[FOREWORD]
[CHAPTER 1], [2], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32], [33], [34], [35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40], [41], [42], [43], [44], [45], [46], [47], [48], [49], [50], [51], [52], [53], [54], [55], [56], [57], [58], [59], [60], [61], [62], [63], [64], [65], [66], [67].

POSSESSION

A NOVEL
BY
LOUIS BROMFIELD
Author of “The Green Bay Tree"
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
MCMXXVI
Copyright, 1925, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company
All rights reserved

To
MARY

“Life is hard for our children. It isn’t as simple as it was for us. Their grandfathers were pioneers and the same blood runs in their veins, only they haven’t a frontier any longer. They stand—these children of ours—with their backs toward this rough-hewn middle west and their faces set toward Europe and the East and they belong to neither. They are lost somewhere between.”

“Wherever she goes, trouble will follow. She’s born like most people with a touch of genius, under a curse. She is certain to affect the lives of every one about her ... because, well, because the threads of our lives are hopelessly tangled.... Marry her if you will, but don’t expect happiness to come of it. She would doubtless bear you a son ... a fine strong son, because she’s a fine cold animal. But don’t expect satisfaction from her. She knows too well exactly where she is bound.”

FOREWORD

“Possession” is in no sense a sequel to “The Green Bay Tree.” The second novel does not carry the fortunes of the characters which appeared in the first; it reveals, speaking chronologically, little beyond the final page of the earlier book. On the contrary both novels cover virtually the same period of time, from the waning years of the nineteenth century up to the present time. The two are what might be called panel novels in a screen which, when complete, will consist of at least a half-dozen panels all interrelated and each giving a certain phase of the ungainly, swarming, glittering spectacle of American Life.

Those who read “The Green Bay Tree” must have felt that one character—that of Ellen Tolliver—was thrust aside in order to make way for the progress of Lily Shane. With the publication of the present novel, it is possible to say that the energetic Miss Tolliver was neglected for two reasons; first, because she was a character of such violence that, once given her way, she would soon have dominated all the others; second, because the author kept her purposely in restraint, as he desired to tell her story in proportions worthy of her.

In Ellen’s story, the author, knowing that much which pertains to the life of a musician is boring and of little interest to any one outside the realm of music, has endeavored to eliminate all the technical side of her education. He does this not because he lacks knowledge of the facts but because they are in themselves uninteresting. Ellen Tolliver might have been a sculptor, a painter, an actress, a writer; the interest in her lies not in the calling she chose but in the character of the woman herself. She would, doubtless, have been successful in any direction she saw fit to direct her boundless energy.

“Possession” is the second of several novels in which familiar characters will reappear and new ones will make their entrance.

L. B.

Cold Spring Harbor
May 1, 1925
Long Island.

POSSESSION

1

IN the fading October twilight Grandpa Tolliver sat eating an apple and reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The ponderous book (volume III) lay spread open upon his bony knees, for it was too heavy to be supported in any other way, and he read by leaning far over and peering at the pages through steel rimmed spectacles which were not quite clear, as they never were. The dimness of lens, however, did not appear to annoy him; undisturbed he read on as if the spectacles sharpened his vision instead of dimming it. Things were, after all, what you believed them to be; therefore the spectacles served their purpose. He was not one to be bothered by such small things....

The room in which he sat was square and not too large. On two sides there were windows and in one corner an enormous and funereal bed of black walnut (the nuptial bed of three generations in the Tolliver family) which bore at the moment the imprint of the perverse and angular old body. He had lain there to think. Sometimes he lay thus for hours at a time in a sort of coma, ruminating the extraordinary and imbecile diversity of life. But it was the number of books which contributed the dominating characteristic of the room. There was row upon row of them rising from floor to ceiling, rows added year by year out of Grandpa’s infinitesimal income until at last they had walled him in. There were books bound in fine leather and books in cheap leather, worn and frayed at the corners, books in cheap boards and an immense number of books bound in yellow paper. Pressed close against the books on the north wall of the room there stood an enormous desk of the same funereal black walnut—a desk filled with innumerable pigeonholes into which had been stuffed without order or sequence bits of paper scribbled over with a handwriting that was fine and erratic like the tracks of a tiny bird strayed into an inkpot. The papers ranged through every variety of shade from the yellowish bisque of ancient documents to the gray white of comparatively new ones. Of all the room it was the desk alone that had an appearance of untidiness; it lay under a pall of dust save for two small spots rubbed clean by the sharp elbows of Grandpa Tolliver.

What did he write? What was contained in this immense collection of documents? No one knew that; not even the curiosity of his daughter-in-law Hattie, who entered the room each morning to throw open the windows (an action he detested) and force the old man out into the chill air of the streets, had been able to penetrate the mysteries of the extraordinary bird tracks. A word with luck, here or there.... Nothing more. And she had examined them often enough in a fierce effort to penetrate the secret of his strength. From years of breathless, headlong writing the words had lost all resemblance to combinations of letters. The letters themselves were obscured; they flowed into one another until each one, in the fashion of the Chinese, had become a symbol, a mystery to which the old man alone held the key. It was the writing of a man whose pen had never been able to keep pace with the lightning speed of his thoughts. It may have been that the old man himself could not have deciphered the writing on those sheets which long since had turned to a yellow bisque. So far as any one could discover, he never took them from the pigeonholes and read them a second time. They were simply thrust away to turn yellow and gather dust, for Grandpa Tolliver had suffered for years from a sense of the immense futility of everything.

As he sat in the fading light in his decrepit rocking chair the appearance of the old man struck faintly a note of the sinister. Something in the shape of his great, bony head, in the appearance of his unkempt gray beard, in the remarkable angularity of his lean body gave him the appearance of one in alliance with the powers of darkness. The peculiar gray green of his glittering eyes had a way of piercing through pretense, through barriers of reserve and secrecy. They were the eyes of one who knew far too much. They were the eyes that got somehow at the core of things, so that a person—even his bitterest enemy, the vigorous and unsubtle Hattie—winced before the shattering light that gathered in their depths. They looked out from under shaggy brows with a knowledge bred of solitude that was something more than human. And he had a terrible way of using them, of watching people, of silently and powerfully prying open their shells. For Grandpa Tolliver there were no longer any illusions; he was therefore a horrid and intolerable old man.

At length when the light grew too dim even for the unearthly eyes of the old man, he closed The Decline and Fall and devoted himself to finishing his apple, absorbed for the time being in reflecting triumphantly upon passages in the ponderous work which proved without any doubt that the human race lay beyond the possibility of improvement.

When his strong pointed teeth had finished with the apple, he cast it aside for Hattie to sweep out in the morning and, lifting The Decline and Fall as high as possible, he dropped it to the floor with a resounding crash. As the echo died there rose from belowstairs the sound of clattering pans shaken by the crash from the startled hands of Hattie, and then an inarticulate rumble of exasperation at this latest bit of minute deviltry.

The old man leaned back in his chair and chuckled, wickedly. It was one more skirmish in the state of war which had existed between him and his daughter-in-law over a period of years.

Through the closed window the homely sounds of a dozen backyards filtered into the room ... the sharp slam of a refrigerator door, the sudden mad barking of a dog playing with a child, the faint whicker of a horse in one of the stables and then the sound of Hattie’s vigorous voice, still carrying a persistent, unmistakable note of irritation, summoning her small sons from the far reaches of the neighborhood.

The sound of the voice rose and hung in the autumn night, rich, full-blooded, vigorous, redolent of energy, beautiful in its primitive strength. At the faint note of irritation Grandpa Tolliver, rubbing his teeth with a skinny finger, chuckled again.

The voice wavered, penetrating the remote distances of the back yards, and presently there came an answering cry in the shrill, high treble of a boy of twelve arrested suddenly in the midst of his play.

“Yay-us! Yay-us! We’re coming!”

Primitive it was, like a ewe calling to her lambs, or more perhaps (thought the old man) like a lioness summoning her cubs. It was Robert who answered, the younger of the two. It was difficult for Fergus to yell in the same lusty fashion; his voice had reached the stage where it trembled perilously between a treble and a bass. The sounds he made shamed him. Fergus, like his father, disliked making a spectacle of himself. (Too sensitive, thought Grandpa Tolliver. Like his father he would be a failure in life, because he had no indifference.)

The room grew darker and after a time the sweet, acrid odor of smoldering leaves, stirred into flame by the children who played beneath the window, drifted through the cracks in the glass. As if the scent, the soft twilight, the sound of Hattie’s voice, had set fire to a train of memories, Grandpa Tolliver began to rock gently. The chair made a faint squeaking sound which filled the room as if it had been invaded by a flock of bats which, circling wildly above the old man’s head, uttered a chorus of faint shrill cries.... The old man chuckled again. It was a bitter, unearthly sound....

The room in which Grandpa Tolliver sat had been added to the Tolliver house during one of those rare intervals, years ago, when his son had prospered for a time. The house itself stood back from the street in the older part of a town which within a generation had changed from a frontier settlement into a bustling city whose prosperity centered about the black mills and the flaming furnaces of a marshy district known as The Flats, a district black and unsightly and inhabited by hordes of Italians, Poles, Slovaks and Russians who never emerged from its sooty environs into the clear air of the Hill where the old citizens had their homes. Among these houses the Tollivers’ was marked by the need of paint, though this shameful fault was concealed somewhat by masses of vines—roses, honeysuckle, ivy—which overran all the dwelling and in summer threw a cloud of beauty over the horrid, imaginative trimmings conceived by some side-whiskered small town architect of the eighties. There was in the appearance of the house nothing of opulence. It was gray, commonplace and ornamented with extravagant jig-saw decorations. Also it suffered from a slate roof of a depressing shade of blue gray. But it was roomy and comfortable.

Houses occupied for a long period by the same family have a way of taking on imperceptibly but surely the characteristics of their owners. The Tollivers, Hattie and Charles, had come into the house as bride and bridegroom, in the days when Charles Tolliver had before him a bright future, years before he gave up, at the urging of his powerful wife, a commonplace adequate salary for a more reckless and extravagant career in the politics of the growing county. By now, twenty years after, the house, the lawn and the garden expressed the essence of the Tolliver family. The grass sometimes went in grave need of cutting. The paint had peeled here and there where it lay exposed to the middle-western winter. At the eaves there were streaks of black made by soot which drifted from the roaring Mills in the distant Flats. The shrubs were unpruned and the climbing roses would have been improved by a little cutting; yet these things, taken all in all, produced an effect of charm far greater than any to be found in the other neat, painted, monotonous houses that stood in unspectacular rows on either side of Sycamore Street. In the careless growth of the shrubs and vines there was a certain wildness and inspiring vigor, something full-blooded and lush which elsewhere in the block was absent. There was nothing ordered, pruned or clipped into a state of patterned mediocrity. Here, within the hedge that enclosed the Tolliver property there reigned a marked abandon, a sense of life lived recklessly with a shameless disregard for smug security. The Tollivers clearly had no time for those things which lay outside the main current.

Yet there was no rubbish in evidence. The whole was spotlessly clean from the linden trees which stood by the curb to the magenta-colored stable at the end of the garden. You might have walked the length of the block without consciousness of the other houses; but in front of the Tollivers’ you would have halted, thinking, “Here is a difference indeed. Some careless householder without proper pride in his grounds!”

Yet you would have stopped to notice it. At least it would have interested you by the wild, vigorous, disheveled character of its difference.

In the beginning the room which Gramp occupied had been built for a servant and through its doors, in the spasmodic periods of Tolliver prosperity, had passed a procession of weird and striking “hired girls” ... country maidens come to town in search of excitement, Bohemian and Russian girls, the offspring of the Flat-dwellers; one or two who had been, to Hattie’s shocked amazement, simply daughters of joy. With the passing of Myrtle, the last of these, who was retired in order to bear a child of uncertain paternity, the Tollivers’ ship of fortune had slipped into one of the periodical doldrums and the stormy, unsatisfactory era of the hired girl came to an end forever. Almost as if he had divined the event, Grandpa Tolliver appeared on the same day seated beside the driver on a wagon laden with books, to announce that he had come to take up his abode with the family of his son. There was nothing to be done. The books were moved into the room above the kitchen and there the old man settled himself. He had been there now for ten years, a gadfly to torment the virtuous, bustling existence of his daughter-in-law. He seldom stirred from his room. He had, indeed, done nothing in all his life which might be scored under the name of accomplishment. As a young man he had been trained for the church, but when his education had been completed, he discovered that he had learned too much and so believed nothing. He bothered no one. His crime was inertia. He possessed an indifference of colossal proportions.

As the room fell into a thick blackness, the rocking chair, under the urge of flooding memories, acquired a greater animation. It may have been that there was something in the homely sounds of the backyard vista and the pleasant smell of burning leaves that pierced by way of his senses the wall of the old man’s impregnable solitude. Presently he chuckled again in a triumphant fashion, as if the memory of Hattie Tolliver’s irritation still rang in his ears.

Ah, how she hated him! How they all scorned him! Even on his rare and solitary ramblings along the sidewalks of the Town, prosperous citizens regarded him with hostile looks. “Old Man Tolliver ... The Failure!” They pointed him out to their children as the awful example of a man without ambition, a man who drifted into a lonely and desolate old age, abhorred and unwanted, a burden to his own children and grandchildren. That’s what came of not having energy and push!

Old Man Tolliver ... The Failure! At the thought, the wicked old man chortled more loudly than ever. Failure! Failure! What did they know of whether he was a failure or not. Failure! That was where he had the joke on the lot of them. He alone had fixed his ambition, captured his ideal; he had done always exactly what he wanted to do.

In sudden satisfaction over his secret triumph the old man was very nearly overcome by his own chuckling.

Old? Yes, he felt very old to-night. Perhaps he hadn’t many years before him. Maybe it was only a matter of months. Then he would die. What was it like to die? Just a passing out probably, into something vast and dark. Oblivion! That was it. Why wasn’t that the ideal end? Oblivion, where you were nothing and had no mind and no memory and no books, where you simply did not exist. Just nothingness and eternal peace. Aratu, that kingdom where reigned mere oblivion. He wasn’t looking forward to Heaven and harps. (Imagine Hattie strumming a harp!) He was filled with a sense of great completeness, of having done everything there was to do, of having known all of life that it was possible for one man to know. Sin? What was sin? He didn’t regret anything he had done. He had no remorse, no regrets. On the contrary he was glad of all the things he had done which people called sin. It gave him a satisfactory feeling of completeness. Now when he was so old, he needn’t wish he had done this or done that. He had. To be sure, he hadn’t murdered any one! He hadn’t been guilty of theft. It was very satisfactory ... that feeling of completeness.

Nothing remained. Death.... Deadness.... Why he was dead already. Death must be like this room, blank, dark, negative, neither one thing nor the other. He had been dead for weeks, for months, for years; and here he was walled up in a tomb of books. “La Pucelle” (a rare edition). What would become of it? Like as not Hattie would burn it, never knowing its value. Think how she would suffer if ever she discovered she had burned up a great pile of banknotes! Candide, The Critique of Pure Reason, Spinoza, Montaigne, Darwin, Huxley. (What a row they’d caused! How well he remembered the chatter.) Plato. And there was Verlaine and George Sand and all of Thackeray. Colonel Newcome and Rebecca Sharp with her pointed nose and green eyes. What an amusing creature she was! Amelia Sedley, that tiresome, uninteresting, virtuous bore! And Charles Honeyman. (Ah! He knew things they didn’t dream of in this town!) And there in the corner by the old desk, Emma Bovary tearing voluptuously at her bodice.

But they were not all ghosts of books. There were ghosts too of reality, ghosts born of memories, which came dimly out of the past, out of a youth that, dried now at its source, had been hot-blooded and romantic and restless; such ghosts as one called Celeste (in a poke bonnet with a camelia pinned just above the brim) who seemed forever peeping round the corner of a staircase as she had once peeped, in a glowing reality round the corner of a staircase in the Rue de Clichy. Nina who was more alive now than she had ever been.... And they thought him a failure!

Yes, they were amusing ghosts. He had lived with them so many years. Lonely? How was it possible to be lonely among such fascinating companions? He had lived with them too long. He knew them too well, inside and out. They kept him company in this tomb of books. He seldom left it. Once a week, perhaps, to walk around the block; and then the children ran from him as if they saw the Devil himself.

Grandpa Tolliver began to rock more gently now. Yes, he’d been wicked enough. He’d known everything there was to know and didn’t regret it. They shut him up in this room and didn’t address him for days at a time, but he had Emma Bovary and Becky Sharp to amuse him; and Celeste who belonged to him alone. Grandpa Barr didn’t even have them. His children had left him—all but his daughter Hattie—to go to Iowa, to Oregon, to Wyoming, always toward the open country. Your friends might die and your children might go away, but your memories couldn’t desert you, nor such friends as Emma and Becky.

Outside it began presently to rain, at first slowly with isolate, hesitating drops, and then more and more steadily until at last the whole parched earth drank up the autumn downpour.

2

IN the sound of rain falling through soft darkness there is a healing quality of peace. Its persistence—the very effortless unswerving rhythm of the downpour—have the power of engulfing the spirit in a kind of sensuous oblivion. Even upon one of so violent and unreflective a nature as Ellen Tolliver, one so young, so impatient and so moody, the sound of the autumn rain falling on the roof and in the parched garden had its effect. It created a music of its own, delicate yet primitive, abundant of the richness of earth and air, so that presently in a room a dozen feet from her grandfather, Ellen stopped sobbing and buried her face in the pillow of her great oak bed, soothed, peaceful; and presently in the darkness of her room she lay at last silent and still, her dark hair tossed and disheveled against the white of the pillowcase. She lay thus in a solitude of her own, separated only by the thinness of a single wall from the solitude in which her grandfather sat enveloped. If the sound of her sobbing had been audible, there was another wall that would have stopped it ... the wall of warm autumn rain that beat upon the earth and shut her away from all the world.

She knew no reason for this outburst of weeping. If there had been a reason she would not have locked herself in her room to weep until she had no more tears. She could not say, “I weep because some one has been unkind to me,” or “I weep because I have suffered a sudden disappointment.” She wept because she could not help herself; because she had been overcome by a mood that was at once melancholy and heroic, sad yet luxuriously sensuous. After a fashion, her weeping gave her pleasure. Now that the sound of the rain had quieted her, she lay bathing her soul in the darkness. Somehow it protected her. Here in a locked room where no splinter of light penetrated, she was for a little time completely herself. That was the great thing.... She was herself.... There was no one about her.... Sometimes this same triumphant aloofness came to her from music.... It too was able to set her apart where she was forced to share nothing of herself with any one. In the darkness people couldn’t pry their way into your soul. All this she understood but vaguely, with the understanding of a sensitive girl who has not learned to search her own soul. And this understanding she kept to herself. None knew of it. The face she showed to the world betrayed nothing of loneliness, of wild and turbulent moods, of fierce exasperation. To the world she was a girl very like other girls, rather more hasty and bad-tempered perhaps, but not vastly different—a girl driven alone by a wild vague impulse hidden far back in the harassed regions of her impatient soul. It is one of the tragedies of youth that it feels and suffers without understanding.

For an hour she lay quite still listening to the rain; and at the end of that time, hearing sounds from below stairs which forecast the arrival of supper, she rose and lighted the gas bracket above her dressing table.

At the first pin point of flame, the world of darkness and rain vanished and in its place, as if by some abracadabra, there sprang into existence the hard, definite walls of a room, square and commonplace, touched with quaint efforts to create an illusion of beauty. The walls were covered with wall paper bearing a florid design of lattices heavily laden with red roses on anemic stalks. Two Gibson pictures, faithfully copied by an admirer, hung on either side of the oak dresser. They were “The Eternal Question” and “The Queen of Hearts.” The bed, vast and ugly, and still bearing in the white counterpane the imprint of Ellen’s slim young body, fitted the room as neatly as a canal barge fits a lock. The chairs varied in type from an old arm chair of curly maple, brought across the mountains into the middle-west by Ellen’s great-grandfather and now relegated to the bedroom, to a damaged patent rocker upholstered in red plush with yellow tassels. On the top of the dressing table lay a cover made elaborately of imitation Valenciennes and fine cambric, profusely ornamented by bow knots of pink baby ribbon.

By the flickering light, the girl arranged her hair before the mirror. It was dark, heavy, lustrous hair with deep blue lights. Hastily tossing it into a pompadour over a wire rat, she washed her eyes with cold water to destroy the redness. She was preparing the face she showed the world. It was not a beautiful face though it had its points. It was too long perhaps and the nose was a trifle prominent; otherwise it was a pleasant face, with large dark eyes, fine straight lips and a really beautiful chin. It held the beginnings of a beauty that was fine and proud. The way the chin and throat leapt from her shoulders was a thing at which to marvel. The line was clear, triumphant, determined. Even Ellen was forced to admire it. What she lacked in beauty was amply compensated by the interest which her face inspired. The pompadour, to be sure, was ridiculous. It was but a week or two old, the sign of her emancipation from the estate of a little girl.

For a long time she studied the reflection in the mirror. This way and that she turned her proud head, admiring all the while the line of the throat and tilted chin. It delighted her as music sometimes delighted her, with a strange leaping sensation of triumph over people about her.

She thought, “Am I to be great one day? Am I to be famous? Is it written in my face? I will be or die ... I must be!”

Early in the afternoon, before the long rain settled in for the night, she had walked out of Miss Ogilvie’s little house down the brick path under the elms with a heart singing in triumph. Before she arrived home, the sense of triumph had faded a little, and by the time she reached her room it was gone altogether, submerged by a wave of despair. It seemed that her triumph only made life more difficult; instead of being an end it was only a beginning. It created the most insuperable difficulties, the most perilous and agitating problems.

Miss Ogilvie lived in a weathered old house that withdrew from the street behind a verdant bulwark of lilacs, syringas, and old apple trees abounding in birds,—wrens, blackbirds, finches and robins. In the warm season, as if the wild birds were not enough, a canary or two and a pair of love-birds hung suspended from the roof of the narrow piazza high above the scroll-work of the jig-saw rail. There were those who believed that Miss Ogilvie, in some earlier incarnation, was herself a bird ... a wren perhaps, or a song sparrow flitting in and out of hedges and tufts of grass, shaking its immaculate tail briskly in defiance of a changing world.

When she sat in her big rocker listening to the horrible exercises of her pupils, she resembled a linnet on a swaying bough. She rocked gently as if she found the motion soothing to some wildness inside her correct and spinsterish little body. Always she rocked, perhaps because it helped her to endure the horrible renderings of Schumann and Mendelssohn by the simpering daughters and the sullen sons of the baker, the butcher, the candle-stick maker. For Miss Ogilvie understood music and she was sensitive enough. In her youth, before her father failed in the deluge that followed the Civil War, she had been abroad. She had heard music, real music, in her day. In all the Town she and Grandpa Tolliver alone knew what real music could be. She had even studied for a time in Munich where she lived in her birdlike way in a well chaperoned pension. The other girls fluttered too, for in her day women were all a little birdlike; it was a part of their training.

In the early afternoon when Ellen Tolliver came for her weekly lesson, Miss Ogilvie, dressed in a tight-fitting basque of purple poplin ornamented with pins of coral and cameo, received her formally into the little drawing-room where she lived in a nest of pampas grass, conch shells, raffia baskets, and spotless bits of bric-a-brac. There was in the reception nothing unusual; Miss Ogilvie permitted herself no relaxation, even in the privacy of her own bed-chamber. She remained a lady, elegantly so, who supported herself in a genteel fashion by giving music lessons. But with Ellen a certain warmth and kindliness, seldom to be found in her contact with other pupils, occasionally tempered the formality. To-day her manner carried even a hint of respect.

Ellen sat at the upright piano and played. She played with a wild emotionalism unhampered by problems of technique. She poured her young, rebellious soul into the music until the ebony piano rocked and the ball-fringe of the brocade piano-cover swayed. Miss Ogilvie sat in her big rocking chair in a spot of sunlight and listened. It was significant that she did not rock. She sat quite still, her tiny feet barely touching the floor, her thin blue-veined hands lying quietly like little birds at rest in her purple poplin lap. The canaries too became still and listened. A hush fell upon the garden.

“And now,” said Miss Ogilvie, when Ellen paused for a moment, “some Bach,” and the girl set off into the tortuous, architectural beauties of a fugue. She played without notes, her eyes closed a little, her body swaying with a passionate rhythm which arose from something far more profound than the genteel precepts of Miss Ogilvie. It was savage. It must have terrified the gentle little old woman, for she knew that to play Bach savagely was sacrilege. And yet ... somehow it didn’t matter, when Ellen did it. There was in the music a smoldering, disturbing magnificence.

Then she played some Chopin, delicately, poetically; and at last she finished and turned about on the piano stool to await the criticism of her teacher.

Miss Ogilvie said nothing. Her blue eyes winked a bit in embarrassment and down one withered cheek ran a tear which had escaped her dignity and self-possession. The sunlight flickered across her thin hands, and presently she stirred.

“My child,” she said, “there is nothing for me to say.”

And Ellen’s heart leapt so suddenly that she grew faint with joy.

“I no longer count for anything,” said Miss Ogilvie gently. “You are beyond me....” She smiled suddenly and dabbed her eyes politely. “Who am I to instruct you? My child, you are an artist. You frighten me!” She leaned forward a little, confidingly, and whispered. “It happens like that ... in the most unexpected places, in villages, in ugly towns ... why, even in a dirty mill town like this.”

Between the two there was a bond, a thing which neither ever mentioned but which, in the silence that followed Miss Ogilvie’s undignified outburst, took possession of both and drew them together. Both scorned the Town, a treason which none had discovered; and now when Miss Ogilvie spoke again she dragged the secret bond into the glaring light of day.

“Artists occur,” she said, “without respect for places.” And then after a little pause.... “But you must never let any one here suspect you’re an artist. It would make you unhappy.” Recovering herself a little she began again to rock gently. “For a long time I’ve known you were escaping me.... It was no use hiding it from myself.... I know it now....”

She smiled triumphantly a withered, rosy smile, a bit like the smile one might see on the bright face of a lady apple, and began pulling at the lace on her handkerchief. “It’s wonderful,” she said, “to think I have discovered it.... Poor me! But you must work, Ellen, there are hard days ahead ... harder than you guess.

“D’you know?” she continued, in her excitement leaning forward once more, “when I was a girl, I played well ... I was like you ... not so independent, not so strong, because I was always a little woman ... even then,” she added as if she were conscious that age had shriveled her. “Sometimes I thought I would like to be a great pianist ... a great artist.... But women didn’t do such things in my day. My father would never have listened to it for a moment. It wasn’t a ladylike thing to do. It was like being a circus rider. He let me take lessons so that I could play in the drawing-room and accompany my young men when they sang. My father even let me study in Munich, but when he found out I was more interested in music than in young men ... he brought me home. I never got very interested in young men ... I always liked music better.”

Ellen listened respectfully, moved as much by her feeling for Miss Ogilvie in the rôle of a friend as by her respect for older people in general. She was carefully brought up and had good manners. But, secretly, the tale bored her a little. There was nothing interesting in it, nothing to seize one’s imagination, nothing to soothe her impatience, nothing which fed that wild ambition. All that Miss Ogilvie told her had happened so long ago.

“I suppose I ought to have got married,” continued Miss Ogilvie. “But I waited too long.... I had chances!” she added proudly, “good ones.... Maybe I would have been happier to-day.... I don’t know, though,” she added doubtfully, puckering her withered lips as if she could come to no decision in the matter. “There’s so much to be said on both sides. But what I mean to say is, that you must go ahead.... You mustn’t let anything stop you.... It’s easier now than it was in my day. At least there’s no one to oppose you.... It’s a gift that doesn’t come to every one.... You see I didn’t marry and I didn’t become an artist.” And a note of wistfulness entered her voice. “So now I’m just an old spinster who gives music lessons. Maybe,” she said, “you can manage both. I don’t know ... and you don’t.... But don’t let anything stop you.... Don’t die without having done what you wanted to do. There’s no more for me to tell you.... I can teach you nothing, but I hope you’ll come sometimes and play for me.... I’d like it.”

By the time she finished Miss Ogilvie’s eyes were again bright with tears, as much from pity of herself as in a benevolent envy of the impetuous Ellen’s youth and independence.

“It won’t be easy....” the girl said presently. “There’s my mother.... She thinks I ought to get married.... She had me take music lessons because she thought it would make me more marriageable if I could play the piano.... Of course she’s proud that I play so well. She’s proud of anything I can do.”

“Perhaps she’ll come round,” suggested Miss Ogilvie. “But it’ll be a struggle.... I know your mother, Ellen.... She’s made you ambitious.... That’s where she made a mistake.” She coughed suddenly with embarrassment. “But I don’t want to interfere. She’s your own mother.... It’s for her to decide.” And Miss Ogilvie abased herself and her high hopes for Ellen before the altar of her generation’s respect for the position of a mother.

“And there’s no money ...” said Ellen sullenly. “There never is.”

“Perhaps we could work that out.... I could let you take some of the pupils ... I have too many now ... I’d be willing to help ... to sacrifice if necessary.” It was clear that Miss Ogilvie meant to say nothing directly; she had no desire to be responsible for the actions of the impetuous girl. Yet she continued to hint, to imply that she would do her part if a crisis arose.

“I want to,” said Ellen, “I want to more than anything in the world.... I want to be great and famous.... I’ve got to be.” She became so savage, so intense that in her great rocking chair Miss Ogilvie trembled.

At last Ellen put on her hat, which perched well up on the absurd pompadour, bade Miss Ogilvie good-by, and went out to the piazza, where her bicycle rested against the fancy railing under the cages of the canaries and love-birds. As she turned down the brick path, the voice of Miss Ogilvie followed her.

“If the chance comes,” she said, “look to me. I’ll do what I can to help you.” The words came out in little gasps as if she were unable to keep them—bold though they were—imprisoned any longer. Ellen smiled back at her over her shoulder and the old lady retired into the weathered house.

As Ellen pedaled over the brick streets between rows of maple trees, her delight faded slowly before the assaults of her common sense. In these skirmishes, wild hope and inspiration went down in defeat. There were too many obstacles ... poverty, prejudice, even her own sense of provinciality. Yet underneath a little voice kept saying, “You’ll do it ... you’ll do it.... Nothing can stop you. You’ll be able to get what you want if you want it hard enough.”

And by the time she turned into the block where the Tolliver family lived, clinging like grim death to a respectability which demanded a brave face turned toward the world, her mind began once more to work in its secret way, planning how it would be possible.

Miss Ogilvie’s timid, frightened offer of help she had quite forgotten. Miss Ogilvie was so old, so gentle, so ineffectual ... like her own caged canaries. Ellen’s mind had begun already to turn toward her cousin Lily. The glamorous Lily must know some way out.

3

It was Lily who still dominated her thoughts when she descended at last to find her mother setting the table for the family supper. This was an operation into which Mrs. Tolliver threw all the great energy and force of her character. It was impossible for her to do things easily; the placing of each fork involved as much precision, as much thoroughness and intensity as the building of a bridge or a skyscraper. It was the gesture of an ardent housekeeper burning incense before the Gods of Domesticity, the abandoned devotion of an artist striving for perfection.

For an instant Ellen stood in the doorway watching her mother as if somewhere in the recesses of her clever brain she considered this parent as she might consider a stranger, marking the woman’s strong face, her vigorous black hair, the rosiness of her healthy cheeks. Ellen, her mother said, had a disconcerting way of studying people, of prying into their lives, even of imagining things about them that could not possibly have been true. This was exactly what Ellen did as she waited in the doorway. She regarded silently the figure that stood before her, swathed in durable serge and ornamented with a gold chain and a tiny Swiss watch out of all proportion with the size and vigor of her body.

Then suddenly Mrs. Tolliver became aware of her daughter’s presence. She straightened her back and stood with the knives and forks poised in her hand beneath the glare of the ornate chandelier.

“Well,” she said. “You might speak when you come into a room.” Then after a slight pause, “You can finish the table. I’ve got to watch the pies.”

Listlessly the daughter took the silverware and absently she began laying it at the places to be occupied by her father, by Fergus, by Robert. There was no place for Gramp Tolliver. He ate in the solitude of his own room meals which were placed on the bottom step of the “back way” to be carried up by him in response to a loud knock on the door of his hermitage. For eight years he had eaten thus in exile.

“Ma,” began Ellen, “when does Lily arrive?”

The mother continued to pour water into the shining glasses. “In a week or two ... I don’t know exactly,” she said, and then raised her blue eyes to regard her daughter with a long and penetrating look. Between the two there was a sort of constant and secret warfare which went on perpetually as if, failing to understand each other, there could be no grounds between them for trust. Now Mrs. Tolliver saw nothing but the top of Ellen’s dark head, secretive, silent, as she bent over the table.

“Why do you want to know?” she asked with an air of suspicion. “You’ve been talking a great deal about Lily lately....”

“I don’t know,” came the evasive answer. “I like her.... I’d like to be like Lily some day.”

Mrs. Tolliver resumed her task in silence but with an air of thoughtfulness. Again it was Ellen who broke the silence.

“I suppose there’s no money ... now that everything is settled.” She put this forward tentatively, as if the matter was of no great interest to her.

“There’s nothing over ...” replied her mother. “You knew there wouldn’t be.... If Papa is elected, things will be all right again ... for a time at least.” This last she added with a profound sigh—a signal that at any moment consideration of the trials brought upon her by an easy-going husband might loose all the torrent of an emotional, primitive nature. “Why do you ask?”

“I just wondered,” said Ellen. “I’d hoped things might be a little better.”

“They won’t be ... for a time....”

The significance of this conversation lay not so much in what was said as in what was not said. Neither the mother nor the daughter approached the real subject of the conversation openly. They hovered about it, descending for a time on the edge of it, flitting away again coyly, with backward glances. The fault may have been Ellen’s. Certainly the ways of the honest, emotional Mrs. Tolliver were neither dark nor devious. Presently the mother made an effort to strike at the heart of the situation.

“I wish,” she said, “that you would settle down and be content, Ellen.... I thought you were better for a time.... What is it you want? Is it to go away just when you’re old enough to be a comfort to me? Is that the reward a mother has for her care and sacrifices? That she loses her only daughter as soon as she is old enough to think she is grown up?”

She was slipping into one of the most unbearable of her emotional moods, a mood of self-pity, when she threw herself as the Pope before the Visigoths upon the mercy of her husband and children. All the signs of its approach were at hand—the pathos, the slightly theatrical tone. The mood was aggravating because fundamentally it was reasonable. You could not argue the rightness of her position. She had sacrificed everything for her husband and her children. Day by day she continued to sacrifice everything. She would go on sacrificing herself until she died. She would have given her life for them without a regret. To wait upon her amiable unsuccessful husband and her three superlatively wonderful children was her idea of love, of perfect service. They were her world, her life, the beginning, the very core, the end of her passionate existence. The only reward she asked was possession; they must belong to her always.

And then it struck Ellen suddenly that the position of the mother was pitiable. It was pitiable because she knew so little of what was in her daughter’s heart ... so precious little of all the things stirring there so wildly, so savagely. She could never know, at least until after it was done—whatever it was that was to be done. Even then she could not understand that there were stronger things than love, things which were more profound and more important.

“And why are you so interested in Lily?” began her mother. “Why do you say you want to be like her?”

“I don’t know,” replied Ellen in a low voice. “I don’t know except that I don’t want to be like the others.”

Her mother considered her for a moment and then shook her head, as if silently she had reached a decision.

“I can’t understand your restlessness,” she said. “I don’t know where you get it.”

Ellen stood now leaning against the mantelpiece above the gas log. Outside the rain still fell heavily.

“Well,” she said, “it’s not my fault that one grandfather ran away from home as a boy and went to California to dig gold.... And it’s not my fault that the other left his wife and ran away to live in Europe for thirteen years.”

Mrs. Tolliver turned sharply. “Who told you that? I mean about your grandfather Tolliver....”

Ellen smiled in her silent, proud way. “I’m not deaf, Mama, nor blind.... I’ve been about the house now for nearly nineteen years. I know about Gramp Tolliver.”

Again Ellen was smitten by amazement at her mother’s ignorance of how much she knew, at how little the older woman understood of the shrewd knowledge she had hoarded away.

“I’m sorry you know it,” said Mrs. Tolliver. “It would have been just as well if you hadn’t known.” Again she nodded her head with that same air of reaching a secret decision. “But now that you know it, you might as well know some other things.... You’re old enough now, I guess.” She sat down on one of the stiff-backed chairs and beckoned to her daughter. “Come here,” she said, “and sit on my lap.... I’ll tell you other things.”

Ellen came to her and sat upon her lap, rather awkwardly, for to her it seemed a silly thing. She had not the faintest understanding of all that this small gesture meant to her mother. And secretly she hardened herself against a treacherous attack upon her affections. It was the habit of her mother to attack her through love. Always it had been a sure method of reducing Ellen’s fortress of secrecy and hardness.

“It’s about Lily,” began Mrs. Tolliver. “I know Lily is beautiful. She’s very kind and pleasant ... but there are things about her that aren’t nice. In some ways Lily is a loose woman.... She’s laid herself open to talk.... People smirch her good name.... Perhaps she isn’t really bad.... Nobody really knows anything against her, but she is free with men.... There’s been talk, Ellen, and when there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

Here Ellen interrupted her. “I don’t believe it.... I don’t believe any of it,” she exclaimed stubbornly. “It’s the way people talk. I know how they do.... I’ve heard.... It’s one reason why I hate the Town.”

And then Ellen saw her mother assume a great calmness, deliberately and with a certain ostentation, in order to impress Ellen with her sense of justice. It was like taking a cloak from a closet and putting it gravely about her. “I’ve never mentioned it to any one,” she said (never once guessing the thoughts in her daughter’s mind), “not to a soul.... Nothing could induce me to.... After all, Lily is my first cousin, the daughter of Aunt Julia, my own mother’s sister.... I wouldn’t permit any one to befoul her name in my presence.... But here we are alone, together, you and I.... It’s in the family. That makes a difference.... Sometimes, in the family, one has to face the facts. And the facts are that Lily hasn’t behaved well.... She’s lived in Paris for years, alone in the wickedest city in the world.... There’s even talk about her having had a baby ... and she’s never been married.... Nobody knows ... and Aunt Julia wouldn’t tell me.... You can’t get a word out of her.... You wouldn’t want to be like that, now would you?”

