HER HUSBAND'S PURSE

BY
HELEN R. MARTIN

ILLUSTRATED BY
JOHN NEWTON HOWITT

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1916

Copyright, 1916, by
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"Oh!" her voice rippled with laughter, "this is the twentieth century A.D., not B.C., Daniel" (see page [180]) (missing from book) . . . . . . Frontispiece

"'Benefactor'?" she read, "'a doer of kindly deeds; a friendly helper.' You see, I'm your benefactor, according to the Standard" (missing from book)

[Margaret suddenly laid down her napkin and rushed from the room, every nerve in her sick and quivering with the physical and moral disgust she felt]

["You will be glad to know, Jennie, that I have persuaded mother to spend the night with us," Margaret said]

HER HUSBAND'S PURSE

I

The Pennsylvania town of New Munich was electrified by the sudden and entirely unlooked-for announcement of the betrothal of Daniel Leitzel, Esquire; but his two maiden sisters with whom he lived, and to whom the news was also wholly unexpected, were appalled, confounded. That Danny should have taken such a step independently of them (who did all his thinking for him outside of his profession) was a cataclysmal episode. Of course it never would have happened without their knowledge if Danny had not been temporarily away from his home on business and far removed from their watchful care—watchful these twenty years past that no designing Jezebel might get a chance at the great fortune of their petted little brother—though it must be admitted that Danny was by this time of a marriageable age, being just turned forty-five.

"To think he'd leave us learn about it in the newspapers yet, sooner 'n he'd come home and face us with it! Yes, it looks anyhow as if he was ashamed of the girl he's picked out!" exclaimed Jennie, a stern and uncompromising spinster of sixty, as she and her sister Sadie, sitting in the elaborately furnished and quite hideous sitting-room of their big, fine house on Main Street, stared in consternation at the glaring headlines of the New Munich Evening Intelligencer, which announced, in type that to the sisters seemed letters of flame, the upsetting news of their idolized brother having been at last matrimonially trapped. Being confronted with his betrothal in print seemed to make it hopelessly incontrovertible. They might have schemed to avert the impending catastrophe of his marriage (in case Danny had been taken in by an Adventuress) did not the Intelligencer unequivocally state (and the Intelligencer's statements were scarcely less authoritative to Jennie and Sadie Leitzel than the Bible itself) that Danny would be married to the Unknown inside of a month. If the Intelligencer said so, it seemed useless to try to stop it.

"To think he'll be married to her already before we get a chance, once, to look her over and tell him if she'd suit him!" lamented Sadie who was five years younger than Jennie.

"Well," pronounced Jennie, setting her thin lips in a hard line, "she'll find out when she gets here that she ain't getting her fingers on our Danny's money! She'll get fooled if she's counting on that. She'll soon learn that she'll have to do with just what he likes to give her and no more! And of course Danny'll consult us as to just how much he ought to leave her handle. When she finds out," Jennie grimly prophesied, "that our Danny always does the way we advise him to and that she'll have to keep on the right side of us, I guess she won't like it very well!"

"We can only hope that she ain't such a bold, common thing that just took our Danny in, that way!" sighed Sadie.

"But why would he hurry it up so, like as if he was afraid we would mebby put a stop to it? She put him up to fixing it all tight before he could change his mind!" Jennie shrewdly surmised.

"It does look that way!" fretted Sadie.

Jennie, the elder sister, was tall, gaunt, and rawboned. Though approaching old age, her dominating spirit and grasping ambitions had preserved her vigour, physically and mentally. Her sharp face was deeply lined, but the keenness of her eyes was undimmed, her shoulders were erect, her hair was thick and black. The expression of her thin slit of a mouth was almost relentlessly hard.

Sadie, five years younger, had also a will of her own, but happily it had always operated on a line so entirely in harmony with that of her sister, that they had lived together all their lives without friction, the younger woman unconsciously dominated by the elder. Indeed, no one could abide under the same roof with Jennie Leitzel who ventured openly to differ with her. Fortunately, even Sadie's passion for dress did not clash with Jennie's miserliness, for Sadie, too, was miserly, and Jennie loved to see her younger sister arrayed gorgeously in cheap finery, her taste inclining to that of a girl of sixteen. A dormant mother-instinct, too, such as must exist, however obscurely, in every frame of woman, even in that of a Jennie Leitzel, found an outlet in coddling Sadie's health and in ministering to and encouraging a certain plaintiveness in the younger woman's disposition. So, these two sisters, depending upon and complementing each other, of congenial temperaments, and with but one common paramount interest in life, the welfare of their incomparable younger brother whom they had brought up and of whom they were inordinately proud, lived together in the supreme enjoyment of the high estate to which their ambitions and their unflagging efforts had uplifted the Leitzel family—from rural obscurity to prominence and influence in their county town of New Munich.

To be sure, the sisters realized that they held what they called their "social position" only as appendages to Danny—Danny who had been to college, who was the head of a great corporation law firm, who was enormously rich and a highly eligible young man; that is, he used to be young; and though New Munich regarded him as a confirmed old bachelor, his sisters still looked upon him as a dashing youth and a great matrimonial prize. They were not ashamed, but proud, of the fact that people tolerated them because they were Danny's sisters.

It may seem strange that anything calling itself "society" could admit women so crude as Jennie and Sadie, even though they were appendages to a bait so dazzling as Danny Leitzel, Esquire. But in communities where the ruling class is descended from the Pennsylvania Dutch, "society" is remarkably elastic and has almost no closed doors to the appeal of wealth, however freighted it may be with vulgarity and illiteracy; and, be it known, Danny's sisters were not only financially independent of Danny, but even wealthy, quite in their own right.

In spite of this fact, however, what social footing they had in the little town of New Munich had not been acquired so easily as to make it appear to them other than a very great possession.

As to the big, fine house in which they lived, it had been Danny's money which, in the early days of his prosperity, had, at his sisters' instigation, built this grand dwelling on the principal street of New Munich, to dazzle and catch the town.

The room in which the sisters sat to-night would have seemed to one who knew them a perfect expression of themselves—its tawdry grandeur speaking loudly of their pride in money and display, and of, at the same time, their penuriousness; the absence of books and of real pictures, but the obtrusive decorations of heavy gilt frames on chromos; the luridly coloured domestic carpets; heavy, ugly upholstered furniture, manifesting the unfortunate combination of ample means with total absence of culture. It would seem that in a rightly organized social system women like these would not possess wealth, but would be serving those who knew how to use wealth.

"To think our Danny'd marry a stranger, yet, from away down South, when he could have picked out Congressman Ocksreider's daughter, or Judge Kuntz's oldest girl—or Mamie Gundaker and her father a bank president! Any of these high ladies of New Munich he could have!" wailed Sadie. "They'd be only too glad to get our Danny! And here he goes and marries a stranger!"

"It ain't like him that he'd up and do this thing behind our backs, without askin' our adwice!" Jennie exclaimed.

"Think of the grand wedding we could have had here in New Munich!" Sadie sighed.

"And we don't even know if she's well-fixed or poor!" cried Jennie in a wildly worried tone.

"But I hardly think," Sadie tried to comfort her, "that Danny would pick out a poor girl. Nor a common one, either, so genteel as what we raised him!"

"But men get so easy fooled with women, Sadie! If she's smart, she could easy come over Danny."

"Unless he got stubborn-headed for her."

