustive meditations in medicine and theology, which were as plain as the most self-evident nose on a man's face, were not estimated at their par value, got up and explained that he must go to Greenpoint and call on a man who had lately lost a child; and then, fearing he wouldn't get back to supper, he said good-by, and come again, and always glad to see you, Charley, and good luck to you; and so made his way down the dingy stairs.

Charley Millard now turned to his aunt, a thin-faced woman whose rather high forehead, wide and delicately formed in the region of the temples, made one think that in a more favorable soil she might have blossomed. She was sitting by the window that looked out upon the narrow courtyard below and on the rear house to which Aunt Martin's apartment was bound by a double clothes-line running upon pulleys. In fact the whole straitened landscape in view from the back windows was a vision of ropes on pulleys. Sunday was the only day that Mrs. Martin cared to look on this view, for on week-days it was a spectacle of sheets and pillow-cases and the most intimate male and female garments flapping and straddling shamelessly in the eddying wind.

Millard, while yet the older children had not returned, broached the subject of their education. He particularly wished to put Mary, the eldest, into a better school than the public school in her neighborhood, or at least into a school where the associations would be better. He proposed this to his aunt as delicately as possible.

"It's very kind of you, Charley," she said. "You want to make a fine lady of her. But what would you do with her? Would it make her any happier? She would want better clothes than we could give her; she would become dependent on you, maybe; and she would be ashamed of the rest of us."

"She could never be ashamed of you, aunt," said Millard. But he was struck with a certain good sense and originality in his aunt which kept her from accepting anything for good merely because it was commonly so taken. What service, indeed, would it be to Mary to declass her? Of what advantage to a poor girl to separate her from her surroundings unless you can secure to her a life certainly better?

"It would be well," he said after a while, "if Mary could prepare herself for some occupation by which she might some day get a living if other resources fail. You wouldn't like her to have to go out to service, or to fall below her family, Aunt Hannah?"

"No; certainly not. But there's the trouble. Her father is like many other men from the country; he can't bear the idea of Mary's earning her own living. He says he expects to support his own girls. And you know Henry won't have her educated at your expense. He's very proud. But if she could somehow get into a school better than the public schools in this part of the city, a school where she would get better teaching and meet a better class of children, I would like it, provided she did not get a notion of being a fine lady. There is nothing worse than half-cut quality, and that's all she'd be. And are you sure, Charley, that rich people are happier than we are? We don't worry about what we haven't got."

The children were now upon the stairs, and the private talk was ended. They greeted their cousin eagerly, and began as usual to talk of Miss Callender.

"We tried to bring her home with us," said Dick, "but she said, 'Not to-day, Dick, not to-day,' and she stuck to it. I told her you'd be here, and I thought that would fetch her, but she only laughed and said she had to call and see a poor sick young lady that hadn't walked for five years; and then she said, 'Give my love to your mother,' and left us. I sh'd thought she'd 'a' sent her love to Cousin Charley, too, but she never done it."

"Don't say 'never done it,' Dick," broke in Mary. "It's not proper."

Millard accepted his aunt's invitation to tea, and then walked homeward by a very round-about way. He was not quite aware of the nature of the impulse that caused him to turn downtown and thus to trace a part of the route he had walked over with Phillida four weeks before. He paused to look again at the now dark stairway up which lived the bedridden Wilhelmina Schulenberg, and though he shuddered with a sort of repulsion at thought of her hard lot, it was not sympathy with Mina Schulenberg that had arrested his steps at the mouth of this human hive. To his imagination it seemed that these dark, uninviting stairs were yet warm with the tread of the feet of Phillida Callender; it could not be more than two hours since she came down. So instead of following the route of a month ago through Tompkins Square and Eighth street, as he had half unconsciously set out to do, he walked through Tenth street to Second Avenue. This way Phillida must have gone this very afternoon, and this way he felt himself drawn by an impulse increasing in force ever as he journeyed. It seemed of prime importance that he should call on Miss Callender without delay, just to consult her about Mary's education. His reasoning in favor of this course was convincing, for logic never gets on so well as when inclination picks all the pebbles out of the pathway.

A long discussion concerning Mary Martin's education was held that evening between the young people sitting by the drop-lamp in Mrs. Callender's parlor. Many nice theories were broached by each of them, but during the whole of the discussion they were both in a state of double consciousness. Canvassing Mary and her outlook in life in one center of thought, they were thinking and feeling more profoundly regarding the outlook in life of two other people in another vortex of brain action. For Phillida could not conceal from herself the fact that Mr. Millard was only half interested in what he was saying, but was utterly absorbed in her with whom he was talking. His passion, so long denied, now had its revenge, and even the training of a man of the world to conceal what he felt and to say what he did not think was of no avail against it.

Notwithstanding the divided state of their minds, in consequence of which Mary's interests got only a minority of attention, her interests did not fare badly, for the very effort to keep the thoughts and feelings that were eddying below the surface from engulfing their whole mental action forced both talkers to concentrate their minds earnestly upon Mary's schooling.

In the first place both of them admitted the force of Mrs. Martin's objection to declassing Mary in such a way as to leave her segregated from family ties. Then it came out that Phillida did know a school—not a fine school, but a good school—where Mary would not be without companions in sober clothes, and where the teacher, a Miss Gillies, knew her business and had not too many scholars. But how to overcome Uncle Martin's objection to being helped by his wife's nephew?

"If," said Millard "the teacher of whom you speak had given to her a sufficient amount to pay the tuition of some suitable girl from a plain family, she would naturally consult you?"

"Yes; I think so," said Phillida.

"And under such circumstances why could you not recommend Mary?"

Phillida hesitated.

"I see you are more truthful than we men of business, who could not keep our feet without little ruses. There would be an implied deception of Uncle Martin, you think. Well, then, I will make the subscription absolute, and will leave Miss Gillies in entire control of it. I will advise her to consult you. If she does, and you think some other child than Mary ought to have it, or if it should be refused for Mary, you may give it to some one else. Do you know any one else who would profit by such a tuition?"

"Oh, yes!"

"Well, perhaps a better way would be this. I'll make it double, and you may have the entire disposal of both scholarships, if Miss Gillies will let you. Suppose I leave it to you to communicate the fact to her?"

"That will be very good, indeed"; and Phillida's face lost for a moment the blushing half-confusion that had marked it during the conversation, and a look of clear pleasure shone in her eyes—the enthusiastic pleasure of doing good and making happiness. Millard hardly rose to the height of her feeling; it was not to be expected. Whenever her face assumed this transfigured look his heart was smitten with pain—the mingled pain of love intensified and of hope declining; for this exaltation seemed to put Phillida above him, and perhaps out of his reach. Why should she fly away from him in this way?

"And may I come—to-morrow evening, perhaps—to inquire about this matter?" he said, making a movement to depart.

The question brought Phillida to the earth again, for Millard spoke with a voice getting beyond his control and telling secrets that he would fain have kept back. His question, tremulously put, seemed to ask so much more than it did! She responded in a voice betraying emotion quite out of keeping with the answer to a question like this, and with her face suffused, and eyes unable to look steadily at his, which were gazing into hers.

"Certainly, Mr. Millard," she said.

He took her hand gently and with some tremor as he said good-evening, and then he descended the brownstone steps aware that all debate and hesitancy were at an end. Come what might come, he knew himself to be irretrievably in love with Phillida Callender. This was what he had gained by abstaining from the sight of her for four weeks.

When the elevator had landed him on one of the high floors of the Graydon Building, a bachelor apartment house, and he had entered his own parlor, the large windows of which had a southern outlook, he stood a long time regarding the view. The electric lights were not visible, but their white glow, shining upward from the streets and open squares, glorified the buildings that were commonplace enough in daytime. Miles away across a visible space of water Liberty's torch shone like a star of the fifth magnitude. The great buildings about the City Hall Park, seen through a haze of light, seemed strangely aërial, like castles in a mirage or that ravishing Celestial City which Bunyan gazed upon in his dreams. A curved line of electric stars well up toward the horizon showed where the great East River Bridge spanned the unresting tides far below. Millard's apartment was so high that the street roar reached it in a dull murmur as of a distant sea, and he stood and absorbed the glory of the metropolitan scene—such a scene as was never looked upon in any age before our own decade—and it was to him but a fit accompaniment to his passion for Phillida, which by its subjective effect upon him had transformed all life and the universe itself. A month before he had sat and stared a hard-coal fire out of countenance in apprehension of falling in love with Phillida. Now he eagerly drank in the glory of earth and air, and loved her without reserve and without regret.

XI.
IN THE PARK.

Although love had at length come to Millard like an inundation sweeping away the barriers of habit and preconception, he was quite aware that Phillida Callender's was not a temperament to forget duty in favor of inclination, and the strength of his desire to possess her served as a restraint upon his action. He followed the habits of business negotiation even in love-making; he put down his impatience and made his approaches slowly that he might make sure of success. As a prudent beginning to his courtship he called on Phillida at first but once a week. She soon regained her wonted placidity of exterior, and Millard found it difficult to divine how far his affection was reciprocated.

For himself, he kept up his round of post-Easter social engagements. It would be time enough to lop these off if Phillida should require it when his affairs with her should be upon a more secure footing. Phillida, too, kept up a series of post-Easter engagements, but of another sort. Besides the ordinary work of the mission, and the extraordinary work attending the preparations for Fresh Air excursions for the invalid poor which were to be carried on in the heats of summer, she went once a week to the parlor Bible readings of Mrs. Frankland, which were, in fact, eloquent addresses, and which served greatly to stimulate her zeal. Thus these two lovers journeyed upon paths that had no convergence, even while feeling themselves drawn irresistibly toward each other.

As April wore into May, Millard ventured on more frequent attentions, and from day to day meditated how he might light on an opportunity to tell her what he felt and wished. But at her house he was always held in check by remembering the crash of an overturned chair at the time of his first call, and he could not speak very confidential words with no other screen than those thin sliding doors. When on two occasions he contrived to encounter Phillida returning from her Sunday afternoon mission to the east, he thought he perceived certain traces of debate going on in her mind, and an apparent effort on her part to hold the talk to cool and indifferent topics. That she was strongly attracted to him he readily believed, and had she been a woman of the ordinary type this would have been sufficient. But she was Phillida Callender, and he who would win her must gain consent not alone of her affections but of her conscience as well, and of her judgment. Such a decision as he should ask her to make would be tried by the test of the high life purpose that ruled her and looked on all interfering delights and affections with something like fierceness. For how shall one of the daughters of God be persuaded to wed one of the sons of men?

And thus, by the procrastination that comes of lack of opportunity, and the procrastination that comes of timidity, the spring was fast passing into summer. Hilbrough had taken Millard into partnership in an enterprise of his own—the reorganization of a bankrupt railway company in the interest of the bondholders. It was necessary to secure the co-operation of certain English holders of the securities, and Hilbrough felt sure that a man of Millard's address and flexibility would achieve more than he himself could in a negotiation abroad. So it was arranged that on the first Saturday in June the assistant cashier should sail for London on a ten weeks' leave of absence from the bank, and that when his business in London should be completed he was to make a short tour over the well-beaten paths of European travel. This arrangement rendered it necessary that Millard should bring his diplomatic delays to an end, and run the risk of an immediate proposal to Phillida Callender.

Memorial Day came round, and all the land showed its sorrow for the innumerable host that perished untimely in deadly battle and deadlier hospital by keeping the day right joyously. This gave Millard a holiday, and he set off after a lazy breakfast to walk up Fifth Avenue and through Central Park. He proposed to explore the Ramble and meditate all the time how he might best come to an understanding with Phillida that very evening.

He entered the Park at the southeast corner, but instead of pushing straight up to the Mall, a childish impulse to take a hurried glance at the animals deflected him toward the old armory. The holiday crowd already gathering proved quite too miscellaneous for his fastidious nerves; the dumb brutes he could stand, but these pushing and chattering human monkeys were uninteresting, and he went on through the region of wild beasts to that of tame ones, where the patient donkeys were busily employed carrying timid little children and showing their skill in their favorite game of doing the least possible amount of work in any given time. Though the motion of these creatures was barely perceptible, the pace seemed frightful to some of the alarmed infants clinging to their backs. Millard looked at them a moment in amusement, then refusing the donkey path he turned to the left toward the shady Mall. The narrow walk he chose was filled to-day with people, who, having fed the elephant, admired the diving of the seal, wondered at the inconceivable ugliness of the hippopotamus, watched the chimpanzee tie knots in the strands of an untwisted rope by using her four deft hands, and shuddered a little at the young alligators, were now moving away—a confused mass of children, eager to spend their nickels for a ride at the carrousel, and elders bent on finding shelter from the heat under the elms that overhang the Mall. There was a counter-current of those who had entered the Park by remoter gateways and were making their way toward the menagerie, and Millard's whole attention was absorbed in navigating these opposite and intermingling streams of people and in escaping the imminent danger of being run over by some of the fleet of baby-carriages. From a group of three ladies that he had just passed a little beyond the summer-house, he heard a voice say, half under breath:

"Mr. Millard, I declare!"

It was Agatha Callender, and as he turned to greet her he saw behind her Phillida supporting her mother.

"Mama is not very well, and we persuaded her to take a holiday," explained Agatha; "and I am trying to find a way for her out of this crowd."

Millard took charge of the convoy and succeeded in landing the party on shady seats at the lower end of the Mall, where the colossal Walter Scott is asking his distinguished countryman Robert Burns, just opposite, if all poets engaged in the agonizing work of poetic composition fall into such contortions as Burns does in this perpetual brass.

After a while Agatha grew as restless as the poet seems in the statue. She had brought money enough to take her party about the Park in the regular coaches, and spending-money unspent always made Agatha unhappy. She now broached the subject of taking a coach, and remembered that it was a free day at the Art Museum. Millard proposed to go to the Fifth Avenue gate and get a carriage for the party. This extravagance the prudent Mrs. Callender would not consent to, and so Millard conducted the ladies to the place where Shakspere, a little weak in the knees, has long been doing his best, according to his ability, to learn a part in a new play. The first coach that came by had but two vacancies. Millard hailed it, and said promptly:

"Now, Miss Agatha, we shall not find four places in one coach to-day. You and Mrs. Callender get into this one, and take stop-over checks at the Museum. Miss Callender and I will join you there in the next coach or on foot."

There was no time for debate, and before Mrs. Callender could muster her wits to decide what was best to be done about this, Charley's gloved hands had gently helped her into the coach, put Agatha in beside her, and handed a half-dollar to the driver for the fare. Just as Mrs. Callender was beginning to protest against this last act the coach rolled away, and Agatha saw Millard and Phillida face about without waiting for another coach and return toward Shakspere and the Mall.

"I oughtn't to have let him pay for us," murmured Mrs. Callender.

"Oh, you needn't feel under any obligations," whispered Agatha; "he just wanted to be alone with Phillida."

But now that Millard had seized the advantage of an unchaperoned stroll with Phillida, he found himself without the courage to use it. The very suddenness with which they had been left to themselves made Phillida feel that a crisis was imminent, and this served to give her an air of confusion and restraint. In presence of this reserve Millard drew back.

The two strolled along the Mall, admiring the wide, elm-shaded triple avenue, and talking of uninteresting subjects. They were involved once more in the evergrowing holiday crowd, and Millard saw with vexation that his opportunity was slipping away from him. When they had traversed the length of the Mall and were approaching the bust of Beethoven, Phillida said suddenly:

"There is Mina Schulenberg in a wheel-chair. I wonder how she contrived to get one."

She pushed forward toward the invalid, but Millard hung back a little, and Phillida suspected that he was probably ashamed to be seen talking with Mina, who was wheeled by her brother, a stalwart young man of twenty, in his Sunday clothes.

"O Miss Callender, is it you? Do you see my chair already? It must have been you who managed to get it for me."

"No, Wilhelmina; indeed I knew nothing about it till I saw you in it this moment."

"Then I don't know what to think," said the invalid. "It was sent up from a place down in Grand street already, with my name on a ticket and the word 'Paid' marked on the ticket. I wish I could thank the one that gave it to me wunst already, for I don't feel like it belonged to me till I do."

Phillida turned about and looked at Millard, who still lurked behind her. When he met her penetrating gaze he colored as though he had been caught doing wrong.

"Miss Schulenberg, this is Mr. Millard," said Phillida. "I don't know who sent you this chair; but if you thank him the person who paid for your chair will hear about it, I feel sure."

Mina looked at Millard. The faultlessness of his dress and the perfection of style in his carriage abashed her. But she presently reached her emaciated hand to him, while tears stood in her eyes. Millard trembled as he took the semi-translucent fingers in his hand: they looked brittle, and he could feel the joints through his gloves as though it were a skeleton that thus joined hands with him.

"You gave me my chair!" she said. "Yesterday I was out in it for the first time already—in Tompkins Square. But to-day Rudolph here—he is such a good fellow—he wanted to give me a big treat wunst, and so he brought me all the way up here already to see this beautiful Park. It's the—the first time—" but shadowy people like Wilhelmina hover always on the verge of hysteria, and her feelings choked her utterance at this point.

Millard could not bear the sight of her emotion. He said hastily, "Never mind, Miss Schulenberg; never mind. Good-morning. I hope you will enjoy your day."

Then as he and Phillida went up the stairs that lead out of the Mall at the north of the arbor by the Casino, Millard made use of his handkerchief, explaining that he must have taken a slight cold. He half halted, intending to ask Phillida to sit down with him on a seat partly screened by a bush at each end; but there were many people passing, and the two went on and mounted the steps to the circular asphalted space at the top of the knoll. Phillida, shy of what she felt must come, began to ask about the great buildings in view, and he named for her the lofty Dakota Flats rising from a rather naked plain to the westward, the low southern façade of the Art Museum to the northward, to the east the somber front of the Lenox Library,—as forbidding as the countenance of a rich collector is to him who would borrow,—and the columnar gable chimneys of the Tiffany house.

Millard now guided Phillida to a descending path on the side of the hill opposite to that by which they had come up, and which perversely turned southeastward for a while, it having been constructed on the theory that a park walk should describe the longest distance between any two points. Here he found a seat shaded by the horizontal limbs of an exotic tree and confronted by a thicket that shut out at this season almost all but little glimpses of the Tiffany house and the frowning Lenox. He asked Phillida to sit down, and he sat beside her. The momentary silence that followed was unendurable to Phillida's excited nerves, so she said:

"Mr. Millard, it was a splendid thing to do."

