FIRST HARVESTS

WORKS OF FICTION

BY
F. J. STIMSON
(J. S. of Dale)

FIRST HARVESTS

An Episode in the Life of Mrs. Levison Gower

A Satire Without a Moral

BY
F. J. STIMSON
(J. S. OF DALE)

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1888

Copyright, 1888, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
TROW’S
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY,
NEW YORK.

TO THE READER.

I have called this book a satire; yet have sought within that key an overtone of hope and faith. Our early generation of writers could be all optimists: for they wrote of virgin soil. But since their day has passed, our country’s first-fruits were garnered. With these we have to deal.

F. J. S.

Boston, November 6, 1888.

CONTENTS.

FIRST HARVESTS.

CHAPTER I.
THE SILAS STARBUCK OIL COMPANY.

ON the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-second Street, just where the long rise of the avenue begins, and vanishes in higher perspective like the stage of a theatre, its long slope always dotted with a multitude of yellow carriages, cabs, and dark-green private broughams, there stands a large brown-stone house of irreproachable respectability. The steps in front of the door are also of brown-stone; and the columns on either side terminate in the hollow globes of iron, painted green, common to a thousand other houses in New York. Upon the first floor above the basement are three windows and a door; in the second story are four windows, one above the door; and in the third, four others again. The windows are all of the same size; but those of the second and third stories are plain, while the lowest have above them an oval design with flowery, curved ornaments. What the original designer of these windows sought to express in them is not clear; but subsequent builders, not seeing the need of expressing anything in window-caps, but supposing some adornment proper in that place, have copied them without deviation, much as a lady ties a bow-knot on her lapdog’s tail.

Yet, such as it is, this square brown box contains a flower of American civilization. And flowers are gay, conspicuous, noteworthy in themselves; but the more noteworthy as bearing the seeds that shall be multiplied in next year’s crop. No one would perhaps think that this house, standing unadorned and unnoteworthy on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-second Street, was so rare a possession, or contained in itself so much; that this square box, valued solely because of its proximity to other similar square boxes, represented the American social apotheosis—the pure spheres of perfect democratic joy, the acme, in this republic of terrestrial success. Yet of the fact there can be no question. That little vertebral ridge named Fifth Avenue, with its one or two similar ridges, its few timid excursions and venturings in by-streets to the east and west, represents the flower and the crown of things; only those there live who can command at least wealth or power at will; neither blood nor brains nor breeding can maintain themselves upon that vantage-coin unaided and alone. So have we seen some bed of oysters, planted at just the proper level of the shoal, look down with superiority and scorn upon those below, cumbered with the sea-weed, and those above, left awash at low spring tides. Merely to own this house, and not to live in it; to own it only as some miser owns a picture or a rare gem, for the pleasure of possession—would cost, in interest and taxes, the labor of some score of able-bodied men each year. To live in it, with servants trained to feudal manners and address, with the necessary wines and equipage and flowers and feathers that attend so rare a gem, would cost the earnings of an army. Has the fortunate possessor of the house such an army at his call? Surely; else how could he keep it? We shall see them shortly. And what of the inside of the house?—is it suited to the high position of the inmates? Softly, my good madam; a stranger can hardly know how difficult it is to gain access to this mansion, and how exclusive is the set which Mrs. Gower leads.

For the pedestrians on the pavement look up to No. 2002 with an air of respect. Few of them but know the house as Mrs. Levison Gower’s. And even the pedestrians on the pavement, in this select spot, are of a picked and chosen class. Many of them are young girls, robed for this winter (it is the fashion) in trailing gowns of deep-blue velvet; many more are young men, carrying their arms bow-leggedly, as it were, as if not satisfied with the natural stiffness of their starch and buckram, but adding the conscious poise of art, to make you note that they are dressed, not clothed alone. And not one of them that passes but knows and values at its due the house in which you take so little interest. This is the respectable quarter; and the great, ugly house stands insolently, as of social position assured.

But our great city is too great, too human, to show us much of this. Like most fecund mothers, like nature herself, her luxuriance is somewhat slatternly, her exuberance has burst its stays. Here and there our manners, our conventions, trim a hedge or two; but everywhere the forests, and even at our feet, the weeds, grow wild. Fifth Avenue, and its short purlieus, is the home of society; but elsewhere in the island of Manhattan humanity lives, unkempt, full of sap—that great humanity which has made Mrs. Gower, and which she so studiously avoids. For she lives in society; and perhaps has never thought that it is on humanity she lives. Let us walk from her great house down the side street in search of it.

For a block or two the houses will stand shoulder to shoulder like a well-drilled rank, well kept, well swept, and uniformed in the same non-committal, smug, respectable brown-stone, a very broadcloth of building. Then the houses begin to grow narrower, with thinner walls, though still they keep their facing on the street. Soon you pass stables, city stables; their stale, sour odor, puffing from the rarely opened windows, is very different from the sweet, healthy smells of a country farm-yard. Now the street is lined with long, low, blank-windowed warehouses, built cheaply of brick and studded with star-shaped iron clamps; you wonder what may be their use, for the windows, even when not curtained with blue paper, are impenetrable and do not avow their vocation; nor, usually, is there any sign, though the ugly walls are covered with advertisements of patent medicines, powders for making bread, powders for washing clothes, powders for feeding children, Giant Destroyers of moths, and the like. But soon this limbo is passed, and you come to the populated districts of humanity. Here the windows are no longer blank; the houses overflow with children; stout mothers sit nursing them in the doorways and gossip with their neighbors in the second story across the way; things in general are used too much, to keep their varnish from the shop. I am afraid Mrs. Gower would call it squalor.

The retail shops do a driving business in the avenue around the corner; on the curb, under a ragged locust-tree, is a canvas shed for horses, too busy to take their feed respectably in a stable; the brick police station is the only building having pretension to respectability. An ice-cream vender sells his wares openly on the street, in front of a hospitable barber’s—the processes of human life are open and avowed; great iron gas-retorts are seen above the roofs of the houses. There is a row of huge smelting-furnaces, with straight lines of stunted willow-trees shading them; and the air is full of the crash of hammered iron. The pedestrians on the sidewalks walk with the same bent arms as on Fifth Avenue; but the arms are bent with labor, and the hands are half clenched, with the curl of being but just released from some accustomed tool. Piles of Spanish-cedar logs on the street denote our approach to the wharves; and now the river, fretted with the traffic of a continent, lies before us.

But our business—Mrs. Gower’s business—lies not among the wharves, but across the river and beyond. If the wind lies in the east, you may set your nose toward it and sniff the air—is there not already a faint smell perceptible, a smell other than that of the salt water, a smell artificial and complex? As we cross the river it increases. We thread our way among the tug-boats, the scows, the flat-ended ferry-boats and other land-lubber craft; passing all the great steamers of the lower town, and the lumber-wharves and water-gardens of the upper, and you may see ahead of you a series of long wharves, jutting far out into the stream. Behind them are many acres of long, low buildings, platforms, piles of barrels, and many huge and lofty towers of plated iron; the wharves themselves surrounded with attendant ships—fine ships, three-masted, with the natural beauty and symmetry that comes from adaptation to the free winds of heaven, and not to steam and man’s contrivance. There are no steam-boats at the wharves, and you will wonder why; but, by this time, the rich and unctuous smell from the wharves proceeding will demand your whole attention.

You will perhaps read the long sign, painted in letters, as it were, life-size, displayed in long procession athwart the wharf’s end, in square, plain, proper characters of black on white—

THE SILAS STARBUCK OIL COMPANY

—but the reading will be superfluous; for the pleasureless, painless perception of the eye but feebly supplements the pungent, will-arousing sensation of the other sense. It is the old battle of the idea and the will; and the will, as always, wins. And all the world is smell.

Many things grow clear to us as the smell grows stronger. While we mildly wonder that a sense so little cultivated in æsthetics can bring so strong a pain, we also perceive the reason for the absence of steamers; for petroleum is a dangerous blessing, fond of fire, and it takes fire to make water do its work—a lazy element, much like the human soul.

Is there a perfume called mille fleurs? A thousand odors woo our preference as we land among the great ships; but there is a certain agreeableness in some of them, as we get used to the worst and begin to discriminate. We can even understand the workmen growing fond of them, as they tell us that they do; that they are also conducive to long life seems more doubtful. All over the oil-yards are smells; as many in variety as the colors of aniline dye, from the first rather pleasant smell, like a cellar full of cider, barrels of cider with the bung-holes open, to the more fetid varieties. Many places have the sickening, capitive odor of ether, from the volatile surface-naphtha; this, being dangerous, has a peculiar fascination of its own. For naphtha is light, volatile, inflammable, impulsive, the aristocrat of oils; and its odor intoxicates.

But come—we must not dally with this naphtha, this crême de la crême of the upper crust—come to the receiving-tanks upon the hill. There is a lesson in the making of oil, as in most things. I make no doubt Mr. Tyndall would find the process quite of a piece with the evolution of the soul. Here you see the crude oil as it came from its native earth, in the pipe-lines from the wells; it looks like greenish molasses, and smells of the devil. Natural depravity, we must suppose. But see it in the tail-house; or, rather, let us first look at the stills, those broad, black towers, under which the fire rages, like those in the city of Dis. Here is the burning and the broiling that throws off the grosser atoms from the pure oil of light; first, alas! first of all, our pleasant naphtha, our cream of oils; a short hour or two is enough for that, and it is gone. Here you see it, through the glass cover to the iron trough in the tail-house, the first “run” of all. What a strange liquid, as it breaks and dances in its flow—light, shining, mobile, broken into sharp facets and flashes like cut glass; a spirit, not an oil.

Flossie Starbuck used to fancy this was the water of the streams of hell. A great poet had had the same idea before, which is surely to the credit of Flossie’s imagination; for she knew nothing of great poets, as a child.

This tail-house, or receiving-house, was a favorite haunt of hers, on half-holidays when her father would take her to the works, for a treat. It was pleasant, on a warm day, to stand at the window of the iron blower-house and watch the great fan whirl its four hundred revolutions in a minute, and feel the rush of cool air in through the open windows; but it was more interesting to sit in the tail-house and admire the “runs” of oil—the quick naphtha, dry and shining, with its etherous, heady fragrance, and then the duller, yellower oils, under which the flow of mixed water went in globules of a dirty blue. Florence could have told you as well as any workman when the naphtha-run had passed and it was time to turn the oil into the tanks, and whether it were Standard, Regular, or Water-White—the same discrimination that now she exercises upon humanity. Then, when the black, pitchy residuum began to show, she would get the superintendent to talk to her of the aniline, and of the lovely colors which the nasty, black stuff would make; and how the foul-smelling paraffine was made into chewing-gum “for young misses.” Flossie never used chewing-gum; but later in life, when standing before Transatlantic Titians, it had come over her with a pang that she had once admired aniline dyes; cards of which, magentas, sea-greens, mauves, the superintendent used to give to her, and she to place upon her bureau.

Have you had enough of oil? There is no beauty, you say, not much of truth, and many bad smells. One moment; before we turn away let us glance into the spraying-house. This was always Flossie’s bonne-bouche, and it shall be ours.

The spraying-tank is another great, round iron tower, rusted and dingy like the rest; but inside—have you seen the Alhambra? When Flossie first went into the Court of the Lions, passing in through the low gate in the ugly brick tower, to the green pool and the plashing fountain, and the sunlight streaming in from above upon the snowy columns of rosy marble and the rainbow-hued arabesques of those fairy vistas, the grouped columns changing, as she walked, like clusters of fair women holding converse in a garden—her first thought was of this. A fathom deep the oil lies in the central pool; and as we come in from the dark passage the spraying-fountain bursts upon us like a vision of glory. The great room would be dark, for there are no windows, but that an iron slide, high up above, is drawn back a quadrant of the circle of the wall; and through this a mighty shaft of sunlight pours downward into the whirl of golden spray. Here is the fountain of gold of the Arabian Nights.

Cool and still lies the oil in the amber pool, clear as some golden air; while above, the fountain whirls it in a million golden beads, spraying into spray as fine as water, falling a golden rain, but silent, without a splash, into the liquid rest of the basin, where it, fine as water, foams. Thence it is ever drawn back again, and forced through the fountain in the sun, until all commoner atoms are lost and the pure oil is sprayed to test. And the yellow drops run in steady curves and arches light as any lintel of the Moorish palace, and chase each other with a merry music till they fall in the amber pool; and there the full sun shines fair upon its surface in a gorgeous purple, green, and iridescent sheen. And so pure and beautiful the oil lies when the fountain is still, so clear, with the steam-pipes in the bottom keeping it warm lest it should grow cloudy! Here Flossie would sit and dream for hours, before she waked to the world and its real joys, watching the oil as it was sprayed to test.

And how do they know when it is pure enough to stand the test? The process is simple. An electric spark is applied, at the various degrees of heat, until the oil takes fire and flashes in the pan. Temptation is the test of all things in this world.

Yet many a fortune has been made in this place; and chief among them was, and still is, the fortune of Mr. Silas Starbuck, late of New York City, now of parts unknown, refiner of whale and sperm oils, deceased in 1872; half the income of which fortune, the corpus being vested in three testamentary trustees of prominence in the Presbyterian Church, and immense wealth of their own, is annually paid by said trustees (after deducting all necessary expenses of repairs, insurance, taxes, care and management of the property, their own commissions, and an annuity of $1,000 each to the American Bible Society and the Board of Foreign Missions) to the only daughter of the said testator—Florence, now wife of T. Levison Gower, Esq., whose “elegant residence” at No. 2002 Fifth Avenue we have already admired.