Ellen fell to pleating the folds of her cheap dress. Her dark brows drew closer together. She was sullen, awkward.

“I don’t see that it makes any difference ... not to Lily. She’s free.... She’s happy.”

“But she’s rich,” said her mother. “That’s why she’s free ... and only God knows whether she’s happy.... A woman like that can’t be happy.... I don’t want my daughter, my pure, lovely little daughter to be contaminated.”

The tide of Mrs. Tolliver’s emotions displayed all the signs of bursting the dam of her restraint. Ellen knew these signs. Her mother was beginning to drag in God. She was beginning to use words like “pure,” and “lovely.” And for the first time in her life, Ellen found herself instead of softening, growing harder and harder. Strangely enough, it was the words of the gentle, birdlike Miss Ogilvie which gave her a new power. This time, she was not to be defeated.

“Well, it doesn’t make any difference,” she said, rising from her mother’s lap. “I like Lily better than any one in this town ... I always will ... and nothing can change me.” The fine line of her young chin grew stubborn and there rose between mother and daughter the old impregnable wall.

It is impossible to imagine what ruse Mrs. Tolliver would have used next, impossible to calculate the depths of emotion into which she might have plunged, had she not been halted by so small a thing as the ringing of a doorbell. The sound jangled noisily through the house and Ellen, finding in it the opportunity for escape, sped away to open the door.

Outside on the doorstep, drenched, tow-headed and grinning, stood Jimmy Seton, the little brother of May Seton. In one grubby hand he held a note.

“It’s from May,” he grinned. “I guess it’s an invitation to a party.”

And without another word, he vanished like an imp into the dark wall of pouring rain.

4

THE father of May Seton was rich according to standards. He was not so wealthy as the Harrison family which owned the Mills, or as Julia Shane, Mrs. Tolliver’s Aunt Julia, a great and proud lady who lived in Shane’s Castle, a gloomy house, relic of a past day, which stood isolated now upon a low hill in the midst of the clamorous and ascendant Mills. There were some who said that Harvey Seton was richer than Julia Shane, but it was impossible to know. The Seton wealth was public property. The wealth of Julia Shane, except for the land which she owned, lay concealed in the vaults of banks in Paris, in New York, in Pittsburgh, in Chicago. No one could gage it; and from the old woman’s mode of living, it was impossible to make any estimate. There had been a day when Shane’s Castle was the great house of the Town, even of the state. Great people stopped there, politicians, artists, musicians, even a President or two. But for years now, ever since Lily went to live in Paris, the famous drawing-room, glittering with crystal and silver and glowing with tapestries and paintings, had been closed and muffled in cheese-cloth. In the big house, beneath the unceasing fall of soot from the furnaces, Julia Shane with her spinster daughter, Irene, lived in three rooms. It was this state of affairs which led people in the Town to believe that her fortune had decreased in some mysterious way. The old woman alone knew that she could have bought up Harvey Seton, tossed his corset factory into the midst of the Atlantic Ocean and never missed the money. She lived upon the income of her income. The Town, so far as she was concerned, no longer existed.

These things played an important part in the life of the Town. No one ever tired of discussing them. It was by these standards that citizens were judged; and there were no better standards in a town which had emerged less than a century before from a complete wilderness. There was nothing unusual in them, for it is the man of property after all whom most people, in their heart of hearts, honor most profoundly.

The success of Harvey Seton was, in itself, not especially interesting. It paralleled very closely the tale of any successful middle-western manufacturer. The interest lay in what he manufactured and in his character. He was born and brought up in what people call straitened circumstances. At twenty-one he entered a pharmaceutical school and upon being graduated, started life as a clerk in a pharmacy of the Town. For eight years he lived rigorously and saved his money. He was a Methodist and attended church regularly, despising card-playing and the theater as implements of the devil. In this there is nothing unusual. It is here that the bizarre makes its appearance.

There came a day when he learned that Samuel Barr, a brother of Julia Shane and of Mrs. Tolliver’s father, had invented a combination of gutta percha and steel which served as an admirable substitute for whalebone. Now Samuel Barr was always inventing something. He invented a cash-carrier, a patent rocker, and had even meddled with the idea of perpetual motion. He had invented a machine which he set up in a field on the farm of his brother-in-law, because he said the contrivance, once it was started, would not stop until it flew into pieces of its own velocity; therefore one must have an open space about it so that no one might be injured by the flying fragments. With his brother-in-law, Colonel John Shane, he waited behind a tree for the machine to fly to bits. It revolved a few times and presently came to an abrupt halt. No fragments flew through space. The machine was a failure.

It is standing there to-day, in the midst of a field now cultivated by Bohemian immigrants. It is too bulky to be moved. It remains, like a gigantic rock, in the midst of waving corn, the single monument to Samuel Barr’s inventive genius. The other things,—the cash-carrier, the patent rocker, the synthetic whalebone have survived. With a few variations they whiz coins through gigantic department stores in a hundred cities; they support the tired backs of a million exhausted housewives; and they enclose the swelling forms of even more millions of too plump women. But Samuel Barr made no money out of these things. Others made the money and stole the credit. It was the perpetual motion machine which was the apple of his eye, the great creative effort of his soul. No one wanted that, so no one stole it from him. It remained, the single possession of his trusting soul. The weather is eating it slowly away. Sometimes people stop along the road and walk into the field to regard the strange Gargantuan engine. “Sam Barr’s Perpetual Motion Machine” exists, the only monument to his name.

Samuel Barr is important to this tale because it was he who founded Harvey Seton’s fortune, and because it was his machine which stands as a superb symbol for the taint which ran through all his family. It was the taint of a family of great energy which had fantastic visions, which gambled high, staking everything to win or lose. It was a curious taint, rare and unhappy, but out of it there sometimes rose a sudden genius—an artist, an adventurer, a philosopher, an inventor. The taint was in all of them. His sister Julia risked her fortune a dozen times and, winning, increased it a dozen times. His niece Hattie Tolliver never ceased to plan great undertakings which would make her husband rich. She risked her fortune a dozen times and, losing, saw it vanish into a mass of debts. His great-niece Ellen Tolliver had it strongly, though few would have suspected it. She was subtle like old Julia Shane. She told her affairs to no one.

When Harvey Seton, twenty-nine, rather pallid and ambitious in a cold-blooded fashion, heard of Samuel Barr’s invention, he set about to gain possession of it. This he accomplished in time, by methods not entirely honest, at the cost of one hundred and fifty dollars. Then he secured a partner and the Eureka Reinforced Corset Factory came to raise its walls in the factory district under the windows of Shane’s Castle.

In justice to Harvey Seton, it must be said that he struggled for a time with his conscience. He was not a bad man. His fault lay in a too great desire for wealth; that is to say, wealth in the abstract, for its own sake alone, and not for what it could bring to him of this world’s pleasures. He had some pangs over his treatment of Samuel Barr, but they were as nothing to the pangs he endured from the nature of his enterprise.... A Methodist corset manufacturer might seem a contradiction in terms, a combination of two elements which are in no way soluble, the one in the other; but somehow, Harvey Seton—perhaps because he was really shrewd—managed to unite them. He continued to sing in the church choir; and, on the left hand, he manufactured corsets. He knew, no doubt, that some of the most devout of his Methodist sisters wore stays beneath their clothes. Perhaps if they had been forced to wear them on the outside, the corset business would have suffered. The world being what it is, Harvey Seton prospered. His corsets became known in remote lands for their durability and their restrictive values. Eureka Reinforced Corsets came to be worn by the great ladies of New York and London, by the housewives of the Middle West, by the demi-mondaines of Paris and Brussels, by professors’ fat wives in Germany. They were introduced at length even among the bisque ladies of Polynesia and the black ladies of brothels in Mozambique. In 1897 Harvey Seton opened a branch factory at St. Denis on the outskirts of Paris. It brought him nearer to his continental markets.

Meanwhile Harvey Seton’s life followed a narrow path to and from the corset factory, and presently he married one of the plumpest of Methodist sisters who presented him after a hesitation of three years with a daughter, May. Then followed an hiatus of ten years and there appeared a thin anemic little boy. These are the facts of Harvey Seton’s life. There was nothing more and nothing less. It was the thin sickly little boy, now grown precocious and somewhat spiteful, who brought the note through the pouring autumn rain to Ellen’s doorstep and thus played his tiny, anemic part in the drama of her life.

But May and Ellen were friends, or as near friends as it was possible for any one to be with such a girl as Ellen. May frankly adored her. She admired her straight, slim figure, so different from her own vague softness, and her handsome dark hair. She envied her ability to play the piano. What Ellen said or believed, to May was gospel. And in this there was nothing extraordinary. It was the worship of a weak, good-natured soul for a strong, self-willed one. May was pretty in a plump, blonde, pale fashion. She giggled a great deal and liked the companionship of the Town boys. Ellen did neither of these things. In fact she hated the boys with a kind of savage resentment, as if it were presumptuous of them even to fancy they might interest her. She permitted May to worship her, since there seemed nothing to be done about it; yet the adoration annoyed her at times so profoundly that she wanted to strike the blonde, silly girl, to really hurt her, to destroy her as she might destroy some pale, stupid worm. She hated her because May had those things which would have made her own way easy. But her pride kept her silent. She smiled at May in her cold, aloof fashion and permitted her to continue worship.

5

WHEN Ellen arrived at the Setons’ on the night following the visit of Jimmy, she found that the family had not yet finished supper. They sat about the table, Seton père at the head, thin, bloodless, bearded, looking like one of the more austere of the saints, rather than a corset manufacturer. Seton mère, fat, fleshy, good-natured, occupied a seat at the far end. Between them sat disposed little Jimmy, anemic and insignificant, May plump and pale, and last of all, a stranger.

“This,” said May Seton, giggling and indicating the young man at her left, “is Mr. Clarence Murdock. I’ve been wanting you to meet him, Ellen. I’m sure you’ll like each other. He’s from New York ... here to see Papa on business.”

The young man rose and bowed a little stiffly but with a flattering deference.

“May has told me so much about you ... I’m delighted to know you.”

“Sit down until we finish,” said May. “We’re just eating the last of our dessert.”

Now May’s introduction of Mr. Clarence Murdock was not altogether straightforward. From the phrases she chose, it could be gathered that it was the first time she had ever seen Mr. Murdock and that Ellen had never heard of him before. In this there was no truth for he had seen May many times. They even called each other by their Christian names. And May had given Ellen elaborately detailed descriptions of the young man, having gone even so far as to hint that there was more between them than mere friendship. But May could not resist doing things of this sort where a man was concerned. It was impossible for her to be honest. The mere shadow of a man upon the horizon goaded her into a display of dimples and coquetry. She bridled, grew arch and mysterious. She was taught by an aspiring mother that these things were a part of a game. Ellen might have replied, “Yes. I’ve heard a great deal concerning you, Mr. Murdock,” but she did not. She said, “I’m so glad to know you,” gave him a faint smile and a look which seemed not so much concerned with Mr. Murdock as with the dead fish and boiled lobsters in the ornamental print on the wall behind him. All the same she began quietly examining the points of the stranger.

He was not bad looking and he had nice manners. To be sure he might have been taller. He was not quite so tall as Ellen. He had nice brown hair sleekly brushed back from a high forehead, and he wore a starched collar of the high, ungainly sort which was the fashion in those days. His eyes were brown and gentle and near-sighted, his face well-shaped and his nose straight, though a trifle thin so that it gave his countenance a look of insignificance which one might expect in a perpetual clerk. He was not, Ellen decided, the sort of romantic figure which could sweep her off her feet. Still, he came from New York. That was something. He had lived in the world.

“My, what a rain we’ve been having,” observed Mrs. Seton. “I suppose it’s what you’d call the equinoctial storms.”

Yes, her spouse replied, it was just that. And he launched into a dissertation upon equinoctial storms, their origin, their effect, their endurance, their manifestations in various quarters of the globe,—in short all about them. Fifteen precious minutes passed beyond recall into eternity while Harvey Seton discussed equinoctial storms. No one else spoke, for it was the edict of this father that no one should interrupt him until he had exhausted his subject. He was indeed a King among Bores. And when he had finished, his wife, instead of going further with this topic or one of similar profundity, struck out in the exasperating fashion of women upon some new and trivial tangent.

“Herman Biggs is coming in, Ellen,” she observed brightly. “Right after supper.” And she beamed on Ellen with the air of a great benefactress. Her thoughts were not uttered, yet to one of Ellen’s shrewdness they were clear. The smile said, “Of course a poor girl like you could not aspire to a New Yorker like Mr. Murdock, but I am doing my best to see that you get a good husband. Herman Biggs is respectable and honest. He’ll make a good husband. We must look higher for May. She must have something like Mr. Murdock.”

And even as she spoke the doorbell rang and the anemic Jimmy sped away to open it as if on the doorstep outside stood not the freckled Herman Biggs but some wild adventure in the form of a romantic stranger.

It was Herman Biggs. He came in as he had come in a thousand times before, and stood with his dripping hat in his hand, awkwardly, while he was introduced to Mr. Clarence Murdock. But he did not sit down. The lecture upon equinoctial storms had claimed the remainder of the time allotted to dessert. The little group rose and distributed itself through the house. Mr. Seton went into a room known as his den. Mrs. Seton went into the kitchen and the young people disappeared into the cavernous parlor, followed by Jimmy, still filled with the same expectancy of stupendous adventure, intent upon harassing the little party for the rest of the evening by the sort of guerilla warfare in which he excelled.

It was a gaunt house constructed in a bad period when houses broke out into cupolas, unusual bay windows and variations of the mansard roof. Outside it was painted a liverish brown; inside the effect was the same. In the parlor there was an enormous bronze chandelier with burners constructed in imitation of the lamps found during the excavation of Pompeii, an event which considerably agitated the world of the eighties. The walls were covered with deep red paper of a very complicated design of arabesques upon which was superimposed a second design in very elegant gold, even more complicated. Against this hung engravings of Dignity and Impudence, The Monarch of the Forest, and The Trial of Effie Deans. Pampas grass in vases ornamented with realistic pink porcelain roses, waved its dusty plumes above a bronze clock surmounted by a bronze chariot driver and horses which rushed headlong toward a collision with a porcelain rosebud. By the side of the clock stood a large conch shell bearing in gilt lettering the legend, “Souvenir of Los Angeles, Cal.”

“Shall we play hearts?” asked May, with appropriate glances, “or shall we just talk?... There’s no moon and the piazza is all wet.”

Ellen said nothing; she continued to regard Mr. Murdock with a curious, speculative air.

“Let’s play hearts,” said the anemic Jimmy, fidgeting and climbing over the sofa. “I kin play, Mr. Murdock,” he added proudly.

Upon the pride of the Seton family, Ellen turned a withering glance, charged with homicidal meaning. It said, “What are you doing here?... If you were my brother you’d be in bed where you belong.”

“Ellen wants to play hearts!... Ellen wants to play hearts!” sang out Jimmy, pulling awry the shade of the imitation bronze lamp.

Herman Biggs blushed and stammered that it made no difference to him. Mr. Murdock was gentle and polite. “Let’s talk,” he suggested mildly, “we might as well get acquainted.” As the oldest by nearly ten years and the most sophisticated by virtue of his residence in New York, he took the lead.

“I think so too,” replied Ellen and a curious flash of understanding passed between them, a glance which implied a mutual superiority founded upon something deep in Ellen’s nature and upon Mr. Murdock’s superior age and metropolitan bearing.

So they talked, rather stupid talk, punctuated by May’s giggles, the guffaws of Herman Biggs, and the pinches of the anemic Jimmy, who was never still. Now this pale pest swung himself from the curtains, now he climbed the back of a chair, now he sought the top of the oak piano, menacing lamps and vases and pictures. And after a while Ellen was induced to sit at the piano and play for the party. It was ragtime they wanted, so she played “I’m afraid to go home in the dark” and “Bon-bon Buddy” and other favorites which Mr. Murdock sang in a pleasant baritone voice. After that he gave imitations of various vaudeville artists singing these same ballads.

At length May and Herman Biggs retired, accompanied by Jimmy, to bring in the refreshments, and Ellen was left alone with the stranger.

“I suppose,” she began, “you find it dull here after New York.”

Mr. Murdock coughed. “No, it’s pleasant enough.... Mr. Seton has been very kind to me.... I’ll be here another week or two installing the electrical equipment.”

Ellen raised her head proudly. “I’m going to New York myself soon ... probably this winter.... I’m going to study music.”

Mr. Murdock was very ready. “Well, we must meet again there.... It’s a lonely place for a girl without family or friends.”

“But I don’t get homesick,” said Ellen, with the sophisticated air of an experienced traveler. “I certainly wouldn’t be homesick in New York.”

From that moment Mr. Murdock began to regard her with a deeper interest. Perhaps he saw that by her side May had no points to be compared with Ellen’s air of quiet assurance, her youthful dignity, her curiously apparent respect for herself as an individual. She sat in the plush rocker within the glow from the bronze lamp. At the moment she was not awkward at all; she was tall, graceful, dark, even a little imposing. The essence of her individuality rose triumphant above the plush rocker, the engravings that hung against the elaborate wall paper, above even the cheap dress which concealed her young slenderness. She stirred the imagination. Certainly her face was interesting.

“I didn’t know,” began Mr. Murdock, “that you were a professional musician.... I don’t suppose you like playing ragtime.... Maybe you’d play me something good ... something classical, really good, I mean like Nevin or MacDowell.”

And Mr. Murdock, growing communicative, went on to say that his sister played too. She lived in Ogdensburg, New York. He had come from Ogdensburg to make his fortune in the city. That was the reason, he said, that he understood how lonely a person could be.

“Of course, it’s different now,” he continued, “I have lots of friends.... Homer Bunce and Herbert Wyck.... But you’ll meet them when you come to New York.”

He was very pleasant, Mr. Murdock. And he was nice looking in a rather spiritless way. His eyes were kind and his hands nice. To Ellen hands were important features. Shrewd beyond her years, she saw people by their hands and their mouths. Mr. Murdock’s mouth was a trifle small and compressed, but otherwise all right. He might be a prig, but underneath the priggishness there lay a character nice enough.

“And now won’t you play for me?” he persisted, “something of Nevin or MacDowell?”

Ellen went to the piano and played a Venetian Sketch and To a Waterlily. She and Miss Ogilvie considered such music pap. From choice she would not have played it, but she understood at once that Mr. Murdock would like this music. Indeed he had asked for it. She knew he would like what the people in the Town liked. Mr. Murdock listened with his eyes closed and when she had finished he said, “My, that’s fine.... I like soft, sweet music.”

She was still playing when May and Herman returned bearing the hot chocolate and plates of cakes, followed closely by the simian Jimmy, his mouth stuffed to overflowing. Mr. Murdock still listened, lying back in his chair with closed eyes.

It was Mr. Murdock who outmaneuvered the gauche Herman Biggs and escorted her home. They talked stiffly, walking very close to each other through the pouring rain beneath the Tolliver family umbrella.

On the steps of the porch, Ellen bade him good-night.

“We must meet again before I go away.”

“Certainly,” said Ellen; but in her heart she had resolved against it, for she considered Mr. Murdock slightly boring. It was possible, she could see now, for people to live in a city and still never leave their home towns.

It was like Mr. Seton, thought Ellen. Every two years he went to Europe to visit the Junoform Reinforced Corset branch factory at St. Denis near Paris, but he really never left the Town at all. He carried it with him.

If only she could go to Paris....

6

MR. MURDOCK stayed a week longer than he had planned, and before he left he managed to see Ellen not once, but many times. Always May was present, giggling and admiring, though toward the end, under the prodding of a shrewd mother who saw a concealed menace in the situation, she betrayed a slight and refreshing coldness toward her friend. Before he left, Ellen called him Mr. Murdock no longer, but Clarence.

In the weeks that followed she received from him two post cards, one a colored picture of lower New York photographed from Brooklyn Bridge against the sunset and the other a view of the Reservoir at Forty-Second street which, he wrote, had been demolished a little while before. On them he recalled her promise to let him know when she came to New York. May, however, received a dozen post cards and a half-dozen letters, so his correspondence with Ellen must have signified nothing at all. Certainly it did not excite her deeply.

“Clarence writes me,” said May one day, “that you are going to New York. Why didn’t you tell me?... I should think you’d tell your best friend a thing like that.”

And Ellen slipped into a cloud of evasions. “I may have told him that,” she replied airily. “I don’t know how he could have found out.... It was a secret, I haven’t mentioned it to any-one.” And she made a number of vague excuses, which seemed neither logical nor founded upon fact. It was as if she considered May too stupid to understand such things or thought her too unimportant to consider at all.

“It’s funny,” said May, “that you’d tell such a thing to a stranger like Clarence....” For a moment the suspicions planted in her complacent mind by an aspiring mother stirred with life and raised their heads. But she succumbed again quickly to the domination of her companion and thrust an arm about Ellen’s waist.

“It’s only because I’m interested,” she said. “I know that you’re going to be great and famous some day.... We’re all going to be proud of you.”

At which Ellen sniffed, not without an air of scorn, as if she cared not a fig whether the Town was proud of her or not.

At home, however, May received another warning from her mother. “Mr. Murdock,” said the plump Mrs. Seton, “is not a young man to be passed up lightly.... There aren’t many like him.... He suits your father to a T, and he would fit in fine at the factory. Your father needs some one like that to help him out, until Jimmy is big enough to take hold.... Don’t trust Ellen too far.... She’s too quiet to be trusted.”

At which May only laughed. “Why, Ellen wouldn’t think of marrying him,” she said, “she won’t marry anybody in this town.... It isn’t likely she’ll ever marry ... at least for a long time. Besides, she doesn’t think he’s good enough.”

Mrs. Seton snorted angrily and put down the Ladies’ Home Journal. “Good enough for her ...! Who is she to be so choosey?... Why, the Tollivers can’t pay their bills.... They’re just out of bankruptcy.... Good enough for her ...! If she ever gets as fine and upstanding a young man as Mr. Murdock ... a man so industrious and hardworking and well-behaved, she can thank her stars....” For a moment Mrs. Seton paused to recover her breath, greatly dissipated by this indignant outburst. That Ellen should scorn Mr. Clarence Murdock was not a thing to be borne lightly. Then she continued, “And this talk about going to New York.... How’s she going to get to New York? Who’s to put up the money, I’d like to know? Old Julia Shane, I suppose.... It’s not likely the old woman would part with a cent even if she could.”

It was, in the Seton family, a cherished fiction that Julia Shane was stricken by an overwhelming poverty: it was a fiction that increased the confidence of a fortune founded upon reinforced corsets.

“Julia Shane!” continued the ambitious mother, “Julia Shane! What’s she got to be proud about?... With a daughter as fast and loose as Lily?... I suppose she’s proud of living in that filthy old house in the midst of the Flats.”

And so the ashes of the feud between the Setons and the Barr-Shane-Tolliver clan, lighted accidentally by the chance appearance of the guiltless and model Mr. Murdock, showed signs of flaming up again after a peace of twenty years.

7

THE Christmas holidays arrived; the Tollivers sold the last of their horses, and went on showing brave and indifferent faces to the world. Ellen, going her secret way, awaited the arrival of her cousin Lily, still certain that Lily would have a solution. She no longer argued with her mother. Instead she took refuge in silence and if she spoke at all it was in a docile and pleasant fashion. She permitted herself to be petted and admired, so that Mrs. Tolliver in the eternal optimism of her nature believed that Ellen had forgotten or out-grown her restlessness, and was content.

But the girl spent hours at her piano, playing wildly, as if the sound of her music in some way eased the fierce restlessness of her spirit. At times she attacked a polonaise with such violence and fire that the spangled notes soared through the air and penetrated even the stillness of Gramp Tolliver’s solitary chamber. At such moments the old man paused in his reading, permitted his book to slip to the floor and sat in his rocking chair motionless, listening with his lean old head cocked a little on one side, a wild and dancing light in his eye. For hours at a time he listened thus, muttering occasionally to himself.

(That granddaughter of his had something which none of them suspected, something that was rare and precious in this world.) When the music at last died away, losing itself in the maze of walls which shut him into exile, it was his habit to sink back with a clucking sound and begin to rock, gently at first and then more and more savagely, until at last he became submerged by the stream of shrewd, malicious thoughts which swept through his old brain.

“She’s got something none of them understand.... And I’m the only one who knows it. But they’ll kill it in her. They’ll pull her down until she’s on the level with the rest of them. I know.... I know.... Haven’t I heard Liszt himself, in Paris in the heyday of his fame? And Rubinstein? They’ll destroy her if they can with all their little tricks and deceits.... Mean they are, meaner than dirt, trying to drag her down to the rest of them.... The girl doesn’t know it herself.... How good she is no one has ever told her.... She doesn’t know the power that’s in her. They’ll never let her free. They’ll clip her wings. They’ve clipped the wings of greater ones....”

And then with a cascade of wicked chuckles the old man settled back to his reading. “They’ve never clipped my wings. They can’t because I don’t live in their world. They can’t come close enough to catch me. They can’t fly high enough....”

And slowly the rocking decreased in violence until at last the chair became quite still and the skinny arm reached down to recover the heavy book. Belowstairs the last echoes of the turbulent music died away until the silence was broken only by the distant cries of children playing in the streets and the faint muttering of the old man....

“It’s best that she doesn’t know.... It wouldn’t help her ... only make her miserable ... only give them a chance to tear her to pieces, nerve by nerve....”

Again the persistent rocking until at last the room grew dark, and the old man rose in response to a loud knock on the door of the stairs, stirred himself and lighted an oil lamp so that he might find his way to the tray of food that Mrs. Tolliver thrust in at the door of his cell. There was no gas in this room beneath the roof; Gramp Tolliver had been an expense for too many years. It would have cost twenty dollars to fit his room with gas lights. And in ten years he had produced nothing save the scraps of paper covered with bird track handwriting that were stowed away in the pigeonholes of the desk.

In those days there came to Grandpa Tolliver, more by some obscure instinct than by any communication with those outside his cell, the certainty that his granddaughter’s behavior was a source of irritation to the people of the Town. True, he occasionally overheard from the kitchen below snatches of reproachful conversation which drifted upward by way of the ventilator ... strange remarks which appeared to come out of the blue, yet when pieced together they provided a coherent story. Reproaches of sulkiness, of silence, of secrecy, cast by a mother, who desired nothing so much as confidences, against a daughter who was incapable of anything but secrecy. They were an ill-matched pair. This the old man understood, with a sort of wicked satisfaction, because the things which in Ellen were incomprehensible to her mother were the things which had come down to the girl from himself. It was another mark in the long score between Grandpa Tolliver and his daughter-in-law; another, in which nature herself took a hand, in the long battle between two fiercely antagonistic temperaments.

He could not have known that the people in the Town likewise had reproaches for Ellen. He could not have known that they said it was her duty to begin giving music lessons in order to prop up the fortunes of a proud and bankrupt family. Yet in his unearthly way, he did know; and in some vague way he was pleased. Even in his isolation so impregnable, so defiant, his heart was warmed by the thought of an ally. The enemy was driving Ellen, a neutral, into his camp; and into his icy heart there came drop by drop a warm trickle of unaccustomed sympathy. Not that Gramp Tolliver planned active aid; that would have been too much to expect, for Gramp Tolliver had discovered half a century earlier the idiocy of mixing in the affairs of other people.

Instead he chuckled and read in triumph and vindication The Decline and Fall.

8

ON the morning of the third day before Christmas, Clarence Murdock, bearing a neat handbag packed with those things which he would need during a journey of three weeks through the middle-western country, turned his back on the Babylon Arms and made his way toward the railway station and the transcontinental express. Behind him he left the two young men whom, in the fashion of bachelors who have migrated without root or connection from the provinces into a great city, he had picked up as companions somewhere amid the flotsam and jetsam of Manhattan life. They had come to him separately, each drawn perhaps in his own way by the smug neatness which marked the life and character of Clarence. Yet the two men were in no way alike. Their difference was manifested in the very reasons for their attachment to Clarence. The one, an adventurous boisterous soul, had fastened upon Clarence because Clarence had a talent for keeping things in order, a perfect genius indeed for pigeonholing the very emotions of his own life. Out of the mighty chaos which was the essence of the wholehearted Homer Bunce, there emerged a pathetic need for order and comfort; and this Clarence supplied to superb satisfaction. Even the books and pillows of their tiny apartment were kept in scrupulous order. Disorder made Clarence nervous.

Mr. Wyck, on the other hand, had found strength in Clarence, a thing which Bunce himself never even thought of finding in the orderly depths of Clarence’s soul. For Mr. Wyck’s family was old and Mr. Wyck himself lacked vitality. There was in the lower Manhattan in those days a street named for the Wycks, a street renamed long since, in the hasty fashion of a great city, for a Tammany politician. His family was so old (as age went in New York) that there remained only himself and two spinster aunts who lived at Yonkers. It was this antiquity of blood which the pale Mr. Wyck counted upon as the very rod and staff of his existence. At his first meeting with Clarence, at an annual outing on Staten Island of the employees of the Superba Electrical Company, Inc., Mr. Wyck had sensed in Clarence a certain un-American and shameful respect for an old family name, the strange yearning in a man with no tradition for a name which carried with it memories, even though they were very distant and virtually obsolete, of coaches and country estates. They were distant, for seventy years had gone the way of eternity since there had been money in the Wyck family, and the descendant of the patroons, the last of the Wycks, now followed his fortune as a clerk in the accounting department of the Superba Electrical Company, Inc.

On the rock of this respect for tradition, Wyck had fastened his hope. At length, he discovered in Clarence a man who was impressed; and the self-respect of Mr. Wyck, for all the insignificance of his world, increased in direct proportion with the awe produced in Clarence Murdock by the awful sound of the name Wyck.

Thus the three had come together, living in a fashion contented enough, in a tiny apartment filled with beaded portières bought at a Seventh Avenue emporium and leather cushions decorated with pyrographic Indian heads by loving sisters and aunts. Yet a spirit of unrest hovered over the place, an uneasiness which none save Mr. Wyck discerned with any degree of clarity. He alone knew that the day would come when, one after the other with fatal precision, his two companions would find their present mode of life unendurable. In turn each was certain to choose, from among the hordes of girls that swarmed the streets of New York, a mate. Only the gods knew who these two women might be or where they were at that moment. There was only one certainty, and that Mr. Wyck, with the sensitiveness of an effeminate man of low vitality, admitted to himself. Clarence and Bunce would marry, Bunce no doubt for love because his animal spirits were high, Clarence perhaps because he would be trapped by the glamour of a tradition.

Oh, Mr. Wyck understood this. It troubled him in the moments when he was left in solitude. It disturbed his digestion of the greasy meals which he ate alone each day in some hole-in-the-wall restaurant far downtown near the offices of the Superba Electrical Company, Inc. It was impossible that he should ever marry. Women had never interested him; the very idea filled him with a faint disgust. He would not only be left alone in the world; he would no longer possess even Clarence who respected his name. He knew that any woman was stronger than himself.

The Babylon Arms raised its twelve stories in one of the Eighties just east of Riverside Drive. Among the brownstone fronts of the early part of this century its gaunt sides gave it an overpowering appearance of height, loneliness, even grandeur. In those days great apartments were rare in that part of New York, and the Babylon Arms stood as a solitary outpost of the army of apartment houses which since have ranged their extravagant bulks in a solid face along the North River and eastward to the Park. The Babylon Arms is still there, rather shabby and démodé, a belle of the early nineteen hundreds, out of fashion, overpainted, with electric bulbs fitted into gas brackets and the once somber red walls of its hallways painted over in grotesque imitation of the more ostentatious marble of its newer sisters. But its pride is gone. It stands jostled now and a little battered, like the bedizened women who came in from the streets to flit through its gloomy corridors. It is shabby genteel, like the two old ladies who live in the parlor bed-room of the first floor. It is jolly and good-natured, like the clerk and his family who climb the two flights of worn stairs above the point where the antiquated elevator rocks uncertainly to its final stop. It is comic, respectable, quaint, vulgar, tragic, common and happy ... all these things; and so after a fashion, in the way of old houses, it is like life itself.

But it was new and elegant in the early nineteen hundreds. The Babylon Arms! It was a name known throughout the growing Upper West Side! It was the first of the skyscraping apartment houses. And among the pioneer cliff dwellers were Clarence Murdock and two companions who shared among them the expenses of the apartment two floors above where the elevator jolted uncertainly to a final stop. It was not so expensive—living two floors above the elevator; and the name “Babylon Arms” looked impressive, even a little flamboyant, on one’s card. To Bunce the name signified opulence, a certain grandiose triumph of success; to Clarence it meant that people would say, “Ah, the Babylon Arms! He must have a good background to live there!” To Mr. Wyck, it meant simply that he was keeping up one of the traditions of his name; yet there were times too when he was a little ashamed of the Babylon Arms as an institution touched by vulgarity.

As Clarence on the third day before Christmas closed the door behind him on the bead portières and burnt leather cushions, he left Bunce singing lustily as he rubbed his great healthy body in the chilly air of the bathroom, and Mr. Wyck, still lying in bed, his thin, slightly yellow nose peeping above the blankets against the hour when it would be painfully necessary for him to rise. As the door closed, Bunce’s rendition of “I’m afraid to go home in the dark” was interrupted for an instant while he shouted after Clarence, “Look out now and don’t come home married to that fat, pretty Seton girl!”

At the shout Clarence hastened away, shocked a little by the vulgarity of Bunce. As for Mr. Wyck the words struck terror into his heart. He saw the breaking up of his home. He saw himself, a timid, frightened little man, lost once more among the obscenities of a cheap boarding house.

9

A NUMBER of things made necessary this trip of Clarence; there were the usual customers to be visited; the new equipment of the Junoform Corset Factory was in need of inspection, and finally there was an engagement to spend Christmas and several days of the holiday season as the guest of the Seton family; and this he looked upon with relief because life in hotels had come to weary him inexpressibly. He longed for a home, with a wife who would put by his slippers for him and sit by his fireside. The prospect of one dreary hotel after another burdened his soul; so the acceptance of Mr. Seton’s invitation had been even colored by a subdued enthusiasm.

It was, after all, ambition which had betrayed him into city life and the wretched, fly-by-night existence of a drummer. He was ambitious to be wealthy, to be admired, to be honored in a community.

There were times, but these were rare and isolated moments, when his ambitions rose for an instant beyond even these things, times when, in an ecstasy of intoxication, they soared dizzily among the pinnacles of hope far beyond the reach of one whose place in the structure of life was clearly somewhere in the foundations. It was then that he caught for an instant glimpses of a life in which he saw himself not only wealthy and respectable but distinguished and glamorous, one whose character captured the imagination, who gave himself and his life to the great world.

All this was perhaps not clearly thought out in his mind; yet he sensed its presence a little way beyond his reach as a small boy searches in the darkness of a jam closet for something which he knows is there but cannot see.

In these lurid, almost ecstatic moments, he saw his future wife not so much in the rôle of a domestic paragon, as a brilliant and beautiful creature, fit to walk through the avenues of the great world by the side of a clever and worldly man. To be sure, such things were never mentioned to fellow-drummers, yet they were there, shut up in his heart, quiet save for rare moments. His companions in the smoking car may have had their secrets too. It is impossible to say. If such secrets existed, they were too well hidden beneath their suspicions of each other.

It was in one of his placid, normal moods that he boarded the train for the west. He took off his brown overcoat with the half-belt at the back, his brown fedora hat, adjusted his eyeglasses, and settled himself in his chair. At the moment he permitted his thoughts to hover about the picture of May Seton, pale, blonde, good-natured and pretty in her plump way. There was nothing in the least carnal in these thoughts, for he was a young man who might have served as a model for those institutions which concern themselves with the morals of young men and preach the doctrine that complete purity of mind is possible by sheer perseverance alone. He was innocent of women. He had worked hard and had no time for them. Indeed the very thought of them in that way gave him a faintly squeamish feeling. He was one of those in whom desire follows in the wake of timid experience, who cannot in the beginning conceive passion otherwise than abstractly. So now he conceived May Seton more as an idea, a sort of stepping stone to comfort and warmth, than as a woman to be desired. That he might be a sensual man had never occurred to him.

As the train moved across the Jersey Flats he fell to considering his prospects as a son-in-law of Harvey Seton and the certainty of an interest in the Junoform Reinforced Corset Company, a thing already hinted at by his suppositions mother-in-law. He thought of the Town. He pictured, quite clearly and placidly, a small and pleasant house surrounded by shrubs and trees, a comfortable front porch. He even pictured Mrs. May Seton Murdock in a rocking chair, far more attractive than she was in the flesh, darning his socks. In fact, he saw his future bounded on four sides by Junoform Reinforced Corsets, by May Seton, by the Town and by hard work. It was this placid and uneventful path that his feet were to follow.

The car in which Clarence sat, like all cars bound from the East across the mountains into the fertile and prosperous Midlands, was crowded. He was not a man gifted with great curiosity and rarely indulged himself in speculation concerning his fellow travelers. Indeed, from his manner one soon understood that he observed very little about him. And now as the wheels clicked along the smooth track he settled himself to reading. He had brought with him against the monotonous agony of the trip a book by Richard Harding Davis and a copy of the Saturday Evening Post, and these absorbed his attention until the train had passed Philadelphia and turned northward a bit in the direction of Altoona. Presently his interest flagged and he fell to watching the scenery; but before long this too wearied him and he fell asleep. Slumber was a state which he welcomed, for there were long periods when his mind grew exhausted with turning over the same frayed thoughts. There were times when it might have been said that he existed in a state of suspended animation.

So between slumber and a bored wakefulness, the hours passed in a succession of dreary towns and monotonous winter-dead farms, punctuated by signs advertising patent medicines and cheap hotels. As the train swept through Johnstown, he was for a moment diverted by the sight of so much smoke and desolation, by the gigantic slag heaps and the flaming furnaces. The spectacle was not a new one. He must have seen it twenty times, by day when it was sordid, and by night when it became wild and fantastically magnificent. Yet it interested him as it always interested him, tugging at some part of his soul which failed to fit the neat pattern of his universal conformity.

