HERMIA SUYDAM

GERTRUDE FRANKLIN ATHERTON

AUTHOR OF “WHAT DREAMS MAY COME”

THE CURRENT LITERATURE PUBLISHING CO

NEW YORK, SAN FRANCISCO, LONDON, AND PARIS

Copyright, 1889.

The Current Literature Publishing Co.

[All rights reserved.]

Press of J. J. Little & Co.

Astor Place, New York.

Table of Contents

FROM HERBERT SPENCER’S CHAPTER ON “THE WILL.”

To say that the performance of the action is the result of his free will is to say that he determines the cohesion of the psychical states which arouse the action; and as these psychical states constitute himself at the moment, this is to say that these psychical states determine their own cohesion, which is absurd. These cohesions have been determined by experiences—the greater part of them, constituting what we call his natural character, by the experiences of antecedent organisms, and the rest by his own experiences. The changes which at each moment take place in his consciousness are produced by this infinitude of previous experiences registered in his nervous structure, co-operating with the immediate impressions on his senses; the effects of these combined factors being in every sense qualified by the psychical state, general or local, of his organism.

HERMIA SUYDAM

CHAPTER I.

A SECOND AVENUE HOUSEHOLD.

When Crosby Suydam died and left exactly enough money to bury himself, his widow returned to New York, and, taking her two little girls by the hand, presented herself at the old Suydam mansion on Second Avenue. “You must either take care of us or see us go to the poor-house,” she said to her brother-in-law; “I am not strong enough to work, and my relatives are as poor as myself.” And she sank into one of the library chairs with that air of indifference and physical weakness which makes a man more helpless than defiance or curse. Did John Suydam still, in his withered, yellow frame, carry a shrunken remnant of that pliable organ called the heart? His brother’s widow did not add this problem to the others of her vexed existence—she had done with problems forever—but in his little world the legend was whispered that, many years before, the last fragment had dried and crumbled to dust. It must be either dust or a fossil; and, if the latter, it would surely play a merry clack and rattle with its housing skeleton every time the old man drew a long breath or hobbled across the room.

John Suydam’s age was another problem. His neighbors said that the little yellow old man was their parents’ contemporary. That he had ever had any youth those parents denied. He was many years older than Crosby Suydam, however, and the world had blamed him sharply for his treatment of his younger brother. Crosby had been wealthy when he married, and a great favorite. Some resentment was felt when he chose a New England girl for his wife; but Mrs. Suydam entertained so charmingly that society quickly forgave both, and filled their drawing-rooms whenever bidden. For ten years these two young people were illuminating stars in the firmament of New York society; then they swept down the horizon like meteors on a summer’s night. Crosby had withdrawn his fortune from the securities in which his father had left it, and blown bubbles up and down Wall street for a year or so. At the end of that time he possessed neither bubbles nor suds. He drifted to Brooklyn, and for ten years more, struggled along, at one clerkship or another, his brother never lending him a dollar, nor offering him the shelter of his roof. He dropped out of life as he had dropped out of the world, which had long since forgotten both him and his unhappy young wife.

But, if John Suydam had no heart, he had pride. New York, in his opinion, should have been called Suydam, and the thought of one of his name in the poor-house aroused a passion stronger than avarice. He told his sister-in-law that she could stay, that he would give her food and shelter and a hundred dollars a year on condition that she would take care of her own rooms—he could not afford another servant.

It was a strange household. Mrs. Suydam sat up in her room all day with her two little girls and in her passive, mechanical way, heard their lessons, or helped them make their clothes. Her brother she met only at the table. At those awful meals not a word was ever spoken. John, who had atrocious table manners, crunched his food audibly for a half-hour at breakfast, an hour and a half at dinner, and an hour at supper. Mrs. Suydam, whose one desire was to die, accepted the hint he unconsciously gave, and swallowed her food whole; if longevity and mastication were correlatives, it was a poor rule that would not work both ways. She died before the year was out; not of indigestion, however, but of relaxation from the terrible strain to which her delicate constitution had been subjected during the ten preceding years.

John Suydam had her put in the family vault, under St. Mark’s, as economically as possible, then groaned in spirit as he thought of the two children left on his hands. He soon discovered that they would give him no trouble. Bessie Suydam was a motherly child, and adversity had filled many of the little store-rooms in her brain with a fund of common-sense, which, in happier conditions, might have been carried by. She was sixteen and Hermia was nine. The day after the funeral she slipped into her mother’s place, and her little sister never missed the maternal care. Their life was monotonous. Bessie did not know her neighbors, although her grandparents and theirs had played together. When Mrs. Suydam had come to live under her brother-in-law’s roof, the neighborhood had put its dislike of John Suydam aside and called at once. It neither saw Mrs. Suydam, nor did its kindness ever receive the slightest notice; and, with a sigh of relief, it forgot both her and her children.

A few months after Mrs. Suydam’s death another slight change occurred in the household. A fourth mendicant relative appeared and asked for help. He was a distant cousin, and had been a schoolmate of John Suydam in that boyhood in which no one but himself believed. He had spent his life in the thankless treadmill of the teacher. Several years before, he had been pushed out of the mill by younger propounders of more fashionable methods, and after his savings were spent he had no resource but John Suydam.

Suydam treated him better than might have been expected. These two girls, whom a malignant fate had flung upon his protection, must be educated, and he was unwilling to incur the expenses of a school or governess. The advent of William Crosby laid the question at rest. John told him that he would give him a home and a hundred dollars a year if he would educate his nieces, and the old man was glad to consent.

The professor taught the girls conscientiously, and threw some sunshine into their lives. He took them for a long walk every day, and showed them all the libraries, the picture galleries, and the shops. In spite of the meanness of her garb, Bessie attracted some attention during these ramblings; she had the pretty American face, and the freshness of morning was in it. Poor Hermia, who obediently trotted behind, passed unnoticed. Nature, who had endowed the rest of her family so kindly—her father and mother had been two of the old dame’s proudest works—had passed her by in a fit of abstraction. Under her high, melancholy forehead and black, heavy brows, stared solemnly a pair of unmistakably green eyes—even that hypocrite Politeness would never name them gray. Her dull, uninteresting hair was brushed severely back and braided in a tight pig-tail; and her sallow cheeks were in painful contrast to the pink and white of her sister’s delicate skin. Her eyelashes were thick and black, and she had the small, admirably shaped hands and feet of the Suydams, but the general effect was unattractive. She was a cold, reserved child, and few people liked her.

The professor took the girls to the theater one night, and it was a memorable night in their lives. Each was in a fever of excitement, and each manifested it characteristically. Bessie’s cheeks were flushed to her eyelashes, and she jerked the buttons off both gloves. Her gray eyes shone and her pink lips were parted. People stared at her as she passed and wondered who she was. But for once in her life she was blind to admiration; she was going to see a play! Hermia was paler than ever and almost rigid. Her lips were firmly compressed, but her hands, in her little woolen gloves, were burning, and her eyes shone like a cat’s in the dark. They sat in the gallery, but they were in the front row, and as content as any jeweled dame in box or parquette.

The play was Monte Cristo, and what more was needed to perfect the delight of two girls confronted with stage illusion for the first time? Bessie laughed and wept, and rent her gloves to shreds with the vehemence of her applause. Hermia sat on the extreme edge of the seat, and neither laughed, wept, nor applauded. Her eyes, which never left the stage, grew bigger and bigger, her face paler, and her nostrils more tense.

After the play was over she did not utter a word until she got home; but the moment she reached the bedroom which the sisters shared in common she flung herself on the floor and shrieked for an hour. Bessie, who was much alarmed, dashed water over her, shook her, and finally picked her up and rocked her to sleep. The next morning Hermia was as calm as usual, but she developed, soon after, a habit of dreaming over her books which much perplexed her sister. Bessie dreamed a little too, but she always heard when she was spoken to, and Hermia did not.

One night, about three months after the visit to the theater, the girls were in their room preparing for bed. Hermia was sitting on the hearth-rug taking off her shoes, and Bessie was brushing her long hair before the glass and admiring the reflection of her pretty face.

“Bessie,” said Hermia, leaning back and clasping her hands about her knee, “what is your ambition in life?”

Bessie turned and stared down at the child, then blushed rosily. “I should like to have a nice, handsome husband and five beautiful children, all dressed in white with blue sashes. And I should like to have a pretty house on Fifth Avenue, and a carriage, and lots of novels. And I should like to go to Europe and see all the picture-galleries and churches.” She had been addressing herself in the glass, but she suddenly turned and looked down at Hermia.

“What is your ambition?” she asked.

“To be the most beautiful woman in the world!” exclaimed the child passionately.

Bessie sat down on a hassock. She felt but did not comprehend that agonized longing for the gift which nature had denied, and which woman holds most dear. She had always been pretty and was somewhat vain, but she had known little of the power of beauty, and power and uncomeliness alone teach a woman beauty’s value. But she was sympathetic, and she felt a vague pity for her sister. She thought it better, however, to improve the occasion.

“Beauty is nothing in itself,” she said, gently; “you must be good and clever, and then people will think——”

“Bessie,” interrupted Hermia, as if she had not heard, “do you think I will ever be pretty?”

Bessie hesitated. She was very conscientious, but she was also very tender-hearted. For a moment there was a private battle, then conscience triumphed. “No,” she said, regretfully, “I am afraid you never will be, dear.”

She was looking unusually lovely herself as she spoke. Her shoulders were bare and her chemise had dropped low on her white bosom. Her eyes looked black in the lamp’s narrow light, and her soft, heavy hair tumbled about her flushed face and slender, shapely figure. Hermia gazed at her for a moment, and then with a suppressed cry sprang forward and tore her sharp nails across her sister’s cheek.

Bessie gave a shriek of pain and anger, and, catching the panting, struggling child, slapped her until her arm ached. “There!” she exclaimed, finally, shaking her sister until the child’s teeth clacked together, “you little tiger cat! You sha’n’t have any supper for a week.” Then she dropped Hermia suddenly and burst into tears. “Oh, it is dreadfully wicked to lose one’s temper like that; but my poor face!” She rubbed the tears from her eyes and, standing up, carefully examined her wounds in the glass. She heaved a sigh of relief; they were not very deep. She went to the washstand and bathed her face, then returned to her sister. Hermia stood on the hearth-rug. She had not moved since Bessie dropped her hands from her shoulders.

Bessie folded her arms magisterially and looked down upon the culprit, her delicate brows drawn together, her eyes as severe as those of an angel whose train has been stepped on. “Are you not sorry?” she demanded sternly.