The question, how a man made his fortune, has in our days not only a commercial but a psychological interest. Society has never had any objection to the sale by gentlefolk of themselves; but it is only of late years that it has permitted them the sale of anything else. You could formerly predicate with much certainty that a gentleman who had money had either inherited it or married it; now the problem has become more complex. Society to-day graciously permits a man to make money; it is even not over-critical as to the means; and we may almost look forward to the time when a man who has gone down-town to make it will be able to go up-town and spend it himself, and not vicariously, by his grandchildren. This was not quite the case, however, when Silas Starbuck was alive; and this fact had a very important bearing on Mrs. Gower’s life. Old Starbuck, as you know, made his money, not only by the refinement of oil, but also by selling his oil when refined—a fact society could hardly overlook.

Si Starbuck was generally thought the weakest, as he was the youngest, of the four sons of old Captain Starbuck, who commanded for many years the brig Loan, and then the ship Fair Helen, both clearing from Old Town in the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Thaddeus, Obed, and Seth were all older brothers, who lived and grew to be captains in their day. Si was a lazy fellow in his youth, and unadventurous; he usually kept snug to the ship, and if he ever went aloft willingly, it was to get the five-dollar reward that the owners paid the man who first discovered a blow. Si was quick enough at seeing things, and was much cuffed by his brothers—perhaps more for this one excellence than for his many shortcomings. Silas commonly had to act as cook and general swabber-out; all the same, he managed to keep a sound skin to his body, and had more time for reading than the rest. At home, when the Starbuck family got together about the fire with the older men, emeriti, who stayed at home and swapped stories, Silas was the cynical listener to their yarns of risk of life and capital. Even when they told the history of the great three-thousand-barrel sperm take of ’38, from Fairhaven, his eyes glistened more over the balance-sheet than at the stories of their doings in the Pacific when the whales were killed. So, naturally enough, when Silas got his time, he left the ship and drifted over to the continent, going first to New Bedford, where he began refining the materials which his brothers found.

The event justified his sagacity. None of his brothers made fortunes; Thaddeus was killed by a black-fish in the Northern Pacific, and Seth died of the scurvy in Hudson’s Bay. When Silas began to be really successful in New York, he kept up little intercourse with his brothers. Mrs. Gower does not remember them at all; so, at all events, she tries to think, though she had one great scare. In ’64, just as she was beginning to think of her coming out in society, her uncle Obed, then a hale, grizzled old fellow of sixty winters (most of which were Arctic ones), made himself very prominent by resisting a Confederate cruiser with harpoons and a couple of bomb-lance guns. This was a terrible event for pretty Miss Flossie, as it got into all the papers, making quite a hero of poor old uncle Obed; and several of her father’s friends had no more savoir faire than to speak of the old whaleman as her father’s brother at a dinner-party. However, uncle Obed never troubled them in New York; and shortly after her marriage (to which he had been invited by cards accidentally mailed only two days before the wedding) he died, to her inexpressible relief; whether childless or not, she never troubled herself to inquire. Now, however, Mrs. Gower speaks with much pride of her brave old seafaring ancestors.

Thus it came about that all the virtue of the race, as well as all their wealth, is now vested in Mrs. Gower and her brother, Howland Starbuck. The wealth has but gilded the wings on which she soared; her virtues were her own.

CHAPTER II.
FLOSSIE STARBUCK ASPIRES.

THERE was a time when Mrs. Gower was not fashionable. It is necessary, for our purpose, to go back to these dark ages. Her maidenhood was passed in unobtrusive splendor behind a frowning brown-stone front on a cross-street only two doors from Fifth Avenue. This house was one of a thousand: nine hundred and ninety-nine other New York houses were just like it. Here old Silas Starbuck for his twenty last years, led an even life, torpid in his undigested gold. Here Miss Florence pressed her girlish nose against the window-pane to stare at the opposite houses and wonder who the inmates were, and whether their lives were like to hers; or she strained her large eyes sideways to reach the perspective of morning ash-barrels, reaching in either direction to the avenue beyond. She did not then even know that brown-stone fronts were expensive, when she looked and speculated so wearily upon them.

A little later she began to speculate upon the people in them, and wonder more particularly about them, as she saw them, when coming from church, meet each other on the avenue and bow. No one ever bowed to them; though sometimes an oldish man would stop and speak to her father. It was at this time that it occurred to her to read books; and she became romantic, and would dream, after the manner of democratic maidens, of some courtly suitor, some young prince, who would fall in love with her, and give her rare old family jewels and take her to court balls.

This era lasted but a short time with Florence Starbuck, for she was very clever and sensible, even as a girl. She soon learned to fix her ambitions on possible things. And, indeed, she had no envy for the impossible. She soon learned to covet only those goods which her neighbors possessed, according to our practical version of the commandment, that “thou shalt not hanker after the ideal.” There was a certain clumsy accord of motive between old Starbuck and his daughter, but he was far from appreciating her refinement of desire, or fancying what high things went on in his daughter’s pretty head when the weekly “Home” paper dropped from her idle hands, and she sat knitting her virginal white brow for longing of the world. He had really only known himself to be rich a short time; and the brown façade which kept him from the fashionable street still seemed to him the acme of earthly ambition, as the printed list of charitable benefactors did of heavenly. Wealth had come very suddenly when it did come; and he felt it hard that his wife, of whom he had been fond in a certain way, had not lived to enjoy it. He had married her in old New Bedford days; and she had died, shortly after Florence’s birth, in the New York house. Mrs. Gower often thought, with something like a shudder, of what she might have been, had her mother lived. Mrs. Gower, like most of us, had thoughts that she admitted to others, thoughts she admitted to herself, and thoughts she admitted to no one, not even herself; and this was one of the last.—Do not think her hard-hearted; she is, with all her faults, one of the best-hearted people in the world, for one so clever. Satisfy her ambition, and she is good-nature itself; and she hates to do an ill-natured thing, even to her enemies. Florence, by the way, was a name she owed to the mercy of her mother; old Starbuck would have called her Nancy, as he had called her brother, Silas. Fortunately, in his case, Mrs. Starbuck got in the Howland from a maternal grandfather; and he is now S. Howland Starbuck, Esq., in the advertisements of companies—Mr. Howland Starbuck on his card.

Of course Flossie went to a fashionable school on Fifth Avenue, where she chose her friends judiciously, and it was at this time that she began to read books. She derived much profit from books, and has always owed much to them; even now she reads a little, as an old habit not quite outgrown. I don’t know what it was fired her maidenly ambition; “Lucille” had not been written then, nor Ouida’s works, but I doubt there was something similar. And it was certainly books that gave her her first inkling of a beau monde. She used to be very generous among the girls, her schoolmates, but never sought to take the lead among them, and was only known as a rather nice little thing from Eighteenth Street. She never even tried to make their brothers’ acquaintance, which was duly ascribed on their part to her proper sense of the fitness of things. The brothers were more interested in her. Once she was asked to spend a week’s vacation with Miss Brevier; but she never invited any of her school friends to her own house. If she had not been so clever, she might almost have become popular. As you see, Flossie learned much at school; but she took away more, and most of all she had carried thither with her.

In her maiden meditation, Miss Starbuck gave much and serious thought to what could be done with her father and brother. Silas, Jr., was a big, large-boned fellow with a heavy jaw; thick as to legs and head; in whom the family traits came out with peculiar coarseness, much as when you raise a mullein in a garden. The effect of wealth had been to produce him with greater luxuriance and less pruning, in more size and even coarser fibre. However false may be this analogy, there is no doubt that his brave old uncle, who had struggled with famine and the setting ice in Arctic seas, belonged to a much finer type of manhood. Fortunately, as Miss Flossie reflected, there were no ethics in the question. Fashion asks no awkward questions. Style, in the year 1868, in New York, of all the cardinal virtues, was perhaps the easiest to attain. They had the money—if she could screw it out of Mr. Starbuck.

There, however, came the first difficulty. Not that Mr. Starbuck did not fully sympathize with her aims, so far as he understood them; but it was difficult to make him understand them all. She soared in higher circles. For, remember, Flossie, like most New England girls, had a natural refinement of her own. And she was very pretty—petite in figure, then, with a most delicious little face, a face with a thousand lights and no definite expression. Her eyes though—her eyes were expressive; there was an archness, a directness, and a certain dewy softness.—Flossie soon learned that she must be careful of her eyes, and only use them on great occasions. It was one of her many studies, out of school, how to make them look demure; particularly before older women—older women, stout in figure, who would set their heads back on their comfortable shoulders and gaze at her, through double eye-glasses, with the liberty of age.—At such times Flossie used to drop a sort of curtain over those eyes of hers and look straight before her. She was secretly afraid of these older ladies; and this helped her, for she really became embarrassed.

But to return to Mr. Starbuck. He was willing to live in an expensive street, and even to keep a costly carriage, in an expensive stable, with a cobble-stone court-yard, at eight dollars the cobble-stone, and put his name in three figures on subscription-papers; but there his liberality stopped. This was all very well; and Flossie used the carriage to go to Stewart’s and shop, and, on rainy “Sabbaths,” for the church. But old Starbuck, who spent the income of a hundred thousand in façade, would have thought himself a Sardanapalus if seventy-five cents a day had gone for a pint of claret. Frequently they even dined without soup; and all wines, in old Starbuck’s mind, were grouped under the generic name of Rum. Mr. Starbuck had no æsthetic objection to rum—rather the contrary—but he thought it not respectable, and kept his tastes in that direction as a private sin. On days when the minister dined with them a decanter of pale sherry was brought out—a species of rum sanctified, as it were, by church use, and not expensive. Mr. Starbuck’s evenings were devoted to slippers and snores. Certainly, no poor girl had ever more unpromising material to work on. Flossie felt that, at best, her father could be little more than a base of supplies; she could never use him for attack.

Improbable as it might seem, Miss Starbuck decided that her social salvation rested with her unlikely brother Silas. The discovery of the possible use of so clumsy an instrument, at her age, must be reckoned a master-stroke. An awkward school-boy, he had met certain other youths whom Flossie felt she would like to know; with some of them had gone skating or played games in the streets. Flossie encouraged her father to give him plenty of pocket-money; he was only a year older than she, and she might be expected partially to fill her mother’s place. It was to her that he owed his horse and buggy; this was before the days of dog-carts. Sometimes he would bring his friends home in the evening; she would discourage their coming to dinner, but would throw her influence with his to favor anything that could be reasonably accorded at other times; and Flossie would excuse it to her father when they stayed a little late, or would shut the doors between Si’s upper-floor room and the library when they made too much noise. Sometimes, when Si lost too much at vingt-et-un, he borrowed of his sister; and she was not so much shocked as old Starbuck would have been. She knew that young men would be young men, and that Si must make friends, if at all, by his pleasant social vices rather than his father’s business virtues. This sounds cynical; but she did not reason it out in such bald, unpleasant analysis—it all came from delicate feminine intuition, of which she had more than her share. She was a quick-witted girl, living in a great city, with nothing at home to attract her. What else could she think about? Her vision went no farther than her brown-stone horizon. She was not romantic; her intellect quite overbalanced her emotional nature. And she had no Browning societies, and had never read Emerson nor Ruskin.

At nineteen she had been out of school a year, but had no definite launching in society. She looked much younger, being as immature in person as she was the contrary in mind. She saw hardly anyone except her school-girl friends, with two or three of whom she still remained intimate; they were kind to her, in a patronizing way, and invited her to their own parties; sometimes they would even send for her, at the last moment, to fill a vacant place at a dinner. A few of her friends’ brothers, and all of her brother’s friends, had been attracted by her; none of them knew her well, but they were in the habit of joking about her when alone. Most of her friends’ brothers took little interest in her, and thought her slow. But then (said their sisters) she has seen so little of the world, poor thing! Flossie felt this, too; but, as her friends said, she was an unselfish little creature, and her mind was chiefly occupied with a sisterly solicitude for brother’s future. She would have liked him to go to college; but he did not share his sister’s wishes, and the father utterly disapproved of it. He considered the college-bred man, when successfully perfected, as a pretty poor article; and college itself as a place where young men learned to drink and smoke, and spent their money in buggy-hire and billiards, unbeknown to their fathers. He insisted on Si’s going into the office; and Si, having finished school, did in fact spend a portion of his mornings in that nursery of millions, his afternoons in the park or elsewhere, and his evenings over cards or at Academy balls, or elsewhere again, all unbeknown to his father. It was at this time that Si picked up that fine knowledge of life which fitted him, as a man of the world, to take, afterward, so prominent a position in society.

There is no unlucky accident which an adroit person may not turn to happy advantage. Si might never have been a success in literary circles; but he began to develop quite a popularity among young men of a very good set. At this time it was by no means necessary for a New York fashionable to be liberally educated. And young Starbuck had several valuable accomplishments—he was a good whip, and soon became a tolerable ’vet and knew every jockey on the road; he played a capital hand at poker, and told stories and talked slang with a certain pungent humor of his own; and he could even thrum an accompaniment on a banjo. He was blessed with perfect health, large appetites, plenty of money; sparred well; was both stupid and good-natured, and had all the other elements of greatness. Fortunately, Flossie had no very clear idea of what Si did with his friends; and, secretly, her respect for him rose when he came home late at night and the next morning talked familiarly of the Duvals, and Lucie Gower, and “Van.” (“Van” was Mr. Killian van Kull, of the Columbian and Piccadilly clubs.) It was at this period that Si, thanks partly to the intercession of his sister attained to the ownership of a latch-key, and began to come home very late indeed, and talk mysteriously of French balls. Flossie had a very vague notion what these might be; and old Starbuck was not over-strict on that score. He would have thought wine-bibbing infinitely worse, and cards a shade more heinous than either. And, in fact, he was not insensible to Si’s social successes. True, old Starbuck was on the same board of directors with T. L. Gower, Sr., and one of his co-trustees in a charity; but he secretly felt—all democrat in a democracy that he was—he secretly felt it a much greater triumph in his career that young Gower and his son should get drunk together. This is a coarse way of putting it; let us hasten through the beginnings of things and get out where we may see the stars once more.