"What?"

"To give that chair to Mina Schulenberg, and all so quietly."

"Miss Callender—Phillida—may I call you Phillida?"

A tone of entreaty in this inquiry went to her heart and set her thoughts in a whirl. It was not possible to say "No." She did not lift her eyes from the asphalt, which she was pushing with the ferrule of her parasol, but she said "Yes," filled with she knew not what pleasure at having Millard use this familiarity.

"Phillida, you have taught me a great deal. It is to you that the poor girl owes her ride to-day, and to you that I owe the pleasure of seeing her enjoy it. I'm not so good as you are. I am a rather—a rather useless person, I'm afraid. But I am learning. And I want to ask you before I go away whether you could love me?"

Phillida kept trying to bore into the pavement with her parasol, but she did not reply.

After a pause Millard went on. "I know you don't decide such things by mere passion. But you've had reason to think that I loved you for a good while. Haven't you?"

"I—I think I have." This was said with difficulty after a pause of some seconds.

"And you must have thought about it, and turned it over in the light of duty. Haven't you—Phillida?"

This address by her Christian name startled her. It was almost like a caress. But presently she said, "Yes; I have." She remembered that her prayer this very morning had been that before she should be called upon to decide the question of marrying Millard she might have some sign to guide her, and now the happy face of Wilhelmina seemed the very omen she had sought.

"And you haven't made up your mind to reject me?" said Millard.

The answer this time was longer than ever in coming.

"No; no, Mr. Millard."

Millard paused before putting the next question. "I'm going away, you know, on Saturday. May I get out of that last answer all that I wish to, Phillida?"

The parasol trembled in her hand, and perceiving that it betrayed her she ceased to push the ground and let go of the staff, grasping the edge of the seat instead. Millard could see her frame tremble, and in his eagerness he scarcely breathed. With visible effort she at length slowly raised her flushed face until her gaze encountered his. But utterance died on her lips. Either from some inclination of the head or from some assent in her eyes Millard understood her unuttered answer to be in the affirmative. He lifted her hand from the seat beside him and gently kissed it. And then as he held it he presently felt her fingers grasp his hand ever so lightly. It was answer enough. A noisy party was coming down the steps toward them.

"Now, Phillida dear, we must go," he said, rising. "Your mother will not know what has detained us."

Phillida looked up playfully as they walked away, and said, her voice still husky with feeling:

"Agatha will be sure to guess."

XII.
PHILIP.

Philip Gouverneur, passing the Graydon on his return from a dinner-party, thought to make a farewell call on Millard. He encountered Charley in the elevator, just coming home from an evening with Phillida, his face aglow with pleasure.

"Fancied I should find you packing," Philip said. "I thought as you would cross the Alps for the first time I'd come and give you a few points. If I were not so lazy and inefficient I believe I should go with you and 'personally conduct' you."

"That would be jolly. Come over in three or four weeks and I'll be quits with London. We'll engage a traveled English valet together, and journey in comfort. I will follow your lead and go anywhere."

"No; I shall not get over this year."

They entered Millard's rooms, where things were in a state of upheaval, but orderly even in their upheaval. Seating themselves for half an hour by the open windows they talked of things to be seen in Europe. Then Philip, remembering that his friend had much to do, rose to go, and Millard said with an effort:

"Well, Phil, I'm going to be kin to you. Congratulate me."

The color fled from Philip's face as he said:

"How's that?"

"Phillida Callender and I are engaged."

"You and Phillida?" said Philip, struggling to collect his wits. "I expected it." He spoke low and as though some calamity had befallen him. A moment he stood trying to muster his forces to utter some phrase proper to the occasion, and then he abruptly said:

"Good-night; don't come out"; and walked away toward the elevator like a somnambulist doing what he is compelled to by preconception without making note of his environment. And Millard wondered as he looked after him.

The next morning Philip came to breakfast so late that even his indulgent mother had forsaken the table after leaving directions to "have things kept hot for Mr. Philip, and some fresh coffee made for him."

When he had eaten a rather slender meal he sought his mother's sitting-room.

"Aunt Callender called last night, I hear. She must have had something to say, or she would hardly have persuaded herself to leave her sewing so long."

"She came to tell me of Phillida's engagement," said Mrs. Gouverneur, looking at Philip furtively as she spoke.

"I supposed that was it."

"Did you know it, then?"

"Oh, Charley Millard told me last night. These lucky fellows always take it for granted that you'll rejoice in all their good fortune; they air their luck before you as though it were your own." He was looking out of the window at the limited landscape of Washington Square.

"I'm sorry you feel bad about it," said his mother.

Philip was silent.

"I never dreamed that you had any special attachment for Phillida," said Mrs. Gouverneur.

"What did you think I was made of?" said Philip, turning toward his mother. "Since she came from Siam I have seen her about every week. Now consider what a woman she is, and do you wonder that I like her?"

"Why didn't you tell her so?"

"I might if I'd had Charley's brass. But what is there about a critical, inefficient young man like me, chiefly celebrated for piquant talk and sarcasm—what is there to recommend me to such a woman as Phillida? If I'd had Charley's physique—I suppose even Phillida isn't insensible to his appearance—but look at me. It might have recommended me to her, though, that in one respect I do resemble St. Paul—my bodily presence is weak." And he smiled at his joke. "No, mother, I am jealous of Charley, but I am not disappointed. I never had any hopes. I'd about as soon have thought of making love to any beatified saint in glory as to Phillida. But Charley's refined audacity is equal to anything."

The mother said nothing. She felt her son's bitterness too deeply to try to comfort him.

"I hate it most of all for Phillida's sake," Philip went on. "It can not be a happy marriage. Here they've gone and engaged themselves without reflection, and a catastrophe is sure to follow."

"Oh, maybe not," said Mrs. Gouverneur, who could not help feeling that Philip partly blamed her for the engagement.

"Why, just look at it. They haven't really kept company. He has been going to dinner and dancing parties this spring, and she to Mackerelville Mission and Mrs. Frankland's Bible Readings. If they should discover their incompatibility before marriage it wouldn't be so bad; but he's off to Europe for the summer, and then they'll be married in the autumn, probably, and then what? Phillida will never spend her time dancing germans with Charley; and he would make a pretty fist running a class of urchins in Mackerelville. I tell you it only means misery for both of them." And with this prediction Philip mounted to his own room.

Millard was too busy with the packing of trunks, the arrangement of business, and farewell visits to Phillida, to give much thought to Philip's curious behavior; but it troubled him nevertheless. And when, on the deck of the steamer Arcadia, he bade good-by to a large circle of friends, including Mr. Hilbrough, who brought a bouquet from his wife, and Mrs. Callender and her daughters, he looked about in vain for Philip. He could no longer doubt that for some reason Philip disliked his engagement. But when the last adieus had been waved to diminishing and no longer distinguishable friends on the pier-end, and the great city had shrunk into the background and passed from view as the vessel glided steadily forward into the Narrows, Millard entered his cabin and found a package of guide-books and a note from Philip excusing his absence on the ground of a headache, but hoping that his friend would have a pleasant voyage and expressing hearty good wishes for his future with Phillida. It was all very curious and unlike Philip. But the truth below dawned upon Charley, and it gave him sorrow that his great joy might be Philip's disappointment.

When September had come Philip sat one day in a wide wicker chair on the piazza of the old-fashioned cottage of the Gouverneurs at Newport. This plain but ample cottage had once held up its head stoutly as one of the best. But now that the age of the Newport cliff-dwellers had come, in which great architects are employed to expend unsparingly all the ideas they have ever borrowed, on cottages costlier than kings' palaces, the Gouverneur house had been overshadowed, and, after the manner of age outstripped by youth, had taken refuge in the inexpugnable advantage of priority. Like the family that dwelt within, it maintained a certain dignity of repose that could well afford to despise decoration and garniture, and look with contempt on newness. The very althæas, and lilacs, and clambering jasmines in the dooryard and the large trees that lent shade to a lawn alongside, bespoke the chronological superiority of the place. There was no spruceness of biweekly mowing about the lawn, no ambitious spick-and-spanness about the old, white, wooden, green-blinded cottage itself, but rather a restful mossiness of ancient respectability.

Here Philip watched out the lazy September days, as he had watched them since he was a lad. This was a Newport afternoon, not cloudy, but touched by a certain marine mistiness which took the edge off the hard outlines of things and put the world into tone with sweet do-nothingness. Half-sitting, half-lying, in the wide piazza chair, clearly not made to measure for him, Philip had remained for two hours, reading a little at intervals, sometimes smoking, but mostly with head drawn down between his shoulders while he gazed off at the familiar trees and houses, and noted the passing of white-capped maids with their infant convoys, and the infrequent carriages that rolled by. His mother, with her fingers busy at something of no consequence, sat near him. Each was fond of the other's presence, neither cared much for conversation. Gouverneur, the father, was enjoying a fine day in his fashion, asleep on a lounge in the library.

"It's just as I expected, mother," said Philip, coming out of a prolonged reverie. "Charley and Phillida will marry without ever getting acquainted, and then will come the blow-out."

"What do you mean by the blow-out?" said Mrs. Gouverneur. "They are neither of them quarrelsome."

"No; but they are both sensitive. Aunt Callender's sickness took Phillida to the Catskills before he got home, and she's been there ever since. I suppose he has gone up once or twice on a Saturday. But what chance has either of them to know the other's tastes? What do you suppose they talk about? Does Phillida explain her high ideals, or tell him the shabby epics of lame beggars and blind old German women in Mackerelville? Or does he explain to her how to adjust a cravat, or tell her the amusing incidents of a private ball? They can't go on always billing and cooing, and what will they talk about on rainy Sundays after they are married? I'd like to see him persuade Phillida to wear an ultra-fashionable evening dress and spend six evenings a week at entertainments and the opera. Maybe it'll be the other way; she may coax him to teach a workingmen's class in the Mission. By George! It would be a comedy to see Charley try it once." And Philip indulged in a gentle laugh.

"You don't know how much they have seen of each other, Philip. Phillida is a friend of the Hilbroughs, and Mr. Millard once brought her to our house on Sunday afternoon from the Mission or somewhere over there."

"That's so?" said Philip. "They may be better acquainted than I think. But they'll never get on."

Perceiving that this line of talk was making his mother uncomfortable, he said:

"Nature has got the soft pedal down to-day. Come, mother, it's a good day for a drive. Will you go?"

And he went himself to call the coachman.

XIII.
MRS. FRANKLAND.

Mrs. Frankland, the Bible reader, was a natural orator—a person with plenty of blood for her brain, ample breathing space in her chest, a rich-toned voice responsive to her feelings, and a mind not exactly intellectual, but felicitous in vocabulation and ingenious in the construction of sentences. Her emotions were mettlesome horses well-bitted—quick and powerful, but firmly held. Though her exegesis was second-hand and commonplace, yet upon the familiar chords of traditional and superficial interpretation of the Bible she knew how to play many emotional variations, and her hearers, who were all women, were caught up into a state of religious exaltation under her instruction. A buoyant and joyous spirit and a genial good-fellowship of manner added greatly to her personal charms.

She was the wife of a lawyer of moderate abilities and great trustworthiness, whose modesty, rather than his mediocrity, had confined him to a small practice in the quieter walks of the profession. Mrs. Frankland had been bred a Friend, but there was a taste for magnificence in her that argued an un-Quaker strain in her pedigree. On her marriage she had with alacrity transferred her allegiance from no-ceremony Quakerism to liturgical Episcopalianism, the religion of her husband. She gave herself credit for having in this made some sacrifice to wifely duty, though her husband would have been willing to join the orthodox Friends with her, for the simplicity and stillness of the Quakers consorted well with his constitution. Mrs. Frankland did not relinquish certain notions derived from the Friends concerning the liberty of women to speak when moved thereto. No doubt her tenacity in this particular was due to her own consciousness of possessing a gift for swaying human sympathies. Such a gift the Anglican communion, from time immemorial, has delighted to bury in a napkin—in a tablecloth, if a napkin should prove insufficient. But Mrs. Frankland was not a person to allow her talent to be buried even in the most richly dight altar-cloth. In her, as in most of the world's shining lights, zeal for a cause was indistinguishably blended with personal aspirations—honest desire to be serviceable with an unconscious desire to be known. It is only healthy and normal that any human being possessed of native power should wish to show his credentials by turning possibility into fact accomplished.

Mrs. Frankland's temperament inclined her to live like a city set on a hill, but the earlier years of her married life had been too constantly engrossed by domestic cares for her to undertake public duties. It had often been out of the question for the Franklands to keep a servant, and they had never kept more than one in a family of four children. At first this ambitious wife sought to spur her timid and precise husband to achievements that were quite impossible to him. But when the children grew larger, so that the elder ones could be of assistance in the care of the house, Mrs. Frankland's opportunity came. The fame of such women as Mrs. Livermore, Miss Willard, and Mrs. Bottome had long been a spur to her aspiration. She did not set up as a reformer. Denunciation and contention were not proper to her temperament. She was, above all, pathetic and sympathetic. She took charge of a Bible class of young ladies in the Sunday-school, and these were soon deeply moved by her talks to them as a class, and profoundly attracted to her by a way she had of gathering each one of them under the hen-mother wings of her sympathies. That she and they exaggerated the degree of her personal feeling for her individual listeners is probable; the oratorical temperament enlarges the image of a sentiment as naturally as a magic lantern magnifies a picture. In later days beloved Maggies and Matildas of the class, who had believed themselves special favorites of Mrs. Frankland—their images graven on her heart of hearts—were amazed to find that they had been quite forgotten when they had been out of sight a year or two.

The Bible-class room in the Church of St. James the Less soon became uncomfortably crowded. This was what Mrs. Frankland had long desired. She thereupon availed herself of the hospitality of a disciple of hers who had a rather large parlor, and in this she opened a Bible reading on Friday afternoons. Eloquent talk, and especially pathetic talk and vivid illustrations by means of incidents and similes, were as natural to her as melodious whistling is to a brown thrush, and the parlors were easily filled, though out of deference to church authorities men were excluded.

The success of this first course of so-called Bible readings was marked, and it determined Mrs. Frankland's career. She was enough of a woman to be particularly pleased that some of the wealthiest parishioners of St. James the Less were among her hearers, and that, having neglected her in all the years of baby-tending and dishwashing obscurity, these people now invited her to their houses and made her the confidante of their sorrows. This sort of success was as agreeable to her as merely social climbing was to Mrs. Hilbrough. For even in people of a higher type than Mrs. Frankland the unmixed heroic is not to be looked for: if one finds zeal or heroism in the crude ore it ought to be enough; the refined articles have hardly been offered in the market since the lives of the saints were written and the old romances went out of fashion.

Two results of Mrs. Frankland's first winter's readings, or preachings, had not entered into her calculations, but they were potent in deciding her to continue her career. One was that her husband's law practice was somewhat increased by her conspicuousness and popularity. He was not intrusted with great cases, but there was a very decided increase in his collection business. At the close of the season Mrs. Frankland, in making her farewell to her class, had, like a true orator, coined even her private life into effect. She touched feelingly on the sacrifice she and her family had had to make in order that she might maintain the readings, and alluded to her confidence that if Providence intended her to go forward, provision would be made for her and her children, whom she solemnly committed by an act of faith, like that of the mother of Moses, to the care of the Almighty. She said this with deep solemnity, holding up her hands toward heaven as though to lay an infant in the arms of the Good Shepherd. The vision of a house-mother trusting the Lord even for the darning of stockings was an example of faith that touched the hearers. Under the lead of a few active women in the company a purse of two hundred dollars was collected and presented to her. It was done delicately; the givers stated that their purpose was simply to enable her to relieve herself of care that the good work might not suffer. The money was thus handed not to her but to the Lord, and Mrs. Frankland could not refuse it. Do you blame her? She had earned it as fairly as the rector of St. James the Less earned his. Perhaps even more fairly, for her service was spontaneous and enthusiastic; he had grown old and weary, and his service had long since come to be mainly perfunctory.

There are cynics who imagine a woman with a mission saying, "Well, I've increased my husband's business, and I have made two hundred very necessary dollars this winter; and I will try it again." If the matter had presented itself to her mind in that way Mrs. Frankland probably would have felt a repulsion from the work she was doing. It is a very bungling mind, or a more than usually clear and candid mind, that would view a delicate personal concern in so blunt a fashion. Mrs. Frankland's mind was too clever to be bungling, and too emotional and imaginative to be critical. What she saw, with a rush of grateful emotion, was that the Divine approval of her sacrifices was manifested by this sustaining increase of temporal prosperity. The ravens of Elijah had replenished her purse because she trusted. Thus commended from above and lifted into the circle of those who like the prophets and apostles have a special vocation, she felt herself ready, as she put it, "to go forward through fire and flood if need be." It would not have been like her to remember that the fire and flood to be encountered in her career could be only rhetorical at best—painted fire and a stage flood.

Among those who chanced to be drawn to Mrs. Frankland's first course of Bible readings, and who had listened with zest, was Phillida Callender. Phillida's was a temperament different from Mrs Frankland's. The common point at which they touched was religious enthusiasm. Mrs. Frankland's enthusiasms translated themselves instantly into eloquent expression; she was an instrument richly toned that gave forth melody of joy or sorrow when smitten by emotion. Phillida was very susceptible to her congenial eloquence, but hers was essentially the higher nature, and Mrs. Frankland's religious passion, when once it reached Phillida, was transformed into practical endeavor. Mrs. Frankland was quite content to embody her ideals in felicitous speech, and cease; Phillida Callender labored day and night to make her ideals actual. Mrs. Frankland had no inclination or qualification for grappling with such thorny problems as the Mackerelville Mission afforded. It was enough for her to play the martial music which nerved others for the strife.

It often happens that the superior nature is dominated by one not its equal. Phillida did not question the superlative excellence of Mrs. Frankland, from whom she drew so many inspirations. That eloquent lady in turn admired and loved Phillida as a model disciple. Phillida drew Mrs. Hilbrough to the readings, and Mrs. Frankland bestowed on that lady all the affectionate attention her immortal soul and worldly position entitled her to, and under Mrs. Frankland's influence Mrs. Hilbrough became more religious without becoming less worldly. For nothing could have seemed more proper and laudable to Mrs. Hilbrough than the steady pursuit of great connections appropriate to her husband's wealth.