Hermia gazed at her steadily for a moment. “Yes,” she said, finally, “I am sorry, and I’ll never get outside-mad again as long as I live. I’ve made a fool of myself.” Then she marched to the other side of the room and went to bed.

CHAPTER II.

JOHN SUYDAM GIVES HIS BLESSING.

One day a bank clerk came up to the quiet house with a message to John Suydam. As he was leaving he met Bessie in the hall. Each did what wiser heads had done before—they fell wildly and uncompromisingly in love at first sight. How Frank Mordaunt managed to find an excuse for speaking to her he never remembered, nor how he had been transported from the hall into the dingy old drawing-room. At the end of an hour he was still there, seated on a sofa of faded brocade, and looking into the softest eyes in the world.

After that he came every evening. John Suydam knew nothing of it. Bessie, from the parlor window, watched Mordaunt come down the street and opened the front door herself; the old man, crouching over his library fire, heard not an echo of the whispers on the other side of the wall.

Poor Bessie! Frank Mordaunt was the first young man with whom she had ever exchanged a half-dozen consecutive sentences. No wonder her heart beat responsively to the first love and the first spoken admiration. Mordaunt, as it chanced, was not a villain, and the rôle of victim was not offered to Bessie. She was used to economy, he had a fair salary, and they decided to be married at once. When they had agreed upon the date, Bessie summoned up her courage and informed her uncle of her plans. He made no objection; he was probably delighted to get rid of her; and as a wedding-gift he presented her with—Hermia.

“I like her better than I do you,” he said, “for she has more brains in her little finger than you have in your whole head; and she will never be contented with a bank clerk. But I cannot be bothered with children. I will pay you thirty dollars a quarter for her board, and William Crosby can continue to teach her. I hope you will be happy, Elizabeth; but marriage is always a failure. You can send Hermia to me every Christmas morning, and I will give her twenty-five dollars with which to clothe herself during the year. I shall not go to the wedding. I dislike weddings and funerals. There should be no periods in life, only commas. When a man dies he doesn’t mind the period; he can’t see it. But he need not remind himself of it. You can go.”

Bessie was married in a pretty white gown, made from an old one of her mother’s, and St. Mark’s had never held a daintier bride. No one was present but Mordaunt’s parents, the professor, who was radiant, and Hermia, who was the only bridesmaid. But it was a fair spring morning, the birds were singing in an eager choir, and the altar had been decorated with a few greens and flowers by the professor and Hermia. At the conclusion of the service the clergyman patted Bessie on the head and told her he was sure she would be happy, and the girl forgot her uncle’s benediction.

“Bessie,” said Hermia an hour later, as they were walking toward their new home, “I will never be married until I can have a dress covered with stars like those Hans Andersen’s princesses carried about in a nutshell when they were disguised as beggar-maids, and until I can be married in a grand cathedral and have a great organ just pealing about me, and a white-robed choir singing like seraphs, and roses to walk on——”

“Hermia,” said Bessie dreamily, “I wish you would not talk so much, and you shouldn’t wish for things you can never have.”

“I will have them,” exclaimed the child under her breath. “I will! I will!”

CHAPTER III.

BROOKLYN AND BABYLON.

Thirteen years passed. Bessie had three of her desired children and a nice little flat in Brooklyn. Reverses and trials had come, but on the whole Mordaunt was fairly prosperous, and they were happy. The children did not wear white dresses and blue sashes; they were generally to be seen in stout ginghams and woolen plaids, but they were chubby, healthy, pretty things, and their mother was as proud of them as if they had realized every detail of her youthful and ambitious dreams.

Bessie’s prettiness had gone with her first baby, as American prettiness is apt to do, but the sweetness of her nature remained and shone through her calm eyes and the lines of care about her mouth. She had long since forgotten to sigh over the loss of her beauty, she had so little time; but she still remembered to give a deft coil to her hair, and her plain little gowns were never dowdy. She knew nothing about modern decorative art, and had no interest in hard-wood floors or dados; but her house was pretty and tasteful in the old-fashioned way, and in her odd moments she worked at cross-stitch.

And Hermia? Poor girl! She had not found the beauty her sister had lost. Her hair was still the same muddy blonde-brown, although with a latent suggestion of color, and she still brushed it back with the severity of her childhood. Nothing, she had long since concluded, could beautify her, and she would waste no time in the attempt. She was a trifle above medium height, and her thin figure bent a little from the waist. Her skin was as sallow as of yore, and her eyes were dull. She had none of Bessie’s sweetness of expression; her cold, intellectual face just escaped being sullen. Her health was what might be expected of a girl who exercised little and preferred thought to sleep. She had kept the promise made the night she had scratched her sister’s face; during the past fifteen years no one had seen her lose her self-control for a moment. She was as cold as a polar night, and as impassive as an Anglo-American. She was very kind to her sister, and did what she could to help her. She taught the children; and, though with much private rebellion, she frequently made their clothes and did the marketing. Frank and Bessie regarded her with awe and distant admiration, but the children liked her. The professor had taught her until he could teach her no more, and then had earned his subsistence by reading aloud to John Suydam. A year or two before, he had departed for less material duties, with few regrets.

But, if Hermia no longer studied, she belonged to several free libraries and read with unflagging vigor. Of late she had taken a deep interest in art, and she spent many hours in the picture galleries of New York. Moreover, she grasped any excuse which took her across the river. With all the fervor of her silent soul she loved New York and hated Brooklyn.

She was sitting in the dining-room one evening, helping Lizzie, the oldest child, with her lessons. Lizzie was sleepy, and was droning through her multiplication table, when she happened to glance at her aunt. “You are not paying attention,” she exclaimed, triumphantly; “I don’t believe you’ve heard a word of that old table, and I’m not going to say it over again.”

Hermia, whose eyes had been fixed vacantly on the fire, started and took the book from Lizzie’s lap. “Go to bed,” she said; “you are tired, and you know your tables very well.”

Lizzie, who was guiltily conscious that she had never known her tables less well, accepted her release with alacrity, kissed her aunt good-night, and ran out of the room.

Hermia went to the window and opened it. It looked upon walls and fences, but lineaments were blotted out to-night under a heavy fall of snow. Beyond the lower roofs loomed the tall walls of houses on the neighboring street, momentarily discernible through the wind-parted storm.

Hermia pushed the snow from the sill, then closed the window with a sigh. The snow and the night were the two things in her life that she loved. They were projected into her little circle from the grand whole of which they were parts, and were in no way a result of her environment.

She went into the sitting-room and sat down by the table. She took up a book and stared at its unturned pages for a quarter of an hour. Then she raised her eyes and looked about her. Mordaunt was sitting in an easy-chair by the fire, smoking a pipe and reading a magazine story aloud to his wife, who sat near him, sewing. Lizzie had climbed on his lap, and with her head against his shoulder was fast asleep.

Hermia took up a pencil and made a calculation on the fly-leaf of her book. It did not take long, but the result was a respectable sum—4,620. Allowing for her sister’s brief illnesses and for several minor interruptions, she had looked upon that same scene, varied in trifling details, just about 4,620 times in the past thirteen years. She rose suddenly and closed her book.

“Good-night,” she said, “I am tired. I am going to bed.”

Mordaunt muttered “good-night” without raising his eyes; but Bessie turned her head with an anxious smile.

“Good-night,” she said; “I think you need a tonic. And would you mind putting Lizzie to bed? I am so interested in this story. Frank, carry her into the nursery.”

Hermia hesitated a moment, as if she were about to refuse, but she turned and followed Frank into the next room.

She undressed the inert, protesting child and tucked her in bed. Then she went to her room and locked the door. She lit the gas mechanically and stood still for a moment. Then she threw herself on the bed, and flung herself wildly about. After a time she clasped her hands tightly about the top of her head and gazed fixedly at the ceiling. Her family would not have recognized her in that moment. Her disheveled hair clung about her flushed face, and through its tangle her eyes glittered like those of a snake. For a few moments her limbs were as rigid as if the life had gone out of them. Then she threw herself over on her face and burst into a wild passion of weeping. The hard, inward sobs shook her slender body as the screw shakes the steamer.

“How I hate it! How I hate it! How I hate it!” she reiterated, between her paroxysms. “O God! is there nothing—nothing—nothing in life but this? Nothing but hideous monotony—and endless days—and thousands and thousands of hours that are as alike as grains of sand?”

She got up suddenly and filling a basin with water thrust her head into it. The water was as cold as melting ice, and when she had dried her hair she no longer felt as if her brain were trying to force its way through the top of her skull.

Hermia, like many other women, lived a double life. On the night when, under the dramatic illusion of Monte Cristo, her imagination had awakened with a shock which rent the film of childhood from her brain, she had found a dream-world of her own. The prosaic never suspected its existence; the earth’s millions who dwelt in the same world cared nothing for any kingdom in it but their own; she was sovereign of a vast domain wrapped in the twilight mystery of dreamland, but peopled with obedient subjects conceived and molded in her waking brain. She walked stoically through the monotonous round of her daily life; she took a grim and bitter pleasure in fulfilling every duty it developed, and she never neglected the higher duty she owed her intellect; but when night came, and the key was turned in her door, she sprang from the life she abhorred into the world of her delight. She would fight sleep off for hours, for sleep meant temporary death, and the morning a return to material existence. A ray of light from the street-lamp struggled through the window, and, fighting with the shadows, filled the ugly, common little room with glamour and illusion. The walls swept afar and rolled themselves into marble pillars that towered vaporously in the gloom. Beyond, rooms of state and rooms of pleasure ceaselessly multiplied. On the pictured floors lay rugs so deep that the echo of a lover’s footfall would never go out into eternity. From the enameled walls sprang a vaulted ceiling painted with forgotten art. Veils of purple stuffs, gold-wrought, jewel-fringed, so dense that the roar of a cannon could not have forced its way into the stillness of that room, masked windows and doors. From beyond those pillars, from the far perspective of those ever-doubling chambers came the plash of waters, faint and sweet as the music of the bulbul. The bed, aloft on its dais, was muffled in lace which might have fringed a mist. Hidden in the curving leaves of pale-tinted lotus flowers were tiny flames of light, and in an urn of agate burned perfumed woods. * * *

For this girl within her unseductive frame had all the instincts of a beautiful woman, for the touch of whose lips men would dig the grave of their life’s ambitions. That kiss it was the passionate cry of her heart to give to lips as warm and imploring as her own. She would thrust handfuls of violets between her blankets, and imagine herself lying by the sea in a nest of fragrance. Her body longed for the softness of cambric and for silk attire; her eye for all the beauty that the hand of man had ever wrought.