CHAPTER III.
FLOSSIE STARBUCK ATTAINS.

T LEVISON GOWER, Jr., the Perseus to our Andromeda, that angel who was to take Flossie’s hand and lift her with him to a higher sphere, was a pallid young man with a long nose, a short forehead, a thin neck, and a prominent Adam’s apple. Large noses are aristocratic; and Gower valued his as typical of his pure Dutch blood. It was disappointing, though, after so fine a beginning, to find his brow retreat in a rapid little slope; and then, taking a quick round curve, to find your eye resting on the nape of his neck almost before you knew it. Horizontally lying across his forehead was a deep crease, perhaps three inches long, running half an inch below the line of the hair and half an inch above the abutment of his nose; this line did duty for determination and thought. The mouth and chin were large again. With this kind of face, Gower at twenty-two looked virile and worldly, and at five-and-thirty he looked twenty-two. What more can be said of him? His trousers never showed the impression of his knees, though his legs were long and thin; and there was more definite expression in the pattern of his colored shirt than of his face. This was before the fashion of scarf-pins; but he now wears—and would then have worn—a glass head of a bull-dog in a light-checked satin scarf. Gower’s ideas hardly ever change, which is fortunate for his peace of mind, and his tastes never, which is fortunate for his wife. Yet, were you to introduce young Gower anywhere (in American society, of course), the answer would be wreathed in smiles—Mr. Gower, of New York, I suppose? And in Flossie Starbuck’s mind these three words would have been fit climax for anything, from the caption of a tomb to a Newport hotel-register—Levison Gower, of New York. It was as Randolph of Roanoke. Crude as Flossie Starbuck’s notions were, she was fortunate enough to aim high the first time.

Gower first knew her brother in Eighteenth Street, where they used to play games together Saturday afternoons. Si was physically stronger than young Gower, and, from the first, inspired him with respect. Gower had not at this time learned his own advantages, and Starbuck used to treat him quite cavalierly. This rough patronage produced a respectful affection which years could not efface; and when they next were thrown together, owing to a similarity of tastes in roads and equipages, Si was still fortunate enough to remain the passive member in the friendship. This intimacy was further cemented in ways before indicated; and very soon, Gower, finding Starbuck a pleasant companion at wine-suppers and popular at public balls, bethought himself of bringing him home to dinner and introducing him to his sisters. Si was too stolid to show embarrassment, and his physical presence carried him through anything. The Misses Gower rather liked him; here was a man who was rich and manly, and yet made them feel their own superiority. Even the great Killian van Kull, Gower’s popular and accomplished cousin, took a fancy for Si. “Buck” Starbuck, as he dubbed him, began to be popular. Here was a man who could gamble and fight, who was ready for anything at night, and never ill-natured nor headachy the day after. Both Kill van Kull and Si had health, animal spirits, and a taste for dissipation; and little Lucie, as they were accustomed to call Levison in the intimacy of the trio, soon became their very admiring and submissive dependent. Thus Si had the luck to start in life with two of the most valuable friends a young man could have had; for Kill van Kull represented fashion and popularity, and Gower position and wealth. So he passed his first five years after leaving school, when he was supposed to be in business, and not wasting his time and money in college. Old Starbuck would have winced, had he known Si’s true courses, had he even known as much as Flossie did; but, after all, young Starbuck was building better (in this world’s way) than even his sister knew.

For it often became necessary to send someone home to bring Si’s clothes, or bear his excuses—he had gone up the Hudson to spend Sunday with the Duvals, or on a yachting-trip with Kill van Kull; and it was often inconvenient for him to leave Kill himself. No one was so convenient in these times as Lucie Gower; and he was good-natured, and could easily run back for an hour or two. Besides, if Si had gone, he might sometimes have met his father, and have been detained peremptorily. Thus Gower became a sort of male Iris, a messenger between pleasure and duty; and he was soon familiar with the high, empty house on Eighteenth Street. He usually saw Flossie at these times. There grew to be a sort of understanding between the two. She was so much cleverer than Gower was; and she knew exactly how to face old Mr. Starbuck. And Gower learned to have confidence in her, and often told “Buck” that his sister was a brick.

“Starbuck’s pretty sister” was getting to be a little better known among the young men now, though not unpleasantly talked of. She kept very quiet; and the one or two girls that knew anything about her—Miss Brevier, for instance—spoke well of her. Meantime, Si was getting on with the fast set, that set which the Duvals and old Jake Einstein were timidly forming before they dared dominate—the set which carried the tastes of the French shopkeeper into society. They spent much money, and a few fashionable hangers-on, like Van Kull, found it pleasant to stand under the golden shower.

Now came a great event in Si’s life. Van Kull and Gower found it tiresome to always go to a bar-room and sit on hard chairs with Si, when they wanted to drink and smoke after a theatre or a dance. It was proposed that Si should become a member of their club—the Piccadilly, of Madison Square. And in a few months or so Si had the pleasure of seeing his name, S. Howland Starbuck, printed in the blue book of that fashionable refuge for would-be solitary males.

It was a great event for Si, and possibly, also, for his father. Old Starbuck knew very well that, although old Mr. Gower was a member and colleague of his in church matters—affairs of the other world—he never would have gone sponsor for him, as he had for his son Silas, in a club election in this. Yet this knowledge did not offend him; he was glad to see his son Silas rise in the world, and bore no malice. Perhaps he was even pleased that his son could go where he could not. It was right that Si should make friends, and perhaps just as well that he had not gone much into the business, after all. For about this time the oil from Oil Creek began to attract attention in the markets. Long before—centuries before—the Indians had been used to dip their blankets along the creek’s still surface until they were thoroughly saturated, and then to obtain the oil by the simple process of squeezing; for the oil was known to be “great medicine” and good for rheumatism, sores, and troubled souls. In the salt-wells near Pittsburg, on Saturday nights, when the brine was well pumped away, the miners were annoyed by the increasing flow of the green, bad-smelling stuff, which by Monday would have disappeared, pressed back by the new flow of brine into its deep crevices in the subterranean rock. But no one had thought of value for the stuff—except the few quack doctors or credulous ones who, trusting to the old Indian legend, skimmed a little oil from wooden cribs about the creek and sold it as a medicine of nature’s patent, in the Philadelphia drug-stores, for one dollar the ounce. At this price the fluid was not a dangerous competitor with Mr. Starbuck’s product; and even when one of these same Philadelphia druggists analyzed the oil, found its value, and made a contract for the output of one of the salt-wells, the only effect of his enterprise was to ruin its value as a medicine by making it free to anyone (like those other medicines of water, air, and out-doors), without rendering it as cheap as the coal-oil already made from cannel-coal. Still, the flow, once begun, did not cease; wells were sunk whose daily flow exceeded the capacity of many a whale; already, refining whale and sperm was not what it had been; and there was more competition in petroleum, and he was not so well situated for the raw material. Old Starbuck began to think it was time he sold out; the works had been very profitable, and the expense and hazard of changing machinery and clientèle made the future risky. Few of his competitors had the energy to make the change, the process of refining being so different, but went on filtering the diminished catch of whale and sperm, until the divine law of the survival of the fittest put a quietus to their struggles. By all this Starbuck profited, as was to be expected. The S. Starbuck Oil Company was formed; capital, Two Millions; Starbuck himself remaining one of the directors. The business and works were then supposed to be worth about $800,000. One-half the capital was paid up, and $800,000 of it paid to S. Starbuck, Esq., for the works, machinery, business, and good-will; besides this cash, Starbuck received $800,000 in stock of the new company at its face value. The stock was then considered worth par, and he was shrewd enough to keep it always well above eighty; in fact, he continued to manage the concern for a year or two, and was even so clever as to get it back to a healthy basis, although he had first watered and then milked it to the tune of a million and a quarter. When he had succeeded in this, he sold half of his remaining stock, all he could safely get rid of, and retired absolutely from business. Eight months after this, his work being satisfactorily finished, to himself, in this world, he left it, in October, 1872. In April, 1873, the engagement of Miss Starbuck and Mr. T. Levison Gower, Jr., was formally announced.

People were much surprised, but less so than if Lucie Gower had married someone of whom they knew something. Now they commonly knew nothing of Flossie, except that she was “Buck” Starbuck’s sister. Things have changed since; and Si is Mrs. Levison Gower’s brother now. Miss Brevier was delighted, and went about telling her friends that Flossie was a perfectly sweet girl. Silas Starbuck’s friends commonly said “By Jove!” among themselves, and nothing when Si was present. Flossie was already twenty-four, and had been generally supposed, as much on account of this as of her retired life, not to be about to marry. Still, there were few ill-natured comments about it. Her modesty did her a good turn here. And no one much envied her young Gower, except for his wealth; and she had plenty of that.

The Gowers themselves looked more askance at the match. After all, it was their family that she was going to marry into. And she might have many relations. Only old Gower, seeing that she had the essentials, had the sense to accept the thing from the first. He knew that his social position was a rock on which a fair structure might be built with her money. Old Gower had come to New York about 1830 from one of the hill-towns in Northwestern Connecticut; and had first been known as engaged in the banking business, with one of the Lydams as his partner. It was a Miss Lydam whom he married. He was very rich, or had that reputation; and was a prominent magnate in one of the largest evangelical denominations. There he had met and known and appreciated old Starbuck. He was not sorry, however, that that gentleman was dead. Mr. Gower felt toward him much as a ci-devant marquis might have felt toward the rich farmer-general father of his daughter-in-law. Mr. Gower lived in the most democratic city of a democracy; but a democracy lends itself to sudden and extreme social distinctions. The imaginary line, drawn hap-hazard, must be drawn all the deeper to endure a decade. A society which has no Pyrenees must give an extra attention to the artificial forts of its boundaries. Old Mrs. Gower felt deeply these truths. She knew that Mr. Starbuck had been in oil; but she also said to herself that her son would raise Flossie to his own level. What that level was we have seen.

Meanwhile, the two lovers were very happy. Flossie allowed herself, by anticipation, a little more style in dress. She appeared with young Gower in his buggy in the park, radiant, and really very pretty. Lucie Gower’s friends congratulated him boisterously, and called her Flower-de-Luce—a name which persisted ten years or so, until some savage wit changed the Flower to Fruit. She was then still slight; and, for the first time, dared to show how pretty she was. “How she has come out since her engagement!” was the common remark. Indeed she had; she was very happy; she felt as if she had been born anew, into a world of which previously she had only seen the brown-stone front. Gower went to see her every day; and though these tête-à-têtes were rather long, she consoled herself with the idea that the marriage would soon be over. He, too, was impatient; and very proud of her. He secretly liked to have his friends dig him in the ribs—as they would do, with Gower. He had never possessed any girl, before, who had loved him solely for himself; for surely there was nothing else to attract Miss Starbuck?—he had little money. Lucie felt a flattering sense of ownership in this fair creature that was going to link her life with his. The simple fellow was touched by it; and he never really ceased to be in love with her, though too weak to resist temptation in any simple and attractive form. Si, too, was immensely delighted. He thought Lucie little better than a fool; but then, he was just the man to make a capital husband. And, on the whole, he would not be a disagreeable brother-in-law. However, after the first relief and contentment of the thing were over, and Flossie fairly disposed of, it no longer concerned Si very much.

Never was a marriage so happy, or the course of true love so smooth. There was a delicious excitement about it all to Gower; he felt as if he had multiplied himself by four. And Flossie—Flossie’s feelings were more complex. She obtained Miss Brevier’s services as a bridesmaid; and it was arranged that the newly-married couple should live on Fifth Avenue at the corner of Thirty-second Street. The old Starbuck house in Eighteenth Street was sold, and Si went into lodgings—as he had long desired.

The wedding-presents, though few in number, were very handsome; Flossie had the satisfaction of seeing her wedding under the head of “Fashionable Weddings” in the New York Herald; two clergymen performed the ceremony; and in the evening the bride and groom went to Boston. After a fortnight they returned and installed themselves in the Fifth Avenue house, which had been elaborately decorated and extravagantly furnished for their coming. Old Mrs. Gower gave a grand reception in their honor. And about the same time, young Gower began to find himself in his club-window, sucking his cane, and wondering what he should do with his afternoon, very much as usual. He puzzled much over a certain feeling he had, but was not clever enough at self-analysis to make it out. But it was as if the theatre had ended too early, and there were nothing to do with the rest of the evening.

Not so Mrs. Gower.

CHAPTER IV.
ARTHUR HOLYOKE’S DREAMS.

WHEN the living poet and the dead came out to see the stars once more, the Florentine found himself upon a grassy slope, alone in the early morning, with his silent guide. So, when Tannhäuser, after his ten years’ sojourn in the Venusberg, broke through the walls of the mountain in a rift made by a prayer, he too found himself on the brow of a green and sunny mountain valley, filled with the long-forgotten breath of morning; and, in place of the devil’s music, a shepherd piping to his sheep. So, reader, you in flesh and blood, as I hope, may follow me, in the story, to the time of dates and daylight, and a place—the time, September, 1883; the place, the village of Great Barrington, far down in Berkshire in old Massachusetts. The early morning shadows still reached long across the green carpet of meadow in the intervale; the shadows of the houses, and of the great masses of elm foliage, and of the tall spire of the meeting-house up on the hill; the undulating masses of greenery that robed the lower hills were striped here and there with autumn scarlet, like a blackbird’s wing; and the silver lace in the meadow grass, and the long silken cobwebs in the air, and the rich violet-blue sky, shading off to pink like an onyx near the horizon, were precursors of the coming glory of the day.