"Well," admitted Jennie, "to be sure Danny can get awful stubborn-headed sometimes. But if she's smart and found out how rich he is, she'd take care not to get him stubborn-headed."

"Yes, that's so, too," nodded Sadie. "I wonder if she's a fancy dresser?"

Sadie's love of clothes was second only to her devotion to Danny. She was dressed this evening in a girlish Empire gown made of red cheesecloth.

"What will folks say to this news, anyhow?" scolded Jennie. "I'll have a shamed face to go on the street, us not knowing anything about it, not even who she is yet! If folks ast us, Sadie, we must leave on we did know—we'll just say, 'Oh, it ain't news to us!'"

"But how could we know much when Danny himself has knew her only a little over a month, Jennie?"

"Yes, don't it, now, beat all?"

"Yes, don't it!"

"That shows what she is—marrying a man she knew only a month or so!"

"Well, to be sure, it wouldn't take her even a month, Jennie, to see what a catch our Danny is."

"If she does turn out to be a common person," said Jennie with her most purse-proud look and tone, "she's anyhow got to act genteel before folks and not give Danny and us a shamed face here in New Munich—high up as we've raised our Danny and hard as we worked to do it yet!"

"Yes, the idea!" mourned Sadie.

"Yes, the very idea!" nodded Jennie vindictively. "I shouldn't wonder," she added anxiously, always concerned for her sister's health which was really quite remarkably perfect, "if this shock give you the headache, Sadie!"

"I shouldn't wonder!" Sadie shook her head sadly.

"Read me off the piece in the paper and see what it says all," Jennie ordered. "But sit so the light don't give you the headache."

Sadie, adjusting her spectacles and turning on the electric table lamp at her elbow, read the glaring article which had that evening appeared on the first page of their daily paper and which every household in New Munich was, they knew, now reading with feelings of astonishment, curiosity, disappointment or chagrin, as the case might be, for the sisters were sure that many heartaches among the marriageable maidens of the town would be caused by the news that Danny was no longer within their possible reach. These twenty-five years past he and his gold had been dangling before them—and now to have him appropriated, without warning, by a non-resident!

The article was headed in large type:

"ONE MORE VICTIM OF CUPID'S DARTS—
DANIEL LEITZEL LED LIKE A LAMB
TO HYMEN'S ALTAR."

Sadie breathed heavily as she read:

In a communication received at this office to-day from our esteemed fellow-citizen, Daniel Leitzel, Esquire, sojourning for the past four weeks in the balmy South, we are informed of his engagement and impending marriage to "a young lady of distinguished Southern lineage," one who, we may feel sure, will grace very acceptably the social circle here of which Mr. Leitzel is such a prominent, prosperous, and pleasant member. The news comes to our town as a great surprise, for we had almost begun to give Danny up as a hopeless bach. He will, however, lead his bride to Hymen's altar early next month and bring her straightway to his palatial residence on Main Street, presided over by his estimable sisters, Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie. New Munich offers its congratulations to her esteemed fellow-citizen, though some of us wonder why he found it necessary to go so far away to find a wife, with so many lovely ladies here in his native town to choose from. Love, however, we all know, is a capricious mistress and none may guess whither she may lead.

The happy and fortunate lady, Miss Margaret Berkeley of Berkeley Hill, a distinguished and picturesque old colonial homestead two miles out of Charleston, S.C., is, we are informed, a lineal descendant on her mother's side of two governors of her native state and the niece of the learned scholar and eminent psychologist, the late Dr. Osmond Berkeley, with whom Miss Margaret made her home at Berkeley Hill until his decease a year ago, since which sad event she has continued to reside at this same homestead, her married sister and family living with her, this sister being the wife of a Charleston attorney with whom Daniel Leitzel, Esquire, has been conducting some legal railroad business in Charleston and through whom our esteemed fellow-citizen, it seems, met his happy doom.

New Munich's most aristocratic society will anticipate with pleasurable interest the arrival of the happy bride and groom, Mrs. and Mr. Daniel Leitzel. No doubt many very elegant society events will take place this winter in honour of the newcomer among us; for New Munich is noted for its hospitality.

"It don't say," Jennie sharply remarked, "whether she's well-fixed—though to be sure if she comes from such high people they'd have to be rich."

"But her grand relations are all deceased, the paper says," returned Sadie despondently. "You may better believe, Jennie, if she had money, Danny would have told the noospapers."

"It says in the paper she's living with her married sister, and it looks to me," Jennie shrewdly surmised, "as if her brother-in-law (that lawyer Danny had dealings with) wanted to get rid of her and worked her off on our Danny. Or else that she took up with Danny to get a home of her own."

"Do you think Danny could be so easy worked?" Sadie doubtfully inquired.

"He's a man," Jennie affirmed conclusively (though there were those among Danny's acquaintances who would not have agreed with Jennie); "and any man can be worked."

"You think?"

"To be sure. Danny would have been roped in long ago a'ready if I hadn't of opened his eyes to it, still, when he was being worked."

"Yes, I guess," agreed Sadie. "Say, Jennie, what'll Hiram say when he hears it, I wonder!"

Hiram was their brother next in age to Jennie, who, upon the family's sudden, unexpected access to wealth thirty-five years before, through the discovery of coal on some farm land they owned, had been a young farmer working in the fields, and had immediately decided to use his share of the money obtained from leasing the coal land to prepare himself for what had then seemed to him a dizzy height of ambition, the highest human calling, the United Brethren ministry. For twenty years now he had been pastor of a small church in the neighbouring borough of Millerstown. His sisters were very proud to have a brother who was "a preacher." It was so respectable. They never failed to feel a thrill at sight of his printed name in an occasional number of the Millerstown New Era—"Rev. Hiram Leitzel." But Hiram did not, of course, hold Danny's high place in their regard; Danny, their little brother whom they had reared and who had repaid them by such a successful career in money-making that he had, at the age of forty-five, accumulated a fortune many times larger than that he had inherited.

"Hiram will take it awful hard that Danny's getting married," affirmed Jennie. "He'd like you and me an Danny, too, to will our money to his children. He always hoped, I think, that Danny wouldn't ever get married, so's his children would get all. To be sure the ministry ain't a money-making calling and Hiram has jealous feelings over Danny that he's so rich and keeps getting richer. Hiram likes money, too, as much as Danny does."

"I wonder," speculated Sadie, "if Danny's picked out as saving and hard-working a wife as what Hiram's got."

The characteristic Leitzel caution that Hiram had exercised in "picking out" a wife had prolonged his bachelorhood far into middle life. He had now been married ten years and had four children.

Keenly as the Leitzels loved money, none of them, not even Hiram himself, had ever regretted his going into the ministry. It gave him the kind of importance in the little borough of Millerstown that was manna to the Leitzel egotism. Hiram really thought of himself (as in his youth he had always looked upon ministers) as a kind of demigod; and as the people of Millerstown and even his own wife treated him as though he were one, he lived in the complacent enjoyment of his delusion.

He had greatly pleased his sisters and his brother Daniel by marrying the daughter of the richest man in his congregation, and they all approved of the frugality by which he and his wife managed to live on the little salary he drew from his church, letting his inherited wealth and that of his wife accumulate for the children.

"It ain't likely," Jennie replied to Sadie's speculation, "that Danny's marrying as well as Hiram married, when he's acting without our adwice."

"No, I guess anyhow not," agreed Sadie. "Say, Jennie!" she suddenly whispered mysteriously.