When wandering among those brain-born shadows of hers, she was beautiful, of course; and, equally inferable, those dreams had a hero. This lover’s personality grew with her growth and changed with every evolution of the mind that had given it birth; but, strangely enough, the lover himself had retained his proportions and lineaments from the day of his creation. Is it to be supposed that Hermia was wedded peacefully to her ideal, and that together they reigned over a vast dominion of loving and respectful subjects? Not at all. If there was one word in the civilized vocabulary that Hermia hated it was that word “marriage.” To her it was correlative with all that was commonplace; with a prosaic grind that ate and corroded away life and soul and imagination; with a dreary and infinite monotony. Bessie Mordaunt’s peaceful married life was hideous to her sister. Year after year,—neither change nor excitement, neither rapture nor anguish, nor romance nor poetry, neither ambition nor achievement, nor recognition nor power! Nothing of mystery, nothing of adventure; neither palpitation of daring nor quiver of secrecy; nothing but kisses of calm affection, babies, and tidies! 4,620 evenings of calm, domestic bliss; 4,620 days of placid, housewifely duties! To Hermia such an existence was a tragedy more appalling than relentless immortality. Bessie had her circle of friends, and in each household the tragedy was repeated; unless, mayhap, the couple were ill-mated, when the tragedy became a comedy, and a vulgar one at that.

Hermia’s hatred of marriage sprang not from innate immorality, but from a strongly romantic nature stimulated to abnormal extreme by the constant, small-beer wave-beats of a humdrum, uniform, ever-persisting, abhorred environment. If no marriage-bells rang over her cliffs and waters and through her castle halls, her life was more ideally perfect than any life within her ken which drowsed beneath the canopy of law and church. Regarding the subject from the point of view to which her nature and conditions had focused her mental vision, love needed the exhilarating influence of liberty, the stimulation of danger, and the enchantment of mystery.

Of men practically she knew little. There were young men in her sister’s circle, and Mordaunt occasionally brought home his fellow clerks; but Hermia had never given one of them a thought. They were limited and commonplace, and her reputation for intellectuality had the effect of making them appear at their worst upon those occasions when circumstances compelled them to talk to her. And she had not the beauty to win forgiveness for her brains. She appreciated this fact and it embittered her, little as she cared for her brother’s uninteresting friends, and sent her to the depths of her populous soul.

The books she read had their influence upon that soul-population. The American novel had much the same effect upon her as the married life of her sister and her sister’s friends. She cared for but little of the literature of France, and the best of it deified love and scorned the conventions. She reveled in mediæval and ancient history and loved the English poets, and both poets and history held aloft, on pillars of fragrant and indestructible wood, her own sad ideality.

CHAPTER IV.

IN THE GREEN ROOM OF LITERATURE.

Hermia’s imagination in its turn demanded a safety-valve; she found it necessary, occasionally, to put her dreams into substance and sequence. In other words she wrote. Not prose. She had neither the patience nor the desire. Nor did she write poetry. She believed that no woman, save perhaps time-enveloped Sappho, ever did, and she had no idea of adding her pseudonym to the list of failures. When her brain became overcharged, she dashed off verses, wildly romantic, and with a pen heated white. There was a wail and an hysterical passion in what she wrote that took the hearts of a large class of readers by storm, and her verses found prompt acceptance by the daily and weekly papers. She had as yet aspired to nothing higher. She was distinctly aware that her versification was crude and her methods faulty. To get her verses into the magazines they must be fairly correct and almost proper, and both attainments demanded an amount of labor distasteful to her impatient nature. Of late, scarcely a week had passed without the appearance of several metrical contributions over the signature “Quirus;” and the wail and the passion were growing more piercing and tumultuous. The readers were moved, interested, or amused, according to their respective natures.

The morning after the little arithmetical problem, Hermia arose early and sat down at her desk. She drew out a package of MS. and read it over twice, then determined to have a flirtation with the magazines. These verses were more skillful from a literary point of view than any of her previous work, because, for the sake of variety, she had plagiarized some good work of an English poet. The story was a charming one, dramatic, somewhat fragmentary, and a trifle less caloric than her other effusions. She revised it carefully, and mailed it, later in the day, to one of the leading New York magazines.

Two weeks passed and no answer came. Then, snatching at anything which offered its minimum of distraction, she determined to call on the editor. She had never presented herself to an editor before, fearing his betrayal of her identity; so well had she managed that not even Bessie knew she wrote; but she regarded the magazine editor from afar as an exalted being, and was willing to put her trust in him. She felt shy about acknowledging herself the apostle of beauty and the priestess of passion, but ennui conquered diffidence, and one morning she presented herself at the door of her editor’s den.

The editor, who was glancing over proofs, raised his eyes as she entered, and did not look overjoyed to see her. Nevertheless, he politely asked her to be seated. Poor Hermia by this time was cold with fright; her knees were shaking. She was used to self-control, however, and in a moment managed to remark that she had come to inquire about the fate of her poem. The editor bowed, extracted a MS. from a pigeon-hole behind him, and handed it to her.

“I cannot use it,” he said, “but I am greatly obliged to you, nevertheless. We are always grateful for contributions.”

He had a pleasant way of looking upon the matter as settled, but an ounce or two of Hermia’s courage had returned, and she was determined to get something more out of the interview than a glimpse of an editor.

“I am sorry,” she said, “but of course I expected it. Would you mind telling me what is the matter with it?”

Editors will not take the trouble to write a criticism of a returned manuscript, but they are more willing to air their views verbally than people imagine. It gives them an opportunity to lecture and generalize, and they enjoy doing both.

“Certainly not,” said the editor in question. “Your principal fault is that you are too highly emotional. Your verses would be unhealthy reading for my patrons. This is a family magazine, and has always borne the reputation of incorruptible morality. It would not do for us to print matter which a father might not wish his daughter to read. The American young girl should be the conscientious American editor’s first consideration.”

This interview was among the anguished memories of Hermia’s life. After her return home she thought of so many good things she might have said. This was one which she uttered in the seclusion of her bed-chamber that evening:

(“You are perfectly right,” with imperturbability. “‘Protect the American young girl lest she protect not herself’ should be the motto and the mission of the American editor!”)

When she was at one with the opportunity, she asked: “And my other faults?”

“Your other faults?” replied the unconscious victim of lagging wit. “There is a strain of philosophy in your mind which unfits you for magazine work. A magazine should be light and not too original. People pick it up after the work of the day; they want to be amused and entertained, they do not want to think. Anything new, anything out of the beaten track, anything which does not suggest old and familiar favorites, anything which requires a mental effort to grasp, annoys them and affects the popularity of the magazine. Of course we like originality and imagination—do not misunderstand me; what we do not want is the complex, the radically original, or the deep. We have catered to a large circle of readers for a great many years; we know exactly what they want, and they know exactly what to expect. When they see the name of a new writer in our pages they feel sure that whatever may be the freshness and breeziness of the newcomer, he (or she) will not call upon them to witness the tunneling of unhewn rock—so to speak. Do you grasp my meaning?”

(Hermia at home in her bed-chamber: “I see. Your distinctions are admirable. You want originality with the sting extracted, soup instead of blood, an exquisite etching rather than the bold sweep and color of brush and oils. Your contributors must say an old thing in a new way, or a new thing in so old a way that the shock will be broken, that the reader will never know he has harbored a new-born babe. Your little lecture has been of infinite value to me. I shall ponder over it until I evolve something worthy of the wary parent and the American Young Girl.”)

Hermia in the editor’s den: “Oh, yes; thank you very much. But I am afraid I shall never do anything you will care for. Good-morning.”

The next day she sent the manuscript to another magazine, and, before she could reasonably expect a reply, again invaded the sanctity of editorial seclusion. The genus editor amused her; she resolved to keep her courage by the throat and study the arbiters of literary destinies. It is probable that, if her second editor had not been young and very gracious, her courage would again have flown off on deriding wings; as it was, it did not even threaten desertion.

She found the editor engaged in nothing more depressing than the perusal of a letter. He smiled most promisingly when she announced herself as the mysterious “Quirus,” but folded his hands deprecatingly.

“I am sorry I cannot use that poem,” he said, “but I am afraid it is impossible. It has decided merit, and, in view of the awful stuff we are obliged to publish, it would be a welcome addition to our pages. I don’t mind the strength of the poem or the plot; you have made your meaning artistically obscure. But there is one word in it which would make it too strong meat for the readers of this magazine. I refer to the word ‘naked.’ It is quite true that the adjective ‘naked’ is used in conjunction with the noun ‘skies;’ but the word itself is highly objectionable. I have been trying to find a way out of the difficulty. I substituted the word ‘nude,’ but that spoils the meter, you see. Then I sought the dictionary.” He opened a dictionary that stood on a revolving stand beside him, and read aloud: “‘Naked—uncovered; unclothed; nude; bare; open; defenseless; plain; mere.’ None of these will answer the purpose, you see. They are either too short or too long; and ‘open’ does not convey the idea. I am really afraid that nothing can be done. Suppose you try something else and be more careful with your vocabulary. I trust you catch my idea, because I am really quite interested in your work. It is like the fresh breeze of spring when it is not”—here he laughed—“the torrid breath of the simoon. I have read some of your other verse, you see.”

“I think I understand you,” said Hermia, leaning forward and gazing reflectively at him. “Manner is everything. Matter is a creature whose limbs may be of wood, whose joints may be sapless; so long as he is covered by a first-class tailor he is a being to strut proudly down to posterity. Or, for the sake of variety, which has its value, the creature may change his sex and become a pink-cheeked, flax-haired, blue-eyed doll. Hang upon her garments cut by an unconventional hand, looped eccentrically and draped artistically, and the poor little doll knows not herself from her clothes. Have I gazed understandingly upon the works of the literary clock?”

The editor threw back his head and laughed aloud. “You are very clever,” he exclaimed, “but I am afraid your estimate of us is as correct as it is flattering. We are a set of cowards, but we should be bankrupt if we were not.”

Hermia took the manuscript he had extracted from a drawer, and rose. “At all events you were charitable to read my verses,” she said, “and more than good to attempt their re-form.”

The editor stood up also. “Oh, do not mention it,” he said, “and write me something else—something equally impassioned but quite irreproachable. Aside from the defect I mentioned, there were one or two verses which I should have been obliged to omit.”

Hermia shrugged her shoulders. She might repeatedly work the lovers up to the verge of disaster, then, just before the fatal moment, wrench them apart and substitute asterisks for curses. The school-girls would palpitate, the old maids thrill, the married women smile, and the men grin. No harm would be done, maidens and maids would lay it down with a long-drawn sigh—of relief?—or regret?