“What a great country!” he reflected. “By George! It’s a privilege to be a citizen of a country so energetic and prosperous!”

A curious light came suddenly into his nice brown eyes, and for a time the corset factory and May Seton were forgotten in the face of a new emotion, so much more profound and stirring. Even the rawness, the barren crudity of the picture exalted him. For a moment his ambitions threatened to gain the upper hand—those wild unruly ambitions which sometimes bore him beyond the round of thoughts which wearied him.

“To own mills like these!” he thought. “To be a power in industry. To go to Europe every year. To have a great house and one of these new automobiles.”

And Johnstown disappeared behind the train, lost in a gigantic and all-enveloping cloud of smoke and soot through which the flames of the furnaces flashed dimly.

The monotonous mountains, seamed with black rivers flowing between crags of blue ice, succeeded the smutty town, and Clarence settled back in his chair. But he did not read. He sat staring out of the window, thinking, thinking, thinking. Perhaps he tried to nurse his sense of importance, to persuade himself that he possessed the stuff which went into the accomplishments of great ambitions.

The roaring train sped on and on, and presently he went into the smoking compartment where he fell into conversation with other traveling salesmen. They exchanged stories of a broad nature, until Clarence, by nature a nice young man, found the flavor growing too strong and returned to his seat.

Then it was for the first time that he noticed his fellow passengers. He did not notice all of them, or even two or three. He noticed only one, a woman who sat in the chair beside him reading a novel with a yellow paper back called “Chèri” by a person with the queer name of Colette.

He sat down and tried to read but, for some obscure reason, the figure of the woman kept getting between him and the story of the great open spaces. He found himself reading paragraphs which meant nothing to him. He read an entire page without knowing what had happened in the tale. Such a thing had never happened to him before.

The woman who kept thrusting herself between him and the story was dressed all in black, though she did not appear to be in mourning. Rather it seemed that she wore black because it became her. Across one shoulder was thrown a stole of black fox and from the brim of her small hat hung a froth of black lace which obscured her dark eyes and permitted her to regard her companions without receiving in return the force of their stares. From beneath the hat there escaped a bit of tawny hair, so dark that in some lights it appeared almost red. She appeared to take full advantage of the shield made by the lace, for from time to time she put down her yellow-backed novel and fell to observing the people about her ... a middle-aged woman with a little boy in a sailor suit, a fat man who lay back in his seat and snored quietly, a pair of college girls, one reading ponderously the essays of Emerson and the other absorbed (self-consciously) in the pages of Boccacio; another traveling salesman and a pair of old women returning from a funeral who vied with each other in a talking race.

“And then I said to her....” “She said, ‘Mabel, he’ll never be well again ... even if he didn’t die, he’ll never be well again’” ... and “What do you think of such behavior?... Unpardonable, I thought....” “I quite agree with you, unpardonable....” “Well, that’s what I told Mabel.”

Snatches of the old women’s talk, projected in voices pitched high enough to override the clamor of the train, were tossed about them like jagged fragments of glass.

The woman with the veil put down her book and, smiling quietly, listened to them. She turned away from Clarence a little so that he was able to shift his position and thus obtain a clearer view of her.

She was beautiful, and even to Clarence, unskilled in such fine distinctions, it was clear that she was a lady. This fact was conveyed beyond all doubt by the way she sat, poised with a neat and easy grace, in the way her slender hands clasping her book lay against the black of her dress, the way she carried her head and wore her fine clothes, even by the veil which somehow stood as a symbol of all that was gently bred in her character. There seemed between her and the others in the car an invisible veil which shielded her while she looked out upon them from a different world.

At her feet stood a smart black handbag, covered with bright labels. Clarence read them one after another in a kind of intoxication—Sorrento, Cannes, Dieppe, Hotel Ruhl, Hotel Royal Splendide, Hotel Ritz-Carlton. And, surely yet imperceptibly, just as an hour or two earlier the sight of the Johnstown furnaces had captivated his moderate imagination, the woman began to take possession of him. Somehow these two impressions became blended, and out of them there came to Clarence glimpses of a brilliant world which he never before penetrated, even in the wildest flights of ambition.

Presently the stranger, wearied of listening to her companions, resumed her reading and Clarence, still fascinated, continued to watch her until, becoming conscious of his gaze, she turned suddenly and dismissed him by the faintest movement of her shoulder. At the gesture, which from her seemed a command, he turned quickly away and blushed as if she had spoken to him in rebuke. Yet it seemed to him that as she glanced in his direction, her lovely mouth was arched for an instant by the faintest of smiles—a smile which said: “Staring does not disturb me. It is nothing new to me.” It may even have been that she mocked him. It was impossible to say. Only one thing remained certain: Clarence had been disturbed by something entirely new in his experience.

In his own way he tried to discover what it was that suddenly shattered all his peace. The woman was beautiful, yet he in no sense desired her. Indeed, in the dull purity of his mind, it is probable that no such unclean thought even occurred to him. Beyond all doubt she fascinated him, yet it was not this which destroyed his ease. Rather it was something in her manner, something in her very bearing and personality which overwhelmed him ... that sudden glimpse of another world, in which people lived lives as different from his as day is different from night, a sudden terror at her self-possession, at the unseen, impregnable barrier by which she protected herself from those others in the car. There was in her manner too a certain veiled but terrifying recklessness.

With an air of infinite absorption, she continued to read the yellow-backed novel, as if she had forgotten that the man in the seat beside her existed. Beyond her, the two old women continued, “And I said to her when she rang me up the next morning....” “It’s shameful what some women will do!” ... “Since that day he’s been an invalid, unable to stir!” And they clucked and wagged their crêpe-clad heads like a pair of crows on a fence.

The train roared on through the blue-white mountains, into the west toward Pittsburgh. Upon the hills the early winter darkness had already begun to descend.

Still Clarence did not read. The novel and the Saturday Evening Post slipped to the floor and lay there unnoticed. The characters in his book failed to hold their own against the woman in the adjoining seat. He even had a faint sense of being on the edge of the romantic and exciting.

And at the same moment, the thoughts of May Seton and a comfortable house in the Town were swept away like so much rubbish into oblivion, carrying with them the sense of peace and certainty which a little time before made the future so pleasant and comfortable.

Presently he rose and went into the smoking compartment where he remained for a time. When he emerged, it was quite dark, and high up on the barren mountains an occasional warm yellow light indicated the existence of a lonely house. Returning to his chair he found the mysterious woman had vanished. Only the somber handbag covered with bright labels remained. The names glittered ... Sorrento, Cannes, Firenze, Beau Rivage, Royal Splendide, Claridge’s, Berkeley....

He glanced at his gold watch (the gift of Uncle Henry) and decided to dine. Making his way toward the dining car, he found the passageway blocked by other passengers, college girls and boys, drummers like himself, old women, children, all swaying with the motion of the speeding train. It was a bad time to travel, on the eve of a holiday; yet the crowd was pleasant enough, good-natured, laughing, on the whole gay with the holiday spirit.

Slowly the door of the dining car devoured the thin line, casting out others who fought their way back in an opposing column, until at last Clarence stood at the entrance of the bright car, surveying the groups of heads bent over swaying soup and underdone chops.

Still harassed and unaccountably miserable, he stood first on one foot and then the other, surveying the crowd until at length he discovered far down the aisle his friend of the paper-backed novel. She sat at a table for two opposite an elderly man in a black frock coat who, quite properly, did not address her although he seemed not unconscious of her presence, for he stole from time to time glances at her tawny hair and fine throat until she dismissed him suddenly with a frank stare in which there was a great deal more than a hint of amusement. After that a wall, invisible as it was impenetrable, separated them, as was proper between two victims of a system which threw harassed travelers arbitrarily into each other’s company. As she ate the woman continued to look about her as if she were profoundly amused by the friendly spectacle of the rocking car. Still she appeared to use the film of lace as a perpetual shield.

He had been watching her thus for a long time when, to his sudden horror, he saw the elderly man wipe his thin mouth with his napkin, pay his check and, followed by the steward, move fatally toward the end of the car. At the sight Clarence was tempted suddenly to run. Yet it was impossible to run. The best one could do was to turn back and squeeze slowly and painfully past the fat encumbrances of the corridor. Besides, how could one make a spectacle of one’s self? What would people think? He stood frozen with horror, filled with the sensations of one about to be dragged forward to torture. As in a nightmare he felt himself borne forward by a steward who grinned maliciously and said, “Place for one? Certainly! Right this way.”

Without effort he floated through space until suddenly, with a tormented and unuttered groan, he sank into the seat opposite the woman with the delicate black veil.

He felt the pulses beating in his throat. He bent over the menu card, but even this did not protect him. Again the unreality of a nightmare smote him. This time he was naked and horribly embarrassed at his improper predicament. He sensed the woman examining him as she examined the others, with a detached and curious smile of appraisal.

These were his sensations, various, confused, terrifying. As though there were eyes in the top of his neatly brushed head, he saw all this happening. What he did not see, what he could not have known were the thoughts of the woman—that she watched him, that she saw the throbbing vein in his throat stand out suddenly and knew well enough its meaning. By the aid of that agitated vein she saw, with a sophistication beyond his wildest imaginings, in this mild little drummer a man of a sensual, passionate nature. The thing which amused her was a speculation, absurd to be sure, but none the less clear. She wondered whether this little man knew himself, whether he had ever been aroused.

“Chops,” Clarence found himself writing on the check. “Chops. Mashed potatoes. Lima beans. Coffee.”

Then the sound of a voice reached him, warm, low, insinuating. “I advise you against the chops. They are atrocious. I was forced to send them back and order something else.”

The woman had spoken to him of her own accord and his suspicions arose in sudden array, bristling and fully armed. Yet he knew that he must answer. Heroically he looked up and asked,

“What do you advise?”

“The roast beef is very good....”

Though he detested it, he wrote down roast beef and then straightened in his chair, pulling at his collar and cravat. For the life of him, he could find nothing to say. It was impossible to overcome that fragile, invisible barrier.

“Don’t think me impertinent,” she said, “for speaking ... but I’m almost bored to death.... I hate traveling.... I’d like always to stay in one spot.”

For an instant he suspected the faintest trace of a foreign accent in her voice, though he could not be certain.

“I know,” he said politely, “I hate it too....”

She laughed softly.

“It’s the first time I’ve traveled any distance in years.... I couldn’t talk to the old crow who sat there before you.... It would have frightened him to death.”

It was impossible for Clarence to say that it also frightened him to death, so he coughed and buttered a bit of roll.

“You don’t mind my speaking, do you?” she pursued.

For a moment Clarence fancied he had lost his mind. It was queer enough that a strange woman should speak to him, but even queerer that she should sweep past all the procedure of good manners and ask him directly whether he minded it. And she was neither brazen nor embarrassed.

“No, of course not,” he managed to say, “I mean I’m awfully glad. I hate traveling alone.”

Then it occurred to him that he had made an indelicate, perhaps a suggestive remark, and the blushes once more swept his face.

After hours the waiter arrived with the roast beef and lima beans.

“I haven’t much farther to go,” continued the woman. “Thank God, I’m not bound for Chicago.”

Clarence found it impossible to eat beneath her gaze.

“I get off at eleven something ...” he said, “I’ve forgotten exactly....”

The woman laughed. “Why, so do I! We must be bound for the same place.”

For an instant he succumbed to a terrifying suspicion that, in truth, she had marked him for her own. But this idea he dismissed quickly, as utterly improbable. The woman was clearly a lady. She was terribly sure of herself, of keeping things just where she wanted them. She might be a spy, an adventuress. (Ghosts of a thousand cheap magazine stories danced through his brain.) Yet a woman like that, if she were bad, wouldn’t be bothering herself with insignificant game like himself. He began to believe that she had been speaking the truth, that she had been driven to address him only out of a vast boredom.

“Perhaps we are,” he said, and told her that he was bound for the Town.

“So am I,” she replied. “It’s the first time I’ve been back there in years.... Maybe you come from the Town?” she continued.

The discovery of this bond helped matters a little. It furnished at least some ground for the stumbling feet of Clarence.

“No, I’m going on business.... I’ve been there before.... It’s a nice progressive Town, full of booming factories ... a place to be proud of.”

But he found abruptly that he had taken the wrong turning. The stranger was not proud of the Town. “I suppose you might be proud of it, if you like that sort of thing.... I find it abominable.” For a moment, the bantering, charming, humorous look went out of the eyes behind the veil, supplanted by a sudden sadness. “No,” she continued, “I don’t like it, though I’ve no doubt it’s very prosperous.”

For a moment Clarence was baffled. He understood suddenly that this new strange world was more remote, more unfamiliar than he had imagined. It was not perhaps made out of factories and roaring furnaces. The discovery increased his awkwardness and in some strange way distended the glamour with which he surrounded her. He struggled for words.

“I’m going to spend Christmas with the Setons,” he said. “Probably you know them. They’ve always lived in the Town.”

The woman frowned slightly. “Seton?” she repeated, “Seton?” Then it appeared that the light dawned upon her. “To be sure.... I know.... They own a corset factory.... But they’re new people. Yes, I know who they are although I don’t know them.”

She made the statement simply and without a trace of condescension. She made it as a simple observation. If she had said, “I know who the King of England is ... but I don’t know him,” the intonation, the inflection would have been identical. She had answered his question, but she had answered it more profoundly than she knew, more profoundly, more tragically than even Clarence knew until years afterward. “I know who they are although I don’t know them.”

Before the eyes of Clarence there rose suddenly the image of May Seton, good-natured, trivial, blonde, commonplace. It was almost as if she had entered the train by some obscure miracle and stood there beside the mysterious stranger, awkward, silly, ungainly.

The woman was rising now. “I must go back to my seat,” she said. “It isn’t fair to keep the others waiting.” She pulled the stole of black fox about her handsome shoulders and lowered the veil. “Thank you,” she said, “for saving a poor helpless traveler from boredom.”

And with that she closed the adventure.

When he returned to his seat, he found her sitting absorbed in her yellow-backed novel. Greeting him with a faint smile, she returned to her reading. After an hour she rested her head against the back of the chair and appeared to fall asleep. It was not until the train roared into the Town that she again addressed him.

Snow filled the air as they got down from the train at midnight. The big flakes, tormented by a rising wind, fell heavily, obscuring the yellow lights of the dirty brick station. They were the only passengers to descend and Clarence offered to take charge of her luggage. There were two large trunks and another handbag. The trunks she left at the station. She would send for them. The two handbags she would take with her.

The great train, spouting steam, got under way with a vast uproar. The brightly lighted cars moved away into the snowstorm and the pair of them were left alone beneath the yellow glare of the station lamps. A little way off two horse drawn cabs stood by the curb, the heads of the beasts hanging, their backs bent against the storm. From the warm station emerged a pair of drivers, muffled to the ears. To one of them, the lady called out.

“Oh, Jerry,” she said, “I’m glad you’re here.... There’s no one to meet me.... I didn’t send word ahead.”

The plumper of the two old men took off his hat and peered at her for a moment while the snow fell on his bald head. Slowly recognition came to him. “Sure, Miss Lily.... It’s a pleasure.... Back again, after so many years ... and not a day older, if you’ll let me say so.”

At this the stranger laughed softly. The cabby took the bags from Clarence, who had bestirred himself briskly to do the proper thing.

“It’s late,” he said. “Perhaps I’d better go with you to see that nothing happens.”

“Thank you,” replied his companion, “but I’ll be safe.... I haven’t far to go ... and I’ve known Jerry all my life.... He has driven me ever since I was a little girl.... You see I only live a little way off.” She laughed again, “Right in the midst of the Mills.” She made a little gesture with her big muff to indicate the direction of the Mills. There, above the encircling flames of the furnaces, rose dimly the silhouette of a great house crowning the top of a low hill. But for the flames of the furnaces it would have remained invisible. Now it stood out against the red, snow-dimmed glare, black, mysterious.

The woman stepped into the swaying, moth-eaten cab and the driver climbed to the seat. Suddenly she leaned out of the window and addressed Clarence. “Before we part,” she said, “I suppose we ought to know each other’s names, pour sauver les convenances. I’m Miss Shane,” she added, “Miss Lily Shane.”

Clarence took off his hat and bowed. “I’m Mr. Murdock.... Mr. Clarence Murdock.”

“And you won’t think me wicked, I know,” she added, “for speaking to a strange man.... I’m careful who I speak to.... I knew I would be safe with you.”

And the cab drove off through the snowstorm in the direction of Shane’s Castle, leaving Clarence on the platform mumbling a polite answer, his face scarlet, his pulses beating faster than they had ever beaten before.

After a moment he climbed into the other cab and bade the driver take him to the residence of Mr. Harvey Seton. The contentment, the holiday spirit had oozed out of him. He was no longer glad to be spending Christmas with the Setons. Reflecting upon his recent encounter, it occurred to him suddenly what it was that was familiar about the woman. Lily Shane! To be sure, she was the cousin of Ellen Tolliver! The rich cousin ...! There was something about her that reminded him of Ellen as she sat talking to him in the Setons’ parlor, something withdrawn and contained, rather distinguished and proud. In one of those moments of insight, so rare to him, he saw all at once that there was in the girl and her cousin something which set them aside from the others.

This thought he turned over and over in his mind as the musty cab, smelling faintly of ammonia, bore him through the blowing storm further and further into the smug future that lay spread out before him in a suburban panorama of little white houses with “artistic” piazzas and shutters ornamented by cut-out hearts and diamonds; and after a time he became once more almost content. The wild disturbance caused by the sudden encounter with the stranger appeared to have quieted, when another thought, entering suddenly his tired brain, made him miserable once more. He fell to considering the final speech of Miss Lily Shane.... “I’m careful who I speak to. I knew I should be safe with you.”....

He could not make out whether or not the speech was meant as a tribute to him. Something in the memory of the stranger’s manner implied that he was a poor thing.

And then it occurred to him that at this very moment he must be passing the Tollivers’ house, and poking his head out of the cab window, he saw that there was still a light in the windows. For an instant he fancied that the wind bore toward him the strains of wild music, surging and passionate; but of this he could not be certain, for the wind howled wildly and snow fell in a thick blanket. It may have been, after all, only his imagination; it had been playing him queer tricks since the very moment he raised his eyes and saw Miss Lily Shane sitting there beside him.

10

THE same evening was for Mrs. Tolliver one of rare peace and happiness—an evening when, warmed by the glow from the open fire, she sat surrounded by her family while the blizzard howled and tore at the eaves, setting the limbs of the gnarled old apple tree to scratch against the frozen panes. At such times there was in her appearance something grand and majestic; she sat in her ample chair like a triumphant Niobe, a sort of enthroned maternity the borders of whose narrow kingdom ended with the walls of the Tolliver living room.

It was a large square room, infinitely clean, although shabby and worn, for the dominant rules of the Tolliver household were cleanliness and comfort. It was this room which was the core of the Tolliver existence, the shrine of the sacred Lares and Penates, such a room as has existed rarely in each generation of the world since the beginning of time. With her family assembled about her, the cares and worries of the day slipped from her shoulders softly, beautifully into oblivion. She rested herself by darning the family stockings.

Near her Ellen sat at the piano playing, playing endlessly, in the wild and passionate fashion which sometimes overwhelmed them all, causing the mother to cease her darning for an instant, young Fergus to look up from his book, and even Charles Tolliver to stir himself sleepily and forget in the surge of her music the cares which he sought to drown each evening in sleep. The great shabby sofa was his. There it was that he lay for hours every night, until at length and after much effort, he was shepherded off to bed by his energetic wife. Perhaps he slept because in sleep he found a solace for the complacent failure of his life.

Robert, the younger brother, lay on his stomach beside the fire, his short nose wrinkled in an effort to decipher the mysteries of a picture puzzle. He had a passion for problems, and a persistence which had come to him from his mother.

Ah! They were a family in which to take pride! What was money compared to such a good husband and such fine children? So ran the thoughts of Mrs. Tolliver; and presently her face became wreathed in smiles, but she did not know she was smiling. If she had looked at that moment into a mirror, she would have been astounded. Her happiness at such moments ceased to be a conscious emotion.

Outside the windows the wind howled and the snow, falling in the first real blizzard of the winter, whished against the rattling panes.

The fire crackled and presently beneath the great blanket her husband stirred slowly and murmured, “Ellen, play the one I like so much.... I don’t know the name but you know what I mean.”

And slowly Ellen turned into the melodies of one of Liebesträume—the one which is written about the lovers lost on a lake during a black storm.

In her strange way the girl loved her father best, perhaps because in his gentle impersonal way he made upon her none of those savage demands which her mother, in all the ferocity of her affection, constantly exacted. With Mrs. Tolliver love implied endearments, constant manifestations of affection. To her love between people separated by hundreds of miles was inconceivable. It was a thing to be touched, to be fondled and treasured. Those whom she loved must always be at hand, under her eye, full of protesting affection. Perhaps in this she was right; she was, after all, a primitive woman who trusted her instincts. There was no reason in her. Perhaps love is only fanned into life by close and breathless contacts.

Mr. Tolliver was so different. There was in him something of his father, a touch of the terrible philosophic aloofness of the gaunt old man who lived above the kitchen in another part of the house. But he lacked Gramp Tolliver’s strength, as well as that implacable resistance of the old man to all the assaults of emotion. Where the old man was aloof, powerful, and independent through the very quality of his indifference, the son had failed by some weakness of character. There was in him too much of humanity. People liked him. Farmers in their fields stopped their horses and abandoned their plows to talk with Charlie Tolliver. At the elections they had supported him to a man; but there were not enough of them. The Town was too powerful.

In the world Charles Tolliver failed because of his very gentleness. He had a way of regarding life with a fine sense of proportion, of seeing things in their proper relation. It was as if he stood already at the end of his own existence and looked back through it as through a long tunnel, seeing that those things which others labeled as mountains were after all but mole-hills, and those things which others would have called trivial possessed the most uncanny importance. And this was a weakness, for it led one into the paths of philosophic acceptance; and it was a weakness which none recognized more shrewdly than his own direct and vigorous wife.

Ah (she thought) if only he would see things in the proper light. If only I could make him fight as I would fight in his place! He’s innocent, like a little child; but it’s not his fault. That old man abovestairs is to blame; that old devil who never cared for his own children. And, goaded by these thoughts, a kind of baffled rage at Gramp Tolliver swept the honest woman. She had no subtle way of combating his deviltries, because to a woman of so violent a nature, indifference was an unconquerable barrier. Gramp Tolliver lived, in his sinister fashion, in a world which she not only failed to understand but even to imagine.

Suddenly Ellen ceased her music; it died away in a faint, diminishing breath, disappearing slowly into silence beneath the strong beautiful fingers. The girl leaned forward on the piano and buried her face silently in her hands. She did not sob, and yet one could be sure that she was miserable. In her silence there was something far more terrible than weeping. It rose up and filled all the room, so that Mrs. Tolliver, lost in her angry thoughts of the old man in the lonely room overhead, sensed it suddenly and ceased her darning. This thing had come so often of late to break in upon the happiness of their lives. It was a monster, savage, insatiable. Something more powerful than all of them.

For a time she watched her daughter and slowly there spread over her face a look of trouble and bewilderment. It was an expression which of late had come to Mrs. Tolliver so often that it had begun already to leave its mark in the fine lines about her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. It was at times like this that her heart ceased all at once to beat and a coldness swept through her body; for love with her was really an intense and physical thing.

On the sofa her husband slept peacefully, quieted at last by the Liebestraum; and again she resented his indifference, all his willingness to accept life, his refusal to struggle against fate. “Things come out right in the end,” he always said when she assailed him. “There is no use in struggling.”

Ah, she thought bitterly, but there is use in struggling. There is a satisfaction to the spirit. But this, of course, her husband could never have known.

“Ellen,” she murmured, “Ellen.” And the girl raised her head with a look in her eyes so terrible that it appalled her mother. “Are you tired?”

“No.”

Again a little pause. “Why are you unhappy?”

For an instant the face of the girl softened. There were signs of a sudden collapse, of sobbing, of yielding utterly. Perhaps if it had come in that moment—a sudden abrupt bursting of all restraint—the lives of all the people in that warm and comfortable room would have been changed. But it did not come, for one so young does not yield so easily. The girl sighed, stiffened her body and sat upright.

“I don’t know,” she answered dully. And yet she lied, because she did know, perfectly. In that moment life for her was an awful thing, baffling, suffocating, overwhelming. It was impossible to say so, because her mother would not have understood. It would have been the same as when Mrs. Tolliver said, “It is beautiful, your music ... lovely,” when she did not understand it at all, when she said such things simply because she loved her daughter and was proud of her cleverness.

Outside the storm persisted, increasing steadily in fury. And presently, Ellen said, “To-night Cousin Lily arrives, doesn’t she?”

At which her mother regarded her sharply and paused in her darning to say, “Yes. But why do you ask? You talk of nothing but Lily.”

And again Ellen answered, “I don’t know. I simply want to see her.”

Into the proud reflections of Mrs. Tolliver there entered from time to time thoughts of the most profound satisfaction over the part she had played in the existence of her children. In the beginning, even before they were born, she had determined for them careers which were to follow clearly demarcated lines. As a bride, after she had brought up her eight brothers and sisters and married at last the patient Charles Tolliver, she went, driven by eager duty, to a lecture given by a bearded man upon the things every mother should know. This doctor had told her that it was possible to begin even before birth to influence the characters of one’s children, and so she had begun on that very night to plan their lives.

The first, she had decided, was to be a musician. It was a story which went back a long way into the days of Hattie Tolliver’s own youth when she had longed in her passionate way to be a musician. But always there had been something to intervene—an invalid mother; and after her death the cares of a family of brothers and sisters and the management of her father’s household, no easy task in those early days of great farms and broad lands. Yet in spite of these things she had managed to learn by sheer persistence something of the mysteries of the keyboard, and out of these she had woven on the melodeon of the old farmhouse the tunes of a few hymns, the Ninety and Nine, and snatches of The Blue Danube. So before Ellen was born, these fragments were revived and brought into service once more to be played over and over again on the upright piano purchased in the early years of her husband’s prosperity. Thus, with the support of a vast energy and an overwhelming optimism, she had begun to plan the future of Ellen long before the girl was born.

Long before midnight the two boys, under the gentle urgence of their mother, had drifted sleepily to bed. Ellen remained, still playing, almost mournfully now with a kind of moving and tragic despair. Beyond the frozen windows the wind howled wildly and the snow piled against the wall of the house. Mrs. Tolliver darned savagely, with short, passionate stitches, because the thing of which she lived in constant terror had returned to come between her soul and that of Ellen.

On the great sofa, her husband snored gently.

At midnight she rose and, poking the ashes of the fire, she said to Ellen, “It’s time we were all asleep. Lock up and I’ll get papa to bed.”

The transference of Mr. Tolliver from the sofa to his bed was nightly an operation lasting many minutes. When Ellen returned, her mother still stood by the sofa urging her husband gently to stir himself.

“Please, papa,” she said, “come along to bed. It’s after midnight.”

There was a series of final plaints and slowly the gentle Mr. Tolliver sat up, placed his feet on the floor, yawned and made his way sleepily to the stairway. The mother turned off the gas and the room suddenly was bathed in the warm, mellow glow of the dying fire. Ellen, breathing against the frozen window pane, cleared a tiny space to look out upon the world. It stretched before her, white and mysterious, beckoning and inscrutable. And suddenly she saw far down the street the figure of a cab drawn by a skinny horse which leaned black against the slanting snow within the halo of a distant street lamp.

The mother joined her, watching the cab for an instant and murmuring at length, “I wonder who it could be at this time of night.”

“I know,” said Ellen softly. “It’s Mr. Murdock. He was coming to-night on the express to stay with the Setons. He must have come on the same train with Lily.”

At the mention of Lily, her mother turned away. Ellen followed her and in the doorway Mrs. Tolliver halted abruptly and embraced her child, fiercely as if she would hold her thus forever. For an instant they clung together in the warm darkness and presently Mrs. Tolliver murmured, “Tell me, darling.... If you have any secrets, tell them to me. I’m your mother. Whatever happens to you happens to me.”

Ellen did not reply at once. For an instant she was silent, thoughtful. When at last she spoke, it was to say dully, “I haven’t any.” But the tears came suddenly into her blue eyes. She was lying, for she had her secrets. They were the secrets which youth finds it impossible to reveal because they are too precious. All the evening she had not been in the comfortable, firelit room. She had been far away in some vague and gigantic concert hall where people listened breathlessly while she made music that was moving and exquisite. The faces stretched out before her dimly in a half-light until in the farthest rows they were blurred and no longer distinguishable. And when she finished they cheered her and she had gone proudly off to return again and again as they crowded nearer to the great stage.

After the mother and daughter had climbed the creaking stairs, both lay awake for a long time, the one entangled in her wild and glowing dreams, the other terrified by the unseen thing which in her primitive way she divined with such certainty. It was not to be seen; she could not understand it, yet it was there menacing, impregnable.

And in a distant part of the house, a light was put out suddenly and Gramp Tolliver thrust his skinny legs between the blankets. All this time he had remained awake listening to the beauty of the music which came to him distantly above the wild howling of the storm. He was sure now of his secret. He could have told Hattie Tolliver what it was that shut her out from the soul of her precious daughter. It was something that would keep the girl lonely so long as she lived. Gramp Tolliver knew about such things.

So at last all the house fell into sleep. Outside there lay a vast desert of white which, it seemed, began at the very walls of the warm shabby house and extended thence to the very ends of the world. Even the tracks, left a little while before by the passing of the cab which brought Clarence Murdock through the blizzard, were obliterated now. One might have said that he had not passed that way at all.

11

WHEN the cab bearing Clarence drew up at length before the heavy portals of the Seton house, there was a light still burning in the room with the filigreed wall-paper. Leaving the bony horse and the smelly vehicle behind him, Clarence stumbled through the storm and pulled the bell. Far away, deep inside the house, it tinkled dismally in response, and presently there arose from within the sound of bodies sleepily setting themselves in motion to prepare a welcome. Mr. Seton himself opened the door, tall, bony, forbidding behind his thin whiskers, cold as the storm yet not so fresh or so dry. There was always a distinct dampness hanging about him, even in the touch of his hand.

“Well, well,” he said in his hollow voice, “you’re almost a stranger.”

Behind him in a row stood Mrs. Seton, fat and obviously sleepy, and May who interspersed her giggles with yawns which she attempted to conceal with a refined hand. And last of all there was the anemic Jimmy, not at all sleepy, and fidgeting as usual, this time with the cord of the red plush portières which he kept pulling to and fro until halted in this pastime by his mother, who said, “Come, dear, you mustn’t do that just when Mr. Murdock is arriving. Step forward and shake Mr. Murdock’s hand like a little gentleman.”

So Jimmy shook hands in a fashion which he had been taught was the very peak of gentility.

As for Clarence, the whole scene proved much less warm, much less vivid than he had pictured it. Somehow those dreams with which his day had begun were now dissipated, indeed almost lost in all that had happened since then. In the greeting there was a certain barrenness, intangible yet apparent. It may have been the dimness of the hall that depressed him, for Mr. Seton never permitted more than a faint flicker of gas in the red glass chalice which hung suspended by Moorish chains from the ceiling.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Seton, “you’re almost one of the family with us. May has talked of nothing else but your coming.”

May wriggled a little and added, “Yes, we’re glad you’ve come.”

And Clarence, dropping his bag, shook the snow from his coat. He could find no answer that seemed appropriate. How could one answer such greetings? Somehow he had expected, after his journey through the wild storm, something of warmth; and there was only this strange, damp confusion, strained and inexplicable. In the room with the filigreed wall-paper there burned the remnants of a fire; it was clear that Mr. Seton had permitted it to die down for the night.

They asked him about his trip, whether the train had been delayed by the blizzard, which of the cab drivers he had engaged. He did not know the name of his driver, yet he was able to identify him because he had heard the name of the other one. (“I’ve known Jerry all my life.... He has driven me ever since I was a little girl.”)

“Jerry.... Jerry was the name of the other driver,” Clarence announced suddenly, as if, not having heard their talk, he had brought his mind by some heroic effort back from a great distance.

Mrs. Seton said, “I can see Mr. Murdock is very tired. We mustn’t keep him up.... Mr. Seton will show you your room.”

So Clarence bade them good night and, led by his soft-footed host, made his way through the dark halls until the corset manufacturer opened a door and admitted him to a room that was damp with the chill of a tomb. The sudden flicker of the gas revealed an enormous bed with the cotton sheets turned back.

“Here,” said Mr. Seton, with a contracted gesture of the hand intended clearly to be hospitable. “You will find it a little chilly in the spare room, but it is a cold night. Once you’re in bed it’ll be warm enough.”

Clarence murmured polite protests and Mr. Seton withdrew, closing the door behind him. The sound of its closing had a curious effect upon Clarence. For a moment he was tempted to turn suddenly, fling it open and run for his life. Why he should have experienced this impulse he did not know. The whole sensation was confused, disturbing, a part of the wretchedness which had overcome him as he saw the stranger enter her cab and drive off in the direction of the great black house among the flaming mills. He had visited this house before ... many times. He knew the habits of its owners. They had not changed. It was clear that the trouble lay hidden in himself. Something had happened to him, something quite outside his neat and pigeon-holed calculations. He had come prepared to win success and a comfortable wife, and now ... instead of that there was fear of something vague and indefinable, a curious instinct to escape from some dreadful trap.

For a time he sat quietly on a stiff chair, his overcoat thrown across his knees, trying to discover the cause of his uneasiness. It was entangled in some strange way with the woman of the veil. The Setons.... I know who they are although I don’t know them. And then, I’m careful who I speak to.... I knew I should be safe with you.

Certainly he was not in love with her. Such a thing had never occurred to him. She was too remote, too far beyond even the wildest flights of his rarely erratic imagination.

And presently, shivering, he began to undress. With the routine of this daily act, he began at once to grow more calm and more assured. One by one, as he took each article from his pocket—a pen, a pencil, a pocketknife, the watch Uncle Henry had given him on his twenty-first birthday for never having touched tobacco, a few coins—the disturbing sensations seemed to loose their subtle hold. As he laid these things in turn on the mantelpiece beneath the chromo of Watts’ Hope, it seemed that he deposited with each of them a fear, an uneasiness, a premonition; the breath-taking sense of grand adventure oozed out of his finger tips.

At length he hung his coat and waistcoat over the back of the chair, placed his shoes beneath the bed and his trousers, carefully folded (to preserve the neat creases that meant so much in the world of himself and Mr. Bruce) beneath the mattress. In the flickering gaslight his body looked pinched and cold, as if he suffered from a lack of warm blood. He was a muscular little man, but his muscles were hard and tight and knotty, the muscles of a man whose only exercise was taken each morning beside the bath tub.

At last after turning out the flickering gas flame, he slipped, shivering and gasping, into his nightshirt and sprang courageously into the monumental bed. Seldom used, it was like the room, dampish and chilly, but before long the warmth of his body permeated the cotton sheets and, coupled with the sound of the wild storm outside, it filled him with a certain comfort which lulled him presently to sleep. In the air-tight room he slept with his mouth opened a little, his teeth exposed, so that in breathing he made a faint wheezing noise.

12

THE snow lingered for days, blackening slowly under a downpour of soot from the Mills that penetrated even the distant reaches of the old Town where the Tollivers and the Setons had their houses. Throughout the Flats where the aliens lived and in the park of Shane’s Castle it lay soft and thick as if a great and infernal blizzard had passed that way in a thick downfall of sable flakes. With the return of Lily, the old house set in the midst of the furnaces took on a new aspect. Lights glowed once more behind the diamond-shaped panes and the sound of music sometimes penetrated the tottering walls of the filthy houses where the steel workers dwelt. It was gay, triumphant music, for Lily was one whom the Town had never conquered. Any passer-by could have told that she had returned....

The days passed slowly and meanwhile Ellen made no effort to see her cousin. This Mrs. Tolliver observed with astonishment, setting it down in her hopeful way as proof that the restlessness was passing out of her stormy Ellen; but she did not remark upon it because she feared the mere sound of Lily’s name. There was something about Lily which made even Mrs. Tolliver uneasy; it was impossible to understand this woman who denied the existence of the Town, who could return to it when she chose out of a life which it was whispered was none too respectable, to dominate the townspeople again and again in her own disarming, pleasant fashion. In a vague way Lily stood for that vast land beyond the Mills which held such terror for the soul of the simple woman. It was as if Lily were a menace, as if there could be no peace, no contentment until she had gone back again into that vague and distant world from which she came. And here once more Mrs. Tolliver failed to understand. She did not see that Ellen, for all her stiff-necked pride, was shy and held by the same uncertain fear. It was a fear that Clarence Murdock knew. Somehow it had touched him and changed alike himself and the world about him. It was the fear of naïve souls for one that was perhaps not good but one that was experienced, that moved through life with a sure step, without fear for those things which would have terrified the less courageous. The soul of Mrs. Tolliver was simple. The soul of Clarence was small, and that of Ellen had not begun to grow; until now, save as a bundle of wild desires and feverish unrest, it had not been born.

At length came Christmas day when it was no longer possible for Ellen to avoid her cousin. For seventy years this day had been set aside in the clan composed of the Barrs, the Tollivers and the Shanes as a day given over to feasting, an occasion which brought the most remote members of the great family from every part of the county to the black house among the Mills. But the seventy years had wrought changes. The great house that once raised its bulk, proud and aloof on its hill amid the marsh land, now stood surrounded and blackened by the great mills and factories. Of the family only nine gathered about a table which once had seated forty. The old ones were dying off, slowly; the younger ones had gone away, all save Hattie Tolliver and her children, Irene Shane, and a spinster cousin, the daughter of the Samuel Barr who died after inventing the celebrated and useless perpetual motion machine.