"Well, what?"

"Will we leave Mom know about Danny's getting married?"

"Well, to be sure she'll have to find it out," Jennie curtly answered. "It'll mebby be printed in the County Gazette and she sees that sometimes."

"Say, Jennie, if Danny's wife is a way-up lady, what'll she think of Mom yet, with her New Mennonite garb and her Dutch talk that way, and all! My goodness!"

"Well, a body can't help for their step-mothers, I guess!"

"But she's so wonderful common and ignorant. I guess Danny would be ashamed to leave his wife see her. And his wife would laugh so at her clothes and her talk!"

"But how would his wife ever get a chance to see her? We don't ever have Mom in here and we never take any one out to see her."

"That's so, too," Sadie acquiesced.

"I guess Hiram'll press it more'n ever now that we'd ought to put Mom to the poorhouse and rent our old home. The land would bring a good rent, he says, and we've no call to leave her live on it free any longer. But I tell Hiram it would make talk if we put her to the poorhouse. Hardly any one knows we got a step-mother, and we don't want to start any talk."

"Yes, well, but how could they blame us when she ain't our own mother?" Sadie protested.

"But you know how she brags about us so proud to her neighbours out there in Martz Township—just as if we was her own sons and daughters—and tells 'em how grand we live and how much Danny is thought of and how smart he is and what fine sermons Hiram preaches and how she kep' us all when we were little while Pop drank so and we hadn't anything but what she earned at the wash-tub! Yes," said Jennie indignantly, "she tells it all right out perfectly shameless and anybody to hear her talk would think we was her own flesh and blood!"

"Yes, it often worries me the way the folks out there talk down on us and say she always treated us like her own and we always treated her like a step-mother!" fretted Sadie.

"Well, I guess we needn't mind what such common, poor country folks say about us!" sneered Jennie. "All the same"—she suddenly lowered her voice apprehensively—"we darsent start folks talking, or first thing we know they'll be saying we cheated Mom out of her widow's third because she was too ignorant to claim it!"

"How would they have dare to say that when the land come from our own mother in the first place?" pleaded Sadie. "And Danny always says we've got our moral right to all the money even if we haven't the legal right."

"Yes, and he always says, too, that if we ain't awful careful we'll have a lawsuit yet, and be forced to give a lot of our money over to Mom! Yes, I often say to Hiram, 'Better leave sleeping dogs lay,' I say, 'and not go tryin' to put Mom into the poorhouse.'"

"Yes, I guess anyhow then!" breathed Sadie.

"By to-morrow"—Jennie veered off from the precarious topic of their step-mother, for here was ice too thin for even private family handling—"we'll be getting a letter from Danny giving us the details. Say, Sadie, if he don't offer to pay our way, I ain't using my money to travel that far to his wedding."

"Nor me, either," said Sadie. "Do you think, Jennie," she anxiously asked, "folks will talk at our still keeping house for Danny when he's married? You know how Danny always made us promise we'd stay by him, married or single?"

Jennie sniffed. "As if he could get along without us! As if any one else could learn his ways and how he likes things—and him so particular about his little comforts! He wouldn't leave us go away! And look at what he saves with us paying half the household expenses!"

"And as for his wife's not liking it——" began Sadie.

"As for her," Jennie sharply put in, "she's coming here without asking us if we like it—she'll be put in her place right from the start."

"But if she's got money of her own mebby," Sadie suggested doubtfully, "she could be independent, too, then."

"Well, to be sure she'd put her money in her husband's care, wouldn't she?—and him a lawyer."

"A body couldn't be sure she'd do that till they saw once what kind of a person she was, Jennie."

"Well," Jennie stoutly maintained, "Danny'll see that she does."

It will be noted that the story of Miss Berkeley's "distinguished lineage" did not greatly impress Jennie and Sadie Leitzel. They did not quite understand it. They knew nothing about such a thing as a distinguished lineage; New Munich "aristocrats" certainly did not have any; and the sisters' experiences being limited to life as it was in New Munich, whose "first families" were such only by reason of their "means," Sadie and Jennie were ignorant of any other measure of excellence. To be poor and at the same time of any significance, was a combination unknown to them.

As the newspapers did not state how closely those ancestral governors were related to Miss Berkeley, the relationship was undoubtedly so distant as to be negligible.

The one thing that would have softened their attitude toward their new relative would have been an unequivocal statement as to the firm financial standing of her family. And on that point the newspaper, though furnished by Daniel himself with the facts, was ominously silent. The conclusion was unmistakable. She was certainly penniless.

It was not greatly to be wondered at that the Leitzels worshipped money. It was money that had done everything for them: it had rescued them from a fearful struggle for a bare existence on a small, heavily mortgaged farm; it had freed them from the grind of slavish labour; from an obscurity that had been bitterly humiliating to the self-esteem and the ambition which was characteristic of every one of them. It was money that had given them power, place, influence; that made their fellowmen treat them with deference and relieved them from the necessity of treating any one else with deference. They knew of no worth in life unpurchasable by money. They did not, therefore, know of their own spiritual pauperism; their abject poverty.

II

The betrothal and impending marriage of Daniel Leitzel was the only topic of discussion that evening at the New Munich Country Club dance. Certainly New Munich had a Country Club. "Up to date in every particular." There was nothing in the way of being smartly fashionable that the town of New Munich lacked. Well, if up to the present it had lacked old families of "distinguished lineage," who, in these commercial days, regarded that kind of thing? Anyway, was not that lack (if lack it had been) now to be supplied by the newcomer, Mrs. Daniel Leitzel?

Not only at the Country Club dance, but wherever two or three were gathered together—at the mid-week Prayer Meeting, at the Woman's Suffrage Headquarters, at the Ladies' Literary Club, at the Episcopal Church Vespers, at the auction bridge given at Congressman Ocksreider's home—Danny Leitzel's betrothal was talked about.

"Just imagine this 'daughter of a thousand earls——'"

"Governors, not earls," corrected Mr. Schaeffer, the whist partner of the first speaker who was Miss Myrtle Deibert, as supper was being served at eleven o'clock on the card tables at Congressman Ocksreider's. "A thousand governors and highbrows—shy-lologists, or something like that—whatever they are!"

"Well, just imagine such a person living at the Leitzels!"

"But you don't suppose Danny's sisters will still live with him after he's married!" exclaimed Mr. Bleichert, the second young man at the table.

"If he thinks it more economical, they certainly will," declared Miss Myrtle Deibert.

"Whew!" exclaimed Mr. Bleichert. "Good-night!"

"Who would have supposed any nice girl would have married old Danny Leitzel!" marvelled Mr. Schaeffer.

"Oh, come now," protested Mr. Bleichert who was a cynic, "why have all the girls, from the buds just out, up to the bargain-counter maidens in their fourth 'season,' been inviting Danny Leitzel to everything going, and running after him heels over head, ever since he built his ugly, expensive brick house on Main Street? Tell me that, will you?"

It should be stated here that it was an accepted social custom in New Munich for the people at one card table to discuss the clothes, manners, and morals of those at the next table.

"You know perfectly well," retorted Miss Deibert, "that at least two girls in this town, when it came to the point of marrying Danny, chucked it."

"I should think they might," said Schaeffer. "Why, he isn't a man, he's a weasel, a rat, a money-slot!"