Mrs. Frankland's imagination had been moved by her success. It was not only a religious but a social triumph. Some of the rich had come, and it was in the nature of an orator of Mrs. Frankland's type to love any association with magnificence. Her figures of speech were richly draped; her imagination delighted in the grandiose. The same impulse which carried her easily from drab Quakerism to stained-glass Episcopalianism now moved her to desire that her ministry might lead her to the great, for such an association seemed to glorify the cause she had at heart. She did not think of her purpose nakedly; she was an artist in drapery, and her ideas never presented themselves in the nude; she was indeed quite incapable of seeing the bare truth; truth itself became visible to her only when it had on a wedding garment. As she stated her aspiration to herself, she longed to carry the everlasting gospel to the weary rich. "The weary rich" was the phrase she outfitted them with when considered as objects of pity and missionary zeal. To her mind they seemed, in advance, shining trophies which she hoped to win, and in her reveries she saw herself presenting them before the Almighty, somewhat as a Roman general might lead captive barbarian princes to the throne of his imperial master.

Mrs. Frankland could not be oblivious to the fact that a Bible reading among the rich would be likely to bring her better pecuniary returns than one among the poor. But she did not let this consideration appear on the surface of her thoughts, nor was it at all a primary or essential one.

She knew but little of the intricacies of social complications, and her mind now turned to Mrs. Hilbrough as the wealthiest of all her occasional hearers, and one having an ample parlor in a fashionable quarter of the town.

Her first thought had been to get Phillida to accompany her when she should go to suggest the matter to Mrs. Hilbrough. But on second thought she gave up this intermediation, for reasons which it would have been impossible for her to define. If she exerted a powerful influence over Phillida in the direction of emotion, she could not escape in turn the influence of Phillida's view of life when in her presence. Although personal ambitions mixed themselves to a certain extent with Mrs. Frankland's religious zeal, disguising themselves in rhetorical costumes of a semi-ecclesiastical sort, they did not venture to masquerade too freely before Phillida. Mrs. Frankland, though less skillful in affairs than in speech, felt that it would be better in the present instance to go to Mrs. Hilbrough alone.

It was with a glow of pleasure not wholly unworldly that she found herself one afternoon in Mrs. Hilbrough's reception-room, and noted all about her marks of taste and unstinted expenditure. To a critical spectator the encounter between the two ladies would have afforded material for a curious comparison. The ample figure of Mrs. Frankland, her mellifluous voice, her large, sweeping, cheerily affectionate, influential mode of address, brought her into striking contrast with the rather slender, quietly self-reliant Mrs. Hilbrough, whose genial cordiality covered, while it hardly concealed, the thoroughly business-like carriage of her mind.

Mrs. Frankland opened her plan with the greatest fullness of explanation as to what her motives were, but she did not feel obliged wholly to conceal the element of personal aspiration, as she would have done in talking to Phillida. Her intuitions made her feel that Mrs. Hilbrough would accept religious zeal all the more readily for its being a little diluted. Mrs. Hilbrough responded with genial cordiality and even with some show of enthusiasm. But if she had less address in speech than the other she had more in affairs. While theoretically supporting this plan she did not commit herself to it. She knew how slender as yet was her hold upon the society she courted, and she would not risk an eccentric move. Her boat was still in shallow water, with hardly buoyancy enough to float a solitary occupant; if she should undertake to carry Mrs. Frankland, it would probably go fast aground. What she said to Mrs. Frankland with superficial fervor was:

"You ought to have a person that has been longer in New York, and is better acquainted than I am, to carry out your plan, Mrs. Frankland. It would be a pity to have so excellent a scheme fail; that would probably prevent your ever succeeding—would shut you out as long as you lived. It would be a great honor to me to have your readings, but you must begin under better auspices. I regret to say this. Your readings, rightly started, will be a great success, and I should like to have them here."

This last was in a sense sincere. Mrs. Hilbrough was sure of Mrs. Frankland's success if once the thing were patronized by the right people. Here Mrs. Frankland looked disappointed, but in a moment broke forth again in adroit and fervid statement of the good that might be done, mingled with a flattering protest against Mrs. Hilbrough's too humble estimate of her influence in society. While she proceeded, Mrs. Hilbrough was revolving a plan for giving Mrs. Frankland more than she asked, while avoiding personal responsibility.

"I think I can do something," she said, with a manner less cordial but more sincere than that she had previously assumed. "Leave the matter with me, and I may be able to open to you a grand house, not a plain, middling place like mine"—and she waved her hand deprecatingly toward the furnishings which seemed to Mrs. Frankland inconceivably rich—"a grand house with all the prestige of a great family. I don't know that I shall succeed with my friend, but for the sake of the cause I am willing to try. I won't tell you anything about it till I try. If I fail, I fail, but for the present leave all to me."

Mrs. Frankland was not the sort of person to relish being guided by another, but in Mrs. Hilbrough she had met her superior in leadership. Reluctantly she felt herself obliged to hand over the helm of her own craft, holding herself ready to disembark at length wherever Mrs. Hilbrough might reach dry ground.

Of all that Mrs. Hilbrough had won in her first winter's social campaign, the achievement that gave her most pleasure was the making acquaintance and entering into fast ripening friendship with Mrs. Van Horne. Little Mrs. Van Horne was not in herself very desirable as a friend, but she was one of those whose fortune it is to have the toil of thousands at their disposal. Her magnificence was fed by an army: innumerable laborers with spades and shovels, picks and blasting-drills, working in smoke and dripping darkness to bore railway paths through mountain chains; grimy stokers and clear-sighted engineers; brakemen dripping in the chilly rain; switchmen watching out the weary night by dim lanterns or flickering torches; desk-worn clerks and methodical ticket-sellers; civil engineers using brains and long training over their profiles and cross-sectionings; and scores of able "captains of industry," such as superintendents, passenger agents, and traffic managers—all these, and others, by their steady toil kept an unfailing cataract of wealth pouring into the Van Horne coffers. In herself Mrs. Van Horne had not half the force of Mrs. Hilbrough, but as the queen bee of this widespread toil and traffic, fed and clad and decked as she was by the fruits of the labor of a hundred thousand men, Mrs. Van Horne had an enormous factitious value in the world. How to bear her dignity as the wife of a man who used the million as a unit she did not know, for though she affected a reserved stateliness of manner, it did not set well on such a round-faced, impressionable little woman quite incapable of charting a course for herself. No show of leadership had been hers, but she had taken her cue from this and that stronger nature, until by chance she came in hailing distance of Mrs. Hilbrough. The two were perfect counterparts. Mrs. Hilbrough was clairvoyant and of prompt decision, but she lacked the commanding position for personal leadership. She was superficially deferential to Mrs. Van Horne's older standing and vastly greater wealth, but she swiftly gained the real ascendancy. Her apparent submission of everything to Mrs. Van Horne's wisdom, while adroitly making up a judgment for the undecided little lady, was just what Mrs. Van Horne liked, and in three months' acquaintance that lady had come to lean more and more on Mrs. Hilbrough. The intimacy with so close a friend rendered life much more comfortable for Mrs. Van Horne, in that it relieved her from taking advice of her sisters-in-law, who always gave counsel with a consciousness of superiority. Now she could appear in her family with opinions and purposes apparently home-made. To a woman of Mrs. Hilbrough's cleverness the friendship with one whose brooks ran gold rendered social success certain.

Mrs. Hilbrough was a natural promoter. Her energy inclined her to take hold of a new enterprise for the mere pleasure of pushing it. She felt a real delight in the religious passions awakened by Mrs. Frankland's addresses; she foresaw an interesting career opening up before that gifted woman, and to help her would give Mrs. Hilbrough a complex pleasure. That Mrs. Frankland's addresses if given in Mrs. Van Horne's parlors would excite attention and make a great stir she foresaw, and for many reasons she would like to bring this about. Mrs. Hilbrough did not analyze her motives; that would have been tiresome. She entered them all up in a sort of lump sum to the credit of her religious zeal, and was just a little pleased to find so much of her early devotion to religion left over. Let the entry stand as she made it. Let us not be of the class unbearable who are ever trying to dissipate those lovely illusions that keep alive human complacency and make life endurable.

Mrs. Hilbrough contrived to bring Mrs. Frankland with her abounding enthusiasm and her wide-sweeping curves of inflection and gesture into acquaintance with the great but rather pulpy Mrs. Van Horne. The natural inequality of forces in the two did the rest. Mrs. Van Horne, weary of the inevitable limitations of abnormal wealth, and fatigued in the vain endeavor to procure any satisfaction which bore the slightest proportion to the vast family accretion, found a repose she had longed for when she was caught up in the fiery chariot of Mrs. Frankland's eloquent talk. All the vast mass of things that had confronted and bullied her so long was swept into a rhetorical dustpan, and she could feel herself at length as a human soul without having to remember her possessions. Mrs. Frankland's phrase of "the weary rich" exactly fitted her, and to her Mrs. Frankland's eloquent pulverizing of the glory of this world brought a sort of emancipation.

Mrs. Frankland unfolded to her a desire to reach those who would not attend her readings at any but a very fashionable house. Mrs. Van Horne, encouraged thereto by Mrs. Hilbrough, was delighted at finding a novel and congenial use for some of the luxurious and pompous upholstery of her life of which she was so tired. Her parlors were opened, and "persons of the highest fashion" were pleased to find a private and suitably decorated wicker-gate leading into a strait and narrow vestibule train, limited, fitted up with all the consolations and relieved of most of the discomforts of an old-fashioned religious pilgrimage.

XIV.
MRS. FRANKLAND AND PHILLIDA.

Mrs. Callender would have told you that mountain air had quite restored her, but enforced rest from scissors and sewing-machine, the two demons that beset the dear industrious, had more to do with it than mountain air. The first of October brought her and Phillida again to their house, where Agatha had preceded them by two days, to help Sarah in putting things to rights for their advent. Millard met the mother and daughter at the station with a carriage and left them at their own door.

"Did Mr. Millard say that he would come again this evening?" Agatha asked of Phillida when she rose from the dinner-table.

"No."

"Well, I should think he would. I wouldn't have a young man that would take things so coolly. He's hardly seen you at all since his return, and—that's the expressman with the trunks. I'll go and see about them"; and she bounded away, not "like an antelope," but like a young girl bubbling to the brim with youth and animal spirits.

An hour later, when Phillida and Agatha had just got to a stage in unpacking in which all that one owns is lying in twenty heaps about the room, each several heap seeming larger than the trunk in which it came, there was a ring at the door, and Mr. Millard was announced.

"Oh, dear! I think he might have waited until to-morrow," grumbled Agatha to her mother, after Phillida had gone to the parlor. "He'll stay for hours, I suppose, and I never can get these things put away alone, and we won't get you to bed before midnight. He ought to remember that you're not strong. But it's just like a man in love to come when you're in a mess, and never to go away."

Millard was more thoughtful than another might have been, and in half an hour Phillida returned to the back room, with a softly radiant expression of countenance, bearing a bouquet of flowers which Millard had brought for Mrs. Callender. Phillida at once helped Agatha attack chaos. The floor, the chairs, the table, the bed, and the top of the dressing-case were at length cleared, and preparations were making for getting the tired mother to her rest before ten o'clock.

"Seems to me," said Agatha, "that if I were in Philly's place I'd want something more than a brief call on the first evening, after so long a separation."

"Seems to me," said the mother, mimicking Agatha's tone and turning upon the girl with an amused smile, "if you ever have a lover and are as hard to please with him as you are with Mr. Millard, he might as well give it up before he begins."

In the morning early came Mrs. Frankland. She kissed Phillida on this cheek and on that, embraced her and called her "Dear, dear child," held her off with both hands and looked with admiration at her well-modeled face, freshened with wind and sun. She declared that the mountain air had done Phillida a great deal of good, and inquired how her dear, good mother was.

"Mother is wonderfully better," said Phillida; "I may say, well again."

"What a mercy that is! Now you'll be able to go on with the blessed work you are doing. You have a gift for mission work; that's your vocation. I should make a poor one in your place. It's a talent. As for me, I have a new call."

"A new call—what is that?" said Phillida, rolling up an easy chair for Mrs. Frankland to sit on.

"It's all through you, I suppose. You brought Mrs. Hilbrough to hear me, and Mrs. Hilbrough made me acquainted with Mrs. Van Horne, and she has invited me to give readings in her parlor. I gave the first last Thursday, with great success. The great parlor was full, and many wept like little children."

The words here written are poor beside what Mrs. Frankland said. Her inflection, the outward sweep of her hand when she said "great parlor," brought the rich scene vaguely to Phillida's imagination, and the mellow falling cadence with which she spoke of those who had wept like little children, letting her hands drop limp the while upon her lap, made it all very picturesque and touching. But Phillida twisted the fingers of her left hand with her right, feeling a little wrench in trying to put herself into sympathy with this movement. It was the philanthropic side of religion rather than the propagandist that appealed to her, and she could hardly feel pity for people whose most imaginary wants were supplied.

The quick instinct for detecting and following the sympathy of an audience is half the outfit for an orator; and Mrs. Frankland felt the need of additional statement to carry the matter rightly to Phillida. She was ever feeling about for the electrical button that would reach a hearer's sympathies, and never content until she had touched it.

"I find the burdens of these wealthy women are as great—even greater than those of others. Many of them are tired of the worldliness, and weary of the utter frivolity, of their pursuits." She put a long, rich, vibrant emphasis on the words "utter frivolity." "Don't you think it a good plan to bring them to the rest of the gospel?"

"Certainly," said Phillida, who could not logically gainsay such a statement; but she was convinced rather than touched by any living sympathy with Mrs. Frankland's impulse, and she still twisted the tips of the fingers of her left hand with her right.

"I hope, dear child," Mrs. Frankland went on, in a meditative tone, looking out of the window and steering now upon a home tack—"I hope that I can serve in some way the cause of the poor you have so much at heart. Missions like yours languish for funds. If I could be the means of bringing people of great fortune to consecrate their wealth, it might fill many a thirsty channel of benevolence with refreshing streams." Ah, that one could produce here the tone of her voice as of a brook brimming over barriers, and running melodious to the meadows below!

"That is true," said Phillida, remembering how many betterments might be made in the coffee-room and the reading-room if only one had the money, and remembering how her own beloved Charley had helped the Mission and made the lot of the unhappy Wilhelmina Schulenberg less grievous. "I do think it may prove to be a great work," she added thoughtfully, folding her hands upon her lap in unconscious sign that she had reached a conclusion—a logical equilibrium.

"And I want you to go with me to the readings on Thursday. Mrs. Van Horne knows your aunt, Mrs. Gouverneur, and she will be glad to see you."

Phillida looked down and began to pinch the tips of her fingers again. She shrunk a little from Mrs. Van Horne's set; she thought her dress probably beneath their standard, but with an effort she put away such fears as frivolous, and promised to go.

Thursday afternoon found Phillida sitting by Mrs. Hilbrough in the Van Horne parlor, which was draped with the costly products of distant looms, wrought by the dusky fingers of Orientals inheriting the slowly perfected special skill of generations, and with the fabrics produced by mediæval workmen whose artistic products had gathered value as all their fellows had perished; for other races and other ages have contributed their toil to the magnificence of a New York palace. The great room was spanned by a ceiling on which the creative imaginations of great artists had lavished rare fancies in gold and ivory, while the costliest, if not the noblest, paintings and sculptures of our modern time were all about a parlor whose very chairs and ottomans had been designed by men of genius.

Once the words of Mrs. Frankland were heard with these surroundings, one felt that it would be wrong to attribute to ambitious motives her desire for such an environment. She might rather be said to have been drawn here by an inspiration for artistic harmony. The resonant periods of Bossuet would hardly have echoed through the modern centuries if he had not had the magnificent court of Louis the Great for a sounding-board. When Mrs. Frankland spoke in the Van Horne parlor her auditors felt that the mellifluous voice and stately sentences could not have had a more appropriate setting, and that the splendid apartment could not have been put to a more fitting use. Even the simple religious songs used at the beginning and close of the meetings were accompanied upon a grand piano of finest tone, whose richly inlaid case represented the expenditure of a moderate fortune. Mrs. Van Horne could command the best amateur musical talent, so that the little emotional Moody-and-Sankeys that Mrs. Frankland selected were so overlaid and glorified in the performance as to be almost transformed into works of art.

Phillida looked upon these evidences of lavish expenditure with less bedazzlement than one might have expected in a person of her age. For she had grown up under shelter from the world. While she remained in the antipodes her contact with life outside her own family had been small. In Brooklyn her mother's ill health had kept her much at home, and the dominant influence of her father had therefore every chance to make itself felt upon her character, and that influence was all in favor of a self-denying philanthropy. To the last her father was altruistic, finding nothing worth living for but the doing for others. Abiding secluded as Phillida had, the father's stamp remained uneffaced. She saw in all this magnificence a wanton waste of resources. She put it side by side with her sense of a thousand needs of others, and she felt for it more condemnation than admiration. Mrs. Frankland's vocation to the rich was justified in her mind; it was, after all, a sort of mission to the heathen.

And who shall say that Mrs. Frankland's missionary impulse was not a true one? Phillida's people were exteriorly more miserable; but who knows whether the woes of a Mulberry street tenement are greater than those of a Fifth Avenue palace? Certainly Mrs. Frankland found wounded hearts enough. The woman with an unfaithful husband, the mother of a reckless son who has been obliged to flee the country, the wife of a runaway cashier, disgraced and dependent upon rich relatives—these and a score besides poured into her ear their sorrows, and were comforted by her sympathy cordially expressed, and by her confidence in a consoling divine love and her visions of a future of everlasting rest. Mrs. Frankland had found her proper field—a true mission field indeed, for in this world-out-of-joint there is little danger of going astray in looking for misery of one sort or another. If the sorrows of the poor are greater, they have, if not consolation, at least a fortunate numbness produced by the never-ending battle for bread; but the canker has time to gnaw the very heart out of the rich woman.