Hermia kept these reflections to herself and departed, thinking her editor a charming man.

When she reached the sidewalk she stood irresolute for a moment, then walked rapidly for many blocks. The Mecca of her pilgrimage was another publishing-house. She stepped briskly upstairs and asked for the editor with a confidence born of excitement and encouragement. After a short delay she was shown into his office, and began the attack without preliminary.

“I have brought you some verses,” she said, “which have been declined by two of your esteemed contemporaries on the ground of unconventionality—of being too highly seasoned for the gentle palates to which they cater. I bring them to you because I believe you have more courage than the majority of your tribe. You wrote two books in which you broke out wildly once or twice. Now I want you to read this while I am here. It will take but a few moments.”

The editor, who had a highly non-committal air, smiled slightly, and held out his hand for the verses. He read them through, then looked up.

“I rather like them,” he said. “They have a certain virility, although I do not mistake the strength of passion for creative force. But they are pretty tropical, and the versification is crude. I—am afraid—they—will hardly—do.”

He looked out of the window, then smiled outright. It rather pleased him to dare that before which his brethren faltered. He made a number of marks on the manuscript.

“That rectifies the crudeness a little,” he said, “and the poem certainly has intellectuality and merit. You can leave it. I will let you know in a day or two. Your address is on the copy, I suppose. I think you may count upon the availability of your verses.”

Hermia accepted her dismissal and went home much elated. The verses were printed in the next issue of the magazine, and there was a mild storm on the literary lake. The course of the magazine, in sending up a stream of red-hot lava in place of the usual shower-bath of lemonade and claret-cup, was severely criticised, but there were those who said that this deliberately audacious editor enjoyed the little cyclone he had provoked.

This was the most exciting episode Hermia could recall since Bessie’s marriage.

CHAPTER V.

THE SWEETS OF SOLITUDE.

A few weeks later Frank made an announcement which gave Hermia a genuine thrill of delight. A fellow bank-clerk was obliged to spend some months in California, and had offered Mordaunt his house in Jersey for the summer. Hermia would not consent to go with them, in spite of their entreaties. As far back as she could remember, way down through the long perspective of her childhood, she had never been quite alone except at night, nor could she remember the time when she had not longed for solitude. And now! To be alone for four months! No more evenings of domestic bliss, no more piles of stockings to darn, no more dinners to concoct, no more discussions upon economy, no more daily tasks carefully planned by Bessie’s methodical mind, no more lessons to teach, no more anything which had been her daily portion for the last thirteen years. Bridget would go with the family. She would do her own cooking, and not eat at all if she did not wish. Her clothes could fall into rags, and her hands look through every finger of her gloves. She would read and dream and forget that the material world existed.

It was a beautiful spring morning when Hermia found herself alone. She had gone with the family to Jersey, and had remained until they were settled. Now the world was her own. When she returned to the flat, she threw her things on the floor, pushed the parlor furniture awry, turned the framed photographs to the wall, and hid the worsted tidies under the sofa.

For two months she was well content. She reveled in her loneliness, in the voiceless rooms, the deserted table, the aimless hours, the forgotten past, the will-painted present. She regarded the post-man as her natural enemy, and gave him orders not to ring her bell. Once a week she took her letters from the box and devoted a half-hour to correspondence. She had a hammock swung in one of the rooms, and dreamed half the night through that she was in the hanging gardens of Semiramis. The darkness alone was between her and the heavens thick with starry gods; and below was the heavy perfume of oranges and lotus flowers. There was music—soft—crashing—wooing her to a scene of bewildering light and mad carousal. There was rapture of power and ecstasy of love. She had but to fling aside the curtains—to fly down the corridor—

It is not to be supposed that Hermia’s imagination was faithful to the Orient. Her nature had great sensuous breadth and wells of passion which penetrated far down into the deep, hard substratum of New England rock; but her dreams were apt to be inspired by what she had read last. She loved the barbarous, sensuous, Oriental past, but she equally loved the lore which told of the rugged strength and brutal sincerity of mediæval days, when man turned his thoughts to love and war and naught besides; when the strongest won the woman he wanted by murder and force, and the woman loved him the better for doing it. Hermia would have gloried in the breathless uncertainty of those days, when death and love went hand-in-hand, and every kiss was bought with the swing of a battle-axe. She would have liked to be locked in her tower by her feudal father, and to have thrown down a rope-ladder to her lover at night. Other periods of history at times demanded her, and she had a great many famous lovers: Bolingbroke and Mirabeau, Napoleon and Aaron Burr, Skobeleff and Cavour, a motley throng who bore a strong racial resemblance to one another when roasting in the furnace of her super-heated imagination.

Again, there were times when love played but a small part in her visions. She was one of the queens of that world to which she had been born, a world whose mountains were of cold brown stone, and in whose few and narrow currents drifted stately maidens in stiff, white collars and tailor-made gowns. She should be one of that select band. It was her birthright; and each instinct of power and fastidiousness, caste and exclusiveness, flourished as greenly within her as if those currents had swept their roots during every year of her life’s twenty-four. When ambition sank down, gasping for breath, love would come forward eager and warm, a halo enveloped the brown-stone front, and through the plate-glass and silken curtains shone the sun of paradise.

For a few weeks the charm of solitude retained its edge. Then, gradually, the restlessness of Hermia’s nature awoke after its sleep and clamored for recognition. She grew to hate the monotony of her own society as she had that of her little circle. She came to dread the silence of the house; it seemed to close down upon her, oppressing, stifling, until she would put her hand to her throat and gasp for breath. Sometimes she would scream at every noise; her nerves became so unstrung that sleep was a visitor who rarely remembered her. Once, thinking she needed change of scene, she went to Jersey. She returned the next morning. The interruption of the habit of years, the absolute change of the past few months made it impossible to take up again the strings of her old life. They had snapped forever, and the tension had been too tight to permit a knot. She could go down to the river, but not back to the existence of the past thirteen years.

For a week after her return from Jersey she felt as if she were going mad. Life seemed to have stopped; the future was a blank sheet. Try to write on it as she would, the characters took neither form nor color. To go and live alone would mean no more than the change from her sister’s flat to a bare-walled room; to remain in her present conditions was unthinkable. She had neither the money nor the beauty to accumulate interests in life. Books ceased to interest her, imagination failed her. She tried to write, but passion was dead, and the blood throbbed in her head and drowned words and ideas. She had come to the edge of life, and at her feet swept the river—in its depths were peace and oblivion—eternal rest—a long, cool night—the things which crawl in the deep would suck the blood from her head—a claw with muscles of steel would wrench the brain from her skull and carry it far, far, where she could feel it throb and jump and ache no more—

And then, one day, John Suydam died and left her a million dollars.

CHAPTER VI.

SUYDAM’S LEGACY AND HERMIA’S WILL.

Hermia attended her uncle’s funeral because Frank came over and insisted upon it; and she and her brother-in-law were the only mourners. But few people were in the church, a circumstance which Hermia remembered later with gratitude. The Suydams had lived on Second Avenue since Second Avenue had boasted a brick or brownstone front, but no one cared to assume a respect he did not feel. Among the tablets which graced the interior of St. Mark’s was one erected to the dead man’s father, who had left many shekels to the diocese; but John Suydam was lowered into the family vault with nothing to perpetuate his memory but his name and the dates of his birth and death engraved on the silver plate of his coffin.

Hermia took no interest in her uncle’s death; she was even past the regret that she would be the poorer by twenty-five dollars a year. When she received the letter from Suydam’s lawyer, informing her that she was heiress to a million dollars, her hands shook for an hour.

At first she was too excited to think connectedly. She went out and took a long walk, and physical fatigue conquered her nerves. She returned home and sat down on the edge of her bed and thought it all out. The world was under her feet at last. With such a fortune she could materialize every dream of her life. She would claim her place in society here, then go abroad, and in the old world forget the Nineteenth Century. She would have a house, each of whose rooms should be the embodiment of one of that strange medley of castles she had built in the land of her dreams. And men would love her—she was free to love in fact instead of in fancy—free to go forth and in the crowded drawing-rooms of that world not a bird’s flight away find the lover whose glance would be recognition.

She sprang to her feet and threw her arms above her head. New life seemed to have been poured into her veins, and it coursed through them like quicksilver; she felt young for the first time in the twenty-four centuries of her life. She dropped her arms and closed her hand slowly; the world was in the palm. She smiled and let her head drop back. She moved it slowly on the pivot of her throat. Her eyes met the glass.

The cry of horror which burst from her lips rang through the room. For this girl had lived so long and so consistently in her imagination that it was rarely she remembered she was not a beautiful woman. During the past hours she had slowly grasped the fact that, as with the stroke of a magician’s wand, her dream-estates had been hardened from shadow into substance; it had not occurred to her that the gift most coveted was the one gift withheld.

She sank in a heap on the bed, all spirit and hope gone out of her. For many minutes she remained motionless. Then she slowly straightened herself until she was erect once more, and in her face grew a look of hope fighting down doubt. In a moment hope triumphed, then gave way to determination, which in turn yielded to defiance. She sprang forward and with her clenched hand shattered her mirror into a star with a thousand points.

“I will be beautiful!” she cried aloud, “and I will never look into a glass again until I am.”

CHAPTER VII.

A HEROINE IN TRAINING.

The thirty or forty thousand dollars over John Suydam’s million had been left to Bessie. She immediately bought a charming house on St. Mark’s Avenue—it did not occur to her to leave her beloved Brooklyn—and Hermia furnished it for her and told her that she would educate the children. Hermia did not divide her fortune with her sister. She kept her hundred thousands, not because gold had made her niggardly, but because she wanted the power that a fortune gives.

The old Suydam house was one of the largest of its kind in New York. Exteriorly it was of red brick with brown-stone trimmings, and about the lower window was a heavy iron balcony. Beneath the window was a square of lawn the size of a small kitchen table, which was carefully protected by a high, spiked iron railing.

Hermia put the house at once in the hands of a famous designer and decorator, but allowed him no license. Her orders were to be followed to the letter. The large, single drawing-room was to be Babylonian. The library just behind, and the dining-room in the extension were to look like the rooms of a feudal castle. The large hall should suggest a cathedral. Above, her boudoir and bed-room was to be a scene from the Arabian Nights. A conservatory, to be built at the back of the house, would be a jungle of India.

The house was to be as nearly finished as possible by the beginning of winter. She wrote to her mother’s sister, Miss Huldah Starbruck, a lady who had passed fifty peaceful years in Nantucket, and asked her to come and live with her. Miss Starbruck promised to come early in December, and then, all other points settled, Hermia gave her attention to the momentous question of her undeveloped beauty.