"Well, of course, the girl or old maid, 'bird or devil,' that has caught him at last, isn't marrying him for himself, but for his money," serenely affirmed Myrtle Deibert.

"When she meets his two appendages, Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie, she'll wish she was single again!" predicted Mr. Bleichert.

"They'll probably think it their business to manage Danny's wife the way they manage him," Miss Deibert declared.

"I hope she's a spendthrift," shrugged Mr. Schaeffer. "It would give Dan Leitzel the shock he needs to find himself married to a spendthrift."

"She won't be one after she's Mrs. Daniel Leitzel!" Miss Deibert confidently asserted.

"But of course she's rich—Dan Leitzel wouldn't marry a dowerless woman," said Bleichert.

"Well, then he won't let her spend her money," Miss Deibert settled that.

The second young lady at this card table, a pale, serious-looking girl, did not join in the discussion, but sat with her eyes downcast, toying with her food, as the rest chattered. The other three did not give Miss Aucker credit for remaining silent because she found their gossip vulgar and tiresome (which was indeed her true reason) but attributed her disinclination to talk to the fact that during the past year Daniel Leitzel had been rather noticeably attentive to her; so much so that people had begun to look for a possible interesting outcome. Miss Deibert, Mr. Schaeffer, and Mr. Bleichert, therefore, all considered her demeanour just now to be an indelicately open expression of her chagrin at the news they discussed.

"He was her last chance," Miss Deibert was thinking. "She must be nearly thirty."

"One would think she wouldn't show her disappointment so frankly," Mr. Schaeffer was mentally criticising her.

"You know," chuckled Miss Deibert as she dabbed with her fork at a chicken croquet, "Danny, away from his sisters and his awful house and among strangers, would appear so like a perfect gentleman, even if he is 'a rat, a weasel, a money-slot,' that I think even the descendant of earls or governors might be deceived. You see he's had so many advantages; he was only ten years old when they discovered coal on their land and got rich over night. And from the first, his sisters gave him every advantage they could buy for him, sending him to the best private schools, and then to college, and then to the Harvard Law School; and every one knows that Danny Leitzel is no fool, but a brilliant lawyer. So I do think that, detached from his setting here, there's nothing about Danny that would lead an unsuspecting South Carolina bride to imagine such contingencies as Jennie and Sadie and that Main Street house. I suppose she lives in an ancestral colonial place full of antique mahogany, the kind we all buy at junk shops when we have money enough."

"What kind of a woman would it be that could stand Dan Leitzel's penuriousness?" Mr. Schaeffer speculated. "He makes money like rolling down hill and I've heard him jew down the old chore woman that scrubs his office and haggle over a fifty-cent bill for supper at the club. He's the worst screw I ever knew. And mind you, his bride's a Southern woman, accustomed to liberality and gallantry and everything she won't find at Danny's house!"

"Do you know (not many people in New Munich do seem to know) that the Leitzels' mother is living?" said Miss Deibert.

"What?"

"I know a woman that knows her. She lives in the Leitzels' old farmhouse out in Martz Township."

"But Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie are too old to have a mother living."

"It's their step-mother. But she brought them up from little children and I heard she even took in washing to support them when their own father drank—and now they're ashamed of her and don't have anything to do with her. I was told she's a dear old soul and never speaks against them, but is as proud of their rise in the world as if she were their own mother. The neighbours out there say she has a hard time getting on and that they don't do a thing for her except let her live in their old tumble-down farmhouse. Isn't it a shame, as rich as they are!"

"You can't believe everything you hear."

"But it would be just like them!" affirmed Bleichert.

"Mary!" Miss Deibert suddenly laid her hand playfully on that of the silent Miss Aucker. "Congratulations on your escape, my dear!"

"I was never in the least danger, Myrtle. Aren't we gossiping rather dreadfully? I've been wondering"—she looked up with a smile that transformed her seriousness into a gentle radiance—"what a newcomer like Mr. Leitzel's wife, doomed to live here, will do with us and our social life, if she really is a woman of breeding and culture. I wonder whether it would be possible this winter to make our social coming together count for something more than—well, than just an utter waste of time. What is there in it all—our afternoon teas, auction bridge, luncheons, dinners, dances. The dances are of course the best thing we do because they are at least refreshing and rejuvenating. But don't you think, Myrtle, that we might make it all more worth while?"

"There's the Ladies' Literary Club," Myrtle suggested, "for those that want something 'worth while,' as you put it. I think it's an awful bore myself."

"Of course it is," Mary agreed.

"But what would you suggest then?"

"I suppose it is after all a question of what is in ourselves. A dozen literary clubs at which we read abstracts from encyclopedias wouldn't alter the fact that when we get together we have so little, so little to give to each other!"

"Oh, I don't know!" protested Myrtle. "We all read all the latest books and magazines and talk about them, and——"

At an adjoining table another phase of the agitating news was being threshed out.

"If she's what the papers say she is, I suppose she'll turn up her nose at New Munich," said the daughter of the Episcopal rector.

"Oh, I don't think she need put on any airs!" said Miss Ocksreider, the hostess's daughter. "I've visited down South and I can tell you we're enough more up to date here in New Munich. Nearly every one down there, even their aristocrats, is so poor that up here they wouldn't be anybody. It's awfully queer the way those Southerners don't care anything about appearances. They tell you right out they can't afford this and that, and they don't seem to think anything of wearing clothes all out of style. There was an awfully handsome new house in the town where I stopped, and when I asked the hotel clerk who lived in it and if they weren't great swells, he said: 'Oh, no, they are not in society; they're not one of our families, though they're very nice people, of course, members of church and good to the poor and all like that.' 'Not in society in a little town like this Leesburg, and living in a mansion like that?' I said. Yes, that's the way they are down there."

"How queer!" came from two of her table companions to whom, like herself, any but money standards of value were rather vague and hazy.

"But if they don't care for money down there, then what's this girl marrying Dan Leitzel for?" one of the men candidly wondered.

"Well, you know there's no accounting for tastes."

"I could excuse any woman's marrying for money—in these days it's only prudent," said the candid one; "but I certainly couldn't respect a woman that married Dan Leitzel for anything else."

"It's to be hoped she's an up-to-date girl and not a clinging vine, for Danny will need very firm handling to make him part with enough money to keep her in gloves and slippers and other necessary luxuries," said Miss Ocksreider.

"Yes, if it were only her husband that she'll have to manage; but there are Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie, too!" cried the rector's daughter. "Danny doesn't so much as put on a necktie without consulting them. They even tie it for him and part his hair for him."

"That may be," said one of the men, "but let me tell you that any one who thinks Dan Leitzel hasn't any force of character better take another guess. If he lets his sisters choose his neckties for him, it's because he doesn't want to do it himself. He's the most consummately selfish individual I've ever known in the whole course of my long and useful life and the most immovably obstinate. Weak? Why, when that fellow takes a notion, he's a mule for sticking to it. Reason with him? Go out in your chicken yard and reason with your hens. It wouldn't be as futile!"

"He may be independent of his sisters, but his wife won't be!" prophesied the rector's daughter darkly.

"Anyway," said Miss Ocksreider, "it will be interesting, won't it, to look on this winter at the drama or comedy or tragedy, as the case may be, of Danny Leitzel's marriage?"

"Won't it!" exclaimed in chorus her hearers.