Even on the mind of Phillida, as she now listened to Mrs. Frankland, the accessories made a difference. How many dogmas have lived for centuries, not by their reasonableness but by the impressiveness of trappings! Liturgies chanted under lofty arches, creeds recited by generation following generation, traditions of law, however absurd, uttered by one big-wigged judge following a reverend line of ghostly big-wigs gone before that have said the same foolish things for ages—these all take considerable advantage from the power of accessories to impose upon the human imagination. The divinity that hedges kings is the result of a set of stage-fixings which make the little great, and half the horror inspired by the priest's curse is derived from bell and book and candle. The mystery of print gives weight to small men by the same witchcraft; you would not take the personal advice of so stupid a man as Criticus about the crossing of a t, but when he prints a tirade anonymously in the Philadelphia "Tempus" the condemnation becomes serious.

Just in this way the imagination of Phillida was affected by the new surroundings in the midst of which Mrs. Frankland spoke. The old addresses in a Bible-class room with four plastered walls, or a modest parlor, did not seem to have half so much force as these. The weight of a brilliant success was now thrown into the scale, and Mrs. Frankland could speak with an apostolic authority hitherto unknown. The speaker's own imagination felt the influence of her new-found altitude, and she expressed herself with assurance and deliberation, and with more dignity and pathos than ever before.

With all this background, Mrs. Frankland spoke to-day from the twelfth chapter of Romans on personal consecration. But she did not treat the theme as a person of reformatory temperament might have done, by denouncing the frivolity of rich and fashionable lives. It was not in her nature to antagonize an audience. She drew a charming picture of the beauty of a consecrated life, and she embellished it with wonderful instances of devotion, interspersed with touching anecdotes of heroism and self-sacrifice. The impression upon her audience was as remarkable as it was certain to be transient. Women wept at the ravishing vision of a life wholly given to noble ends, and then went their ways to live as before, after the predispositions of their natures, the habits of their lives, and the conventional standards of their class.

But in the heart of Phillida the words of the speaker fell upon fertile soil, and germinated, where there was never a stone or a thorn. The insularity of her life had left her very susceptible to Mrs. Frankland's discourses. Old stagers who have been impressed now by this, now by that, speech, writing, or personal persuasion, have suffered a certain wholesome induration. Phillida was a virginal enthusiast.

XV.
TWO WAYS.

It seemed to Millard that Phillida would be the better for seeing more of life. He would not have admitted to himself that he could wish her any whit different from what she was. But he was nevertheless disposed to mold her tastes into some likeness to his own—it is the impulse of all advanced lovers and new husbands. It was unlucky that he should have chosen for the time of beginning his experiment the very evening of the day on which she had heard Mrs. Frankland. Phillida's mind was all aglow with the feelings excited by the address when Millard called with the intention of inviting her to attend the theater with him.

He found a far-awayness in her mood which made him keep back his proposal for a while. He did not admire her the less in her periods of exaltation, but he felt less secure of her when she soared into a region whither he could not follow. He hesitated, and discussed the weather of the whole week past, smiting his knee gently with his gloves in the endeavor to obtain cheerfulness by affecting it. She, on her part, was equally eager to draw Millard into the paths of feeling and action she loved so well, and while he was yet trifling with his gloves and the weather topic, she began:

"Charley, I do wish you could have heard Mrs. Frankland's talk to-day." Phillida's hands were turned palms downward on her lap as she spoke; Millard fancied that their lines expressed the refinement of her organization.

"Why doesn't she admit men?" he said, smiling. "Here you, who don't need any betterment, will become so good by and by that you'll leave me entirely behind. We men need evangelizing more than women do. Why does Mrs. Frankland shut us out from her good influences?"

"Oh! you know she's an Episcopalian, and Episcopalians don't think it right for women to set up to teach men."

"I'm Episcopalian enough, but if a woman sets up as a preacher at all, I don't see why she shouldn't preach to those that need it most. It's only called a 'Bible reading'"—here Charley carefully spread his gloves across his right knee—"there's no law against reading the Bible to men?" he added, looking up with a quick winning smile. "Now you see she turns the scripture topsy-turvy. Instead of women having to inquire of their husbands at home, men are obliged to inquire of their wives and sweethearts. I don't mind that, though. I'd rather hear it from you than from Mrs. Frankland any day." And he gathered up his gloves, and leaned back in his chair.

Phillida smiled, and took this for an invitation to repeat to him part of what Mrs. Frankland had said. She related the story of Elizabeth Fry's work in Newgate, as Mrs. Frankland had told it, she retold Mrs. Frankland's version of Florence Nightingale in the hospital, and then she paused.

"There, Charley," she said deprecatingly, "I can't tell these things with half the splendid effect that Mrs. Frankland did. But it made a great impression on me. I mean to try to be more useful."

"You? I don't see how you can be any better than you are, my dear. That kind of talk is good for other people, but it isn't meant for you."

"Don't say that; please don't. But Mrs. Frankland made a deep impression on all the people at Mrs. Van Horne's."

"At Mrs. Van Horne's?" he asked, with curiosity mingled with surprise.

"Yes; I went with Mrs. Hilbrough."

"Whew! Has Mrs. Frankland got in there?" he said, twirling his cane reflectively. "I hadn't heard it."

"It isn't quite fair for you to say 'got in there,' is it, Charley? Mrs. Frankland was invited by Mrs. Van Horne to give her readings at her house, and she thought it might do good," said Phillida, unwilling to believe that anybody she liked could be more worldly than she was herself.

"I did not mean to speak slightingly of Mrs. Frankland," he said; "I suppose she is a very good woman. But I know she asked Mrs. Hilbrough to let her read in her house. I only guessed that she must have managed Mrs. Van Horne in some way. It is no disgrace for her to seek to give her readings where she thinks they will do good."

"Did she ask Mrs. Hilbrough?" said Phillida.

"Mrs. Hilbrough told me so, and the Van Horne opening may have been one of Mrs. Hilbrough's clever contrivances. That woman is a perfect general. This reading at Mrs. Van Horne's must be a piece of her fine work."

Just why this view of the case should have pained Phillida she could hardly have told. She liked to dwell in a region of high ideals, and she hated the practical necessities that oblige high ideals to humble themselves before they can be incarnated into facts. There could be no harm in Mrs. Frankland's seeking to reach the people she wished to address, but the notion of contrivance and management for the promotion of a mission so lofty made that mission seem a little shop-worn and offended Phillida's love of congruity. Then, too, she felt that to Millard Mrs. Frankland was not so worshipful a figure as to herself, and a painful lack of concord in thought and purpose between her lover and herself was disclosed. The topic was changed, but the two did not get into the same groove of thought during the evening.

Even though a lover, Millard did not lose his characteristic thoughtfulness. Knowing that early rest was important for the mother, and conjecturing that she slept just behind the sliding-doors, Charley did not allow himself to outstay his time. It was only when he had taken his hat to leave that he got courage to ask Phillida if she were engaged for the next afternoon. When she said no, he proposed the theater. Phillida would have refused the invitation an hour before, but in the tenderness of parting she had a remorseful sense of pain regarding the whole interview. With a scrupulousness quite characteristic she had begun to blame herself. To refuse the invitation to the Irving matinée would be to add to an undefined estrangement which both felt but refused to admit, and so, with her mind all in a jumble, she said: "Yes; certainly. I'll go if you would like me to, Charley."

But she lay awake long that night in dissatisfaction with herself. She had gained nothing with Charley, her ideals had been bruised and broken, her visions of future personal excellence were now confused, and she was committed to give valuable time to what seemed to her a sort of dissipation. Would she never be able to emulate Mrs. Fry? Would the lofty aspiration she had cherished prove beyond her reach? And then, once, just once, there intruded the unwelcome thought that her engagement with Millard was possibly a mistake, and that it might defeat the great ends she had in view. The thought was too painful for her; she banished it instantly, upbraiding herself for her disloyalty, and replacing the image of her lover on its pedestal again. Was not Charley the best of men? Had he not been liberal to the Mission and generous to Mina Schulenberg? Then she planned again the work they would be able to accomplish together, she diligent, and he liberal, until thoughts of this sort mingled with her dreams.

She went to see Irving's Shylock. The spectacular street scenes interested her; the boat that sailed so gracefully on the dry land of the stage excited her curiosity; and she felt the beauty and artistic delicacy of the Portia. But she was ill at ease through it all. She was too much in the mood of a moralist to see the play merely as a work of art; she could not keep her mind from reverting to matters having nothing to do with the play, such as the versatility of an actress's domestic relations. And she could not but feel that in so far as the play diverted her, it did so at the expense of that strenuousness of endeavor for extraordinary usefulness which her mind had taken under the spell of Mrs. Frankland's speech.

"Didn't you like it?" said Millard, when they had reached the fresh air of the street and disentangled themselves from the debouching crowd—a noble pair to look upon as they walked thus in the late afternoon.

"Yes," said Phillida, spreading her parasol against the slant beams of the declining sun, which illuminated the red brick walls and touched the lofty cornices and the worn stones of the driveway with high lights, while now this and now that distant window seemed to burn with ruddy fire—"yes; I couldn't help enjoying Miss Terry's Portia. I am no judge, but as a play I think it must have been good."

"Why do you say 'as a play'?" he asked. "What could it be but a play?" He punctuated his question by tapping the pavement with his cane.

Phillida laughed a little at herself, but added with great seriousness: "Would you think worse of me, Charley, if I should tell you that I don't quite like plays?" And she looked up at him in a manner at once affectionate and protesting.

Millard could not help giving her credit for the delicacy she showed in her manner of differing from him.

"No," he said; "I couldn't but think the best of you in any case, Phillida, but you might make me think worse of myself, you know, for I do like plays. And more than that," he said, turning full upon her, "you might succeed in making me think that you thought the worse of me, and that would be the very worst of all."

This was said in a half-playful tone, but to Phillida it opened again the painful vision of a possible drawing apart through a contrariety of tastes. She therefore said no more in that direction, but contented herself with some general criticisms on Irving's Shylock, the incongruities in which she pointed out, and her criticisms, which were tolerably acute, excited Millard's admiration; and it is not to be expected that a lover's admiration should maintain any just proportion to that which calls it forth.

Again the Thursday sermon at Mrs. Van Horne's came around, and again Phillida was restored to a white heat of zeal mingled with a rueful distrust of her own power to hold herself to the continuous pursuit of her ideal. Millard, perceiving that she dreaded to be invited again, refrained from offering to take her to the theater. He waited several weeks, and then ventured, with some hesitation, to ask her to go with him to see one of the Wagner operas. He was frightened at his own boldness in asking, and he kept his eyes upon the ferule of his cane with which he was tapping the toe of his boot, afraid to look up while she answered. She saw how timidly he asked, and her heart was cruelly wounded by the necessity she felt to refuse; but she had fortified herself to resist just such a temptation.

"I'd rather not go, Charley," she said slowly, in accents so pleading and so full of pain that Millard felt remorse that he should have suggested such a thing.

But this traveling on divergent lines could not but have its effect upon them. He was too well-mannered, she was too good, both were too affectionate, for them to quarrel easily. But there took place something that could hardly be called estrangement; it was rather what a Frenchman might, with a refinement not possible in our idiom, call an éloignement. In spite of their exertions to come together, they drew apart. This process was interrupted by seasons of renewed tenderness. But Phillida's zeal, favored by Mrs. Frankland's meetings, held her back from those pursuits into which Millard would have drawn her, and only a general interest in her altruistic aims was possible to him. Again and again he made some exertion to enter into her pursuits, but he could never get any farther than he could go by the aid of his check-book. Once or twice she went with him to some public entertainment, but those social pursuits to which he was habituated she avoided as dissipations. Thus they loved each other, but it is pitiful to love as they did, while unable to conceal from themselves that a gulf lay between the main tastes and pursuits of the one and the other.

XVI.
A SÉANCE AT MRS. VAN HORNE'S.

The Bible reader was no polemic. People of every sect were gathered under the wings of her sympathies. In vain dogmatic advisers warned her against Unitarians who believe too little, and Swedenborgians who believe too much. Mrs. Frankland's organ of judgment lay in her affections and emotions, and those who felt as she felt were accepted without contradiction, or, as she put it, mostly in Scripture phrase, which she delivered in a rich orotund voice: "Let us receive him that is weak in the faith, but not to doubtful disputation."

A certain sort of combativeness she had, but it was combativeness with the edge taken off. It served to direct her choice of topics, but not to give asperity or polemical form to her discourses. Suddenly introduced to the very heart of Vanity Fair, she had caught her first inspiration by opposition, and this led her to hold forth on such themes as consecration. But as her acquaintance with people of wealth extended she found that even they, conservative by very force of abundance, were affected by the unbelieving spirit of a critical age. The very prosperous are partly under shelter from the prevailing intellectual currents of their time. Those whose attention is engrossed by things are in so far shut out from the appeal of ideas. But thought is very penetrating; it will reach by conduction what it can not attain by radiation. An intellectual movement touches the highest and the lowest with difficulty, but it does at length affect in a measure even those whose minds are narcotized by abundance as well as those whose brains are fagged by too much toil and care. When Mrs. Frankland became aware that there was unbelief, latent and developed, among her hearers, the prow of her oratory veered around, and faith became now, as consecration had been before, the pole-star toward which this earnest and clever woman aimed. With such a mind as hers the topic under consideration becomes for the time supreme. Solemnly insisting on a renunciation of all possibility of merit as a condition precedent to faith, she proceeded to exalt belief itself into the most meritorious of acts. This sort of paradox is common to all popular religious teachers.

Mrs. Frankland's new line of talk about the glories of faith had a disadvantage for Phillida in that it also fell in with a tendency of her nature and with the habits nourished in her by her father. Millard thought he had reached the depths of her life in coming to know about her work among the poor, but a woman's motives are apt to be more involved than a man imagines or than she can herself quite understand. Below the philanthropic Phillida lay the devout Phillida, who believed profoundly that in her devotions she was able to touch hands with the ever-living God himself. Under the stimulus of Mrs. Frankland's words this belief became so absorbing that the common interests of life became to her remote and almost unreal. Her work in the Mission was more and more her life, and perhaps the necessity for accommodating herself a little to the habits and tastes of a lover was her main preservative from a tendency to degenerate into a devotee.

While Mrs. Frankland aroused others, her eloquence also influenced the orator herself. Advocacy increased the force of conviction, and the growing intensity of conviction in turn reinforced the earnestness of advocacy. Irreverent people applied an old joke and called her "the apostle to the genteels," and in the region to which she seemed commissioned the warmth of her zeal was not likely to work harm. What effect it had was in the main good. But the material in her hands was only combustible in a slow way; the plutocratic conscience is rarely inflammable—for the most part it smolders like punk. Nor was Mrs. Frankland herself in any danger of being carried by her enthusiasms into fanaticism of action. However her utterances might savor of ultraism, she was conservative enough in practical matters to keep a sort of "Truce of God" with the world as she found it.

But to Phillida, susceptible as a saint on the road to beatification, the gradually augmented fervor of Mrs. Frankland's declamation worked evil. It was especially painful to Agatha that her sister was propelled by this influence farther and farther out of the safe lines of commonplace feeling and action, and that every wind from Mrs. Frankland's quarter of the heavens tended to drift her farther and farther away from her lover. Agatha's indignation broke out into all sorts of talk against Mrs. Frankland, whom she did not scruple to denounce for a Pharisee, binding heavy burdens on the back of poor Phillida, but never touching them with her own little finger.

Mrs. Frankland's discourses on faith reached their zenith on a January day, when the carriage wheels that rolled in front of Mrs. Van Horne's made a ringing almost like the breaking of glass in the hard frozen snow of the streets, and when the luxurious comfort within the house was the more deliciously appreciable from the deadly frostiness of the bone-piercing wind without. Only Phillida of all the throng found her comfort disturbed by remembering the coachmen who returned for their mistresses before the end of the discourse. It cost those poor fellows a pang to do despite to their wonted dignity of demeanor by smiting their arms against their bodies to keep from perishing. But even a coachman accustomed to regard himself as the main representative of the unbending perpendicularity of a ten-million family must give way a little before a January north wind in the middle of a cold wave, when his little fur cape becomes a mockery and his hard high hat a misery. However admirable Mrs. Frankland's prolonged sessions may have seemed to the ladies with tear-stained cheeks within the house, it appeared far from laudable as seen from the angle of a coachman's box.

The address on this day followed a reading of the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, which is itself the rhapsody of an eloquent man upon faith. If this were written, as some suppose, by Apollos, the orator of the early Church, one may almost fancy that he reads here a bit of one of those addresses wherein speaker and hearer are lifted up together above the meanness and exigencies of mere realism. Mrs. Frankland accompanied the reading of this summary of faith's victory by a comment consisting largely of modern instances carefully selected and told with the tact of a raconteur, so as to leave the maximum impression of each incident unimpaired by needless details. Some of these stories were little short of miraculous; but they were dignified by the manner of telling, which never for an instant degenerated into the babble of a mere wonder-monger.

As usual, Mrs. Frankland, or the oratorical part of her, which was quite the majority of her mind, was carried away by the force of her own speech, and in lauding the success of faith it seemed to her most praiseworthy to push her eulogies unfalteringly to the extreme. You are not to understand that by doing this she vociferated or indulged in vehement gesture. He is only a bastard orator who fancies that loudness and shrillness of tone can enforce conviction. When Mrs. Frankland felt herself about to say extravagant things she intuitively set off her transcendent utterances by assuming a calm demeanor and the air of one who expresses with judicial deliberation the most assured and long-meditated conclusions. So to-day she closed her little Oxford Bible and laid it on the richly inlaid table before her, deliberately depositing her handkerchief upon it and looking about before she made her peroration, which was in something like the following words, delivered with impressive solemnity in a deep, rich voice:

"Why should we always praise faith for what it has done? Has God changed? Faith is as powerful to-day as ever it was since this old world began. If the sick are not healed, if the dead are not raised to-day, be sure it is not God's fault. I am asked if I believe in faith-cure. There is the Bible. It abounds in the divine healing. Nowhere are we told that faith shall some day cease to work wonders. The arm of the Lord is not shortened. O ye of little faith! the victory is within your reach, if you will but rise and seize upon it. I see a vision of a new Church yet to come that shall believe, and, believing as those of old believed, shall see wonders such as the faithful of old saw. The sick shall be healed; women shall receive their dead raised to life again. Why not now? Rise up, O believing heart, and take the Lord at his word!"