She went to a fashionable physician and had a long interview with him. The next day he sent her a trained and athletic nurse, a pleasant, placid-looking young woman, named Mary Newton. Miss Newton, who had received orders to put Hermia into a perfect state of health, and who was given carte blanche, telegraphed for a cottage on the south shore of Long Island. She had a room fitted up as a gymnasium, and for the next four months Hermia obeyed her lightest mandate upon all questions of diet and exercise. Once a week Hermia went to town and divided the day between the house-decorators and a hairdresser who had engaged to develop the color in her lusterless locks.

On the first of December, Miss Newton told her that no girl had ever been in more superb condition; and Hermia, who had kept her vow and not yet looked in a mirror, was content to take her word, and both returned to town.

CHAPTER VIII.

HERMIA DISCOVERS HERSELF.

Had Hermia been a bride on her wedding-night she could not have felt more trepidation than when she stood on the threshold of her first interview with her new self. She was to meet a strange, potent being, who would unlock for her those doors against which, with fierce, futile longing, she had been wont to cast herself, since woman’s instinct had burst its germ.

She entered her bedroom and locked the door. But she did not go to the mirror at once; she was loath to relinquish pleasurable uncertainty. She sank on a rug before the hearth and locked her hands about her knee in the attitude which had been a habit from childhood. For a few moments she sat enjoying the beauty of the room, the successful embodiment of one of her dearest dreams. The inlaid floor was thick with rugs that had been woven in the looms of the Orient. The walls were hung with cloth of gold, and the ceiling was a splendid picture of Nautch girls dancing in the pleasure palace of an Indian prince. The bed, enameled to represent ivory, stood on a dais over which trailed a wonderful Hindoo shawl. Over the couches and divans were flung rich stuffs, feathered rugs, and odd strips of Indian conceits. The sleeping-room was separated from the boudoir by a row of pillars, and from the unseen apartment came the smell of burning incense.

Hermia leaned back against a pile of cushions, and, clasping her hands behind her head, gazed about her with half-closed eyes. There was a sense of familiarity about it all that cast a shadow over her content. It was a remarkably close reproduction of an ideal, considering that the ideal had been filtered through the practical brain of a nineteenth century decorator—but therein lay the sting. She had dreamed of this room, lived in it; it was as familiar as Bessie’s parlor in Brooklyn, with its tidies and what-nots; it wanted the charm of novelty. She had a protesting sense of being defrauded; it was all very well to realize one’s imaginings, but how much sweeter if some foreign hand had cunningly woven details within and glamour above, of which she had never dreamed. The supreme delight of atmospheric architecture is the vague, abiding sense that high on the pinnacle we have reared, and which has shot above vision’s range, is a luminous apex, divine in color, wondrous in form, a will-o’-the-wisp fluttering in the clouds of imagination.

Hermia sighed, but shrugged her shoulders. Had not life taught her philosophy?

Where the gold-stuffs parted on the wall opposite the pillars, a mirror, ivory-framed, reached from floor to ceiling. Hermia rose and walked a few steps toward the glass without daring to raise her eyes. Then with a little cry she ran to the lamps and turned them out. She flung off her clothes, threw the lace thing she called her night-gown over her head, and jumped into bed. She pulled the covers over her face, and for ten minutes lay and reviled herself. Then, with an impatient and audible exclamation at her cowardice, she got up and lit every lamp in the room.

She walked over to the mirror and looked long at herself, fearfully at first, then gravely, at last smilingly. She was beautiful, because she was unique. Her victory was the more assured because her beauty would be the subject of many a dispute. She had not the delicate features and conventional coloring that women admire, but a certain stormy, reckless originality which would appeal swiftly and directly to variety-loving man. Her eyes, clear and brilliant as they had once been dull and cold, were deep and green as the sea. Her hair, which lay in a wiry cloud about her head and swept her brows, was a shining mass of brazen threads. Her complexion had acquired the clear tint of ivory and was stained with the rich hue of health. The very expression of her face had changed; the hard, dogged, indifferent look had fled. With hope and health and wishes gratified had come the lifting and banishment of the old mask—that crystallization of her spirit’s discontent. Yes, she was a beautiful woman. She might not have a correct profile or a soft roundness of face, but she was a beautiful woman.

She pinched her cheek; it was firm and elastic. She put her hands about her throat; it rose from its lace nest, round and polished as an ivory pillar. She slipped the night-gown from her shoulders; the line of the back of her head and neck was beautiful to see, and a crisp, waved strand of shorter hair that had fallen from its place looked like a piece of gold filigree on an Indian vase. Her shoulders did not slope, but they might have been covered with thickest satin. She raised one arm and curved it slowly, then let it hang straight at her side. She must always have had a well-shaped arm, for it tapered from shoulder to wrist; but health and care alone could give the transparent brilliancy and flawless surface.

Hermia gazed long at herself. She swayed her beautiful body until it looked like a reed in an Indian swamp, blown by a midnight breeze. It was as lithe and limber as young bamboo. She drew the pins from her hair. It fell about her like a million infinitesimal tongues of living flame, and through them her green eyes shone and her white skin gleamed.

Tossing her hair back she sprang forward and kissed her reflection in the glass, a long, greeting, grateful kiss, and her eyes blazed with passionate rapture. Then she slowly raised her arms above her head, every pulse throbbing with delicious exultation, every nerve leaping with triumph and hope, every artery a river of tumultuous, victorious, springing life.

CHAPTER IX.

HELEN SIMMS.

A year later Hermia was sitting by her library fire one afternoon when the butler threw back the tapestry that hung over the door and announced Helen Simms. Hermia rose to greet her visitor with an exclamation of pleasure that had in it an accent of relief. She had adopted Helen Simms as the friend of her new self; as yet, but one knew the old Hermia. Helen was so essentially modern and practical that restless longings and romantic imaginings fled at her approach.

Miss Simms, as she entered the room, her cheeks flushed by the wind, and a snow-flake on her turban, was a charming specimen of her kind. She had a tall, trim, slender figure, clad in sleek cloth, and carried with soldierly uprightness. Her small head was loftily and unaffectedly poised, her brown hair was drawn up under her quiet little hat with smoothness and precision, and a light, severe fluff adorned her forehead. She had no beauty, but she had the clean, clear, smooth, red-and-ivory complexion of the New York girl, and her teeth were perfect. She looked like a thoroughbred, splendidly-groomed young greyhound, and was a glowing sample of the virtues of exercise, luxurious living, and the refinement of two or three generations.

“What do you mean by moping here all by yourself?” she exclaimed, with a swift smile which gave a momentary flash of teeth. “You were to have met me at Madame Lefarge’s, to have tried on your new gown. I waited for you a half-hour, and in a beastly cold room at that.”

“I beg your pardon,” replied Hermia, with sudden contrition, “but I forgot all about it—I may as well tell the bald truth. But I am glad to see you. I am blue.”

Helen took an upright chair opposite Hermia’s, and lightly leaned upon her umbrella as if it were a staff. “I should think you would be blue in this ‘gray ancestral room,’” she said. “It looks as if unnumbered state conspiracies and intrigues against unhappy Duncans had been concocted in it. I do not deny that it is all very charming, but I never come into it without a shiver and a side-glance at the dark corners.”

She looked about her with a smile which had little fear in it.

“These stern gray walls and that vaulted ceiling carry you out of Second Avenue, I admit; and those stained-glass windows and all that tapestry and antique furniture waft me back to the days of my struggles with somebody or other’s history of England. But, Hermia mia, I think it would be good for you to have a modern drawing-room in your house, and to sit in it occasionally. It is this semblance of past romance which makes you discontented with the world as you find it.”

Hermia gave a sigh. “I know,” she said, “but I can’t help it. I am tired of everything. I dread the thought of another winter exactly like last. The same men, same receptions, same compliments, same everything.”

“My dear, you are blasé. I have been expecting it. It follows on the heels of the first season, as delicate eyes follow scarlet fever. The eyes get well, and so will you. Five years from now you will not be as blasé as you are this moment. Look at me. I have been out four years. I was blasé three years ago, but to-day I could not live without society and its thousand little excitements. See what you have to look forward to!”

Hermia smiled. “You certainly are a shining example of patience and fortitude, but I fear you have something in you which I lack. I shall grow more and more bored and discontented. Three years of this would kill me. I wish I could go to Europe, but Aunt Frances cannot go yet, and I don’t care to go alone the first time, for I want to see the society of the different capitals. After that I shall go to Europe by myself. But in the mean time what am I to do?”

“Have a desperate flirtation; I mean, of course, a prolonged one. Heaven knows you are the most fearful flirt in New York—while it lasts. Only it never lasts more than a week and a day.”

“I am not a flirt,” said Hermia. “I have not the first essential of a flirt—patience. I have been simply trying with all my might to fall in love. And I cannot have a prolonged flirtation with a man who disappoints me.”

“My dear, as a veteran, let me advise you. So long as you keep up this hunt for the ideal you will be bored by everything and everybody in actual life. All this sentiment and romance and imagination of yours are very charming, and when I recall the occasions wherein you have kept me awake until two in the morning, I forgive you, because I found you quite as entertaining as a novel. But it is only spoiling you for the real pleasures of life. You must be more philosophical. If you can’t find your ideal, make up your mind to be satisfied with the best you can get. There are dozens of charming men in New York, and you meet them every week. They may not be romantic, they may look better in evening clothes than in a tin hat and leather legs, but they are quite too fascinating for all that. Just put your imagination to some practical use, and fancy yourself in love with one of them for a month. After that it will be quite easy.”

“I can’t!” exclaimed Hermia emphatically, as she turned to pour out the tea the butler had brought in. “I get everything they know out of them in three interviews, and then we’ve nothing left to talk about.”

Helen removed her glove from her white hand with its flashing rings, and, changing her seat to one nearer the table, took up a thin slice of bread-and-butter. “Is it five o’clock already?” she said, “I must run. I have a dinner to-night, the opera, and two balls.” She nibbled her bread and sipped her tea as if the resolution to run had satisfied her conscience. “Shall I have the pleasure of seeing you have twice as many partners as myself?”

“No; I am not going out to-night. You know I draw the line at three times a week, and I have already touched the limit.”