But at one of the other tables a man was at this moment remarking: "You may all laugh at Dan Leitzel—he's funny of course—but he's all the same a man of brains and education, of wealth and influence and power. In short, he's a successful man. And in Pennsylvania who asks anything more of a man?"

III

Meantime, several hundred miles away, the two objects of all this criticism and speculation were not so apprehensive for their future as were the gossips of New Munich, though it must be confessed that the prospective bridegroom, in spite of his jubilant happiness, did have one or two misgivings on certain points, and that the bride, while wholly ignorant of the real calibre of the man she was about to marry, and having no conception of such a domestic and social environment as that from which he had sprung, nevertheless did not even imagine herself romantically in love with him.

That a girl like Margaret Berkeley could have become involved in a love affair and an actual betrothal with a man like Daniel Leitzel, while apparently inexplicable, becomes, in view of her unique history and present circumstances, not only plausible, but almost inevitable.

Her entanglement with him may be dated from a certain evening just twenty-four hours before she met or even heard of him, when a little episode, trivial enough in itself, opened her eyes to an ugly fact in her relation with her sister to which she had been rather persistently blind.

She had been radiantly happy all that day because of the unusual circumstance that she had something delightful to anticipate for the evening. Her godmother, who lived in Charleston, had 'phoned out to Berkeley Hill to invite her to go with her to see Nazimova in "Hedda Gabler"; and as Margaret had seen only three plays in all the twenty-five years of her life (though she had avidly read every classic drama in the English and French languages) she was greatly excited at the prospect before her. So barren had her girlhood been of youthful pleasures, so sombre and uneventful her daily routine, and so repressed every natural, restless instinct toward brightness and happiness, that the idea of seeing a great dramatic performance loomed big before her as an intoxicating delight. All day, alone in her isolated suburban home, in charge of her elder sister's three small children and of the two rather decrepit negro servants of the great old place, she had gone tripping and singing about the house. She had been quite unable to settle down to the prosaic work of mending the week's laundry, or of wrestling with the intricacies of Henry James' difficult style in "The Golden Bowl" in which, the night before, she had been passionately absorbed.

She could scarcely wait for her sister Harriet to come home from town, where she was attending a young matrons' luncheon party, so eager was she to tell her of the treat she was going to have.

"She will be so glad for me. I've scarcely been outside the hedge for a month, and she has been having such a gay time herself—she's so popular. She'll be so glad I'm going!" she repeated to herself, trying to ignore the doubt in her heart on that point.

But when at half-past four in the afternoon Harriet returned, the blow fell upon Margaret.

"Harriet, dear!" she exultantly greeted her sister with her splendid news the moment the latter came into the house, "Aunt Virginia is going to take me to see Nazimova to-night! Oh!" She laughed aloud, and danced about the spacious hall in her delight, while her sister, a very comely young matron of thirty-five, leisurely removed her wraps.

"But Walter and I are going," Harriet casually remarked as she tossed her cloak over a carved, high-backed chair. "The editor of the Bulletin gave Walter two tickets as part payment for some legal business Walter did for him. Of course you and I can't both be away from the children. Has the baby had her five o'clock bottle?"

"It isn't quite five yet."

"Will you see that she gets it, dearie? I'm so dead tired, I'll have to rest before dinner if I'm going into the city again to-night. Will you attend to it?"

"Yes."

"That's a dear. I'm going up to lie down. Don't let the children come to my room and wake me, will you, dear?" she added as she started languidly upstairs.

"But, Harriet!"

"What?" Harriet asked, not stopping.

"I accepted Aunt Virginia's invitation and she is coming out in her motor for me!"

"Too bad! I'm awfully sorry. You'd better 'phone at once or she will be offended. Tell her that as we are much too poor to buy tickets for the theatre, we can't possibly refuse to use them on the rare occasions when they're given to us!" Harriet laughed as she disappeared around the curve of the winding stairway.

Margaret sprang after her. "Oh, Harriet! I can't give it up!" Her voice was low and breathless.

"But if you 'phone at once Aunt Virginia won't be cross. You know, dearie, you shouldn't make engagements without first finding out what ours are." And Harriet moved on up the stairs to her bedroom.

Margaret was ashamed of her childishness when at dinner that evening Walter, her brother-in-law, inquiring, in his kind, solicitous way, the cause of her pallor and silence, she burst out crying and rushed from the table.

Walter, looking shocked and distressed, turned to his wife for an explanation. But Harriet's face expressed blank astonishment.

"Why, I can't imagine! Unless she's tired out from having had the children all day. I was at Mrs. Duncan's luncheon, you know. I didn't get home until nearly five. I'll tell Margaret to go to bed early to-night and rest up."

Walter Eastman, searching his wife's face keenly, shrugged his big shoulders at the impenetrability of its innocent candour. No use to try to get at the truth of anything from Harriet. She wasn't exactly a liar, but she had a genius for twisting facts to suit her own selfish ends—and all Harriet's ends were selfish. Even the welfare of her children was secondary to her own comfort and convenience. Walter had no illusions about the wife of his bosom and the mother of his three children. He knew perfectly well that she loved no one as she loved herself, and that this dominating self-love made her often cold-blooded and even sometimes a bit false, though always, he was sure, unconsciously so. He was still quite fond of her, which spoke well for them both, considering that they had been married nine years. Of course, after such a length of time they were no longer "in love." But Harriet was an easy-going, good-natured woman, when you didn't cross her; and as he was also easy-going and good-natured, and never crossed her when he could avoid it, they got on beautifully and had a pretty good time together.

Walter wondered sometimes what Harriet would do if placed in circumstances where her own inclinations would have to be sacrificed for those of another. For instance, if she and Margaret had to change places.

"Take Margaret to the play with you to-night and I'll stay home with the kiddies, Harriet," he suggested, looking at his wife across their beautifully appointed dinner-table with its old family china and silver. Harriet, in her home-made evening gown, graced with distinction the stately dining-room furnished in shining antique mahogany, its walls hung with interesting portraits. "If Margaret's had charge of the children all day, she ought not to have them to-night."

"No." Harriet shook her head. "Margaret ought not to go out to-night, she's too tired. And I want you with me, dear. Margaret is not my husband, you know. That's the danger of having one of your family living with you," she sighed. "It is so apt to make a husband and wife less near to each other. I am always resisting the inclination, Walter, dear, to pair off with Margaret instead of with you. I resist it for your sake, for the children's sake, for the sake of our home."

"I shall feel a selfish beast going to a play and leaving that dear girl alone here with the babies. They're our babies, not hers, you know."

"She loves them like her own; she's crazy about them. They are the greatest pleasure she has, Walter."

"Because she hasn't the sort of young pleasures she ought to have. And because she's so unselfish, Hat, that she lets herself be imposed upon to the limit! I've been thinking, lately, that we ought to do more than we do for Margaret; she ought to know girls of her own age; she ought to have a bit of social life, now that the year of mourning is over. It's too dull for her, sticking out here eternally, minding our children and seeing after the house."

"But she's used to sticking out here and seeing after the house. When she lived here with Uncle Osmond she had a lot less diversion and life about her than she has now, and you know how deadly gloomy it was here then. We've brightened it up and made it a home for Margaret."

"The fact that she had to sacrifice her girlhood for your uncle is all the more reason why she shouldn't sacrifice what's left of it for our children."

"If Margaret doesn't complain, I don't see why you need, dear."