Perhaps Mrs. Frankland did not intend that declamation should be accepted at its face value; certainly she did not expect it.

After a hymn, beautifully and touchingly sung, and a brief prayer, ladies put on their sealskin sacques, thrust their jeweled hands into their muffs, and went out to beckon their impatient coachmen, and to carry home with them the solemn impressions made by the discourse, which were in most cases too vague to produce other than a sentimental result. Yet one may not scatter fire with safety unless he can be sure there are no dangerous combustibles within reach. The harm of credulity is that it is liable to set a great flame a-going whenever it reaches that which will burn. A belief in witches is comparatively innocuous until it finds favorable conditions, as at Salem a couple of centuries ago, but, in favorable conditions, the idle speculations of a pedant, or the chimney-corner chatter of old women, may suddenly become as destructive as a pestilence.

It was in the sincere and susceptible soul of Phillida that Mrs. Frankland's words had their full effect. The lust after perfection—the realest peril of great souls—was hers, and she was stung and humiliated by Mrs. Frankland's rebuke to her lack of faith, for the words so impressively spoken seemed to her like a divine message. The whole catalogue of worthies in the eleventh of Hebrews rose up to reprove her.

"I suppose Mrs. Frankland's been talking some more of her stuff," said Agatha at the dinner that evening. "I declare, Phillida, you're a victim of that woman. She isn't so bad. She doesn't mean what she says to be taken as she says it. People always make allowances for mere preaching, you know. But you just swallow it all, and then you get to be so poky a body has no comfort in life. There, now, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings," she added, as she saw the effort her sister was making at self-control.

Phillida lay awake that night long after the normal Agatha, with never an aspiration of the lofty sort, slept the blessed sleep of the heedless. And while the feeble glow of the banked-down fire in the grate draped the objects in the room with grotesque shadows, she went over again the bead-roll of faith in the eleventh of Hebrews and heard again the response of her conscience to the solemn appeal of Mrs. Frankland, and prayed for an increase of faith, and went to sleep at last reflecting on the faith like a germinant mustard grain that should upheave the very mountains and cast them into the midst of the sea.

XVII.
A FAITH CURE.

The next day the cold wave had begun to let go a little, and there were omens of a coming storm. The forenoon Phillida gave to domestic industry of one sort and another, but in the afternoon she put on her overshoes against icy pavements, and set out for a visit to Wilhelmina Schulenberg, remembering how lonesome the invalid must be in wintry weather. There were few loiterers on the sidewalks on such a day, but Phillida was pretty sure of a recognition from somebody by the time she reached Avenue A, for her sympathetic kindness had made friends for her beyond those with whom she came into immediate contact as a Sunday-school teacher.

"O Miss Callender," said a thinly clad girl of thirteen, with chattering teeth, and arms folded against her body for warmth, rocking from one foot to the other, as she stood in the door of a tenement house, "this is hard weather for poor folks, ain't it?" And then, unable longer to face the penetrating rawness of the east wind, she turned and ran up the stairs.

Phillida's meditations as she walked were occupied with what Mrs. Frankland had said the day before. She reflected that if she herself only possessed the necessary faith she might bring healing to many suffering people. Why not to Wilhelmina? With this thought there came a drawing back—that instinctive resistance of human nature to anything out of the conventional and mediocre; a resistance that in a time of excitement often saves us from absurdity at the expense of reducing us to commonplace. But in Phillida this conservatism was counteracted by a quick imagination in alliance with a passion for moral excellence, both warmed by the fire of youth; and in all ventures youth counts for much.

"Dat is coot; you gomes to see Mina wunst more already," said Mrs. Schulenberg, whom Phillida encountered on the second flight of stairs, descending with a market-basket on her arm. She was not the strong-framed peasant, but of lighter build and somewhat finer fiber than the average immigrant, and her dark hair and eyes seemed to point to South Germany as her place of origin.

"Wilhelmina she so badly veels to-day," added Mrs. Schulenberg. "I don' know"—and she shook her head ominously—"I vas mos' afraid to leef her all py herself already. She is with bein' zick zo tired. She dalk dreadful dis mornin' already; I don' know." And the mother went on down the stairs shaking her head dolefully, while Phillida climbed up to the Schulenberg apartment and entered without knocking, going straight over to the couch where the emaciated girl lay, and kissing her.

Wilhelmina embraced her while Phillida pushed back the hair from the pale, hard forehead with something like a shudder, for it was only skin and skull. In the presence of sympathy Wilhelmina's mood of melancholy desperation relaxed, and she began to shed tears.

"O Miss Callender, you have from black thoughts saved me to-day," she said in a sobbing voice, speaking with a slight German accent. "If I could only die. Here I drag down the whole family already. I make them sorry. Poor Rudolph, he might be somebody if away off he would go wunst; but no, he will not leave me. It is such a nice girl he love; I can see that he love her. But he will say nothing at all. He feels so he must not anyway leave his poor sister; and I hate myself and my life that for all my family is unfortunate. Black thoughts will come. If, now, I was only dead; if I could only find some way myself to put out of the way wunst, for Rudolph it would be better, and after a while the house would not any more so sorry be. Last night I thought much about it; but when falling asleep I saw you plain come in the door and shake your head, and I say, Miss Callender think it wicked. She will not let me. But I am so wicked and unfortunate."

Here the frail form was shaken by hysterical weeping that cut off speech. Phillida shed tears also, and one of them dropped on the emaciated hand of Wilhelmina. Phillida quickly wiped it away with her handkerchief, but another took its place.

"Let it be, Miss Callender," sobbed Wilhelmina; "it will surely make me not so wicked."

She looked up wistfully at Phillida and essayed to speak; then she turned her eyes away, while she said:

"If now, Miss Callender, you would—but may be you will think that it is wicked also."

"Speak freely, dear," said Phillida, softly; "it will do you good to tell me all—all that is in your heart."

"If you would only pray that I might die, then it would be granted already, maybe. I am such a curse, a dreadful curse, to this house."

"No, no; you mustn't say that. Your sickness is a great misfortune to your family, but it is not your fault. It is a greater misfortune to you. Why should you pray to die? Why not pray to get well?"

"That is too hard, Miss Callender. If now I had but a little while been sick. But I am so long. I can not ever get well. Oh, the medicines I have took, the pills and the sarsaparillas and the medicine of the German doctor! And then the American doctor he burnt my back. No; I can't get well any more. It is better as I die. Pray that I die. Will you not?"

"But if God can make you die he can make you well. One is no harder than the other for him."

"No, no; not if I was but a little while sick. But you see it is years since I was sick."

This illogical ground of skepticism Phillida set herself to combat. She read from Wilhelmina's sheepskin-bound Testament, printed in parallel columns in English and German, the story of the miracle at the Pool of Bethesda, the story of the woman that touched the hem of the garment of Jesus, and of other cures told in the New Testament with a pathos and dignity not to be found in similar modern recitals.

Then Phillida, her soul full of hope, talked to Mina of the power of faith, going over the ground traversed by Mrs. Frankland. She read the eleventh of Hebrews, and her face was transformed by the earnestness of her own belief as she advanced. Call it mesmerism, or what you will, she achieved this by degrees, that Wilhelmina thought as she thought, and felt as she felt. The poor girl with shaken nerves and enfeebled vitality saw a vision of health. She watched Phillida closely, and listened eagerly to her words, for to her they were words of life.

"Now, Mina, if you believe, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, all things are possible."

The girl closed her eyes a moment, then she opened them with her face radiant.

"Miss Callender, I do believe."

Already her face was changing under the powerful influence of the newly awakened hope. She folded her hands peacefully, and closed her eyes, whispering:

"Pray, Miss Callender; pray!"

Phillida laid down the Bible and solemnly knelt by the invalid, taking hold of one of her hands. It would have been impossible to listen to the prayer of one so passionately sincere and so believingly devout without falling into sympathy with it. To the bed-ridden and long-despairing Wilhelmina it made God seem something other than she had ever thought him. An hour before she could have believed that God might be persuaded to take her life in answer to prayer, but not that he could be brought to restore her. The moment that Phillida began to pray, a new God appeared to her mind—Phillida's God. Wilhelmina followed the action of Phillida's mind as a hypnotized subject does that of the dominant agent: as Phillida believed, so she believed; Phillida's confidence became hers, and the weak nerves tingled all the way from the nerve-centers with new life.

"Now, Wilhelmina," said Phillida at length, slowly rising from her knees and looking steadily into the invalid's eyes, "the good Lord will make you whole. Rise up and sit upon the bed, believing with all your heart."

In a sort of ecstasy the invalid set to work to obey. There was a hideous trick of legerdemain in the last generation, by which an encoffined skeleton was made to struggle to its feet. Something like this took place as Mina's feeble arms were brought into the most violent effort to assist her to rise. But a powerful emotion, a tremendous hope, stimulated the languid nerves; the almost disused muscles were galvanized into power; and Wilhelmina succeeded at length in sitting upright without support for the first time in years. When she perceived this actually accomplished she cried out: "O God! I am getting well!"

Wilhelmina's mother had come to the top of the stairs just as Phillida had begun to pray. She paused without the door and listened to the prayer and to what followed. She now burst into the room to see her daughter sitting up on the side of her couch; and then there were embraces and tears, and ejaculations of praise to God in German and in broken English.

"Sit there, Mina, and believe with all your heart," said Phillida, who was exteriorly the calmest of the three; "I will come back soon."

Wilhelmina did as she was bidden. The shock of excitement thus prolonged was overcoming the sluggishness of her nerves. The mother could not refrain from calling in a neighbor who was passing by the open door, and the news of Mina's partial restoration spread through the building. When Phillida got back from the Diet Kitchen with some savory food, the doorway was blocked; but the people stood out of her way with as much awe as they would had she worn an aureole, and she passed in and put the food before Wilhelmina, who ate with a relish she hardly remembered to have known before. The spectators dropped back into the passageway, and Phillida gently closed the door.

"Now, Wilhelmina, lie down and rest. To-morrow you will walk a little. Keep on believing with all your heart."

Having seen the patient, who was fatigued with unwonted exertion, sleeping quietly, Phillida returned home. She said nothing of her experiences of the day, but Millard, who called in the evening, found her more abstracted and less satisfactory than ever. For her mind continually reverted to her patient.

XVIII.
FAITH-DOCTOR AND LOVER.

The next day, though a great snow-storm had burst upon the city before noon, Phillida made haste after luncheon to work her way first to the Diet Kitchen and then to the Schulenberg tenement. When she got within the shelter of the doorway of the tenement house she was well-nigh exhausted, and it was half a minute before she could begin the arduous climbing of the stairs.

"I thought you would not come," said Wilhelmina with something like a cry of joy. "I have found it hard to keep on believing, but still I have believed and prayed. I was afeard if till to-morrow you waited the black thoughts would come back again. Do you think I can sit up wunst more already?"

"If you have faith; if you believe."

Under less excitement than that of the day before, Mina found it hard to get up; but at length she succeeded. Then she ate the appetizing food that Phillida set before her. Meantime the mother, deeply affected, took her market-basket and went out, lest somehow her presence should be a drawback to her daughter's recovery.

While the feeble Wilhelmina was eating, Phillida drew the only fairly comfortable chair in the room near to the stove, and, taking from a bed some covering, she spread it over the back and seat of the chair. Then, when the meal was completed, she read from the Acts of the Apostles of the man healed at the gate of the temple by Simon Peter. With the book open in her hand, as she sat, she offered a brief fervent prayer.

"Now, Wilhelmina, doubt nothing," she said. "In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, rise up and walk!"

The invalid had again caught the infection of Phillida's faith, and with a strong effort, helping herself by putting her hand on Phillida's shoulder, she brought herself at length to her feet, where she stood a moment, tottering as though about to fall.

"Walk to the chair, dear, nothing wavering," commanded Phillida, and Mina, with much trembling, let go of Phillida's shoulder, and with sadly unsteady steps tottered forward far enough to lay hold of the back of the chair, and at length succeeded, with much ado, in sitting down without assistance. For years she had believed herself forever beyond hope of taking a step. She leaned back against the pillow placed behind her by Phillida, and wept for very joy.

"But, Miss Callender," she said after a while, "the man you read about in the Bible was made all well at once, and he walked and leaped; but I—"

"Perhaps our faith isn't strong enough," said Phillida. "Maybe it is better for us that you should get well slowly, like the man that Jesus cured of blindness, who, when he first saw men, thought they looked like walking trees. Let us be thankful for what we have, and not complain."

In a few weeks Wilhelmina's mental stimulation and graduated physical exercise had made her able to sit up nearly all day, to walk feebly about the house, and even to render some assistance in such affairs as could be attended to while sitting. The recovery, though it went no farther, was remarkable enough to attract much attention, and the fame of it spread far and wide among the people in the eastern avenues and those connected with the Mission.

This new development of Phillida's life increased her isolation. She could not speak to her family about her faith-cures, nor to Mrs. Hilbrough, and she did not like to confide even in Mrs. Frankland, who would, she felt sure, make too much of the matter. Most of all, it was not in her power to bring herself to say anything to Millard about it. The latter felt, during the three or four weeks that followed the treatment of Wilhelmina, that the veil between him and the inner life of Phillida was growing more opaque. He found no ground to quarrel with Phillida; she was cordial, affectionate, and dutiful toward him, but he felt, with a quickness of intuition characteristic of him, that there was some new cause of constraint between them.

"Phillida," he said one evening, a month after Phillida's work as a faith-doctor had begun, "I wish you would tell me more about your mission work."

"I don't like to speak of that," she replied. "It is too much like boasting of what I am doing." She had no sooner said this than she regretted it; her fierce conscience rose up and charged her with uncandid speech. But how could she be candid?

"I don't like to think," said Millard, "that so large a part of your life—a part that lies so near to your heart—should be shut out from me. I can't do your kind of work. But I can admire it. Won't you tell me about it?"

Phillida felt a keen pang. Had it been a question of her ordinary work in the months that were past she might easily have spoken of it. But this faith-healing would be dangerous ground with Millard. She knew in her heart that it would be better to tell him frankly about it, and face the result. But with him there she could not get courage to bring on an immediate conflict between the affection that was so dear and the work that was so sacred to her.

"Charley," she said slowly, holding on to her left hand as though for safety, "I'm afraid I was not very—very candid in the answer I gave you just now."

"Oh, don't say anything, or tell me anything, dear, that gives you pain," he said with quick delicacy; "and something about this does pain you."

Phillida spoke now in a lower tone, looking down at her hands as she said, with evident effort: "Because you are so good, I must try to be honest with you. There are reasons why I hesitate to tell—to tell—you all about what I am doing. At least this evening, though I know I ought to, and I will—I will—if you insist on it."

"No, dear; no. I will not hear it now."

"But I will tell you all some time. It's nothing very bad, Charley. At least I don't think it is."

"It couldn't be, I'm sure. Nothing bad could exist about you"; and he took her hand in his. "Don't say any more to-night. You are nervous and tired. But some other time, when you feel like it, speak freely. It won't do for us not to open our hearts and lives to each other. If we fail to live openly and truthfully, our little boat will go ashore, Phillida dear—will be wrecked or stranded before we know it."

His voice was full of pleading. How could she refuse to tell him all? But by all the love she felt for him, sitting there in front of her, with his left hand on his knee, looking in her face, and speaking in such an honest, manly way, she was restrained from exposing to him a phase of her life that would seem folly to him while it was a very holy of holies to her. The alternative was cruel.

"Another time, Charley, I mean to tell you all," she said; and she knew when she said it that procrastination would not better the matter, and in the silence that ensued she was just about to change her resolve and unfold the whole matter at once.

But Millard said: "Don't trouble yourself. I'm sorry I have hurt you. Remember that I trust you implicitly. If you feel a delicacy in speaking to me about anything, let it go."

The conversation after this turned on indifferent matters; but it remained constrained, and Millard took his leave early.

XIX.
PROOF POSITIVE.

The more Millard thought of the mysterious reserve of Phillida, the more he was disturbed by it, and the next Sunday but one he set out at an earlier hour than usual to go to Avenue C, not this time with a comfortable feeling that his visit would be a source of cheer to his aunt, but rather hoping that her quiet spirit might somehow relieve the soreness of his heart. It chanced that on this fine winter Sunday he found her alone, except for the one-year-old little girl.

"I let the children all go to Sunday-school," she said, "except baby, and father has gone to his meeting, you know."

"His meeting? I did not know that he had any," said Millard.

"W'y yes, Charley; I thought you knew. Henry always had peculiar views," she said, laughing gently, as was her wont, at her husband's oddities. "He has especially disliked preachers and doctors. Lately he has got the notion that the churches do not believe the Bible literally enough. There were two Swedes and one Swiss in his shop who agreed with him. From reading the Bible in their way and reading other books and papers they have adopted what is called Christian Science. They have found some other men and women who believe as they do, and a kind of a Christian Science woman doctor who talks to them a little—a good enough woman in her way, I suppose—and they think that by faith, or rather by declaring that there is no such thing as a real disease, and believing themselves well, they can cure all diseases."

"All except old age and hunger?" queried Millard.

The aunt smiled, and went on. "But father and his woman doctor or preacher don't agree with your Miss Callender. They say her cures are all right as far as they go, but that she is only a babe, unable to take strong meat. The Christian Science woman in Fourteenth street, now, they say, knows all about it, and works her cures scientifically, and not blindly as Miss Callender does."

This allusion to cures by Phillida set Millard into a whirl of feeling. That she had been doing something calculated to make her the subject of talk brought a rush of indignant feeling, but all his training as a man of society and as a man of business inclined him to a prudent silence under excitement. He turned his derby hat around and around, examining the crown by touch, and then, reversing it, he scrutinized the address of the hatter who did not make it. Though he had come all the way to Avenue C to make a confidante of his aunt, he now found it impossible to do so. She had rejoiced so much in his betrothal to her friend, how could he let her see how far apart he and Phillida had drifted? For some minutes he managed to talk with her about her own family matters, and then turned back to Phillida again.

"Tell me, Aunt Hannah, all you know about Miss Callender's cures. I don't like to ask her because she and I disagree so widely on some things that we do not like to talk about them."