“Quite right. You will be beautiful as long as you live. Between Miss Newton, three nights’ sleep a week, and a large waist, you will be quoted to your grandchildren as a nineteenth-century Ninon de l’Enclos. But, to return to the truffles we were discussing before the tea came in—another trouble is that you are too appallingly clever for the ‘infants.’ Why do you not go into the literary set and find an author? All I have ever known are fearful bores, but they might suit you.” She put down her tea-cup. “I have it!” she exclaimed; “Ogden Cryder has just come back from Europe, and I am positive that he is the man you have been waiting for. You must meet him. I met him two or three years ago, and really, for a literary man, he was quite charming. Awfully good-looking, too.”

“He is one of the dialect fiends, is he not?” asked Hermia, languidly. “It is rather awkward meeting an author whose books you haven’t read, and I simply cannot read dialect.”

“Oh! get one or two and skim them. The thread of the story is all you want; then you can discuss the heroine with him, and insist that she ought to have done the thing he did not make her do. That will flatter him and give you a subject to start off with. An author scares me to death, and, upon the rare occasions when I meet one, I always fly at him with some reproach about the cruel way in which he treated the heroine, or ask him breathlessly to please tell me whether she and the hero are ever going to get out of their difficulties or are to remain planté là for the rest of their lives. This works off the embarrassment, you see, and after that we talk about Mrs. Blank’s best young man.”

Hermia smiled. It was difficult to imagine Miss Simms frightened, breathless, or embarrassed. She looked as if emotion had not stirred her since the days when she had shrieked in baby wrath because she could not get her chubby toes into her toothless mouth.

“Ogden Cryder might at least have something to talk about,” Hermia answered. “Perhaps it would be worth while.”

“It would, my dear. I am convinced that he is the man, and I know where you can meet him. Papa has tickets for the next meeting of the Club of Free Discussion, and I will tell him to take you. He knows Mr. Cryder, and shall have strict orders to introduce you. What is more, you will have the pleasure of hearing the lion roar for an hour before you meet him. He is to give the lecture of the evening.”

“Well,” said Hermia, “I shall be glad to go, if your father will be good enough to take me. Which of Cryder’s books shall I read up?”

“‘Cornfield Yarns’ and ‘How Uncle Zebediah sowed dat Cotton Field’ are the ones everybody talks about most. Some of the yarns are quite sweet, and the papers say—I always read the criticisms, they give the outline of the plot, and it saves an awful lot of trouble—that Uncle Zebediah is the most superb African of modern fiction. Uncle Tom has hidden his diminished head. ‘Unc. Zeb.,’ as he is familiarly called, rolls forth an amount of dialect to the square inch which none but a Cryder could manipulate. It is awful work pulling through it, but we all have to work for success in this life.”

She drew on her long, loose, tan-colored glove, pushed her bangles over it, then carefully tucked the top under her cuff. “Well, addio, Hermia mia,” she said, rising; “I will send you a note to-morrow morning and let you know if anything can possibly happen to prevent papa going on Wednesday evening. In the mean time, make up your mind to be vanquished by Ogden Cryder. He really is enchanting.”

CHAPTER X.

A MENTAL PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY.

After Helen left, Hermia went up to her room. There she did what she never failed to do the moment she entered her bedroom—walked over to the glass and looked at herself. She had not even yet got used to the idea of her beauty, and sometimes approached the mirror with dread lest her new self should prove a dream. She saw nothing to alarm her. A year’s dissipation had not impaired her looks. Excitement and good living agreed with her, and Miss Newton tyrannized over her like the hygienic duenna that she was.

She sank down on the floor before the long glass, resting her elbow on a cushion. Her crouching attitude reminded her of the women whose lines had fallen in days of barbaric splendor. It is not to be supposed for a moment that this effect was accidental. Hermia had determined, before she burst upon New York, that her peculiar individuality should be the suggestion of the untrammeled barbarian held in straining leash by the requirements of civilization. Her green eyes and tawny hair were the first requisites, and she managed her pliant body with a lithe grace which completed the semblance.

She wore to-day a tea-gown of Louis XIV. brocade and lace, and she watched herself with an amused smile. A year and a half ago her wardrobe had consisted of coarse serges and gingham aprons.

She put her head on the cushion, nestled her body into the feather rug, and in a vague, indolent way let her memory rove through the little photograph gallery in her brain set apart for the accumulations of the past twelve months. There were a great many photographs in that gallery, and their shapes and dimensions were as diverse as their subjects. Some were so large that they swept from floor to ceiling, although their surface might reflect but one impression; others were too small to catch the eye of the casual observer, and the imprint on them was like one touch of a water-colorist’s brush. Many pasteboards of medium size were there whose surfaces were crowded like an ant-hill at sundown; and pushed into corners or lying under a dust-heap were negatives, undeveloped and fading. At one end of the gallery was a great square plate, and on it there was no impression of any sort, nor ever had been.

Hermia pushed up her loose sleeve and pressed her face into the warm bend of her arm. On the whole, the past year had been almost satisfactory. A clever brain, an iron will, and a million dollars can do much, and that much Hermia’s combined gifts had accomplished.

She opened the windows of her photograph gallery and dusted out the cobwebs, then, beginning at the top, sauntered slowly down. She looked at her first appearance in the world of fashion. It is after the completion of her winter’s wardrobe by a bevy of famous tailors, and she wears a gown of light-gray cloth and a tiny bonnet of silvery birds. The début is in St. Mark’s; and as she walks up the center aisle to the Suydam pew, her form as straight as a young sapling, her head haughtily yet nonchalantly poised, every curve of her glove-fitting gown proclaiming the hand that cut it, Second Avenue catches its breath, raises its eyebrows, and exchanges glances of well-bred, aristocratic surprise. Late that week it calls, and this time is not repulsed, but goes away enchanted. It does not take long for the unseen town crier to flit from Second Avenue to Fifth, and one day his budget of news sends a ripple over the central stream. John Suydam’s heiress, a beautiful girl of twenty, with a style all her own, yet not violating a law of good form! The old red-brick house transformed into an enchanted palace, with a remarkably wide-awake princess, and a sacrifice to modern proprieties in the shape of a New England aunt! How unusual and romantic! yet all as it should be. We begin to remember poor Crosby Suydam and his charming young wife. We recall the magnificence of their entertainments in the house on lower Fifth Avenue—now resplendent with a milliner’s sign. Both dead? How sad! And to think that John Suydam had a million all the time! The old wretch! But how enchanting that he had the decency to leave it to this beautiful girl! We will call.

They do call; and a distant relative of Hermia’s father, Mrs. Cotton Dykman, comes forward with stately tread and gracious welcome and offers her services as social sponsor. Hermia accepts the offer with gratitude, and places her brougham at Mrs. Dykman’s disposal.

Mrs. Dykman is a widow approaching fifty, with lagging steps yet haughty mien. Her husband omitted to leave her more than a competence; but she lives in Washington Square in a house which was her husband’s grandfather’s, and holds her head so high and wears so much old lace and so many family diamonds (which she hid in the wall during the late Cotton’s lifetime) that the Four Hundred have long since got into the habit of forgetting her bank account. To her alone does Hermia confide the secret of her past external self and the methods of reconstruction, and Mrs. Dykman respects her ever after.

In a photograph near the head of the gallery Hermia and Mrs. Dykman are seated by the library fire, and Hermia is discoursing upon a question which has given her a good deal of thought.

“I want to be a New York society woman to my finger-tips,” she exclaims, sitting forward in her chair; “that is, I want to be au fait in every particular. I would not for the world be looked upon as an alien; but at the same time I want to be a distinctive figure in it. I want to be aggressively myself. The New York girl is of so marked a type, Aunt Frances, that you would know one if you met her in a Greek bandit’s cave. She is unlike anything else on the face of the earth. You cross the river to Brooklyn, you travel an hour and a half to Philadelphia, you do not see a woman who faintly resembles her unless she has been imported direct. The New York girl was never included in the scheme of creation. When the combined forces of a new civilization and the seven-leagued stride of democracy made her a necessity, Nature fashioned a mold differing in shape and tint from all others in her storehouse, and cast her in it. It is locked up in a chest and kept for her exclusive use. The mold is made of ivory, and the shape is long and straight and exceeding slim. There is a slight roundness about the bust, and a general neatness and trimness which are independent of attire. And each looks carefully fed and thoroughly groomed. Each has brightness in her eye and elasticity in her step. And through the cheek of each the blood flows in exactly the same red current about a little white island. Now all this is very charming, but then she lacks—just a little—individuality. And I must have my distinctive personality. There seems nothing left but to be eccentric. Tell me what line to take.”

Mrs. Dykman, who has been listening with a slight frown on her brow and a smile on her lips, replies in her low, measured accents, which a cataclysm could not accelerate nor sharpen: “My dear, before I answer your amusing tirade, let me once more endeavor to impress you with the importance of repose. You may be as beautiful and as original as your brains and will can make you, but without repose of manner you will be like an unfinished impressionist daub. Few American women have it unless they have lived in England; but I want you to take coals to Newcastle when you make your début in London society.

“In regard to the other question,” she continues, “experience and observation and thirty years of that treadmill we call society have taught me a good many things. One of these things is that eccentricity is the tacit acknowledgment of lack of individuality. A person with native originality does not feel the necessity of forcing it down people’s throats. The world finds it out soon enough, and likes it in spite of its own even pace and sharply defined creeds. That is, always provided the originality wears a certain conventional garb: if you would conquer the world, you must blind and humor it by donning its own portable envelope. Do you understand what I mean, my dear? You must not startle people by doing eccentric things; you must not get the reputation of being a poseuse—it is vulgar and tiresome. You must simply be quietly different from everybody else. There is a fine but decided line, my dear girl, between eccentricity and individuality, and you must keep your lorgnette upon it. Otherwise, people will laugh at you, just as they will be afraid of you if they discover that you are clever. By the way, you must not forget that last point. The average American woman is shallow, with an appearance of cleverness. You must be clever, with an appearance of shallowness. To the ordinary observer the effect is precisely the same.”

She rises to her feet and adjusts her bonnet. “It is growing late and I must go. Think over what I have said. You have individuality enough; you need not fear that people will fail to find it out; and you assuredly do not look like any one else in New York.”

Hermia stands up and gives Mrs. Dykman’s tournure a little twist. “You are a jewel, Aunt Frances. What should I do without you?”

Whereupon Mrs. Dykman looks pleased and goes home in Hermia’s brougham.

Hermia is fairly launched in society about the first of January, and goes “everywhere” until the end of the season. It gets to be somewhat monotonous toward the end, but, on the whole, she rather likes it. She is what is called a success; that is to say, she becomes a professional beauty, and is much written about in the society papers. She receives a great many flowers, constant and assiduous attention at balls, and her dancing is much admired. She gets plenty of compliments, and is much stared upon at the opera and when driving in the park. Her reception days and evenings are always crowded, and her entertainments—supervised by Mrs. Dykman and a valuable young man named Richard Winston—are pronounced without flaw, and receive special mention in the dailies.