Of the older generation only two remained ... the proud old Julia Shane and her brother-in-law Jacob Barr, the father of Mrs. Tolliver. This old man was an extraordinary character who at eighty still had a powerful stalwart figure and a great rosy face framed in white hair and a white beard which once had been red. In his youth the people of the county had called him The Red Scot and marveled at the superb strength of his great body. There were tales of his having moved his log barn alone and unaided when the men who were to have helped him failed to arrive at the appointed time. When at last they came, so the story ran, they found Jacob Barr mopping his great, handsome face by the side of the windlass and the barn moved a full hundred yards from the spot it once occupied. At eighty he still managed his farm and scorned his daughter’s offer of care. He was the last of the pioneers.

There were times when this grandfather seemed even more remote to Ellen than old Gramp Tolliver in his cell lined with musty books; for the remoteness of Grandpa Barr was the remoteness of one who dwelt in a tower of unbending virtue. In the county he had been the first abolitionist, the first prohibitionist, the first advocate of woman suffrage. He had organized the Underground Railroad which aided slaves to escape to Canada. He was a Presbyterian without sympathy for those who were weak. His wife had died in bearing him child after child. For Gramp Tolliver his scorn was so profound that it was beyond all expression in words. He never spoke of Gramp Tolliver at all.

Jacob Barr was a citizen. He had what people called “backbone,” and Ellen was not his granddaughter for nothing.

There was in this annual dinner a pomp, a circumstance that approached the medieval; it was a rite which symbolized the pride, the greatness of a family which admitted no weakness, no failure, no poverty; the persistence of a family which, because it lived sometimes in dreams when the reality became insupportable, knew no such thing as failure. What one does not admit, does not exist. This one sentence might indeed have stood above the crest of the clan. If Hattie Tolliver knew in her heart that Lily was a feeble reed, she ignored it. In her presence none would have dared to hint at such frailty; for Lily existed within the sacred barrier of the family.

On Christmas day, the guests arrived in a procession ... first Grandpa Barr, rugged, handsome, defiant of his years, yet yielding through bitter necessity to the stout stick of cherry wood which he carried; Mrs. Tolliver, large, powerful, vigorous in a shabby astrakhan jacket, a beaver tippet and a small hat covered with ostrich plumes slightly frayed by age; Charles Tolliver, gentle, handsome, pleasant in his neat and faintly threadbare clothes; Ellen, stiff-necked, awkward, yet somehow handsome and overpowering and, last of all, the two brothers, Fergus, gentle, charming like his father and Robert, stocky and for all the world like the fierce, blue-eyed old Scot with his cherry stick. A vigorous family. And in the midst marched Mrs. Tolliver, erect and with a strange dignity, her plumes nodding a little as if she were a field marshal surrounded by a glorious army.

But Gramp Tolliver was nowhere to be seen. He had been left behind to have his Christmas meal alone in the room walled in by books. Gramp Tolliver, who never worked, who had wrought nothing in this world, was a disgrace which one did not air in public. He took his place among the things which one did not admit.

Before the wrought iron portico of Shane’s Castle, the little family defiled across the blackened snow to the heavy door. Mrs. Tolliver pulled the bell as Hennery, the black servant, drove off the sleigh drawn by horses which the Tollivers had for their keep since the latest débâcle in family fortunes. Ellen, trembling a little, perhaps at the thought of the cousin who awaited her inside the long, beautiful drawing-room, perhaps at the fear of the thing she had to ask of Lily, stood leaning against the iron railing, gazing out across the furnaces that flamed even on Christmas day below the eminence of the dying park.

Inside the house there was a distant tinkle and the door swung open presently to reveal Sarah, the mulatto housekeeper, and behind her a long hallway, hung with silver mounted mirrors and a chandelier of crystal that reflected its dull light against the long, polished stairway. For in the Flats, where the Mills reigned, the darkness was so great that lights burned even at midday in Shane’s Castle.

Once inside, there was the rustle of descending coats. Before the mirror Mrs. Tolliver frizzed her hair and Ellen patted the newborn pompadour. Beneath her coat she wore a starched white shirtwaist and a skirt of blue voile, with a tight belt and a contrivance known as a chatelaine dangling and jingling at one side. The Town called her well-dressed. It marveled that she could afford such clothes, although it knew well enough that they came from Hattie Tolliver’s sewing machine. Yet she was ridiculous and in the next moment she knew it.

For as she turned there moved toward her out of the old drawing-room, that glittered softly in the reflected light of the candles upon mirror and bits of crystal and silver, the figure of Lily, whom she had not seen in seven years. Her cousin wore a gown of black stuff, exquisitely cut by the hand of some artist in the establishment of Worth, a gown which came from the other side of the earth, from a street known to every corner of the world. Her fine bronze hair she wore drawn back over her ears in a knot at the back of her beautiful head; about her throat close against the soft skin hung a string of pearls. As she moved there came from her the faint scent of mimosa, which smote the quivering nostrils of Ellen as some force strange and exotic yet almost recognizable. It was a perfume which she was never able to forget and one which so long as she lived exerted upon her a curious softening power. Years afterward as she passed the flower carts behind the Madeleine or moved along the Corniche above the unreal terraces of Nice the faint scent of mimosa still had the power of making her suddenly sad, even wistful ... and those were the years when she had conquered the world, when she was hard.

Now she only trembled a little and offered her hand awkwardly to the smiling cousin.

“Well,” said Lily, “and now, Ellen, you’re a woman. To think of it! When I last saw you, you were a little girl with pigtails.”

Her voice carried that thin trace of accent which Clarence had noticed. Somehow it made her strangeness, her glamour, overpowering; and thus it strengthened the very barrier which to Ellen seemed so impossible ever to pass. In that moment there rushed through the confused brain of the awkward girl a multitude of thoughts, but out of them only one emerged clearly defined. “Ah, if I could be like that, I would not care what people thought of me! To be so free, so certain, so gracious, to overcome every one so easily!”

For all Lily’s warmth the talk was not easy between them. Yet for the first time it seemed to Ellen that the door stood open a little way. It was as if already she looked out upon the world.

And then Lily turned away to speak to the others, smiling, disarming them, even Grandpa Barr, who in the isolation of his virtue glared secretly at her from beneath his shaggy brows, suspecting her as that which was too pleasant to be good.

And Ellen, with a wildly beating heart, turned to gaunt Aunt Julia Shane, who, leaning on her ebony stick and dressed all in black with amethysts, shook her hand harshly and disapproved of her pompadour.

“It is a silly thing the way girls disfigure themselves nowadays,” she said. But Ellen did not mind.

The old woman was handsome in a fierce, cold fashion and had the Barr nose, slightly curved, and intolerably proud, which had appeared again in this awkward great-niece of hers.

Then there was Irene to greet.... Aunt Julia Shane’s other daughter, given to charity and good works, thin, anemic, slightly withered, so different from the radiant, selfish Lily. Irene Ellen ignored, because Irene stood for a life which, it seemed to Ellen, it was best to forget. And beyond Irene there was the horse-faced Eva Barr, daughter of the perpetual motion machine, a terrifying spinster of forty-five who regarded Lily as obscene and spoke of Ellen as a “chit.” Both of them she hated passionately for their freedom, because to her it was a thing forever lost. She, like Miss Ogilvie, had been trapped by another tradition. It was too late now....

In the dark lovely room, all these figures passed before Ellen, but of them all, she saw only Lily who stood now before the fire of cannel coal beneath the glowing Venice painted by Mr. Turner. She was like the picture, and shared its warmth, its graciousness, its unreal, extravagant beauty.

Ellen in her dark corner savagely bit her lip. She would escape some day and herself see Venice. Lily should help her. Every one should help her. And into her handsome young face, beneath the absurd, ratted pompadour, there stole a look of determination so fierce that Irene, seeing it, was frightened, and old Julia Shane, seeing it, exulted in the spirit of this great-niece of hers.

13

IN another part of the Town far on the Hill above the Flats, the Setons and their guest sat down to Christmas dinner at an hour somewhat earlier than that kept at Shane’s Castle, for Harvey Seton, in the manner of many men who have made their own success, created social laws for himself, as if in some way he could thus place himself above the rules. Certainly he could not have brought himself to follow the fashions set by Shane’s Castle. He was, he said, a simple man and hoped to remain so until he died.

The shadow of this unspoken defiance appeared to cloud the cheer of Christmas Day at the Setons. There was in the air a certain conscious tension, a vague uneasiness which manifested itself in a dozen ways ... in the unflinching frown of the father, in the extreme politeness of the mother, in the nervous and concentrated giggles of May herself. The most uneasy of them all was the guest himself. Alone of all the group the simian Jimmy appeared to enjoy himself; and in this there was nothing strange or unusual, for it was an atmosphere in which he flourished and one to which he was highly sensitized. With the sharpness of a sickly, precocious nature, he understood that the air about him was heavy with foreboding. He knew that it required but a spark to precipitate a crisis with all the suddenness of an explosion. He waited now, joyful, expectant, watching the others with an impish satisfaction.

There was in the dampish atmosphere of the room an odor of unwonted richness ... the smell of a roast goose, strange and exotic in this household. But Christmas was a season which caused even Harvey Seton to unbend a little. It was the only occasion when the Christianity of the man was tempered even for an instant by anything faintly suggestive of warmth. His manner as he carved was touched, despite the thinness of the slices which fell from the breast of the bird, by a majestic air, which suggested more than ever his likeness to a grotesque Gothic saint; (he might have been one of those early fathers who battled and gave up their lives for some minute point of dogma.)

As he stood whetting the knife coldly against the steel, a sense of awe penetrated slowly one by one the hearts of those about the table ... all save Jimmy. With his small pointed head barely visible above the table’s edge, he waited. And presently, as if he could restrain his impatience no longer, he banged his knife sharply against the edge of his plate.

The effect was instantaneous. It brought from the harassed mother a sharp scream and a violent slap on the wrist.

“Don’t do that again or you’ll be sent to bed without any goose!”

But Jimmy, knowing his safety, only grinned and varied the method of torture by scratching the fork against the cold surface of the plate so that it produced a dreadful whining sound.

There were, to be sure, reasons for this strange condition of nerves. Since the night when Clarence arrived out of the blizzard, things had not progressed. Indeed, it appeared that, on the contrary, they were moving backwards. By now, everything should have been settled, and yet nothing was done; there had been no declaration, no hint. The wooer remained wary, suspicious; and the consciousness of his failure penetrated even the sluggish workings of May’s brain and hurt her pride. Mrs. Seton it baffled. She was conscious that some event, some obstacle, some peril which she was unable to divine had raised itself during these past few days full in the middle of her path.

“My,” said May presently, “it’s much warmer. I expect it’s the January thaw.”

Then the silence descended and again there was only the whine of Jimmy’s fork and the metallic click of the carving knife against the plated dish which bore the goose.

As for Clarence, he managed to conceal that wavering sense of uncertainty and terror which had assailed him with increasing force as the visit progressed. It was a terror which, strangely enough, centered itself in the father, for Clarence, in his chivalrous fashion, regarded women as creatures whom one could put aside. Never having been assailed, he had no fear of them. But the face of the Methodist elder, slightly green and intensely forbidding, filled him with uneasiness. When the corset manufacturer turned to address him, the fishy eyes accused him of unspeakable things.

In all those days in the dampish house there had been no mention of the encounter aboard the transcontinental express. If Lily Shane had been a light woman with whom (Heaven forbid!) Clarence had spent the night, he could have been no more silent concerning the adventure. Somehow he understood that the very name of Lily Shane had no place in the household of the Setons. And the longer he kept silent, the more glamorous and wicked the secret had become, until now it had attained the proportions of a monstrous thing. Each time the Elder looked at him the offense increased a degree or two in magnitude.

Yet in the end he betrayed himself. Perhaps it was the strained silence, perhaps the unbearable whine of Jimmy’s fork against the cold plate. In any case there came a moment when even Clarence could bear the strained silence no longer. He knew that something must be said. What he chose to say was calamitous and no sooner had the words passed his lips than he knew his error.

He said, “Do you know a woman called Lily Shane? I met her on the train.”

It was purely an effort at conversation; he knew well enough that they knew her, but the effect was terrific. Mr. Seton’s carving halted in mid-air. The mouth of Mrs. Seton went down at the corners. May giggled nervously and Jimmy, sensing triumph, raised himself until he displayed several inches of skinny neck above the table’s edge.

“Yes,” said Mr. Seton in a hollow voice, “we know about her. She is not a good woman.” What he said was mild enough, yet it carried overtones of the unspeakable, of bacchanalian orgies, of debauchery. And the mother, seeing her chance, took it.

“She is not nice, you know. There are things about her....” She would have gone on but a look from her husband halted her. It was a look which said, “We do not discuss such women before May and Mr. Murdock.” So Mrs. Seton coughed and suppressed her revelations. Instead she made a conversational step aside. “I suppose she looks old and worn now. A woman leading that sort of life always pays in the end.”

At this point Clarence, like a plumed knight, went to the defense of the damozel. “No, I wouldn’t say that. She seemed quite young and beautiful.” And then as if he had gone too far, he added mildly, “Of course, I don’t know her well.”

“It’s better to avoid women like her,” rejoined the father. “Take a word of advice from an older man. Women like that can ruin men ... just by talking to them. They are creatures of the Devil.”

Somewhere within the mind of Clarence a great light broke, and he saw everything clearly. He understood then that all the visit differed from his expectations not because the Setons had changed but because he had encountered Lily Shane.... She lay at the root of the trouble. Yes, women like her were powerful. There was no denying it.

The talk came easily enough now. Mrs. Seton, following her instincts, saw an opportunity to destroy the single menace which she fancied stood between her and her success. “She is a cousin, you know, of Ellen ... that Tolliver girl. They all have bad blood in ’em.”

But she had taken a false turning and, though she never knew it, her implications were in their effect fatal. Without understanding it she brought into the room both Ellen and her cousin Lily Shane, and Clarence saw them there, aloof and proud, more clearly than he had ever seen them in the flesh. He saw in them the same qualities, the assurance, the subtle, bedeviling recklessness, the outward indifference that concealed beneath it things undreamed of.

And then May giggled, nervously, as if she were smirking at the veiled improprieties which her mother kept concealed. The sound was more terrible than the scraping of the fork against the cold plate, for suddenly May stood revealed, and Clarence, in the nicety of his soul, was horrified.

“I couldn’t tell you the whole story,” continued Mrs. Seton. “Perhaps Mr. Seton could. I think you ought to know.”

But the thoughts of Clarence had wandered away from the little group, away from the goose and cranberry sauce on his plate. Indeed they had wandered a long way, for they were centered now on the great black house he had seen for an instant high above the flames of the furnaces, so distant, so unattainable. In his mind he had created a picture of the house, of what sort of a dinner must be in progress within its sooty, decaying walls. It was a picture, to be sure, far more magnificent than the reality and therefore more fatal to his happiness. The old ambitions began to stir once more, ponderously and terribly.

And far away he heard May saying, “She doesn’t stay much in the Town. She thinks it isn’t good enough for her.” And then following the cue of so bad a campaigner as her mother, “Neither does Ellen. They’re both stuck up. They think there’s nothing good enough for them in the Town.”

“You’d think,” rejoined Mrs. Seton, “to see Ellen in her homemade clothes that she was a princess!”

A fierce resentment, bordering upon savagery, colored her voice. In the course of the conversation the fat, complacent woman became transformed into a spiteful, witch-like creature. And in the brain of Clarence there echoed a soft voice which said, “Ah, the Setons! To be sure, I know who they are but I don’t know them,” dismissing them all quite easily, without resentment, without savagery, even without thought, forgetting in the next moment their very existence.

And then the lightning struck.

The shrill voice of Jimmy, impatient of results, suddenly cut the dampish air like a knife. “I know what it is! She’s had a baby and she was never married!... She’s had a baby and she was never married!”

14

DUSK had already fallen and the black servants had placed silver candlesticks among the wreckage of the Christmas feast before the first chair was drawn back with a scraping sound in the paneled dining room of Shane’s Castle.

Throughout the long dinner, Ellen sat silent and somewhat abashed, eating little, hearing nothing, not even the family talk which each year followed the same course, rambling backward into reminiscences of the Civil War and of Grandpa Barr’s adventure to the Gold Coast in the Forties. Even when the old man, lost in a torrent of sweeping memories, described with flashing blue eyes and the resonant voice of youth the jungle tapestries of Panama and a terrible shipwreck off the Cocos Islands, Ellen did not raise her head. It was not these things which interested her; they were too far away and she was still too young, too egoistic, to understand the burning romance that lay in them.

It was only Lily who interested her, and with Lily she had been able to make no progress. Her cousin was placed opposite her, between Charles Tolliver and his son Fergus; and between these two Lily divided her attention, save in those moments when the stentorian tones of the Red Old Scot drowned all conversation. Even the boy she addressed with as much charm and as much interest as if he had been the most fascinating of men; and Fergus, young though he was, had been affected. His clear blue eyes, half-hidden by dark lashes, glowed with a naïve pleasure. Ellen, watching the pair, understood suddenly that this brother, so fascinated by the woman beside him, would one day escape as Lily had escaped. It was easy for him; it was easy for any man. For a girl to escape was a different matter. Yet, sitting there wrapped in despair, she planned how she might help him if she were the first to make her way into the world.

For Fergus exerted upon her a strange effect of softening. His fanciful mind she alone understood, and there were times in the long winter evenings when it was to him alone that she played her savage music. His shyness, which, unlike hers, lacked all the quality of savagery, aroused in her a fierce instinct of protection. There were times when the sight of his clear eyes, his blond curly head and snub nose filled her with an unaccountable melancholy and foreboding.

Sometimes during the dinner Ellen turned at the sound of a loud, rasping voice to regard her cousin Eva Barr, who sat by the side of Irene discussing harshly their work among the poor. Something about the horse-faced spinster filled her with a vague terror. It was as if Eva Barr stood as a symbol of that which a courageous, strong-minded woman might become if kept too long imprisoned. To Ellen, turning these things over secretly in her mind, it seemed that the way of her own destiny lay before her, branching now into two paths. At the end of the one stood the glowing Lily and at the end of the other Eva Barr, baffled, sour, dogmatic, driving herself with a fierce energy into good works.

In a sudden access of pity and sorrow, for herself as much as for Eva Barr and old Miss Ogilvie, the tears welled in her eyes and dropped to the starched front of her shirtwaist. But she dried them, quickly and proudly, before they were seen, with the handkerchief she kept in the jangling chatelaine at her waist.

Ah, she saw everything very clearly ... even the tragedy of her mother, so contented at this moment, in the midst of all her family, talking in her rich, vigorous voice to bitter old Julia Shane. Yet there was no way of saving any one, of changing anything. By some profound and feminine instinct, the girl knew this and it made her weep silently.... Ellen, who people said was so proud and had no heart.

Thus all her plans for seeking help from Lily were dissipated. If she had been less proud, she might, by an heroic effort, have approached her cousin saying, “You must give me money ... lend it to me. Some day I will pay you back, for I will be rich, powerful. You must help me to do what I know I must do.” But she found herself incapable of speaking the words, because the pride of a poverty which has been trained to show an indifferent face was too deeply planted in her. She would ask anything else ... anything. She could not ask for money.

It was Lily herself who, all unconsciously, closed the matter once and for all. As the family, much wrapped in coats and furs against the cold, stood in the dark hallway making their farewells, she drew Ellen aside and, placing a friendly arm about the waist of the girl, said, “You play superbly, Ellen. If you can play always as you have played to-day, you will be a great artist.” And then in a whisper, almost furtive, she said, “You must not throw it away. It is too great a gift. And don’t let them make you settle into the pattern of the Town. It’s what they’ll try to do, but don’t let them. We only live once, Ellen. Don’t waste your life.... And when the time comes, if you want to come and study in Paris with the great Philippe, you can live with me.” For a moment, the girl blushed and regarded the floor silently. “I won’t let them,” she managed to murmur presently. “Thank you, cousin Lily.” It was all that she was able to say.

And when she stepped through the doorway into the cold air, the flames above the furnaces were blurred before her glistening eyes. Lily had promised Paris. That was something; but Paris was a long way off and the road between was certain to be hard.

15

THE heavy snow lasted until the day before the New Year when the weather, turning suddenly, sent it slithering away down the gutters of the Town in streams of black water to swell the volume of the Black Fork so that in the Flats, where the stream meandered a tortuous course, it overflowed its banks and filled the cellars of the hovels with stinking damp. It was through this malodorous area that the fastidious carriages of the Town made their way on New Year’s Eve to the eminence crowned by Shane’s Castle, aglow now with the lights that had flashed into existence upon the arrival of Lily. Kentucky thoroughbreds picked their way daintily through the streaming gutters, drawing behind them the old families of the Town and one or two of the new, for the Shanes, the Barrs and the Tollivers did not, save in cases of rare distinction, admit the existence of the new. Consequently there was no carriage bearing a member of the Seton family. It was this circumstance, far more perhaps than any other, which had precipitated the dinner table crisis of Christmas Day. And its consequences had not ended there; they were destined once more to enter into the existence of Clarence Murdock.

On the same New Year’s Eve at about the hour when the gaiety in the house among the mills, centering itself about the returned prodigal, had reached its height, Mrs. Seton, with a rustling of her voile skirts, drew May off to bed. Even the persistent Jimmy was swept with them, so that Clarence, left conspicuously alone with the father, understood that some event of grave importance had been arranged. Indeed, the manner of the corset manufacturer made his divination doubly sure. The man poked the remnants of the fire to make certain that it was entirely consumed before he retired, and then faced his guest.

Clarence, opposite him in a stiff backed chair of mahogany veneer, stirred with a sense of impending doom. The green eyes of his host fastened upon him with the old implication of guilt. From one corner of his narrow mouth there hung, limply, an unlighted and rather worn cigar which had done service all the day.

“I’ve been thinking it over,” he said presently in his cold, deliberate voice. “I thought perhaps we’d better talk over a few things before you go away for good.” A cinder slipping in the grate disturbed the stillness of the room and he continued. “I don’t want to hurry you about anything, but it’s best to come to an understanding.”

In his uncomfortable chair, Clarence, swayed by the cold deliberate manner of the Elder, shifted his position as if he were sitting on a bag of rocks.

“Yes,” he managed to articulate, as if he knew what was coming. “It’s always better.”

“First of all,” began his host, “there is this matter of the Shane woman.... Lily Shane.” He coughed and looked into the fire for a long time. And then, “It’s a matter I don’t care to discuss before May.... She’s innocent, you know, like a flower.... The way girls should be.”

“Yes,” said Clarence agreeably; but there rang in his ears the horrid memory of May’s knowing giggle.

“I don’t understand how Jimmy could have found out unless he overheard his mother discussing it,” continued the father. “We’ve always kept such things from the children. My wife and I are great believers in innocence ... and purity. It’s a fine protection.”

A month ago, Clarence would have agreed. Now he murmured, “Yes,” politely, but in his heart he felt stirring a faint desire to protest, to deny this assertion. Lately there had come into his mind a certainty that the greatest of all protections lay in knowledge. One could not know too much. Each bit of knowledge was a link in the armor.

“It’s true ... what Jimmy said.”

And again there was a silence in which Clarence flushed slowly a deep red.

“We can speak of such things ... man to man,” continued the torturer and slowly there swept over Clarence a terrible sense of becoming involved. Life in the Babylon Arms in the midst of a great and teeming city was simple compared to the complications of these last few days.

“But it doesn’t seem to make any difference,” he said presently. “All the Town has gone to the ball.... I saw the carriages going there ... a whole stream of them, and it’s Lily Shane who is giving it.”

For an instant, Harvey Seton remained silent, turning the worn cigar round and round in his thin lips, as if it might be the very thought he was turning over in much the same fashion in his own devious mind. “Yes,” he replied, after a long time. “That’s true. But it’s because nobody really knows.”

At this speech Clarence, moved perhaps by the memory of Lily leaning from the window of the cab as she drove off through the storm, asked, “But do you know?”

Slowly his host eyed him with suspicion. It was as if the veiled accusations contained in their depths had suddenly become defined, specific; as if he accused this model young man opposite him of being the father of the vague and suppositious child.

“I have no proofs ... to be sure,” he said. “But a woman, like that.... Well, to look at her is enough. To look at her in her fine Paris clothes. A woman has no right to make herself a lure to men. It’s like the women of the streets.” Then he added gruffly with a sudden glance at the dying fire, “She’s always been bad. They’re a bad lot ... the whole family, unstable, not to be relied upon. They go their crazy way ... all of ’em. Why there was Sam Barr, Lily Shane’s uncle, who spent his whole life inventing useless things ... never making a cent out of ’em. His daughter lives in a cheap boarding house now.... If he’d made an honest living instead of mooning about.” He laughed scornfully. “Why, he even thought he could invent a perpetual motion machine.” Then he halted abruptly as if he realized that he had protested too much, and returned to the main stream of his discourse. “As for the Town going to the ball, all the Town knows just what I know, and they talk about it, only they see fit to ignore it to-night because there is music and good food and champagne punch at Shane’s Castle.”

In the silence that followed Clarence bent his neatly brushed head and slipped away into a world of philosophy new and strange to him. “Yes,” he found himself thinking, “the world is like that and nobody can change it much. If Lily Shane had asked you, you would have gone.”

But in this he was unfair to his enemy; Skinflint Seton would not have gone, because he would have taken too great a satisfaction in refusing. It was this satisfaction, undoubtedly, which he now missed so bitterly.

But the turn things had taken exerted upon Clarence a curious effect. It was as if he found himself for the first time on the offensive, as if he were placed now within the ranks of all the others who were at the ball, laughing, dancing, forgetful (as Lily Shane had been) that Harvey Seton even existed. He had begun to lose the feeling of isolation, of being trapped. There appeared in the offing a gleam of hope.

He knew vaguely that it was difficult to deal with this man who sat opposite him; but he did not understand the reason—that it lay in the very positiveness of his opponent, in the fact that the world of Harvey Seton consisted entirely of blacks and whites. There were in between no soft, warm shades of gray. May was (despite that fatal giggle) innocent as a flower, just as Lily Shane was the apotheosis of sin; and they were so because he willed them to be so. Thus he had created them, knowing his own daughter perhaps no better than he knew Lily Shane.

Clarence looked at him and blushed slowly. The walls began once more to close about him; he was frozen into silence.

“It was about May,” Seton repeated slowly.... “She’s unhappy.... At least her mother says she is, and it’s on account of you.”

In response to this Clarence found nothing to say. He would have protested but there were no words with which to frame a protest. The corset manufacturer bore down upon his victim like a Juggernaut. Clarence could neither speak, nor scream, nor rise from its path.

“I’ve guessed for a long time that there was something between you two.” And here he permitted himself to smirk suddenly with a frigid sentimentality. “I’m not sorry, you understand.... Nothing could please me more. I’ll need some one to help me in the factory ... until Jimmy’s old enough to take hold.”

In his chair before the chilly, dying fire Clarence sat motionless; betraying no sign of the tortured soul that writhed within him.

“But I don’t ...” he began. “I mean....”

The Juggernaut rolled on. “I understand your bashfulness,” continued his host. “I once had the honor of speaking myself ... to the fine woman who is now my wife. My boy, there is nothing like a wife. It’s the finest step a man can take ... to settle himself into honorable matrimony.” Here he bit a piece from the badly worn cigar and spat it into the ashes of the fire. “I am only speaking to you because I wanted to know if your intentions are honorable. After all, you have been close to us now ... for a long time, living as one of the family, and under such conditions it is not surprising that a young girl should ... should have her interest aroused.”

By now Clarence managed to speak. He sat upright and with superhuman effort turned upon his torturer.

“My intentions ...” he began. “My intentions....” And then he ended weakly. “Of course they’re honorable, sir. What did you think?” It was as if he were in some terrible nightmare in which there was no faint gleam of reality.

“Then,” continued the Elder, “a declaration would clear up everything ... everything. I wouldn’t have hurried you except on the girl’s account.”

It was impossible to believe that this was happening to him—Clarence Murdock—that he was being forced slowly into a life of slavery, of horror, a world of damp cotton sheets and reinforced corsets, of cold piety and stewed mutton. He must fight for time, somehow.

“You know, sir,” he heard himself saying from a great distance, “I am bashful.... I’ve meant to propose, but I can’t screw up my courage.... I’ve ... I’ve meant to all along ... and then I thought I’d leave it until I went away.”

“I have no intention,” replied the Elder firmly, “of hurrying things. I only thought that it would make every one easier ... yourself included.”

“I’m going away to-morrow ... for three days,” said Clarence. “When I come back we’re going on a skating party if it’s cold enough.... I’ll ... I’ll ask May then if she’ll have me.”

Harvey Seton rose and came over to him, placing one hand on his shoulder. “That’s fine,” he said. “May’s a fine girl. She’ll make you a fine wife.” Then he withdrew his hand for an instant and regarded Clarence with his accusing green eyes. “I suppose,” he began, “there’s no reason why you shouldn’t marry her?” And at the look of astonishment in the eyes of his guest he continued, “I mean, there’s been no other woman ... you’ve led a clean, pure life. You are fit to marry such a pure, innocent girl.”

By now Clarence had became quite still, with the stillness of one who cannot believe the sensations conveyed by his own nerves. His mouth opened. It closed. At last he stammered, “Why.... Why ... of course there’s been no other woman.... I don’t know anything about women.” (And in the back of his mind a still small voice said, “But I’m learning.... I’m learning.”)

Harvey Seton backed away and stood with his lean legs between Clarence and the dead fire. He shook himself suddenly as if the chill had penetrated even his spare frame. “Well, I’m glad to hear that.... I’m glad to hear that.... I didn’t know. Things are different in a city like New York.... And then you talked to Lily Shane....”

“But she spoke to me first....”

“I know ... I know. I’ve encountered temptations.” And he squared his thin shoulders with the air of St. Anthony resisting all the forces of the Devil. “I know.” Then he turned suddenly and raised his arm toward the flickering gas. “It’s gettin’ chilly in here.... We’d best go to bed.”

On the way to the door, the father turned in the darkness. “Of course,” he said, “you can leave your things here if you’re only going to be gone three days.... There’s no use in lugging all that stuff away with you.... You can get it when you come back....” There was a little pause, during which Clarence shuddered silently. “When you come back to propose to May. My, it’ll make her happy. You know, she’s one of the marryin’ kind.”

In the mind of Clarence there lingered the memory of that obscene giggle. With this new turn of affairs, it filled him with actual terror.

After he had gone to his room, he stood for a time looking out of the window far across to the other side of the Town. The house stood on a hill so that it overlooked all the wide and flooded expanse of the Flats. It was impossible to have seen Shane’s Castle but above the spot where it raised its gloomy pile there was a great glow that filled all the sky. To be sure, it was a glow caused by the flames from the furnaces but it might have come from a great house where there was a ball in progress with music and good food and champagne punch.... The glow appeared at length to spread over all the Town and penetrate the very blood of Clarence as he stood there silhouetted against the light. His bony legs shivered beneath his cotton nightshirt; it may have been the cold, or it may have been fright. Clarence himself could not have said which it was.

Presently he lifted the window a little way. Unmistakably it was growing colder. There would be skating in three days. Nothing could alter the course of nature.

16

IT was about this time that Gramp Tolliver, as if he scented the imminence of stupendous happenings, began like a long dormant volcano to display signs of activity. Despite the bitter cold and the ice that lay thick upon the pavement, he left his cell and, clad in a beaver cap and a moth-eaten coonskin coat, took to wandering about the streets. This activity Hattie Tolliver observed with apprehension, not alone because of the risk which the glittering pavements placed upon his brittle old bones, but because from long experience she interpreted such behavior as an omen of disaster. Standing in the doorway she watched his daily departure with a hostile eye, knowing well enough that if he did not come to grief, he would return in time for meals; his appetite was the best and on the rare occasions when he undertook any exercise it suffered a consequent augmentation. All the signs were present at meal time when the noise in the room above the kitchen became more violent and assumed a variety of manifestations. On occasion there was an admirable directness in Gramp Tolliver, not distantly akin to the directness of an elderly tiger at the approach of the feeding hour.

The sight of his grotesque figure, wrapped in furs and perambulating with uncanny skill the slippery places of the street, provided the people of the neighborhood with a divertissement of rare quality. As he passed along the street they took their children to the windows and there pointed out with ominous fingers his figure, saying, “There goes old man Tolliver, a living example of what laziness comes to. A perfect failure in life! Let him be an example to you.... Just watch him! If it was a good hard working man like your grandfather, children, he would have fallen and broken his leg long ago. But not him! Not old man Tolliver! The devil looks out for him!”

And by that time Gramp Tolliver would have vanished around the next corner to draw new moralists to peer at him from behind the Boston fern that adorned each successive bay window.

Knowing these things, Hattie Tolliver in her respectable heart experienced a certain shame at this frank exposure of Gramp. She would have preferred some other person as a walking example of failure; but there was nothing to be done unless she locked him in his room, and then he might easily have climbed to freedom by way of the grape arbor, a proceeding even more perilous to his brittle limbs than these icy promenades.

Into the midst of Gramp Tolliver’s unusual behavior, Ellen returned from Shane’s Castle with her appearance altered almost beyond the realms of the imagination. She had stayed with Lily, at the request of her cousin, over the three days following the ball, and now, on her return, it was clear that something stupendous had taken place during the visit.

She came upon her mother without warning in the very midst of a busy morning, and at sight of her Mrs. Tolliver halted her work abruptly and stood staring quietly for a good three minutes, while Ellen took off her hat and laid aside her coat. It was then that the shock became so great that Mrs. Tolliver broke the silence. She went at once into the heart of things.

“What has Lily done to you? What ideas has she put into your head?”

There was reason for her astonishment; the girl had changed. She appeared older, more mature. The wire rat, that so recently had supported the pompadour which was her pride, had vanished, and her fine black hair lay smooth and close to her head, in a fashion created by a doubtful lady named Cléo de Merode and appropriated not long afterward by Lily Shane. Her corsets, instead of being laced to give her the hourglass figure and the slight stoop forward so cherished in those days, were now worn so indecently loose that the clasps of her flaring skirt no longer fulfilled their mission. She was, according to the standards of the Town, extremely unfashionable in appearance, but she was far more beautiful. She belonged now not to the world of fashion plates fed to small towns by gigantic women’s papers, but to a world of her own which had little to do with fashion or convention. Even though there was something ridiculous in her appearance, she had a new dignity. Something of the provinciality had slipped away. It was this, perhaps, which alarmed her mother—as if suddenly the girl had escaped into that horrid world where Lily moved and had her being.

“To think,” said Mrs. Tolliver mournfully, “that I sent away my little girl and now she comes back to me a grown woman. That’s what Lily has done to you. You aren’t my little girl any longer.”

To this Ellen made no reply. She stood, somewhat sullenly, as if she implied that there was no answer to such a sentimental observation.

“I suppose it’s Lily who had you change your hair.”

“I have beautiful hair. Why should I spoil it with a rat?”

“Lily said that. I know she did.... I can hear her saying it. But that doesn’t make it right.... It’s not the fashion, at least not in the Town. And that’s where you’re living.”

For the first time Ellen smiled, in her old secretive fashion, as if she and Lily had entered upon some dark compact.

“It was just what Lily said. Rats are silly things, anyway.”

“They’ll laugh at you,” continued her mother, with an air of feeling her way. “Young men don’t like girls to be different. It makes them seem eccentric.”

Ellen must have known, in her shrewd way, that her mother was not speaking frankly. She knew beyond all doubt that her mother was not concerned with what the young men would think. She was talking thus because she saw these things—the rat, the corsets, the new air—all as signs of something far deeper. She was fighting against the escape of her child, battling to keep her always.

“Yes, they would laugh, wouldn’t they?” remarked Ellen presently. And then, quite suddenly, the timbre of her voice changed. “Well, let ’em,” she added abruptly.

As if she saw the beginnings of a storm, her mother sighed, turned away and observed casually, “Gramp has started to wander about again. It worries me.”

But Ellen swept past her and placing her handbag on the dining room table, she opened it, saying, “Lily gave me some clothes.”

“You shouldn’t have taken them. I don’t want Lily making paupers of us.”

“I thought about that,” said Ellen with an air of reflection. “But you don’t understand Lily.... It wasn’t like that at all. She doesn’t do things that way.... She gave them to me as a present, the way she might have given me a book.”

For a time there was a silence during which Ellen proceeded with the unpacking of her bag. Reverently, almost with an air of worship, she took out from among her own threadbare clothes three gowns of superb material and spread them across the table under the gray winter light. One was of black, one of green—the color of deep jade—and the third was the color of flame, so brilliant that in the comfortable shabby room it destroyed all else.

“I’m sorry I let you stay at Shane’s Castle,” began her mother. “Lily ... Lily ...” she halted abruptly and regarded her daughter with suspicion. “She didn’t promise you anything, did she?”

Ellen laughed, but through the sound of her soft mirth there ran, like a taut singing wire, the echo of subdued bitterness. “No. At least nothing very definite.... She said that when I came to Paris to study I could live with her. We didn’t get beyond that.”

“But you don’t want to go to Paris.... It’s a wicked city.... I thought you’d given all that up long ago.”

But Ellen only lifted the flame colored gown and said, “Look at it. Feel it. Isn’t it beautiful?” And she ran her hand over the soft brocade with a sensuous air that was new and alarming. “There’s nothing like it in all the Town.”

Dumbly the mother fingered the stuff; she felt of it tenderly, reverently, and after a long time she said, “But you couldn’t wear such clothes here. Nobody has ever seen anything like them ... except on Lily, and she’s different. That’s why people talk about her. No, you couldn’t wear them here. People would laugh at you.”

For an answer Ellen only held up the green gown and then the black one. They were simply made and not dissimilar, the flame colored one girdled by a chain of glittering rhinestones, the others by cords of silver. They were so scant there seemed to be nothing to them, so simply made that their lack of ornament conveyed to Hattie Tolliver a sense of nakedness. People in the Town wore bows, rosebuds, festoons of lace—all save Lily.

“I don’t see what Lily was thinking of,” she observed presently. And she drew in her lower lip doubtfully with an air of meditation as if the gowns raised before her eyes a wild vista of foreign orgies.

“Yes, people would laugh at me,” said Ellen, “not that it makes any difference.”