No one was stirring in the village. In the ploughed uplands a few farmers were idly walking, hither and thither like generals on the battlefield of their success, tightening a sheaf of fodder or replacing a yellow squash or two that had rolled off from a summit of the great golden pyramids standing, piled like cannon-balls, in the cornfields. But the day of sowing was over, and the day of reaping was over, and little remained but to sit and look at the crops and grow fat. Up on the hill, the roads were empty—who should travel when there was no need? Even the plodding oxen-teams were idle in their stalls, being fattened and coddled, perhaps, for the annual cattle show. So that Gracie Holyoke and Arthur had the beautiful Stockbridge road, and the morning look of the mountains, all to themselves. They rode at a sharp canter, but with little conversation; at least, so a groom might have thought riding behind them; as the two heads never seemed to turn inward. But there was no groom, and the chestnut horses had a way of riding so closely side by side (being in this constantly drilled) that to turn one’s head was hardly necessary.

Were these two in love? A city groom, used to ride behind many a preening pair in their smart T-cart, seasoned and wearied with his master’s catechism of flirtation, which he had so often overheard; being there in theory to play propriety, but in fact, as he well knew, only as a license to flirt, much as a policeman is stationed in the Park for the skating when the ice is thin—such a groom would have said No. For they hardly ever look at one another. But perhaps an older groom, good dan Cupid himself, the blind passenger who perches like dark care on so many a horse’s back, and drives dark care away—he might answer Yea: for they are not flirting.

Now, there are several legitimate states of being in love, as videlicet, to be in love and know it, to be in love and not know it, to know that she loves you and to think that you love her, to be in love, but with another person than the one you think:—but to know it and not be in love is but a modern and puerile intellectual trifling; this we call flirtation. And in that these two were surely not. Were they then simply indifferent to one another? Unlikely—so early in the morning. And surely, the cosmic chances are all in our favor: is it not the normal relation, to be in love? Given, a young man of twenty-one and a lovely girl some few months younger—and the uplands, and the forest, and the sun, moon, stars, storm and springtime—and show me one such younker not in love and you will show me a wretched fellow you had best avoid.

No such selfish saint or sordid sinner can this slender Arthur be, who turns in his saddle and shows the clear-cut New English profile with the delicate but winning smile. But see, the smile has faded into earnestness; leaning yet farther from the saddle, he is looking up into his companion’s face, and seeming to be searching for something there. Does he find it? Ah, Cupid, good dan Cupid, were you right once more? or were we both too hasty—for she has not blushed, but the one rounded cheek we see, as we press after them, grows quickly pale, and we can just make out the dark eye-lashes that droop quickly down, breaking the contour; and now they do not speak again, but ride at the run in mutual silence—oh, a silence that is surely mutual, if ever silence was—and we have much to do, being old and no longer in love, to keep behind these two, who do not dally. This was all that happened in the ride. Only, coming home, and both dismounting (she without waiting for his aid) and he taking her hand to say good-morning (as he had done a hundred times before, that very summer) the color mounted in the young girl’s face (as it had never done before) so that she turned the face aside which was too near her heart, and ran indoors in haste and left him there.

This was all that happened on that ride—it was all that had ever happened—but in it, Arthur Holyoke had made bold to ask his cousin to become his wife; and she had bade him wait till evening for his answer; and then they both had ridden home. A city groom would have seen nothing of it all; yet these things had been done. A short probation, you will say, until the evening only; and Arthur hardly thought of it as such, but walked home briskly, hat in hand, castle-building; his dark gray eyes turned inward, and the wind making free with his curly, undecided-colored hair. For what probation was there more, after all their lives had so far been together, than living on together, man and wife? Not that she loved him then so much as he loved her—but that was to be expected. She loved him more than he deserved, he knew; but then, that is true of most pairs, and the men must needs not waste their pity, but resign themselves, as it is the way of women. And Arthur walked along the straight garden path that led from door to highway in Judge Holyoke’s old place, switching off the prim asters with his riding-cane. For his uncle’s house was built in the days of gardens, not of lawns—can we not imagine the large contempt with which the dwellers of a prairie would regard a barbered rood or two of grass?—and the flowers were part of Gracie’s presence there, and she of them.

Arthur was not too stout, but strong and graceful, almost Greek in figure as in face; a strange, strong scion of that narrow-chested clergyman-father, so stout in spirit, but so fragile in this world, who had died and left him to his uncle’s care, the Judge. There are many such: it seems our people (like some mute, inglorious poet) have had their period of pale and interesting youth, and now are comfortably stout and genial, in their easy-going middle age, the wasting spiritual fires quelled: like a sometime tractarian clergyman, now optimistic in a fat living. Arthur, however (not to carry the analogy too far), was spiritual enough in his way, though not the orthodox; delicately balanced, mobile, imaginative, Celtic more than Saxon, and rather Greek than either. Nor could you truly say that his way wanted depth, unless depth means sluggishness or stillness. Arthur was a New Englander, and New England is in reality the essence of all things American, in germ and future; and the people, the crowds, are already rather Greek than English. Irreverent, fond of novelty and quick—in politics, if not in art, they are Athenian. The public of Aristophanes is the public of the American burlesque; of lions, fair ladies, lecturers; of advertised politics, priests and prophets, of the mind-cure and of the secular Sunday newspaper.

Arthur Holyoke had been brought up by the Judge, chiefly on the simple plan of keeping him in the country and giving him plenty of books; a most admirable plan, never to be enough recommended. The Judge spent his winters in the city; then Arthur was kept at boarding-school; one of those quiet little boarding-schools of the wooden Doric variety, now disappearing. The Judge travelled abroad, or went to England or to the West, every summer; Arthur was left at Great Barrington. One winter Arthur had passed in Boston with his uncle, and had attended lectures at the Institute of Technology; it was the winter that Gracie had been away with her aunt in New York. This happened in one of these years when the whim of Hellenism seemed, in Boston, to be permanently eclipsing the Hebraism which has really made that city; and Arthur was intoxicated by the new atmosphere, as a hardy wind-flower might be in the rich sweet air and tempered light of a grapery. You do not make grapes of blackberries by putting them under glass; but you modify them considerably. If you had asked Arthur what was to be his profession, he would have answered engineering; but his inward consciousness was that he should be a great poet. But he knew the pitying contempt with which the world regards its contemporary failures—and its contemporaries are always failures—in that line; and in spite of his assurance that he had it in him (whilst others had not) he did not mean that it should be known until it was known only to his glory. These dreams had blended with his dreams of life with Gracie, until it was hard to say which was more the cause and which the effect; they grew apace together. To-day his dreams of love had the ascendant; and he wandered about the country many hours, rapt in his love and her. They would live where? in the city, of course; in New York, where was the largest focus for his genius. That, too, was the place where the most rapid fortune was to be made; for, of course, they must have money, and the money must be made quickly, that he might get his leisure and return to his poetry again. For this was to be the ultimate, the crown of his life. Engineering would not do; some quicker way than this must be found; banking, or railroads. The years of business would be irksome, no doubt; but then, with Gracie with him!

So the boy wandered, through the afternoon, working many a gorgeous variegation on the themes of love and fame; with but the least substratum of gold among them, as if to give strength to the pigments of his fancy. Meantime, Gracie, on her part, had been thinking, now happily, now in shades of sadness, oftener still in prayer. Yet she went about the household on her usual duties, passing silently like the daylight through the long library, where the old Judge sat over his briefs and closely-wrought opinions, nor ever noticed so slight a thing as a young girl’s mood.

Arthur found her in the garden, when he came, in a favorite place of hers, sitting on an old stone seat by the little brook, where it was most densely overshadowed by the flowering shrubs. She had that serious look in her dark eyes which he loved best in them, and she neither blushed nor smiled when he took her hand and sat him down beside her. Arthur had often fancied that at this time a flow of speech worthy of a Petrarch would be his; but as it was, the simplest words alone seemed strong to him. “The day has seemed so long to me!” Perhaps he thought it true; but it was not. The day had seemed short, and full of dreams. She made no answer; but, in a moment, turned her head and looked at him, gravely, as it seemed to Arthur, fondly, as it might have seemed to an older man. “I do not think we ought to be engaged,” she said; and this he could not make her unsay in all the afternoon.

But the old tragicomedy was re-enacted, which is so old, and will seem so new to our great-grandchildren; and Arthur knew, at the first, that she loved no one else; and at the last, he knew, or might have known, that she loved him. But the yes she would not say, but only, wait; and when he urged, But you may care for someone else? she only said, “I shall care for no one else, Arthur”—and at the last it grew to be but a pleasant play, so sure he was of her. It was settled between them that he was to go to New York and make his fortune and hers; and that then he was to come back and ask her father’s consent; or sooner perhaps, if the fortune was too slow in coming. She would not write to him, she said,—but she would answer a letter now and then—and he kissed her once for the first time, under the old lilac bush, before they left. And more, a thousand times more, he felt in love with her than he had even been that morning; and so they came out of the greenery into the broad sward with the long slanting shadows of the sunset, he still holding to her hand.

They were close on the Lenox road; and he had to drop her hand in haste, as an open carriage came swinging by, bearing an old acquaintance of ours—Mrs. Levison Gower and a guest of hers from Lenox. The guest must have made some quick remark to Mrs. Gower about them; for they both turned and looked at the young people, and she bowed to Gracie; and then the light wheels whisked by, leaving but the dust, and the crisp sound of the horses’ trot. Arthur had noticed the glance, but did not speak of it; he saw that Gracie was blushing again. He forgot even to ask who Mrs. Gower was, as he took Gracie’s hand again in his; and together, slowly, they went down the broad garden-walk.

CHAPTER V.
OF GRACIE HOLYOKE AND OF HER HEART.

A MAN’S grand life, says someone, is a dream of his youth realized in and by his later years; what then shall we say of a woman’s? Think not on this; but let your soul answer. The answer should be there, in the hearts of all; but whether it comes from memory, from things now half forgotten, or from within, or from some birth-dream had in childhood, who shall say? Yet is it there; like a child’s dream of a star; happy he whose manhood sees the star, its dream not yet departed. And all of us have fancied women so, at some time in our lives; have we never known one such? For but one such is enough, mother, bride, or daughter. Some slight girl whose maidenhood was a sweet bloom, like Mary’s lily in the Temple; and then we may have lost sight or knowledge of her, for a time. And then perhaps we have met some other woman, some old woman, with white hairs; not the same, of course, and yet it seems as if we could have pieced together their two lives and make them like one brook, that we have known in places only, which brings soft fields and flowers. And be sure that there was in between some womanhood, some mother’s life, not known save to her sons and God, not preached in meetings and conventions; deep hidden in some human fireside, like the brook that makes so green a summer wood—Such lives are white and shining, like a dream of God’s made real on the earth.

And all the world seems thirst, and lust, and envy, and desire; the fires of heaven are put out, and all men struggling, trampling, for the colored stones of earth; and yet such blooms do come upon it. But they blossom stilly, like silent lilies born above the meadow-mire. White and pure they shine, and breathe in heaven’s sunlight, and give out heaven’s fragrance, borne each upon its slender stem above the blind, black bog.

The day after this, Gracie had an errand, up in a little town beyond the hills. Arthur asked that he might go there with her; then they both might ride instead of driving. So they started, after luncheon; the new brown leaves lay crisp beneath their feet, and the light that flooded the valley was like yellow wine. Their way lay up over the hills to the eastward, and then, cresting their summits, along a rambling grass-grown road, between the crumbling stone walls and old unpainted farmhouses. What paint the farmers had to spare, they put upon the barns; a poor powdery stuff, weak in oil, and leaving but a brushing as of red earth upon the seasoned boards; the windows of the farmhouses looked out forlornly upon the fields already lonely, grim and unrelieved by any curtain. The places where gardens had been used to be, were common for the hens; along the fences for a hundred yards on either side of every house was a littering of chips where the wood-piles had been, but the piles were scant this year, and of half-grown birch; the reason was easy to see, for the great hills rolled off around them denuded of timber, save here and there a new growth of scrub oak. Beside each house the old well stood, its sweep pointing to the sky, but now disused and replaced by a patent log-pump, painted a garish blue.

Arthur rode very close to Gracie to-day; there was an exhilarating space and sweep to the free wind that brought bright color to their cheeks, and their clear eyes sparkled as their glances soared far over the brown downs and rested with delight upon the distant sky-line. There is something about our New England uplands like the barren worn-out plains of Old Castile; yet these two might have stood for a youth and future that one cannot hope from Spain.

They came out from the table-land down into a combe that had been worn for itself by a little stream now dry; as they ambled down the winding grass-grown way, the trees began again about them, oak and pines, then firs; a house or two was passed, and then a little school-house, the houses boarded up, and the school-house closed. They came down upon the turnpike, which had come by the longer way, around the hills; here was a bit of a village, a blacksmith’s house, a country store and an old hotel. The weather-worn wood of these seemed older than any thatched and plastered cottage in old England.

Gracie’s pensioners lived in a little house close by, the blacksmith’s wife and her six children; she had some medicine for them, and Arthur a few newspapers. While Gracie went to see them, Arthur led the horses to the inn; there was a swinging sign of George Washington over the door, which the pride of each successive owner had kept well varnished ever since the memorable night when he had stopped there,—though nothing else about the place was in repair. No one came to the door as Arthur walked up, and he tied his horses to a well-nibbled rail, and went in. There was a long bare entry leading from the front door, with a row of doors; each with a tin sign above it, “office,” “dining-room,” “ball-room” (now half obliterated), and “bar.” Arthur opened the last one, and went in.

There was a high black stove with a hard-coal fire, in the centre of the room; around it on the floor a square wooden tray, filled with sand. The walls were covered with gay posters, a cattle show, an advertisement of melodeons, of a horse stolen, of an auction sale of a farm, farming utensils, a horse and cow, many sleighs and wagons and some household furniture. An old man sat in one corner, in carpet-slippers, with a newspaper, and a look upon him as if he had not been out-doors that day.

“Well, Lem?” said Arthur, “business quiet, eh?”