"She'd never complain—she never thinks of herself. Your Uncle Osmond took care not to let her form the habit! For that very reason we should think for her a bit, Hattie, dear. I say, we've got to let Margaret in for some young society."

"When I can't afford to keep up my social end, let alone hers? And if we should spend money that way for Margaret, where would the children come in?"

"Oh, pshaw!" said Walter impatiently. "You're bluffing! You care no more about the money side of it than I do. You're not a Yankee tight-wad! Margaret need not live the life of a nursemaid because we're not rich, any more than you do, honey. It's absurd! And it's all wrong. What you're really afraid of, Hat, is that if she went about more, you'd have to stay at home now and then with your own babies. Eh, dear?"

But he was warned by the look in his wife's face that he must go no further. He was aware of the fact that Harriet was distinctly jealous of his too manifest liking for Margaret. Being something of a philosopher, he had felt occasionally, when his sister-in-law had seemed to him more than usually charming and irresistible, that a wife's instinctive jealousy was really a Providential safeguard to hold a man in check.

He wondered often why he found Margaret so tremendously appealing, when undoubtedly his wife, though ten years older than her sister, was much the better looking of the two. He was not subtle enough to divine that it was the absolutely feminine quality of Margaret's personality, the penetrating, all-pervasive womanliness which one felt in her presence, which expressed itself in her every movement, in every curve of her young body—it was this which so poignantly appealed to his strong virility that at times he felt he could not bear her presence in the house.

He would turn from her and look upon his wife's much prettier face and finer figure, only to have the fire of his blood turn lukewarm. For he recognized, with fatal clearness, that though Harriet had the beautiful, clear-cut features and look of high breeding characteristic of the Berkeley race, her inexpressive countenance betrayed a commonplace mind and soul, while Margaret, lacking the Berkeley beauty, did have the family look and air of breeding, which gave her, with her countenance of intelligence and sensitiveness, a marked distinction; and Walter Eastman was a man not only of temperament, but of the poetic imagination that idealizes the woman with whom he is at the time in love.

"The man that marries Margaret will never fall out of love with her—she's magnetic to her finger-tips! What's more, there's something in her worth loving—worth loving forever!"

At this stage of his reflections he usually pulled himself up short, uncomfortably conscious of his disloyalty. Harriet, he knew, was wholly loyal to him, proud of him, thinking him all that any woman could reasonably expect a husband to be—a gentleman of old family, well set up physically, and indeed good-looking, chivalrous to his wife, devoted to his children, temperate in his habits, upright and honourable. She did not even criticise his natural indolence, which, rather than lack of brains or opportunity, kept his law practice and his earnings too small for the needs of his growing family; but Harriet preferred to do without money rather than have her husband be a vulgar "hustler," like a "Yankee upstart."

It was this same indolence of Walter's, rather than want of force of character, which led him to stand by passively and see his sister-in-law constantly imposed upon, as he distinctly felt that she was, though he realized that Margaret herself, dear, sweet girl, never seemed conscious of it. Her unexpected outburst at dinner to-night had shocked and hurt him to the quick. He was sure that something really outrageous on Harriet's part must have caused it. Yet rather than "raise a row" with Harriet, he acquiesced in her decision to leave Margaret at home. It must be said in justice to him that had his astute wife not kept him in ignorance of their Aunt Virginia's invitation to Margaret he would undoubtedly have taken a stand in the matter. Harriet, carefully calculating the limit of his easy forbearance, knew better than to tell him of that invitation; and she could safely count upon Margaret not to put her in the wrong with Walter.

Margaret, meantime, locked in her room, had quickly got over her outbreak of weeping and was now sitting upright upon her bed, resolutely facing her quandary.

It was Harriet's assumption of authority, with its implication of her own subservient position, that was opening Margaret's eyes this evening to the real nature of her position in her sister's household.

"Suppose I went straight to her just now, all dressed for the theatre, and told her in an off-hand, careless, artistic manner that I couldn't possibly break my engagement with Aunt Virginia!"

Margaret, perched Turk-fashion on the foot of her bed, her hands clasped about one knee, her cheeks flushed, her eyes very bright, contemplated in fancy Harriet's consternation at such an unwonted procedure on her part—and she knew she would not do it. Not because, like Walter, she was too indolent to wrestle with Harriet's cold-blooded tenacity; nor because she was in the least afraid of her sister. After living eight years with Uncle Osmond she would hardly quail before Harriet! But it was that thing Harriet had said to her this afternoon—that awful thing that burned in her brain and heart—it was that with which she must reckon before she could take any definite stand. "You should not make any engagements without first finding out what ours are," Harriet had said, which, in view of all the circumstances, simply meant, "Being dependent upon us for your food and clothes, your time should be at our disposal. You are no more free to go and come than are the cook and butler."

Now of course Harriet would never admit for an instant that she felt like that. Margaret knew perfectly well that her sister did not begrudge the little it cost to keep her with them. Harriet was not so thrifty as that. This attitude, then, was probably only a pretext to cover something else which Harriet was no doubt unwilling to admit even to her own soul, that something else which Margaret, herself, had tried so long not to see, which made her presence at Berkeley Hill unwelcome to both Walter and Harriet. And Harriet, too proud to acknowledge her true reason for wishing her sister away, pretended to an economic one.

"Suppose I said to her, 'You must not make engagements without first finding out what mine are?' Now if she had only said, 'We should not make engagements without first consulting with each other.' But she put all the obligation where she tries to persuade herself that it belongs."

When presently Margaret heard her sister and Walter leave the house to go to the theatre she got up from her bed and went to Harriet's room adjoining the nursery, to keep guard over the three sleeping children until their parents came home.

Lying on a chintz-covered couch at the foot of Harriet's huge four-posted bed, she thought long and earnestly upon every phase of her difficult situation, determined that before she slept she would solve the apparently impossible problem of how she might leave Berkeley Hill.

IV

Nine years ago it was that Margaret, a girl of sixteen, had come out from Charleston to live at Berkeley Hill as nurse, amanuensis, housekeeper, and companion to her sickly, irritable, and eccentric old Uncle Osmond Berkeley, eminent psychologist, scholar, and author, who at that time owned and occupied the Berkeley homestead. It was the death of her father and Harriet's immediate marriage that, leaving her homeless and penniless, had precipitated upon her those years of imprisonment with an irascible invalid. Indeed so completely stranded had she been that she had accepted only too thankfully her uncle's grudging offer to give her a home with him on condition that she give him in return every hour of her time, making herself useful in every variety of occupation he saw fit to impose, and to do it all with entire cheerfulness and absolutely no complaining. That was the chief of his many "unqualified conditions "—a cheerful countenance at all times, no matter what her fancied reason for dissatisfaction, and no matter how gloomy he might be.

"I'm never cheerful," he had affirmed, "and that's why I require you always to be so. If that seems to you unreasonable and illogical, you're stupid. Give the matter a little thought and light may come to you. You'll have plenty of chance, living with me, to develop what little thinking powers you may have—much more chance than you'd ever have in a school for young ladies, where you no doubt think I ought to send you for the next two or three years. Schools for young ladies! Ha!" he laughed sardonically. "Ye gods! Thank me for rescuing you from the fate of being 'finished' at one of them! Well named 'finishing schools!' They certainly are a girl's finish so far as common sense, capacity for usefulness, and ability to think for herself are concerned! And there actually are parents of daughters who seriously regard such schools as institutions of 'education!' Yes, education, by God! You'll get more education, my girl, from one week of my conversation than you would from a decade of one of those parasite factories!"