And placing the gowns over her arm, she turned away and started up the stairs to her own room. Her mother, staring after her, made a clucking sound which was her invariable signal of alarm. She must have speculated upon what passed between Ellen and her mysterious cousin within the depths of the gloomy house among the Mills; but she said nothing. In such a mood, it was impossible to learn anything from the girl.

And as she turned at last to resume her duties in the kitchen, the shadow of a moth-eaten coonskin coat and beaver hat passed the window. It was the ominous shadow of Gramp Tolliver hungrily returning for his noon meal. Clearly there was calamity in the air. He had never been so active before....

Ellen had a way of dealing with the truth which must have alarmed her mother. It was not that she lied; rather it was that by some selective process she withheld certain truths and brought forward others so that the resulting effect was one of distortion, complicated by the wildest variation of mood. At the moment the girl appeared to be elated, perhaps only by the possession of the three naked gowns—so elated that her high spirits carried into the afternoon when she announced her intention of going skating.

“Are you going with May?” questioned her mother as she left the house.

“No, I’m going alone. May has Clarence Murdock. I don’t imagine she’ll want to be disturbed.” And then with a sort of grim malice she added, “Things aren’t moving very fast for May.... Not fast enough to suit her mother. You see she spread the story months ago that she was already engaged, and now she has to make it work out.”

And without another word she passed out of the door into the bright cold sunshine, her tall, fine figure moving briskly down the path between the shaggy, frozen lilacs that marked the path to that extraordinary house of the shabby and respectable Tollivers.

17

WALKER’S Pond lay on the outskirts of the Town, a long sinuous expanse of water, frozen now, which wound its length between two long low hills left behind by the melting of the second great glacier. It twisted its way among the convolutions of rock and earth in a multitude of small coves and inlets, fringed by tangled bushes and low willows that stood black and naked in the winter wind. At the lower end the pond expanded into a broad and circular lake on the borders of which stood a low shed. Here it was that the crowds from the Town did their skating and here it was that May, in ignorance of the promise exacted by her impatient father, had brought the reluctant Clarence.

Any one watching the course of Ellen as she neared the spot must have realized that she had no intention of joining the crowd; instead of approaching the pond by the road of frozen clay which ended near the shed, she turned off through the fields, and swinging her skates, struck out for the far end where it lengthened into a serpentine canal. As she walked her skirts struck the ice coated stalks of the dead weeds, causing them to break off and fall beneath her feet with a slight tinkling sound of distant, crystal music. Among the bushes that bordered the fields the berries of the dogwood showed crimson against the black of the bare branches with a color rivaled only by the dark flame of the plumed sumach. Something in the day’s brilliance must have penetrated the soul of the girl, for she sang as she walked more and more quickly in the direction of the ice. There was in her manner, now that she was once more alone and unharassed, something wild and passionate, a sort of untamed fierceness of the spirit.

Before her from the crest of the low hill, the lower pond at last spread out its glittering oval, sprinkled now with the black figures of skaters moving round and round with a soft rhythmic motion. The crisp air rang with the distant sound of steel upon ice. It was a queer, muted sound, like the music of violins in a far-off orchestra. For a moment Ellen stood quietly among the trees contemplating the distant black figures, as if she stood, a goddess, upon some Olympian peak regarding the spectacle of Man; and then with a sudden bound, she ran down the long slope and in a little cove sheltered from the wind, fastened her skates, and sprang forward on to the glistening ice.

She skated superbly. The lines of her young body, so slender, so sinuous, so strong, despite all the awkwardness of her clothes, stood revealed in the triumphant swing of her strokes. Here in her own hidden cove, she gave full rein to the wild, secret ecstasy of a proud, shy soul. Now she flew ahead into the biting wind; now she halted, pirouetting in a wild freedom; now, with a careless grace, she skated backward for a time, and presently she fell to practising with the precision of an artist one intricate figure after another. In this lonely backwater, she must have skated thus, triumphing in her skill and grace, for more than an hour; and at length, when she had accomplished each figure with perfection, she glided to the bank and, removing her skates, set about gathering sticks. In another moment she had lighted a fire and sat down by the side of it, her hair streaming, her cheeks bright with the cold, to warm her hands and sit staring into the blaze. Drifting up the sinuous curves of the pond, the sound of skating still floated toward her, but of this she no longer appeared to take any notice. She sat thoughtfully, ignoring it, and presently the color began a little to recede from her cheek and the old expression of restlessness to steal back into her dark eyes. The hills shut her in now, as if they might imprison her in their brooding fashion forever.

She had been sitting thus for more than an hour, apparently in profound thought, when slowly she became aware that the solitude of her retreat had been violated. In the gathering dusk of the early winter evening she beheld, through the branches of the thick willows which sheltered her, the figure of an intruder—a man—who skated awkwardly and with an air of effort, as if the act required the most profound concentration. Yet it was clear that his mind wandered now and then to other things, for from time to time in the stillness of the evening the sound of his muttering reached her. He failed even to notice the smoke of the dying fire, and as he came nearer a sudden gust of wind carried his words toward her so that in snatches they became audible.

“I won’t do it.... I’ll be damned if I do. (And then the labored, steady ring of his skates on the glittering ice.) They can’t make me....” (Then once more a painful labored concentration upon skates and ankles that were too weak.)

By now Ellen must have recognized him. The figure was unmistakable—slight, rather stiff and incredibly neat, even to the carefully pressed line of his trousers. In place of a warm skating cap he wore a Fedora hat pulled over his ears to prevent the wind, which had reddened his smooth face, from blowing it astray. The man was Clarence Murdock. Ellen might have permitted him to pass unnoticed, save that in the next moment he came round the willows and, tottering upon his skates, stood face to face with her.

For a moment he stared at her silently, with the air of one who cannot believe his senses.

“Well?” said Ellen, rising to her feet slowly.

Clarence shook himself, balancing more and more perilously on his skates. “I didn’t know you were here,” he began. “I didn’t see you.”

“I wasn’t there,” replied Ellen, indicating the direction of the round pond. “I’ve been skating here all afternoon.... You look cold. Wait, I’ll poke up the fire. I was going home, but I’m in no hurry.”

Once his astonishment had passed away, his manner assumed a certain calm; it appeared even that he experienced a relief in finding her there among the willows. He began to rub his ears vigorously while the fire, beneath the proddings of Ellen and the addition of more fuel, sprang into a blaze. It crackled cheerily and sent a bright shower of sparks heavenward. Within its glow Clarence, extending his hands toward the warmth, seated himself. He was more calm now, as if the quiet, capable directness of the girl had quieted his anxiety.

There was a long silence and presently Ellen asked, “Where’s May?” But all the answer she received was a nod of the head indicating the round pond that lay beyond the hill. Again the silence enveloped them.

“It’s fine skating,” said Ellen, in another attempt at conversation. “The best there has been this winter.” (It was clear that she could not say she had heard him talking to himself.)

“It is,” replied her companion, thoughtfully, “but I can’t skate very well. It’s been a long time....”

The girl was slipping on her skates once more with an air which said, “If you won’t talk then I’ll skate, at least until you warm yourself.” She slipped to the edge of the ice and glided away, but she did not go any great distance. She circled about, gracefully, with a sure strength which carried an air of defiance, as if she sought to show Mr. Murdock how well it could be done. She pirouetted and did difficult figures with all the grace of a soaring bird. Indeed, she should have been to Clarence Murdock an intolerable spectacle. But she was not insufferable; on the contrary she clearly inspired him with a profound wonder. He watched her with a concentration approached only by that which he had given to his own efforts in the same direction. To observe her more clearly, he had put on his nose glasses and, beneath their neatly polished surface, his near-sighted eyes grew bright with admiration. Presently as she approached the shore in a sudden graceful swoop, he stirred himself and said, “You skate beautifully.... I wonder if you could help me.”

“To skate?” inquired Ellen.

Clarence coughed nervously. “I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean in another way.”

Ellen, halting abruptly, seated herself on a rock. “In what way?” she asked. “I’ll help you if I can.”

For a time Clarence did not reply. In the distance, the faint whirring sound of the other skaters had grown gradually less and less distinct as one by one they withdrew from the ice to turn their feet homeward toward the Town. At last he said, “I oughtn’t to speak to you, but I thought you might understand ... being a woman.”

It was the first time any one had ever called her a woman, and, despite all her hard independence, it flattered her. She leaned forward a little and said, “Maybe I will ... I don’t know until you tell me what it is.”

And then Clarence blurted out the truth. “It’s about May.... I don’t want to marry her!”

Ellen laughed suddenly in a mocking fashion. “Well,” she said, “do you have to? Have you asked her to? There’s no law to make you do it.”

At this speech Clarence blushed, and to cover his embarrassment, he bent his head and started once more to rub his ears, so that when he spoke again it was without looking at her. “It isn’t that ... I haven’t asked her. But I’m in a bad position. You see, I promised her father that I’d ask her to-day.... I didn’t want to. I really didn’t. I had meant to once, but I changed my mind.... I can’t explain that. It was her father that forced the promise out of me.”

There was no doubt of his misery. Even to Ellen it must have been clear that he felt cornered, trapped, like some mild and inoffensive animal. He was such a nice young man.

Again Ellen laughed scornfully. “It’s what old man Seton would do ... the old skinflint!”

In the darkness beyond the little ring of flame the shadows danced on the black and naked bushes. There was in the lonely figures by the fire an air of infinite pathos. They were both so young, so ignorant, so perplexed by the business of living.

“You can always run away,” suggested Ellen. “They couldn’t arrest you for it....”

At this Clarence looked up suddenly. “But don’t you see, all my clothes are at the Setons’ ... everything I brought with me. I have to get them and if I go back I’ll have to face her father.”

“But is that the only reason?” asked his companion. “I should think you’d be glad enough to escape at the price of a few clothes.” She laughed suddenly with a curious, scornful mockery that confused Clarence. “That is, if you really want to escape. I should think you wouldn’t want to settle down in this nasty Town.... There’s nothing here for you. There’s nothing for any one. I’m going to run away before long myself,” she added boldly.

She spoke with such passion that Clarence made no reply for a long time. He sat watching her across the circle of light, contemplating her clear blue eyes, the fine glow of her face, the superb line of the throat which she herself admired so passionately. Something was happening to him; it was the old thing once more at work, the thing which betrayed him when he least expected it. Presently he said, “You’re still going to New York? To study?”

To which Ellen replied with the same intensity, “Of course I am. I don’t want a little shut-in world. They can’t smother me ... none of them! Not all of them together!”

It may have been that Clarence gathered strength from her strength, that far down in his timid soul some chord of his nature responded to the defiance of the girl. Certainly she was admirable ... the way she had come to this hidden spot to skate in solitude, to build a fire with her own hands, to ask him in a friendly way, so frank and so free from all coyness and giggling, to warm his anemic frozen body. She was like the woman on the train. She wasn’t afraid. And she didn’t giggle....

“I’ve been wondering,” he said after a little time. “I’ve been wondering ...” and then he coughed suddenly. “Would you come with me to New York?”

At this speech Ellen looked at him with a sudden penetrating glance, as if she failed to understand his meaning. Then, with the caution of a proud nature, she said, “But you see, I haven’t enough money yet. It takes money for a girl alone in a city.” She did not expose herself to the peril of being hurt.

But Clarence, now that he was started, rushed on, “I don’t mean that ... I mean ... would you marry me? Would you come as my wife?”

The sound of the distant skating had died away until by now only the faintest ring of steel singing upon the ice was borne by the rising wind into the little cove. In the darkness Ellen bowed her head and sat thus silently for a long time. Her thoughts, whatever they may have been, were interrupted presently by the sound of Clarence’s voice, softer this time, and less frightened, though it still carried a timidity, almost the abjectness of an apology.

“I could help you.... I could make money and you could go on with your music. You see, this didn’t come over me suddenly. I’ve thought about it before ... ever since I saw you that first time.”

There was nothing in the least dominating in his manner. He sat there at a proper distance from her, mild and gentle, pleading his case. It was clear that he was even a little frightened, as if he had spoken almost without willing it. But the little vein in his throat which Lily had noticed so long before began to throb, slowly at first and then with steadily mounting rapidity. If Lily had been there, she would have understood its significance as surely as a ship’s captain watching his barometer in a storm. Lily understood such things.

When at last Ellen raised her head, it was to look at him directly and with a certain appraising frankness.

“Yes.... I’ll marry you,” she said at last. She spoke breathlessly, her voice clouded by a faint choking sound as if for the first time in her life she were really frightened.

“I’m glad,” said Clarence. “You see, I want to be great and famous some day. I want to be rich, and I want some one to share it with me. I couldn’t marry May. It would be like shutting myself up in a trap.” The terrible ambitions were loose again, running wild, leaping all bounds, intoxicating him. “I want to be great and rich ... if I can. I never told anybody this before, but I thought you might understand because you’re different.”

It was the longest speech he had ever made in her presence, and throughout its duration Ellen watched him with a growing wonder mirrored in her eyes.

“I didn’t know you felt that way,” she said almost with reverence. “You never mentioned it before. I thought you’d be content with May.”

But all the same, her words lacked the ring of conviction. All at once she felt herself engulfed by a great and unaccustomed wave of pity that was quite beyond explanation. She felt that Mr. Murdock was pathetic. It was almost as if she could weep for him. It was not until long afterward that she understood this chaotic emotion. It passed quickly, and she said, “But you’d better go now and find May.... Don’t wait for me ... I’m all right.... She must be all alone by now, wondering where you are. I can look out for myself.”

And a little later Clarence, treacherously shepherding May on their last walk together, saw in the far distance against the dying glow the black silhouette of Ellen. Alone she moved over the crest of the high hill, walking slowly now, her head bent in thought ... remote, proud and somehow terrifying.

18

IT was not until ten o’clock that Mrs. Tolliver began to grow uneasy. There had been, after all, nothing to cause alarm. An hour before supper Ellen had come in from skating with a countenance fresh and almost happy. True, Gramp Tolliver had returned late from one of his expeditions—the second that day—and was noisier and more impatient than usual in his room above stairs. Indeed his uproar continued even after feeding time, until long after Ellen, saying that she was to spend the evening at the Setons’, had gone out into the rising wind. If there was anything which alarmed Mrs. Tolliver it was the mutterings of the volcano overhead; so great was the variety of its manifestations that she remarked upon it to her husband.

“You know,” she said, “Gramp is restless again ... worse than ever ... worse than he was at election time.”

From his refuge on the great threadbare sofa her husband mumbled a reply, indistinct yet understandable because it was a speech he made so frequently when his wife insisted upon conversation.

“You’re worrying again.... There’s nothing to worry about.”

But she knew that she was right. It was a feeling which was almost physical, an intuition, an instinct which her husband, in the way of fathers (which at best were but poor things), did not share. After all he came by his conclusions in a logical fashion, not without the aid of a peculiar and individual philosophy, and therefore, by omitting the human equation, he gave his wife the opportunity more than once of saying, “I told you so.”

Though Mrs. Tolliver rocked and darned placidly enough, she was not, even out of respect for her husband’s love of slumber and forgetfulness, to be kept silent. When Ellen was out and there was no flow of music to bind together the comfort of the evening, it was necessary to talk; otherwise the peace became mere stillness, and the contentment a barren boredom. For Mrs. Tolliver needed constant evidence of happiness or cordiality. It was a thing not to be taken easily and for granted; one must make a show of it.

“He behaved like this, only not as bad, when Judge Weissman—the dirty scoundrel—bought the last election.”

This time the only reply from the sofa was an engulfing silence, broken now and then by the aggravating sound of heavy breathing.

“Why don’t you say something?” she said at last in exasperation. “Why don’t you talk to me? I work all day and then when evening comes, all you do is to sleep.”

The blanket on the sofa heaved a little and Charles Tolliver changed his position, muttering at the same time, “What shall I say? What do you want me to say?” And then after a pregnant silence, “If Gramp is ranting around, I don’t see what we can do about it.”

He spoke thus of his father in the most natural fashion. It was as if the old man were something of a stranger to him, a vague figure entirely outside the circle of the family existence.

After another long silence, Mrs. Tolliver observed, “It’s nearly eleven o’clock and Ellen hasn’t come in yet.” Then she leaned forward to address her sons who lay sprawled on the floor, the older one reading as usual, the other lying on his back staring in his sulky way at the ceiling. “You boys must go to bed now. I’ll come up with you and see that you’re tucked in properly. It’s a cold night.”

The three departed and after a time, during which the hall clock sounded the hour of eleven, she descended from the neat upper regions and went into the kitchen to see that the door was locked, that the dog was on his mat, that the tap was not dripping, indeed, to oversee all the minutiæ of the household that were the very breath of her existence. When at last she reëntered the living room there was in her manner every evidence of agitation. She approached her husband and shook him from his comfortable oblivion.

“I don’t understand about Ellen,” she said. “It’s very late. Maybe you’d better go over to the Setons’ and see what has happened to her.”

But her spouse only groaned and muttered. “Wait a while.... Like as not she’s in bed asleep.”

“That couldn’t be ... not without my knowing it.”

What she would have done next was a matter for speculation, but before she had opportunity to act there rang through the silent house the sound of the doorbell being pushed violently and with annoying energy. It rang in a series of staccato periods, broken now and then with a single long and violent clamor. At the sound Mrs. Tolliver ran, and, as she approached the door, she cried out, “Yes!... Yes!... I’m coming. You needn’t wear out the battery!”

On opening it she discovered on the outside that source of all evil, Jimmy Seton. Even at sight of her he was unable to relinquish the pleasure of ringing the bell. Indeed he kept his hand upon the button until she knocked it loose by a sudden slap on the wrist.

“What do you mean by ringing like that?”

Jimmy, unabashed, faced her. “Ma,” he began, in his shrill voice, “wants to know if Mr. Murdock is over here. He ain’t been at our house since before supper. He said he was going to the barber shop and he never came back.”

For an instant, Mrs. Tolliver, wisely, held her tongue. The old instinct, working rapidly, told her that she must protect Ellen. It was clear then that the girl had not gone to the Setons’. Where could she be? Where was Mr. Murdock? Within the space of a second unspeakable catastrophes framed themselves in her mind. But she managed to answer. “He’s not here. He hasn’t been here. I don’t know anything about him.”

“All right,” said Jimmy. “I’ll tell her.”

He made a faint gesture toward the button of the doorbell but Mrs. Tolliver thrust her powerful body between him and the object of his temptation, so that Jimmy, with a baffled air, turned and sped away into the darkness. When he had vanished she closed the door slowly, and stood for an instant leaning against it. Then, before she moved away, she raised her voice in a summons.

“Papa!” she called, “Papa! Something has happened. Ellen wasn’t at the Setons’ and Mr. Murdock is missing.”

In the moment or two while she stood thus with her hand resting on the knob of the door, there passed quickly through her mind in a series of isolated fragments all the events and the forebodings of the past few weeks. Gradually these fitted into a pattern. She understood well enough what had happened; she knew that Ellen had gone. Yet she refused to admit this, as if by refusing to acknowledge the fact it might come gradually to have no existence. She understood Gramp Tolliver’s ominous outburst of restlessness, Ellen’s strange look of triumph, the air almost of happiness which had come over the girl. Only one thing she could not understand.... Clarence Murdock! After all, Ellen had mocked him as something quite beneath her consideration. Why had she chosen him?

In that single brief moment she was hurt more deeply than she was ever hurt again. Those things which came afterward were not so cruel because she came in time to be used to them. But this ... this was so sudden, so cruel. She had no defenses ready, not even the defense which the less primitive have—a capacity for putting themselves into the shoes of the other fellow, of understanding why he should have acted thus and so. No, there was nothing, save only a sudden sharp physical pain and that which was far greater—a fear for a child who was gone suddenly from her protection.

When she reëntered the warm living room, she found her husband sitting on the edge of his sofa. Because he was a man who enjoyed his sleep and was reluctant to shake it off, he was not altogether awake.

“You say,” he murmured drowsily, “that Ellen has run off with that Murdock?”

“They are both gone.... They must have gone together.”

This the husband considered for a moment. Foolishly exalting logic above intuition, he asked, “How do you know?” To which his wife retorted, “Know! Know! Because I do know! I’m sure of it.... What are we going to do?” Suddenly she leaned forward and shook him violently. “Why, they’re not even married. They can’t have been and they’ve gone off together. Anything might happen.”

The husband, out of the depths of knowledge which arose not from instinct or profound love but from long speculation upon the human race answered, “Don’t worry about that. Ellen’s no fool! She’s not in love with him!”

“When you talk like that, you’re like your father!” Nothing could have signified in clearer fashion the gravity of the situation, for this was a retort which Mrs. Tolliver used only upon occasions of profound disaster. It was, she believed, the most cruel thing she could say. This time she did not wait for him to reply.

“What train have they taken?... They’re bound to go east. Perhaps you can stop them. Come! Get up.... If you don’t go I will!”

With exasperating slowness her husband gained his feet. “There’s a train a little after eleven.” He regarded his watch. “We might be able to catch them, though I don’t think I can make it.”

Already his wife stood before him with the coat she had taken from the living room closet. “Here!” she said. “And wrap your throat well. It’s a bitter night.” Then she herself helped him into his coat and fastened his muffler with great care. Before she had finished, he asked, “What sort of a person is this Murdock?”

“It’s no time to ask that.... Go! Hurry!”

Barely had these speeding words fallen from her lips when from overhead there came with the suddenness of an explosion the sound of a terrific crash, as if some part of the house had suddenly collapsed. The sound distinctly came from the rear. The volcano at last had burst forth!

In a breathless instant, the pair faced each other. It was Mrs. Tolliver who spoke first.

“What has he done now?” And with a fierce emphasis she added, “I think the Devil himself has gotten into him.” Then she recovered herself quickly. “Go! Go! Catch Ellen. I’ll take care of Gramp.”

He argued for a moment—one precious moment—and losing as usual, was sped on his way by his powerful wife.

When her husband had vanished sleepily into the darkness, Mrs. Tolliver made her way up the back stairs to the room under the tin roof. As she opened the door, there rose before her in the flickering light of the kerosene lamp a room which had the appearance of a place wrecked by a cyclone. One of the vast bookcases lay overturned, the worn leather volumes sprawled in a wild confusion about the floor. Bits of paper covered with bird track handwriting lay scattered like fallen leaves and at one side, a little removed from the path of the catastrophe, lay stretched at full length the brittle body of Gramp Tolliver, still and apparently unconscious. There was in its rigidity something ghastly. Only a miracle had saved him from being buried under his own books, battered and broken perhaps by his own beloved Decline and Fall.

Climbing over the wreckage, Mrs. Tolliver leaned down and took the body of the old man in her arms. Thus a truce was declared, and when the one enemy had made certain that the other was still alive, she went downstairs, wrapped a shawl about her and fetched a doctor.

19

IT was midnight when Charles Tolliver returned alone. Without removing his coat or the carefully bound muffler, he made his way through the house to the back stairs which he climbed slowly and with an air of sheepishness. His wife was, after all, no easy woman to face under conditions like this. The news he had for her was not the best. Indeed it is probable that he experienced a great relief when he found that his wife was not alone. In the dusty room thrown now into a wild disorder which Mrs. Tolliver was already vigorously engaged in clearing away, the doctor stood beside the bed. There was a quality of the grotesque in the battered figure of the old man and the fantastic shadow of the physician cast by the flickering light upon the wall. At the sound of his footsteps Mrs. Tolliver, still holding in her arms volumes three and four of the Decline and Fall, looked up from her task. She stared hard at him as if by concentration she might produce out of thin air the figure of her daughter. But there was no mistake. He was alone.

It was Charles Tolliver who spoke first. He found no pleasure in airing his troubles in public, so he said nothing of his errand. “What’s the matter with Gramp?”

The doctor faced him. He was a short fat man with little mutton chop whiskers. “It seems he’s had a stroke,” he murmured. “And yet I don’t know. It might be something else. The symptoms aren’t right.” And he took up once more the bony wrist, to count the pulse. Instantly Mrs. Tolliver stepped close to her husband.

“Did you find her?” she asked in a low voice.

“No.... The train was pulling out just as I reached the station. I was a minute too late.”

“It was Gramp who let her get away. If you hadn’t stayed to argue. You could have hurried. My God, who knows what will happen to her.... My little girl!”

“She isn’t that.... Not any longer.”

But before she could reply the doctor interrupted. “No, I don’t know what it is. His pulse seems all right and he has no fever.” And the little man fell to wagging his head, in the manner of a physician who was always secretly doubtful of his own opinion. “To-morrow I’ll fetch another doctor. We’ll have to have a consultation.”

After that he packed his bag, wrapped himself up to the throat and bidding them good night in a mournful, bedside whisper, as if (thought Hattie sourly) Gramp had been an adored child cut off in the bloom of youth, made his way down the creaking stairs.

When he had gone, Mrs. Tolliver turned abruptly and said again, “You could have made it if Gramp hadn’t thrown this fit. And now she’s gone....”

In the shadows that covered the vast bed, Gramp Tolliver’s body lay stiff as a poker thrust beneath the sheets. But presently in the midst of the hushed talk that went on by his side, one eye opened slowly and surveyed the scene. For an instant there rose in the still cold air the echo—it could not have been more than that—of a far-off demoniacal chuckle. At the sound Mrs. Tolliver turned and approached the bed.

“He laughed,” she said to her husband. “I’m sure of it ...” and she shook the old man gently without gaining the faintest suspicion of a response. He lay rigid and still. At last she turned away.

“Go,” she said, “and take the next train. You might catch them at Pittsburgh. If you haven’t enough money there’s some tied in a handkerchief under the mattress.”

“But you.... What’ll you do?”

“Never mind me ... I’ll sit here in the rocker and keep watch....”

And until the gray winter dawn crept in at the windows she sat there, awake, with one eye on the old man, for the echo of that wicked chuckle had awakened in her mind the most amazing suspicions. In the single moment that she had stood listening to the sound of the catastrophe overhead, Ellen had made her escape.... How could he have known what no one else knew? Yet she was certain that he had known.

Charles Tolliver did not overtake his daughter; indeed, on that night she escaped from him forever. He saw her afterward ... long afterward, but he never recaptured her, even for one fleeting moment. Perhaps in the dismal solitude of a day coach filled with weary travelers rushing eastward through the winter night, he understood this in his own way. It was, after all, a way different from that of his father, Old Gramp, or his wife who sat patiently now in a kind of dumb, animal agony by the side of the old man. Of Charles Tolliver, it might have been said that he expected nothing of life, that from the very first he had accepted life as at best a matter of compromise. One took what came and was thankful that it was not worse. Because he was like this people called him a weak man.

And it is impossible to say that he regretted profoundly the flight of his daughter. In his gentleness, he understood that this thing which she had done was inevitable. Nothing could have prevented it. Even the pursuit was a futile thing. If Ellen were recaptured, it was vain to hope that she would remain so; yet the pursuit was in itself a symbol of action and therefore it satisfied his wife in at least a small way. It may even have been that in the rare wakeful moments of his lonely, fruitless journey he envied Ellen; that he saw in her escape a hope which had always eluded him. He had been known since childhood as a worthy man, the unfortunate son of a father who was worthless and a failure. He had existed always as a symbol of virtue, as one who had stood by his mother (dead now these many years) in the long periods of poverty and unhappiness. If he had been ruthless instead of dutiful, if he had escaped, if he had ventured into a new world.... What might have happened? But even this thought could not have troubled him for long. He slipped easily back into the pleasant oblivion of sleep.

The passengers wakeful, uncomfortable, restless in the close air of the crowded car could never have guessed that the gray-haired, handsome man, who slept so peacefully, was a father in pursuit of an eloping daughter.

And in another train a hundred miles beyond, rushing faster and faster toward the rising dawn, sat Ellen and Clarence Murdock. They too rode in the common car, for the train was crowded. They sat bolt upright and rather far apart for lovers. From time to time Clarence reached out and touched her hand, gently, almost with deprecation, and to this she submitted quietly, as if she were unconscious of the humble gesture toward affection. It is true that they were both a little frightened; what had happened had happened so quickly. Even Clarence could not have explained it. To Ellen, though she came in the end to understand it all, it must have been a great mystery.

The romance—what little of it there had been—was all vanished now, gone cold before the glare of the flaring lights, beneath the staring, bleary eyes of their fellow passengers. Somehow everything had turned cold and stuffy, touched by the taste of soot and the accumulated dust of half a continent. The train rocked and swayed over the glittering rails, and presently Clarence, who had been frowning for a long time over something, said, “D’you think they’ll ever send on my hand bags?”

Ellen laughed and regarded him suddenly with a curious glance of startled affection. For a moment one might have taken them for a mother and child ... a mother who saw that her child must be protected and pitied a little.

“I wouldn’t worry over that,” she answered. “What difference does it make now?”

“And May ...” began Clarence once more.

“It’s done now,” said Ellen gravely. “Besides in a little while she’ll forget everything and marry some one else. Any man will suit May. It’s only a man she wants, not the man.”

But Clarence was not comforted; there was his conscience to torment him, and worse than that there was a distrust, vague and undefined, of what lay ahead. He could not have described it. If he had been a strong man, he would have said, “All this is a mistake. We will not marry. It is wrong, everything about it.” He could have turned back then and saved himself; but he did not. He sat quietly against the dusty plush, watching Ellen now and then out of the corner of his nice eyes with the manner of a man resting upon the rim of a volcano.

By dawn the train had come in sight of the furnaces on the outskirts of Pittsburgh and the color of the flames mingled with the cold gray of the January sky. He had come out on the train with Lily; he was going back on the train with her cousin. He stood there, timidly, upon the threshold of his new world—a world filled with people who haunted those rare flights of a treacherous imagination.

20

IT was not until noon of the following day that the amazing news percolated fully through the houses of the Town. Women congregated and discussed it, passionately; men greeted each other with the news, “Have you heard that Charlie Tolliver’s girl has eloped with that young Murdock who was visiting Skinflint Seton?” They turned the news over and over, worrying it, adding details, filling in the gaps in a story which could have been known to no one. And always the conclusion was the same ... that here was another evidence of the wildness and eccentricity of the Barr family. Old Julia Shane, in her youth, had done the same thing. And then there was Sam Barr and his crazy perpetual motion machine. The history of this spirited family was ransacked and a thousand odd, half-forgotten stories brought to light. There was, of course, that element which hinted that Ellen had eloped because the circumstances made it necessary. Women said this, not because they believed it, but because they hated Ellen and old Julia Shane.

In her sooty house among the Mills this grim old woman received the news, rather later than most (it was brought her by one of her negro servants) with a sort of wicked delight. This was a great-niece worthy of her blood, who took matters into her own hands and acted, quickly, sensationally! And before an hour had passed she seated herself with a quill pen and wrote the news triumphantly to Lily who, that morning, had started back to Paris. The letter finally overtook her daughter a month later when Lily, installed once more in her big house in the Rue Raynouard, sat awaiting the arrival of her friend the Baron. To him she read it aloud, creating for his pleasure a picture of the smoky Town, of the effect the news would have upon its residents. She described to him the fierce impetuous Ellen. She told him the Town was a town like Roubaix or Tourcoing or Lille, only more provincial.

Across the silver-laden tea table in her long drawing-room in Passy, she said, “You may see her one day yourself. I’ve told her to come here and live with me. She wants to be a great pianist.... A girl like that can accomplish anything she sets her mind to.... But I don’t think you’ll like her.... She’s too powerful.”

Nearer home, the news came to May Seton and her mother a little after midnight when Jimmy, sent a second time as messenger, brought back the suspicion of their elopement. In the beginning the situation was embarrassing, for May in her optimism had spread the story that the fiançailles of Clarence and herself had been accomplished. Once this had passed, she experienced a sort of inverted triumph, superior if possible even to that which might have arisen from the capture of a New York young man. She understood presently that people regarded her as a martyr, a virgin robbed of her lover, and once she got the full sense of this she played the rôle to perfection. Dressed in her most somber clothing, as if she mourned a lover worse than dead, she paid and received a great number of calls, always in company with her mother who now assumed the rôle of duenna and garnished May’s account of the affair with appropriate and growing details. Old ladies swooped about and settled upon the tale to pick it over and contemplate the ruins with ghoulish satisfaction, until at length the event, now of proportions beyond the realms of the imagination, became an epic in the chronicles of the Town, a piece in which May Seton played the rôle of injured innocence and Ellen that of adventuress in the grand manner of East Lynne or Lady Audley’s Secret. In short, what had appeared in the beginning to be a calamity, turned out to be a triumph. Husbands might be found at every turn, but public martyrdom comes rarely. Indeed before many weeks had passed, potential husbands began to loom upon the horizon and crowd into the middle distance. Because May in her bereavement had become what she had never been ... a figure of interest.

But there was one part of the story which remained known to only one person in the Town. It was the space of time which elapsed between the hour that Clarence departed for the mythical barber shop and the hour the train left for the east. This was a matter of five hours, in which much might have taken place. No one seemed able to account for it. No one had seen either of them. They had, to all intents, disappeared for five hours ... a thing which in the Town was incredible.

Yet there was one person who knew, and she was the last whom any one could suspect. It was impossible to believe that a creature so birdlike, so gentle, could have played a part in so scandalous an affair as the rape of May Seton’s lover. Yet it was true; the guilty pair had spent the five hours in the room filled with conch shells and pampas grass and plush, for Miss Ogilvie had kept her rash promise to Ellen. Indeed, the whole affair had been planned under her very eyes. But in the little house surrounded by lilacs and syringa bushes, she kept her secret as faithfully as she had kept her promise, though it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. It was almost as if she herself had escaped into a great world where there were no neighbors and no sewing circles.

But the two who suffered most were the two whose pride was greatest ... those born enemies Mrs. Tolliver and Skinflint Seton. From the moment of the elopement the ancient feud over the swindle of the synthetic corset stays emerged without shame or pretense into the open, and the story became common property that Harvey Seton had been seen on the Tollivers’ piazza being ordered into the street because he suggested that Ellen had eloped because the circumstances made it necessary.

Scarcely less mysterious than the missing five hours was the nature of Gramp’s illness, a thing which had baffled the consultations and head waggings of the Town’s best medical talent. Two days later he was up and about again perambulating once more, in his coonskin coat, the icy pavement of the Town. And it was with a new look of defiant malice that he regarded the faces peering at him from behind the Boston ferns of Sycamore Street. The sharp old eyes mocked the passers-by. They said, “My Granddaughter has a good deal of the old man in her. She has the courage to do as she sees fit. You’ll hear from that girl!” All this punctuated by the sharp tap! tap! tap! of his tough hickory stick on icy pavements where an ordinary man would long ago have slipped and broken his leg.

21

WEEKS passed before there came from Ellen any news beyond the mere statement that she was alive, comfortable and well, and that although she was sorry for her actions she could not have done otherwise. Some day, she implied with romantic overtones, they would understand.

When at last a real letter came, it was turbulent, hard and unrepentant. Nor was the spelling the best.

“I am sorry for May ... a little,” she wrote, “but it won’t make any difference to her. She is in love with men and not one man. To have lost Clarence won’t end her happiness. Any man will do as well. In a year she’ll be married, like as not to Herman Biggs. It was different with me. Everything depended upon Clarence ... everything, you understand. To me he made all the difference.

“And we are happy,” she continued, as if this was, after all, a matter of secondary importance. “Clarence loves me. We have a nice apartment quite near to Riverside Drive that overlooks the river where the warships anchor. It is the top floor of an enormous apartment house ... ten stories high, and the view is wonderful. You can see over half the city. It is called the Babylon Arms.

“You see, Clarence and two friends of his (a Mr. Bunce and a Mr. Wyck) shared it before I came and now we have it to ourselves, because his two friends kindly moved elsewhere. Mr. Bunce is nice but Mr. Wyck is a poor sport, always talking about his relatives. You see, he’s what he calls an ‘old New Yorker,’ sort of run-down and pathetic, and awfully dependent. I think he hates me for having taken Clarence away from him, and for breaking up the apartment. But it doesn’t matter. He’s too insignificant to count.

“Mr. Bunce got married the other day. He says we drove him to it, chasing him out into the street with no place to live. That’s the way he talks ... hearty and pleasant but a bit noisy. The girl isn’t much—a big, pleasant girl like himself whose father is a building contractor in Hoboken, which is really a suburb of New York.”

And so she sketched briefly, and with the careless cynicism of youth, the downfall of Mr. Wyck; for it is true that the reverberations of the elopement made themselves felt in a place so far from the Town as the Magical City. With her appearance the whole world of Mr. Wyck toppled, hung for a moment in mid-air, and at last collapsed, leaving him in the backwater of a grimy boarding house on lower Lexington Avenue. No longer had he any one to admire or honor him for the sake of the ancient Wyck blood and the spinster aunts in Yonkers. On the very day of Ellen’s arrival the name of Wyck Street was changed to Sullivan in honor of a Tammany politician. Night after night, a lonely little man, he sat, an outcast, on the edge of his narrow bed, waiting for his milk to heat over the gas jet in the fourth floor rear. He mourned Clarence who represented the only friendship he had ever known. He mourned the Babylon Arms where for a time he had been almost a man, independent and free. And as he mourned the hatred grew in the recesses of his timid, unhappy soul.

It is true that in her letter Ellen revealed a great deal, but it is true that she did not reveal everything, for there remained between her and a complete revelation the pride which would not allow her to admit disillusion. She did not, for example, say that the view from her windows included, besides the noble river, glimpses of wooden shacks and bleak factories, half-veiled in smoke and mist, on the distant Jersey shore. Nor did she say that beneath her window there were monotonous and hideous rows of brownstone houses, unrelieved in their ugliness even by tiny patches of mangy grass. And she said nothing of the railway tracks that lay between her and the river, crowded with cars that imprisoned lines of wretched cattle standing shoulder to shoulder, whose presence sometimes filled the lofty flat with the faint, dismal sounds and odors of the barnyard. These things she could not bring herself to set down on paper because they would have dimmed the splendor raised by such a name as The Babylon Arms.

Nor did she say that after all Mr. Bunce and Mr. Wyck and even perhaps Clarence were not so different from the people in the Town; because this might have given rise to a faint suspicion that, after all, she had not escaped. There were things and shades of things which the Town must never know. She understood, perhaps even then, the affair of building a career. There must be glory, only glory, and triumph.