His aunt saw that Charley was profoundly disturbed. She therefore began with some caution, as treading on unknown ground, in talking with him about Phillida.

"I don't know what to think about these things, Charley. But in anything I say you must understand that I love Miss Callender almost as much as you do, and if anybody can cure by faith she can. In fact, she has had wonderful success in some cures. Besides, she's no money-maker, like the woman doctor in Fourteenth street, who takes pay for praying over you, and rubbing your head, maybe. You know about the cure of Wilhelmina Schulenberg, of course?"

"No; not fully. We haven't liked to talk about it. Wilhelmina is the poor creature that has been in bed so long."

This mere fencing was to cover the fact that Millard had not heard anything of the miracle in Wilhelmina's case. But seeing his aunt look at him inquiringly, he added:

"Is she quite cured, do you think—this Miss Schulenberg?"

"No; but she can sit up and walk about. She got better day after day under Miss Callender's praying, but lately, I think, she is at a standstill. Well, that was the first, and it made a great talk. And I don't see but that it is very remarkable. Everybody in the tenement house was wild about it, and Miss Callender soon came to be pointed at by the children on the street as 'the woman doctor that can make you well by praying over you.' Then there was the wife of the crockery-store man in Avenue A. She had hysterical fits, or something of the sort, and she got well after Miss Callender visited her three or four times. And another woman thought her arm was paralyzed, but Miss Callender made her believe, and she got so she could use it. But old Mr. Greenlander, the picture-frame maker in Twentieth street, didn't get any better. In fact, he never pretended to believe that he would."

"What was the matter with him?" asked Millard, his lips compressed and his brows contracted.

"Oh, he had a cataract over his eye. He's gone up to the Eye and Ear Hospital to have it taken off. I don't suppose faith could be expected to remove that."

"It doesn't seem to work in surgical cases," said Millard.

"But several people with nervous troubles and kind of breakdowns have got better or got well, and naturally they are sounding the praises of Miss Callender's faith," added his aunt.

"Do you think Phillida likes all this talk about her?"

"No. This talk about her is like hot coals to her feet. She suffers dreadfully. She said last Sunday that she wondered if Christ did not shrink from the talk of the crowds that followed him more than he did from crucifixion itself. She is wonderful, and I don't wonder the people believe that she can work miracles. If anybody can in these days, she is the one."

Millard said nothing for a time; he picked at the lining of his hat, and then put it down on the table and looked out of the window. His irritation against Phillida had by this time turned into affectionate pity for her self-imposed suffering—a pity rendered bitter by his inability to relieve her.

"Do you think that Phillida begins to suspect that perhaps she has made a mistake?" he asked after a while.

"No. I'm not so sure she has. No doctor cures in all cases, and even Christ couldn't heal the people in Nazareth who hadn't much faith."

"She will make herself a byword in the streets," said Millard in a tone that revealed to his aunt his shame and anguish.

"Charley," said Mrs. Martin, "don't let yourself worry too much about Miss Callender. She is young yet. She may be wrong or she may be right. I don't say but she goes too far. She's a house plant, you know. She has seen very little of the world. If she was like other girls she would just take up with the ways of other people and not make a stir. But she has set out to do what she thinks is right at all hazards. Presently she will get her lesson, and some of her oddities will disappear, but she'll never be just like common folks. Mind my words, Charley, she's got the making of a splendid woman if you'll only give her time to get ripe."

"I believe that with all my heart," said Millard, with a sigh.

"I tell you, Charley, I do believe that her prayers have a great effect, for the Bible teaches that. Besides, she don't talk any of the nonsense of father's Christian Science woman. I can understand what Phillida's about. But Miss what's-her-name, in Fourteenth street, can't explain to save her life, so's you can understand, how she cures people, or what she's about, except to earn money in some way easier than hard work. There comes your uncle, loaded to the muzzle for a dispute," said Aunt Hannah, laughing mischievously as she heard her husband's step on the stairs.

Uncle Martin greeted Charley with zest. It was no fun to talk to his wife, who never could be drawn into a discussion, but held her husband's vagaries in check as far as possible by little touches of gentle ridicule. But Mr. Martin was sure that he could overwhelm Charley Millard, even though he might not convince him. So when he had said, "How-are-yeh, and glad to see yeh, Charley, and hope yer well, and how's things with you?" he sat down, and presently opened his battery.

"You see, Charley, our Miss Bowyer, the Christian Science healer, is well-posted about medicine and the Bible. She says that the world is just about to change. Sin and misery are at the bottom of sickness, and all are going to be done away with by spirit power. God and the angel world are rolling away the rock from the sepulchre, and the sleeping spirit of man is coming forth. People are getting more susceptible to magnetic and psy—psy-co-what-you-may-call-it influences. This is bringing out new diseases that the old doctors are only able to look at with dumb amazement."

Here Uncle Martin turned his thumbs outward with a flourish, and the air of a lad who had solved a problem on a blackboard. At the same time he dropped his head forward and gazed at Charley, who was not even amused.

"What are her proofs?" demanded Millard, wearily.

"Proofs?" said Uncle Martin, with a sniff, as he reared his head again. "Proofs a plenty. You just come around and hear her explain once about the vermic—I can't say the word—the twistifying motion of the stomach and what happens when the nerve-force gets a set-back and this motion kind of winds itself upward instead of downward, and the nerve-force all flies to the head. Proofs?" Here Uncle Martin paused, ill at ease. "Just notice the cases. The proof is in the trying of it. The cures are wonderful. You first get the patient into a state where you can make him think as you do. Then you will that he shall forget all about his diseases. You make him feel well, and you've done it."

"I suppose you could cure him by forgetfulness easily enough. I saw an old soldier with one leg yesterday; he was drunk in the street. And he had forgotten entirely that one leg was gone. But he didn't seem to walk any better."

"That don't count, Charley, and you're only making fun. You see there is a philosophy in this, and you ought to hear it from somebody that can explain it."

"I'd like to find somebody who could," said Charley.

"Well, now, how's this? Miss Bowyer—she's a kind of a preacher as well as a doctor—she says that God is good, and therefore he couldn't create evil. You see? Well, now, God created everything that is, so there can not be any evil. At least it can't have any real, independent—what-you-may-call-it existence. You see, Charley?"

"Yes; what of it?"

"Well, then, sickness and sin are evil. But this argument proves that they don't really exist at all. They're only magic-lantern shadows so to speak. You see? Convince the patient that he is well, and he is well." Here Uncle Martin, having pointed out the easy road to universal health, looked in solemn triumph from under his brows.

"Yes," said Millard, "that's just an awfully good scheme. But if you work your argument backward it will prove that as evil exists there isn't any good God. But if it's true that sin and disease have no real existence, we'll do away with hanging and electrocution, as they call it, and just send for Miss Bowyer to convince a murderer that murder is an evil, and so it can't have any real independent existence in a universe made by a good God."

"Well, Charley, you make fun of serious things. You might as well make fun of the miracles in the Bible."

"Now," said Millard, "are the cures wrought by Christian Science miracles, or are they founded on philosophy?"

"They're both, Charley. It's what they call the psy-co-what-you-may-call-it mode of cure. But it's all the same as the miracles of the Bible," said Uncle Martin.

"Oh, it is," said Millard, gayly, for this tilt had raised his spirits. "Now the miracles in the Bible are straight-out miracles. Nobody went around in that day to explain the vermicular motion of the stomach or the upward action of nerve-force, or the psychopathic value of animal magnetism. Some of the Bible miracles would stump a body to believe, if they were anywhere else but in the Bible; but you just believe in them as miracles by walking right straight up to them, looking the difficulty in the eye, and taking them as they are because you ought to." Here Charley saw his aunt laughing gently at his frank way of stating the processes of his own mind. Smiling in response, he added: "You believe them, or at least I do, because I can't have my religion without them. But your Christian psychopathists bring a lot of talk about a science, and they don't seem to know just whether God is working the miracle or they are doing it by magnetism, or mind-cure, or psychopathy, or whether the disease isn't a sort of plaguey humbug anyhow, and the patient a fool who has to be undeceived."

"W'y, you see, Charley, we know more nowadays, and we understand all about somnambulism and hyp-what-you-may-call-it, and we understand just how the miracles in the Bible were worked. God works by law—don't you see?"

"The apostles did not seem to understand it?" asked Charley.

"No; they were mere faith-doctors, like Miss Callender, for instance, doing their works in a blind sort of way."

"The apostles will be mere rushlights when you get your Christian Science well a-going," said Charley, seriously. Then he rose to leave, having no heart to await the return of the children.

"Of course," said Uncle Martin, "the world is undergoing a change, Charley. A great change. Selfishness and disease shall vanish away, and the truth of science and Christianity prevail." Uncle Martin was now standing, and swinging his hands horizontally in outward gestures, with his elbows against his sides.

"Well, I wish to goodness there was some chance of realizing your hopes," said Charley, conciliatorily. "I must go. Good-by, Uncle Martin; good-by, Aunt Hannah."

Uncle Martin said good-by, and come again, Charley, and always glad to see you, you know, and good luck to you. And Millard went down the stairs and bent his steps homeward. As the exhilaration produced by his baiting of Uncle Martin's philosophy died away, his heart sank with sorrowful thoughts of Phillida and her sufferings, and with indignant and mortifying thoughts of how she would inevitably be associated in people's minds with mercenary quacks and disciples of a sham science.

He would go to see her at once. The defeat of Uncle Martin had given him courage. He would turn the same battery on Phillida. No; not the same. He could not ridicule her. She was never quite ridiculous. Her plane of motive was so high that his banter would be a desecration. It was not in his heart to add to the asperity of her martyrdom by any light words. But perhaps he could find some way to bring her to a more reasonable course.

It was distinctly out of his way to cross Tompkins Square again, but in his present mood there was a satisfaction to him in taking a turn through the square, which was associated in his mind with a time when his dawning affection for Phillida was dimmed by no clouds of separation. Excitement pushed him forward, and a fine figure he was as he strode along with eager and elastic steps, his head erect and his little cane balanced in his fingers. In the middle of the square his meditation was cut short in a way most unwelcome in his present frame of mind.

"It is Mr. Millard, isn't it?" he heard some one say, and, turning, he saw before him Wilhelmina Schulenberg, not now seated helpless in the chair he had given her, but hanging on the arm of her faithful Rudolph.

"How do you do, Miss Schulenberg?" said Millard, examining her with curiosity.

"You see I am able to walk wunst again," she said. "It is to Miss Callender and her prayers that I owe it already."

"But you are not quite strong," said Millard. "Do you get better?"

"Not so much now. It is my faith is weak. If I only could believe already, it would all to me be possible, Mr. Millard. But it is something to walk on my feet, isn't it, Mr. Millard?"

"Indeed it is, Miss Schulenberg. It must make your good brother glad."

Rudolph received this polite indirect compliment a little foolishly, but appreciation from a fine gentleman did him good, and after Charley had gone he was profuse in his praises of "Miss Callender's man," as he called him.

XX.
DIVISIONS.

Millard went no farther through the square, but turned toward Tenth street, and through that to Second Avenue, and so uptownward. But how should he argue with Phillida? He had seen an indisputable example of the virtue of her prayers. Though he could not believe in the miraculous character of the cure, how should he explain it? That Wilhelmina had been shamming was incredible, that her ailments were not imaginary was proven by the fact of her recovery being but partial. To deny the abstract possibility of such a cure seemed illogical from his own standpoint. Even the tepid rector of St. Matthias had occasionally homilized in a vague way about the efficacy of faith and the power of prayer, but the rector seemed to think that this potency was for the most part a matter of ancient history, for his illustrations were rarely drawn from anything more modern than the lives of the Church fathers, and of the female relatives of the Church fathers, such as Saint Monica. Millard could not see any ground on which he could deny the reality of the miracle in the Schulenberg case, but his common sense was that of a man of worldly experience, a common sense which stubbornly refuses to believe the phenomenal or extraordinary, even when unable to formulate a single reason for incredulity.

After an internal debate he decided not to call on Phillida this afternoon. It might lead to a scene, a scene might bring on a catastrophe. But, as fortune would have it, Phillida was on her return from the Mission, and her path coincided with his, so that he encountered her in Tenth street. He walked home with her, asking after her health and talking commonplaces to escape conversation. He went in—there was no easy way to avoid it, had he desired. She set him a chair, and drew up the shades, and then took a seat near him.

"I've been at Aunt Martin's to-day," he said.

"Have you?" she asked with a sort of trepidation in her voice.

"Yes." Then after a pause he edged up to what he wished to say by adding: "I had a curious talk with Uncle Martin, who has got his head full of the greatest jumble of scientific terms which he can not remember, and nonsense about what he calls Christian Science. He says he learned it from Miss Bowyer, a Christian Science talker. Do you know her?"

"No; I have only heard of her from Mr. Martin, and I don't think I ought to judge her by what is reported of her teaching. Maybe it is not so bad. One doesn't like to be judged at second-hand," she said, looking at him with a quick glance.

"Especially when Uncle Martin is the reporter," he replied.

Meantime Phillida's eyes were inquiring whether he had heard anything about her present course of action.

"I saw Wilhelmina Schulenberg in Tompkins Square to-day," he said, still approaching the inevitable, sidewise.

"Did you?" she asked almost in a whisper. "Was she walking?"

"Yes. Why did you not tell me she was better?"

Phillida looked down. At this moment her reserve with her lover in a matter so personal to herself seemed to her extremely reprehensible.

"I—I was a coward, Charley," she said with a kind of ferocity of remorse. This self-accusation on her part made him unhappy.

"You?" he said. "You are no coward. You are a brave woman." He leaned over and lightly kissed her cheek as he finished speaking.

"I knew that my course would seem foolish to you, and I couldn't bear that you should know. I was afraid it would mortify you."

"You have suffered much yourself, my dear."

She nodded her head, the tears brimming in her eyes at this unexpected sign of sympathy.

"And borne it bravely all alone. And all for a mistake—a cruel mistake."

Millard had not meant to say so much, but his feelings had slipped away from him. However, he softened his words by his action, for he drew out his handkerchief and gently wiped away a tear that had paused a moment in its descent down her cheek.

"How can you say it is a mistake?" she asked. "You saw Wilhelmina yourself."

"Yes; but it is all a misunderstanding, dear. It's all wrong, I tell you. You haven't seen much of life, and you'll be better able to judge when you are older." Here he paused, for of arguments he had none to offer.

"I don't want to see anything of life if a knowledge of the world is to rob me of what is more precious than life itself." Her voice was now firm and resolute, and her tears had ceased.

Millard was angry at he knew not what—at whatever thing human or supernal had bound this burden of misbelief upon so noble a soul as Phillida's. He got up and paced the floor a moment, and then looked out of the window, saying from time to time in response to deprecatory or defensive words of hers, "I tell you, dear, it's a cruel mistake." Now and then he felt an impulse to scold Phillida herself; but his affectionate pity held him back. His irritation had the satisfaction of finding an object on which to vent itself at length when Phillida said:

"If Mrs. Frankland would admit men to her readings, Charley, I'm sure that if you could only hear her explain the Bible—"

"No, thank you," said Millard, tartly. "Mrs. Frankland is eloquent, but she has imposed on you and done you a great deal of harm. Why, Phillida, you are as much superior to that woman as the sky is—" He was about to say, "as the sky is to a mud-puddle," but nothing is so fatal to offhand vigor of denunciation as the confirmed habit of properness. Millard's preference for measured and refined speech got the better of his wrath barely in time, and, after arresting himself a moment, he finished the sentence with more justness as he made a little wave with his right hand—"as the sky is to a scene-painter's illusion."

Then he went on: "But Mrs. Frankland is persuasive and eloquent, and you are too sincere to make allowance for the dash of exaggeration in her words. You won't find her at a mission in Mackerelville. She is dressed in purple by presents from the people who hear her, and Mrs. Hilbrough tells me that Mrs. Benthuysen has just given her a check of a thousand dollars to go to Europe with."

"Why shouldn't they do such things for her? They hardly know what to do with their money, and they ought to be grateful to her," said Phillida with heat. "Charley, I don't like to have you talk so about so good a woman. I know her and love her. You don't know her, and your words seem to me harsh and unjust."

"Well, then forgive me, dear. I forgot that she is your friend. That's the best thing I ever knew about her."

Saying this, he put on his hat and went out lest he should give way again to his now rising indignation against Mrs. Frankland, who, as the real author of Phillida's trouble, in his judgment deserved severer words than he had yet applied to her. But when he had opened the front door he turned back suddenly, distressed that his call had only added to the troubles of Phillida. She sat there, immovable, where he had left her; he crossed the room, bent over her, and kissed her cheek.

"Forgive me, darling; I spoke hastily."

This tenderness overcame Phillida, and she fell to weeping. When she raised her head a moment later Charley had gone, and the full confession she had intended must be deferred.

To a man who has accepted as a divine authority all the conventions of society, hardly anything that could befall a young woman would be more dreadful than to become a subject of notoriety. His present interview with Phillida had thoroughly aroused Millard, and he was resolved to save her from herself by any means within his reach. Again the alternative of an early marriage presented itself. He might hasten the wedding, and then take Phillida to Europe, where the sight of a religious life quite different from her own would tend to widen her views and weaken the ardor of her enthusiasm. He wondered what would be the effect upon her, for instance, of the stack of crutches built up in monumental fashion in one of the chapels of the Church of St. Germain des Près at Paris—the offerings of cripples restored by a Roman Catholic faith-cure. But he reflected that the wedding could be hardly got ready before Lent, and a marriage in Lent was repugnant to him not only as a Churchman but even more as a man known for sworn fealty to the canons of fashionable society, which are more inexorable than ecclesiastical usages, since there is no one high and mighty enough to grant a dispensation from them. It had long been understood that the wedding should take place some time after Easter, and it seemed best not to disturb that arrangement. What he wanted now was some means of checking the mortifying career of Phillida as a faith-doctor.