It was in the library at Berkeley Hill, the stately old country home which for seven generations had belonged to the Berkeley family, that this preliminary interview had taken place, her uncle in his reclining chair before a great open hearth, the firelight playing upon his pallid, intellectual face crowned with thick, white hair, and upon the emaciated hands clasping a volume on his knee. Repellently harsh he seemed to the shrinking maiden standing before him in her deep mourning, to be inspected, appraised, and catechised; for in spite of the fact that she had been born and brought up in the city of Charleston, only two miles away, her uncle had never seen enough of her to know anything about her.

Perceiving, now, how the girl shrank from him, his eyes sparkled; there was something ghoulish in his love of cowing those who served him. For the past ten years he had had no woman near him save hired attendants who cringed before his bullying.

"A human creature who lets itself be bullied deserves no better," was his theory, and he never spared a sycophant.

"The day I have you weeping on my hands," he warned his niece as she stood pale and silent before him, "or even looking as though you were trying not to weep, out you go!"

The fact that the girl was scarcely more than a child, that she was alone and penniless, did not soften him.

"She's old enough to show her mettle if she has any. If she hasn't, no loss if she's crushed in the grind of serving me, for I'm useful, and shall be while I breathe and think."

"Well, what have you to say for yourself, wench?" he demanded when she had heard without a word his uncompromising statements as to what he would require of her in return for the "home" he would give her.

"I accept all your unqualified conditions, Uncle Osmond," she answered quietly, no tremor in her voice; and the musical, soft drawl of her tone fell with an oddly soothing and pleasing effect upon the invalid's rasped nerves; "if you'll accept my one condition."

Her uncle's white head jerked like a startled animal's. "What? What?" he ejaculated after an instant's stunned silence. "Your condition? Huh! You making a condition, upon my word! What pertness is this? A 'condition' upon which you'll accept my charity!"

"Not your 'charity.' The self-supporting position of your cheerful, uncomplaining, industrious, capable, untiring, companionable, intelligent chattel," came the musical, lazy drawl in reply. "My condition is that you solemnly promise never again to call me a 'wench.'"

"I'll call you what I see fit to call you! If you're so damned squeamish, I won't have you near me! I'd be hurling books at your head!"

"I'm not 'damned squeamish,' Uncle Osmond, indeed I'm not. I really rather like the way you swear, it's so manly and exciting. But I won't be called a 'wench.'"

"Why not? I won't have my liberty of speech hampered!"

"Very well, then, Uncle Osmond, dear, I won't come."

"You shan't come! I wouldn't have you in the house, Miss Pernicketty!"

"Good-bye, then. I'm very sorry for you, Uncle Osmond. I'm sure the loss is yours. I would have been very kind to you."

"Sorry for me! You think well of yourself, don't you, wench?"

"At least so well that I'll go out sewing by the day, or stand in a store, or go on the stage, or turn evangelist (I've heard there's money in that) before I'll be called a wench!"

"What in hell do you imagine the word means?"

"I don't know what it means, but I won't be addressed as a wench."

"Get the dictionary. Look it up."

"But I won't be called a wench no matter what it means."

"Won't be called one! You dictate to me? Understand, girl, nobody dictates to me! Read Shakespeare's sonnet, Lucrece:

"'Know, gentle wench, it small avails my mood.'

No offence in the word, you see, my authority being our greatest English poet."

"Good-bye, Uncle Osmond," she said, turning away and walking toward the door.

"Come back and behave yourself!"

She came back at once. "All right—and don't ever forget your promise."

"I promised nothing. I never make promises."

"Your acceptance of my condition is a promise."

"Acceptance of your condition!" He choked and spluttered over it.

"And it's a mighty small condition considering all I'm going to do for you with cheerfulness, amiability, a pleasant smile——"

"Hold your tongue and speak when you are spoken to!" he growled, apparently furious, but secretly exulting at the child's refreshing fearlessness with him.

It had been an instinct of self-preservation that had led Margaret to demonstrate to her uncle, in that very first hour with him, that the line would have to be drawn somewhere in his browbeating. And the word "wench" had served her purpose. Thereafter, in the eight years that she lived with him, docile and patient as she always was, he never forgot, and she never had to remind him, that there was a limit past which he could not safely venture in the indulgence of his tendency to tyrannize.

But her life was hard; most girls would have found its monotony and self-sacrifice unbearable; its gloomy environment in the great empty barn of a house too depressing; its close confinement within the narrow limits of the unkept grounds, overgrown with weeds and bushes, and dark with big trees and a high hedge of hemlocks, as bad as any jail. There were sometimes weeks at a stretch during which she saw no human being save her uncle and the old negro couple who had lived on the place for a quarter of a century; for though Harriet and her husband lived in Charleston, her uncle would spare her so seldom to visit them, and was so exacting as to her speedy return to him that she soon fell into the way of confining her intercourse with her sister almost entirely to a weekly exchange of letters.

In spite, however, of her isolation Margaret felt that there were compensations in her lot. She had resources within herself in her love of books, and she found in her uncle's rich intellectual equipment, of which he freely gave her the benefit in their daily association, a stimulus, a variety, and even an excitement that meant much more to her than the usual girl's diversions of frocks, parties, and beaus would have meant. It is true she often longed for a congenial companion of her own age, she hungered for affection, she suffered keenly in her occasional feverish paroxysms of restlessness, and there were times when the surging fountains of her youth threatened to break down the barriers that imprisoned a nature that was both large and impassioned.

"She's temperamental enough!" was her uncle's early conclusion as, from day to day, the girl's mind and heart were unfolded to his keen observation.

Her rare periods of passionate discontent, however, though leaving her spent and listless for a time after they had passed over her, did not embitter her. There was a fund of native sweetness in Margaret's soul that even her life with cynical old Osmond Berkeley could not blight. That philosopher marvelled often at his inability to spoil her, remarkably open as he found her young mind to the ideas and theories which he delighted in impressing upon her. It was indeed amazing how readily she would select from the intellectual feast daily spread before her what was wholesome and pure and reject what was morbid.

"That's right," he would approve when she would frankly refuse to accept a dogma laid down to her. "Better think for yourself, even though you think wrongly, than do as the other females of the species do—believe whatever they are told to believe—or, worse, what it suits their personal interests to believe. Be everlastingly thankful to me that I encourage you to think for yourself, to face the facts of life. George Meredith writes, 'The education of girls is to make them think that facts are their enemies.' You shall not escape some knowledge of facts if I can help it!"

"It's awfully nice of you to care so much about my mind, Uncle Osmond," she gratefully responded. "To really care for anything about me. I do love to be mothered and coddled and made much of!"

"Huh! 'Mothered and coddled and made much of!' You're at the wrong shop! And don't let me hear you misuse that word 'nice.'"

"I insist upon being pleased at your caring at least about my mind! I'd be grateful even to a dog that was good to me."

"I'm not a dog, and I'm never so 'good' to any one that you could notice it particularly."

"Don't try to make yourself out worse than you are; you're bad enough, honey, in all conscience!"

"Hold your impudence and bring me Volume Third of Kant's 'Critique.'"

"Oh, dear!" Margaret sighed as she obeyed, "is it going to be that awful dope to-day? I hoped up to the last you'd choose an exciting novel. Do you know I don't think it's womanly to understand Kant's 'Critique.'"