And Mrs. Tolliver, reading the letter over and over in the long darkness of the winter evenings, stirred herself night after night to observe that “something had happened to Ellen.”

“She’s told me more in this letter than she has ever told me in all her life before. She must be happy or she couldn’t write such a letter.”

And for a time she consoled herself with this thought, only to utter after a long silence the eternal doubt. “I only hope he’s good enough for her.”

Then, when her husband had fallen into a final deep slumber from which he stubbornly refused to be roused, it was the habit of the woman to go to the piano and dissipate the terrible stillness of the lonely room with the strains of The Blue Danube and The Ninety and Nine played laboriously with fingers that were stained and a little stiff from hard work.

The faint, awkward sounds, arising so uncertainly from the depths of a piano accustomed now to silence, must have roused in her a long sequence of memories turning backward slowly as she played, into the days when she had struggled for time from household cares to learn those pitiful tunes. The hours spent at the old harmonium in her father’s parlor were hours stolen from cooking and baking, from caring for her younger brothers and sisters, hours which, so long ago, had raised in her imagination sounds and scenes more glamorous than anything found in the borders of the country that was her home. They were not great, these two melodies—one born of Evangelism and the other out of the gaiety of an Austrian city—yet they were in a fashion the little parcel of glamour which life had dealt out to Hattie Tolliver. The rest was work and watchfulness, worries and cares.

There must have been in the woman something magnificent, for never, even in deep recesses of her heart, did she complain of the niggardliness of that tiny parcel. She sought only to wrest a larger share for her children, for her Ellen who was gone now a-seeking glamour on her own.

And, of course, the sound of the music made by her stiffened fingers may have brought back for a time something of her lost Ellen.

Because there was in Hattie no softness which would allow her to admit defeat, she set about, once the first shock of the affair had softened, to reconstruct all her existence upon a new plan, motivated by a single ideal. How this change came about, she would have been the last to understand. It came, in a sense, as a revelation. She awoke one morning and there it was, clear as the very winter landscape—a vision of the sort which guides people of passionate nature. True, there were circumstances which led her mind in that one direction; there was, to be sure, the look that had come into the blue eyes of her elder son since the day when Ellen had fled. Any one could have seen it, a look so eloquent and so intense, which said, “I too must have my chance. I too must go into the world.” Perhaps he remembered the half-humorous promises to help him that Ellen had made so frequently. There was, she knew, a secret sympathy between the two in which she played no part. It was a look which came often enough into the eyes of Hattie Tolliver’s family. If the boy had been old enough to reason and understand such things, he might have said, “My grandfathers set out into a wilderness to conquer and subdue it. It was a land filled with savages and adventure. I too must have my chance. I am of a race of pioneers but I no longer have any frontier. I must turn back again, as Ellen has turned, to the east!” In a little while—a few years more—the look was certain to come into the eyes of Robert, the youngest.

And doubtless the woman came to understand that it was impossible any longer to hope that her husband might realize any of the wild and gaudy dreams she had held so often before his philosophic and indifferent eyes. He was a gentleman, and no longer young; he had indeed turned the corner into middle age. What must be done rested with her alone.

And so, understanding that Ellen would never turn back, the plan of her existence ceased to find its being in the smoky Town; it became instead a pursuit of her children. If they would not remain in the home she had made for them then she must follow them, and, like a nomad, place her tent and build her fires where they saw fit to rest.

So she set about planning how it was possible to escape from the Town, to transport all her family and their belongings into a world which she had disliked and even feared but which now must be faced. Fantastical schemes were born, reared their heads and collapsed in a brain which considered nothing impossible. She would herself support them all if necessary, though she had not the faintest idea of how it was to be done. Surely in a great city like New York, there were ways of becoming rich, even fabulously so. She had read stories in the newspapers....

But her first action was a direct one. Dressed in black merino and armed with an umbrella which she carried on important occasions as a general bears his baton, she assailed her enemy Judge Weissman in the sanctuary of his untidy office, and after a scene in which she accused him of thievery, bribery and a dozen other crimes, she bullied him, playing shrewdly upon a horsewhipping incident out of his own past, into using his influence to gain for her husband some new work—not mere work but a position worthy of him and of the dignity of her family.

She won the battle and in her triumph, which mounted higher and higher during the walk home, she gave rein in her unbounded optimism to even wilder and more fantastic schemes. There was relief in the knowledge that at last she had taken things into her own hands. No longer was she to be a power behind the throne urging forward an amiable and indifferent husband. Things must change now. She herself would act. She had achieved an opening wedge. In time she would secure an appointment for her husband in New York. She could take the children there. She could be where she could drop in on Ellen at the Babylon Arms (preposterous name!). She would watch and aid them in their progress toward success and glory. Ah, she could wrest anything from life. It was, after all, nothing more than a question of energy and persistence.

These thoughts were whirling madly about her brain as she turned the corner into Sycamore Street in time to see a group of children congregated before the path that led into the shaggy domain of the Tollivers. They appeared to be watching something and clung to the gate peering in through the lilacs at the vine-covered house. Unconsciously she increased her pace, and as she approached the gate they fell back, with a look of awe and the sort of animal curiosity which comes into the eyes of children gathered on the scene of a catastrophe. Through their ranks and into the house, she made her way like a fine ship in full sail.

Once inside she learned the news.

It was this—that upstairs in the room once occupied by Ellen there lay on the bed the unconscious form of her father, the invincible Jacob Barr. They told her that the patriarch, while superintending the loading of hay in his mows, had made a miss-step and so crashed to the floor twenty feet below. They had brought him to her house on a truss of hay. The doctors, the same doctors whom Gramp Tolliver had baffled, said he might die suddenly or that he might live for years, but he would never walk again.

When she had put the place in order and driven out the confusion which accompanies physicians, she seated herself in a chair opposite the unconscious old man and presently began to weep.

“What good is it now? What difference does it make?” she repeated bitterly over and over again.

Where before there had been but one, there were now two old men to be managed, and Hattie Tolliver, understanding that it was now impossible to follow Ellen, settled herself to waiting. For what? Perhaps for death to claim her own father. It would have been, as she said, a blessing, for the fracture concerned far more than a hip bone; the very spirit of old Jacob Barr was crushed in that fall from the mows. Sinking back upon the pillows of Ellen’s bed, he gave up the struggle. A life in which there was no activity was for him no life at all. He became again like a little child, like his own little children whom his daughter Hattie had cared for through all the years of his widowhood. Sometimes he sang songs and there were hours when he talked to himself and to Hattie of things which had happened when she was a very little girl or before she was born. He lived again in the Civil War and in the days preceding it when the fleeing niggers hid in his great mows. Passers-by in Sycamore Street sometimes heard snatches of singing in a voice now cracked, now loud and strong and defiant.... John Brown’s Body lies a-moldering in the Grave, But his Soul goes marching on. Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

But Gramp Tolliver in his high room walled with books kept spry and alert, triumphant now in the knowledge that he had survived old Jacob Barr, that the stern virtue of the old Scotsman had not prolonged his health and happiness by so much as an hour. He read his old books and scribbled on bits of yellow paper, ageing not at all, remaining always spare, cynical, vindictive.

In these days his daughter-in-law rarely addressed him, and less and less frequently she came to see that his room was in order. There were other cares to occupy her energy. There was a husband, working now, and two growing boys and her own father to care for; in addition to all these she had taken to sewing, secretly, for friends whose fortunes were better. (She was a magnificent needle-woman.) And she had each day to write a long letter to Ellen, though the letters in return came but weekly and sometimes not so often.

They kept her informed of the bare facts of her daughter’s life. They told her, in a new, amusing and somewhat cynical fashion of Ellen’s adventures among the music teachers of the city ... of weeks spent wandering through the bleak and drafty corridors of studio buildings, tormented with the sounds made by aspiring young musicians. They described the charlatans, the frauds, which she found on every side, teachers who offered every sort of trick and method by which fame and fortune could be reached by the one and only short cut. There were women called Madame Tessitura and Madame Scarlatti, who had been born Smith or Jones and knew less of music than May Seton, and men who wore velveteen jackets and insisted upon being called “Maestro.” There were the usual adventures (alarming to Hattie Tolliver who saw her daughter still as a little girl) with lecherous old men. Indeed, in this connection Ellen wrote with a certain hard mockery that was utterly strange and carried overtones of an unmoral point of view, as if such things were to be treated more as preposterous jokes than as “grave offenses.” And in this Mrs. Tolliver fancied she discerned some traces of Lily’s influence. To a woman like Lily, such things didn’t matter. She took them too lightly, as a part of the day’s experience ... carefree, charming, indolent Lily, so impossible to combat.

And at last, wrote Ellen, she had stumbled upon the proper person ... an old man, a Frenchman, who bore the name of Sanson. He knew what music could be, and so she had settled with him, working under his guidance. In his youth he had known Liszt, and he had been a friend of Teresa Carreño, until a quarrel with that temperamental beauty ended the friendship. Ellen, he had hinted, might one day become as famous as Carreño (she was like her in a way) but she must work, work, work and not lose her head. It would be a long hard path with Paris at the end! (It was always this thought which filled Mrs. Tolliver with a nameless dread. Paris! Paris! And Lily!)

But what troubled her most was the absence of any comment upon Clarence beyond a simple statement that he was well. By now she must have realized that Ellen had no love for him. From her letters it was clear that she had not found him actually offensive. He was a good enough husband; he did everything for Ellen. It was, indeed, clear that he worshiped her. But on her side there appeared to be only a great void, a colossal emptiness where there should have been the emotion that was the very foundation of her mother’s life.

Mrs. Tolliver worried too about the expenses of her daughter’s household. In such matters, distance made no difference. It was her habit to remark to her husband, “If only I could be near Ellen I could teach her so much about managing. Clarence must make a great deal of money to have such a flat and pay for her lessons too.”

And when she questioned Ellen in her letters, she received the reply that Ellen had spoken to her husband and been told that there was no need to worry. He had, he said, plenty of money ... eight thousand a year.

It is possible of course that Ellen never loved him for an instant; it is probable that the state of her affections never progressed beyond the stage of the kindly pity which is akin to love. She was not a bad wife. She cared for him admirably. She kept his house in order. She even cooked for him delicacies which she had learned from her mother. He insisted that she have a servant, declaring that he could easily afford it. She gave him all that he asked, even of herself, and yet there was a difference ... a difference with altered everything. It was that difference which Hattie Tolliver, expert in such things, sensed in the letters of her daughter. It filled her with a vague suspicion that Ellen had sold herself to satisfy a thing no greater than mere ambition.

Of Clarence’s sentiments there could have been no doubt. He sang his wife’s praises to the men at the Superba Electrical Company, to the men whom he met on those trips into the west when Ellen was left behind alone in the Babylon Arms. He bought her present after present until, at length, the whole aspect of their little apartment was changed. Bit by bit the furniture altered its character. First there was a small grand piano, and then a sofa and presently a chair or two, and at last the brass beds which he and Bunce had once occupied gave place to twin beds of pale green ornamented with garlands of salmon pink roses. And strangely enough as the apartment brightened, the little man himself appeared slowly to fade. In contrast with his handsome and energetic wife, he grew more and more pale. It was as if he were being devoured by some inward malady. Yet there was nothing wrong. Doctors could discover nothing save the usual weakness of his heart.

If he desired a more demonstrative affection than that given him by Ellen, he said nothing of the desire. He never spoke of love. Indeed, long afterward, when Ellen followed back her memories of their life together she was unable to recall any mention of the word. If he desired her passionately he sought her silently and with timidity, as if each caress she gave him were far beyond that which he had any reason to expect. He was a shy man and with Ellen it was impossible to speak of such things; there was a coolness about her, a chastity of the sort which surrounds some women regardless of everything. And always it was she who dominated, always she who gave, coldly and without passion, as if she felt that in all honor she owed him a debt.

With the passing of the months the breach between Ellen and Mr. Wyck became complete. The other friends came sometimes to the Babylon Arms where Clarence, with a sudden expansion of temperament, entertained them in lordly fashion and beamed with pride in his wife. But Mr. Wyck no longer came. There had been no open quarrel, not even a hasty word. Quietly he had dropped from the habit of seeing Clarence at home. It was a change so imperceptible that before Clarence understood it, it was complete.

They met sometimes at lunch in one of the cheap restaurants frequented by Mr. Wyck, for Clarence, so far as his own needs and pleasures were concerned, had taken to a program of economy. And there, over greasy food, they talked of the old days together, Clarence speaking with sentiment and Mr. Wyck with a curious wistfulness. He too had grown pale and cadaverous upon the diet in his Lexington Avenue boarding house. He hated Ellen. He had hated her from the moment she had stepped through the door of the apartment, so cool and arrogant, so sure of herself. But he was too wise to betray his feeling save in subtle gibes at her and references to the jolly old days that were passed. He was lost now in the obscenities of a boarding house, a nobody treated scornfully even by the old aunts in Yonkers who looked upon him still as an anemic little boy with Fauntleroy curls playing among the iron dogs and deers of their front lawn.

And no one, of course, knew that Mr. Wyck, wrapped in his shabby overcoat, sometimes walked the streets after dark in the neighborhood of Riverside Drive, the gale from the North River piercing his bones, his pale eyes upturned toward the pleasant light that beamed from the top floor of the Babylon Arms.

22

ONE night nearly two years after they were married, Clarence asked, “What do you hear from your cousin?”

And Ellen, who had been playing all the evening, turned and asked, “What cousin?”

“Miss Shane.”

“Oh, Lily!” And a shadow settled on her face as if the mention of Lily’s name suddenly aroused memories which she had been striving to forget. “Oh, Lily!” she repeated. “I haven’t heard from her in weeks. She never writes. You know she is indolent.... When I last heard from her she was all right. She wrote from Nice.”

Clarence kept silent for a moment. “Nice must be a beautiful place. A man from the office was there last year, our foreign agent. Nice and Monte Carlo. I guess they’re quite close together.”

“She has a house there. It’s called the Villa Blanche.”

Again Clarence remained thoughtful for a time. The newspaper had fallen from his hands and lay now, crumpled and forgotten by his side. Presently he blushed and murmured, “D’you think she might lend us the house some time.... We might be able to go there.... Not now, but when we have more money. I’d like to see Nice.”

And the shadow on Ellen’s face darkened. “We will ... some day. When I’m famous and making money too.”

“But I don’t want to do it that way. I want to take you myself and pay for everything.... We might have Lily come and visit us.”

Then to fill in the silence Ellen fell to playing again, softly now so that it did not halt the conversation; yet the sound in some way protected her. It was like the frail veil of lace which Lily wore. It shut her in suddenly. Clarence talked no more. He lay back in his stuffed chair, one hand strumming thoughtfully the wooden arm. A look of loneliness, more and more frequent of late, came into his brown eyes.

It was Ellen who turned to him presently, in the midst of the soft music and said, “I have good news for you. I am going to play to-morrow night in public. I am going to be paid for it. Sanson arranged it. I’m going to play at a party. It will mean money for us both.”

But Clarence wasn’t pleased. On the contrary he frowned and kept a disapproving silence.

“It’s silly to feel that way about it,” continued Ellen. “Why should I work as I do if not to make money in the end? Why shouldn’t a wife help her husband? There’s nothing wrong in it.”

And then more music and more silence, while she destroyed slowly, bit by bit, his hopes of grandeur, of conquering a world for the sake of the woman he loved. He saw, perhaps, that despite anything he might do she would in the end surpass him.

“You see, we understood this when we married, Clarence. It’s nothing new.... Is it?... Nothing new. Some day I shall be famous.” She said this quite seriously, without the faintest trace of a smile. “Some day I shall be great and famous. I mean to be.”

By now Clarence was leaning forward holding his head in his hands. His glasses had slipped from his pointed nose and lay forgotten in his lap. Presently he interrupted the music to say, mournfully, “And then I shall be Mr. Tolliver ... husband of a famous woman.”

As though amazed by this sudden resentment, Ellen ceased playing for an instant and regarded him with a curious penetrating look.

“It won’t be like that,” she said. And there entered her voice an unaccustomed note of warmth. It was the pity again, an old sense of sorrow.

“Besides,” she continued, “the day will come when I must go to Paris.... You see, I will have to polish off there ... I can live with Lily. It won’t cost anything. You see, we can’t forget that. We have to think of it. It’s nothing new.... I told you that in the beginning.”

For a long time there was no sound in the room save that of Ellen’s music, soft, beautiful, appealing, as if she used it now as a balm for the wounds caused by all she had been forced to say. Presently her strong beautiful fingers wandered into the Fire Music and the tiny room was filled with a glorious sound of flame and sparks, wild yet subdued, thrilling yet mournful. And then for a time it seemed that, wrapped in the color of the music, they were both released and swept beyond the reach of all these petty troubles. When at last the music ceased, Clarence roused himself slowly and, coming to her side, knelt there and placed his arms about her waist, pressing his head against her. There was in the gesture something pitiful and touching, as if he felt that by holding her thus he might be able to keep her always. The little vein in his throat throbbed with violence. There were times when his adoration became a terrible thing.

It was the first time in all their life together that he had ever done anything so romantic, so beautiful, and Ellen, looking down at him in a kind of amazement, must have understood that there were forces at work quite beyond her comprehension—something which, for the moment, overwhelmed even his shame of love. The act, by its very suddenness, appeared to strike a response in the girl herself, for she leaned toward him and fell to stroking his hair.

“I didn’t know,” she said softly, “that you could be like this.... It frightens me.... I didn’t know.”

His arms slowly held her more and more tightly, in a kind of fierce desperation. “You won’t go,” he murmured, “you won’t leave me.... There would be nothing left for me ... nothing in the world.”

“I’ll come back to you.... It won’t be for long. Perhaps, if there is money enough you could go with me.”

But all the same, she was troubled by that simple act of affection. Somehow, she had never thought of his love in this fashion.

The rest of the evening was raised upon a different plane, new and strange in their existence together. Some barrier, invisible as it was potent, had given way suddenly, out of Clarence’s dread of the future it seemed that there was born a new and unaccountable happiness. Ellen, watching him slyly with a look of new tenderness, played for him the simple music which he loved.

But at midnight when, at last, the music came to an end Clarence asked, “Where are you going to play to-morrow?”

“At the house of a Mrs. Callendar ... I don’t know who she is.”

“If it’s Mrs. Richard Callendar ... she’s rich and fashionable. One of the richest women in New York.... Rich and fashionable....” But the rest was lost in a sudden return of a bitterness that seized him of late with a growing frequency. He knew of Mrs. Callendar. Wyck, in his snobbery, had spoken of her. One saw her name in the journals. It may have been that he had thoughts of his own which no one had ever guessed ... not even Ellen.

“It is Mrs. Richard Callendar,” she said.

23

IN the beginning Mrs. Callendar had regretted the sudden indisposition of the great pianist she had engaged. It was, she said, embétant. But presently as the hour of the reception drew near, the things which old Sanson had said of his unknown prodigy began to have their effect and, being like most women of affairs, a gambler as well, she saw in the approach of the unknown substitute the possibility of an adventure. She was, in any case, willing to take the word of old Sanson; he was, when all was said and done, no humbug. He knew a performer when he saw one. He did not go about his studio in a coat of velveteen calling upon his pupils to address him as “Maestro.” In a satisfactory way, he got down to brass tacks. What he had to offer must at least be interesting.

The drawing-room of the house on Murray Hill was enormous. It extended the full length of one side of the house, finishing in a little alcove where to-night space had been made for the performers, who sat shielded by a lacquered screen reaching almost to the ceiling. Before it a little place had been cleared and a small dais, covered with black velvet, erected to serve as a stage. There was a great piano at one side and then more cleared space reaching out to where the row of collapsible chairs had been placed for the guests.

The room itself was painted gray and high up near the ceiling hung in a row portraits of the Callendars, male and female, who had existed since the immigrating member, an honest Dutch chemist, founded a fortune in America by buying farms that lay north of Canal Street. The usual furniture had been pressed back against the sides of the room or removed entirely, but some of the pieces remained ... chairs and sofas of gilt and salmon brocade, American adaptations of the monstrosities of Louis Philippe—the furniture of some preceding Mrs. Callendar. And in gilt cases of glass there ranged the famous Callendar collection of Chinese bric-à-brac ... bowls and idols of jade, porphyry, and carved sandalwood, row upon row of tear bottles (it was for these that the collection was especially noted) in jade, ivory and porcelain. All these ornaments represented the second period in the fortunes of the Callendar family ... the days when the clipper ships of Griswold and Callendar carried cargoes around the world from Singapore, Shanghai and Hong-Kong. The fortune was now in its third stage. The clipper ships had vanished and the money they once represented was now safe in the best stocks and bonds it was possible to buy.

The room had never been brought up to date. Indeed it had remained untouched since the Seventies, for Mrs. Callendar spent only a month or two of the year in New York and, being thrifty, had not found it necessary to alter anything. The caretaker, once a year when her mistress returned, sent for a small army of charwomen, dusted, cleaned and scrubbed the old house and engaged a corps of servants. The rest of the time it remained empty but solid, immersed in the quiet dignity which is acquired only by houses of great bankers, a symbol in the midst of less enormous and somber dwellings, of all that is enduring and respectable in a changing effervescent world.

At ten o’clock on this particular evening the lacquer screen concealed behind its shimmering walls the figure of a Russian tenor, a Javanese dancer (really a low caste Hindu woman who had her training in some brothel of Alexandria) and the unknown American girl whom Sanson recommended as a fine artist. They were entertainers, mountebanks, brought together only to divert a crowd of guests, who presently would arrive, jaded and somewhat torpid, from monstrous dinners of twenty courses held in houses from Washington Square as far north as the east Sixties. In the behavior of the three performers there was no great cordiality. They sat apart, without interest in each other; indeed there were in their manner unmistakable traces of jealousies as old as their very profession.

Sometimes the tiny dancer, with skin like café au lait satin, stirred restlessly, setting all her bangles into jangling motion, to address the Russian tenor in bad French. He was an enormous blond man with a chest like a barrel and hands that rested like sausages upon his knees, a man gauche in manner, a little like a bear let loose in a drawing-room ... a mountain between the little Hindu woman and the American girl who sat a little apart, slim and tall as Artemis, her black hair wound low over a face that was pale with excitement. She knew no French and so, after the first exchange of “Goot eefning!” with her two weird companions, she lapsed into a silence which concentrated all its force upon a crevice in the lacquered screen. Thus she was able to see the whole length of the great drawing-room and witness the spectacle of the arriving guests.

At first there appeared only her employer, a squat, plump woman laced until her figure resembled the hour glass shape of the ladies in Renoir’s pictures of bourgeois picnics at St. Cloud. From sources hidden in a veritable upholstery of satin and velvet, so cut as to emphasize all her most voluptuous curves, little ladders and tongues of jet sprang forth and glittered darkly at every motion of her tiny plump feet. The face too was plump and, despite a drooping eyelid (which in her youth might have been fascinating and now only made her appear to be in a constant state of sly observation), it must have been lovely, perhaps even subtle. The tight little mouth had an expression that was pleasant and agreeable. It was as if she said, “Ah, well. Nothing in this world surprises me. It will all come out right in the end.”

The sleek black hair she wore pulled back into an uncompromising knot, though in front it was frizzed into a little bang which once might have passed for a weapon of coquetry. Over all this was flung the glittering sheen of jewels, prodigal, indecently Oriental in their extravagance. Above the fuzzy bang reared a tiara of emeralds and diamonds and beneath, sweeping over the mountainous curve of her bosom so that it entangled itself in the plastrons of diamonds fastened beneath, hung a necklace of emeralds. All these repeated their glitter in the rings on the plump hands emerging from long tight sleeves of black satin, which stretched perilously at each dominating gesture employed to direct the small army of servants. But all the jewels were a little dirty. It was probable that no money had been wasted in cleaning them in more than twenty years.

This, then, was the Mrs. Callendar, appearing to-night in grande tenue to receive a small and shrewdly picked list of guests at her only entertainment of the season. To Ellen, peering with breathless curiosity through the crack in the screen, this plump middle-aged woman must have appeared a highly bedizened figure of fun; for Ellen, having come freshly from the provinces, could have known nothing of all the glamour and power that lay concealed in the hour glass of velvet, satin, and soiled diamonds.

There was no secretary hired by this thrifty woman to send lists of her guests to the daily papers and see that her picture or paragraphs concerning her appeared once or twice a week. She did not even give twenty course dinners interrupted by false endings of Roman punch, nor circus entertainments like those of some women who filled the pages of the noisier journals with columns of diversion for shop girls. Through the barbaric spectacle of the late nineties and the early nineteen hundreds she made her way quietly and firmly, knowing perhaps that she was above these things, a power beyond power, living most of the year abroad, seeing only those persons who amused her (for she had learned long ago that in order to survive one must be selective). Indeed her name was more likely to appear upon the pages devoted to stocks and bonds than in the columns given over to what was known variously as the beau monde and the Four Hundred.

Queerest of all was the fact that behind this stout-willed dowager lay an impossibly romantic past.

In the early Seventies when the steam freighters were making their final inroads upon the business of the clipper ships, the house of Griswold and Callendar, Shippers, Importers and Bankers with offices in Liverpool, New York, Marseilles, Bombay and Shanghai, was already on a decline. Already the capital was being shifted into bonds. In these days there remains of this firm no importing business at all but only a great banking house with offices in Wall and Threadneedle Streets and the Boulevard Haussmann; but in the Seventies it was still a great shipping company whose ships circled the globe and dealt alike with Chinese, Indians, Frenchmen, Greeks, and the men of half a dozen other nations. In consequence of these dealings there arose from time to time many disputes, so that always there was some member of the firm on business in a distant quarter of the world. It was to Richard Callendar, the youngest and most vigorous member and the only Callendar in the firm, that most of this traveling fell; and so, in the course of time, he found himself in Constantinople on the business of settling claims with a crafty fellow, one Dikran Leopopulos, whose bank had offices in Calicut and Alexandria with the main house at the Golden Horn.

The contest between the two was drawn out, resolving itself at length into a battle between Yankee shrewdness and Levantine deceit. Leopopulos, a swarthy fellow with narrow green eyes, opened the engagement by an onslaught of hospitality. He entertained his young visitor in the most lavish and Oriental fashion. There were dinners to which the chic foreign world of Constantinople were invited ... ambassadors, secretaries and their ladies, French, German, English and American, in the banker’s palace in Pera; there were pique-niques beside the River of Sweet Waters, and moonlight excursions in caïques propelled by dark oarsmen, on the Bosphorus near the Greek banker’s summer palace; and excursions in victorias to the ruins of Justinian’s fortifications. He sought as a wily means of gaining his end to dazzle the blond, romantic young American, to coddle him by eastern luxury into a false bargain. And to make the entertainment complete, he brought from her seclusion his young daughter, a girl of eighteen, slim, dark, fresh from a French convent, dressed in the very latest modes from Paris, to preside over his entertainments. The girl’s mother was dead, having swooned and later passed away of the heat and confusion at the great Exposition in Paris whither she had gone to visit, after many years, her great-aunts. For the wife of Leopopulos had been French, the daughter of an impoverished, moth-eaten Royalist, and in her child, the slim young Thérèse, there was much that was French ... her wit, her self-possession, her sense of knowing her way about the world. But there was much too that was Levantine.

When at last the revels came to an end, there were bickerings and bargainings in which Yankee shrewdness, in the end, got the better of Levantine deceit. The green-eyed Leopopulos to hide his sorrow gave a farewell dinner aboard the young American’s ship (a Griswold and Callendar clipper named Ebenezer Holt) and so, he believed, closed the incident. It was not until the following day, when a veritable army of fat Greek aunts and cousins, wailing and lamenting, burst at dawn into his green bedroom, that he learned the full extent of his sorrow. His daughter, the dark-eyed Thérèse, had sailed on the Ebenezer Holt as the bride of young Richard Callendar.

Thus Thérèse Callendar came to New York, a stranger out of the oldest of worlds entering into the newest, confused a little by her surroundings and by the primness of her husband’s family, so like and yet so unlike the caution of her own Greek aunts and cousins. In those early days at long dinners in rooms hung with plush and ornamented with Canalettos and Cabanels, her sensations must have been very like those of an ancient Alexandrian, civilized, cultivated, and a little decadent among the more vigorous and provincial Romans of Cæsar’s day. In that age of innocence she found it, no doubt, difficult going; for there was in New York no warm welcome for a foreign woman, no matter how great her beauty, her cultivation, or her charm; much less for a Greek from such a frontier as Constantinople, the capital of the cruel and abandoned Turk. An alien was a creature to be regarded as a curiosity, to be treated, unless he possessed a great title, politely but with suspicion. She was, to be sure, probably the first Greek who came to live on Manhattan’s rocky island; but despite this and all the other barriers, she succeeded in the end, because she was, after all, older than any of them, more civilized, more fortified by those institutions which come only of an old race. In her French blood she was old, but in her Greek blood how much older! She was as old as the carved emerald which she wore always upon her little hand, now so plump with middle age, in a ring which legend had it survived the sack of Constantinople. In tradition she was as old as Justinian and Theodora. The family of Leopopulos was proud—so proud and so old that one no longer discussed its pride and age.

After two years she bore a son, and before the end of that year she became a widow when her ardent young husband, swimming in the surf off Newport, went in his reckless way too far out and never returned. The son she called Richard, after the father, and together with her he inherited the great Callendar fortune, to which was added with the passing of years the gold, the olive orchards, the vineyards, and the palaces of the green-eyed old Banker of Pera. But Thérèse Callendar never married again; she devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and to the husbanding of a great fortune which by shrewdness and will she had long since doubled and tripled. She was, in her soul, a Levantine; thrift and shrewdness were a part of her very flesh and bones. She lived here and there, always on the move, now in Constantinople, now in Paris, now in London, now in Cannes, now in New York, even making at times trips to such outlandish places as Bombay and Sumatra; a woman of sorts, of vast energy and sharp intelligence. And slowly as she passed down the corridor of the years the slim chic figure became an hour glass hung with jet and diamonds. Her eyes were no longer good and she was able to see now only with the aid of lorgnettes through which she stared with a petulant intensity into the faces of all her companions.

But she was rich; she was respected; she was fashionable. Indeed in those days of the Nineties and the early Nineteen Hundreds when European titles had not yet acquired a doubtful character, she achieved an added glamour through the unsought visits of bankrupt Royalist relatives, distant in relationship but much in need of American heiresses. And at least two of them took home as brides the respective daughters of an American nickel plate king and a wizard of Wall Street. They were gaudy days, less pleasant perhaps in the eyes of Thérèse Callendar than the quiet provinciality she had known in the beginning as the bride of Richard Callendar. This capital of the new world she knew, in the depths of her racial instinct, to be an awkward affair, flamboyant, yet timid; vulgar yet aspiring; arrogant but still a little fearful. It was the day of twenty course dinners and banquets at which the cost of feeding each guest was estimated in the daily press. The Greek woman knew that some day this city would come of age.

So Ellen, trembling with excitement in her hiding place behind the screen, must have caught a little of the smoldering magnificence that lay hidden in the plump corseted figure, for presently she forgot entirely the bearlike Russian tenor and the exotic dancer with her outlandish bangles. She had eyes only for Mrs. Callendar and the guests who had begun to arrive.

That wise hostess might have written an entire book on the subject of an amusing entertainment. From the procession of guests it was clear that she considered them a part of the evening’s diversion, a kind of preliminary parade about the arena which provided variety and color. She understood that people came when you provided rich food and amusing types, the more preposterous the better.

A Tzigane orchestra, much in fashion, assembled itself presently and played an accompaniment to the grand march of arriving guests. Among the first were the Champion girls and their mother. These represented the old families. The two girls, already past their first youth, wore gowns made by Worth, cut low back and front, which fitted their thin bodies in the Princess style. But these gowns, Thérèse saw instantly, they had ruined; for in a moment of caution the deep V’s, front and back, had been built up with modest inserts of lace and tulle, and short sleeves of similar material had been inserted to shield the upper portions of their white arms. They held themselves stiffly. Nothing of them remained exposed save the fact that they were virgins.

Close upon their heels, so close that the mother in her haste appeared to shuffle her daughters into a corner with the air of a hen covering her chicks from a hawk, came that elderly rake, Wickham Chase, and Mrs. Sigourney, the latter dressed tightly in black and diamonds rumored to be paste—thin, piercing and hard, too highly painted, a divorcée. (None but Thérèse Callendar would have dared to ask her.) And then Bishop Smallwood, whom Sabine Cane called “The Apostle to the Genteel,” a Bishop with a See in the far West, who managed to divide his time between New York and Bar Harbor and Newport ... a fat, pompous man with a habit of alluding too easily to “My wa’am friend Mrs. Callendar” and “My wa’am friend Mrs. Champion” and “My wa’am friend Mrs. So-and-so” ad infinitum through the lists of the wealthy and the fashionable. Trapped between the Scylla of Mrs. Champion and her Virgins and Charybdis of the questionable but very smart Mrs. Sigourney, the poor man found himself at once in an untenable position. Seeing this, the small eyes of his hostess glittered with a sinful light.

Next came the Honorable Emma Hawksby, a gaunt Englishwoman of some thirty-eight summers with a face like a horse, projecting teeth, and feet that appeared to better advantage in the hedgerows than in the ball room. To-night they emerged barge-like from beneath a very fancy gown of pink satin ornamented with sequins and yards of mauve tulle. It was in her direction that the anxious Mrs. Champion steered her two virgins. Was she not a cousin of the notorious Duke of Middlebottom?

And then the four Fordyce sisters, arriving unattended in a hollow square formation, large, dark, powerful girls ranging in age from twenty to thirty-one, filled with an inhuman energy and zeal for good works, the very first of those who struggled for the enfranchisement of women.

Then one or two nondescript bachelors, of the handy sort seen everywhere as conveniences, stuffed with food and wine taken at some monstrous dinner in the Thirties; and on their heels Mrs. Mallinson, who belonged in the category of Mrs. Champion and her virgins, but who had escaped years ago into the freedom of the literary world wherein she wrote long novels of society life. She was a hard woman and beginning to sag a little here and there so that she threw up against the ravages of decay bulwarks in the form of a black satin ribbon ornamented with diamonds about her dewlapped throat. She lived outside Paris in a small château, once the property of a royal mistress, and spoke with a French accent. Because she was literary, she was considered, in Mrs. Champion’s mind, also Bohemian.

In her hiding place behind the painted screen, the dark eyes of Ellen Tolliver grew brighter and brighter. Behind her the Javanese dancer and the Russian tenor had relapsed into a condition of moribund indifference.

More and more guests filtered into the room, old, young, dowdy, respectable, smart, one or two even a little déclassée. They regarded each other for a time, slipping into little groups, gossiping for a moment, melting away into new and hostile clusters, whispering, laughing, sneering, until the whole room became filled with an animation which even the great dinners of two hours earlier could not suffocate.

With the arrival of Lorna Vale the excitement reached its peak; even the gipsies played more wildly. She was an actress! And in those days it was impossible to imagine an actress and the Champion virgins in the same room. The Bishop stared at her, somewhat furtively to be sure, and Mrs. Champion, quivering, again executed her swooping gesture of protection toward her two daughters. But Mrs. Sigourney, perhaps seeing in her an ally, pierced the surrounding phalanx of eager young men and found a place by her side. Each benefited by the contrast, for the one was large, an opulent beauty with tawny hair, and the other, thin as a hairpin, black and glittering.

Then, during a brief pause in the music, the wide doors opened again and there entered Sabine Cane and Mrs. Callendar’s son Richard.

At their approach there was, even in that nervous, chattering throng, a sudden hush, a brief heightening of interest as if the crowd, like a field of wheat, had been swayed faintly for an instant by the swift eddy of a zephyr. Then all was noisy again. It was a demonstration of interest, polite, restrained, as it should have been at a gathering so fashionable, but a demonstration that could not be entirely disguised.

It was in the women that the excitement found its core ... women who saw in the dark young man a great match for their daughters, girls who desired him for his fortune and his rakish good looks and found the legend of his wild living a secret and sentimental attraction; widows and spinsters who discerned in him matchmaking material of the first order. Beyond doubt the glittering Mrs. Sigourney and the tawny Lorna Vale held other ideas, not to be expressed in so polite an assemblage. He had been, after all, notoriously attentive to both though they were years older. But there was one element in the situation which raised the interest to the pitch of hysteria; it was his attention to Sabine Cane, a fact of growing importance which many a jet-hung bosom found hard to support.

She was a year or two older than Richard Callendar (every woman present could have told the very hour she made her entrance into society) and she was not, like most of young Callendar’s women, an acclaimed beauty. Yet there were other qualities which set her aside from the commonplace round of marriageable girls. She was easily the most smartly dressed in all the room; there was about her clothes a breathless sort of perfection that bespoke the taste of an artist. In place of an overwhelming beauty, she had developed a wit that could be infinitely more disastrous. In this, she resembled Cleopatra, Madame de Staël and the Montespan. These things made her perilous and caused many an ambitious mother hours of sleeplessness.

A long nose, a generous mouth frankly painted, green eyes set a trifle too near each other, a mass of brick red hair and a marvelous figure ... these things comprised the physical aspect of Sabine Cane, a combination that was changeable and a trifle bizarre and therefore, as Thérèse Callendar had observed more than once, enormously intrigante. But there was more than this, for in the green eyes there lay a light of humor and malice and beneath the brick red hair a brain which had a passion for the affairs of other people. What disconcerted her enemies most was her air of entering a room; she did not walk in, she made an entrance. It was as if such women as Mrs. Sigourney and Lorna Vale did not exist. Lily Langtry or Cléo de Merode were less effective. To-night she wore a brilliant yellow dress with a wide full train. It was as if she understood shrewdly her ugliness and made capital of it.