XXI.
MRS. HILBROUGH'S INFORMATION.

Casting about in his thoughts for an ally, he hit upon Mrs. Hilbrough. In her he would find an old friend of Phillida's who was pretty sure to be free from brain-fogs. He quickly took a resolution to see her. It was too late in the afternoon to walk uptown. On a fine Sunday like this the street cars would not have strap-room left, and the elevated trains would be in a state of extreme compression long before they reached Fourteenth street. He took the best-looking cab he could find in Union Square as the least of inconveniences; and just as the slant sun, descending upon the Jersey lowlands, had set all the windows on the uptown side of the cross streets in a ruddy glow, he alighted at the Hilbrough door, paid his cabman a full day's wages, after the manner of New York, and sent up his card to Mrs. Hilbrough with a message that he hoped it would not incommode her to see him, since he had some inquiries to make. Mrs. Hilbrough descended promptly, and there took place the usual preliminary parley on the subject of the fine day, a parley carried on by Millard with as little knowledge of what he was saying as a phonographic doll has. Then begging her pardon for disturbing her on Sunday afternoon, he asked:

"Have you heard anything about Miss Callender's course as a faith-healer?"

Mrs. Hilbrough took a moment to think before replying. Here was a direct, even abrupt, approach to a matter of delicacy. There was a complete lack of the diplomatic obliquity to be expected in such a case. This was not like Millard, and though his exterior was calm and suave enough from mere force of habit, she quickly formed an opinion of his condition of internal ebullition from his precipitancy.

"I did not hear anything about it until Thursday, two weeks ago, and I learned certainly about it only yesterday," she replied, resting as non-committal as possible until the drift of Millard's inquiry should be disclosed.

"May I ask from whom?" He was now sitting bolt upright, and his words were uttered without any of that pleasing deference of manner that usually characterized his speech.

"From Mrs. Maginnis—Mrs. California Maginnis," she added for the sake of explicitness and with an impulse to relax the tension of Millard's mind by playfulness.

"Mrs. Maginnis?" he said with something like a start. "How does Mrs. Maginnis know anything about what takes place in Mackerelville?"

"It wasn't the Mackerelville case, but one a good deal nearer home, that she was interested in," said Mrs. Hilbrough. "It's too warm here," she added, seeing him wipe his brow with his handkerchief. She put her hand to the bell, but withdrew it without ringing, and then crossed the room and closed the register.

Millard proceeded in a straightforward, businesslike voice, "Tell me, please, what Mrs. Maginnis had to do with Miss Callender's faith-cures?"

"Her relation to them came about through Mrs. Frankland."

"No doubt," said Millard; "I expected to find her clever hand in it."

The mordant tone in which this was said disconcerted Mrs. Hilbrough. She felt that she was in danger of becoming an accomplice in a lovers' quarrel that might prove disastrous to the pretty romance that had begun in her own house. She paused and said:

"I beg pardon, Mr. Millard, but I ought hardly to discuss this with you, if you make it a matter of feeling between you and Phillida. She is my friend—"

"Mrs. Hilbrough," he interrupted, taking a softer tone than before, and leaning forward and resting his left hand on his knee, and again wiping his forehead with his handkerchief, "my whole destiny is involved in the welfare of Phillida Callender. I haven't quarreled with her, but I should like to show her that this faith-curing is a mistake and likely to make her ridiculous. You said that Mrs. Frankland—"

"Mrs. Frankland," said Mrs. Hilbrough, "through somebody connected with the Mackerelville Mission got hold of the story of the cure of a poor German girl somewhere down about what they call Tompkins Square. Is that the name of a square? Well, on Thursday, two weeks ago, when Phillida was not present, Mrs. Frankland told this story—"

"Trotted it out as a fine illustration of faith," broke in Millard, with something between a smile and a sneer, adding, "with Phillida's name attached."

"No, she didn't give the name; she spoke of her as a noble Christian young woman, the daughter of a devoted missionary to the heathen, which made me suspect Phillida. She also alluded to her as a person accustomed to attend these meetings, and again as 'my very dear friend,' and 'my beloved young friend.' Mrs. Maginnis listened eagerly, and longed to know who this was, for she had a little girl troubled with Saint Vitus's dance. She had just been to see Dr. Legammon, the specialist."

"Who always begins his treatment by scaring a patient half to death, I believe, especially if the patient has money," said Millard, who, in his present biting mood, found a grim satisfaction even in snapping at Dr. Legammon's heels.

"He told Mrs. Maginnis that it was an aggravated case of chorea, and that severe treatment would be necessary," continued Mrs. Hilbrough. "There must be eyeglasses, and an operation by an oculist, and perhaps electricity, and it would require nearly a year to cure the child even under Dr. Legammon; and he didn't even give her much assurance that her child would get well at all. He especially excited Mrs. Maginnis's apprehension by saying, 'We must be hopeful, my dear madam.' Mrs. Maginnis, you know, is strung away up above concert-pitch, and this melancholy encouragement threw her into despair, and came near to making her a fit patient for the doctor's specialistic attentions in a private retreat. She couldn't bring herself to have the eyes operated on, or even to have electricity applied. It was just after this first visit to the doctor, while Mrs. Maginnis was in despondency and her usual indecision, that she heard Mrs. Frankland's address in which the cure of the poor girl in the tenement-house was told as an illustration of the power of prayer."

"Mrs. Frankland worked up all the details with striking effect, no doubt," said Millard, with an expression of disgust.

"Well, you know Mrs. Frankland can't help being eloquent. Everybody present was deeply affected as she pictured the scene. As soon as the meeting closed, Mrs. Maginnis, all in a sputter of excitement, I fancy, sailed up to Mrs. Frankland, and laid her troubles before her, and wondered if Mrs. Frankland couldn't get her young friend to pray for her daughter Hilda. Phillida, by solicitation of Mrs. Frankland, visited the Maginnises every day for a week. They sent their carriage for her every afternoon, I believe. At the end of a week 'the motions disappeared,' as Mrs. Maginnis expressed it."

"I believe it isn't uncommon for children to get well of Saint Vitus's dance," said Millard.

"You couldn't make Mrs. Maginnis believe that. She regards it as one of the most remarkable cures of a wholly incurable ailment ever heard of. The day after Phillida's last visit she sent her a check for three hundred dollars for her services."

"Sent her money?" said Millard, reddening, and contracting his brows. "Did Phillida take it?" This last was spoken in a low-keyed monotone.

"Hasn't she told you a word about it?"

"Not a word," said Millard, with eyes cast down.

"She sent back the check by the next postman, saying merely that it was 'respectfully declined.'"

"And Mrs. Maginnis?" asked Millard, his face lighting up.

"Didn't understand," said Mrs. Hilbrough. "These brutally rich people think that cash will pay for everything, you know. Mrs. Maginnis concluded that she had offered too little."

"It was little enough," said Millard, "considering her wealth and the nature of the service she believed to have been rendered to her child."

"She thought so herself, on reflection," said Mrs. Hilbrough. "She also had grace enough to remember that she might have been a little more delicate in her way of tendering the money. She likes to do things royally, so she dispatched her footman to Mrs. Callender with a note inclosing a check for a thousand dollars, asking the mother to use it for the benefit of her daughter. Mrs. Callender took the check to Mrs. Gouverneur, and asked her, as having some acquaintance with Mrs. Maginnis, to explain that Phillida could not accept any pay for religious services or neighborly kindness. Mrs. Gouverneur"—here Mrs. Hilbrough smiled—"saw the ghosts of her grandfathers looking on, I suppose. She couched her note to Mrs. Maginnis in rather chilling terms, and Mrs. Maginnis understood at last that she had probably given offense. She went to Mrs. Frankland, who referred her to me, as Phillida's friend, and she called here yesterday in a flutter of hysterical importance to get me to apologize, and to ask me what she could do."

Millard was almost amused at this turn in the affair, but his smile had a tang of bitterness.

"She explained that she had not understood that Miss Callender was that kind of person," said Mrs. Hilbrough. "She had always supposed that ministers and missionaries and their families expected presents. When she was a little girl her father used to send a whole hog to each minister in the village every fall when he killed his pigs. But it seemed Miss Callender and her mother held themselves above presents. Were they 'people of wealth'? That is her favorite phrase. I told her that they were one of the best old families in the city, without much property but with a great deal of pride, and that they were very admirable people. 'You know, these very old and famous families hold themselves rather above the rest of us, no matter how rich we may get to be,' I said, maliciously.

"This seemed almost to subdue her. She said that she supposed people would expect her to do something at such a time. It was always expected that 'people of wealth' should show themselves grateful. What could she do that would not offend such touchy people?

"I suggested that Hilda should buy some article, not too expensive, for a love token for Miss Callender. 'Treat her as you would if she were Mrs. Van Horne's daughter,' I said, 'and she will be content.' 'I don't want to seem mean,' she replied, 'and I didn't think so pious a girl would carry her head so high. Now, Mrs. Hilbrough, do you think a Christian girl like Miss Callender ought to be so proud?' 'Would you like to take money for a friendly service?' I asked. 'Oh, no! But then I—you see, my circumstances are different; however, I will do just what you say.' I warned her when she left that the present must not be too costly, and that Hilda ought to take it in person. She was still a little puzzled. 'I didn't suppose people in their circumstances would feel that way,' she said in a half-subdued voice, 'but I'll do just as you say, Mrs. Hilbrough.'"

This action of Phillida's was a solace to Millard's pride. But one grain of sugar will not perceptibly sweeten the bitterness of a decoction of gentian, and this overflow into uptown circles of Phillida's reputation as a faith-doctor made the matter extremely humiliating.

When Mrs. Hilbrough had finished her recital Millard sat a minute absorbed in thought. It occurred to him that if he had not spoken so impetuously to Phillida and then left her so abruptly he might have had this story in her own version, and thus have spared himself the imprudence and indecorum of discussing Phillida with Mrs. Hilbrough. But he could not refrain from making the request he had had in mind when he came, and which alone could explain and justify to Mrs. Hilbrough his confidence.

"I came here to-day on an impulse," he said. "Knowing your friendliness for Phillida, and counting on your kindness, I thought perhaps you might bring your influence to bear—to—to—what shall I say?—to modify Phillida's zeal and render her a little less sure of her vocation to pursue a course that must make her talked about in a way that is certain to vulgarize her name."

Mrs. Hilbrough shook her head. She was flattered by Millard's confidence, but she saw the difficulty of the task he had set for her.

"Count on me for anything I can do, but that is something that I suppose no one can accomplish. What Phillida thinks right she will do if she were to be thrown to the wild beasts for it."

"Yes, yes; that is her great superiority," he added, with mingled admiration and despondency.

"You, who have more influence than any one else," said Mrs. Hilbrough, "have talked with her. I suppose her mother has said what could be said, and Agatha must have been a perfect thorn in the flesh to her since the matter became known at home."

"Yes," said Millard, ruefully; "she must have suffered a great deal, poor child!"

"I don't suppose Mrs. Gouverneur let her off cheaply," continued Mrs. Hilbrough. "She must have made Phillida feel that she was overthrowing the statues of her great-grandfathers, and she no doubt urged the unhappiness she would cause you."

Millard saw at this moment the origin of Phillida's sensitiveness in talking with him.

"I don't care for myself, but I wish to heaven that I could shelter her a little from the ridicule she will suffer." He was leaning forward with his hand on his knee and his eyes cast down.

Mrs. Hilbrough felt herself moved at sight of so much feeling in one not wont to show his emotions to others.

"I will see if anything can be done, Mr. Millard; but I am afraid not. I'll ask Phillida here to lunch some day this week."

The winter sunshine had all gone, the lights in the streets were winning on the fast-fading twilight, and Mrs. Hilbrough's reception-room was growing dusk when Millard slowly, as one whose purposes are benumbed, rose to leave. Once in the street, he walked first toward one avenue and then toward the other. He thought to go to his apartment, but he shrank from loneliness; he would go to dinner at a neighboring restaurant; then he turned toward his club; and then he formed the bold resolution to make himself welcome, as he had before, at Mrs. Callender's Sunday-evening tea-table. But reflecting on the unlucky outcome of his interview with Phillida, he gave this up, and after some further irresolution dined at a table by himself in the club. He had small appetite for food, for human fellowship he had none at all, and he soon sought solitude in his apartment.

XXII.
WINTER STRAWBERRIES.

Knowing that Phillida was a precipice inaccessible on the side of what she esteemed her duty, Mrs. Hilbrough was almost sorry that she had promised to attempt any persuasions. But she dispatched a note early Tuesday morning, begging Phillida's company at luncheon, assigning the trivial reason, for want of a better, that she had got some winter-grown strawberries and wished a friend to enjoy them with her. Phillida, fatigued with the heart-breaking struggle between love and duty, and almost ready sometimes to give over and take the easier path, thought to find an hour's intermission from her inward turmoil over Mrs. Hilbrough's hothouse berries. The Hilbrough children were fond of Phillida, and luncheon was a meal at which they made a point of disregarding the bondage of the new family position. They seasoned their meal with the animal spirits of youth, and, despite the fact that the costly winter berries were rather sour, the lunch proved exceedingly agreeable to Phillida. The spontaneous violence which healthy children do to etiquette often proves a relish. But when the Hilbrough children had bolted their strawberries, scraped the last remainder of the sugar and cream from the saucers, and left the table in a hurry, there came an audible pause, and Mrs. Hilbrough approached the subject of Phillida's faith-healing in a characteristically tactful way by giving an account of Mrs. Maginnis's call, and by approving Phillida's determination not to take money. It was a laudable pride, Mrs. Hilbrough said.

"I can not call it pride altogether," said Phillida, with the innate veracity of her nature asserting itself in a struggle to be exactly sincere. "If I were to take pay for praying for a person, I'd be no better than Simon, who tried to buy the gift of the Holy Ghost from Saint Paul. I couldn't bring myself to take money."

"And if you did, my dear, it would mortify your family, who have a right to be proud, and then there is Mr. Millard, who, I suppose, would feel that it would be a lasting disgrace." These words were spoken in a relaxed and indifferent tone, as though it was an accidental commonplace of the subject that Mrs. Hilbrough was settling.

Phillida said nothing. Here she was face to face with the old agony. If her faith-healing were only a matter of her own suffering she need not hesitate; she would take the cross with all her heart. But Mrs. Hilbrough's words reminded her again that her sense of duty forced her to bind Charley Millard for the torture. A duty so rude to her feelings as the half-publicity of it made faith-healing, ought to be a duty beyond question, but here was the obligation she owed her lover running adverse to her higher aspirations. The questions for decision became complex, and she wavered.

"Your first duty is to him, of course," continued Mrs. Hilbrough, as she rose from the table, but still in an indifferent tone, as though what she said were a principle admitted beforehand. This arrow, she knew, went straight to the weakest point in Phillida's defense. But divining that her words gave pain, she changed the subject, and they talked again on indifferent matters as they passed out of the room together. But when Phillida began her preparations for leaving, Mrs. Hilbrough ventured a practical suggestion.

"I suppose you'll forgive an old friend for advising you, Phillida dear, but you and Mr. Millard ought to get married pretty soon. I don't believe in long courtships. Mr. Millard is an admirable person, and you'll make a noble wife."

"We have long intended to have the wedding next spring. But as to my making a noble wife, I am not sure about that," returned Phillida. "I am engaged with my work, and I shall be more and more talked about in a way that will give Charley a great deal of suffering. It's a pity—"

She was going to say that it was a pity that Charley had not chosen some one who would not be a source of humiliation to him, but she could not complete the sentence. The vision of Millard married to another was too much even for her self-sacrifice. After a moment's pause she reverted to Mrs. Hilbrough's remark, made at the table, which had penetrated to her conscience.

"You said a while ago that my first duty is to Charley. But if I am wrong in trying to heal the sick by the exercise of faith, why have I been given success in some cases? If I refused requests of that kind would I not be like the man who put his hand to the plow and looked back? You don't know how hard it is to decide these things. I do look back, and it almost breaks my heart. Sometimes I say, 'Why can't I be a woman? Why am I not free to enjoy life as other women do? But then the poor and the sick and the wicked, are they to be left without any one to care for them? There are but few that know how to be patient with them and help them by close sympathy and forbearance. How can I give up my poor?'"

Her face was flushed, and she was in a tremor when she ceased speaking. Her old friend saw that Phillida had laid bare her whole heart. Mrs. Hilbrough was deeply touched at this exhibition of courage and at Phillida's evident suffering, and besides, she knew that it was not best to debate where she wished to influence. She only said:

"It will grow clearer to you, dear, as time goes on. Mr. Millard would suffer anything—I believe he would die for you."

Phillida was a little startled at Mrs. Hilbrough's assumption that she knew the exact state of Millard's feelings.

"Have you seen him lately?" she asked.

"Yes; he called here after four o'clock on Sunday afternoon, and he spoke most affectionately of you. I'm sorry you must go so soon. Come and spend a day with me some time, and I'll have Mr. Millard take dinner with us."

As Phillida rode downtown in the street car she reasoned that Charley must have gone straight to Mrs. Hilbrough's after his conversation with her. When she remembered the agitation in which he had left her, she could not doubt that he went uptown on purpose to speak with Mrs. Hilbrough of his relations with herself, and she felt a resentment that Millard should discuss the matter with a third person. He had no doubt got Mrs. Maginnis's story from Mrs. Hilbrough, and for this she partly reproached her own lack of frankness. She presently asked herself what Charley's call on Mrs. Hilbrough had to do with the luncheon to which she had just been invited? The more she thought of it, the more she felt that there had been a plan to influence her. She did not like to be the subject of one of Mrs. Hilbrough's clever manœuvers at the suggestion of her lover. The old question rose again whether she and Charley could go on in this way; whether it might not be her duty to release him from an engagement that could only make him miserable.

He called that evening while the Callenders were at six o'clock dinner. He was in evening dress, on the way to dine at the house of a friend, and he went straight to the Callender basement dining-room, where he chatted as much with Mrs. Callender and Agatha as with Phillida, who on her part could not show her displeasure before the others, for lovers' quarrels are too precious to be shared with the nearest friend. He left before the dinner was over, so that Phillida did not have a moment alone with him. The next evening she expected him to call, but he only sent her a bunch of callas.