“There ain’t much business, Mr. Holyoke,” said the hotel-keeper, without changing his position, “’xcept what’s in here.” And he pointed to the bar, and the pitcher of water, and the row of tumblers behind it.

“I want you to give my horses a feed,” said Arthur, “we came over from Great Barrington.”

“Came over from Barrington, did ye?” said he. “And what’s the news in town?” And without waiting for an answer, the old man rose and hobbled to the side door. “Mike!” he cried, “Mike!” There was no answer. “I guess the feller must ha’ gone to Lee,” he added, grumbling. “There’s a cattle show there, to-day.”

“Let me go,” said Arthur; “I’ll look after them.”

“You’ll find the feed in the bin,” said the inn-keeper, relapsing into his stuffed chair, with a sigh of relief.

“And what’s the news from your son, Mr. Hitchcock?” said Arthur, when he came back.

“Lem’s still out in Ioway,” said Mr. Hitchcock. “There ain’t much call for a young feller of sperit to be loafin’ around here. I brought him up for the business; but I guess the old place’ll have to keep itself after I am gone.”

“Still at your old books, Mr. Hitchcock, I see,” said Arthur, taking up a well-worn copy of Tom Paine. “Why, I didn’t know you read French!” And Arthur turned over with interest the leaves of a book the other had just laid down; it was a volume of Voltaire.

“I l’arned it when I was a b’y in college. Perhaps ye didn’t know as I was a college-bred man?”

“I might have known it,” said Arthur. “But you didn’t send Lem there?”

“No,” said the other, shortly. And then, with a chuckle, “They’ve pretty much all come to my way of thinking, now. D’ye notice the old meetin’-house as ye came along? They’ve had to shut it up, ye know. Have a cigar?” And Mr. Hitchcock brought two suspicious looking weeds out of a gayly pictured box, and extended one to Arthur. The latter took one, knowing the old man would be mortally offended if this rite of hospitality were passed by.

“Whose house was that I saw boarded up?” said Arthur, for the sake of something to say.

“What!” said the old man, “ain’t ye heard? That’s Uncle Sam Wolcott’s. The old man was livin’ there with his daughter and her little b’y.” And Hitchcock took a comfortable pull at his cigar.

“Yes,” said Arthur, “I remember now.”

“The child’s dead,” said he.

“What?” said Arthur. “Dead?”

Hitchcock nodded assent. “Killed him, ye know.”

“Killed him? who—”

“The grandfather—Samuel Wolcott. Killed him with an axe, Sunday week. Them air gospel folks got him crazy.”

The old man spoke with a sort of grim satisfaction, and Arthur looked at him in amazement. “Great heavens! you don’t mean to say he murdered him? Where’s the mother?”

“Lucky for her she warn’t there at the time, I guess. Fust time I ever knew o’ church doing a critter any good.”

“But where is she now?”

Hitchcock waved his hand in the direction of the biggest poster, “Farm for Sale.” “Gone back to her husband’s folks, I guess. And when she come back, she found old Wolcott a-hangin’ to a rafter in his barn.”

“But what possible motive—” began Arthur aghast. “Had he no other family?”

“He had a sister—I never heard what became o’ her. She married a feller by the name of Starbuck, from New London way, an’ I mistrust he turned out bad. I guess the old man got kinder disperited. An’ then the gospel folks—But he was the last of the old Wolcott family, an’ they was gret folks in their day. So they put him an’ the infant in the family tomb, and sealed it up.”

Arthur looked at the old hotel-keeper, and then out at the empty street. Gracie was coming along under the elm-trees, the yellow leaves falling about her in the autumn wind. “I must be going,” said he.

“Have a little something hot, before ye go?”

“No,” said Arthur, “thanks, I guess not.” And he made haste to get away, feeling the spirit of the place come over him like a pall.

“Well, good-bye?” said the other. “Always glad to see ye. But we’ve all got to come to it. Some day, ye’ll find me hanging to the beam up there, I expect.” Heedless of which gloomy prognostication, Arthur made haste to get to the stable and brought out the horses. They mounted, and rode some time in silence.

“Did Mr. Hitchcock tell you?” said Gracie with a shudder.

Arthur nodded. Something in the terror of the place brought out his love the stronger, as he looked at her, the tears in her deep gray eyes. “I wonder that we had not heard of it,” said he; “but these places are so out of the world.”

“Poor man, I have so often wondered if we could do nothing for him,” said she. “I went there once; but he almost ordered me out of the house.”

“Hitchcock says it was some religious mania,” said Arthur.

“He never went to church when I knew him,” said Gracie. “He cared most for his sister; and I think her husband turned out ill. Poor people, does it not seem cruel they cannot be taught to live? They could be so happy here, in this lovely country, if they only knew.”

“We are happy, are we not, dear?” said Arthur.

“Yes, Arthur. It almost seems wrong—” and Gracie looked out over the hills ahead of them, where the sun was already low in the sky.

“Are we going home, now?”

“I want to stop a moment at the Kellys—that Irish family, you know.”

Instinctively, they had taken another road back, leaving the old meeting-house and the now ended homestead on the right; and as they came up on the brow of the first hill, they passed a large wooden cross, painted freshly, with a gilt circle and the mystic letters I. N. R. I. in the centre. A short distance beyond this was a square old-fashioned farm-house, with a fine old doorway, needing paint like all the other houses. But the yard was full of pigs and hens and chickens; and about the door a half-score tow-headed children were playing. These ran up to Gracie as they rode up. “Mother’s in the kitchen,” said the biggest of the girls, putting a finger in her mouth. The boys stood still, and stared at them, abashed.

Gracie went in; and Arthur stood and looked about him. The fields were already stubble; but lit up with yellow piles of squashes; a noise of cattle came from the rambling old stable; and behind the house was a low peat-meadow, fresh-ditched and being drained. The healthy Irish stock had grown luxuriantly, where the older line was dying out. Gracie came out, smiling. “She is a nice old body, Mrs. Kelly,” said she. “And now, for home!” and they put their horses at the gallop, and were soon up on the bare downs again. And Arthur, like a man, began to plead his suit once more.

CHAPTER VI.
THE JUDGE SUMS UP HIS CASE.

JUDGE HOLYOKE sat in his library, trying to reconcile good law with good conscience by distinguishing the present case, in which the plaintiff was clearly in the right, from a former one in which he had been as clearly in the wrong. The opinion was a hard one; and the Judge had got no farther than the summing up, when there was a knock at the door. The Judge always wrote his opinions with ease and clearness when law and right coincided; but when they did not, he would lie awake of nights to produce an opinion which would remain a marvel of learning and obscurity. His high brow wrinkled a little when he heard the knock at the door; he hated to be disturbed while in the agonies of judicial creation; and as Arthur came tentatively in, he looked at him sternly, as upon a counsel who ventured upon an unexpected motion, with a curtly short-cutting well?

(He has come for a larger allowance, thought the Judge; he knows that he is of full age, and wants his full income.)

(How shall I ask him for his daughter, thought Arthur. Well—at all events, he must know that she is mine.)

Arthur sat down, still hesitating. The Judge waited impatiently, though he thought he knew what was in his mind; for it was part of his legal training never to give his own ideas until he had fully extracted those of the other side. Thus, mutual misunderstanding like that of a scene in a comedy was averted; for when Arthur did begin, it was to the point.

“Uncle John,” said he, “I am engaged to Gracie.”

Uncle John was in fact more staggered than if he had moved him for a non-suit; but his judicial calm was as unruffled as if it were but a similiter in pleading. “And is Gracie engaged to you?” he answered, illogically, but to the point, in his turn. And Arthur’s hesitation in replying gave him time to hastily adapt himself to the issue and make up his judicial mind; which was, as usual, that the court would reserve its decision. Arthur, however, hesitated but for a moment; and then with a faint blush mantling his ingenuous face, “I think, sir, she might be, if you would consent.”

“But, dear me,” said the Judge, “I don’t consent! Don’t understand me for one moment as consenting! Where’s Gracie? Did you tell her of this—of this surprising motion of yours?”

“No, sir,” said Arthur, “I thought—that——”

“That you wanted an ex parte hearing? Now I can’t pronounce a decision, sir, in the absence of the parties; and Gracie has not made her appearance in this suit as yet!”

“I’ll go get her,” said Arthur, promptly.

“No, sir, you’ll do nothing of the sort,” said the Judge, appalled at this evidence of collusion between the parties. “You’ll go away from here for some years before you get her; and then——”

“And then?” said Arthur, eagerly.

The Judge looked at him curiously over his round spectacles. “What do you propose to live upon?”

“I am coming to that,” said Arthur. “I have fifteen hundred a year——”

“Two thousand,” said the Judge, absently.

“Two thousand?” said Arthur, “I did not think it was so much.” And he began rapidly to calculate how much farther the extra five hundred would carry them.

“Well,” said the Judge, “you don’t propose to marry my daughter and live in Boston on two thousand a year, do you?” But, secretly, it seemed to him the proper thing to do.

“No, sir,” said Arthur; (“Oh,” interpolated the Judge, rather disappointed.) “I—I have decided to go to New York and enter a banking-house. And, in that, sir, I want to ask your help—and your advice.”

The Judge was silent a minute. “In order that you may use the one and decline the other, I suppose, with thanks. Well;—and granting this point (for the sake of argument)—What next?”

“Then,” said Arthur, “I shall try to make some money; and then, if I succeed—will you give your consent to our engagem—to our marriage?”

“Dear, dear,” thought the Judge, “how persistent he is! I haven’t given my consent to your engagement as yet,” he answered. “Why do you wish to go to New York?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said Arthur, taken by surprise. “At least, it is a larger field—one may get on in the world more rapidly—and I thought, with my engineering training, as agent of a banking-house I should be sooner able to support a wife.”

“Do you think Gracie would be happier there than in Boston?”

“I don’t know—we had not got to that yet, sir,” said Arthur, cleverly enough. True, they had not; and the Judge smiled a little.

“I mean, in case we should consider this most preposterous scheme?” he added. “Do you mean to be a banker all your life?” he asked, suddenly.

“Oh, no, sir—at least, that is—I should like——”

“Suppose I should ask you to take some practical position on a railroad in the far West?”

“I think I should rather be in New York, sir.—But, of course, I should want to follow your advice.”

“Would you give up the New York plan entirely, if I asked you to?”

“Yes, sir,” said Arthur. “If you gave me Gracie.”

The Judge paused. Arthur sat, twirling his light straw hat in his hand, but looking earnestly at his uncle. “Shall I send her here to you, sir?” he said, finally, finding the suspense intolerable.

The Judge looked at him gravely, over his spectacles.

“On the whole, I think New York will be the best place for you. I will write to Mrs. Livingstone about it to-night. But not a word of this to Gracie, mind. And now, good-night.”

Arthur got up; but he hesitated nervously at the door, before turning the handle.

“And suppose—suppose she asks me, sir?”

“You will tell her I unqualifiedly disapprove of the whole project,” thundered the Judge in his most court-like manner; and Arthur must fain go content with that answer. But he met Gracie in the parlor, and told her that her father would not give his consent as yet; but that he had written to New York, and would find him, Arthur, a place in some banking-house.

And so, these two went on to talk of more important matters; or rather, Arthur did; as, how long he had loved her, and how much, and how he had come to speak upon just that day; until Gracie, hearing nothing from her father, feared that he might be ill or worried, and gave Arthur his dismissal, and with more formality than usual. A certain constraint was between these two now, most new and delightful, to Arthur, at least; but quite different from the old cousinly ease.

Meantime, the Judge had dropped his papers from him and set to considering this last case, that was so much nearer home. He had no objections—of course, he had no serious objection to his daughter’s marrying Arthur—if Arthur was good enough for her; for cousinship is but a slight objection in New England. The Judge had always looked up to his elder brother, the clergyman, as being far his own superior; but somehow, with his son and his own daughter, it seemed otherwise. The Judge strenuously kept out of his mind any consideration of Gracie’s leaving him, lest it should bias his decision; he felt an odd desire to submit the case to someone else, as one in which he was too much interested to sit.

Perhaps in every middle-aged or elderly mind, there is a slight impatience with the matrimonial doings of the younger, as being always somewhat premature and ill-considered. When one’s own life is neatly rounded off, when one has duly weighed its emptiness, and properly resigned one’s self to it; when that resignation, which once seemed so unlike content, has become a habit; there must be a certain impertinence,—you being so ready to say enfin!—in anyone’s starting up and crying recommençons! Of course, Judge Holyoke knew that Gracie would some day wed—of course, he wished her to be well, i.e., happily married—but not exactly here—not now—not to this one nor to that one. Not that he doubted that Arthur was in earnest—or that he spoke the truth in saying Gracie loved him—nor did he think that they were both too young to know their own minds. It is the fashion to scoff at first loves, but the Judge believed in them; whether rightly or wrongly, we cannot say; but this was part of that which made him trusted, even by the prisoner upon whom he was passing sentence; and yet, a just judge, too.

But somehow, things had changed so much since the Judge was young, that he did not see how any one could soberly contract to see them change much further, or take the risk of any new beginning. He himself had been a Rousseau, a Robespierre, a Lovelace with a dash of folly and Tom Paine, to the worthy people of the town where he then sat, the people who were then sleeping in the hillside yonder; and yet, how fine a town these same good folk had made, in the days when he was a young law-student under old Judge Sewall! But in middle life, the world and its movement had passed him; and now, the gay folk and the band were almost out of sight ahead of him, and he behind with the feeble and the stragglers, the old and the obstructive, and no longer any hankering to be drum-major.