Sabine knew things about these people who filled the drawing room—little bits of gossip, scraps of information picked up here and there in the course of her twenty-six years. She knew, for example, that Mrs. Champion (mother of the virgins and most rarefied of aristocrats) had a grandmother known as Ruddy Mary who in her first assault upon the social ranks had invited people to a monstrous ball by invitations written in red ink, and so gained a sobriquet that was now forgotten. She knew that Wickham Chase had a maternal grandfather who had been a Jewish pawnbroker and laid up the money which he now spent. She knew that the Honorable Emma Hawksby (niece of the notorious Duke of Middlebottom) was without a cent in the world and found an easy winter in New York by living off those who liked to speak of the dear Duke’s cousin. “Honorable” was not a great title, but it went far enough in those days to keep the Honorable Emma in bed and board for the winter. She even knew that a brother of the Apostle to the Genteel had to be kept, at some expense to the Apostle, in an out of the way country town in order that he might not make a drunken spectacle of himself before the Apostle’s many “wa’am friends.”

Sabine kept a great many family skeletons in her clever memory and it was impossible to know the moment when she might bring them forth and rattle them in the most grisly fashion.

It was clear that her companion, shrewder than the well-fed young men about him, penetrating with those instincts which came to him from the plump bundle of satin and diamonds who stood receiving the guests, understood perfectly the atmospheric disturbance. He was young, clever, handsome in a fashion that was a little sinister, and very rich, so rich that the whispers of gossip that clustered about him—even the talk of Mrs. Sigourney and Lorna Vale—made no difference. Mrs. Champion found him not entirely beneath consideration as a possible match for Margaret or Janey, the redoubtable virgins.

“Look at Boadicea and her daughters,” Sabine whispered maliciously in his ear as they came abreast of this virtuous group.

Young Callendar was tall, with dark skin, closely cropped black hair and a wiry kind of strength that was an heritage of his green-eyed grandfather, the Banker of Pera. When Sabine said “Boadicea,” he laughed and showed a row of fine teeth set white against an olive skin. It was this same dark skin which gave his eyes a look of strangeness. The eyes should have been brown or black; instead they were a clear gray and had a way of looking at a person as if they bored quite through him. People said he was fascinating or wild or vicious, according to their standards of such things. The women morbidly watched his greeting of Mrs. Sigourney and Lorna Vale, but they discovered nothing. All the talk may only have been gossip. He was, after all, only twenty-four ... a boy. But, of course, he had French and Greek blood and had lived on the continent. “That,” said Mrs. Mallinson, the escaped novelist, with an old world air, “makes a difference.”

Behind the screen, the Hindu dancer had begun to droop a little with boredom, like a dark flower turning on its stem. Close by her side the bear-like Russian tenor had fallen asleep, his enormous blond head bent forward against his rumpled shirt front; his enormous hands, bursting the seams of his civilized white kid gloves, hung limp between Herculean thighs clad in black broadcloth that would have benefited by a visit to the cleaners.

Only Ellen remained alert and nervous, peering through her crevice, all interest now in the handsome young man and the bizarre red-haired woman at his side. These, her instinct told her, were characters, individuals, powerful in the same fashion that the plump little woman covered with dirty diamonds was powerful. And deep down in her heart a tiny voice kept saying, “This is the great world. Some day I shall be on the other side of the screen, seated no longer with mountebanks.”

Behind the screen she experienced a swift tumult of emotions, confused and ecstatic like the sensations she had known on sight of her first play in a real theater. The scene was glamorous, extravagant. Perhaps for an instant she caught a sense of what was really passing before her eyes; it may have been that she understood the spectacle even more clearly than any of the participants save only Thérèse Callendar ... that these people were not gathered in the tomb-like room because they were drawn by any bond of affection, but rather because they had been summoned, each of them, to play his little rôle in a comedy of manners which the world called fashionable life. There was the Bishop who played a part quite his own (two bishops would have been too many and so, by giving the evening a clerical aspect, have dulled the edge of its chic). Mrs. Sigourney, wicked and painted, played the rôle of Sin, a fascinating and indispensable part, just as Mrs. Champion and her virgins as Virtue, Purity and Chastity, were her foil; and Mrs. Mallinson and Lorna Vale were the Muses of Literature and the Drama. Others stood for Family, and Wealth and what-not, while Mrs. Callendar, hidden behind the drooping lids of her near-sighted green eyes, understood all this and pulled the strings. She made for the piece an admirable showman.

Ellen, watching them, grew excited, and out of this excitement there emerged slowly a new ambition, which had nothing to do with a career in music. It was, rather, a passionate desire to conquer this world as well, so that she might fling her triumph back into the world of the Town; it would serve as an admirable weapon to flaunt in the faces of those who had mocked her poverty. For she had not yet escaped the Town; she had not even learned how difficult it would be ever to escape.

The Russian tenor was a dismal failure. Save for the fact that he was Russian and therefore wildly exotic, he would have been impossible, for he sang in a bleating voice a popular ballad or two by Tosti and a dreary bit of folk music, still half-caught in the mists of slumber. In the back of the room, seated against the wall so that the figures of the other guests rose in silhouette between them and the lights of the low stage, Richard Callendar and the ugly Sabine sat like naughty children, jeering. They were bored by such spectacles; they were interested only in the individuals which comprised it. They saw that the others were a little restless.

And then there was a brief hush broken presently by the music of the Tzigane orchestra augmented by drums and clarinets, rising slowly at first and then breaking into a crescendo of Arab music, filled with insinuating and sensual rhythms, accentuated by the beating of a tom-tom, and from behind the lacquered screen there arose a faint tinkling sound like the music of a million tiny bells heard from a great distance. Then as the music rose to a climax the sound grew suddenly more and more clear and from behind the screen sprang the Javanese dancer, gyrating, now bending low, now rising with a motion of a tawny lily swept by a breeze. It was a beautiful body, soft yet muscular, wild yet restrained. She wore the costume of a Burmese dancer, all gold with a towering hat like a pagoda made all of gold. Her breasts were covered with gold and her thighs, and on her hands she wore gauntlets of gold that ran out into long tapering pinnacles; but the rest of her was naked. The skin of café au lait satin glistened, voluptuous and extravagant. There were tiny gold bells on her wrists and ankles.

For an instant a faint gasp, barely audible, swept the little group seated on collapsible chairs. From her hiding place in the shadows Sabine Cane nudged her companion and whispered again, “Look at Boadicea!”

Before her eyes, between her and the dancer, Mrs. Champion had raised her fan; her daughters had done likewise. Between her and “his wa’am friend” Mrs. Mallinson, the Bishop stirred uneasily. Some leaned forward; others feigned indifference. One or two of the men assumed expressions of boredom. For none of them, save in brothels in Paris, had ever seen a woman dancing without tights, utterly naked.

Withdrawn a little from the others Thérèse Callendar sat staring at the dancer through her lorgnettes. She was immovable but interested, as if the barbaric music and the sight of the Hindu woman’s naked body roused in her a train of dim racial memories. And slowly in another part of the room Sabine Cane became aware that Thérèse Callendar’s son no longer had any interest in her. He no longer heard the malicious sallies she uttered in a whisper. He had risen now and was standing so that he might have a clearer view of the little dais bathed in light where the golden dancer swayed and whirled to the wild music of the Tziganes. Slowly his body stiffened and into the weird gray eyes there came a look of fierce concentration. The dark muscular hands, clasping the chair, so near to Sabine that she could have touched them, grew taut and white. It was not mere sensuality that was roused by the sight; Sabine, with her hard intelligence, must have known that it was something more profound, something that savored of a passionate and barbaric excitement, as if the man was stirred in the depths of his spirit. She must have understood then for the first time that he was of a race so different, so alien that there was a part of him forever beyond comprehension.

Sabine said nothing. Fascinated, she watched him quietly until, as the music died suddenly, the dancer stood motionless as a statue of bronze and gold. There was a ripple of embarrassed applause and she disappeared, then another hush and the nervous murmur of many voices. On her little throne Thérèse, like a plump Buddha, nodded her approval and beat her plump hands together. “C’est une vraie artiste,” she murmured, leaning toward Mrs. Sigourney, in whose eyes there glittered the light of jealousy at being outdone in spectacularity by a hired entertainer.

In her corner Sabine said, “Beautiful!” To which young Callendar made no reply. He fingered his mustache and presently, smiling slowly, he murmured, “Mama shouldn’t have done it. She has shocked some of them. This isn’t Paris. Not yet!”

They were different from the others—Thérèse and her son.

While he was still speaking the gypsies deserted the stage, leaving it bare now save for the great piano. Again a brief hush and there emerged from behind the painted screen with a curious effect of abruptness and lack of grace a tall girl, very tall and very straight, with smooth black hair done in the style of Cléo de Merode and cheeks that were flushed. She wore a plain gown of black very tight and girdled with rhinestones that, shimmering, threw off shattered fragments of light as she walked. Her strong white arms were bared to the shoulder. There was pride in her walk, and assurance, yet these things hid a terror so overpowering that only those who sat quite near saw that her lip was bleeding where she had bitten it.

On her little throne Thérèse Callendar in cold blood waited. She wondered, doubtless, whether Sanson had failed her, and slowly she began to perceive that he had not. Somehow as she emerged from behind the screen, the American girl captured the imagination of her audience; it was as if she dominated them by some unreal power. They stirred and looked more closely. It was not altogether a matter of beauty, for the dancer who had preceded her was by all the rules far more beautiful. It was something beyond mere physical beauty. It emanated from her whole body, running outward, engulfing all the little audience. They became aware of her.

“Hm!” murmured Mrs. Callendar. “Here is something new. Something magnificent. A born actress ... crude still, but with magnetism!” And she raised her lorgnettes and peered very hard with her short sighted little eyes.

To Richard Callendar, Sabine murmured, “Interesting! Who is she?”

“She’s very handsome.... A discovery of Mama’s.”

And then, seating herself the girl began after a shower of liquid notes, to play, softly and suggestively, a Chopin valse, one that was filled with melody and simple rhythm. After the hot passion of the dancer she filled the great room with the effect of a soft wind infinitely cool and lovely, serene in its delicacy. She appeared presently to forget her fright and gave a performance that was beautiful not alone in sound but in manner as well. It may have been that old Sanson taught her that a great performance meant more than merely making beautiful sounds. All her face and body played their part in the poise, the grace of every movement, the sweep and the gesture. But it is more probable that she was born knowing these things, for they are a matter more of instinct than of training and lie thus beyond the realm of mere instruction.

There could be no doubt of the impression she made, yet in all the audience there was none, unless it was old Thérèse Callendar, who suspected that she had never before played in the presence of anything but a small town audience. There was in her performance the fire of wild Highland ancestors, the placidity of English lanes, the courage of men who had crossed mountains into a wilderness, perhaps even the Slavic passion of a dim ancestress brought from Russia to live among the dour Scots of Edinburgh, the hard, bright intelligence of Gramp, and the primitive energy of Hattie Tolliver. There was all the stifled emotion pent so long in a heart dedicated to secrecy, and the triumph of wild dreams; and there was too a vast amount of passion for that little company who believed in her, whom she dared not betray by failure ... for Lily whose very gown she wore, and the withered Miss Ogilvie; for Gramp, and young Fergus who worshiped her with his eyes, for her gentle father and the fierce old woman in Shane’s Castle; but most of all for that indomitable and emotional woman whom she must repay one day by forcing all the world to envy her.

When she had finished she was forced to return because overtones of all this wild emotion had filtered vaguely into the very heart of the restless, distracted audience on stiff collapsible chairs. They applauded; it was as if she had suddenly claimed them.

Then she played savagely the Revolutionary Prelude and disappeared behind the lacquered screen. There was a hush and then more talk and then a sudden excitement which began at the screen and ran in little ripples through all the stiff gathering. From the alcove there emerged the bass rumbling of the Russian, stirred suddenly into somnolent activity, and again a wild tinkling of little bells and a torrent of French in the shrill voice of the Javanese dancer. The screen parted and the dancer, half naked, covered only by the heavy gold ornaments and a wrapper of scarlet silk, emerged chattering French and gesticulating. She addressed Mrs. Callendar who stirred herself into a sudden dull glitter of movement. The son left the ugly Sabine and joined his mother, calm but with a fierce, bright look in his eyes. The American girl ... the unknown pianist had fainted!

24

WHEN at length Ellen became conscious of her surroundings, it was with the faint odor of stables in her nostrils and in her ears the jingling of harness and the steady, brisk clop! clop! made by the hoofs of spirited horses upon wet asphalt. The cabriolet, flitting through the streaks of light made by street lamps on the wet pavement, was passing through an open space where the light shone on the bare branches of trees and banks of wet and dirty snow. Otherwise everything was silent.

When she stirred presently and moved into an upright posture, she saw by her side a mass of sable, the sudden glint of a brilliant yellow dress, captured and fixed by a stray beam of light and then the face and bright lips of the bizarre woman with red hair, who stirred and murmured,

“It’s all right. I’m Miss Cane. On the other side is Mr. Callendar ... Mrs. Callendar’s son.”

The dark man removed his top hat and bowed. “We’re taking you home,” he said, “to the Babylon Arms.... That’s right, isn’t it?”

There was a faint trace of accent in his voice ... vaguely familiar, confused somehow with a memory of mimosa and the figure of Lily standing beneath the glowing Venice in the drawing room of Shane’s Castle. The same sort of accent....

“That’s right, isn’t it?” continued the voice of the dark young man. “The Babylon Arms?”

Then for the first time, Ellen spoke, slowly and with a certain shyness. “Yes. I live there.... But how did you know?”

The man laughed. “Two reasons,” he said. “First. Sanson told my mother. Second. My mother owns the Babylon Arms.”

Again a wandering ray of light flitted across the window of the cabriolet illuminating for an instant the brilliant lips of Miss Cane. The lips were smiling, as if conscious that they were shielded by the darkness, but it was a mocking smile and the memory of it haunted Ellen long afterward. It was as if the painted lips were really speaking and said, “The Babylon Arms is a preposterous pretentious place.” And for the first time, perhaps, Ellen doubted the magnificence of that vast pile.

Her next speech was dictated by the careful precepts of Hattie Tolliver. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have fainted.... It ruined everything.”

There was a stifled laugh from Sabine Cane. “Nonsense! It gave us a chance to get into the air.”

Then silence once more and the echoing clop! clop! clop! clop! regular as the beams of light which flashed past the open door of Thérèse Callendar’s cabriolet.

Long after midnight the carriage came to a halt before the gigantic Syrian lions of cast iron that ornamented the entrance to the Babylon Arms. It was young Callendar who descended first, lending his arm with a grave and alien grace to Ellen who, having recovered entirely, emerged with a sure and vigorous step. The third occupant, instead of remaining behind as she might well have been expected to do, followed them, driven by an overpowering desire to miss nothing. So with Ellen between them, Callendar in a top hat, and Sabine Cane, muffled in sables and holding her full yellow train high above the wet pavements, descended upon the astonished negro who ran the elevator.

Here Ellen bade them good night. “I’m all right now.... It was good of you to have come.”

But they insisted upon accompanying her. There were protests, into which there entered a sudden note of desperation as if the girl were striving to conceal something which lay hidden at the top of the flamboyant apartment.

“But you might faint again,” protested Sabine firmly. “I shan’t be satisfied until I see you safe in your flat.”

“Besides,” observed young Callendar, smiling, “some day the Babylon Arms will be mine. I should like to see what it looks like, abovestairs.”

So they pressed her until at last she yielded and in their company was borne aloft in the swaying elevator. As it jolted to a halt, she bade them good night once more, saying, “The elevator only runs this far and I live two flights above. I’ll go the rest of the way alone.”

But they went with her through the red painted corridors under the light of the flickering gas up the flights of stairs to a door which she opened with her own key. There at last the farewells were made, for she did not invite them to enter.

“My mother will call in the morning,” said Callendar, “to see that you are not really ill.... Oh yes! You couldn’t prevent her! You don’t know her as well as I do!”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

And as the door closed they caught a sudden glimpse of a man, standing timidly in the dim light of an inner room, listening with an air of curiosity to their talk. He was a small man and rather thin, and stood dressed in a shirt and trousers. His hair was rumpled; obviously he had been “sitting up.” Behind him there was a table covered with papers and accounts. All this the shrewd eye of Sabine captured in one swift instant.

As they descended under the guidance of the negro, Callendar said, “The man ... who was he?”

“Some one ... perhaps her lover. Musicians have lovers....”

Her companion turned sharply. “No ...” he said, “not a lover. A woman with such spirit wouldn’t have that sort of lover.”

Sabine laughed softly and with a hint of wickedness in her voice. “You don’t know women ... how queer they can be. Besides....” And she indicated with a nod of her red head the listening negro. “One must be careful.” But she regarded Callendar with a new interest and during the long ride back through the park she remained silent save to comment now and then upon the bits of gossip which he discussed. Knowing him so well, perhaps she understood that a new source of disturbance had crossed his path. There was between them a remarkable sense of intimacy, as if each expected the other to understand him perfectly.

By the time they reached the solid house on Murray Hill the party was already on the wane and the guests had begun, in a motley stream, to leave. Mrs. Champion and her daughters disappeared among the first after Mrs. Callendar had the audacity to bring forward the artists and beg them to join the guests. The Russian tenor stood awkwardly alone and in a corner and the tiny dancer, in a turban and gown of crimson and gold brocade, sat surrounded by young men. She had learned the business of entertaining during those early days in Alexandria.

25

THE prediction of young Callendar came true, for in the morning, while Ellen sat in a purple wrapper practising her scales, the bell rang suddenly and into the room came Mrs. Callendar, dressed coquettishly in a very tight black suit, a hat much too large for her short, plump figure, and a voluminous stole of sable. The climb up the two flights of stairs above the elevator had been very nearly too much for her and she greeted Ellen with much panting and blowing.

“Good morning, my dear,” she said. “I hope you’re none the worse for last night’s experience.”

Ellen smiled respectfully and bade her guest seat herself in the padded arm chair that was the property of Clarence. “I’m all right again. I can’t imagine what could have made me faint. I’m sorry. It must have spoiled the party.”

At this Mrs. Callendar, settling herself in the chair, chuckled, “Not at all. Not at all. They’ll talk of it for days. You could not have done better. It was dramatic ... dramatic.”

“I’m all right. You needn’t have come. It is good of you.”

“Perhaps you lace too tightly,” suggested Mrs. Callendar, returning to the subject of Ellen’s collapse.

“I don’t lace at all,” said Ellen. “I can’t play if I’m all boxed in.”

Mrs. Callendar threw back her stole and nodded her head sagely. “You’re much wiser, my dear. Much wiser. When I was a girl I was famous for my waist. Sixteen inches it was ... only sixteen inches.” And she brought together her plump fingers in a gesture which implied that once she might have encircled her waist with her two hands. “But I fainted.... I used to faint daily. I don’t lace tightly any more, but it makes no difference. It’s just stayed that way. You see, my corsets are quite loose.” And she thrust a finger into the space between her ample bosom and her corset to prove her statement. “I know my figure is bad in these days. Too many curves and too little height. But I’m past forty and it doesn’t matter so much.”

Secretly Ellen must have compared the figure of her guest with that of her own vigorous mother. Mrs. Tolliver was ten years the older, yet her appearance was that of a woman much younger than Mrs. Callendar. It was in this difference that the Levantine blood of the latter betrayed her. She was a friendly woman, certainly, and one who was quite sure of herself, fortified clearly by the conviction that the king can do no wrong.

“You shouldn’t have climbed the stairs just to see if I was all right.”

“But you see,” said Mrs. Callendar, “I’m interested in you. Sanson tells me you have a great future. He doesn’t tell me such things if he doesn’t believe them.... But don’t let that turn your head. Nothing comes without work ... least of all, anything to do with the arts.”

For a moment Ellen did not reply. At last she said, thoughtfully, “I know that.”

“You are bitter,” observed Mrs. Callendar, “and perhaps unhappy,” she added with a shrewd glance of her near sighted eyes. “Well, that’s a good thing. It shows character, and no artist ever existed without character. Character is the thing that counts.” Here, having regained her breath, she rose and placing the lorgnettes against her slanting eyes, she wandered to the window. “It’s a fine view you have from here,” and after a moment’s consideration, “Not so fine as it appears at first. Too many locomotives and signboards. You see,” she added, turning toward the girl, “I came here this morning for other reasons too. I own the Babylon Arms.”

“So your son told me.”

“But I’ve never seen it before. I’m only in New York for a month or two at a time. I own a great deal of property here and there. I don’t have to look at it. I have a good agent ... a young Jew, trustworthy ... a fellow who knows values up and down. I pay him well and he knows that if he played me a trick, I’d throw him out at once. Oh, I can trust him. Besides, I’m a Levantine myself and in every Levantine there is a Jew hidden away. We understand each other ... Minsky and I. It’s a fine building but the elevator ought to run all the way up. Then I could charge you more rent. I suppose there’s no room for it. The architect made these upper floors too fancy. No eye for comfort and common sense.”

And having uttered this torrent of opinions, she returned to the plush chair and said, “But tell me about yourself. I have a terrible curiosity about people. You’re American, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” replied Ellen. There was about this preposterous visitor a quality that was irresistible. It was impossible to know whether you liked or disliked her, because she gave you no time to consider. Even if you decided against her, it availed nothing; she swept over you with the persuasion of a mountain torrent ... a powerful woman and one whose friendliness was disarming. For a moment or two, the absurd thought that she might have been drinking lingered in Ellen’s mind.

“Well,” observed Mrs. Callendar, “some day this raw country is going to produce a superb art. Maybe you’re one of the first artists. Who can say?” Fumbling in the reticule of black jet she brought out at last a tiny cigarette case, made of onyx with the name Thérèse in small diamonds, a bizarre box which in the possession of a woman less powerful and less foreign would have been vulgar. “I suppose you smoke?”

“No,” said Ellen, “I never have.”

“Well, you will.” And she thrust the case back into the reticule. “You don’t mind if I do?”

“Certainly not.” Ellen brought out the small table consecrated to the smoking apparatus of her husband. It was a violation of Clarence’s principles. On this subject he had spoken to Ellen many times, saying always, “Women who smoke are all of one kind.”

“Wouldn’t you have a cup of tea or a bit of cake?” asked Ellen. “I owe you something for the climb up the stairs.”

“Thank you, no. Not at this hour of the day, and besides there is my figure to consider. It is real suffering to possess at the same time a tendency toward fat and an appetite for rich food.”

She paused for a moment to breathe in the smoke of the tiny scented cigarette. All this time her eyes, aided by the lorgnettes, had been roving the room, as if somewhere within its walls she might find other clues to Ellen’s history. To Ellen this action must have been disconcerting, especially since the drooping lid which half concealed one eye of the visitor made it impossible ever to know in what direction or in what object she was interested.

“But tell me about yourself,” she continued. “You like Sanson?”

“He is a good teacher.”

“No monkey business about him ... no fanfaronade and nonsense. I’ve known him a great many years. I see him in Paris more often than here. He’s not so busy over there.”

Ellen sat on the edge of her chair, like a school girl in the presence of an elderly aunt. In the age and self-possession of her guest there was some quality which caused her to feel an awful sense of youth and inexperience. “I’m going to Paris to study in a year or two,” she said modestly. It was almost as if Mrs. Callendar had the power of making her enact a rôle.

“Of course. So you must. Nobody here would pay to hear an American musician. And you must take a foreign name. That’s important. Some day it won’t be. But it is now. We’re still afraid to trust ourselves. People spend money for names as well as music. You must have a good foreign name, the fancier the better so long as it doesn’t sound like a music hall. Have you any friends over there?”

“I have a cousin.” Her manner was better now, a little more contained and far less shy, for the amazing friendliness of Mrs. Callendar had begun to accomplish the inevitable effect. This dowager was perhaps the first woman in all the city who had been friendly toward her, the first woman who had not been a little on her guard, a little uncertain ... the way Bunce’s wife was uncertain and hostile. And there was something in the manner of Mrs. Callendar which must have reminded Ellen of her mother ... a certain recklessness, a quality that was quite beyond barriers of any sort.

“Is the cousin male or female?” asked Mrs. Callendar, “because in Paris it makes a difference.”

“Female,” replied Ellen.

“Indeed! Perhaps I know her?”

“Her name is Shane,” said Ellen. “Lily Shane.”

For a time Mrs. Callendar regarded the blue smoke of her cigarette in silence, thoughtfully. “Shane,” she murmured. “Shane? I don’t think I know any one named Shane? I know most of the Americans in Paris. Has she lived there long?”

“Many years.”

“Shane? Shane?” Mrs. Callendar continued to murmur with an air of searching the recesses of her excessively active brain; and then, all at once, she grew alert. “Shane! Shane! Of course. Reddish hair. Tall. Beautiful. Madame Shane. I’ve never met her, but I’ve seen her somewhere. She’s been pointed out to me ... maybe at the races, maybe at the Opéra. Madame Shane ... to be sure. A beauty! A widow, isn’t she?”

There was in Ellen’s reply no haste: indeed she waited for a long time as if turning the simple inquiry over and over in her mind. Lily a widow! Lily who had never been married! She did not, as her mother might have done, spring impulsively to a blundering answer. Perhaps out of her memory there emerged old thoughts, old gossip, bits of instinct and emotion which presently fashioned itself into a comprehensible pattern—such things as her own pride of race, the tribal sense that was so strong in her family, the memory of gossip about a child, indeed all those fragments of mystery which surrounded the existence of her cousin. When she replied it was calmly in a manner that protected Lily. “Yes,” she said, “a widow. That’s the one,” as if nothing had occurred that was in the least surprising.

“A beautiful woman,” continued Mrs. Callendar crushing out the ember of her cigarette upon the tray dedicated to the ashes of Clarence. “And now,” she added, “coming to the point, I wanted to know whether you would come sometimes and play for me in the evenings.... Not a performance, you understand, but simply to play once in a while for me and perhaps my son and Miss Cane and one or two friends.... Miss Cane—you may remember her—came home with you last night ... a clever woman. I’d pay you well ... understand that. I’d like to have you once or twice a week. I don’t go out frequently. I love music but I dislike musicians. You’ll understand that when you come to see more of them.”

For Ellen it was, of course, the opening of a new world in which she might become independent, a world such as she had imagined the city to be. It was as if, overnight, the whole course of her life had been changed. There were chances now, subtle, hidden gambits for which she had an instinct.

“Yes,” she replied quietly. “I think I could arrange it to come.”

“And very likely,” said Mrs. Callendar, “I could get other engagements for you.” She had risen now and was wrapping the sable stole about her short fat neck. “I’ll let you know when I’ll want you to come. I’ll write you a note that will be a sort of contract between us. I believe in contracts. Never trust the human race.... And now good-by, Miss Tolliver. I’m glad you’re all right again. You may have fainted out of fright. There were people there last night ... stupid people ... who would have frightened Rubinstein himself.”

So Ellen thanked her, bade her good-by and walked with her to the top of the stairs. Half way down, Mrs. Callendar turned. “I suppose,” she said with a rising inflection, “that you live here alone.”

“No,” said Ellen; but that was all she said, and Mrs. Callendar, smiling to herself, disappeared amused, no doubt, by the memory of the story which Sabine Cane had told her when she had returned across the park from the Babylon Arms.

Once the door was closed, Ellen flung herself into a chair and sat staring out of the window into the gray clouds that swept across the sky high above the North River. It must have occurred to her then that Mrs. Callendar had departed with an amazing amount of information ... knowledge which concerned herself and her family, her future, her plans, even the details of the very flat in which she lived. Her guest had, after a fashion, absorbed her and her life much as a sponge absorbs water. By now Mrs. Callendar could doubtless have drawn a detailed and accurate picture of the flat and written a history of its occupant. Indeed she had very nearly tripped Ellen into one unfortunate truthfulness. That was a fascinating thought ... Lily and her strange foreign life. Lily a widow? What were her morals? How did she live in Paris? Surely no one in the Town could have had the faintest idea. But Madame Shane! Still Mrs. Callendar might have been mistaken. It would have been, under the circumstances, a natural error. It was as though Lily was destined in some unreal fashion to play a part in Ellen’s own life. Always she was there, or at least some hint of her. Even Clarence talked of her in a way he did not use when speaking of other women. Yet no one knew anything of Lily.

Smiling dimly she rose, and before returning to her music she took the brass ash tray containing the remains of Mrs. Callendar’s scented cigarette and cleaned it thoroughly, taking care to bury the offending morsels well out of sight where Clarence could never find them. Certainly she performed this act through no fear of him. Rather it was with an air of secrecy as if already she and her visitor had entered into a conspiracy. It may have been only a touch of that curious understanding which flashes sometimes between persons of great character.

26

THE life of Mr. Wyck was no longer of interest to any one; yet there were times, usually after a stronger dose than usual of his wife’s power and independence, when Clarence sought the company of Wyck with the air of a man in need of refreshment and rest. For she had brought into the lives of both men a sense of strain which, during the days of their amiable companionship on the top floor of the Babylon Arms, had been utterly lacking. To Clarence, this new condition of affairs remained a mystery; but Wyck, with an intuition that was feminine, must sometimes have come close to the real reason.

He knew, beyond all doubt, that Ellen, for all her indifference, was his enemy—an enemy who never once considered her foe, an enemy who in her towering self-sufficiency had not troubled to include him in her reckoning. There were times, during the lunches the two men had together in a tiny restaurant in Liberty Street, when he came very close to speaking the truth, so close that Clarence, moved by a shadowy and pathetic loyalty, turned the talk of his companion into other channels. People said that a wife made a difference with one’s friends, that marriage ended old friendships and began new ones. There were, to be sure, old ones that had come very near to the end of the path, but in their place there were no new ones. It was wonderful how Ellen appeared to exist without friends.

“She is busy, I suppose,” he confided in admiration to Wyck over the greasy table, “and she is more independent than most women but still I don’t see how she stands it. She might have had Bunce’s wife for a friend.”

Wyck said, “Oh, no! She’s not good enough for her.” And then as if he had spoken too bitterly, he added, “I can understand that. Bunce’s wife is a vulgar woman.” He had never forgiven the contractor’s daughter the theft of Bunce. He hated her so strongly that in order to disparage her, it was necessary by comparison to reflect praise upon another enemy.

There were at times long silences when neither man spoke at all, for even their talk of shop came to an end after it had been turned over and over a hundred times. What thoughts occurred in those tragic silences neither one could have revealed to the other because they were in the realm of those things which friends, or even those who cling to the rags of friendship, cannot afford to tell each other.

Clarence with his nose-glasses and neat white collar drank his thin coffee and thought, “Wyck is a dull fellow. How could I ever have liked him? Funny how men grow apart.”

And across the table Wyck, finishing his apple sauce, thought, “Ah, if only there was some way to save him. That woman is destroying him slowly, bit by bit. He should never have married her. If only I could get him back where he would be happy again.”

There were in these thoughts the vestiges of truth. At one time they were more filled with truth than at another, for no thing is true persistently and unutterably. Yet in their truth Clarence was the happier of the two because he had discovered in his marriage a freedom of a new and different sort; through Ellen he was strong enough to yield nothing to the shabby little man who sat opposite him. In some way he had caught a sense of her independence, a knowledge that she was not as other women, or even as most men. She belonged to the ruthless and the elect. As for Wyck, he had only his sense of loss, for which there was no reward, and a pang which he was resolved one day to heal by some revenge, as yet vague and unplanned. And in his heart he believed that friendship between men was a bond far finer, far more pure than any relation between a man and woman.

“See!” he thought, over his apple sauce, “what it is doing to Clarence. It is destroying him. His love for her is consuming him.”

And when they had finished eating and had paid the yellow-haired cashier who sat enthroned behind the till, it was their habit to saunter into the streets and lose themselves in the noon crowds of lower Broadway. Sometimes they wandered as far as the Battery to sit on a bench and watch the fine ships going proudly across a bay of brilliant blue out to the open sea. But there was not much pleasure in their promenade. It ended always in the same fashion with Clarence looking at his watch to observe, “It’s time we started back.”

And so they would return, back the same way over the same streets and over the same doorstep. There were times when the sight of the blue sea and the great ships sliding silently through the green water filled the heart of Mr. Wyck with a wild turbulence which was beyond his understanding. Those were times when he hated both his friend and the woman who held him prisoner.

But no one was really interested in Mr. Wyck. In the evening when he returned to the gas-lit bed room in Lexington Avenue there was nothing for him to do. He read sometimes, but not frequently, and on warm nights he sat on the doorstep watching the passers-by and exchanging a word now and then with the grim woman who was his landlady. There were long hours in which there was nothing to do but to think, and not even the gray cat, watching the shadow of her tail against the decaying brownstone of the doorstep, could have guessed the dark trend of those secret thoughts.

His life, his happiness had been ruined by a stranger who scorned even to think of him.

Other changes came in the life of Clarence.

Once he had been a great one for organizations. He had been vice president of the Mutual Benefit Association of the Superba Electrical Company and a member of no less than three lodges. In the days before his marriage the duties concerned with all these organizations had required much of his time, but when Ellen arrived he came to stay more and more at home, and little by little these gaieties too lost their place in his life. It seemed that he was content to remain in the flat reading the newspaper, working over his accounts and now and then merely listening to his wife’s music with a strange expression of bewilderment as if it were impossible for him ever to understand her; and that little vein in his throat, which Lily had observed with such interest, throbbed and throbbed with a desire which sometimes must have terrified him.

Sitting there in the long evenings, silhouetted as she played, against the brilliant blue of a sky that stretched out interminably beyond the windows of the Babylon Arms, she had an air of lofty magnificence, an aloofness that was unconquerable. There were times when she seemed a very symbol of all that was unattainable; and always she was related to the wild dreams that became gradually less and less turbulent.

When she told him of these new engagements to play for Mrs. Callendar, he frowned and said, “But what of me? What am I to do?”

“It means more money for us ... and we need money. You see, Mrs. Callendar pays me well. My music will cost me nothing. Perhaps I shall be able to put something aside. Besides there is the experience which must not be overlooked.”

These things were true, and of late the mention of the money she might earn seemed not so unpleasant to Clarence as it had once been. He was, it appeared, more troubled by the fear of her escaping him, for he said, “I don’t think it’s wise to go too much with these people. They’re not our sort.... I’ve heard stories of how they live. They’re society people.”

At which Ellen mocked him, laughing, to say, “But I have nothing to do with them. I work for them. I entertain them ... that’s all.”

“And Wyck says that young Callendar has a reputation for being a bad one.”

Ellen laughed again, scornfully. “How does he know anything about young Callendar? Wyck and his boarding house. It’s because he hates me. I know what he’s like ... a mean, nasty little man who hates me.”

“He has friends.... His family was rich once in New York.”

What Clarence said was true. Wyck did know because, although he had long since ceased to have any existence for such people as the Callendars, there were channels by way of housemaids and distant relatives through which news of their world penetrated at last, somewhat distorted and magnified, to the spinster aunts in Yonkers, and so at length to Mr. Wyck himself. For the old ladies had known young Callendar’s father as a boy and they still lived in the world of those early days when, ensconced on lower Fifth Avenue behind plush curtains ornamented with ball fringe, they had received the Sunday procession of fashionables. The vulgar, new city of this early twentieth century, for all its noise and show, did not exist for them any more than they, for all their thin blooded pride, existed for the Callendars. It was after all an affair merely of dollars and cents. The Callendars had increased their fortune; the Wycks had lost theirs.

“I shall go to the Callendars’ and play for them because it is necessary,” said Ellen. “I am not a fool. I can take care of myself.”

To this abrupt statement, Clarence found no answer. He yielded quietly and, presently, on the nights when Ellen played in the great house on Murray Hill, he found himself going back once more to his three lodges and the Mutual Benefit Association of the Superba Electrical Company. There were members of the latter organization who thought it queer that their vice president attended the annual ball, held that year in a Brooklyn Hotel, as he had always done, alone, without his wife. It happened that she played that night in the solid house on Murray Hill.

And what then of Ellen herself? She was not, surely, unconscious of all that was happening so slowly, so imperceptibly about her. It is true that she was one of those who are born to success, one for whom the past does not exist and the present has reality only in so far as it provides a step into the future. Indeed, during those years in the city, even the Town itself became a very distant and shadowy memory. She was concerned, desperately, with what lay before her, confused perhaps by a sense of imminent disaster so vague that it could have for her no real meaning or significance.

But of course she never spoke of these things to her husband, perhaps because she was conscious that he might not understand them. At times the old pity for him, the same pity which had seized her so unaccountably upon the night of their flight, overwhelmed her, and at such moments it was her habit to be tender with him in a fashion that sent him into extravagant flights of happiness. But these moments became, after a while, conscious things on the part of Ellen so that presently she used them cheaply to quiet his unhappiness as one might use a gaudy stick of candy to quiet an unhappy child. Such little things made him happy.

Sometimes in the night she would lie in one of the green beds ornamented with garlands of salmon pink roses, listening to the sounds of the city that lay far beneath them ... the distant rumble which rose and mingled somehow with the glow of light that filled all the dome of the sky, a rumble pierced sharply by the sudden shrill cry of a city child playing late in the streets, or the faint clop! clop! of hoofs upon asphalt blurred now and again by the ghostly boom of a great ship’s whistle rising from the fog-veiled river ... marvelous, splendorous sounds of a great world close at hand. There lay in these sounds a wonderful sense of the crowd—in which she herself was not a part. Lying there, her fingers would clutch the bedclothes tightly and presently she would become conscious that in her listening she was not alone, that beside her, separated by the little chasm which divided the two green beds, Clarence too lay awake ... listening. She must have known in those hours an unreal consciousness of something that was waiting ... a Thing destined not to become clear until long afterward ... a Thing which waited silently and with a terrible patience. It was an experience that was not rare; it happened many nights, so that presently she came to be happy in the weeks when Clarence, traveling through the night hundreds of miles from her, was not there at all.

Sometimes her hand would steal out and in the darkness be touched and clasped by another hand that trembled and clung to hers in a sort of terror.

27

ELLEN’S awareness of Richard Callendar came over her slowly, a sensation neither desired nor anticipated, but one which stole upon her in some obscure fashion through the corridors of her own music. It would have been impossible to fix the moment at which this awareness took form; certainly it was not during that first damp drive through the park, when, wedged between his slim body and that of the yellow-clad Sabine, she had her first view of him. On that occasion she had remarked him merely as a young man perhaps of thirty (in this she was wrong by five years) who possessed a beauty of a kind new to her, a beauty of which there were traces to be found among certain of the workers in the Mills that hugged the dying hedges of Shane’s Castle. It was, in short, a kind of mystical, unearthly beauty born of an old, old race that was sensual and filled with an intense capacity for suffering ... a kind of beauty never to be found among her own Scotch and English friends and relatives. It had its determining quality in the extraordinary blackness of his hair, the dark olive of his skin and the unreality of gray eyes so queerly placed in so much darkness.