That night Phillida sat by the fire sewing after her mother and Agatha were asleep. During the past two days she had wrought herself up to a considerable pitch of indignation against Millard for trying to influence her through Mrs. Hilbrough, but resentment was not congenial to her. Millard's effort to change her purposes at least indicated an undiminished affection. The bunch of flowers on the table was a silent pleader. If he did wrong in going to Mrs. Hilbrough for advice, might it not be her own fault? Why had she not been more patient with him on Sunday afternoon? The callas were so white, they reminded her of Charley, she thought, for they were clean, innocent, and of graceful mien. After all, here was one vastly dearer to her than those for whom she labored and prayed—one whose heart and happiness lay in her very palm. Might she not soften her line of action somewhat for his sake?

But conscience turned the glass, and she remembered Wilhelmina, and thought of the happiness of little Hilda Maginnis and her mother. Was it nothing that God had endowed her with this beneficent power? How could she shrink from the blessedness of dispensing the divine mercy? Her imagination took flame at the vision of a life of usefulness and devotion to those who were suffering.

Then she raised her head and there were the white flowers. She felt an impulse to kiss her hand in good-night to them as she rose from her chair, but such an act would have seemed foolish to one of her temperament.

She went to bed in doubt and got up in perplexity. She could not help looking forward to Mrs. Frankland's Bible-reading that afternoon with expectation that some message would be providentially sent for her guidance. The spirit perplexed is ever superstitious. Since so many important decisions in life must be made blindly, one does not wonder that primitive men settled dark questions by studying the stars, by interpreting the flight of birds, the whimsical zigzags of the lightning bolt, or the turning of the beak of a fowl this way or that in picking corn. The human mind bewildered is ever looking for crevices in the great mystery that inwraps the visible universe, and ever hoping that some struggling beam from beyond may point to the best path.

XXIII.
A SHINING EXAMPLE.

Mrs. Hilbrough and Phillida Callender sat together that day at Mrs. Frankland's readings and heard her with very different feelings discourse of discipleship, culling texts from various parts of the four gospels to set forth the courage and self-denial requisite and the consolation and splendid rewards that awaited such as were really disciples. Now that she had undertaken to look after Phillida in the interest of Millard, Mrs. Hilbrough trembled at the extreme statements that Mrs. Frankland allowed herself to make in speaking of self-denial as the crowning glory of the highest type of discipleship. The speaker was incapable of making allowance for oriental excess in Bible language; it suited her position as an advocate to take the hyperbolic words of Jesus in an occidental literalness. But Mrs. Hilbrough thought her most dangerous when she came to cite instances of almost inconceivable self-sacrifice from Christian biography. The story of Francis of Assisi defending himself against the complaint of his father by disrobing in the presence of the judge and returning into his father's hands the last thread of raiment bought with the father's money that he might free himself from the parental claim, was likely to excite a Platonic admiration in the minds of Mrs. Van Horne's friends, but such sublime self-sacrifice is too far removed from prevailing standards to be dangerous in New York. Mrs. Frankland no more expected her hearers to emulate St. Francis than she dreamed of refusing anything beautiful herself. But Mrs. Hilbrough knew Phillida, and, having known the spirit that was in her father, she was able to measure pretty accurately the tremendous effect of this mode of speech upon her in her present state of mind. While the address went on Mrs. Hilbrough planned. She reflected that Mrs. Frankland's influence could only be counteracted by the orator herself. Could she not talk confidentially with Mrs. Frankland and make her see the necessity for moderating Phillida's tendency to extreme courses of action? But when she tried to fancy Mrs. Frankland counseling moderation in an address, she saw the impossibility of it. Prudence makes poor woof for oratory. It would "throw a coldness over the meeting," as the negroes express it, for her to attempt to moderate the zeal of her disciples; the more that exhortations to moderation were what they seemed least to require. Another alternative presented itself. She would appeal from Mrs. Frankland public to Mrs. Frankland private, from the orator aflame to the woman cool. If Mrs. Frankland could be rightly coached and guided, she might by private conversation with Phillida counteract the evil wrought by her public speech.

Mrs. Hilbrough's state of antagonism continued to the very close of the address, and then while many were thanking and congratulating the speaker, and receiving the greetings she gave with ever-fresh effusiveness, Mrs. Hilbrough came in her turn, and Mrs. Frankland extended both hands to her, saying, "My dear Mrs. Hilbrough, how are you?" But Mrs. Hilbrough did not offer her any congratulations. She only begged Mrs. Frankland to make an appointment that she might consult her on a matter of importance.

"Certainly, certainly, dear friend," said Mrs. Frankland, beaming; "whenever you wish and wherever you say."

"Perhaps you could drive with me in the Park to-morrow, if the weather is fine," said Mrs. Hilbrough. "Shall I call for you about half-past three?"

"With pleasure, Mrs. Hilbrough"; and Mrs. Frankland made an affectionate farewell nod backward at Mrs. Hilbrough as she stretched out her hand to one of her hearers who was waiting on the other side for a share of her sunshine.

Mrs. Hilbrough turned about at this moment to find Phillida, meaning to take her home in the carriage, but Phillida, engrossed with thoughts and feelings excited by the address, had slipped away and taken the Madison Avenue car.

She had counted that this address would give her personal guidance; she had prayed that it might throw light on her path. Its whole tenor brought to her conscience the sharpest demand that she should hold to the rigor of her vocation at every cost. All the way home the text about leaving "father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake," was ringing in her memory. Even Mrs. Frankland, in the rush of oratorical extravagance, had not dared to give this its literal sense. But she had left in it strenuousness enough to make it a powerful stimulant to Phillida's native impulse toward self-sacrifice.

Once at home, Phillida could not remain there. She felt that a crisis in her affairs had arrived, and in her present state of religious exaltation she was equal to the task of giving up her lover if necessary. But the questions before her were not simple, and before deciding she thought to go and privately consult Mrs. Frankland, who lived less than half a mile away in one of those habitable, small high-stoop houses in East Fifteenth street which one is surprised to find lingering so far down as this into the epoch of complicated flats and elevated apartments.

Phillida was begged to come without ceremony up to the front room on the second floor. Here she found Mrs. Frankland in a wrapper, lying on a lounge, her face still flushed by the excitement of her speech.

"Dear child, how are you?" said Mrs. Frankland in a tone of semi-exhaustion, reaching out her hand, without rising. "Sit here by me. It is a benediction to see you. To you is given the gift of faith. The gift of healing and such like ministration is not mine. I can not do the work you do. But if I can comfort and strengthen those chosen ones who have these gifts, it is enough. I will not complain." Saying this last plaintively, she pressed Phillida's hand in both of hers.

If her profession of humility was not quite sincere, Mrs. Frankland at least believed that it was.

"Mrs. Frankland, I am in trouble, in a great deal of trouble," said Phillida in a voice evidently steadied by effort.

"In trouble? I am so sorry." Saying this she laid her right hand on Phillida's lap caressingly. "Tell me, beloved, what it is all about?" Mrs. Frankland was still in a state of stimulation from public speaking, and her words were pitched in the key of a peroration. At this moment she would probably have spoken with pathos if she had been merely giving directions for cooking the dinner spinach.

The barriers of Phillida's natural reserve were melted away by her friend's effusive sympathy, and the weary heart lightened its burdens, as many another had done before, by confessing them to the all-motherly Mrs. Frankland. Phillida told the story of her lover, of his dislike to the notoriety of her faith-cures. She told of her own struggles and of the grave questions she might soon have to settle. Should she yield, if ever so little, to the demands of one who was to be her husband? Or should she maintain her course as she had begun? And what if it should ever come to be a question of breaking her engagement? This last was spoken with faltering, for at the very suggestion Phillida saw the abyss open before her.

A person of Mrs. Frankland's temperament is rarely a good counselor in practical affairs, but if she had been entirely at herself she would perhaps have advised with caution, if not with wisdom, in a matter so vital and delicate. But the exhilaration of oratorical inebriety still lingered with her, and she heard Phillida professionally rather than personally. She was hardly conscious, indeed, of the personality of the suffering soul before her. What she perceived was that here was a new and beautiful instance of the victory of faith and a consecrated spirit. In her present state of mind she listened to Phillida's experience with much the feeling she would have had if some one had brought her a story of martyrdom in the days of Nero. St. Francis himself was hardly finer than this, and the glory of this instance was that it was so modern and withal so romantic in its elements. She exulted in the struggle, without realizing, as she might have done in a calmer mood, the vast perspective of present and future sorrow which it presented to Phillida. The disclosure of Phillida's position opened up not the modicum of practical wisdom which she possessed but the floodgates of her eloquence.

"You will stand fast, my dear," she said, rising to a sitting posture and flushing with fresh interest. "You will be firm. You will not shrink from your duty."

"But what is my duty?" asked Phillida.

"To give the Lord and his work no second place in your affections. He has honored your faith and works above those of other people. Therefore stand unfalteringly faithful, my dear Phillida. It is a hard saying, that of Christ: 'If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he can not be my disciple.' But you are one of those able to receive the hard words of Christ."

All this was said as it might have been in an address, with little realization of its application to the individual case before her. Mrs. Frankland would have been the last person to advise an extreme course of action. She admired the extravagance of religious devotion for its artistic effect when used in oratory. It was the artistic effect she was dreaming of now. Phillida got little from her but such generalities, pitched in the key of her recent address; but what she got tended to push her to yet greater extremes.

In the hour that followed, Phillida's habitually strenuous spirit resolved and held itself ready for any surrender that might be demanded of it. Is the mistaken soul that makes sacrifice needlessly through false perceptions of duty intrinsically less heroic than the wiser martyr for a worthy cause?

XXIV.
THE PARTING.

On that Thursday evening Millard dined at his club. Instead of signing a joint order with a friend for a partnership dinner, he ordered and ate alone. He chose a table in a deep window from which he could look out on the passers-by. A rain had set in, and he watched the dripping umbrellas that glistened in the lamplight as they moved under the windows, and took note of the swift emergence of approaching vehicles and then of their disappearance. His interest in the familiar street-world was insipid enough, but even an insipid interest in external affairs he found better than giving his mind up wholly to the internal drizzle of melancholy thoughts.

Presently Millard became dimly conscious of a familiar voice in conversation at the table in the next window. Though familiar, the voice was not associated with the club-restaurant; it must be that of some non-member brought in as the dinner-guest of a member. He could not make out at first whose it was without changing his position, which he disliked to do, the more that the voice excited disagreeable feelings, and by some association not sufficiently distinct to enable him to make out the person. But when the visitor, instead of leaving the direction of the meal to his host, called out an exasperatingly imperative, "Hist! waitah!" Millard was able to recognize his invisible neighbor. Why should any member of a club so proper as the Terrapin ask Meadows? But there he was with his inborn relish for bulldozing whatever bulldozable creature came in his way. Once he had made him out, Millard engaged in a tolerably successful effort to ignore his conversation, returning again to his poor diversion of studying the people plashing disconsolately along the wet street. It was only when he heard Meadows say, "You know I am a director of that bank," that his attention was sharply arrested.

"Farnsworth is cashier," continued Meadows. "He ought to have resigned long ago, but he isn't that sort of a man. So he's at last taken to bed, has he? Some complication of the heart, I believe. Won't live long, and—well, I'll have on hand a hard fight about the filling of his place. But I didn't hear of that faith-doctor plan before."

"I don't believe they've carried it out," said the club man who had invited Meadows and who was a stranger to Millard. "Farnsworth wouldn't agree. I used to dine with Farnsworth often, and my sister knows Mrs. Farnsworth; they go to the same church. Mrs. Farnsworth has heard of a Miss Callender that can pray a person up out of the grave almost, and she's nearly persuaded Farnsworth to send for her. His mind is weakening a little, and I shouldn't wonder if he did consent to have her pray over him. The doctors have given him up, and—"

"Who is this Miss Callender?" interrupted Meadows; and though Millard could not see him he knew that in the very nature of things Meadows's pugnacious chin must be shoved forward as he asked this.

"She's a young woman that won't take any money for her services. That's the greatest miracle of all," said the other. "If anything could make me believe her mission supernatural, it would be that."

"Don't you believe it," said Meadows; "don't you believe a word of it. The dead may be raised, but not for nothing. There's money below it all. Money makes the mare go"; and Meadows laughed complacently at the proverb, giving himself credit for it with a notion that adopted wit was as good as the native born.

"No; she won't have it. I heard that Mrs. Maginnis sent her a check for curing her little girl, and that she sent it back."

"Wasn't enough," sneered Meadows.

"Well, I believe they tried a larger check with the same result. She doesn't seem to be an impostor; only a crank."

"These people that refuse money when it's pushed under their noses are the worst knaves of all," said Meadows. "She knows that Maginnis is very rich. She's laying for something bigger. She'll get into Mrs. Maginnis for something handsome. More fool if she doesn't, I say"; and Meadows laughed in an unscrupulous, under-breath fashion, as of a man who thought a well-played trick essentially meritorious.

Millard was debating. Should he protest against these words? Or should he knock Meadows down? That is not just the form it took in his mind. Any rowdy or a policeman may knock a man down. Your man of fashion, when he wishes to punish an enemy or have an affray with a friend, only "punches his head." It is a more precise phrase, and has no boast in it. No one knows which may go down, but the aggressor feels sure that he can begin by punching his enemy's head. Millard was on the point of rising and punching Meadows's head in the most gentlemanly fashion. But he reflected that a head-punching affray with Meadows in the club-room would make Phillida and her cures the talk of the town, and in imagination he saw a horrible vision of a group of newspaper reporters hovering about Mrs. Callender's house, and trying to gain some information about the family from the servant girl and the butcher boy. To protest, to argue, to say anything at all, would be but an awful aggravation. Having concluded not to punch the head of a bank director, he rose from the table himself, and, avoiding Meadows's notice, beckoned the waiter to serve his coffee in the reading-room. When he had swallowed the coffee he rose and went out. As he stood in the door of the club-house and buttoned up his coat, a cabman from the street called, "Kerrige, sir?" but not knowing where he should go, Millard raised his umbrella and walked. Mechanically he went toward Mrs. Callender's. He had formed no deliberate resolution, but he became aware that a certain purpose had taken possession of him all uninvited and without any approval of its wisdom on his part. Right or wrong, wise or unwise, there was that which impelled him to lay the condition of things before Phillida in all its repulsiveness and have it out with her. He could not think but that she would recoil if she knew how her course was regarded. He fancied that his own influence with her would be dominant if the matter were brought to an issue. But these considerations aside, there was that which impelled him to the step he was about to take. In crises of long suppressed excitement the sanest man sometimes finds himself bereft of the power of choosing his line of action; the directing will seems to lie outside of him. It is not strange that a Greek, not being a psychologist, should say that a Fate was driving him to his destiny, or that his Dæmon had taken the helm and was directing affairs as a sort of alter ego.

When at length Millard found himself in front of Mrs. Callender's, and saw by the light that the family were sitting together in the front basement, his heart failed him, and he walked past the house and as far as the next corner, where his Fate, his Dæmon, his blind impulsion, turned him back, and he did not falter again until he had rung the door-bell; and then it was too late to withdraw.

"You are wet, Charley; sit nearer the register," said Phillida, when she saw how the rain had beaten upon his trousers and how recklessly he had plunged his patent-leather shoes into the street puddles. This little attention to his comfort softened Millard's mood, but it was impossible long to keep back the torrent of feeling. Phillida was alarmed at his ominous abstraction.

"I don't care for the rain," he said.

"But you know there is a good deal of pneumonia about."

"I—I am not afraid of pneumonia," he said. "I might as well die as to suffer what I do."

"What is the matter, Charley?" demanded Phillida, alarmed.

"Matter? Why, I have to sit in the club and hear you called a crank and an impostor."

Phillida turned pale.

"Vulgar cads like Meadows," he gasped, "not fit for association with gentlemen, call you a quack seeking after money, and will not be set right. I came awfully near to punching his head."

"Why, Charley!"

"I should have done it, only I reflected that such an affray might drag you into the newspapers. I tell you, Phillida, it is unendurable that you should go on in this way."

Phillida's face was pale as death. She had been praying all the afternoon that the bitterness of this cup might not be pressed to her lips. She now saw that the issue was joined. She had vowed that not even her love for the man dearest to her should swerve her from her course. The abyss was under her feet, and she longed to draw back. She heard the voice of duty in the tones of Mrs. Frankland saying: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he can not be my disciple." It was a cruel alternative that was set before her, and she trembled visibly.

"I—I can't neglect what I believe to be duty," she said. She wished that, by some circumlocution or some tenderness in the tone, she could have softened the words that she spoke, but all her forces had to be rallied to utter the decision, and there was no power left to qualify the bare words which sounded to Millard hard and cruel. A suspicion crossed his mind that Phillida wished to be released from the engagement.

"You do not consider that you owe any duty to me at all," he said in a voice smothered by feeling.

Phillida tried to reply, but she could not speak.

Millard was now pacing the floor. "It is all that Mrs. Frankland's work. She isn't worthy to tie your shoes. She never fed the hungry, or clothed the naked, or visited the sick. It's all talk, talk, talk, with her. She talks beautifully, and she knows it. She loves to talk and to have people crowd around her and tell her how much good she is doing. She denies herself nothing; she feeds her vanity on the flattery she gets, and then thinks herself a saint besides. She exhorts people to a self-sacrifice she wouldn't practise for the world. She's making more money out of her piety than her husband can out of law. And now she comes with her foolish talk and breaks up the happiness you and I have had." This was spoken with bitterness. "We can not go on in this way," he said, sitting down exhausted, and looking at her.

Phillida had listened in silence and anguish to his words, spoken hurriedly but not loudly. What he said had an effect the opposite of what he had expected. The first impression produced by his words was that the engagement had become a source of misery to Millard; the second thought was that, considering only her duty to him, she ought to release him from bonds that had proved so painful. His last words seemed to indicate that he wished the engagement broken, and after what he had said it was evident that she must break with him or swerve from the duty she had vowed never to desert. Taking up the word where he had left off, she said in a low, faltering voice:

"We certainly can not go on in this way."

Then, rising, she turned to the antique desk in the corner of the parlor. With a key from her pocket she unlocked a drawer, and from it took hurriedly every keepsake she had had from her lover, not allowing herself to contemplate them, but laying them all at last on the ancient center-table in the middle of the room. With a twinge of regret, visible to Millard, she drew her engagement ring from her finger, and with an unsteady hand laid it softly down with the rest.

Millard was too much startled at first to know what to say. Had she misunderstood the intent of his last remark? Or did she wish to be released?