For it seemed as if the old prizes had lost their lustre; and there were no longer any public for a man; an honest one getting so little applause, in this world’s stage, and the general taste being vitiated, and too coarse to relish the finer flavors of the human soul. He believed Arthur to be an honest man, with the education and breeding of a gentleman; more he did not ask, his smartness, or his faculty for getting on. The old Judge had little of the avarice miscalled of age; he thought too little of the worth of money for one who grieved so much that it alone had worth; perhaps Arthur, in his way, thought as much of this. With Gracie married, he at least might well go off the stage. Many creatures live but to their time of reproduction; this is all that nature seems to care; and the time which is given to live with and cherish his children to nature would seem but surplusage. He had lived and married; he had found all that even his youthful ambitions had dared to formulate or hope; but was he quite content? Somehow, the sky, so blue in the morning, had grown troubled and overcast toward the twilight. There was no one thing he could say was wanting; he had done what he had sought to do; he had been honored more than he had hoped; he would leave—what? A few well-wrought opinions, valuable until the next statute; a reputation as a nice old fogy; a few poor dollars, some books, and—

The door opened softly, but the Judge did not hear it; and his daughter entered and placed her soft hand on his. He started, as if he had been dreaming. Gracie was troubled by his absence of mind, and feared she might be the cause; she looked at him, not timidly, nor inquiringly, and yet so that the old man’s eyes grew softer as he looked at hers. “No, dear, you did not disturb me,—neither you nor Arthur,” he added, at her half-spoken word. “Tell me, do you care for him very much?”

“No more than I do for you, dear,” said the girl; but in her manner the Judge could read her silent strength of love. And more was said between them; but come, we are not fit for such scenes, you and I; let us go out gently and leave these two alone.

Meantime, Arthur, the cause of all this, was sleeping quietly, with the sleep of a hunter of any manner of wild-fowl, and the dreamlessness of insouciant youth. For Gracie loved him—that was clear, both to happy Arthur and the wakeful Judge.

There is a curious timeliness in our modern ailments; a timeliness which would be still more striking if we could know the elements of each man’s life. In older times, men wore out slowly, by labor or by rust; they set about dying deliberately, as they worked their land or managed their daily concernments. But in these days of steam and dynamite, our mode of death is sudden, quick and certain, like an explosion or a railway catastrophe; less like the processes of nature than those of man. Paralysis, like nihilism, has developed in the nineteenth century, and chooses, as if by some secret intelligence, its moment with a terrible skill.

So, one such night as this, and not long after—of the exact date I am not sure—death came upon the Judge, as he was sitting with his papers, working late at night and lonely, striving to fashion human statutes to fit diviner laws, that justice might be seen of men.

CHAPTER VII.
ARTHUR SEES THE WORLD.

IT was near the end of the first hour in the New York Stock Exchange. The floor was crowded. A few of the young brokers, who had less business and more time, having executed their orders, were now ready for sky-larking and horse-play. But it had been a great “bull” morning, and the greater number, many of whom were older brokers, and had only been attracted personally to the scene as the news of the great battle spread abroad about the Street, were still madly pressing around the painted signs which were set, like standards, to mark the stations of the stocks. The high roof of the hall seemed too close to make the noise endurable; the air itself seemed torn and tired with the cries of the combatants. The rays of light which came down from the high windows were full of shreds and the dust of battle; the worn floor was littered with bits of paper, telegrams and orders, the exploded cartridges of that paper warfare. To the contemplative stranger in the gallery—if any contemplating stranger there had presence of mind and spirit calm enough to remain so—it seemed as if the actors in the scene, rushing madly from one skirmish to another, crying their orders, now unheeded, now to a crazy crowd, were the orators or leaders of a vast mob, trying each to work his will upon the multitude. Or he may have thought it a parliament, a congress that had overleapt all rules of decorum, where each member forgot all save the open rush for private gain. But one who understood might still have seen the battle wax and wane; might have seen here the attack and there the repulse, here the concentration of forces and the charge, there the support brought up to the post that showed signs of wavering. And it was a battle, of a sort more common now than that of arms; and who shall say, less real than it? Surely, they were fighting for their hearths and for their altars; such altars and such firesides as they had. And many a city palace, and many a country cottage, were hanging with their owners on the outcome of the day. Each magnate of the market, each leader in the fray, stood surrounded by his staff and subaltern officers; while the telegraph boys and camp-followers rushed hither and thither, and nimble clerks hastened from the room with messages and returned with new supplies.

Near the end of the great arena where the chief point of onslaught seemed to be, stood the standard of the Allegheny Centrals—Allegheny Central, the great railroad that made their houses and their yachts and carriages for hundreds of the rich, and to which some ten thousand of the poor looked for their daily bread. No great corporation had a better name than this: none was surer, none more favored by widows with their mites, by shrewd lawyers, by banks, and by trustees. A greater power, almost, than the people, in the States through which it ran, it was well and honestly managed, and little in favor with speculators and those who like best of all to win by other people’s losses; perhaps the easiest way. This stock had therefore been chosen by the flower of the “bull” army, and was the very wedge of their attack. A great crop had been sown upon its line that year; and about the sign of Allegheny the maddest fight of all was fought. A dense crowd encircled it, a small sea of high hats—some already crushed in the conflict—and a babel of hoarse voices; and even on its outskirts were others madly pushing, pressing to get in. The figures cried went up by leaps at a time—Ninety! Ninety-one! a half! three quarters! Ninety-two for any part of ten thousand! And the smaller men, who had no thought of purchase at such a time, were drawn in as by a whirlpool, such was the excitement of seeing others get what all were there to make, such was the resistless attraction of success.

Among the men who took no part, but stood curiously, on the outskirts of the fight, were two whose faces and figures would attract you even in that crowd. They were apparently friends; at least, they had come in together. The older was a young man of twenty-four or five, very handsome in his way; that is, he was lithe, graceful, tall, with dark hair neatly cut, a small black moustache, shaped like a gentleman’s—it was not the moustache of a gambler, nor yet of an elegant of the dry-goods counter—and, above all, with an indescribable air of high finish and high living. His clothes were beautifully cut; his hands white, his cheeks red, his nervous system evidently in perfect order, and his digestion unimpaired. He came in sauntering, carelessly pointing out the people of interest to his friend; his manner was perfectly indifferent, as he drifted from one sign-post to another, chewing between his lips the green stem of some flower,—as a countryman puts a straw in his mouth when making a horse-trade. He passed by the Allegheny Central and stopped in front of the Louisville and Nashville sign; and no one suspected that he, Charlie Townley, of Townley & Tamms, had just sent brokers into the heat of the fight, by order of headquarters, to sell twenty thousand shares of the Allegheny Central itself. He cast no glance behind him, but was engaged in pointing out to his friend three well-known brokers—one famed for his wit, the other for his wife, and the third, to continue the alliteration, for his wiles. The companion was of different build; but we need not describe him. Arthur Holyoke had arrived in New York the very night before. He had come on from the country with his cousin and her aunt, Mrs. Livingstone, with whom in future Gracie was to live. He had been with Gracie all those weeks since her father’s death; but his quick perception had prevented him from speaking to her again of their engagement. Gracie was a girl whose standard of conduct was placed above the plain and obvious right; who would go out of her way to seek duties that were almost romantic, justice more than poetical, motives ethereal, and benefits to others that their better angels might have overlooked. And Arthur was enough of a poet himself to feel that he would not wisely mention love to her for many months at least; not because her father had not approved it, but because he was no longer there to approve.

When Judge Holyoke had written to his sister-in-law about Arthur, Mrs. Livingstone had spoken at once to Mr. Townley, who was an old friend of hers; and he had promptly offered to let Arthur serve an apprenticeship in his own business. Mr. Townley, the old gentleman, that is; for Charlie, despite all his finish and importance, was but a line-officer, representing them actively in the field. He was only a far-off orphan cousin of Mr. Townley’s, and a clerk in the firm of Townley & Tamms, on a salary of $2500 a year. But his alertness and his wide-awake air had gained for him the pleasanter duty of representing the firm in its seat in the Stock Exchange; said seat being, as we have seen, a privilege to get standing-room therein if possible.

No one knew all this of Townley. Most of his merely society acquaintances supposed him to be the senior partner’s son; even his intimate friends thought of him as the probable heir, in a fair way to be a partner, an impression which Charlie artfully heightened by his extravagant mode of life when away from his boarding-place, his late hours, and his general inattention to all but the showy work of the firm. It was evident that he took far more interest in keeping his dress correct than in the books of the firm; and, the Stock Exchange once closed, no young man of fashion could be more safely relied upon for an afternoon of sport, or a ride and dinner at the Hill-and-Dale Club.

But all this Arthur had yet to learn; for the present, he was interested in the battle around him, the conflict of the two spirits, hope and despair, affirmation and negation, enterprise and nihilism, in this safety-valve of traffic, where alone the two forces meet directly, each at touch and test with the other. For the Stock Exchange is a kind of gauge, testing the force of the national store and the national need of money; and the bears, too, have their healthy function, keeping down the fever in the body politic.

In the shriek and roar of all the crowd about them, the young men could hardly converse intelligibly; but that might come after; meantime, Arthur was fully employed in seeing. Few of the men showed evidence of much mental anxiety; opposite them, to be sure, a pale-faced little Jew stood in a corner, nervously biting his lips; but most of the crowd were red-faced, and panting with the physical excitement alone, as if it were a foot-ball match. As they looked on, a fat, good-natured-looking broker with an impudent face and a white hat cocked on one side of his head, came out of the Lake Shore crowd, and with the slightest perceptible wink to Townley as he passed, joined the madder fight about Allegheny Central.

“Ninety-one,” said he, “a thousand!”

“Come out of the floor,” said Townley to Arthur; “come up-stairs; there’s going to be some fun.” At first, no one paid any attention to the new-comer; and when our friends got to the gallery, the fat broker was still offering his stock at ninety-one to an unheeding world, and the state of affairs was much the same as before. Only, that at this distance the noise had something in it less human; it was inarticulate, monstrous, and the sight of half a thousand men, struggling, every eye fixed on his neighbor’s, made a something awful in the experience, as if they two on-lookers were unseen Valkyrs, looking down upon some battle of the Huns.

“Ninety-one,” they heard the new-comer say again; and this time he was answered; for there was a howl of derision, and then a sudden sway in the crowd, and a rush to where he stood. “Ninety and three quarters,” said he; “a half,” and there was another howl; but by this time the leaders of the inner defence had heard of this flank movement, and their tactics changed. “Ninety!” “Nine and a half!” “Eighty-nine!” “Eight and three quarters!” “A half!”

“Seven, for ten thousand,” said the solitary broker, coolly; and the roar doubled in volume, if such a thing were possible; and the rush to sell began, at rapidly dropping figures. The fat, good-natured broker turned away, and started to go, having sold the stock down five points in hardly fifty seconds; when crash! a small soft orange went through the centre of the impudent white hat. With a yell of derision, the crowd turned their fury upon this; whack! crack! flew the unlucky hat, from one fist to another, amid the cheers of the multitude, until a well-directed kick landed it beside Arthur in the gallery. This gave a new object to their humor; and with one accord the assemblage began singing in regular well-tempered cadence, evidently referring to Arthur:

“Lambs! Lambs!

One shorn lamb!”

Arthur, blushing, hurried from the gallery; and Charlie Townley followed him, laughing inordinately.

“They’ll get used to you in a day or two, my dear fellow,” said he. “They wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t seen you with me.”

When they got into the corridor below, they met the broker of the ravaged hat. He had got another by this time, and winked, this time with a broad smile, at Townley as they came out. “I did that pretty well, I think?” said he.

“First-rate,” said Townley. “How much did it cost?”

“Not over twenty thousand shares, I guess, and twelve at least went to your friends. The boys didn’t like it, though, did they?” And the man’s mouth grinned wider, as he thought of the scene we have described.

“Charge the hat to the pool,” laughed Townley. “Who’s selling,—not the Old Man?”

“Tammy, I guess,” said the other. “Doubt if the Old Man even knows it.”

“Ta-ta,” said Townley; and they sallied forth, Arthur much wondering at these metropolitan methods of doing business; and Townley completed his duties as host and cicerone by giving him a very elaborate lunch at a down-town club and putting his name down among the candidates for membership. “You needn’t feed here unless you like,” said he; “but it’s so convenient to bring a fellow to.” Indeed, Townley had been very friendly to the young countryman; and this was no less than the third club at which he had “put him up” that day. “You can try ’em all, and then make up your mind which ones you’d like to join,” said he. At a word of remonstrance from Arthur, he had glibly anticipated all objection. “Now don’t talk about extravagance,” said he; “I tell you, no fellow ever made money in New York who didn’t spend it first.” And Arthur had been silenced by this paradoxical philosophy.

Townley’s friendship had even extended to providing him with a boarding-place, a room in the house where he himself lodged; and toward this the young fellows took their way, early in the afternoon. Arthur was already tired, with his short and idle day; he was overcome by the rush and the whirl and the magnitude of things. He had heard talked of, had handled, had seen the management of, huge sums of money; he had seen millions in the process of their making; but how to divert a rivulet of the Pactolean stream to himself seemed a greater mystery than ever. It took so much to make so little! Such huge heaps of bullion had to be sweated to yield to the manipulator the clippings of one gold dollar! Truly, on the other hand, Townley talked to him of millions made and lost as if they had been blackberries. It was, “There’s old Prime—he made a million in that Panhandle deal,” or “There goes poor old Howard—the shorts in Erie used him up,” until Arthur saw that he was seeing here a most instructive process: nothing less than the creation and founding of American families. Here were the people, the progenitors of future castes; the sources of inherited estate, of culture, of consideration; this old man with the battered hat, that sharp-faced young Israelite, were the ancestors, the probable fathers and grandfathers of the men and maidens who were to be “society” in the future Republic; the first acquirers of—not the broad acres, but the city lots—the rich houses, the stocks and bonds, the whole equipment of life, that was (if our laws are maintained) to make sleek the jeunesse dorée of the twentieth century. A million! It is not much, in many ways, in most ways that we read about in books and bibles; it is not a factor of the Crusades, nor of the War of the Roses, nor yet (as we are informed) of the kingdom of heaven. But most things that Townley saw were multiples of it; and now Townley carefully avoided reading books; for even General Gordon, you remember, writing from Khartoum to posterity, records the reflection that mankind and his works are governed by his ventral tube. Now of ventral tubes, a million is the deity; books should, as they used to, speak to souls. And Arthur, thinking of all this, who had marvelled first at all their eagerness, now wondered rather at their carelessness; of these men, taking and losing such things so lightly.