Sabine Cane, so completely civilized, so disillusioned, understood this beauty with the mind of one capable of an amazing detachment and power of analysis, for she had an extraordinary power of pulling herself up short in the midst of her emotions and saying, “This is indeed interesting. Here am I giving way to a good wholesome passion. Well! Well!...” and then, “It’s all very good so long as I don’t allow myself to be hurt by it.” For Sabine had the sort of intelligence which is the equipment of every potential sensualist.

This awareness on the part of Ellen forced its way through a torrent of impressions and emotions into a consciousness never too well organized. At the “parties” of Mrs. Callendar, there were, as the amusing woman predicted, never more than three or four people. There was always herself and usually her son. Sometimes Sabine Cane, whose relationship to the older woman was that of one who shares a complete understanding, was present, and now and then an elderly beau or two, of the sort which appears at concerts and the opera where they sit in the rear of boxes obscured somewhat by bedizened dowagers.

These entertainments, referred to variously by Thérèse Callendar as musicales, parties and soirées, were held in the vast drawing room where Ellen appeared on that first evening. While she played, the others, flanked by brocade curtains of immense dimensions, rows of Callendar family portraits and cases filled with bronze Buddhas and jade tear bottles, sat about respectful, listening, prepared to speak only in hushed voices, for it was true that all of them were wholly devoted to music ... all perhaps, save Sabine who, it might be said, was present as much because she found Thérèse Callendar amusing and had a profound curiosity regarding the shy, handsome girl who came to entertain them.

Ellen had a capacity for “feeling her audience.” She had not played many times before she knew exactly the degree and quality of appreciation in each of those who listened. She came to know that Sabine neither understood music nor cared very greatly for it, and that Mrs. Callendar preferred the compositions which were a little wild and barbaric. In the dark young Richard Callendar there was a quality altogether different from any of the others. It was a kind of appreciation which she had experienced only twice before. Lily listened in that fashion and her own brother Fergus. It was as if they abandoned themselves completely to the sound, as if they became in all their senses quite immersed. For a long time after the music ceased it was difficult for them to return wholly to the world of reality. She herself knew the intoxication; it was an emotion quite beyond the realm of drunkenness; it might be perhaps comparable to the effect of certain drugs. Richard Callendar listened in that fashion, and understanding this she came at length to play for him alone, moved only by an instinct of profound gratitude.

Even Sabine Cane, with all her sharp intelligence, failed to understand what was happening before her green eyes. She knew, vaguely, that there were times when the girl outdid herself, when the sounds she made possessed a beauty unusual in degree and quality, but her penetration seldom progressed beyond this point, because, by virtue of that strange and mystical bond, the other two were raised into a world quite beyond her. If there was a difference it lay in this ... that to Sabine one would have said that nothing could ever happen, because she guarded herself so carefully.

In the beginning, Ellen had come in only to play in the evenings at nine o’clock when the others had finished dinner and were sitting in the walnut-paneled library over cigarettes, coffee and liqueurs. She came, as a mountebank, to entertain. It was her habit to arrive quietly, to greet Mrs. Callendar and then sit modestly a little apart from the others until the moment came for her to play. They were kind to her, and sometimes quite cordial—even Sabine who, out of an awkwardness born of a nature really shy, talked with her in the most confused and disjointed fashion, sometimes, under the stress of temptation, striving even to pry into the details of her life. Perhaps Sabine, in the recesses of her clear intelligence, speculated regarding the origins, the background, the very surroundings of Ellen. Her own life had been one ordered and held in check by a rigid tradition ... a nurse, a day school kept by an affected and clever old harridan in impoverished circumstances, a year abroad and at last a coming-out ball. The independence she possessed lay altogether in her own thoughts, a thing hid away deeply. It moved like a mountain torrent confined placidly within the walls of a canal. It manifested itself only in a sharpness of tongue, a restless and malicious desire for gossip. She encouraged her imagination to rebuild the lives of her friends according to some pattern more exciting than that of the straight-laced world by which she was submerged. It was this, perhaps, which drew her to old Thérèse Callendar and her son. In them she found a freedom, a sophistication that elsewhere was lacking. Richard Callendar was not unwilling to discuss such things as mistresses. Thérèse did not treat her as if she were a spotless virgin to be protected against the realities of the world. They provided release to an intelligence bound in upon all sides by the corseted bejetted traditions of the day. They treated her with respect, as an individual. They possessed candor.

And so in the beginning her curiosity had seemed to Ellen, not understanding all this, an impudent thing, to be snubbed quietly in the proud way she had. She understood, well enough, that Sabine possessed the advantage ... at least in the world of Mrs. Callendar’s drawing-room. Sabine was at home there. She had lived always in such drawing-rooms. And yet there came a night when Sabine turned with her strange abruptness and said apropos of nothing, “I envy you.”

At which Ellen smiled and asked, “Why?”

“Because,” continued the abrupt Sabine, “you will always have the advantage over us (she was quite frank in admitting that they belonged to different worlds). It is always so with those who make their way by their wits.”

Once Ellen might have pondered such a speech, wondering whether she should consider herself insulted by it. But in the experience of many talks with Sabine, she came to understand that there lay at the bottom of the observation no more than a complete honesty. Indeed, the remark was so honest that in the very moment it was made, Ellen saw not only its honesty but its truth. She was making her way by her wits. Sabine had nothing to make ... nothing to expect save a marriage which would occur in due time according to the plan that controlled all Sabine’s life. And the artist in Ellen leapt at once to assume the rôle. She would make her way by her wits, from now on, consciously. That placed her. It provided her with a certain definiteness of personality.

“People like that are always more sure of themselves,” Sabine continued. “I’ve noticed it. Take Mrs. Sigourney. She’s done it. She’s outraged some people but she’s got what she wanted.... She was nobody and now she’s chic. It’s her wits, always her wits.... She never does the wrong thing ... never puts herself in a place where she can be hurt.”

At the end of the speech, Sabine’s voice dropped suddenly. There was even a little echo of something ... perhaps a faint sigh, as if it came somewhere from deep within her. She had been hurt then, perhaps a long time ago. Perhaps her flawless clothes, her sharp and witty tongue, her air of entering a room, were all no more than an armor she had raised about herself. She was not, like Ellen, isolated, independent, free ... belonging to nothing, to no one, save only herself. Her friendship with Richard Callendar may only have been a bit of bravado, to flaunt in the face of the others who desired him.

Ellen saw it, clearly now. In the Town she would have been like Sabine. There, in a community all her own, they could have hurt her. Here in this world there was no one who could do her any injury. Alone, isolated, she was stronger than she had been in the very midst of all those who had known her since the beginning.

“I wish,” continued Sabine, “that you would tell me about yourself some time.... Tell me and Richard. He’s interested in such things.”

“But I must play now,” said Ellen.

On the same night when the hour came for Ellen to be sent home in Mrs. Callendar’s cabriolet, the plump woman said, “The next time.... Let’s see, it’s Thursday, isn’t it?... You must come for dinner.... I’ll send Wilkes at twenty to eight.”

28

THAT there was any such thing as kindliness involved in all these complicated, new relationships had never occurred to Ellen, perhaps because she had never for a moment expected it. It was only with the invitation to dinner, in itself a tacit recognition of her individuality as something more than a mere music box, that the real state of affairs first became clear to her. It was as if she had progressed a step in the world, as if she had achieved a little already of the vast things she had set out to accomplish. She tried, in her direct, unsubtle way of speaking, to convey something of the idea to Clarence. She wanted him, as always, desperately to understand her actions. She wanted him, perhaps dishonestly, to believe that she could not help acting as she did, that it was not from choice but from a desire to brighten both their lives that she left him now and then to venture forth into regions which it was impossible for him to penetrate. And in her own fashion, as she had done so often with her mother, she told him the truth selectively, so that although she did not lie she managed to achieve an effect that was not the truth.

The great thing which she neglected to admit was this ... that she had come now to the point where it was no longer possible to take him with her. Even his fantastic dreams could not make him more than he was, and that was not enough. He had come to the end of his tether. She had barely begun. Imagine him in Mrs. Callendar’s drawing-room! Fancy the abrupt Sabine Cane talking to him as she talked to Ellen! He, she knew, would suffer more than any one.

She said to him, “I’m sorry, but on Thursday I shall be out for dinner.... I’ve got to dine with Mrs. Callendar.... It’s business, dear.... I must do these things.”

And at the speech, Clarence assumed that hurt and crestfallen look which touched her sense of pity. It was the one thing which could alter her determination; indeed there were times when she must have suspected that he used it consciously, as his only weapon. It moved her even now, so that she went so far as to kiss him and say, “It’s just one night.”

“But it’s a beginning.” He saw it perhaps, clearly enough, more clearly than she ever imagined. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

And then she explained to him again the things which it was necessary for her to do in order to win what she must have. She talked long and eloquently, for she was earnest and she pitied him. It was clear that her dishonesty arose not so much out of any evil calculation as out of a desire to have everything, to go her way and still leave Clarence unharmed and happy. It was a thing impossible, of course, yet it never seemed so to her. There was in her so much of her indomitable mother that she was never able to believe in the impossible.

So she talked eloquently and at length she even arranged it for him that he should dine on Thursday night with Mr. and Mrs. Bunce. Thus, by a single act, she accomplished another thing. She dined with the Bunces without having to dine with them. She knew too that they would be happier with Clarence there alone. It would be like the old days, without strain, an evening when the three of them,—Clarence and Harry Bunce and his rosy wife,—could dine, as one might say, in peace. There would be no strain, no sense of an intruder in their midst. For she was a stranger, always; they were never quite at ease with her.

Thus Clarence found the evening arranged, and he was content in his way, for he liked the Bunces.

Afterward Ellen’s clearest memory of the evening was the voice of Sabine drifting from the drawing-room as she entered the hall, saying, “The trouble with Boston people is that they are all descended from middle class immigrants and they’ve been proud of it ever since.”

This speech became fixed somehow in her brain as a symbol of Sabine’s queer worldliness, of a strangely cynical honesty that would color her whole point of view up to the very end. If Sabine thought it idiotic to take pride in being middle class, if she thought it absurd not to strive after distinction, she would say it, whether or not people thought her a snob. The world to her was thus and so; it moved according to an ancient pattern. All the orations in the world upon the subject of democracy could not alter the rule of things. Besides, it was a good enough rule. Why pretend it wasn’t? Sabine, of course, could afford to take such a position. In a worldly sense, she had nothing to strive for. She had been born to those things.

Ellen, removing the squirrel coat Clarence had given her, turned these considerations over in her mind as she entered the room. She was watching them all to-night as she had watched them once before through the crack in the lacquered screen, cautiously, with an air of an enemy laying siege to their fortress.

There was, beneath the gaze of the Callendar ancestors, only Mrs. Callendar in a dress of jet and sequins, Sabine in a brilliant green gown and Richard Callendar, handsome and dark in his black and white clothes. Richard rose and came forward to meet her.

“Mama,” he said, smiling, “has just been talking of you. She believes that one day you will be a great personality.”

“We are dining alone, the four of us,” said Mrs. Callendar abruptly. It was clear that she meant to keep Ellen forever in ignorance of what she had said.

The dining room was done in the grand manner of the Second Empire, a room copied at the behest of young Callendar’s grandfather from a house built by the Duc de Morny for one of his mistresses. It was grandiose, with columns of white and gilt, centering upon a massive table and a group of chairs with backs which ended a foot or two sooner than they should have ended. On the four panels of the walls there hung pictures of Venice in the dry, hard manner of Canaletto ... Venice at Dawn, Venice at Sunset, Venice at Carnival Time and Venice in Mourning for the Pope. On the huge table stood a silver épergne filled to overflowing with the most opulent of fruits ... mangoes, persimmons, red bananas, Homberg grapes and pomegranates. It was as if Thérèse Callendar had built this monument of fruit to recapture something of her own Oriental background—the rest of the room was so bad, so filled with the shadows of Cockney demi-mondaines and snuffbox adventures out of the Second Empire. At the four corners of the vast épergne stood four huge candelabra of silver.

Despite the air of depression given out by the monstrous room, it possessed a somber magnificence. To Ellen, the only magnificence approaching it lay in the drawing-room of that gloomy house known as Shane’s Castle, set in the midst of the smoking furnaces. Aunt Julia’s house was like it, filled with pictures and furniture and carpets which, like these, had been brought out of Europe.

There were wines for dinner, not one or two, but an array of port, madeira, sauterne, sherry and, at the place where Mrs. Callendar seated herself in a chair raised more than the others so that she might dominate the massive table, a pint of champagne for herself in a tiny silver bucket filled with ice. It was a schoolgirl’s dream of magnificence ... something out of the pages of a super-romantic novelette. In the beginning, the spectacle, proceeding through course after course, dazzled Ellen and made her shy. It was superb food, for in the veins of Thérèse there blended the blood of Frenchman and Greek. It was food that had a taste ... not the boiled stuff of Anglo-Saxons.

After dinner, when they had all gone into the dark library, the moment came at last when Ellen’s tongue was loosed. It may have been the wine she drank or it may have been the cigarette which, in her new freedom, she smoked over the coffee (for in a single evening she had broken two of Clarence’s rules); but it is more likely that it was the picture hanging over the mantelpiece, which changed everything.

She looked at it carefully and then said, “Is that by Turner? My aunt has one by him.”

And a moment later, under the subtle urgence of Sabine, she was telling them everything. She described, for example, the Town, its Mills, its desolation, the misery of the workers. She painted for them a picture of her own family, of the Red Scot who lay now, helpless and childish, in her own big bed. She told them of her other grandfather, cold and aloof, who had run away in his youth and lived in the Paris of the Second Empire, and now existed in a room walled in by books. She recreated before their eyes the gloomy color of Shane’s Castle, only to be interrupted in the midst by Thérèse Callendar, who turned to Sabine and observed, “She is a cousin, you know, of the Madame Shane we saw once at Madame de Cyon’s in Paris.... You remember Madame de Cyon, the Russian woman, whose husband was French minister to Bulgaria.... She lived in the Avenue du Bois. A Bonapartist. Madame Shane was the beauty with red hair.... Miss Tolliver’s Aunt Julia is her mother.”

And then she permitted Ellen to continue, and the girl meanwhile, even as she talked, understood that Mrs. Callendar had not forgotten Lily. She had even fixed the place and time of their meeting. It was clear that she had been thinking of Lily, as every one did.

She told the story simply enough, but with an earnestness that was moving. To her the canvas which she painted was not remarkable, but to the listeners it appeared to hold, perhaps because it was so new to them, the fascination of a world which was utterly strange and a little exotic. They listened, moved by the simplicity of her utterance, and Richard Callendar asked her questions about the mills and furnaces, about the foreign population. The recital was a success and out of it she learned something new,—that there was nothing of such power as simplicity, nothing of such interest as individuality. She understood all that from the way in which they listened. It was the first time in all her life when she had thrown caution to the winds. She was, for an hour, her complete self.

But there was one part of the story which she did not tell. It was that part which concerned her elopement and all that had followed it. She said simply, “And so I came to New York to study, and luckily fell into the hands of Sanson....”

Richard Callendar stood up suddenly and poked the fire. His mother said, “You could not have done better,” and Sabine observed, “Here in New York we forget that the rest of the country exists.... I’ve never been out of New York except to go to Europe or to some summer place.”

To-night, instead of being a performer, one who played in public, she was the guest, the center of the evening.

She played for them the Moonlight Sonata and while she played, she became conscious again of the curious, breathless way in which Richard Callendar listened. It seemed, for a time, that he existed only in a single spirit which somehow enveloped her and the music of Beethoven. All the evening he had been silent and watchful, as silent and as watchful as herself, save in the moment when she was carried away by her own story. When she had finished playing she was conscious of another fact, perhaps even more interesting. It was that Sabine had noticed a difference and was regarding the handsome Callendar with a look so intent that Ellen, turning sharply, caught her unaware.

This new world was a world of shadows, of hints, of insinuations, a world of curious restraints and disguises. Out of these, in the very instant she turned from the piano, she understood that the relation between Sabine and young Callendar was more than a casual friendship. Sabine was in love with him, passionately, perhaps without even knowing it, for it must have required a terrible force to lead a woman so circumspect into such a betrayal.

That night, for a second time, Ellen left the house in company with Sabine and Richard Callendar. It came about that, as they were preparing to leave, young Callendar proposed to accompany them and without further discussion entered the carriage. In the past it had been the custom to send Ellen home in the cabriolet while Callendar followed in the brougham with Sabine. Sometimes these two walked to Sabine’s house. She lived in Park Avenue, a half dozen blocks away, in a tall narrow house, exceedingly stiff and formal in appearance ... a house which one could not but say suited her admirably.

On the way, they talked music for a time and when the cabriolet approached Sabine’s corner, she said simply, “I am tired. You can drop me at home.”

So she bade them good night without further ado and disappeared into the narrow house. It was a strange thing for her to have done. Ellen and Callendar must have expected her to accompany them all the way to the Babylon Arms and to return alone with him; that would have been the order of things. But she was more subtle than they imagined. If she understood, as Ellen was certain she had, that there was some new thing come into the relations that existed among them all, she was clever. She did not attempt to change or even interrupt this new current; wise in the depths of her shrewd mind she saw that to be an obstacle was not the same as to be a goal. So she left Richard Callendar with the stranger who had become her rival. It may have caused her sleeplessness and torment; she may have felt a keen jealousy, but it was impossible to know. It may also have been that, knowing the continental ideas of Callendar, she was not concerned over her ultimate victory. By the rule of the very tradition which had shut her in, Callendar could not marry this stranger.

29

AS Callendar reëntered the cabriolet, Ellen settled back into her corner to wait. She watched, as always, but this time she was conscious that there was another who was watching. It seemed for the first time that there had risen up in her path a person, perhaps even an enemy, who played the same waiting game. Callendar sat in his corner, his dark face visible now and then as a streak of light from the lamps entered the door, and in that uncertain and shifting illumination, Ellen studied him closely for the first time.

It was a strangely pleasing face; the very dark pallor, so evenly distributed, so perfectly shaded caught her attention as a kind of beauty new to her. There was no ruddiness here, no boisterous energy. Rather it was a silent, subtle kind of beauty. The power behind it was not so much a crude energy as a strength that was placid yet possessed of the quality of steel. It was a strength that revealed itself in the firm, clean line of the jaw and in the square, almost hard modeling of the intelligent head. If there was a hint of passion it lay in the red lips that were so full and sensual beneath the fine black mustache. He wore the collar of his coat turned up a little, with his hat pulled well over his eyes so that the whole gave an impression of rakishness and adventure. Yet her instinct told her that here was something to be feared, something subtle and rather neat, of a sort strange to her.

They must have ridden several blocks in silence when he said to her, in a voice that was warm and carried faint traces of an accent, “I say, you are a remarkable person. I’d never dreamed how much it took to bring you where you are.”

When she answered, Ellen felt a new and absurd inclination to become a helpless, almost arch, young girl. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I’d never thought about it.”

“It was an entertaining story you gave us.... You see people like me and Sabine seldom get any idea of what the real world is like.” He paused for a moment and then continued as if to make clear what he meant—“I mean a world in which people have to fight for things. We just have them. We forget about the others. And we’re in the minority of about ... shall we say ... one to a thousand. I’ve always had what I wanted.... I suppose I’ll always have it.”

This was strange talk, in a queer philosophic vein, to which Ellen answered again, “I don’t know ... I’ve never thought about the difference. I know what I want and some day ... I suppose I’ll have it.”

“You are an extraordinary musician ... you know,” he continued. “I wonder if you know how extraordinary.”

Ellen did know; she was sure of it. But she saw fit not to answer because she was a little puzzled. In a world bounded by Clarence and Herman Biggs, she had not met a man of this sort. He was younger than Clarence and not much older than Herman but that made no difference. It was something that had nothing to do with age. Rather it was a matter of experience. She knew she was an excellent musician; she must have believed it or she could not have gone her own way with such unswerving directness, but she chose to answer modestly. In the dim light of the cab, it was impossible to know whether or not she actually smirked.

“Perhaps I am. How is one to know?... About one’s self, I mean.”

“My mother and I know about such things,” he replied, and then for a time the cabriolet fell into silence. They turned from the avenue into the park, and presently out of his corner he spoke again.

“You’re sure you told us everything to-night? You didn’t leave out of the story anything that might interest us?”

There was in this an impertinence which Ellen sensed and considered for a time. He was looking out of the window at the bare trees of the park with a splendid air of indifference, which Ellen felt was not indifference at all. Far back in her consciousness an odd feeling of triumph came into existence, a queer, inexplicable feeling that she was the dominant one, that somehow she had caught him now off his guard, as if she found he was not so clever as he thought. She became aware of a genuine sense of conflict, vague and undefined, ... a sort of conflict between her own intelligence and one that was quite as powerful. She watched the clear-cut ivory profile for a time and then said, “No. I left out nothing that could possibly interest anybody but me.”

(That much for his curiosity about the little man he saw for an instant through the open door at the Babylon Arms!)

Callendar turned to her. “I sound impertinent, but I only ask because it seems to me that you are even more interesting than the story you tell.”

Again this was bold and even personal, as though he sought to assume possession of that part of her which should belong to no one ... the part which was herself, at which he had no right to pry. The temptation to become feminine seized her once more.

“I suppose,” she said, “that that is a compliment. I thank you for it. Of course, I don’t know how true it is.”

“It is true,” he replied abruptly. “You are admirable ... and courageous. Spirit is a fine thing ... the greatest in the world.”

There was one thing for which she was thankful. He did not treat her as if she were a silly girl, as a man might, for example, have treated May Seton. In years he was not much older than herself yet in reality she understood that he was centuries older. Of that, she was certain. What she did not understand was that his approach to life, down to the veriest detail, was one which, by the nature of things, was not only alien but incomprehensible. He had patience, a quality which in her was so utterly lacking as to be inconceivable; he could wait. It was this which puzzled her ... this and the sense of conflict, so complicated, that was always a little way off, just out of reach and not to be understood.

From a great distance, she watched him and even herself, confused, puzzled, but profoundly interested. That much she had gained from the blood that flowed in old Gramp Tolliver’s veins. She was always watching, waiting, learning.

The rest of their conversation was less interesting. It possessed, to be sure, a strange quality of leisure; there were long silences not in the least awkward and uncomfortable. On the contrary, despite that sense of conflict and watching, there was a certain calmness about them, as of the silences which fall between old friends immersed in a perfect understanding. It was perhaps the same friendliness which she neglected always to take into consideration, in which she would never quite believe.

At the Babylon Arms they passed between the Syrian Lions of cast iron and at the elevator he left her. There was no prying this time, no evidence of curiosity. As he bade her good night, he suggested that one day they might lunch together. Then the swaying elevator bore her upward to Clarence and out of sight of Callendar.

The sense of conflict disturbed her, even after Clarence came in from the Bunces’, murmuring apologies for having forgotten her and stayed so late. He apologized too for having, in the enthusiasm of a pinochle game, invited the Bunces to dinner four weeks later when he had returned from his western trip.

30

MRS. CALLENDAR stayed two months longer than usual in New York. She was kept by the only things which could have kept her away from the sunshine of her adored Cannes; that is to say, difficulties over stocks and bonds, adjustments of the Callendar fortune. She saw to it that there were no slips and no losses. Indeed, by missing the season at Cannes she turned a profit of several hundred thousand dollars which might have been lost in the hands of one in whose veins there flowed less Levantine blood.

Richard, of course, remained with her, though he exhibited a curious indifference toward the affairs which made upon his mother claims so passionate. When she reproached him, as she frequently did, he turned to her sometimes in the dark library of the house on Murray Hill and said, “My God! I’m too rich now. What should I do with any more money? Why should I worry?”

It was an attitude in which there was nothing of softness, nothing of degeneracy; it was not even the case of a son pampered by riches. His mother must have known that, better than any one, because she had encountered in him a will not unlike her own ... a will troubled in his case by a strange restlessness born perhaps of the bizarre mixture of blood. If he was possessed of any passions they were for women, and for music, which had an effect that was amazing; it was the one thing which held the power of quieting him. There were times when he would sit motionless in the presence of music as if enchanted by it. Its effect upon him was primitive and barbaric like the hypnotism which a tom-tom exerts upon a savage.

There came a night when, as they sat alone over their coffee, estranged and a little silent after her reproaches, she turned to him and without warning said, “What about this jeune prodige ... Miss Tolliver. I hear you’ve been lunching with her.”

At this direct sally, a smile appeared slowly on the dark face of the son. It began gently at first on the sensual red lips, and then spread itself until the effect was utterly disarming. He had a way of smiling thus, after a fashion that was disconcerting because its implications were so profound, so subtle, and so filled with disillusionment. It was a smile in which the gray eyes, lighting suddenly, played a tantalizing rôle—a smile which seemed to envelop its subject and, clinging there for a time, to destroy all power of deceit by its very friendliness. It said, gently and warmly, “Come now, let’s be honest and generous with each other.” The red lips curved ever so gently beneath the dark mustache. It was the smile of a man born knowing much that others seldom ever learn.

He smiled at her and said, “Ah! Who could have told you that?... Who but Sabine ... who knows everything?”

The very tone of his voice appeared to caress and yet mock his mother. (Sabine ... indeed all women.) Before such an assault even Thérèse Callendar had no resistance. Shifting her plump body so that the heavy bangles on her wrists jangled and clattered, she waited a moment before answering. Then a faint blush, which appeared to arise from a real sense of guilt, spread slowly up to the edges of her bright small eyes.

“It was Sabine who told me,” she said. “You can’t blame her for that.”

“No ... she always knows everything.” He laughed abruptly. “Sometimes I think she must be in communication with the birds ... or the mice.”

“You know what I think.... I think that it’s time you married. It’s a responsibility ... the money.... There ought to be heirs. We can’t give all that money to charity or some drafty museum.” While she knocked off the ashes from her cigarette, he watched her silently with the same caressing, mocking smile. “You’re past twenty-five, you know.... I want my grandchildren to be the children of young parents. I believe in it.”

Then suddenly, he pierced straight into the thing which she had avoided mentioning. “I shan’t marry Sabine,” he said. “I’ll find some one. I haven’t found her yet.”

“Sabine is excellent. She is well brought up.... She is rich. She is one of the few American women we know who is mondaine. I want you to marry an American. We need new blood. She knows her way about. She dresses superbly.... She will make an excellent hostess. She will be at home everywhere.”

“But I am not in love with her,” he said smiling.

For an instant a glint of hard anger appeared in her eyes. “You are old enough ... or at least wise enough not to be romantic.”

“It is not a question of romance, Mama.... It is more a question of necessity. I should prefer to be faithful to my wife.”

At this speech, she clucked her tongue, and crushed out the end of her cigarette. “Ça ne marche pas,” she observed coldly. “You can’t expect me to believe such nonsense.”

Thérèse was by no means innocent. She had lived in the world, always. She knew what things went on about her and, being Levantine and French, she expected even less than most women of experience. She understood that there were such things as mistresses and that most men of her world were not unacquainted with them; so she could not for a moment have supposed that her son, smiling at her in his knowing fashion, possessed a purity that was virginal. Indeed, it might be said that she knew more of his adventures than he ever supposed. Once she had scandalized Mrs. Champion by saying, “My son has an intrigue with the wife of one of my best friends in Paris. It puts me in a most uncomfortable position.”

Nevertheless she had said this in a tone that implied satisfaction; the mistress of her son was, at least, a lady and not a woman of the streets. There was only one thing (she was accustomed to say) that she regarded as unforgivable; it was that he should make a fool of himself or waste great sums of money on any woman. And this, she must have known, was extremely unlikely.

After their disagreement they sat for a time in the sort of strained silence that envelops a conflict between two people of extraordinary will. It was Thérèse who, with a sudden embarrassed cough, interrupted the stillness.

“This girl ...” she said. “I hope you’re not entangling yourself with her.”

Again he smiled and replied, “No, I haven’t entangled myself.”

“Because, it is dangerous with a girl of that sort.... She’s an American, you know, and not the sort one finds among musicians in Paris.... Autres choses.... She’s well brought up ... bourgeoisie, I should say, of the provinces.”

This time Richard laughed. “Not so bourgeoise as you might think.”

She leaned forward a little. “That’s just it!” she said. “She’s not easy to win.... She’s not the ordinary sort. She’s a woman of character ... of will.” Then she moved back, folding the chubby hands, glittering with rings, on the brief expanse of her black satin lap. “No, you’d best keep clear of her.... Whatever happens is without my approval.”

“She is interesting,” the son replied. “I’ve never seen a woman quite like her.”

This, it appeared, was the cause for new alarm. After regarding him for a time curiously, she murmured, “You can’t marry her, of course. She’s too inexperienced.... Sometimes, she’s gauche. But that’s not the chief thing.... If you married her, I don’t think I should object ... not very greatly.... It’s new blood ... healthy blood. But I advise you against thinking of such a thing. Wherever she goes, trouble will follow. She’s born, like most people with a touch of genius, under a curse.” He would have interrupted her here, but she checked him with a gesture of her fat hand. “She is certain to affect the lives of every one about her ... because, well, because the threads of our lives are hopelessly tangled. Oh, don’t think I’m talking nonsense or saying this to discourage you.... I know it.... I’m sure of it.... Marry her if you will, but don’t expect happiness to come of it. She would doubtless bear you a son ... a fine strong son because she is a fine cold animal. But don’t expect any satisfaction from her. She knows too well exactly where she is bound.”

During this long speech the son stood smoking silently with a shadow of the mocking smile on his lips. When she had finished he did not answer her but sat, with a thoughtful air, looking out into the garden which Thérèse this year had not bothered to have planted.

After a time she spoke again to say, “Surely you don’t fancy you could ever control her.... She’s a wild young filly.... No man will ever control her ... not for long.”

“I’ve never thought of marrying her,” he replied quietly. “Why, she has a lover already.”

At this Mrs. Callendar’s countenance assumed an expression of passionate interest. “But she is not that sort ... not a demi-mondaine. She is an honest woman ... a cold woman. One can see that.”

He smiled, this time even more softly and mockingly and into the gray eyes there came a gleam of ironical humor. “It was Sabine who said she had a lover,” he said. “You remember, Miss Tolliver told us nothing of what has happened to her since she came here.... Besides, cold women are the most successful. They do not lose their heads.”

31

IF Ellen had ever had any use for such a creature as a confidante, she would have told her no doubt that life, at this moment, was an exasperating puzzle. Between the manners of Herman Biggs and Clarence and the manners of such a man as Richard Callendar, there lay a vast gulf, a sort of blank page in the book of her experience, an hiatus that left her uneasy and disturbed.

Clarence and Herman Biggs, she understood, represented to a great degree the husband and lover of her own country. They were the ones who came seeking, the ones who idolized the object of their affections. They were, if not fascinating, affectionate and docile. They were perhaps, even convenient, so long as they did not get under foot. There was in them a certain childlike innocence, complicated alone by a Quixotic code of chivalry and honor which allowed them to be despoiled. Either they overlooked or were innocent of the ways of the world and so clung to the sentimental image of women as pure, devoted creatures who were always good and generous. There were, of course, such things as “bad women” but these did not concern them; such women were of a class apart, without any real relation to good women, a third sex one might have said, with its own uses. The women of their world had changed abruptly, swiftly, in a generation or two, from helpmates on a rude frontier adventure into creatures of luxury; and men like Herman and Clarence had not kept pace. These were the men whom Ellen had always known. There had never been any one like Richard Callendar.

In the absence of Clarence among the factories of the middle west Ellen lunched, not once, but several times with Callendar. Out of the money she had earned by her playing she was able now to dress herself in a fashion which, if not smart, was at least simple and charming. With the approach of the warm days, they lunched at Sherry’s (for he made no effort to conceal his attentions) in an open window which gave out upon the Avenue and the stream of carriages, disordered now by increasing inroads of noisy automobiles. She must have understood, out of the depths of her mother’s teachings, that what she did was an improper and even a dangerous thing. It was, at least, a misstep, taken through lack of experience ... a step which later on she might not have risked.

There was Callendar himself to be considered. It was clear that, despite all her coolness, he had an effect upon her. There were times when she would blush as if suddenly overcome by a sense of his presence, for he was charming to her—gentle, understanding, full of a fire which leapt up in sudden gusts to join the flame of her own triumph and zest in living. In the window overlooking Fifth Avenue there were moments when she must have forgotten everything save the future, hours when they talked of Europe, when he described to her with something very close to passion the brilliance of Paris or the smoky glow of London. Both were naïve, Ellen in the fashion of the inexperienced and Callendar, so dark, so charming, so utterly new, in the fashion of a man whose directness of action had nothing to do with the question of conventions. It was impossible for either to have understood the emotion that drew them together, for it was a romantic thing to which both were then insensible, the one because life had taught her not to expect such a thing as romance, the other because he had never believed in its existence.

One bright afternoon in May they walked all the way from Sherry’s through the park to the Babylon Arms. It was a soft day when the park appeared veritably to reflect its greenness upon the air itself, a day when the willows were softened by a haze of new leaves, and the rare clusters of cherry trees appeared in faint blurs of delicate pink. Along the edges of the lake, freed now of its burden of ice and not yet burdened anew with the old newspapers of sweltering August, the nursemaids divided the iron benches with vagabonds and old ladies who had come there simply to rest, to sit relaxed, silent, as if they were sustained somehow without effort by the very softness of the air. The quality of this pervading gentleness appeared to have its effect upon the two; for a time they were enveloped by a languor which drugged the intelligence and warmed the senses. They walked lazily, side by side, Ellen in a tight gray suit and a large picture hat, Callendar looking at her now and then out of his gray eyes and poking the fresh green grass with his malacca stick. At times they stopped and laughed, for Callendar was in a charming mood when he became a blagueur, irresistible and caressing. Under the influence of the day even the hardness of Ellen, which could be at times almost pitiful, appeared to melt away. She laughed at him. She even watched him slyly from the corner of her eyes, but not in the old hostile fashion. It was more the way one would watch a charming little boy, fearful lest his knowledge of the admiration might give him an advantage.

It could not have been the weather alone which so changed her. There were other things, among them beyond all doubt Callendar himself and the friendship which he had given her, the same friendship which his mother and even Sabine in her brusque, shy way had offered. They were friends in a way no one, save Lily, had ever been before. It is possible that there came to her on this soft warm day a knowledge of her kinship with these people, of a bond which if undefinable was none the less certain and secure. They had nothing to gain from her and they were not concerned with subduing her; they did not seek to change her in any way at all. They were like her old Aunt Julia and the mysterious Lily, who had warned her not to let people make her fit a pattern, not to let them drag her down to the level of their own mediocrity; she understood now what Lily meant. These were people who, by some quality of honesty that was almost a physical thing, had attained an aristocracy of their own, a state which had its foundations in that very honesty. There was, too, a distinction about them of a sort beyond such individuals as the genteel, decayed Mr. Wyck, May Seton and her giggles, Mr. Bunce who was so robust and kind, and (this thought must have occurred to her) even Clarence whose kindly humbleness barred him forever. They were not muddled; they stood outlined, for all their strangeness, with a sharp clarity.

It was an understanding that had come to her over a long time dimly as through a mist. To-day she knew it. She began to understand why there were some people whom she admired and some for whom she could have in her heart contempt or at best an emptiness that bordered upon pity.

So she walked very happily with the fascinating, dark young man, content perhaps that she might go on thus forever, that she might always have him and Sabine and Thérèse quite as they were, without any change. And in the depths of her heart it would have given her a sharp, leaping pleasure to have encountered suddenly on one of those asphalt paths May Seton and others of her townspeople. It would have pleased her to have had them witness her triumph. For she had not yet escaped the Town.

Into the midst of this a new knowledge came, sharp and unforeseen.

Under the shadow of Daniel Webster in the bronze attitude of a pouter pigeon, Callendar halted sharply and turned toward her with a swift directness, looking at her so closely that for an instant she blushed.

“Might I come in with you this afternoon?” he asked. “Will you be alone?”

Faced by the disarming gaze of the gray eyes, she forgot for a moment her game of watching. She answered, “Why, yes. I’ll be alone.” And then, as if she could not control herself, she looked away and started walking once more.

He did not speak again until they had reached the outer barrier of the park when he said,

“I’d like to have you play for me ... alone. I’ve never heard you save in a crowd. I fancy you would play best for an audience of one.”

They turned presently between the Syrian Lions of the Babylon Arms and, after being borne silently aloft in the swaying elevator, they climbed the two flights of stairs to the door of the tiny apartment which Ellen opened with her key. The room was in darkness until she lifted the shades which (on the advice of that passionate housekeeper, her mother) were drawn to protect the cheap, bright carpet from the sharp rays of the spring sun, and then the light revealed a shabby little room stuffed with the things which Clarence had bought her. There were chairs and sofas and pillows, pictures, ornaments and little tables. In one corner the grand piano stood somewhat apart in a little bay cleared of furniture. Richard, leaning on his stick and viewing the confusion gravely, must have thought her lover a poor sort, who could offer her only a great profusion of things in the poorest of taste. Yet he did not smile, perhaps because he was not greatly interested in the room. In the midst of all the stuff, Ellen, taking off her picture hat and blushing still with a hazy sense of confusion, possessed an air of aloofness, of being detached from all the shabby things. She rose above them as once before she had risen above the furniture in the Setons’ dismal parlor.

The gaiety that had flourished in the bright park became dampened now by a queer sense of strain, an awkwardness which made itself apparent in the silence of both. They were no longer in the bright open park: the walls which shut them in had changed everything, sharpened in some indefinable way the power of their senses. For an instant they stood regarding each other shyly, and presently Ellen said, “Do sit down there.... And I’ll play for you. What do you want to hear?”