"I've no desire to be womanly. Do as I tell you."

In addition to finding his niece capable and patient as a nurse and housekeeper, Margaret interested him more than any individual he had known in many years. He secretly blessed the hour when she had come into his sombre life to enliven and, yes, enrich it. Not for worlds, however, would he have let her know what she was to him.

There were rare moments when he was actually moved to an expression of gratitude and tenderness for his long-suffering victim; but Margaret's touchingly eager response to such overtures (heart-hungry as she was in her loneliness) while gratifying him, had always the effect of making him promptly withdraw into his hard shell again and to counteract, by his most trying exactions, his momentary softness; so that in time she learned to dread any least sign of amiability.

She did not know the full extent of her uncle's selfishness in his treatment of her: how ruthlessly he schemed to avert the danger which he thought often threatened him of losing her to some one of the half-dozen middle-aged or elderly gentlemen of learning who had the habit of visiting him in his retirement and who, to the last man of them, whether married or single, adored his niece. It seemed that no man could lay eyes on her without promptly loving her (what men called love). Even his physician, happily married and the father of four lusty boys, was, Berkeley could see, quite mad about her, though Margaret never discovered it; she only thought him extremely agreeable and kind and liked him accordingly. Indeed the only fun she ever got out of this train of admirers was an occasional hour of liberty while they were closeted with her uncle; for he took care, as soon as he realized how alluring she was to most men, to have her out of the way when his acquaintances dropped in, a deprivation to his own comfort for which the visitor paid in an extra dose of pessimism and irony.

"When that child falls in love," Berkeley once told himself, "as of course so temperamental a girl is bound to do sooner or later, it will go hard with her. Let her wait, however, until I'm gone. Time enough for her then. I need her. Couldn't endure life without her now that I'm used to her!"

So he not only gave her no opportunity to meet marriageable men, he tried to unsex her, to engraft upon her mind his own cynicism as to the thing named love, his conviction of its gross selfishness, his scorn of sentimentality and of "the hypocrisy that would idealize an ephemeral emotion grounded in base, egoistic appetite."

"All 'love,' all attraction of whatever nature, is grounded in sex," he would affirm. "The universe is upheld and constantly recreated by the ceaseless action of so-called love. A purely natural, physical phenomenon, therefore. There is not in life such a thing as a disinterested love."

"A mother's love?" Margaret once suggested in reply to this avowal.

"Entirely selfish. She loves her child as part of herself; all her pride and ambition for it are because it is hers."

"Well, if you call a mother's love selfish, there's no use saying anything more."

"And not to mince matters," he reaffirmed, "I want you to know for your own protection that a man's love for a woman is that of a beast of prey for its victim!"

"But I'm so safe here, I don't need such protection; I never see a man. No one but learned scholars ever come here."

"'Learned scholars' are not men, then, in your category?"

"Not the interesting wild kind that you warn me against."

"The man, woman, or 'learned scholar,' who has not a devil as well as an angel in his soul, a beast as well as a god, is too limited a creature to see life whole and big and round."

"Am I, then," she inquired with interest, "a devil and a beast as well as an angel and a goddess, do you think?"

"Mostly devil, you! I couldn't stand the angel-goddess combination. Even you, my girl, are wholly selfish; you would not stay with me for one day if it were not that I give you a home. Come, now," he invited, and evidently expected a protest against this assertion.

"Why, of course I shouldn't. Why would I?"

He looked rather blank at this, though privately he never failed to find her honesty refreshing.

"I never understood," she added, "that it was a question of affection between you and me, did you, my dear?"

"'Affection!'" he sneered bitterly. "Affection for ourselves!"

"Of course. You wouldn't give me a bright and happy home like this if you did not need me to wait on you thirty-six hours out of the twenty-four with a cheerful, Cheshire-cat smile, and all for my food, bed, and two new frocks and hats a year."

"Have you no appreciation, girl, of the liberal education it is for you to be with me, to be permitted to read to me, to have such a library as mine at your command?"

"Yes, indeed, Uncle Osmond."

"Well, then?"

"But I don't stay here for the pleasure of your amiable society, dear," she assured him, patting his hand. "You're far too much like your old Scotch Thomas Carlyle that you admire so much. My goodness, what a life Jane must have led with that old curmudgeon!"

"Hold your impudent tongue!"

"Yes, dear."

"Don't speak to me again to-day!"

"Thanks; I'm so glad you don't also require me to be brilliantly conversational. I'd really have to charge extra for that, Uncle Osmond."

"Get me my eggnog!"

In spite of all Osmond Berkeley's precautions, however, Margaret did, of course, go through the intense and fiery ordeal of "falling in love"; for when a maiden's budding soul begins to unfold to the beauty of life, to throb and thrill before the wonder and mystery of the universe, no walled imprisonment can check the course of nature—she is bound to suffer the bitter-sweet experience of becoming enamoured of something, it doesn't much matter what; a cigar-shop Indian will suffice if nothing more lively comes her way. For circumstances are, after all, nothing but "machinery, just meant to give thy life its bent." Berkeley, priding himself on his knowledge of sex-psychology, knowing that girls isolated in boarding-schools fall in love with their woman teachers, and in colleges with each other, nevertheless persuaded himself that he could, in this instance, defeat nature; that Margaret was being safeguarded too absolutely to admit of her finding any outlet whatever for the pent-up emotional current of her womanhood.

But there came to Berkeley Hill one day a stranger, an earnest young minister of Charleston, who, having read a magazine article of Osmond Berkeley's in which "the hysterical, unwholesome excitement of evangelistic revivals" was demonstrated to be purely physiological, wished to remonstrate with its author and point out to him that he was grievously mistaken.

One keenly appraising, glance at the embarrassed, awkward young man as he was shown into the library where Berkeley sat in his armchair before the fire, with Margaret at his side reading to him from a just published work by Josiah Royce, made her uncle decide that it would be superfluous to send her from the room—"on account of a creature like this, with no manners, no brains, and an Adam's apple!"

But it was the young man's deadly earnestness in the discussion between these two unequal protagonists that impressed itself upon Margaret's hungry imagination; his courage in coming with what he conceived to be his burning message of truth to such a formidable "enemy to truth" as the famous scholar, Dr. Osmond Berkeley. Evidently, the young man's conscience, in spite of his painful shyness, had lashed him to this visit, more dreadful than a den of lions. There were still, even in these days, it seemed, martyrs for religion.

Now, while Margaret of course recognized the intellectual feebleness of the young minister's side of the question which was under fire, nevertheless, before his visit was concluded, his brow wore for her a halo; his thin little voice was rich music to her quivering nerves; his unsophisticated manner the outward sign of a beautiful simplicity; his Adam's apple a peculiar distinction.

Berkeley, as soon as he found his visitor a bore, made short work of him and got rid of him without ceremony. In Margaret's eyes the young man stood up to his rebuffs like a hero and a martyr.

Her uncle did not notice, upon her return to the library after seeing the young man into the hall, how bright were her eyes, how flushed her cheeks, how sensitive the curve of her lips.

"Ha, ha!" he laughed sardonically, "wouldn't you rather go to hell than have to hear him preach?"

"You laugh like a villain in a melodrama!" retorted Margaret.

"I haven't laughed for twenty years except at damned fools. When did you ever see a melodrama?"

"Aunt Virginia took Harriet and me to see The Two Orphans once."