Arthur could not have had a better cicerone than Charlie Townley. He knew his New York like the inside of his pocket; its streets, its ways, its women, its wiles, its heroes and its favorites; its eating places, drinking places, breathing places; its getting up and its lying down. When they passed Fourteenth Street, his manner changed very apparently; the æsthetic overcame the practical; the hard shine of millions was displaced by the softer radiance of women’s eyes. Many of these same eyes were, in their turn, riveted by the display of women’s wares in the shop-windows about Union Square, which gave Townley the opportunity of gazing at his ease; although, it must be owned, if any of these eyes looked up and met his own, he seemed little disconcerted.

They stopped and made a call at the Columbian Club, which was crowded with men, breaking the long journey homeward to their firesides, domestic or otherwise. And as, in some country hamlet of the Middle Ages, we can fancy the little ale-house, standing on the heath, midway; Jock and Dickon are plodding home tired from the long day’s plowing; behind this one smoking chimney the cold November sky lowers drearily, the last pale tints of the tired day are fading, and the common is bare, and the naked moorland left to the wolves; and the two men stop in a moment at the Cat-and-Fiddle to have a bite and a sup, a cup around the tavern-fire, and a bit of human companionship, to talk about the price of corn, and of Hodge the tinker’s son and Joan his sweetheart, and the doings of the new squire, whose round brown towers peep from the coppice of the distant park—so, too, here in our New York, the jaded men drop in, and chat about the price of stocks, their neighbor’s horses and his wife, and have a glass of bitters round the fire. Townley took vermouth, lamenting bitterly that his health permitted nothing stronger; but other paler men than he administered brandy-cocktails unto themselves, or pick-me-ups of gin. Here Charlie brushed himself, and took his silver-headed cane; and again the pair sallied forth upon their journey, crossing Madison Square and striking up the Avenue. Many damsels, richly robed, now lit up the long way; there is usually a received type at any period for the outdoor gorgeousness of womankind, and this year it was blue—a walking-suit of blue, from neck to heel, close-fitting, and all of velvet. Dozens and scores of velvet gowns they passed, and Arthur noticed that his guide, philosopher, and friend looked at many of them as if they were familiar sights, but bowed to few. Now there had been many, in Union Square, to whom he had nodded, at the least. He seemed to read Arthur’s thoughts, for he said:

“These are all off-side girls. You don’t see the others out at this time.”

“What do you mean?” said Arthur.

“Why, they’re not in society, you know.” And he lifted his hat to one of them, who had given him a most empressé bow, including in it Arthur. “There’s one of the prettiest girls in town,” said he, meditatively; “Kitty Farnum. They’re awfully rich, too; old Farnum’s got no end of money.” This thought seemed to depress Charlie for a minute, and they walked on in silence. Now Arthur had met Miss Farnum at a New Haven ball, where she had been a very proud belle indeed.

“There,” said Townley, at last, as they crossed a side street, “is Mrs. Levison Gower’s.” There was a certain reverence in his tone, as he said this, that his voice had not yet shown in all that day, and Arthur looked with a proper admiration, though not clearly understanding why, at the house we have already described.

Their lodgings were near by (so Townley always spoke of the boarding-house where he lived), and the young men separated to dress for dinner. Arthur had been rather surprised that so elegant a person lived in a boarding-house at all; but the fact was, Townley preferred to use his money elsewhere than at home. But he never dined with the other inhabitants; in fact, his acquaintance with them was extremely slight, as he always breakfasted in his room; and to-night he put a finishing touch upon his hospitality by inviting Arthur to a very pretty little dinner at the Piccadilly Club. But after this, Townley had an engagement, and Arthur was left to his own devices. He smoked his cigar and read the evening paper; then he began an article in the Edinburgh Review, took up the Spectator, and ended with Punch; after which he became unoccupied, and his spirits dropped visibly.

By this time several men had strolled in; there was much laughing and gay spirits; around him were all the luxuries of mind and body that the inventive bachelor mind has yet devised for the comfort of either such part of himself. But as Arthur leaned back in the deep, throne-like leather chair and sipped (if one may so say) his reina victoria, his consciousness went back to a certain sunny hillside, with the light of the rich autumn morning, and the joyous beat of the hoofs upon the dewy grass.

He had been to see Gracie only the day before; but he drew on his overcoat and walked around to the Livingstones. A light was in the second-story window of the high house; and he rang the bell hopefully.

“Mrs. Livingstone?”

“Not at home,” said the man, gravely.

“Is—is Miss Holyoke in?”

“The ladies are out, sir,” said the man, decidedly.

“I will not leave a card,” said Arthur, answering the man’s gesture; and he walked sadly back to the club-house.

Surely, Arthur felt, the forms of life and the trammels of the great city were coming home to him.

CHAPTER VIII.
ARTHUR SEES MORE OF THE WORLD.

THE firm of Townley & Tamms were of the oldest and best-known bankers and brokers in the Street. Mr. Townley had been known in New York over fifty years; he had a taste for art, and was a director in the Allegheny Central Railroad. Tamms was a newer man; a younger man with a square head, stiff red beard, broad stubby fingers, and great business ability. Arthur was expected to be there a little after nine in the morning, which made it necessary for him to breakfast at the boarding-house on Fifth Avenue at sharp eight. Most of the other men did the same, except Townley, who had his coffee in his room.

These men were not interesting; in fact, they seemed to Arthur singularly unattractive. Their faces were all chopped or rough-hewn into one prevailing expression, as rows of trees by the sea-shore are bent the same way by the wind. It would be best described as a look of eagerness; their eyes were sharp and piercing, and they even ate their breakfast eagerly. They all seemed common to Arthur; and he one of them, reduced to his lowest terms of expression, a unit of population, nothing more. They were all hurrying through breakfast, folding their napkins, putting on their great-coats, and going down-town for money, and for nothing else; so was he. To be sure, he had a woman he loved at the end of it; but so, perhaps, had they.

Arthur rose impatiently, leaving his second egg, and passed out, receiving a clipped or half-audible “good-morning” from most of his fellow-boarders; the sort of salutation that hurried men may give who must still dimly remember or recognize, while they may regret, the necessity for small social courtesies. He put on his overcoat, and started walking down the Avenue.

There was no reasoning himself out of it, his spirits drooped; not with the sentimental and romantic melancholy of a young man (which is a sort of pleasant sadness, and results in nothing worse than pessimistic poems, nocturnal rambles, and a slightly increased consumption of narcotics and stimulants), but with that more practical, less tolerable, discontent which the grown man has in moments when the conviction is irresistibly borne in upon him that his position in the world is not a brilliant one, and his worth, to make the best of it, is unappreciated. For those who choose to be sad over these things there is no remedy. And in New York, he felt himself—number one million three hundred and fifty-six thousand two hundred and two.

Arthur had, too, a strong desire to go and see Gracie, much as a child wants to go to its mother’s lap and cry. But how much farther off she seemed than if they had stayed at Great Barrington! It was impossible, of course, for him to see her; she had insisted that there should be no announced engagement between them. He doubted even if Mrs. Livingstone knew of it. But how long it would be before they could be married, before they could live in a house—in a house like that one there, for instance! And Arthur waved his cane unconsciously at a house on the corner of Thirty-second Street, in which, though ugly enough outside, it seemed to him it might be reasonably possible for him to maintain his own identity and their dignity of life. Then he remembered that Townley had pointed it out to him the day before as Mrs. Levison Gower’s house, and that he had been introduced to her at Lenox. Probably she would not remember him now.

Going to the office, he sought that corner of a desk which was in the future to be his station in the world. Townley arrived late, and gave him a hasty nod; it was a busy day, and he had been up late in the night at the first ball of the season. Arthur’s work that day consisted in writing letters for the firm, following Mr. Tamms’s hastily pencilled instructions; but the first letter he wrote of all was not signed by the firm signature, and it bore the address “Miss Holyoke, care of Mrs. Richard Livingstone, 6 W. ——th Street, City.” Such letters as these it is that make the world go on; and truly they are more important than even the foreign mail of Messrs. Townley & Tamms. This relieved his mind, and the daily labor for his daily bread coming happily in to sweeten his meditations, he got fairly through to four o’clock, when Townley proposed that they should go to drive.

Arthur protested his duty to his employers.

“Nonsense,” said Charlie; “the governor knows you’ve got to get into harness by degrees. Besides, he doesn’t pay you anything for your services—and they arn’t worth anything, yet,” he added. The last argument was unanswerable.

Charlie’s cart (it is quite impossible for us, who have known him nearly two days, to call him Townley any more) was very high, very thick, and very heavy, and was purchased in Long Acre; the horses, which answered the same description, were also imported; and the harness, which corresponded to the cart in thickness and heaviness, came from Cheapside. Townley’s coat, clothes, top-hat, whip, and gloves were all native of Bond Street or Piccadilly; and in fact, the only thing about him which was produced fairly beyond the London bills of mortality was the very undoubted case of green Havana cigars that he offered to Arthur the moment they had left the Park. They drove up Fifth Avenue, past the same procession of pedestrians they had seen the day before, and Arthur could not but note how much more interesting they seemed to their fellow-creatures from the summit of their dog-cart, and how the interest had become mutual as they entered the Park and joined the procession of T-carts, phaetons, and victorias. He admired the dexterity with which Charlie kept the tandem-reins and the whip properly assorted in his left hand, while the right was continually occupied in raising his hat to pretty women who had bowed.

The Hill-and-Dale Club, the newly established country institution, a sort of shrine or sacred grove whither city folk betook themselves to commune with nature, was in Westchester County, not far from the historic banks of the Bronx. An old country mansion, former quarters of Continental generals, rendezvous of Skinners and Cowboys, had been bought, adorned, developed, provided with numerous easy chairs and sporting prints; and lo! it was a club. The wide lawn in front was turned into a half-mile track for running races; a shooting range and tennis-grounds were made behind; and you had a small Arcadia for mundane pleasures. Here could tired mortals loaf, chat, eat, drink, smoke, bet, gamble, race, take exercise, and see their fellow-creatures and their wives and cattle. Expatriated Britons found here a blessed spot of rest, a simulacrum of home, where trotting races were tabooed, where you were waited on by stunted grooms, and could ride after your hounds, and always turned to the left in passing. Before this Elysium did Charlie pull up, and throwing the reins to a stable-boy, led Arthur to the inner Penetralia. After inscribing his name in the club-book (making the fourth, thought Arthur) they went to the smoke-room, where they met a dozen of the fellows (some of whose faces seemed already familiar to him) and executed the customary libation. Here Charlie stood boldly up to a composite ambrosia of which the base was brandy, saying that he thought a fellow deserved it after that drive. Some conversation followed; but I sadly fear ’twould not be worth the trouble of reporting in cold print. Then Charlie proposed they should go look at the stables; and they did.

“That is the beast for you,” he said, pointing to a gaunt, fiery-eyed creature with a close-cropped tail. “Vincent Duval is going abroad, and you can have him for four hundred.”

“But, my dear fellow, I can’t——”

“Nonsense, Holy,” said Charlie familiarly falling into the nickname that then and there sprang full-grown like Minerva from his inventive brain. “Look here, young fellow, I want to give you some advice. Let’s go in and smoke on the piazza.” They found easy seats above the broad green lawn, half across which reached already the shadows of a belt of huge bare forest trees that rimmed in the western end; and there, inspired by tobacco and the beauty of the scene, did Charles Townley deliver himself as follows:

“My dear boy, we live in a great country; and in a free country a man can make himself just what he likes. You can pick out just the class in life that suits you best. This is the critical moment; and you must decide whether to be a two-thousand-dollar clerk all your life, a ten-thousand bachelor, or a millionaire. If you rate yourself at the two-thousand gauge, the world will treat you accordingly; if you spend twenty thousand, the world, sooner or later, will give it to you. There’s Jimmy De Witt, for instance; after the old man busted, he hadn’t a sous markee—what was the result? He had an excellent taste in cigars and wine, knew everybody, told a good story—you know what a handsome fellow he is?—no end of style, and the best judge of a canvas-back duck I ever saw. Everybody said such a fellow couldn’t be left to starve. So old Duval found him a place as treasurer of one of his leased railroads down in Pennsylvania, where all he has to do is to sign the lessee’s accounts; he did this submissively, and it gave him ten thousand a year. Then we made him manager of the Manhattan Jockey Club—that gave him six thousand more; then he makes a little at whist, and never pays his bills, and somehow or other manages to make both ends meet. And now they say he’s going to marry Pussie Duval. Do you suppose he’d ever have been more than a poor devil of a clerk, like me, if he’d tried economy?” And Charlie leaned back and puffed his cigar triumphantly.

“But I mean to pay my bills,” said Arthur.

“Well, he will, too, in time,” said Charlie.

Arthur smiled to himself, and reflected that the corruptions of New York were rather clumsy, after all, and its snares and temptations a trifle worn-out and crude; but he said nothing, and by this time their tandem was brought around and they whirled off to the city. When they got home, he found a note:

“Mr. and Mrs. William H. Farnum request the pleasure—Mr. Holyoke’s company—small party, Thursday the twenty-eighth,” etc, etc.

He tossed it over to Charlie. “Since you’re such a social mentor, what must I do to that?” said he.

“Decline it, of course,” said the other; “I’ve got one myself; you see they saw us together. You mustn’t show up, the first time, at the Farnums.”