And yet—Hermia rubbed her fingers thoughtfully up and down several of the pictures as if to make their figures clearer—in her heart she did not deem herself an unqualified success. Men ran after her—but because she was the fashion, not because they loved her.

During that first winter and the ensuing season at Newport, she had a great many proposals, but with two or three exceptions she believed them to have been more or less interested. She did not seem to “take” with men. This had angered her somewhat; she had expected to conquer the world, and she did not like obstacles.

She had an odd and voluptuous beauty, she had brain and all the advantages of unique and charming surroundings, and she flattered men when she remembered that it was the thing to do. Was it because the men felt rather than knew that they did not understand her? Or was it because she did not understand them? She was keenly aware of her lack of experience, and that her knowledge of men was chiefly derived from books. And wherein she was right and wherein wrong she could not tell.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose experience will come with time,” she thought, “and I certainly have not much to wish for—if—only—”

She clasped her hands behind her head and turned her mental eyeglass upon the unused plate at the head of the gallery.

When the news of her good fortune had come, her heart’s first leap had been toward the lover who awaited her in the world thrown at her feet. That lover, that hero of her dream-world, she had not found. Occasionally she had detected a minor characteristic in some man, and by it been momentarily attracted. In no case had the characteristic been supplemented by others; and after a long and eager search she had resigned herself to the painful probability that ideals belonged to the realm of the immaterial.

But, if she had sighed farewell to the faithful and much-enduring hero of her years of adversity, she had by no means relinquished the idea of loving. Few women had ever tried more determinedly and more persistently to love, and few had met with less success. She had imagined that in a world of men a woman’s only problem must be whom to choose. It had not taken her a year to discover that it is easier to scratch the earth from its molten heart than to love.

She sprang to her feet and walked up and down the room with swift, impatient steps. Was she never to be happy? never to know the delights of love, the warmth of a man’s caress, the sudden, tumultuous bursting from their underground fastness of the mighty forces within her? Was she to go through life without living her romance, without knowing the sweet, keen joy of hidden love? Would she end by marrying a club-room epigram flavored with absinthe, and settle down to a light or lurid variation on Bessie’s simple little theme? She laughed aloud. Perhaps it need not be stated that a year of fashionable life had increased her contempt for matrimony.

Was Ogden Cryder the man? An author, yet a man of the world; a man of intellect, yet with fascination and experience of women. It sounded like! It sounded like! Oh! if he were! He might have flaws. He might be the polaric opposite of her ideal. Let him! If he had brain and passion, skill and sympathy, she would love him with every fiber of her being, and thank him on her knees for compelling her so to do.

CHAPTER XI.

A TAILOR-MADE FATE.

Helen Simms was a young woman who had cantered gracefully under the flick of society’s whip since the night of her début. Occasionally she broke into a trot, and anon into a run. The speedier locomotion took place on unworn by-paths; when on the broad highway she was a most sedate representative of her riding-school. At times she had been known—to a select few—to kick; and the kick had invariably occurred at the crossing of the highway and the by-path, and just before she had made up her mind to forsake the road for the hedges.

She had all the virtues of her kind. On Sunday mornings she attended St. Thomas’s, and after service was over walked home with her favorite youth, whom she patronizingly spoke of as her “infant.” In the afternoon she entertained another “infant” or read a French novel. Nor was her life entirely given over to frivolity. She belonged to the sewing-class of her church, and like its other members fulfilled her mission as a quotable example, if she pricked her fingers seldom; and once a week she attended a Shakespeare “propounding.” She took a great deal of exercise, skimmed through all the light literature of the day, including the magazines, and even knew a little science, just enough to make the occasional clever man she met think her a prodigy as she smiled up into his face and murmured something about “the great body of force” or a late experiment in telepathy.

She had a bright way of saying nothing, a cool, shrewd head, and an endless stock of small-talk. Both sexes approved of her as a clever, charming, well-regulated young woman—all of which she indisputably was.

Enthusiasm had long since been drilled out of her, but she had for Hermia an attachment very sincere as far as it went—it may be added that, if there had been more of Miss Simms, there would have been more attachment. It is possible that Hermia, without her brilliant position, would not have attracted the attention of Miss Simms, but it is only just to Helen to say that the conditions affected her not a whit; she was quite free from snobbery.

She liked Hermia because she could not understand her—much as she was influenced by the sea in a storm, or by mountains with lightning darting about their crests. Whenever she entered Hermia’s presence she always felt as if the air had become suddenly fresher; and she liked new sensations. She did not in the least resent the fact that she could not understand Hermia, that her chosen friend was intellectually a hemisphere beyond her, and in character infinitely more complex. She was pleased at her own good taste, and quite generous enough to admire where she could not emulate.

She was constantly amused at Hermia’s abiding and aggressive desire to fall in love, but she was by no means unsympathetic. She would have regarded an emotional tumult in her own being as a bore, but for Hermia she thought it quite the most appropriate and advisable thing. Once in a while, in a half-blind way, she came into momentary contact with the supreme loneliness and craving of Hermia’s nature, and she invariably responded with a sympathetic throb and a wish that the coming man would not tarry so long.

She was so glad she had thought of Cryder. She honestly believed him to be the one man of all men who could make the happiness of her friend; and she entered the ranks of the Fates with the pleasurable suspicion that she was the author of Hermia’s infinite good.

She surprised her father, the morning after her last interview with Hermia, by coming down to breakfast. She was careful to let him finish his roll to the last crumb and to read his paper to the acrid end. Then she went over and put her finger-tips under his chin.

He glanced up with a groan. “What do you want now?” he demanded, looking at her over his eye-glasses. His periodical pettings had made him cynical.

“Nothing—for myself. Did you not say that some one had sent you tickets for the next meeting of the Free Discussion?”

“Yes; but you can’t have them to give to some girl who would only go to show herself, or to some boy whose thimbleful of gray matter would be addled before the lecture was half over. I am going to hear that lecture myself.”

“How perfectly enchanting! That is what I wished, yet dared not hope for. And you are not only going yourself, but you are going to take Hermia Suydam with you.”

“Oh!” Mr. Simms raised his eyebrows. “I am? Very well. I am sure I have no objection. Miss Suydam is the finest girl in New York.”

“Of course she is, and she will make a sensation at the club; you will be the envied of all men. And there is one thing else you are to do. As soon as the exercises are over I want you to present Ogden Cryder to her. I have particular reasons for wishing them to meet.”

“What are the reasons?”

“Never mind. You do as you are told, and ask no questions”—this in a tone which extracted the sting, and was supplemented by a light kiss on Mr. Simms’ smooth forehead.

“Very well, very well,” said her father, obediently, “she shall meet him; remind me of it just before I leave. And now I must run. I have a case in court at ten o’clock.”

He stood up and gave one of his handsome, iron-gray side-whiskers an absent caress. He was not a particularly good-looking man, but he had a keen, dark eye, and a square, heavy jaw, in both of which features lay the secret of his great success in his profession. He was devoted to Helen, and had allowed her, with only an occasional protest, to bring him up. He could be brusque and severe in court, but in Helen’s hands he was a wax ball into which she delighted to poke her dainty fingers.

Helen wrote a note to Hermia, and he took it with him to send by an unwinged Mercury.

On Friday morning Helen went over to Second Avenue to make sure that her friend had not changed her mind. She found Hermia in her boudoir, with one of Cryder’s books in her hand and another on a table beside her.

“What do you think of him?” demanded Miss Simms, somewhat anxiously, as she adjusted her steel-bound self in a pile of cushions—straight-backed chairs in this room there were none.

Hermia shrugged her shoulders: “A decorous seasoning of passion; a clear, delicate gravy of sentiment; a pinch of pathos; a garnish of analysis; and a solid roast of dialect. Woe is me!—I have read two whole volumes; and I pray that I may like the author better than his books. But he is clever; there is no denying that!”

“Oh, horribly clever! What are you going to wear, to-night?”

“That dark-green velvet I showed you the other day.”

“Lovely! And it will match your eyes to a shade. You will look, as usual, as if you had just stepped out of an old picture. Mr. Cryder will put you in a book.”

“If he does I shall be a modern picture, not an old one. That man could not write a tale of fifty years ago.”

“So much the better for you! What you want is to fall in love with a modern man, and let him teach you that the mediæval was a great animal, who thought of nothing but what he ate and drank. I do not claim that the species is extinct; but, at least, in these days we have a choice.”

CHAPTER XII.

THE CLUB OF FREE DISCUSSION.

Hermia looked at her reflection that evening with a smile. The shadowed emerald of her velvet gown made her hair glow like vibrant flame. The color wandered through her cheeks and emptied itself into her lips. Her eyes were as green as the limpid floor of ocean-hollowed caverns. Across her ivory-white shoulder swept a curving blue vein, thin as an infant’s lash, and on the rise of her right breast were three little moles, each marking the corner of a tiny triangle.

Mr. Simms called for her promptly, and when they arrived at the club-rooms they strolled about looking at the pictures and the people until the exercises began. There were many literary and artistic celebrities present, all of whom looked much like ordinary and well-bred people; but to Hermia there was a luminous halo about each. It was her first experience in the literary world, and she felt as if she had entered the atmosphere of a dream. It was one of her few satisfactory experiments. She was much stared at; everybody knew her by reputation if not by sight; and a number of men asked to be presented.

Among them was Mr. Overton, the editor who had published her poem in his magazine. She changed color as he came up, but his manner at once assured her that she was not recognized: he would have vindicated his fraternity, indeed, had he been keen-sighted enough to recognize in this triumphant, radiant creature the plain, ill-dressed, stooping girl with whom he had talked for half an hour at the close of a winter’s day two years before. Hermia, of course, no longer wrote; life offered her too many other distractions.

Mr. Overton suggested that they should go into the lecture-room and secure good seats. He found them chairs and took one beside Hermia.

“Ogden Cryder gives the address to-night,” he said, after he had satisfied Hermia’s curiosity in regard to the names of a half-dozen people. “Do you like his books?”

“Fairly. Do you?”

Mr. Overton laughed. “That is rather a direct question, considering that I print one of his stories about every six months.”

“Oh, you might not like them. You might publish them out of tender regard for the demands of your readers.”

Mr. Overton had a characteristic American face, thin, nervous, shrewd, pleasant. He gave Hermia a smile of unwonted frankness. “I will confide to you, Miss Suydam, that such is the case with about two-thirds I publish. I thank Heaven that I do not have to read a magazine as well as publish it. I have an associate editor who sits with his finger on the pulse of the public, and relieves me of much vexation of spirit.”