Arthur was nettled. “I shall do nothing of the kind,” said he. “I shall accept it.”

“As you like,” laughed the other, good-naturedly. “I shall accept, too, as far as that goes; but you needn’t go. They can put it in the newspaper that I was there, if they like.” Arthur opened his eyes; what sort of young nobleman, then, was his friend, disguised as a clerk upon a salary?

“Perhaps you object to my calling on the Livingstones?” said he, with biting sarcasm.

“Not at all—the Livingstones are all right,” said unconscious Charlie. “But don’t go to-night; come to the opera with me. In fact, you can’t make calls in the evening any more, you know.”

“What opera is it?”

“I don’t know,” said Charlie, serenely. “What does it matter?”

Arthur had nothing to reply to this; and the opera turned out to be “Linda.” But Charlie was right; the audience proved more interesting. Here was a dress parade of all that was most fashionable in New York; for it was a great night, the first of the season, and everyone was anxious to put herself en évidence. Townley was out of his seat three quarters of the time; and Arthur paid little attention to what was going on on the stage. The wicked marquis came, saw, and sought to conquer; the sentimental young heroine sighed and suffered, repelled both the marquis and his diamonds, and fled from the wilds of Chamounix to the seclusion and safety of Paris; and the jewelled ladies in the boxes (familiar with this tale) gave it now and then their perfunctory attention, recognizing that all this drama was being well and properly done, the correct thing, according to the conventions of the stage. Directly opposite him, in one of the grand-tier boxes, were three women who attracted his eyes unwittingly. Two of them were young, and both were beautiful; one, with heavy black hair and fair young shoulders sitting quietly; the other not quite so pretty, but with an indescribable air of complete fashion, a blonde with the bust of a Hebe, talking with animation to quite a little group of male figures, dimly visible in the back of the box; and the third a woman of almost middle age, with the figure of a Titian Venus and hair of an indescribable ashen yellow. Surely he knew that face?

“Who is that in the box opposite—the middle one, I mean, with the two beauties?”

Charlie lifted his opera-glass, and then as quickly dropped it. “She would thank you,” he said, “for your two beauties. She is the only married woman of her set who isn’t afraid to have pretty young girls about her. That’s Mrs. Gower, and she’s looking at you, too.”

Arthur looked up and met her eye; she made a very slight but unmistakable inclination of her head, and Arthur bowed.

“You’re in luck, young’un,” said Townley. “Now you’ve got to go and speak to her.”

“Have I?” said Arthur. “I know her very slightly.”

“She doesn’t seem to think so, and you needn’t remind her of it,” said Charlie, the worldling; and Arthur, having noted the number of the box from the end of the row, started on his quest. He came to the door that seemed to be the seventh in number from the stage, and paused a minute with his hand upon the knob. What young man’s heart, however much its pulsations may be dedicated to another, does not beat awkwardly when he is on the point of addressing three lovely women, two of them quite unknown, the other nearly so? Then again, suppose he had counted wrong, and not got into the right box?

His hesitation was cut short by the sudden opening of the door and the exit of a gentleman from within. Before it closed, Arthur had plunged boldly into the dark anteroom, and was blinking earnestly out from it, somewhat dazzled by the blaze of light and the gleam of the three pairs of white shoulders in front.

“Ah, Mr. Holyoke, I hoped you would come—Mr. Wemyss, Mr. Holyoke—Miss Duval, Mrs. Malgam, Mr. Holyoke, of——”

“Of New York, I believe,” said Arthur, bowing, and accepting the chair which the gentleman addressed as Wemyss had given up, at a look from Mrs. Gower. Certainly, Mrs. Gower had charming manners, he thought; and it was very pleasant of her to be pleasant to him.

“Of New York? I am so glad—I knew that Great Barrington was only your summer home, but I had feared that you were wedded to Boston. Where is Miss Holyoke?” Mrs. Gower added, without apparent malice; and Arthur cursed himself inwardly as he felt that he was blushing.

“She is living with her aunt, Mrs. Livingstone,” said he. And then, with a wild attempt at changing the subject, “Do you like ‘Linda,’ Miss Duval?”

(Crash! went the big drums; whizz, whizz, in cadence came the fiddles. The wicked marquis, who had also turned up in Paris, was at his old tricks again.)

“I think it is perfectly sweet,” said Miss Duval. “Patti does it so well!”

“It must be very pleasant for her to have you here,” said Mrs. Gower, innocently. “I was so sorry to hear of poor Judge Holyoke’s death. And so you have come to settle in New York? How delightful! Let me see—I have not seen you since last summer, at Lenox, have I?”

“It is very kind of you to remember me,” said Arthur.

“Or was it Lenox?” Mrs. Gower went on. “I remember seeing Miss Holyoke one day as I drove by, in Great Barrington,” she added naïvely.

Arthur felt that she was watching him, and was seeking for a reply, when fortunately Linda came forward, almost under the box, and told in a long aria, with many trills and quavers, with what scorn she repelled the marquis’s advances; the marquis, in the meantime, waiting discreetly at the back of the stage until she had had her encore and had flung madly out of his ancestral mansion. This being the musical moment of the evening, all paid rapt attention; and when the last roulade was over Mrs. Gower rose and they all proceeded to help with opera cloaks and shawls. “Mr. Holyoke, you must come and dine with me—are you engaged—let me see—a week from Friday?”

“You are very kind,” said Arthur. “No, I think not.”

“Then I shall expect you—at half-past seven, mind,”—and our hero had the felicity of walking with Mrs. Gower to her carriage, the others coming after them, with the two young ladies. The carriage-door closed with a snap, leaving Arthur with Wemyss and the other man, whom he did not know. Wemyss seemed to feel that their acquaintance had come to an end; so there was nothing left for Arthur but to return to Charlie Townley.

“What the deuce is Mrs. Lucie up to now?” thought he, when Arthur had recounted to him his adventures; but he said nothing; and Arthur was left for the last act to give his entire attention to the stage. Virtue triumphed, and Vice (who, as represented in the person of the lively marquis, seemed to be a pretty good sort of fellow after all—an amiable rascal, the kind of chap of whom you would feel inclined to ask, What would he like to drink?) was duly forgiven; and he showered his diamonds as wedding-gifts upon the bride. So that Linda, thrice fortunate Linda, not only followed the paths of virtue, but got her lover and the diamonds into the bargain; and with this moral and a Welsh rarebit Arthur and his friend sought home and pleasant dreams.

CHAPTER IX.
ARTHUR GETS ON IN THE WORLD.

THERE should never be more than six at a dinner, unless there are fourteen. You can have your dinner either a parlor comedy or a spectacular play: but you must choose which you will have. Mrs. Gower was well aware of this; and hers consisted of a leading lady, a first young lady, a soubrette, a virtuous hero, a heavy villain, and a lover. With these ingredients, you may have a very pleasant dinner; but you must be a sufficiently skilful observer of humanity to detect the rôle. For people say that there are not such rôles any more, and that we are all indifferent and good-natured, and none of us heavy villains.

Arthur was too inexperienced for this; for, like all young men, he also supposed that all these characters were conventional fictions of the stage. He did not believe in villains. Perhaps it would repay us to formulate Arthur’s views, as those of a respectable young New Englander of good education and bringing-up, with whose fortunes in life our book is largely concerned. Roughly expressed, they might be put in canons, much as follows:

I. The world is in the main desirous of realizing the greatest good of the greatest number.

II. Unfortunate necessities—the primal curse of labor, or what not—occupy the greater part of the time of the greater number with sustaining life; so the leisure of the fortunate few is doubly pledged to the discovery and attainment of the object before mentioned.

III. Money is a regrettable necessity; but its acquirement, even from the selfish point of view, is but a means to an end. That end, where personal, is the enjoyment of the pleasures of life—i.e., literature, art, refined society, travel, and health. The larger end is intelligent charity, or public work.

IV. Vice exists, like vermin, as a repulsive vulgarity.

V. Crime exists pathologically—i.e., it is either an abnormal disease, or the consequence of a pitiable weakness.

VI. Honesty is the first virtue of the greater number; honor, which is honesty with a flower added, is the peculiar virtue of a gentleman.

VII. Gentlemen are honorable and brave; ladies are like Shelley’s heroines, or the ladies in the Idylls of the King.

VIII. The chiefest quality of humanity is love; and the object of all human endeavor is to observe and avail itself of the love of that being which is not humanity.

So much for his ethics; and, as we have said Arthur was a poet, it may not come amiss to add an approximation of his theory of æsthetics. This was, in brief:

IX. All beauty is the visible evidence of the love of God; nature is a divine manifestation; and literature, art, and music are the language in which humanity may reply. Thus, in particular, all highest poetry is but this—the discovery of the love of God.

Such were his tenets, the standard of Arthur’s exalted moments, as he supposed them then to be of others. In trying to live by them, he knew that he was weak, as all men are. Of all the people whom he knew, Gracie Holyoke alone seemed always to observe them.

So it may well be that Arthur did not, on that night, justly estimate the worth of those about him. He had, simply, a very enjoyable dinner; he was innocently pleased with the glitter of the glass, the sparkle of the diamonds, the richness of the china, the beauty of the women, the finish of their talk; it was a venial sin for him to like the food and wines,—but there was perhaps one other ingredient in his pleasure, the subtilest of all, which escaped him. Leaving this, for his account, let us speak of the others.

And here we may save space and the wearied reader’s attention, for they had no ethics and no æsthetics; and their philosophy of life was simple. Probably their sensual sin was not so great as Arthur’s—for terrapin and duck were a weariness to most of them—but in the summum bonum they all agreed. To be not as others are, and have those others know it—such was their simple creed. Jimmy De Witt was on the whole the most innocent; his being yearned for horses and yachts, even if they were not all the fastest; and he was not a bad fellow, a great friend of Lucie Gower himself, and so sitting in loco conjugis, for the husband of the hostess was absent. To him came next Mrs. Malgam, who was—but all the world, yea, even to the uttermost bounds thereof where the society newspapers do permeate, knows all about Mrs. Malgam. Upon De Witt’s other side, convenient, Miss Duval—“Pussie” Duval, grand-daughter of Antoine of that ilk who had kept the little barber shop down on Chambers Street; then Arthur, on Mrs. Gower’s right; and on her left Caryl Wemyss again, a modern Boston Faust, son of the great poet who was afterwards minister to Austria; his son, thus born to the purple of diplomacy, had lived in Paris, London, and Vienna, executed plays, poems, criticisms, music, and painting, and, at thirty-five, had discovered the hollowness of things, having himself become perfect in all of them. So he became a critic of civilization—and this is how he was not as other men—for it was the era of the decadence, and he the Cassandra who foresaw it. Mrs. Gower, our leading lady, made the sixth.

From being the lonely Cinderella of an unexplored fireside, Flossie had grown to be one of the most famed and accomplished hostesses in all New York. She had the tact of knowing what topics would touch the souls of the men and move the women’s hearts, and of leading the conversation up to these without apparent effort or insolent dictation. She could make Strephon talk to Chloe, or Marguerite to Faust, without taking the awkward pair by the elbows and knocking their heads together. And all this sweetly, simply, while reserving the preferred rôle to herself, as a carver justly sets aside for his own use his favorite bit of venison. Ordinarily, these six people—four of them, surely—would have talked about other people and their possessions; but Mrs. Flossie rightly fancied that Arthur, knowing little of the world, could only talk about books, or at most, about the world in the abstract. Taking up the talk where it was left at the opera, an early speech from Arthur to the effect that he did not mean to go much into society gave her the necessary opening.

“You must not do so,” said she. “Society is as important to a young man as work. Is it not, Mr. Wemyss?” (One of the charms of this woman’s cleverness was that indefinable quality of humor which consists in the relish of incongruities; her reference to Wemyss for the uses of work, for instance.)

“Society is sour grapes to those beyond its pale,” said Wemyss, “but those who can value it press from it the wine of life.” (Wemyss gave a little laugh, to indicate that he did not mean to be taken as a prig.) “Seriously,” he added, “no person of wide intelligence can afford to ignore the best society of a nation, whatever it be, for it represents its essence and its tendency. It is the liquid glass of champagne left in the frozen bottle, and has more flavor than all the rest, it is the flower, which is at once the present’s culmination and the future’s seed.”

“Oh, that is so true!” cried Pussie Duval. Miss Duval would have made the same remark had Mr. Wemyss asserted that abuse of stimulants was the secret of Hegel. The others stared rather blankly. Arthur had never considered it quite so seriously; and to Mrs. Malgam and Jimmy De Witt, interpreting it esoterically, society needed no more explanation than the Ding an Sich.

“Then again,” said Wemyss, “did you ever go to a party of the people? I don’t mean at Washington—there they get a little rubbed off—but at home. Well, I went to one, once—some people who had lived for many years in the house next to mine on Beacon Street—and I do assure you, it was triste à faire peur; they thought you were flippant if you even smiled, and took offence, like awkward boys and girls, at the least informality. One longed for a Lovelace, si ce n’était que pour les chiffonner. Now, in the world, one’s manners are simple, easy; you have some liberty; people don’t take offence—il n’y a jamais de mal en bonne compagnie. But the trouble with society in this country is,” he continued, “that it has no meaning. Now it must have a meaning to be interesting; it must mean either love or politics. In France, if not in England, it has both. But here, all the meaning of it stops when one is married.”

“Thank you,” said Flossie.

“Madame,” said Wemyss, “you are one of the three sirens, singing in the twilight of the world. But in this dark night about you, society exists only to make all young men get married. In the old time, it had a more serious reason for being. In courts where there was a more social element in politics, intrigues were always quasi-political; parties were made at evening parties; and ministries were entered from boudoirs; you met the Opposition in his salon, and embraced the minister’s principles with—”

“Look out, Mr. Wemyss,” said Mrs. Gower, playfully.