“But tell me what you think of Mr. Cryder.”

Mr. Overton raised his eyebrows. “He is indisputably the best dialect writer we have, and he is a charming exponent of surface passions. Whether he would drown if he plunged below the surface is a question; at all events he might become improper, and morality pays in this magazine era. There he is now; no doubt we shall have a delightful address.”

Hermia turned her head quickly, but Cryder had taken a chair at the foot of the rostrum, and there were many heads between her own and his. A moment later, however, the president of the club made the preliminary remarks, and then gave place to Cryder.

Hermia watched him breathlessly as he ascended the steps and stood beside the table, waiting for the hearty welcome to subside. Was it he at last? He was certainly good to look at; she had never seen more charming eyes—clear golden-hazel, half melancholy, wholly intelligent. His small, well-shaped head was thickly covered with short, soft, gold-brown hair; the delicate, aristocratic features were as finely cut as those on an intaglio; and the thin, curved lips were shaded by a small mustache. His figure, tall, light, graceful, had a certain vibrating activity even in repose. His hand was white and tapering as that of a woman, and his auditors were given opportunity to appreciate it.

The subject of the lecture was “The Dialect Element in American Fiction,” and Mr. Cryder did it justice in a clear, ringing, musical voice. He very properly remarked that it was the proud boast of America that no other country, ancient or modern, could present such an array of famous dialects, consequently no other country had ever had such infinite variety in her literature. He would say nothing of the several hundred dialects as yet awaiting the Columbus-pen of genius; he would merely speak of those nine already discovered and immortalized—the Negro, the Yankee, the Southern, the Creole, the Tennessee Mountain, the Cow-boy, the Bret Harte Miner, the Hoosier, and the Chinese. Each of these, although springing from one bosom, namely, that of the Great American People, had as distinct an individuality as if the product of an isolated planet. Such a feature was unique in the history of any country or any time. The various patois of the French, the provincialisms of the English, the barbarisms of the Scotch, the brogue of the Irish, were but so many bad and inconsequent variations upon an original theme. Reflect, therefore, upon the immense importance of photographing and preserving American neologies for the benefit of posterity! In the course of time would inevitably come the homogeneity of the human race; the negro, for instance, would pervade every corner of the civilized earth, and his identity become hopelessly entangled with that of his equally de-individualized blonde brother. His dialect would be a forgotten art! Contemporaries would have no knowledge of it save through the painstaking artists of their ancestors’ time. Reflect, then, upon the heavy responsibility which lay upon the shoulders of the author of to-day. Picture what must be the condition of his conscience at the end of his record if he has failed to do his duty by the negro dialect! Picture the reproaches of future generations if they should be left ignorant of the unique vernacular of their grandfathers’ serfs! (Applause.) He did not lay such stress upon the superior importance of the negro dialect because he had enrolled himself among its faulty exponents; he had taken his place in its ranks because of that superior importance. Nevertheless, he was by no means blind to the virtues of those other eight delightful strings in the Great National Instrument. No one enjoyed more than he the liquid and incomprehensible softness of the Creole, the penetrating, nasonic strength of the Yankee, the delicious independence of the Hoosier, the pine-sweet, redwood-calm transcriptions of the prose-laureate of the West. He loved them all, and he gloried in the literary monument of which they were the separate stones.

To do Mr. Cryder’s oration justice would be a feat which no modest novelist would attempt. Those who would read that memorable speech in its entirety and its purity will find it in the archives of the club, in the sixth volume of the Sessional Records. After reading brief and pithy extracts from the nine most famous dialect stories of the day, he sat down with the applause of approval in his ears.

Hermia turned to Mr. Overton: “He was guying, I suppose,” she said.

Mr. Overton stared. “Certainly not,” he said, severely. “The value of precisely rendered dialect is incalculable.”

Hermia, quite snubbed, said no more; and in a few moments, Mr. Duncan, a shrewd, humorous-looking little Scotchman, rose to reply.

“I have nothing whatever to say in contradiction to Mr. Cryder’s remarks regarding the value of dialect,” he said, looking about with a bland, deprecating smile. “On the contrary, I have yet another word to add in its favor. I hold that the value of dialect to the American author has never yet been estimated. When a story has a lot of dialect, you never discover that it hasn’t anything else. (Laughter, and a surprised frown from Cryder.) Furthermore, as America is too young to have an imagination, the dialect is an admirable and original substitute for plot and situations.” (Laughter and mutterings; also a scowl from Cryder.) “Again, there is nothing so difficult as the handling of modern English: it is a far speedier and easier road to fame to manipulate a dialect familiar to only an insignificant section of our glorious sixty millions.” (“Hear, hear!” from a pair of feminine lips, and many sympathetic glances at Cryder’s flashing eyes.) “Yet again, the common fault found with our (I wish it understood that I speak always from the standpoint of the country which I have adopted)—with our writers is lack of passion. Now, nobody can be expected to be passionate when groaning in the iron stays of dialect. Dialect is bit and curb to the emotions, and it is only an American who is sharp enough to perceive the fact and make the most of it. What is more, pathos sounds much better in dialect than in cold, bald English, just as impropriety sounds better in French, and love-making in Spanish. Contrast, for instance, the relative pathos of such sentences as these—the throbbing sadness of the one, the harsh bathos of the other: ‘I done lubbed you, Sally!’ ‘I loved you, Maria.’” (Laughter from one side of the house; ominous silence from the other.) “Truly, ’tis in the setting the jewel shines. I would like to say, in conclusion,” he went on, imperturbably, “that Mr. Cryder, in his enumeration of American neologics has omitted one as important and distinctive as any in his category, namely, that of fashionable society. In the virility, the variety, and the amplitude of her slang, America is England’s most formidable rival.”

He left the platform amidst limited applause, and then Mr. Cryder’s pent-up wrath burst forth, and he denounced in scathing terms and stinging epigrams the foreigner who had proved himself incapable of appreciating one of his country’s most remarkable developments, and attempted to satirize it from his petty point of view.

The auditors were relieved when the exercises were over and the club’s disruption postponed, and, betaking themselves to the supper-room, dismissed both lecture and reply from their minds.

Hermia was standing by one of the tables talking to three or four men, when Mr. Simms brought up Cryder and introduced him. Cryder looked absent and somewhat annoyed. He was evidently not in a mood to be impressed by feminine loveliness. At the end of a few moments Hermia wisely let him go, although with a renewed sense of the general flatness of life. At the same time she was somewhat amused, and sensible enough to know that it could not have been otherwise.

CHAPTER XIII.

OGDEN CRYDER.

Only the nineteenth century could have evolved Cryder. The infancy of a democratic civilization produces giants. The giants build hot-houses, and a flower, delicate, beautiful, exquisitely perfumed, but fragile, light as bubbles of blown glass, is the result. America is now doing the best she can with her hot-house flora. She has no great men, but the flora is wondrous fine. Outside the forcing-houses is a wilderness of weeds in which lies her future’s hope.

Cryder would have taken the medal at an orchid show. He was light as a summer breeze, yet as stimulating and fresh. He was daintily humorous, yet seldom witty enough to excite envy. His conversation was like the song of a lark, clear, brilliant, trilling, with never a bass note to disturb the harmony. In a quick, keen, flashing way, he had an exact knowledge of the salient world. He was artistic to his finger-tips, and preferred an aquarelle to an oil. He had loved many times and hoped to love as many more, and his love was always that of an æsthete. For coarse passions he had a cold contempt. He had broken many roses from their stems, but more because he thought an herbarium looked better when filled than because he enjoyed the plucking of the flower. Probably it is needless to observe that he never drank more than a pint bottle of champagne, and that he never over-ate.

The day after his address at the club he was walking down the avenue when he met Helen Simms. He turned back with her, and finished the afternoon in her drawing-room.

Helen did not give him so much of her time without an object. She cared little for Cryder, and few of her doings were unprompted by motive; life was too brief.

“You met Miss Suydam last night, did you not?” she asked, when Cryder was comfortably established in an easy-chair near the fire.

“Yes, for a moment. I was a little put out by Duncan’s attack on me, and only stayed for a few words. I needed the solace of a cigarette.”

“I read the account of the affair in this morning’s papers. Mr. Duncan’s remarks were purely foolish, as he must have realized when he saw them in print. However, you have the consolation of knowing that after your reply he will not be likely to attack you again. But I am glad you met Miss Suydam. She will interest you as a study. She is all the rage at present. Every other man in town is in love with her.”

Cryder turned to her with some interest in his eyes. “Is she so very fascinating? She is certainly handsome—yes—stylishly handsome.”

“Oh, she is a beauty! Such a unique type! And she is quite as different from other people herself. That is her great trouble. She is called a terrible flirt, but it is the men’s fault, not hers. She is always looking for something, and can never find it.”

“Sad and strange! Is she a young woman with yearnings?”

“Not at all. She is the most sensible woman I know. She is merely unusually clever, consequently she is very lonely. I do not believe any man will ever satisfy her. She is like the sleeping princess in the enchanted castle. She shuts herself up in that wonderful house of hers and dreams of the lover who never comes.”

“You touch my fancy; and what do you mean by her wonderful house?”

“That house would delight your author’s soul. Every room is the materialization of a dream, as Hermia would say;” and she gave him an account of her friend’s inartistic but original abode.

Cryder listened with much interest. Romance was a dead-letter to him, but he was alive to the picturesque. He concluded that it would be quite enchanting to make love to a woman in a feudal library or an Indian jungle, and more than satisfactory to awaken the sleeping beauty. It would be a charming episode for his present brief stay in New York, altogether quite the choicest specimen in his herbarium. What she was waiting for was a combination of brain and skill.

“You have made me want to know her,” he said, “but, of course, she did not ask me to call.”

“I will take you to see her some time.”

“That is very good of you. Some afternoon when you have nothing better to do.”

“Come on Monday. That is her day. You won’t have much chance to talk to her, but then you can go again as soon as you like.”

Cryder took out his note-book and penciled a memorandum, “On Monday, then.”

Helen concluded that if she had been born a man she would have elected diplomacy as a career.

CHAPTER XIV.

IN A METROPOLITAN JUNGLE.

Cryder called on Hermia Monday afternoon. Although the room was full he had a few words with her, and she thought him very charming.

“I want to talk to you,” he said. “I have wanted to talk to you ever since I met you, but I was in such a bad humor the other night that I would not inflict you. Are you ever alone? Cannot I have an hour or two some evening?”